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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 6h

“politics is the art of the possible”

That is something that you say when you’re trying to get to 51 Senate votes on a reconciliation bill, not when you are floating Leviticus as a policy roadmap

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 6h

🎶She's Canadiaaaan [uh huh, uh huh] / 🎶
🎶You wouldn't know herrrr [uh huh, uh huh]🎶

a woman in a spitfire shirt is standing in a crowd of people .

Alt: a woman in a spitfire shirt is standing in a crowd of people, bouncing to a ska song

media.tenor.com

Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 6h

I swear, this guy is a bot

Could not possibly be real. It's like a dril tweet come to life

No possible way someone owns themself this hard, uh uh, nope, no way

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Reposted by Dale Chapman

Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 8h

👨‍🍳💋

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 6h

This guy JFC

You know, not all of politics is some kind of amusing spectator sport, fodder for your contrarian takes

Your only setting as a political analyst is the popcorn munching meme

Guy with neatly coiffed white hair sitting in a chair in a suit, nodding with gleeful eagerness, while munching from a giant tub of popcorn

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 7h

Right, which used to set the far outer perimeter of right wing extremism, paramilitary survivalists at the edge of the known world

Now it occupies something close to the center of US politics

Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 7h

Right. All of those videos with gritty footage of manly men in tactical gear and wraparound shades that they had hoped to set to bitchin’ Slipknot tunes lose all of their punch when the enemies they are combining are decked out like Care Bears

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Reposted by Dale Chapman

Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 8h

As the administration goes all in on an alternate reality about portland that bears no resemblance to fact and rule of law, continuing radical (and just plain funny, ridiculing) acts of the imagination along with other ways of getting out the reality on the ground may help curb their momentum.

fake film poster with a sunset and the portland frog protestor with words The Portland War, A Film by Ken Burns

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 7h

Really not sure about the optics here, Mr. Miller

Some group of fisherman (they could easily be fisherman) going about their business in some random corner of the Atlantic, and you basically nuke them from orbit

Who do you think comes across as more of a menace? Them or you?

Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 7h

Make my misnomer of "Dave" seem really underwhelming by comparison

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 8h

Well, I guess Morrissey

TBH, I knew he was a xenophobic racist as far back as his first solo album (You don't write "Bengali in Platforms" if you haven't got a chip on your shoulder about immigrants), but with Johnny Marr in the Smiths, I can't not listen to those records

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 8h

"I made a lifetime of great music, and all I got was this major biopic featuring Joaquin Phoenix and a killer swan-song video featuring my stunningly cathartic setting of a Trent Reznor song, part of a groundbreaking late-career revitalization produced by Rick Rubin"

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 8h

The coolest my dad has ever been was when he told me, "yeah, I saw Johnny Cash in Toronto in the late 70s. He was high on something!" he said, clucking disapprovingly

I was like, I would legit build a time machine to experience that

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 9h

"Finally giving Cash his due": I guess this guy slept through the last decade of Cash's life, the Rick Rubin collabs, the NIN covers, the major biopic that followed his passing, etc. etc.

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 9h

Oh yeah, lol, major dork, all of us definitely think so

Cover for one of Rick Rubin's Johnny Cash productions, "Last Man Standing (American Outtakes)." Cash is standing with his back to us in a black and white photo, wearing a dark coat and pants, his acoustic slung over his back, the dramatic, all-caps bold sans-serif word CASH in white letters at the top against a black/dark grey background.

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 10h

Particularly applicable for when you are a musicologist who has slept on a big new album that has just dropped

Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 10h

Do we know if that guy was able to get his flight rebooked?

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 10h

I feel like every single cabinet member was appointed with the immediate, short-term goal of owning the libs

The fact that they would actually have to govern after that was mostly a secondary concern

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 10h

The circumstances in which Obama earned his Nobel -- ie., before even becoming President -- seem like almost crafted in a lab to make Trump furious lol

I will say that if Trump really wants one, a good first step would be to lay off the extrajudicial murders of Venezuelan boat passengers

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 10h

There's a third way of saying it, the way I say it

3. "I, a self-deprecating scholar/journalist/intellectual with a bad case of imposter syndrome, have never heard of this thing, further proof of my intellectual fraudulence, and am looking at my feet in humiliation as I mumble the phrase gloomily"

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 10h

Uh oh. What is it now lol

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 10h

The impact of the internet, and an obsession with shareholder value, has led newspapers to slash newsrooms, dismantle foreign bureaus, consolidate entire news beats into threadbare coverage by overworked multitaskers

And he's gonna ask him if he'd like to see a machine replace more writers' jobs

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 10h

Were I him, I would try to learn more about the subject of my interview before blundering in with a question like that

This is a guy who has spent a chunk of his career railing about how newspaper journalism has been killed by disinvesting in the human expertise that gives you attention to detail

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 11h

This is unbelievable. An NPR journalist asking David Simon if he wishes that he had AI to help himself break through writer's block with soulless boilerplate

As if the show he was writing for was CSI Miami, and not The Fucking Wire

Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 1d

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 11h

RFK JR.:

The "say the line, Bart!" meme, where the caption in the first frame -- expectant students and teacher, looking at Bart -- is "show us the proof, Mr. HHS Scientist!". The second frame, showing a dejected and compliant Bart, has the caption, "In our study of 417 TikTok videos, we 'definitively proved' that acetaminophen causes autism". (In the last of the three frames, the entire class cheers as Bart has "said the line"

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