I don’t think you can separate this impulse from the fact that the white people protesting against COVID restrictions are more likely to have artificially inflated political influence via senate and EC. “Politics is downstream of culture” is and always was bullshit.
“We.”
Literally the left would claim the DNC was lying. The left needs to step up and fact check their sources.
How old were you back then? Because that’s the sort of objection I would expect to hear from someone who was a child at the time. I don’t think you are old enough to be worth anyone’s time.
The letters are to provide notice & preserve the record for future court action. Im somewhat dismayed that more Dem attorneys haven't pointed this out. Anyway... bsky.app/profile/jlra...
They didn’t. They barely got the bill passed, and the Republicans crushed Democrats in 2010 because of it.
I liked that Democrats halved the uninsured rate, eliminated preexisting conditions, granted Medicaid prescription bargaining rights, regulated the big banks, saved the automotive industry, and repeatedly rebuilt the economy. Maybe they could have done more if voters had kept them in office.
Absurd and outrageous map would lead to a 7-1 GOP margin in a state that is often split about 60-40 GOP by creating an absurd district 5 that spans about two thirds of the way across the state, 200 miles from West to East Oppose this.
I guarantee you they don’t mean it in those terms.
tl;dr: They're going to get rid of the CDC as you know it. They're going to build something new and ghastly that they call the CDC, using its legal powers and data systems, and they are going to use it to hunt down every abortion in America. We are still in the window of time when we can stop that.
But by far and away, the biggest priority for a Heritage Foundation-captured CDC is going to be using the agency's legal frameworks for access to medical data, and weaponizing them to control women. *Most* of the Project 2025 plan for CDC is a witch hunt against abortion on an unprecedented scale.
You don’t think cities could absorb people? These are good close knit rural people! They should be used to making do, unlike decadent independent city folk.
If all the rural people in the country moved to cities, city populations would increase by only 15%. And those rural people are already moving to cities. That’s why those areas are dying. That’s why those hospitals can’t fund themselves.
Ultimately, this is the way. Many red states are gerrymandered and have low voter turnout- but they have low voter turnout because elections go the way most of the voters want them to go. They made their choices.
Nearly all PhDs take 5 years--with finishing in 4 a rare outcome. This is deliberately designed to eliminate the international powerhouse that is US postgraduate training.
For the eleventy billionth time: Attacks on science funding and science jobs in the United States don’t mean that science will just move elsewhere. It means a lot less science for everyone. There aren’t enough jobs or funding everywhere else )combined) for US scientists to just move.
Agreed. SFW content is also literally SFW. I don’t need to explain to my boss why I’m streaming lo-fi music or random video essays(in a background window) or instructional videos on YouTube. Any of those hosted on an NSFW server is an instant conversion with HR.
Hard to convince younger generations, but for decades, Republicans went on and on about how two of the worst things imaginable were (1) state intervention in the market and (2) DC using federal troops against US states; both so bad the people should be ready for armed rebellion in case it happens.
Actually, maybe rural roads shouldn’t be paved. Maybe rural communities should just have correspondence schools. Maybe rural towns should be forced to cough up the funds for their own police. #fundsepta you fucking assholes
Not to be dramatic but if your truck literally cannot fit in a standard parking spot, you should have to have an additional license for it and that license should be very expensive with all revenue going to road maintenance
The only mildly interesting thing about this is that there’s not even any pretense that it’s anything other than a naked power grab.
A point I’ve tried to make before: Behind most rainbow capitalist branding schemes was a bunch of sincere LGBT+ employees trying to push C-team towards a culture of inclusivity by speaking to their bottom line.
I feel like conservatives succeeded with their “virtue signaling” op, where they convinced everyone that because rainbow capitalism/corporate Pride/etc weren’t necessarily sincere, they were bad/useless. They were just virtue signaling. But stuff like that helps set societal norms.
People are so excited that we might be on the verge of civil war. I’m not. I’m a basic bitch who likes basic things like pumpkin spice lattes and not getting shot at in the grocery store.
There are going to be a ton of scientific papers retracted in about five years. And a bunch of profs and postdocs are suddenly going to have to look over the shoulders of every new grad student as they do calculations.
There were a chunk of people who let their annoyance with liberals cloud their judgement on Russian interference on Trump's behalf. But it was clear then (and has became increasingly clear since) that Russiagate was at least 80-90% real
I remember clearly a conversation I had where I realized the problem was coming from my generation. Up until then, I’d thought we might get better. And then I realized clearly that I was never going to outlive this shit. People do change, but systems also improve when people die.
You can tell the field based on the number of acceptable publications per year. A colleague just sent me a paper to look over, and one of my biggest points of feedback is that it should be two separate papers.
Counterpoint - men benefit from patriarchy because patriarchy is a hierarchical system that oppresses women as a class, and the reason that patriarchy persists is for that very reason. That’s not to say patriarchy doesn’t harm men too. But men benefit from it.
Whose nonspecific 'leftism' is functionally an agreement with Republicans on all major points of fact and law, with _very slightly_ different valences, and a shared bedrock commitment to vote against and sabotage Democrats, is a scathing lens to apply but a very educational one.
I’ve been wanting to do the Hallmark movie where the widowed small-town mother visits her married kids for Christmas and finds new love and community in a big city.
If abortion proves anything, it’s that evangelical Protestants reinvent their “deeply held religious beliefs” on a whim every few decades.
Texas voters need to get off their asses and vote for Democrats. Nobody can do it for them.
Every once in a while, people like my response to this dude, which means I get periodic reminders of the deliberately casual rhetoric of the left just before the election.
Agreed. Chatbots have an additional advantage: they’re around even in the middle of the night or during the workday.
We stopped expanding the House in the 1920s, decided the Supreme Court should freeze in the 1930s, added the last states in the 1950s, amended the Constitution only once in the last fifty years. The USA and its government continued to grow, but almost all that growth came in the executive branch.
I guess, but I think things aimed at young adults is far more likely to be age appropriate than a much older book aimed at adults.
Holy crap, that hits hard. Worst part is, in 2015, I think most on the left would have had more sympathy. And now? All of them did it to themselves. Farm policy hasn’t helped. Good luck revitalizing your hometown near a CAFO.
This. I’ll add: if the assholes can’t fund SEPTA, why should my money go to paying for their roads?
Under what world don’t liberals understand that shaping public opinion is possible? Except in the sense that liberals are somehow the clueless Other.
A lot of YA stuff is extremely dystopian, I think it’s far more common than adult sff. Teens seem to like it.
… and I’d add that books that are progressive are often graded far more harshly than books which aren’t.
It doesn’t make his work not worth reading, but new readers usually don’t grade things on a curve. I adore Moore’s Judgement Night - it feels wildly ahead of its time - but that doesn’t mean I’d recommend it to a new sff fan, unless they’re trying to read older books.
I wouldn’t say it’s bad, but it’s a book far more interesting read in conversation with the novels that followed it. The same could be said for many of her works, honestly. She’s sparked dialogues that have continued.
… and Exhalation is a decade old at this point, so I probably shouldn’t recommend it to newer readers either.
I adored Stross’s Saturn’s Children, just because it’s the only one I’ve read that took the assignment seriously. It’s a fun book even as it savages Heinlein.
This. We don’t insist that kids start with Elvis in order to like modern music. We don’t even necessarily expect them to have heard Elvis. It sucks to watch your favorites become forgotten - or worse, just be seen as boring - but that’s life.
Most people don’t start out wanting to be fans of anything. They become fans and then seek things out.
For all of Tolkien’s virtues, writers attempted to mimic his deliberately archaic style for far longer than they should have. Fantasy up until the 1970s / 80s suffers from that, IMHO.
Jackson’s _Haunting of Hill House_ made me realize I’d graded all of Silver Age sff on a massive curve. Writing quality improved with the New Wave, but I think contemporary styles always feel superior to newer genre readers.
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR SKINNER: We’re closing down the X-files again. MULDER: Because I’m too close to truth! SKINNER: No, a DOGE guy named “Big Balls” got pounded into hamburger by a pack of rowdy teens, so the president is turning you into a traffic cop.
I guess. Many of them struck me as quite clunky. I think most modern readers are going to be pulled in by Exhaulation more than they are from A Martian Odyssey, for example.
There are a ton of subjects that are quite toxic in the wrong hands. I’d rather find out about a biography of General Lee, say, from an AP reviewer. You’re asking people to do a lot of research into finding reviews for newly published books.
None of those are sources I would trust with expertise sufficient to review a nonfiction book.
This talk around recommendations reminds me of the excellent question by the excellent @ldlewiswrites.com -- 'Are you a fan, or were you a fan?' If you can't recommend a favorite book written in the last five years, maybe bow out of the making recommendations to young people conversation.
I guess. But two stories don’t justify an entire short story collection, unless you’re already hooked on the genre. There’s a ton of clunky writing in there.
I reread Fire Upon the Deep a few years ago & I caught myself rewriting the plot so that the female characters weren’t as secondary … and then I realized the first time I’d read it, I’d done the same thing - but I’d done that with *everything* back then.
A lot of the 14-18 yr olds in the past were reading “adult” sf/f that dealt with the same themes as YA dystopia. Enders Game is closer in themes & target audience to the Hunger Games than many people would like to pretend.
Some of them were quite good, but they’re not something that I would assume would hook younger readers.
I remembered their names though didn’t follow them heavily. But they definitely had people who followed them, and I think it’s one reason a lot of people went off a cliff in 2016.
Even if they’re irrelevant, they’re both warnings: figureheads the left cares about can and will be corrupted, and they will drag their followers with them unless people are vigilant.
There’s one on Exile 2 out there. I was playing the remake and just marveling at how many hours the person making the website put in to detailing a game they didn’t make.
Yeah, I feel like it was way easier to look up game stuff back then. These days you have to try to find a Youtube video. I miss intricately detailed websites talking about the nuances of games.
I learned touch typing because I didn’t want to die in a MUD.
The geniuses at DOGE are bringing us insights like "I'm not really sure why the tax agency for a country of 330 million people has a larger staff than a midsize bank"
If you’re a sad man and you expect my sympathy, look elsewhere right now. The world is falling apart. I genuinely have no interest in listening to someone’s personal problems.
Please shut up. I have no desire to engage with a sad man right now. Pubmed is free; go look it up.
Which were founded by a bunch of bigoted teens who didn’t know better and colonized by a bunch of stupid adult women desperate to believe the “community” they spent money trying to join is a utopia, and get assured that you definitely have it just as bad or worse than women.
So spare me. You get - statistically - paid more than me, you are - statistically - more likely to marry someone who is willing to compensate for your flaws. You are going to get coddled and have your behavior dismissed as things you can’t help doing. And then you get to go into your ASD fora
And of course they did: they were pathetic teenage losers who had never gotten laid. They shouldn’t have been expected to know otherwise, which is why they should never have been left to run free to form “self-advocacy” groups.
and TikTok videos showing you how to spot high masking autism like you’re hunting for a wild bird. Neither approach is helpful, but what I know is that, when I needed them, those men on the ASD fora told me that I should flash my tits at men to get them to do what I wanted.+
So spare me. If you’re above 30 and can tie your shoes, you wouldn’t have benefited from early diagnosis, because the resources at the time were shit and the community was toxic. And now it’s turned into a cutsy diagnosis about people having songs stuck in their heads
I told no one because I remembered that line. And the “self-advocacy” groups at the time were shit. Everyone denies this now, but men with ASD (the diagnosis was prob 90% male at the time) populated the incel fora.+
I am not exaggerating when I say that line defined - and still defines- huge amounts of my life. I didn’t understand epidemiology when I was 16, but when I was 27 with a postdoctoral fellowship & I spent nights & weekends reading about amyloid plaques & came up with a theory that seems to be true,+
There’s a line from Lora Wing in one of the papers I looked up that had lived rent free in my head since then, where she didn’t think people with ASD were capable of actually having insights into their special interests, as she thought they just possessed superficial understandings of the subjects.+
And I had my diagnosis - at 16 - shoved down my goddamn throat. I didn’t ask for it, and the literature at the time was a disaster. Everyone has erased the fact that Asperger was seen as overly *optimistic*.+
Statistics show that men do better than women, even though women have less social impairment. And statistics also show that women face a double edged sword upon revealing a diagnosis- like an aging actress, people try to see blemishes rather than seeing appeal.
Hate to be this person but just want to note that Trump said he was going to deport anti-Israel protesters back in 2024 and anyone who didn't take him seriously is a fucking idiot
And then the leftists start whinging.
Muted. It’s clear you are offended by facts.
Crickets on campus since the election. But sure, the issue was always Democrats.
Again, crickets on my university’s campus. I’m speaking facts, but it seems like you don’t like them.
Again, crickets the day after the election. Like none of them actually cared about the issue.
I’m not blaming them for anything. I was honestly sympathetic. But it’s been crickets since the election. It’s very clear that they either didn’t care or were coordinated by someone who didn’t care.
They’ve been absolutely silent since November, at least on my campus. I don’t think they were as committed as you want to think.
It’s not their stupidity. It’s their pride in their stupidity.
Perhaps if we hated Russia more, we wouldn’t be here right now. Both the right and left bought into Russian agitprop. And here we are.
Cynicism gets you nowhere. The US’s word HAS been worth quite a bit. But sure, we’re just as bad as we’ve always been.
Being a historian, people ask me if I think the US is living through Germany 1933. I answer no, analogies are always imperfect but to me it feels more like Russia 1999: a blatant theft of state assets and liberals in a fugue state, refusing to believe the arc of progress is bending against them.
We *were* warned
"They'll never cut Social Security" is the new "they'll never overturn Roe v Wade."
(1/3) It needs repeating: in 1994, Ukraine was persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons to Russia in return for the US, the UK, and Russia guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.
Is this about the free markets or the personal liberties? It's all so confusing.
100% Supporting the idea that "collective action is a social norm and this is what it feels like" is part of the process of getting citizens to realize and employ their agency.
There are like 5 scandals every day that would have broken any previous Administration.
When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”
Congressional Democrats say Congress should have spending authority and other powers laid out in Art. 1 of the Constitution. Congressional Republicans say this is a red line, insisting that budgets and other bills are merely suggestions, and the White House must be able to break laws when it wants.
In a heathy democracy, the WHCA would fight this by boycotting all WH and travel events until the old system was restored. But they’re going to roll over and do whatever it takes to maintain “access” so they can be lied to in comfort
Terrible music in the 1850s was good for stimulating conversation, apparently.
They also had Napoleon during that time. The odds of a revolution producing a stable government on the first go are pretty low, and if the US hadn’t succeeded, few European countries would likely have tried it. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is all about that problem.