Abolish the Senate. I am absolutely dead serious.

The torment nexus is when people I consider my inferiors can directly interact with my thoughts and opinions

Me: we'll cross that bridge when we come to it [2 minutes later, at the bridge] Me: Oh shit oh fuck oh no

This is basically the whole problem right here. The Founders, for all of their flaws, had (some) principles and the courage to fight for them, and they assumed later generations would have the same fire. The level of complacency and ass-covering among our elites now is literally destroying the US

Shiv is right, but it's also a reason all the No Kings stuff isn't effective (as that sort of protest--I think it's good to build soft support). If you ain't willing to take a day off work, you're probably not up for storming the Bastille (I include myself in this)

The dialogue is a whole other thing but the bit about "fuck you shoot me I'll die for this shit" and the reaction is the crux here, from Gandhi's time on down, no authoritarian in history ever knows how to respond to this and it's why it beats them whenever deployed

Why does everyone keep calling it “The Epstein Ballroom?” Please stop repeating “The Epstein Ballroom” because it is not called “The Epstein Ballroom!” Don’t tell the news that it’s called “The Epstein Ballroom” and please don’t repost this!!!!!

25 years later, Perfect Dark is an amazing multiplayer game. But wow, the level designs are extremely busy and hard to map mentally--sewer and G5 Building especially

How many lone wolves does it take to form a pack?

A thought about how Guantánamo led to Trump: Once someone convinces you it's good to torture someone if you're furious, that's all it takes. No sin is greater than torture. And anger is easily stoked and then directed as needed.

"we are better than this" i am telling your right now... no we are not find the courage to be what the moment requires

First you set up a dragnet to sweep up everyone you can... then you hold them for ransom

This is a big deal. Please pay attention.

a canceled streaming subscription is easily converted to several spec fic magazine subs on patreon and similar services, some are as low as 1-2 bucks. the more you know.

Don't a let bunch of hateful fash Scrooge McDuckian broligarch ghouls destroy everything you love and care about without a fight.

Despair is a commodity for which we have no use for in this moment

What I can't get over about this is that people are arguing SO HARD over something that's ALL downside risk. Indivisible is gonna do fine without your email. You Cannot Know what the consequences of signing up might be .... BUT! A Black woman said it and therefore you gotta disagree with her

At what point and how exactly do we grapple with a) this system's inability to prevent from ever coming to power the kind of people who are both absolutely thrilledly eager to lie and cheat *and* are hell-bent harming others, and b) its lack of meaningful safeguards to stop them if & when they do?

Fundamentally what I’m hearing is I need to pipe down about bigotry for the good of the country. Be quiet about it so “reconciliation” can happen. That’s just the recipe for Jim Crow, bar for bar, line for line. This isn’t even original.

Who knew “democracy dies in darkness” was aspirational

"Everything is powerless peoples' fault" is a great phrase.

The crazy thing about the media's beatification of Charlie Kirk is that he was murdered literally while saying racist stuff! (Apparently that was a large fraction of his life, but still.)

Charlie Kirk died doing what he loved: gleefully encouraging violence

every society based on domination renders the violence it depends on invisible, and all the violence that challenges it an outrage. two million locked up in gulags is the cost of doing business, one window smashed at a protest is a crime against civilization

A liberal is a person who will step over a dead homeless person on their way to brunch. Once there, they will admonish others for insufficiently mourning a fallen fascist.

Jamelle is right, but this highlights a crucial confusion of the Trump era: Is the law the text of a statute? Or how courts interpreted it over time? Or how they do so right now? Or what the executive chooses to enforce? and in any event, what good is it? 🧵

So I am VERY late to this, but dear God, "Breath of the Wild" is a great game. That degree of design--making sure there's some new crazy thing to be curious about, not too far away, is just so well done. Also, the dialogue localization is fantastic.

Schumer and Jeffries are doing things that advance their own goals. If you find it confounding, you are mistaken about their project.

The more we stretch ourselves and our imaginations to encompass the humanity of everyone, the more capacious our lives will be. The more we insist that we should deal only with people who are like us in some stupid, arbitrary respect, the more our world will shrivel.

You continue to miss the the point of this and counting letters: the LLM demonstrates it is not thinking, merely outputting tokens it does not understand in an order its model shows is "likely". The LLM made no mistake! It has successfully performed its function. That function is not thought.

this is an entire culture, an entire epoch built on burning the world and swearing the fires will never touch us, an entire civilization founded on denial of the basic idea that we are animals living on a planet with other animals who share their fate. that culture has to die if we're going to live

It's telling that as Trump threatens a military takeover of cities, actively censors universities, imposes his politics on private companies, and weaponizes the DOJ against his critics, reactionary centrists who've made free expression their core issue . . . are still focused on wokeness.

Again, they’re trying to be the leaders in a fight they can’t even name.

Goddamn.

In 2007, Dobson said that his Christian faith made him okay with torturing people at Guantanamo. One of the most vile people of my lifetime.

the Trump 2.0 project is best understood as a national reimposition of Jim Crow

Once you understand that a driving principle of American politics is there is no such thing as a compassionate solution that's cheap enough or a cruel solution that's too expensive, a lot of things click into place.

The leadership of the Democratic party is not anti-fascist. I think that it's helpful to keep this in mind at all times.

"Nothing was done" is maybe the wrong emphasis: the motherfuckers got away with it. And that required the catastrophic failure of just about every institution in this country. What's going on here, now, is the result of 20 years of rot. Nothing Trump is doing wasn't prefigured by W.

anyway the choice america faces going forward is live in the confederacy or do reconstruction for real and purge those motherfuckers from all of public life. and there isn’t really an in-between.

Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, godlike technology. E.O. Wilson was right about us.

"If they want to preserve themselves" is the key. White leaders weren't especially interested in preserving the Union as a truly multiracial state in the 1870's. And white leaders weren't interested in preserving democracy in 2024

the thing everyone is going to have to accept is that the post-trump period, whenever it comes, will not and cannot be a project of national unity, it must be a project of partisan project of renewal, in the same way that reconstruction and the new deal were partisan projects of renewal.

I hate to reflect on the fact though that America, when you really take it all in historically, has been running Fascism-lite very successfully to the detriment of everyone and not only was that not enough for them but also now they want Turbo Fascism

"Do not ask me for my vote if you're not willing go to jail for resisting. Do not ask me for my vote if you’re not willing to get ME out of jail for resisting!" Vince Warren of Center for Constitutional Rights @ccrjustice.org ‪#NN25 keynote. Watch-> www.facebook.com/share/v/1FJD...

I don't know if there's a better more sticky term but we should really call the silicon valley 2010s bubble of start ups an economic proxy war against worker's rights.

🧵🧵🧵 In this thread, I lay out more than a dozen facts about Trump and his child-molester friends Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. I challenge you to read the whole thread and then decide what the odds are that Trump did not abuse girls or tolerate his pals Epstein and Maxwell doing so.

Pastor's respectability analysis applies to white communities too, we just call it ... wow, I don't know if we have a word for it. Functionally it's cowardice & complicity, but the aspirational angle on it is ... maybe neighborliness? Not knocking over the apple cart because it's simply not done

Not to keep going on about it, but I see a lot of well meaning takes on the left about the Ian Dunt thing saying, "Well it's bad that when boys search for 'why don't I have a GF?' fasc stuff comes up, but it's complex...." Pals, Justin is *doing this work on the left and you can help fund it.*