Made me laugh:

On women, two overlooked things that contribute to 'hot face' is short midface, and wide mouth.
If the distance from the top of your lip to the bottom of your eyes is really short, and if your smile 'wraps around' your face, then congrats u r probably cute

— Aella (@Aella_Girl) March 5, 2021

Emphasizing neotenous traits is most of beauty.

I’m so sorry. The whole argument is idiotic. If we can own homes, land and stock shares for life AND we can leave them to our heirs, I cannot understand, for the life of me, why anyone thinks we should rob creators (and their heirs). Why this difference between physical and IP?

— beatrice (@BeaLawson27) March 5, 2021

It is shocking that people who can read and write can still be this stupid. Really, it is.

“What is the difference between physical and IP?” Is that some sort of joke? Ok, I know it is not, but lord I sure wish it was. There are literally whole bodies of scholarship delineating the differences between real property and intellectual property. Like, that is a whole enormous area of inquiry. Here is a good, fairly short start, but of course no one like the doofus above will read something that difficult.

That aside, here is Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constituition:

“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries….”

Notice some keywords there: “limited” and “authors.” Not “heirs.” Not “in perpetuity.” Nothing about “forever” or leaving those rights to anyone. Not a word about any of that. In fact, the Copyright Act of 1790 established copyright for all works with a term of 14 years with 14-year renewal. A little too long but arguably good enough.

So many people are just terrifyingly clueless, and with shocking certitude in their utter gormless ninnery.

Nope. Still mad. The idea that these tech bros think creators should give up the copyright to work after 30 years, and Bezos and Zuckerberg et get to collect billions forever…it really says a thing.

— sarah maclean (@sarahmaclean) March 5, 2021

Nice false choice, you fucking dipshit. Like that is the only two possibilities.

It really is true that most people literally cannot even imagine the world being different than it is currently configured. They cannot even think about it, even a little bit.

We are a nation of fucking simpletons blathering and blithering on about bullshit.

Going off current evidence, it looks likely to me that the vaccines reduce transmission by 80-90%, and if I had to bet on a point estimate I’d bet on the high end of that. People deserve to know this when trying to make risk decisions.

— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) February 23, 2021

Yeah, I’d say ~90% transmission reduction. And! Due to the way the virus tends to spread by a few superspreaders and superspreading events, if you vaccinate those (of course you don’t know who they are in advance), you start having an outsize effect.

That’s one of the main reasons why I say case rates will fall through the floor in summer. Assuming we get to roughly 50% vaccinated, even with variants, we’ll be ok.

Is This the End of French Intellectual Life? The country’s culture of argument has come under the sway of a more ideological, more identity-focused model imported from the United States.

Yes, it is the end of French intellectual life. And it’s fucking terrible. The last country that I know of with a bit of independent thought and that had not been completely captured by wokesterism and meaningless identity sloganeering has now fallen.

Intellectual inquiry is being destroyed everywhere, all for the blandest and most useless lowbrow pseudo-cerebral movement that is not even remotely self-coherent and doesn’t actually help the groups it purports to raise up, but instead individuates us all into ethnic groups of one lone person. It’s a Hobbesian war of all against all, in the name of equality.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

sometimes i remember these photos of Kristen Stewart and Janelle Monae and my ovaries explode.

At the time these were taken, Monae was in her 30s and Stewart was still in her 20s. According to modern lib/fem doctrine, that is automatically abuse — if it were a male/female pairing. So why is it not abuse in this case?

(Note that I don’t think any pairing of any gender above the age of majority is automatically abuse, but many do these days. In fact, I think men and women should date a wide range of ages throughout their entire lives.)