he literally is losing court cases because his public statements have nothing to do with reality.

The situation in America is not great. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

eventually politicians need to start advocating for criminal and civil penalties for people involved in fabricating stories to get citizens incarcerated. or, put another way: a society that would like to keep functioning has to discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

That our immigration system is deeply flawed, as is our public‘s idea/notion of criminality, and the incongruity between what constitutes a trained and licensed professional and competency itself.

its truly remarkable, you have to really take the measure of it and it's almost hard to comprehend it, but the president of the united states is having texas invade illinois and oregon just to make twitter content

how insane was it to say “we tortured some folks” and then not only not do anything about it but keep everyone involved in polite society. what did we think was going to happen after that

The regime is acting this way because there are no consequences so it is clear that consequences—the development of them, the advocacy for them, the imposition on bad behavior—are the answer to our crisis.

genuinely impossible to overstate what the secret police are doing. It is state hooliganism. It is gangsterism as policy. It is the jouissance of the original klan nightriders that followed the civil war. they terrorize minority communities while intentionally paralyzing local governments.

I will gnaw at the holes of the universe until it kills me or some truth falls out

Hey check it out they're inserting nakedly partisan propaganda in front of bureaucratic federal websites

i know hegseth's speech was intended to tell the military they won't get prosecuted for war crimes and beating your wife won't hold up getting promoted to O-4, but bringing in trump fresh from death's door is a really persuasive way to unconsciously tell them the crimes jubilee may not last too long

once again, if you straightforwardly explain how LBOs work to any normal person, they think you must by lying

I mean yes this is funny, but the fact that these unconstitutional stormtroopers are so directionless that they literally stand around waiting for random nonwhite delivery guys to bike past them is just pathetic. No mandate, no mission, no clue. Just racism.

the president just said the military should start shooting american civilians if they want to

what anil said. also, two things are true: 1. america has a horrific, brutal facist and authoritarian tradition which has prepared for this moment; 2. that is not the only american tradition, and pretending it is helps the fascists.

Pretty much just the US civil war, Vietnam's toppling the Khmer Rouge, the Sea People's righteous jihad against the decadent tyrannies of the Bronze Age, and world war 2. All morally grey them aside.

Destroy car dealerships and you save US democracy

it's simultaneously worse than most people think and also, yes, not as hopeless as many believe.

Telling a bunch of foreign leaders you might kidnap and disappear their citizens AT THE U FUCKING N is wild

ICE agents held a man’s five year old autistic daughter and taunted him with “Is that your daughter” in an attempt to get him to come out of the house. They were rebuffed but two days later took him from his car.

If he were serious about this, he would be going "Hell fucking yeah I am shutting down this government. Have you seen them kidnapping people and throwing them in concentration camps? They don't deserve a single cent for their crimes against our republic and should be in prison."

I honestly don’t think this impacts Israel’s decision making all that much but the fact that US allies are able to act in open opposition to stated US goals and positions shows US leadership on the international stage is basically nonexistent at this point.

What’s more astonishing: 1) that the president clearly believes, and repeatedly suggests, that asylum seekers are people from mental asylums, or 2) that no journalist has ever challenged him on this and no mainstream media outlets have done any deep dives on this story?

i would go a little further: i don't think they have faith in institutions so much as just completely take them for granted. surely groceries and gas are always relatively cheap. water is always drinkable; why would it not be? it's water. of course the stock market works, it's a market.

the hiring of Olivia Nuzzi by Vanity Fair makes the new rules of media clear: ❌ lightly criticizing Charlie Kirk ✅ FaceTime fingerblasting with your story’s subject, RFK Jr.

South Korean protest culture is one of the country's huge strengths and it relies in part upon having large networks of people who can be mobilized at short notice. The U.S. is at nowhere near this stage of organization but it badly needs to be.

Are we all ready to admit, once and for all, that the culture wars over "free speech" this last decade or so have been entirely about the *content* of the contested speech, not procedural commitments to speech as such?

i dont want to go back to normal, i want a democratic president to use these newfound powers to completely dismantle the conservative media apparatus responsible for this mess

what I'm learning from the fact that every one of these decisions has a "huge merger waiting to be approved" factor is that we should no longer allow mergers sorry, you can't buy any other companies anymore, too dangerous to civil society only antitrust breakups allowed

Saying we’re going to have to learn to live with each other and debate in the marketplace of ideas while the president is purging comedians off the TV is why people are not reacting positively to Ezra Klein.

These two things might seem unrelated, but together they help distill the workings of competitive authoritarianism. When the opposition loses, it gets blamed on their having terrible leaders, but part of why they have terrible leaders is bc any rising leader is hounded by the ruling party.

"I knew that someday, years or perhaps decades down the line, when half of Gaza was still rubble and the other half Israeli skyscrapers, the magazine would offer a mea culpa. Maybe someone involved would end up considering it the biggest mistake of their career."

US President back-pedalling furiously after his administration treated some innocent hard-working Koreans like they were innocent hard-working Latinos.

grok is primarily used as a method of creating propaganda at scale in support of genocidal policies

so ICE murdered a father in cold blood from a routine traffic stop, we're murdering random Venezuelans in foreign waters, we're shackling S. Koreans for building the factories we need to keep the southern economy alive, and we have a majority party trying to tie passport status to political views

The thing to emphasize here is that this treatment is *utterly normal.* It's part of the system of detention which has existed for decades. Folkston has been like this for many, many years,

the underlying circumstances are extremely different, but here is the famously woke william safire on oliver sipple, who was outed by the press after saving gerald ford's life: "He will think twice before he does any good deed again." www.nytimes.com/1975/09/29/a...

im pretty tired of the private provision of common communication carriers

KIM KITSURAGI - "What is it, detective? Can you make it out?" BULLET - "if you read this you are gay lmao" 1. "It, um, doesn't say anything." 2. "Transgender ideology. My old foe." 3. [Espirit de Corps - Medium 10] "I think you should read it for yourself, Kim."

Bluesky really doesn't want people to say "rest in piss" about Charlie Kirk aftermath.site/bluesky-char...

"The only phantasmagoria in this imaginary world lies in the tenderness and warmth of the crowd, and in the sufficient and excessive number of gadgets necessary to create the multitudinous effect." - Simulacra and Simulation

you can condemn political violence without asking me to believe that charlie kirk was just an ordinary decent pundit who believed in the liberal project--believed in pluralism, freedom, and equality. he didn't. his whole thing was that he hated those ideas and wanted to destroy them

"He reviled, belittled, and demeaned large numbers of my fellow Americans, but he was quite cordial to me" sets my teeth on edge.

The day before we found out from the President himself that actually political violence is unacceptable the Supreme Court said it’s legal for masked men to bust your car window and snatch you away from your family for having the wrong skin color.

I’m also not interested in litigating what is or isn’t “political violence” with people who willfully refuse to consider the quotidian violence that defines this country as political, or to entertain that the very idea of violence itself is ipso facto political. sorry but no thanks

I'm shrinking my facial features 30% in solidarity and you should too.

- you clean up that banksy? - sure did, your honour, leaving a perfect, permanent outline, imbuing the work with real fuckin gravitas while making its point better than the artist did himself just like you asked

the wicked rulers whose crimes provoked divine wrath in the old testament committed far less grave crimes than trump has admitted to or openly done