I try not to reply to trolls myself, but thank you and well done.

Damn. That concluding sentence. I think the more important question is less about “how many authoritarian figures are on the rise” (which was brought up in some interesting articles back before the 2016 election: I liked this one on vox particularly), but “which democracies can withstand the rise of authoritarian…

It’s the fucking law in Thailand that you can’t make jokes about the king. I’m not in Thailand, so I like to call him a pig-fucker whenever I can.

It’s weird, but I think we’re almost hard-wired to trust people. It’s really mentally difficult to continue to mistrust people all the time, and it’s just easier to just take people at their word. In addition, if we want to get all ev-psych about it (ugh), it seems like trust is kind of a pre-cursor to building a…

I’m stuck looking for this old story about how easy it is to be placed on Interpol’s wanted list. It was on Planet Money or This American Life or some NPR podcast. It was fascinating, but I don’t think the point of the story was how easy it was for shitty governments to get Interpol looking for you. I wish I could…

And Kitty Pryde was stuck in phase, and they had to get Dr. Doom to get her out. I remember really liking X-Men vs. Fantastic Four. And Thor’s bones were cursed to be brittle.

I dunno. I think to count as “good politics” it needs to get maybe one point outside of his base. Maybe? I really don’t know. Obviously his politics has gotten him this far, but I’m not a fan of results bias.

He sold it, according to the article.

I would like to kill every idiot who thinks the word “verbiage” is better than the word “words”. Also, it means “excessive wording,” not just “wording” you morons.

Never forget.

The state that rescinded honoring Martin Luther King, and then only returning the holiday under threat of losing the Super Bowl? You’re asking if that state is known for racism?

I love Giri’s work here. It reminds me of how much I loved Brian Phillips’ work on Grantland years ago--the main reason I would read anything on Grantland.

How unfortunately plausible.

I believe getting the actual physical address from the ISP requires a court order. Going to an IP location service happens earlier in the investigative trail, and does not require the D.A.’s approval, nor does it require an actual judge to write an actual order for the ISP to release that data. No one has yet been…

Who the fuck is this John Coltrane cat, anyway? Didn’t change *my* life!

It’s like you read the Almanac’s entry on Liberia and stopped at “sports stars” and “flags”. The original poster’s point was correct: many antebellum whites thought that the solution to “the slavery question” was something like forced migration back to Africa. Lincoln himself mentioned it publicly more than once,…

Quality like that rises above.

One of the first things Lincoln said after Appomatox was “We can have Dixie back.” It was one of his favorite tunes. This argument that anything associated with the confederacy is ipso facto bad because the confederacy was bad is a stupid argument. Obviously, the rest of this shit is stupid, but c’mon. Focus.

The very idea that Leonard needs to “comment publicly on what the hell was going on with him” is also a creation of the media, itself.

Free yourself, people! I turned my back on my childhood team decades ago, and now I actively root against them. It feels good to watch them suffer.