I would guess the average semi-news-aware European citizen can probably speak more intelligently about the illegality of Trump than they can about their MEP's record. *Looks up who the Warsaw MEPs are on his phone under the table before he gets asked at this diner near the Polish consulate.*

Quick, someone ask this weirdo about his thoughts about the concept of the pater familias. (It will be neither short or surprising, but it will give the rest of us time to leave and seal all other exits.)

Thank you, from the bottom of my materially unaffected heart, for upholding the sanctity of marriage in these trying times. 🖤🖤

There are a lot of well-reasoned arguments to support you, so I'll roll in some bad faith, opinionated ones: the scripts taught in most North American schools in recent decades are ugly! GTFO with this D'Nealian and Zaner-Bloser bullshit. Do Spencerian if you insist on a local one instead of imports

And I do think memorization can be improved (setting aside how much of education should be memorizing stuff 🙄). But there are more disjointed scripts better suited to pencils and modern pens. Also, how I really feel: cursive taught in most North American schools in recent decades is ugly as hell.

I was trying to come up with a joke about how Cyrillic cursive is actually just generations of gaslighting. Then I realized that a hastily written transliteration of the word English word "gaslighting" into most versions of Cyrillic cursive is already pretty funny to my dumb brain as it is.

1. A key trait of proper scum is that they bring out the worst in us, especially when confronting them. E.G. my strong awareness of sharing humanity with the ICE agents who raid my neighborhood makes me loathe them more, not less.

2. Costume opportunity for an unfiltered inner monolog character? 👀

Yes please! Seeing the battle between attempts at smooth localization and an ever increasing footnotes-to-main-body ratio on each page would be more than worth it on its own.

Can someone please link to the original thread(s)? I'd like to be righteously indignant on @michaelhobbes.bsky.social's behalf one last time before the year is up.

As a dear friend of mine once said: "Thomas, circular firing squads are important. It's how you know the guns work."

How does this work? Do we just reply as needed to this post? Or is this a one time thing? (I'll take whatever parasocial encouragement I can get in this endeavor!)

You're a compelling journalist grounded in empathy and curiosity. Many of the things you say that frustrate me coincide with traits I have disliked in myself that I need to learn to accept or even value. And your dunks on neolibs, authoritarian communists, and other dumb children are par excellence.

Once again, the elite podcaster class is punching down at poor, defenseless legacy journalism institutions for something as trifling as not investigating the substance of a news story. One hardly knows whether to laugh or weep.

In the spirit of solidarity and celebration in the face of truly asinine forms of evil coming at us, let me say as a Chicagoan on this special night: okay fine, I guess bodegas are sort of different from just like a regular corner store.

This would perhaps get under my skin less if there weren't retVrn with a V idiots actively trying to harken back to something that never existed as they imagine it. Why are we conceding the past to our enemies?

And it just equally fascinates me and frustrates me that one of the successful legacies of these monstrous empires is that we view everything through a lens that centers them even when acting in opposition to them and their like. To a limited degree that's necessary, but it blinkers us quickly.

I'm maybe mixing up my It Could Happen Here hosts (sorry if so), but it reminds me of what I think @miawong.bsky.social said about learning about at least a single third fascist state other than Italy and Germany to compare to because there's no shortage. Evil presents itself in many forms.

Even if we're sticking to the specific parts of Europe that anglosphere secondary education happens to fixate on from that particular time period, you're still erasing contemporary phenomena ranging from, say, millworkers' culture across Britain to oppressive structures in Wilhelmian Germany.

This is not to underestimate the cultural and political might of a specific side of Britain at the time. But our imagining a monolithic set of values for the time period frankly makes those weirdos seem more mainstream than they ever managed to make themselves and is a posthumous victory for them.