left McLean in too long because he ALWAYS leaves the starter in too long

now bringing in a terrible choice of reliever, however it works out. Absolutely done with this

fire Carlos Mendoza btw

And that's game

twelve in a row

listen even getting one is herculean right now

this team.

I mean this team

(Inshallah both of these change tonight)

Fun fact btw: the 2026 Mets have currently won as many games at Oracle Park as they have at Citi Field.

And indeed as many games at Oracle Park as the 2026 Giants

The important thing is that no matter how we blow it tonight, we homered with men on base and took a multi-run lead for the first time in two weeks. It can be done. We do not have to go 7-155

THE METS HAVE SCORED MULTIPLE RUNS IN AN INNING

48 hours to be like “ok, maybe the Mets will reset themselves, the offence can’t actually be this bad” and I’m willing to wave the white flag eight pitches into the first inning

Note that the fact is wrong. It’s an understandable error because they assumed that no Labour PM could have been so utterly craven and immoral as to promote Mandy, to make him the second most powerful person in the government , and leave him there… but this is wrong!

True; it was very silly to call him popular when that’s obviously bullshit

It is precisely this reason that Trump didn't go in '17, '18, '19, or last year.

That he was unwilling to humble himself or reaffirm the important role of the press *in criticizing him* is a clear testament that he is unfit to be the leader of a free people (ignored by the voters, alas).

I disagree here, the problem is not the dinner, it is Trump.

The WH Correspondents Dinner, as actually practiced, is a sort of humiliation-of-the-powerful ritual common and valuable in republics since antiquity.

That Trump is incapable of doing this is yet another signal of his unfitness to lead.

I'm not sure my French is good enough to understand the full subtleties of Libé's review of the Michael Jackson biopic

Also an utterly bizarre take on the founding of Israel which he seems to believe the Attlee government was a prime mover in???

Of the nearly infinite stream of legitimate critiques of the Starmer government, “not nostalgic enough about Labour and the old working class” manages to be a rare *miss*

Among other things, I enjoy the closing rant about how Labour today doesn’t care about the working class voters they did in the 1940s, a thing you can certainly believe if you have never heard or read literally anything about them

Derived I will say from the work of Hagith Sivan and more recently Adrastos Omissi!

But because there isn’t a civil war and both sides have an interest in pretending there’s no conflict at the time and never was one afterwards, and especially because Theo ultimately takes over the whole thing and leaves his kids in power, everything gets hushed up and we get the official story

Anyway my own theory of this (with a few but a minority of scholars) is that Theo wins a skirmish, seizes the moment to have his army acclaim him as emperor in the absence of an eastern ruler, and then dares Gratian to do anything about it, and Gratian fumes and sulks for a year before saying “FINE”

Later Gratian *does* acknowledge him. But it still appears very frosty, and with little cooperation.

And Theodosius’ own propaganda will claim that Gratian made him emperor but also weirdly downplays his role at the same time? It feels forced IMO

There are no contemporary records to fill in the blanks. But we do have sources from Gratian’s court the next year in 379 and they *completely* ignore the existence of Theodosius. No mention. Probably no coins. Silence, even in all the venues that normally acknowledge co-emperors

The story in our sources is:

August 378; Valens killed by Goths

Late 378: Theodosius, a completely undistinguished and only recently rehabilitated general of probably modest rank, is active near the front & wins a minor victory

January 379: Gratian makes Theodosius co-emperor

This is… weird

I think it’s plausible that Theodosius I usurped the throne illegally without Gratian’s consent and successfully covered it up for ~1700 years

Doc Strange 2 has the admittedly extremely comic book thing where you sort of have to see Wanda Vision to get it but it also feels hard to reconcile with Wanda Vision’s conclusion?

Profound political debate

Remember how in FWS, people keep accusing each other of being ‘supremacists’ except with no attached ideological marker so it is unclear who exactly anyone believes is supreme

This is pretty much my view too

I think “well it’s just a comedy” could be fine but the movie itself tries to have it both ways: it wants to seem like it’s saying something about grieving and even at one stage about imperialism (??) but is also too petrified of sincerity to ever land any of its beats