Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

Just a few bad apples.

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Consistently wrong since 2002

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

What fresh hell is this?

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

The willow is too close to the house.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Good luck with your asparagus.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

Too inconsequential to be sued

People are complicated. Love is not.

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Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.

GOP Death Cult Open Thread: ‘Leader’ Mitch McConnell Wants to Destroy America’s Economy

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“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”

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Excellent Cryptocurrency Read: ‘This Is All Exactly What It Looks Like’

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There are the many liberative and exciting things that cryptocurrency might someday be and be used for, and then there is what cryptocurrency currently is, and how it actually gets used. Neither, strictly speaking, is anything that a normal person would really need to know or care about unless that normal person is the victim of a ransomware scam, or wants to buy drugs on the internet, or needs to discreetly send $250,000 to Roger Stone. For now, this is what it is: something that’s absolutely real, but also abstracted and howlingly sketchy even relative to other speculative investment vehicles and obscure even when compared to the other memetic fads that our moment’s reigning cretins tend to favor. The discourse around it is absolutely catastrophic, just disastrously obnoxious and dishonest and stilted at every turn, but that is generally true when it comes to conversations about money.

It is not unreasonable to be suspicious of this, both because of who is making the argument and how they are making it. Cryptocurrency, at least as it is sold by its most fervent adherents—the most prominent of those are men already famous for being rich, with a greasy substrate of rise-and-grind influencer types pumping and dumping and posting and posting and posting away just beneath—is rhetorically much more ambitious than the previous innovations that promised to Change The World for the better. Another reason for skepticism is that those previous innovations, when pitched by this type of person, all quickly wound up resolving to abetting ever bleaker new frontiers of serf labor, or expediting and optimizing the process through which aspiring genocidaires around the world get their social media posts in front of the most receptive possible audiences.

But also there is just the reality of how and what cryptocurrency actually is, which is, as SEC chair Gary Gensler said last week, “a highly speculative asset class.” When the Biden Administration tentatively moved to tax and regulate cryptocurrency transactions, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained the decision by saying, “To the extent [cryptocurrency] is used, I fear it’s often for illicit finance. It’s an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions, and the amount of energy that’s consumed in processing those transactions is staggering.” Advocates’ response to this series of basically true observations is less a rebuttal than a blithe counterproposal to the effect that 1) none of that matters and also is all being fixed, and 2) the new money will bring about world peace so honestly how dare you…

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For the Insatiably Curious: Quick Notes from Yesterday’s COVID Summit

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GOP Coup Attempt Open Thread: Meet ‘Trump Lawyer John Eastman’

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We are now officially better at journalism than those sites (or, apparently, the NYTimes).

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Uphill Battle

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Wednesday / Thursday, Sept. 22-23

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Open Thread: Our Failed Media Would-Be Celebrities

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Too many of our ‘elite’ media members have decided they want to be the STARS of the show, not just the people who tell the rest of us about it. That’s why so many right-wing ‘reporters’ make fools of themselves at Jen Psaki’s press conferences — even getting pigbladdered for an inane question is a kind of spotlight, a little taste of celebrity. He mighto occasionally have put their careers, or even their lives, in jeopardy, but TFG gave good teevee…

For one brief shining moment… they could imagine themselves, every one, in the spotlight…

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