as much as everyone loves "the power of love won't save us, we need the power of incredible violence" i'm sorry to rain on your parade but we've actually tried that about ten million times as a species, and you'll be shocked to hear the power of incredible violence, without the power of love behind it, is just brutality. the power of incredible violence has been ruling (various parts of, and then the entire) world for the past 5,000 years. ours is not that damn special.
like yes use that gun you found but WHY are you using it? on who are you using it? what would make you stop using it? is your goal to live in a world where every problem is solved by violence, or is your goal to do the violence necessary to live in a world where that necessity is unthinkable?
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More male characters who are interested in their mother's legacy. As a trope there's a lot of sons and daughters who follow in the father's footsteps and there's yes, girls who honor their mother, ect. But let's have more dudes who are like. Stumbling on their mom's secret fairy cottage or some shit. And they're like aight gotta make the tea
“Only George H.W. Bush successfully prosecuted a short war. Why? Because the Persian Gulf War had one very specific and contained goal: force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. One can agree or disagree with his decision to launch the war, but at least it was aimed at doing one and only one small and specific thing. The neocons were imploring him to march on to Baghdad. He said no, you people are crazy. Then his dumb son got to the White House, and he put the crazies (led by Dick Cheney) in charge, and they launched a war based not on one specific goal but on a theory—that regime change in Iraq would help spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Do we think Trump gave these matters two minutes’ worth of thought before he decided to start this war? We know the answer to that question. Of course he didn’t. Because to Trump, the laws of history don’t apply to him. He’s different. And Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan did the lion’s share of the work of convincing Trump to do this, knew perfectly how to feed Trump’s vanity and take advantage of his total historical ignorance.”
— Trump Just Gave Us a Horrible New Reason to Worry About the Iran War
I like the idea in fantasy that humans are better at maintaining things long term because they set up societies or professions to do it whereas dwarves and elves and stuff are like “just get bob to do it he’s got a good few hundred years left” and then bob doesn’t teach anyone else how to do it
Human: Wait that’s why there’s ruins of elven cities even though you live for so long? You just keep not asking people how to do things? How do you learn anything?
Elf: There’s a lot of “you’ve got time to figure it out on your own” attitudes floating around in our society that I’m starting to question somewhat.
Elf: Impossible! Those metalworking techniques were lost a hundred years ago!
Human: What do you mean lost? My great-grandmother learned to make these swords from an elven smith, then taught it to her kids.
Elf: That's ridiculous. No elf would give such secrets to a human.
Human: They didn't. Meemaw delivered the metal to the forge, and no one kicked her out when she stayed and watched. She always said they barely acknowledged her even when doing business with her, like she wasn't worth noticing.
Elf: Come to think of it, my great-uncle always was rather single-minded when he started working.
Human: So he wasn't ignoring her, he just forgot she was there?
Elf: Oh, he was definitely ignoring her, too. He was super racist.
Free service with ads: Well, if I'm not paying for it they have to foot the bill somehow.
Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.
Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.
"We used to be a paid service without ads, but now we're putting ads in it! If you want the ad-free version you have to pay more for preeeeemium": Fuck you fuck you fuck you
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It was clear that even after seeing my face on Volescu’s camera video, they didn’t recognize me without the helmet. So then I had to look at them and say, “I’m your SecUnit.”
This scene was so funny to me and personally I think it’s one of the examples of Murderbot being an unreliable narrator. I’m pretty sure there is no way those people actually had no idea who MB was in that situation. I mean, there aren’t that many people around to get confused and think MB could have been anyone else 😅
I think Ratthi says something along the lines of “who is that?” But I’m convinced that he is joking around.
It’s not exactly difficult to guess who the “new” face is, if you are nine people and you know eight of them…
So it’s hilarious to me that MB is like “oh well, those silly humans, I will now unfortunately have to introduce myself to them, or else they won’t get it”
These were produced from around the time of the Roman annexation of Egypt in the late 1st century BC to around the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century CE.
They were a continuation of the Egyptian tradition of funerary masks but rather than sculpting them and making them of precious metals, they began painting these lifelike portraits.
It’s hotly debated whether this is an example of Greco-Roman realist style imposed on their subjects, or a home grown Egyptian development of their own ancient tradition. Those who say it’s more Egyptian than Roman point out that there’s no surviving paintings in the rest of the Roman Empire that were this realistic. Those who say it’s more Roman than Egyptian point out the arid climate left these portraits intact, and beleive the others in the rest of the empire were lost.
Personally I think you can call them Egyptian because these people, whether of Roman or ancient Egyptian descent, are still the ancestors of the modern Egyptians today.
Despite the realism you can see a slight exaggeration of the eyes, smoothing of the skin and inclusion of certain important objects around the subject’s head. It’s a pattern that would get more and more pronounced until it became the style of Byzantine iconography in the Orthodox Christian Church
Younger people, one thing I want you to understand about Millenials is that, overall, our parents taught their daughters to aim for careers and employment, but they didn't teach their sons to keep house. This causes a whole lot of Situations.
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Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
Here's a sentence that stopped me in my tracks last week: "The statement that 'the cemeteries are full of indispensable people' is just as true of nations, and in particular the US":
https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/16/55382/
The writer is John Quiggin, writing about the fact that, under Trump, the world has raced through a series of seismic shifts in how it organizes itself, rushing to fill an America-shaped void in its dealings.
This is a subject that's very much on my mind. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor and then flipped the table over because he resented having to pretend to play at all. The "international rules-based order" that gave America oversight and control over the world's militaries, finances, trade, and communications was always a better deal for America than it was for the rest of the world.
The long persistence of this system doesn't mean that other countries liked it. The reason the American century endured for as long as it did was that the toll that America extracted from the world was always lower than the cost of making a new system. Just as people stay on Facebook because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, the nations of the world let America control their systems because they feared the cost and difficulty of building a new system more than they resented letting America dictate and tax every part of their politics and economies.
That's where Trump comes in. The price of doing business with Trump is, effectively, infinity. If you buck Trump, he doubles down and demands twice as much. If you capitulate to Trump, he interprets it as weakness and comes back for three times as much. There are no deals to be made with Trump, only temporary measures that last until his next Fox and Friends binge or chance encounter with a ridiculous conspiracy theory.
Take Canada: in 2018, Trump tore up NAFTA – the deal that Bush Sr and Clinton crammed down Mexico and Canada's throats – and replaced it with USMCA, a trade treaty that was even more advantageous to America. Then, within months of his 2024 election, Trump tore up USMCA and replaced it with a chaotic series of tariffs that swung around wildly from 25% to 100% to (as of this week) 50%:
Trump has no coherent reason for this new tariff. Canada has bent over backwards to give Trump everything he wants and more. Despite some high-minded words at Davos about the need for "middle powers" to decouple from the USA, PM Mark Carney has given Trump everything he could ask for. Carney allowed Palantir – a company that makes no bones about being an agent of Trump's will – inside the most sensitive parts of the Canadian military. Carney dropped his plan to charge US tech companies a 3% tax. Carney is firing tens of thousands of civil servants and replacing them with chatbots, the majority of which will be operated by US companies, running on US servers.
Sure, Canada's imposed some retaliatory tariffs on US products, but that's just a way of making everything Canadians buy more expensive, which is a weird way of punishing America. It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can in the hopes that the downstairs neighbour says "ouch." Meanwhile, Carney has consistently ignored US interference in Canadian politics, including the tsunami of dark money pouring into the Alberta separatist movement – a bid by Trump to literally steal an entire province.
Give Trump everything he asks for and he'll demand more. Deny Trump anything and he'll demand more. Sign a contract with Trump and he'll break it. Send Trump an invoice and he'll stiff you. For Trump, "the art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: renege.
This is why – as David Dayen writes – there will likely be no peace deal in Iran for so long as Trump is in office. Why would the Iranians sign any deal with Trump when they know Trump will break it?
Last Christmas, I gave a speech in Hamburg about "the post-American internet" that the rest of the world has the chance to build now that Trump has zeroed-out all the value it used to get from playing by America's tech policy rules, even as Trump has weaponized US tech companies to attack world officials who buck his agenda:
After that speech, I wrote a book (The Post-American Internet) that Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in August 2027. In the book, I describe the role that "trusted third parties" (T3P) play in complex transactions. Think of an escrow agent who holds onto the deed for the house you're buying from the seller until you hand over the money, and then forwards the deed to you and the money to the seller.
The more complex a transaction is, the more it needs a T3P. For most of the past century, the US has been the world's T3P. Most of the world's transoceanic fiber optic lines make landfall in the US and interconnect to one another in US data centres. Most of the world's international transactions are conducted in dollars and are cleared through US-controlled platforms like SWIFT. Through its aid programs, the US sets the health and public services agenda for billions of non-Americans, and the US has military installations in more than 100 countries. The US trains the world's militaries, it supplies (and withholds) information from the world's intelligence agencies, and it runs the IT infrastructure powering the world's government agencies and critical infrastructure, from tractors to medical equipment.
Right from the start, the US was never an entirely trustworthy "trusted third party." There were plenty of moments where the US abused its control over its "neutral" platforms to serve the American national interest at the expense of the countries that relied on those platforms.
But those violations were either covert or carried out under some kind of legal rubric ("the rules-based international order"). You'd probably continue to trust an escrow agent that obeyed court orders to hold onto the money after handing over the deed. That trust might persist even if the escrow agent withheld the money on the say-so of a DA or sheriff, even without a court order. You might even continue to trust the escrow agent if they sometimes said, "I'm going to hang onto this money for 72 hours because I think there might be something weird in this deal."
Same goes for the escrow agent who has a secret side-hustle with the local land-registry office and realtors that lets them skim a few points off every deal and scoop up the best properties through a shell company. Provided you never find out about this, you'll happily hire that escrow agent to handle your property deal.
Trump is the escrow agent who keeps the money and the deed, then announces he did it because the seller was a fentanyl dealer and the buyer was a lizard-person; and then publishes a long screed on Truth Social calling everyone who criticises him a terrorist, promising to do it again next time.
Even if you need to sell your house, and even if Trump is the only escrow agent you can find, you're just not going to trust him with your deed or the money. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again."
Back to Quiggin: the US was the world's indispensable nation, and the cemeteries of history are full of indispensable nations. As Quiggin writes, Europe and Ukraine have largely given up on US military protection from Russia and are building their own capacity, already surpassing the US in drone and artillery capabilities. The US can no longer credibly provide missiles and anti-missile defenses, not after Trump used up America's stockpiles in his pointless, endless war in Iran.
Quiggin notes that the consensus case against the EU as a military power held that Europe "lacks the capacity to project power globally" and that it is "too disunited to act effectively." Per Quiggin, these only matter if you believe that the post-American military order will look and act like the American system that Trump just trashed. Trump has a chud "Secretary of War" who kidnaps foreign leaders and can't reliably get oil through the Strait of Hormuz – if that's the dividend from "unity" and "projecting power," you can keep it.
On finance, Quiggin notes that the EU is racing to break its reliance on SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard, and the more Trump weaponizes these against institutions like the International Criminal Court, the faster this transition will go.
America's load-bearing private institutions – like the Big Four accounting firms and the bond rating agencies – have self-immolated, thanks to decades of lax regulation by successive US administrations through scandal after scandal. Quiggin points out that there's no reason to replace these giant, structurally important (but terrifyingly unreliable) cartels with trustworthy versions. It's cheaper and more robust to rebuild our economy so that it no longer serves the finance system, returning finance to "its pre-1970s role as a provider of a relatively limited set of services to the real economy."
On manufacturing, Quiggin points to the twin facts of Trump's chaotic tariffs and China's "economic nationalism," which have put the EU in the centre of a new trade order. Here, too, we're getting something new, not a Made-in-Europe version of "the failed globalist dream of the WTO" nor "Trump’s attempts to extort surplus through bilateral bullying":
As I said, Quiggin's article has been rattling around in my mind ever since I read it last week, but there's one area where I think Quiggin's got it wrong: the relative difficulty of building a post-American internet.
First, because Quiggin says that the real challenge is building a post-American AI. Sovereign AI is, frankly, nonsense. If Trump turns off all of your country's chatbots, nothing changes. If Trump orders Microsoft to shut off your country's access to Office 365 (as he did to the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian judge who pissed him off), your country would simply cease to function:
In the face of these real, non-speculative, immediate, grave threats, focusing on AI – the money-losingest technology in human history, which has consistently underperformed relative to its boosters' promises – is just misguided. If you really want an "AI strategy" for your country, it should be this: wait for the bubble to burst, then buy hardware and talent at fire-sale prices in the wave of ensuing bankruptcies, and use them to extract more performance from free, open source models.
The real digital challenge is building apps and data centres to run everyday administrative, telecoms and e-commerce software on, and then moving your country's, ministries', companies' and households' data over to the new platforms. The hardware and software are challenging, but ultimately straightforward. Raising capital for data centres is just a matter of convincing people to invest in being a kind of landlord, which is among the easier sells to make (and there's plenty of investors who are looking for real alternatives to getting sucked into the AI bubble).
Getting the apps is hard, but there's an army of technologists who are ready for more, after decades of doing fake startups for a Big Tech company to "acqui-hire" and/or toiling to improve ad click-throughs. These people yearn to follow Steve Jobs's injunction to "make a dent in the universe" and they are being chased out of Silicon Valley by ICE chuds who want to send them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.
There's plenty of talent and capital for the taking.
The real hard part isn't writing or running the code – it's extracting the data, replacing the firmware, and bridging new systems – like post-American social media platforms – into the existing ones. This part is hard because every country in the world has agreed to a trade deal with America wherein they agreed to make it illegal to reverse-engineer US tech exports, in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Trump has made the case for abandoning these deals better than I ever could have:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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So in the run up to the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition, one of the Chicago newspapers put out a call for drawings and sketches, all with the same brief---capture the spirit of the newly rebuilt Chicago, just as Columbia or Uncle Sam stood for the USA generally.
(One Birmingham, AL newspaper reporting on the contest said that, "New York has her Father Knickerbocker, Philadelphia her William Penn" and suggested that Chicago have a woman with windblown hair and webbed feet. However, they also wrote that "[Birmingham should have] a handsome young woman with a constitution of iron, hair of the blackest of coal, and eyes with the fiery glow of the furnaces," so I think the takeaway here is that throughout all of history, people without Hetalia will invent it.)
Anyway, the newspaper received hundreds of entries, and they chose as their winner a woman standing with feet apart and one hand on her hip, a mason’s square in the other hand, crowned with a phoenix rising from the ashes to reference the Great Chicago Fire. Most importantly, she had "I WILL" emblazoned on her cuirass.
The New York Times called this "a badly proportioned design and a swaggering pose" but Chicago didn't care (and maybe liked the swagger, thanks very much). The Columbian Exhibition moved ahead, and a lady crowned with a bird and flames, "I WILL" somewhere on her person, became as close to an official symbol for the fair as you could get---so much so that they brought her back for the 1933 Fair too.
(that 'Y' you see on either side of her was also the result of a newspaper competition around the same time, and is still found throughout the city.)
I don't really have a point here, I just like her. I've never seen the anthropomorphic personification of a place and thought "actually? that seems about right."
OKAY OKAY OKAY so when I realized I was going to have to write a lot of space battles, I did two things. The first was put a sticky note on my laptop that said THE ENEMY'S GATE IS DOWN (which, ugh, fuck OSC into the SUN), to remind myself that direction is both 1. important, and 2. relative, and then I watched approximately a billion hours of bait ball footage in David Attenborough documentaries, which helped me write battles in which all directions are possible.
(A bait ball, btw, is when teams of predators work together to eat small fish like anchovies, sardines, or lantern fish. Tuna, seals, sharks, dolphins, etc corral the fish into a ball at the surface, and then pick them off. Sometimes rays get involved. It's like a toothy, toothy dance. Gannets and boobies dive down from above. They can go 20m down! And then sometimes a whale comes up from the deep and swallows the whole thing. It is my favourite part of any nature documentary.)
I consistently get compliments on the clarity of my space battles and my number one trick is just to stay in close third person, as tight as I can get it. I may know all or most of what's going on, but what I'm telling you is very much just what this one person is seeing and thinking -- I'm going there, I'm shooting this guy, I'm noticing that my squadmate said or did this.
(My number two trick is that I think of a lot of the action in terms of hockey games: this character is always three steps ahead of the action, that one hangs behind ready to cover an opening, and so forth. Probably any sportsball that ranges all over a field would work: basketball, soccer, etc. The point is to differentiate out how each character relates to the battlefield, which gives me a lot more ways to be specific instead of just "he's evading their shots and shooting back".)
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