MTBinDurham

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

Lol not a hard one to predict (that you find a fair few atheists in the pews) but just glad it’s working out for you so far.

One of these days I'll finally put together my "genial drunk folks two campsites over in the state park blasting their tunes as they sit around the fire at dusk at exactly the right volume for it to waft over to you" playlist.

First up:

there are people who are very badly infected by this who also contain impulses towards loving, reciprocal relationships, and sometimes that wins out.

But this dynamic is absolutely present in many male-male relationships and it's one of those things that once you see it, you see it everywhere.

To be clear, I was cutting a lot of corners while ranting before cooking dinner so I elided a lot.

This is about straight men and definitely not all straight men. There's something to be said about a "queer straightness" that disengages from this. And . . .

I do think it says something that whenever we ask ourselves questions like this, we get a jumble of 500 policies. What are the unifying concepts that explain why that agenda is cohesive and desirable? That tells us how and why to prioritize certain goals at certain times? That's what the right has.

Hulk Hogan, lying inexplicably sideways in his open coffin, being visited by a chihuahua dog, who looks distraught. The people behind the coffin do too

I'm sorry, but this may be the funniest Facebook AI slop I have ever seen. Bury me sideways in my coffin, brother. Let my dog see

Luke Farritor must go to jail, for breaking the law and killing people.

These assholes must be punished if we want to rebuild an American democracy. He broke the law. Prosecute him and imprison him. What liberal leader will call for that?

I would love if her estate sued Trump for allowing sex trafficking to happen.

It may be what he's trying to cover up.

The Boy Genius Who Killed 14 Million Poor People What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?

"Before January 2025 there had been no—zero, zilch—interest in killing off USAID. It wasn't something Trump ran on. It wasn't envisioned in Project 2025. It was only once Elon Musk decided that USAID was evil that destroying the agency became a policy goal for the Republican party."

And what’s the stat, something like 70% of House Republicans are new since the Trump era?

The Tea Party didn’t ally with insider Republicans. They replaced them.

There are things called primaries, you know. Protest non-voting is a dangerous tactic that almost never actually works. It just royally pisses off coalition partners and generally bad leadership responds by ignoring you.

Following the 2000 Nader votes, the Dems moved substantially to the right.

"He's a piece of shit, but let's get the political science stuff out of the way," Steven told me when I asked if he thought support of Tesla could be considered apolitical. "Elon Musk has platformed white supremacists and antisemites on X. He got rid of all the moderation. He put back accounts that were clearly neo-Nazis. He's changed algorithms to promote that type of hate. Him and DOGE did massive cuts in the government, including our civil services. He's cut cancer research. Did I mention he was a giant piece of shit?" "He's cut our aid to Africa, which Will result, without exaggeration, in millions of women and children and innocent people dying. Millions," he said. "I'm not a big fan of people who give the Hitler salute. I mean, I'm kind of fussy like that. He gave it twice at Trump's inauguration," he continued. "He's a Nazi. And he cheats at video games. You have another question?"

lol at this response to a “man on the street” interview with protestors at the Tesla diner

Parable of the Sower really messed with me, but one of the ways it MOST messed with me (in a good way) was its insistence on the inevitability and persistence of change.

We're never going back, but also we never WERE going back.

This rollercoaster never had a reverse button. Time never does

Cheers, mate.

So the blog posts that men need to be writing, if this is going to be a thing, I guess, is how to not be obsessed with your social position vis a vis other men when having sex with someone.

Once we get all the way back there, we can restart this convo on real ground.

We need to go ALL THE WAY BACK to actually getting men to rethink how to actually ENJOY SEX IN THE FIRST PLACE (YES REALLY) and think about WHY YOU WANT TO HAVE SEX.

Because (and I cannot emphasize enough how fucking culturally insidious this is) otherwise sex is a video game and women are levels.

So let's go back to that unfortunate dude trying to explain for "the left" how to have sex.

See, it's busted from the beginning because we're *still* stuck in the toxic masculinity mindset.

Which is rape culture.

THIS is why (as @tressiemcphd.bsky.social points out) so many men seem to just want women to have sex *on* them, not with them. So long as they have achieved sex, they get points on the toxic masculinity scoreboard.

And it's so ingrained that the hotness of the women can't even be evaluated on whether your own male gaze gets kinda stuck there. I've been on sports forums and if the conversation turns to famous women, men will ask IN ALL SERIOUSNESS, "is she hot?"

Even *desirability* is a thing to be debated!

Are you seeing it? The barbershop had Jerry Springer or something on, we're not even sitting there looking at spouses.

The *hotness of the celebrity's wife* is an inherent way that *toxic masculinity keeps score in a competition between men.*

Now maybe they just want some eye candy. But this is 2025 and internet porn is not hard to find, to say the least.

I went to a (really bad) barbershop once and was chatting with the guy about whatever was on TV. Every celebrity he mentioned, the guy was like, "but he has a beautiful wife."

Now usually what I wanted to know was, how old is this player, how many goals have they scored, how many rebounds did they have last year, batting average, whatever.

But enough people (I mean it's men, right?) are out looking to see a player's wife.

(I suppose in our new dystopian search hellscape this could be unique to me somehow, but I promise you I'm never doing these searches myself.)

Let's go down this rabbit hole. Like many people, I enjoy watching sports. Sometimes I want to know more about a player. So start typing a name into a search bar.

Always... ALWAYS... one of the first suggestions for male athletes in the search bar is "<player name> wife"

I'm dead serious, try it.

Fine, I'm doing a thing:

bsky.app/profile/did:...

One of the really, really twisted parts of toxic masculinity is that it makes sex more than just a thing that's enjoyable. It makes sex with women a *mediator* for relationships *between men*.

If you need an entry point start at "trophy wife" and go from there.

We can't even start with "men are looking for this because they want to know how to get laid" because you have to ask *why* they want to get laid.

I know that sounds like a stupid question but it's not (here's where it gets awful).

Yes, many men like to have sex. But . . .

Straight up front, in the tl;dr section.

You can't start with "this is how you get laid." Nope, back up.

You can't start with "this makes men right wing." Not like that, let's back up.

It's so much fucking worse than that.

Okay this is frustrating for me because there's a real issue underneath this but the men trying to talk about it keep starting out on the wrong foot.

I can't do this fast so I'm gonna thread.

But like we have to go down three levels of why masculinity is so fucking broken to get there.