They never wanted freedom. Just control. And all those kids (among others) killed by gunfire who were treated as the sad but necessary cost of freedom…died for nothing.
Nutmegger in Australia. Public health researcher. Mad as hell about, well…*gestures around*. I have reached levels of middle-aged dad that you cannot fathom
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They never wanted freedom. Just control. And all those kids (among others) killed by gunfire who were treated as the sad but necessary cost of freedom…died for nothing.
Where are the 2nd amendment nuts? Are they rushing in to defend Illinois? Chicago? Latino communities?
Wikipedia editors right now
John Doe thinking about how he’s gotta to fit all that punishment into one person.
lol, I hope the Seven guy got to him. But which of his many sins would he have he focused on?
Despicable how he, Leavitt, and other MAGA Christians weaponise their faith to make themselves the real victims of a mass shooting.
Wait, of England or Spain? Because honestly...
We’ve just done the same here in Australia for most parcels.
He’s a catalysing force. His secret trick was giving the worst Americans (which I now realise is about 30-40% of them) permission to be their worst selves. It explains why they’re so slavishly devoted to him, and also the exponential ghoul-ificaction of conservatives starting 2015.
You know how he’d be the kind of guy to hide a zombie bite?
I was wondering how it would deal with Aaron. Kinda disappointed.
![Man shrugging with [redacted] as a caption, standing in for “I hope he dies”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:gmmgaa4z3tkgbkppgsnip36c/bafkreifoigelauyfmzau2gk4penycpf2exz5djy23cjvtqc6lh4tp5dprq@jpeg "Click to view full size")
If he lives that long. From my experience as a nurse’s aide in a nursing home and watching my own father’s decline, I reckon he’s a babbling mess by 2027 or dead.
A rare double-double
Me praying to Kathy Hochul that she gerrymanders Elise Stefanik out of Congress.
Putin is known for identifying world leaders’ weaknesses (Merkel feared dogs, Trump’s vanity). He may try distracting Vance with a cheap futon with a washable cover.
Yes but only because the other half is filmed in Vancouver.
My home state. The fucking Gestapo have come to Connecticut.
I think it’s even more reckless than that. This mother didn’t drink the raw milk herself. She was buying something winkingly labelled “not for human consumption” *for her toddler*! She contracted Campylobacter from cleaning up her toddler’s vomit and diarrhea after they got sick from the raw milk.
I no longer live in the U.S. so take my position with a grain of salt. I’ve been arguing for blue state secession since before Trump won in 2024. The biggest pushback I get is “do you want Civil War? Because that will cause Civil War.” My counterpoint has been, “we may get Civil War regardless.”
He does love the poorly educated.
Given how radical the 5th is, could this be a political calculation, wanting to avoid an escalating gerrymander war that could put Republicans in a worse position?
I keep saying this was Trump’s path to the White House: he gave GOP voters permission to be openly bigoted again. And the party has followed him, openly embracing bigotry.
The nation has been Dixie-fied. Utah’s Mike Lee retweeted a video of black kids fighting, replied with a bunch of racist nonsense, and concluded, “this is why we need the 2nd.” And when you pick at that, you see he means “white people need guns to take care of black people because they’re violent”.
But he specifically told me not to worry whom he worked for, he’s actually an OK guy!
Third possibility: both dumb and corrupt.
Both lead-addled. The Romans from their plumbing and, among the elites, adding lead to their wine to sweeten it. And our gerontocracy from paint and gasoline.
“Pro-life” was always so obviously a misleading a branding exercise. I guess “punishing women for being sexually active”, while a more accurate summation of the right’s outlook, didn’t do well in focus groups.
He’d vote Bloc Québécois in BC.
I think this is what makes me favour Family Guy/MacFarlane in the (one-sided) feud. South Park’s ethos was more “caring is uncool”. And while Family Guy was digging at the cretins in W’s administration for Iraq, South Park got so high on its own supply they thought Manbearpig was a good critique.
People support Trump because he gives them permission to be their worst selves. Every Trump supporter I know is a dumber, crueler person than they were before 2016. And that’s why they excuse his clear failures as a human, both moral and cognitive.
I feel this in my tinfoil-covered bones
I guess when you’re HHH and your father in law is a rampant sexual abuser, and your mother in law did nothing about the sexual abuse of boys in her company…it’s not much of a stretch to help Trump distract from revelations about his friendship with the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker.
Especially when you realise: 1) Trump knew Epstein/Maxwell trafficked multiple girls from MaL, not just Giuffre as previously reported 2) Trump’s fallout with Epstein was in 2004. Giuffre was trafficked in 2000. Trump gave his “Epstein likes them young” interview in *2002*!
Holy shit this is so much worse than I thought. Giuffre was trafficked from MaL in 2000. Trump gave his “Epstein likes ‘em young” interview in 2002. And he only severed ties with Epstein in 2004.
So Trump probably knew what Epstein was up to before their friendship disintegrated. He was only mad that Epstein and Maxwell were procuring victims from his property. And there was more than one girl recruited from MaL?! AFAIK, only Giuffre was known about.
And even being out of rowing shape and struggling after a minute or two of sprinting, we managed to bump all four days win the 2nd boat’s first set of blades. So that’s two personal sporting highlights!
Our 1st boat dominated its division for the next few seasons. I graduated and moved to London after the next season, but was asked to come back and help whip the 2nd boat of novices into shape for another bumps race. I took on stroke, arguably the hardest seat, despite being out of rowing shape.
And things played out as we expected; the 2 boats ahead of us bumped out and we got the overbump, but just before the finish line! That meant were very tired after a long sprint. Nevertheless, we smashed through our next race and got a quick bump, winning the men’s boat its first blades!
(bumping in each race in the event). We were in our division’s 4th position and suspected the boat ahead of us would bump before we could get them, meaning we’d have to bump the boat in 1st position for an “overbump”. Then we’d have to race in the next division an hour later.
All right, so really esoteric. Summer VIIIs 2011, an Oxford bumps race with four days of rowing where the object is to touch the boat ahead of you or get their cox to concede. I was in the 2 seat of Green Templeton College’s 1st boat. We bumped the three previous days and were on course for “blades”
Never forget that snivelling shit Vance defended spreading the lie about Haitians to spotlight the issue of “unchecked immigration”. But then during the VP debate, the moderators couldn’t stop him ranting against the fully legal process they entered by. It was never about “illegal” immigration.
This is either of my children whenever something doesn’t go exactly to their liking.
lol, a lot of nerve invoking “mutual respect” when Trump and the MAGA movement’s driving force is hating anyone that is different and who opposes them.
Party of Christian theocrats who justified their anti-trans bigotry under the guise of protecting women and children, is shutting down Congress to stop further investigation into the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker.
My boy loves sushi. Fortunately, his favourite is sushi from the petrol station.
Cool. Totally cool. And completely unrelatedly, I'm reminded of the scene in Inglourious Basterds where Brad Pitt carves a swastika into the Nazi's forehead so he'll never be able to hide what he did. Again, completely unrelated to the concentration camp manager job advertisement.
lol, my wife just sent this to me and my family has made clear they would take her in the divorce.
If you grew up watching WWF in the 90s like I did, there’s no way you ever would have predicted that 30 years later Diesel would be kicking this much ass, and for a good cause.
I finally settled on a theory to explain Trump’s appeal: he gives people permission to be their worst selves. And that’s been catnip to a lot of rural and suburban white people who felt they had to hide their bigotries. It may explain why the most successful MAGA imitators are such ghouls.
The Final Frontier is often (unfairly) maligned but there is a magnificent sequence where Sybok makes the main trio face their pain. Bones’s is surprisingly intense for ST, and Kelley totally crushes it. It’s then followed up by Shatner’s equally moving refusal with, “I *need* my pain.”
This aligns with my study of the effects of police-involved deaths before the pandemic. My takeaway from both is: the mechanism isn't de-policing, it's people no longer trusting police and turning to informal justice to resolve disputes. IOW, police violence causes community violence.
New preprint. What caused the 2020 spike in violence? Two events are often cited: the pandemic and George Floyd's murder. I investigated using daily incidence of various violent crimes in Minneapolis and it seems pretty clear that the cause was Floyd's murder.
our latest, investigating the longer-term impact of exposure to discrete but extreme PM2.5 from the Hazelwood coal mine fire on health service use.
We often hear about state-run media but in America you have a media-run state.
Our letter on how serological Covid tests can mis-identify vaccine antibodies as infection if the individual has been vaccinated with a whole-virus vaccine.
The Flashman series.
I had this same argument with friends at the time; the left (of which I am a solid member) was busy fawning over Cuomo because he was a bully but against Trump so they gave him a pass. But the stories coming out of the right wing press were deeply concerning.
My home state Senator calling out the GOP for its embrace of violence, the problem of its gun extremism, and the bullshit that is “both sides”-ism. There’s a normal party in American whose members run the gamut from hacks to true leaders, and a psychotic party that come in one flavour: fascist.
There are some Democrats calling this what it is. My Senator Chris Murphy, for instance.
Same energy
Democrats have been so hesitant to criticise these Christian theocrats who use their faith as a shield against criticism. Newsom’s got baggage but I’m ever so glad he’s taking the fight to them.
Governor JB Pritzker said to Rep. Mary Miller: "I am not going to be lectured to by somebody who extols the virtue of Hitler." Finally, someone says it to their faces.
Klaus Barbie is at it again
To be fair, I can't conceptualise the kind of person who goes MAGA. I personally know several and have them in my family, but I still don't get what is attractive about his movement beyond the least charitable explanation (that he gives people permission to be their worst selves).
Add Uber to the list of companies I will no longer use.
...or suppression of black voters. or unfettered access to weapons of war. or infusing public schools with religion. or...
LAPD fired rubber bullets at Australian journalist @laurentomasi.bsky.social
Though I live in Australia, I grew up in Connecticut with family that goes directly back to Miles Standish. Whenever I hear that “real America” nonsense, I like to retort, “I’m from one of the 13 original colonies and states that didn’t rebel. You don’t get to say which America is “real”.
Yeah I guess LeBron putting up a 22.6 PER is pretty special, but it's not that impressive when you compare him to people rolling out of bed and firing off something like this at age 86.
IFYKYK
Mostly bad, but also great if they destroy each other. But I think they’re both just variations of Danny DeVito’s Penguin
🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿
We wanted to cite background material on how serological tests for COVID-19 differentiate antibodies from vaccine and infection, but couldn't find anything! So we wrote the paper ourselves. I hope our labour helps others!
The pro-life movement has always been less about protecting foetuses/the unborn and much more about punishing women for having sex. Once you view their actions through this lens, all their policies on this front seem to make much more sense.
“On a mountain of skulls, in the castle of pain, I sat on a throne of blood. What was will be, what is will be no more. Now is the season of Evil.” -New FEMA Director motto
You talk to MAGA, methodically address their points, and they will eventually say, “I don’t care as long as we get rid of [slur]”. They love Trump because he gives them permission to be their worst selves. Their rationales don’t matter because they’re cover for bigotry. She 100% voted for this.
and we’d already booked, they required a €300 deposit. We replied we were a stag do but a bunch of a bunch PhD students, only one truly of us British, and had a woman in our entourage; they were satisfied. Anyway, we saw the British football hooligans in the old town; scariest mob I’ve ever seen.
I’m American but was studying in England when I got married and did my stag do in Tallinn. When the backpackers we booked found out we were a bunch of mostly men coming from the U.K., they asked if we were a stag do. They said normally they don’t accept such parties but since our booking was in,
Someone is still sore Harvard rejected him 60 years ago.
Good point. Ignorant, selfish, angry losers burned America’s Library of Alexandria.
The issue isn’t low pay; it’s the lack of academic jobs. The US invested astounding amounts in its research infrastructure. Nobody comes close. And now that it’s seemingly collapsed, we’ve got a glut of Americans looking to bail (I don’t blame them as I’m one of them, I just bailed two decades ago!)
I also really like that my work is cited in Hemenway's paper as a "a careful reanalysis of Kleck's data" which "led to a completely different result" doi.org/10.1080/1381...
Yep! Been calling her that for a while!
I've been calling her "Klaus Barbie" for a while.
That’s not to say they’re not great or don’t provide great history. They certainly are great but full of critical interpretation, rather than an objective (but skilful and entertaining) weaving together of historical facts.
And that’s what’s so great and so seductive about the Flashman books. You think that because he is so open about who he is, you credit him with honesty and believe his version of events, forgetting 1) he is still a fictional character and 2) a mouthpiece his modern author’s read on history.
“We’re all trying to find the guy who overturned rule of law.”
And does “honorary white” count? (I’m guessing not)
Broseph gonna be exorcising some personal demons on that can.
In my restless dreams, I see that toilet… Silent Bathroom
Why is CSPAN adopting the language of calling them “refugees”?!
Man, if Americans thought dealing with domestic rednecks was bad, just wait until they get a load of some good old Boers who are still mighty aggrieved about Apartheid ending. (Source: I lived in South Africa for two years)
As with everything Trump, there are two equally plausible explanations. 1) he really is this stupid and believes what he is saying. 2) he knows better and is lying. The same applies to his base.
Trump has effectively cut off all refugees who wish to come to America, while fast-tracking Afrikaners. I WONDER WHAT HE LIKES ABOUT THEM?!
Nah we care in Australia. It probably sank the conservatives in our recent election. I worry about that American bias too (I’m originally from Connecticut) but all signs point to my new countrymen going, “woah, fuck, no. We want none of that craziness” starting in February.