Fritz Swanson

I don't think it's good that the president is threatening the Iranian men's national soccer team with violence, tbh.

They've torched everything. The DOJ is just one of hundreds of reservoirs of talent, good will, and effectiveness that they have torched. It's an etch-a-sketch end of the universe. We need to pass brutal taxes on billionaires. Some will leave, good. Some will stay and they will pay to rebuild.

I love that our discourse is so bad that foreign adversaries can’t even get into it with us. We all know! We all hate him! Get in line, Iran.

Trump doesn’t have objectives. He only has tactics. He walks into a bar, breaks a bottle, and waves the jagged end at people as his opening gambit. That’s the totality of his approach. Then he just demands whatever he can demand. He’s a bandit for the sake of banditry.

“Because I just don’t know much about it” is close to honesty from Trump. What he literally means is he has an outcome he wants, and he is still waiting for someone to assemble the proper bullshit that gets him to his outcome. It’s the only way he understands the world.

CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements An internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows for the first time CBP used location data sourced from the online advertising industry to track phone locations. ICE has bought access to similar…

An internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows for the first time CBP used location data sourced from the online advertising industry to track phone locations. ICE has bought access to similar tools.
www.404media.co/cbp-tapped-i...

The Air Guitar Presidency.

Iran: It’s Hard to Know How Exit When You Don’t Know Why You’re There In discussions of modern wars Americans obsess about “exit strategies”. How do...

Iran: It’s Hard to Know How Exit When You Don’t Know Why You’re There talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/iran-...

"surely the third democratic presidency to come to power after a norm-breaking and warcrime-cheering Republican administration will pursue justice against their predecessors," I repeat like a mantra til I collapse

It’s about voting or staying home. And it obviously happens. This cohort gets excited or frustrated. When they are excited they show up to vote and answer polls. When they’re frustrated they disappear. As a bearded white guy who has lived his whole life in rural places, I know these guys.

In Praise of Useless Studies (a manifesto) by William H. Worrell I HAVE spent most of my life in the study of useless things. Naturally I have been greatly embarrassed in explaining, or explaining away, what it was that I was doing as a col…

Here’s what “the joy of learning” actually looks like from a scholar’s point of view. wolverinepress.org/in-praise-of...

The joy of learning DID happen. But only as a kind of incidental effect. The systems were slow and confused, and there was a lot of telling of self-serving stories. But the millisecond the classics stopped leading to power they were dropped.

Boy. This is not true. “Humanities immersion” meant studying the classics as a way to learn Latin and Greek and the law. As a way to ascend in the Church and in the State. The fact that you read Hesiod was incidental. Whether you LIKED Hesiod was immaterial. It’s always been about acquiring power.

Having some of the most thoroughly redacted thoughts of my life.

Fevers don’t break in culture. Culture just twists and turns. Elites and masses are in a constant negotiation for the center point. Printing created a huge power structure that had previously been occupied by the sword. The internet broke that power and we’re scrambling for a new center.

Threatening the president is illegal.

Watching the final MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movie. As Hunt struggles to navigating a sunken submarine that is slowly rolling down a slope, I feel like it accurately captures us within the world as Trump and the Billionaires ravage it.

Chalamet is accurate but not right. It’s true that different artforms are ripe for capitalist exploitation at different times. And it’s also true that film is drifting toward opera as an artform outside the scope of capitalist exploitation. But maybe we should reflect on capital here. And not opera.

Between 5 and 50 miles of high speed rail built per day.

a man wearing glasses is asking if he is the bad guy ALT: a man wearing glasses is asking if he is the bad guy

Don’t flatter them. It’s FALLING DOWN starring Michael Douglas.

The psychic compensation of causing pain can be broadly distributed. The material compensation of good infrastructure is only narrowly experienced.

Kristi Noem misattributing a paraphrase of Rudyard Kipling to George Orwell really does sum it all up huh

I’m here to support all erased and unposted threads.

Seems right to me.

This is why we want him to be smart. We want him to be good at something. We want there to be some kind of virtue in his success. We can’t accept that we’re ruled by a meat grinder.

He’s Immortan Joe. A ravager. A wastelander. People have to accept that you can be effective by being purely awful, and that that is bad. Our society believes that success is its own pure justification. We have a very hard time with the idea that the means aren’t justified by the end.

He started with slums, and with his family loyal to him. He just kept upping the game, periodically blowing out, building a new team of crooks from the wreckage. He’s a reaver. He’s willing to do anything, and he just needs a crew with the same stripped bare id. Except it has to be his id.

Trump moves tactically, accumulating leverage, until he blows out. He only cares about having more leverage, and then extracting his cut, day by day. In order to do that he needs loyalty. In order to get that he needs crooks who are beholden to him. It’s his whole life. No plan. Pure tactics.

The internet aggregates people into communities of shared interest and/or identity. But it doesn't know if some communities SHOULD be aggregated, in part because WE can't decide on that point. It turns out that we have an affirmative responsibility to create that loving and peaceful world.

The obvious thing that happened was that every queer kid in the world went from being alone to being connected. That was great. But also, every homophobic kid in the world found all of the other homophobes too. And both of those populations found confidence in a larger community that supported them.