Sparky Clarkson

Mary Shelley doesn't get enough credit for not only anticipating the silver-spooned narcissist techbro who recklessly creates technology without thinking through the consequences, but also for knowing that said techbro would be an absolutely terrible father.

if you are worth billions of dollars — a sum that makes you wealthier than any king in antiquity — you already *have* been incentivized. you have been allowed, by the state and by your fellow citizens, to escape any material concern except death, a condition entirely unique to the modern era.

"why are institutions continuing to fold at the same time that trump's approval numbers are going down and some methods of oppositions are proving effective" is The Question right now imo

i didn't get into it in my essay on this speech, but beyond the basic incoherence of vance's assorted grievances, i'm struck by how ungrateful *he* is, a man who owes his fame and fortune to the open, cosmopolitan society he is trying to destroy for the sake of power

If the federal government can simply seize privately held patents then that is the end of the U.S. patent system, the legal basis for American innovation.

approval rating among Democrats: 11%

packing the court: it’s good primary politics, get on board now before this train leaves the station

it’s basically trite to note at this point but if this were any other president, and certainly a democrat, spending a ton of money to gild the white house would be a legit scandal

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk say human population not nearly big enough: ‘If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts’ “I think in a lot of these endeavors we're very like-minded,” Bezos said of himself and Musk regarding getting humans into space.

I don’t know why this incenses me as much as it does, but it does:

we very likely have a thousand plus Mozarts *right now*. But they make non-Western art in economically destitute conditions so they have to do other work to pay bills; if you cared, UBI’d be more important to you than going to space

once again, it is a core belief of people on the american right that it should be illegal for you not to like them or want to be around them or work with them

Warner Bros. has said The Hunt for Gollum is in fact the first of two new Lord of the Rings feature films from Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens based on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, as the company aims to make more of the franchise. With The Hunt for Gollum, we’ll get to see what Gollum was up to in the years between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Can't stress this enough: nobody fucking cares what he was up to

"Trump shuttered your hospital to pay for the Epstein Ballroom"

"Trump's ballroom adopts the aesthetics of fascism and white supremacism" - loser nerd talk

"Trump's ballroom costs TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS of TAXPAYER MONEY" - winning argument

Devir's Ace of Spaces was the sole title I heard the most about before & after GenCon, yet not one person who I saw rave about it cared to mention they did a big honking racism.

Euro publishers: ignorance & isms this willful, in 2025, feels intentional and is bad (see also CGE's Codenames: TERF).

Going to keep saying: a society that wants to keep functioning needs to discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

theres millions of dollars on the left of center. we just waste it on a lot of shit. www.oliverexplains.com/p/democrats-...

Kids today are learning that the fastest and easiest way to make money—the key value that has been modeled to them in America society—is to scam others, cheat your way through, and attract negative attention online that can be monetized. My endless sympathy to parents

Former Superman turns into an ICE supervillain Dean Cain, the actor best known for portraying Superman on the TV series “Lois & Clark,” announced on Wednesday that he will be joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The decision runs in ...

"Cain has not done much high-profile work since “Lois & Clark”. He followed up the show with a slew of basic cable and direct-to-video movies, and has appeared in several right-wing propaganda films like “ObamaGate: The Movie,” and “God's Not Dead: In God We Trust.”" www.dailykos.com/stories/2025...

Encouraging everyone to think about how every right-wing paramilitary death squad around the world for the past century has armed itself with “lost” or “stolen” military/police gear and also 97% of their members were the same guys but with masks on.

These GOP Lawmakers Referred Constituents to the CFPB for Help. Then They Voted to Gut the Agency. Many of the same Republican lawmakers who have targeted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for cuts have collectively directed thousands of constituents’ complaints about banks, credit cards, lo...

Reps. Darrell Issa (CA), and Rob Wittman (VA), and Texas Sen. John Cornyn have all voted for cuts to the CFPB.

Yet collectively, they’ve routed more than 1,000 constituent complaints about financial products and services to the agency.

By @joeljacobs.bsky.social @propublica.org

Ari Cohn @aricohn.com • 18h "Fake moral panic" FIRE pointed problems out where it saw them. Your problem is with the people in office. "You shouldn't say anything that someone with bad intent should misuse even if it's right" is stupid position worth Erp consideration. Jamison Foser @jamisonfoser.bsky.social • 14h This reminds me that when Donald Trump spent last fall threatening to imprison people for criticizing the Supreme Court, I couldn't find a word of mention of it from FIRE or any other self-styled free speech organization. Possible I missed something but they sure weren't saying much. Ari Cohn @aricohn.com Who was president when he did that, tell me

also hilarious FIRE dude goes from "we pointed out threats to free speech where we saw them, even if it was just some college kid, because we are very smart" to "yeah we didn't bother pointing out that threat because the guy wasn't president" in one move.

🤡🤡🤡

Do not accept the question "But how do we pay for it?" about social programs ever again. That talking point is done forever.

Anyway the lady who created a villain so committed to supremacist domination that it consumes him and leaves him as an empty husk w/an irretrievably splintered soul has a few more thousand thoughts today about one of society's most marginalized groups, by which I mean she has 1 thought 1000 times.

Wait you mean a Democrat can just go to a microphone and make news and it’s not always about cowering under your desk all day, consulting a focus group to shape a mealy mouth message?

Whoa if true

Hello journalists. If you report this you gotta say that under the Constitution he has no power to do it. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Imo it would be FINE if Buttigieg said, "hey, some folks have fallen for anti-trans propaganda from the far right around sports, and we have an obligation to help them understand why that propaganda is hateful and false."

But he didn't.

He said we should "take them seriously."

Absolutely not.

also raising my eyebrow at 'huh, so many historian briefs support liberal positions--I guess history profs are Dem elites'

or maybe historians felt compelled to respond to originalism's ascendancy and the Supreme Court's reliance on spurious historical arguments to advance a far-right policy agenda

The thing is, what this book made most want was a comprehensive history of the Confederate Navy, something I think Hearns would be eminently qualified to write. This study feels like a little slice out of a history of failure. That said, I recommend this one to Civil War history buffs.

Hearn's rendition, I think, does too little credit to Farragut (although he is appropriately negative towards the admiral's brother Porter). Hearns also I think makes the threads of Confederate failure a little harder to follow due to his structural choices.

Judah Benjamin (and really all secretaries of the War department) also receive their due share of blame for freely stealing troops from Louisiana to feed armies in Virginia in Tennessee, leaving very little effective ground force to resist the Federal Navy and "Spoons" Butler.