this is one of the funniest things i've ever seen
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Oliver Traldi
@olivertraldi
POLITICAL BELIEFS coming soon with
Fellow . PhD
olivertraldi.weebly.comJoined September 2016
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around eleven years ago i texted my then-girlfriend elated that Roger Federer had won Wimbledon. she replied something like "i'm so glad you're happy. all i want is for you to be happy. and i think you'll be happier without me"
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what’s the worst way you ever got dumped?
I just got impeached
And this is crazy
But here's my number
Make a perfect phone call maybe
astounds me that on Twitter, comedians are the most humorless people, journalists care the least about facts, historians seem the most susceptible to passing fads, and philosophers have some of the weakest arguments
there never seem to be "proud to be getting divorced" essays by men
why do Twitter blue checks sound like guys trying to get girls to talk to them at a party ten years ago twitter.com/adamdavidson/s
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Men are chronically lonely and unable to express their pain. Women hardest hit.
why is it so hard for Democrats to say someone is a good candidate for an important job without trying to turn them into some sort of cult icon
Gonna have to side with Trump on this one, unfortunately.
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I have to admit, that is *literally* a false flag.
a professor DMing me to insult me and then screenshotting my polite reaction and tagging an institution i'm affiliated with over and over is a new one even for this hellsite
you already know seeing a description like this that it's the worst dating app ever made
He just resigned? Wow. I didn't know that. You're telling me now for the first time. He led an amazing career. What else can you say? He was an amazing man who led an amazing career. I am actually sad to hear that.
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reminiscent of the British surrender at Yorktown
would be so weird to date an e-girl. you wake up and make a waffle or something and she tweets "boys DO be liking waffles though" and it gets a thousand likes
The difficulty in distinguishing racism from anti-racism continues.
Writing a play about an academic conference whose attendees are all hoaxers trying to hide it from each other. In Act 2 a second curtain goes up and it's revealed the hoaxers are all being studied by yet another academic. In Act 3 it's revealed the meta-hoaxing study was p-hacked
When journalists start trying to destroy other journalists' lives, it seems to suddenly hit home for them more than when they'd tried to destroy a Google employee who wrote a memo, a woman who wore a questionable costume to a Halloween party, a gay Conde Nast executive, etc.
viral tweet: Women should stop having sex with men. That'll show them.
me (looking around nervously): Oh geez. Yeah. That'll be different. You bet
I know you're already getting dogpiled, and I don't want to add to that, but gently: if you're trying to avoid accusations like "Maoist", publicizing someone's relatively straightforward email correspondence to shame them for political disagreement is not going to help.
A lot of 90s media aged like shit because it depicts as tragic a bountiful lifestyle whose stability and simplicity, then viewed as sadly aimless, now seems only barely achievable. American Beauty is another example of this.
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Watching “fight club” for the first time since I was like thirteen and the ennui it depicts is so comfortable and luxurious it feels totally alien now. You got a microwave cordon blue on your business flight and a tiny bar of soap in your hotel, oh nooo!
Prime numbers are the Chads of numbers. It's not very masculine to be divisible by a bunch of smaller numbers.
it's crazy that "ableism" now mostly means expecting completely healthy people to have basic competence at their jobs
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sorry, just to be clear, i think the funny part is the contrast between the first two statements and the third, which comes out of nowhere
The WaPo multiple corrections reminded me of the greatest moment in modern journalism, when a New York Times story on Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson not knowing what Aleppo was needed to be corrected twice because the journalists mocking Johnson also had no clue.
Good. Now Berkeley can make its admissions decisions entirely based on unique extracurricular activities, lavish letters of recommendation from famous people, and heartwarming personal statements, which are, of course, perfectly equitably distributed.
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Just in: UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ just announced her support of dropping the SAT and ACT as an admissions requirement. Says research has convinced her the tests" really contribute to the inequities" of the system.
It's pretty odd that the across-the-board lowering or even dissolution of standards of intellectual quality (e.g. standardized tests) is taking place perfectly simultaneously with the across-the-board imposition of very exacting and complex new standards of political etiquette.
"Everyone of your political persuasion was interpersonally cruel to me, so I looked into the other side" seems like completely normal behavior to me of the sort that is cited by all sorts of activists. Not whiny or irrational at all, and a good reminder to be kind when possible.
when i call a girl "queen" what it really means is that i'm prepared to sacrifice her in a stunning tactical sequence
It's the most successful social policy in American history, but don't you dare suggest anyone in particular ever actually benefited from it!
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Welp, Today is going to suck.
Today starts the final process of taking down affirmative action. AA has been nothing short of the most successful social policy in American history (bar maybe the GI Bill), but too many white folks hate it so now it's going to die.
I will never get used to the fact that things that would be considered mediocre, derivative, and often poorly-expressed ideas in freshman comp classes get thousands of likes when tweeted out by professional writers here.
Harvard rescinding Kashuv's acceptance isn't necessarily a huge deal. More pressing is the ever-growing sense that there is no age too young and no channel too private for public scrutiny of one's words to be seen as off-limits. Surveillance is ubiquitous and arises organically.
This tweet is essentially what contemporary identity thinking is about. Some identities are good, some identities are bad, and you plug them in to a kind of formula to see whether the good "cancels out" the bad, which tells you how positive or negative your self-image should be.
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imagine a piece by a man that's like "i want to be back on Tinder" but he has to frame it as like "i want to teach my kids to be open to life and new experiences and to dive into the watery mirror that reflects their depths"
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Every scene from this show was this shit. One of the worst cultural products I've ever encountered, on any medium.
I'll say just one more thing about the New York Times college-girl cancellation article. Once some action is associated with an "-ism" or "-phobia", we seem unable to proportion our response to it. Any response is justified since it's inherently and completely beyond the pale.
if libs went to some magic country without reactionaries they would immediately devolve into arguments about which of them are the reactionaries
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Replying to @drvolts
Thing is, if libs could go to some magic country without reactionaries, they'd never think about reactionaries again. But reactionaries are bereft without libs -- it's right there in the name. They cannot be generative, cannot build. They can only resent & tear down.
Not sure why people are surprised at a New York Times writer-activist espousing the idea that there's such a thing as being "politically black". Four years ago the Advocate said Peter Thiel wasn't gay since he had the wrong views. It's "strategic essentialism" all the way down.
Right. I think we can all agree that the big political problem right now is all the mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers.
Treating standardized tests as actually measuring something valuable is considered more racist in higher education than treating Asian applicants as ipso facto having terrible personalities. twitter.com/EdWhelanEPPC/s
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The Ilya Shapiro dustup suggests that expressing opposition to affirmative action will soon be a firing offense in academia, even as it remains unpopular with the public, frequently gets voted down in statewide referenda, and faces legal challenges in the Supreme Court.
A good way to avoid people digging up offensive posts you made in the past is to become more offensive with each passing moment. If you are always as offensive as you have ever been, then there is nothing they can do to you.
I'm happy to announce that my first book, tentatively named POLITICAL BELIEFS: A PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUCTION, is now under contract with Routledge.
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For just a hundred dollars an hour, I can explain why this tweet is a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of what the test asks you to do.
It is a bit too on the nose that big online progressive personalities are incapable of doing the basic logical thinking and reading comprehension necessary to parse a normal LSAT question and instead have to revert to completely speculative political "analysis" to process it.
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this is a really "vulgar Marxism" take but it's pretty clear that introductory econ and law training are literally designed to beat leftist tendencies out of smart young people with consciences twitter.com/DavidAstinWals…
It's probably the wrong time for this, but I made this meme and now you have to look at it.
Twitter arguments should be like MegaMan - you should get your enemy's power when you defeat them. if you defeat a doctor you should get an MD, if you defeat a professor you should get tenure, if you defeat a journalist you should get a personality disorder, etc.
amazing how many people think that an ethnicity automatically gives you a personality and that the personality being Italian gives you is murderer
when progressives complain that conservatives are expanding the scope of harm/offense words in a way that will stigmatize innocent people
