Manafort is, of course, a world-historical scumbag, but he's only right-wing in the crudest sense of seeking proximity to power.

Atwater was ultimately an opertunist who doesn't seem to have had the slightest intention of delivering anything of substance to the people whose resentments he was exploiting. Miller is a true believer.

This seems like outgroup homogeneity bias. I don't particularly like the patrician neoconsevitism of Bill Kristol or David Frum, but their worldview is fundamentally opposed to that of someone like Stephen Miller.

Building a few more Fort Irwin style NTCs and grading officers on their performance there seems like a good idea. Doing klingon promotions based on people's ability to play Pentagon 40k is nuts and far easier to game (no pun intended) than what we do now.

if you announce that you're breaking up with Nicole Kidman because she wanted too much sex you need to do it at a press conference where you're in a full body cast. just a little slit in the head area where a pair of wild, haunted eyes are staring out

He was apparently of the opinion that (possibly only male) homosexuals could not whistle.

Run for Congress.

An "insurgent" with the FDN?
Is that some very strange way of describing him being part of the CIA mission to support the Contras?

The weird thing about a whole bunch of conservative grievances is that they're only really comprehensible when they're coming from members of the conservative media class.

Old: Congress declares War.

New: POTUS unilaterally "determines" there's an armed conflict, giving himself permission to kill whoever he decides is the enemy.

That Tucker 9/11 series has to be the ultimate example of this meme:

Die comfy.

Of course, the *checks notes* People's Liberation Army would never emphasize leftist ideology over millitary necessity.

I just realized that "can a system prompt violate the rule against rule against perpetuities" is going to have to be ruled on.

Are we far enough past peak wokeness that I can advance my speech-act theory of slurs?

Did we ever get to the bottom of whether that phrase was problematic or not?

*baked

That is very much not the case with, for example, Heracles.

I can't speak to the Jewish tradition, but Platonism got backed into Christianity very early. The idea of christ as the son of god is almost certainly derived in some way from the hellenistic tradition of demigods, but even in the earliest versions, he is born to a vrgin.

But if you read Aquinas, or even just the gospel of John and a bit of the Neoplatonic ideas it's referencing, formal Christian doctrine was way weirder than that.

There's also the question of diversity of religious understanding even within communities. The average medieval lay Catholic probably believed that god was something akin to a all powerful heavenly king, Jesus his son, the angels, archangels, and saints his servants, and the devil his enemy.

Do any of the traditional monothiestic theologians actually view God as male? My understanding is that male pronouns and grammatical gender are used in the Hebrew Bible, but rabbinical sources generally held that it verged on idolatry to take that too literally.

Hear me out...

When you pitch your generals on crushing your political enemies, it's really important to start off negging them about their weight. Napoleon, Mussolini, all the great ones did it. Octavian wouldn't let Agrippa hear the end of the mean girl comments before the Battle of Philippi.

if i were a would-be dictator whose only civilian check on power had been consumed by total-complete partisan loyalty, something i would definitely do is call an unprecedented in-person meeting of the only people who could stop me and then proceed to illustrate why they should stop me

A lot of people are going to invest a lot of time looking for sinister, fascistic dog whistles in this, but it's way, way dumber than that. The president of the United States called the top brass together to ramble at them about how our ships are too ugly.

It really seems like for the rest of Trump's term, we're going to be stuck in a situation where national security policy is decided directly by the major combatant commanders because the national comand authority has basically stopped functioning. That is, to say the least, less than ideal.

Trump is now up rambling about bringing back battleships. "Bullets are cheaper than missiles."

I'd bet that the modal professional criminal is actually worse in countries that are very safe overall. There's just a certain minimum number of psychopaths in any society.