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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • “At a moment of great global instability – with war raging in Ukraine, conflict between Israel and Iran, and authoritarian regimes testing the boundaries of international order – the United States has chosen to gut its frontline diplomatic workforce,” said a statement from the American Foreign Service Association, a professional group that represents US diplomats. “We oppose this decision in the strongest terms.”

    Funny how Trump’s actions always head in the opposite direction to his “stated goal of putting America first.” Almost like the stated goal is BS.





  • Some of us grew up breathing in all the lead and still think guys like this are unbelievable idiots. Low-level lead poisoning may make you slightly stupider and more angry, but I really don’t think it explains MAGA idiocy. In fact, it gives MAGAs an excuse they don’t deserve. Their racist, reactionary, destructively macho attitudes are on them, not on lead.

    The story that MAGAs are like this because of lead poisoning is just another version of the eternal hope that the next generation will see sense and fix things. It never works out that way. Each generation’s assholes get the upper hand under capitalism. The MAGA oldies are particularly nasty and stupid not because of lead but because of how they lived most of their lives during capitalism’s prosperous heyday of post-WW2 reconstruction, but the world is changing and they want to hang on to their privilege at everyone else’s expense, even if it means fascism. It’s their own selfishness, narrow-mindedness and wilful ignorance. We don’t need to divert the blame to lead.



  • I can see where the censors are coming from, and how they might see these as pornographic, but I think they’ve responded to the surface appearance rather than what’s actually going on in the book.

    These excerpts are fairly explicit and describe sex acts and being turned on. In that, they resemble porn. But they also tend to be describing teenage sexual discovery in a realistic way, showing how the development of sexual feelings can be tender and complex. If you remove teenagers’ access to these books, what are they left with to help them understand what they’re experiencing? Internet porn and the manosphere? It can be helpful for kids to have access to more nuanced and sensitive materials, even if they are somewhat explicit.

    So I can see how the censors see this, but I still wouldn’t ban these books just because they contain sexually explicit scenes, and I still think it’s a mistake to classify these as porn.