I'd settle for like a single paragraph halfway down the page where they recall how MAGADOGE advertised itself relentlessly as anti-war and pro fiscal responsibility, but you don't even get that.
remember when the political press spent the last year helping Republicans pretend that MAGADOGE was a good faith effort at government efficiency and fiscal responsibility?
Because they don't.
The media’s framing of DOGE as nothing more than a good faith cost cutting effort might’ve been the most maddening thing of the Trump era.
What's with these guys' use of the word "kinetic?" Where did that come from? Did someone focus-group test it and tell politicians to all start using it or what?
It’s honestly wild that American media has “are liberals trapped in a bluesky bubble???” debates every two weeks while a 22 year old groyper White House staffer known as BasedBoss1488 remixes scenes from 300 in a propaganda video for a toxically unpopular lame duck president’s war of choice
Haha what a bunch of based chads!!!
(The president is radioactive and his new war is an aimless unpopular mess that’s making the economy worse)
In the present moment, the people most willing to think the chatbot is “intelligent” seem to be people who display “theory of mind” issues in other areas, so make of that what you will.
For the book, I settled on “experimental one-off protein-based computer designed by a super genius suffering from a strange new illness and trying to clone her ‘self’ because she was afraid to die” but even in the world of the book it’s a fluke never replicated.
I HAVE thought about it a lot, back in the 1990s when I was writing a science fiction novel where I wanted to have a true self-willed artificial intelligence and I agree with you completely.
Although I will say this: Trump is not actually an evangelical, evangelicals love him BECAUSE he is a mean, bigoted dumbshit just like them.
Right! The editorial says “halls of power” when they mean institutional power like SCOTUS or universities, but mysteriously this DOESN’T include actual politicians, where there are plenty of evangelicals.
“Sure, a bunch of senators and the literal speaker of the House are evangelical, and the President listens to all of them attentively, but everyone knows real power is only found in lecture halls full of sophomores.
Hey guess what my non-dumbshit ex-evangelical college roommate who became a Lutheran pastor is ALSO a Protestant
But there ARE evangelical Republican representatives in Congress and they are inevitably horrible dumbshits
There are no evangelicals on the SCOTUS because evangelicals don’t believe in law school
I’m still angry about it, apparently.
When you see the dumbshittery of the Trump 2.0 admin, the way they openly and viciously hate science, knowledge, history, scholarship, and anybody who seems “uppity” (because they know stuff/aren’t willing to suffer fools) that is the evangelical culture I grew up with escaping containment.
Evangelicals in the 1980s — and they’ve only gotten WORSE since then — had fallen into a state where they reflexively accepted crazy shit with no empirical proof (satanic panic, creationism) and displayed open hostility toward skepticism, science, expertise, scholarship, logic, empiricism, history
Not so in the evangelical context. In the evangelical context, the wilder and, frankly, stupider the better. There’s no vetting at all. Remember the satanic panic? That was my religious coming-of-age where I lost faith in the evangelical church, and, frankly, adults at the same time.
As an **individual** person of faith, you can buy whatever woo you want — sure, believe that you prayed to this one particular saint and they intervened on your behalf that one time! It’s cool! But it’s in a cultural context where you kinda have to keep a lid on it a bit.
I mean, the Catholic church has many flaws, but “just randomly buying fully into whatever woo bullshit comes along” is not one of them. If you want the church to “officially” recognize a new saint or a miracle or something, there’s a whole process, there’s vetting.
But as a teenager I was asked not ONLY to buy into Christian patriarchy, I was ALSO asked to buy into the most egregious RFK Jr - style woo bullshit. And I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t all religion automatically woo bullshit? And the answer is no, certainly not.
I’m sorry/not sorry that this comes across as judgmental, THEY ARE MY OWN FREAKING PEOPLE AND I AM ALLOWED TO JUDGE THEM and my judgment is, you know, not good.
I’ve talked about how the evangelical church spent decades driving out anybody who was too liberal, constantly ratcheting the culture to the political right, they also spent decades driving out anybody who was too smart, constantly ratcheting the culture into more ridiculous dumbshittery.
I mean, it’s not just a random thing, it was a deliberately cultivated culture: American evangelicals are overwhelmingly white, racist, misogynist, conservative, and dumb as hell.
This has been true since the religious right takeover of the white evangelical world in the 1980s, and it was being lamented by 1994 with The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sca...
As an ex-evangelical I can tell you this with some confidence: the reason evangelicals are missing from American “most prestigious institutions” is because evangelicals are ignorant dumbshits
Quite apart from the other problems with this argument, Protestants who are not Evangelicals exist, and have been part of America for longer.
George Washington was a churchwarden! Why are no Supreme Court justices churchwardens, then?
Toxic narcissism as a political philosophy
The U.S. made this class of stunningly stupid, pudding-soft MAGA parasites who have managed to move through life without ever encountering genuinely meaningful pushback. This led them to starting this wildly dangerous war in Iran - and looks like their reality distortion field is no longer working.
