A room with a sociological view.
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6th, many churches moved their services outside that summer. During the interim, administrators had the option of moving services online. 7th, and this is an honest question, did Nichols want more churchgoers to contract COVID & very possibly pass away? Or was it better that they didn't congregate?
4th, folks at the GF protests, generally speaking, WERE masked. (Yet anti-COVID protests, such as occurred at the MI Statehouse, saw many participants unmasked. They were not punished.) 5th, churches that rebuffed guidelines for indoor services were not fined or otherwise penalized.
Tom Nichols is an insane person. 🧵 First off, this is not a game. 2nd, the George Floyd protests, a swift response to an abuse of power by an agent of the State, were organic, not organized. 3rd, doctors issue best practices in accordance w/ public health. Local govts set stay-at-home guidelines.
Before or after the WIRED piece came out? I as well as others (including the YouTube personality Hawk, who is a decades-long lawyer) presume that once the story broke, creators were released from any secrecy clause in their contract, as the cat was out of the bag. www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHWd...
I hate to break it to you, but tu quoque ("You, too!") is not a sound defense. psychologycorner.com/critical-thi...
"It can change women's behavior!" No sht, Sherlock. It's hormonal. Hormones affect people at a cellular level. This pretext is about many things, including that some men feel cheated by the free love era & its aftermath, as sex is no longer a conquest. Also, banning BC basically indentures wives.
There are so many good songs by R.E.M., it's hard to maintain a hierarchy. Lots of hidden gems never made it to radio. "Find the River" is definitely in my myriad top 10.
What amazes me are the people who continue to argue against this designation. On the other side of the coin, Raz Segal, genocide scholar, published in Jewish Currents on October 13, 2023 that Israel was committing a "textbook case of genocide." jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-c...
Awww! 🐈⬛
Yes, of course military occupation will for its duration reduce visible street crime. That's what Bukele in El Salvador is all about. Fascists want us to dispute that instead of emphasizing the military occupation *is* crime in so many ways & does more damage than all the muggers in the world.
So, do you know how cults work? Extremist groups use the same tactics. They're exactly what Lorenz points out, particularly a technique called love bombing. There's also mirroring, where they sync body movements to appear on the same wavelength. You seem upset that she used positive words.
A lot of conservative lawmakers have voted down mental health funds for schools because oftentimes those funds would go toward providing school counselors. Much of the last decade has seen a push by conservatives for chaplains in schools in lieu of non-religiously affiliated counselors.
This is misguided, if only for the fact that the beating heart of fascism is racism. That's the whole point: it tears down class by replacing it with a race worldview that imposes hierarchies. (Sexism has its own contribution.) The way to kill fascism is to pierce the heart with a stake, intently.
She *should* be weeping. (For what it's worth, 109 is entirely within the first standard deviation for average IQ. The avg is 100; the SD is 15 points. She is boasting about an AVERAGE score.)
EXTERMINATE!
That's a mash-up face of Trump & Musk, surely.
Will the motley gang of federal agents step foot in Chicago if they are forced to identify themselves? Hmm.
Yeah mon.
Wasn't that debunked months ago? "We all saw and remember" is leading language. He's reviving FALSE information but framing it as something the audience definitely recalls.
'Expert'.... You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
My first question was, "Why are all these people milling about?" They looked like they were in line for something. It's a food court! As the camera sweeps, you can see the McD's logo, as well as a pizza place. It pans right by what might be a Middle Eastern spot. This video is so transparent.
Yep. Newsom's policy against CA's homeless community is one of the worst policies he's enacted. I say that as someone who's advocated for homeless persons. He's still an effective rhetor against Trump as we sink into actual fascism. It's madness to shut him down at this moment. Literally insane.
Then how can he assert that parts of it are "wildly popular"? Is he in the thrall of truthiness — where it gets him right in the gut?
Hatchet woman decides to dodge hatchet meant for her.
This doesn't make people safer, because it destroys community.
People are often surprised to learn that Lee was an officer who never made it past colonel. The purported promotion to general was awarded by a treasonous cabal calling itself the "confederate states of america" which was put down by force by the Union army, which also had superior generals.
That's what you say when you live in the Upside Down.
Loomer is an inveterate racist. This is known. But it's remarkable to see anyone insert racial information where it has absolutely no relevance EXCEPT in order to generate racism. She went out of her way to raise the salience of that police officer's skin color. Babbitt's the one who broke the law.
Trump wants Harris to have to pay for her own security detail. Also, he wants the SS to be worried ONLY about his and his lieutenants' security. This is about instilling loyalty to him and him alone (which will grow in importance as the rule of law breaks down).
This doesn't make sense, for 2 reasons: 1) Ideologies are passed via word of mouth. This is not tied to genes & means that adults can be converted. 2) Political party, such as it can be passed down from parent to child, "sticks" only ~40% of the time, according to Bob Altemeyer & others. So… 🫤
It's so weird that folks are AI experts now and accuse seasoned writers of lifting a time-honored use of punctuation just because a machine has grabbed hold of it. Ridiculous. I adore emdashes (and semicolons as well), and I'll be damned if I'm going to give them up. They help approximate speech.
I should add that, looking at patterns in the US a hundred years ago, I'd speculate that, were the scenario I suggest above to play out, BC would still be in use but only for "undesired" populations. Buck v. Bell is still technically on the books, never overturned. We'd see forced sterilization.
Just so! I think we're headed back to a time of pregnancy "homes." (I'd written about this at DKos years ago. I believe Karen Attiah has mentioned this recently, too.) When birth control is restricted or gone, teen moms will disappear from public view, I reckon. Or "spend the summer" w/ a relative.
You know that homicide can include vehicular homicide and other unintentional deaths (and those, committed by means other than guns). Also, you would need to corrolate the reduction in guns in those other countries with the level of (intentional) homicide. This graph does not mean much on its own.
RFK Jr on the mass shooting in Minnesota: "We're launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence."
If SSRIs contributed to episodes of violence, there is no way they would have made it out of the lab & the experimental setting. This is another pretext seized upon by this administration. RFK, Jr. has already mentioned that he wants such patients taken off their medications & sent to work camps.
So, instead of advocating for (1) sex education & birth control and (2) reformation of the prison system after spying these social ills, Rod Dreher chalked them up to intrinsic degeneration that necessitated laws forbidding interracial relations. Racism: a white ward against the hex of Black sex. 🕸️
imagine being so maniacally racist that you side with the fire over the firefighter
I'd heard Allen's name speculated as being in the files, though I've watched so much source material in the last 6-7 weeks that I could not pinpoint exactly where I heard that. So, take that with however many grains of salt you deem necessary. Allen really is in a class of his own.
This is insanity. This is the sign of a government that has lost its mind.
14. (Just a best guess.)
But metonomy.
If these provocateurs manage to repeal the 14th Amendment, slavery will re-enter American capitalism. Even if the 13th Amendment isn't simultaneously repealed, they'll just arrest & imprison those they want as a labor pool. Some of these folks have been working at this for a long time.
I daresay that's not the type of roleplaying most couples in the US want to practice.
Thank you. I've been dismayed at this near-ubiquitous response by folks to the WH's absorption of corporations. The move fits right in with fascism. Trump doesn't want to dismantle capitalism—he wants it to benefit him first & foremost. Raking 10-20% allows the corporations to sustain all risk.
wtf is this nonsense? He thinks he can understand kid’s “mitochondrial challenges” just by looking at them? This is an insane person.
Ritchie Torres, U.S. Representative (NY-15).
He doesn't believe what he says, that's why. He's got a Rolodex of pat answers that's he's rotating through in response to each question mark. It's almost irrelevant which question he's answering. Someone should tally how many civilians died on Oct 7 for Mr. Torres. It wasn't "thousands."
Independents think this, too. Even some conservatives do, especially the ones who have left the GOP and are in political limbo *because* of the Epstein issue.
It's more like state capitalism than socialism. I understand the kneejerk reaction, but please place the absorption of corporations by the state in the context of right-wing authoritarianism / fascism. But yes. Epstein.
It's a good read! Of course, I always like your writing. I do think the rub is that many people simply have trouble perceiving women as sexual predators, especially of girls. For those looking to absolve Trump for potential crimes, believing Maxwell a victim relieves them of cognitive dissonance.
Wow. On NPR, @gbrumfiel.bsky.social reports a Social Security official “copied the Social Security numbers, names and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency's cloud.” The source is a whistleblower, who is named: Charles Borges, SSN chief data officer.
Clearly, the WH is banking on benevolent sexism (as opposed to hostile sexism) to allow the intended audience draw upon stereotypes of needing to protect women. This is also why none of the victims have been asked to speak. They too are women and they would spoil the effect.
the opposition party
First, they came for John Bolton And I did speak out Because even though I'm not a nutty right-wing warmonger with a ridiculous mustache, I am an American who is horrified by a simple-minded tyrant using our Justice Department to avenge his petty, personal grudges.
novapsyche.substack.com/p/the-danger...
This is an escalation of what Miller posted on Twitter/X in March. Indeed, he intensifies what I said about his oblique reference of Democrats to terrorists, who are seen as inhuman and thus eradicable.
Re: his March tweet: "What Miller disseminated is, in spirit, not so different from what was distributed in the instance of Radio Rwanda, except in terms of immediacy. It could—and possibly should—be seen as laying the groundwork for future calls to action." novapsyche.substack.com/p/the-danger...
It's amazing. This is not the time for either/or. All opposition accrues. Welcome efforts from all effective corners.
It’s amusing (in an omg where is the asteroid sense) how people who have largely been right on trend about the authoritarian hellscape we increasingly reside are still often treated as being hysterical about where we are headed.
Consider that Trump has made these chest-thumping dictatorial moves because he needs to regain an image of power in the wake of the Epstein debacle. Unlike us, he *knows* what's in the files. They're obviously devastating. This is the one thing that is fatal to him. It's no time to give up on them.
I don't think he can anymore. He's lost something vital. He's no longer savvy enough to couch his intentions.
Is Frank Luntz particularly beholden to the truth? 🤔
The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-ti...
Interesting: former US Atty Preet Bharara told fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat a few weeks ago that he was dispensing with the word 'unprecedented.' It's lost its meaning in this environment. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTaS...
Yes, the stakes here are large. Very large.
What? You aren't making sense. During the electoral season, RFK Jr was consistently eating into Trump's voting base. This is why Trump called him & offered him a cabinet position in exchange for his dropping out of the race. RFK Jr, that's to say, had virtually no Dem constituency.
He's not a bad person, I agree with you. I can see why Pelosi tapped him; and had Harris ascended to the presidency his leadership style would have been complementary. But he isn't meeting the moment. He thinks we can wait it out and let the GOP crash and burn. That's the wrong strategy.
The coup happened back in February. What we're seeing now is a consolidation of power, which if not already at the tipping point is just about at the fulcrum. The sooner folks realize this, the sooner we can organize effectively. You should look into the term 'autocratic breakthrough.'
I'm not defending that. I'm sure you can go back to my comment and read what I actually wrote. I pointed out that his snark has utility in this moment. You have displayed a tendency to extrapolate comments when that's not warranted.
It *would* have worked, had Harris's handlers put the kibosh on the technique. This happened right around the time she began heavily courting center-right voters: clearly she didn't want them to feel insulted.
That's not anything what I said. You exaggerate my point to absurdity but expect me to respond in good faith. This is a failure on your part.
With the confabulist in the WH, you really want to try to trot out the 'word salad' smear from a year ago? You are living in the past.
I don't think that's the immediate goal. He's raising his profile, granted, but the immediate impact is that he's achieving a national level of snark of MAGA that no one else has even tried. That gives liberals something to smile about & MAGA a reason to steam. Not so different from Walz's "weird."
I think Daily Beast is the only one publishing its headlines like this, consistently.
Congrats to Bouie. Well deserved.
Judge Xinis: Your clients are *absolutely forbidden* from removing Mr. Abrego from the continental United States. You understand this? DOJ: Yes.
A lot of people in this thread are calling this socialism. It's not. It's a parasitic state form of capitalism. Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary, said on a recent podcast that what we're seeing from the Trump regime is "fascist capitalism." www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpT7...
Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary, calls the Trump regime "fascist capitalism." That's what we're seeing here.
Who's doing that? All of the criticism of him I've seen has been entirely about his poor (one could say feckless) leadership. He's not the man for the moment. It's clear he wants to be the first Black Speaker. But at this rate he will never get there, if Dems become a permanent minority party.
Note how they're selling their police-state crackdown like merchandise in an infomercial.
"For the first time in their lives"? The hyperbole is off the charts. It would be hilarious if it weren't being used to curtail the civil liberties of everyday citizens.
The EO is clearly unconstitutional. However, the main takeaway here is that Trump is signaling that certain symbols are off-limits to criticism. This is the nationalism that undergirds the fascism we see. While fascism traffics in slogans & clichés, nationalism always communicates in symbols.
This EO is explicitly unconstitutional. The Supreme Court decided this issue way back in 1989, in Texas v. Johnson.
This EO is explicitly unconstitutional.
So how did Snoop feel when filmmakers started putting African-American characters "everywhere"—other than as servants, criminals, and ne'er-do-wells? It's the same bigotry, just a different target.
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You should go back and revisit where we were in July 2024. Biden's numbers were falling off a cliff. There was no perceivable way that he would even have been competitive, let alone won. Biden should have kept his hat out the ring. That's where the trouble started. (Sorry for the double post.)
I have the feeling Jeffries would be content being the leader of the minority party in perpetuity—which is what the Democrats will be if they do not do something now.
You think you're the only one who's ever said that? 👀 Have you looked into the widespread criticism of Merrick Garland over the last three years? I would guess not. I think fewer people are bringing that up now because focusing on that will not help us in the current moment.
Who promised that? Most people in the know understood that, even with Biden stepping aside, Democrats had at BEST a 50/50 chance of winning. (As for the House & Senate, I don't recall anyone saying Dems would sweep.)
That doesn't mean we rend our clothes and say all is lost. But we need to grasp this fact so that we can pivot to the next stage in rectifying this cataclysm.
It's very interesting that so many are putting all of their hopes on the midterms, when it's clear that the coup—the administrative coup undertaken by 'DOGE'—occurred in February. We now have troops in the street, the military side of it. Please come to terms with fact that fascism is already here.
Interesting. I often use biological sex as a category, but that's due to my academic background being in social science. I know there's a difference between 'woman' and 'female' (one's gender, the other is sex). But your description of RWs seems to be the use of 'female' as a term of denigration.
How is it that they don't get it?
I understand what you're saying, but you're simplifying the situation. I agree wholeheartedly that Harris, a centrist, failed in voter outreach at a basic level. But the opposition was primed by the manosphere to hate women & by the alt-right to hate Black people. Wrong candidate at the wrong time.
It's probably true that only a small contingent uses these terms. I doubt that Democratic politicians are doing so on a regular basis. You know who does use this language? Leftists. This is a coded beacon from Third Way to excise leftists from political discourse, esp. among Democrats.
Piers Morgan can go pound sand.
... who were conservatives at the time.