kyleemclauren

[kyleemclauren]

maybe i like my tech a little bit inconvenient

[kyleemclauren]

This is an interesting thing. Looks like testimonies of people who left the MAGA movement- how they got into it and why.

Leaving a cult is really hard, so I really respect the people who are speaking from this place.

[kyleemclauren]

»swofehuper« by richard tipping (+)

[via]

[kyleemclauren]

Also, I cannot emphasize enough that the current Republican argument is that the Biden administration did not have statutory authority to change the payment rates of low-income student loan borrowers, but that they DO have the statutory authority to unilaterally close the organization that runs the student loan program.

[kyleemclauren]

It turns out that actually standing by "men and women are not inherently very different" is a reliable way to bother absolutely everyone. Left or right, cis or trans, feminist or misogynist, all cling to the binary for dear life.

[kyleemclauren]

ok I really don't understand this post because. you're telling me you pee into the toilet standing up in your own house?? You know you can sit down right? No one is making you stand up like it's a urinal

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tumblr discourse after 13 years on this fucking website

[kyleemclauren]

The great dilemma of the news media industry is that people want to be told that they’re right, but they want to be told they’re right by an organisation that’s credible.  If people think that a news source just tells them what they want to hear, it’s not as satisfying; it’s like getting a valentines card from your sister. So a lot of the art of editing a newspaper or tv station is that of giving the impression that if your viewers were wrong in their political beliefs and worldview, you’d give it to them straight, while of course never actually giving it to them straight.  The nature of the art is very different depending on how dumb the people are that you’re practicing it on.  There are plenty of people out there in the world who are happy to receive the cognitive equivalent of a valentines card from their sister; there are even economically viable audiences who are prepared to believe that the stripper really liked them.

Media outlets which have to sell themselves to an intelligent, educated and self-aware audience spend a lot of their time on the project of convincing the audience they would give it to them straight.  Famously, the Financial Times is one of the only places you’ll read left-Keynesian economics, and the Guardian is absolutely famous for castigating its middle class progressive audience for various largely aesthetic awfulnesses of their lifestyle.  The New York Times usually has two or three opinion columnists whose sole and entire job is to annoy and disgust the readers. The name of the game here is to throw a load of bracing but peripheral criticism, to reinforce the credibility of the central message of agreement. At the other end of the scale, well, Fox and the Daily Mail. 

Been thinking of the maximally truth-seeking AI that seems to be asking Elon what he thinks.

[kyleemclauren]

[kyleemclauren]

how it feels to be a lesbian feminist & a pervert in 2025

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[kyleemclauren]

ok time to pirate ubisoft games even harder

[kyleemclauren]

I will admit I do find Republican self-pity increasingly frustrating, because it often stems from imagining what it would be like for certain things to happen to them, while the people they vote for or otherwise support actually do them to somebody else.

Way back during the George Floyd riots, there was a news story about some poor family on a camping trip to a city in rural Washington, who were surrounded and had the road they were on blocked off by a bunch of chuckleheads who thought they were antifa raiders, finally mounting their attack on rural America!

And the national media sort of mostly treated this as a terrifying example of armed stupidity, but national press never really picked up on the thing that made it especially infuriating to me.

Which was that there was a city in the pacific northwest where violent political activists would travel from out of town in order to intimidate the locals, violently assault people, and vandalize businesses.

The city of Portland, Oregon.

For goddamn years before the Floyd riots, the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer (Not to mention other lesser remorae) would travel to Portland every summer specifically to get into fights.

Tiny Toese is serving time for an assault conviction stemming from a brawl he and his cronies started a god damned mile from where my mom lived at the time.

Fun fact, there's footage of him during the speech before the brawl talking about how he wanted to follow trans women into bathrooms and beat the shit out of them.

They pulled this shit in Seattle, too.

So there was and still is something so incredibly frustrating to me about a politics that just reverses reality. That treats an imaginary thing antifa is probably about to do as hard, concrete fact, the rock upon which to build a political outlook, a thing so utterly concrete and real that you will grab a loaded gun and head out into the night to stop it from happening.

And at the same time the actual direction of that kind of political violence, the actual groups that had for years been actually traveling to cities they don't live in to provoke, mock, threaten and assault the locals are just ignored as bizarre liberal paranoia.

And it's the same with the people who spent the Obama years terrified of Jade Helm looking complacently at Trump.

"Well, Republicans are afraid of state power, you see. The Democrats don't really understand that the government isn't always your friend."

And like, look, I am fucking FAR better off than a lot of other people, but like, the President has called me "vermin", has deployed the military to MacArthur park in order to intimidate the people and politicians who live there, because they hold political views that I happen to share, and he is currently talking about how popular politicians in my political party might need to be arrested, denaturalized and deported from the country.

Yeah, man, I fucking know that the government isn't always my friend.

[kyleemclauren]

Depression is actually really *weird* by the standards of "things that can be different about how your brain works", isn't it?

[kyleemclauren]

this is legitimately the funniest thing that’s ever happened in my town

[kyleemclauren]