EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

“Let’s get some peace,” he said. “We need peace. We need to stop the death and destruction.”

Trump has also grown increasingly critical of continued US funding for Ukraine, and in recent days has sharpened his attacks against Zelensky, calling him the “greatest salesman on Earth”.

You know what? I say we let him cook.

This is why I drink on the bus. The bus driver keeps us all safe.

I wonder which Trueanon rules he broke. No way he’s still alive.

“lmao let’s put a boy one and a girl one together to see if they make a baby”

Picard suffered from the same thing for sure. Too much time telling too little story. Somehow it felt both rushed and drawn out. I still enjoyed Picard for all the fan service and old characters, but it was definitely in spite of the overall structure of the show.

They’re all cuties 😭

You know they’re scary when people who live in the sticks and carry guns and think safety regulations are suggestions will see a polar bear and leave immediately, then phone the neighbors to make sure everyone knows to steer clear.

I’ve been slogging through the latest season of Discovery, mostly just so I get the references. I’m just finished 5x05 and I’m not really enjoying it.

It suffers from a lot of the problems with the prestige-ification of TV. Everything feels too serialized and too cinematic. The episodes don’t seem to have a unique identity, and the serialization means that you have to enjoy the commitment to that one serialized plotline (which I admit is not grabbing me). I prefer Star Trek when it’s episodic or has shorter story arcs within a larger season. The story itself is also very fast-paced, in that it’s a race against time/the enemy, which sucks because everything then has to happen inside of this very tight window of time. That’s fine for a movie, but I don’t know why it’s a good idea for a full season of a TV show (unless it’s something like 24 where that’s the whole gimmick). Star Trek is famous for using ticking clocks to keep the action moving, but they resolve at the end of the episode, and the next episode might not have a ticking clock, or the clock is caused by a fundamentally different thing with different stakes. In this season it’s like they’re doing laps around a racetrack. “Okay, we’re ahead now, let’s keep up our lead while we do basically the same thing next episode.” And we have to keep up the idea that it is a race despite having a ship that travels anywhere instantly. Incredibly boring.

Mostly I just hate Alex Kurtzman. I hope his next Trek show flops hard enough that they decide not to renew his deal and they go find someone who doesn’t have obvious contempt for the audience.

Apologies for the ranting. Short answer: DSC season 5, not great

I think it’s hilarious that there was apparently another attempt on Trump’s life and all people are saying about it is “you gotta see this guy’s tweets.”

I think the two go hand in hand, sadly. Make a big deal out of Trump being Hitler, insist that you are the better choice because the other choice is Hitler, rinse repeat as you asymptotically approach becoming Hitler. It’s never been easier to be the lesser evil. The Democrats may actually be onto something when they say they want a strong Republican Party if this is what they do when the Republicans are flailing.

It was really funny during the debate when he called them out about their hyperbolic rhetoric leading to someone shooting at him. Regardless if that were a factor, and granted that Trump implied not so subtly in 2016 that someone should shoot Hillary, it’s a fair point to make. Don’t tell people that someone is Hitler 2 if you’re not going to take responsibility for political violence against them. Either be okay with stochastic terrorism or don’t, but pick one.

I really want to know now. I tried searching for the term but can’t seem to find anyone explaining what it means in the context of a military action, just examples of using the term to describe operations.

nations supplying weapons to Kyiv have the right to limit their use

What a pathetic statement. “We’re going to encourage Ukraine to start WW3 and then hand the responsibility to the individual states.”

Well, and making a reasonable case for that on the merits. It’s not just a matter of “allowing” Ukraine to strike Russia, NATO would have to provide the weapons, the intelligence, and trained personnel in order to make such strikes possible. Ukraine is barely even involved at that point.

Yeah, the idea that you would have nuclear weapons and not use nuclear energy is insane. If you can ban all of it on principle then fair enough, but the idea that opposing nuclear power plants has anything to do with nuclear weapons is wishful thinking.

Imagine how amazing the world would be if everyone stopped trying to compete with China and just let them build us the Star Trek future that they are very clearly succeeding in doing. It’s nice to know that for the rest of my life, China will keep on embarrassing every self-serious westerner who thinks that cargo cult neoliberalism is going to start working any day now.

Granted it’s unlikely we’ll ever see anyone like him again, but I think it’s worth noting that nothing has changed about the electoral system that would prevent someone taking a similarly unorthodox path. “Trump vibes” isn’t going to be a problem if someone is actually doing the Trump playbook properly. No one in the media or political establishment wanted Trump in the first place, and they all had to eat shit in 2016 when he single-handedly took over the GOP. Someone else could do it again if they were brazen enough.

Trump isn’t a genius, he just happened to stumble into a way to win the rock-paper-scissors game against the establishment civility and norms fetishists. They haven’t changed or learned anything in the last 8 years, and it’s unlikely they’ll smarten up this time around, especially if he loses again. The core vulnerability is still there. The game still depends on people following the rules, and if someone else comes along who doesn’t care about those rules, they’ll be able to do the same thing.

US electoralism is still a huge cargo cult joke that deserves no better than Trump, is what I’m saying.

Last night was really helpful for cleansing my twitter feed. General consensus was obviously that Trump ate shit, but you could tell from the comments who was watching the debate to hear what the candidates were saying vs who was there just to cheer on Harris and/or see Trump fail.

One of the minor but notable differences I’ve noticed between Canadian electoralism and American is that there’s very little room in American discourse for just being a hater. It seems like you have to pick a side, and if you say anything bad about one side then you must necessarily be supportive of the other side.

In Canada, we have the same two mainstream neoliberal parties that are the only ones who ever form government, but then there are several other parties and interest groups that have legitimate amounts of support and some representation in the legislature. If you say you hate Trudeau, there are too many possible angles you might be coming from for me to make any assumptions. You could be a conservative, an NDP/Green supporter, a Quebec nationalist, an indigenous person, anyone from BC or Alberta, the list goes on. It’s true of any Canadian politician, party, or interest group, so you can freely shit on anyone and everyone without people being able to assume your specific political leanings.

In Canada, someone like Hasan would be able to be like “Boy, that debate sure was a pile of dogshit” and proceed to roast each candidate on the merits, but in the US the algorithm needs you to declare or else it presumably shunts you into the unserious crank category.

lmao and there’s nothing they could do because he wouldn’t actually be revealing classified information. He’d be an absolute legend if he gave up on winning and just tried to do as much damage as he could on the way out. Come on, Teflon Don, let the spite take over. Go down swinging. You might not be president again, but you can make your enemies’ lives harder.

It’s amazing that they were still teaching cursive when I was in school in the 90s. They had elementary school kids who had never seen a fountain pen in their lives learning two different kinds of writing for no reason whatsoever. As a kid you’re just like “I guess we doing cursive now” but it had to be embarrassing to be a teacher, who has also never used a fountain pen, trying to explain why anyone would ever need or even want to write in cursive.