The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced the Democrats have to push their hand immediately. The parallels with the delays and subsequent failures after January 6th are blaring warning signs about what will happen if they don’t go after the issues with ICE and CBP at the root RIGHT NOW.

Even if Bovino gets fired, ICE has to go. Even if Noem is out, ICE has to go. Even when Trump leaves office, ICE has to go. As protests grow and ICE's popularity drops, we may see concessions and leadership changes, like Bovino's departure. ICE still has to go. www.cnn.com/us/live-news...

The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.” That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.

guess what... i made a website www.mothership.blog

No preview sucks so here is the post with alt text.

I’d rather have open borders than this. If you’re here, you’re here. Pay your taxes, don’t hurt anyone, and welcome to the neighborhood.

I just watched the shooting video. It's a horrific beating and execution in the middle of the street. If local and state officials don't move to arrest everyone involved for murder, they need to resign. Making arrests will de-escalate the situation. Do nothing and this is going to explode.

At the end of the day, the Black Lives Matter era was about whether people should be killed in the street, and lots of people decided yeah and put those little blue flags on their cars. It spread to everyone because it stopped for no one.

Immigration is a fake problem. We have politicians on the one hand who want to use immigrants as scapegoats for our real ones and politicians on the other who are too cowardly to stand against them and tell the truth. That is the entire situation. Until that changes, people will continue to die.

Look, I believe in casts, but if a parent has strongly-held anti-cast beliefs, they should be allowed to let their kid’s broken arm grow back all floppy and fucked up, even to the point of lifelong, debilitating pain. And that’s not child abuse because a kid’s bones are their parents’ property

My hot take is that at minimum a domestic violence conviction should carry a lot more of the shame and restrictions of a sex offender; it should ban you nationally from gun ownership, jobs in law enforcement, schools, pretty much any public sector work. It’s our clearest red flag for future violence

Everyone is (rightfully) dunking on the Titanic part but even if you leave that specificity out it’s pretty crazy to think that it takes more than a night to turn a boat around.

As someone who spent the last 15 years working with aging brains & dementia, I can't stop thinking about this. It is gerontocracy: leaders who are substantially older than most of the adult population. When did we accept this? The new generations can't show up because the old generations never left.

There’s no point during the detention of a five-year-old that any person with a functioning moral center would not step back to reassess the situation and their place in it. That nobody involved did proves they lack the common interiority required to successfully coexist in ordered society.

I’ve never understood why this isn’t a thing. A financial and ethical audit at the end of the term, with penalties enforced right away—something like clearing in high school—makes far more sense than the present combination of scrutiny before office, immunity while in it, and impunity after.

Al Gore loudly booing a US Commerce Secretary at a bankers’ forum should be a Futurama joke instead of real life.

i'm going to spend the rest of my life figuring out how a small band of elites decided that acting as the global currency and primary military hegemon was gay and feminine coded

This is a more accurate metric of impending bad weather than the Waffle House Index

I said when Ras Baraka was arrested that it was a break glass moment of the Democratic party. It should have triggered a 100% McConnell version blockade. No votes for anything. End of story. Instead they are still approving Trump's nominees, lol.

I wrote about how concentration camp regimes evolve and why it's not too late to stop this, even though we are deep in it now.

I am building an essential 90,000 square foot ballroom and soliciting billion dollar membership fees for my new alternative UN while I shake down Venezuela for cash I will hide in Qatar and I am debating whether I should collapse NATO by stealing the world’s biggest island.

Society parried the ozone layer, acid rain, and Y2K back to back and instead of going "wow, parrying is badass" a lot of people went "society didn't even get hit so I guess there's no need to learn how to parry" and instantly took a thousand hits

$77 billion could have solved homelessness in America for over 8 years, but they had to make second life with no legs.

to watch a man/admin whose far-right allies published a detailed plan over a year ago successfully consolidate power in the U.S. with a loyal-to-him secret police force rounding up people he hates and then still say “HE HAS NO PLAN” and have huge swathes of liberals agree…I’m so tired

who could ever have guessed* *all the leftists predicting this exact thing and getting screamed at by liberals for Hating America

well then

Breaks my heart to share this, but today is my last day at The Verge and I am looking for work! I'd really like to stay in video games, preferably in some kind of journalistic capacity but I can do PR/Marketing and maybe even a lil Narrative Design. Please get in touch! www.ashparrish.com

I read an interview today where Alison Bechdel talked about using chatGPT for a panel of her recent comic -- she prompted it and copied the results -- and I still don't know what to do with that. It genuinely feels in moments like this like so many of our art elders are failing us.

between this, the piss bottles, and the footage of ICE agents getting yelled at in a restaurant, i like this new thing where the fascists vocally inform everyone about what kind of opposition bothers them the most

every time you read a Marvel or DC comic, or play Magic, or engage with folklore that should by all rights be something we all collectively own if not the artists involved, you are paying rent to the brandlord, and sometimes one has to go on tenant strike.

If your worry is about elections, focus on the curtailment of mail-in and early voting, on intimidation at the polls, on the possibility of local attempts at fraud. There's plenty to freak out over that's more real than "There aren't gonna be any midterms."

It's not too late Wizards you can still turn this around

Holy hell, what an obituary

Post a game you remember playing that nobody else remembers

This good-natured, 34-year-old, Muslim, immigrant man—who the Times bemoaned was too young and radical to “get anything done”—has accomplished more good governance in a *week* on the job than most liberal politicians accomplish in their whole careers. With a smile & a joyful heart. A blessing.

A U.S. president cannot be held accountable. Therefore, a U.S. president must never make a policy decision.

I hate LA so much lol

What—and I say this is my most professional professor-of-art-history-voice—the HELL are we doing here? WaPo is committing a fundamental category error. That category error is like gripping the neck of the journalistic integrity in two hands and squeezing it till the lights go out. 1/n

ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis or we WILL lock up our own citizens

The Dems giving up the govt shutdown was such an insane @schumer.senate.gov fuckup. They got fuck all, no health insurance ‘promise’, & Trump’s polling went up after it. Holiday travel and the economic hit would’ve been GOP’s mess. ICE raids would’ve decreased. Venezuela wouldn’t have happened.

losing my mind at the "she should have followed directions" people really? really? you're cool with "if you don't follow directions, they get to kill you"? that seems like a good state of affairs to you? that seems like how law enforcement ought to work: instant obeisance or death?

annual repost of Trashed Bathrooms

One guy tried, unsuccessfully, to blow up a plane with a bomb in his sneakers, and everybody had to take off their shoes at the airport for the next 20 years. Chatbots have a collective body count equal to Richard "The Night Stalker" Ramirez, and they're trying to put them in schools.

I wonder if Maduro could have avoided being kidnapped by setting alerts for these kinds of bets on Polymarket. There’s no "wisdom of the crowds" at work here. These trades are basically anonymized, financially incentivized national security leaks.

This whole story is so darkly funny man. The Nobel prize committee decided to give an imperial lapdog of the Americans their silly little medal to promote neoliberal hegemony, accidentally ruined her chances of actually being installed as puppet viceroy by the mad king