#really good read

[kawamagi-crow]

christmas was real nice this year lmao

[alexbkrieger13]

https://www.aftonbladet.se/sportbladet/fotboll/a/5Bd4Wb/ryden-magdalena-eriksson-ar-tillbaka-pa-allvar-igen

Good read

Rydén: Back seriously – it needs Blågult

She may not see herself as a star, but in the Olympic qualifiers she has taken a leading role. 

After two tough seasons, Magdalena Eriksson is back in earnest and Blågult needs it. 

A single careless mistake and the Olympic dream goes down the drain

The national team has bused down to Malmö for the fourth match in the Nations League, also the Olympic qualifier. The fourth match with the knife to the throat.

There is no room for carelessness or mistakes, then the Olympics are far away.

That's why it's nice to see a smiling Magdalena Eriksson , with lowered shoulders, entering the field in the bright sun. The 30-year-old has had two tough seasons behind him. The injury against Wolfsburg in the Champions League in December 2021 was the start of something that Magdalena Eriksson was probably not prepared for. The ankle injury kept her off the field and even though it was only for three months, it took longer before she was really back as we are used to seeing her..

A thinking player

In EC 2022, the centre-back had problems getting up to level and finding the flow. It can perhaps be partly explained by how it was rotated between a three-back and four-back line and partly by the fact that Eriksson played both left and centre-back. It was clear that something was not right and it was quite telling to see how the day after the Switzerland match she walked around Camden Park alone with her eyes downcast and headphones in her ears.

Magdalena Eriksson is a thinking player and she is probably her own harshest critic.

Left in tears

Then came an injury to Millie Bright and Eriksson not only got playing time, she also had to score. In the big meeting with Arsenal, she scored her first goal in the league since November 2021 and tearfully left London as champion.

In the World Cup, she was included in the Swedish starting eleven and after a little recovery, it seems to be the case in Bayern Munich as well. And if there is something the Swedish national team needs right now, it is a defense general with self-confidence.

Because now Magdalena Eriksson shines again.

Close to squealing

In the World Cup, it was Amanda Ilestedt who took that role and more or less brought Italy down on her own, with her own head. Now she has, once again, left the collection and it is up to Eriksson and the gang to deliver.

Although Blågult overcame Italy 5–0 in the WC, the result did not reflect the match picture. On a deserted mountaintop in Italy, in an arena without a match clock and a grass field that left something to be desired, Sweden won 1–0.

Italy, who have changed their national team captain after the World Cup, have played in the Nations League. They were close to beating Spain and will land in Malmö with good confidence.

It will be a physical match, a jerky match. It applies to Sweden to fast on fast.

And why not let Magdalena Eriksson get in another perfectly timed run and score on Swedish soil for the third game in a row?

[darkwood-hollows]

i love and hate finishing books in a single day. it's like being in a drunken haze, brought in by the prose of the book. i'm enamored by it, live in it, and then it's over and i return to reality feeling numb and listless.

[praise-suns-and-chill]

Did I make OCs again after reading a new book?

Yes. Yes I did.

Meet Selene

And Soleil Dexter

Selene, a very sweet, genuine girl. She values honesty, mostly because she can barely be honest with anyone. So when she can actually really trust someone, she will never lie about anything.

Also a very good actress though. When she lies, acts and makes her way through Kelestri, everyone believes her no matter what she says. Just has an air that she could never do any wrong.

Soleil though... A cynical and very blunt fella, honest to a fault. He might not look intimidating, but every threat coming from him will still be taken serious as he is a lot stronger than he seems. And everyone knows, he's a terrible liar, best he can do is lie by omission. However, he will do his best to behave around his sister, who he is VERY protective of. Despite her being the older twin.

When he warms up to someone (mostly due to not wanting to make Selene mad) he can be more friendly though, and again, very protective. It's just very rare that he happens to like someone.

His mother always tended to pay more attention to him, for better and for worse. Mostly worse.

[scrmnviking]

And don't immediately obey. Gulf of A_____? Fuck that. Use Gulf of Mexico. Get rid of DEI? Don't wanna not gonna do it. MAKE them make you comply. It eats up their resources and time which helps us have time to file lawsuits and demonstrate they don't have this illusory power.

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[ciderbird]

academic bias is so funny because you’ll be reading about the same historical event and one person is like “Despite the troubles that befell his homeland and near constant criticism of the court King Blorbo remained strong in the face of adversity” and the other one is like “after letting his people carry the brunt of his cringefail decisions Blorbo the Shitface refused to listen to any reason and continued to be a warmongering piece of shit. Also he was ugly.”

[tackrusso]

everyone come look at this fucking AITA post i just saw

[flourmelon]

“And as for the people around here, well, I’m very sorry that my rocket might crash through their roofs and put a premature halt to their careers as professional television watchers, but given the state of the economy, I might actually be doing them a favor.”

Grady Hendrix, BadAsstronauts

05.16.2024

🐎🚀⛺️🕶️🍺

[great-and-small]

The majority of the Earth’s rodents: How do you survive environments with practically zero oxygen, feel no pain, and live for decades when none of the rest of us can???

Naked mole-rats:

[alexbkrieger13]

Good read probably behind a paywall later-ish

https://www.dn.se/sport/sa-byggde-gerhardsson-sin-hyllade-ledarstil-man-maste-fa-tillatas-att-tanka-pa-sig-sjalv/

This is how Gerhardsson built his celebrated leadership style: "You must be allowed to think about yourself"

Several national teams have been torn apart by internal contradictions.

In the Swedish World Cup squad, cohesion is celebrated like never before.

Here, players can be themselves, say several stars.

Union captain Peter Gerhardsson explains his leadership philosophy:

- Many people talk about the team before the self, but for me it's just the opposite. You must be allowed to think for yourself to create a good group

Spanish footballers have rebelled against their national team captain and boycotted national team games. In France, the contradictions between the former leadership and the big stars were so great that the national team captain had to be replaced. And in Norway, one of the World Cup squad's biggest players has completely cut off the national team leadership, indirectly put himself above his teammates - and was forced to apologize.

Yes, it has stormed around several national teams before and during the WC.

In Sweden?

- The team cohesion that we have right now, not many teams have, says midfielder Elin Rubensson.

- This is what I think is one of our greatest strengths, that we work a lot on personal relationships, adds colleague Kosovare Asllani.

- That people dare to relax and be themselves.

If Asllani is to be believed, it hasn't always been that way. The Milan star told this in a long interview with DN before the World Cup:

- In previous years, before Peter took over (2017) I would say, I felt that everyone would fit into a square, no one was allowed to stand out, but you looked for more mistakes and tried to set a standard how you "should" behave. But since Peter took over, it doesn't matter how you are.

The Peter she is talking about is the union captain Gerhardsson.

- He has an openness, explains national team captain Caroline Seger.

- We are very open with each other. Then there won't be these little moments of irrationality that maybe other teams experience.

When Gerhardsson himself has to explain how he worked with group dynamics, he refers, as often when he has to put the words out about something, to the time when he was club coach for BK Häcken's men.

- There were many who were young, many were older, many players were from other nations. That dynamic was fantastic to work with, says the union captain to DN.

When he took over responsibility for the women's national team, he wanted to create a similar climate.

- Many people talk about the team for the sake of the self, but for me it's just the opposite. Self before the team.

- You must be allowed to think about yourself and be allowed to think about yourself in order to create a good team, a good group. That doesn't mean you should be stupid, you should also have respect. But in order to end up respecting someone, you have to have a slightly broader view of how people work - background, where you come from and so on.

He exemplifies:

- In a way, I am perhaps dependent on my upbringing, where I come from. But no one can be exactly like me. Then I'm stupid if I believe that.

The national team must work as a group and strive towards the same goal, say both Gerhardsson and several players. But especially during championships – week in and week out together – there must be room for individual adaptation. Not least when it comes to training and recovery.

When Sweden takes on the USA in the World Cup round of 16 in Melbourne on Sunday, it will be after several weeks together in Oceania - but it is not written in stone that everyone had the same schedule.

- We set up training based on some kind of median. Then someone may need to train more and someone may need to train less. We cannot set up collective training sessions for everything, says Gerhardsson.

Even outside the pitch, the individual must have a place, he continues.

- Our entire group, both leaders and players, is based on an individual freedom to say what one thinks and thinks. Then of course there are frames in it.

- But just like in Häcken, I wanted players who stand for their opinions, who are not anonymous. One way is to create a trust in people and talk to people. You can have different opinions, but you respect each other.

His celebrated group dynamics are not just about the atmosphere among the players either.

Several Swedish WC names mention how the management team is close to the playing squad, in a way that - perhaps - stands out.

- If there is something, we have promised each other that we will take it immediately, and then move on. Then it's easier, says Seger.

After the EC last year was such a period.

DN has previously told about how injuries, covid infection and shaky results affected the mood in the group.

- I want to believe that everyone is always very happy, but you have to keep in mind that there can always be a player who is disappointed, who was substituted, substituted late or not substituted at all, says assistant national team captain Magnus Wikman during this year's WC.

- Then it is important to communicate, take it early and have regular contact - not have a development meeting once a year.

A key person in this context is, in addition to Gerhardsson, the football psychological advisor Rasmus Liljeblad, who the national team captain brought with him from Häcken, say several players.

The role was new in the national team in 2017, and deals with group and individual calls, Liljeblad has previously explained his mission to DN.

But he is often also the spider in the web in well-being activities and team building. During the WC, for example, the entire Swedish squad competed in a well-known tournament in a so-called cornhole (which involves throwing bags on a board with a hole in it).

- I think every single player and manager was involved in the final. We had physical therapists who were cheerleaders and someone else was a DJ, it was a cool experience. That is what will take us far, says Elin Rubensson.

It might sound silly , but just such things create harmony in a group, says striker Olivia Schough.

- I've been in teams where there hasn't been harmony in the group and then there hasn't been good football either. You want to have fun at work, that is very important.

[valtsv]

my main advice for writing an enemies to lovers relationship is to resist the urge to make the characters' loathing and attraction mutually exclusive opposing forces. it's okay if they're getting weirdly into it and having Thoughts whilst also sincerely wanting to kill each other with hammers.

[heartorbit]

if we could stay connected, just like this

[oifaaa]

It's funny how opinions can change over time for instance I used to want Bruce to be a good parent but then I realised how fucking boring that is to read at the end of the day comics are soap operas and I'm here for the drama

[blanketforcas]

i think what saves me from a lot of discourse is that i'm simply Not Reading All That

[autumn-may]

Mostly spoiler free summary of my viewing experience