All of Us Should Be Able To Agree With This…..

I dunno, bro, you drinking "Essentia+" water like it's not just over-priced tap water.

Not sure I trust your take on things now.

(Essentia+ is one of a dozen or so "alkaline" water brands you can spend your entire paycheck on just to prove you're super special. The water? It does nothing.)

Let’s stop going into space. There’s nothing to see and no one to talk to | Zoe Williams I’ve nothing against astronauts or scientific innovation. But what’s the point of Artemis II, asks Zoe Williams

@zoesqwilliams.bsky.social Leaving aside the issue of this being a bad take, this is noticeably shorter and less articulate out than your other recent columns.

Did your employer demand you write ragebait? Like I'm genuinely curious here.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

You know when you see an op-ed in a publication, and you think:

"Gosh, you are such an arsehat for writing that"

and then you see the publication pushing it because they are slaves to their metrics ...

Well....

Today's arsehat is Zoe Williams, and the publication is The Guardian.

Don't bother.

I feel like lumping Discord users and Reddit users into the same category is unfair to Discord users, who don't deserve to be equated with the miserable inhabitants of large subreddits. :)

I'm going to play Helldivers 2 with some friends tonight. Depending on who's online, I'll likely get a Canadian friend or two, or even one of my New Zealander friends.

Much more worth my while than continuing this conversation

I'm probably going to wean myself back into BlueSky over time, but I've learned to set limits.

Perhaps if you spent more time hanging out with real people online and less time screaming at BlueSky users, hawking AI, and talking to chatbots, you would be less unpleasant to talk to.

Its why I spent more time on Discord over the past 6 months than on here. It's why even if Discord goes through with age verification nonsense, I will spend more time in other online chat spaces than here.

Turns out that people in chatrooms act more like people than on Twitter/etc.

I talk with numerous non-Americans online, but outside of BlueSky, and I rely on them to help address my blindspots. This includes at least a dozen Australians. The ones I know are mostly center left and left.

None of them talk like you, because they understand that Americans aren't a uniform bloc.

Yeah I probably shouldn't have brought the first thing up. Part of the reason I took an extended break from BlueSky was a wave of extremely confident and extremely wrong US politics takes from people not in the US.

"Why don't you just have a civil war right now?" got really grating.

Okay, that is understandable. I've been on anxiety medication for almost 20 years.

He's not from the US according to LinkedIn, and he's an "AI entrepreneur". I suggest ignoring him

MGA voters are very good at barking, but wusses at biting.

Having protested, the worst I've seen is people rolling coal, giving the finger, or saying bullshit. My friend in a deep red area got harassed by one and beat him up. The other guy had a tantrum over it.

I'm not saying you are responsible. I am saying that being afraid to protest is exactly what the administration wants, and a lot of the intimidation they project is a bluff. I apologize for not communicating that clearly.

If you are implying something, say it explicitly. If you are not, respond with constructive advice. If you don't have anything constructive to say, I suggest you move on.

You seem to be implying that Americans should do something specific, but you seem to be not keen on elaborating and very keen on asserting that all I'm doing is voting and peaceful protesting (I have other activities, plans and skills besides that).

As an secular humanist and self-described pessimistic agnostic, I never expected to agree with accusations of it, nor for Christians to call out prosperity gospel as "heresy" rather than "bullshit", but here we are.

Your condescension is as useful as it is appreciated.

In particular, she seems to be giving Trump voters more fear than is warranted.

Attack is a strong word here, especially since she was using far harsher language on another Dem.

We are all on the same team, but that doesn't mean I can't give criticism of her argument.

Also "80,000 million Americans" would be 80 billion Americans.

Everyone in my family, myself included, voted for Harris too, and you don't see me afraid to protest. It turns out most people, even most Trump voters, don't act anything like loud chronically online MAGAs

And I'm not capable of doubling down on tribalistic schadenfreude like you are here.

I think the difference is that the real Lovecraft started out as a raging bigot and slowly got less bigoted until his death.

I don't think this guy is following the same arc.

I just don't think the move is to frame it like this. Like it's some fait accompli. They're dodo-headed dumbdumbs and we should treat them as such, not as scary evil geniuses. Threaten to, and then actually severely punish them when we get the chance. Don't doom about them.

I refuse to be shaken to my core

Bondi could be feigning confidence, which is a skill lawyers develop: you can't just half-ass a case you know your client will lose. She could also be stupid and/or delusional, like a lot of Trump's inner circle is, and genuinely not be considering the consequences.

The "they look confident, therefore that confidence must be real and grounded in reality" argument is stupid, and I'm getting quite sick of running into people using it instead of the evidence we *do* have for what this administration is doing.

That scaled Y axis is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

"I don't care".
That tells us all we need to know. No conscious, no soul, no respect, no humanity.