Oy, so much atomization, so much harm from same to say the least.
But bullshit has ruled more and more for years. And now we chose a POTUS who's 100% bullshit -- maybe literally so per reports from the NYC criminal trial and claims of adult diaper mismanagement.
But that's the area where I can be bothered to have some mercy for the shitheads who reelected Trump. What with profound media failure in refusing to note that lies are lies, what's an ignoramus to do? (That's rhetorical. The actual answer is if one gives a fuck, one finds actually reliable sources and, you know, does the minimal work to be minimally informed.)
Eh, whatever, it's all on us now. You do what you gotta do to fix the world (to coin a phrase cribbed from an ancient source).
And FFS learn how to filter out the bullshit and, you know, just focus.
“You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take should be read by anyone who wants to know how we can not only save democracy but finally achieve what I call 𝗮 𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝘀𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴.”
—William J. Barber II, author of White Poverty
Let's put our collective fortunes together and buy one of those.
Yesterday, in the scrum of the Big Bad Bill:
"Senator King continued: “I don’t understand the obsession and I never have…with taking health insurance away from people. I don’t get it. Trying to take away the Affordable Care Act in 2017 or 2018 and now this. What’s driving this? What’s the cruelty to do this, to take health insurance away from people knowing that it’s going to cost them…up to and including…their lives.”
I have a new theory about the deliberate population-reduction program the minions are implementing here:
1) we been in this handbasket a long-enough time for 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 to see where we're goin'
2) "everybody" includes the nazis
3) the nazis are ridding the nation of competition for clean water/air/food because of #s 1&2
4) for this whole idiotic scheme to work, the nazis need to enforce the remaining temporarily-nationed folk to do their bidding...the coercions are gonna get epically worse for that to succeed
You have found the North Star of totalitarian's bent. The compass points to perpetual genocide. Not for power ultimately, but for death, including suicide. The solution is always the elimination of the ever-shifting other, the out-group, the purported source of all ills, until a new source is needed. Human behavior has this peculiar wrong turn, perpetuated by Us/Them reactions, now accelerated by tendencies to binary, yes-no thinking, and the underlying algorithms of daily life.
This is the cross on which the latest totalitarians are staking themselves and the rest of us out upon. The way information gets processes and repackaged turns these levers in our behavior into little screws pinning us to the ephemeral fictions of our own imagination.
But these are spells as readily broken as the little lies among children and lovers. A simple antidote in most cases, the magic words, Hell no both yes and no. The question itself is an unnecessary illusion in a series of things most of us in the moment do not need to answer.
Hmm…dark, but I can’t fault your logic. It all turns on your fourth point, are “the people” going to allow it. Will they gain confidence from the fact they number in the tens of millions and across the board they’re much smarter than the Trumpists? Are they willing to fight, whatever that looks like, even if Dem politicians have for the most part chosen to be scoldy administrators as their best response to this onslaught? I imagine it won’t be pretty or quick, especially if they’re able to transform ICE into an American version of Mukhabarat?
What should worry us is that it’s been a fairly reliable form of rule around the globe for like forever. A brutal military-backed junta, a small but extremely wealthy aristocracy, a slice of the population skilled enough to keep it working who wisely keep their heads down, and a vast feudal class under the whip doing all the menial stuff. I’ve thought for a while that maybe MAGA really stands for Make America Guatemala Already.
With regards to "Make America Guatemala Already" -- one of the major reasons Central America is how it is is because of the malign, and sometimes militarily backed, influence of the giant Yanqui neighbor to the north. (The Monroe Doctrine is over 200 years old now.) I know there are plenty of White Americans that would love to live in a dictatorship as long as they had power, but it's because they've never had to live within sword's point of one. (The same dictatorship that gives you power can also take it away.) And those that did? Fled to the USA.
Leave us not forget the filibusters who went south to conquer like the good ol' days...
A little OT, but I was reminded of Ben Linder yesterday ago. He stopped in at our factory in 1983 on his way to Nicaragua to teach locals how to do small civil engineering projects. He was traveling there from Oregon on his unicycle, juggling all the way. Ben was a thoughtful, kind and generous person. The contras tortured and murdered him.
Our guys, paid to murder Americans in central America.
I like this kinda optimistic REBID, as if the 21st century hasn’t taught us Republicans are America, the racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, ignorant shit-hole country the rest of us have to live in.
One thing I think about a lot is that 1. so few people think about politics hardly at all and 2. Yet every four to twelve years they get disgusted and vote in an opposite direction from the last time.
And yet... America, the racist shit-hole country where 48.3% of the voters picked the Black woman for President. What's that tired phrase much-beloved by hack writers? Oh yeah, "America is a land of contrasts."
Doesn't "all men are created equal" blow all that shit away? They never stop screaming the pledge of allegiance and waving flags in our faces, and it never makes any difference to how wrong they are.
While reading your inspiring work, I was distracted by a frisson—of messages long gone from a youth spent mesmerized by teevee. From the Madison Avenue Marketing Giants of soda, we need some new lyrics:
Ah, WhiteyBoots. I wonder if his preferred refugee class make it ashore (from f'rinstance South Africa) via their WhiteyBoats, whilst digging the WhiteyBeats, juking the algorithms with their WhiteyBots and smacking the help around with their WhiteyBats, before eventually settling into their exclusive gated community...
The soda commercial I liked was the Dr Pepper ad where hundreds of people were running down the street in more-or-less identical T-shirts that all said something like "I'm an individual."
I think you’re on to something here Roy. Imho the whole reality-building thing on the right really got going with Ronnie and all the “shining city” and “morning in America” stuff. That’s where the back-to-the-imaginary-50s movement kicked off and they tried for more than 30 years to persuade people to go there. But they couldn’t persuade enough and so now they’re gonna make us go back. It’s not working, though, and if anything they seem to be losing ground. Facts, it turns out, really are stubborn things.
Bright spot: Great Warrior Wayne Michael has caught & killed another mouse! (A worryingly large "mouse" so I am glad it's gone!)
That said, I think I'm imposing some reality on my relatives. Apparently expressing myself doesn't work, so now the policy will be "NO politics". Not around me. You want to chuckle about protesters getting run over, do it when I'm not present. And NO "conversation" because apparently you know already what I think, because FAUX told you what I think, and you're not willing to listen. I am not going to spend what little time I have left with my father with him smirking at my "naivety".
For some reason I always thought it was a rumsfeldism, but I've found no direct proof (known unknown). Probly I'm wrong* – seems unlikely he (the unknown known king) woulda chosen anonymity on that one.
Couldn't have been Rumsfeld; whatever his attributes *thinking* was not among them. He was always a "retaliate against insults with massive weaponry" kind of person.
Roy, this is outstanding. Obviously atomization, the simple fact that most people get their news from TikTok or Facebook if they get it at all, plays a huge role here. Others have said so at length, we all understand it.
But you highlight a different important point: Trump's predecessors all managed to get some degree of buy-in from people. While not having buy-in from the majority of the governed can't stop how much of its will an authoritarian regime will impose by brute force, I think NOT having that buy-in greatly limits the *duration* that authoritarian regime can remain in power. I hope.
That “we’re history’s actors, and the rest of you will be left to study what we do” bit rings a little hollow considering many of the “actors” historians study were real pieces of shit.
I'd be a lot more optimistic if the Supreme Court had not made clear last week that the Constitution is unconstitutional, and that Donald Trump shall be bound by no law, ever.
Recall that it is specifically his (as president) breaking of the law that protects him from prosecution/harm. If'n he just figured to skirt the regs a little the courts could go after him, but not for real crimin'.
The Supreme Court is lawless and illegitimate, and aside from the notable exception of the Civil Rights era, has largely been a malignant tumor on our democracy since they seized power in Marbury v Madison.
I heard some political legal light with connections (can't remember names or which podcast) relating how he had asked a well-placed acquaintance in the Trump WH (or DOJ) what their legal philosophy would be in this new term, expecting some high academic principle or such like. The answer he got: "Try and stop us." And that certainly looks to be, as they said back in Nixon's reign, operative.
I'm turning 60 this month, and I've been working since I was 18, have never drawn unemployment in my life, always worked as a temp if I didn't have a permanent gig, was on food stamps for one 3 month period in my early twenties. It was so demoralizing I would never go through it again.
I chose an approved for women vocation, office work, which has given me for the most part clean, quiet jobs that offered health insurance and other benefits that many in the workforce didn't have. I started my career as a receptionist and worked my way up to executive assistant. Nearly 20 years ago, after having had a belly full of egomaniacs over the previous decade or so, I did a voluntary downshift and took a job in what amounts to a typing pool. Basically, I'm the this and that girl, doing all the odd little tasks that no one else knows how or wants to know how to do. I don't complain, because I make very good money. But after 40 years, to think that I'm going to have to live on cat food after retirement so some gazillionaire can have another fucking yacht, well, it does something to you. And it's not very pleasant.
The thing about that claim that “we create our own reality” is that it was and is nonsense in its own terms, even for the most powerful empire. Newton’s laws apply nearly as well to social interactions as to physics; any time any entity acts on others, those affected will react. Empire might be powerful enough to prevail for centuries, but eventually it will fail, as all empires eventually have done.
And also, since it’s is prominent in the MAGA vocabulary, the word “freedom” is punishingly misused—to mean the “freedom” to coerce or abuse others—but take enough of the actual freedom to live as they want away from enough people, not to mention medical care and dignified retirement, and their resistance will be felt. The tragedy is how long it will probably take, how many unnecessary deaths it will entail, and how difficult it will be to rebuild and reinvent American government after the wrecking crew has bean removed.
It won’t happen in my lifetime. But for my grandkids’ sakes, I choose to believe it will happen.
I was privileged to meet spouse for lunch in the Dept of Interior grotto one day during the Great Enstupification*. The menu board had Freedom Fries, because the French were being snotty. Then I looked at the dessert list. Even tho the Germans' response to the Chop Socky in Iraqi was exactly the same as the French, no one in that disadministration thought to serve Freedom Chocolate Cake...
After the large Democratic socialist win last week the news was all, " Well what do you expect from a bunch of lieberal city folk?"
I can't remember the last really liberal New York mayor. I remember the billionaire, the cop creep, whatever that was before him. I don't really remember any dyed in a wool leftists. This was a big deal. Not just a Socialist, a Muslim socialist.
If they pass this budget, everything's fucked and everybody will know who to blame. And if you add in another plague of some sort, or a foreign war with boots on the ground or just a normal hurricane with no FEMA reaction, things will be really fucked . And when we get rid of the people that really do the work around here, growing food, working in warehouses, doing construction, driving trucks - all the stuff brown people do, we're going to be really fucked then. And don't forget no one to do home health care. I bet having to decide who's turn it is to wipe Mema's butt
Is going to be the real cause of most divorces in the future -
Some shit you can't buy or lie your way out of - real soon, right is going to have 10 or 12 things on the list and everybody's going to know.
Glad you're relatively optimistic! You're a pretty sharp guy. I take it is a good sign!
A "sewer socialist"! As in, improving city services. Good history lesson about the importance of public service at local levels. And this might be a past version of someone like Mamdani, who has great personal appeal to go with the sensible politics:
"Jasper is also a grand mixer. There is not a civic or social function that he misses. He used to participate — I don't know if he is still able to get around — at every wedding, funeral, house warming and clambake — and go home sober."
I was in Houston a few months after their last really big storm/flood. The city was inundated (more than usual) with south-of-the-border workers, and, man, they got things put back together fast. So a surprise! hurricane followed by nobody around to fix stuff is going to be ugly. And inevitable.
It makes more sense if it's just pure grift: "People like Elon, people like Jesus, I'll just AI up some shit with Elon's kid singin' about Jesus and the clicks will come pourin' in!"
Iraq, those were the days! I flashed back to that when they sent the Marines into LA: "You couldn't control Baghdad when you had no rules of engagement other than 'Kill 'em all and left God sort 'em out', now try LA."
And that's what I struggle with, constantly. What they're attempting to do is so repulsive we should scream long n' loud about it, but then the execution falls so far short of their dreams that it's hard (for me, at least) to take it all as seriously as I should. The plane to El Salvador was an outrage, I expected daily torture-prison flights after that, we haven't had a second one.
I know, that's the thing, "Boy, they sure are a bunch of fuck-ups" sounds like Famous Last Words, something future historians (if any) will point to and laugh, bitterly. But they really are a bunch of fuck-ups.
Keith Olbermann always says, if democracy survives, it won't be because of what we did to protect it so much as the ineptitude of those who tried to destroy it.
It's easier to hurt people when you deliberately avoid knowing anything about them, it's easier to destroy institutions when you refuse to learn anything about what they do. Stupid* helps to facilitate evil.
*There's a nitpick about whether a person refusing to know a thing they could easily know with a little effort is actually stupid, or just being willfully ignorant. This argument, like all arguments about the minds of Trump voters, is a waste of time.
Oy, so much atomization, so much harm from same to say the least.
But bullshit has ruled more and more for years. And now we chose a POTUS who's 100% bullshit -- maybe literally so per reports from the NYC criminal trial and claims of adult diaper mismanagement.
But that's the area where I can be bothered to have some mercy for the shitheads who reelected Trump. What with profound media failure in refusing to note that lies are lies, what's an ignoramus to do? (That's rhetorical. The actual answer is if one gives a fuck, one finds actually reliable sources and, you know, does the minimal work to be minimally informed.)
Eh, whatever, it's all on us now. You do what you gotta do to fix the world (to coin a phrase cribbed from an ancient source).
And FFS learn how to filter out the bullshit and, you know, just focus.
From a book review I found today:
“You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take should be read by anyone who wants to know how we can not only save democracy but finally achieve what I call 𝗮 𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝘀𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴.”
—William J. Barber II, author of White Poverty
Let's put our collective fortunes together and buy one of those.
Yesterday, in the scrum of the Big Bad Bill:
"Senator King continued: “I don’t understand the obsession and I never have…with taking health insurance away from people. I don’t get it. Trying to take away the Affordable Care Act in 2017 or 2018 and now this. What’s driving this? What’s the cruelty to do this, to take health insurance away from people knowing that it’s going to cost them…up to and including…their lives.”
I have a new theory about the deliberate population-reduction program the minions are implementing here:
1) we been in this handbasket a long-enough time for 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 to see where we're goin'
2) "everybody" includes the nazis
3) the nazis are ridding the nation of competition for clean water/air/food because of #s 1&2
4) for this whole idiotic scheme to work, the nazis need to enforce the remaining temporarily-nationed folk to do their bidding...the coercions are gonna get epically worse for that to succeed
You have found the North Star of totalitarian's bent. The compass points to perpetual genocide. Not for power ultimately, but for death, including suicide. The solution is always the elimination of the ever-shifting other, the out-group, the purported source of all ills, until a new source is needed. Human behavior has this peculiar wrong turn, perpetuated by Us/Them reactions, now accelerated by tendencies to binary, yes-no thinking, and the underlying algorithms of daily life.
This is the cross on which the latest totalitarians are staking themselves and the rest of us out upon. The way information gets processes and repackaged turns these levers in our behavior into little screws pinning us to the ephemeral fictions of our own imagination.
But these are spells as readily broken as the little lies among children and lovers. A simple antidote in most cases, the magic words, Hell no both yes and no. The question itself is an unnecessary illusion in a series of things most of us in the moment do not need to answer.
"spells as readily broken as the little lies" yes
Hmm…dark, but I can’t fault your logic. It all turns on your fourth point, are “the people” going to allow it. Will they gain confidence from the fact they number in the tens of millions and across the board they’re much smarter than the Trumpists? Are they willing to fight, whatever that looks like, even if Dem politicians have for the most part chosen to be scoldy administrators as their best response to this onslaught? I imagine it won’t be pretty or quick, especially if they’re able to transform ICE into an American version of Mukhabarat?
What should worry us is that it’s been a fairly reliable form of rule around the globe for like forever. A brutal military-backed junta, a small but extremely wealthy aristocracy, a slice of the population skilled enough to keep it working who wisely keep their heads down, and a vast feudal class under the whip doing all the menial stuff. I’ve thought for a while that maybe MAGA really stands for Make America Guatemala Already.
With regards to "Make America Guatemala Already" -- one of the major reasons Central America is how it is is because of the malign, and sometimes militarily backed, influence of the giant Yanqui neighbor to the north. (The Monroe Doctrine is over 200 years old now.) I know there are plenty of White Americans that would love to live in a dictatorship as long as they had power, but it's because they've never had to live within sword's point of one. (The same dictatorship that gives you power can also take it away.) And those that did? Fled to the USA.
Leave us not forget the filibusters who went south to conquer like the good ol' days...
A little OT, but I was reminded of Ben Linder yesterday ago. He stopped in at our factory in 1983 on his way to Nicaragua to teach locals how to do small civil engineering projects. He was traveling there from Oregon on his unicycle, juggling all the way. Ben was a thoughtful, kind and generous person. The contras tortured and murdered him.
Our guys, paid to murder Americans in central America.
I remember Ben Linder’s murder. The Reagan lackeys were very callous about it.
I like this kinda optimistic REBID, as if the 21st century hasn’t taught us Republicans are America, the racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, ignorant shit-hole country the rest of us have to live in.
Yeah well I'm not letting it go.
One thing I think about a lot is that 1. so few people think about politics hardly at all and 2. Yet every four to twelve years they get disgusted and vote in an opposite direction from the last time.
I think there's something in it!
You’re right. I read that only 18% of surveyed Americans know Medicaid cuts are in the BBB.
Well Tubby SAID he wouldn't touch Medicare, so why would you even be paying attention? We have his assurances!
and pretty much all media is awful
True, but I think you could beat it into their heads 24/7, and many of them would still come away thinking: whatever this is, it won't affect ME.
But when it does they are more likely to remember who did it to them
And yet... America, the racist shit-hole country where 48.3% of the voters picked the Black woman for President. What's that tired phrase much-beloved by hack writers? Oh yeah, "America is a land of contrasts."
You spelt 'contras' incorrectly.
Doesn't "all men are created equal" blow all that shit away? They never stop screaming the pledge of allegiance and waving flags in our faces, and it never makes any difference to how wrong they are.
While reading your inspiring work, I was distracted by a frisson—of messages long gone from a youth spent mesmerized by teevee. From the Madison Avenue Marketing Giants of soda, we need some new lyrics:
[coke]
"I'd like to teach the world to live
With communal self-sufficiency…"
[dr. pepper]
"Be a socialist! Think Socialism!"
[7up]
"The un-Nazi!"
Now do "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!"
It's not butter, but I think that's a slippery slope!
I Can't Believe It's Not a Slippery Slope
2 marks to botha yinz!
"Atsa one spicy tamale! Deport this guy!"
from that speecy spicy Meatball, Ron DeSantis.
Ah, WhiteyBoots. I wonder if his preferred refugee class make it ashore (from f'rinstance South Africa) via their WhiteyBoats, whilst digging the WhiteyBeats, juking the algorithms with their WhiteyBots and smacking the help around with their WhiteyBats, before eventually settling into their exclusive gated community...
You know – WhiteyButtes.
HIS dungeons are surrounded by alligators, top THAT MAGA govs. He's so proud.
The soda commercial I liked was the Dr Pepper ad where hundreds of people were running down the street in more-or-less identical T-shirts that all said something like "I'm an individual."
As the Dictators (I know, I know — it's appropriately timely!) once sang: "You're such a nonconformist, just like everybody else."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F8gNyI_m-I
I think you’re on to something here Roy. Imho the whole reality-building thing on the right really got going with Ronnie and all the “shining city” and “morning in America” stuff. That’s where the back-to-the-imaginary-50s movement kicked off and they tried for more than 30 years to persuade people to go there. But they couldn’t persuade enough and so now they’re gonna make us go back. It’s not working, though, and if anything they seem to be losing ground. Facts, it turns out, really are stubborn things.
He was right (very right) about the mourning in America part.
Bright spot: Great Warrior Wayne Michael has caught & killed another mouse! (A worryingly large "mouse" so I am glad it's gone!)
That said, I think I'm imposing some reality on my relatives. Apparently expressing myself doesn't work, so now the policy will be "NO politics". Not around me. You want to chuckle about protesters getting run over, do it when I'm not present. And NO "conversation" because apparently you know already what I think, because FAUX told you what I think, and you're not willing to listen. I am not going to spend what little time I have left with my father with him smirking at my "naivety".
This seems like a step forward (oh, the dead mouse also)
Boundaries are your friend!
The “aide” was widely believed to be Karl Rove, right?
For some reason I always thought it was a rumsfeldism, but I've found no direct proof (known unknown). Probly I'm wrong* – seems unlikely he (the unknown known king) woulda chosen anonymity on that one.
*shrug...used to it...
Couldn't have been Rumsfeld; whatever his attributes *thinking* was not among them. He was always a "retaliate against insults with massive weaponry" kind of person.
It's certainly Rumsfeldian.
Yeah. And if he was, that's really funny, considering where he ended up.
Roy, this is outstanding. Obviously atomization, the simple fact that most people get their news from TikTok or Facebook if they get it at all, plays a huge role here. Others have said so at length, we all understand it.
But you highlight a different important point: Trump's predecessors all managed to get some degree of buy-in from people. While not having buy-in from the majority of the governed can't stop how much of its will an authoritarian regime will impose by brute force, I think NOT having that buy-in greatly limits the *duration* that authoritarian regime can remain in power. I hope.
Me too!
That “we’re history’s actors, and the rest of you will be left to study what we do” bit rings a little hollow considering many of the “actors” historians study were real pieces of shit.
Still need to research them, if only to establish patterns of pre-recognition so's we can head off the next ones (I snort).
I'd be a lot more optimistic if the Supreme Court had not made clear last week that the Constitution is unconstitutional, and that Donald Trump shall be bound by no law, ever.
Recall that it is specifically his (as president) breaking of the law that protects him from prosecution/harm. If'n he just figured to skirt the regs a little the courts could go after him, but not for real crimin'.
That is the legacy of the Corte di Tutti Corti.
The Supreme Court is lawless and illegitimate, and aside from the notable exception of the Civil Rights era, has largely been a malignant tumor on our democracy since they seized power in Marbury v Madison.
Oh, for an Earl Warren now...
Well, at least as a Supreme.
I heard some political legal light with connections (can't remember names or which podcast) relating how he had asked a well-placed acquaintance in the Trump WH (or DOJ) what their legal philosophy would be in this new term, expecting some high academic principle or such like. The answer he got: "Try and stop us." And that certainly looks to be, as they said back in Nixon's reign, operative.
Yeah. I don't remember who, but was clearly their operative philosophy of disgovernance.
Yeah, Nixon. Whatever happened to that guy?
I hope he’s enjoying his eternal lodgings with Kissinger, Reagan, and Pinochet (now there’s a cursèd guest list).
(Was going to say that he'd made a fourth for bridge, but Reagan's brain was already pudding so they'd have to play poker.)
Or, in the words of soon-to-be-Federal judge Emil Bove, "Fuck you"
I'd love to see some of the "try" part!
There is no "try". There is only "Do" and "Chuck Schumer"
Somehow this seems scarier than what we’re seeing. The frat boys are running the place.
I'm turning 60 this month, and I've been working since I was 18, have never drawn unemployment in my life, always worked as a temp if I didn't have a permanent gig, was on food stamps for one 3 month period in my early twenties. It was so demoralizing I would never go through it again.
I chose an approved for women vocation, office work, which has given me for the most part clean, quiet jobs that offered health insurance and other benefits that many in the workforce didn't have. I started my career as a receptionist and worked my way up to executive assistant. Nearly 20 years ago, after having had a belly full of egomaniacs over the previous decade or so, I did a voluntary downshift and took a job in what amounts to a typing pool. Basically, I'm the this and that girl, doing all the odd little tasks that no one else knows how or wants to know how to do. I don't complain, because I make very good money. But after 40 years, to think that I'm going to have to live on cat food after retirement so some gazillionaire can have another fucking yacht, well, it does something to you. And it's not very pleasant.
You and me is workers, chum. Happy birthday!
Friskies is for closers?
I have no idea what this means, but I [shudder] love it!
I'd think it'd be Fancy Feast!
The thing about that claim that “we create our own reality” is that it was and is nonsense in its own terms, even for the most powerful empire. Newton’s laws apply nearly as well to social interactions as to physics; any time any entity acts on others, those affected will react. Empire might be powerful enough to prevail for centuries, but eventually it will fail, as all empires eventually have done.
And also, since it’s is prominent in the MAGA vocabulary, the word “freedom” is punishingly misused—to mean the “freedom” to coerce or abuse others—but take enough of the actual freedom to live as they want away from enough people, not to mention medical care and dignified retirement, and their resistance will be felt. The tragedy is how long it will probably take, how many unnecessary deaths it will entail, and how difficult it will be to rebuild and reinvent American government after the wrecking crew has bean removed.
It won’t happen in my lifetime. But for my grandkids’ sakes, I choose to believe it will happen.
Simple rule of bumper stickers: if it contains the word "freedom," it refers to, and I mean a full 100% of the time, guns.
I was privileged to meet spouse for lunch in the Dept of Interior grotto one day during the Great Enstupification*. The menu board had Freedom Fries, because the French were being snotty. Then I looked at the dessert list. Even tho the Germans' response to the Chop Socky in Iraqi was exactly the same as the French, no one in that disadministration thought to serve Freedom Chocolate Cake...
*one of...
After the large Democratic socialist win last week the news was all, " Well what do you expect from a bunch of lieberal city folk?"
I can't remember the last really liberal New York mayor. I remember the billionaire, the cop creep, whatever that was before him. I don't really remember any dyed in a wool leftists. This was a big deal. Not just a Socialist, a Muslim socialist.
If they pass this budget, everything's fucked and everybody will know who to blame. And if you add in another plague of some sort, or a foreign war with boots on the ground or just a normal hurricane with no FEMA reaction, things will be really fucked . And when we get rid of the people that really do the work around here, growing food, working in warehouses, doing construction, driving trucks - all the stuff brown people do, we're going to be really fucked then. And don't forget no one to do home health care. I bet having to decide who's turn it is to wipe Mema's butt
Is going to be the real cause of most divorces in the future -
Some shit you can't buy or lie your way out of - real soon, right is going to have 10 or 12 things on the list and everybody's going to know.
Glad you're relatively optimistic! You're a pretty sharp guy. I take it is a good sign!
Yeah, you want Socialist mayors, you gotta go to Milwaukee.
Aren’t the socialists all in Green Bay? Owning the means of distraction?
And leave us not forget the ketchupchucker in chief now owns a piece of US Steel. Socialist to the rotten core!
Or Bridgeport! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_McLevy
A "sewer socialist"! As in, improving city services. Good history lesson about the importance of public service at local levels. And this might be a past version of someone like Mamdani, who has great personal appeal to go with the sensible politics:
"Jasper is also a grand mixer. There is not a civic or social function that he misses. He used to participate — I don't know if he is still able to get around — at every wedding, funeral, house warming and clambake — and go home sober."
Imagine publicly-owned GROCERY STORES. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
Apparently, this is the last (plastic-not-paper) straw.
As long as it is the last one, we're good. Today, the straws. Tomorrow, the Plastic People of the Universe!
I was in Houston a few months after their last really big storm/flood. The city was inundated (more than usual) with south-of-the-border workers, and, man, they got things put back together fast. So a surprise! hurricane followed by nobody around to fix stuff is going to be ugly. And inevitable.
Honestly, I'm just winging it. And I pay a lot more attention to their personal psychology than I do their politics; it's more informative.
You just had to show us that video, didn't you. That will haunt me.
If the Times is going to MAGA diners, they should embed among whoever gets comfort and joy from that shit.
Yeah that was gruesome. And the product of a deeply strange mind that I will never understand.
It makes more sense if it's just pure grift: "People like Elon, people like Jesus, I'll just AI up some shit with Elon's kid singin' about Jesus and the clicks will come pourin' in!"
Iraq, those were the days! I flashed back to that when they sent the Marines into LA: "You couldn't control Baghdad when you had no rules of engagement other than 'Kill 'em all and left God sort 'em out', now try LA."
And that's what I struggle with, constantly. What they're attempting to do is so repulsive we should scream long n' loud about it, but then the execution falls so far short of their dreams that it's hard (for me, at least) to take it all as seriously as I should. The plane to El Salvador was an outrage, I expected daily torture-prison flights after that, we haven't had a second one.
"but then the execution falls so far short of their dreams" SO FAR!
I know, that's the thing, "Boy, they sure are a bunch of fuck-ups" sounds like Famous Last Words, something future historians (if any) will point to and laugh, bitterly. But they really are a bunch of fuck-ups.
Keith Olbermann always says, if democracy survives, it won't be because of what we did to protect it so much as the ineptitude of those who tried to destroy it.
Well, THERE'S a cheery thought!
Maybe time to acronymize TANVBG TGOOH (these are not very bright guys [and] things got out of hand).
I'm seeing "TANVBG TGOOH" as a defenseman on the Finnish national hockey team (speaking of people who knew how to confront totalitarianism)
"Stupid and evil" is always a bad combination, yet Republicans keep trying it.
It's easier to hurt people when you deliberately avoid knowing anything about them, it's easier to destroy institutions when you refuse to learn anything about what they do. Stupid* helps to facilitate evil.
*There's a nitpick about whether a person refusing to know a thing they could easily know with a little effort is actually stupid, or just being willfully ignorant. This argument, like all arguments about the minds of Trump voters, is a waste of time.
Which raises the question "how many Trump voter's minds can dance on the head of a pin?", truly one for the ages.
Pretty sure a sizeable quotient of the Wrong Reich is dreaming of more executions.
"There are parts of New York that I would not advise you to invade."
Ha ha, that's the attitude.