Ignoring all geopolitical and realpolitik considerations, Ian Welshian “roll over and surrender” for Ukraine fails the very first moral test it comes across. After all, which people should just allow their lands to be invaded, their population to be killed, their children to be stolen, solely for the reason that having this occur displeases the United States? Or for any reason at all?

Welsh and his ilk are all vile ghouls. Just terrible humans who pretend to care but only if it somehow harms the US (which in this case it doesn’t even do that).

I won’t link to anything of Ian Welsh’s, but he continues his usual clownish misunderstanding of events in Ukraine — having never spoken to an actual Ukrainian person — and also does not really understand Russia’s impetus, either.

Once Russia decided to invade, Ukraine was going to suffer either way. And no, it had very little to do with NATO encroachment. That was just a propaganda excuse, like our “Iraq had WMDs” claptrap. Now, the best outcome remaining is keeping Russia tied down in Ukraine so it’s unable to invade other states that would trigger an actual full-on war with NATO. This will of course be very bad for Ukraine but good for all the rest of Europe and the United States. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, and Poland would’ve been next on Russia’s hit list. Because of Ukraine’s resistance, that is very unlikely to happen any time soon.

Ian Welsh has a fucking terrible, child-level (and not even a bright child’s) understanding of what Russia’s motivations and goals were in invading Ukraine, is utterly clueless about how warfare works, and has no idea at all what the stakes are for not resisting this invasion. Just a total dipshit in every way it’s possible for someone to be.

I can’t get over people saying that someone like Sydney Sweeney has an “impossible” body. Like, come on, I’ve dated quite a few women with bodies very similar to hers. I assure you it’s not impossible or even unlikely.

It’s certainly impossible, however, if you snarf 4,000 calories a day and consider a full quart of ice cream a normal dessert portion. The clownish Fat Acceptance movement really, really fucked a lot of people over with their ideology. That movement should be dissolved as a terrorist organization (I’m half serious).

I have to admit, it was a little jarring seeing someone refer to Nine Inch Nails as “old people music” the other day. Because of course I’m old enough to remember when NIN was very new and quite threatening to middle class sensibilities.

But I also agree — NIN music seems aslant our current cultural moment, having little to do with modern concerns. The music is not relevant because it’s talking about different matters from a very different time. It’s embedded in vastly variant assumptions that seem inapplicable or even trivial today. Prudishness resurgent makes a song like “Closer” seem like an alien artifact. Also, “Head Like a Hole” is a debate that became a generally-accepted conclusion among younger people.

So yeah, NIN is “old people music.” It has precious little to do with today. Then, it seemed like the future because it was talking about the present. Now it just feels like ancient history.

I remember when electric cars becoming common was “impossible.” That was being claimed regularly as recently as five years ago.

It’s interesting how often the “impossible” becomes quotidian in a very short span of time. Something to remember when you see confident pronouncements about the future.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

To be clear about something, I’m not looking forward to Civil War 2.0.

However, I absolutely am looking forward to a wing of A-10s absolutely blasting the fuck out of a column of MAGA dipshits in F-250s. I’ll be hooting and hollering just like I somehow got the chance to travel back in time to see Big Mama Thornton perform “Hound Dog” live in 1952. No, I do not give a fuck about them, their deaths or its effects on their (mostly) wives or their kids. I hope they all die embarrassingly if they do something like begin another civil war and that there are no body parts left to recover after they are all blasted apart by 30mm depleted uranium rounds fired from the A-10’s GAU-8 Avenger gun.

As the saying goes, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And they’re gonna win a helluva lot of those.

One of the most common questions I get from trans people and families is, “Where can I go to be safe?”

I made this risk map to help people make these decisions.

It shows the 2-year risk of the worst anti-trans laws.

Subscribe to support my work.https://t.co/sR0whXsYjn

— Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) March 18, 2023

If you’re not trans, this is also a great map of states you should not fucking move to, and states that you should urgently move away from if you’re living there now. Most of them are going to go to absolute hell in the next decade.

Believe it. Because I’ll be right.

would be great if the VC class was even one tenth as mad about the government’s “let it burn” attitude toward those without health insurance as they are about the prospect of multimillionaire depositors losing 1% of their deposits because they didn’t bother to do risk management https://t.co/90dSQNJJrZ

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) March 19, 2023

As many people have noted, it was funny watching the ludicrous tears of all the pseudo-libertarians demanding a bailout after their easily-preventable failures. They got it, too. All of them should’ve been hung out to dry. For years they had styled themselves as too clever to need government, too intelligent to require state intervention in their provident lives. Then some minor inconvenience occurred and they were bawling like a two-year-old denied eating from the dog’s bowl.

They got what they wanted this time but I’m not quite sure they realize the contempt many people have for them, how ridiculous they look to most others not in the Silicon Valley bubble, and how that can quickly turn into real change. Let’s hope it does.

Literally no serious person believes the Chinese Govt stumbled on ‘new evidence’ almost 4 years after the pandemic started in China … in Wuhan … where the PRC lab experimenting on Viruses was located … https://t.co/kGk8hrXoMb

— Gray Connolly (@GrayConnolly) March 18, 2023

A lot of people do in fact believe it. They are insane but they want to buy into the propaganda. Also, a lot of non-Chinese viral researchers doing stuff with gain-of-function and related science are also extremely eager to push this sort of nonsense so their funding doesn’t get cut.

When you want your house to look like a 1980s McDonald’s.

I mean, I like color. But this…this is an abomination.

They were strangers in Bolivia. Six months later they fell in love in Paris.

It’s interesting how many of the ways people meet Gen Z would now classify as harassment and stalking. It’s not really their fault, but we’ve raised a generation of socially-incompetent weirdo prudes.

That’s some truth right there.

Wall Street rides to the rescue as 11 banks pledge $30 billion to First Republic Bank.

It’s more like Wall Street shoots a bunch of people, rides their horse behind a hill and changes into a nurse outfit then rides back out again to the “rescue” of a problem and crisis they caused.

Why do people fall for this shit? The propaganda pipeline is so well-developed now. This is an example of a type of propaganda that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. That is, it’s the pernicious variety so ingrained that it no longer has to be promulgated. No, this propaganda lives right inside people’s minds already — so when another Wall Street failure occurs they automatically pen articles exonerating the actual guilty parties and painting them as the innocent white knights, ever blameless, riding to the rescue.

How the heck do your purge that from the body politic? It’s in too deep.

Knocked out another “impossible” celebrity workout.

w00t w00t that’s how my rump got cute.