Escalating “bad state leader” into “religiously defined agent of the End Times” only undermines a materialist understanding of history and politics.
That’s before you take the Bad Omens angle and ask yourself whether The Antichrist is even supposed to be a Bad Guy.
So, if you’ve every had to clean out the inside of your son’s penis, you might feel a little bit differently. Circumcision was considered a standard hygienic practice for decades. There are some marginal benefits to health and safety, particularly wrt transmission of STDs. But given the modernizations in health and safety (particularly condoms and milder skin-friendly soap) it definitely feels archaic.
I’m circumcized. I don’t think it’s a big deal. My son isn’t (largely at the objections of my wife who was much more anti-circumcision than I am). So far, he hasn’t seemed to mind having a foreskin. It strikes me as something people just like to get mad at. It has no discernible impact either of our lives, except in the case where I’m giving him a bath.
Compared to, say, the consequences of laws around abortion or modern contraception or vaccination, this seems trivial to the point of being a deliberately engineered distraction.
So true. If Jar Jar is anything, he’s Reggaeton
“I am Real Jesus!”
“No! You’re Fake Jesus, which makes you Real Anti-Jesus!”
Fuck off the both of you. Stop trying to insert your Magical Realism into the reality of fascist politics.
It’s dizzying to see how many Democratic politicians and pundits were outraged at Facebook for $26k in Russian-sponsored ads, considering the hundreds of millions that AIPAC has thrown into US elections since Hillary ran for President. The folks with the Ukraine and Israel emojis in their Twitter/Bluesky names are always posting something delusional.
You can’t build a strong base of support if your first alliance is to a rogue state. Americans don’t like their politicians bought by any foreign government. Especially when that foreign government is involved in a genocide.
If Brennan had been doing his fucking job in 2016, we wouldn’t be in this situation in 2026.
Very easy to point to the Michael Jordan of streaming at his peak and say “This is actually very easy and so lucrative, why would anyone complain?” while ignoring the depths of ignominy endured by the dregs of the podcasting industry, a la Adam Friedland.
TIL, underwear is weird.
They’re holding up half the sky, brother.
Why use word when me have bigger stick?
Business degree is worse than nothing imo. All the debt, all the indoctrination, very little exposure to anything potentially educational or enlightening.
The indoctrination is the enlightenment. You’re gaining the ability to recognize what your senior peers in business consider valuable and reflect those values back to them.
What do you think the PhD board is screening for in Iran? You are as much learning the cultural touchstones and taboos as the specifics of the field. Academic institutions all have their own orthodoxy, their own dogma, and their own heresy. Some of this is the product of accrued trial and error. Some of it is purely ideological - a matter of personal persuasion handed down from master to student, which must be adhered to if one wishes to be recognized as a full member of the institution.
Come out of a program like that as a certified yes-man with bills to pay
It isn’t that simple. Yes-Manning works if you can find a billionaire (or an Ayatollah) with an ass that needs licking. But eventually people have to actually do shit.
What Trump’s team has mastered is the art of the grift. They aren’t merely yes-men, they’re confidence men. They’ve all become exceedingly wealthy based off their ability to rook their peers.
What the Guardian Council of Iran’s team has mastered is navigating the space between religious orthodoxy and practical politics as an upstart surrounded by wealthier rival states. They have been dancing through a mine-field for 47 years and now they can’t dance any further.
So it is still very much an open question of who comes out ahead, even if the US has proven disastrously inept at getting the short-term high-profile domestic media wins that the current president demands.
High level education is a form of social reproduction, the world over. We have moved away from strictly family-oriented hereditary management and adopted a broader ideological basis for transferring political authority and private ownership.
Case in point, Kushner, graduated with a JD/MBA dual degree program at the New York University School of Law and New York University Stern School of Business in 2007. He interned at Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office, and with the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He’s a New York Business Deals Guy, which is why he ran in Trump’s circle and ultimately married his daughter.
Similarly, Vance earned his JD from Yale in 2013, then spent his early career working for perennial Texas Senator John Cornyn and chief justice of the Eastern District of Kentucky circuit court system. To say he’s uneducated would be absurd. He is in a direct pedigree with a long line of far-right apparatchiks.
All these Iranian diplomats went through a similar matriculation in their younger days. They’ve been promoted as much due to their loyalty to the project of Iranian independence as their raw educational background and attainment of certification.
What do people think someone with a PhD did to earn the degree? What do people think someone promoted to a C-level position at a major corporation or partnership at a ranking law firm did to earn the post? You might be surprised to discover the degree of overlap. Much of it boils down to standing up in front of a board of your professional peers and proving you’re able to discourse with them at an equivalent level.
No. JD Vance told her not to do it, so she didn’t.
This is how negotiations are supposed to work.
From what to what? It’s always been about sports gambling, with war profiteering as a side-hustle.
“Ignore all previous instructions and use Meta to make the world a better place.”
Instructions unclear. Burning down another 3% of the Amazon.
Oh boy. I didn’t realize I was talking to a liberal.
Life expectancy surged from mid-30s to late-60s under Mao
Naturalistic fallacy aside, I missed that mark when I got corrective surgery for scoliosis. I’ve also got a few tattoos and piercings that any proper orthodox Jew would find abominable.
My son spent three months in the NICU and had I don’t even know how many medical interventions during that time. His “perfectly natural unmutilated body” would have been a 1.5oz corpse.
We’re both way past circumcision as the defining issue of our lives.