I’ve got stretched ears. Even if I take out my plugs they won’t fully close. I also don’t particularly want to, to be honest. Being comfortable with how you look is a blessing. There’s definitely a shift in that sort of stuff, even my conservative baptist grandmother mostly makes good-hearted jokes about my nose ring…

I saw some of those, but the thing is I also remember the ones with other politicians that got a lot less press. Most politicians are, to put it bluntly, not very smart. The skills necessary to get elected are not necessarily the ones required to discuss policy in depth. Most make up for it with staffers who do the…

There’s a serious risk-aversion among the top establishment Democrats. It’s not just them, there’s a similar thing across a number of center-left and left parties across Europe too. The entire “Third Way” movement was about a crisis of faith among liberals, who tried to emulate conservatives. It worked, in the sense…

Didn’t that happen once or twice? I half-remember something like that happening on Twitter. With all the attacks on her by the usual suspects it’s hard to remember exactly what the issue was though.

I’d be better off working on campaigns, which I did a little bit of in the past. Even now there’s not much market for tattoos and piercings in the political scene, and even if I wear a nice suit I still look like a punk kid in a suit. I’m more of a policy wonk at heart anyway. I am thinking about seeing what Warren’s…

I’m under no illusions, though I do partly understand why the romantic mythic view of Labor Zionists has such cache (every country/society has their ideological myths).

AOC has really impressed me. It’s not that I was skeptical, but having dipped a foot into the political world I knew a lot of otherwise well-meaning politicians were, for lack of a better word, a bit vapid. She’s showed a lot of depth and strength and I really respect that. I think there’s more young Democrats in the…

Unless this party is a secret intervention for her compulsive dishonesty or an attempt to make a citizen’s arrest, it shouldn’t be happening.

The side judges are supposed to hold off on raising their flag now because of VAR, the idea being that if a goal is scored and it’s offsides it’ll be checked. That’s the guidance for the men’s game at least, I think it’s the same for the women’s now. 

Did they rewrite the “make a play on the ball from offsides position” part of the rule, or am I incorrectly remembering something? If Lloyd had made a “play on the ball” after starting in an offsides position, even if she didn’t touch it, I thought that’d be offsides.

I honestly bet Hoyer knows little to nothing about actual Israeli policies or the reality on the ground. I get the feeling he’s a committed ideologue who lives in a very small bubble. No doubt even critical Israeli coverage is kept out of that bubble. Reminds me of an older woman who ranted at me about reading Haaretz…

They’re a lot better than they look, and I say that as someone that’s pretty picky. Granted, I grew up where Krystal is very much a thing (East Tennessee) but it’s a fairly beloved localish franchise for a reason. 

As if he knows anything about history. Take a look around, it’s historians backing AOC because the record is unambiguous on this topic.

Anti-racism is entwined with the myths of modern American identity. Civil rights, WWII, spreading freedom, etc. It’s why even though many people are racist they don’t want to be perceived as racist. There’s a self-conscious desire to look like you’re above such crass behavior.

You know, there are thousands of people every year who “admit guilt” despite likely not being guilty. Set aside the horrifying malpractice of justice in the Central Park Five case, it’s a known fact people take plea deals even when they’re innocent because lawyers and judges encourage it. Because the system is…

The far-right is incredibly self-conscious about their intellectual credentials. It’s a common theme. So the appeal is less about “normies’ and more about supporting their own egos. There’s also a strong fetish for Enlightenment philosophers, though unlike the IDW charlatans who engage in slightly more deniable and…

There’s far too many confounding variables there, and I’m also not certain the time a minority has lived in a region is relevant at all. The first big Turkish migrations to Germany began in ‘61 with a guest worker program. Some of the heaviest immigration from North Africa to France happened in the late ‘60s and early…

That’s an outright neo-Nazi meme. You don’t just stumble across that on Twitter regularly unless you, like me, regularly flag far-right accounts.

That’s a good point I forgot to add. There is plenty of bigotry among European conservatives, like US conservatives. Against Muslims in France, for example, or Turks in Germany, or Roma basically everywhere. There are elite-set parameters on how you discriminate, and groups like the AfD or Front National violate that…

He did, supposedly due to a request from CENTCOM (I’m dubious), but that posturing is being directed by the Pompeo-Bolton axis of hardliners. Most of the thousand troops announced the other day are support, largely for existing bases. It’s really mostly posturing.