Tyler

This is my major issue with 'abundance bros' who are essentially arguing for techno-optimism 2.0. - they believe both in the conceit of the ethos/theology that tech developed, and in the private sector as the best chance to deliver it

This is true, and I'm not against mechanization of farm work, (a better term than automation, which implies an autonomy that's illusory at best) but it is worth pointing out that even if you aren't against it, it's probably not smart to trust corporations to be in charge of developing it

Evil

The thing is, to keep the racket going, Trump doesn't have to even give up the crazy bellicosity - he just sprinkles in unrelated sentences and everyone else takes care of the rest

TRUMP: I think everything's wrapping up nicely. I'm going to launch a nuke at Tehran. Prince Andrew only has a few days to live
HEADLINE: 'Everything's Wrapping Up Nicely', Confident Trump Declares

the market is stupid.

A full decade and change after Trump started doing this, the conventional tactic remains simply picking which of his many bullshit contradictory sentiments you like the best - if they had to account for all of them, everything would fall apart, so they don't

Trump says war on a Iran could be ‘short-term excursion’ Donald Trump has just told House Republicans that the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran is a “short-term excursion”. Our country is doing really well. I mean, at a level that nobody thought. We took a little excursion because we felt like we had to do that to get rid of some evil. I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion. We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough. We go forward, more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long running danger once and for all.

Looking at the supposed 'Trump says the war is about done!' thing, and amazing - the second statement directly contradicts the first, which means that everyone taking the first as the 'real message' (including the stock market) is hearing what they want to

dementia don. no longer has a filter. putting us soldiers in grave danger in order to gloat about murdering unarmed sailors

Imagine the reaction in the US if ~175 schoolgirls had been killed by a targeted Iranian missile. (Or anyone's missile.)

This is an atrocity.

To be clear though - the less rigid and required those extremes are, and the more irrelevant the worst outgrowths of it are (not least the oppressive system built on it), the better

let's see if I've got this straight

the war is over, pretty much

except if we want to bomb iran some more, or israel does

or if iran decides to keep the strait closed

also the regime didn't change and we didn't accomplish anything but blowing up a bunch of kids and poisoning tehran

ok good work

Guzman's looking good!

Timothee needs to learn the Adrian Brody technique of saving his obnoxiousness until after he’s won the Oscar and they can’t take it back.

Stop saying “for the male gaze” when what you mean to say is “aesthetically lazy & incurious in its implicit rejection of body types that don’t resemble Dakota Johnson” !!! The latter critique is fair game, the former is gibberish

Film Is in Its Own Crisis, Timothée Chalamet might not realize it, but he is expressing a fear that is not being reckoned with by his peers.

Well, this was unexpected but Vulture (aka my day job) cross-posted today's newsletter essay about Timothée and the existential crisis film is in.

www.vulture.com/article/film...

Anyway, although I'm perfectly willing to be proven wrong, stuff like this is why I'm unsure that abolishing the gender binary (as opposed to recontextualizing it, playing around in it, or playing it against itself - femme4femme, butch4butch) is fully possible

You can imagine a woman singling the latter sentiments (in fact, there is - 'These Boots Are Made For Walking', which Nancy Sinatra seized from Lee Hazelwood) but you can't picture a woman condescending to a man like the former

When this all comes around, I think of Ellen WIllis pointing out that Cat Stevens's 'Wild World' is actually much more sexist than the Stones' 'Under My Thumb'

And even non-binary/genderfucked sexiness isn't about finding some 'neutral' territory, but about either mixing and matching signifiers or leaning one way or the other. Pinning one extreme of dimorphism as 'bad' and the other one as 'good' unless reversed just leaves you in a mess

Patriarchal beauty standards are often ridiculous (no hair below the brows!) and arbitrary (four centuries ago, men were wearing leggings and pancake), but our concept of sex appeal is still rooted in sexual dimorphism - even sexualized butches are more likely to resemble male beefcake shots

Maybe it's because I grew up interacting with working class butch lesbians with framed Playboy covers hanging up, but eventually this makes much saphhic lust incomprehensible

I do not care about ads in any way shape or form, but this points up something: one of the major problems with the concept of the 'male gaze' is that as it's been simplified/vulgarized for (relative) mass understanding, it's come to mean 'women being looked at pruriently'

i don't give a rip who the CEO is i will use this website until the day it shows me one single advertisement and then none of you will ever see me again

The super rich have rigged it so that they will not face consequences until the rest of us are long dead, at which point it won't matter

This is why I shrug at early morning drops because they always zoom into the manic stratosphere by the afternoon, the whole planet could be nuked & it’d go up 8,000 points on “he’ll be releasing a plan to deal with the radiation in about two weeks”

bsky.app/profile/paul...

They not only don't care about us, they don't care about real wealth - they care about the imaginary numbers, which can go up forever, and will

One of the most destructive blind spots to the guys currently tanking our society is that they treat information like vitamins and believe it can be optimized.

1. They’re lying/wrong

2. It means the world is run by guys who think they have nothing to learn from a movie or song or play or stranger