Hegseth is the one most likely to get the Fegelein treatment. Vance, like Himmler, will be smart enough to not be in the White House when it all goes down.

The level of rank incompetence, bellicosity, and cowardice in the administration does remind you of the last days of the Third Reich.

There's this huge gap between what what we know Epstein did (prey on teenagers Maxwell recruited for him; maybe allowed his friends to prey on them too) and the Qanon shit that people think happened (vast network of government officials buying child sex slaves)

These are the same kinds of people who think Nixon, the guy who vetoed the Clean Water Act, was good because he created the EPA.

The reality is that Trump knew what was up with Epstein and didn't say shit because he didn't see a problem with it.

What people want this to say is that Epstein was selling girls to Trump, which the emails shown so far definitely don't support.

My worry is that the way people gas this shit up means that you're going to get a lot of contrarian takes in the Times about it not being so bad

marx was anti-capitalist in the sense that he longed for what (he thought) would come after; these days it seems many anti-capitalists are anticapitalists insofar as they long for what came before

or i guess more relevantly here, karl marx recognized capitalism as a *new and distinct* phenomenon, something radical and different which was sweeping away an old shitty order

these days you ask people what capitalism is and they'll give you a definition indistinguishable from feudalism

Every woke crew has the following:

White Yankee twink
Mysterious Samoan cannibal
Another white Yankee twink
Mysterious Parsi prophet
Disabled white Yankee neurodivergent (transitioning would have saved her)
Black kid gifted with mysterious prophetic visions
Several other white Yankee twinks

A large number of people just don't think that pressuring a 16 year old to have sex with you is all THAT bad. Mostly that's because of misogyny.

uhhh this actually reminds me a lot of how LLMs function at a basic level too - predicting tokens based on proximity & context, etc 😬 ...so we're teaching kids to read like AI & saying AI level is good enough

Matt Yglesias is the millennial Thomas Friedman.

The best feeling in the world is when you're allowed (or better yet, compelled by moral logic) to be pointlessly cruel to others.

"Is this right-wing nationalism totally organic, or is it pushed by Russian propaganda and reactionary billionaires?"

Douthat: "Ha ha, it's good right wing nationalism, sir"

Check under the hood.

It's pushed by Russian propaganda and reactionary billionaires.

Oh that's simple. It means using the bully pulpit.

*maximum alpha at 1.25x speed* continuously lives on in my head, unfortunately.

"The American people are dumb as shit and still love anyone who gives them money," yes, but they can't read and instead vote based purely on vibes.