Americans can understand if you phrase it differently.

"You know how sometimes, you go to a big event, and the parking is so far away from the event that they have to ferry people from the parking lots to the event using a bus? Well, this is just like that, except you park at home."

I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They weren't happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That's when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.

Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.

Advertisers couldn't just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don't even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.

Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can't even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.

If the EU Parliament had to have a minute of silence for every shitty American killed by a gun, they'd never have time for anything else.

So, ICE is scared that aggressive untrained people will use deadly force against them, and that afterwards the government will do nothing about it?

That's pretty much how everybody else has felt about ICE for a long time.

Imagine that. You not only paid for the refrigerator, but also the electricity and the internet access. And it uses all of that stuff to display ads to you. You're literally paying for every ad it shows you.

"Designated" in what way?

IIRC, Trump just designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization despite the fact that it has never committed terrorism and it is not an organization.

This is just carte blanche to murder any political opposition.

Did anybody else interpret Trump's messages about Rob Reiner's murder as the same as when a terrorist organization takes credit for an attack? If anything actually deserves to be designated as a terrorist organization, it's MAGA.

For all of you guys that aren't going to read the relatively long article, here's a TL;DR

The artist in question is Devon Rodriguez, who you will more likely recognize if I say he is "the painter who draws people on the subway, from TikTok."

He did a gallery, and this critic, Ben Davis, said that these types of subway portraits are nothing new. The portraits are good as far as realistic portraits go, but as an art critic, the portraits themselves are not very noteworthy. The videos of him making the portraits are what is noteworthy.

Devon Rodriguez didn't like the review and pointed his fans at it. His fans didn't actually read the review (nor did Devon). The fans really got stuck on the part where the critic said that you might not recognize the artist until he called him "the painter who draws people on the subway, from TikTok."

On Saturday morning, I woke up to a tidal wave of anger from Rodriguez on Instagram, tagging me across scores of posts. Hundreds of his followers went on the attack, swarming my Instagram: “loser,” “hater,” “pathetic,” “jealous,” “your a dick,” and on and on and on. There were many creative variations on “kill yourself.” Others said they were going to get me fired, or said things like, “we are going to start a cancellation campaign against you.” A large number thought that defending Rodriguez meant calling me bald, ugly, fat, or whatever they thought could get under my skin. Most didn’t seem to have actually read my article. A contingent went after my wife. “Some women will do anything for money,” one commented. That one was funny, actually.

Meanwhile, Devon makes public posts saying, of the critic, "love will always outshine being a hater, I hope I taught you that today."

The critic goes on to say that Devon Rodriguez's videos are obviously faked, and posts the most obvious example he could find, where another TikToker dances on the London Underground for 30 minutes while he makes a sketch of her that clearly seems to be from a photo not taken at the time. The whole thing has multiple camera angles, and then she acts surprised when he reveals that he drew her.

He ends talking a lot about how problematic parasocial relationships can be. These are where a lot of people feel like they "know" a famous person, but he clearly doesn't know them. And the celebrity ends up with a lot of people acting all wacky to defend him.

You need to make a choice to continue using Facebook

This reminds me of the movie War Games, when WOPR says, "The only winning strategy is not to play." The only correct choice to make here is to delete your Facebook account.

I'm not going to read Marjorie Greene's entire statement so I might theoretically be missing some context, but what does she say here? "Communists aren't Americans and need to be locked up."

That's just McCarthyism. A bunch of nonsense we should have left behind.

Even if her accusations of communism were accurate, there isn't anything in the Constitution that says people who identify as Communists cannot be American citizens. On the other hand, birthright citizenship is specifically granted in the 14th Amendment.

I truly, honestly, believe that a congressperson saying that AOC, who was born in NYC, isn't American, is a violation of their oath of office. Marjorie Greene swore to defend the Constitution, and the Constitution couldn't be any clearer about AOC's citizenship. I also think that office holders who violate their oath of office should be removed from their office, and that it is the responsibility of other representatives to do so.

Tesla could solve most of their problems by firing Musk. Any other public company whose CEO makes a very public Nazi salute would fire that CEO.

Yes, he'd still be a large shareholder, but I think simply getting him out of the company would give a lot of people the sense that he faced some personal consequences for his actions, and that any companies who deal with Musk will also face consequences.

If you can radically change your political views like Fetterman has, based solely on a personal experience and not logical argument, then you never had a rational basis for your new views.

Even if everything Fetterman said was true, it's still damning.

Also, he was elected based on the views he professed at the time of the election. Even if he personally changes, he still owes it to his constituents to act like the person who they thought they elected. It's like he doesn't even understand the most basic principles of representative democracy.

Or at least commit acts of terrorism?

How do you add "no terrorism" to "no organization", and come up with "terrorist organization"?

Antifa's Wikipedia page has a similar juxtaposition:

Several analyses, reports, and studies have concluded that antifa is not a major domestic terrorism risk. On September 17, 2025, Trump announced plans to designate Antifa as a "major terrorist organization."

When things go right, it's "I". When things go wrong, it's "We". These are Musk's situationally preferred pronouns.

You know what else gets rid of fleas? All of those products you can get from the vet and pet stores. You know? The ones that have been scientifically proven to safely get rid of and prevent fleas. Why would you do this to your own cat?

Many people on the left do have guns, but they also have other things to go along with guns: self-control and a sense of decency.

If conservatives were discriminated against, all of this would be true.

But they aren't discriminating against conservatives for intellectual jobs. They're discriminating against idiots.

It just so happens, for whatever reason, that the upper echelon of intellectuals often reject the backwards and counterproductive conservative dogma in favor of rational policies based in reality.

Also, any number whose digits sum to a multiple of 3 is divisible by 3. For 51, 5+1=6, and 6 is a multiple of 3, so 51 can be cleanly divided by 3.

What happens to the rapist, then? Can he get partial custody of the child? Can he use that as an excuse to keep meeting or at least indirectly interacting with his rape victim?

What a great healing agent, to force women to be repeatedly reminded of that time when they were raped.

They give a bit more context in this video. (from 2017)

By the way, I got that link from an article in The Guardian, and I can't find anything in either of those two articles that really adds on top of what was known in 2017. It could just be hard for a layperson to understand, and so was oversimplified?

TLDW is that researchers have known for decades that this tablet showed the Babylonians knew the Pythagorean Theorem for 1000 years before Pythagoras was born. So, that part isn't new.

They seem to be saying that what's new is that they understand each line of this tablet describes a different right triangle, and that due to the Babylonians counting in base 60, they can describe many more right triangles for a unit length than we can in base 10.

They feel like this can have many uses in things like surveying, computing, and in understanding trigonometry.

My take is that this was a very interesting discovery, but that they probably felt pressure to figure out a way to describe it as useful in the modern world. But we've known about the useful parts of this discovery for forever. Our clocks are all base 60. And our computers are binary, not base 10, just to start with.

We overvalue trying to make every advance in knowledge immediately useful. Knowledge can be good for its own sake.

There is exactly one person's life that Trump cares about, and that says everything that needs to be said about this topic.