Das Doak

🎵 every accusation is a confession 🎵

tapping the "people underestimate how many of our society's elites are motivated not by self-interest, but by sadism" sign

left-liberal-democratic-international!

There are a whole bunch of competent anti-imperialists; most of them are running countries that are currently resisting imperial aggression by China or Russia.

The best time to buy an e-cargo-bike is as soon as humanly possible.

Well, gas is expensive, and food is expensive, and we’re doing a war nobody wants, but at least there are no jobs

Is it really just like a cruise if there isn't a raw seafood buffet?

Image of a car filled highway in congestion and gridlock, with three cigarette packs in front, one named gas, the second named hybrid, and the third named EV. The main text says “taste the freedom.“ At the bottom is the tagline for the Urban Truth Collective. Car dependency is the opposite of freedom.

Car dependency is a hell of a drug. #UrbanTruth

I figured that they'd remodeled, but the bones are still there and they scream "70s den of unspeakable acts and abundant body hair" loud and clear.

bsky.app/profile/dasd...

It turns out that no amount of military force is going to turn a corrupt, unpopular, Western-friendly tinpot dictator into a competent leader who can actually motivate the people of his country to defend his government.

Many of those great power L's were a direct consequence of the fact that the political goals of the great power couldn't actually be accomplished with military force alone.

That's not true. But Alexander turned his armies around at the Hyphasis River because he heard that Chotiner was embedded with the Nanda army, and wanted to interview him.

Given the fact that at least part of your work is taking about how screwed up our built infrastructure is, I'd be surprised if you *weren't* angry most of the time.

The album cover of American Hi-Fi's Hearts on Parade.

...yes, my taste in Music has always been terrible.

“Well, it seems that the problem with capitalism is that eventually you may need a socialist to come in, correct previous under-budgeting, account for current service levels as well as expected growth," Mamdani continued, in reference to Eric Adams' deceptive bookkeeping.

2/2

An image suffering greatly from JPEG compression artifacts and a lack of contrast showing two white towels folded/wrapped to look like swans beak-to-beak, making a heart shape, on a white bedspread.

...the towels folded together to make a little pair of swans forming a heart is cute though, I'll give them that.

Some make their intent much clearer than others.

bsky.app/profile/did:...

Poaster: "It's not a sex hotel, it's a regular hotel."

The rooms at said hotel:

A photograph of a Sybaris Suites bedroom, with a gigantic mirror hanging on the ceiling over the bed, and a large upholstered foam... thing at its foot. These are doubtless intended for the most innocent purposes imaginable.

Also we really need to fully appreciate the details of the rooms.

"Bed-sized mirror on ceiling over bed" is one of those features that is relatively lacking in chaste uses.

I mean, it's a hotel specializing in suites with swimming pools.

That statement is doing some serious abuse to the word "normal."

A marketing image from the Sybaris website, showing a hotel suite with a built-in pool and SO MUCH KNOTTY PINE lining the ceilings.

Also, I love how, despite the obvious renovations and remodeling, the aesthetic of these things is still pure late-70s/early80s.

...IT'S A CHAIN?!?!?

www.sybaris.com/locations/

The annoying thing is, because luck can make things *seem* fine for a really long time, you can get quite a ways down the dysfunction rabbit hole before you realize how fucked you actually are.

It's a case where the weak/dysfunctional politics are a craps game with the dynamic, technologically advanced economy as the stakes.

If you're lucky, you can keep everything for quite a few rolls of the bones - but eventually you are going to go bust.

I'm not going to say that all Nazis are idiots as a blanket statement; some of them can actually be quite clever.

However, they've all clearly picked the idiotic answer to the question of whether or not to be a Nazi.

That one at least had the "he is the mostly cowardly man to hold the presidency ever" backing it up, even if it flew in the face of the fact he's a bully.

Of a massive number of lies about what Trump would do, that one was the most transparently egregious.

Technically, no.

Which is why, historically, the most reliable way to win a war as an overwhelmingly strong power after thoroughly wrecking a place is to say "well, that taught them a lesson," grab all your toys, and go home.

When I wrote a piece about my son's love of reading in January, I included this bit because I refuse to hear lectures about literacy rates from the selfsame ghouls and vandals who've cheered on as the UK's apparatus for childhood reading has been stripped to the wiring and sold off for scrap.

As an older millennial, I grew up reading the newspaper and gradually shifted to blogs as the quality of newspaper writing started going downhill.