If Vladimir Putin didn’t convince you that good pecs and hair do not qualify you to govern, I give you Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime ministerial princeling whose years in office have proven that there is no policy so progressive that he will not back it — provided he never has to do anything to make it happen.
Continue reading “Hasan Minhaj roasts Justin Trudeau on climate hypocrisy”
Tag: ha ha only serious
“It’s easy to play the Nazi card”
This video from Bohemian Browser Ballett on Germany’s public broadcaster Funk is absolutely genius: a comic dialogue between a literal uniformed Nazi officer outraged that someone had the temerity to call him a Nazi: “Just because someone doesn’t share mainstream opinion it doesn’t mean he’s a Nazi. Maybe I’m a concerned citizen who is afraid of foreign domination!” (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
Juicy Ghost: Rudy Rucker’s tale of an American coup
“Juicy Ghost” is a new tale from Rudy Rucker (previously), an explicitly politican sf story told from the point of view of a suicide-assassin who is getting ready to take out an illegitimate president during his inauguration; as Rucker describes, he really struggled with the story, and couldn’t figure out where or if to publish (he even contemplated rebooting his late, great, much-lamented webzine Flurb with an “all-politics” issue as a means of giving the story a home).
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Man-Eaters Volume Two: Fleshing out the world where girls turn into lethal werepanthers when they get their periods
Volume One of Man-Eaters, Chelsea Cain and Kate Niemczyk’s scathing, hilarious, brilliant comic about girls who turn into man-eating werepanthers when they get their periods, is the best comic I read in 2019, and Volume Two, just published by Image comics, continues the brilliance with a set of design-fiction-y fake ads and other collateral that straddle the line between a serious piece of science fictional world-building and Switfian satire.
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John Oliver on Facebook’s role in fomenting genocide, pogroms and authoritarianism.: “a toilet”
Facebook usage is falling in the US and Canada, especially among young people, but it’s still dominating the internet overseas, especially in countries where Zero Rating is legal.
Continue reading “John Oliver on Facebook’s role in fomenting genocide, pogroms and authoritarianism.: “a toilet””
Chris Slane’s privacy-oriented editorial cartoons are painfully funny
Online privacy is pretty much a dumpster-fire, but it’s a funny dumpster fire in the world of Kiwi editorial cartoonist Chris Slane, whose one-panel strips are hilarious in a kind of oh-shit-we’re-doomed kind of way.
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Train your AI with the world’s largest data-set of sarcasm, courtesy of redditors’ self-tagging
Redditors’ convention of tagging their sarcastic remarks is a dream come true for machine learning researchers hoping to teach computers to recognize and/or generate sarcasm.
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Donald J Trump: “No matter who wins, at least I had fun” (The Onion)
The Onion is apparently struggling to satirize an election that is so absurd it can only be called “self-satirizing,” but they scored a hit with their op-ed by Donald J Trump: “No Matter What Happens Tomorrow, At Least I Had Fun.”
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A journalist finally uncovers the root of Trump supporters’ anger
Benjamin Hart journeys to the forgotten post-industrial town of Bleaksville, Kentucky and digs deep to find the answer to the question no other journalist (apart from the roughly 7,200 who wrote articles on this subject during this election cycle) will ask: why are Trump supporters so angry?
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Devil’s Dictionary: the ed-tech edition
I’ve been noting humorous updatings of Ambrose Bierce’s 1906 humor classic The Devil’s Dictionary for years — there was the publishing edition, and this corker on copyright — but the Educational Technology edition, by New Storytelling author Bryan Alexander has a currency and an urgency that scores an acerbic bullseye.