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Guy who is perfectly okay with all of Hasan Piker's stance on politics including being pro houthi but is unforgivably angry at him for queerbaiting

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You know US millennials and younger have known peace for most of their lives because of how many of them are screaming crying throwing up about WWIII because the US dropped a few bombs on one country

It's just downright fucking disrespectful at this point

Not only did millions die in WWIII, but estimates of hundreds of thousands died in US-backed wars against Al Qaeda, ISIS, etc in the twenty -aughts and -teens

This isn't even close to the scale of war in Ukraine, or Sudan that are like, currently unfolding

It is mind boggling how everyone's brains have rotted to the point where they can only express things in extremes

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Many observers of constitutional law thought, until recently, that Geduldig had been consigned to history. The decision was viewed as an anomaly and outdated not only because of its reasoning, but also because it had been whittled away and rejected by both Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress overturned the result in Geduldig when, in 1978, it designated pregnancy discrimination as a species of sex discrimination. The Supreme Court also declined to apply Geduldig in cases where states sought to invoke biological differences between men and women to excuse discrimination against women. For example, in United States v. Virginia, the Court rejected the argument that Virginia could maintain a men’s-only military-leadership academy because the state insisted that women, due to their biology, could not conform to the school’s rigorous methods. Although Congress, by statute, prohibited pregnancy discrimination in employment, that did not change the Constitution. Similarly, although the justices weakened or ignored Geduldig, they never outright overruled it. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called for Geduldig to be formally overruled, perhaps recognizing that the Court’s failure to do so left the decision available to be invoked in the future to protect other discrimination.

In Skrmetti, the Court dropped even more hints that it is open to green-lighting more sex discrimination. Roberts’s majority opinion acknowledged that “a law that classifies on the basis of sex may fail heightened scrutiny”—but, it continued, the law would fail only “if the classifications rest on impermissible stereotypes,” as opposed to permissible ones such as those rooted in biological differences (emphasis added).

The Republican-appointed justices have now indicated that Geduldig is making a comeback. When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, Alito’s majority opinion invoked Geduldig to declare that abortion restrictions do not amount to sex discrimination. Such restrictions, Alito wrote, are about a medical procedure tied to the biological differences between men and women.

By invoking Geduldig, the Roberts Court is doing what the Supreme Court of earlier eras did: supplying tortured legal logic to justify long-standing hierarchies. In Plessy v. Ferguson, for example, the Court insisted that laws that required white and Black individuals to ride in different train cars were not impermissible racial discrimination—the rules applied to and burdened everyone, after all. That logic sounds like the thread in Skrmetti that maintains that bans on gender-affirming care don’t constitute gender-identity discrimination because the bans allow transgender and cisgender kids to access hormones and puberty blockers—just not for treatment of gender dysphoria. In Korematsu v. United States, the Court claimed that the internment of Americans of Japanese descent did not constitute racial discrimination; the policy was about national security. That reasoning tracks with Skrmetti’s insistence that the health-care bans do not discriminate on the basis of sex or gender identity; they are about age and medical procedures.

The decisions in Plessy and Korematsu are rightly reviled today. Geduldig should be as well. Instead, the country has a Court that is turning to it as precedent, repurposing it to justify a new era of legal discrimination.

The Archaic Sex-Discrimination Case the Supreme Court Is Reviving

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When President Donald Trump won a second term, the question wasn’t whether his economic policy would be different from the first-term version, but how. Two factions have vied to steer the administration’s agenda: Conservative populists came with a plan to roll back globalization and empower the working class. And the tech right brought a vision of an accelerated future driven by innovation and disruption.

Vice President J. D. Vance announced in March that “as a proud member of both tribes,” he believed that “this idea that tech-forward people and the populists are somehow inevitably going to come to loggerheads is wrong.” Trump would blend the two visions into a new synthesis that would simultaneously lift up his downscale voting base and unleash technological progress.

Three months later, the product that has emerged is not a better iteration of the original Trumponomics, which consisted largely of conventional Republican policy, but a worse one, much worse. It has managed, amazingly, to abandon the two tribes’ most attractive proposals while retaining the least-appealing elements of each. It discards the futuristic ambition of the tech right while preserving its social Darwinism. It leans into the closed-off nostalgia of the populist right while ignoring populists’ impulse to help workers.

One measure of the dismal result of the administration’s agenda is the slew of projections about the fiscal and economic effects of its tariffs and the megabill racing through Congress. The policies, in combination, amount to an enormous transfer of resources from people at the bottom of the economic scale to those at the top. The Yale Budget Lab projects that the bottom four-fifths of the income distribution would be made poorer by the combined tariffs and megabill, while only the most affluent would come out ahead. That is an incredible result for an administration that is increasing the national debt.

Various economic models disagree as to whether the megabill would have no effect on economic growth or actually inhibit it. Again, this would be a normal outcome for a plan that would shrink the deficit, but it’s a difficult result to pull off when you are pumping stimulus into the economy. The perverse consequence of Trump’s plan to tariff foreign trade, cut taxes for the affluent, and take health insurance from some 10 million Americans is a smaller pie, divided less equally.

You might suspect that Republicans reject the assumptions behind such projections. Indeed they do. Yet it’s not as though Trump’s economic plan has satisfied the president’s own coalition. Elon Musk, the foremost spokesperson for the tech right, lambasted Trump for blowing out the deficit while cutting support for solar and battery technology (at least, he did before Trump bullied him into silence). Oren Cass, the chief economist at the right-wing think tank American Compass and a leading advocate for populist conservatism, denounced Trump’s legislation as “a death march through a series of choices that nobody really wanted to be making.”

Vance’s prediction that the populists and the tech right could come together turned out to be, in a way, correct. The two factions quietly agree that Trump’s plan is a failure.

The effort to change the Republican Party’s economic program has been going in fits and starts for the better part of two decades. Starting in George W. Bush’s second term, a clique of reform conservatives, or “reformicons,” critiqued the party’s attachment to tax cuts for the rich as a political drag that fit poorly with its growing share of working-class voters. They derided the tax-cut fetish as “Zombie Reaganism,” a mindless adherence to an obsolete program. Yet they failed to make headway, precisely because Republicans believed, with theological certainty, that Ronald Reagan had discovered the eternally correct set of economic policies in the late 1970s, and that questioning their efficacy amounted to heresy.

The internal debate seemed to die down—until Trump emerged with his claim that every previous Republican, including the sainted Reagan, had been a total loser. At times, Trump made populist rhetorical gestures that resembled elements of the reformicon plan (promising to raise taxes on the rich, rein in Wall Street, and give everybody terrific health insurance). When he took office in 2017, however, he fell back on the old formula.

After Trump’s first term ended in defeat, his supporters set out to ensure that they would not squander their next opportunity. Most of the intellectual energy went toward building up authoritarian power that would overwhelm the hated “deep state,” as well as the judiciary, the media, and other forces that Trump loyalists blamed for undermining him. At the same time, his partisans sought to supply a second Trump administration with authentically Trumpian policies.

The populist version is laid out in a new book edited by Cass, The New Conservatives: Restoring America’s Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry. The authors lament the squandered potential of Trump’s first term, which could boast only another regressive tax cut as its sole major domestic-policy accomplishment. Rather than continue lavishing such gifts on the affluent, Cass and his colleagues argue, the new administration should tax the rich more heavily and give the working class a break. The policies they favor would combine protection of key domestic enterprises with an industrial policy to create good-paying jobs for blue-collar workers.

The alternative vision floated by the tech right is more amorphous, as you might expect from supremely confident billionaires unburdened by deep familiarity with public policy. The general thrust is a desire to cut the deficit by slashing social-insurance programs, while supercharging economic growth by encouraging high-skilled immigration and investing heavily in science.

Each tribe’s plan has its merits and drawbacks. The strength of the populist program is its emphasis on low-income workers and its willingness to tax the rich. Its weakness is its static impulse to restore a 20th-century economy. The reverse holds true for the tech right: Its strength is its emphasis on dynamism, and its weakness is its social-Darwinist-infused hostility to the safety net.

Trump might have chosen one approach or the other, or—per Vance—tried to blend their best features. Instead, he did the precise opposite: He made scientists leave the country and put in doubt the future of hundreds of high-tech factories while exploding the deficit, jacking up inequality, and taking medical care from millions.

Amazingly, in the most obvious area of overlap between the populists and the tech right—government support for a domestic battery industry, which would be vital for powering AI, drones, and other key products—Republicans have imposed deep rollbacks. The House version would cut battery production by three-quarters in coming years, eliminating manufacturing jobs and strangling this tech incubator. And by cutting funds for green energy, the House bill would raise energy prices by 7 to 9 percent, according to different projections. Trump’s determination to crush low-carbon energy sources at any price was exemplified by his recent order to reopen antiquated coal plants in Michigan, which forced consumers to pay higher electric bills simply to subsidize coal.

The perversity of this outcome is almost impressive. Trump is not even mortgaging the future for the benefit of cheap, dirty energy. He is combining short-term pain with even greater long-term pain.

The collapse of the attempt to reform Republican economic policy under Trump has been so swift and complete that we can already discern causes for the failure. I propose four.

First, Trump, flushed with victory, rashly attempted to speedrun versions of both reform visions via executive order. DOGE was the tech right’s turn at the wheel. Trump gave Musk virtualcarte blanche to remake the federal government. Rather than pursue a coherent reform agenda, Musk appeared to fall for a series of conspiracy theories, alienated Trump’s Cabinet, and wound up kneecapping some of the federal government’s tiniest but most cost-effective functions. In the process, he failed to generate any meaningful fiscal savings or operational improvements. One could envision a tech right–driven government overhaul that accomplished something useful, but Musk’s blundering resulted in fiasco.

In tandem with all of that, Trump worked with his populist trade adviser Peter Navarro to impose a set of global tariffs, on the erroneous premise that the trade deficit amounted to per se evidence of unfair foreign-trade practices. The “Liberation Day” tariffs overreached, generating a stock-market blowback that Trump couldn’t tolerate, causing him to fall back on lower across-the-board tariffs that have served little strategic purpose. No really smart way to use trade to revive manufacturing, as the populists had hoped, may have been available to Trump—but there were less dumb ways.

In both cases, Trump opted for speed and unilateral authority instead of care and legislative consultation; ham-fisted management by his ill-chosen staff did the rest.

A second source of failure is that Trump prioritized political control above any other objective, including economic outcomes. His slashing attacks on the bureaucracy, including deep cuts to scientific and medical research, incapacitated agencies that play a vital role in the economy. After paying lip service to the tech right’s hope for more high-skilled immigration, Trump not only abandoned the goal but also created a brain drain with his war on universities. In every case where Trump could choose between building human capital and punishing his enemies, he selected the latter.

Third, the deliberations among Republicans in Congress and the White House have revealed the hold that Zombie Reaganism retains over the party. The fiscal gravity of Trump’s tax cuts is so huge that it has pulled every other aspect of the party’s economic program into its orbit. Republicans have taken politically toxic votes to cut Medicaid and SNAP benefits because those cuts were needed to offset the cost of making Trump’s tax breaks permanent. The same dynamic drove Republicans to pull spending on batteries and green-energy manufacturing.

Republicans have not so much embraced these trade-offs anew as assumed them to be self-evidently good. No senior Republican elected official has advocated for letting the Trump tax cuts expire. Although many of them complain about deficits, they’ve blamed spending, not tax cuts—despite the fact that the megabill is slated to reduce spending.

The final and most profound reason that Republicans failed to revise their economic program is the corrosive influence of the Trump personality cult.

However strongly the populist wing wants to expand the party’s appeal by jettisoning unpopular policy baggage, it is committed above all to elevating Trump. Although populists such as Steve Bannon and Josh Hawley might warn of the dangers of cutting Medicaid, or urge their party to raise taxes on the rich, they have neither the leverage nor any willingness to press their complaints. The source of their political authority is loyalty to MAGA before all else, and they know that dissenting from Trump on any policy matter is a ticket to political exile—as the tech right has already discovered. Ardent Trump supporters horrified by his trade war have had to couch their dismay in obsequious pleading. Even Musk, after briefly entertaining the notion that he was free to argue with Trump in the way that Trump argues with people, shrank into humiliating contrition, adopting the tone of a defrocked Soviet official apologizing at his show trial to Stalin.

Remaking an economic strategy is an intellectual endeavor, one that is inherently fraught in the atmosphere of conformity and obfuscation that Trump has cultivated. The Republican Party’s economic philosophy was long trapped in mindless dogma. But rather than escaping it, the GOP has exchanged one cult for another.

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Think of a famous storm—maybe Hurricane Katrina, gathering force over the warming Atlantic surface and pinwheeling toward the mouth of the Mississippi River to flood the great city of New Orleans. You may remember that Katrina killed more than 1,300 people. You may remember other, less deadly storms, such as Sandy, which killed dozens of people in New York City, and at least 147 overall. Now think of a famous heat wave. It’s more difficult to do. And yet, heat waves can be fatal too. In 2023, scorching weather lingered for more than a month in Phoenix, Arizona, pushing temperatures to 119 degrees and killing an estimated 400 people in the county. Two years later, it’s all but forgotten. A major storm is history. A major heat wave is the weather.

This week’s heat wave is menacing much of the entire country: Almost three-quarters of America’s population—245 million people—have been subjected to temperatures of at least 90 degrees, and more than 30 million people are experiencing triple digits, according to one estimate. Yet few of us will remember this shared misery, unless we ourselves happen to be hospitalized because of it, or lose someone to heat stroke. Instead, these few days will blur together with all the other stretches of “unseasonably warm weather” and “record-setting temperatures” that now define summer in America. They will constitute just one more undifferentiated and unremembered moment from our extended slide into planetary catastrophe.

Heat waves have always been anonymous disasters. They lack the flashy action of earthquakes, volcanoes, or plagues, and they don’t show up much in ancient histories and myths. No single heat wave from human history has been assigned the narrative resonance of the Vesuvius eruption, or the mythic power of the storms that imperiled Odysseus. When heat waves do appear in stories, they tend to come in aggregate, after a series of them, occurring over months or years, have intensified droughts and famines. Our main cultural record of these collected runs of extreme heat consists of ruins left behind by civilizations that vanished after too many rainless years and failed harvests.

What if heat waves could be called by name, like Katrina and Sandy? Maybe that would give them greater purchase on our cultural memory. Several organizations have recently argued that we ought to label heat waves as we do tropical storms. (This week’s, if it were the first in some new system, might be called “Heat Wave Aaron.”) Supposedly, this would make heat loom larger in public discourse: More people would become aware of it and stay indoors. In 2022, a team working with the mayor’s office in Seville, Spain, piloted this idea. They assigned a local heat wave that had reached 110 degrees the name Zoe. According to a paper the team published last year, the 6 percent of surveyed residents who could recall the name without prompting also said they’d engaged in more heat-safety behaviors.

No one knows whether that effect would have lasted through other heat waves, once the novelty of naming wore off for the Sevillians. Either way, the idea may be tricky to implement. In the Atlantic Ocean, fewer than 20 tropical storms, on average, are named each year. But the United States alone is subject to hundreds of annual heat waves, and they vary immensely in scale. Some are city-size, and others—like this week’s—drape themselves across the country like a thick and invisible down blanket. And unlike tropical storms, which are categorized according to wind speed, heat waves kick in at different temperatures in different places. (Seattle’s heat wave might be Santa Fe’s average summer day.) So which of these deserve a name tag, and which ones don’t? Even if the naming idea catches on, these details will need working out.

Alas, heat waves will likely remain anonymous for most of us for a good while longer, if not forever. But perhaps we should not be so ashamed of this. Our inability to record these sweltering spells in a more conspicuous way is shared by the natural world, which rarely shows the marks of an episode of hot weather in any lasting way. A storm or an earthquake can reconfigure a landscape in a single moment of violence, leaving behind scars that can still be seen with the naked eye millennia later. In nature, as in culture, heat waves tend to show themselves after they have piled up into a larger warming trend. Only then are they visible in tree rings and ice cores, in coastlines that move inland, and in the mass extinctions that glare out from the fossil record—a thought to console yourself with as you wait for this week’s heat to break.

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The Supreme Court’s decision last week in United States v. Skrmetti will have direct consequences for many transgender minors. Tennessee’s law, which the Court upheld, prohibits people under age 18 from accessing certain kinds of treatment, such as hormones and puberty blockers, to treat gender dysphoria (the condition in which an individual’s sex does not align with their gender identity). But the consequences will be indirect as well, and reach beyond the realm of transgender rights—potentially representing a setback for gender equality and the enforcement of antidiscrimination law.

The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by the five other Republican appointees, revives an outdated case, Geduldig v. Aiello, that blessed discrimination based on archaic thinking. If the Republican appointees plan to revive this older case, they will take the law and the country back to a time when the government used the existence of “biological differences” between men and women to excuse all kinds of discrimination against women. The Court’s logic underscores the extent to which the ideology and methodology of the conservative justices threaten many of the hard-fought civil-rights protections of the 20th century.

The key issue in Skrmetti was whether Tennessee’s law, and others like it, requires heightened constitutional scrutiny. The Court said it does not and rejected two different theories to the contrary—first, that the law discriminates on the basis of sex, and second, that the law discriminates on the basis of gender identity against trans minors.

Roberts’s majority opinion first insisted that the law does not constitute sex discrimination because it concerns a medical procedure for minors—the law prohibits using hormones or puberty blockers to treat minors for gender dysphoria. Therefore, Roberts reasoned, the law distinguishes between persons on the basis of medical treatment and age rather than sex.

Roberts next explained that the law does not constitute discrimination on the basis of gender identity—discrimination against transgender individuals as such. The Court’s logic went as follows: Although the law restricts access to hormones and puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, both transgender and cisgender individuals can access these treatments for other conditions. Therefore, the Court suggested, even though transgender people are the only group negatively affected by the law, it still does not amount to discrimination against them, because they, along with cisgender individuals, can still receive hormones and puberty blockers as treatment for conditions other than gender dysphoria. (In a concurring opinion, Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito indicated that even if a law did specifically and overtly discriminate on the basis of transgender status, they still would not subject the law to heightened scrutiny.)

As support for the majority’s claims, the Court cited Geduldig v. Aiello, a 1974 case about sex discrimination that somewhat infamously concluded that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy does not constitute discrimination on the basis of sex. The case concerned California’s disability-insurance program, which excluded coverage for any disabilities arising from pregnancy. Sure, the Geduldig Court acknowledged, the group excluded from the disability-insurance program by the pregnancy-discrimination provision included only women. But the group of people who could access the state’s disability-compensation benefits for reasons other than pregnancy included both women and men. “The program divides potential recipients into two groups—pregnant women and nonpregnant persons. While the first group is exclusively female, the second includes members of both sexes,” the Court wrote. In other words, the law didn’t exclude all women from coverage, just those women who were unable to work because of pregnancy.

Geduldig also gestured to the idea that pregnancy reflects an objective biological condition, which, the all-male justices explained, made the law legitimate and meant that the law was not a form of discrimination. “Normal pregnancy,” the justices opined, “is an objectively identifiable physical condition with unique characteristics.” At the time Geduldig was decided, laws that explicitly and specifically discriminated on the basis of sex were not subject to heightened judicial scrutiny. The courts instead excused and explained away the discrimination by invoking the biological differences between men and women—legitimate reasons for legitimate discrimination.

Many observers of constitutional law thought, until recently, that Geduldig had been consigned to history. The decision was viewed as an anomaly and outdated not only because of its reasoning, but also because it had been whittled away and rejected by both Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress overturned the result in Geduldig when, in 1978, it designated pregnancy discrimination as a species of sex discrimination. The Supreme Court also declined to apply Geduldig in cases where states sought to invoke biological differences between men and women to excuse discrimination against women. For example, in United States v. Virginia, the Court rejected the argument that Virginia could maintain a men’s-only military-leadership academy because the state insisted that women, due to their biology, could not conform to the school’s rigorous methods. Although Congress, by statute, prohibited pregnancy discrimination in employment, that did not change the Constitution. Similarly, although the justices weakened or ignored Geduldig, they never outright overruled it. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called for Geduldig to be formally overruled, perhaps recognizing that the Court’s failure to do so left the decision available to be invoked in the future to protect other discrimination.

In Skrmetti, the Court dropped even more hints that it is open to green-lighting more sex discrimination. Roberts’s majority opinion acknowledged that “a law that classifies on the basis of sex may fail heightened scrutiny”—but, it continued, the law would fail only “if the classifications rest on impermissible stereotypes,” as opposed to permissible ones such as those rooted in biological differences (emphasis added).

The Republican-appointed justices have now indicated that Geduldig is making a comeback. When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, Alito’s majority opinion invoked Geduldig to declare that abortion restrictions do not amount to sex discrimination. Such restrictions, Alito wrote, are about a medical procedure tied to the biological differences between men and women.

By invoking Geduldig, the Roberts Court is doing what the Supreme Court of earlier eras did: supplying tortured legal logic to justify long-standing hierarchies. In Plessy v. Ferguson, for example, the Court insisted that laws that required white and Black individuals to ride in different train cars were not impermissible racial discrimination—the rules applied to and burdened everyone, after all. That logic sounds like the thread in Skrmetti that maintains that bans on gender-affirming care don’t constitute gender-identity discrimination because the bans allow transgender and cisgender kids to access hormones and puberty blockers—just not for treatment of gender dysphoria. In Korematsu v. United States, the Court claimed that the internment of Americans of Japanese descent did not constitute racial discrimination; the policy was about national security. That reasoning tracks with Skrmetti’s insistence that the health-care bans do not discriminate on the basis of sex or gender identity; they are about age and medical procedures.

The decisions in Plessy and Korematsu are rightly reviled today. Geduldig should be as well. Instead, the country has a Court that is turning to it as precedent, repurposing it to justify a new era of legal discrimination.

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JD Vance is as if someone was writing a caricature of a millennial white supremacist

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The U.S. Treasury’s Federal Insurance Office has posted  ZIP code level data for 2018-2022 showing that homeowners insurance is becoming more costly and harder to procure for millions of Americans as the costs of climate-related events pose growing challenges to insurers and their customers. The snapshot covers more than 330 private insurers and about 50 million homeowner insurance policies for each year. The data were collected through a first-of-its-kind effort by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, state insurance regulators, and the Federal Insurance Office.

This interactive map, built from a spreadsheet the Treasury posted in January 2025, shows several indicators. Typing in a particular zip code calls up a report card with the fraction of policies that were not renewed, the frequency of claims, the average claim payment, and the average premium for each of the five years. These data are averages; any particular homeowner’s experience may differ from the average. These data allow current and prospective homeowners to compare the cost of insurance and the frequency of claims and non-renewals in their neighborhoods to adjacent neighborhoods and to the rest of the country.  

The data were accompanied by a 66-page report, Analyses of U.S. Homeowners Insurance Markets, 2018-2022: Climate-Related Risks and Other Factors.

Among the report’s key findings:

Homeowners insurance costs are rising fast across the nation, although with significant variation by region and ZIP code. Average premiums increased 8.7% faster than the rate of inflation in 2018-2022.

Homeowners in communities affected by substantial weather events are paying far more than those elsewhere. From 2018 to 2022, consumers living in the 20% of ZIP codes with the highest expected annual losses to buildings from climate-related perils paid $2,321 in premiums on average, 82% more than those in the 20% lowest climate-risk ZIP codes.

Homeowners in areas with the highest expected losses from climate-related perils face higher policy nonrenewal rates from private insurers.  Consumers in the highest risk ZIP codes faced average nonrenewal rates about 80 percent higher than those in the lowest risk ZIP codes.

Climate change is making it more costly for insurers to operate. The paid loss ratio—how much insurers paid for claims relative to premiums received—was highest in the highest risk ZIP codes. These areas had a higher average claim—$24,000 on average, compared to an average of about $19,000 for lowest risk areas. 

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Worried about my qualifications? I can crush a mech with my biotics or shoot its head off at a hundreds yards. Take your pick.

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The Tale About Peace Deals And Russia

The End.

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Vomit

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The best way to approach the Supreme Court’s decision in US v. Skrmetti, which upheld Tennessee’s transphobic ban on gender-affirming care for minors, is to understand that the conservative majority these days begins with their desired result and then works backward.

You’d think the conservative justices would care about how to craft their arguments, particularly Chief Justice John Roberts, a person who’s exceedingly concerned about his legacy. But they don’t. It’s not laziness — lord knows these justices probably run their Federalist Society/fascists-in-training law clerks ragged tracking down material they can bend and twist and mangle in service of rolling back civil rights. It’s that they don’t care because they don’t have to. They know they have all the power.

Think of the MAGA majority’s shoddy arguments as a flex, a reminder that five (or six) justices control your fate and can’t even be bothered to pretend that they value coherent reasoning. That’s the real legacy of the Roberts Court: a steady erosion of rights dressed up as freedom, with little care as to whether their positions are legally sound.

Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Skrmetti, a low quality mix of medical misinformation, praise for other countries that also kick trans kids in the teeth, and legal conclusions that are equal parts tortured and dishonest. None of these things is new, however. These are the usual rhetorical tricks of the Roberts Court.

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He’s selling off national forest to corporations now. Even if protections are reinstated later, there’s not going to be anything left to preserve. I’m so fucking tired.

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I actually think an underdiscussed solution to the male loneliness epidemic is for lonely men to stop killing people. I think if lonely men didn’t kill people because they felt entitled to the love and attention of others that would really do a bangup job of helping male loneliness. Perhaps they could even make friends with a woman without thinking that if they’re nice to her 3 times they deserve sex from her. Just spitballing here.