Wait, so you’re telling me speaking breathily in hushed but very deliberate tones like an NPR interview doesn’t automatically make you a great person deserving of respect and accolade and substack subscriptions?? 🤯

Papa Johns

Who was an actual piece of racist shit BTW, I would love to see him thrown into the mix.

Nobody even engages with news and information anymore.

The people who already believe they know “the truth” are not going to change their views, and everyone else is far more concerned with seeing how the back-and-forth narrative plays out than even curiosity about actual science or research.

Trump knows this, either consciously or instinctively, which is why he’s been so successful at capturing the attention spans of people who know on some level that the WWE probably wouldn’t actually hire necromancers to be professional athletes, but they enjoy the drama so much that they make a conscious choice to believe in something they know isn’t true.

This isn’t an effect limited to redneck conservatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe

I spent years in Therapy to no effect, the lessons on mindfulness and cognitive exercises did nothing for me.

It took finally connecting with someone who better realized what my issues were to accurately gauge where the problem was, and he didn’t pull punches. He explained that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works profoundly well for so many people because largely, most people don’t exercise cognitive thought.

The human brain is so amazing and has so many layers of operation, and our society so tuned for our survival, that you can go through your whole goddamn life on autopilot, never forming an internal dialogue, never using language inside your head to analyze and compare things, never exploring the source of your own feelings and the narrative that spring from them. Most people do this, just surf through their days reacting appropriately to whatever they experience.

My problem was the opposite, I spent every waking moment in conscious dissection of every facet of my existence, always forming stories and ruminations with narration and comparisons, even when I just need to sleep and stop feeling and thinking.

Yah so anyway, that’s how I got diagnosed as being on the spectrum.

“I keep catching myself in this uncanny loop — expecting the so-called ‘AI moment’ to have fizzled out, only to realize the bubble hasn’t just not popped, it’s still inflating. You didn’t just add AI to your business plan, you pivoted your entire narrative to center on it — because in 2025, apparently, no pitch deck is complete without a sprinkle of machine learning magic. Every time I see it, I’m not just surprised, I’m re-surprised — like déjà vu, but powered by buzzwords and venture capital fumes.”

edit: the above is the same comment I replied to, but run through an AI to sound more like an AI wrote it.

Mmmnnn Hershy’s Vomit bars

I refuse to believe Europe, broadly a consumer of the same products as the US and the rest of the world, has never seen individually bagged candy.

At least we don’t have to worry about getting our houses egged anymore.

Is it still considered a fragging if he’s a lower rank than them?

While I love the fantasy, the reality is even colder and harsher.

They likely are not paying this clown any attention at all unless they’re forced to.

Policy decisions and recruitment strategies come and go, but they have a saying about war and if it ever changes or not. These lifetime generals and leaders are in their positions because they have far greater concerns than the temporary ravings of a political pundit who captured the spotlight for a moment. They will all go back to their stations, a little time lost, a little more to do, and they will sweep all the performative letters into the garbage so they can focus on the eternal art of finding ways to put holes in other people in mass numbers before they can put holes in us in mass numbers.

I wonder how many of us will go through our whole lives being able to mentally trace the route between Freeport and Qeynos. Or the perfect knoll-grind route in Blackburrow.

Metal Gear was such an influential series in my young life that I managed to get into Metal Gear Solid 2.

I could never say which guard I am in the open internet, but it’s my lasting claim to immortality.

It is criminal how we let a culture war breed violence and hate and instead of dealing harshly and unforgivingly with the people and companies profiting on violence and fear of each other, we bred an entire swath of the population frightened of anything more dangerous than a butter knife.

I think if the average first-world liberal really understood how flimsy everything actually is, and how little is separating us from dark-ages pillaging and raping, people would be far more terrified of voting in the wrong people.

impeachable

We gotta get it through society’s skull broadly that laws don’t actually exist. We all follow a social expectation, an unwritten contract. The rest is just paperwork to work out what we do when someone breaks it.

The liberal expectation that law will prevail is how democracies fall over and over.

Speak for yourself, I would have paid DIRECTLY to the defense department to put Hegseth on stage in front of hundreds or thousands of career military professionals from all walks of life and all branches of our highest levels of defense planning and strategy so they all get to see him in person for what he is, a wannabe TED-talking, sound-bite spewing grifter civilian with no leadership qualifications past running a podcast. Telling them each “how it’s going to be” in a sad, rambling, uninspired, chat-GTP written lecture that you would expect from a CEO of a silicon valley startup hungup on military aesthetics.

There is no better way to ensure that every competent and concerned armed-forces leader is on the same page as getting them all in a room together to listen to these clowns perform their circus act.

If it comes to it, we do not win revolutions without the military. We need this kind of performance.

Target was already in a really tight spot, their prices are too high and their products too specialized for an economy teetering on free-fall, and they’re not exactly offering the broad-appeal staple products like Walmart, which usually have locations literally across the street from Target.

Larger brands rarely budge and if they do, it’s not exactly a lasting social impact. I maintain that you can do a lot more as an individual simply by spending less broadly. Companies only cave to public backlash when they’re desperate, so we all need to do a lot more to make them desperate. Spend less on luxuries and entertainment, cut back or quit vices, learn to go without the latest games, movies and electronics and keep your money out of credit companies so they stop feeding off us. We built this monster, we need to starve it. (Also, again, the economy is close to collapse, good idea to start stuffing your mattresses.)

If the political temperature was about a thousand degrees cooler, it would be trivial to create a long-term buyback program and a lot of sensible laws and a simple registry for responsible owners.

I had to sell my entire firearm collection when I fell into hard times and didn’t get close to what I paid for them, if they had a program that paid even 75% of a gun’s value you would have people lined up around the block to sell off their shitty old handguns and rifles they never use.

But america will never, ever, ever let go of their weapons as long as everyone is afraid of their neighbors and their government.

America has a pretty impressive social firewall around it, we don’t get to see what its like in other countries. The average median American voter believes countries like Sweden and Norway are nations of unpopulated wilderness with old-fashioned, quaint villages where people wear silly hats and bake nice desserts for tourists.

It’s entirely kayfabe guys. Please read up on it, understand that our entire future of politics and social discourse is going to be kayfabe. The sooner we can digest and accept this fact the sooner we can use this as a tool instead of trying to “take the higher road” which our population has broadly forgotten about.

I am sad that so many progressives and leftists are not seeing this for what it is.

I hate it here.

The left gets to see headlines like this that seem devastating and they pump their fists in satisfaction.

The right pumps their fist as they see their own set of headlines that describe a totally different narrative, that despite facing unfair backlash, that the “woke mob” has been dealt a blow and has learned that Disney isn’t going to ignore the dangerous and violent rhetoric that the late night grifters spew.

Either way, Disney has calculated all of this, and their numbers will be back to normal within six months or higher because of the trending of their brand names. The average, uninvolved median voter and comfortable liberal will snuff a noise of amusement at the whole thing before firing up their Disney+ subscription to catch the latest round of Star Wars slop this fall.