Kathleen

Writer, Lefthander, AU Tiger, news junkie (I admittedly follow a lot of news and news-related accounts 😬) 10 years overseas

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 HOLY SMOKES. Trump Education Sec. Linda McMahon just found out that DEAD PEOPLE were getting student loans from the federal government

BILLIONS of dollars are now being saved.

"There were BOTS, ghost students, dead people getting these loans. We enforced and tweaked the entire system so we have real-time fraud identity now."

Finally, you have to actually PROVE you're a real person.

Unbelievable this was not already the case!

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).

Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.

Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.

Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.

Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.

Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.

Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.

C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.

Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.

Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.

Alors pardon. Et au travail.

[Kathleen @flyingkat]

@KeriA1776again Love this! I grew up in a house full of pets — rabbit, fish tank, birds, dog (even had turtles! Ha!) Thanks for sharing your post . It brought back some fun memories.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

🚨 OH. MY. GOSH!!!!!!!

It has been revealed that the city of Asheville NC will only rebuild 8 HOUSES with the $225 MILLION grant they received from the Trump administration after Hurricane Helene.

Yes, you read that right... EIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!

...OUT OF 11,488 DAMAGED HOMES

The city allocated ONLY $3 MILLION for home repairs.

And $14.9 MILLION for "administration"

FIVE TIMES MORE for PAPERWORK than for the people whose homes got COMPLETELY DESTROYED!!!!!!

Over 100+ approved families are CURRENTLY ON A WAITLIST that will never be funded.

THIS IS CRIMINAL!!!!!!!!!!!

PEOPLE NEED TO GO TO JAIL!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Luke Rosiak @lukerosiak]

Tweet your favorite Columbus, Ohio Medicaid mill. These 7 buildings are owned by one New Jersey-based landlord, mostly on one street. Collectively they are desolate inside but house 288 Medicaid LLCs that billed a quarter billion dollars of taxpayer money.

[J @weronlyhuman]

@JoshHall2024 She’s a problem everywhere for Americans

https://t.co/mfu0zNj28C

[Kian Tajbakhsh @k_tajbakhsh]

Your references to “fundamentally different data sets” and “parallel reality” @StrickerNonpro are precisely what prompts me to reply.

I think you are overstating the clarity of the case. The JCPOA was never the magic solution some now suggest. It had benefits, but also serious risks, sunset clauses, and strategic consequences that unfolded over time. Even Obama acknowledged the sunset problem: once advanced centrifuges came into play, "in year 13, 14, 15...breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero" (NPR April 2015). That alone should make us more modest about claiming that one side saw reality while the other lived in fantasy.

The deeper flaw in much pro-JCPOA analysis is that it is static. It judges the deal as if its consequences were frozen in 2015. They were not. Over the next eight years — and especially after October 7 — the costs became clearer: the nuclear file had been artificially separated from the regime’s broader system of coercion: missiles, drones, proxies, hostage-taking, maritime threats, regional intimidation, and domestic repression. As I argued in Iran Crisis Notebook #2: The Layered Roots of the Current War, https://t.co/WF1BEBqfp2 this war did not begin with the United States or Israel. It began in 1979, when the Islamic Republic launched its revolutionary war against America, Israel, the liberal West, and its own people. The current confrontation is not a war Washington or Jerusalem started; it is their effort to finish a war the regime began and has sustained for 47 years.

And on “parallel reality”: I lived and worked in Iran for more than a decade, then spent more than a year in Evin prison, including eight months in IRGC solitary confinement, as a political prisoner and U.S. hostage. I was interrogated for years by senior IRGC officers. I know what a parallel reality looks like. It is the worldview of the Islamic Republic itself: every deal is treated as a tactical instrument in a zero-sum struggle to preserve revolutionary power, in which it is the entire rest of the world that is driving the wrong direction on the highway (to use a Persian joke).

The idea that remaining in the JCPOA would have strengthened “pragmatic elements” and pushed Iran in a more moderate direction is, in my view, the real illusion. After the Green Movement was crushed in 2009, genuine reformist politics inside Iran was systematically destroyed. Leaders were imprisoned or exiled. Reformist parties were banned. Newspapers were shut down. I was in prison with some of those people.

So yes, data sets matter. But assumptions matter more. And the assumption that the Islamic Republic was gradually moderating is one I simply do not recognize — not from lived experience, not from research, and not from the regime’s own conduct.

If there is a parallel reality here, it is the belief that a revolutionary regime built on hostage-taking, repression, proxy warfare, and anti-Western struggle was quietly evolving toward moderation because of a nuclear bargain.

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

Here’s Mayor Pete announcing the Biden administration’s decision to fight the Jet Blue and Spirit merger so they could protect consumers and ensure low fares. Now the airline doesn’t exist and passengers are stranded across the country.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 HOLY CRAP! President Trump just revealed that after he canceled the Pakistan-Iran trip, they SENT HIM A BETTER DEAL

Art of the Deal, in motion.

"They gave us a paper that should have been better. And INTERESTINGLY, immediately when I canceled it, within 10 MINUTES, we got a new paper that was much better!"

"I'll deal with whoever runs the show...but there's no reason to wait 2 days, have people traveling for 16, 17 hours...When they want, they can call me, we have all the cards!"

"That whole deal is not complicated: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon." @RapidResponse47

🔥 The man knows what he's doing.

[Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew]

If the SPLC's payments of millions of dollars to individuals involved with racist hate groups wasn't controversial, why did the SPLC take active steps to conceal what it was doing?

If donors would have been fine with what they were doing, why the need for bank accounts in the name of fictitious companies?

[Jim Geraghty @jimgeraghty]

The position of the Southern Poverty Law Center appears to be that there was nothing wrong with paying millions of dollars to members of hate groups to be informants, that it saved lives and was completely justified, AND that they don't do it anymore and they'll never do it again.

[Kathleen @flyingkat]

@Matt_Pinner Looks like the weights for a clock / cuckoo clock?