cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2915426

It's worth reading the whole article because there's many amazing quotes. But the best part comes at the end:

In the basement, I smiled and said hello. She (Jill Biden looked back at me with a confused, panicked expression. It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of a family emergency. “Uh, hi,” she said. Then she glanced over to her right. Oh …

I had not seen the president up close in some time. I had skipped this season’s holiday parties, and, preoccupied with covering Trump’s legal and political dramas, I hadn’t been showing up at his White House. Unlike Trump, he wasn’t very accessible to the press, anyway. Why bother? Biden had done few interviews. He wasn’t prone to interrupting his schedule with a surprise media circus in the Oval Office. He kept a tight circle of the same close advisers who had been advising him for more than 30 years, so unlike with his predecessor, you didn’t need to hang around in West Wing hallways to figure out who was speaking to him. It was all pretty locked down and predictable in terms of the reality you could access as a member of the press with a White House hard pass.

I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.

Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth.

This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call “low trust” — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals. The White House often did not engage when questioned about the president’s stare, which sometimes raised alarm on social media when documented in official videos produced by the White House. The administration was above conspiratorial chitchat that entertained seriously scenarios in which the president was suffering from a shocking decline most Americans were not seeing. If the president was being portrayed that way, it was by his political enemies on the right, who promoted through what the press office termed “cheap fakes” a caricature of an addled creature unfit to serve. They would not dignify those people, or people doing the bidding of those people, with a response.

For many inclined to support the president, this was good enough. They did not need to monitor the president’s public appearances, because under his leadership the country had returned to the kind of normal state in which members of a First World democratic society had the privilege to forget about the president for hours or days or even weeks at a time. Trump required constant observation. What did he just do? What would he do next? Oh God, what was he doing right at that moment? Biden could be trusted to perform the duties of his office out of sight. Many people were content to look away.

My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered. He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black-tie affair. I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.

Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.

“It was a bad night.” That’s the spin from the White House and its allies about Thursday’s debate. But when I watched the president amble stiffly across the stage, my first thought was: He doesn’t look so bad. For months, everything I had heard, plus some of what I had seen, led me to brace for something much more dire.

We're sooooooo fucked lmao

from this video. idk where the screenshot is from exactly tho

If it wasn't for the fact I'm just weary from all the mountains of shit these so-called journalists pour out of their mouths I'd be screaming like Matt Christman right now

somethings changed I dont know what the fuck is going on, i mean something has to be wrong i can feel it

i can't quite put my main fucking finger on it but im very scared and I don't like it

PLEASE HELP ME IM SCARED

You might be able to correctly guess that the reason for my mistake was that I had heard the phrase "ramen noodles" so often and so invariably that I randomly ended up rebracketing the final N in "ramen" as the first N in "noodles". And then because I myself only referred to "rama noodles", nobody ever corrected me, because to them my output sounded exactly like their input.

And I did not have much written input to go off of, either: not on instant noodle packages, which generally just said "noodles"; nor on ramen shop signs, the few of which I would've seen apparently found it "fancier" to not put the word "ramen" in their names; nor did ramen really come up in writing elsewhere, because I wasn't exactly going around spending my days reading about the history of pulled noodles.

So there were a few ways in which my bubble could've burst:

1. I could've just read the word "ramen" somewhere. While the instant noodle packages and ramen shops in Norway tended not to readily use the word "ramen", those in occupied Mni Sota Makoce did. And so I had elevated chances of encountering the word "ramen" in writing for the fraction of any given year that I spent in Mni Sota Makoce. But time and time again, I didn't notice ramen shop signage in Mni Sota Makoce; and time and time again it did not occur to me to actually inspect the packs of Maruchan atop me nan's fridge.
2. I could've looked up "rama noodles" online, only to find that all the results were for "ramen noodles". But it would seem that I just never did this, because I didn't really have any sort of burning curiosity about noodles as a kid that would've inspired me to google about the ol' yummy curls.
3. I could've heard someone use the word "ramen" not paired with the word "noodles", nor paired with any other word that would allow rebracketing; or I myself could've said "rama" not paired with such a word, and in so doing exposed my error to others.

This is of course assuming that even if I had been exposed to someone saying or writing "ramen", that I would not have come up with any number of alternate explanations that would've allowed me to continue to believe that the word was "rama" just as I'd always believed; and this is also assuming that even if I had very clearly said "rama" in a way that others could not explain away as a mishearing, that other people would've actually bothered to correct me instead of just letting it slide, or even if they had corrected me, that I would've actually noticed the correction and had it stick.

...But truth be told I honestly don't think I ever actually did any sort of explaining away, and I don't think I ever actually was consciously corrected for saying "rama" instead of "ramen". I really do think that it was as simple as my conversations involving ramen just tending to be very short and sporadic, with my interlocutor exclusively saying "ramen noodles" and myself exclusively saying "rama noodles".

So yeah, the only likely ways in which I could've learned that it was "ramen" instead of "rama", was by either reading the word in Mni Sota Makoce, or by hearing someone say "ramen" not paired with "noodles". And indeed, the only specific memory I have relating to my unlearning of "rama" in favor of "ramen" was ~7:34 in the JonTron video "Are You Afraid of the Dark? Part 2", in which the racist antivaxxer says,

Bad guy wears boots, all black, and his hair looks like... ramen. Mmm!

...Though I am not entirely certain it actually was this exact clip that burst my bubble, or whether I just saw that JonTron clip at a time when I had recently from somewhere else learned that I'd been saying "ramen" wrong — and so that clip actually just reinforced my unlearning of "rama" by making me recall and cringe about my earlier mistake. I mean, I can certainly imagine that all these years later that I could've forgotten my actual first experience of unlearning "rama", and so my brain has just substituted that experience for my memory of that JonTron clip.

Which isn't to say that it's impossible that JonTron was the one who taught me to say "ramen" instead of "rama" — just that it's impossible to be certain he did.

Anyways, point is, that's why English speakers call oxen "steer" and Norwegian speakers call them "tyr".

can't believe the mods loosened the posting restrictions here

They also have a search engine that filters out AI sludge, ad-infested websites, and commercial websites at https://search.marginalia.nu

Make a post about it if you find anything cool!

https://archive.is/ldiB8

The current libertarian candidate has been going on right wing podcasts to defend drag queen story hours and trans issues lol

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/29/two-bidens-trump-debate-2024-president