"I have spent the last few weeks addressing and preparing for a military invasion by the President of the United States. No, I’m not a soldier or a foreign adversary. I’m the Governor of Illinois"

"The world of Hollow Knight has a Barsoom vibe, dead sea bottoms separating isolated kingdoms" is today's random association thought.

the funny thing about the constant misappropriation of MLK is that the guy left a massive body of writing specifically aimed at explaining his views of those of the movement he represented to the broad public. it is extremely easy to know what the guy thought on a variety of subjects and yet

Despite all their frantic flailing to astroturf this worthless peddler of hate into a posthumous saint, Charlie Kirk is unpopular, he is unmourned, and he will be forgotten.

these are all actual headlines from the washington post. you can literally track the rightwing ideological shift over time towards supporting billionaires & transphobia.

kinda fascinating in a grim sorta way how you can map our media nazification to literally immediately after the muskrat bought twitter

I do wonder if this is an aspect of the modern political/demonstration dysfunction. Not only is our population more educated, it feels like activists community leaders, etc are competing intensely with clerks and business types for the sorts of Party roles usually given as recognition for service.

Besides the effects on the tech industry, right now there are H-1B holders—people—who built a life in the US. If they are traveling, they have 17 hours to get back to the US, or the life they built will be shattered and taken from them. Can you imagine constantly living with this uncertainty?

we're going to win

Hot take: the fact that Nintendo is panicking so badly about Palworld they claim a deeply unworkable & creatively bankrupt patent to keep from Pokemon having competitors is above all a profound indictment of Pokemon's lack of creative or narrative ambition.

Everybody wants to revive the pan-ideological coalitions of the 20th century, which had intense regional differences, but nobody actually knows how to do that, which is why we get the same moronic commentary repeated over and over and over again from people who should really know better!

The way I revel in the shock expressed by the kinds of people who make these kinds of decisions - you thought the peons didn't have it in them to pick up pitchforks 🤔

Journalists should tell them to fuck off.

"Hadrian enjoyer" for an antizionist is a deep antisemitic cut, lol.

Starting to hear rumblings from organizers, activists, interested parties that they want to advance further on protesting payment processors. Not enough to call, not enough to sign petitions. It’s time to protest in person, IRL at the locations of these businesses — PayPal, Visa, MasterCard

AOC: All in the name of Charlie Kirk, Trump and the FCC are now cynically threatening to shut down ABC and any outlets who give air time to the administration's political critics. This is a disgusting attack on the American people and the very first amendment rights that define us as a country.

if I were a member of the current Trump administration I would not be excited about the concept of “illegal pardons”

The defining lesson of this first year of Trump authoritarianism is that kowtowing & capitulating yields zero permanent benefit and only emboldens the admin to come after you more. This critical lesson was first documented in the landmark political science treatise “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”

This is imo the big difference between old school Zionists, especially Jews & liberals, & both modern reactionary "Zionists" & antizionists. The Christian Zionist and the antizionist agree that Zionism is the ideology of power. To the liberal Zionist, it is a downtrodden people fighting back.

I need people to square the circle between "Magneto was Right" and Zionism. Because the impulse behind the former is why Zionism exists.

Someone else described it as the elites going through the fairy-tale moment of the prince putting on rags, and it's not inaccurate - but instead of the fairy tale hero approach of greater empathy, a lot of these folks just came away hating the masses.

So um. This is what's been up with me for the last year. I hate hate hate asking but very much appreciate your support. www.gofundme.com/f/fund-me-if...

Discworld QOTD, from Night Watch

You don’t even have to like Omar at all to see that this is some of the most wildly inappropriate and dangerous language imaginable for a member of congress to use about a colleague; it would legitimately be grounds for expulsion in a remotely functional political system

Love liberalism or hate it, liberalism is not an ideology of pacifism alone. Liberals dropped artificial suns and industrialized hellfire on cities. Liberals shredded Nazis with artillery. Liberals bayoneted Southern slavers. Liberalism does not love war. That does not mean we're not good at it.

Trump can appear "strong" by blowing up little boats in the Caribbean, because presidential powers are hard to restrain in that area. He can get networks to deliver him a comedian's scalp. But he can't drum up real prosecution of his enemies without running smack into deep institutional resistance.

You fly the flag of America because your goal is to persuade Americans that America can be a force for good and thus get them to register their Americanism as obligating them to support your cause. Your goal in these protests is not to bring down America, your goal is to get America on your side.

because Americans generally like America and you should wave the symbol associated with America in protests in America where your primary goal is to convince and win over Americans to your side, not some shit that only the people in your book club recognize.

the hysteria has gone off the rails so far that the average american thinks 1 in 5 people are transgender. pure absolute insanity that is driving the current lavender scare

A federal judge has thrown out President Trump's lawsuit against The New York Times. The suit, he says, "stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements" of federal court rules. It is "decidedly improper and impermissible." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

IMO one of the biggest changes in social media environment between terms 1 and 2 has been the far smaller appetite for promoting Trump’s stream of losses and far greater appetite for alarmism about how he always wins or even the losses don’t count etc bsky.app/profile/jona...

A lot of u are this guy rn

They just tear-gassed us. They tried to run us over in a van holding a peaceful protester. They shot us with pepper balls. They dragged another protester into the facility.

House Oversight Ranking Member Robert Garcia says he'll be launching an investigation into the Trump admin, ABC, and Sinclair "amid ongoing efforts to censor opposition to the President of the United States."

It’s GOOD to be antifascist.

this man is insultingly stupid

hey so, read this story and this is an incredibly vague piece of reporting i am personally taking with lots of salt before jumping to conclusions instead of trying to explain in one text limited post, a quick thread…

you can be an academic speaking to an academic audience and using terms with specific esoteric theoretical meanings and fairly say you should only be judged by those terms, *or* you can be a public intellectual. you can't be both, and many people try to be!

honestly, kudos to him for this

Democrats are doing what a lot of people *on here* asked them to do by holding shadow hearings. Help amplify!

What we are witnessing is an outright abuse of power. This administration is attacking critics and using fear as a weapon to silence anyone who would speak out. Media corporations — from television networks to newspapers — are capitulating to these threats.

Even more than court-packing, I want state-packing. Admit DC as a state! And the USVI! And Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands! And Puerto Rico (if they don't want independence)! There should be no territory under permanent US sovereignty that is not part of a state with full voting rights.

First the grand juries, now the trial juries. This Admin is not winning.

Lander does this shit when he's not even running for anything. The realest possible one

My strongest structural convictions on American governmental structure are A: you fundamentally can only guard against a Trump not by disempowering the Presidency or empowering an equally dysfunctional Congress, but by not electing an evil, senile old man to either. B: pack SCOTUS.

I do still think "little theory boy who gets literally crushed by the money needed to run the rebellion" is a nasty bit of backhanded commentary, though, especially seeing as he ends up a lot more useful in death to the rebellion than alive.

I'm not trying to tell you it's not going to suck but this is more or less what the path to most of the good endings looks like: 1) isolated, unpopular president with few allies 2) entirely transactional and lightly committed collaborators 3) deeply committed domestic and international opposition