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Cake day: January 11th, 2024

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  • “Prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death,” said conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump and one of several far-right figures who are organizing digital campaigns on X, the social media site, to ferret out and publicly shame Kirk’s critics.

    Laura Loomer and Kirk’s assassin were both Groypers. Nick Fuentes backed Loomer for congress, and she was shit-talking Kirk over his Epstien stance last month. She’s more culpable than anyone she’s whining about.







  • Number 2 is the actual ideal, not number 1. Number 1 represents, “good,” gerrymandering that politicians argue for, but it really only serves them. They get to keep highly partisan electorate that will reelect them no matter what, which means they can be less responsive to the will of their voters. They only have to worry about primary challengers, which aren’t very common, and can mostly ignore their electorate without issue.

    It’s also important to note that this diagram is an oversimplification that can’t express the nuances of an actual electorate. While a red and blue binary might be helpful for this example, a plurality of voters identify as independents, and while most of them have preferences towards the right or left, they are movable. The point is that actual voters are more nuanced and less static than this representation.

    Number 2 is how distracting would work in an ideal world; it doesn’t take into account political alignment at all, but instead just groups people together by proximity. A red victory is unlikely, but still possible if the blue candidate doesn’t deliver for his constituents and winds up with low voter turnout. It also steers politicians away from partisan extremism, as they may need to appeal to a non-partisan plurality. That being said, when literal fascists are attempting number 3, we’ll have to respond in kind if we want any chance of maintaining our democracy, but in the long term, the solution is no gerrymandering, not, “perfect representation,” gerrymandering.




  • First, Bill Clinton is almost certainly all over them, and older Democrats still think of the Clintons as the epitome of Democratic success. Some of the old guard is still trying to push focus away from the Epstien files. Just two days ago, Nancy Pelosi was calling the Epstien files a distraction, which is a bat-shit crazy thing to say about evidence that could prove that your opponent was involved in a pedophile ring.

    Second, Epstien probably has some sort of ties to the intelligence community. I don’t know that I believe all these stories about him being a secret Mossad asset, but I think its very possible that the someone in the CIA was using him. Alex Acosta, who prosecuted Epstien in 2008, claimed that he was told to back off because he, “belonged to intelligence,” and they’re clearly withholding a lot of information, there’s definitely something they don’t want people to know. Anyway, since 9/11, the Democrats and Republicans have had basically the same position on the intelligence community (essentially, abject deference), so if the CIA says that it would be a national security risk to release the files, the Democrats aren’t going to release the files.


  • Yeah, a lot of people keep telling me, “Oh, the MAGA cult will just believe whatever he tells them,” and sure, some of them will, but others only go along with it because they’re convinced Trump is about to expose the, “deep-state cabal.” They have a fictional Trump in their head that they will protect at all costs, even from real-world Trump. (…and then they’ll probably claim that real-world Trump is a cloned body double and the real Trump is recuperating in a medbed and planning his triumphant return or something).



  • This is what I’ve been trying to explain to people for a few days now. Grifters like Charlie Kirk or Dinesh D’Souza will just go along with whatever Trump says on Epstien. They never believed in or cared about QAnon and the conspiracy bullshit. They opportunistically picked it up when it was useful, they’ll drop it now that it’s inconvenient, and a big chunk or MAGA will listen to them.

    But guys like Alex Jones, who, if he isn’t actually a die-hard true-believer, at least knows that his audience is entirely die-hard true-believers, will not do that. They have staked everything on a made up story about satanic pedophiles that started with Comet Ping-Pong and ended with Jeffery Epstien, and they can’t just drop it. That is another large chunk or MAGA, and it will go to war with anyone, even Trump, to keep their delusion going.


  • This complaint is such an admission. They can’t point to a single similarly between Israel and the bad guys in the movie except, “nation with technology advanced weaponry being deployed against unarmed civilians,” and they’re not even disputing that that’s an accurate depiction of what’s happening. It’s not like they’re saying, “this movie parallels Hamas propaganda.” They’re saying, “depicting colonial genocide negatively is anti-Israel.”





  • People are right in saying it’s context and consent, and it’s not completely gendered. Men’s swimsuits are basically just boxer shorts. Normally I’m not self-conscious about that, but a few months ago I signed up for a toddler swimming class with my son where I wound up being the only Dad, and suddenly I felt a bit exposed. I think the normalcy of walking around in nothing but a small pair of shorts kinda evaporated once I was the only man in the room.