a story i've told before, but feels like a good time to tell again. "I too know the horrors of war" The year was 2019, and the campaign was End the Forever War. I was part of a veteran group meeting with members asking them to sign a pledge to responsibly end GWOT.

It's really hard to explain what the weirdest people in the world who also happen to be in the military in direct proximity to you are like, but we've all met a whole bunch of them.

This is absolutely fucking wrong and disrespectful.

This proves that you must abolish ICE and start a new border security administration from scratch with a completely new and healthy culture. You can’t reform an agency where agents feel free to do this while completely bare faced.

I think a good strategy for your non-leftist social media presence (ie everywhere but here) is to give this photo - the remains of Danish soldiers returning in coffins after being killed in America's war in Afghanistan - as wide an audience as possible. Remind people who we're betraying

Somewhere in this crisis, and I don't know when it's coming, is a cascade of ABO losses.

My main problem with this line of thinking is the trend of Americans putting everything on the backs of service members. Don’t want to fight a war in Iraq / Afghanistan you once overwhelmingly supported? Service members. Don’t want a war Congress is too weak to rein in? Service members.

the median voter wants no taxes & no debt but still healthcare & pensions, they want clean energy, clean water, cheap beef, & cheap gas, & they want a bruising take-no-prisoners military that embraces lesbians & furries & single moms without threatening anyone's masculinity

So your North Star is just a means and not an end like “helping working Americans, revitalizing democratic institutions, etc” tells you everything you need to know about the state of D politics

Who among us doesn't pursue fascism at home & colonialism abroad bc we weren't awarded a peace prize for arbitrarily murdering Venezuelan fishermen?

Great thread about learning from your failures: moral edition.

Whatever’s in these Epstein Files (and we have some idea) must be really bad.

If the U.S. military is given direct orders to seize Greenland—pull down another nation’s flag, and then claim the ground in the name of the United States—every senior commander has a moral obligation to refuse to accept or support such a command. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

I think it would be a good idea for D politicians to be declaring this publicly, pre-emptively. They should state it as an abstract, legal proposition: an order by the President to seize Greenland would be unlawful, here's why. Trump does not have the legal right to attack a NATO ally. Say it.

I think some posters on here missed that "getting punched in the face, repeatedly, by goon security services and not directly punching back" has been a core tenet of just about every successful nonviolent resistance movement in history

See, everyone who's ever lived in Japan or even just visited here for a week knows that Mamdani's cause is moral and righteous

Johnson: They are going after dangerous criminals. Hmmm. So Mr. Speaker, explain in words of one syllable how multiple 17 yr olds just working and living their lives as AMERICAN CITIZENS being arrested and assaulted by ICE represents dangerous criminals. Go ahead. Explain it. We'll wait you tool.

Any Democratic votes to fund DHS later this month as Minneapolis is being terrorized by DHS is going to be a major slap in the face to Americans living here. Demand major reforms or shut the government down.

🤔

Whole lotta dudes think they're Bluto Blutarsky when they're really Doug Niedermayer

All power of armed government organizations should be derived via the consent of elected officials. They should never be able to generate their own political power unilaterally. We run the military this way and armed law enforcement agencies should be no different.

I think a useful thing for Democratic state legislatures to think about is abolishing police unions

A reminder - before Trump, MAGA, Musk and Fox rewrote history - that this is what the entire country agreed had happened five years ago today:

In the “We’ll see” file, a lot of current and former military exist on the right and this new precedent could be weaponized in a D admin to go after currently serving but also currently sitting members of the political class

This is designed to have a chilling effect on all retired service members. The message is that if you speak out, you risk your retirement pay.

Himes: "I was delighted to hear that Tom Cotton, chairmen of the Senate Intel Committee, has been in regular contact with the admin. I've had zero outreach and no D I'm aware of has. So apparently we're now in a world where the legal obligation to keep Congress informed only applies to your party."

I don’t think Machado realizes that engineering an installation by Trump without a democratic process is going to sink her legitimacy and credibility and turn a good share of the non-Chavista Venezuelan people against her pretty fast. It’s the ultimate Faustian bargain

A lot of officers hanging their future careers and perhaps freedom on a badly-drafted OLC memo and perhaps vague conceptions of the presidential pardon powers.

Remember how appalled we all were in 2022 when Russia completely unprovoked attacked Ukraine? That is what we’re doing tonight with Venezuela. We are the bad guys here. Everyone who supports this is supporting unprovoked murder. Fuck every last one of them

😊🧭🔭 #CalvinandHobbes

Reflecting on the first half of my fellowship, I think we need to accept the fact that the 21st century has been and likely will be the Chinese century. As uncomfortable as that is, refusing to allow it as a possibility, if not outright accept it, prevents us from proper preparations.

Me in Tahoe today

Some accountability would go a long way towards making the move fast and break stuff crowd be a little more careful about what they release. Cute to make grok apologize. But it's the company paying for the processing that needs to be hauled in front of a judge.

Since it’s now PFT season and now training for a 3:45 plank and a chiseled core to keep mama bear happy, we start daily 5 minute abs. 5’ Core (Day 1): 1’ Plank 10” Rest 30” Plank 10” Rest 30” Plank 10” Rest 30” Plank 10” Rest 30” Plank 10” Rest 30” Plank 10” Rest 30” Plank

Hitler's strategic calculations, 1942 [colorized]

You don’t need a New Year’s resolution. You need a day’s. Do the right thing today. And then do it again tomorrow. That’s it. All it takes is your life. Day after day. That’s how life is lived. And how it’s wasted. Your choice. We all matter or none of us do. And all means all

Tolkien was onto something with dragon sickness. All of these billionaires have more than they could ever use, and yet constantly thirst for more. It very much is a sickness. They are broken people.

Please do not unwrap 2026, if in the first 30 days we end up not liking it we can return it.

Today is 30 December 2025. I am excited to receive an email from this organization by 10 Jan 26 (even though I’ve had overseas orders for two weeks). I complained about this to CMC38 three years ago. Let’s see if this has any power to unfuck this process (TL;DR: I’m skeptical)

Embrace Harry Truman thought

Ya, dort is a fucking clown, but the military doing nothing to police this behavior sends the message that you can be a partisan in uniform, and if the military isn’t going to do it, civilians (Dems) are going to have to do it for them

Watched 2 GOs turn their brains to mush in Iraq through lack of sleep—one so badly he was MEDEVACed. Slim’s chapter on his battle rhythm should be mandatory reading.

What I worry about is the next Dem administration being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. They are going to need to right some historical wrongs, execute a massive reorganization, and most importantly actually deliver on improving people's lives *simultaneously*

You don't need to be an anarchist to think that ICE should be abolished You can be a good governance liberal who thinks that the agency has demonstrated an institutional disrespect for the Constitution, and therefore advocate for unwinding the agency and rolling its functions into a revived INS.

Yeah something that irritates me is that there’s this false dichotomy between open borders and the current brutality. A more humane immigration enforcement that is still meaningful enforcement is totally possible and has existed previously.

Speech has never been freer! Not performing for the president is now illegal.

Denmark lost more troops per capita in the post 9/11 war on Afghanistan. Saying they “are not a good ally” because they won’t surrender their territories to the US is lunacy. We are betraying our allies to satisfy the whims of a would-be Emperor for whom the US is not enough.