To celebrate the one month anniversary of this article, I thought I would do an update of everyone on this chart.

I even color coded them accordingly. 🤓
🔴 Trump
🔵 Distribution
⚪️ Ops
🟢 Tech
🟠 Former Intel
🟣 LARP

THREAD
#RIPQ #StupidCoup

THREAD: #TandavOnPrime

Things to notice:

1) Shri Ram is getting popular & this is making Shiv ji insecure & he wonders what should he do to get more popular.

2) Farmer Protests - It shows how the Central Government is forcibly taking away the land from the poor farmers.

1/n

3) Fake encounter being done by police to suppress the protests.

4) How it is the muslims who are always at the receiving end of everything bad & how they are always targeted because of their religion.

5) Attack on UAPA.

2/n

6) The "Azaadi" chants of JNU. Interestingly it becomes VNU( Vivekananda National University) here.

7) Also, in the first episode , Saif's father ( played by Tigmanshu Dhulia) , terms Saif as "Tanashah" ( A clear reference to you know who).

3/n

8) It also shows that this is a RW party which has been running the country for the last 3 terms.

9) A senior party member( played by Kumud Mishra) is shown as the one who went to Jail during Emergency period. ( Reference to Jan Sangh).

4/n

Having said that, even if we ignore all this & watch this only for Entertainment, it also falls flat there. The show is a perfect example of a stylized exterior beneath an undercooked, amateurish and shallow excuse of a show.

5/n

Watching Cobra Kai, plus a lot of the manosphere plus the insurrectionists has put me in a mind of the idea of "the world's hard, so I have to make you hard to succeed" and how much that's used to justify... well, pretty much everything. But mostly abuse. /1

You see this outlook all over the place if you make even a cursory glance at just about anything, but *especially* media on the right. The outrage over "PC culture" or, as most of us call it "not being an asshole". Railing against things like banning hazing or spanking. /2

Hell, you see it in sports, when football players are lauded for playing with injuries or pushback against trying to reign in CTE. You see it with folks — mostly men — who say "this is too much, I need to step away or go to therapy" getting called weak or pussies. /3

And of course, it's all over the place online, in games, on forums, Twitter, Facebook etc. "Suck it up," "grow a thicker skin," "It's trash talking everyone gets it" and of course, the ever popular "snowflake" and "facts don't care about your feelings." /4

What I find fascinating is how much this comes down to two mindsets that intertwine like horny snakes.

1) I went through this so YOU have to, even though I hated it

and

2) A better world is not possible. This is how it always has been and how it always will be.

/5

1/36 A thread on Alana Newhouse's Tablet essay. I'm sorry to criticize an essay framed around a writer's ill child.

But my dream for the 2020s is to read big, serious essays whose premises aren't "everything is broken," & that don't say "how to fix

2/36 The writer rightly laments the "flattening" of thought to appeal to algorithms.

But the essay itself commits that sin. We can't observe *something*--problems in medicine--without expanding it to *everything*; & we can't observe *anything* without saying we can "fix it."

3/36 Two weeks ago, I saw a magazine at a cash register: THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING, its cover said, quoting Naomi Klein.

I looked inside.

The cover was an ad, and the "thing" that changed everything turned out to be a Dolce & Gabbana-branded Smeg toaster.

4/36: Obviously, we--businesspeople, writers, editors, academics--feel we can't claims unless it's about "everything"--to be big enough, bold enough, attention-grabbing enough.

This is a really bad problem, though, not just the minor price of admission to public life.

5/36: Trump talked up this philosophy--hyperbole. "The key to the way I promote is bravado," he said in the '80s. "I play to fantasies"--even dark fantasies. "A little hyperbole never hurts."

I say "philosophy, not "tactic," b/c if we use it enough, it becomes a mindset.

1/ I enjoy rereading books that provided me a lot of insights and ideas on the first go around.

just reread this, and I highly recommend reading it if you haven't

2/ The author, Paul Kalanithi, was a neurosurgeon and writer who got a stage IV lung cancer diagnosis when only in his mid-30s. He died at age 37 in 2015, but not before writing "When Breath Becomes Air."

It's filled with insights that perhaps only a dying man could see clearly

3/ “There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”

And

“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”

4/ But, as I remembered from my first reading, it was his last passage that took my breath away. Here it is:

"Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way,

5/ they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed."

https://t.co/8LfEjakFw6

1. The problem with the Ben Shapiro Playbook isn't primarily the author. It's that the *content* of the piece is bad, in a way that was eminently predictable given the author.

I'm going to go through the entire piece and explain why.

2. Shapiro's core argument is that House Republicans opposed impeachment because they saw it as a Democratic plot to undermine them — and, moreover, that they were right (or at least justified) in thinking that.

3. This logic has a glaring logical flaw: as @jonathanchait points out, Democrats couldn't use impeachment to tie Republicans to Trump *if they voted for it*

4. The problem goes deeper than that. The evidence that Shapiro uses to argue that Republicans are justified is that Democrats and liberal commentators have argued that the Capitol Hill riot vindicates their positions on *issues other than impeachment*

5. Of course they'd say that — they're Democrats! You can debate the validity of these claims, but that says nothing about the purpose of pursuing impeachment. There's just no real connection between Shapiro's argument and the evidence offered for it.

Interesting to see lots of talk about grammar lately. Here's a thread from me on why I think explicit grammar instruction is important, but not all explicit grammar instruction is created equal!

I think explicit grammar instruction is important because it helps pupils to write better sentences. Pupils often write run-on sentences, and they aren't sure where they should put a full stop. This makes their writing much harder to understand.

For me, grammar instruction is about sentence structure. It's not about pedantic 'gotchas' designed to show how clever you are or how stupid everyone else is. It's about helping students to marshal their thoughts into coherent, logical sentences.

(On that note, I am sure there will be errors in this tweet thread, because I am writing it pretty quickly. I apologise for them in advance and hope it doesn't impede your understanding too much!)

To write good sentences, I think you have to know what a verb is and what a subject is. So what's the best way to teach those? You can teach definitions - a verb is a doing word, a noun is a person, place or thing, a subject is the person or thing that is doing the verb.

Let's review the ambitious labyrinthian design of Mothership's Gradient Descent, a 64-page mega-dungeon with a half-letter (5.5 × 8.5'') format.

This is gonna be a long one, so I'll experiment and break this review into multiple threads. This one will be about graphic design.

Mothership is a lived-in universe. No matter the particular brand of sci-fi you bring to your table, the books imply a grimy, sweat-soaked space made of pig iron and leaky hoses.

Of all the Mothership products, Gradient Descent is the truest expression of that.

Exhibit A: Textures

For example, the pages look like Sean McCoy didn't design the book so much as found it wedged behind IBM terminals tasked with MKUltra—and then faxed it to himself.

Every page has this weathered look deliberately placed where it would exist in real life.

Before I was a copywriter, I crawled inside furnaces in manufacturing, and strung from the catwalks over centrifuges and die toolings were books like this.

Cobbled together, photocopied, faxed, stomped out, squeegeed dry, and faxed-again manuals.

This design speaks to my soul.

If Gradient Descent were a handout, the graphic design would be perfect. Atmospheric. It feels more discovered than constructed.

But as a gm article, it fights itself on usability, economy, and storytelling, which I'll explain further in parts.

Philosophers if they were muppets, a thread I made so I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore:

Machiavelli is Ernie

John Locke is Hoots the Owl

Karl Marx is the Grouch

Hume is Fozzie Bear (credits and legal responsibility go to @KreetzTristan for this one)

Foucault is Bert

1/ In the Michael Butter book I read Saturday he made some interesting points. Up to the 1950s, in the West, conspiracy theories were regarded and completely legitimate forms of knowledge whose underlying assumptions were beyond question ( it was normal to believe in them)

Thread: I don't know about you, but staying sane recently hasn't been that easy. I've found it particularly hard to read novels - something that is usually my go-to therapy.

BUT I've always loved radio, and especially radio drama, and...

I was giving someone a few recommendations for things to listen to on BBC Sounds and realised I was getting carried away. I've heard tons of really good stuff in the past year and a lot of it is still online.

So here are some links! (stay tuned - this will take a while).

Firstly, there's Primo Levi's 'The Periodic Table' - unutterably brilliant. If you haven't heard this you've just got to stop what you're doing and do so.

Then there's Big Girl, Small Town by @michellegallen

Brilliant - probably the best thing I've heard on radio on a long time. A dark secret gradually gets revealed (or not) in small town near the British border in Ireland.

For a bit of fun there are two Charles Paris Mysteries - A Doubtful Death / The Cinderella Killer. Bill Nighy plays a slightly louche thespian with a bent for amateur sleuthing. Funny dramas based on old radio plays by Simon Brett updated by Jeremy Front.

Far-right parties are currently gaining momentum & exerting parliamentary influence in diverse countries such as the UK, Hungary, the USA, Austria, Sweden, Germany, & Denmark.

Far-right terrorism has increased dramatically.

We ignore this at our

Far-right recruitment discourse offers an affective script of feeling angry, insulted, & ashamed, as well as courageous, proud, & hopeful.

Research shows how affective–discursive practices are employed to create gateways to radicalization and ideologically motivated violence.

Within fascism, the myth of #palingenesis, that is “national rebirth from the ashes,” is continual and key to the motivation of political action & violence: 'heroism' is the “psychological recompense for fascist political activism.”

The language of the Nazi regime had an emotional impact; fascist & far-right rhetoric rely heavily on affective performative work.

The collective Nazi mind comprised hatred of women, fear of sexuality, & a desire for homosocial belonging, as well as a lust for ritual violence.

Ruth Wodak describes fear as fueling the political success of the far right, whereas others identify desire for male comradeship & the urge to “express anger and frustration at mainstream society” as key emotional gateways for neo-Nazi recruits.

Very excited to share this one with you all!

It was both a shock & an honor to get an email from the editors at Current Directions asking for a paper on this topic, and I'm glad to see it out in print.

Feel free to share/RT widely (please!)

Obviously, as I'm sure you all know, internet pornography use is incredibly common.

Yet, despite how common pornography use is, the premiere outlets for psychological science have all-but-ignored the topic for 30th years.

Now, it wasn't always this way. In the 1960s-1980s, there were actually quite a few excellent (though early) papers in JPSP and even American Psychologist about the use of "erotica," but since about 1985, there's just nothing.

Now, I suppose that this would be reasonable if nothing significant had changed about use in the past three decades, but, as I'm sure you are all aware, there have been some major technological changes that have affected use.

Y’all know how much I love “The Twilight Zone”... the more I learned about the man behind the show Rod Serling, the more I loved it. Here’s what he had to say after Dr. King was assassinated #thread #MLKDay

There is a bitter sadness and special irony that attends the passing of Martin Luther King. Quickly and with ease, we offer up a chorus of posthumous praise—the ritual dirge so time-honored and comfortable and undemanding of anything but rhetoric.

In death, we offer the acknowledgement of the man and his dream that we denied him in life. In his grave, we praise him for his decency—but when he walked amongst us, we responded with no decency of our own.

When he suggested that all men should have a place in the sun—we put a special sanctity on the right of ownership and the privilege of prejudice by maintaining that to deny homes to Negroes was a democratic right.

Now we acknowledge his compassion—but we exercised no compassion of our own.

Soul ( AThread)
Life's biggest questions | Meaning, purpose, living

(1/n)
Soul is a story about Joe Gardner, a middle school band teacher, whose life hasn't necessarily gone the way he thought it would. He dreams of one day becoming a professional Jazz musician. It is what he always wanted in his whole life.

(2/n)
And just when he gets the break of a life time to finally fulfill his dream, an untimely accident separates his soul from his body.

(3/n)
As he begins to preced to 'The great beyond' Gardner skips to 'The great before' a world where souls develop personalities and traits before being sent off to earth. There, Gardner must work with 'soul 22' a soul with a dim concept of life.

(4/n)
To help '22' find passion, and in the process discover what it means to have a soul. Passion and obsession are two sides of the same spectrum. It is very easy for one to titre from one end to the other. Their ability to take in the beauty is the greatest inspiration.