Andrew Jackson was too sincerely awful to be a slopulist, so probably William Henry Harrison. A Virginia aristocrat campaigning on log cabins and hard cider

It's not about oil in the sense that it's remotely connected the oil market in any material way (producers were already worried about the price going down too much). It is about oil in the sense that the world's most powerful man likes the aesthetic of it being about oil.

Jinan didn't even have a metro when I left in 2015. It opened in 2019

Literally every single bad decision this country has made over the past half-century can be attributed to “a lot of voters are panicky racist morons” but left, center, and right all have a vested interest in denying that and keep tying themselves in more ornate knots to avoid confronting it

The damned in hell are not more powerful for the fact that the fires do not consume them; it is part and parcel of their torment.

I love that there’s a Syrian restaurant in my town, yes. But besides it being nice to have access to the food, I think it is Good for someone who had to flee a civil war to succeed in getting a whole life built up and claim a stake in a foreign country.

You ever allow yourself to perceive how much good-natured defense of multiculturalism is just “they bring us this food”?

That doesn’t seem like a great attitude.

"No gambits" has been a core part of my politics ever since people were hoping Trump would win the Republican primary so the general election would be a cakewalk. It turns out bad events just lead to more bad outcomes

Trump v US is still extremely bad, but only because Trump became president again, not because it made Trump president

The thing about Trump v US is its immediate effect was far more to delay than derail, it really only foreclosed the prosecution relating to the attorney general replacement. It shouldn't have taken until 2024 is the problem.

The outcome of the 2024 election was decided in 2021 when Merrick Garland and Joe Biden decided Donald Trump should get to be president again

If Labour wants people to vote for them based on values I would recommend having some

A fair number of West Virginians also just hate people who live in cities (and hate DC in particular) more explicitly than any racist views than they might have

Recently found out that DC has more deer per square mile than West Virginia by a lot. It's probably somewhere from 3 to 5 times more, and it used to be even worse.

Downright Shakespearean how hard he tried to back out on the sale after it was too late

Hard to imagine a better endorsement of ranked choice than how the Zohran-Lander relationship played out

It's kind of amazing how quickly the Unitary Executive turned into exactly the kind of monstrous 'elective monarchy' (ie what we now call a 'caudillo') the Founders worried the Presidency might become if unchecked.

The greatest empirically falsified fuckup in US jurisprudence since Dred Scott.

Pretty straightforwardly true that the Israeli government is one of the greatest geopolitical threats to US interests

Sure but the neocons' whole thing was setting up Iraq as a US-aligned democracy. Israel and Trump are probably willing to keep dropping bombs until Iran turns into something they like

They endorsed Harris last year, you're probably thinking of the Washington Post, which is somehow even more washed

Used to do "navy showers" when I was a kid during a drought and you can definitely do it in under two minutes, with water running for less than one minute

Kinda get why Martin Luther was so mad about indulgences now

The central ethical question of the 21st century is freedom of movement, and it'll be absolutely inexcapable. There will be no contest

Partner insisting that I ‘clean the bathtub’ before she comes to stay with me, as though the bathtub is not daily cleaned through as a byproduct of being used to bathe. Love her despite these irrational beliefs.

It probably makes a healthier discourse. The worst part of X is everyone becoming addicted to screaming at each other. But screaming at strangers is addictive, and if you make that harder people looking for the same feeling are just going to lose interest

Seeing solutions to this that amount to "better tools for blocking people" and it's like recommending to someone whose plants are dying that they water their plants more when they already water their plants 3x a day

This website is full of people who substantively agree on almost everything, so we're stuck yelling at each other about presentation. We agree on X and Y so we yell at people for mentioning only X, or mentioning Y first

I always thought Oblivion was the weakest of the three because it was an awkward transition between Morrowind and Skyrim accomplishing very different things