Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

The revolution will be supervised.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

We’re not going back!

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

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Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Putin’s Bridge to Nowhere

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Russian (childhood) expat — ““General Armageddon” & Putin’s Bridge to Nowhere”:

… Vladimir Putin described the attacks as retaliation for the explosion that partly demolished his beloved bridge across the Kerch Strait connecting the Crimean peninsula to the Russian mainland. If you look at a map of the area, you realize that Nikita Khrushchev wasn’t, as Putin claims, a dunce and a traitor for making Crimea part of the Ukrainian S.S.R., rather than the Russian S.S.R. It’s a peninsula, and its only connection by land is to Ukraine, not Russia. It’s why Putin sent “volunteers” into eastern Ukraine as soon as he annexed Crimea in March 2014: he needed a land bridge, an easy way to get to this fancy new peninsula he’d stolen from his neighbor, as well as a way of supplying it with water, power, food and all kinds of other vital necessities. Unfortunately for Putin, his forces were stopped at Mariupol by the newly formed Azov Battalion, made up, in part, of far-right Ukrainian nationalists.

Putin had another plan to connect Crimea to the Russian mainland. Less than an hour after announcing the annexation, the Kremlin announced the tender for a state contract to build a bridge across the Kerch Strait, the body of water between Crimea and Russia. Putin gave the $5 billion contract to his childhood judo buddy, Arkady Rotenberg, a man who was such a talented businessman that he became a billionaire in the first decade of Putin’s rule. The bridge, which was supposed to accommodate both car and rail traffic, was a priority for the Kremlin, and unlike every other government project, it was finished ahead of schedule, just in time for Putin’s third reelection, in 2018.

Putin put a lot of stock in that bridge. As a man who thinks often about his historic legacy, he spoke explicitly about how he was able to accomplish a great feat of engineering, of crossing a sea that both Nicholas II and Josef Stalin had attempted, but failed, to conquer.

And so, we can imagine the agony that Putin felt when he discovered, in the early hours of October 8, that his bridge had been engulfed in a massive fireball that completely destroyed one of the two sections that carried automotive traffic, and damaged several kilometers of railway track. It could not have escaped his noticed that whoever had planned the bombing just missed his 70th birthday by a few hours. A report later indicated that the driver of the eighteen-wheeler that allegedly carried the explosives onto the bridge was set to detonate them on the day of the Russian president’s jubilee, but had stopped to take a nap…

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Same Old Same Old Open Thread: Former South African Reverts to Time-Tested Excuses

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When Elon Musk was growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, various combinations of ‘but it’s the law’ and ‘will of the people’ were the English-ancestry minority’s go-to explanation to outsiders. The Boers were stone cold bigots, the Not-Whites were impossible, what could an embattled minority of pale-skinned Anglicans be expected to do about the unfairness of it all?…

I thought I might be the only one biased by such memories, but then a whole bunch of twitter feeds pointed out Ben Shapiro’s response to Mr. Musk:

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FTFNYT Open Thread: There Are Monsters Among Us, and Christopher Rufo Is One of Them

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Christopher Rufo and his family live in a lovely coastal community literally on the other side of the country from the most dangerous of his new-found followers. He will never be abused in person by the bigots and misogynists he gins up, nor will his children attend schools where the curriculum has been dumbed down to pander to those bigots.

And the NYTimes genuinely admires a white dude who can accomplish such a nice lifestyle with no more than a busy internet history and no sense of shame:

Christopher Rufo appears on Fox News so often that he converted a room in his Pacific Northwest house to a television studio, complete with professional lighting, an uplink to Fox in New York and an “On Air” light in the hall so his wife and two children don’t barge in during broadcasts.

“I’ll do ‘Tucker’ and then pop out and have dinner,” Mr. Rufo said recently at his home in Gig Harbor, Wash., thousands of miles from the nation’s media and political capitals.

Mr. Rufo is the conservative activist who probably more than any other person made critical race theory a rallying cry on the right — and who has become, to some on the left, an agitator of intolerance. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, he has emerged at the front of another explosive cultural clash, one that he sees as even more politically potent and that the left views as just as dangerous: the battle over L.G.B.T.Q. restrictions in schools…

On Friday, Mr. Rufo appeared with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at the signing of a bill known as the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which bars teaching in workplaces and schools that anyone is inherently biased or privileged because of race or sex. Mr. Rufo, who consulted on the bill, warned Disney that an in-house program it had run that urged discussion of systemic racism was “now illegal in the state of Florida.”

The signing was the culmination of Mr. Rufo’s long campaign to short-circuit corporate and school efforts at diversity and inclusion training. He has acknowledged twisting hot-button racial issues to achieve his aims. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote on Twitter last year…

His advocacy has been financially rewarding. Besides his Manhattan Institute position, he has a newsletter with 2,500 paid subscribers, and he runs a nonprofit entity to support his work, which he said had received over $500,000 in donations since late last year…

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Masks Off (Hoods On)

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Of course, wealthy aristocrats like Carlson don’t lead their own slave patrols; there’s always ‘white trash’ bullies who’ll do the hard work in return for crumbs, plus the chance to feel better than Those People…


(I’d like to believe she meant ‘shoot’ as in ‘film’, but… )

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Trump Death Cult Open Thread: Proud, Proud Boys

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Once again, the Squatter-in-Chief has invited his biggest fans to do whatever they want… which is to intimidate people in the name of White supremacy. On the positive side, at least even the least discerning pundit can no longer pretend they don’t know what Trump might be encouraging…

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Late Night Terrorshow Open Thread: The ‘Commander-in-Chief’ Is TERRIFIED

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Not exactly, at least not yet…

From the Atlantic article Cheryl cited earlier:

… Yet another, related, explanation concerns what appears to be Trump’s pathological fear of appearing to look like a “sucker” himself. His capacious definition of sucker includes those who lose their lives in service to their country, as well as those who are taken prisoner, or are wounded in battle. “He has a lot of fear,” one officer with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s views said. “He doesn’t see the heroism in fighting.” Several observers told me that Trump is deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as disgust for those who have suffered…

Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.

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American Carnage After Dark: The (Extrajudicial) Kenosha Shooter

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The kid who murdered at least two people in Kenosha seems to have been a softer, dumber version of the guy who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville — a dropout whose uneasy classmates ‘joked’ about becoming a school shooter, someone whose only strong affiliation or interest was a Protect & Serve! fantasy of blue knights standing guard over a grateful community against the forces of disorder. In the Reuters video with the best short summary, he runs away from people attempting to disarm him, literally trips over his own feet, and starts spraying bullets in all directions when they catch up to him. Then he walks toward an armored police vehicle with his hands up — only to be waved past by LEOs in search of the real threat, mouthy Black protestors and stoners armed with skateboards.

And then the Worst People in the World leapt to his defense, because after all this ‘misunderstood young man’ was just doing what they’d been urging all their listeners to do.

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