The Stakes

Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, our collective interest in the Trump legal escapades is ultimately about whether or not there’s any part of the husk that is the American experiment worth saving.

His crimes are so obvious, his attempts at covering them up so insipid and blatant, that a system that ultimately fails to hold him accountable and, more importantly, punish him in such a way that it discourages others from attempting anything similar is irrevocably fucked.

It’s that “irrevocably” that’s at stake here. We already know we live in a deeply flawed and gamed system where a billionaire asshat can put a cobbled together metal X on his roof that strobes an incredibly bright light and building inspectors checking to see if this janky-ass testament to insecurity might topple to the ground in a stiff wind are simply told “no, you can’t look at it, I reject your authority over me.”

But can this system at least do the bare minimum necessary to Trump? We don’t know. We hope it can, even as the cynical part of ourselves doubt it will. But there isn’t some other line past this one where the system can still redeem itself. This is the definitive test. We find him guilty of all the things he’s obviously guilty of and punish him and, after that, make sure he somehow doesn’t become President again (and the fact that that’s even a necessary step here is shocking to even the numbest of cores) or it’s over.

Passing this test means there’s a bottom to the hole we have to crawl out of. Failing it means we just keep falling.

Learn To Needlepoint

 IN THIS HOUSE, WE…

• Enjoy indictments
• Celebrate convictions
• Throw parties for sentencing

Numerology

Ben Shapiro went to the Barbie movie and counted ten instances of the word “patriarchy”.

He would’ve counted eleven, but he didn’t want to get kicked out of the theater.

Yee And/Or Haw

Oh, goodie, it looks like all the algorithms are agreeing that I’m interested in the lasted skirmish in the “culture wars”.

See, there’s this country song that is, somewhat unsurprisingly, violent and racist. And as the song gained traction, people pointed out that the violent, racist song was violent and racist.

So the singer responded that the song just represented small-town values, and everyone was like, “yes, we know, small town values like violence and racism.”

And then the singer said the song was about how small town people have each others backs, and everyone else was like “yes, we know, by violently beating up anyone with a different skin color than you on the mistakes belief that they’re going to do crimes and/or burn your town down like you think they did to all the cities during the George Floyd protests except that didn’t happen either.”

And then the argument somehow keeps going, because the bar for plausible deniability for America’s Nazi and Nazi-adjacent communities is so low that even wearing a swastika or quoting Hitler and getting applause for it somehow isn’t enough to settle the “are they a bad person” argument. Because making a reasonable judgment based on blatantly obvious evidence wouldn’t be “balanced”. Or drive engagement metrics.

Swiftness Upgrade

I think, as a nation, America could probably find a nice middle ground between “we immediately march you into the public square and have a firing squad ready” and “three and a half years after you did it, we’re going to send you a sternly worded letter letting you know you’re about to be in trouble.”

Your Long Awaited Social Media Update

 See also on the left bar.

Threads: youaredumb.net

Bluesky: @youaredumb.bsky.social

Still on Mastodon and Post despite using them. Who knows where this will all end up. 

Anyway, you can’t link to Threads or Blueskyy as far as I can tell, so until you can, those will just click back here but you can search and follow from those account names.

Burying The Lede

 

I realize this is science news, but I really think they should have mentioned the moon paying off DeSantis so they can pave Florida roads with the radioactive moon granite. 

Your Morning Analogy

Twitter was always a shitty party bus serving watered down drinks and playing covers of hair metal bands way too loud.

Then it caught fire.

Mastodon pulled up first, but it was a fleet of pedicabs pulled by penny-farthing bicycles and each one was playing a different curated Spotify stream of songs you’ve never heard of.

Bluesky pulled up, but it was just one Uber driver in a Smart car and all he had to drink was one of those four ounce bottled waters and it was lukewarm. 

Zuckerberg searched and searched until he found the exact same model of party bus, only five years older, with the same number of seats and a playlist of all the hits. And he sat, just within sight of the burning party bus, and only pulled up when the gas tank exploded and the music started playing at half speed.

And yes, it’s weird that it’s only the medium-stakes social media drama shit inspires me to write much anymore. Bot so little of what’s going on these days slots so nicely into that medium stakes world where I do my best work.

Threads, I Guess

youaredumbdotnet on Threads.

Don't immediately love it, for all the reasons I don’t love Instagram plus the apparent lack of a Following tab for fuck’s sake, but if anything is gonna steal Elon’s thunder once and for all it’s this. If someone less evil had managed it or does manage it, that’ll be different.