James Calvey

@slothbus8746 @cool_hot_woman Why don’t you help me out for a second, break down where on the political spectrum Charlie Kirk’s assassin was, and start with who you think the assassin is. Then we can argue about who is retarded.

@TheJamesCalvey @cool_hot_woman nice repost man, not ironic or retarded in the slightest

Why wait to announce? The day that the manuscript was submitted the publisher would want that info out, Dunk and Egg was a great show, and the next season of House of the Dragon is on its way. I’ve created lives since the last book came out, moved across the world, bout a house, built a family. Changed careers. Just hearing the book is coming would have enough chatter that the shows get the jilted fans back. The most I have heard from diehard fans is that if GRRM doesn’t care they won’t either.

Apparently TWOW will be announced soon!

Yeah but so was Marc Hamill as Luke. Look at old the original series. Harrison Ford was the charismatic character, Luke is whiny and lame, just like how ewan McGregor drove the prequels. Hayden Christensen was not known as a good actor. Obviously we love them now. I just don’t know if we would love the sequel as much because they don’t have that genuine spark that Lucas brought to it all.

@TheJamesCalvey @martianwyrdlord > she did a great job acting with. Her worst offense was being boring.

Naturally she fails to understand the meaning of Mary Sue entirely. It does not mean "girl character", it means "perfect character who can do anything with no limitations". Luke Skywalker was a half decent pilot with a degree of natural ability with the Force that takes him years to develop. He isn't particularly good at anything else. From the very beginning of The Force Awakens, Rey is an expert pilot, a master martial artist, a top spaceship mechanic, and within five seconds of finding out that the Force exists ascends to the level of Jedi Master. She's also hot, smart, brave, and all the other good things. She needs neither assistance nor instruction. Character growth is unnecessary and impossible. Her only struggle is getting people to admit her natural perfect awesomeness. And even this comes easily to her.

@SydSteyerhart There was a deli in Brooklyn I used to go to that had free print versions of The Onion during the Obama presidency that used to make my morning.

Kids won't remember this but there was a time in the late 90s and early 00s when The Onion was absolute comedy gold, and sometimes truly brilliant. I don't know what this is. There's not even a joke here.

Please be kind, what’s my ethnicity.....

Israelis don’t plan far enough ahead to realize that continuing to insult the only people who have bothered to support them is not a winning strategy. England should have given them a homeland in northern Canada back in ‘46, they wouldn’t have lasted the winter and we could pretend we miss them.

Whites emerged from 40,000 years of brutal winters in a premodern era where failure to plan ahead, cooperate, build mutually respectful community was death. Its not the same.

@D13trainees @AnderHRO1965 @Justadutchguy I’m not European, can’t you read in a proper ‘Murican accent?

@TheJamesCalvey @AnderHRO1965 @Justadutchguy But you are buying his gas and as long as it's cheaper, you're not gonna complain, hypocrite. The whole Ukraine war was engineered by Obama and Macron to proxy war Russia, because direct action would drive up Europe energy costs. Can't want that, so Ukraine kills its own instead.

🇺🇸🎪🇺🇸 MAGA: “Europeans are freeloaders. We’re done paying for you.” Europeans: “Understood.” MAGA: “You’ll collapse without us.” Europeans: “Noted.” MAGA: “You’d better start learning Russian.” Europeans: “Message received.” MAGA: “Wait… why are you all rearming and not buying from us?” Europeans: shrug in Polish rearm in German fortify in Finnish mobilise in Baltic Fly in Swedish innovate in Dutch Because we finally started taking you seriously.🤷 🇵🇱🇫🇷🇩🇪🇫🇮🇪🇪🇱🇻🇱🇹🇸🇪🇩🇰🇳🇱🇨🇿🇦🇹🇷🇴🇭🇷🇸🇮🇧🇪🇱🇺🇮🇪🇪🇸🇵🇹🇮🇹🇬🇷🇧🇬🇨🇾🇲🇹 MAGA: "Not like that!!!" 😭 x.com/MindEnterprise…

@Rothmus So... the witches took over Sweden, Denmark, and the Czech Republic back then, right? That's what I am getting here.

The way they teach us so extensively about this, you’d think the numbers were higher over 550 years.

@TheFellaEnto @eurofounder @Keir_Starmer Would you mind providing further context? I just see a lot of Matthias's content, his reasonable and measured takes and his anecdotes of modern European living are enlightening and help shape my own world view.

@TheJamesCalvey @eurofounder @Keir_Starmer “No don’t shit talk my leader” you suck his toes to?

I was in the Middle East this week. Here’s why.

@duke4204 @Justadutchguy I feel like there is a good joke about your mother and voids I've found myself in but I guess that's the difference between smart and "smart".

@TheJamesCalvey @Justadutchguy the huge void you find yourself in which you try to offset by being "smart" reply guy

@Brigade77Agent @Justadutchguy Israel really does pretty efficiently erode any high ground we have, huh? You know what stinks the worst, Trump was the anti-war candidate. I guess we both shouldn't throw genocidal stones in our glass houses.

@TheJamesCalvey @Justadutchguy And look who's doing that now and who's helping them? You morons started a war because Netanyahu wants to wipe out a whole ethnic group. You should sit this one out.

@eurofounder @Keir_Starmer You have the ability to dream and are the EU consolidated into a single man. I think your influence is a tier above Keir. Your wife's boyfriend should treat you better.

@Keir_Starmer It’s crazy that both Keir Starmer and myself have most likely the same level influence over the Middle East, which is zero

@Brigade77Agent @Justadutchguy Well that's comparing apples to holocausts. You are rearming after we all collectively agreed if you were left to your own devises you'd start systemically killing ethnic minorities. That's a bit different than gang violence and spree shooters, don't ya think?

@TheJamesCalvey @Justadutchguy Well the USA is probably the most armed nation on the planet and your homicide rate is at least 3 times higher than Europe. You barely have any history as a nation and you love killing each other.

Yeah, exactly. I'm from the north as well, no slave holders in my history, or at least in the past few centuries. I know you weren't talking about individuals either, I just have been through too many arguments this week about history with people I just want to hit common ground with today so I keep coming across like a dick.

@TheJamesCalvey @KathleenPow1 @Justadutchguy I meant as a country, not individually. My ancestors fought for the union, and they never owned slaves. I agree it is a dumb thing to even discuss since slavery ended over 160 years ago.

@KR3Wmatic Yeah, but the most video games have ridiculous stories and someone still designs them. Just try not to actively hurt other people and get ready for how dumb our reality probably actually is.

The idea that god would wait 13 billion years (universe start) or even 4.5 billion years (earth formation) or even 8 million years (human ancestor identified) or even 300,000 years (modern human identified) before he sent himself down in the guise of his son to be brutally murdered to forgive himself for misdemeanours against himself is too ridiculous to be believed in the 21st century.

@Ted__Hoffman @KathleenPow1 @Justadutchguy She wasn't complicit, nor were you or I. Lets just reject using it as a weapon against each other when we have legitimate policy discussions to smack each other with until we all agree to have a better future.

@KathleenPow1 @TheJamesCalvey @Justadutchguy Slavery ended less than a century after American became independent. What you fail to realize is slavery started. It existed far longer when the US was a group of British colonies (1619-1776). It's cute that you are ignoring your complicity in the matter.

@wehadtohamhim @anishmoonka What an odd worldview you have. What does race have to do with anything, and why bother insulting people? Talking about why loneliness makes people give up is not an invitation for racists to come in and claim they are better. Keep washing your ass dude, no one cares.

@TheJamesCalvey @anishmoonka This is probably why white people age so poorly. Because as a black personC even when I expect to see no one, I still get up and do my skin routine and take a shower.

The people in this photo aren't friendlier than you. Their apartments are just smaller. So small that Parisians basically gave up on living indoors and moved their living rooms onto the sidewalk. And that was the whole plan. In the 1850s, a city planner named Baron Haussmann tore apart medieval Paris and rebuilt it. He widened streets into boulevards, capped every building at five stories, and added one rule that explains this entire photo: the ground floor of every building had to be a café, a bakery, or a shop. The apartments above were intentionally tiny. Some were single rooms carved out of old mansions. No garden. Barely any sunlight. A private balcony was something most Parisians would never have. So the café became home. You ate breakfast there. Held meetings there. Received your mail there. By the late 1700s, Paris already had close to 2,000 of them. In 2002, there were still 1,907. Even now, after years of closures brought that number to about 1,410, the coverage is absurd: a 2020 city study found 94% of Parisians live within a five-minute walk of a bakery. When COVID shut indoor dining in 2020, Paris ripped out parking spaces, turned them into outdoor terraces, and let 9,800 cafés and restaurants keep them permanently. An American sociologist named Ray Oldenburg wrote a book in 1989 called The Great Good Place. He had a name for spots like the Parisian café: "third places." Not your home, not your office, but the casual in-between spots where you actually get to know people. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, the corner store where the owner knows your name. His whole argument was that American suburbs were built with only two zones, your house and your job, connected by a car. No sidewalk café, no place to bump into a neighbor by accident. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health epidemic in 2023. Being alone all the time is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Half of American adults say they feel lonely. Weekly socializing dropped from 5.5 hours in 2003 to just 4 hours in 2023, and it never bounced back after COVID. Americans between 15 and 29 now spend 45% more time alone than they did in 2010. The scene in this tweet looks like a personality trait. It is a 170-year-old engineering project that works exactly as designed.

The problem is that we are generally reactionary so it isn’t a what about, but rather a but our actions are because. I think Europe has forgotten WW2 more than we have, or perhaps the reality of that has been so distorted by pop culture that we don’t want to see something like that happen again to us, or our allies. Its also annoying because of the Russian invasion doesn’t jive with that. America is the bad guy because its nice to insult the ones who just want to help, and when an invasion is going on we help and it’s not enough. It’s exhausting for the average person.

If you want to understand the psychological structure of American empire, watch the reaction to a very simple sentence: "The United States is the most violent nation in the modern world." Not a difficult claim to document. By military spending. By foreign interventions. By coups supported. By governments overthrown. By wars initiated. By civilians killed. By arms exported to every conflict zone on earth. By the numbers, on any honest accounting, the claim is defensible. The reaction it produces is not engagement with the numbers. The reaction is almost always emotional, personal, and immediate. A sense of attack. A sense of injustice. "What about China? What about Russia? What about the Mongols?" The "what about" is not an argument. It is a symptom. It reveals that the sentence was not processed as a political claim about military policy. It was processed as an accusation against an identity. And identity doesn't respond to evidence. Identity responds to threat.