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Reposted by Alison Smaalders

Garth Marenghi's Catbus @hayao.lol · 13h

running for president in '28, my entire campaign is just two posters, one picturing prominent members of the current administration beneath the banner headline "PRISON", and another of all the leading techbros beneath the banner headline 'WE WILL TAKE ALL THEIR MONEY'

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rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 3d

I haven't had the capacity to keep up with moderation lists for a bit, but this one is really obvious, so I'm stealing some energy from Future Me: a list for the extremely obvious wave of inauthentic accounts following today's newly-created US gov accounts

bsky.app/profile/did:...

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Molly Jong-Fast @mollyjongfast.bsky.social · 19h

Mike Johnson has given the house a very very very very very very very very very long vacation because he’s worried about the Epstein files

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Alison Smaalders @vividwings.bsky.social · 3h

WHY DID YOU HAVE TO REMIND ME ABOUT THE SCHOOL BUS the school bus lives rent free in my head forever. I will be mumbling about it in the nursing home.

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Miriam Forster @miriamforster.bsky.social · 2d

Chekhov: if there is a gun on the mantlepiece it must go off in the third act.

T. Kingfisher: if there is a gun on the mantlepiece, the mantlepiece is probably going to try to eat you.

Stephen King @stephenking.bsky.social · 2d

Two books for spooky season:
COFFIN MOON, Keith Rosson: Best modern vampire story ever (although it's set in the 70s).
THE TWISTED ONES, by T. Kingfisher: It lures you in with chatty good humor (especially about NPR Pledge Week) and a lovely dog...then slams the door and bites you in the dark.

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Patrick 🗽 🇺🇸 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 ⚖️ @patrickjk.bsky.social · 2d

Speaking of boyfriends/girlfriends.

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AndreaaaHHhHHHHh!! Grimes @andreagrimes.com · 7h

no thoughts only cat tv

Tipsy the tortoiseshell kitten perches on a tv cabinet and swats at an animated lizard dashing across a tv screen above

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Cheryl Lynn Eaton @cheryllynneaton.bsky.social · 8h

"How do you expect to win back men...?"

We don't want those men. They are the hot dogs on the floor of humanity and we still have all these nice prepped hamburger patties if someone would just let them cook.

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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 7h

it always makes me feel like I'm losing my mind whenever some absolute monster says "well ALL men do this evil thing so why are you mad at ME, it's just in our MALE NATURE to be hateful rapist Nazi homophobes" or whatever the thing is

I'm always like, the men around him should feel insulted by that

Cheryl Lynn Eaton @cheryllynneaton.bsky.social · 8h

People act like all the men are gone. The men are attending protests. The men are putting together scooters for their kids. The men are getting a set of turntables for the first time. The men are buying Nikes. The men are getting super into noir. They're not Nazis and they're fine. Keep your freaks.

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Dan Killam @dantheclamman.blog · 12h

Premeditated murder of the American research community. None of this had to happen.

jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 13h

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero

Harvard FAS Cuts Ph.D. Seats By More Than Half Across Next Two Admissions Cycles | News | The Harvard Crimson

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for th...

www.thecrimson.com

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Reposted by Alison Smaalders

Solomon @solomonmissouri.bsky.social · 14h

“I was a fool then but I’m not now”

GROWTH

Technical appreciator @whatahellofawaytodad.com · 14h

Reminder that Violent J of Insane Clown Posse has the correct response to a lot of the shitty things he said in the early days.

STEREOGUM: People my age, we talk about how we were lucky that we didn’t have social media growing up, and there’s no record of all the dumb shit we said and did. You didn’t have social media, but everything you said and did in those years is on record, and you’ve got to live with it now. That’s tough.

VIOLENT J: And the amount of gay Juggalos out there is really surprising. I think about them doing their research and getting the old records, getting excited about it, and getting their hearts broke or something, you know? I tell my daughter, “For the rest of your life, when your friends ask why your dad said that, say it’s because your dad was a fool. Don’t defend me. Say I was a fool then, but I’m not now.” There’s no excuse. I was going with the flow, and that’s the very thing we preach against — being a sheep. And that’s what I was doing.

https://www.stereogum.com/2083804/icp-interview-juggalos/interviews/weve-got-a-file-on-you/

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David Sirota @davidsirota.com · 1d

Every now and then I go back and read the Citizens United ruling to see if it is as unhinged as I thought, and every time I do that I see it is actually far more deranged than I remembered.

levernews.com/book

Supreme Court ruling: "This Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 1d

Monstrous and inhumane. Our neighbors are being tortured

Ken Stone @kenstonemedia.bsky.social · 1d

Basement of courthouse horror stories: “One immigrant got her period during the meeting in which she was detained, and was forced to wear that same underwear for days.”
timesofsandiego.com/politics/202...

Asylum-seekers now held for days – in a downtown San Diego basement

Migrants held in makeshift conditions in basement offices say they slept in the cold, used the restroom without privacy and went without medical attention.

timesofsandiego.com

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social · 1d

the symbolism of “Trump destroying the White House for a overpriced luxury vanity project, during a government shut down, days after a historically-large mass demonstration against his regime called “No Kings”’ would be rightly viewed as laying it on a little thick if it was in a work of fiction

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Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 2d

Actual Voters have takes so much wilder than anyone online could imagine

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Akane ⚔️🫀 DTIYS pinned! @akanelogics.bsky.social · 8d

‼️ REMOVE AIslop from your PINTEREST results.‼️
Let's see how true this is....

1. Go to ‘Refine your recommendations’ and remove everything related to ‘generative AI interests’.

(As if anyone who visits the site for reliable references would be interested in that...)

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Alison Smaalders @vividwings.bsky.social · 1d

Even if this doesn't fix it entirely, any reduction in slop is a win. Thank you for this tip!

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Alison Smaalders @vividwings.bsky.social · 1d

This might be worse than the previous winner of "most dangerously enmeshed startup activity and/or 'benefit'" I have seen previously, which was "our yearly team building exercise is that the CEO takes the whole company and their significant others to Burning Man to run a theme camp".

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Carole V. Bell @cvbell.bsky.social · 1d

It really does seem remarkable how often protest activity from the right is treated as the voice of the people and protest from the left no matter how big tends to be questioned and downplayed.

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 1d

Here's a gift link to the New York Times' coverage of the initial Tea Party rallies in April 2009 which inspired the media to treat it like a massive movement.

Check out how tiny the crowds were:

Philly: 200
DC: "several hundred"
Boston: 500
Austin: 1,000
Houston: 2,000

Tax Day Is Met With Tea Parties (Published 2009)

www.nytimes.com

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Alison Smaalders @vividwings.bsky.social · 1d

Silwa seems to engage in good faith- his opinions, however bad, good, or just deeply weird, are his own. He is not tempering them in order to get elected by the current GOP. I think that's why he and Mamdani were way more respectful towards each other during the debate than they were to Cuomo.

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Constant Scream @ajaxsinger.bsky.social · Apr 4

The Calvinist insistence that charity interferes with the predestined choices of God runs very very deep in our culture and is a perennial thwarting force to having nice things

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · Apr 4

Keynesianism is like Ozempic in that it's something that works but makes people mad because they want moral hazard to be involved

Regime Accountant, CPA ☠️🎢 @regimecpa.bsky.social · Apr 4

There’s a certain kind of person who thinks Keynesian stimulus is “putting off” a necessary correction and I’m always amazed how many of them there are.

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ivysorta @ivysorta.bsky.social · Apr 7

Meme about unmasking a Scooby Doo villain. The masked villain is labelled "a confusing and abrasive aspect of American culture". Fred pulls off the mask to reveal John Calvin's face and exclaims "John Calvin! Again?"

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John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 1d

Are we doing "The ACA Sucks" Discourse again?

I'm going to guess most people hating on it from the left have never received a hospital bill the size of book; I put the apple there for scale.

That's the $1.3 million bill my kid incurred in his first ~94 days. Why does that make me respect the ACA?

A giant stack of papers, about 1/2 the size of an apple, on a counter.

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Emma Evans @trance.bsky.social · 1d

Link was one of the early members of Bluesky, he's a lawyer and disability advocate. He pointed out Jay, the CEO of Bluesky was following a noted transphobe and was critical of this. Then he was suspended. When people were like WTF, it was said his ban was due to posting a Charlie Kirk reaction meme

Joe Broggio @joebroggio.bsky.social · 1d

Who is link and why were they banned, I finally gotta ask

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Dan Izzo @izzos.us · 1d

It's also worth pointing out that we don't have JUST billionaires. We have UBER-Billionaires, people with HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS.
They're massive money sinks at the top of the economy and just hoard INSANE, POINTLESS levels of personal wealth that is artificially cut off from other people

Micah @rincewind.run · 1d

billionaires should not be allowed to exist because the downside of "one of them loses their mind" is simply too dangerous for a functional society

also, having a billion dollars tends to make you lose your mind

John Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.social · 1d

The whole point of democracy is so one person's derangement does not become everybody's problem. It's social hygiene. The fact the richest men in the West are a mix of grotty twelve year olds and deranged apocalypse fanatics is a problem, and we should be honest about it.

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