dactylotheca

Problem isn’t convincing people that he’s racist. The problem is convincing people that it matters.

I'd argue that a more pressing concern is convincing people that it isn't a good thing, not that it matters

I've seen a lot of people raise doubts about whether there really are significant amounts of swing voters this time 'round, and I'd sort of tend to agree – if not for any other reason than it seems bizarre that somebody could be vacillating between Trump and Harris

many GOP strategists, including in the Trump camp, worried that attacks on Harris’s race and gender […] would pose a serious liability for the campaign

Do they seriously understand their base that badly, or is this just optics? "I hope his completely unexpected racism doesn't alienate our voters who are totally not racist we swear this is so bad we're so worried oh no"

Sounds like an ant lie to me tbh

Moth memes went away?

Oo I love Event Horizon. It's a bit of a scifi horror cult classic though isn't it? Not exactly Blade Runner, but not Battlefield Earth either.

One of my favorite trashy scifi movies is maybe Saturn 3 (Zardoz doesn't count!). It's a godawful piece of shit featuring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, and a baby faced Harvey Keitel. It's astonishingly bad and great fun to watch, and there was some sort of fairly hilarious story behind how it got made too (I'll have to see if I can dig up the blog post I read about it)

edit: there's a whole website https://saturn3makingof.com/

But some fascists do manage to be pretty coherent. It's just that clearly Hitler wasn't one of them.

Interesting that they released Yashin. I wonder if he got asylum from somewhere or if he's staying in Russia? Neither NPR or The Guardian mentioned anything and I haven't done any searching yet.

Also, I had no idea who Whelan is so I went and read his wiki page – apparently he's a former US Marine who got arrested in Russia over charges of espionage. Based on the article I was left with the impression that the charges seem like bullshit, but his FSB buddy thing was, well… pretty weird if nothing else. Apparently he was in Russia for the wedding of a friend who's also a former Marine, and it somehow struck me as funny that jarheads seem to like Russia

I read Battlefield Earth and actually enjoyed it, but in the same I enjoyed eg. watching Plan 9 from Outer Space (or the Battlefield Earth movie for that matter.)

It's an abject piece of shit as a book, written late enough in Hubbard's life that nobody dared edit him so there's whole chapters that just sort of repeat, and many of its premises are so stupid it hurts, but its old-timey pulp scifi schlock feel was often very fun.

So yeah, not a good book by any definition, but it was sorta fun and also interesting to read knowing that Hubbard tried to inject his world view into it too. For example the reason why the Psychlo were so eeeeeevil was that they were ruled by the Catrists who'd eg. use psychosurgery or electric shocks to make Psychlos more compliant – knowing that Hubbard absolutely loathed psychiatrists, it's not hard to see that Psychlo Catrist = psychiatrist.

It's such a terrible book, not just because of… you know, Nazis, but because it's atrociously badly written. Rambling and fueled by completely blind hate, and it sets out a vision that's completely detached from reality.

Really gave me similar vibes as listening to Trump talk, a sort of utter disbelief that people actually think he had something worthwhile to say

Saying Mein Kampf is borderline unreadable is bold?

Yeah they're just a bit disorganized, but generally it's a really nice country. "Our infrastructure is a bit bad, but we'll get to it mañana – let's have some wine and tapas."

Then there's countries like Russia or Belarus that are also medieval, and not in a good way.