Phil Stanton

To a first approximation, no one should read anything an English teacher would assign, because those books are more likely to dissuade you from a life of reading than inspire you to read more.

No institutional design can overcome a lawbreaking president, a Congress defending lawbreaking and forfeiting its own power, a Supreme Court that pretends legal text doesn’t count to facilitate lawbreaking, and a citizenry that votes for all that.
Need at least one that wants rule of law. Maybe two.

Soldiers at the Bass Pro Shops pyramid in Memphis, TN.

> It is 2025 BC. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis

> It is 2025 AD. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis

this is kind of ingenious - a bunch of animal costumes are difficult to make look menacing even with manipulative editing by regime propagandists

Hammer of Bogardan? (Was tempted to say Savage Twister.)

so you agree, the whole industry is built on theft

I’m a US citizen and a veteran. ICE arrested me for no reason. Jailed for three days without an explanation or ability to notify anyone, George Retes argues the only path to healing starts with the government taking accountability for its actions.

"[A]gents engulfed my car in tear gas, smashed my driver-side window, and pepper-sprayed my face.... I spent three nights and three days in federal custody. No explanation. No charges. No apology. One day, I was just told, 'you’re free to go.'" #KavanaughStop

"We're going to create superintelligence" How about making outlook search work first. How about that

Terrorizing and wrecking an entire 150-unit apartment building--hundreds of people, mostly legal or citizens--to detain 37 people. This should be a much more massive story.

isn't the whole point of copyright that you are opting out of people stealing your work

The United States is simply not politically stable enough, nor sufficiently committed to democratic and international principles, to host the UN.

OMG - the judge in Florida just sua sponte struck the complaint in the Trump v NYT case for -wait for it - violating Rule 8.

Lawyers, tell the folks at home how hard it is to get the complaint struck outright for something like that in fed eral court.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

In the last 10-15 years, a particular slice of online fandom seems to have gotten madder and louder. These viewers only assess media through the binary lens of:
If my ship is cute or gets "enough" screentime, it's GOOD
If my ship fights or is underrepresented or "loses" to another ship, it's BAD

As a historian of masculinities, I can confirm that life truly is mostly about Buffalo Wild Wings

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Card image of Autochthon Wurm from Ravnica: City of Guilds

Isn’t it just Autochthon Wurm at 15:0? cards.scryfall.io/large/front/...

Flash Counter (iirc it was printed as Instant when Interrupt still existed)

This is a terrific thread.

note also that with the AFAIK lone exception of Rubio all confirmed nominees have taken ~full clock time, with minor asterisks.

Dem votes for confirmation do not affect the clock.

Hi authors! Please remember to file a claim!

We spend lots of time parsing through all the preexisting trends that made the rise of an American fascism possible, and that's all true enough, but it's still a huge contingent factor that Donald Trump is a literal freak of nature, a sui generis pathological bundle of min-maxed personality traits.

2.5 million people is more than a quarter of the population. The equivalent of more than 85 million people protesting on the same day in the United States.

By comparison, an estimated five million people joined USA No Kings Day protests.

We’ve discovered a literal miracle with almost unlimited potential and it’s being scrapped for *no reason whatsoever*. This isn’t even nihilism, it’s outright worship of death and human suffering.

Sorta feels like "they are actively gutting cancer research" should be finding more purchase out there

My reaction to that completely batshit press briefing by Tulsi Gabbard in which she accused Obama of “treasonous conspiracy” is that whatever is in the Epstein files about Trump must be really really bad

ICE handcuffs 71-year-old grandmother, a U.S. citizen, at San Diego immigration court Barbara Stone was handcuffed and held by federal agents for hours, according to her family; she was accused of pushing an ICE officer, which she denies.

When I say most people are good and we are going to beat these fascists, people like this woman are why I feel so confident:

“The message that it sent was very clear: For us to be afraid to come back and do the work that we’re doing,” Mendez said.

Stone, however, said she would volunteer again.”

It’s bad that Trump thinks he got elected Boss of America and the whole government is just his staff, but it’s much worse that a majority of the Supreme Court and the leaders of both chambers of Congress agree

I don’t think it’s widely appreciated how much the insular circles of the extremely online have fostered a generation of extremely smart people talking about completely fictional futures based on various plausible but unhinged fan fictions about how the world works.

Vance is here to grab content he can post on X, using your replies. Starve the beast.

To the Gen z voters who helped make trump president again who are too young and/or too dumb to remember the first time: yes, this constantly careening from mega-crisis to mega-crisis with myriad lives on the line does not stop while he’s in power and no, nobody is coming to save you