If the time of the old white males is over, perhaps Pete FitzSimons can transfer his million dollar book deals and media publishing contracts to me. But he won’t, because he’s a selfish fucking boomer who just wants to set fire to everything right as he shuffles off the scene.

I can't stop thinking about 9/11. The more I think, the more awful I feel for laughing at 9/11 jokes in the past. I just can't get the firefighters, Flight 93 passengers, or Man in the Red Bandana out of my mind. It all felt so real this year in a way it had never before.

Pete FitzSimons appears to not very much like diversity in his personal life. He lives in one of the least diverse areas of Sydney according to this online census map I built with AI

BREAKING: Russian authorities have just imposed a nighttime curfew near the Narva Estonian border and have banned vehicles and people entering the Slantsy and Kingisepp districts within 5km of the border to September the 26th.

Building a 3D model of Level 78 of the WTC South Tower - the site of some of the worst atrocities on 9/11. Up to 200 people were waiting for elevators in the Sky Lobby when United Airlines Flight 175 hit the floor. It is estimated that roughly one-third of all those who died in the South Tower lost their lives on or near this single floor. Still early days but I will try add an incident map based on the surviving oral history testimony we have from the floor

It’s actually amazing how dog shit Obama’s reflections on 9/11 were in 2001. His writing is amazing because it actually perfectly illustrates how the left never understood 9/11 ever. Obama said that the fundamental problem was that the hijackers lacked empathy and that their lack of empathy grew out of “a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” Basically a version of “hurt people hurt people.” But Bin Laden came from a billionaire family and the pilots and planners were all university-educated, middle-class men. Marc Sageman analysed hundreds of terrorist biographies and found that three quarters of his al-Qaeda sample came from the upper or middle class, 90 percent from intact families, and 63 percent had attended college against a developing world norm of 5–6 percent. They were essentially a kind of jihadist version of a Marxist-Leninist vanguard organisation with a much higher concentrated pool of human capital than the masses they claimed to speak for. Qutb's Milestones actually explicitly calls for a vanguard to lead the Muslim masses, and Qutb is the intellectual lineage Zawahiri came out of. And rather than lacking empathy for their victims, they knew full well that they were inflicting massive suffering on the world - they simply believed that Americans deserved this suffering. Think about it for a second. How do we define the concept of empathy? It’s the ability to understand and access the feelings of others. This necessarily rests upon an understanding that the other party is in fact human and can feel. The 9/11 hijackers and the men who plotted it knew full well that their victims were human. They fully understood that they were slaughtering thousands of American civilians in some of the most brutal ways imaginable. It’s not that they dehumanised Americans - they knew they were human and wanted them to suffer. Cruelty requires cognitive empathy - you can't design maximal suffering without modelling the victim's mind. To terrorise, humiliate or maximise suffering you have to model what the target dreads, what will break them, what they will see coming. Bin Laden's 2002 "Letter to America" argues that American civilians are not innocent because they elect their government and fund it through taxes. That is the collective-guilt argument in the perpetrators' own words - it presupposes Americans are moral agents, not sub-human. So Obama diagnosed a deficit - an "inability to imagine" - when the 9/11 hijackers and plotters in fact imagined the suffering perfectly well. They wanted to inflict suffering on Americans because they believed their actions were morally right. Al-Qaeda operated according to a highly developed and ideological Schmittian friend-enemy distinction framework, yet Obama naively imagined they were a bunch of poor suffering Third Worlders who could have been diverted from attacking America through development aid, economic opportunity and education. Doesn’t work like that when your enemy marks you as an eternal enemy against which anything is justified.

Let me give you a basic education on gay style Matt I will not insult you, despite you not only accusing me of having your photo saved on my phone, but also implying that a look retired four months ago is beyond critique. A look does not enter the public domain after 120 days. It is still yours. You still did it. This is not gay style. You can take a page out of Cher's book and be better than this. You argue that because camp is maximalist, more is always more. By your logic, a rhinestone glued to every surface of a house would also be camp. At face value this could not be true, so let's actually examine the canon you failed to ever read. First is the principle of Undertone Matching (any Sephora employee, unprompted). Foundation must match the neck, not the aspiration. Yours is two shades warm of your own throat, meaning your face and body are now operating in separate jurisdictions. That is not a look. That is a border dispute. "Take one thing off before you leave the house" (Coco Chanel, apocryphal, but so is your shade match) is the clear provision proving that restraint is absolutely allowed in camp. It is through this underlying principle that gay men are able to wear six inches of chrome nail and still leave the house looking intentional. What is not permitted is destructive maximalism: five different colours, five different shapes, one hand, no theme. That has a house edge and thus a negative expected value on your face. This is widely accepted by scholars. Sontag drew a line between camp that knows what it's doing and camp that doesn't. Divine's eyeshadow went to the brow because it was a decision. Your nails went to five colours because Claire's had a clearance bin. Recreation is canon, and restraint is the test. You wouldn't know this, but the Drag Race judges already permit a mismatched set once one nail is the accent and the other four agree with each other. Yours have not been introduced. To explain it more simply so that someone of your calibre can understand: the nails are bombastic, the foundation is the wrong shade, and the cap is doing all the work. My critique is grounded in actual craft. You on the other hand constantly make a fool of yourself by never knowing even the basics of "your" aesthetic. None of this is serving. None of this is what Cher wanted (and we both love a look, we just disagree on whether this is one). Educate yourself.

Merkel left office five years ago to huge acclaim. Why? She ripped off Nato, cultivated gas dependency on Putin, cosied up to China and opened the door to a million migrants in 2015 alone. She, not the populist right, was the true extremist of our age