This is genuinely one of the foundational copes of the modern conservative movement, a stabbed-in-the-back narrative about why the US lost Vietnam

"Carter lost Vietnam" was the original "Biden was in charge for all the Covid lockdowns" bsky.app/profile/niss...

surely no army in military history has ever been laid low by disease, a famously uncommon problem among people living in enforced close quarters

Based on the texts I get, I would say that Ossoff is absolutely planning a 2028 presidential run.

For the record, for anyone who’s forgotten, it’s sheer madness for a president to contradict himself nearly every day. It’s profoundly wrong that we can’t trust the veracity of a single thing that he says.

And it's directly related to toxic masculinity, how we raise boys, and manosphere BS. But we can't talk about that either.

Washington vaccinated all his troops for smallpox! Ffs!

But after reading this interview where a guy thought it was all real, and should govern policy, I started to think “how MANY things do people believe are true representations of how the world works, when they’re really just dramatic conventions we all take for granted”

And I had never really thought about it before, because it’s so obviously used as a dramatic expedient: hero has to know a thing, so they torture a bad guy for the info, and this shows various things about the character struggles of the hero.

The thing is, I had watched 24, and enjoyed the first season, but I hadn’t really made much note of the “people getting tortured for information that turns out to be accurate” bits because it is SUCH a common trope in thriller type entertainment.

We’ve probably talked about this IRL, but I was a little gobsmacked to find out that the guy responsible for the GWB-era TV series 24 **really believed** that you could get accurate information from people by torturing them enough, and that’s why he included those scenes in the show.

One of my operating philosophies is “you can’t make a person do a thing” and also, this drives a certain kind of authoritarian into a constant state of apoplexy.

Ha, you trolled them in the other direction.

Like, I think at one time, conservatives being the “money party” led them to embrace facts when it came to the money if in no other context, but that’s all gone now.

Anyway, one of the things I’ve been haunted by over the last 10 year of maga is how many stupid and dysfunctional things I observed in the evangelical church have completely metastisized.

I visited an evangelical Bible college as a high school student, and it struck me as almost hilariously terrible, a glorified day care center for young adults who wanted to act like dumb babies, and it was explicitly sold to me, a girl, as a great way to marry a minister.

So, on the one hand, evangelicals like to act stupid, but they don’t like to think of themselves as stupid. Who does, right? So they invented alternate environments where they could think of themselves as learned because, I dunno, they have “study Bibles” and make a lot of notes during sermons.

Evangelicals have a broad distrust of science, fact, history, and truth, because they fear, with good cause, that truth leads people away from The Truth ie their doctrine.

This was a pattern I first observed in the evangelical church in the 1980s when I was a teenager: this idea that a “good” evangelical kid goes to college and goes liberal, and it must be due to all that indoctrination from their liberal God-hating professors!

Conservatives cannot handle, emotionally, the fact that learning true stuff tends to drive people away from conservatism, so they do what they always do, project: it’s the LIBERALS who are shutting down free and honest debate (because they won’t let us say slurs) and we’re just responding to that

The modern conservative project is, broadly speaking, against science, knowledge, and tradition. They resist open debate, open exchange of ideas, open movement of persons, and freedom in general.

There is a bit of a difference between “liberal” as in “liberal arts” and liberal as in “votes for Democrats” but in the current environment that distinction is eroding.

There was a point, maybe 50 years ago, where you could argue that conservatives were just traditionalists, people who didn’t like change, but under Trump 2.0 we see that conservatives are EAGER for change as long as it’s regressive, they love chaos and dysfunction and wild untested ideas

The right wing in academia has a problem, which they pretty much ALWAYS have, which cannot be solved: conservatism is, fundamentally, as a necessary condition, stupid

I haven’t read the article, so maybe this is an unfair assessment, but I can only imagine this being one of those “maybe we WERE too mean to conservatives” thinkpieces

Virginia Woolf, more than a hundred years ago:

Several people with signs like this at the Boston Marathon today

Feel like it should be a bigger story that Howard Lutnick's firm (run by his kids) created a financial product to buy up tariff refund claims at a major discount, and will now be cashing in on the higher costs passed onto consumers.

For example, the landscape of Epstein Island

a low stakes one I believe is that reclusive and legendary Simpsons writer John Schwartzwelder is not a real person, but an elaborate prank/pen name used to attribute work by a different writer or writers (almost certainly longtime fellow Simpsons writer George Meyer)