John Holbo jholbo.bsky.social
@jholbo1
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Ecce Holbo. (Professor of Philosophy, Illustrator of Philosophers.)
Joined August 2015
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I beg this favor of friends and followers. Kindly share and retweet. I'm living the dream! Webcomics. "On Beyond Zarathustra - A Double-Parody For All & None"! I built a 'website' (as the kids say)!
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I don't believe this guy lets a day go by without attempting a false equivalency between something a Dem did that was, in context, totally fine, and something Trump did that was, in context, so bad as to be basically unprecedented in the history of the US Presidency.
It's not just Republican primary voters who rally around people who break the rules & disrupt the working of legislatures.
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Right-wing 'culture war' politics is, to a degree that is hard to gauge but quite undeniable, fuelled by wish-fulfilment fantasies of strong men seizing power and wielding it with impunity - fetish tableau of 'you asked for it!' dominance & submission.
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A superhero named Placebo, whose power is that people react to him as if he had powers.
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Easter is here! (Coloring finally done.)
Mangog!
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Cabbage is under-rated from a design perspective.
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@plmanseau
I think it's pretty much impossible to beat literal wrong turn in traffic lands you right in front of Gavril Princip, who is waiting on the wrong street to kill you, and you stop to sort out wrong turn, and Princip shoots you dead, causing the 20th Century to take a wrong turn.
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I surely didn't know about Tulsa, growing up, but the single thing I have learned in the last few years, that most shocked me and also fundamentally altered my view of the landscape, was the prevalence of 'sundown towns' across the US. 1/
Tulsa isn’t the only race massacre you were never taught in school. Here are others.
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I got curious when 'cancel' was first used of a person. It appears to be from Milton, "Paradise Lost". I cannot find an earlier instance.
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If Elon blows up Twitter it's gonna be a classic 'cozy catastrophe'. We'll go off into the wilderness, whittle blogs out of HTML. Send up RSS smoke signals. We old ones will pass along lost wisdom to the young. 'What IS it, grampaw?' 'It's a blogroll.'
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This is not just intuitively the morally most satisfying result, it should surely be legally correct. If you write off an asset as a 'loss' you don't get to keep owning the asset. You lose it.
when movies get deleted for tax reasons, they should legally become public domain. people should be allowed to upload it anywhere they want. that's the tradeoff you make if you wanna delete your own movie released this year for a few extra bucks, and i think it's fair
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Today’s protesters are not observing proper time, place and manner restrictions. Protests are permitted but must be held in the past.
Yet even though Cornell loves to celebrate the ARMED OCCUPATION of a campus building, they've decided peaceful pro-Palestine protests are beyond the pale. Students like
@unionnick
have been suspended for political speech during Cornell's "Freedom of Expression" theme year. 4/
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The Kant thing is boring because the guy hasn't read Kant and is, therefore, making stuff up. But it's interesting that a grown man, who doesn't have a college paper due, would straight up pretend to have read any Kant. Like, any. 1/
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Arguing with people like this about trans stuff is like arguing about whether DEI is a good idea with someone who does not accept the legitimacy of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
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'Tis the season to re-up my masterpiece. What if Dr. Seuss had written "Over the Garden Wall"? Every year I hope
@Patrick_McHale
will notice me, but it never happens. Sad.)
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It’s weird to have a major political party, the GOP, one of whose main functions is reverse-gatekeeping on the right. Rather than keeping kooks out, it positively functions as a transgressive space where otherwise unacceptable views and behavior have to be regarded as acceptable.
Congratulations to Laura Loomer on her primary win!
Now Twitter should re-instate her account.
@jack
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Twitter is good with the caveat that for some people Twitter is like being in a hotel and the hotel is evil and the hotel makes you chase innocent people around with an axe. And if there'd been no hotel you might have just stayed a writer or something.
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(Sigh.) Religious liberty is a liberal value. It is not imperiled by liberals ceasing to be religious. Atheists have no problem supporting religious liberty. Religious liberty IS imperiled - but by religious believers like Dreher ceasing to be liberal. 1/
Very bad news that so many US liberals are leaving Christianity. Aside from the fate of their souls, this is going to make defending religious liberty in the decades to come far more difficult. Thanks to
@ryanburge
for the data.
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If we assume that infinitely many preborn souls are all rights-bearing persons then all women are morally obliged to be constantly pregnant? We need to reconceive of human life as a massive, Dunkirk-like rescue operation out of Limbo? We must pave the earth with people?
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Pete Buttigieg sure is good at this. In politics, if you are explaining you're losing. Pete's superpower is to explain without losing. R's always seek to portray liberal-progressive acts/goals as crazy & extremist. Pete always gets it back to 'no, this is reasonable' in 1 minute.
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Terrorism is unacceptable, even given Israel's brutal occupation.
Israel's brutal occupation is unacceptable, even given Hamas' terrorism.
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Imagine if there were an umpire SO good at just calling balls n' strikes the fans of one team in particular kept buying him lavish vacations for his impartiality.
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Here it is. The argument goes: if you can ban abortion, you can be as invasive as you need to be to ban it effectively. But that would imply too-invasive state action. Ergo a right to 'privacy' protects abortion rights. This is the "Roe" logic, basically.
So, I'm starting to think about this "no out of state abortions" rule. Can a state stop you from going next door to do other stuff? Drink? Commit adultery? If they find a map to Vegas, they can arrest you?
Basically, state police in the red states are going to be modern Vopos?
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Premise: the town is under attack. The Catholic priest fails. In the end only an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, with her liberal, creedless tolerance has the power to stop them. Vampires hate "respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part."
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@martyrmade
One of the uglier aspects of the Civil War was that men of means in the South were able to purchase people.
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Reasons why I'm single ...
1. Causa sui.
2. Incapable of interacting with other substances.
3. I'm the only thing that exists.
4 If that's not me, then I don't exist.
Reasons why I'm single
1. Hobby is making bizarre perfumes
2. Bejewelled tortoise as pet
3. Nocturnal
4. Force servants to wear felt slippers
5. Prefer imagining travel to travelling
6. Nervous system strained by years of overstimulation
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@niralshah
Dabney Colman (as the Dalai Lama) and a young Dolly Parton as the new one, who isn't getting enough credit for her spirituality. "Working 8 to 4". (8-fold path to 4 noble truths, that is.)
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@roddreher
@LPJamison
@conor64
People understand you fine. They just don't think it makes sense to define 'ruling class' in such a way that it has nothing to do with wealth or power.
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Beto's gotten dragged a lot but credit where due.
This is her. Her name is Gina. Her daughter's name is Summer. The problem with our economy is she has to live in her car—while a disgraced TV host like you makes millions.
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This is a strange column. It consists of arguing, indignantly, that everything
@jbouie
says is objectionably … true. As to what to call it that Harlan’s famous, lonely dissent isn’t really anti-racist? How about: ironic?
If opposing Jim Crow alone at the peak of its ascendancy in 1896 isn't "anti-racist," what does that term really mean? |
@baseballcrank
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@ryanlcooper
@chrislhayes
"'I have done that,' says my memory. 'I cannot have done that,' says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually - memory yields." - Nietzsche
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Earliest recorded 2020 ‘how it started/how it’s going’ meme, circa 11th century.
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How to teach Jim Crow if it is illegal to teach that racism is embedded in society or law, or that Jim Crow served the function of upholding white supremacy, rather than it just being the case that a bunch of individuals at the time coincidentally all didn't like black people.
American history textbooks in the state of Florida "may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles"—if they want to be used in *public schools* that is.
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It really is astonishing how true it is. Conservatism says the law protects in-group members without binding them; while binding out-group members, not protecting them. Mafia logic all the way up and down.
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I consider myself a lefty Dem. I'm not even one of those lefties who is habitually infuriated at the party for not being more lefty even though I'm more lefty than the party. But I find this sort of rhetoric to be not just indefensible, morally, but actually incomprehensible.
Nancy Pelosi: Protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza "is Mr. Putin's message... Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see...
"I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some I think are connected to Russia."
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This is quite shocking.
Tremendous & extremely thorough
@radleybalko
piece that shows the scientific weakness underlying forensic firearm analysis, the ubiquitous criminal-justice practice that says a specific bullet can be matched to a specific gun.
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James Loewen, who wrote the book, remarks on that page: "When I began this research, I expected to find about 10 sundown towns in Illinois (my home state) and perhaps 50 across the country. Instead, I have found about 507 in Illinois and thousands across the United States." 2/
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Great read. It's hard to find clear, lengthy statements, written for popular consumption, revealing how politicians in this era really think about the fact that the parties are ideologically unsorted. (Not that these statements are fully candid, but it's something.)
In my MYTH AMERICA chapter on the Southern Strategy, I mention this 1951 debate between two Republicans that unfolded in the pages of Collier’s Magazine.
The title gives the question: “Should the G.O.P. Merge with the Dixiecrats?”
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@NeilClark66
Toilet paper is cancelled. We weren't born with a roll hanging over our butts, conveniently.
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Hanania, Dreher and Kisin experience contemporary politics as a disagreeable dom-sub set-up, with the 'woke' as the doms. But their objection is not to politics as sublimated dom-sub play, per se. They crave reversing the roles but keeping the game the same.
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The price of conceding too much to the critics of "Roe", over the years, has been erosion of a sense of why a right to 'privacy', to be 'left alone', is in fact plausibly rooted in the Constitution: in the 4th, the 9th, and - yes - the 14th.
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@Noahpinion
Yes. Not to be snarky. Totally serious. Stuff like this perfectly illustrates what antisemitism that obviously isn't anti-zionism looks like. No one throws an elbow because they think the Balfour declaration was a tragic mistake in retrospect or anything like that.
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Everyone talks about epistemic justice. No one talks about epistemic revenge. An eye for an eye, a truth for a truth.
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This seems like a good joke - and it is - but it’s actually a deep point about the co-evolution of ‘cartooning’ and Modernism. By extension about the long misconstrual of the relation between Modernism and ‘primitivism’. But it turned out ok! (Which is what makes it a good joke.)
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Cops blasting Disney music to weaponize copyright to block citizen oversight is such a Cory Doctorow premise that HE should be able to sue the cops for copyright violation, feels like.
The officer - an SAPD corporal, badge 3134 - woke the sleeping residents of W Civic Center Dr and N Western Ave at 11 p.m., and kept the Disney tunes going for hours until a resident - who was also a Santa Ana city councilor - confronted him.
5/
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@baseballcrank
17th, 18th & early 19th century Americans had arguably the world's highest standards of living before the development of penicillin. Should we ban antibiotics to get our standard of living back up to the top? (The thing about arguing logic with conservatives is - they won't.)
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@njhochman
'Surely it can't be nefarious if, in the end, our cruel plot is foiled. Pick a lane, good guys!'
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It is impressive how Trump's 'Russia Russia Russia hoax' memory hole has worked and conservatives - even just Trump-curious ones like Dreher - truly remember the Mueller report as having turned up 'nothing'.
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This Tyler Cowen piece has gotten attention. A note. The far-right is NOT more skeptical of elites. It despises liberal elites, in theory & practice, because it despises liberalism. It is LESS skeptical of elite rule in principle again due to illiberalism.
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@mattyglesias
I do feel that the right has an historic advantage over the left in the high-functioning-nihilism department.
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It literally is a case, then, of R's saying: if D's are going to behave perfectly, even in a tough situation, under pressure, we R's have no choice but to do wrong, horribly, even when it ought to be easy to do right. And when that happens, you will only have yourselves to blame.
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Huh. William Blake. Shine on you crazy diamond.
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Oh that's BAD.
SCOOP from me &
@NickSurgey
: In new leaked video dark money group Heritage Action brags to top donors about writing “model legislation” making it harder to vote in GA TX IA FL AZ. This is proof of massive coordinated right-wing voter suppression campaign
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@baseballcrank
But it isn't correct to denounce two candidates, one of whom is a normie pol - Biden - one of whom is a - threat to the republic - Trump, as if they are similarly bad. Nichols is pointing out correctly that you are using your public platform to hereby spread falsehoods.
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Why does John Bolton always want war, especially with Iran? I get it he doesn't have a good reason but I don't really get what his bad reason is. What's his origin story?
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Locke believed in mermaids. Rousseau believed in vampires (or, rather, believed all ideal epistemic agents believe in them.) Kant had highly exact beliefs about Jovian biology. And we're supposed to act like none of that happened.
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@weird_christmas
@LaurynIpsum
I should maybe add that the reason I didn't consider at the time that I might fool someone is I underestimated just how weird Victorian cards can get. I was not yet familiar with the outer reaches of the genre. I just had a stack of cute, fringed items to photoshop.
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@baseballcrank
@drvolts
I don't think 'no matter how awful Trump was, there is something some Dem did, that is honestly fine, that I can make out as just as bad' is a good principle.
No, seriously: make the case, taking the whole situation into account, that what those two guys did was wrong.
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Another case, like 'Gore did it first in 2000, undermining trust in elections!' where it isn't even some Dem doing something slightly wrong. Gore in 2000 did right, given the hanging chad intensity (not his doing.) And these 2 guys engaged in textbook, ideal civil disobedience.
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It will be literally a miracle if the R's back down. There are no mechanisms whereby individual R's can be pressured to act responsibly. Individually they'll just get grief for 'caving to Biden' if they do the right thing. So, yeah, platinum coin.
Some Dems just don't seem willing to accept the full implications of GOP radicalization. Dems need to take seriously the possibility that Republicans really are willing to default, accept that normal politics may not be the answer, and plan accordingly:
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Listening to
@samuelmoyn
Carlyle lectures. I'm through the first two, on Shklar and Berlin. This stuff is dynamite, man. My historiographic presuppositions are significantly atremble. Kid you not.
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What IS imperiled in the US is, as it were, Christian hegemony, the right or privilege to dominate the culture. You can call it 'positive liberty', the freedom to dominate, modestly but firmly, without being dominated. That is clearly not a right that can be extended to ALL. 3/
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I have heard the word. It is ... Easter! (Damn, tiny eggs are an unforgiving and smear-y medium. I’ll let these dry for a day.)
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The GOP's trolling problem. Your trolling is barreling down the tracks. If you continue to troll, 5 of your elderly voters will be killed. But if you switch tracks, 1 liberal will say 'I told you so'. What do you do?
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Baseball is responsible for his own choices and acts. Hence his understandable irritation at having the nature of his choices and acts pointed out by
@jbarro
. 1/
Everyone is responsible for their own choices & acts. If you claim that there is an existential, above-parties interest in keeping Trump out of power, your choice to help Trump get closer to power is one that you must answer for.
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It is impossible to think sanely about the situation without acknowledging that Hamas is significantly a creature of Israeli realpolitik policy. The goal of the policy was to forestall any peaceful solution by preventing the emergence of any group that might credibly back one.
How Israel helped spawn Hamas, from that notorious Islamist sheet, the Wall Street Journal
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Alright, I have completed my pragmatism portrait set. Rorty, Dewey, James and Peirce. And I made one of my graphics to celebrate. I really wish I had a job designing dubious book covers fifty years ago.
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11 things can be true at once.
1) Israeli policy towards Palestinians has been & continues to be deeply unjust.
2) Belief in 1) is not antisemitic.
3) Since 1) is a main root of the conflict 'solutions' that ignore it won't work & are bad.
4) The left has an antisemitism problem.
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This interlocks with the gross over-representation of rural America in our political system. Just think about that. R's like to polish it up, like so: small town America is just more politically virtuous in Tocqueville-something-something fashion. Deliberative democracy! 10/
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@DouthatNYT
The motive is that DeSantis calculates performative cruelty to migrants and wasteful trolling of blue states will solidify his brand. What you call the obvious actual point of the stunt is obviously not its actual point. It's the pretext. Vice signaling needs a pretext.
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Religious liberty, per the Constitution, must be enjoyed equally by all. Dreher cannot support such a right. Equal enjoyment of religious liberty by all would defeat his (illiberal) goal of establishing the desired degree of cultural hegemony for his favored conception. 4/
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Trump is popular so he ought to be allowed to run, the law be damned. There are worse arguments. I would be willing to settle for: anyone who makes the argument is permanently barred from pretending to take originalism or textualism seriously ever again.
Read this thread. I would like to pose some hypothetical questions to insurrection-deniers: Is there anything Trump could have done that *would* have unambiguously constituted insurrection — anything that you’d acknowledge *does* require disqualifying him? 1/
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We can’t know who leaked it, but - if it’s true the Justices were exempted from investigation - we can know John Roberts and Michael Chertoff think it’s highly likely a conservative Justice leaked it.
Seriously: It seems pretty clear this investigation excluded the Supreme Court justices themselves, so it's absolutely *wild* that Michael Chertoff says "I cannot identify any additional useful investigative measures" and he should be 1) asked about this and 2) mocked mercilessly
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Truly, I think that Baseball's anti-anti-ness makes him a perfect, room-temperature superconductor of partisanship. He isn't the most powerful partisan, but he is, in a way, almost perfect. No partisanship leaks away into wasted fair-mindedness, as in a normal human.
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Religious liberty, in a negative liberty sense - freedom from coercion regarding religious beliefs, attitudes, observance, expression - has never been more generously and strongly protected in the US. Legally, it's seen an unbroken string of victories. 2/
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It’s nice that psychedelic phone book cover was a thing for a few years. Peter Max and Milton Glaser.
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@SadMeganGirls
I made this a few days ago and now the hashtag has a cute little elokigatormoji to go with. Ah, well. I was ahead of my time!
#AlligatorLoki
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The main argument against investigating is that, heck, the guy was openly corrupt about this stuff so who cares if he was also secretly corrupt about it?
NEWS: Rep Jamie Raskin has been making the case to Senate Dems that they consider using their subpoena power to continue his investigation into Trump's millions in profits from foreign governments while in office.
Why aren't Senate Dems pursuing this? 1/
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My pitch. The film is "Let's Roll". The premise: an idiot passenger notices the pilot is black and his name is 'Hussein', so he assumes the plane has been hijacked. So he does the "Flight 93" necessary and hijacks the plane, thinking he's saving it. 1/
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Easter is coming. (Pour one out for Moleman, who fell and cracked. He was the best of us.) First phase coloring complete.
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I'll grant that if Musk truly wants to turn Twitter into a fetish dungeon of the right-wing cultural imaginary - well, his house, his rules. People can leave twitter if it gets bad. But politics is different. 'Since you are such conformists tyranny will set you free' is not on.
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I'm thinking of starting a thread just for things Trump does that, although they are not scandalous, for Trump, would have been major scandals for any other President. Today it's 'Bolton is classified until the election.'
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Reactions to the Paul Pelosi attack from the right prove there isn't any establishment force, in the GOP, that can act as a political brake or check on extremist right-wing violence. If the attack were more serious, that would only make it MORE imperative not to admit a problem.
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I had this idea for a visual joke. Then it was actually an idea for a story, plus a little essay. So I wrote both and you can read them. Or just laugh at the graphics and get the joke. (
@arrr
,
@eschwitz
,
@ericlinuskaplan
,
@doctorow
,
@nescio13
)
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@William_E_Wolfe
For your analogy to work Obergefell and slavery need to be relevantly analogous. The problem with slavery was that it coercively harmed people, to put it mildly. Obergefell does not coercively harm anyone.
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This is why liberalism as non-domination is a good idea. Because, frankly, some stuff is fine in the bedroom but, in the public square, it gets out of hand. It's not like you can have a safe word for the republic. And, individually, people should be able to opt out of 'subspace'.
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But, aside from the nightmare fuel quality of it, and the recency of it, and the collective amnesia about it, it feeds into one of the most salient dynamics in contemporary politics, the urban-rural 'density' divide. 8/ (
@willwilkinson
)
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'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids Republican and Democratic Presidents alike from being investigated by anyone but a Republican.'
Bill Clinton (D) was investigated by Ken Starr (R)
George W Bush (R) was investigated by Patrick Fitzegerald (R)
Hillary Clinton (D) was investigated by James Comey (R)
Donald Trump (R) was investigated by Robert Mueller (R)
Joe Biden (D) was investigated by Robert Hur (R)
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This gives the fantasy a weirdly self-negating quality. 'I wish for X and that X were -X.' The fantasy of sudden, forceful dom-sub role reversal affords a welcome sense of it-is-but-it-isn't.
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