joelbirch.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Can anyone tell me why there is a widespread societal war being waged upon what amounts to less than 1% of the population? This is some fucking bullshit.

submitted 10 hours ago • 2 comments

"Don't write and deploy good policies that address the root cause of public discontent - just do podcasts and then sometimes geopolitical circumstances will result in you being elected, after which you can be the right-wing nightmare you always wanted to be" www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

submitted 12 hours ago • 20 comments

The thing that’s very important to remember about American conservatives and any other sort of fascist is that anytime they posit some value or principle or positive outcome, they are lying. Every time they talk about stealing and enslaving and murdering and terrorizing, they are telling the truth.

submitted 1 day ago • 11 comments

"A federal judge on Tuesday blocked" Trump's "retribution campaign" against Susman Godfrey and others, calling it "'a shocking abuse of power....While I wish other firms were not capitulating as readily, I admire firms like Susman for standing up and challenging it.'” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/u...

submitted 2 days ago • 4 comments

Just a reminder how classic what we're seeing is: 1. redefine a group as a threat to civilization 2. reduce legal protections that they enjoy 3. abuse, threaten, harm, and/or relocate them 4. dismiss/ignore concerns about abuses and harms from the process 5. repeat steps 2-4, escalating each time

submitted 2 days ago • 118 comments

People in Cambria County, PA (where I grew up) were very excited about Trump in 2016 because he said he'd bring coal jobs back to that once flourishing mining area. By 2020 exactly 2 coal jobs had come back to the county, both of which required a college degree. In 2024 they voted for him again.

submitted 2 days ago • 25 comments

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg struggled in federal court to defend his reasons for the Facebook owner’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram more than a decade ago — one of two acquisitions the Federal Trade Commission now contends was illegally anticompetitive.

submitted 2 days ago • 159 comments

Heard someone say Bukele gave off the same vibes as the Zara salesman at the mall who asks the 19 year old girls who work at the food court if they’ve ever done any modeling.

submitted 2 days ago • 19 comments

Leica 🔴

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Leica 🔴

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Whenever I'm sitting with people who wanna have a discussion about American fascism, and someone (and yes, it's mostly a white American liberal) starts talking in a way that makes it seem like America "only just" became fascist, I immediately stand up and leave.

submitted 3 days ago • 4 comments

And congratulations to the Labour Party, who even now, is allying with the far right to shutdown non pro Israel discourse at American universities through one of their Blairite front organisations.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Every year, we observe April 15 as Steal Something from Work Day—an opportunity to reflect on the causes and implications of workplace theft. crimethinc.com/StealfromWor... This year, we turn our focus to “Robin Hood employees”—those who steal from their workplaces in order to share with others. 🧵

submitted 3 days ago • 4 comments

We've reached the point in our descent into fascism where the Jewish governor's house getting firebombed on Passover by a guy trying to bash his head in with a sledgehammer is overshadowed by the story of the President saying he wants to build foreign gulags for US citizens.

submitted 3 days ago • 369 comments

We’re really entering dangerous territory where white people are all in on concentration camps. nypost.com/2025/04/14/u...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

We’re living in an apocalypse as imagined by a jock rapist who’s only seen the first 30 minutes of EL TOPO.

submitted 3 days ago • 142 comments

When I reported a long 2021 piece about Cuomo, a thing that many people who worked for him for years told me about (besides the corruption, incompetence & cruel domination tactics) was that he & those in his senior circles JUST DIDN'T CARE about policy, or about actually getting anything done.

submitted 3 days ago • 22 comments

Your regular reminder that almost everything Trump is getting away with is not because of presidential strength, but because of congressional weakness and judicial deference. The constitutional tools are already there to fix this, but those who can fix it are refusing to do so.

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

One of hundreds of people abducted by ICE and sold to slavery in El Salvador was a 19 year old with no criminal record in the US or Venezuela and no tattoos of any kind. An ICE kidnapper who grabbed him outside his house said, "He's not the one." The other said, "Take him anyway." So they did.

submitted 4 days ago • 694 comments

I hope @theatlantic.com and @nytopinion.nytimes.com are happy they spent years laying the “intellectual” groundwork for the Trump attacking free speech. Ditto for the Democrats who bought the idiotic “young leftists are antisemitic” bullshit. You all built this.

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

I do as well, but it means that we need to primary nearly every single person in the Democratic Party (with obvious exceptions). Most of the party leadership comes from the Bush/Obama years that let Bush/Cheney, the greatest war criminals of my lifetime scot free and prevented any investigations.

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

This, from the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

submitted 3 days ago • 59 comments

Oxfam America has noted that the firing of 50,000 IRS employees — roughly half the agency’s staff — would “hurt ordinary people through slower refunds and customer service, while allowing wealthy tax cheats to pocket billions of dollars.”

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

Nahhh. Maher wasn't duped - he wanted exactly what he got. He's an old Boomer who wants to be at the new A-listers' table with Joe Rogan and his imitators. He's ready to jettison the liberals in his audience for some of that action.

submitted 5 days ago • 109 comments

Okie dokie

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Chevron made 8bn profit off Australian gas last year- $17bn in the last 3y. In that time it’s paid $0 in petroleum resources rent tax. We let multinationals sell our gas overseas for free while we struggle with a cost-of-living crisis. I’ll keep pushing for fair tax reform.

submitted 4 days ago • 16 comments

I've got major issues with Josh Shapiro's politics. But antisemitism is antisemitism and I'd like to know where President Antiantisemitism is. And by the way, when the call comes from inside the far-right, deporting more pro-Palestinian supporters for doesn't make Jews safer.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Not Antisemitism (according to MAGA): - Firebombing a Jewish governor‘s house during Passover - Doing a Sieg Hitler salute - Eating dinner with neo-Nazis Antisemitism (according to MAGA): - Saying Israelis and Palestinians deserve rights and dignity - Using freedom of speech on campus

submitted 4 days ago • 43 comments

submitted 4 days ago • 42 comments

so, uh, is this a red line?

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

I'm a lawyer and this is correct. Straight line of "blatantly illegal constitutional end-runs to violate human rights" from Iran–Contra to Gitmo to CECOT paved by the only consequences the perpetrators suffering being more money, more power, and more prestige.

submitted 4 days ago • 71 comments

When the Obama administration launched healthcare dot gov the media wrote endless articles about the imperfection of the roll out. Trump changes his tariff policy every five minutes – causing panic in the world economy and the media just reports it as normal.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

For whatever reason this part of the 'kid who killed his parents and wanted to assassinate Trump story' doesn't seem to be getting as much play. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

submitted 4 days ago • 86 comments

Can't slam "repost" on this hard enough

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Here come the people saying the left are equally as bad as the right, give it a few hours.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

I think you can explain quite a lot of this government's priorities if you start from the assumption that the people responsible are genuinely, sincerely, very right-wing.

submitted 6 days ago • 3 comments

Ended. Up. Ended. Up. endedup

submitted 5 days ago • 121 comments

Our VA therapists aren't allowed to text or email us anymore. Everything we say in therapy is potentially sent to MAGA DOGE, the anti-Patriots. I rely on the VA to survive now I need an alternative to survive. Dead vets are cheaper than alive ones. www.npr.org/sections/sho...

submitted 5 days ago • 9 comments

Kinda hard to see a free and fair 2028 election where she doesn’t win by a lot.

submitted 5 days ago • 920 comments