First Wordle Problems
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fwordleproblems.bsky.social
First Wordle Problems
@fwordleproblems.bsky.social
Black sheep boy, fearful Jesuit, functionary of the great swamp

midwest office guy, he/him

"Half the crowd is calling out for Born to Run / The other half is calling out for Born to Lose. / Baby, we were born to choose."
Pinned
"He has a good deal to say, and if he can reduce his complicated and painful feelings...to a few telling and effective pages, it ought to be child's play to analyse the state of the nation..."
Star Wars is a legitimately great movie! Empire too in its own way, but it’s very conscious of itself as a sequel, if that makes sense? Still. There’s something very dreamlike almost about “The Empire Strikes Back”; it’s a note they never really hit again.
February 11, 2026 at 2:25 AM
Yeah, that's the other big thing. There's no even quasi-legitimate way to elevate an autocrat here. It would always be clearly extra-constitutional if somebody tried it. Which doesn't make it impossible in principle! It's just a big hurdle in your way.
February 11, 2026 at 2:12 AM
When we're done relitigating Weimar here we'll get to January 6, never you fear. And I will DOMINATE. 🙃
February 11, 2026 at 2:05 AM
It's the contention of most of us here that a GREAT many Americans like us are strongly committed to this Republic and don't intend to be here for the end of it. Your mileage may vary!
February 11, 2026 at 2:04 AM
It's not original to say, but there just weren't nearly enough people committed to the republic as it was constituted; not in any real way. The Weimar constitution wasn't even old enough to vote in 1955! Why would anyone care if it lasted?
February 11, 2026 at 2:04 AM
Yeah, just in terms of its basic structure AND in terms of "not working the way it was supposed to." (I mean, yeah, obviously our own set-up hasn't worked the way it's "supposed to" for a while, if it ever exactly did. But we've never reached THAT level of total dysfunction, not yet.)
February 11, 2026 at 2:00 AM
Yes I am joking, but Quayle and Pence are BOTH basically comic figures. Obviously Pence did the "right thing," and good for him, but I don't REALLY believe he saved the republic or made that much of a difference, heh.
February 11, 2026 at 1:42 AM
Dan Quayle. The hinge around which history turned. There was an hour, and there was a man for the hour, and they found each other. In Indiana, for some reason.
February 11, 2026 at 1:41 AM
Yeah. Like, the tradition of liberal democracy in the German lands was...rather slight, shall we say. It was all paper thin. Maybe it didn't HAVE to birth an autocrat, but in that environment it feels almost overdetermined. And with a whole generation of resentful war veterans all ready to go?
February 11, 2026 at 1:36 AM
nasty tricksy posters
February 11, 2026 at 1:33 AM
Yeah. There’s a lot of terrible governments in history. Probably more terrible ones than good ones! We don’t automatically have to leap to the Worst One Ever when searching for a comp. It has a whiff of stolen valor, as it were. (We’re staggeringly wealthy and secure compared to ANYONE in 1933!)
February 11, 2026 at 1:30 AM
America now (the whole WORLD now!) is just so drastically different from interwar Germany that it's just really hard to draw direct connections. Everything about our history, culture, political tradition, political SYSTEM...it's hard for us to even understand what they were going through.
February 11, 2026 at 1:21 AM
I feel like we all used up our 1933 analogies and our rebuttals to them last year sometime, so I won't go too deep into it. But I've always thought it was a generally poor analogy for our own situation, one that obscures more than it reveals.
February 11, 2026 at 1:20 AM
“Recognize when you are being fucking played for a mark” is like Step One in nearly all contemporary politics and so many people on all sides just NEVER GET THERE. It’s exhausting.
February 11, 2026 at 12:37 AM
WRONG, lowtax. We don’t like Chris Hayes EITHER.
February 11, 2026 at 12:33 AM
Man things got so “woke” for a while that it was practically illegal to be a dude in America. It was the era of
February 11, 2026 at 12:27 AM
I mean I guess? But in the story we’re told, those legionaries crossed the Rubicon for their beloved commander, right? Not for some dumbass civilian who’s openly contemptuous of them.
February 11, 2026 at 12:24 AM
I usually consider it a skill issue, like many other things that are bad.
February 10, 2026 at 10:50 PM
I don’t care about “ideological differences” smh I care when people are WRONG.
February 10, 2026 at 10:50 PM
Oh of course; it’s completely insane. This is just how the guy talks, and people like Kudlow just let him. We’re allowed to mock him though!
February 10, 2026 at 10:28 PM
Why is the American president allowing all this communism to go on, is what the people want to know
TRUMP: We can grow at 15 percent. I think more than that!

KUDLOW: Well, 15 is a big number sir

TRUMP: But Larry, you can do it. We used to grow at 15 percent because we had spirit. Today we have a lot of communism
February 10, 2026 at 10:22 PM
(I mean our side is not without sin. You’d see the usual “Trump stole the election” stuff online all of last year. But those were just crackpots and grifters, not officials.)
February 10, 2026 at 10:16 PM
States will still try to purge voter rolls in sketchy ways, etc. Suppression. But not old-school “election fraud” like Republicans are always on about.
February 10, 2026 at 10:11 PM
I’m not talking about the broad sweep of history here like they teach in “history lessons.” Or the constitution or whatever. Just the nuts and bolts of election administration and law, heh. Nobody can just stuff ballot boxes like they used to, etc. All that stuff is mostly fictional now, as we see.
February 10, 2026 at 10:09 PM
No no I mean I thought she was that character in real life because I am old and dumb and impossibly straight heh.
February 10, 2026 at 9:34 PM