A Great Idea for People With a Terrible Disease: Let’s Find a Cure Ourselves — Zeynep Tufekci praises the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, a group of people with Long Covid who are funding research into the condition. She asks people to donate.
Republicans are the predators stalking American bathrooms. Republicans are sex-obsessed deviants who want to strip-search everybody to make sure their genitals are correct.
The far right grows through disaster fantasies
Cory Doctorow:: The right thrives on fantasies about urban collapse, “FEMA death camps, ‘great replacement theory,’ the ‘Great Reset,’ fifteen-minute cities, 5G towers being beacons of mind control, and microchips installed in people through vaccines,” while denying the existence of real-world catastrophes like climate change.
Think of conservatives' obsession with imaginary and hypothetical children, from Qanon’s child trafficking conspiracies to the forced birth movement’s fixation on “the unborn.”
It’s not just that these kids don’t exist – it’s that the right is either indifferent or actively hostile to real children. Qanon peaked at the same time as Trump’s “kids in cages” family separation policy, which saw thousands of kids separated from their parents, many forever, as a deliberate policy.
The forced birth movement spent decades fighting to overturn Roe in the name of saving “the unborn” – even as its leaders were also overturning the Child Tax Credit, the most successful child poverty alleviation measure in American history. Actual children were left to sink into food insecurity and precarity, to be enlisted to work overnight shifts in meat-packing plants, to fall into homelessness – even as the movement celebrated the “culture of life” that would rescue hypothetical children.
Lifting kids out of poverty and building a world where parents can afford to raise as many children as they care to have is a collective endeavor. Firebombing abortion clinics or storming into a pizza parlor with an assault rifle is an individual rescue fantasy that escapes into the world.
Ian Welsh: The causes of the Ukraine war and What Ukraine looks like post-war if Russia imposes the peace. Welsh has an idiosyncratic view of the Ukraine war; I think he sees both sides as bad, but Ukraine is worse, and Russian victory is nearly inevitable. He makes a credible case, and I have to remember that everything I know about that war comes from Big Journalism.
Let’s All Take a Breath and Get Off the Plane Like Grown-Ups
I got in a shouting match with a guy last month over this issue — which, to be clear, means I was a jerk. I’m not proud of that moment.
Then, when I got home, I did some Internet research and determined I had been wrong about this for 35 years. But no more! I have learned! I am a new de-boarder! Or I will be the next time I fly.
Currently reading: The Closers by Michael Connelly 📚 Harry Bosch never disappoints.
Simplifying! I decided to stop posting to Threads, check in there only occasionally and consolidated my two personal newsletters into one. Also, I’m going to quit checking Reddit daily. I feel lighter already!
Cutting Through An Inundation of Dipshit Racists — The meaning behind the Maori haka demonstration in the New Zealand parliament.
A secret parachute in the FBI’s possession may have finally solved D.B. Cooper’s identity.
The children of a D.B. Cooper suspect handed over new evidence to the FBI because they think their dad was the culprit. A parachute long hidden on family property in North Carolina is said to match the type used in the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history.
Why’d the suspect hang on to the evidence, though?
Ian Welsh: Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase — “Nothing saves money on people who are old, disabled and unable to work like just killing them.”
John Scalzi: Holden Caulfield in middle age. Like Scalzi, I never got the appeal of “Catcher in the Rye.” And my reasons were similar to his: I grew up reading science fiction.
If you were going to give me a teenage hero, give me Heinlein’s Starman Jones: He traveled the galaxy and memorized entire books of log tables and became Captain of a starship (for procedural reasons, granted). All Holden did was bitch, bitch, bitch.