Valhalla Island

To valorize agency without also emphasizing its purpose allows us to ignore harder questions like: How do I live a good life? And what about the collective good?

Katter Breaks Silence On Childhood Autism Being Carved Out Of The NDIS Saying That Back In My Day We Didn't Have This Spectrum Business Because Every Single Bloke On The Railways Was Of That Way And That Was The Whole Bloody Point Of The Railways In The First Place Because The Nation Knew That If You Had A Kid Who Was A Bit Quiet Or A Bit Funny About Routine Or Who Liked Counting The Rivets On A Bridge Instead Of Playing Footy You Didn't Send Him To A Therapist You Sent Him To The Railway Camp And He Was Thankful For It Because The Entire Backbone Of Queensland And Indeed This Nation Was Built By Blokes That Eat Pizza With A Knife And Fork Who Were Put To Work Swinging Picks And Lining Up Bolts With Mathematical Precision And That Was Their Therapy And Their Purpose And Their Identity And I'll Tell You Something Else The Only Reason We Even Built Railways On That Scale Was To Entertain And Employ Those Men Who Saw The World Differently And Enjoyed It In Their Own Time And To Give Them A Place Where Their Talents Were Respected And Where Their Repetition Wasn't A Disorder But A Bloody Asset Because If You Needed Someone To Hit A Spike Two Hundred Thousand Times Without Complaining You Went To The Different Boys And They Delivered The North Coast Line The Great Northern Line And The Rest Of It On Time And On Budget Without An Acronym Or A Consultant In Sight And That Was The NDIS Before We Even Knew What An NDIS Was And The Politicians Down South Can Laugh But Every Station Every Rail Bridge Every Bit Of Track You've Ever Ridden On Exists Because Autism Built It And The Least We Could Do Today Is Show The Same Respect To These Kids Instead Of Cutting Them Loose And Leaving Them To Be Lost In The Inescapable Darkness That Is Real Life

The technology currently lavishly fucking up your grocery order in a supervised setting will soon make you breakfast and drive you to work and help raise your child and manage both your glucose levels and those of your pet. 

Making friends is a process that does not lend itself to visual documentation.

Did I sleep? Did I connect deeply with people I love? Did I get some time to myself? Did I make choices for my body that felt good?

All of the post-truth factions of culture see fact-checking (and its usual attendant tone of sneering elite condescension) as proof of their own correctness, with cynical community leaders exploiting vulnerable true believers. Same playbook over and over.

I realize it’s boring to list all this. Journalism thrives on unconventional narratives. It may appear that Republicans are a threat to democracy, but the true threat lies on the left is a more compelling story than things are what they seem.

This is laughable. Buruma, the senior editor of a national magazine, suffered a reputational hit after publishing an article that invited widespread public backlash. This happens in journalism constantly. Jonah Lehrer didn’t break any laws, but he was effectively banished from journalism after making up Bob Dylan quotes. Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana stepped down after retracting the infamous University of Virginia rape story. Applebaum is arguing that these consequences are not only unjust— regardless of the underlying facts — but evidence of creeping totalitarianism.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Cobb County School District said that the district’s rules for student dress “encourage a focus on learning for all 110,000 students in Cobb, not on what students prefer to wear.”

Getting into the Delta Variant Mindset: