Tag: trump
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All It Takes Is One.
Finally got around to reading Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario and the striking thing is not the ending, exactly — our radioactive annihilation has been played out in countless books and movies, with the Cold War movie Threads frequently hailed as among the most realistic. It’s the beginning of her book that’s scary. See,…
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The death of community and MAGA
Note: this is effectively a preabmble for a forthcoming series on the Eighty Year Crisis. A while ago ago, professional internet troll Matt Yglesias touched off a bit of a public debate on that one emotion that only grows in power starting in our mid-20s or so, nostalgia. It’s what has everyone from politicians to…
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Various and et cetera, March ’24 edition
programming note: this is part of a series of three unrelated mini-posts, the topmost of which is always guaranteed not to be about politics. promise! My patient the other day was a 27 year old female “Carla” here for routine STI testing. She stated she had one partner, had no symptoms at the time, and…
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Submission and the conservative mind
Over at National Review last month, their in-house Reasonable Conservative, Jim Geraghty, has a piece laying out why he believes a second Trump term would not devolve into a dictatorship, despite a lot of people both left and right saying so: the former fearfully, the latter gleefully. I believe he is wrong, for reasons related…
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Why?
The Atlantic decided to push an issue dedicated to what a second Trump administration would look like. They gathered some two dozen of their best mucky-mucks to deliver hellfire sermons on the enormous damage Trump will wreck on law, on journalism, on NATO, on the foundations of America. You can find it here (paywall removed),…
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Not with a bang but a whimper
Dystopian fiction is riddled with speculative ends of the United States of America. Monsters. Supervillains. Plagues. Nuclear wars. But the real end will actually be far more boring, far more stupid — and far more deserved. In my very first entry onto this very same blog 10 years ago, I mused on the greatest weakness…
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Today’s One-Dimensional Political Axis
Earlier, I thought I saw in the app Threads an opportunity for Elon Musk’s nemesis Mark Zuckerberg to steal half the userbase of Twitter (or, sigh, “X”). As a far more stable platform than other Twitter clones, backed by the might of social media’s premier corporation, maybe he could’ve done what Mastodon couldn’t, and become…
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The only two rules of the Right.
Ok, last post on this for a while, I promise. Here are two recent social media posts that I would like to share. I’ve long held that the right since circa 2017 has held two, and only two, principles: absolute seething hatred of people who vote for liberals or Democrats, and devout and utterly submissive…
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Various and et cetera, Aug. ’23 edition
I don’t know why we aren’t talking about the Ariana scandal more. As far as celebrity sex scandals go, few are juicier and more appalling. She and Ethan went on double dates with their respective wronged spouses, even as they were (likely) cheating! Ariana once liked a post about the wife — on Mother’s Day!…
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A strange game. The only winning move is…
I cannot sometimes help but feel like we’re all in a Hearts of Iron game that started Jan. 1, 2022. boy, nothing bad could possibly come from this! Such a strategy game starting in 2022 would bear certain similarities. Of course, the major powers are different this time: USA and China rather than Germany, the…
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