My wish list of things to fix in this regard is quite long, but at the very top would be doing away with mandatory arbitration clauses that are now tucked into every contract and EULA. Consumers are being consistently denied all avenues of redress by corporations, and the consequences can be dire.
My standard response when I run into one of those highly-online hyper-cynical "skeptic" types who's always claiming "I do my own research" goes something like this:
So, when you download a piece of software, do you read the license agreement yourself or send it to your lawyer? (Because we all know what they actually do, because it's the same thing we ALL do.)
Thanks again for the positive message! Yeahbuttism is rampant. ( " Looks like we're winning !" "Yeahbutt we'll probably lose because we're losers!")
I think we're in for a historic win. My daughter, Gen X Roller Derby Lesbian, is is QA director for a gigantic software company. The company feels QA is a great place to start new software engineers. My daughter has a lot of Gen Z on her teams. She says they're whiny and irritating but really focused. They have a huge sense of what's right and they insist on it, popular or not. We were talking about polling and I mentioned that I bet Swifties seldom get polled, yet they're all going to vote.
My daughter said this election was Gen Z's coming out.
The Party of Clinton offers crumbs but not the change we need.
Like young people, they buy the Dem line because they haven't the experience to know better. Eventually, they'll be enlightened when they see no response from the Ds on neoliberalism -- crumbs, again -- and there will never, ever be a proper global response to global warming.
Former dues-paying, paper-selling member of the International Socialist Organization here, struggling with this " proper global response to global warming" because we need to build about ten million massive wind turbines and hundreds of gigawatts of solar farms, and I don't see anyone who's going to do that except for-profit corporations. So I kinda like the Biden approach, which is to sweeten the pot for those for-profit corporations, promising them even GREATER profits because we don't have time to muck about too much with our Means of Production right now.
But yeah, once all that shit gets built out, all power to the workers, brother.
Or, I suppose, we could treat climate change as the existential threat it is, adopt a WW2-type mentality, and just nationalize the damn production and direct funds to that instead of the Pentagon and tax breaks for the 0.01%.
Haven't really looked into how we did it in WWII, Boeing built B-29s under government contract, I assume they made some profit on the deal (so they could piss it all away 80 years later by letting their quality control go to shit.)
Plus we couldn't even get enough Americans aboard that original "let's ensure our survival" train until Pearl Harbor. Now Florida could end up under two feet of water all the way across and this country wouldn't let the response be "Nationalize oil." It'll be Congress sending half a trillion dollars to the bilge pump industry. Then if Trump is in, add in Leon Musk selling the government drones to deliver a pump to every flooded house. Every incel in the country and their Russian handlers hailing Apartheid Junior as messiah.
What Loper-Bright will birth, so to speak, cannot be overstated.
In the greater scheme of things, Trump-as-threat is maybe overrated. As well illustrated in today's post, the R supermajority on SCOTUS is countless times worse.
And right behind it is the bipartisan, corrupted system that will never, ever do anything about it. The one solution to that is electing a majority of politicians who would do something about that. And that will never happen. Obviously, the GOP isn't a tool for that but the DNC, by practice and policy is equally opposed. (I had been thinking that Kamala was a break from the Party of Clinton but it looks like I'm wrong. Running against the GOP would help down ballot races in a way that embracing irrelevant never-Trump Republicans cannot do. Hard to run against the GOP when the D POTUS candidate embraces them.)
Trigger warning: balloon's about to be popped.
At the moment, I'm seeing the election as this: some indeterminate slowing of the nation's move towards fascism or rapid acceleration of same. We have SCOTUS and a likely R majorities in both houses of Congress. In such an environment... well, let's say Harris as POTUS in that environment is very, very far from what's needed -- and, again, what's not happening.
And after that, then there's Trump. Take him out and, as SCOTUS and the Party of Clinton show, the improvement would be a modest one. That is, yes, a world without him would be better, but not by all that much.
We voters by and by have had the power to do something about it and we've consistently dropped the ball and here we are.
All that spewed, I'll be happy to eat of crow if and when the time comes.
This book I'm reading now, Hope for Cynics, argues that the opposite of cynicism isn't naïveté, but skepticism. Because cynicism is built on a mountain of untested assumptions - assumptions that things will always turn out for the worse - so if we even just step back to "It's the future, we can't know for sure" we'd be far better off.
Oh, LSP isn't our biggest problem, no - it's the swarm of Baby Hitlers that are still out there looking for power, like Vance. I don't know how we slap them down, but fortunately knowing that that ain't my job.
My synapses are shorting out at the moment. What means LSP?
Anyway, if I wasn’t clear enough: the problem is the entire GOP and has been since Slick Willie decided the Dems should, on the important matters, stop fighting them. Fascist party and fascist-leaning party: great combo for regression.
Take Trump out of the mix and the improvement is kind of minor. Closest thing to something that looks big is the three POS that went on SCOTUS during his term. Anyone thinks any other Republican POTUS would have nominated anything better, well, maybe but likelier not.
Or put it this way: too much focus on Trump is a huge distraction.
Yeah, but. The move toward fascism has always been around, and so far the voters have backed off at the sticking point. Past performance is no guarantee yadayada, but that's what we know so far.
I've used this before, but Trump is The Mule. The psycohistorians running the Republican party had a neat timeline of locking in control of state and federal government, but Trump blew it to pieces because the Party can't give up the dream of Reagan 2.0, and Trump leveraged that to take control of its voter base and then the Party. He's Chaos, The Joker. He doesn't care if the world burns as a side-effect of getting the tribute he deserves. Fhat's why Liz 'n Dick are voting for Harris, they want their party back, invluding the voter base. Somebody Else has to stick the knife in Trump's back.
Net, Trump has been a plus for the GOP. Qualification to that is the remote possibility of bringing a down ballot disaster in November. And even then, the huge national problem of SCOTUS — which the Democrats action-wise are too bothered by.
Meanwhile, states are their own parallel disaster.
And complicit in all this is the lack of a serious major opposition party.
A plus? Can't see it. He's motivated the base by narrowing it with his air horn dog whistles. He's sucking money out of the party paying his legal bills. The reason the Republican party is not serious is him. Right now he owns the party the same way he owns its voter base. They all follow his orders, and their sucession plan is JD Vance, a man who rivals Ted Cruz for likeability. What is the party getting out of all this?
He’s done more good than harm for the party so far.
But, yes, the primary voters are really fucked up now. Dunno whether that’s going to result in disaster for the party and, if it does, whether it’ll be in time. And given the Democrats’ ambivalence re the slide to fascism how much it would matter.
Good? What good? And wanting to work theough the system to deal with Trump isn't ambivalence. Insert Thomas Moore quote here. You can reject them as insufficient if you want, but there are reasons.
I'm guessing (thinking? Moi?) that MM means good fer the rubes. you know, owning the libs, killing the blacks and the jews and the southron hordes, breaking the gummint, making the trains run on...well, maybe not THAT one...
There's a certain demographic, men who are cynical, disengaged from politics, low-propensity voters, and he did move some number of those guys from non-voter to Republican. I think that's just for Trump, though, doesn't seem to translate to Republicans generally.
And policy-wise, he did move the Republicans away from Paul Ryan-style austerity budgeting, probably just because he doesn't give a shit about the deficit (not giving a shit being his default mode) and you can see that in his campaign promises this time around, like eliminating taxes on Social Security. And not having Paul Ryan as the public face of your party has got to pay big dividends.
Thing is, those are Trump voters, not Republican voters. Again, that's not a benefit to the party that Trump leads. His cult of personality make Reagan look like Adlai Stevenson. He has no coattails, even for loud and proud MAGA candidates.
And don't worry, the 4 horsemen of Waste, Fraud, Abuse, and Austerity will saddle up once Somebody Else takes care of their Trump problem. Other than the MAGA wing (and god alone knows what happens with them when Trump is "gone") the party underneath is unchanged. Its all coming back because they have no other plan or direction. Once the grease fire is out the fight goes on.
Except Trump was able to so easily defeat the competition because nobody, not even Republican voters, wants that balanced-budget shit. Their choices are: 1) Go back to Paul Ryan-Jeb Bush conservatism and never win another election, or 2) Go even further into the racism and misogyny and probably never win another election, although your odds might be a little better.
There is generally little reason for anyone to give a shit about the deficit as long as growth rate outdoes interest rate and your country controls its currency
True, this was a thing that distinguished Trump from the other Republican candidates in 2016, is that he didn't even pretend to care. In Trump's case another factor was that he had carried staggering amounts of debt his whole life, and probably just saw debt as a normal part of doing business. A rare case where a Republican gets into office and then does actually "run government like a business."
When the revolution comes (HA!) Reed O'Connor, the entire Fifth Circuit, and the six SCOTUS Justices should be the first round of reprobates sent to the guillotine. I wouldn't bother to send Trump to the chop, it would be more of a punishment to banish him to a deserted island where no one pays attention to him.
Execution isn't optimal. It is better to strip institutional power from them and let them live as powerless individuals. In the case of open corruption, Thomas and Alito for sure, trial and prison makes sense. Demonstrate how laws and social consequences still apply. It isn't as if Amy Coney Barrett and Roberts will go to Cuba and raise an army and return to retake the realm. These clowns don't have even a twenty-first equivalent of returning from exile within. The wealthy and groups like the Federalist suck-ups do are overconfident and believe the rest of us don't know how to use the institutions and our collective power anymore, because the Democrats and the public were suckers for decades. Now is the time to show them democracy and collective action is alive and ready for a righteous return.
Oh, of course. I'm being facetious, I oppose the death penalty. And frankly, I think they'd view being relegated to a one bedroom apartment with $40,000 a year to live on as a fate worse than death.
And in order to make a phone call, or unlock the front door, or log on, they hafta navigate the imponderable small print of every damn 'agreement' their legelbeagle litigants have freed up. Chew on THIS contract, ye slime!
After Harris wins with record-setting voter turnout, Biden needs to add four justices to the court immediately.
In the lame duck session, all the steps the other side will decry need to be done in short order.
If the courts or other fascists try any shenanigans, Biden needs to step up and cite the immunity the court handed the executive branch.
I think of what happened in Algeria, when an extremist minority messed up the election. Vaguely I recall they nullified the whole thing and didn't leave power until the baddies were stopped.
That's where I am now. Even if it means removing the six anti-constitutionalist justices for violating their oaths and losing the public trust.
Perp walk them out and jail them for forty-eight hours at least.
Yep. Time to quit fucking around with these assholes. Long past time, actually - been wondering for a while now when everybody else would finally catch on.
I allowed myself a bit of hope after seeing what Colin Allred did you Lyin' Ted at their debate the other night. DESTROYED and EVISCERATED as the YouTube titles would have it. But just a bit of hope, I know the Gods are watching and will punish all of America if I show any hubris (even though the all-hubris-all-the-time guys never seem to receive any punishment.)
Biden needs to add four justices to the court immediately.
Do you have a mechanism for doing this? This has been Congresses job in the past and it is highly unlikely that SCOTUS would accept using an Executive Order. With SCOTUS he would have a better likelihood of killing 3 justices than expanding the court by XO
Great read. Trump is nothing but the stalking horse for the morons to put the next piece in place. As I keep telling certain acquaintances 'the fight is only beginning'. I can understand the deep desire to exhale in a few weeks, but undoing the numerous tangled attempts to return us to feudal serfdom will take a lot of effort and a lot of candle power. We can do it.
They want JD to be the "real" President with a lot of apartheid money behind him. (They've been mad at America for helping to destroy apartheid for thirty-five years; now is their chance for revenge.)
Trumpov can give speeches, do ribbon cuttings and that sort of thing, with frequent breaks to his dacha near St Petersburg.
The other theory being if orangefatball gets the gig, the wirepullers invoke the 25th and insert Vance who is 1000% more dangerous and shifty - not to mention easily malleable to any billionaire technocrat who comes knocking.
Dunno, though. For someone who's supposed to have something like food tasters (e. g., wait staff open the bottle of Diet Coke in front of him), it seems surprising for him to let Thiel insert a VP. Maybe the vision of getting his tiny hands on those millions was too dazzling to think about this. Or maybe he expects his goons to be more effective than Thiel goons.
I think in my smol-brain the first priority is to get conspiracy bullshit out of politics. As we've been recently with the hurricanes, it's toxic, entrenched, and going to get innocent people killed.
A côte de today’s discussion, the NYT online had an editorial today titlede, without a shred of self-awareness, “Against Nihilism.” In swearing that those not longer sanguine the government will help them are the exact same as MAGA choads dismantling that government.
I mean, no — not at all. But about milk-livered silk livery journos & pundits who fiddle while it at all burns down & claim there’s no way to decide? That seems nihilistic on a whole nother level…
I swear, when Dash Sulzberger is shot in the back of the head by the American arm of the FSB, his last thought will be, "We should have had more Cletus Safaris."
Dude is in "journalist's defensive crouch" mode. Permanently.
If you can't even stick up for your *own* work, yet demand your readers take the extra time to interpret what *you* said, why are you even in this profession?
If I talked about my job the way this guy talks about his job - in public, in front of my colleagues, I think I'd pretty quickly be sitting across a table from my Dean, who would be gently explaining my retirement options.
You would think Dems in Congress and the White House would be well done with these fascist Justices. Whether, in a Harris administration, they finally say, “Enough! We write and administer the laws. You can voice your opinion but we get the final say if we follow your interpretation or ours” is to be hoped for but hardly likely.
Ryan LLC - Liberating our clients from the burden of being responsible citizens (in a similar way to how Lumpy Shit President doesn't pay his bills) - which makes me wonder if they think he gets back into Presidenting again, they won't have to pay their bills, either. Ha ha, silly me, how could that possibly be true!
Also: would that Papa John's non-compete rule forbid other employers from offering higher wages, which would be an "inducement" to leave? Am I supposed to work at the shitty low wage job FOREVER, lest I hope for better? Could they shut down vocational schools for "inducing" leaving a job? Am I worried I'm NOT fucking exaggerating?
(mental images of my BIL upon hearing me kvetch about the Tedium Factory: "well, at least you get a PAYCHECK." yeah, that's worth sacrificing my sanity, sure 🤷)
Yeah, Trump is the kitchen fire spreading to the living room, the Republican Party and the League of Super Villians behind them are the termites in the post-and-pier foundation. It's not the Middle Ages they want, or even the Paradise Lost of the antebellum South, but the golden era of say 1880-1929, the Guilded Age, when you would use names like Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Sarnoff, to identify a specific industry, and you could buy the federal government and they'd stay bought. Loons like Thiel and Musk get attention for their A. E. Van Vogt fantasies, but the bulk of them just want a nice orderly society that knows its place, underneath them. Whether it's a "democracy" or theocratic state doesn't matter much to them since they will be exempt (they think, just like the industrialists who backed the Nazis) no matter what.
I think a large percentage of billionaires really do sincerely believe The Left is Destroying America, and maybe even human civilization. They really are that delusional. I don't see any reason to think they're at all rational about this.
Like, for example, they could be against taxes purely out of rational self-interest, but I think most of them take it a lot farther than that. They see taxes as "punishment of the smartest and hardest-working" and that leads them to some social-Darwinist argument that taxes put us on a downward slope toward total civilizational collapse. And they really do believe that shit.
This checks out, since our current crop of billionaires are often tech guys, and the tech dudes I personally know have a difficult time not reasoning to dire extremes. "If Harris is elected, it seems likely Texas will refuse to concede that she won; it follows that a dozen states and much of the army would join Texas in seceding. Therefore Trump winning, though a fascist, is the only hope for America; Harris, were she serious, would drop out of the race today." They quickly convince themselves of the stark perfection and inevitability of an idle thought experiment like this (ripped from a real-life conversation btw). We need to stop letting software dudes have power, they're almost all goddamn nuts.
I do have some limited experience with coding, and it's true, once you set the thing up and get all the bugs out of it the thing will ALWAYS do the same thing, given the same inputs. And boy, is that not a good model for real life. I can see how it would cultivate a false sense of certainty.
Interesting! Yeah -- like, okay, say Texas does refuse to concede Harris won, but it doesn't matter because she has the electoral college without Texas. A normal person is able to see that Texas then has a dozen options, most of which amount to raising money off their grandstanding and voting for worse candidates. But one or two of my coder friends see only "refuse to concede = secede." As if the abstract principles involved are a real and binding thing. If you "refuse to concede," no two ways about it, you have declared war on the Union. They don't see that it's all human beings who are not obligated to a clear set of rules. It's weird, since they have met human beings.
These 'saboteurs of democracy' would very possibly not object to the description because they have a different conception of the proper limits of democracy to (I'll guess) most of us frequenting this substack. Everyone who believes in individual rights believes in limits to democracy, but we believe in different ones or in different emphases.
Brown vs Board… went against the wishes of most of white majorities in multiple states. Obergefell vs Hodges _certainly_ sabotaged democracy, because it overturned the results of referenda and the decisions of democratically-elected representatives. So did Texas vs Johnson, as I'm pretty sure a majority of Texans wanted flag-burning to be illegal.
I think it's important to keep this in mind over the next four-plus years of Trump/Vance because they will obviously follow the authoritarian playbook of saying that The People need direction, or need to be construed as only their cultists, when they need to do that but, given the pieties of the age, will whenever possible limn the attack against some or all of us as just 'democracy in action'.
(Sorry to go on so: I plead 0.) wishing to make sure I don't look like an Austrian or a 1964 AuH2O asshole, 1.) insomnia, and 2.) displaying mine own cleverness momentarily soothes my continual freak-out over what look like the coming Horrible Times and questions like 'If I canʼt or wonʼt fight will not leaving a country grown monstrous make me complicit?'.)
The past is an imperfect guide, but I think my high school history teachers didn't want to get into the freedom/democracy split, as (for example) they never mentioned that Kristallnacht was presented by the government as a spontaneous expression of The People's rage against The Jews after a minor assassination by a Polish-Jewish refugee in the German embassy in Paris. (The gov't had been planning this for awhile, waiting on an excuse and an agreement on how to make the German insurance companies whole, which they did by stealing compensation for them from the Jews.)
Reactionaries love to oppose freedom and democracy, and think that this sinks democracy as a good road, because the only right about which they really care is the right to manage private property exactly as the owner wants, particularly when the owner owns the amount of property that makes think-tanks a good long-term investment, and this inevitably will not be popular with sane adults who don't worship the wealthy.
I want make clear that I think democracy potentially dangerous to the rights of all persons but also its best possible guarantor, as something that benefits everyone should get majorities…if people value their own rights and don't value the oppression of others higher. The moldbuggy assholes out of one side of their mouths claim that their C.E.O.-king would be a better guarantor (for Reasons that have never worked for long) and out of the other denigrate a desire for human rights as bourgeois-dysgenic—why should someone who's proved their unworthiness by disagreeing with King Infant have the same freedom-of-speech as someone who's _not_ an Enemy of The People? (But see the pseudo-democratic appeal in that phrase, even as it mystifies both 'Enemy' and 'The People'.) (The TradCaths have at least one papal encyclical denouncing Freedom of Speech for treating Truth and Error equally.)
and you didn't even get to Lawrence v Texas and Loving v Virginia. The only the Repubs want to end that the party base would not want overturned is Griswold v Connecticut
I'm reminded by this missive that subsequent to applying the appropriate pieties, the legal regals are free to accept gifts from their eversograteful supplicants without apology to the niggling press nor the actual (and permanent perpetual) losers. The only thing is, in a nation of 330 million, there's not that many judges to gift to...so there's an easily imagined queue of competing gratitudinous court-jammers rushing – Ah Say RUSHING!! – to fill the gap. Which leads me to the slightly amusing dream of great mobs of corporatized solicitors hacking and chopping each other with great broadswords and cudgels to assure only THEIR agendas are aptly ameliorated.
I’m surprised every time at how well the cheerleader uniform fits you, Roy. You look great in it and you get your jaded, curmudgeonly fans excited every time. Go team!
My wish list of things to fix in this regard is quite long, but at the very top would be doing away with mandatory arbitration clauses that are now tucked into every contract and EULA. Consumers are being consistently denied all avenues of redress by corporations, and the consequences can be dire.
Apparently, these corporations take EULA as a directive...
“End Users with this Licensing Agreement!”
My standard response when I run into one of those highly-online hyper-cynical "skeptic" types who's always claiming "I do my own research" goes something like this:
So, when you download a piece of software, do you read the license agreement yourself or send it to your lawyer? (Because we all know what they actually do, because it's the same thing we ALL do.)
Prolly not - because they can always snarl that it's Biden's fault when they get fucked
Why didn't FEMA read this for me, huh?
It's like we live in a neoliberalism controlled state or something.
I think you may be on to something.
Huh, letting corporations run amok in the name of COMMUNISM BAD for forty years might have not been a great idea.
Periodic reminder that Europe's most vigorous anti-Communist was once named "Adolf Hitler".
Yeah, but a hundred years, Shirley.
I've heard tell it's good to be king, but I've not tried it yet, so...
Hear, hear.
I'm still waiting for them to start placing "we now own your first born child" clauses in those things.
Thanks again for the positive message! Yeahbuttism is rampant. ( " Looks like we're winning !" "Yeahbutt we'll probably lose because we're losers!")
I think we're in for a historic win. My daughter, Gen X Roller Derby Lesbian, is is QA director for a gigantic software company. The company feels QA is a great place to start new software engineers. My daughter has a lot of Gen Z on her teams. She says they're whiny and irritating but really focused. They have a huge sense of what's right and they insist on it, popular or not. We were talking about polling and I mentioned that I bet Swifties seldom get polled, yet they're all going to vote.
My daughter said this election was Gen Z's coming out.
🤞🏻
If only.
The Party of Clinton offers crumbs but not the change we need.
Like young people, they buy the Dem line because they haven't the experience to know better. Eventually, they'll be enlightened when they see no response from the Ds on neoliberalism -- crumbs, again -- and there will never, ever be a proper global response to global warming.
That whined, hope I'm proven wrong.
Former dues-paying, paper-selling member of the International Socialist Organization here, struggling with this " proper global response to global warming" because we need to build about ten million massive wind turbines and hundreds of gigawatts of solar farms, and I don't see anyone who's going to do that except for-profit corporations. So I kinda like the Biden approach, which is to sweeten the pot for those for-profit corporations, promising them even GREATER profits because we don't have time to muck about too much with our Means of Production right now.
But yeah, once all that shit gets built out, all power to the workers, brother.
Or, I suppose, we could treat climate change as the existential threat it is, adopt a WW2-type mentality, and just nationalize the damn production and direct funds to that instead of the Pentagon and tax breaks for the 0.01%.
Naaaaah.
Haven't really looked into how we did it in WWII, Boeing built B-29s under government contract, I assume they made some profit on the deal (so they could piss it all away 80 years later by letting their quality control go to shit.)
Plus we couldn't even get enough Americans aboard that original "let's ensure our survival" train until Pearl Harbor. Now Florida could end up under two feet of water all the way across and this country wouldn't let the response be "Nationalize oil." It'll be Congress sending half a trillion dollars to the bilge pump industry. Then if Trump is in, add in Leon Musk selling the government drones to deliver a pump to every flooded house. Every incel in the country and their Russian handlers hailing Apartheid Junior as messiah.
Those Musk pump delivery drones will arrive about the same time as the ventilators he promised back in the early days of the pandemic: never.
You are correct, though!
One thing we did that wouldn't happen today was to not allow windfall profits from companies work from the government
Face it – climate change means there's just too much windfall now.
See Dollar-a-Year-Men.
What Loper-Bright will birth, so to speak, cannot be overstated.
In the greater scheme of things, Trump-as-threat is maybe overrated. As well illustrated in today's post, the R supermajority on SCOTUS is countless times worse.
And right behind it is the bipartisan, corrupted system that will never, ever do anything about it. The one solution to that is electing a majority of politicians who would do something about that. And that will never happen. Obviously, the GOP isn't a tool for that but the DNC, by practice and policy is equally opposed. (I had been thinking that Kamala was a break from the Party of Clinton but it looks like I'm wrong. Running against the GOP would help down ballot races in a way that embracing irrelevant never-Trump Republicans cannot do. Hard to run against the GOP when the D POTUS candidate embraces them.)
Trigger warning: balloon's about to be popped.
At the moment, I'm seeing the election as this: some indeterminate slowing of the nation's move towards fascism or rapid acceleration of same. We have SCOTUS and a likely R majorities in both houses of Congress. In such an environment... well, let's say Harris as POTUS in that environment is very, very far from what's needed -- and, again, what's not happening.
And after that, then there's Trump. Take him out and, as SCOTUS and the Party of Clinton show, the improvement would be a modest one. That is, yes, a world without him would be better, but not by all that much.
We voters by and by have had the power to do something about it and we've consistently dropped the ball and here we are.
All that spewed, I'll be happy to eat of crow if and when the time comes.
Your argument has merit. Me, I put my hope in the future, where it can't do me much harm!
You know I have, like, mood swings with this. It’s a seriously scary road up ahead.
And, of course, there’s my recurring hedge: I’d be happy if proved wrong.
But, you know, one sees the same thing with the same results including not learning any lessons… (the comrades, who know better, especially).
If such a thing is possible, I’m sure I’ll be getting yet crazier in the next few weeks.
Pattern recognition is sooo depressing...
This book I'm reading now, Hope for Cynics, argues that the opposite of cynicism isn't naïveté, but skepticism. Because cynicism is built on a mountain of untested assumptions - assumptions that things will always turn out for the worse - so if we even just step back to "It's the future, we can't know for sure" we'd be far better off.
Oh, LSP isn't our biggest problem, no - it's the swarm of Baby Hitlers that are still out there looking for power, like Vance. I don't know how we slap them down, but fortunately knowing that that ain't my job.
My synapses are shorting out at the moment. What means LSP?
Anyway, if I wasn’t clear enough: the problem is the entire GOP and has been since Slick Willie decided the Dems should, on the important matters, stop fighting them. Fascist party and fascist-leaning party: great combo for regression.
Take Trump out of the mix and the improvement is kind of minor. Closest thing to something that looks big is the three POS that went on SCOTUS during his term. Anyone thinks any other Republican POTUS would have nominated anything better, well, maybe but likelier not.
Or put it this way: too much focus on Trump is a huge distraction.
LSP= Lumpy Shit President, i.e. Orange Manchild.
You’re too kind. He’s so much worse than being an obese painted POS.
I was guessing Landing Ship Pundit
Loser, Swaying Precariously
Yeah, but. The move toward fascism has always been around, and so far the voters have backed off at the sticking point. Past performance is no guarantee yadayada, but that's what we know so far.
I've used this before, but Trump is The Mule. The psycohistorians running the Republican party had a neat timeline of locking in control of state and federal government, but Trump blew it to pieces because the Party can't give up the dream of Reagan 2.0, and Trump leveraged that to take control of its voter base and then the Party. He's Chaos, The Joker. He doesn't care if the world burns as a side-effect of getting the tribute he deserves. Fhat's why Liz 'n Dick are voting for Harris, they want their party back, invluding the voter base. Somebody Else has to stick the knife in Trump's back.
Net, Trump has been a plus for the GOP. Qualification to that is the remote possibility of bringing a down ballot disaster in November. And even then, the huge national problem of SCOTUS — which the Democrats action-wise are too bothered by.
Meanwhile, states are their own parallel disaster.
And complicit in all this is the lack of a serious major opposition party.
A plus? Can't see it. He's motivated the base by narrowing it with his air horn dog whistles. He's sucking money out of the party paying his legal bills. The reason the Republican party is not serious is him. Right now he owns the party the same way he owns its voter base. They all follow his orders, and their sucession plan is JD Vance, a man who rivals Ted Cruz for likeability. What is the party getting out of all this?
He’s done more good than harm for the party so far.
But, yes, the primary voters are really fucked up now. Dunno whether that’s going to result in disaster for the party and, if it does, whether it’ll be in time. And given the Democrats’ ambivalence re the slide to fascism how much it would matter.
Time will tell…
Good? What good? And wanting to work theough the system to deal with Trump isn't ambivalence. Insert Thomas Moore quote here. You can reject them as insufficient if you want, but there are reasons.
I'm guessing (thinking? Moi?) that MM means good fer the rubes. you know, owning the libs, killing the blacks and the jews and the southron hordes, breaking the gummint, making the trains run on...well, maybe not THAT one...
they control SCOTUS and got rid of Roe and Chevron deference
There's a certain demographic, men who are cynical, disengaged from politics, low-propensity voters, and he did move some number of those guys from non-voter to Republican. I think that's just for Trump, though, doesn't seem to translate to Republicans generally.
And policy-wise, he did move the Republicans away from Paul Ryan-style austerity budgeting, probably just because he doesn't give a shit about the deficit (not giving a shit being his default mode) and you can see that in his campaign promises this time around, like eliminating taxes on Social Security. And not having Paul Ryan as the public face of your party has got to pay big dividends.
Thing is, those are Trump voters, not Republican voters. Again, that's not a benefit to the party that Trump leads. His cult of personality make Reagan look like Adlai Stevenson. He has no coattails, even for loud and proud MAGA candidates.
And don't worry, the 4 horsemen of Waste, Fraud, Abuse, and Austerity will saddle up once Somebody Else takes care of their Trump problem. Other than the MAGA wing (and god alone knows what happens with them when Trump is "gone") the party underneath is unchanged. Its all coming back because they have no other plan or direction. Once the grease fire is out the fight goes on.
Except Trump was able to so easily defeat the competition because nobody, not even Republican voters, wants that balanced-budget shit. Their choices are: 1) Go back to Paul Ryan-Jeb Bush conservatism and never win another election, or 2) Go even further into the racism and misogyny and probably never win another election, although your odds might be a little better.
There is generally little reason for anyone to give a shit about the deficit as long as growth rate outdoes interest rate and your country controls its currency
True, this was a thing that distinguished Trump from the other Republican candidates in 2016, is that he didn't even pretend to care. In Trump's case another factor was that he had carried staggering amounts of debt his whole life, and probably just saw debt as a normal part of doing business. A rare case where a Republican gets into office and then does actually "run government like a business."
FIAT!
When the revolution comes (HA!) Reed O'Connor, the entire Fifth Circuit, and the six SCOTUS Justices should be the first round of reprobates sent to the guillotine. I wouldn't bother to send Trump to the chop, it would be more of a punishment to banish him to a deserted island where no one pays attention to him.
Off with their goddamn heads!
Execution isn't optimal. It is better to strip institutional power from them and let them live as powerless individuals. In the case of open corruption, Thomas and Alito for sure, trial and prison makes sense. Demonstrate how laws and social consequences still apply. It isn't as if Amy Coney Barrett and Roberts will go to Cuba and raise an army and return to retake the realm. These clowns don't have even a twenty-first equivalent of returning from exile within. The wealthy and groups like the Federalist suck-ups do are overconfident and believe the rest of us don't know how to use the institutions and our collective power anymore, because the Democrats and the public were suckers for decades. Now is the time to show them democracy and collective action is alive and ready for a righteous return.
Oh, of course. I'm being facetious, I oppose the death penalty. And frankly, I think they'd view being relegated to a one bedroom apartment with $40,000 a year to live on as a fate worse than death.
[ dern it.......]
For most people in this world, it would be a step up.
PEOPLE!? I'm not "people", I'm [reads from Federalist Society paper] "a shimmering, glowing star in the legal firmament."
And in order to make a phone call, or unlock the front door, or log on, they hafta navigate the imponderable small print of every damn 'agreement' their legelbeagle litigants have freed up. Chew on THIS contract, ye slime!
After Harris wins with record-setting voter turnout, Biden needs to add four justices to the court immediately.
In the lame duck session, all the steps the other side will decry need to be done in short order.
If the courts or other fascists try any shenanigans, Biden needs to step up and cite the immunity the court handed the executive branch.
I think of what happened in Algeria, when an extremist minority messed up the election. Vaguely I recall they nullified the whole thing and didn't leave power until the baddies were stopped.
That's where I am now. Even if it means removing the six anti-constitutionalist justices for violating their oaths and losing the public trust.
Perp walk them out and jail them for forty-eight hours at least.
Yep. Time to quit fucking around with these assholes. Long past time, actually - been wondering for a while now when everybody else would finally catch on.
Wholeheartedly agree, but pretty sure Dems need to hold the Senate as well to carry that out, which is looking a bit grim.
I allowed myself a bit of hope after seeing what Colin Allred did you Lyin' Ted at their debate the other night. DESTROYED and EVISCERATED as the YouTube titles would have it. But just a bit of hope, I know the Gods are watching and will punish all of America if I show any hubris (even though the all-hubris-all-the-time guys never seem to receive any punishment.)
Biden needs to add four justices to the court immediately.
Do you have a mechanism for doing this? This has been Congresses job in the past and it is highly unlikely that SCOTUS would accept using an Executive Order. With SCOTUS he would have a better likelihood of killing 3 justices than expanding the court by XO
Great read. Trump is nothing but the stalking horse for the morons to put the next piece in place. As I keep telling certain acquaintances 'the fight is only beginning'. I can understand the deep desire to exhale in a few weeks, but undoing the numerous tangled attempts to return us to feudal serfdom will take a lot of effort and a lot of candle power. We can do it.
They want JD to be the "real" President with a lot of apartheid money behind him. (They've been mad at America for helping to destroy apartheid for thirty-five years; now is their chance for revenge.)
Trumpov can give speeches, do ribbon cuttings and that sort of thing, with frequent breaks to his dacha near St Petersburg.
The other theory being if orangefatball gets the gig, the wirepullers invoke the 25th and insert Vance who is 1000% more dangerous and shifty - not to mention easily malleable to any billionaire technocrat who comes knocking.
Ha ha, Trump's never leaving and these numb-nuts are no match for him.
Dunno, though. For someone who's supposed to have something like food tasters (e. g., wait staff open the bottle of Diet Coke in front of him), it seems surprising for him to let Thiel insert a VP. Maybe the vision of getting his tiny hands on those millions was too dazzling to think about this. Or maybe he expects his goons to be more effective than Thiel goons.
I think in my smol-brain the first priority is to get conspiracy bullshit out of politics. As we've been recently with the hurricanes, it's toxic, entrenched, and going to get innocent people killed.
Hear hear!
Great! You and I can march toward the guns!
I always said I'd rather be at ground zero instead of a few miles outside the perimeter!
A côte de today’s discussion, the NYT online had an editorial today titlede, without a shred of self-awareness, “Against Nihilism.” In swearing that those not longer sanguine the government will help them are the exact same as MAGA choads dismantling that government.
I mean, no — not at all. But about milk-livered silk livery journos & pundits who fiddle while it at all burns down & claim there’s no way to decide? That seems nihilistic on a whole nother level…
I swear, when Dash Sulzberger is shot in the back of the head by the American arm of the FSB, his last thought will be, "We should have had more Cletus Safaris."
Hey didja see this one? Senior NY Times reporter says how they report stuff doesn't matter much, because hardly anyone reads them anyway:
https://www.findinggravity.net/p/a-new-york-times-reporter-tells-on
I think I'm gonna stop wasting so much of my time on lesson-planning, not like my students are paying attention, anyway.
Interest, newsletter.
Dude is in "journalist's defensive crouch" mode. Permanently.
If you can't even stick up for your *own* work, yet demand your readers take the extra time to interpret what *you* said, why are you even in this profession?
If I talked about my job the way this guy talks about his job - in public, in front of my colleagues, I think I'd pretty quickly be sitting across a table from my Dean, who would be gently explaining my retirement options.
"OOOOOHHHH, YOU think you get RETIREMENT options...."
Hearted for milk & silk. Suggesting only that next time you might wanna find a way to work 'bilk' in there too...
You would think Dems in Congress and the White House would be well done with these fascist Justices. Whether, in a Harris administration, they finally say, “Enough! We write and administer the laws. You can voice your opinion but we get the final say if we follow your interpretation or ours” is to be hoped for but hardly likely.
Ryan LLC - Liberating our clients from the burden of being responsible citizens (in a similar way to how Lumpy Shit President doesn't pay his bills) - which makes me wonder if they think he gets back into Presidenting again, they won't have to pay their bills, either. Ha ha, silly me, how could that possibly be true!
Also: would that Papa John's non-compete rule forbid other employers from offering higher wages, which would be an "inducement" to leave? Am I supposed to work at the shitty low wage job FOREVER, lest I hope for better? Could they shut down vocational schools for "inducing" leaving a job? Am I worried I'm NOT fucking exaggerating?
Papa John's, LLC submits paperwork for a name change to Massa John's LLC.
"Hey, what do you want? You've got a secure job!"
(mental images of my BIL upon hearing me kvetch about the Tedium Factory: "well, at least you get a PAYCHECK." yeah, that's worth sacrificing my sanity, sure 🤷)
Wage Slavery FTW!
Well, when you say it like that...
Yeah – unchain us from those iniquitous wage thingies! We must be allowed to work for free!
Work Free Or Die!
non-competes would only be in effect for the same industry. So you couldn't go work for Pizza Hut but you could work for Amazon
Ha ha, restrictions, no way THOSE would go away
Yeah, Trump is the kitchen fire spreading to the living room, the Republican Party and the League of Super Villians behind them are the termites in the post-and-pier foundation. It's not the Middle Ages they want, or even the Paradise Lost of the antebellum South, but the golden era of say 1880-1929, the Guilded Age, when you would use names like Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Sarnoff, to identify a specific industry, and you could buy the federal government and they'd stay bought. Loons like Thiel and Musk get attention for their A. E. Van Vogt fantasies, but the bulk of them just want a nice orderly society that knows its place, underneath them. Whether it's a "democracy" or theocratic state doesn't matter much to them since they will be exempt (they think, just like the industrialists who backed the Nazis) no matter what.
I think a large percentage of billionaires really do sincerely believe The Left is Destroying America, and maybe even human civilization. They really are that delusional. I don't see any reason to think they're at all rational about this.
Like, for example, they could be against taxes purely out of rational self-interest, but I think most of them take it a lot farther than that. They see taxes as "punishment of the smartest and hardest-working" and that leads them to some social-Darwinist argument that taxes put us on a downward slope toward total civilizational collapse. And they really do believe that shit.
This checks out, since our current crop of billionaires are often tech guys, and the tech dudes I personally know have a difficult time not reasoning to dire extremes. "If Harris is elected, it seems likely Texas will refuse to concede that she won; it follows that a dozen states and much of the army would join Texas in seceding. Therefore Trump winning, though a fascist, is the only hope for America; Harris, were she serious, would drop out of the race today." They quickly convince themselves of the stark perfection and inevitability of an idle thought experiment like this (ripped from a real-life conversation btw). We need to stop letting software dudes have power, they're almost all goddamn nuts.
[rattling ball bearings in left hand] And I proved, with geometric logic...
I do have some limited experience with coding, and it's true, once you set the thing up and get all the bugs out of it the thing will ALWAYS do the same thing, given the same inputs. And boy, is that not a good model for real life. I can see how it would cultivate a false sense of certainty.
Interesting! Yeah -- like, okay, say Texas does refuse to concede Harris won, but it doesn't matter because she has the electoral college without Texas. A normal person is able to see that Texas then has a dozen options, most of which amount to raising money off their grandstanding and voting for worse candidates. But one or two of my coder friends see only "refuse to concede = secede." As if the abstract principles involved are a real and binding thing. If you "refuse to concede," no two ways about it, you have declared war on the Union. They don't see that it's all human beings who are not obligated to a clear set of rules. It's weird, since they have met human beings.
Yeah, if Harris could win Texas, there is no way Trump can win barring Harris losing NY or CA
I wrote some IF-THEN-ELSE for this scenario, and it definitely comes out to civil war.
They've met human beings, yes, but would they concede to being human themselves?
These 'saboteurs of democracy' would very possibly not object to the description because they have a different conception of the proper limits of democracy to (I'll guess) most of us frequenting this substack. Everyone who believes in individual rights believes in limits to democracy, but we believe in different ones or in different emphases.
Brown vs Board… went against the wishes of most of white majorities in multiple states. Obergefell vs Hodges _certainly_ sabotaged democracy, because it overturned the results of referenda and the decisions of democratically-elected representatives. So did Texas vs Johnson, as I'm pretty sure a majority of Texans wanted flag-burning to be illegal.
I think it's important to keep this in mind over the next four-plus years of Trump/Vance because they will obviously follow the authoritarian playbook of saying that The People need direction, or need to be construed as only their cultists, when they need to do that but, given the pieties of the age, will whenever possible limn the attack against some or all of us as just 'democracy in action'.
(Sorry to go on so: I plead 0.) wishing to make sure I don't look like an Austrian or a 1964 AuH2O asshole, 1.) insomnia, and 2.) displaying mine own cleverness momentarily soothes my continual freak-out over what look like the coming Horrible Times and questions like 'If I canʼt or wonʼt fight will not leaving a country grown monstrous make me complicit?'.)
The past is an imperfect guide, but I think my high school history teachers didn't want to get into the freedom/democracy split, as (for example) they never mentioned that Kristallnacht was presented by the government as a spontaneous expression of The People's rage against The Jews after a minor assassination by a Polish-Jewish refugee in the German embassy in Paris. (The gov't had been planning this for awhile, waiting on an excuse and an agreement on how to make the German insurance companies whole, which they did by stealing compensation for them from the Jews.)
Reactionaries love to oppose freedom and democracy, and think that this sinks democracy as a good road, because the only right about which they really care is the right to manage private property exactly as the owner wants, particularly when the owner owns the amount of property that makes think-tanks a good long-term investment, and this inevitably will not be popular with sane adults who don't worship the wealthy.
I want make clear that I think democracy potentially dangerous to the rights of all persons but also its best possible guarantor, as something that benefits everyone should get majorities…if people value their own rights and don't value the oppression of others higher. The moldbuggy assholes out of one side of their mouths claim that their C.E.O.-king would be a better guarantor (for Reasons that have never worked for long) and out of the other denigrate a desire for human rights as bourgeois-dysgenic—why should someone who's proved their unworthiness by disagreeing with King Infant have the same freedom-of-speech as someone who's _not_ an Enemy of The People? (But see the pseudo-democratic appeal in that phrase, even as it mystifies both 'Enemy' and 'The People'.) (The TradCaths have at least one papal encyclical denouncing Freedom of Speech for treating Truth and Error equally.)
The moldbuggy assholes out of one side of their mouths claim that their C.E.O.-king would be a better guarantor
they are just modernizing Plato who thought Philosopher-Kings like him should rule
and you didn't even get to Lawrence v Texas and Loving v Virginia. The only the Repubs want to end that the party base would not want overturned is Griswold v Connecticut
I'm reminded by this missive that subsequent to applying the appropriate pieties, the legal regals are free to accept gifts from their eversograteful supplicants without apology to the niggling press nor the actual (and permanent perpetual) losers. The only thing is, in a nation of 330 million, there's not that many judges to gift to...so there's an easily imagined queue of competing gratitudinous court-jammers rushing – Ah Say RUSHING!! – to fill the gap. Which leads me to the slightly amusing dream of great mobs of corporatized solicitors hacking and chopping each other with great broadswords and cudgels to assure only THEIR agendas are aptly ameliorated.
Let the Games begin!
I’m surprised every time at how well the cheerleader uniform fits you, Roy. You look great in it and you get your jaded, curmudgeonly fans excited every time. Go team!
Just found this. Bravo bravo bravo Roy.