Electric Kool-Aid Bechdel Test

There’s a Talmudic opinion about how we shouldn’t let people convert to Judaism when Jews are doing well politically, as they may be doing for improper reasons.

So yeah. Fucking nailed it. 🙃

literally did not occur to me that by "halls of power" they could mean "universities"

Evangelicals can also help address a broader issue American institutions face. The political analyst Yuval Levin has observed that Americans too often see the organizations to which they belong as mere platforms by which they can raise their profile, build their brand and advance their career. Or they channel their energy into political grievance and culture wars. For this reason, institutions atrophy and critical problems such as civic cohesion, economic dynamism and family formation go unaddressed. It is toward these fundamental issues that American elites should be directing their attention and efforts.

Evangelicals: definitely not channeling their energy into political grievance and culture wars

Even if they weren’t such a large share of the population, evangelicals would have something important to offer. America was historically a Protestant country, and much of its culture and institutional structure has Protestant roots. Also, as a traditionally middle-class movement, evangelicalism has thrived by being in touch with the culture and concerns of middle- and working-class America. Given these facts, evangelicals are well-positioned to understand what resonates with the broad middle in America. By bringing this knowledge to c-suites and lecture halls, they can help bridge the divide that separates the elite from the rest of the country. Indeed, one reason evangelical politicians have done so well at winning elections is their ability to respond to the concerns of non-college-educated Americans.

Evangelicals have plenty to offer: they’re white, first of all. And secondly, they’re not ‘elite’. Thirdly, they know how to appeal to uneducated idiots.

I’m sold, sign me up!

Who the fuck picks *this* historical moment to come out with that headline? For fuck's sake.

Sorry, just, elected evangelicals are working to legislate me and my friends out of existence, while evangelical military commanders are talking about how a war they are fighting right now is part of a plan to fulfill their terrible apocalypse prophecy, but somehow none of that is "power".

This is also why Donald Trump is not an "elite", but a 23-year-old with blue hair, a pronoun pin, a poorly-compensated food service job, and a pile of student debt is the most "elite" of all.

Positions of legislative or military authority do not count as "the halls of power", because we all know real power is not the power to set policy and wield the state's monopoly on force, but rather the power to be perceived as cool and sophisticated.

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

Her curse also puts her in a position to make an absolute killing as a derivatives trader.

Don't you know you can just head on down to the local mall and get top surgery at Claire's?

how would a teen even get trans surgery without parental consent. do they think this is happening

I watched a documentary on TLC in like 1998 that discussed gender affirming surgery. I excitedly told my 3rd grade classmates about it at lunch. They were revolted by it and told the teacher. I was put in detention. I was quickly forced to internalize even the possibility of being trans was wrong.

The question is always "what if a kid is wrongfully transitioned" and never "what if a trans kid is denied the ability to transition and endures years of excruciating dysphoria and has to have multiple surgeries later in life to fix the issues caused by going through the wrong puberty."

the point he lands on here is “self-determination is not trustworthy”, which is not not fascism adjacent

with that recent piece in the atlantic much of today's transphobic mass hysteria rotates around the fundamental premise that it is incomprehensible that a baby trans girl would want to be understood as one of the girls or be one in part because she thinks girls are cool and relatable

control immigration take care of our own meme but the big guy is saying "don't transition be a feminine man" the small man is saying "I'd like to be a feminine man" and the big man tells him to fuck off

It took the smarts and bravery of fucking Ben to uncover the conspiracy that effeminate gay men are being forcibly transitioned by a medical establishment that refuses to prescribe hormones and tries to dissuade people from transitioning every step of the way.

No one has ever told me that they would actually respect me if I knocked off this silly "insisting I'm a woman" business and just admitted I'm an effeminate gay man, despite the inconvenient fact that I have never once been attracted to men---a fact that gets me branded a predator for existing!

In Defense of Effeminate Boys If anyone had suggested that I might really be a girl, I don’t know how I would have responded. By Ben Appel

No one before Ben has ever considered that trans women might actually be effeminate gay boys. No one has ever suggested such a thing to us, repeatedly, in a bid to prevent us from transitioning, or developed entire typologies around the idea, or reinforced it in multiple academic fields!

Note that this all rests on the facially absurd notion that being a trans woman is met with widespread social favor and preference over being a cis gay man to the point that cis gays are being pressured into transness. Does... anyone think that's true?

It's worth keeping in mind that Kansas has a strict voter ID law, so this law has essentially instituted a poll tax on all trans people in the state because they have to pay to get their ID replaced.

tl;dr: more people should watch this gentleman's speech and think seriously about what he is saying

bsky.app/profile/slcl...

whether war, vaccines, or critical infrastructure there is contingent of the right that seems to believe that their security from the worst things that happen is some kind of metaphysical principle rather than the result of specific historical processes that could've gone otherwise and still could

a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people

Comment on “Boss! Autistic woman smashing work goals rewarded with burnout!” After 4 burnouts, there's nothing like humour to minimize the reality of being Autistic and living with burnout. How amusing.

I wrote this article from bed 🙃

WSJ reporting that the U.S. used Claude for the air strikes in Iran. Centcom has been using Claude "for intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios" www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

this is making me want to revisit the tattoo idea from my early twenties which was just going to be DISGUST IS A LEARNED RESPONSE on the lower back

We Need to Get Off the Defensive About Immigration Free movement is a fantastic thing, and we should say it.

there's this deep seated instinct that as soon as someone says something socailly liberal they become an out of touch professional elite & it's such bullshit

www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-g...

In order to understand UK politics in 2026 you must realise that a plumber & plasterer doesn't represent the interests of the working class because she is left-wing but a wealthy broadcaster & former academic does represent the interests of the working class because he is right-wing. Hope this helps