kontextmaschine

I think an underappreciated vulnerability about Obama’s “cool, professorial” style is that if he’s not the loudest guy in the room there’s still going to be a loudest guy in the room

I think a lot of the culture war stuff getting bad recently does grow out of Barack Obama’s election and re-election.

But at the same time he, Barack Hussein Obama, the human who regularly sits on a toilet and excretes feces into it really hasn’t done much to inflame things, and has since his election often passed up opportunities to enhance his tactical position by publicly doing so.

And I think actually a lot of the former flows from the latter, that he came in as this symbol of like, Changing Demography, the Emerging Democratic Majority For Reals This Time I Swear, and then didn’t cash that mandate in for anything, and the other actors and megaphone-holders that wanted him to, that were looking forward to it, got fed up and started doing it themselves. Only without any coordination so each operating in their own arena and idiom they ended up all writing checks against the same overdrawn account

(And I think that explains Republican base frustration and Trump, that the party hasn’t done anything to push back on that front, and that even if it’s not immediately apparent as a matter of electoral politics, “resist the forces openly angling towards your disposession in full public view” is a basic element of representative agency, and the lackadasical - or in the case of stuff like the RFRAs supine - attitude the GOP has taken here has been maddening and delegitimizing)

So that’s maybe a counterpoint to the notion that his laid-back manner is an advantage for jujitsuing his enemies - it kinda draws the worst out of his allies and baits them into missteps too

literally me: ::approvingly nods as he reads about famine and well poisoning as tools of war::
literally me: it's ok i can't be evil i'm listening to classical music and petting a cat

More on how France maintains its former African colonies as vassal states

That reminds me, when Trump says that states under the protection of American-powered alliances should pay tribute to the United States in exchange? They absolutely fucking already do. It’s largely buried in basing agreements and weapons sales (and especially ongoing maintenance and service contracts) to avoid irritating the locals, channeled through the military-industrial complex stateside, but they absolutely do.

That’s what was going on with Australia and the F-35, why the government was so damn intent at throwing money at an overpriced, undercompetent and not particularly cried-out-for system, because that’s not the point, the point is to reaffirm the American alliance in the face of China’s expanding territorial and economic ambitions in the region.

That’s the subtext behind Jeremy Corbyn’s disinterest in maintaining the UK’s fleet of Trident boomer subs, and of the Scottish nationalists’ inclination to evict them from their deep-water ports - the expensive Trident program…me (and before it the Polaris) are effectively the basis on which the UK licenses a great power franchise from the US.

averyterrible:

rincewitch:

ryannorth:

objectdreams:

‘batman: the animated series’ synopsis

written using a predictive text emulator

source: ‘batman: the animates series’ synopses

transcript:

Keep reading

BIG INTO THIS

“The Penguin makes things worse by killing Batman.”

“Batman learns he has been abducted from his past and is merely a series of stories related to justice.”

One of my favorite things about political twitter is all the not-that-high-level apparatchiks - the ones the Weird Left calls “lanyard-fuckers”, I like that - puffing their chests trying to present all badass and solemn and portentious, while Gerry Adams, the terrorist mastermind/more or less successful insurgent leader who bombed the British Empire to the negotiating table/Member of Parliament has the most fucking whimsical timeline I’ve ever seen.

jemthecrystalgem:

moriartystayingalive:

moriartystayingalive:

moriartystayingalive:

moriartystayingalive:

moriartystayingalive:

Um… how the fuck is there a lure on an unreachable pokestop? Like, I’m watching this thing, and there are no boats near it. Why is there a stop even out there?

I mean, I have a kayak at home. I could go get it and paddle out there just to see what the deal is. Is it worth it?

I AM FUCKING DOING THIS.

I am literally sitting here in a kayak catching pokemon, and I still can’t figure out how someone got a lure on this pokestop. It’s just me out here, no other boats, like what the hell. People on the shore are staring at me. I can feel them judging me for actually paddling out to this pokestop. GOTTA CATCH EM ALL.

When I got back to the shore, a guy asked me if he could borrow my kayak to get the pokestop, and now I’m charging people $10 a pop to use it.

What a time to be alive

the-entire-furry-fandom:

multitrackdrifting:

when i see sans i just htink of that one soundcloud post thats like do you know what happens to naughty girls that dont behave or whatever and my life immediately gets worse 

pyramidenpapist:

Sexmission (Polish: Seksmisja) is a 1984 Polish cult comedy science fiction action film. It also contains a hidden political satirelayer specific to the time and place of its production.

The two protagonists, Max and Albert, played by Jerzy Stuhr and Olgierd Łukaszewicz, respectively, submit themselves in 1991 to the first human hibernation experiment. Instead of being awakened a few years later as planned, they wake up in the year 2044, in a post-nuclear world. By then, humans have retreated to underground living facilities, and, as a result of subjection to a specific kind of radiation, all males have died out. Women reproduce through parthenogenesis, living in an oppressive feminist society, where theapparatchiks teach that women suffered under males until males were removed from the world.

The cold-shoulder treatment Max and Albert receive from the women, their character differences and specific realities of future life serve as background of many humorous encounters. The plot thickens when it turns out that the females have no interest in the rebirth of men, and that for the good of society, the two males are to be killed or “naturalised”, i.e. undergo a sex-change. While trying to break away, Max and Albert find out the impact of their masculinity on women. With one of the scientists on their side, the men choose freedom and prefer to escape and die outside. In doing so, they discover the truth: radiation was just a feminist lie to keep women underground and the surviving male population were “naturalised” into women by the feminists when they took power in the post-war period. As a result of discovering the truth, both Max and Albert begin thinking of bringing the world back to normal.

So Verizon is going to own tumblr now.

Become brand brothers with AOL

Ain’t that something

grimelords:

A great responsible gambling poster that helpfully doubles as a dire warning from a besieged future.

bloodandhedonism:

kontextmaschine:

So Verizon is going to own tumblr now.

Become brand brothers with AOL

Ain’t that something

Kontext, I want your guess: what will tumblr’s endstage look like? We all saw what happened with myspace and I’ve personally noticed that facebook has been with “elderly people exchanging flyover country memes” for a few years now. 

not sure, like you say precedents are all over the place, ecosystem’s still young, it’ll only be obvious in retrospect what innovations were just plug bayonets

anatomy-lesson:

“One Reason Germany Slows Down,” Montreal Star, July 23, 1938.  

“Here’s the situation in Czechoslovakia as another major crisis seems imminent because of Sudeten German disapproval of the Government effort to compromise the ‘racial minorities’ problem.  There have been warnings that any effort to impose the plan would create a ‘dangerous situation’ - meaning possible invasion of Czechoslovakia by Germany to ‘protect the rights’ of Czechoslovakians of German extraction.

The map shows how the hardy Czechs would meet any such invasion.  The little republic’s 2500-mile frontier - touching hostile territory all the way round except for 150 miles bordering friendly Rumania - is heavily and cleverly fortified.

Military experts believe that despite the comparatively small size of the Czechoslovakian army, any invasion across the three defensive lines built by the Czechs would be made at heavy cost.”

so at this point we accept that dreams are your brain running like predictive text on the corpus of your mind?

reallly interested in how people’s dreams changed once they started seeing smash cuts and boom shots and that movie stuff

yeah ok nationalism’s why we have genocides

it’s why we don’t have kings tho

pick your poison

reblog if you would buy a magic 8 ball based off my 5am oracularism

an issue is it’s entirely plausible that my and Vladimir Putin’s interests are better aligned than mine and Anne Applebaum or Franklin Foer’s

saying this Institutional Conservatism was for a while giving me the entry-level “schmooze and drink with the sexy scionesses of post-Soviet Europe” treatment

it was no Taglit but it was at least trying

the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: it was at least trying

(produced this out of the experience, so huh)

RIP Miss Cleo

alphajade:

death of the author is the idea that works of literature may be examined independently of what the author originally intended, that a reader’s interpretation may be just as valid even if the author disagrees, as long as the reader succeeds in killing the author and becoming the new author