“Meanwhile, in another corner of the internet, a bunch of conservative women started doing what appears to be actual Nazi salutes on Instagram (though some deny it). In many ways, it highlighted how ridiculous the “good genes” controversy was; as we saw during Medhi Hasan’s Jubilee episode, when right-wing influencers want to say they’re Nazi sympathizers, they don’t exactly use invisible ink. But it also served as a reminder: Here were people doing an actually egregious thing, and Democrats didn’t have the tools to make it stick. Indeed, Democrats have tried for years to tie the genuinely extreme, not-just-irritating views of the far right to the rest of the Republican Party, and most of the time, it fails.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/08/sydney-sweeney-republicans-win-media-ecosystem-00497761
“were “the Democrats,” collectively, actually upset about the ad?
At first, “criticism of the ad campaign had come almost entirely from a smattering of accounts with relatively few followers,” Ken Bensinger and Stuart A. Thompson of The New York Times wrote last week. “Conversation about the ad did not escalate online or in traditional media until days later, after right-leaning influencers, broadcasters and politicians began criticizing what they described as a wave of progressive outrage.”
…
Do woke liberals really think a publicly traded clothing company, and one of the biggest stars in the world, are inserting eugenicist terminology into commercials? Who cares, if it means I get to make my political enemies out to be fools.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/11/the-self-sustaining-outrage-cycle-of-sydney-sweeneys-jeans-ad/
“The fires have now killed at least 20 people, torched more than 14.8 million acres, and destroyed more than 900 homes since September. The blazes turned skies orange and made breathing the air in Sydney as bad as smoking 37 cigarettes. The bushfires have also killed 480 million animals, environmental officials told the Times in the United Kingdom, including nearly one-third of the koalas in one of Australia’s most populated koala habitats, an area 240 miles north of Sydney.”
…
“The extreme heat in Australia this week is not just a fluke. There were unique patterns in rain, temperature, and wind that converged to scorch the continent, factors that scientists were able to detect in advance. But Australia is also deep in the throes of the accelerating climate crisis, facing not just extreme heat but changes in rainfall patterns. These shifts in turn stand to worsen other problems like drought and wildfires.”
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“However, the links between fire risk and climate change are more complicated than the links between extreme heat and climate change.”