I don’t think Trump and his people are capable of engineering “distractions,” I think the mind-numbing chaos we see every day is straightforwardly the result of giving the dumbest, cruelest, most corrupt, most selfish people of a generation near-unmitigated power
Jamelle Bouie clearly and quite publicly works very hard to be informed and even-handed and anyone talking about him as if he’s not doing either of those things should shut the fuck up and definitely be widely ignored
Which is why it has to be Bernie who says enough is enough. I really think he alone can fix this. I hope he does. And I think it speaks poorly of him if he continues to not even try.
The real story is that foreign govts try to "interfere" all the time. In 2020 and 2024 we had mechanisms to catch them, call them out, & mitigate damage. Now, those mechanims are gone & the Trump admin would prefer to exploit "foreign interference" to justify a federal take-over of elections.
When I saw the news story about the girls school being bombed, one of my first thoughts was about how unlike American physics, Iranian physics is 50% women at the undergrad level and how some of those girls who had been murdered were going to be physicists one day
the gambling on wars thing feels like something directly out of the shittiest cyberpunk novel you have ever read. doing insider trading on it is the kind of thing "leverage" would have rejected as "too on the nose"
Impeachment now.
Al Jazeera is the only news outlet I’ve seen reporting on this, which is why I follow Al Jazeera.
It's not a new observation, but I'm always struck listening to Trump cry and whine about how he's the victim, bitch and moan about how mean and unfair everyone is to him, brag endlessly about how great he is and how unfair it all is, to remember that his cult thinks he's the Peak Alpha Male
Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude
IMO, instead of lamenting that inter-movement in-fighting and bickering is happening at all (which is pointless), we should be more focused on how to *manage* inevitable interpersonal conflict within activist movements in the social media era.
The successful nonviolence and civil rights movements of the past, as I’ve gathered from reading about them, ALSO featured a shit ton of incessant petty drama and in-fighting.
But crucially, they didn’t have social media - so this was kept far more private.
absolutely, though I think there's something really admirable here in the ability to like . . . be both a victim and also an ally to other victims who suffered greater harm. she knows where she falls on the privilege scale and she's using the platform she was given not to make it all about herself
You cannot do "commonsense reform" for a secret police force that's declared itself exempt from constitutional requirements. You cannot reform ultraviolent agencies that have been corrupt for decades and now have accountability only to the president's goons and lackeys.
I’m actually quite moved by how swiftly she pivots away from her own grief and trauma - real and justified though it is - to remind us not to take our eyes off the women who were assaulted
the Bring Back Shame Popular Front is expanding
Given the news drop of elite institution in the Epstein files, I hesitate to say this about *any* institution but…if Harvard continues to hold out, it will matter. Something that he cannot buy. Nominally anyway.
Conspiracy theorizing is a cognitive error, it’s what happens when our powerful ability to find patterns and construct narratives loses any real braking mechanism and runs completely off the rails, operates unchecked
People are especially vulnerable to it when they feel beset and helpless
Something I picked up pretty early when I started studying sociology is that things that look like grand highly intentional conspiracies are so often just systems of power and incentive structures that connect people who have the same interests
Which isn’t to say there are no conspiracies but
I know the lootbox Bobby kotick Epstein email is wild but microtransactions go all the way back to arcade machines which required quarters to continue playing. lootboxes were not invented by Activision gatcha mechanics preexisted that shit by years. Please believe in the existence of history
But the people who are in denial about the fact that hundreds of millions of people *use* these tools, willingly? That’s *bananas*. It might make you mad, you might not _like_ it, but the behavior is absolutely real. Fixing a problem requires confronting reality. The denialism about it is unreal.
Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/
pizzagate and qanon were not onto something, they were orchestrated by pedophiles to make accusing people of pedophilia make you look insane so that they could continue doing pedophile shit. fucking christ
there’s been an assumption that when Dems take power again they will keep ICE funded at these ridiculous levels forever and they are now on record voting to end that
they’ll need to go much further than that but it’s a start - and I sure don’t see the politics of ICE improving between now and then
Calling up your Dem senators and thanking them for doing this is how you encourage them to hold the line, no matter how low your estimation of them is
I'm one of the people who got him to delete the old politics board, I'm not sure I feel about finding out I got overridden by fucking epstein
Want to take a break from the doom scrolling? Then you can try our ~15 minute color perception survey!
We're using it to learn about language and color perception.
studies.labinthewild.org/color-percep...
@labinthewild.bsky.social
#TimelineCleanse
