Benjamin Harnett

Lot of questions about why Macron called snap elections. One clear factor: By ordering speed campaign, he expected Left could not unite, & so they'd be knocked out in Round 1, helping his own party. Instead, Left united within days—& now surged to win biggest bloc in Assembly.

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Benjamin Harnett

my FB feed at the moment

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Benjamin Harnett

"For all their feted ‘pragmatism’, centrists are at heart absolutists of necessity, even more rigorously deterministic and unilinear in their reading of history than Stalinism at its peak." newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Richard Seymour, Majority Without a Mandate — Sidecarnewleftreview.org Elections in the UK.

Turkey vulture!

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Benjamin Harnett

Not great!!!

Well this is grim

It’s infuriating that Democratic elites want this election to be decided in a brutal squeaker by airheaded mushbrained people who can’t make up their mind between Trump and Biden instead of winning big by turning out their politically-aligned nonvoters.

Kind of digging that all the lion’s knights minifigures are so femme in the new Lego sets.

Getting back into physical media. Enjoying these little Blu-ray producers making limited editions with some very weird catalog of things you can’t get streaming. Derided as “Laura, warmed-over” but if you loved Laura you will enjoy this, and it has enough clever bits, real suspense, and acting…

You don’t actually need billionaire psychopaths or inbred failsons to understand why the news is fucking things so hard: just read Gaye Tuchman’s MAKING THE NEWS. It’s about the inherent biases of professionalized newsmaking. It’s all about the frame.

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Benjamin Harnett

Americans need to take some heart in the Labour victory. Rubbish can actually be thrown away. Don't be outdone.

I think there is a third camp, or at least I don’t see myself here. Biden’s primary debate performances were execrable bordering on embarrassing and his “masterful” speeches were barely passable. It’s a pretty low bar and it was raised by our desperate desire for Trump to be knocked out early.

There's a fundamental disconnect between people who watched the debate and saw it as viscerally disqualifying and people who saw a gifted politician having a very bad night. The two camps are going to have a very hard time reaching agreement on anything else about the race.

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Benjamin Harnett

Lmao

NEW: Biden has narrowed Trump’s lead in swing states despite a widely panned presidential debate performance, the Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll finds

Biden Narrows Gap With Trump in Swing States Despite Debate Losswww.bloomberg.com The incumbent trails his GOP rival by just 2 points across key states, a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult shows, even as three in 10 Democrats say he should leave the race.

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Benjamin Harnett

Reply to

Don Zeko

one of the most dishonest things people in my profession do is pretend as if “the story” and “the narrative” isn’t something they have direct control over

I mean he fucking sucks. He sucked in 2020, he really sucked before that, and he will keep sucking until he dies. We also basically threw out every other option so the only one left is to white knuckle this shit to triumph or annihilation.

This is shockingly solipsistic. And dangerous.

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Benjamin Harnett

This is what every executive who says they “work 18 hours a day” means

I will never forget Trump's official White House schedule

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Benjamin Harnett

turns out the villain monologue is actually incredibly realistic

Everyone watching any Bond movie: this is utterly unrealistic, no one would stand there and say exactly how they were going to do some awful thing, the Incredibles even made a joke about monologuing. Everyone experiencing reality: Oh. Oh, I see.

Here have a kitty

The only Democrat that sucked worse than Harris during the primaries was Biden, so if she ends up being the nominee I feel pretty good.

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Benjamin Harnett

Worst case scenario for beating Trump is everyone from the big media to defecting elected Dems to concerned voters keep hammering Biden for being (clearly) unfit and it doesn’t work and he runs anyway significantly wounded. And it looks like that’s what’s going to happen!

My best guess is these were used to churn out plaster reliefs for brits on the grand tour

Classical themes—copies of early Greek examples?

These really are cool

Hellenistic vibe here

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Benjamin Harnett

Just like none of the bold investigators backfilling Joe Biden's feeble debate performance with punchy anonymous quotes have ever figured out why Trump was rushed to Walter Reed, claimed he wanted a spur-of-the-moment weekend checkup, and a year later declared that he had NOT had a series of strokes

"Executive Time" fell out of the coverage of Donald Trump in the most incredible way. Nobody writing about his quest to become president again ever mentions the fact that he hated the job when he had it and he couldn't and wouldn't really do it!

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Benjamin Harnett

The discourse around biden needing more sleep is fully insane. Does no one remember "Executive Time," the thing Trump spent the majority(!) of his schedule on where he would just watch TV and tweet? Dude was categorically unable to fulfill any of the demands of the office and the press barely cared

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Benjamin Harnett

yes, we boiled the planet, but it was worth it to make a machine that, instead of adding two plus two, takes the statistical average of every answer to questions containing "what" "is" "two" and "plus" from a database of illegal cell phone transcripts and returns a fake nude pic of a high schooler

I was gifted this small collection of intaglios that I have no idea what to do with—no idea of their age (some might actually be old?) or provenance or relative quality. So I’m going to start by sharing some pictures since I think some are quite lovely to look at 🧵