One thing that's exhausting is people reaching very confident conclusions about what the 2024 election means, whether it's the presidential, or specific senate races, or whatever, when every piece of evidence we have is that 24 was a weird outlier and any data from it should be treated with caution.

Look with all due respect Trump is very unpopular and most Americans do not approve of pretty much anything he’s doing. Our political and media institutions are pathetic, filled with cowards looking for a boot to crawl under, but even despite pressure to comply Americans broadly do not condone this

When I went to Montreal a few years ago my wife was like "hey let's go try these bagels, they're famous." and I was like "ok sure, but it's a bagel, how amazing could it be." Reader, I could not have been more wrong. A Montreal bagel is an almost religious experience.

From a strategic perspective, I'm struck by how the Trump administration seems to view its strategy as using 'red states' to hold down 'blue states' but the actual gap between Illinois and Texas is fairly small - IL is D+6, TX is R+6 or so. These aren't even 55/45 states, they're both 53/47 states.

there’s this weird idea a lot of people seem to have about how all of us writers and artists must secretly want to use AI and are merely resisting temptation for ethical reasons, and like, no, it’s not hard for me to resist drinking the bowl of Piss With Glass In It actually

"why is nobody talking abou--" EVERYONE is talkin about it BRO. You just never stick around to listen to ANYONE ELSE, you're just here to TALK aaaaaaaaaaa

donning the armor of god to face the forces of hell

Trump vs. US was the final straw imo. You cannot read that ruling and continue believing they have legitimacy. It is not only against the plain text of the constitution, it is anathema to the national ethos. It is offensively, insultingly un-American and they ceded legitimacy by committing that sin.

Mods! Mods! He's winning and that's not fair!

Watching so many people in high places go through the motions of polling and median-voter whispering can make you feel like you're in Bodysnatchers. It's worth a reminder that the typical experience of tyranny is...basically normal life. Which means we have to will ourselves to fight harder.

It is pretty galling that the Supreme Court spent four years telling Biden "you can't do that without Congress" then allowed Trump to seize a once-unthinkable amount of power from Congress within nine months and concentrate law-making authority almost entirely in the executive branch.

This is not a risk. We have seen over and over again that there is absolutely a major political benefit to publicly stopping the GOP from doing harm in a high profile showdown. If Dems win the standoff then it is imperative that it be yelled from the rooftops that they won the standoff

I'm as desperate to see the moral abominations in Gaza end as the rest of you, and I understand why there is so much anticipation that this might finally be a ceasefire, but given how this has played out over 2 years, some caution and skepticism should probably be advised.

The vindictive prosecutions of political enemies are not a distraction from the Epstein files - they’re one and the same: wielding the power of the DoJ to persecute your foes AND to protect your friends.

Ok, I think it's official that Fetterman is now being worse than Manchin would have been in a similar situation. And that's leaving aside that PA ain't fuckin West Virginia.

Another way to think about this is that the industrial revolution changed so much about the economy of the entire world to a degree that the economy before vs after are simply not comparable. They are two very, very distant worlds, and we in the second world have trouble understanding the first.

It's interesting seeing the different ways resistance has formed in different cities. Los Angeles Organized, Chicago Radicalized, and Portland Got Weird as Fuck. All 3 have had success unifying their respective cities. I guess my point is there are multiple paths to ungovernability.

An actual hot take: Too many authors are afraid of editors watering down their voice or whatever and not afraid enough of editors letting you put any old slop on the page.

A thing that stuck with me from graduate school is that when humans don’t have ingroup / outgroup distinction in a given group, they will invent one.

The thing is that even engaging with the issue at its crudest level and looking at long term salary prospects alone, it’s not true. English graduates do, on the whole, fine. The creative sector is a prosperous one. All the cliche reveals is the poverty of Badenoch’s imagination.

Never before in American history has one state's military force been deployed in another state over its objection. I say never because the Civil War involved states whose governments legally ceased to exist, their offices vacated by constructive resignation, with no legitimate governors to object.

Substitute Teacher, Veteran teacher, Student Teacher or History Teacher, ELA teacher, Art Teacher

my wife and fellow adjunct prof. has told me, having observed a recently lecture of mine that I should swear less in front of students because instead of seeming refreshingly casual it gives off too much of a “I’m the COOL professor, fellow kids” vibe am now more convinced of that than ever before

I don't doubt that Trumpism will soon crumble and things will return to a seeming normal. But what worries me is whether we will again make the mistake of offering impunity to these degenerates because if so, we're just waiting around for fascism that sticks.

It tends to get underplayed in American historical imagination, but our Revolution was in a direct, conscious lineage from the Glorious Revolution and before that the English Civil Wars. The road to 1776 began outside the Banqueting House in 1649. We are, in that real sense, still Anglo-Americans.

So Trump is now going to try to rule like an early modern king - just avoid calling the estates general or parliament or the diet and so rule by fiat. Maybe someone in the GOP should turn the page in book and see what happened next...oh, oh dear...oh no...oh dear ohnonono....

Like I have said earlier, at this point Trump is challenging the Magna Carta and its doing precisely the things that led to the English Civil War.

To be fair, I don't question her integrity or ability to be fair and impartial. I know very well the answer to the question, so there is no need to ask.

I encourage you to push this talking point, buddy

Look, when you are starting to lose the local police with your BS, things are not going well for you.

We’re in a moment now where it would be worth people taking three hours to watch Gandhi, particularly the scene of the salt march. There is value to making the brutality of your opponent so plain as day that no one can argue with it. The clarity of that brought down an empire

A "contrarian" is a bog-standard reactionary who identifies, for marketing purposes, as "actually pretty liberal."

Those of us who have been paying Too Much Attention to politics have been exhausted for eons of the constant re ligating of the 2016 democratic primary. Well, good news! Now we get to relitigate the 2024 presidential election!

what if I told you that taking accountability for your actions was traditionally considered a load-bearing feature of masculinity?

Charlatan is probably too harsh for this guy, but it does seem like he wasn't truthful in ways thar mattered. The bigger story to me is that the school district doesn't use E-Verify to background applicants!

While I agree with Quinta, I think that it's typical for people to struggle to deal with radical paradigm shifts. People are trying to understand what is happening now through the lens of what happened in the US before, even under Trump I. But that doesn't produce clear insights.

What I would argue is that this isn't civil war as we would understand it yet, it's basically Bleeding Kansas, an actual honest to goodness war/conflict being waged in small scale which could be a prelude to the real thing if the fundamental issues causing the conflict are not resolved.

John Roberts’ Constitution: The federal government protecting people’s right to vote or giving them health care violates the sacred principle of state sovereignty but if the deranged POTUS and his bloodthirsty advisers want to use the military to invade other states for being too liberal that’s fine

The national myth that Vietnam was winnable but for an unwillingness to do warcrimes is stupid for many many reasons but chief among them to me is that arguably the opposite is true, we were entirely too willing to reach for simple atrocity and it made us lose twice. The conventional and moral wars

I see the administration us run by completionists who want to make sure they get 100% completion and violate every section and clause of every article as well as every part of every amendment.

When I am elected dictator of the internet, I will make it the law that the owner of a social media platform will be banned from being on the social media platform they own. Nothing good has ever come of it.

ICE is deeply unpopular and getting less popular by the day! stop giving them the legitimacy of an unstoppable secret police force, they don’t have it, they don’t even have black hundreds legitimacy.

The single most irritating thing about the AI boosters on here is that they are in smug agreement that their critics are thoughtless, stupid, and incapable of understanding tech while they run around making provably wrong statements about mathematics and biology and displaying deep incuriosity

One of the things I took away from the 60s and Richard Nixon, first mentioned by Hunter Thompson, but I believe to be true, is the fact that we believed, at time, that all our protesting, marching and sign waving was futile and pointless when in fact, it drove Richard Nixon to alcohol fueled madness

this is why leftists dismissing 50501 and such as a bunch of useless libs is so unserious. 50501 is mustering protests across the country without a major provocation. it's a dress rehearsal and we're really fucking rusty.

The skeleton key to unlock the Trump administration is to understand that everything it does is for the sake of posting. It wants to get likes and shares. And it is specifically captured by a neo-Nazi, fascist audience that wants images of torture, violence, and murder, especially of minorities.

This is what it looks like when the entire Democratic Party gets & stays on message while Republican flail around

One of the things I always find telling is the idea that we have to judge past people by the standards of their time, as if the fact that they did bad things means that everyone thought it was okay. They didn't. Pretty much every obviously evil act had people saying that it was, in fact, bad.

the single best decision I’ve made about how I use this website is that I do not argue in my replies I ignore it or I block people, nothing good ever comes of it and I am just some guy and not the sin eater for every moderation decision

We have exited a long period of peace and entered into a struggle not unlike war: one in which all the old certainties have gone malleable and the future of the republic is at stake. www.liberalcurrents.com/democrats-mu...