Michael Hobbes

This is so good!

I feel like David Graeber really captured something about lefty academia because the concept of “bullshit job” is very resonant and has a lot of intuitive appeal but his exploration of it is totally hamstrung by the fact that he’s never left campus and is very vague on the mechanics of actual work

This is the conversation that goes through my head every day when my shitty neighbor smokes his skunk weed on his porch and my entire backyard and house smells like weed.

I want to punch him in the face but I don’t want to send him to jail.

Katy Perry's "Firework"

Kelis's "Fireworks"

Proof we live in a simulation: The best pop song of all time is a tie between two songs with the same name

I’m actually willing to buy that he’s more a moron than an ideological antisemite, but you really have to be laughably clueless to think “but his wife is Jewish” is even the slightest bit relevant to that question. It should have exactly zero effect on anyone’s certainty either way.

I, too, think tens of thousands of people should go to prison because sometimes I smell something I don't like

Labour is what happens when the nominally "center-left" party stands for absolutely nothing and just shifts more and more to the right in a foolish attempt to woo voters to their right: a massively unpopular party that's going to get absolutely crushed... and right-wing policies.

"Gender heretic" bitch, please

I genuinely don't understand what it is about the NYT that turns successful journalists into weird little sickos fixated on making life worse—in myriad ways, big and small—for their most vulnerable neighbors. Surely nobody gets into journalism WANTING to afflict the afflicted

The only gay people the Atlantic has ever thought might need protection are effeminate gay "boys" who they've decided need protection from the trans agenda, and historically, that's not what gay kids actually need protection from.

This fear lives only in the minds of straight cis journalists.

Whenever Michael makes a post like this I go and check the wastewater data for Kings County. We've never had so little COVID in Brooklyn than this winter, and I think that's great!

I think one of the things that bothers me the most about the way Polymarket presents itself to the world is that it's adopted the language of journalism to make itself sound more legitimate. Like look at this post from yesterday morning incorrectly "projecting" the winner.

skill issue. if you can't maintain your faggotry through transition and growing a great rack, that's a you problem diva!

Same! I have been masking in any crowded indoor space and I wish we brought back testing (there are flu/covid ones now) for indoor gatherings.

Respiratory virus vaccination rates in the 2025-2026 season Young children and the oldest adults face the highest risk from influenza and covid and should be vaccinated, public health officials say.

Just like last year, far more people are vaccinated against the most recent flu strain vs the most recent COVID strain.

Being an anti-vaxxer is dumb but being a selective anti-vaxxer is just weird.

The H3N2 strain of influenza A, which is typically associated with more severe illness in older people, circulating around the world mutated after public health officials selected the strain vaccine manufacturers should target. That left the annual flu shot offering less protection than hoped — similar to what happened last year.

Covid has to keep changing to keep infecting people. But in the last two years, we haven’t seen the significant leap forward in mutations needed to render immunity to severe illness moot and force hospitals to reopen covid wards. Strains selected for updates to annual covid vaccines have been fairly well matched to the variants circulating in winter the last two years.

The reason appears to be that COVID boosters were matched to the circulating variants, whereas the flu mutated after the vaccines were produced.

Flu has overtaken covid in emergency rooms during the past two winters

Hospital numbers don’t capture how most people actually experience these illnesses: minor inconveniences or nasty bugs that leave you feeling lousy and homebound. Wastewater tracking, which measures viral particles in sewers to track viral trends, also shows that flu has surged and covid has seen a small uptick, smaller than the summer wave.

We barely had a winter wave of COVID this year but the flu has been absolutely brutal
www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

I transitioned TO become an effeminate gay boy. Now what

I’m not familiar with this specific author but what also gets me is that for all this hand-wringing I don’t see efforts made by perpetuators of this myth to make gender nonconformity more accepted lol (despite their frequent idea that transness is somehow more accepted when it most certainly isn’t)

Jesse singal literally wrote a whole article about an imaginary me and then asked people to be furious at his fantasy version of me.

I find it baffling that, just from a purely cynical standpoint, they don’t just adopt the default position of “if Trump does it, it’s bad.” They’ll be right 98% of the time and attacking your opponent weakens them

The epistemic structure Evan points to here is really important, and more and more pervasive. It's the same one at work in Anti-Vax stuff and seems to be animating all kinds of moral panics. There's a kind of metastasizing biopoltical phantasmatic that's at the core of the new fascism.

Yeah like to put things in perspective, the damage done by Sergey Brin’s ex-wife single handedly funding large segments of the anti-vax movement probably undid shitloads of positive public health work done through philanthropy. The ability to use that money for evil shit is just far greater.

This whole idea that someone could be peer-pressured into transitioning, and that this pressure would come from medical professionals, it just fails the smell test on so many levels.

One of the first things I learned as a professor is that accommodations don’t make the class/assessment easier — they just make it inclusive. Doing a moral panic on accommodations is just gross and ableist.

These increases are notable but they're not synonymous with accommodations, nor are they synonymous with *unfair* accommodations. Elite media is doing another social-contagion panic, this time on disability writ large.

Colleges See Spike in Students With Disabilities, Including Elite Schools

They are clearly trying to whip up a moral panic about disability accommodations but this article doesn't include any data on accommodations.

I was a very effeminate little kid and absolutely nobody tried to get me to transition, they just tried to get me to be More Manly. It's an entirely imaginary problem created from whole cloth by bigots.

You won’t find a better or safer environment for effeminate gay boys to freely be themselves than a community where trans kids are affirmed.

Every trans person is like "I knew something was up before I had the words to describe it and had to fight for this for years" and every transphobe is like "one conversation with a doctor could have convinced me to get the walrus surgery from the movie 'The Walrus'"