It’s a Shepherd’s Tone headline. Taken at face value, I have to assume 110% of the county is illiterate and scores are expected to get twice as bad by the end of the year.

Here’s a jpg of a graph with no citations and a poorly defined X-axis. Please go be Doomers in the comments now. Don’t forget to point at a generational cohort and blame them for everything

Really intrusive to take the AI pee-test every six months. But that’s what it takes to maintain my security clearance, do whatchagonnado

Dirty Hair

Lord of the Ring: Just The Ringbearer

The Full Squadron of Starfighters

Wyoming Joe

Wait, is this the singular of Shivers or something else?

The President’s Single Guy

Being rich means having a surplus of valuable commodities and capital.

In a modern capitalist system, the commodities are fetishized in order to inflate their received value.

But in a more socialized system, shared capital has the capacity to enrich everyone.

The big catch is that, under a more socialist economy existing in parallel with a capitalist media, poverty becomes associated with the public institutions while capitalism becomes indicative of education, independence, and success.

An individual might be wealthy with respect to historical peers under a socialist model, but still feel improvised relative to the elites and their horded private wealth. That they’ve got access to libraries and parks and subways and public housing doesn’t feel like wealth relative to the country clubbers who have more grandeous private versions of all of the above.

You’ll see this in Western depictions of Soviet states all the time. Small apartments, bread lines, and grumpy bureaucrats are slanted as rampant poverty. Meanwhile, homelessness and malnutrition and the lawless frontier are all just part of the Hero’s Journey on the way to glory.

I haven’t seen anyone doing a better job. Lots of hype around the new things, though.

everyone at the time thought people would be crazy to vote for him in the first place.

Not everyone. We’d seen this cycle of the reactionary break out vote in '08 and '12. Ted Cruz probably could have secured the nomination if Trump hadn’t run and he’s a whole different level of fascist.

Trump was never the better alternative to Hillary.

Trump was the stalking horse of the Hilary campaign, via her Pied Piper Strategy.

He would not have even been on the ballot had she not sponsored his run.

Now we’re seeing the same dynamic in the LA mayor race, with the incumbent Karen Bass sending her donors to Spencer Pratt in order to keep a DSA rival off the final ballot.

Trump ran on Stopping the Pedos and Ending the Wars. Not unlike Nixon, in that regard.

Very easy to get up on a pedestal and scream invectives at the Bad People on The Other Side. Any degenerate asshole can do it. You don’t even have to be on the other side. You can, for instance, be a stalking horse for your good friends the Clintons, who just overshoots his role and ends up in the Presidency rather than back on TV as the host of another four seasons of The Apprentice.

Better than the alternative

The eternal problem with “Better than the alternative” is that it inevitably cuts both ways.

Keir Starmer was better than the alternative of Rishi Sunak.

And now I guess Nigel Farrage is better than the alternative of whatever hack Labour MP (probably Streeting) replaces Starmer.

Trump was the “better than” alternative to Hillary and then Harris just like Biden was forced down folks’ throats as the “better than” of another Trump term. From world leaders to city dog catchers, you’re constantly getting served up two shitty options and told to pick the least-worst one. And if you pick wrong (we somehow always do), the fanatics on the losing end of the spectrum scream at you for being the reason the country is falling apart.

Amazon’s service model, for example, is to twiddle the knobs to just under the point where the majority ragequit

I mean, I get Amazon Prime via their shopping service whether I want it or not. And half of their “library” such that it exists is just links out to other paid premium services. Nevermind their Netflix-esque habit of cancelling or delaying popular shows while churning out lots of AI slop to fill in the gaps.

There’s no strong incentive to drop Prime Shipping (because it’s dirt cheap and I still do plenty of retail shopping on Amazon). But I find myself going to their TV / Movies selection less and less frequently. Occasionally just pirate the Amazon show I already have access to out of convenience.

Can’t say the same of Netflix, though. Cancelled that shit a few years ago. Barely anything left worth pirating from it anymore.

Let me know when they find a way to get ads into the torrented copies of their shows.

The problem with fascism is that it is very difficult to campaign against it before it arrives, because you just sound hysterical.

And it is even more difficult to campaign against it after it arrives, because… well… you know. The fascism.

But also, The Ad Council was really great at spending small fortunes on pithy ads. Really terrible at actually organizing community groups in defiance of any of these policies. Like, it was a cornerstone of the Bush Era brand of non-partisan liberalism. It operated under the theory “If we just tell people there’s a problem then they’ll figure out the solution”. And the leadership was so deep in bed with the federal government that messaging failed to do more than echo the views of the prevailing administration.

Incidentally, there’s a reason you need to throw back to a clip from 2002 to talk about censorship in libraries. You’re not going to see a ton of Ad Council work on government censorship OR libraries under the current government.

Yeah, it’s crazy to find out a CIA operative would just lie to folks like that.