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its absolutely incredible watching people not realize the stakes watching DOJ being weaponized against SPLC and not realizing that its basically an existential fight for the republic now
Those who do believe America is a Christian nation don't take their own preaching. Trump is evil. Truly evil. Yet that's *not* what Christian nationalists mean. They mean America should repent for being a nation that isn't completely white & "Christian." That's, um, not what repentance is for.
all I want are Beatles remasters that update the whack stereo mixing but leave everything else unchanged
Warsh hearing so far has been kind of frustrating. No one has asked the questions that seem most relevant to me:
1) is Trump's criminal investigation into Powell appropriate?
2) what would you do if Trump threatened retribution against you if he didn't like your actions/Fed policy decisions?
DONALD TRUMP: Mail-in voting is CHEATING.
ALSO DONALD TRUMP: I did a mail-in ballot because I'm the President of the United States.
This is not a joke or sarcasm. This was literally Donald Trump's rhetoric over the course of mere days last month (and it reinforces Greg's summary of Trumpism).
Whamond
The Pulitzer-winning composer, whose unconventional music reflects the rugged landscapes he lives in, talks about his relationship to nature and his new piece Horizon. n.pr/4cHxNbJ
Of course they are concentration camps. And @anatosaurus.bsky.social is right that once you accept the euphemism you are halfway to normalizing the thing.
There are a lot of people out there doing good work but today a profound thank you to @bencollins.bsky.social, for what he has done at The Onion, what he has done to InfoWars, and for refusing to take any of the 21st century fascist bullshit lying down.
So much of our language reflects
the common “car first” bias around our streets, & we should never forget that much of that language was the result of deliberate campaigns to specifically re-write our perspective of streets as “for cars only.” This is one of the more subtle, but important, examples.
It's such a "humanity, fuck yeah" solution; I love it
“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back to a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.”
IT SAVES PUBLIC MONEY to house people.
I don’t think we talk nearly enough about the fact that corporations like Amazon, don’t pay a single cent to maintain the roads they use, the transportation system they use, the courts they use, they pay nothing for the infrastructure that is absolutely critical to their business.
WE Pay for
I’m not sure there’s actually anything more damning I could say about the American press that ‘protesting Trump at fancy dinner with First Amendment pocket square’ doesn’t already
Illiberal actors like Palantir weaponize Karl Popper's tolerance paradox, insisting liberal societies accommodate viewpoints that seek to undermine or oppose pluralism.
But equality and democracy demand that tolerance and pluralism be regarded as *normative*, not merely descriptive, traits.
Adam Zyglis
Prediction markets are presented as real-time measures of probable outcomes driven by collective investment. Which is what horse racing odds are, and we don’t treat those as more than a novelty. Gift link: www.ctinsider.com/columnist/ar...
One reason that we cannot have professional diplomats representing the interests of the United States is that it would disrupt a pattern of personal enrichment for the Presidents allies and families.
A diagram showing the VDA framework and the Arc of Democracy. At the top, three icons label the essential elements of democracy: Verification (tick), Deliberation (speech bubble), and Accountability (magnifying glass). Arrows descend from each through three horizontal bands representing the arc: Substantial (truth tested, voices included, power constrained), Performative (forms remain but substance is weak, rituals without consequence), and Simulated (appearance maintained but functions inverted: propaganda as verification, polarisation as deliberation, scapegoating as accountability). A vertical arrow on the left marks the arc's direction: improvements, decline, collapse. A column on the right maps counterpublics onto the same three states: functional counterpublics act in a substantial way, hollow counterpublics in a performative way, disordered counterpublics in a simulated way. The bands shift from grey through pink to red as democracy moves toward simulation.
I've set out the framework I'm using here in an earlier thread, on VDA, the Arc of Democracy, and the moral-epistemic stacks idea, what follows applies that framework to the Palantir document directly. skywriter.blue/@eliothiggin...
In a scene from the B&w movie Scrooge (1951, released as A Christmas Carol in the United States) an adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge has awoken on Christmas morning after being visited by the three ghosts, he leans out the window and tells: YOU BOY ARE THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ OPEN OR CLOSED TODAY
A diagram showing the VDA framework and the Arc of Democracy. At the top, three icons label the essential elements of democracy: Verification (tick), Deliberation (speech bubble), and Accountability (magnifying glass). Arrows descend from each through three horizontal bands representing the arc: Substantial (truth tested, voices included, power constrained), Performative (forms remain but substance is weak, rituals without consequence), and Simulated (appearance maintained but functions inverted: propaganda as verification, polarisation as deliberation, scapegoating as accountability). A vertical arrow on the left marks the arc's direction: improvements, decline, collapse. A column on the right maps counterpublics onto the same three states: functional counterpublics act in a substantial way, hollow counterpublics in a performative way, disordered counterpublics in a simulated way. The bands shift from grey through pink to red as democracy moves toward simulation.
A society that runs on this stack doesn't stop holding elections, or debating, or running investigations. The forms stay, but what goes is their capacity to constrain power. The arc bends toward simulation, carried out in the language of defending democracy.
It's harder to measure but I feel like RFK Jnr shutting down funding for MRNA research is actually up there with DOGE cuts and this latest Iranian war as a contender for Most Evil Things Trump II has done. Accounted properly, this regime is really wracking up 20th-century-dictator kill counts imo.
Road in Tahiti, 1891 #cloisonnism #paulgauguin
Monday is 4/20. I’m starting early by trying to roll my first joint in YEARS and watching Clerks.
I think it’s important context to mention to people who think this is just a crackpot Trump/RFK thing that the Bush II admin set USA back years with a war against stem cell research.
Destroying scientific advancement that can save lives for specious or superstitious reasons is Republican policy.
Extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement
It will never stop pissing me off how much trump is going to walk away from this presidency as a “real” billionaire in a way he never was before, and it is going to be solely because of the public office
It's just crazy to see a genuine star in the Democratic Party talking about the *working class*. Not *working families* not *the middle class* not *ordinary Americans*.
The working class. Words two consecutive generations of Democrats were bullied into never speaking aloud.
Yeah - time and again people have merely asked the court to maintain the status quo while the court decides the merits of an issue. And the court has decided time and again that the greater damage would not be to allow Trump to dismantle your government before they rule on its illegality. It’s nuts