My Discord server after posting this:

Yes, you’d think that exposure to an endless stream of information would make your views of the world more complex. But in fact many people are mostly using that information as a kind of emotional triggering mechanism, and if anything, it reinforces the simplest version of their views

Wipe the floor with his ass, Mallory.

This specific war is illegal and immoral, but "seizing enemy commerce" is actually a pretty standard part of how wars have worked since approximately forever, and is well-covered by international law.

Write drunk, edit sober.

It’s from Hemingway, but what he really means is write without inhibitions, edit with inhibitions.

Joseph McCarthy lived in a time where it was impossible to go to large coastal cities in America without tripping over a Communist plant of some sort. However very few of them seemed to attract his interest. This was because rolling back the New Deal was really his agenda, and Cold War a pretext

The Cold War is often portrayed as a tragic misunderstanding (or even purely a product of American paranoia, exemplified by McCarthyism) rather than a rational response to a totalitarian state (run by Stalin!) holding half of Europe in subjection.

I always see mixed things about Kodacolor but I've really enjoyed it, hope they turn out well!

Woke 2.0 will be more precise, if nothing else

On the one hand, as a Catholic, it is a bit annoying to see a bunch of people saying "Well *I'm* not a Catholic, but JD Vance should totally get excommunicated for this"

On the other hand, as a Catholic, JD Vance should totally get excommunicated for this

The fantasy here is, like, Rick Deckard, Aragorn, Han Solo or Indiana Jones and notice how all of them have signature weapons strongly associated with them which they *keep*?

Players of this specific kind of game are gonna want *their* iconic weapon, as part of expressive play!

Close but not quite what I'm looking for

And this was before the spectrum scanner! You had to fly up close to planets to get a read on them back then, took ages

You might formulate this as like

"Something with knock-offs good enough to cause uncertainty, but not so good as to actually be mistaken for the real thing"

E.g.:

When I played Elite Dangerous, I scanned planets, and the best planets to scan were Ammonia worlds

Problem is, there were planets that looked 80% like an Ammonia and would waste my time

But every single time I actually found an Ammonia, I instantly had zero doubt that's what it was

Okay I need an obscure German word for this specific phenomenon:

"Having moderate confidence in a series of false-positives, only to be immediately 100% confident when the real thing shows up"

If you think this is world war you have no idea what the spin up for the first two were like (or even the pre 20th century equivalents)

A lot about Bsky makes more sense when you realize that a tiny but extremely vociferous portion of it are downwardly mobile trust fund kids who are cosplaying as impoverished revolutionaries &/or literal meth heads doing the same.

Hungary is also a small landlocked country bordered on all sides by EU member-states hostile to Orban and with a vested interest in seeing him go

An extremely important bit of context nobody seems to think worth mentioning

I assume the Hungarian opposition beat Orban by being uncompromisingly progressive across the whole set of policy issues. Well done.

analogy for the America brained is like if the Dems lost to Trump four times in a row and then ran Mitt Romney to save the country and won crazy supermajorities and also Mitt Romney was named Johnny America

"Eric may have tipped the scale": Swalwell scandal threatens surge of House expulsions "We want a full house cleaning," one House Democrat said. "Get the garbage out of here."

NEW: There is real appetite among House members in both parties to expel Swalwell, Gonzales, Cherfilus-McCormick and Mills in one go and be done with it, @axios.com has found.

"We want a full house cleaning," said one Democrat. "Get the garbage out of here."
www.axios.com/2026/04/12/s...

I mean, this is in a way the logical response to the breakdown in negotiations, "if we can't use the strait, neither can you," but folks aren't going to like it.

Assuming they didn't yet get around to unfreezing Iranian foreign assets, there might be some leverage there, too, as I understand it.

one of the most revealing things to me is how, when I grew up, many people in the US were uninsured and could not be insured. then we had a huge, epochal political fight to institute a universal health care system, and won. and progressives... just kept pretending the first system was in place

Ok. Blockading the strait is not actually a bad strategic decision, but like, but it’s one that the Navy should have done the moment Iran closed the strait to deny their tankers (ie economic lifeline) transit, not 6wks later when the dipshits in the WH finally realized you need economic coercion too

Since we’ve stumbled backwards into a naval strategy and this is getting reskeeted, I want to clarify: 1) Best option was not to start the war in the first place; 2) this is the least bad option now: 3) it still might not work!

"They're acting like they wholly won the war and are attempting to negotiate terms of surrender rather than make any sort of actual deal"

Okay but the problem is that *both* sides are negotiating like this

Instead of tit-for-tat expulsion resolutions, any member of the House could offer a privileged resolution to simultaneously expel Swalwell (D), Cherfilus-McCormick (D), Gonzales (R), and Mills (R) on a single combined vote.

Really not a fan of the reposts of the Iranian LEGO ai vids are rife with antisemitic imagery but get shared under the aegis of owning the admin

being a cog in the machine is great! you do stuff other people care about and you do it well for them so they give you respect and money and you get to have your own life and not think about it when you're off the clock if you don't want to!