This is a full-time Boris stan account. Even if I'm not posting about Boris, like, ever, I am still stanning Boris.
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To be clear, the Dems don't HAVE to run their caucuses mostly on seniority, but they do. Which is one of the most profound defects of the party -- "wait your turn" without succession planning in an era when good healthcare gets white collar workers into their 80s means nothing ever changes.
OTOH, Schumer is trying to recruit the current 77 y/o Governor of Maine to run, which says the Dem "elites" are worried by Platner. Because there's nothing which says "forward planning" like bringing a 77 y/o into an institution which runs on seniority. No grief to Janet Mills, but READ THE ROOM.
It's so when he gets lost, whoever finds him will know how to return him.
It's like everything else in the US. Rich straight white men vs. "political groups." Normal heartland voters vs "politics." The political valence in the US has consistently been shifting from "conservative = normal" to "white nationalism = normal". Everyone else is political or a freak or both.
It's about getting Dem leaders to blame "the left" and "the groups" and fear the right. The only way they'll blame themselves is "I screwed up and listened to the left and the groups. Only billionaire donors and James Carville from now on!"
I'm not going to snitch-tag him, but I don't think that this is a conversation one should have without including John Scalzi.
Waiter! Waiter! This food has too much flavor and texture! This is unacceptable! Please return it to the kitchen and bring me s platter filled with the acceptable experiences: pale, bland, gummy, and mushy. A Farage of foods, if you would.
Has to just be a promotion.
Well, given that "ride" doesn't mean a CAR ride in Hiberno-English, "a luxury experience with Black" does also take on a quite different implication.
Stevens has publicly stated that was wrong in his beliefs and his role in building the fascist machine, and I think is honestly trying to make amends. I can't say the same for most of the other Never-Trumpers.
"When they go low, we go high" And they they punch you right in the junk, as hard as they can, BECAUSE THERE AREN'T ACTUALLY ANY RULES, AND THAT'S HOW THEY WIN.
Almost every one of the Republican defectors (even those who haven't repented, unlike Stevens) have a much clearer view of the situation and the necessary response than the Dem national leadership. Because (1) they built the machine Trump is riding, and (2) they actually know how to fight.
Our ruling classes and their courtiers in the press are like the Bourbons. They've learned nothing, and forgotten nothing. And it will be the death of us all.
Turns out that while some of us thought "Baghdad Bob" was a figure of ridicule and a cautionary tale, others thought he was a role model!
I've seen "de facto dissolution" years ago, but didn't see "soft secession" until that article (though clearly it's been used before).
Not in California, at least. It was just restricted because of availability.
BEHOLD! THE ENSODDENING IS UPON US! GET THEE SOME GORETEX AND A SUBARU!
You've probably got a better shot with the Catholics. Catholics can be more weakly attached to their religion than Fox viewers are to theirs.
The Dem national "leadership" is so weak, and people are so hungry to see any fight at all from almost any Dem, that people are attracted even to Gavin Newsom, a centrist and crass political opportunist who has no real beliefs, but has worked out that "being seen to fight" is a good look.
Iowa isn't gerrymandered. They have compact districts drawn by a non-partisan commission. It's just really white and really rural.
Literally all they have to do is follow you to post in your comments. How do I know? Inductive reasoning!
This is just who he is. He's a machine politician beholden to the big donors in the FIRE industries, without any real fight in him.
Also, it doesn't fucking matter what the appropriators do. The Trump regime just moves the money around however they like, and now they've got a tariff slush fund to cover whenever they overspend on their priorities (one of the reasons for the tariffs). The Anti-Impoundment Act is a dead parrot.
Ixnay on the arginalmay axtay atesray! Do you want the inquisition to pick all of us up? They'll do it!
When do we get our "Typewriter" which guides can point out and mock for the tourists?
Gosh, Bill, if only there were something you could join with your Democratic colleagues to do in order to help fix this mass-murder situation. But you're just a lowly Senator, and if there's one thing we know, it's that Senators can't really do anything at all.
Understanding the concept of marginal utility is a blasphemy against America's God.
A lot of the people in that top 10% are urban professional Dem voters who regularly vote to tax themselves more, and (for example) the change in the SALT cap alone will make up that difference. Where the hockey stick and moral culpability hits is once you get into the top 0.1%.
But this is why they hate teaching empathy, teaching people about the cruelties of history, not the mythology. Those things help develop the social norms of cooperation, solidarity, and positive-sum thinking. This has been making the rounds. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwpa...
If you KNOW these people, grew up around them, you KNOW they're motivated by crab-bucket spite, the desire just to be the crab on top. If you offer escape from the bucket, they look at you like you're insane. And so do all the nice liberals when you try to explain crab-bucket people to them.
The perspective of GOOD tech journalism. Too much tech journalism is just unquestioningly repeating unsupported (and unsupportable) technofuturist claims and acting as courtiers to the techbro ruling class.
Also, once its clear that you're one of the mutants who can play at that level, everyone starts kissing your ass and you absorb a lot of conservative nonsense about merit – esp. if you're white. Dude, you're a mutant. It happens, and it's just dumb luck. Good on you for doing the work AFTER that.
"Hey, you have all these resources, maybe you could do better with them!" "Why would you say something so unfair? Do you want us to fail?"
"We need to be engaged with the torrent of fascist sewage to do our jobs. But it certainly doesn't affect us at all. Now please read our third think piece this week about how that fascist sewage represents the true Volkswille of America, the beliefs of real Americans bound by blood to the soil."
The US will be the captive buyer of last resort for the petrostates.
"The problem is that Americans are super-killy! So the solution is MOAR GUNZ!" Yes, yes, that makes total sense. Very sane and not a death cult at all.
Ruled. Ruled by monsters. This isn't governance.
Golgafrincham Ark B clown shit.
I would. I think the wait time is 60 days? But you can check that. It's like the flu vaccine, in that they keep updating it to try to keep up with the current variant.
I've just basically written off the national Dems at this point. They're almost all Golgafrincham Ark B material.
[sigh] Watching Labour speedrun the Dems in the 1990s while watching the Republicans speedrun Europe in the 1930s is… depressing.
The basic position of USian "conservatives" is a sort of malignante survivorship bias: "The world is cruel and full of suffering, and any effort to moderate that is a crime against God, the natural order and me. Especially a crime against me."
I've never even been to NY, but I get the impression from afar that Williamsburg is a sort of hipster theme park, where the purported inhabitants all go home to somewhere else when the bars close and come back when it's time to line up to pretend to go to brunch.
And that might work for you! It did for a friend of mine, just not for me. You should know within about 6 months. The exercise is worth doing on its own merits, as is improving one's diet – without sacrificing pleasure in your meals, because that's just not sustainable.
You might also just try skipping straight to a moderate statin dose if you're of a certain age. Some folks' livers just make too damn much of the stuff, and getting a handle on it fast reduces arterial plaque buildup. Source: it me! I tried diet and exercise for a few years w/o any change.
It's the same thing as "Democrats' failure to address rural issues". The issue isn't the material conditions of rural people, which Democrats DO act to improve. It's the general vibes of "disrespect" which can never be satisfied, just like the general vibe of "criminess" can never be satisfied.
Is there a difference between hard shell tacos and traditional soft tortilla tacos w/r/t whether they're sandwiches?
In the US, that'd be drug charges for all the pills.
Grand jury nullification, even better!
When you're ignorant of history and incurious about anything which doesn't just stroke your paymasters' egos and your ethnocentric revanchism, every idea that serves your purpose seems new and exciting, no matter how old, evil, and tediously stupid it actually is.
It's a special election. Over the last decade or so, the Dems have become the party which turns out for specials and off-years. It used to be the Republicans. And Dems are PISSED right now. So it could be some of each, but I suspect it's mostly high Dem turnout and maybe some independents flipping.
Iowa isn't gerrymandered, it's got a nonpartisan system to draw its districts. It's just reeeeally white, and really rural.
It works as a metaphor, of course. But I grew up around the literalists, and it always bugged me.
It's the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and w/o that info, how do they know why they should obey once Yahweh left? They would lack the moral equivalent of object permanence – the innocence assumed suggests that they wouldn't have known what death was or why it would be bad.
Also, my other really hot take on the Bible is that Adam and Eve were set up. How could they know it would be evil to disobey Yahweh before they ate the fruit?
I was always confused about the vilification of Judas. From a human perspective, sure, looks like a betrayal. But without Judas, how do we get the divinely-mandated sacrifice and Christ the redeemer? Wasn't Judas just carrying out God's plan?
Agree. Starmer's Labour is practically inviting a Faragist victory, while in France (despite Macron himself) his party and the more-left parties cut deals for all but one to drop out in multi-party districts where the right was a threat.
The UK's multi-party first-past-the-post ridings, though, mean that "not a majority" doesn't mean "can't win a parliamentary majority." This is a real threat there.
"The purpose of a system is what it does." So the purpose of Labour's current policies is apparently to get a Faragist government elected.
"Charles Schumer made a statement calling for bipartisan cooperation and assistance of Republican colleagues, though it was muffled as he spoke through the hood."
Yes, but inflation is expressed as a percentage, and so is the Fed funds rate. So lower fed funds rate has to mean lower inflation. It's just math! Why do the libs hate math?!
There have literally been twice as many Republican presidents from California (2) as there have been Dem nominees (1). You can keep going back, and the next NY Dem nominee you can find is FDR.
Here's a list of the states of the Dem nominees, working backward to 1972: California, Delaware, New York, Illinois, Illinois, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Georgia, Georgia, South Dakota.
Americans who are concerned about isolation are statistically not going to be Trump voters. So what they think doesn't matter.
But hear me out on this, being a Dem national elected is a good gig. You get paid reasonably well, there are insider trading opportunities, the common people defer to you, and you have a staff to do your chores. You might mess all that up if you start taking aggressive stands against Republicans.
If the Dems are ever allowed to be anything except the lapdog opposition again (if that), they will absolutely try to return to the status quo, say "the fever has broken" and "let us look forward, not back", and there will be MASSIVE pressure from the reactionary centrists to issue blanket pardons.
There is a whole subreddit (r/rabm) dedicated specifically to supporting people in finding black metal which isn't Nazi or Nazi-adjacent. So it's (1) a problem, and (2) not a problem which means that one has to stop listening to the music.
Thanks!
The world of US politics and political reporting is so profoundly damaged that the simple act of repeating the words that a Republican says, or even remembering what a Republican actually did is met with scorn and disbelief.
Back when I picked up the phone for polls, I was always boggled at how bad the questions were – so much question-begging and unexamined assumptions – and then how useless they were on a more basic level: Do you approve of the Democratic Party? No, not right now. Then NO follow up. ASK ME WHY!
Oh, look, Cossacks!
Are the new formulations for 2025 out yet? That's the only reason we're waiting.
The Republicans TOLD EVERYONE IN ADVANCE about Operation Redmap, and the Dem "leadership" had no response. Some individuals are OK – Harry Reid wasn't bad. But the Dem elites as a whole, especially the consultocracy, are useless (unless fighting a challenger from the left).
I spent 20 years trying to explain my urgency to nice liberals: "they can't" or "they won't" are just wishful thinking, the authoritarians only have to get lucky ONCE, and sometimes you just fucking lose, there's horrific suffering, and you may never get back to where you were. Didn't take.
Leaving aside ANY view about ENM's viability for most people, why would you EVER want to have your first steps in that direction recorded and televised?[*] It's guaranteed to be emotionally messy and weird. [*]Disclosure: I don't know why you'd want to have any of your life recorded and televised.
More likely, because we're who we are as a nation, it would be mandatory fitbits (someone gets their beak wet), diet controls, and free colloidal silver and ivermectin at the re-education camps for people who don't get their steps in.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
But also, maybe don't yell at people who rightly feel that the transphobic triangulator is also a direct threat to their existence. It's the obligation of the rest of us to protect those vulnerable people, not to bully them.
"Vote for me! Despite my party registration, I'm actually the GOOD Republican the Dem establishment says we need."
The Republican plan is to do to blue states what they've done to blue cities in red states. Control, colonize, confiscate, tax, oppress.
A handful of simple analytic rules will get you everything you needed to predict the last 4 decades or so. The first one is "When people show you who they are, believe them the first time."
Every one of those institutions and the powerful "elites" who run them have left the rest of us to be prey, while still demanding we defer to them. And NOW if we ordinary people try to push back, we will risk our lives and freedom. We should ask them, EVERY day, "what exactly is the point of you?"
Ditto.
The difference now is that enough white people don't like Jim Crow that the only way to impose it, especially nationwide, especially in blue states and cities (which have their own problems, but where the citizens don't like THIS) will be nationwide fascism.
"Behind the curve" suggests that they want new talent and/or would be willing to cultivate new talent if they knew how. Occam's razor and decades of practice suggests that neither liberal funders nor liberal institutions really want new talent.
In which "but the states run elections" is shown to be a monkeys' paw. The removal of any standards of fairness in elections means that there are now sufficient red states which aren't democracies in any meaningful sense that they can take over the country by rigging their elections.
That's more like a code name for an intelligence operation.
The petrostates will need a captive customer of last resort. That's us, now.
And then they will turn the panopticon on citizens. Which was always the goal. Roll back the social hierarchy to 1900 with the visual aesthetics of 1950, all locked in place by the surveillance police state of 2025.
They'll clear the streets with the threat of live fire and set loose a couple hamstrung homeless people to hunt and beat/tase into submission for his amusement.
Yes, I retract the "worse" part. It's certainly parallel in its intentions and its motivations. Chattel slavery is this country's never-healing sucking chest wound.
It's important that liberals continue to be convinced not to take their own side in a fight. Every time a public figure on the nominal left starts to get ideas that maybe they should act openly and loudly in solidarity with the vulnerable, and speak out actively, that person is attacked.
Redistricting is non-justiciable according to SCOTUS -- at least when Republicans do it. Also, they don't care about Trump's public statements -- they're not evidence of anything, see the first Muslim travel ban. Also, 6 of 9 justices want permanent White Nationalist rule (Yes, even Thomas).
Do the CA Leg and Executive have any contingency plans for when the federal government no longer sends any of the money CA taxpayers have paid and is due the stated? IIRC, they're already withholding billions in research grants, education funds, and FEMA funds for the LA wildfires.
"You can do better!" "Why would you say something so hateful?! You must want us to fail!" Yes, that must be it.
They're going to be comfortable as a permanent minority (assuming that's the outcome and not something more extreme). Nice money, a staff to fetch and carry, no expectations.
Here they'll go by stops if no-one on the bus requests it AND there's nobody at the stop. But if there's someone at the stop, they will stop and open the doors unless that person waves them by.
"Judge orders release of funds!" Hey, great. So, did the funds all get released, or nah? Nah? Huh. Is the regime still threatening people with withholding funds mandated to be disbursed by law? Yeah, they are? Huh.
In the US, at least in cities, every bus stops at every stop on its route if there's someone at the stop. Maybe rural bus routes are different, but I don't know about those (always used a car when I was out of the city).
These rulings, like dissents from the current SCOTUS minority, are just a form of literature, and focusing on them is a form of wishcasting into the fictional world they represent.