If supporting pride is a ‘political viewpoint’, being against it is one too

Gay existence is not an offense against anyone, it’s the folks trying to ban gay existence that are playing offense. LGBTQ folk resisting their own erasure and persecution (and for their allies to support them) is a straightforward matter of human rights these cretins want to deny

The couple of seconds’ worth of video I saw told me a few things:

• the truck had been spinning out for a long time there

• that situation was going to be tough for most trucks

• it had terrible traction, possibly a matter of not having all-season or snow-specific tires

• it appeared to be driving all wheels, can’t say whether or not they were distributing traction or slip intelligently

• couldn’t tell if anything was high-centering anywhere but it didn’t look it

• driving in situations like that are why I leave tire chains in my truck

• the tree sticking out of the back was comical

Yes. More to the point, there’s a lot of things that we use cops and prisons for that cops and prisons are just plain unqualified to do.

When your solution to mental illness is cops, you tend to kill or imprison people without helping them. When your answer to homelessness is cops, you still have homeless people but they end up in prisons or dead when it’s cheaper and more humane to give them housing and some time with a social worker etc, etc

Translation: when we elected Obama it upset the racists so badly they had a great big meltdown about it

There’s a lot to unpack in this statement, but the short of it is that he’s thinking like a terrorist- that the role of police is to instill fear and the thing keeping them from fulfilling it is that they fear being sued. He’s telling his supporters that he wants cops to do crimes with impunity

While I am mightily amused to see the God Squad fighting amongst themselves…

The one sure way to end the fighting is to fund Ukraine’s defense. When the right defunded Ukraine’s defense, they didn’t do it to promote peace, they did it to advance the interests of their allies (that is, Putin).

The reality of ‘ending the fighting’ is going to mean the violence will continue in the territory Russia controls, even after the ‘hostilities’ as such are ended. When Russia gains some territory, the russification of that territory involves punishing the people there for not having surrendered more quickly, liquidating institutions of local culture and replacing them with Russian ones, the separation of families, the internal displacement of locals on trips to the far east that many won’t survive, the ‘political reeducation’ camps, etc.

When US politicians try to pass off enabling a certain genocide as an ‘end to hostilities’ or in anodyne terms like ‘cede some territory’, don’t let them do it. They’re not acquiescing to the inevitable, they’re actively partnering in genocide.

Russia is not a communist state- if anything, its politics are fascist. The American right has been looking at post-soviet Russia as a model for how it wants to run the USA.

It’s a substack blog with a custom top-level domain, pretty safe. Matt Stoller writes a lot about the tensions between monopoly/corporate power and democracy in the context of US history- he’s legit.

It’s as if it hasn’t occurred to him that he’s an NPC

On the one hand, their pro-Palestinian politics are morally valid and increasingly popular as the world watches horrifying human rights violations in Gaza- I agree with them, it’s important to put pressure on the Democrats to get on the right side of this issue.

On the other hand, I honestly think we are one GOP sweep victory away from an end to democracy in the USA- and my take on that is that the establishment-Dems probably think a 4-year stint of being punished by Republicans will teach those uppity leftists and minorities to toe the line better and in the interim they’re pretty sure they’ll be fiiine.

The reason I lose sleep over this sort of thing is I believe that once political power becomes decoupled from the consent of the governed, the rights and protections that arise in the constitution will become instead favors granted by an unaccountable power, contingent on whether or not they find you supplicant enough. Also we shouldn’t count on being able to vote our way out of a situation where the rules prevent voting from making a difference- should it come to that, it’s dark days friends

DNC never learned their lesson

At this point I honestly think the lesson they’ve learned is that curb-stomping the progressives and daring them to stay at home gets us all 4 years of punishment under the GOP and in the next election they get 100% of what they wanted in the first place without any actual lefties having power.

When you remember FDR, this is exactly what they did then- FDR, scion of privilege, ran on a progressive platform for an electorate thirsty for lefty policy. He surrounded himself with other left-leaning bluebloods interested in progressive politics but dead set against actual leftists gaining power. They doled out progressive policies as political favors but strictly kept the rabble out of actual power.

Likewise, in the waning years of the Prussian Empire, Otto von Bismarck (a staunch monarchist, facing an uprising of social democracy politics he despised) famously undertook socialist-y policies like socialized medicine and old-age insurance/pensions to steal political support from the social democrats while keeping them strictly out of power.

With any luck pretty soon they’ll look at alfalfa farming in the desert too

Hahahaha yesterday during the pie preparations my daughter and I passed each other as I was heading back to the kitchen and she said, apropos of nothing, “I didn’t just steal any whipped cream, shut up!”

LOL I didn’t know they’d been looting the whipped cream before that point but bless their hearts it was cute

Oh no, they’re uncomfortable?

All the more reason for them to comply, really

Wilders is another Putin stooge capitalizing on how shitty everything is with immigrants and all that

When you think about that even a little bit, Putin is responsible for a solid amount of the immigration crisis that has Europeans feeling like there’s too many immigrants (Syria, Ukraine, etc) and the answer must be less democracy and fewer human rights protections because if refugees don’t have human rights they don’t matter, right?

It’s a bit like how the GOP uses its power to make life objectively worse for people in general, and then turns around and argues that it’s proof that democracy doesn’t work.

I’ve seen youtube content on piped I know full well to be 4k video be blurred so badly as to be nearly unwatchable- they honestly decided to spend money to make their content worse as a lever to get you to watch ads or to submit to tracking etc

I hear that a lot, and I get that there’s a reason for how it is, but I still don’t understand why that means court officials must be made to endure more crimes without reaction or accountability or consequence in order for it to happen.

I wrote test automation for Microsoft for years. My team turned a process that took 6 weeks of a hundred people working full time to produce manual test results into one that could complete in an hour on a couple hundred computers in a lab somewhere. It was a massive breakthrough in productivity on our part. Of course, 90% of the team was laid off when the code they’d written could be maintained by a couple of people.

So yeah, the difference “went to the shareholders”, certainly not to the people that did the work

It’s so exhausting to watch the system pretend not to understand the obvious when it’s the likes of Trump brazenly acting out gangster tropes, but when it’s a poor or minority person in even a legal gray area it’s the taser for them and the same crowd falling over itself to defend Trump will cheer to see it