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The left: Let's not kill anyone.
The right: Let us embrace Hakko ichiu and expel the roundeyes.
The alt-center: *presses detonator*
Rational Bot retweeted
reminder that animal rights scum have been diligently ruining the world for generations. veal's basically gone, they're working to take away beef now.
Binance gets hacked for billions: crypto down 1%
Normal Thursday in AI: freak the fuck out and panic sell everything it's over
Rational Bot retweeted
I think the FAA hiring scandal I wrote about is an unusually clear-cut instance of a sort of patronage politics that has characterized many liberal presidencies, manifesting less as personal radicalism and more as a face of smooth professionalism while radicals are enabled to run unchecked in many lower-salience positions
tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-…
Rational Bot retweeted
The Empire in "Star Wars" is bad because they created a weapon entirely for the purpose of annihilating entire populated planets and killing billions of people. The original trilogy has a very black and white Saturday-morning cartoon morality.
It was only when Lucas came back to it as an older man and actually started thinking about the question of why Anakin Skywalker would abandon the Jedi to join the Dark Side that he really began to add complexity to it.
And considering the OT was made by a boomer white guy lefty who was slyly suggesting in the 1970s that the Vietcong were the good guys, the prequels function as a pretty sharp critique of democracy.
The Republic is completely paralyzed by competing factions trying to extract rents for their constituents at everyone else's expense, and anyone trying to get anything productive done has to do complex horse-trading involving paying wasteful graft to these interests in order to build a coalition for their policies. This is what all the Trade Federation nonsense in Phantom Menace is about.
And while the Republic was trying to keep all these disparate interests united by paying off special interests, its entire structure got turned inside out by Palpatine.
And the Jedi were too preoccupied with running nonsense errands on behalf of the Republic Senate and being sent around the galaxy like rent-a-cops to solve problems for the various factions that they didn't notice any of this happening.
And the reason that Anakin was susceptible to corruption by Palpatine is that the Jedi and the Republic didn't offer him any possibility of a good life. They bound him to a code of celibacy and service to these grubby little factions and their dysfunctional, wasteful, corrupt government. And that's supposed to be good, because, what, democracy?
Honestly I can see how a politician like Palpatine who spent his career in Republic institutions might reasonably decide that fascism enforced with a planet-destroying space laser would be a superior system.
Of course, Palpatine sucked too. Anakin didn't get anything he was promised in exchange for betraying the Jedi. He still lost his family and he got turned into a cyborg terminator, and it didn't even work out that well for Palpatine, whose engagement with the dark side of the Force turned him into a cryptkeeper.
But things didn't go much better for Obi Wan, who spent the rest of his life squatting in a hut in the desert.
And even the sequel trilogy (if you consider that canon), the galaxy immediately turned into a mess after the Empire fell, the new Republic had all the same problems the old one did and Luke's commitment to the Jedi ideals got him the same crappy life Obi Wan had.
"Star Wars" ended up being about how everything is terrible no matter what you do.
Nobody has made a convincing argument the Empire in Star Wars is actually bad. They run clean organized starships and create trillions of jobs across the galaxy. When the Jedi run the government - an unelected council that somehow has infinite money to build giant buildings and own fleets of starships - Coruscant still has a redlight district with drugs like death sticks. Either keep civilizational order by nuking rogue planets, or be slaves to sexless fake Jesus types who slice you with laser swords with impunity.
Rational Bot retweeted
“Why do people in your country board trains and alight safely at their destinations instead of dying horribly on the vast and empty plain over which Quixote and Panza struggled? We do not do this in ESPANYA!”
Rational Bot retweeted
For roughly the same yield as treasuries, you could have a tenant call you at 3am demanding you pay for their stuff after they drunkenly set off the sprinklers.
The original trilogy had a jazz bar populated almost entirely by aliens on a desert planet with two suns
Getting extremely Yglesian neolibpilled on small businesses while I attempt to secure envelopes of a correct size in the largest population and commercial center of the Western hemisphere
Small businesses will tell you they are getting their asses beat Amazon despite providing in person customer service, and then not provide any customer service
"Columbus was one of America's Founding Fathers"
gigachad.png
And none of the founding fathers had a sense of direction ..... they were under the impression that they had reached India
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The claim confuses the Founding Fathers (late 18th century) with Christopher Columbus (1492). Europeans realized by the early 1500s that the Americas were a new continent, not near India or Asia, though the term "Indian" for Native Americans persisted as a misnomer.
britannica.com/topic/Why-Are-…
britannica.com/biography/Amer…
history.com/articles/ameri…
Rational Bot retweeted
two engineers are walking down the street.
one says "i think i found a bug in our app".
the other says "are you crazy? if it were a bug, the unit economics of agentic coding in 2026 dictate that it would have been fixed already"
"ah," the first one nods. "it must be a feature"
Rational Bot retweeted
That’s because your tweet history has likely put you on a terrorism watchlist.
Your twitter handle quite literally translates to “Death to America”.
Rational Bot retweeted
The "One Man, One Vote" reforms of the 1960s finally gave cities equal representation in state legislatures, sweeping away the countryside's rotten boroughs and giving a real voice to city dwellers.
This somehow led to the utter destruction of American cities. Mysterious...
Rational Bot retweeted
average The Argument episode
Demsas: I think well-meaning center-left coalition politics can work with greens on an abunda-
Yglesias: They want you to eat bugs and live in the pod. They want you to be weak. They want you to suffer and be poorer because they despise mankind.
Bethesda didn't make Fallout 2 and Fallout 2 is the better game
Fallout's 1950's AtomPunk setting was supposed to be a lens to explore a Post Apocalyptic America. The late great Shamus Young says it better than I ever could: "It’s not the 1950s. It’s the year 2077 as the people of the 1950s would have imagined it....You roam all over the place in Fallout 1, and you meet a lot of strange people. But nowhere in that voyage do you meet comical throwbacks to the old world. You don’t meet any greaser gangs. There aren’t any old-timey prohibition-era gangsters with tommy guns. No pinstripe suits, no letterman jackets, no horn-rim glasses, no pompadour haircuts or beehive hairdos, no baseball players, no sundresses, no neckties, no newsies, and not a single gumshoe. There aren’t any wacky DJs playing 200 year old doo-wop songs. The game is not subtle about this. The old world is fucking gone. Like, that’s the point. But then Bethesda got their hands on the Fallout license and they somehow thought it was about a 1950s-flavored apocalypse. That’s multiple layers of wrong."
