dasdoak.bsky.social
Gentleman adventurer, mostly decent bastard, only slightly pessimistic optimist. I ride bikes, tinker, program, and read way too much.
4,706 posts
580 followers
724 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
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It's what they would do!
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He's not getting in their way was the point.
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Clearly. My central point is that I don't think Schumer is the best person to do those things, I think he knows that and, while I will fault him for *MANY* things, I'm not going to shit on him for standing back and letting people who are better at those things do them.
bsky.app/profile/dasd...
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There are other people who are *far* better at banging the drum and getting the message out, and standing back and letting them do that is a good choice.
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The thing about Schumer is that he's an organizer, not a leader, and his skills are a poor fit for this moment. That being said, he is actively working both to organize his caucus and to make it as easy as possible for Republicans to work with him - which are the most impactful things he can do.
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And he has publicly advocated for the release of detainees:
bsky.app/profile/schu...
Though, again, he hasn't done as much of that as I'd like, and he's really not someone who has a theatrical bone in his body; again, that's work probably best handled by someone else in the caucus.
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Public meetings and interviews with Trump's victims would be nice - but ICE is refusing access to them and there are better reps to do work.
Encouraging defiance is legally problematic, and could lead to him being arrested on trumped up charges which brings us back to the impeachment votes problem.
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...no, you're advocating that he take "actions"; what specific actions are you advocating that he take? This is a pretty direct question that you should be able to answer if you're going to make that demand of a politician.
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What sort of actions do you think that he could do, that he should be doing, which would actually pose a risk to his reputation?
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The most gracious interpretation of Schumer's actions is that he's trying to make himself still seem open to working with Republicans in such a way that a bipartisan impeachment seems easier. I think he could spend more time attacking Trump directly, but that's hardly "risky" behavior.
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Impeaching Trump is still a possible offramp from this shit show with minimal downsides, and we should ABSOLUTELY NOT do anything that might make it harder.
Now, state and local Dems - particularly in Blue States - have a lot more leeway to act in courageous ways because they aren't as critical.
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Here's the problem: we don't want Schumer - or any other congressional Democrat - to risk themselves right now because, if Trump does something that manages to horrify congressional Republicans into considering impeachment, we will need EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRAT REPRESENTATIVE to make it happen.
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If we wanted Schumer to be able to stop Trump, we would've needed to give him a Democratic majority in the Senate to do that! And, given how close the Senate is right now, asking Chuck to go get himself arrested is REALLY DUMB.
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Calling out Schumer for being insufficiently pugnacious is one thing - I do it - but claiming that he's "not willing to do anything risky to save democracy" is nonsense; he's the minority leader, there isn't really anything risky he *can* do to stop Trump that isn't better done by someone else!
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It's calling out bullshit when you see it. 🤷
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We live in a society ruled by sociopaths who have spent the last few decades trying to establish their sociopathy as the norm rather than empathy.
It's worked extraordinarily well with too many people.
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Imagining a solution to that is like trying to imagine a way to stop a car which has had its brakes fail, its emergency brake fail, and the engine of which has become uncoupled from the transmission.
All the safeties are gone, and you aren't really left with any good options.
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At the same time "The President, both houses of Congress, *and* the Supreme Court are all controlled by individuals determined to ignore their oath of office" is a systemic failure that you can't really design for.
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Here's one:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5IE...
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Mine too! I drive past its empty husk sometimes and remember all the weird golf murals inside. Honestly a really sad decor scheme compared to the crazy shit other places got.
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Was gonna say, this was originally the niche RadioShack fit into, though Fry's shoved them out of it because they could just fit *so* much more shit as electronics continued diversifying.
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They had conditional hospitality norms for the *hosts* - doing the equivalent of this as a guest (say, asking a slave of your host if they were actually a freeman and had been forced back into bondage against their will) would be an incredible beach of norms.
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It got Elon to be the richest man in the world, didn't it?
Seriously though, the fact that asshole got tons of money and was never held accountable for any of the dozens of open frauds he was running is going to make corporate governance a nightmare for the next generation or two at least.
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...what do you mean? They can be made to enrich the soil too.
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We're going to have a substantial chunk of heinous things done by ICE too, beyond the extremely illegal enforcement actions they're taking. Impunity mixed with the sort of psychopathic mindset that *wants* a job where you rip people away from their families is a recipe for abuse.
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And some disabled people are disabled in ways that make it impossible to drive safely! Driving is one of the *MOST* exclusionary forms of transit given that you have to have good reflexes, sobriety, and a substantial chunk of money to do it safely.
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Because basically *every single group* I mentioned can safely use the bus or walk, and a significant percentage can safely ride a bike, even if they cannot safely drive.
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Hey, quick question; how do cars accommodate the disabled and elderly people who cannot safely drive? How do they accommodate kids who are too young to drive, but whose parents would like to have the autonomy to safely walk to the park or the store?
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You're behaving as though this is something that is innate, which is convenient because it lets you ignore the fact that the Palestinians have *VERY* valid grievances against Israel for repeated violations of their rights. If polite requests are ignored, violence becomes the only apparent answer.
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Anyways, the proportion of violence and death has always been the same; Palestinians suffer disproportionately while Israelis do not. As I said, the Israelis have *orders of magnitude* more blood on their hands.
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lol, sure, if you ignore all the evidence to the contrary. What, after all, was the long blockade of Gaza prior to October 7th if not sustained violence against the people living in Gaza, even if we ignore all the violence that was indiscriminately meted out during that period.
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At the same time, you have to look at the outcomes and what each side did when it had power - and, from that perspective, Israeli leaders deserve *far* more opprobrium than Palestinian ones. Palestinians aren't blameless, but the Israelis have *orders of magnitude* more blood on their hands.
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That is, again, nonsense, given that the creation of an independent Jewish state was actively opposed by Assimilationist Jews, who thought that having a state actor tied to their religion would prove to be disastrous for Jews around the world in their home countries - and they were proven right!
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...and the modern EU contains modern Hungary. Economic integration does not mean actual justice for all the people within the economically integrated states.
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No, it wasn't anachronistic! There were dozens of multiethnic states at that period of time! And, no, they weren't integrated! You can go read through the plan; it's a pretty bare-bones "economic union" far closer to the modern EU than to an actual confederated state!
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Just because I expect them to be tasteless assholes doesn't mean I can't complain about it when they are.
...of course, the fact that they're racist fascists is a far bigger problem than that they have shit taste in booze, but my hatred can inhabit of multitude of forms.
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Though, again, in all those cases there wasn't a *new* group moving into the area demanding that they get their own state for their own ethnicity at the expense of the ethnic majority that already lived there.
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Uh, yeah, actually - though in the case of the partition of India, the problem was that they didn't partition it *correctly* - like how the partition of Ottoman Mesopotamia was partitioned in a spectacularly dumb way under Sykes-Picot.
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Noooooo - the partition plan was explicitly for two completely separate states, with one *EXPLICITLY* Arab and one *EXPLICITLY* Jewish. They were supposed to share an economic union for customs duties and operation of *some* infrastructure and have rights of passage, but it was still two states.
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Having a gin and tonic before noon is a crime against good taste.
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The 1947 partition was a *terrible* plan, even though the ultimate Nakba was far worse. The Arabs were right in that the entire territory should have been able to remain contiguous and exercise self-determination as a whole rather than being split, and international law was on their side.