Raphael

OK, to give everyone a fair warning for what you're getting yourself into if you start to read my post, I've decided to post a pin a thread listing my positions on various political matters. Again, fair warning: no matter where you stand, there's probably something to hate for you here. (1/5)

"I'm a bigot against other groups, too, so it's fine." Really not thrilled that so much of the left is totally fine with this guy.

Background on the Breakdown of the Trump-Netanyahu Love Affair talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/backg...

It always jumps out at me whenever i brave Douthat discourse that his name is an unadorned command. Do That! Only with the initial "do" pronounced with a Buckleyite Brit-humping affectation. Which makes perfect sense.

nice of the sex pests to gather in one spot

OMG. 😳 First a bomb, then an arson attack, all to try to stop the scientists from building a gravitational wave detector. “A local opposition group says a legally protected quiet zone for the project could constrain industrial development across central Sardinia”

i know i sound like a broken record whenever i talk about this, but i'm fully convinced that at this point, especially in light of, well, just about everything that's unfolded in recent years, we really need to be honest with ourselves and face the reality th–i know i sound like a broken record when

we have gone from george w bush serving up the troops into the meat grinder of iraq to donald trump telling the navy to go fuck itself, and the dems sit on their hands for most of it.

I wonder what it’s like being so comfortable than a few hours a year in a work-required seminar is the worst thing you can imagine, and being so self-centered that you think it’s worse—a more pressing national concern—than state repression, censorship, corruption, crimes, and abuses of power.

Finally updated my macbook OS. Great. 🤦‍♂️

Quite a lot of maddening stories of rail construction incompetence.

safari is a bafflingly bad product. like why is one of the core functions of one of the world's largest products so bad?

In general, yes, but the "3 times as many Muslims per capita" bit is not just social media. Israelis have long been shocked at how many Muslims there are on the street when visiting Europe, even though Israel has more, because Israel has so much spatial segregation that Jews don't usually see them.

Asking the public to sacrifice with a stiff upper lip works better with “the Nazis are bombing us, but we’ll endure, and we’re fighting back” than “we started a war with Iran, screwed it up, and don’t know what to do.”

Wow they must have made a really persuasive case!

I feel like social media constantly reminds us why courts and rule of law and their ability to proportionately sanction were such massive improvements for everyone. the mob can only venerate or destroy.

The paradox, of course, is anyone who would benefit from this advice would never read it

The moral of this story is one should not expect intellectual consistency from people who outsource their thinking

The self-deception holding it all together for American Jews is that the same IDF which does this is the most moral army in the world going above and beyond to be meticulously cautious about protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

oh man sorry guys my laptop glitched and deleted all the research logs, i guess we gotta restart the experiment from the beginning :/

but they're pathetic goobers. makes me think that like hitler and Stalin and whoever were probably pathetic wrecks of insecurity and sexual neuroses etc. too

one thing that this current era makes me really re-evaluate is how much gravitas the evil people of the past had. once someone's body count is in the millions you can't help but attach a certain evil dignity to them. to future generations musk and trump will be these grim and forbidding figures

I mean, you say this but then you see folks get hired - like TAH, about whom the discourse was - ABD with thin CVs because they have the weight of prestige and connections behind them. So they demand you write a book then don't hire you for the Ivy League ABD who hasn't AND WON'T!

healthy public life is impossible without the possibility of semi-private life. discursive communities need a place where they can talk inside baseball stuff. we have none of the benefits of the monoculture in terms of shared experiences, while still having the drawback.

think the 'global public square' fucking sucks & is bad man. people naturally code-switch and adjust based on the context they are in and the community they are talking to. the undifferentiated mega blast feed is a discursive mess that makes any kind of bounded communication impossible.

it remains insane to me that Elon Musk and Trump being responsible for more death than any one else in the 21st century is just a non-story, like a total non-event in the discourse.

sometimes i genuinely wonder how much of politics is determined by the fact that elections happen in the fall of one year but people don't take office until winter of next year

Why wait

I had absolutely no problem reading this but I am also 57 (i.e., "forced to learn cursive" years old) and also I myself actively mix standard and cursive letters when I handwrite things because I'm a weirdo like that

Geology Building xkcd.com/3284/

i do not think magnets are sufficient for that darth i think that takes some mysterious and advanced materials science

doesn’t he use those to keep his hair in place katie

waiting to see what inevitable grift is related to this

AfD formed as a hate party against Greece before it retooled as an anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and homophobic party.

Congrats to the union members who voted for Trump, you put your fellow workers under fascist surveillance www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/u...

Normally, taking 63% while mired in a huge ethics scandal might be an impressive showing for Farage, but not when this guy is your only real opponent.

fellow millennials, let's take a second to appreciate how great it feels to be in the prime marketing demographic catered to by all of the culture. I get now why boomers wanted it to last forever

The Gulf autocrats bribed the wrong guy. Actually, their mistake was thinking a corrupt, ignorant US president was in their interest.

Counterintelligence is almost always secretive, so we don’t know for sure. But reading between the lines on reports about 2016 Trump campaign figures with shady Russia ties—Manafort, Page, the Trump family—I suspected counterintel found a lot and doing criminal inquiry only was a mistake. Alas.

Many Trump things are explicable by hatred, by love of power, by vanity, by greed. Those all make a *kind* of sense. Spending billions of dollars to *not* get wind power the US would otherwise get doesn't seem to make any of those kinds of sense. It' just nuts. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/c...

Dudes just wanna brood in a squat with their cool Scottish goth girlfriends and then your fucking mom comes and ruins the vibe