Pope Gregory XIII in 1582:

The impunity is, indeed, the point. Even moreso than cruelty, it is the animating urge of MAGA: the desire to be wantonly, flagrantly, theatrically impervious to accountability

This is self-evidently correct, and Jamelle is right to say it out loud. But it is unsatisfying on its own in terms of pointing to corrective, because the Weak Parties, Strong Partisanship hypothesis shows us that the GOP is less a coherent organization than a *brand* serving as a vehicle for a...

The fact that "and political leadership" is relegated to a parenthetical is sorta the problem here. The level of strategic thinking among the brass varies far more than it should, but their domain of expertise is the *military* instrument of national power, even if they learn about others in school

Pretty much the entirety of military training & education is focused on jus in bello, not jus ad bellum. Which makes sense, because even jus in bello can be a lot more complicated than people think (then again, a lot of people on here think the definition of war crime is "any violence I don't like")

Bad takes are the mind-killer. Bad takes are the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my bad takes. I will permit them to pass over me & through me. And when they have gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see their path. Where the bad takes have gone there will be nothing.

U.S. foreign policy exists in a superposition of all possible rationales. A definitive rationale is only established when a measurement, such as a Congressional reporting requirement or a lawsuit, takes place and collapses the foreign policy wave function.

Ladies and gentlemen... the weekend. (also: you are important and are not alone 🧡)

My oath is just "Yub yub"

Jan 1: this is the year of new Me Jan 12: [eating shredded cheese directly from the bag] new years resolutions are a bourgeois construct for disciplining bodies into productive units for capital

Hitler's strategic calculations, 1942 [colorized]

Kudos to ESPN for having the courage to air Third Eye Blind singing "And then I bumped up, I took the hit that I was given Then I bumped again, then I bumped again" on national TV lmao. Oral sex and crystal meth for the win

Not to be pedantic - and AR-M obviously knows this perfectly well - but there is a secret, third category that is not aliens or naturalized citizens. Usually it's a fun bit of trivia, but these days... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unironically: youtu.be/CDl9ZMfj6aE

And groups are, fundamentally, about *vibes* so this proves my "all politics is vibes" theory QED

I am wheezing

Long time ago, I worked with a guy who worked on a Congressional campaign in Louisiana. First day, he enters the office in a rented house in Napoleonville...and there's an old Cajun woman asleep on a couch in the foyer. He is at a loss for what to do. She wakes up, looks him up and down, and asks...

They don't think Biden had values either - they don't think anyone has values. They have contempt for Biden because they think he is being mendacious by pretending to have values, which makes it all the more delicious to catch him in hypocrisy. Trump, by contrast, is honest in his utter narcissism.

TEACH THE CONTROVERSY (Harding's extremely horny letters)

BAH GAWD! THAT'S @aelkus.bsky.social's music!

Ladies and gentlemen... the weekend. (also: you are important and are not alone 🧡)

Sadly the Navi are NIMBYs and have it coming

*sigh* Microsoft...what are we doing here

Georgetown-Rosslyn gondola when?

This, too, is cargo cult

My stepdad was stymied in his attempts to get into one of the regional Party archives - even though they had long since been made open to the public - until he unlocked the proper sequence and selection of 'gifts' to the gatekeepers. Who says the old КПСС way of doing things ever went away?

Let’s get it, Georgetown DC ! dlvr.it/TPxdHr You’re next ! 🙂‍↕️

The way to square this circle is to recognize that Ezra, et. al., believe the Dems don't get the credit they should for actually proposing policies that address cost of living, the economy, etc. because The Groups make them perform ritual displays of wokeness that brand them in the public mind.

🎵it’s a duck in a box🎵

The cursed Ograbme gonna nick this guy good, I tell you hwat

May I commend to you the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets

Ladies and gentlemen... the weekend. (also: you are important and are not alone 🧡)

Feel like Waluigi would be on the Epstein flight logs but not Wario and I think that’s the fundamental difference between the characters

This thread is why Jamelle Bouie is worth reading - agree, disagree, or otherwise - every day of the week and twice on Sunday. The man sees the political substrate the way Neo sees the Matrix.

Economic anxiety is impossible to disaggregate from status after you get above "baseline survival" within Maslow's hierarchy, and for many people it's a lot easier to accrue status through bigoted social structures than through economic gains. Status-seeking be status-seeking, one way or another

The category error constantly being made by the popularists is to regard the "issue" as the fundamental unit of analysis & then consider something like "immigration" to be an issue. So since the public is more restrictionist than The Groups and where they've dragged the Dems, gotta lower salience...

Is reality TV responsible for our descent into cargo cultism? Maybe! Tune in next week...

This is "Why don't they make the whole plane out of black box?" -level thinking

The key thing here is that, aside from a small cadre of reporters with a true policy best, most government/political media much prefers the politics-as-entertainment state of affairs - and remain deeply aggrieved at the tight-lipped Biden admin for having denied them this.

This, too, is a form of cargo cultism.

Mmmmmhmmmmmmm youtu.be/RObuKTeHoxo

I actually did once almost walk directly into Newt Gingrich, back in college when I was interning at a non-profit and was making a Staples run to the now-closed location on L. Dude is bigger in real life than I had thought. Pretty sure I saw Kerry once playing roller hockey in front of the Renwick.

Yes, but they typically back into those beliefs and ideas, rather than deriving them from a reasoned combination of first principles (axioms), empirical evidence, and critical analysis. I'll say it again: ideology is theory in theory and vibes in practice.