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I only knew it because of Gene Wolfe

I recently went to Vietnam and this is what everything was like, just with America and communism in opposite positions

Yup! I just enjoy them, get full, and stop eating.

Same! That and the cravings are just turned off. I can eat one piece of cake and feel satisfied for the week that I got a nice treat. It’s wild!

It’s because the left-of-center DESPERATELY needs the explanation for Harris’s loss to be “Harris wasn’t left-wing enough and failed to excite progressive Dems,” and since there’s not one iota of persuasive evidence this was the case, has latched on to Cheney as the skeleton key for the election

If you want to blame someone Biden bears the brunt of it, also a broad misread of the media ecosystem, the Harris campaign itself looks like it did what it could, not sure a different ad or speech gets you over the hump

Like any old man, I occasionally bristle and grumble at linguistic changes, and might roll my eyes if a man of my age and demeanor lists his pronouns as he/him.

What disqualifies me for Trumpism is that I don’t think that’s a good reason to leave NATO.

Is there a Starter Pack of people who correctly identified that Biden should be pushed off the ticket and think Harris ran a good campaign that just couldn't defy gravity and the Democratic Party probably doesn't need to rethink its entire strategy based on one close election?

okay I'm trying this again. so far not super promising since everyone seems to be yelling at Weigel for pointing out the obvious fact that educated liberals use a lot of focus grouped social justice language that normal people find strange or just don't understand

Hard to overstate what an absolute disaster Bluesky was throughout this process. Just a complete echo chamber utterly detached from reality. Surest sign yet that Twitter is the only real option we have.

Also, related to this, it makes sense because this place is entirely populated with people who fled Twitter due to Elon Musk, but the echo chamber effect on Bluesky is *wild*

I don’t have a firm take on what will or should happen, but Biden has clearly lost the confidence of his voters. This feels a lot like Clinton’s emails where instead of trying to deal with a liability, a lot of people are going to pretend the liability is some fake thing the NYT invented.

Nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw, new AP-NORC poll finds The new poll sharply undercuts President Biden's post-debate claim that “average Democrats” are still with him.

This Twitter bubble made up only of elites is getting out of hand.

apnews.com/article/bide...

Sorry, I meant the @davidjroth.bsky.social and @osullyville.bsky.social exchange

Are you a fan of all of those guys who are directly responsible for making the internet an unusable dogshit hellhole? Well boy do I have a VP for you.

If you're any other Democrat what I would suggest is like "Violence has no place in our politics. I hope this is a WAKE UP CALL for Trump, that saying things like an assassin trying to kill Nancy Pelosi was a hoax, that nazis in Charlottesville were 'very fine people,' that" and just go on

COVID is rocking me so all I'll say is that what USers have historically called democracy has long coexisted with tons of explicitly political violence, and that what we call democracy today coexists with absurd amounts of violence that simply isn't called political

I think what's so alluring about "is it ethical to work for an employer who behaves unethically" as an argument is that there's no black and white standard and everyone has a different line they draw, but you can just loudly insist there's an obvious standard that whoever you don't like is violating

Basically. One of the biggest problems (in an Econ sense, not a moral one) in labor markets is sticky wages. Generally people don’t take pay cuts, so wages don’t fall during recession (instead people get fired). Rising prices un-stick the labor market and employers pay more to attract talent.

To be fair, you might not starve if disobedience got you shot first.

I don’t post much any more because why bother, but here’s my marker: Biden is cooked and the only play left is figuring out how to snatch a House majority from the wreckage of his campaign.

I was on tenterhooks because I convinced myself Star Wars was gonna show a butt, but of course Star Wars did not show a butt

My very cynical Israel-Palestine take is that it’s the logical endpoint of nationalism and that everyone keeps comparing one side or the other to Nazis while screaming blood and soil rhetoric.

Obviously the alternative headline here is that Trump would lose 1/3-1/2 of GOP voters, guaranteeing a Biden landslide

After he drinks the Water of Life and puts on that black hood outfit, I was like holy shit Villeneuve is doing Anakin

Just fundamentally don’t see how you get from “There are no Israelis without the genocide of the Palestinian people” to peace

The only candidate I’ve seen poll better against Trump than Biden is 76-year-old Joe Manchin

i think my problem with certain forms of anti-colonialism is that they become indistinct from blood and soil nationalism but merely with a marginally longer memory.

this is distinct from merely saying, "it is bad to go out conquering peoples and we should not do this." which is worth saying