An increasingly terrible culture. I think Neal Stephenson was right — in the future, the majority of people will be illiterate again. We’ll regress to the long-term mean of about a 10-20% literacy rate and everyone else will use glyphs/emojis and communicate with video only.
We’re already on that path and accelerating down the hill; little to nothing will stop it now.
Read McLuhan! https://t.co/6JYDpwjLPt
— Katherine Dee 🐬/acc (@default_friend) April 21, 2025
Yes, all of you need to shut up and read McLuhan! You’re all constantly and usually vaguely-incorrectly “discovering” things he said over 50 years go. He did a much better job of it than all of you are, obviously, and a more thorough one too.
I’m constantly amazed by how culturally illiterate supposedly-literate people are.
Watching Ian Welsh become a consistently-wrong Jew-hating Putin-worshiping mega-putz, I hope someone would tell me if I went down such a bad path.
Lord, please tell me. I don’t wanna go out like that.
Funding cut for landmark study of women’s health. Another moronic thing in the long list.
A 2,000-year-old battle ended in fire, and a tree species never recovered.
Luckily my company paid for it, but I went to an extremely fancy restaurant tonight. Damn I do not belong in that sort of place. From a cultural perspective I mean. I feel like Daryl Hannah’s Madison in Splash with the lobster.
Those people are not my people. And I do not like being fawned over. The food wasn’t even that good. Mainly, it just had a butter overdose and too much salt. Shit, I can get that at TGI Friday’s for a lot cheaper.
It’s weird what men are told we “must” be like vs. what most of us are actually like.
We are told that men think about sex seven times a minute and that all we care about is sex. Reality: Even when I was an adolescent or young adult, I thought about sex like once or twice a day. It varies, but most men are fairly similar.
We are told that men are rapists by default, that only society restrains us from our base urges. Reality: I’ve never even had the slightest desire to rape or assault anyone, even in situations where I absolutely 100% could’ve gotten away with it with guaranteed zero consequences. Most men are about the same; only a small percentage of men commit the vast majority of assaults.
We are told that men have no capacity for empathy and that only women have empathy and care for others. Reality: Men and women are probably about the same here, though women often seem to have almost no empathy for men (as men experience it anyway) because they feel they must be this way to keep away the creeps (even though it makes creep interactions the only ones you’re likely to have).
We are told that we should “open up” and “reveal our feelings.” Reality: Nearly all the time, this is used against us by romantic partners or by family. It’s extremely predictable. So we do not.
We are told that any approach of any woman anywhere at any time for any reason is harassment and always undesired. Reality: Most normal women are fine with a polite approach and taking a “no” for a no.
So men are told constantly how horrible and undesirable we are and regardless of that accepted and routine degradation, we are expected to “man up” and act like robots. Is it any surprise that there’s a huge male mental health crisis and that many of the core tenets of this sort of “all masculinity is definitionally toxic” liberalism is being rejected of late?
Can rotation solve the Hubble Puzzle?
The complex origin story of domestic cats.
UN says Asian scam call center epidemic expanding globally amid political heat. Mass organized scamming is such an interesting phenomenon.
Earth is headed toward several catastrophic climate ‘tipping points,’ study warns.
Women rely partly on smell when choosing friends.
Why Trump Decided Not to Try to Fire Jerome Powell. For now.
I miss the silence of the internet before algorithms started talking over us.
Me too. The internet probably reached its peak in around 2004-2005. You could do most things that you can now but there was nearly no algorithmic crap. No AI. Propaganda was present of course but it was also painfully obvious. There was far less censorship and less useless repetitive squawking by clueless know-nothing doofshits.
Blogging was near its zenith and that was far better than Twitter, Bluesky and other platforms.
I know that those days will never return but it’s not just nostalgia to say that the internet was a superior experience then. (The mid- to late-90s internet was also pretty great, but had severe technical limitations.)
It’s nice that there is some pushback against the moronic “you just hate change” screeching that sprouted up (mostly) in the tech world as increasing enshittification of all tech products occurred and then accelerated.
Pushed at first by (mostly) paid industry shills, this absurd narrative was also embraced by self-abasing and unpaid pitiful clowns.
Yes, you stupid, stupid motherfuckers, I do in fact hate change that directly harms me. I very much do.
Seems I’m going back to my old ways. No, not of getting in constant fights and near-stabbings and such.
I mean, today I read two different books in one day. Short ones, but not YA, both fiction. Mainly this happened because I was traveling. Doubt I will plow through seven books in a single day again, though. That requires reading about twenty hours at a stretch and I just don’t have that in me anymore.
Why a holiday in the US is out of the question.
Universities (finally) band together, fight “unprecedented government overreach.”
Trump wants a Golden Dome over America. Here’s what it would take.
Trump administration unwinds efforts to investigate Russian war crimes.
It’s impossible to be right about Donald Trump’s tariffs because there is nothing to be right about.
I think I see now why so much of the left despises this sort of transition while praising gender transition to the moon.
Getting fitter, improving yourself, is all self-directed. No one can do it for you. Other people can help a little but really it’s all on you; you lift the weight or you do not. You lose the gut or you don’t. It takes a lot of effort over time and there’s very little chance it’ll occur if you do not have motivation and will. It’s as individual as a thing can be in this world.
Gender transition, on the other hand, is something everyone else must agree on: this person is now a man/woman and if you say anything else, you’re obviously bad and evil. The left’s views on trans issues is all about being able to constrain someone to hewing to their ideology in a communitarian manner and to punish them if they dissent1.
It has eluded me until today why the left utterly despises people who get fit, but I think the above insight is a large part of it. The hatred is all because that result is an unauthorized, individual-focused and individual-driven upgrade that no one else has to consent to or agree on. And that it then increases your status enormously in society makes it all the worse (from the left’s perspective).
This is how HR systems are tanking our careers. HR systems are configured by the clueless, monitored by the incompetent, and maintained by utter clowns.
A new record for California’s highest tree.
Astronomers confirm the existence of a lone black hole.
Fossil fuels fall below 50% of US electricity for the first month on record. Not long ago, this was “impossible.”
Trump Shuns Europe, and Its Defense Industry Tries to Capitalize.
U.S. faces $90 billion tourism hit as Trump tariffs, deportation push drive away visitors pic.twitter.com/QUJbAaSneS
— NewsWire (@NewsWire_US) April 20, 2025
I mean, who in the fucking world would want to visit this clown show? No one with any brain.
You’d have to be absolutely fucking nuts to visit the United States now.
Just don’t do it. Stay far, far away from this absurd police state.