I wish I could have at my control such an effective propaganda operation as the one assembled by the food consortiums proxied through the Fat Acceptance nutters. That alliance has done a remarkable job convincing people that being a normal weight is unhealthy (“super skinny”) and that being near metabolic collapse is what health looks like.

That’s some powerful propaganda. I admire it while also loathing everything it stands for.

I don’t really give a shit who is verified or not verified on Twitter or your blue check mark or lack of blue check mark. Like, damn, I came up on the internet where “hornygorilla” and “gooseturds” and such were esteemed users and anonymity was not just accepted but de rigeur. Where it was weird to use your real name.

Call me an asshole, but I don’t really care if your gran gets scammed because she sends money to fake Joe Biden. It’d be better if most people weren’t on the internet, really. It’s a net negative and a cognitohazard for most folks. They shouldn’t be here.

Return to forums, to blogs, to real communities. Let the normies drift away. If Twitter dies, nothing of value will be lost in the end.

Science has been ruined by terrible STEM nerds pushing out real scientists like botanists and taxonomists and experimentalists — all in the service of fucking around with R and Excel spreadsheets mostly uselessly.

Elon buying twitter is not a business deal and assessing it as a business deal is at best myopic.

It’s a political act.

— Misha – Visiting the bay area Nov 19 – Jan 3 (@drethelin) November 10, 2022

Obvious. Well, except to nearly everyone. But obvious to people who like being right.

Do you ever look at your documentation and thank yourself?

Every damn day. My documentation is awesome and helps me and my whole team. There is no documentation that will allow the unskilled to do what I do. But it lets me and my team do things repeatably and reliably they could not easily do before, faster — including me.

Good documentation is like having extra employees around. It’s an investment with huge and nearly-immediate payoff.

Every straight guy alive has had an experience like this:

The first ten on today’s playlist:

One of the weird claims you hear when writing about space tech is that Elon Musk didn't do anything at SpaceX – he just paid for a bunch of engineers. I used to go into an a spiel on how a room of engineers doesn't automatically make useful stuff. Now I'll just say "Metaverse."

— Zach Weinersmith (@ZachWeiner) October 30, 2022

Ex-fucking-actly! That “all he did was hire some engineers” argument is so assclownishly dipshitty. I know why people hate Musk, but that assertion doesn’t even pass the sniff test.

Musk hired and kept Gwynne Shotwell — perhaps the greatest hire of all time. There is more to running a company and hiring than most people realize or will ever understand. Especially if it’s a large company with extremely high capex like SpaceX. Meta is spending $10 billion a year on the Metaverse and that’s the biggest dud since Juicero (but way more expensive).

People’s simplistic explanations for and facile understandings of processes and events just fall apart under even the slightest examination.

I read so many pieces in political media this week (axios, punchbowl, wash post, etc) about how dems were about to be obliterated. It’s almost like they were all being fed the same narrative.

— Aléx Young (@AlexYoung) November 9, 2022

The GOP is much better at messaging and propaganda. Much, much better than Dems. The press repeats what it’s barraged with and what seems plausible. And what seems plausible to them is what they are barraged with — a never-ending circle.

The point of all that GOP agitprop was to suppress Dem voter turnout by portraying Republican victory as inevitable. It didn’t work because many Dems were absolutely enraged about Dobbs, as they should be. Sans Dobbs, the Repubs would’ve captured the Senate and House easily — would’ve been a rout.