Expand the Supreme Court
I think we might be thinking too small on Supreme Court expansion. With the end of Chevron deference, it's obvious the Supreme Court wants to put its stamp on every regulation possible. I've seen...
Posts tagged with "politics"
95 posts found
Why does MAGA worship Trump?
Why MAGA buys Trump's perfect health lie: For a long time, the GOP has been a cult just waiting for its leader. Conservatism often carries an authoritarian bent... The right is regressive both...
It'll get better
I wanted to make a friend of mine feel better, so sent him these messages via text: Dude. I know you’re down right now. For the majority of my life, things were pretty terrible. I didn’t really have...
DNC Autopsy
This was an interesting read. I'm not sure whether all the conclusions in Part 3, but this is much more accountability than anyone in the DNC has shown thus far. We need more of this. Here’s What I...
Struggle for its own sake
Very on point quote from Francis Fukuyama, from his book The End of History and the Last Man. I'm not normally in agreement with him, but this is a solid insight on why we've taken this fascist lurch...
The Secret Police Playbook
This is an interesting look at who becomes part of a secret police. It's not true believers, but rather people who don't have career prospects in a legitimate military or police unit. They decide to...
Meeting halfway
Terminology, Clarity, and the Question of What Is the Left?: ... if you meet a fascist halfway you're halfway to being a fascist. Hannah Arendt famously said, "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule...
A dead and lonely world
Visions of Life / Agents of Death: On Love Thy Neighbor and Love Thy Nature: Donald Trump's world is a dead and lonely world, a world in which everything is for sale and nothing really means anything...
Wear a mask long enough
From a forum I'm on: To paraphrase the Uptown Sinclair quote, It is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their self-image depends on their not understanding it. I heard some...
Third US political party
Only way we get a 3rd party is if someone with Musk or Bezos level wealth decides to build a party infrastructure from the bottom up. Fund candidates at the local level, then go to the state level...
Power without responsibility
I used to think of myself as a centrist. Then I woke up and saw how the world really works. There's no longer any place for people sitting on the fence. You're either for or against human rights....
I know the real reason
This is the way to look at MAGAs. ICE Has Kidnapped The Staff At My Favorite Burrito Shop I don’t care what you say your reasons for that are, because I know the real reason: you are a bad person who...
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Popularists argue that candidates who want to win elections need to focus relentlessly on what polls well and abandon what doesn’t. The claim is not that...
Fascism is demoralizing
I liked how abnormal reedus on Blue Sky described the misery in choosing facism. sometimes i think about that thing a disco elysium dev said in response to someone asking why choosing fascist options...
Cut out the cancer
How Much Longer Can The Politics Of Grievance Sustain Itself?: Racism and right-wing politics weren't anything new for Trump, but like many personalities who make for good television, people were...
Secret fear of the morally depraved
Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong: If the agents detain someone, the observers will try to get that person’s name so they can inform the family. But ICE prefers to make arrests—which the ICE Watchers call...
Withdraw consent
One of the best things I've done is subscribe to the Today's Edition newsletter from Robert Hubbell. He posted this excerpt from one of his readers' letter to an editor at the reader's local paper....
It's changed me into something I don't like and I wish I had not become
I've really been enjoying reading Craig Calcaterra's newsletter lately. He was able to put into words how I feel about how this administration has changed me. Cup of Coffee: January 13, 2026: When...
Fixing the Supreme Court
Electoral-vote.com has some decent ideas on how we can fix the rogue Supreme Court. Can the Supreme Court Be Reined In?: Jurisdiction stripping: In other words, Congress has the clear authority to...
The Golden Calf
Fairness has no place here anymore
Now Is The Time To Maximize Republicans' Political Pain: Democrats, I hope, will learn that they can play offense if they choose to play offense over the next year. And they can do just that if they...
Shame them back into the shadows
We are under no obligation to keep relationships going just because we happened to be born at a certain time to a person. It Is Not Only Alright To Shame, And Ultimately Ostracize, Your MAGA...
Scaredy-cat husk of a soul
Jo Carducci says what I feel much more articulately than I ever could. An Open Letter to Those Self-gelding Dems,: The GOP isn’t here to “work together.” They’re here to rip your face off, wear it as...
It’s a confession
Jo Carducci breaking down the MAGA mindset. No One Made Them Monsters: That was always Trump’s singular skill. He didn’t teach them hate. He gave them the greenlight. He told them the filth in their...
A cornered, wounded old animal
From Ed Burmila's Patreon: A cornered, wounded old animal is still pretty dangerous, and moreover is immune to logic. Its instinct is to fight and its behavior is guided by nothing other than that...
Trump's appeal
This Facebook post from Paul Eisenstein summed up why so many people still love Trump: I’ve seldom seen anyone so succinctly identify what Trump’s appeal is to so many Americans. His niece summed up...
Deniro on MAGA
Out of here
This is a really cool image someone on Reddit made:
The Cinemax Theory of Racism
This is very insightful on why people would vote for Trump even if they're not MAGAs. The Cinemax Theory of Racism: Let’s say you want HBO. So you go to your local cable provider to get HBO and the...
Absolution and disinhibition
The War on Truth Heats Up (just in time for Constitution Day): Arendt tells us we have to commit to the difference between the true and the false. But what do we do when the information we're offered...
Asymmetrical Decency
I agree with this wholeheartedly. Why should Dems continue to be the adults in the room when the GOP refuses? Asymmetrical Decency - by Robert B. Hubbell: We are experiencing an asymmetrical demand...
Extinction-level event
This article is from the May 2016. We should have learned from it before it got to this point. I don't agree with Andrew Sullivan today, but he had some valid points back then. America Has Never Been...
Insincerity
From Ed Burmila's Patreon: Be partisan. Have a couple core beliefs that aren't negotiable. Don't assume your opponent is interested in playing the game on your terms. Among the most basic, perhaps...
A moderately distressing goatee
Mark Teixeira Is Ready To Do Whatever It Is Congress Guys Have To Do: His refusal to go along or get along as a charter member of the ultra-strident House Freedom Caucus suggests that he is at least...
Stupid and unexamined spite transubstantiated into pork
Point/Counterpoint: Rush Limbaugh: ... he was a longtime supporter of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Nebraska Cornhuskers, and every dehumanizing social force in American life. He spent his last years...
We see it as having no inner world, no soul
Nate White, a British copywriter, posted this awesome response to the question: Why do many British people not like Donald Trump?: A few things spring to mind… Trump lacks certain qualities which the...
Then they came for me
Lots of truth being dropped by Cory Doctorow about the true motivations of MAGA's boss class. Maga’s boss class think they are immune to American carnage: It's not just that Texas DA Gocha Ramirez...
Project 2026
I wholly endorse the ideas in this post. No need for Dems to remain the bigger people while the GOP keeps pushing the envelope. Should Democrats Threaten a Project 2026?: It has two parts, the...
Conservatives hate America
The Right Hates America: So maybe I do hate aspects of the country in which I was born. Perhaps this makes me the first person to ever be born into a nation deserving of critique, or maybe I'm just...
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...
Confusion about their Golden Calf
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...
Blowing Sophie's Choice
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?
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's mom
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...
Venn Diagram, Pt. 2
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...
Unwilling to use Occam's Razor
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...
Laugh At Them, Pt. 5
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...
Can't handle complexity
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...
Riding Shotgun with a Drunk Driver
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...
Problem solving without moral constraints
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...
Immigration
First, allowing people to "just walk in" isn't something that concerns me. There are not enought people who are doing it. We have 360 million people in this country. There aren't nearly enough people...
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:...
Open a new front
Social assistance
My belief is that most people are wanting to be productive members of society. But, we fixate on the small number who don't. We then demonize social programs that could help people who are trying to...
Laugh at them
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...
Hard to fight the truth
Costs
The truth is that immigrants will do jobs that Americans won't. Whenever someone says we need to cut off trade to and from China, I ask them whether they're OK paying like $100 for a lawn chair....
Some things you can't hand wave away
Gun control
We need common sense restrictions that allow for activities such as hunting and personal defense. No one needs an AR-15 to hunt or protect themselves. If the military wants to come for you, they...
More Political Parties
I think both parties are too corrupt to be trusted. When I vote, I'm picking the lesser of 2 evils rather than voting for a party. We need additional viable parties, and then you'd have to build a...
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...
Cosmopolites
I just read a fascinating book. It's called "The Cosmopolites". It's about the buying and selling of passports around the world. There are rich people who have like 10 passports to help them travel,...
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...
Can't explain 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...
A Better Way To Look At Most Every Political Issue
A Better Way to Look at Most Every Political Issue: Some Americans would feel less polarized and alienated from their fellow citizens if they recognized that some of the people fighting on “the other...
The Other Side Is Not Dumb
The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb: Sharing links that mock a caricature of the Other Side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed. It signals that we’d rather be smug assholes than consider...
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...
Shutdown
Who supports the Tea Party? Baby Boomers, that's who. I've been thinking about this shutdown and the craziness of the Tea Party. It seems to me to be a direct consequence of the continuing...
Tea party supporters
I finally read something that perfectly sums up the “Impeach Obama, HE’S A MUSLIM, benghazi was a plot” crowd. Noam Schreiber says, “When you’re dealing with delusional people, any gesture in their...
Rise of the stupid
The stupid have been able to rise in the GOP because of the ease of communication today. Back in say, the 1970s, I imagine that everyone knew one or two people who was angry about society and stupid....