i think one thing people have a hard time grasping is that the central figures of the trump administration are not bad as in "the worst republican blowhard you know," but bad as in "the worst people you have ever heard of." donald trump is a serial rapist whose best friend was a pedophile.

I have this argument frequently with people and I always ask them if they feel that they would be extremely wealthy alone on a desert island with no other people competing for jobs. Why not?

Beyond all the normal pathologies everything that has happened since Kirk's death is an example of how Republicans can throw all their efforts into crazy gambits (making CK a martyr) and get huge political benefits while Democrats surrender at the slightest perceived resistance.

This is what was happening when Trump's approval was in toilet in 2017. Being a supporter was perceived as being shameful and stupid and people vied away from it.

Spider-Man on the Genesis has the best continue screen I've ever seen in a video game.

All of these people resent the fact that real resistance to authoritarianism involves mundane mass organizing and working with normies so they instead like to playact that they are like SLA members.

Carl Sagan: (reincarnated as smart fridge as punishment for promoting science over religion) Yᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ ʟᴏᴡ ᴏɴ ᴍɪʟᴋ Me: Ugh, these things are so annoying. I wish my fridge didn’t talk Carl Sagan: (desperately trying to say “It’s me, Carl Sagan! I’m trapped in here!”) Aʟᴇʀᴛ﹕ Mᴜsᴛᴀʀᴅ ᴇxᴘɪʀᴇᴅ

They're selling out the millions upon millions of Americans who have rightfully objected to everything Kirk stood for, and the many who have been suffering terrible professional and social consequences for refusing to honor a bigot. Pathetic cowardice

Every day ordinary Americans risk their safety and livelihoods to resist this regime and our pathetic congressional leadership cannot stand up against the lightest of political winds. Kirk was a nasty bigot -his murder was a crime and tragedy but his life should not be honored.

Today's Low Quality Ad is for this Possum Towel. I repeat the same mantra to myself every time I get a new work email. collabs.shop/jwt0re

Tonight at 11:30

I always bring a cookie monster puppet and have it speak my protest chants.

It's not just that but we've been saying for the last eight years that the failure to oppose Trump aggressively would embolden him and politically normalize the terrible things he does and the Democratic electeds have said that he will go away or burn out on his own (self impeach).Who's been right?

It's starting to think that the causus belli for Musk's buyout of twitter was the Babylon Bee being suspended for a single transgender joke in 2022. It was not especially controversial at the time. Now the grossest most hateful comments are commonplace both online and in political life. The 1/2

I wish that some of them would grapple with the fact that at our current trajectory winning congress on 2026 won't matter. Trump will demand that they not be seated and even if they are they will be powerless. Trump will have complete power of the purse and use if to govern as a dictator. 1/2

We literally had a violent coup attempt and immediately pivoted to stimulus policy.

It should be needless to say, but it is perhaps at this moment worth saying, that transgender individuals have the same right as anyone else to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We don't talk about The Ratio anymore but this is a good one.

How it started. How it’s going

It's looking likely that David Zini will be apppointed as a new Shin Bet head by the end of September. He's a General coming from Israel's Kahanist fringe, who Netanyahu had previously refused to promote because he was "too messianic".

Apropos of nothing, here's a thread of some Charlie Kirk highlights

This is part of it but I think that the bigger factor is that American Jewish views on the war in Gaza have shifted pretty dramatically as it has gone on without resolution and the civilian toll has grown so high. I don't think that we see this same result in mid 2024.

How many times are we going to hear this "master plan of the plutocrats" nonsense. The rich don't want tariffs. They don't want measles outbreaks. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't get a piece of Finland if we invade it

Practically speaking the exact extent does not matter. Democrats are massively failing to break through in the present information environment and until they do better job this deficiency will overwhelm everything else.

This first became very apparent during the vaccine mandate cases where the right wing justices started spouting a bunch of non record antivax talking points that they clearly absorbed from Fox News

This is what I mean about all of the kitchen table stuff just being a pretext not to fight. Domestic violence is very unpopular! Also Trump abused and raped his ex-wife. Go out and attack him on this stuff.

At no point in 2016 do I recall Republicans torturing themselves to connect Hillary Clinton’s email practices with voter pocket books.

Here's gov't shutdown in a nutshell: GOP needs two things (a) pass budget bill (b) fix ACA cut that will go into effect before midterms. The Dem strategy is to give the GOP both in exchange for nothing then blame the Dem base for not understanding how good that is.

Literally all they have are their ability to shape the debate and they refuse to use it. The public believes that Trump is an ordinary conservative Republican and that these disagreements are ordinary partisan fights because Democrats act like Trump is normal and doing normal things.

As far as I can tell Shri Thanedar and Al Green have introduced impeachment articles. AOC has called some stuff impeachable and about 260 others have refused to state this obvious truth.

Has a single Democrat said Trump should be impeached and removed for his open defiance of the Constitution? Or are those words too scary for our fearless opposition leaders to say out loud

Immigrants are a social good, anti-immigrant propaganda is basically all lies, and any approach to the "problem" that doesn't start form those two points is worthless

Couldn’t get a more clear example of Wilhoit’s theory of conservatism: “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

The crazy thing is that he could have just done fascism without massively screwing with the economy. This whole thing is just so gratuitous. A mad king with no one to tell him no.

I will say that I have heard anecdotes of this going back fifteen or twenty years, long predating zoomer discourse. I don't know how prevalent it was in reality but it's not something he came up with (so to speak).

Like there is no secret Haliburton plan to maximize profits by giving everyone measles. The conservative coalition just loves seeing things that are important to others burned down.

Jeffrey Epstein the Port of Cleveland CEO?

The fact that Trump,a racist billionaire has made enormous gains with not just the white working class but Latinos too should maybe cause people to rethink their priors.We have had enormous realignments to Republicans over the last 10 years and virtually no curiosity by Dems about how they did it.

there is a way in which this is even an explicit repudiation of the constitution itself, created not to pass some european idea of "nationhood" down to posterity, but to pass *republican self-government* down to posterity.

Part of the messiness of this debate is that the actual severe NPIs enjoyed broad support when they happened. The real resistance was generated during the Delta/Omicron period when people were vaccinated but there was still a lot of sickness and death and there were fights over closures, masking 1/2

You can for example easily test in surveys that people blame Democrats for the massive surges in crime that have happened in the last ten years and the vast increases in illegal immigration even though none of those things have happened. So it's not clear what the action plan should be.

TOWN BULLY (NOTICING REACHER): Who’s this, your boyfriend? REACHER (BLOTTING OUT SUN): No,

How many people in your real life that since 2018 have become really angry about America's global dominance or some crap. None. Now how many people do you know who have gone crazy from the Internet? I know plenty in addition to well known public figures like Musk or Rowling.

This whole thing is so bizarre because our own national mythology is built around the (accurate) belief that notions of liberty and self determination became widespread. We talk about the Federalist Papers and how they influenced the masses to rise up at significant material risk. We now live in 1/

This is insanity. This is the sign of a government that has lost its mind.