It's All A Joke
This is what galled me the most about Usama bin Kevin: anytime he had to substantively defend his position about some wild conspiracy he'd heard about and was now forcing upon me, he would claim he...
Posts tagged with "politics"
45 posts found
Epstein and the MAGAs
Why The Epstein Thing Is Different: Driven by a burning desire to be loved and adored, Trump softened his stance on the vaccine as an unmitigated good by reminding people they had the right to refuse...
Lisa Murkowski
Dingus of the week: Lisa Murkowski: But the What If We Made Out With Mark Zuckerberg Inside a Shuttered Rural Hospital Bill finally passed because Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski ultimately caved and...
Who Goes MAGA? from Techdirt
I've excerpted this entire link from Techdirt because it's important to know who these people are. > With apologies to Dorothy Thompson, whose 1941 essay in Harper’s, “Who Goes Nazi?” remains a...
Arpaio
Why don't you walk?
The worst people in America
The Worst People In America: For starters, none of the people the Times spoke with seem to understand that they—personally—are culpable for Carol’s imprisonment. Waitress Celena Horton says she loves...
Best Elon insult
Rusty Foster is off the Appalachian Trail, and he came back hot! Friends Forever: Increasingly malevolent emperor Donald Trump and Boer piss baby Elon Musk spent much of last week doing what they...
First Dominican president
We going to find out that Jared Kushner was born in Santo Domingo and his name was Ernesto Gonzalez. Charles Kushner was originally a mechanic who won the seed money for his real estate empire in a...
People unhappy leopards eating faces
Missouri MAGA Mommies Didn’t Vote For Trump To Deport This One Immigrant They Like!: The New York Times is out with what may become a new kind of Cletus Safari, where instead of visiting diners to...
Another Venn Diagram from Ed Burmila
From Ed Burmila on Bluesky: The Venn Diagram of people who say "We need to give more money to trade schools and less to fake Gender Studies universities!" and people who want their own kids going to...
Not deeper than that
From Amanda Marcotte's newsletter: For instance, Trump filibustered on Tuesday by saying, “Think of us as a super luxury store” where “we're going to give you a very good price, we're going to make...
Dark woke
The Fatal Flaw Of 'Dark Woke': Sometimes Dark Woke involves downright harsh and mean spirited barbs aimed directly at the insecurities of prominent fascists like Marjorie Taylor Greene or...
Conservatives and complex systems
Every complex ecosystem has parasites: Conservatives hate complexity. I once described the conservative yearning for "simpler times," as a desire to be a child again. After all, the thing that made...
Free thinker
I’m a Free-Thinking Centrist with Only Right-Wing Ideas: I’ve been red-pilled, but I think The Matrix was just okay. I voted for Trump, but I respect Democrats like John Fetterman who are willing to...
What It Feels Like
What It Feels Like, Right Now: Living here in America right now feels like that time. Stuck riding shotgun in a car with a drunk driver. It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to focus on the things in front...
Oily bag of brain rot
The Billionaire Boycott Conundrum: Elon Musk is an oily bag of brain rot in barely human form, who richly deserves the scorn of history, but he did us all a real solid by having his companies be ones...
Who Goes MAGA? from Talia Levin
This is from Talia Lavin, but she deleted it from her newsletter. It's very important to read. Who Goes MAGA? In 1934, a courageous, flawed, complicated journalist named Dorothy Thompson was kicked...
Populism
This Is the Dark, Unspoken Promise of Trump’s Return: For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation....
Democrats are not progressive
The Democrats are a center right party. They abandoned being progressive when Jimmy Carter got smoked by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Bill Clinton put forth many policies that were conservative, like...
Low trust
Trump Can Still Win: Trump flourishes in this environment where nothing and everything is true. He speaks the brain-dead language of low-trust. And that’s the language a lot of the country speaks.
Left needs to play the game
It's Time For Left-Wing Wrestlemania Politics: The Democratic Party must purge itself of its technocratic tendencies and embrace a purely emotional approach to politics. The party has to stop...
Election Betting Odds
Polling has proven to be unreliable in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, so it's time to go to another method for election prediction. For 2024, I decided to look at betting odds from British...
Bipartisanship Is BS
Kyrsten Sinema is the Democrat Kelly Loeffler. She got one taste of power and suddenly couldn't sell out her principles fast enough. This article makes a larger point, which is that Democrats'...
Voter demographics
Pundits have been saying that the GOP is on the brink of demographic collapse since the Obama years. Here's the most recent example from Cassidy Steele Dale: Three authors at the Hoover Institution...
Rejecting bad faith
I'm tired of the Democrats' weird dedication to civility and bi-partisanship when it hasn't been reciprocated at any point in the last 50 years. All the Dems have done is become a center-right party...
Nazi bar
Why you shouldn't allow any extremists into your establishment: I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the...
My political depression problem — and ours
My Political Depression Problem—and Ours: This is why I now describe the history of conservatism as a ratchet. It must always move in an invariably more authoritarian direction, with no possible end...
Liberalism vs leftism
This was a succinct explanation of how to separate the people who want to attack each other and one up each other's liberal credentials vs. people who actually want progressive government:...
Battles
Make fun of fascists
Believe in nothing
My working theory is that since MAGAs and other nutcases define themselves by what they don't believe in, there's ample space for dissonant views. It's when you have to clearly define a set of...
Truth
Agree to disagree
Minority rule
It's the root of all the Trumpism. Insecure white dudes unhappy about their fading relevance in society. Back in 2008, after Obama was elected, people started saying that a Republican may never get...
Good Christians
Interpreting the Bible
In the book about the evangelical movement I'm reading, The Kingdom and the Glory by Tim Alberta, a pastor mentioned that he got a letter from someone saying they were going to another church because...
The travesty of liberalism
I've tried to articulate my view of liberalism for years, but this comment from Crooked Timber explains it perfectly: There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only...
Empathy
Tea Party progression
Anyone who says people shouldn't get "handouts" and nonsense like that are the first ones who are bewildered when something bad happens to them. Back when I was at the law firm, the calls I got the...
Chances of a US civil war
The US continues sliding down the path to autocracy. James Meek · What are you willing to do? On the case for civil war: The number-crunching core of her case is the work done by a Virginia-based...
Totalitarianism
These are the types of people who are the greatest threats to our system: ...the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the...
A defense of being widely read
I wish more people had this view today. Gen. Mark Milley Delivers Powerful Defense of Studying Critical Race Theory: What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to...
Supplying the money
Michael Lewis always does a great job of finding stories about blowhards who get exposed in public: There were many stories very like the one Tom Vilsack told, about a loan they had made, in...
Conservative thinking
These are some good quotes about conservatives from Metafilter: 2nding George Lakoff's Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think. He uses cognitive metaphor theory to elucidate how...