"I'll be stepping down from the Presidency to reprise my role in the next Home Alone movie."
I write stories and make music and videos and digital paintings and iOS apps and whatever You may know me from https://seinfelt.tumblr.com Former CEO of BabyCorp
711 followers 251 following 4,335 posts
view profile on Bluesky
"I'll be stepping down from the Presidency to reprise my role in the next Home Alone movie."
?
“Bone petite”
The infallible free market has allocated all its eggs into one basket, historically the safest and most profitable way to store eggs
By its very nature, the thing AI is best at making is "lots more of whatever there's already the most of." You may recognize this as the opposite of a value proposition.
Really strongly recommend everyone get off Substack. Not just for the Nazi stuff, but because they're going to lock you into the platform and then slowly bleed you dry
It’s always been a race to be the first to maximally exploit. Other people’s employees can foot the bill. And by the time that runway runs out, they’ve already amassed most of the resources and can spend them paying for personal military forces to protect themselves.
I don't get how people don't realize that a technology that replaces junior and entry level positions in a field destroys that field. There's no skipping steps. You have to be a junior before you can be a senior, and if you don't have senior people, you don't have a field.
I was already pretty done with the news media but seeing clips yesterday from the Sunday shows where an anchor is like “but what if living in a Police State does reduce car jackings? Why would you be against that?” probably was the end
wish i knew what insanely rich people who technically “live in nyc” but are merely shuttled around to various Acceptable Locations in luxury cars with tinted windows and spend all summer at their second homes elsewhere think about the mayoral race. oh well! guess i never will :(
If I were a conspiracy-addled right-wing paranoiac who sees scary faces in every shadow, I wonder how my brain would deal with learning that "A" and "G" and "M" are each 6 letters apart from each other, and how that information might echo in my skull every time I don (no pun intended) my MAGA hat.
I've been a skeptical person my entire life, but between Netanyahu and the Trump administration I'm starting to sincerely believe that these people are all actual literal demons here on earth trying to sacrifice as many children's lives as possible in order to open a portal to hell.
BREAKING: At 8:51 PM EDT last night, President Trump died when he saw his own reflection in the toilet, mistook it for a piece of lasagna, and drowned trying in vain to eat it. :’(
Remember how if a kid choked on a little plastic toy they used to stop selling the toy
Getting food poisoning and having to run through the entire set of Nickelodeons Guts and solve a Scooby Doo mystery with a living talking dog before you can use a toilet
Uhhh excuse me [pushes glasses so hard up my nose my nostril starts bleeding] I notice the Cybertruck is conspicuously absent here………???
Journalism for profit gives us “who can possibly say what the truth is?” while reporters vacillate and equivocate to avoid alienating readers and losing revenue. Government for profit gives us a ruling elite setting rules that benefit only themselves and codifying maximal exploitation of labor.
Housing for profit gives us 750,000 homeless people while houses and apartments stay empty. Food for profit gives us 30% of food thrown out of grocery stores while people go hungry. Health for profit gives us rampant bankruptcy despite us spending 18% of our paychecks on insurance.
Right now in China communism is building high-speed rail and everyone can afford to own a house, but sure, use an example of one shitty car from half a century ago as an attempted rebuttal to complaints about capitalism, an irrefutably exploitative and abusive system that’s making lives worse.
And as proof of this, they point to what right-wingers think about trans people and homeless people and etc and they say “we need to be more like Republicans because they’re winning!” Meanwhile 100,000,000 people don’t vote, and the winner of every election wins by like 5,000,000 votes.
Progressive policies poll super highly nationwide. The more Democrats drift toward the center, the more unpopularly they poll—now with an approval rating worse than Trump. And since the centrists are running the show, they insist it’s because Democrats aren’t far enough to the right.
People downplay Mamdani as “well sure, that plays in NYC, but there’s no way a progressive candidate could win nationwide” but there’s more to that story and it’s that for the first time in any election I can recall, young voters were the largest voting demographic. Usually they’re the smallest.
It’s like walking into a car dealership and saying “look, I’d like you to come down to $25,000, but I’ll pay sticker price if pushed because I really need a car.” What do you think the outcome will be? With enough people saying “I’ll vote for ANY Democrat” it’s going to lead to a bad candidate.
The only thing that could possibly work is if we all band together and say “we will not support this. We will not vote for this.” If we go “let’s try for a better candidate but we’ll vote for whoever they run,” why would that change anything? We’ll just get another terrible candidate.
Meanwhile, I’m not willing to sacrifice any more people or values. I’ve done that in election after election and all I’ve gotten is derision and scorn. The fact that top Democrats won’t even endorse Mamdani, one of the most popular politicians, speaks volumes about hopes for transforming the party.
In 2024 the biggest factor for Harris was voters in the biggest cities—the progressive bastions—in swing states. The takeaway there is that Democrats are alienating their own base and not picking up any more centrist and right-wing voters as a result. It’s not up to voters to solve that.
It’s not even a matter of my own personal preference here, though I personally won’t vote for a candidate who opposes trans rights and supports genocide and oppresses homeless people. The reality is that it’s unpopular to voters at large to cosplay as Republicans. It’s electorally unviable.
Relying on “people will vote even though they hate the candidate” is a pretty fucked-up and stupid strategy. It’s like saying “the refs will award me points even if I don’t score, because I’m the better person. And if they don’t, then it’s THEIR fault the asshole team won.” Bizarre.
When polled, the reason many if not most nonvoters give is “both parties are the same” or “it’s not going to matter anyway”—because for millions of Americans that’s largely true, things suck for them no matter who’s in charge. There’s a way to motivate them and it’s up to Democrats to do that.
This isn’t the responsibility of the voters, it’s the responsibility of the politicians. If they can’t provide a candidate people are willing to vote for, they’ll lose elections. 100,000,000 people don’t vote. The winner gets ~70,000,000 votes. The real winner is apathy, and there are reasons.
Griffin’s definition of fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism—specifically a reactionary nostalgia for a lost history of the nation that never existed—remains undefeated. A nostalgia for a type of bread that is ubiquitous, created in the 20th century, and rage towards bread as old as civilisation
CEOs are trying to convince you that quiet quitting is worse than wage theft, while they plan on replacing you with a robot. Unions know better. Happy Labor Day Weekend.
hot tip for budding entrepreneurs: this might not be a good place to start a restaurant selling fried chicken strips, sandwiches and french fries
And as far as listening to protesters, I implore you to go dig into how Obama and Biden dealt with protests in the U.S. We couldn't even push Democrats to reconsider their support for a goddamn genocide. What makes you think we can move them on issues even less resoundingly clear-cut?
So why do they keep doing it? And why is it OUR obligation to keep pulling them out of their catastrophically bad strategy to elect candidates who get worse and worse every time? If Harris's loss wasn't enough of a rebuke and they refuse to learn the lesson here, it's time for the party to be over.
The underlying thesis is "this is what most voters actually want, and you'll just have to hold your nose and cast your ballot" but in reality when 100,000,000 eligible voters don't vote and Democrats have a 24% approval rating I think most of the people voting for Democrats are holding their noses.
Rewinding a bit, from a pragmatic perspective none of these concessions will even garner more votes, and in fact will likely prove repulsive to voters since most of us still have souls. So why are we running someone who has less of a chance of winning than someone who DOESN'T oppose our values?
If things are truly so far gone that all we can do is sacrifice trans people and homeless people and Palestinian children and sick people and poor people and people with mental health issues on the altar of At Least It's Not Worse, what are we really even saving anymore?
I'm really struggling to figure out why a system that produces a situation where somehow in every single election we have "no choice" except a stopgap against fascism that requires us to concede a little bit more of our values every time is worth saving, versus like balkanization of the U.S.
Treating every disagreement as equivalent and every dissonance as merely a matter of an unrealistic expectation of perfection is really disingenuous rhetoric. As if there’s no distinction between, say, not funding high-speed rail and supporting a genocide or oppressing trans people.
“I’ll continue our policy of materially supporting a genocide” isn’t just a deviation from hyper purity or whatever—it’s an unforgivable stance that invalidates a politician’s entire platform. If they can’t muster the basic moral wherewithal to oppose genocide, they can’t be trusted in general.
Like, sure, if a candidate is like “I don’t support raising taxes” or whatever we can call that a matter of debate, but some policies have to be red lines because it means people will die. And since we’re all unwilling to do violence, voting/not voting is the vector we have for teaching politicians.
This is a bit disingenuous: if you’re a trans person and the candidate is siding with fascists, that’s not “saying one thing that doesn’t align with hyper pure stances,” it’s literally putting trans lives at risk, and for no benefit at all in terms of garnering votes. It’s not just a bad opinion.
BREAKING: At 8:51 PM EDT last night, President Trump died when he saw his own reflection in the toilet, mistook it for a piece of lasagna, and drowned trying in vain to eat it. :’(
kind of fun to imagine the rest of the world flying their flags at 1.5 mast in reverse mourning though
Who milks the milkmen?
Honestly if it happens soon, the biggest risk is all the reasonable adults deciding to give Vance a honeymoon without criticism. If there’s one thing the Iraq War, Covid, etc. has taught me it’s that liberals will decide a change in leadership is enough and it’s time to stop caring.
“Mailman” is such a gendered term… antiquated and a little sexist. The updated progressive term is “mailfighter”
Let’s keep running candidates who keep trying so hard to be Republicans and then wondering why 100,000,000 eligible voters stay home because both parties are too similar, and then blame them for thinking that even though the politicians themselves are saying “we have to move toward the right!!”
If only there were time to find another candidate who’s not a transphobic homeless-oppressing sociopath… three years is just not enough time!!
Shrugging, this was supposed to say, but I didn’t realize it got autocorrected.
Every aspect of critical thought has been removed from it because it turns out that challenging assertions makes people uncomfortable and could alienate some readers, and just shutting and going “who can say???” like a credulous dipshit was actually more profitable.
Journalism has transformed from “find the truth based on evidence with biases removed as much as possible” to “just unquestioningly recite whatever anyone tells you as if it could possibly be the truth because ‘the truth is somewhere in the middle’ and who could say for sure?” over the last 20 years
These fuckers need to start getting [REDACTED, PARODY, RESEARCH FOR A BOOK] ASAP.
Thinking it does the term a disservice to call it pedocon 'theory' at this point
When the ratio of politicians who need to be stripped naked and be walked around by chains around their balls through the streets while members of the public get to hit them with sticks and whips exceeds 80%, you kinda just have to call it and roll an entire new government.
we are honored to have had the opportunity to provide necessary healthcare to you, but because the president is adolf hitler our hands are tied and we have to do absolutely everything he says or we will get a spanking
Eventually there’s going to be a left-wing mass shooter and the right is going to go out of their way to take a 400,000-mile-long step past the myriad right-wing mass shooters to talk about how “the left is so violent” and all these liberal news shows are going to agree with them
Interesting to note that you didn’t actually refute what I said. Perhaps because it’s irrefutable.
Hey how would you feel if we went with a Democrat who was anti-abortion and would help the GOP enact a nationwide abortion ban? Anything’s better than MAGA, right? Why aren’t you willing to make the sacrifice?
Statistically no trans woman is using the ladies’ room to commit sexual assault but I can absolutely assure you that “you have to use the ladies’ room if you were born with a vagina, even if you look like the most masculine cis man” will 100% open the door for cis men to take advantage of that.
By my math here, YOUR weird transphobia opens the door for cis men—y’know, the actual predators here—to use women’s bathrooms and claim “oh I was born with a vagina.” All because you’re scared of trans women, who statistically commit sexual assault at about the same rate as cis women. Nice job!!!
🎶 And thaaaaaat brings me baaaack to the logisticaaaaal problems with your bigotryyyyyy! 🎶 Because now you’ve got the problem where trans men who look just like cis men have to use your bathroom because they were born with a vagina. Seems like that could become pretty confusing!
Which, like, how are you gonna feel when some balding middle-aged guy pulls up to the ladies’ room and pees standing up in the stall next to you? Since, in your ideal world, because he was born with a vagina he belongs in the women’s bathroom. Are you going to demand his medical records?
Trans men DO use the men’s bathroom you fucking lunatic.
Listen: You have a right to safety. You DO NOT have a right to feel safe. Your discomfort and fear are entirely manufactured within your own mind. And as a result you want trans girls and women to be placed in actual literal danger with the cis men who attack them as much as they attack cis women.
A lot of white people feel scared of Black people. Maybe we should segregate our streets then so that white people can avoid the discomfort that’s every bit as evidence-supported as your deranged fantasy fears. White people get the even streets, Black people get the odd streets.
You want trans girls to be raped so that you can gain absolutely nothing except to feel safe from a pretend threat that exists only in your head and isn’t substantiated by any actual data or statistical analysis. You are a sick sad person utterly dominated by paranoia.
Yeah most sports involve the players beating the shit out of each other. This definitely applies to a trans girl who wants to play volleyball on the girls’ team. I’ve never seen a volleyball game where the players weren’t punching each other in the face constantly. You are a deranged sociopath.
Think. Take a moment and actually THINK, instead of squirming and squealing like a dumb trapped animal. Your fears make no sense. They are unsupported by statistics. They are unsupported by science. They are unsupported by reason. They are only supported by a shared bigotry with fascists. Be better
In a country where rapists go free because judges say shit like "think of this boy's promising swimming career" do you really think there's any motivation or need at all for someone to be trans in order to commit sexual assault? Especially when that invites even more scrutiny and wariness.
Meanwhile it is so extraordinarily easy for cis men to rape women and get away with it in this miserable country. Why on EARTH would someone go through all the stigma and trauma of being trans just to achieve that? Nobody's doing that! Nobody is trans to sexually assault women! It's absurd!
So in order to buy yourself and other cis women statistically zero more safety, you're throwing trans women to the wolves where they'll undoubtedly be raped by cis men. You gain nothing, and you spend their lives for it. This is sociopathic. It is cruel and it is wrong. You are wrong.
But what the fuck do you think happens when you take a trans woman and force her to be in the locker room and the bathroom with cis men? Y'know, cis men? Heard of 'em? Biggest sexual predators in our species? Statistically biggest sexual assailants of both cis women and trans women?
Meanwhile, given the statistics, you are in effectively zero danger of ever ever ever getting sexually assaulted by a trans woman. It happens so incredibly rarely that you're more likely to win the lottery. Banning them from sports and bathrooms achieves literally nothing, buys you no more safety.
But again, I urge you to remember that trans MEN also exist, and compete against cis men, and piss in men's bathrooms, and they don't do this to try to sexually assault cis men—they do this just to live their fucking lives.
Forcing trans women to compete against cis men endangers them, because of transphobes like you who embolden the bigots who attack and murder trans people simply for being trans, and places them in situations with the cis men who in general assault both cis and trans women at alarming rates.
Trans women want to compete against other women because they are women, and their physical capabilities place them well within the range of cis women's athletic capability ranges. Which is why they very rarely win against other women athletes!
I'm naturally strong and large and I put on muscle easily, but even if I spent the next 5 years training in, for instance, tennis, Venus Williams would wipe the fucking floor with me from one end of the court to another. The idea that my dick gives me some sort of stat boost is absurd.
In basketball, for instance, a 6'6" cis woman has significantly greater an advantage over a 5'10" cis woman than a trans woman has over either of them. Additionally, I'm a pretty well-built cis man and any female athlete could absolutely kick my ass at their given sport—at any point in my life.
You seriously need to read up on biology, specifically with regard to the effects of hormones on organisms' bodies. Beyond that, though, the differences in human anatomy among people born with vaginas vary significantly—to such an extent that you transphobes thought a cis woman athlete was trans.
Even Musk fans and reply guys are growing appalled at his efforts to push his AI model Grok by constantly reposting animations of scantily clad female characters. “Don’t post AI soft porn for at least one day challenge,” writes one.
We’ve successfully (for the time being) convinced our kids that some of those trucks are just Music Trucks and don’t have any ice cream
It was far more pleasant than the day I saw a guy start taking a dump between two subway cars, open the door, walk through the train with his pants down and a roll of paper towel, and finish shitting between the next two cars. This was on the 7 train in Queens which is elevated above the street btw.
(The interaction inspired one of the plots in this time travel novel trilogy I’m currently in the middle of writing. Felt very surreal at the time.)
At around 2AM one night, an older woman with a shopping cart talked to me at length on an otherwise empty train about Somewhere In Time, the Christopher Reeve movie based on the Richard Matheson book where a man accidentally goes back in time and falls in love with a woman from 100 years ago.
It’s amazing how many transphobes become SO transphobic that they end up becoming misogynist against cis women as a result, but somehow still manage to convince themselves they’re on the path of justice. And all over sports of all fucking things.
I’d like to be able to say it’s strange that people idolize a guy who got famous by exploiting homeless people for online praise but it’s unfortunately perfectly aligned with all the rest of the exploitative horror-show of modern reality.
can calculators get horny for big naturals? big tech wrestles with the “80085” question of our time
The conscious cruelty of people like this is clarified for me by this Chesterton quote. They do these things not because they think their actions aren’t evil but because they know they are. They believe evil and death shall triumph so intentionally make themselves into that
I’ve come to understand, as I’ve reached middle age, that a primary mode of human thought and behavior is attempting to recreate or reenact things that scare or hurt us so that we can feel in control of situations where we’ve felt helpless. Most people do this thoughtlessly with no regard for others
Cops complain they’re never respected but my partner walks around the city in his dorky little Canada Post hat and yellow vest and all the neighbours say hello, give him bottles of water and snacks. I think there’s a lesson for the police, should they choose to understand it.
For folks not in DC: - There are full-on police checkpoints most nights - Gangs of 30+ federal agents roam DC - National Guard folks w/ guns patrolling a Harris Teeter - Every day, multiple friends see ICE kidnapping ppl - Daycares are scared to have kids go on walks due to ICE
You’re right that it’s also extremely weird that online video/audio production has all been enveloped by this catch-all monolith term “creator”, whereas in the past we wouldn’t treat actors and newscasters and reality TV contestants and game show hosts as all the same one category.
I do think the democratization of “celebrity” has a lot of upsides in terms of bypassing the gatekeeping of lottery industries, but it also means that “guy who went viral for videos where he hits homeless people in the balls and then pays them $5,000” is like our generation’s Rock Hudson or whatever
A million monkeys hammering on typewriters could eventually produce the works of Shakespeare but that doesn’t mean they understand it or that they Wrote It. This is a similar mechanism, a more guided and sculpted version of monkeys hammering typewriters.
Do tamagotchis really die when you forget to feed them??? Big tech and users grapple with one of the most unsettling questions of our times…
If you ask it “can you feel?” it’s not engaging in critical self-analysis—it’s providing the most likely series of words that would be the response to that question, based on its available weighted data set built by consuming human-written material without the consent of the authors.
These things don’t think. Their answers aren’t the product of reason but the output of a probabilistic algorithm that finds the next most likely word based on a library of weighted associations. It doesn’t understand what it says. It’s hyper-advanced autocomplete.