Dems on Twitter like “ooh, this congressional committee has sure convinced me that Trump should somehow be imprisoned, prosecuted, and punished”

Like bro, you were trivially gettable for that position in 2018. The question is has the committee produced any legitimacy on the right such that that would be recieved as anything other than a Democratic opening to civil war? Not convinced.

Going out and overhearing conversations driving in how much offline people are not monomaniacally freaking out rn

Voices of the Insouciant Young Left chest-thumping about low Biden numbers among the young and demanding total student debt repudiation as a tribute…

If you wreck the coalition because you didn’t get a pony right now, I do not in fact believe that will bring about a state of affairs more attentive to your desires where you enjoy greater pride of place.

collapsedsquid:

Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) wants to give customers the chance to make Alexa, the company’s voice assistant, sound just like their grandmother – or anyone else.

Alexa speak like my ex-girlfriend

enriquemzn262:

Seriously, why the fuck did they kill that fucking gorilla??? Everything stopped making sense ever since…

The Morbius stuff was the most, uh, peacetime channer thing I’ve seen since early 2015

apricops:

God this moment in time and history (in the US) is so weird. It feels like nothing is happening. It feels like exactly what people were afraid of since the 2016 election: the response to Trump was to put America in a sort of stasis. A freeze. But all these big obvious conflicts and serious problems are going on, so we’re just sort of stuck here, aware of everything but increasingly unable to make sense of anything. Like there’s nothing left to do but cross our fingers and wait.

Except waiting sucks, because the next big obvious thing on the horizon is midterm elections. And the Biden presidency so far has been such a void. Such a vacuum.

And you know, the interesting thing about Covid is that for a few months we had a glimpse of what the federal government could look like. For the first time in my and many people’s lives, the federal government actually improved people’s material conditions in response to Covid. Then Covid kept happening and the spigot was turned off because of course it was. And now we’re approaching the midterms where it is very likely that the Republican Party will make gains because the Biden presidency has been such a stuttering heap of nothingness.

Seriously, what’s next? What possibly comes after this?

Mainstream Democrats still pushing for reenacting the ‘90s (Clinton lost trifecta after 2 years) but also focused on freezing out the ultras, leading them to act out in some way that makes them Republicans’ problem to deal with, let them lose their agenda to doing the purges and come back in when people grow weary?

Like through a combination of caring about different things, operating on different time scales, and the anxiety zeroing, I am watching like everyone freak the fuck out about one thing or another while I’m more carefree rn than I’ve been since starting college, confident that the news I wake up to will represent a world I can somehow do more with than when I went to bed

Yeah. Glad I don’t have anything riding on liberal advocacy these days

How San Francisco Became a Failed City

Heard the usual shit-talk of this on Twitter first, apparently the writer is a local heiress (This used to be a known SF type, all over Dashiell Hammett. Patty Hearst was a local heiress!) which is worth considering as you assess her interpretation of a rightward (if only from leftist to liberal) trend in the city I guess, but all the elements she builds it out of are there.

Interesting that she attributes some backlash to hangover from the electorate being too in their #Resistance cups last Trump-era election cycle and supporting trendy leftism they now realize they don’t actually like as governing philosophy; I really think, big picture, possibly the most significant role Trump played was tripping an assembling left order before it was complete and triggering it to shake itself apart

hazoret:

MY OLD COWORKER JUST SENT ME THIS

Boudin bounced by a mile in firecracker coming-out of Asian conservative bloc in California politics…

…sure

It’s uneven but I noticed it first across Portland Twitter and then more generally, the biggest problems are taking morale hits and dropping off

The RNC’s Ground Game of Inches

The community centers were established to bore the opening further, making the appeal directly to racial minorities inside their communities, with an extremely offline, grassroots offering. This wasn’t a soft sell: The centers beckon potential voters with everything from movie nights to free dinners to holiday parties to gun safety trainings, thrown by local organizers and paid for by your friends at the RNC, which has dedicated millions of dollars to the program.

New York’s hipster wars

What’s really striking here is how the “Manhattan” faction actually reminds me of the interests of Eggers-era Brooklyn as filtered through the aesthetic of McInnes-era Vice, which fits with my “scrap the ‘10s and pick up where we left off” theory I guess.

Like, the “dirty” hipsters weren’t interested in intellectual shit the first time around in the '00s, they were the “hey, white people back in the city, let’s reenact the '70s” guys, American Apparel, electro parties with photographers and Sparks and baggies of cocaine.

Also, the Manhattan scene leveraged itself into position because they didn’t shut down like Brooklyn for the pandemic, LOL

Well, both sides of the Depp/Heard trial losing might be the the best outcome we could hope for

I like that they play up the aesthetic angle so hard you barely notice that tumblr ads have started pitching us weapons

Ah, the liberals grumbling about how the Republicans haven’t been like, removed from the game, letting them win by default, are all fixated on the fight, the removal in its own right, and aren’t even trying to articulate with anyone who isn’t so fixated but could gain in an environment where the Republicans had been removed. Dismissible.

You know, there’s a rough breakup… she comes out appealing to community standards of conduct… then she gets cast as the monster for the (new, deprofessionalized Discourse) internet to hate, while professional internet media frets

Underplayed that Depp/Heard is a karmic mirror of GamerGate