For everyone's edification, Geigner's take on Techdirt. I suspect this won't be the last TD article on this trainwreck-in-the-making.

Yes but then we discovered it makes your calves fabulous.

Then men started wearing full trous, and women started wearing high dresses and skirts, where men wore the shorts and women went full length before.

Deep, deep deep in Scunthorp territory. A homan being should have been around to clear that flag.

A quite intentional trans allegory that also stands as exploring a lot of parallel concepts, and since transness is not popular, its better not to admit it and let trans-panic scare away Matrix fans who couldn't handle it.

The Matrix analogy works better for me compared to my ASD experiences than my midlife enby status.

We know they're stealing Palestinian land. They were stealing Palestinian land when the British Empire installed Israel there. And yes, at that time George VI was glad to suggest it is right and proper to push out the lesser peoples so that the Jewish folk could settle there. And that's exactly what they've been doing since.

However, since then, the international community has become more aware of the humanity of peoples who are not as wealthy or white as westerners, so much like the Church in the middle ages advocating only for Jus Bellum (so that expansionist kings had to find a way to justify their rightful ownership of the places they conquered) modern nations have to find a way to legitimize the regions they annex, or the peoples they war against.

So yeah, Israel was glad to have the excuse when Hamas or Hezbollah were there to provide it. And Iran props them up (provides them materiel support) so that they have the opportunity to take shots at Israel, knowing it will drive them to cruelty while the world watches, de-legitimizing the Zionist movement in the eyes of the international community (and the public).

While Israeli patriots can politely talk about the propriety of (say) price-tag killings or the treatment of Palestinians in Hebron, the State has to be more delicate. All the more so when IDF troopers are expressing glee in the opportunity to massacre Palestinian civilians down to the last child and grandmother.

But there are no humanitarian interests at the international level. All the states are still propped up by oligarchs wanting to clear land and seize resources for their own use, and at this point, as far as I can tell, we're all going to be killed by famine and water shortage due to ecology collapse before that changes.

A lot of things.

For one thing, Trump / Project 2025 wants to kill NATO. Trump has already sown enough distrust that Germany is looking to secure military independence from the US.

Another thing is Trump and his companion ideologues are manipulable, as per his relations with Putin, Kim Jong Un and the Sauds. Even if they can't turn him against Israel, they can certainly goad him into making brash decisions.

Then there's the matter that the MAGA Republican Party favors loyalty over principle, which scares away its own intelligentsia, and creates a brain drain. We already see the Project 2025 plan to replace government department staff (who have education and experience) with Trump and MAGA ideology loyalists (who do not), which is going to speed the regime's plummet into corruption and decadence.

The latter 20th century was defined by the US being the baddest dog on the field, tempered only by the USSR being right there to harrow the US and keep it busy. Now the cold war is ended, the US has just turned into a military bully for the interests of its own oligarchs. (It doesn't help that the white Christian nationalist movement has been pushing the US towards fascist one-party autocracy since the FDR's New Deal, as explained in Behind the Bastards two parter How the Rich Ate Christianity ).

Genuinely free, fair states are a threat to autocrats, far more than other autocrats, so seeing the US fall to one-party autocracy is absolutely on Iran's holiday wishlist.

They may get it too, depending on if Trump wins the election, or his coup d'etat is successful, or civil war breaks out in the States.

The D&D one has material components, including bat dung IIRC. I think the wizard spell is essentially an enhanced molotov.

Yeah, Iran made me do a genocide the way a wife made her abusive spouse do a domestic violence. More that Iran knew the Israeli administration (Netanyahu and friends) were totally eager to accelerate the genocide (it has already been happening), and provided them an easy excuse, because drunk daddy can't help himself.

This is why the US has been screaming at Bibi, Don't! It'll be just like Fallujah! It's a trap! And Bibi couldn't listen with that kind of temptation.

(And yes, this is one of those hazards whenever Trump is in the White House, because Trump can't help himself either.)

Israel, and the current western response to Israel is laying plain for the entire international community that we are at our base, imperialists who won't suffer non-whites or non-Christians. The US has yet to demonstrate otherwise, and in on the verge of possibly installing a one-party autocracy. Iran got all that it hoped for and more.

Gen X here. The great slasher era of cinema started when I was a teen, and was morally inspired by Silent-generation commentary on the boomers and us. It was supposed to warn us If you indulge in sex and drugs and rock-&-roll (Satan approved!) and you'll come to a bad end.

So Friday the 13th (1980 with Kevin Bacon) was the same as Reefer Madness except for general debauchery and bacchanalia rather than just for cannabis. And mostly the silents were pissed that they didn't get to party while young with sex and drugs, and instead drowned their sorrows with hard liquor and cigars.

Curiously, the slasher format came not from classic horror but mystery. The Ur-slasher was And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, regarded as one of her greatest stories, from an author that was prolific like Stephen King.

As per many of Christie's novels, ATTWN was an experiment in defying the (alleged) rules of mystery writing (e.g. the detective must be beyond reproach ) and still being a valid whodunit. She's had the story told by the killer before, and this time the narrative followed one of the victims.

Crystal Lake was a closed circle much like Soldier Island, and the neighborhood of Elm Street was made inescapable because everyone sleeps.

Remember also that Jason Voorhees was actually dead, and the slasher was doing the (double-plus grisly) murders for vengeance of camp councilors for their negligence, while they got high and got freaky. So technically it wasn't about the sex, it was about being AWOL when duty called. (Says the latch-key kid with major depression.)

Also, pre-internet, boobs on screen was one of the few times grown ~~men~~ people who like looking at boobs got to see some that were not their spouse's / exclusive partner's (or just their own), and people having sex on screen was an excuse for flying free. Truthfully, until the Skinemax era of late-night cable soft porn, the love scene and the nude scene were commonly different scenes. By the aughts, the obligatory horror titties became only optional and by the age of the internet they almost faded out entirely ...until the age of subscription television series like Game of Thrones and Sopranos and nudity came back swingin'

But this cartoon points to a curious reality in the United States: The birth-rate is imploding. Given in 2022, one of the justifications for the Dobbs decision was white babies as a commodity (seriously), they were expecting the new generations to keep churning out new generations of school kids to be indoctrinated into the next working / fighting force. But it's not happening. Young men and women are just less interested in that old time romance. This is what has J. D. Vance (and his shadowy billionaire masters) freaked out about childless cat ladies.

It's no wonder, really. 80%+ of the households live in precarity. Employers are skipping the OSHA rules and Millennials and Zoomers are being worked like old-time miners on the truck system ( another day older and deeper in debt... ). Upward mobility is a joke. Wages aren't enough to sustain one adult, let alone a family. The dream of a homestead? Gone. We can't even afford a car. Everyone knows they're going to work and be miserable until they drop dead from exhaustion, where's the point in having kids? Tommy and Gina, are living on a prayer and on accumulated debt until their limit drives them out of their rental.

Gen-Z doesn't have time for Crystal Lake, and are glad for a weekend sleeping in. If it's a holiday, they expect the boss will call them in and then forget to pay them holiday time. The horror zoomers have to face is not slashers in the dark, but the society gone dystopian, making it literally impossible to make ends meet, while tracking you like Big Brother from all the telescreens. Your horror isn't Jason, but Ingsoc.

And that's before global agriculture collapses from water shortage, which is expected to happen when you're middle-aged (in your forties and fifties), at which point your life becomes a Roland Emmerich film. Or Slaughterhouse Five.

The first XKCD that comes to mind

Ellision sounds like the kind of guy that wants an unstoppable army of robot swarms.

Representative Jamie Raskin recently brought up the term neo-monarchy.

That was the point of the action. Iran understands the hatred by the Israeli state for the Palestinian people (condoned, sometimes commended by western imperialist interests, particularly the British empire and the United States) only required provocation before Israel would commit atrocities that could be called a holocaust. So the Iranian intelligence state funded Hamas to cause trouble.

And they played Netanyahu the way Martin Luther King Jr. played US police departments.

The difference is, information from Palestine leaks out better now than it did throughout the 20th century, so the global public, especially in industrialized states, gets to look at it. We get to know what is happening and it is more frightening than we imagined.

The horror of the German holocaust, according to our own nations and their state departments, is not what was done, but to whom.

The candidate for rich people who resent poor people.