Seven years ago, a brave & composed 19-year old named Zach Wahls stood up in front of the Iowa legislature and delivered a speech about growing up with two mothers in a lesbian household.
I get a perverse pleasure out of reading this guy beating on people on Twitter. Thread enclosed but this is how it wound up:
They say I should work hard to patiently illustrate how your moral judgments are fundamentally untenable. But it's useless. This was not a bad man. This was not a bad family. You're just a bad person. And I can't fix that.
— Respectable Lawyer (@RespectableLaw) June 10, 2018
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
I still think Twitter is awful overall (despite some very excellent content, much of which gets reposted here), but I really have to credit her for playing the long game here. She had to have known she could only tweet this once; tweeting it a second time would just mute the impact. And if I’d been her, I wouldn’t have been able to restrain myself from tweeting these three words the second I saw this headline:
(click to embiggen; if it’s illegible on your screen, the relevant headline reads “Pence used personal email in office”)
But she held off. It was a gamble, because it was entirely possible that no more influential person to the outcome of 2016 was going to turn out to be a hypocrite on this issue. It certainly wasn’t going to be Trump – he’s a hypocrite on almost every issue, but he doesn’t use email and had never held elected office before 2017, so he wasn’t going to have a history of using a private email server for government business. And apart from the President, it’s hard to think of a more highly ranked figure than the Vice President.
But she held off. It must’ve required nerves of vibranium, but she held off. Without official confirmation from the woman herself, I can’t know for sure that she knew Comey was such a sanctimonious twit that he’d inevitably be revealed as a colossal hypocrite on this issue, but now I suspect she had his number exactly. She must have known it was just a matter of time before a story like this came out. Once again, she turns out to have had impeccable judgement.
And once again, the scriptwriter turns out to be completely incapable of subtlety when writing characters like Comey. Between turns like this and the use of Dennis Rodman as a figure of diplomacy, I don’t know how that jackass remains employed; plot twists like this frankly stretch the viewer’s suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.
I have to comfort myself using logic and jokes like this right now because, apart from things like Manafort being sent to jail and Cohen probably flipping, there’s precious little in the news right now to comfort me. It’s stuff like this, and works of art, and precious little else. I’d barely played video games in five years, and lately they’re among the few things that relax me. It is to weep.
ETA: Oh, huh. 4,500 posts. I don’t notice these milestones all that often. Cool.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
My dad was tortured by the Gestapo for 4 days and thrown in a concentration camp for being in the Norwegian Resistance. Growing up, he would tell me things he learned in the Resistance. I thought, I'm never going to need this stuff. Here's some things of those things #Thread
Unfortunately, I doubt he could ever be persuaded to run again. He already cleaned up white people's mess once; I doubt even he has the grace and patience to do it again. But what the fuck did those of us who actually voted for Democrats do to deserve, well, this? I'm so fucking tired of living in the shitty timeline.
ETA: also, too.
1. I’ve never tweeted before but today felt like a good day to start.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Well, true, especially now that Kennedy is retiring. I just want Obama back
At least we still have Rep. Lewis, my choice for greatest living American. Too bad there isn't much chance of him running for president.
Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. #goodtrouble
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Chess is a helluva game. It's meant to imitate war, of course, but in a civilized fashion. The best strategies are born of an instinct to think far ahead about the ripple effect of a single move. Your decision on whether to move your pawn one or two spaces initially can decide the entire thing. It takes patience, concentration, and planning.
Of course, there's one way to make sure you always win your chess game. That's to walk up to the table, slap the pieces to the floor, pick up the board and beat your opponent bloody with it, set the pieces on fire and shove them up your opponent's ass, and, if necessary, slam the table itself down on your opponent until they resign from the game.
This is the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
No matter how much it may seem to you that civility and leading with love and going high are the right answers, don't talk over the people yelling that the risk is too great, the costs too high and the urgency too severe for that.
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) June 27, 2018
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
This quote from our greatest president is probably too long to fit in my signature, so I'll drop it here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Abraham Lincoln
As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Plus ça change...
ETA: also, this (not from the same writing AFAIK)
Quote:
It is not needed, nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effect to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor, in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded thus far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.
Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.
It is important to remember that the first Republican president was basically a socialist.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only; cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that Slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State Constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected of all taint of opposition to Slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.
Interestingly enough, last night Jon Stewart used the same Lincoln quote in his rant against Trump on Colbert's show.
But anyway, I came here to say that Kirsten Gillibrand has announced her support for abolishing ICE and "start[ing] over, reimagin[ing] it, and build[ing] something that actually works".
She is doing a good job of going for my 2020 primary vote.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the King of the Netherlands:
Dear mister Trump. You see this beautiful building? It’s the International Court of Justice in Our residency The Hague, the Netherlands. It’s waiting for you. It might take a while. But it’s waiting … pic.twitter.com/KTKpvmRgj3
— ZM Willem-Alexander♔ (@WiIIemAlexander) June 19, 2018
I think the idea behind Abolish ICE (for Democratic politicians, anyway) would be popular. ICE is only 15 years old, and we used to organize immigration enforcement differently. People don't think we had open borders in the 90s, and "Abolish ICE" could simply mean going back to the organization from the 90s.
Although the notion that open borders is ridiculous and no nation would ever do that is ahistorical. The US used to have essentially open borders in the 1700s and 1800s. Of course, that was partly because they wanted white Europeans to come so that they could colonize settle areas still controlled by Native Americans the unpeopled West. Maybe it doesn't make sense to return to that, but still, people who basically worship the Founding Fathers don't want to return to the Founding Fathers' immigration system.
In fact, I'd say we should probably abolish the Department of Homeland Security. Its functions properly belong to the Depts of Defense*, Justice, etc.
The failure to integrate intelligence across departments and thus to recognize and prevent the 9/11 plot doesn't necessitate the DHS. For one, it was largely an excuse for the Bush administration's failure to take the warnings they did receive seriously. Warnings reached the White House, it wasn't the case that there was no recognition of what was going on. And beyond that, information sharing and such doesn't really require putting, essentially, all the xenophobic agencies in one department. And then they split up positive and negative aspects of immigration into separate agencies. ICE doesn't include people who work with immigrants in a positive way, which I'm sure is part of why it's full of xenophobic stormtroopers now (and you've heard of very, very few whistleblowers or resignations from within ICE in the face of Trump's horrific policies). I mean, to address the intelligence failure, one could suppose that we could have some department that would gather intelligence from disparate departments in one central agency. I dunno what we'd call that though.
Apparently DHS's creation was also used to strip union rights from almost 200,000 federal employees, and I'm quite sure that was a motivation as well.
But yeah, the basic idea would be to reorganize ICE - probably, at a minimum, to return to something more like INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services), which was the department that ICE, CBP (Customs and Border Control) and USCIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services) were created out of.
*I mean, if we're using that Orwellian terminology, how in the hell does a defensive department not secure the homeland?
Re: Vive la Resistance! aka non-Trump US politics
Linear Mode
