Elvis: *shows me an assortment of "you got weezered" Tiktoks*
Me: I think I've reached the limit of my ability to understand Zoomer humor.
Elvis: I mean, you got pretty far.
To those who are asking if this is 2021's version of rickrolling … no. I mean, kind of, but also no. It's like that plus BOFA but … color-based? And then there's a bunch of other stuff mixed in. The video Elvis showed me included stock art of an apple for some reason.
(I asked, and apparently the apple was being transformed into an Among Us character. Also there was an Ed Sheeran joke because "Gen Z finds Ed Sheehan hilarious in a cringe way." The video was like 30 seconds long.)
I've always thought that George Wallace's "I got out-n—d," on why he lost the 1958 governor's race, was essential to understanding white supremacy in the Jim Crow era—race hatred as an electoral tactic, race hatred as a verb.
The guy Wallace was referring to died this Friday.
Which is, I guess, a pretty good pretext for sharing something I've had on my desktop ever since I stumbled across is a couple of months ago—a front-page New York Times headline from 1967.
Eddie Albert being in his late forties when he made Roman Holiday is the precise inverse of all of those “look at these middle-aged-ass teenagers from the olden days” threads.
Also, apparently the guy who played the barber was fucking the pope? Like, in real life?
(He wasn’t the pope yet, to be clear. But the actor who played the barber who cut all of Audrey Hepburn’s hair off was apparently in a long term relationship with the Archbishop of Milan, who went on to become Pope Paul VI.)
This entire thread is bullshit, but this tweet in particular is specifically bullshit. When I donate to a campaign, I'm giving money not just to win a specific election, but to build power for progressive politics more generally. And paying staffers well is a part of doing that.
I donated to the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in IDAHO last cycle. Why? Because I wanted to support grassroots progressive politics in the state where my grandfather was a progressive activist. (Also she had a cool tee shirt. But mostly the other thing.)
I was adding my drop to the bucket so she could hire good staff and pay union vendors and distribute lit and provide opportunities for young volunteers. And I don't think I'm all that unusual for having done so.
Everyone's dunking on Nate Silver today, but I'm not seeing a lot of people flagging his claim that when "one side" of a FACTUAL DISPUTE "is excessively concerned with policing the discourse…that side is more likely than not to be wrong."
I mean, let's start with how he puts his thumb on the scale with "excessively." Is "policing the discourse" evidence that you're in the wrong in a factual dispute? No, because of one side of the dispute is obviously incorrect, they're going to get yelled at more.
So the "excessively" isn't a rhetorical flourish. It's central to his argument. But how can "excessively policing the discourse" be measured? What does it refer to, other than someone's gut feeling that one group of people are yelling at another group of people for bad reasons?