Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org

I'm starting to get snarly about the "#distraction" thing with people I have no desire to alienate. So I'll just copy and paste my comments on a friend's post, and leave it at that:

"I do not believe the #culture #war is meant as a distraction. It is meant to accomplish its own whole set of goals, which exist alongside the #economic ones. The right wants to enrich itself by starving poor people *and* run out or kill off everyone who doesn't check all their #demographic boxes. These goals are not mutually exclusive, and neither is a distraction from the other.

"I'm a straight white male native-born middle-aged middle-class veteran: the economic axe will probably fall on my neck before the demographic one does. But I am very well aware that for a lot of other people, including some members of my family and close friends, it's the other way around. So there's really no way to make the d-word more palatable IMO."

Reminder: #HorribleThing is not a distraction from #OtherHorribleThing is not a distraction from #YetAnotherHorribleThing. All the horrible things are horrible, and none of them are planned solely as distractions. They're all things horrible people want.

Benjamin Kratzer, a good friend of long standing, died today.

We'd known each other for well over thirty years, after being stationed together at RAF Upwood. Like many GIs of our generation, we lost contact after the service took us our separate ways, then reconnected thanks to the internet.

Many and various are the online world's sins—but this ability to put people in touch with each other, and back in touch with each other, is an unalloyed good. Human connections are fragile things. Anything that builds and strengthens and maintains them is worth holding onto.

He was a smart, funny, thoughtful, compassionate human being who dedicated much of his life to helping others. Goodbye, my friend. You deserved much more of what you so freely gave.

"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced." We'll do our best.

Yes, absolutely postitively do not call #Teslas "#swasticars." It's mean and totally not funny and makes #Elongated #Muskrat sad.

Gondor calls for wings ... and Tyson will answer!

I'm *really* not doing well with my plan to stick to #writing and #dinosaurs, am I?

Pete #Hegseth received the Combat #Infantry Badge because he heard shots fired in the distance a couple of times. He spent his #deployment sitting in the command tent with a #bottle in one hand and writing himself Bronze Star citations with the other.

I have no proof of this, but also no doubt.

Upon Googling, I discovered that Ben #Garrett did not come up with the repulsive phrase "the #sin of #empathy": there has for several years existed a whole cottage industry of right-wing Christians dedicated to propagating the idea that empathy is a sin. I've been calling out #Christian #hypocrisy for as long as I can remember, but I think never in my life have I seen any doctrine quite so contrary to the #Gospels as this.

Uff-da.

Not wrong, though.

"Yes, I was really upset when they renamed Fort #Cornwallis to Fort #Washington, and took down the statue of General #Tojo at Pearl Harbor." I'm sure you can guess the context.

"Absolutely I don’t, but I’m not going to let them poison my children if I had it to do over again."

"Of course, you'd rather let viruses do the poisoning for you."

"Children do not need 50 #vaccines by the time they’re 18 years old. If I was raising children today, the only vaccine that they would have is for #polio. That’s it."

"Okay, you hate kids. Noted."

Yeah, yeah, I know: walk on by, do not engage. But sometimes they leave an opening a mile wide, and ...

My head is going to a bad place again. I'm going to try *really hard* to concentrate on #writing, #dinosaurs, and writing about dinosaurs. Wish me luck.

The #ADL needs to change their initials to AKL (American #Kapo League). Pathetic.

Read the whole thread. Any #medical #researcher whose work depends on US government funding needs to understand just how bad this is (TL;DR: very bad) and what can maybe, possibly be done in the way of workarounds.

Woe to the land whose king is a child.

You remember that #StarTrek episode where a #planet was about to be #destroyed, and almost the entire population traveled back to previous times in the planet's history where they would live out their lives?

I've been thinking about that a lot lately for some reason.

Ending a post with "let that sink in" is almost always code for "everything above is #bullshit." It's the counterpart to starting with "#technically," which is a nice compact way to say "everything that follows is bullshit."

Huh. I wonder, if you start with "technically" and end with "let that sink in," do they negate each other, or act as intensifiers? Clearly more #research is needed.