Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it’s very rarely relevant to any discussion.

The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn’t the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.

Can’t easily prove a negative but here’s an example.

On 19 April 1943, the twentieth transport left Mechelen transit camp carrying 1,631 Jewish men, women, and children

Three young students and members of the Belgian resistance including a Jewish doctor, Youra Livchitz and his two non-Jewish friends Robert Maistriau[a] and Jean Franklemon [fr], armed with one pistol, a lantern, and red paper to create a makeshift red lantern (to use as a danger signal), were able to stop the train on the track Mechelen-Leuven, between the municipalities of Boortmeerbeek and Haacht.[1] The twentieth convoy was guarded by one officer and fifteen men from the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo-SD), who came from Germany. Despite these security measures, Maistriau was able to open one wagon and liberate 17 people.[1]

Other prisoners escaped from the convoy without any connection with the attack. The train driver, Albert Dumon, did all he could to keep the slowest pace between Tienen and Tongeren, stopping whenever it was possible and justifiable, and so allow that more people could jump without killing themselves. In all, 233 people succeeded in escaping from the train.[1] 89 were eventually recaptured and put on later convoys.[1] 26 others were killed, either by shooting or by the fall, and 118 who succeeded in escaping.[1] The youngest, Simon Gronowski, was only 11 years old.[1] Régine Krochmal [fr], an eighteen-year-old nurse with the resistance, also escaped after she cut the wooden bars put in front of the train air inlet with a bread knife and jumped from the train near Haacht. Both survived the war.

Emphasis mine. Albert Dumon “did his job” (the French version of the article goes a bit more in-depth). He didn’t overtly defy the orders given to him under the threat of immediate execution (!). He didn’t quit his job knowing that if he didn’t drive the trains a German train driver would take his place. He followed the regulations to the letter of the law, as incompetently as he could afford. And his malicious compliance saved 118 lives.

Here is my favorite video essay of 2025: Fantasies of Nuremberg.

A bit of a heads-up: do not watch this video if you want to retain any hint of a fantasy that such a reckoning even did happen in the first place. Do watch if you want a fantastically well written essay about one of the most mythologized and relevant events in history.

A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.

He’s a child of apartheid and, according to his own daughter, was always an awful person in private.

There’s lots of precedent for white supremacists keeping a low(-ish) profile when it suits them. Just look at famous card-holding Nazi and prolific mass-murderer Werner Von Braun and his public perception in the US. If he could cultivate the image of America’s Dearest Scientist, literally anyone could.

Love the technosolutionist mindset, but the parties trying to made that happen lost BIG TIME in the 2024 elections and neither you nor I are in charge of the energy policy. Feel free to found a startup to explore all your big ideas but our problem is neither a lack of ways to decarbonize our energy nor a lack of reasons to go off of fossil fuels.

What I’m not hearing is a solution to the problem that the European far-right is now directly funded and supported by Putin, Musk, Thiel, Zuck, that the parties currently in power have no interest in curbing this obvious foreign interference, and all that is all but guaranteeing that the far right will take full control of the region within the next few years in exchange for a few favors like – among other things – handing out to the oil barrons a blank check. That’s not a technical issue to be engineered out, that’s a political landmine the size of a continent that we’re barreling towards. Well, if we don’t get dragged into WW3 before that, at any rate.

I agree fossil fuels are bad and renewables are good, but electric heat pumps aren’t going to be deployed in every house over the summer no matter how violent the price shock. To go green we need industrial capacity, lots of it, and a ton of political will that the far-right simply does not possess because they’d rather buy Russian gas in exchange for campaign financing.

No-one “needs” anyone but economics aren’t a zero-sum game and both the EU and the US benefited enormously from our economic and military ties, and cutting those ties will be painful and the faster it happens the more painful it will be.

If we employ the economic nukes against the US right now, we will lose most digital payment systems for a few weeks as countries and bunks rush to implement Wero and the digital Euro, and we will face strong gas shortages as we currently rely on the US to make up for Russia’s. Europe and NA would immediately enter into a deep recession.

The payment systems are a hugely understated threat but are being worked on actively. The fossil fuels aren’t understated but we also lack short-term solutions as electrification takes time (but also we aren’t doing nearly enough).

However it is true that the EU is profoundly neoliberal and that ideology is very ill-equipped to deal with a fragmented world order in which free trade is no longer the default. Those assumptions are being challenged, however the far-right seems primed to bring about the populist “solution” of turning Europe into a bunch of mini-Russias.

Are we already forgetting that trump invaded Venezuela for oil, then the oil companies said “excuse me but we can’t profitably exploit their notoriously shitty oil”?

Part of being a literal Nazi is that the o.g. Nazis got themselves stuck in an increasing number of military quagmires not because they had to but because they refused to do consider the obvious peaceful solutions for their problems. The war machine had to be fed even at the cost of their own self-destruction.

Except this time they have a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping all civilization and somehow people aren’t freaking out nearly enough about that.

I mean, Nestlé killed hundreds of thousands in impoverished countries. I think the Oracle service APIs can’t be that bad, though I’m sure they would be if it made Larry Ellison $50.

Also Trump literally illegally kidnapped a head of state to the U.S. And we’re supposed to pretend the first thing they did was not simply… Move the murderer somewhere out of state where they couldn’t reach him even if they tried (which they won’t because no blue state has the balls to meaningfully stand up to Trump)?

I mean, realistically that guy could twerk in front of the Minnesota Capitol with some ICE buddies to back him up and giant sign saying “I did it” and Minnesota still wouldn’t do shit.

“State’s rights” are exactly like the “2A rights”. They only serve conservatives, whom the law protects but does not bind.

This is not just me being salty BTW. I am trying to get across the point to anyone reading this that if your plan to bring back U.S. Democracy relies on the Constitution playing in your favor, you’ve already lost.

That’s just because it’s dry by nature. Monitor your indoors humidity and adjust accordingly with a humidifier.

The sun is just a particularly angry cloud.

I’ve certainly not seen anyone frothing at the mouth about it in the francosphere. It’s a non-subject, we just updated our textbooks and moved on. Whereas in English-speaking media even reasonable actors mentioning Pluto in passing will pointedly remark on its status one way or another. Americans won’t admit it but the only reason that’s a thing is chauvinism.

It’s funny how being bilingual one spots a lot of small semantic or cultural differences that amount to large paradigm shifts between languages. Like how most French people were taught the hydrocution myth (swimming after a meal supposedly being deadly), older Koreans believe fans to be dangerous to use while sleeping, and English speakers associate vanilla flavour with blandness because of the (English-specific) synonym even though the flavor itself is very powerful and no less overused than e.g. strawberry flavoring.

What’s less funny is how when you point out such a difference some people get Big Mad about it because they can’t admit that some core belief from their childhood is actually a specific sociolinguistic quirk not shared by the rest of the world. People get tribal about the weirdest, most inconsequential shit.

“Just another action movie” but the guy up the comment chain is literally dozing off. Part one actually has very little action in it, most of it is packed landscape shots, politics, and lore dumping. Which is very accurate to the source material. If you dislike Villeneuve’s adaptation, I can only assume you did not love the Herbert books because he was incredibly faithful to the tone, especially for material that was thought to be impossible to adapt to the big screen.

Lynch’s stuff is simply not comparable because he said “fuck the source material” and just kinda did whatever came to him in some acid trip or other. Fine if that’s your thing but that’s not what Dune is - especially not the first few books.

I’m sure that pointing out the narrative’s glaringly obvious inconsistencies is going to land Russia in very hot water over the shoot down of that civilian airliner over Ukraine in 2014. Any day now. Any day now… Just one more “le epic debunk”…

Technically true but irrelevant.

A majority of Americans do not give a shit about Danemark and would not lift their pinky to help one of their staunchest allies. That is true.

MAGA is a (large) minority. That is also true.

This is all enabled by a very sizeable chunk of Americans being literally mentally unable to conceptualize people outside their village as living, breathing, fully conscious people deserving of love and safety. They are colloquially known as “non-voters”.

Compared to which alternative?

We know exactly what they are doing already. Watching the trains go by to Dachau saying “better them than me”. Watching their sons and daughters go to war saying “well I’m not really political”.

Feckless cowards. They bear full responsibility for the current situation yet you can’t count on them to do anything they aren’t made to do.

So half your country won’t be moaning and denouncing and overall being sad next time and assassination attempt is made against Trump, right?

… Right anakin?

Yeah, right.