Noah Brand

Someone told me to be careful about who's buying data from my car.

I told them my car is from 1974 and if someone can shake some data out of it, they earned it.

Some folks like Newsom because he has some solid burns on social media, and I agree! If the intern who runs his social media were running, I'd vote for them!

SOCIAL MEDIA INTERN 2028

"It's not that you're right about everything, but at least you have some grounding in what you're talking about and you can express complex ideas in a form that's not a sales pitch."

I was 18 the first time I finished that book, in a hotel room in Madagascar, reading by candlelight because the town I was in didn't have electricity.

I immediately turned back to the first page and started reading it again.

I had a brief thread about this recently. There are two understanding of "who we are" when we talk about America. Both understandings have always been there, since the start, and they are not compatible. bsky.app/profile/noah...

"Yes, I understand what consequences are. Time you did too."

"They had Marimar Martinez on a dangerous activists list before they shot her" and "NIH is out of the business of pandemic preparation" and "they taunted the hungry children at Dilley with Thanksgiving food for the jailers" and "a lot of those empty PDFs are abuse videos" was all today

It really is a James Tiptree story come to life, huh. World's richest man uses technology to guarantee male heir, heir uses technology to become daughter anyway, man goes insane and tries to destroy civilization. 70s reviewers say "cool scifi but isn't the feminist message a little heavy-handed?"

Yeah, when I was a kid, I was just weird. As in "Oh yeah, that's just Noah, he's weird." Nowadays there's a name for it.

So yeah, if an oldster asks "How come there weren't all these autistic kids when I was in school?" tell them that they were the weird kids being shoved into lockers.

his feet are light and nimble. he never sleeps. he says that he will never die. he dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. he never sleeps, handsome pete. he is dancing, dancing. he says that he will never die.

I have a single criterion for anyone who's planning an offworld colony of any kind.

Are you testing it in Antarctica first?

No? Okay, you're not serious, no further questions.

Yeah, no. 30 million vile and feckless people, sure. 30 million people willing to sit through a show where the HEADLINER is Kid Rock? That's a totally different proposition.

A tuxedo cat with long white whiskers, looking concerned.

@domesticat.bsky.social and I have spent the last several days making and freezing several batches of homemade chicken stock, so vaporized chicken has been filling the air.

This little dude has been GRAVELY concerned that the air is made of meat. Perhaps he fears succumbing to Chicken Lung.

Bitcoin.

Man, I'm glad you captioned it, because I didn't even recognize her.

Just to clarify, that is NOT how she looked when we were dating.

A Twitter thread by David Rees from 2017/05/17, part one: "RE: #ComeyFiring, I think the GOP will now go along with anything Trump does. I mean literally anything. It’s TIME FOR SOME SHAME THEORY! I believed GOP was going along with DJT because they thought he could get them their precious policy outcomes: tax cuts, etc. -- and, that if DJT’s malfeasance ever decreased their chances of enacting those policies, they would jettison him. I now think this political calculus has been replaced by a deeper, darker, calculus: a psychological survival strategy. GOP will agree to anything - I mean anything - because they can no longer afford a moral reckoning with what who and what they’ve enabled. Once you've gone so far that checking in with yourself would shatter your belief in your own humanity/decency, there are no limits."

A Twitter thread by David Rees from 2017/05/17, part two: "At this point, there are probably GOPers who wish Trump would suspend the constitution outright. Really just GO FOR IT, so that we leave this liminal, sorta-not-quite-authoritarian space with its semi-sorta-functional institutions behind, and enter a new American era, where their collusion/treason(?) can't be judged by old norms. If you've ever had an affair, or drug issues, etc, you probably know the feeling. The bender/lost weekend/flirtation with hitting bottom. At some point, your shame at your behavior, at the norms you’ve violated, leads you to double down, go ALL IN, obliterate your old self. I used to be a bully in middle school, so I know this amazing, complex feeling of exhilaration and revulsion, the poison rush of living your worst self, resenting *the part of you that knows better.* Not enough to ignore it; you must destroy it."

A Twitter thread by David Rees from 2017/05/17, part three: "Congress had to enter DJT’s orbit in order to pass their sacred tax cuts/repeal the hated ACA. They thought they could contain him. But DJT poisons everyone he touches. The price for working with him is pretty hefty: your humanity and dignity (h/t @joshtpm). Healthy people (and banks!) learned to avoid DJT decades ago. He surrounds himself with damaged goods: Stone, Flynn, other freaks/losers. We are watching that community of damaged psyches expand to include an entire political party. GOP pols must avoid a moral reckoning at all costs. But not just a public reckoning -- a private one. Can’t admit to moral suicide. If #TrumpTrain stopped, GOP would have to answer for putting up with PussyGate, deranged tweets, lies, damaged institutions, all the Russia stuff, etc. etc. The list is overwhelming, unprecedented, debilitating. That reckoning absolutely cannot happen."

A Twitter thread by David Rees from 2017/05/17, part four: "Trump, an experienced abuser, knows this on some lizard-brain level. He has captured the GOP. His transgressions will increase. “Comey was irresponsible about HRC” is deliberately absurd; a power move by Trump to see if GOP will agree to any reality he proposes. Answer: YES. #winning Back to the bender analogy. We’re in the middle of a crazy bender. What would bottoming out look like, when GOP says: ENOUGH? My theory: As of yesterday’s preposterous justification for Comey firing, there is no bottom. The GOP will never call Trump out. In fact, GOP pols must now encourage further transgressions, to destroy the current context in which feeling shame re: DJT is appropriate. Maybe I’m wrong! But my prediction is GOP would agree with DJT if/when he says he’s canceling the 2018 midterms. THE END"

Your point reminds me of a very astute Twitter thread about shame, by David Rees (of Get Your War On fame), from early in Trump's first term. It's hard to find now, so I'm going to post the whole thing here.

And it's SO CLOSE to the simplest way out: "Oh, I'm too old to follow pop music. If they were getting Aerosmith, I'd pay attention, but I just don't know anything about this Bunny fella."

This would, of course, create incentives for crooked states to make their driver's ed deliberately wrong, so as to get that fat federal payout and slide most of it into the governor's pocket.

But it's still a better public infrastructure proposal than most I've heard, so let's go.

Quentin would be miserable. None of the muppets have FEET.

I choose to believe that this headline says "primates" because a senior editor stopped two junior editors who'd been arguing back and forth over "apes" vs. "monkeys" for like an hour.

Unfortunately, humans are also primates.

I suspect what BOAN did (arguably) invent was the huge blockbuster. What I've read is that it made more money than any other movie by a WIDE margin (until GONE WITH THE fucking WIND, of course), which implies that the basic logic is "Anything that makes so much dough must be good... somehow."

I love the little devil on the left with the hot poker. His body language slays me. "Ooooh, he's going to haaaaate this..."

At the risk of courting controversy, I agree with Speedball.

Headline? I've got a headline for you!

PIG EATS SHIT

Much of modern tech is about finding unremovable quirks of human cognition and exploiting them. Recency bias, confirmation bias, dopamine loops, etc.

Anyway, pareidolia is now something you can go crazy from.

In fairness, it's rather more about GILFs. Post-menopausal is all but specified.

I guess "Out As Quietly As Possible And Proud" doesn't rhyme.

I don't think "Okay, sure, [reality], but what about [fiction], that's more important!" is the slam dunk you think it is, especially among horror fans.

The linked article doesn't say anything about a "grooming op"... do you have a source on that part?