Tom Steyer announces plan to jail ICE agents, calls agency a ‘violent extremist group’ (Inside California Politics) As Democratic candidates make moves to solidify their support ahead of the gubernatorial primary, Tom Steyer released a new plan that would take drastic steps to combat…

And, yes I know his hedge fund invested in CoreCivic, I'm just saying, maximalist demands make sense right now.

ktla.com/news/tom-ste...

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I'm not a California lawyer who would know if Steyer's plan would work, but as a California voter, I'm very interested in finding out! 🤔

Seriously though this is the kind of thinking we need to move the Overton window back towards there being consequences for hateful shit.
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A central question in American politics right now is what we might call the restorationist question: what kind of America can we realistically restore after Trump is gone?

It’s not the entirety but the Hungary that elected Peter Magyar answers some of these questions
www.patreon.com/posts/hungar...

It's just math.

"Invincible" is such a great show, I feel so seen

Debunking: MAGA propaganda around the Iran war | Joohn Choe Get more from Joohn Choe on Patreon

The comment sections for this meme are so excited by having ANYTHING shaped like a rational argument to repeat that you almost feel bad for them.

Sources & methods, including prevalence estimate and sourcing "in the wild" on Patreon for subscribers
www.patreon.com/posts/155625...

Sometimes, you can catch really stupid arguments circulating in MAGA spaces if you're in just the right ones where people are not just ignorant, but solid-gold Dunning-Krugerrand *confidently ignorant* because they've harassed and hounded out anyone who dissents.

Like, OK, case in point.

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Simplifying considerably, there are a few convergent "what is actually going on" theories that can be broken down as follows, after which I'll explain what outcomes are likely from all this.

www.patreon.com/posts/what-h...

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Recent additional reporting on the negotiations around the Iran war also complicate just trying to understand what's going on with the Iran war.

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One of the major sticking points of the war, the Strait of Hormuz, appears to have mines where Iran straight-up forgot where they where.

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The Islamabad round is over, but at some level, that was *expected* going into it.

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It's legitimately hard to answer this question with a superficial reading of the news right now.
www.patreon.com/posts/what-h...

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This ended up being surprisingly popular
www.patreon.com/posts/how-to...

And now Vance is picking up the pieces.

Irony.

Maybe it's irony more than craziness.

"Well, they ARE the great Satan, but they made the local police station explode, so let's go riot in the streets and elect a Western-style woke liberal democratic government!"

Hear how dumb that sounds? That's how dumb the plan was that Netanyahu sold to Trump.

Instead, if you buy Haberman & Swan's reporting we got instead a draft dodger President who damn near led us to the brink of nuclear weapon deployment based on the idea that you could make people elect the government you want by selectively exploding them.
archive.is/YZ1Ax

I think a briefly, hugely unpopular but decisive "coup de main" with a highly focused set of strategic goals could have won this war, as dumb as it was to start a war because Israel said it was going to.
www.patreon.com/posts/152094...

In the smart version of "go big", the 31st and11th MEU would have started this war ready-to-go; the LCS minesweeper ships would have been deployed to Iran instead of near Singapore; the 82nd Abn. would have been forward deployed in February, not mid-March.
www.marinevesseltraffic.com/vessels/USS-...

In an Vancean paradigm (wow that is a terrible word but there it is) the mistake pattern to avoid would be a tentative, half-assed campaign that would just piss off Iran and not really accomplish anything.
thehill.com/homenews/adm....

You know, it's going to sound crazy but looking at him at the negotiations in Pakistan, I think JD Vance was actually right about one thing: "if we go, we should go big" was tactically correct advice.

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honestly I was only peripherally aware that Salwell was even running, aren't Becerra and Porter running too

Keep managing Fellas…

And at this point, given how poorly content moderation is being done on the largest platforms there's even a risk you end up with a "viral payload" of unexamined adversary-state disinformation, which is all kinds of no bueno.

BOLO for bullshit, is what I'm saying.
www.patreon.com/posts/155289...

The currently circulating conspiracy theories around the F-15E pilot rescue are relatively easy to debunk for now - compared to what I've seen in the Ukraine war this is, like, really not that serious, folks - but I do find it notable that people in my echo chamber have viral conspiracy theories

Innuendo and substitution of judgments for facts are common, not just in federal propaganda right now, but also in ordinary garden-variety engagement farming right now.

The danger is, if you're not rigorous enough with your sourcing and only going with the most obvious and well-established facts, it's real easy to get led down a garden path into some pretty wild beliefs, often starting with reasonable-sounding-at-first conspiracy theories like this.

It's not wrong to distrust the U.S. government's official lies about the war, especially with our government the way it is right now. It just takes a little bit of extra rigor to do it right.

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And at some point conveniently right near the end of this ceasefire, 11th MEU is going to arrive on-station and this entire conflict, and this ceasefire, I'd predict, is going to look different.

That's going to be difficult with the war in Lebanon going the way it is, though.

I've seen the administration screw even simple things up enough to not accept this ceasefire as a given.

Even as an ardent anti-Trumper I'd be pretty OK if we managed to get out of this with this point forward, today, as the actual end of the Iran war. I've read enough editorials on how it's a net negative for American power.