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bdonnelly

@bdonnelly.bsky.social

1.8K followers 3.1K following 8.4K posts

NYC. Turn ons include black coffee, loud guitars, dead lifts, books, Islay whiskey, demonstrations, and anything for the revolution. He/Him. Happy to be here. Happy to be anywhere. mastodon.social/@Theblueone

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bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · Sep 4

What if the Deep State was just the norms we made along the way?

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ULTRA💀BLAST @ultrakillblast.bsky.social · 1h

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Estee @esteeland.bsky.social · 21h

as a roboticist, i will say that the hardest thing you can ask a robot to do is...

fold laundry.

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bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 3h

Oh look how relaxed and chill he is now. Jerk.

bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 5h

Guitar of the Day

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bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 5h

Trump literally despoils and destroys everything that falls into his orbit, whether materially or reputationally, and now it’s going to be the Nobel Prize.

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Dave Andress @davidandress.bsky.social · 6h

1. Yes, absolutely yes.

2. People have used the available media to sow divisive & loopy garbage for as long as there's been media.

3. There was a postwar/Cold War moment when for various reasons there was tremendous ideological pressure to rein this in.

4. Which only ever partially succeeded.

Alex von Tunzelmann @alexvont.bsky.social · 7h

I bang on about this a lot: I think the combination of a global pandemic, underregulated internet/SM, collapse/corruption of trustworthy media, plus now unregulated genAI, is a wildly toxic environment for radicalisation & mental health. We see the results of that in our politics & lives every day

James Austin @jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 20h

Everyone knows at least one person (normally, but not exclusively, a guy) whose gone properly mental due to net rabbit holes.

We see public figures regularly go mad and destroy themselves.

And we have, at a policy level, just decided to put our fingers in our ears and go nahnahnah

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John SpooOOoky 🏳️‍🌈 @jsoo.refl.club · 7h

This graph haunts me all the time

Gallup poll: Americans' Satisfaction With U.S., by Party ID
In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?

Shows downward trend starting from 2001 across D and R and highly partisan split thereafter

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bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 8h

NYC nor’easter got me up here at 2am. Wind & rain sounds pretty fierce out there

bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 8h

Well they’ve got huge, sharp--eh-- they can leap about-- look at the bandoliers!

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 16h

This two-parter below is exactly why it's hard to make clothes in the United States.

Let's look at how much it costs to produce a button-up shirt in the US. 🧵

Someone on Twitter replies to me: "meh. buy american or stfu."

Two hours later, in a separate thread, the write: "$30 for a single button-up is ridiculous unless it is decent quality silk."

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 19h

This is a good catch. The statutory authorization supposedly being used to transfer R&D funds to regular payroll is, in fact, expired, just like the regular appropriations are also expired.

Ira 'Bluebeard Homer' Goldman @kdbyproxy.bsky.social · 20h

Not that Trump/Vought/Hegseth gaf, but among other ways in which the law says this may NOT be done:
A) The part of 8005 I've underlined in green says money transferred to another account is "available… for the same time period" as that other account; that other acc't expired on Sept 30.

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bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 20h

[laughs in Caligula ordering the legions to battle the sea]

bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 21h

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Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 1d

Pope Leo quotes Hannah Arendt:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist."

www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...

Pope Leo calls for news agencies to stand as bulwark against "post-truths," lies and manipulation

Pope Leo XIV has encouraged international news agencies to stand firm as a bulwark against the "ancient art of lying" and manipulation.

www.cbsnews.com

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Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 1d

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 2d

"If you believe, as Ellison does, that Americans will be better off when they are subjected to 'supervision at all times,' then buying microvideo platforms, enterprise software, streaming services, cable networks, gaming developers, & internet publishers is just buying supervision capacity."

The Ellisons Are Beta-Testing Big Brother.

If your feeds, subs, streams, games, and sports don't ensure you are on your "best behavior," your school and its EdTech partners will.

theamericanvandal.substack.com

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bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 1d

Priest: Did you want confession?
El Mariachi: Heh? Well, maybe later, Father. 'Cause where I am going, I'd just have to come right back.

bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 1d

My own interpretation of Matthew 10:34 is if you show up preaching about serving the poor, that rich people won't to get to Heaven, & flip over some money changers tables? Well, the authorities are going take a dim view. Those kind of ideas will get a Sword pulled out and pointed at you and yours.

bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 1d

I am sitting here at 7:34am on a Sunday morning and thinking "I should go to mass." Like this isn't a thought I have contemplated since 1986.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 1d

The credibility of the Court, of any court, lies in how they're supposed to explain their reasoning, how they act as the outcome of an adversarial process. When they stop doing that, their standing with the general public collapses, sure. But as we see, their authority over lower courts also erodes.

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rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 1d

What Fr Dowling is doing here was not just "offering communion to detainees". A full on Eucharistic Procession is a really fucking big deal. In Catholic theological framing, those folks were the honor guard with the very great privilege of escorting Jesus himself to the detention center.

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bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 1d

Just gonna say that there have been Catholic clergy murdered and assassinated for preaching Liberation Theology.

There have been no evangelical clergy who got murdered because of that Prosperity Gospel of theirs.

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bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah, was going to say it. The dude thought he was creating a Christianity the Jews would absolutely love, and then when they didn’t give a damn, oh boy, some true colors came shining through, didn’t they.

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Dr Eleanor Janega @goingmedieval.bsky.social · 1d

Look, this is what Catholicism does so well. Yes girl, BRING OUT THE MONSTRANCE. MAKE THEM SAY IT IN FRONT OF THE BLESSED SACRAMENT. Martin Luther could *never*. He failed to predict the Trump Presidency and also is directly implecated. I am so serious.

Rich Raho @richraho.bsky.social · 1d

Chicago priest Fr. Larry Dowling describes procession to ICE facility: “No one had the courage to speak directly to us. No one from Homeland Security could stand in the presence of the Monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament. No wonder. Evil is repelled, recoils in the presence of Christ.”

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bdonnelly @bdonnelly.bsky.social · 1d

I’m assuming he has the heart of a 65 year old who has been told he has the blockages of an 85 year old.