acebojangles.bsky.social
227 posts
15 followers
19 following
Discussion Master
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One of several reasons I'm not confident that military leadership will do the right thing if Trump asks them to choose him over the country
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I just want more housing and better infrastructure.
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Also, it's important to consider the larger part of the media world that most of the country sees, where Trump is on a mission from god to protect us from the foreign demons in big cities.
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A lot of the conservative movement since Watergate has been a response to it. Fox News was created in part because Roger Ailes thought Nixon could have survived Watergate if someone told his side of the story. He was probably right.
There was accountability then and it's been eroded on purpose.
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The last 10 years has been a time of depressing realizations about America. Over the last few months it's become pretty clear that most of our press will cover a descent into total fascism as business as usual and half the country will love it.
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It really is. I'd never considered how stupid if feels to go through an authoritarian takeover. So stupid and pointless.
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Unspeakably foolish to watch the past 10 years and conclude that the courts will stop Trump.
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Or worse, the minor incidents at the peaceful protests will be highlighted. The summer 2020 protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, but were a kind of dry run for the propaganda and government response now.
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Yes, but they are also dominating the information space and have been for 10+ years. Propaganda works, unfortunately.
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As the headline suggests, money in politics seems to be a big part of the problem.
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We've been building up to this since at least 2020, when people swore up and down that Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis,etc were razed to the ground. The disparity between reality and people's perception seems worse now. The Right learned a lot from 2020. Most everyone else? Unclear
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And all it cost us was American democracy.
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One of the fundamental imbalances in our political culture is that everyone pretends that big cities suck, yet most people want to live in big cities while everyone also pretends that small towns rule, while nobody wants to live in French Lick, IN.
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They picked him because he's the most 49-year-old looking 22-year-old who ever lived.
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They fired people who wrote assessments that correctly said that Venezuela doesn't control Tren de Aragua.
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Seems like there's one political leader who has fomented conflict between nuclear powers more than any other and it's clearly Putin. Weird that she doesn't see that.
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Their democracy is working better than ours, for sure.
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If you want to understand why conservatives hate liberals, all you need to do is have a massive stroke
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This administration is a natural experiment to find out exactly how much reality matters in American politics. Early results suggest that it basically doesn't matter at all.
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Exactly this, but you can see why it is happening if you pay attention to conservative media. Half the country gets their news exclusively from sources that told them America was burning to the ground under Biden and Trump is literally a divine redeemer. They think everything is great
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Ask them if they would vote for Harris if they could do it again. I bet the answer is mostly no. That's shameful, but shame isn't the point. They want to vote for Trump and be good people, but I think they will still choose Trump if it's a choice.
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It's about as crowd pleasing as a good cocktail could be. A bit sweet. Fizzy. Easy to drink. Served in a big glass
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Exactly my question and conclusion. The lies still work with MAGA and people who don't pay attention. If we reran Trump v Harris tomorrow, I think Trump probably wins again
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Impossible to overstate how stupid we are as a country.
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We're running a massive natural experiment right now.
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The best example of this phenomenon is immigration. Democrats tried to compromise on the idea that there was an emergency and still lost. Now senators are hinting that they might vote to suspend habeas corpus.
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This won't work. Anti-trans rhetoric is not a policy position, it's almost pure demagoguery. There's no policy goal, so compromise can't be made to achieve part of that goal. The only goal is manipulating voters and it's working.
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I generally agree, except that I don't know what you mean by "outlaw". Relatedly, I think a root cause of the financial crisis in 2008 was that people feel no compunction about making money any way they can and we don't legally prosecute fraud.
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100%. If you're an international student, you've got to be thinking hard about your non-US options regardless of how this turns out legally.
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As dumb as this take is, I have to admit that I'm tempted to read the story. A darkly effective clickbait/rage bait campaign. Hopefully that's a sign that The Free Press is desperate.
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I know I'm going to get accused of whataboutism for this, but almost all political violence in America comes from the Right and there's a reason for that. This kind of talk is not normalized on the Left, but it is much more normal on the Right.
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Throw in a bunch of Facebook posts about how lycopene is a demonic Democrat plot, a Rogan interview with a doctor who says you should chase apples with Ivermectin, some Fox News stories about how Trump is standing up to big lycopene, and a NYT story about how questions are being asked about lycopene
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Two weeks, the check is in the mail, and the dog ate his homework. Kind of rude of us to ask, honestly.
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I keep thinking about Argentina. A populist leader who imposes horrible, kleptocratic policies that destroy the economy for decades and poison the country's politics.
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OK. Are there communist countries that do a good job of building housing with communist policies? Have rent freezes worked there?
"I'm a communist" doesn't transport you to a magical world where failed policies suddenly work.
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Yeah, I don't agree with a lot of Yglesias stuff (and he's particularly bad on BlueSky), but I think he has some interesting takes. I guess you'll just go on thinking rent controls will help because you don't like Matt?
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Look up the history of price controls on housing availability. It's not a good policy.
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You definitely have to be a serious POS to be Texas Solicitor General these days. Ted Cruz held the the post previously, so I guess being a POS always helped.
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I really want to know what they redacted, given what was left in.
Honestly, a little comforting to see that a Texas official still has to resign if they harass people in their office. I'm not sure I would have predicted that.
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I hope you know what would happen if Biden and Trump did equal press time:
Every Biden gaffe would be a front page story.
Every Trump gaffe would be buried and cleaned up.
You're almost getting why we're here, but you just can't let go of the insistence that it's really Dems' faults.
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And when we get their, half of America will be certain that Biden/Democrats did it.
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The Democratic brand is poison. People don't seem to comment on that enough. I don't really understand it, except that half the country gets all of their information from sources that say Democrats eat babies.
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As a veteran, thank you for saying this
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Do you think voters can accurately identify Democratic positions on any issue? I don't think so, and I'm therefore skeptical that changing those positions will matter to voters
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I just don't know why you think that means they should have stayed the lower court order. The Supreme Court never needs to hear this case.
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No, they could have let the district court judgement stand
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They don't have to hear the case. And they shouldn't
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Well, that's part of the problem. But no Democrat or lowly normal person would get this kind of assist from the court.
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Amen to all of this. It's also the reason why betraying trans people and other minorities won't help Democrats. Nobody is going to give them credit for it in the MSM and the right wing media will just keep the propaganda spewing out.
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I wish we lived in a country where passing a ruinously awful bill doomed a political party. I'm skeptical. We are in this mess because many people think politics has basically no relationship to legislation and policy.