this isn't just a MAGA thing, it's a cross-American one and *especially* a lot of people who came of age in politics or punditry in the 1990s. the idea that the news could happen to them - that the world might not be all going their way - is genuinely brain-breaking to a lot of them
IFYKYK
These are my assumptions, too. The inability of Congress to pass a war powers limitation will go down in history as an Enabling Act-level of capitulation.
2006: don’t be evil
2016: but really, what *is* evil?
2026: meet your new assistant Evi L® delivering +225% ROI on prison labor
Far too many leftists are content endlessly critiquing power from the outside. It gives them a sense of purpose in life and an endless stream of content that can be milked.
Because governing? Governing is hard, and it requires compromise. And we can’t have THAT.
On the bright side, this event could hasten the eventual supremacy of renewable energy. Who wants to rely on something this erratic that instigates global conflict?
Just a reminder that the first 1970s Oil Crisis began with the Yom Kippur War and the second with....unrest in Iran.
In 1966 the New Jersey Young Republicans gleefully sang racist and antisemitic songs at their gatherings. The lyrics to one went “Riding the Reich in my Mercedes Benz, shooting every kike, saving all my friends." Hartford Courant, 13 February 1966.
Thank you so much for providing the correct words to describe an awful sensation that I can't shake. I especially think of my conversations with low-info voters in 2024 that made me question my grip on reality.
I was forced to watch TV news when I had breakfast in a diner recently and I strongly resonated with the sentiment that being an intelligent person in America today is like being awake during a surgery.
I’m utterly uninterested in “debates” about whether AI can do things well. I wouldn’t care if it could. 1. It stole from me. 2. I prefer me having my job to a computer having it. 3. I don’t teach “with” Lockheed or Raytheon; why wld I teach with Anthropic or OpenAI?
Well back then I thought I was gonna be a lawyer! I am indeed a glutton for punishment.
By that time (age 16) I didn’t want to be a priest, but a couple years earlier I thought it was my most likely career.
As an altar boy I was such an assumed candidate for the priesthood that my parish invited me to the elevation of the new bishop. (The other altar boy they invited is now a priest.)
A war that isn't a war, documented with videos that may or may not be real, funded by elected leaders who are neither for nor against it, is the most dystopian thing that's happened in my lifetime
There are many contenders here, but maybe the most depressing thing about being alive right now is that no one remembers anything that happened more than about a day ago.
Blame what you want - social media, the internet writ large, AI - but a couple years ago might as well be the Middle Ages.
“Crimes against peace” was a charge at Nuremberg for a reason.
Thinking about scores of people dead on the bottom of the Indian Ocean because of a war the aggressor can’t even find a consistent reason why they started it.
I know that the people who need to read this aren’t here, but here goes:
Rules of engagement aren’t for the enemy. They’re for you. They’re for your soldiers when they’re captured or wounded. They’re for your civilians when they’re in range of the enemy. They’re for your allies, to reassure.
Hegseth today: We don't actually have any clear purpose or guideposts or objectives in mind, the metrics are shifting...but "we are just getting started."
Yikes.
i'm taking a brave stance that may get me canceled: there is no reason for the pervert glasses to exist
In the Monkees movie Head there’s a part where they’re soldiers and Peter says he’s going to run forward and Mike Nesmith laconically says “see that you do.” I say it all the time when someone says they’re about to do something.
is it a good sign when the uniform response to a classified briefing is basically everyone immediately doing a vertical video about it in which they spend most of the time screaming that we’re all gonna die?
And this will in no way destabilize Iraq, Turkey, or Syria I’m sure
The thing with racists is that they assume only white people have agency and are thus ill equipped when it turns out that other people actually can do things they don’t expect.
The easiest analytical assumption to make whenever Trump does something is that he hasn't thought it through at all. And yet everytime commentators contort themselves into believing there's some kind of strategy.
When we talk about Baby Boomers not getting off the stage: In 1997, the US president was born in 1946.
In 2007, the US president was born in 1946.
In 2017, the US president was born in 1946.
And next year in 2027? The US president will have been born in 1946.
Netanyahu won't stop, Iran and its proxies won't stop, and I imagine millions of Shia Muslims who are watching their clerics getting merc'ed won't stop either.
The stock market tanking might be the salvation we need to get Trump to stop this, but I honestly don't think anymore that him stopping means others will stop, too.
Hearing someone rave about Dubai is always a red flag to me. They're practically screaming "I am a morally vacant, shallow person with no interest in culture."
