A lot of times you have to study just war theory and international law to differentiate war crimes from just regular war.

But this is so obviously immoral that it’s used as a horrific crime from a bloodthirsty fascist government in The Hunger Games, a series of books and movies for children.

So depressing that the US won’t be researching this, and instead will be evaluating Ivermectin and exposing a bunch of kids in Africa to Hepatitis to learn what we already know.

I have given so many of my fellow pain sufferers the advice to go get fitted for sneakers at a running store. Even though I haven’t run since elementary school, I get a lot out of the selection and customer service there. It takes a lot of convincing that it’s a safe space, and bs like this is why!

Uncertain partisan balance of the panel disincentivizes people bringing shitty edge cases to try to achieve judicially what they can’t electorally.

Mechanism coerced bipartisan buy-in

Disincentivizes justices hanging on to the bitter end to preserve their own power and/or partisan balance.

So if Dems pass the law on party lines (100% of the vote) they get to appoint 100% of the new justices. If Dems and the GOP pass it with equal votes supporting, each part gets to nominate 50% of the new justices

Advantages:
Cases will resolve much faster

Any one individual justice holds less power

My pitch for court reform:

Congress proposes a law to expand the SCOTUS to 200 people. Cases will be heard by a random selection of 9 of those 200.

The law stipulates that the new 191 justices will be appointed by each major party, proportional to the votes each party supplies to pass the law.

In general, I’m with you that we should pay public servants more.

But I also don’t think you can pay a high enough salary to make people unbribeable. Just look at the behavior of CEOs and billionaires—there seems to be no point where they have enough money to behave ethically.

By competitive, I meant smart good people take these jobs and they are usually considered prestigious. Doctors at the NIH, federal prosecutors, economists at the Fed all make less that $300k. And not totally for altruistic reasons—the schedule and stability offered by these jobs is very desirable.

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.

Executive branch salaries are capped at something like $187,000, and the government has been able to recruit many talented lawyers to work for it. Jobs working for the DOJ are (or were) extremely competitive.

I got a package of sour belts. The outside of the candy was the delicious, familiar sugar-and-citric-acid sand. However, the candy itself was scented so strongly with fake vanilla that the whole experience was like eating the chemical frosting on a cheap cupcake topped with citric acid. Repulsive!

The Happiest Place on Earth

The only thing worse than a hospital waiting room with a TV playing is a hospital waiting room with multiple people playing videos aloud on their phones.

the basic theory of DOGE was that if powerful people said it was fine it didn’t matter what the law said.

I think proving that theory wrong is worth significant effort

This is cool and right, but we should make a special day for his wife to wear an incredible outfit. For the morale of the country.

An anthropomorphic piece of sliced bread and a bunch of red roses smiling, walking hand-in-hand. The slice of bread carries a red banner that says "We Want It All" Beneath the image it says Haymarket Books Est. 2001, Chicago IL

We want it all

New design collab with @harebrained.bsky.social

If he’s gonna shoot himself in there, I say let him build it

I really think this is key. My real wages have gone up. They have not gone up so much that I can save enough to be secure in old age if social security collapses. People know they cannot afford to pay for the services the gov’t currently provides if the gov’t stops being able to provide them.

…failing or godless public schools, lack of universal healthcare, doubts about social security solvency or actual egg prices, the big picture is that nobody thinks the government can solve problems, only create them. And we’re looking at a future increasingly as a war of each against all.

I know the particulars of my over-educated left wing mindset—the fascist SCOTUS will end democracy and climate change will destabilize everything—aren’t universal. But the same anxiety just takes different shape on the right and center. Whether you’re in particular worried about crime, immigration…

…that exact experience is shared. But I think big picture, people do not think our government is able to solve problems. And even if real wages are up, they’re not up enough to make me secure in a world where the government can’t protect me from the whims of billionaires.

My subjective experience of that time was a brief relief from doom when the vaccines came out—look, we can still do hard things when we try!—that immediately crashed when I saw how our poisonous tribal politics made it clear that vaccine delivery would be messy and incomplete. I dunno how broadly…

In the charts of consumer sentiment, you see a big spike in optimism around the time the vaccines came out, that then crashes back down quickly. People interpret that as the vaccines providing hope that the lockdown would end, and then those hopes being crushed when the variants came through again.

I really think this has some explanatory power for the vibecession.

My personal finances are pretty good. Not so good that I could weather the collapse of the government, though! Not so good that I could e.g. replace social security with savings. Increasingly, we can’t count on our system to work.

this is why you're not supposed to cross those databases, idiots

Pope: I'm against genocides personally

Republicans: So much for the tolerant left!

Johnson/Vance, smugly: Hey pope, ya ever hear about a little thing called just war theory? It doesn’t describe anything we’re doing, but it is a thing that exists!

In a sick, violent way, they have more faith in the possibility of a new world than a lot of people on the other side. They are willing to reimagine all of it. Many of us cannot imagine getting rid of payday loans and they’re like eff it, let’s see if the Pope’s still got the juice.

Ok guys we can get clever, but we have a word for this and it's called p hacking

Ol’ JD out here making it crystal fucking clear that there isn’t a value he won’t throw in the trash in exchange for power.

I believe this man would sell his children for a shot at the presidency. Disgusting.