crashes, obviously
crashes, obviously
there used to be a decent alt rock station in the boston metro area i would listen to on my commute and their DJ fucking LOVED lightning crashed. i heard it AT LEAST once each way to and from work every day, sometimes more than once in a one-hour drive.
the important thing to remember about people like this and mr. weeks is that they genuinely have no beliefs or ideology whatsoever, except a reflexive opposition to any policy or person favored by an “internet leftist” who exists only in their heads.
he was right about the latter and how he got there doesn’t matter! you can’t treat some americans as more authentically american than others, but if you have to, it is the modern right - who have spat on every single one of the country’s founding ideals - who are the johnny-come-lately usurpers.
this pathology has always been with us. one reason FDR was so effective is that, as a blue-blooded member of two pre-revolutionary aristocratic families, he genuinely believed that leadership was his birthright and he had the right to make sweeping changes to the american social contract.
similarly, if DHS agents were no longer allowed to do raids or deportations but instead forced to attend benefits meeting with immigrants like a social worker and shepherd them through the application process, i think a lot of them would just quit
it is pretty telling that they believe that people adopt liberal attitudes specifically because they are told those attitudes exist in others, and not as the product of any kind of internal process or lived experience
this tendency has always existed but it seems particularly pronounced lately, and also more and more authors seem willing to indulge it - populating their books with complex but orderly taxonomies of Stuff. the story takes second fiddle to the setting. feels like a commercial consideration.
there’s a type of fandom which primarily sees the object of their fandom as a source of facts with which to fill wiki pages. i hate it so much.
who’s “we” this mf canadian
the reason “cops” as currently conceived are a relatively modern invention is that the state’s monopoly on force was exercised in a much more direct, brutal, and arbitrary way throughout much of human history
nazis have been nice to her on vichy twitter, that’s really all it is
i don’t really know how anything you said in this post relates to anything in the previous post, and i don’t really want to try to “pin” you on anything, but it seems pretty far fetched to me to believe that socialists posting on social media were in any way causal of the present situation.
look, if orban can tilt elections in his favor in a nation of 9.5 million people spread over 35,000 square miles, then trump can do it in a nation of 340 million people spread over 3.5 million square miles. that’s just how comparisons work, plane
america has something like 36 times the population of hungary and 100 times the land area. what exactly is the plan? how many goon squads do you think they have?
look i try to avoid american exceptionalism in either direction, but there is a point where the comparison of authoritarian election interference in small european countries, to the same in a nation of 340 million people and 3.5m square miles, ceases to be useful
is it your belief that social media socialism is what fractured the democratic coalition
He’s an opportunist. Erickson will never turn against trump until he’s already dead or discredited. That said, a loud enough chorus of right wing figures advancing a “good tsar/bad boyars” line could get RFK out.
Possibly this was true at time of publication, but the facts on the ground have changed. Will Nintendo issue a correction?
vance’s admission to yale was, from the perspective of its elite gatekeepers, about the same as buying a painting from that elephant that can hold a paintbrush, and they probably treated him roughly the same way.
from what i’ve read he wants to be more involved but nobody respects him. there was a story about him hanging around mooching cookies from the snack table
i think he believes that trump will direct state violence against schumer’s own intraparty enemies and doesn’t really care what else happens.
pavlou seems like he’s leapfrogging wu in the race to becoming full MAGA due to zionism and negative polarization
i think one underdiscussed root cause of our current psychosis is that a lot of media and punditry types expected trump to lose by juche margins in 2020 and when he lost narrowly they processed that as him “winning.” this informed their behavior over the next few years.
a small but significant slice of democratic politicians and opinion leaders believe “democracy was on the ballot in 2024 and it lost fair and square”
the next january 6 isn’t a bunch of random car dealership owners, it’s thousands of ICE agents in coordination with the white house. i don’t know that they’ll win because i don’t think we can avoid the military getting involved at that point and the military could squash DHS flat without noticing.
my dark suspicion is that the problem of democratic willingness to dismember DHS is going to resolve itself because DHS is almost certainly going to participate en masse in an armed revolt against any incoming democratic administration
there are some people whose scorn arises from exasperation at the very real hypocrisies of liberalism and some for whom it arises out of what is essentially hipsterism, but it all leads to the same place
if your core political belief is scorn for the normie liberal values held by your parents and peers, you will eventually realize a hard right is infinitely more dangerous to those values than a soft left.
i think if someone did manage to live to 200, let alone 500, their thought processes would be so alien to us as to render them almost a different species
We are COOKED
newsom is ambitious. he wants power. when he thought talking to charlie kirk would get him that power, he talked to charlie kirk. now he thinks it’s something else. he may still be the man for the moment: we need our 2028 nominee to be able to see, and willing to use, power.
the latter is very bad but also ICE does not have artillery and fixed-wing aircraft so it may not work out for them
there are two ways this ends: 1) they fuck something up so badly, probably an economic collapse but could also be mishandling a natural disaster, that they are basically forced out 2) group of DHS guys sees the writing on the wall as the election approaches that they do a february 26 incident
incredible example of the Guys Being Dudes genre
This is a masterpiece. Simply excellent www.instagram.com/reel/DMVGMIC...
“the correct position on any issue is whatever would make the internet leftist i made up in my head angriest”
also, as an aside, the idea that people who are expressing disappointment with specific members of dem leadership are doing it for “internet clout” rather than out of genuine concern for the effects of their behavior on the country is deeply telling.
it would depend on the nature and context of that endorsement! if they begrudgingly offer a tepid endorsement in the face of pressure, no. if they enthusiastically endorse, yes. priors get updated when you see new information that’s inconsistent with them.
the fact that powerful democrats in congressional leadership are clearly interested in seeing their party’s nominee lose and are doing what they can to make that happen is a huge problem even if in this particular case they are likely to fail
my crank film belief is that a lot of modern directors fundamentally do not believe that the basic blocking and tackling of photography matters anymore. something like “it only matters what the audience is looking at, not how they are looking at it.”
if you were actually a centrist you would, for example, pair your opposition to extreme socially liberal positions with support for limits on provision of weapons to israel. curiously, they never do!
it’s not just that they’re unpopular when aggregated, it’s that, aggregated, they *do not exist* in the wild. nobody has that set of beliefs. “centrists” are ideologues on a specific set of issues, who point to their heterodox positions on other issues as a sign of moderation.
apart from the merits of posting like this, i have to say whoever is writing these has a better grasp on trump’s style than most of the people who try to imitate him. it’s harder than it looks. just lose the all caps so you can mimic his random capitalization and you’re there.
it’s mostly that the spanish language media environment pre-election was absolutely rancid, like ten or twenty times worse than the english one (which was already very bad). lots of outright, insane lies.
to self-described “moderates” the highest political virtue is not “holding morally upright beliefs” or “enacting policies that benefit the country,” it’s “not being too ideologically distinct.” it’s a negative position that defines itself in opposition to anyone who appears to care too much.
polls like this illuminate the mindset of self-described “moderates.” in america, a “moderate” is not someone with “moderate” policy preferences, but someone who finds those who sincerely and passionately hold beliefs to be distasteful.
The Wolvere was a stout carl for the nones; Ful thyc he was with adamantine bones. “The best ther is, bubb,” he wuld oft advyse, “Bot that I do, hit ys nout verry nyce.”
total shameless loon
jesus christ the threads on this sub are incredibly bleak. there is no way we are getting out of this without a lot of permanently damaged people
not even that they are going to “end democracy” through their actions but that their ascension to power marks the end of democracy, which has served its purpose by creating them. they are going to get a nasty shock in 2026.
focusing on the second sentence in your quote there - i do think a lot of elites on both sides *want* politics to be over, they want it to find a final form and stay there. They interpret politics as a teleological process. The trump administration absolutely believes this.
partisan elites’ conception of a moderate: “abortion should be legal in some circumstances in the first two trimesters and we should slow down illegal immigration while providing a path to citizenship” actual “moderate”: “free abortion on demand. put machine guns on the border.”
something elites consistently misunderstand about trump even a decade in is that his stew of bizarre and contradictory positions is interpreted as “moderation” by americans, since that actually describes most so-called “moderate” voters
the guard is the in-universe equivalent of “six copies of the USS We Built This Yesterday”
i think many institutions like a free, pluralistic society, as long as their place in its implicit hierarchy is secure, but if they feel that their power is threatened they absolutely lose their minds. all the moreso because their power is de facto rather than de jure.
imagine a court with the authority to issue writs of mandamus after a 24 hour briefing schedule, forcing kacsmaryk and o’connor to grant relief to trans plaintiffs, immigrants etc.
another option would be to let them stay on the bench but create a new appellate court over them with lightning-quick timelines and plenary authority to review everything they do de novo, so they can just scream into the void but anything they actually try to do is instantly overturned.
my suspicion is that this effect is tempered, if not wholly counteracted, by the fact that by far the biggest factor in officer pay is overtime eligibility, which is controlled by some of the most politically reactionary cops of all.
to be honest i think the price bukele should have to pay to avoid being droned is to throw these people in CECOT forever.
it’s a confluence of factors: neither is a particularly clever or gifted politician in the first case; they both marinated in toxic machine sludge before sliding straight into equally-toxic Dem Congressional Leadership sludge; and their personal prejudices (Schumer’s especially) reinforce it all.
like if google blocks you from showing up in search because they decide they don’t like you, that’s bad, but if the government compels google to block their political opponents’ sites from showing up, it’s fine, i guess?
stoller’s position seems to be that businesses exerting coercive power over their customers through market share is evil, but governments exerting coercive power on the business’s customers through the use of force is good. weird shit!
this shit is all very silly but cuomo has nothing at all to lose by getting silly since he’s going to lose by a landslide if nothing fundamentally changes the race, so it’s probably going to get sillier still.
there was a period when stoller seemed like a serious thinker, but at this point it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he’s basically a strasserite. his bizarrely charitable views on trump’s antitrust agenda probably arise from being more congenial to trump’s culture war positions.
i am telling it to you and you are ignoring it because you cling to the magical belief that SCOTUS can somehow be restored long term as the protector of people’s rights. i have tried to be polite to you so far despite your seeming incapacity to reciprocate but i am done. you are delusional.
there is no way to permanently stop them without entirely reconstituting the legal regime of which SCOTUS is a part. court-packing does not permanently solve the “SCOTUS is controlled by conservatives problem,” it is a step toward permanently solving the “rights exist at the whim of SCOTUS” problem.
again, all of these potential downsides would carry more weight if they weren’t things that are actively happening, today, under the current legal regime
they are literally doing this now! this is actively happening now! trump is threatening to cut federal funding to california over trans kids!
and have been! look up reed o’connor and matthew kacsmaryk! all of these potential negative consequences of court packing are things that have already occurred.
the federal government has enormous coercive power, as we are seeing now. red states have historically refused to follow SCOTUS rulings they disagreed with, such as desegregation (“massive resistance”). you can starve them of funds, sanction their businesses, all kinds of things.
judge reinhardt, one of the most liberal appellate court judges of all time, famously said “they can’t catch ‘em all” when asked why he was reversed so often by SCOTUS.
if SCOTUS precedent lacks legitimacy lower courts will choose not to follow it.
it “functions on its legitimacy” because there are hundreds of federal judges and only 9 SCOTUS justices. there is no automatic process by which a “wrong” lower court opinion gets overturned, and SCOTUS can only hear a limited number of cases per year. courts choose to follow SCOTUS precedent.
ok, well, the answer is no, there’s not. these are the options. if you can come up with another one then i’m sure people would love to hear it, but nobody else has.
the constitution does not actually grant the court the power of judicial review (a right the court arrogated to itself in marbury v madison). it is, in fact, pretty quiet about the court’s powers. the court’s appellate jurisdiction is set forth in the judicial act of 1789 and its amendments.
you are entitled to this opinion but i think most people would strongly disagree with you.
it’s mutually assured destruction. the court functions on its legitimacy, and a constantly switching constitutional regime would destroy that legitimacy. lower courts would ignore precedents they don’t like, since they won’t be precedents for long. state and federal governments, too.
the one that’s less damaging is, objectively, packing. having rights 50% of the time is better than having them 0% of the time.
how about this: if we pack and they counter-pack, the inevitable end result is the destruction of the power of SCOTUS, which is a net good because it has been a malignant force for the vast majority of its history.
no, you couldn’t, because i have not accused you of not understanding the stakes here as you have repeatedly done to me. i’m not telling you that you don’t understand the impact of this court on people’s lives, i’m telling you that you have not proposed a realistic alternative to court-packing.
how about you don’t fucking assume what i get or don’t get. you don’t know the first thing about me, my loved ones, and the impact of this court on us. l
nobody is talking down to you or putting words in your mouth. you are not the only person whose fundamental rights are being eviscerated by this court. you oppose the only practical remedy… why? because you think if the dems somehow “naturally” retake the court the right will just shrug?
alito and thomas are 100% going to retire during the trump presidency. if the dems take the senate in 2026 (unlikely but possible) they will retire in the lame duck. i will bet you any amount of money on this. when they get switched out, we’d have to outlast roberts and kavanaugh, who is 58
i am not. i am looking at historical precedent. not even that long ago, either. you are whistling past the graveyard. there really is no alternative. court packing advocates aren’t stupid, they know the likely impact, they have just calculated that it is less bad than the alternative.
“just win elections and replace justices” does not work when the democrats would be required to win the presidency for, at minimum, the next 20 years straight, and if they lose even one then the clock resets.
what i am telling you is that, without court-packing, we are not turning it back on in your lifetime, if ever. the last time a liberal justice on the supreme court replaced a conservative justice was 1969. supreme court conservatives strategically time their retirements.
rowling syndrome. many such cases.
the chūshingura we could have had…
imagine the Akō incident with trains. Ōishi learns that Kira is going to ride by train from Kyoto to Edo and plans an elaborate ambush, but they’re on a timer because they need him dead before they enter Edo.
trains are cool and i bet sengoku-period samurai would have thought so if they’d had them
i don’t think he’s asking people to stop using the term, he’s asking them to stop using the product for that type of application
the last time a liberal justice replaced a conservative one on the Court was arguably in 1969
court packing is the second worst outcome, but the worst outcome is the one we have now: a permanent conservative majority due to strategic retirements. right now the switch is stuck on “off” forever.
this mf said “to you struggle”
by 2100 there will be an entire generation of modern fantasy media that reimagines historical figure “laura loomer” as a cunning sorceress who secretly survived the Revolution of 2032.