Sign in

Raphael

@raphael-pbl.bsky.social
455 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)

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Raphael
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.
1020144
Reposted by Raphael
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....
89221
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Intereting take. In my case, I keep thinking that his surname is some new slang insult among the kids today that I just haven't heard of yet because I'm so out of touch.
000
Reposted by Raphael
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.
19834
Reposted by Raphael
Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
nice of the sex pests to gather in one spot
1314223
Reposted by Raphael
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”
13387100
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Isn't he a follower of an ideology that teaches that when people give you something, appreciating them for giving you that something and trying to give something back to them are for beta males?
000
Reposted by Raphael
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
1684774
Reposted by Raphael
Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
1233684
Reposted by Raphael
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.
312217
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
What's with that facial hair?
000
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
No, you don't understand. According to Alpha Male Thought (TM), whining is not whining if you express it in a loud, deeply, manly (TM) sounding, aggressive voice. Once you do that, it is no longer whining, but righteous anger. (/sarcasm)
000
Reposted by Raphael
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?
5271
Reposted by Raphael
David Burbach 🇺🇸 @dburbach.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Not nearly long enough? 😬 From @atrupar.com
1365
Reposted by Raphael
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.
1438650
Reposted by Raphael
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.
2928544
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Which is, oddly enough, exactly what they accuse us of.
000
Reposted by Raphael
Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Quite a lot of maddening stories of rail construction incompetence.
2233
Reposted by Raphael
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?
9532
Reposted by Raphael
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.
1589
Reposted by Raphael
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.
1526766
Reposted by Raphael
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 🥲🫡
2403
Reposted by Raphael
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Wow they must have made a really persuasive case!
3857386
Reposted by Raphael
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.
875796
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
There seem to be a lot of people who kind of assume that a famous book called "The Art of War" must certainly contain all of their own most favorite ideas, so there's no need for them to ever actually read it.
062
Reposted by Raphael
Dead Carl @deadcarl.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
The paradox, of course, is anyone who would benefit from this advice would never read it
211713
Reposted by Raphael
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?
0307
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Might be distinction without difference. People who do really horrible things that might make others think "I want vengeance for that" are usually likely to do similar horrible things again in the future.
000
Reposted by Raphael
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
15112673
Reposted by Raphael
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.
0183
Reposted by Raphael
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 :/
2372
Reposted by Raphael
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. 
41793
Reposted by Raphael
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
72258301
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Yes. TDA is a standard disaster movie, except with an extremely big disaster. Thread, on the other hand, is *really* bleak.
020
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Hitler - yes. Not sure about Stalin. There's a somewhat well-known photo of him as a young man that shows him looking like the kind of man all women are after. Makes me suspect that in @rickperlstein.bsky.social 's terms, Hitler was very much an Orthogonian, while Stalin might have been a Franklin.
120
Reposted by Raphael
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
151635
Reposted by Raphael
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
416010
Reposted by Raphael
"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!
0112
Reposted by Raphael
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.
31019
Reposted by Raphael
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.
922315
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Ah, so *that's* how the horseshoe pseudo "leftists" and the outright right-wingers reconcile their initially different attitudes towards drugs. Also should be noted in this context that a year ago, both of them were simply water-carrying propagandists for the most powerful government leaders.
010
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
These guys think stuff like that makes them look cool. And impressive. And they've got large numbers of sycophants who agree.
050
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
My impression is that you see him quite positively, but of course I might be wrong about that.
100
Reposted by Raphael
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.
7299146
Raphael @raphael-pbl.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
"Austerity"? The stimulus was "austerity"?
030
Reposted by Raphael
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
1736449
Reposted by Raphael
John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 14/08/2026
Why wait
372964486
Reposted by Raphael
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
8569616
Reposted by Raphael
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.
593904492
Reposted by Raphael
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
61203