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Raphael

@raphael-pbl.bsky.social
452 followers 781 following 2.3K posts

Used to be raphaelptw on the birdsite. Guy with nerdy/geeky interests who's pretty bad at most of the usual nerd/geek stuff. Politically ranging from center to very leftist depending on issue. he/him (Avatar shows trees reflected in the water of a pond)

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Joel S. @joelhs.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
"I'm a bigot against other groups, too, so it's fine." Really not thrilled that so much of the left is totally fine with this guy.
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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Background on the Breakdown of the Trump-Netanyahu Love Affair talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/backg...
talkingpointsmemo.com
Background on the Breakdown of the Trump-Netanyahu Love Affair
A follow up to last night’s post on Mike Huckabee, now U.S....
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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
It always jumps out at me whenever i brave Douthat discourse that his name is an unadorned command. Do That! Only with the initial "do" pronounced with a Buckleyite Brit-humping affectation. Which makes perfect sense.
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Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
nice of the sex pests to gather in one spot
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 14/08/2026
OMG. 😳 First a bomb, then an arson attack, all to try to stop the scientists from building a gravitational wave detector. “A local opposition group says a legally protected quiet zone for the project could constrain industrial development across central Sardinia”
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Jon Bois @jonbois.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
i know i sound like a broken record whenever i talk about this, but i'm fully convinced that at this point, especially in light of, well, just about everything that's unfolded in recent years, we really need to be honest with ourselves and face the reality th–i know i sound like a broken record when
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Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
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Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
we have gone from george w bush serving up the troops into the meat grinder of iraq to donald trump telling the navy to go fuck itself, and the dems sit on their hands for most of it.
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David Burbach 🇺🇸 @dburbach.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Is this official US policy now? Is POTUS directing that Lincoln have a few more months added before it returns home?
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David Burbach 🇺🇸 @dburbach.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Not nearly long enough? 😬 From @atrupar.com
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
I wonder what it’s like being so comfortable than a few hours a year in a work-required seminar is the worst thing you can imagine, and being so self-centered that you think it’s worse—a more pressing national concern—than state repression, censorship, corruption, crimes, and abuses of power.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 14/08/2026
Finally updated my macbook OS. Great. 🤦‍♂️
what is image playground on my mac and why can't i delete it?

Image Playground is a built-in Apple Intelligence app that lets you create fun, AI-generated images using text prompts and concepts. You cannot delete it because macOS treats it as a core system component locked inside a secure, read-only system partition.
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Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Quite a lot of maddening stories of rail construction incompetence.
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
safari is a bafflingly bad product. like why is one of the core functions of one of the world's largest products so bad?
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Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
In general, yes, but the "3 times as many Muslims per capita" bit is not just social media. Israelis have long been shocked at how many Muslims there are on the street when visiting Europe, even though Israel has more, because Israel has so much spatial segregation that Jews don't usually see them.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Asking the public to sacrifice with a stiff upper lip works better with “the Nazis are bombing us, but we’ll endure, and we’re fighting back” than “we started a war with Iran, screwed it up, and don’t know what to do.”
rollingstone.com
GOP Candidate Slammed for Telling Voters to Deal With Gas Prices by Cutting Back on Starbucks
Minnesota Senate candidate Michele Tafoya advised voters to buy less Starbucks as a way to deal with high gas prices resulting from the Iran war.
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David Burbach 🇺🇸 @dburbach.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Has anyone checked on how Navalist Twitter is reacting? I assume theyll praise Trump for this massive dump on shipbuilding? Konrad no doubt will write a weepy missive how Trump understands that only steam excites 13 yo boys, not magnets, thank you sir 🥲🫡
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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Wow they must have made a really persuasive case!
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
I feel like social media constantly reminds us why courts and rule of law and their ability to proportionately sanction were such massive improvements for everyone. the mob can only venerate or destroy.
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Dead Carl @deadcarl.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
The paradox, of course, is anyone who would benefit from this advice would never read it
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David Burbach 🇺🇸 @dburbach.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
A plutocrat richer than some countries and willing to sustain big financial losses rather than back down is a worrying thing. Could Musk disable all the Teslas in a small country? Could they stop him?
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 15/08/2026
The moral of this story is one should not expect intellectual consistency from people who outsource their thinking
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David Schraub @schraubd.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
The self-deception holding it all together for American Jews is that the same IDF which does this is the most moral army in the world going above and beyond to be meticulously cautious about protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
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Cameron 🇺🇸🗽🦅 @cameroncorduroy.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
oh man sorry guys my laptop glitched and deleted all the research logs, i guess we gotta restart the experiment from the beginning :/
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Mara Wilson @marawilson.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Yeah, I probably should have stuck with my first impression of that app, which was that its name reminded me of the scariest nuclear war movie, and the icon reminded me of the Ebola virus. 
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Mara Wilson @marawilson.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Say what you will about this app but at least people here don’t seem to be baffled by the idea that AI is built upon plagiarism
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
but they're pathetic goobers. makes me think that like hitler and Stalin and whoever were probably pathetic wrecks of insecurity and sexual neuroses etc. too
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
one thing that this current era makes me really re-evaluate is how much gravitas the evil people of the past had. once someone's body count is in the millions you can't help but attach a certain evil dignity to them. to future generations musk and trump will be these grim and forbidding figures
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
I mean, you say this but then you see folks get hired - like TAH, about whom the discourse was - ABD with thin CVs because they have the weight of prestige and connections behind them. So they demand you write a book then don't hire you for the Ivy League ABD who hasn't AND WON'T!
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
healthy public life is impossible without the possibility of semi-private life. discursive communities need a place where they can talk inside baseball stuff. we have none of the benefits of the monoculture in terms of shared experiences, while still having the drawback.
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
think the 'global public square' fucking sucks & is bad man. people naturally code-switch and adjust based on the context they are in and the community they are talking to. the undifferentiated mega blast feed is a discursive mess that makes any kind of bounded communication impossible.
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Henry @henrythedog.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
it remains insane to me that Elon Musk and Trump being responsible for more death than any one else in the 21st century is just a non-story, like a total non-event in the discourse.
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Cameron 🇺🇸🗽🦅 @cameroncorduroy.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
sometimes i genuinely wonder how much of politics is determined by the fact that elections happen in the fall of one year but people don't take office until winter of next year
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 14/08/2026
Why wait
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 14/08/2026
I had absolutely no problem reading this but I am also 57 (i.e., "forced to learn cursive" years old) and also I myself actively mix standard and cursive letters when I handwrite things because I'm a weirdo like that
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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 14/08/2026
Geology Building xkcd.com/3284/
Comic. [A college building labeled “Department of Geology” with a diagonal slash through center making it look uneven.] [caption] The administration regretted giving the geology department free rein to design their new building.
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 14/08/2026
i do not think magnets are sufficient for that darth i think that takes some mysterious and advanced materials science
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darth™️ @darthbluesky.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
doesn’t he use those to keep his hair in place katie
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darth™️ @darthbluesky.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
waiting to see what inevitable grift is related to this
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Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
AfD formed as a hate party against Greece before it retooled as an anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and homophobic party.
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Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Congrats to the union members who voted for Trump, you put your fellow workers under fascist surveillance www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/u...
nytimes.com
U.S. Investigated Left-Leaning Groups During Minnesota Immigration Crackdown
The government conducted expansive surveillance, infiltrated group chats and obtained financial records of organizations never accused of crimes.
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
the best actual answer to this question is 'zionism' because the reactions will be ... revealing
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David Schraub @schraubd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Normally, taking 63% while mired in a huge ethics scandal might be an impressive showing for Farage, but not when this guy is your only real opponent.
Count Binface
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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 21/07/2026
fellow millennials, let's take a second to appreciate how great it feels to be in the prime marketing demographic catered to by all of the culture. I get now why boomers wanted it to last forever
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
The Gulf autocrats bribed the wrong guy. Actually, their mistake was thinking a corrupt, ignorant US president was in their interest.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Counterintelligence is almost always secretive, so we don’t know for sure. But reading between the lines on reports about 2016 Trump campaign figures with shady Russia ties—Manafort, Page, the Trump family—I suspected counterintel found a lot and doing criminal inquiry only was a mistake. Alas.
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David Burbach 🇺🇸 @dburbach.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Part of it is regional transfers. In all of these cases the termination payments for cancellations in blue states are being immediately reinvested by the firms in LA, TX, etc, as a condition of the deal
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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Many Trump things are explicable by hatred, by love of power, by vanity, by greed. Those all make a *kind* of sense. Spending billions of dollars to *not* get wind power the US would otherwise get doesn't seem to make any of those kinds of sense. It' just nuts. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/c...
nytimes.com
Trump Administration to Pay German Firm $1.2 Billion to Cancel Wind Leases
It was the fifth such deal struck by the administration to get companies to drop offshore wind projects.
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Dudes just wanna brood in a squat with their cool Scottish goth girlfriends and then your fucking mom comes and ruins the vibe
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Mike the Mad Biologist and Trump's Press Corps Approver @mikethemadbiol.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
There really seems to be a bunch of pundits hitting middle age, being forced to face physical frailty, and just not handling it well. There are better ways to handle a midlife crisis besides inflicting skin cancer on other people.
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