one of the earliest lessons in politics I learned as a kid from my parents was to always vote for a tax increase, because you're trading a dollar amount so small you probably won't notice in order to fund something important that benefits everybody. I wish that was how Democrats messaged this stuff!
If US democracy was functional, this would have led to an immediate impeachment and removal from office.
When we are on the other side of this (and we will be), I suggest we use those giant prison warehouses these cocksuckers are setting up to lock them up and then we should forget where the keys are forever.
Watching Politico get told they're sanewashing shit by the guy they're sanewashing is just excellent. Media cooked. Getting dunked on by the people they're protecting. We are in the post-dignity era of the press.
For the life of me I cannot understand why Ds are trying to out-Republican Rs on taxes **in this particular moment in time**
That's the sort of thing when you're getting blown out and desperate, not when you're looking at a D+13 or more midterm wave
Yes! Yes! Yes!
We went from "no AI slop pinky swear" to "Xbox is becoming Copilot" in like 2 weeks flat.
It's like they're having an internal competition to see how many ways they can force people to stop using Xbox. Double price of game pass. Hike console prices. Put the Copilot BS everyone hates on it.
sara @sarasoci.al they/she transsexual: hey i'd like to take this harmless drug that makes life worth living america: fuck you *starts a world war*
This is so accurate
And on the insipid “wealth gap” point: the cost of a PhD isn’t the books or research. It’s paying your fucking rent when you make poverty wages for years on end doing vital work for your university.
Until Claude can build students a free house, it has ZERO impact on that. Idiots.
As an actual PhD who’s done the work, let me be real fucking clear:
If I ever had a grad student advisee doing this, they’d need to find a new adviser. They would get no support from me. They wouldn’t pass a class I taught.
You can either do the work yourself, or you can fuck right off. Period.
This was also part of my pushback on NO WAY HOME’s ending. I just didn’t buy it for a second. I didn’t buy that Marvel would ever follow through on it long term, and I didn’t buy that this Peter Parker could actually survive in the world like that. It’s just fundamentally not who he is.
Does Tom Holland's Spidey even know how to get a job? Has he ever submitted a resume? Has he ever opened a bank account for himself? He's never even had to make his own costume for fuck's sake. His whole life was chilling at the preppy STEM school getting ready for MIT. What are we talking about?
Like, I'm really struggling to imagine what people think it would look like for the Spider-Man who went to space and fought Thanos and got dusted and then came back and fought in a giant cosmic battle to suddenly be out delivering pizzas. How would we relate to that? What's the entry point there?
If you do it with Holland, you've taken someone who emphatically *wasn't* one of us - who's had experiences that mark him as fundamentally different, way beyond just the superpowers, in terms of the economics and tech and everything else - and forced him to cosplay as a working man.
When Tobey Maguire's Spidey struggles to pay the rent, there's something relatable, because he clearly came from 'our' world. He started normal and then got the spider-bite. You relate to him because everything other than the powers is totally quotidian.
Whether or not you like the MCU/Holland interpretation of Spidey (I mostly don't) it is at least *an* interpretation. He's Tony Stark Jr., a little rich nerd who quips from behind his magic nano suit. That's what he's been, for good or for ill. You can't just use literal magic to wholesale change it
You can't have a Spider-Man who *was* comfortably middle-class and then bankrolled by a billionaire and then fought aliens in space only *become* 'street-level' and economically disadvantaged because a wizard did it. That's stupid. That's not how stories work. That's not how characters work.
You can reboot the character and have a *new* Spider-Man who is tenuously middle class and focuses on his local neighborhood while struggling to pay the rent (which we really haven't gotten on film since the Raimi days), but you can't have Dr Strange wave his wand and just make that the status quo.
Second, and more importantly, even if they *did* do it - even if they full on have Tom Holland struggling to deliver pizzas and saving cats from trees and whatnot, with no aliens in sight - it would ring so deeply false. Changing the status quo through an act of magic can't make this work.
For one I just don't believe they'll actually do it. They'll nod to it early on and then he'll be doing multiverse shenanigans by the halfway point. 0% chance an MCU that has been entirely devoid of class/economic anxiety/real people/street level anything will suddenly discover it 40 films in.
Thinking about SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY since we're probably getting a trailer soon, and can I just say the pitch that 'we're finally getting street-level Spidey in the MCU' is possibly the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard? Like genuinely breaks-my-brain levels of dumb?
This is such cool news! There hasn't been a missing DOCTOR WHO episode discovered since 2013. Now we've got 2 episodes from "The Daleks' Master Plan" restored, meaning episodes 1-3 are now extant. Every little bit counts. It's so cool when these discoveries happen.
Living in a world where Bravely Default is playable on everything *except* PlayStation is very weird but also very funny. I feel like the number of remaining Xbox players into this kind of thing has to be in like the single digits.
It's like the AI bosses are competing to say the most obscenely, mask-off evil thing possible today.
It's illegal to accidentally drive over a bus lane, but these freaks can gloat about destroying our futures, freedoms, and humanity openly, and we're not even allowed to lynch them in the streets.
Again, leaders of other countries don’t talk this way. The glee with which our current leaders talk about killing people is not normal, and nor is their lack of concern for who exactly we’re killing. American bombs incinerated 100 kids in Minab. Were those the “right people”?
“At some point, in ideal conditions, maybe I would be able to cobble together some feelings about Donald Glover playing a digital dinosaur, but right now I’m tired—very, very tired,” said Wisconsin resident Gina Logan
Some Tech CEO every day: "You don't get to own things now. I own your refrigerator. If you say mean things about me I will turn off your fridge and spoil all your dairy and eggs and meat. If you don't like it you go to jail."
People in my mentions: "Lmao are you REALLY a luddite? smh"
For as much upheaval as has seemingly happened since 2016, it feels more and more like our politics has just been frozen in time. Trump 2.0 had turned out to just be a more radical version of GW Bush (AI bubble instead of housing bubble; ICE abuses instead of patriot act; Iran instead of Iraq)
It’s an uncomfortable conversation, like all forced retirement conversations are, but the fact is there are many areas of high pressure public service where we institute this (law enforcement, air traffic, etc), and when we’re talking about leaders beholden to public interest, the same logic applies
I don’t know the right number. 70? 75? Maybe tie it to the Social Security/Medicare eligibility age and make it so there’s no other pension/healthcare for them as an incentive to fund those programs.
The problem is whatever number you pick, our current class is blowing past it by at least a decade.
