It doesn't take an FBI profiler to see that JD Vance is a bad liar. He makes Ted Cruz look charismatic. The NYT doesn't care, though. They will bothsides any issue, regardless of how one-sided it is. The principle reason I decided to show up and get yelled at for having any optimism is that fuckin' bullshit laserpin thing. I needed the gift link for that bullshit article because the NYT, true to form, wrote a sweeping, allegorical narrative about transformative tech with a couple casual asides about potential difficulties at some hypothetical point down the road. In real life, of course, it's the stupidest, most terrible product since lawn darts which was immediately obvious to anyone with any appreciation for human interaction, let alone human interaction with technology. There was a time when politics was liberals vs conservatives, Republicans vs Democrats, young vs old, capital vs labor. But because of Douchehat and his ilk, it's become oppositionals vs apologists. There's the people who fucking hate whatever is going on now and there's the people who know whatever everyone is howling for, it'll likely be worse than what we have. And it fucking sucks that anyone who thinks is automatically an apologist whether they like it or not. Bernie Sanders' politics are probably closer to my own than any other politician. On this test? I'm out in the Aleutians somewhere. I'm so left that I gotta swim to find the rest of my liberal friends. But because I also recognize that Bernie Sanders has never been a particularly effective legislator all the Bernie Bros consider me a zionist shitlib capitalist shill. It's so. Fucking. Exhausting. Meanwhile the NYT, the WaPo, the Journal, the Guardian, the Economist, the Financial Times, Mother Jones and Pro Publica are all about "there are two sides and both sides are very normal, full stop." They don't have any other framework. Whatever Democrats are doing is normal, whatever Republicans are doing is normal. Obviously the middle is somewhere between an executive order granting citizenship amnesty for spouses of citizens and a governor declaring all classrooms must display the Ten Commandments (Hollywood Version). DoucheHat? Fuck yeah everything is normal, let's stroke our chin at JD Vance even though he's the most unconvincingly cynical political creature ever crafted. A democratic comms director showing up on Candace Owens? Well of course they're just here to tear shit down, that's all they've ever been here to do. You're sitting here going "but what does JD Vance really believe" and holy fuck bro, he believes in personal advancement. That is the extent of his ethics. Every single politician on the right at this moment is there for personal advancement. They have made the calculus that they can get ahead by pandering to the right so they are pandering to the right. And since the right only cares about tearing shit down, they have correctly surmised that they can say any fuckin' thing they want because nobody on the right gives a shit. They're here to own the libs. Reagan/Thatcher era popular conservatism held that if Western culture were wound back to 1954 it would lead to a new era of peace and prosperity for aggrieved white people. But after 50 years of declining standards of living and cultural influence, not a single one of these fucktards has looked around and gone "huh, maybe it isn't working." Especially not when Bothsides Media gives Newt Gingrich a platform to go "it's because we're not owning the libs hard enough." Fast forward fifteen years and we're at "yeah, Donald Trump can't form a coherent sentence with eight aides and a teleprompter but People Are Talking about Joe Biden's mental acuity that one time." And then you dare to say something like "the CHIPS act was good, actually" and some mutherfucker decides to hold you personally responsible for a Supreme Court decision. You don't have to read Hillbilly Elegy. Ron Howard put fucking Glenn Close in it. Because whatever Nazi bullshit the right pulls, they're one of our Both Sides.