What, you mean the north pole that’s currently shrouded in the midst of its endless winter, with eternal darkness o’er the land until the beginning of March?

Well… we’re not still in the “animals don’t feel pain” days of science, but apparently:

The existence of theory of mind in non-human animals is controversial. On the one hand, one hypothesis proposes that some non-human animals have complex cognitive processes which allow them to attribute mental states to other individuals, sometimes called “mind-reading” while another proposes that non-human animals lack these skills and depend on more simple learning processes such as associative learning;[4] or in other words, they are simply behaviour-reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals

Yeah. This stuff where animals don’t know what’s going on, and it’s a surprising breakthrough when we find out they do, must come from people who either don’t know up from down or have never interacted with animals.

Unlike us, they have to survive on their own and so they can’t afford to be clueless about stuff. We certainly have a more fancy brain, but they’ve still got all the standard stuff for understanding the world.

You’re not wrong. It’s also some wishful thinking.

Unfortunately, I have a hard time seeing this working. This is why Musk getting physical control of the computers was important: If no one’s willing to physically go in and stop his people, putting them in prison if they resist, it’s going to continue.

I think someone in Virginia should call up the National Guard. If it’s on, it’s on. Foreign and domestic and all that. I don’t think any of us random yahoos can do much that won’t make things worse, but at a certain point in arresting the shoplifter, physical force is required to get them to come with you, if they want to insist on keeping things within the physical realm.

The link is malformed somehow. The proper link is:

https://www.afge.org/article/afge-allies-file-suit-against-trump-omb-over-doge/

The laws mentioned are the Federal Advisory Committee Act and, in one of the links below, the Administrative Procedure Act but there are surely dozens of others if not more.

Click on the article, then click on the link that says “laws that limit.”

By any currently known measure, he’s allowed to be doing everything he’s doing

Absolutely false. What he’s doing is illegal. It’s just that Trump has sufficiently cowed everybody that they’re letting him do it anyway.

You are confusing our system for some sort of monarchy, where once someone is elected president they can order literally any other part of the whole awesome power of the federal government to do literally anything they want. That is not at all the American system (well… until now, maybe, the jury’s still out), and for good reason.

This collapse of the guardrails of unitary power is a common feature of a modern democratic system collapsing.

There was an image on the front page today of the everything-is-fine dog sitting among the flames saying “they can’t do this it’s illegal.” That seems apt for this article. America elected a fascist, and that fascist is openly tearing down all the informal rules and norms that we’ve always treated like laws.

No. It’s laws. Deciding to have someone without the right security clearance to touch the computers he’s touching, to put a “pause” on a system that congress enacted, that non-political parts of the US government have been implementing, because you might have a mob of your followers attack the building if anyone tries to stop you, is actually illegal.

I think this was one potential endgame Russia had in mind for this whole thing, way back when it started: Break the federal government so badly that the whole strong alliance that’s kept it all together so far shatters in pieces.

I’m not saying it as a good or a bad thing especially. Just that it was one of the goal outcomes.

A lot of politics is subconscious rules about how we’re allowed to interact with each other. A lot of what MAGA is trying to do is rewrite those rules, so that they’re allowed to dictate to you, but you’re not allowed to dictate to them. So no, you cannot. Florida can do whatever it wants, and you can’t. So there. That’s the thinking.

They were already getting fucked under Biden, although that wasn’t fully Biden’s fault. Now, they’re just in an endless nightmare in real life.

Naw, that was during the last administration. Phase 1 is now: Promise to accelerate the genocide, while Trump is impressed and asks you for pointers about it.

I don’t think that most progressive groups doing actual organizing are doing these kind of purity tests

Maybe not. The leftist people I know definitely do, to the point that it’s pretty obnoxious, but they are also not involved in any protest.

I read up about whether there’s any reality to this issue I imagine, and found this kind of stuff:

https://jacobin.com/2021/09/occupy-wall-street-ows-zuccotti-park-nyc-labor-movement-unions-collaboration

https://newrepublic.com/article/175645/left-labor-emerging-political-coalition

So, if we’re assuming that what I can find is representative of what the real issues are, it sounds to me like it’s a little less about “LGBTQ issues versus economic issues” than I was saying, and more about “work with the Democrats versus abandon the Democrats” which causes the rift between the activist left and the established union membership.

We can help any grouping and gather support from any grouping, without needing to say we need to put the brakes on and help some other more virtuous-to-advocate-for grouping instead.

I’m interested in what examples you are thinking of, for this.

Any Democrat? They talk frequently about issues of social justice, race, LGBTQ (with trans issues as maybe an outlier they hesitate to touch on), and very very rarely do they touch on economic justice with anything but the most oblique of “we have to get inflation under control” references.

They will just present anyone who isn’t pro-Israel as ineffectual

Pretty much all of the community efforts that they highlight as something to emulate are pretty far from specifically “pro-Israel.”

when the reality is that the DNC not being responsive to their base

Jesse what the fuck are you talking about? When did the Democrats enter into this at any point? I went back and searched the article for “DNC” and “Democrat” just to see if I had missed something.

It sure feels like you’re trying to make some point here that has nothing to do with the article, and nothing to do with my comment, for reasons of your own.

the majority of Americans (even Republicans) wanted a ceasefire (which is what the protesters were demanding)

Everyone “wants” a ceasefire. If Netanyahu doesn’t want to do one, what then? Stop weapons? What effect will that have on congress, or on the resulting campaign ads, or on the electorate?

More Americans have sympathies with Israel than with Palestine. According to polling. That’s a fucking travesty, and mostly the fault of our media, but a poll that says most people “support a ceasefire” in the abstract means absolutely nothing in terms of what’s a winning position politically or electorally.

If there was a “make ceasefire” button in the oval office, Biden and Harris would both push it. Trump, I don’t think, would.

I realize you’re going to have all kinds of ways of disagreeing with what I just said. I’m not planning to respond. You can of course do a counterpoint if you want. I’ve had this exact conversation too many times to want to do more than just respond one time with my general take on it.

If I had to guess, I would say that won’t happen. I do think that any actual activist organization will be labeled as terrorists and banned and the leaders imprisoned, and that the Democrats will be so thoroughly disenfranchised through a series of various antidemocratic moves that they cannot win again, until some sort of activism comes sufficiently to the front to actively challenge the GOP in ways the current Democrats are simply unable to do. That may happen before the next election, as resistance mounts in the face of increasingly horrifying things Trump tries to do, or it may take 20 years or more of misery and oppression.

I’m not planning on not supporting the Democrats in the meantime, and I would love to be wrong. I’m just saying that I predict they will be fine slotted into their place as performative opposition, as the real repression takes hold. Of course, particular high-profile “bad” Democrats like Biden, Harris, AOC, and so on, will probably be charged with crimes. Whether they will be found guilty and go to prison isn’t clear to me, although having them in some extrajudicial limbo that involves being sent to Gitmo once it’s expanded or something is also a possibility.

I am 0% joking about any of this, if it is not clear.

This comment is perfectly balanced on the inflection point between a pretty sensible assessment of a portion of what cost the Democrats the election, and being anti-Palestinian in a way that will get people mad at it.

“Antisemitic” and “islamofascist terrorists” are the key phrases, I think. Without that I actually think it would be fine, although I’m sure some people would disagree with it. With that, and with the general flavor of “explicitly pro-Israel,” it’s bait for all kinds of people yelling that you are wrong, and equal bait for people yelling at those other people that you have a point.

I’m going to generally agree with most of this while picking out one pretty nitpicky point that I want to counterpoint.

A lack of effective relationship and solidarity building across class, color, gender, religious beliefs, sexuality, age, ability, culture and more is part of the problem.

A lack of effective relationship and solidarity building across economic status, and across “goodness” of the belief of the person being solidaritied with, is the lion’s share of the problem.

The modern progressive left defines itself chiefly in terms of equality of color, gender, religious belief, sexuality, ability, and so on. Most people in the United States, I am sad to say, do not feature that as their primary concern if they give a shit about it at all. Most people want to know that their individual life is going to be better, because it is hard right now, because someone is stealing all of the money they worked for. You could say it would be a better world if they also wanted life to be better for people of different colors, genders, sexualities, and so on, but that’s not the world or the people we’ve got, and they’re not wrong to chiefly worry about the “rich people are stealing everything I’m working for” problem. We can help any grouping and gather support from any grouping, without needing to say we need to put the brakes on and help some other more virtuous-to-advocate-for grouping instead.

Building economic success for the average working person, whether they be black, white, straight, gay, whatever, should be in the wheelhouse for the American left. It should be a slam dunk. Every time Bernie Sanders or AOC starts talking about it, people start cheering so loud they shake the fucking building. But, a lot of what the progressive left wants to talk about is all of the progressive left’s favorite issues. Meaning equality of gender et cetera.

Health care.

Jobs for working people. Unions.

Real democracy instead of management consultants and incessant bullshit text messages asking for money.

That is my one point of input to what otherwise I really like and agree with as a post, and maybe it seems nitpicky and bitter. But I just want to throw in that it would be a good idea, when building all these coalitions that the article pretty exhaustively goes over good guidelines for how to build, not to lean too hard on the purity test that someone needs to be able to use pronouns to your satisfaction before you are willing to collaborate with them on both of you not having to skip meals, or get sent to death camps for unionizing or being Hispanic, or what have you.

Makes perfect sense to me. I have no idea about any of these people, my point was just that “can’t manage to get more than 2 votes in the DNC’s special secret election for special people only to determine the future, God help us, of our country” is, all other things being equal, a point in his favor.

Sounds about right, for someone who has an actual ideology and values that they’ve lived and acted on for years. Presumably, like Bernie, “no one wants to work with him.”

What’s more, the order is unbelievably stupid and illegal.

So stop obeying them. People are taking this random bullshit that Trump says, way too seriously. Just explain that you’ll be happy to follow orders that come in from the US government, that is your employer, and that if someone has delusions that they’re able to tell you what to do outside the established governmental system, that’s not your problem.

I know it’s not that simple. But it’s definitely not as simple as “everyone do whatever crazy illegal shit Trump is telling you, and hope for the best,” either, and way too many people seem okay with taking that approach.