Ally Cinnamon

This is a genuine point worthy of debate, @tomhfh. The reason I stopped thinking like this — and I’m actually a US dual national — is that I stopped believing the US party system was going to “return to normal.” The Republican machine and media have near deified Trump for a decade now. Trumpism continues. Nationalist media survives and continues setting the debate. Meanwhile, the explosion of radical isolationism means figures like Tucker Carlson are viable presidential candidates. There is no reset button. And there is no return to the old cross-party foreign policy consensus. But two Americas alternating. We deserve better than betting our security on the whims of a few hundred thousand people in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin every four years. The other side of that bet isn’t wholly secure either. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, I would note rise of Podcaster Leftism the sustained effort to elevate Hasan Piker, who regrets the fall of the USSR, a lead spokesman for the party. The long term trends are not comforting for unshakable and unquestioned support for our interests.

Has there even been a more perfect marriage of smug elitism, contempt for commonsense morality, and masturbatory self-importance?

@SwannMarcus89 He's just the latest iteration of the eternal bored rich kid trying to feel something. A Bright Young Thing of the 21st century. 100 years ago he'd have had lavish parties and an opium habit, now it's communism and 'crime is cool' edgelord play.

Out-of-touch female journalists: Hasan Piker is popular among young men Hasan: Goes viral among young men because he said dudes who really like video games are incel losers who are destined to die childless and alone I’m not even mad anymore. This is high comedy

This is clearly just the latest round of bored rich kids trying to feel something. The Bright Young Things for 21st century America.

Odd date to pick but OK x.com/GlobeEyeNews/s…

@SCFCJosh96 There's a bizarre anonymity to this Chelsea side. I'd recognise the names if I saw a team sheet, but off the top of my head I could probably name more Bournemouth or Brentford players.

Chelsea 15-20 years ago had a proper core of players who you could reel off in your head. Now you could tell me they've got 60 players in their squad and I'd believe you

wonder how attractive the Chelsea job actually is to managers (from a footballing ptw). Good chance they're getting a ban from european football in the next few years, need to sell players, not really able to buy proper, good experienced ones in.

@PigeonFeatherz Far from the whole story, but Chile has also rapidly secularised in recent decades to the extent it was used as an example in a recent book defending secularisation theory. Like I say, LatAm tfr decline is by no means monocausal, but becoming less religious is surely in the mix.

One of the really interesting things about this whole domain for me is the regional heterogeneity of it. In a lot of places that have plunged down to 0.8-1.3 sort of terrain, a vital element seems to be that they have modernised very rapidly (say, over a generation or two) but without developing an attendant willingness to have children outside marriage. So any meaningful downward swing in coupling rates (or upward swing in average age at marriage) and TFR goes through the floor. Ostensibly what protects places like the US, UK, Australia, much of Europe etc from going down into the “East Asian shelf” TFR wise is that somewhere between a third and over half of all births are to unwed parents, so they’re cushioned to a degree from a decline/delay in actual marriages by a widespread willingness to have babies while cohabiting or even single. In a number of LatAm countries (of which Chile is one), more than 75% of births are extramarital - afaict in the last few decades they were still coupling up fairly young and widely by modern standards, just apparently without feeling any pressure to legally formalise. Would be fascinated to find out what’s caused them to crash so quickly into the Japan/Korea zone because this seems really counterintuitive.

@Halalcoholism I do sometimes wonder if the editors who commission this kind of stuff feel even the slightest pang of guilt? They *must* know deep down they're exploiting people who at the very least 'have issues'.

I perused some of this writer’s other work, and… yeah there’s a lot going on

@echetus 'Have they genuinely disappeared from the discourse or have I just muted them and forgotten about it?' is a question I more than occasionally ask myself when a name randomnly pops into my head. Is Mic Wright still here? Dave Rubin still a thing?

It's very funny to discover some random account you muted years ago is still sending furious tweets your way.

Since the got rid of the "show post by muted account" button you really do forget the accounts you mute exist.

@SoulBossaNovaa @allowableman2 Fascinating question. My middle-aged friends who originally loved it stopped watching nearly 2 decades ago. Our children don't watch it, and for the Gen Z or younger millennials I work with, it simply isn't part of their cultural universe. So who exactly is the audience?

@allowableman2 I'm sure there are people who are watching new episodes of The Simpsons, but why don't we hear from them? I don't know a soul who watches the show anymore, at least not the new stuff

You know, I think it’s time to pack it up

at some point I do feel the "J.K. Rowling naming a character" jokes just circle back to being racist. If you look at a real person's name which happens to be from a particular culture and think "that's so ridiculous" then that is just making fun of the name. But say that it's a Rowling character and the joke becomes acceptable

@felt_vampire 'Implementation of esoteric frippery at the expense of core functionality' unironically appears to be a working template for developers across the board. Booking holidays and even viewing shifts on my new work intranet is now a genuine challenge.

Permanently removing certain topics I could see a use for (even then, I don't think it really works with the nature of the site), or a timed spoiler filter for events/shows. Meanwhile, features I do use to customise my experience are taken away. Worse product by the day

The addition of dropdown menus I will never intentionally use on both Following and For you TLs is great. More unwanted, non-optional clutter, please!

@curcuas @SwannMarcus89 I once shared a flat with a Hungarian in London. Really decent guy, but one Saturday night we were drinking at home and he stood up on kitchen table and announced his intention to invade Transylvania. The look on his (Slovak) girlfriend's face read simply: "Ah. This again".

@SwannMarcus89 Tourist in Budapest: this city is so lovely, tell me about the sites and museums Every Hungarian guide: this is the monument to how Croatia was stolen from us, this is the house that commemorates how we should still rule Romania, have you heard of Trianon?

2026 Hungarian elections be like Who do you support: Center-right 53% Far-right (Nazi skeptic) 38% Far-right (Nazi enthusiast) 6% Right-wing (other): 3%

The frustration of the squeezed middle is palpably rising and the risk of blunt UC cut offs for support whether for day trips, energy bills or pension credit for winter fuel allowance is that you actually end up undermining support for social democratic principles.

@LukeTryl I'd also add that the historical reference points for Britain being 'great,' or even 'things being better than they are now' come from, across the political spectrum, the mid-20th C. Wining the war for the right, Beveridge/Windrush for the left. Empire has nothing to do with it.

The mistaken assumption often is that Brits look at national decline from empire or something, it’s not, for most - particularly in relation to their own standards of living, their reference point is the turn of the century. For older people they think things have regressed since then, younger people think they were cheated out of having it.

A bit late to this from @j_amesmarriott but it’s one of the best pieces I’ve read this year because going beyond day to day politics/struggles people share in focus groups it captures something bigger we hear - that we’ve passed our prime and it’s all been down hill for years.

There should be an international "Day where you can't be late", where anyone who turns up late for an appointment can be rightfully berated at length for their arrogance and lack of consideration.

@gerrylynch Mexico in particular looks smaller than it is on account of being dwarfed by the giant country which borders it to the north. I can't help but mentally code it as 'small central American republic akin to el Salvador or Honduras' as a result.

Super large countries whose size nobody really appreciates: Argentina, 8th most extensive country on earth. Saudi Arabia 12th Mexico 13th Post-partition Sudan still 15th (I'm taking it as read that most people know that Kazakhstan, Algeria, Congo are HUGE. And Iran at No. 17...)

@echetus They see themselves as equivalent to a highly talented eastern bloc footballer of the 60s or 70s, looking mournfully at Milan or Madrid. Fully aware where the centre of power is (and feeling they deserve to be there) but cruelly denied access through accident of birth.

@allycinnamon76 Both this, and the scale of the issue I describe, are going to accelerate as the wealth-gap widens

Vital context for British politicos is that almost all of them wish they were doing it in America instead

Is there any particular reason the culture war seems to, on both sides, produce such terrible 'satire'? Ryan Long aside, the anti-woke stuff is horrendous. The Onion and Daily Mash meanwhile, produce mirror-image dreck like this.