Rachel Lazerus

what this anecdote says to me is that Mamdani, a person whose own name is mocked and mispronounced near-constantly, makes the effort to pronounce proper nouns as they are intended. This shows an actual effort to connect with others.

The NYT seems to prefer people who speak only in dog whistles.

J.D. Vance, the Yale Law graduate, corporate lawyer, Senate aide, and venture capitalist, has an astonishingly narrow view of "elitist education" that manages to include only the people he disagrees with politically and not himself, his wife, his patron Peter Thiel, or any member of the GOP!

I can't emphasize this enough: millions of Americans live in a fascist bubble. They think we're terrorists who want to kill them. One of the aims in my next book is to demonstrate, with 2000 as an almost arbitrary baseline, how GOP propagandists slowly turned this into common sense.

One of the valuable things about this hearing is it plainly reveals that these fascists have willed themselves into a complete state of unreality about the dangers they face. Like the unreality Nazis willed themselves into regarding Jews.

Ironically, The West Wing had the s1 episode "Let Bartlet be Bartlet" where the president decided that taking action on his core beliefs was "more important than reelection."

And the main antagonist of the first season is the Democratic party consultant who only cares about how things look.

several hundred people in my town voted for both Trump and Elizabeth Warren. on the same ballot.

I am a policy wonk and I have given up on making sense of voter preferences.

a non-trivial number of people actually thinks Trump has the right approach to foreign policy, they just wish he was doing it to the people they hate.

however, that would have just gotten people telling me to tell me what an awful person I am, and I get that enough from Jews who are convinced I want to kill them all for an invite to Mamdami's hipster parties.

(They're wrong: I'm a Millennial, I hate hipster parties.)

Last time I said that a whole bunch of people very confidently told me that the US president can order Israel to do whatever he wants with the snap of his fingers and thus all Americans are complicit

I wanted to say, "you're not complicit, I'm complicit, I went to a religious Zionist day school."

Okay, so, Gregor Vorbarra, Miles Vorkosigan, and Ivan Vorpatril are all great-grandchildren of Dorca Vorbarra...

Especially because OCPF works extremely slowly!

He really thought the judge would be dumb enough to fall for that.

What a shitstain.

It's okay, it only really sticks in your mind when you find something relevant, like trying to figure out how Ivan Vorpatril would become emperor of three planets if Gregor Vorbarra died without a named heir.

(Unsurprisingly, most of the SF/F where this is a plot hook was written by horse fans.)

So if you and dad's cousin both have kids, your kids are now second cousins once removed, because your kid's great-great-grandparents are dad's cousin's great-grandparents.

This is more relevant to daily life when you're tracking land inheritance and/or breeding horses and want lineages.

Yeah, the adjective describing the "cousins" is naming the last shared relatives (grandparents = first, great-grandparents = second), and the number of times removed is describing the difference in the relationship you have.

Your great-grandparents are Dad's cousins grandparents: once removed.

Me, after looking at the wreckage Chotiner has made of my former professors and professional role models: "But he'd be different with me!"

In MA, folks enrolled in SNAP who have active EBT cards with at least a $1 balance will still be able to access fresh produce with their cards through the Healthy Incentives Program. That funding doesn't go away Nov. 1, when SNAP does. www.mass.gov/info-details...

I'd never heard of that! Thank you for teaching me something new!

Yeah, when my second cousin is my dad's age and I'm roughly the age of her daughter, she's functionally my aunt even if she's technically my cousin.

Is "atomised" how the idiom "nuclear family" gets translated? That's amazing, because that sort of family does so often go off like a bomb when someone steps out of line.

The people policing this would also be extremely mad at 1) the disrespect Mamdani would be showing if he didn't use an honorific title for someone older than him and 2) my Israeli in-laws, who think you only use terms like "Aunt X" or "Uncle Y" for people you dislike.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

The media convinced themselves through wishful thinking. They're willing participants in this farce.

The Walton family (who own Walmart) are worth over $400 billion, yet many of their employees are on SNAP.

Bezos is worth over $400 billion, many Amazon employees require SNAP.

The people who need help are not the problem.

It’s corporate greed. It’s an unwillingness to pay a living wage.

Oh, he's perfect as Marco -- I'm listening to the series with my 10yo and he nails it every time.

(Also, speaking of formative children's literature, you are the only other person from the non-frum world who has ever heard of the BY Times. I would visit my cousin just to read her copies!)

"No, no, ignore everything you saw and heard, 2024 was totally decided only because we didn't throw trans people under the bus enough."

-"so, well, we're going to name her the same way you spell your name, can't be helped, please don't take this as a major insult or think I hope that you die soon!"

I don't think she ever responded, but she is part of the Likudnik branch, so maybe that's also for the best.

Spouse and I fell in love with the name Maya for our youngest. Only problem: my first cousin has the same name. There are two Hebrew spellings, so I msged my cousin to ask how she spells her Hebrew name.

It happened to be the way my MIL wanted to spell it (מיאה), so I had to reply to my cousin all-

Also Musk using Twitter as a propaganda machine and buying votes in Pennsylvania.

What are you looking for?

My personal favorite is Joseph Heller's GOD KNOWS, but that is deeply (and hilariously) anachronistic fiction.