From The Atlantic's profile of Licht comes this gem, one screamed at us by pundits and media executives since the Tea Party uprising of 2009. It seems impossible to explain to them that we heard all these views a million times and simply do not like them. Yes. As a country. 🧵 Like the annoying devil's advocate at a dinner party, they keep telling us "no, see, if you really heard them, then you'd understand." Well, we did hear them. We are force fed right wing outrage, temper tantrums, and increasingly histrionic, nihilistic GOP talking heads 27/7/365.

Because Matt is an Extremely Online Centrist Opinion-Haver, he raises an interesting question and answers it with the equivalent of a wet fart. But there is a good reason why Millennials are a bit better adjusted: our lives weren’t dominated by social media and culture wars.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1640489783611777028

Let’s make no mistake, the current coterie of vile monsters like Gingrich, McConnell, and Hastert were turning national politics into an absolute shitshow and culture wars were well underway. But they weren’t front and center in literally everything on the news. Politics were …

Microservices are a critical for scaling any cloud native platform. Turning off almost all of them means you're either shutting off actual features or redundancy and failover capabilities which allow Twitter to handle billions of requests per hour. This is a very stupid idea. 🧵 If all of Twitter was one service, it would have horrific memory and CPU needs, costing absurd sums to set up and maintain. Breaking it up into logical modules that can run independently, or microservices, means you can automatically spin up enough instances to handle requests.

Ah, the Russian trolls found this tweet. You can tell it’s a troll farm from the lazy drive-by rehashes of the same two of talking points from Channel One: any critic of Putin’s little empire of fascist thugs is a Nazi, and everything bad is a false flag by Ukrainians and Jews.

https://twitter.com/gregafish/status/1510751614281216002

If they sound an awful lot like the Trumpglodytes who want to know where Obama was during 9/11 and that Trump actually took out bin Laden, it's because they are. They're allowed to wallow in their rage and fear without learning, without growing, without having to adapt to change.

THREAD: It physically pains me to say this, but your least favorite neoliberal pundit is right. NATO can’t get directly involved in Ukraine baring a direct attack on a member state. It's not even about nukes, it's about not protracting and escalating the war globally. Here's why. Russia has labeled any anti-war sentiment treason, is jailing children for laying flowers for killed Ukrainians in public, and using the FSB to harass "foreign sympathizers," the final step in becoming a textbook fascist dictatorship. This is deeply disturbing to may Russians.

Why does Ukraine matter? If Russia is allowed to violently annex Ukraine, it means big nuclear states can now simply decide another country should not exist and invade it without consequences. Cue runaway nuclear proliferation and MAD that will make the Cold War look like a joke. Everyone will want nukes now that they're less of an insurance policy but a basic requirement for your state to exist. Nuclear armed Canada, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Turkey, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia will suddenly become inevitable, and every skirmish means nukes could be fired.

Putin just declared war on the West as the GOP base spent a decade lusting over him like tweens ogling a boy band poster. Fox News broadcasts Russian talking points and the MAGA faithful root for Russian troops because their Facebook feeds are full of anti-American propaganda. I’m told the Republican base are patriots who bleed red, white, and blue. But every post about how much they love their country descends into a rabid screed about how much they hate everything about it, the government, their fellow citizens, and how they can’t wait for civil war.

Right wing politics in two tweets from someone too proud of themselves not to do the Bond villain routine: they don’t know or care what #CriticalRaceTheory is. It’s a lefty buzzword, so they started a five alarm fire over it, and say it encompasses anything upsetting to voters. Right wing pundits and politicians don’t care about the meaning of any of the scary -isms they toss around as if they were televangelists doing an exorcism. They just care about keeping you scared so you give them money and vote for them to protect you against imaginary threats.

Normally, conspiracy theorists tend to be just as sane as the general public, but a researcher thinks that QAnon followers may be an exception, citing frequent posts revealing mental health diagnoses, and that 68% of arrested Capitol rioters received one. theconversation.com/many-qanon-fol… Of course, this doesn’t mean almost 7 in 10 QAnon followers have a mental illness or that 44% had one prior to discovering it because the rioters are a pretty extreme convenience sample. But combined with frequent self-admissions of DSM V diagnoses, this data is concerning.

I love how bluntly Palihapitiya points out the absurdities of the system to people who try to pretend that the stock market hasn’t become a weird casino for rich people and completely detached itself from reality in the last decade. It’s honestly quite refreshing.

https://twitter.com/itsavibe/status/1354484760115081217

And yes, 52% of Americans own stocks, mostly through index funds, IRAs, and 401k plans. I’m one of them. But the top 10% by net worth own 81% of all stocks and the top 1% own 38% of all stocks. Those stocks make up the vast majority of their wealth in the first place.

What does NYT's analysis of Trump's tax returns tell us? Trump barely pays any federal tax as most of his businesses are losing tens of millions, he's way over-leveraged, and he may have ran for president as a marketing gimmick that got out of control. nytimes.com/interactive/20… Explanations that the losses are just accounting magic would indicate fraud and be at odds with both his widely known and awful record as a businessman, and the loud rumors floating around NYC's wealthiest residents that he's not a billionaire but "a clown who lives on credit."

When former terrorist hunters become bloodthirsty agitators eager to murder their fellow citizens for the crimes of refusing to hate the same people and vote for a different party, they're no longer patriots. They're domestic terrorists. thedailybeast.com/michael-scheue… I'm getting tired of saying this, but a developed, civilized country does not have a minority which rejects the legitimacy of elections they lose and calls for sectarian bloodshed and civil war to get their way. That's what happens in "shitholes" ran by sclerotic kleptocrats.

Yeah, this is pretty much spot on. As an ex-Soviet, I'm getting deja vu from Trump's regime. Americans' trademark boundless optimism about things always working out in the end for them is quickly turning into complacent laziness and willful blindness. eand.co/we-dont-know-h… Realistically, I don't think that critics of the government will be jailed or disappeared in the next four years if Trump wins. There will still be enough pushback. But if the GOP can consolidate enough power under him, just about anything is on the table for 2024 and beyond.

This is how reckless conspiracy theories start. Any big enough explosion forms a mushroom cloud because the shape is formed by water vapor in the atmosphere and nothing else. Likewise, there are videos where you can clearly see fireworks going off before the secondary blast.

https://twitter.com/ChrisPalmerNBA/status/1290678170820042752

Here’s a really close up video clearly showing fireworks going off inside the building, and pursuing the rest of the thread will show other obvious pops that are clearly fireworks, not high explosives or anything even remotely like rockets or bombs.

https://twitter.com/svnewsalerts/status/1290686859295612934?s=21

https://t.co/Qc6FP7JMfz

Sam is right. The campaign was bragging about a million tickets. The venue seats 19,000, so even if TikTokers and K-Pop fans signed up for 90% of those free, unlimited tickets, a crowd 5x the venue’s capacity should’ve been jostling for a seat. Something here doesn’t add up.

https://twitter.com/samstein/status/1274662543685029889

Blood red OK should’ve had no problem filling that arena to the brim, so how do a million signups translate into a hair over 6,000 people actually showing up? I’m thinking Parscale lied about the number of signups as even die hard Republicans are getting sick and tired of Trump.

Finland's experiment with universal basic income found that recipients didn't just sit around and play video games or binge TV shows. They actually spent a little more time working and felt a little better about their lives thanks to the new, more flexible safety cushion. This is both encouraging and not. It should be pretty obvious that having more money and control over how to spend it instead of being tightly managed by bureaucrats who think you're only financially struggling because you're a bad person, would be better. worldofweirdthings.com/2016/03/13/wil…

For other viruses we have vaccines, clinically proven and effective treatments we can get at any pharmacy, and built up immunity from years of exposure. We have literally none of that for coronavirus, you blithering #COVIDIOT. I know you’re paid to be stupid in public, but JFC...

https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1248315786621530112

Technically, yes, we would benefit from social distancing for literally any virus transmitted in close proximity. But we weigh the idea against the ease and efficacy of testing and treatment. It’s trivial to get tested, vaccinated, or treated for the flu. #COVIDー19? Not at all.

Whenever you complain about the soaring cost of housing, you'll always find someone who'll say "but homes are bigger than ever, so buy a smaller one" as a counter. Just one problem. Developers are either building big or nothing. Smaller homes aren't there. curbed.com/2020/3/10/2116… You want a smaller house? Well, this one is a rental, this one is about 80 years old and needs a lot of renovations and maintenance, and that one is for sale but landlords are in a bidding war to add it to their investment property portfolio. Starter homes are being wiped out.

Trump will celebrate his acquittal like a kid who won a game where his dad was the referee, his mom ran the scoreboard, and both told everyone they’ll make sure he wins.

I can’t understand the lack of honor it takes to celebrate an obviously rigged victory as if it was earned. Trump is literally the face of upwards failure and participation trophies. He had to parasitize his dad to run a business. He had to rely on fraud to keep from going bankrupt. He badly needs blatant meddling and the EC to win elections. In a way, Trump is an incredible paradox.

THREAD: In case you haven’t noticed, today anyone the American right wing doesn’t like for any reason is a Satanic pedophile laundering globalist money. While traveling this weekend, I saw an alarming example of this worth considering with a tinge of horror and alarm. Columbus, OH is currently absolutely exploding in size and wealth. And one of its most prosperous suburbs, Dublin, decided to ditch its “golf and big house sprawl” image, and rebuild itself as an urban planners’ dream of mixed used buildings in walkable neighborhoods.

Let me offer a brief summation. It’s the conspiracy theory in which anyone you don’t like, or with whom you disagree for any reason, is secretly a treasonous Satanic pedophile about to be sent to Guantanamo Bay to await execution.

https://twitter.com/WattersWorld/status/1203403806110699521

For anyone actually interested in how QAnon looks to anyone outside it’s devotees, here’s an episode of the WoWT Podcast where we talked to @travis_view... worldofweirdthings.com/2019/06/21/wow…