People really want to believe in a binary of good and bad people. The problem with ppl who think they're good people is that it's not about practice for them. It's about identity — as tho goodness were innate, as opposed to something we create outside of ourselves w effort.

— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) April 8, 2020

This is about Biden. I don’t give a fuck if he’s good or not. I care about his history, what he’s done and what he’s likely to do.

His history: Iraq War, Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas, attempts to cut Social Security, drug war, “tough on crime,” supporting banksters at every turn, bankruptcy bill.

What he’s done: lady-sniffing likely rapist, in cognitive decline, with terrible ideas.

What he’s likely to do: be a bankster-coddling absent president who will not do anything to help people who truly need it, while people like Angie Schmitt claim that the president actually has no power (just as with Obama).

I don’t give a crap about Biden’s vital essence or how his soul “really” is. He’s done bad things and looks likely to keep on doing them. These people are fucking dipshits.

Yes, I would say that to their faces too. I am not just a jerk on the internet. I am also one in real life.

We need to shift from thinking about this pandemic as a crisis we’ll get through in months and start thinking of it as a factor that will be part of our reality for at least two years.

I’m not sure how we reconfigure our lives accordingly. No one is.

That’s part of the problem.

— Leah McElrath 🏳️‍🌈 (@leahmcelrath) April 10, 2020

Well, no matter what happens if the economy isn’t opened up again in 2-3 months it won’t matter much. Most people will be starving in the streets. Then nothing politically will happen or be available to change. That’ll all be done.

This is the choice at hand. Fix that first or the rest is irrelevant.

I love in the penultimate episode of Devs how Stewart is reciting the Philip Larkin poem in the tech temple tunnel. And as the head honcho mopey tech bro passes and is asked about it, the disdain with which he treats knowledge of history and art is subtle yet completely effective without being didactic.

So well done, and so apropos to our times. Great poem, too. I had not read “Aubade” since high school. What a lovely work when read aloud well.

Perfect scene, and of course the deeper allusion is to Charon, the ferryman, who shuttles souls into the world of the dead. Because after all, fate was seen by the Greeks as horrifying and inescapable. There’s a reason the word “fatal” means deadly now.

Just a beautiful and terrible (in the 14c. sense) few minutes of television.

I named three colors:

Glisk of Dawn Sky
Carbonated Polyester
Ingenious Cotyledons

Plenty still left to name in the 24-bit RGB color space, so get to appellatin’.

This is why I say that if the economy isn’t restarted by June, there won’t be much of an economy to come back to.

Liberals in particular, but nearly everyone, are gravely underestimating the pernicious and incredibly negative effects this will have. It’s because they are thinking asystemtically and linearly of course, but they just cannot seem to stop.

Imagine that nuclear bombs had been dropped on several major American cities. This is what the economic shutdown is essentially doing. Vital relations and arrangements are just gone. Though those relationships and dependencies are invisible, they are just as real as a road or a building. All of those are being blown away, erased, extirpated — and they don’t and won’t just come back. That’s not how any of this works.

We have some chance if the economy is re-opened by June. If not, the Great Depression will in retrospect be considered an idyllic time.

I wonder if there's a connection between the fact that Hollywood stopped being able to tell coherent stories and then a few years later the State Department, CIA, and media stopped being able to tell coherent stories.

— scientism (@mr_scientism) April 9, 2020

I think so. Dominant ideologies become unable to deal with the existing milieu. Thus, the customary stories have no possibility of making sense as the entire sociocultural environment in which those narratives meant something has evaporated.

That’s the state we’re in now.

It’s going to be a lot of fun over the next six months hearing how horrible I am for refusing to vote for the Democrat rapist candidate rather than the Republican rapist candidate.

Good times.