Do you think music nowadays puts more emphasis on the appearance of the artist than before?

I think the question is backwards. What we have isn’t a prioritization of appearance but a reduction of advertised talent combined with a professionalization of cosmetics. When you’ve consecrated your industry around a bare handful of performers, you can pick out the fist full of people that check every box.

Beyonce, Swift, Usher, and Bieber cover all the bases.

But once you get outside that rarified niche of promoted talent? Do you really think Post Malone is famous for his good looks? Is Kishi Bashi just coasting on his pretty face?

I don’t really think so.

Young Mic Jagger was a snacc.

Whataboutism

Are you arguing the double taps are bad because they’re war crimes or because they’re Russian?

When Russia loses, their war crimes will be prosecuted.

America is on the cusp of pulling out of the ICJ entirely

That’s fair, as Trump is friends with all the big outsourcing CEOs and banking execs.

But he wasn’t doing anything novel. It was the exact same policy enacted under Carter and Reagan and Clinton and Bush and Obama. Jobs outsourcing, automation, and financialization have been the federal policy for 50 years.

What is Harris planning to do differently? Send even more kickbacks to Big Three automakers and failing Silicon Valley firms? Shore up agribusiness by stealing more water from Mexico and subsidizing more resource ravenous cattle and pork production? Using more prison labor to supplant the aging blue collar labor force?

Because right now I’ve seen nothing out of the campaign to suggest it isn’t just a continuation of Neoliberal economics dating to the Milton Friedman era.

double tap is in fact a strategy Russia is using

Hardly unique to the Russians. The “Collateral Murder” video of US war crimes in Iraq was from a helicopter employing a double-tap strategy on a group of civilians fleeing the area.

Also popular in Gaza and Lebanon, as employed by the Israelis. And in the Philippines, by the government against insurgents. And in India during the invasion of Kashmir. And by the Syrian and Turks in their war on ISIS. And, and, and…

Russia is a terrorist state, that must be stopped.

War is the act of committing crimes unimpeded. All states engaged in war are in the act of committing terrorism. When you hear people talk about “necessary evil”, this is the evil their necessitating.

One could conceivably argue that a healthy and resilient workforce can engage in profitable labor, while a sick and fragile workforce gets trapped in cycles of disability and poverty.

It’s been hell on the actual staff, but the NHS refused to break.

The NHS has been broken for some time thanks to repeated budget cuts and privatization of core functions.

Christ, if you could see the abysmal efficiency of business tier SQL code being churned out in the Lowest Bidder mines overseas…

Using a few terrabytes of memory and a stack of processors as high as my knee so they can recreate Excel in a badly rendered .aspx page built in 2003.

Do you have an example where “more perspective just means witnessing more atrocities”?

I spend a couple of hours a day in the NICU as a new father. It’s an experience I’ve never had before, so I’m learning what it means to be a parent.

Recently, one of the women who I’d seen at the bed next to mine on a daily basis for months stopped showing up. Her baby was attended to by a nurse.

I find out from one of the staff that the mom was flagged for intoxicants in her system at birth. She was reported to CPS. They had come into the NICU while she was feeding the baby the prior day and the CPS official had pulled her out of the room, scolded her for being an addict, and forbad her from reentering to see her child. She was then removed from the building by security, screaming and crying.

This story is tragic as told. But as a new father, it carries a much more rarified horror.

There’s definitely an argument for limiting "doom and gloom news for ones own mental health…

This isn’t simply “the news”. It’s a certain consciousness of the world around you that you develop through lived experience.

implementing concrete solutions

So Dems need to… build the wall?

we shouldn’t all be open fucking sores that flip out over literally every single thing we encounter like an autistic toddler: all emotion, no perspective

What happens when I live in a country where more perspective just means witnessing more atrocities?

It’ll be the cutest bloodbath we’ve ever seen

When you wrestle the pig, you both get muddy but only the pig likes it.

We Report, You Decide

Facebook Ads are on par with most of what Trump sells, and they’ve got a market cap of $1.4T

Alpha Males think they’re top shit, but it’s the Gamma Male that’s guaranteed to penetrate me

Anyone have a look behind the paywall?

Running, cycling, climbing, swimming. He’s a quadruple threat.

Persians absolutely malding right now.

It’s just cool to imagine a social media tool that’s monetized SWATing.

Sadly, Marvel has fired all their good screenwriters and replaced them with overworked/underpaid animators based overseas.