millie @ millie @beehaw.org

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Joined

2 yr. ago

The controversial columnist is exiting the New York Times “Opinion” section this spring as part of a wave of job cuts. In 2022, after a decade of editing the Book Review, Paul joined “Opinion,” where she quickly gained a reputation as a liberal contrarian determined to court the rage of the online left. Over three short years, Paul has breezily claimed that free speech is under assault by woke activists, that gender medicine is mutilating a generation of children, and that America has become a dark, dystopian place where freethinkers get canceled and nobody reads books anymore. Through all of this, she has proudly donned the mantle of a beleaguered liberal, rejecting any suggestion that she has collaborated with the victorious right. “If people on the fringe are accusing me of ‘making straw-man arguments’ or ‘both-siderism,’” Paul said in 2023, “then I know that I’ve done something right.”

Wow what an absolute hero. 🙄

Seems like most of the donuts recalled are from the Dunkin' in-store brand.

aaaaa you're not me!

It is incredibly obvious that CAPTCHAs are at the very least a way of exploiting distributed labor to train AI.

An archive link would probably help if you want people to actually read the article.

I appreciate the sideways wordplay. Also it's nice to see some good news.

Stract seems kind of bad. Results are mostly irrelevant. It seems impossible to get information about any sort of local stores or anything like that. I literally can't search up a youtube page. Like, the ways in which google actually still functions don't work on stract at all.

Literally none of that changes the self-destructive stupidity of letting Trump get into office.

It isn't about whether the Democrats are exemplary or even decent. It's about the actual result of your actions. Are the Democrats to blame for failing to act, for failing to prevent a second term, and for all the other mistakes and capitulations they're guilty of? Absolutely. Does that absolve voters of responsibility? Not even a little bit.

At the end of the day, voters still decided that they were willing to let others suffer. They decided that Palestinians don't matter, that health care doesn't matter, that trans rights don't matter, that immigrants don't matter, that the environment doesn't matter, that access to food and housing doesn't matter, that reproductive rights don't matter, and on and on and on, because it's more important to send a message that they don't approve of the Democrats.

Everyone who spread the narrative that they're no different is complicit in everything Trump does, because this is what you chose. This is the supposed lack of difference. This is what you said doesn't matter and isn't important.

Nothing you say about the Democrats will wash the blood from your hands.

Literally. This is the result of the level of discourse on the internet and of petty one-upsmanship with a complete disconnect from reality. All that matters is being 'right' not what actually happens in the world. Therefore it's a race to the bottom while doing everything possible to shatter any political power that might have resulted in a coalition with any chance of saving anything.

So we get the worst because people are too busy shitting on anyone they can point a finger at for not being their idea of perfect.

We are apparently incapable of learning how to get along with one another on the left and are utterly susceptible to atomization, while the right is capable of banding together with absolute moral bankruptcy to light the planet on fire, commit genocide, and destroy every social service we ever had.

Fucking infuriating that this feckless performative bullshit is the best we can muster. That we literally are too divided by pointing out everything wrong with everyone else to ever get together and accomplish anything.

The stupid thing is, the people directing the bot farms that started this? They fucked themselves too. The right fucked themselves, the center fucked themselves, the left who couldn't get it together to work with anyone lacking ideological 'purity' fucked themselves.

Humans are too stupid to exist. Fucking checkmate. We all lose.

Gloat? Hello? I'm furious. The people who pushed this angle successfully fucked the world up for a bunch of people including themselves.

They may literally have wiped us out. All of us. They almost certainly doomed millions to die of entirely preventable environmental disasters.

For what? Hyperbole? Spite? Fucking really?

This guy heard people talking about China being more repressive than the US and took it as a challenge.

Thank goodness the literal heroes who refused to vote for Harris prevented this.

So brave. So admirable. So incredibly thoughtful. What foresight.

So the solution to a society that's propagandized to the point that people legitimately think allowing Trump to have the white house is 'no different' from making sure he doesn't get it is.. not trying to convince anyone that they've been misled? Not trying to point out how utterly foolish that kind of thinking is?

Literally just: don't fight the propaganda machine? Let it happen meekly and quietly? Don't spend any energy on trying to point out how utterly stupid it is to allow the worse option because you don't absolutely love the marginally better one that will save lives?

Read that list of executive orders and tell me again how the Democrats are just like the Republicans.

Why should you be forced to pick one? This isn't some game design decision by the developers of your favorite MMO. You're forced to pick one because you don't have the spine to do anything else that can get results.

Are you out there being the change in the Democratic party? Are you out there forcing change with your actions? Are you actually doing something to have a choice between something other than two parties?

Or are you just passively sitting back and complaining that nobody gave you the choice you'd rather make? The level of helplessness in the decision to just let everyone around you suffer because you don't like the choices that your utter passivity has presented you with is absolutely wild.

This isn't a game. This isn't a boycott. This is our planet, our species, and our lives. Real people, likely including yourself, will suffer because you refuse to do anything but wait for someone to come hand you a warm bottle of milk that you won't turn your nose up at. But you'd rather starve and scream and then say "look what you did by failing to give me the choice I would rather have had."

Y'all need to wake up.

I think you mean "how did it work for us?".

You have to live in this world too. Every person who decided they'd rather let Trump win than vote for Harris still has to inhabit this world and has to watch the shit they ushered into it. Americans who decided they care more about making a point than about the actual material results of the election have that blood on their hands just like the actual Trump voters do.

So become a cobbler.

No. They're supposed to be a means for us to make intelligent decisions that keep the world from being as bad as it possibly could be. They're a means of exerting our influence other than spilling blood.

Is it better when they represent us? Yes. Is it better when we have access to politicians who actually have a substantial moral compass and aren't swayed by money? Absolutely.

But does that mean that if we don't have that we should throw childish fits and sabotage our own world in response? Absolutely not.

Want to know a good way to make sure that politicians actually focus on representing the interests of their electorate?

...Become a politician and do it. Put your money where your mouth is. Instead of having a tantrum and letting the worst possible person literally light the government on fire, go be the change you want to see.

Or, if you're not willing to do that, use your intelligence to make the world as good as you can with the limited power that you have instead of lying on the ground kicking and screaming because nobody's doing it for you.

It's not my fault I shot myself in the foot. Someone should have provided me with a better pair of shoes.

No I can't be bothered to take up cobbling.

Walk barefoot in the woods and take up guitar.