sonch

Still strikes me as pretty weird that the US government using public resources funded ridiculously ill-justified virus-breeding research that created a pandemic killing millions and counting, and no one’s in trouble for it and no one cares, but maybe that’s just me.

There is a very simple explanation here. Ds made Franken resign cuz he became a liability to the ‘me too’ campaign which they wanted, ultimately, to direct against Donald Trump. (It had nothing to do with any coherent principled evaluation of what Franken actually did.) There’s no such political-op underway that somehow requires tossing NYC’s mayor’s wife under the bus. So you see, there’s no contradiction.

wait just remembered he also did Inherent Vice, another Pynchon adapation. which was much more amusing! i could watch that Joaquin character walking around for another 4 hours. maybe i just don't like Leo

Finished OBAA. Some good aspects, but geez overall what a lightweight movie. That Best-Picture award has gotta be a makeup-prize for his other movies (mostly There Will Be Blood, I guess). Like when they gave it to Scorsese for The Departed Licorice Pizza was so much better

“Howcome my principal didn’t go down when I made only minimal monthly interest-only payments that evidently didn’t amortize any of my principal?”, probably

p.s. in a sense, complaining about this whole Smart People/junior-HS clique dynamic is basically my whole online thing fyi, & has been for years. so if this kinda tweet annoys you, may as well unff now

I genuinely mean this btw not just snark. There’s a reason some judge considers a Robert Malone ripe for second-guessing on vaccines yet that same judge would not have considered [Rando Dumbass Bureaucrat w/MPH] ripe for second-guessing on, say, mask mandates. That reason can’t possibly be found in ‘the law’. It’s prior to that. It’s ‘cultural’. The cultural-cohort of (most of) the type of people who might become judges (or, Atlantic writers…same thing?) looks kindly on ‘Public Health Expert’ bureaucrats, but looks askance at all things related to RFK, and ‘anti-vaxxers’. That’s just true. That’s just a sociocultural fact about them. This isn’t traceable to something written in ‘the law’. How could it be? No, it’s just about which clique likes which type of people. Just like in junior high. If you’re in that clique, you and ‘everyone you know’ hates RFK, you find him icky. You just do. You’re suspicious of everything he does & think he ‘needs to be held in check’. You just do. This is something you ‘know’, without and prior to any case being brought. Therefore, if you’re such a person, and hold a judgeship, and someone brings a suit to stay an RFK thing, you *look for reasons to grant it*. Of course you do. Because you ‘know’ that’s needed, for ‘good governance’. Of course you do. Everyone you know agrees. Everything you read reinforces that. Read the article! Meanwhile, if it’s 2021 and lawsuit is brought against the Mask Mandate Edict written by [Local Midwit Public Health Poobah], you look for reasons to throw it out. Of course you do. So: The people who brought it, they’re probably icky right wingers anyway. Do they even have ‘standing’? Who am I as a judge to question the Expertise of this random moron with ‘Public Health’ in her job-title? Etc. That’s not a description of an objective legal or judicial dynamic, just a sociocultural one, and pretty obviously so.

guys i’m having a hard time getting excited & celebrating with every N+1st Iranian guy I’ve never heard of who, I’m told, was a government guy in some capacity, getting killed with a missile. just not feeling it. am i a bad American

yeah but it’s more like what if a stoner ex radical had to be Liam Neeson in Taken (Big Lebowski was What if a stoner ex radical had to be Philip Marlowe) it was also derivative in other ways…‘bad guy is after a girl who is secretly his own daughter b/c her existence proves he did a bad thing & threatens his status’ was the plot of Zero Effect I guess i can forgive it for being ‘pynchonian’ and also, given its structure, doing fairy tale tropes (huntsman has moment of conscience & can’t kill Snow White) It did have some amusing parts, and of course was directed well (the score was annoying), good car chase set piece in the final sequence sure, but overall just very meh

@soncharm The premise was "what If the Dude was really Bill Ayers" and then it's got a few moments

Indeed. And ‘norms’ and ‘good governance’ are based entirely on what all Smart People ‘know’ & have memed-up amongst themselves. This is actually *prior to* questions of legality. It’s pre-judicial. Pre-constitutional. All Smart People ‘know’ that any liquid called ‘a vaccine’ is good & must be injected into as many people as possible. Therefore, any process that inhibits this is automatically suspect, ‘against norms’, not ‘good governance’.

When are prestige-directors gonna finally get their hands on the Robert Cormier corpus and do them justice

Just listened to this again. Gotta say i was spot-on with this call. Holds up just as well as ever

What does this even mean? First of all, i thought Kamala was gonna win. That’s what i thought was gonna happen

@cremieuxrecueil Absorbing to the point of incorporating-as-belief what The authority tells you is one of the core competencies being and remaining in academics selects for

I am often shocked by how many seemingly rational academics believe strange, false assertions if they come from places of perceived authority. I don't know many of those people who would actually suggest just believing any odd thing they say just because of their authority.

@Noahpinion me, i think it was not enough MMT

The right will look at the failure of Trump's second term and say: The real problem is that we didn't Fight Hard Enough. It wasn't the ICE murders, the lawlessness, the corruption, the tariff idiocy, the groyper ideology. It was that we just didn't Fight Hard Enough

Team D just loves Our Precious Democracy so much they have no choice but to turn every power shift into politically-weaponized legal threats, thus replicating the conditions of the late Roman republic leading up to Caesar

Ok but who are they kidding tho. Of course such ‘programs’ are designed to bankroll Beltway power-couples.

Since the President’s inauguration last year, the amount of safe-assets created by the government & held in non-USG hands is $2.8 trillion

being an old timey doctor must have been amazing. absolutely blasted on primo coke for holistic wellness, telling hotties to get in the apparatus

@benryanwriter whenever I’m at the used bookstore with a $1 shelf of these, very real danger I walk away with 5-10 I just pick on a whim

RIP mass market paperbacks. Here’s my shelf of them: