It's cute how if Ukraine fights back that risks nuclear war, but when Russia invades a sovereign country it doesn't

"We're tracking you for your privacy 🙄

"Lady sobs because she imagined things that don't happen"

This kind of performative rhetoric, invented to assign wicked or demonic qualities to your scapegoat, is not a new thing. It's just a retread of the blood libel, the red scare, the lavender panic, reefer madness, and today's bathroom panics. All of them were lies told to justify violence and the criminalization of things that could be used to persecute their targets.

I'm gonna go with: don't send cops on welfare checks. Send somebody competent to respond to mental health challenges, preferably someone not wearing a police uniform (after all, at this point a lot of folks think "unaccountable killer" when they see that uniform and there's honestly reason for that).

It's wild to me that public resources like water are given, not sold, to corporations like Nestle- who then go on to lobby for less public spending on water systems, and who mass-produce those shitty bottles that end up everywhere.

Charge them royalties for taking water from springs, make it cheaper for nestle to buy water from a utility.

Translation: "we did the thing you suspect so don't investigate pretty plz"

Removal of black history classes completes the erasure of generations of racial terrorism against black people, of course they want that.

A policy of denying racial inequity and preventing the truth from being told about it is the very definition of structural racism.

It's so frustrating that this sort of drivel ends up being elevated as serious politics.

I mean really, all they've got at this point is fear and anger and reactivity to anything that might be a change, and he's just charismatic enough to play them into wanting him to be their King.

Their continued refusal to acknowledge that it was a crime, and the normalization of criminal conspiracy and use of political violence to chill efforts to hold people accountable... all amounts to organized crime masquerading as legitimate politics

The US Constitution, on the other hand, does not oblige the federal government to recognize the electoral votes or congressional delegates of a state that does not enfranchise its citizens and submit to their will in the form of their votes.

The Guarantee Clause (article 4, section 4) of the constitution requires that state governments take the form of a republic, versus that of a theocracy or monarchy or dictatorship. (All republics involve some degree of democracy). Section 2 of the 14th Amendment says that if states deny citizens the right to vote, those states shall lose their representation at the federal level- that is, if you're not a democracy that submits to the will of its voters, you can do that but in the process your electoral college votes and ability to send congressmen to DC goes away- and your state will lose its ability to influence federal law and to elect federal officials.

Of course, the current SCOTUS is likely to find some way to assert that anything giving the GOP political advantage must be what the framers would have wanted no matter how many ways they told us unambiguously they fucking wanted government derived from the consent of the governed.

Iranian teen injured on Tehran Metro while not wearing a headscarf has died, state media says was murdered for not wearing headscarf but AP can't quite bring itself to call it murder

Fixed it

LOL I just remembered that some folks in the anti-covid-vax/maga category have been referring to the mRNA covid vaccines as 'the cancer vaccines' based on disinformation that they would 'interact with your genes' and 'give you cancer in 2 years'

Seeing this headline [Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought] I had to look to see if it was the cancer-targeting vaccine or some mouth-breathers talking about the covid ones 😅

Unfortunately, there are already reports of police stopping women in cars on the highway to check if the women are pregnant and off to another state. The notion that a locality or state has the right to violate your privacy in order to veto your travel if it's for purposes they don't like seems impossible to square with the 4th Amendment or the Commerce Clause, but I guess that's not stopping these people

Can we just call these people pro-pestilence instead of dignifying them with names like 'medical freedom activist'?

I swear this sort of euphemism has become the obvious tell that they're up to no good and still demand respect for it

This is where it's time to revisit why and how the economy fared so well in the USA when high top marginal tax rates incentivized top earners (and business owners) to spend on things that got them something when the alternative was paying 90% on money above the line to be in that bracket.

When that money was spent on higher wages or hiring more people or funding pensions or on research & development, the result was growth and a prosperous middle class. The super-wealthy were still super-wealthy, the major difference was that high top marginal tax rates created incentives for them to spend their money in ways that actually did trickle down

Goodbye substack.

So if it's a total blockade now, what was it before? (hint: it was also a blockade then, has been since 2007)

It's saddening to see Israel's military (which is not Israel) attack civilians and civilian infrastructure in retaliation for Hamas (which is not Palestine) having attacked civilians and civilian infrastructure- this is all a shit-show of punishing the innocent to get the other side to back down and it will never end.

Apparently Russia called for a meeting of the UN Security Council to complain about Ukraine fighting back

LOL no fair when you fight back, it's violence! /s

They're suing.

I hope they win. If the basis for their firing was the presumption that they were gay (hint: being gay is a protected class, you can't fire someone for being gay), this would be an open-and-shut case of employment discrimination.

But if it's all a big dumb misunderstanding and they're not gay (and not part of that particular protected class) but they're still fired over it, let me remind you that being autistic is a never-ending ordeal of being misunderstood, often mixed with a sense of justice that could be characterized as white-hot.

...or at least, my sense of justice about this might be in the range of over-wrought, or just blazing.

It's so exhausting to live in a timeline where bullcrap like this is elevated, funded, and taken seriously instead of being ignored or discouraged.

Promoting anti-science, anti-reality conspiracy theories as the basis for political popularity just drives another stake into the heart of the faith and trust it takes to maintain democracy. I just wish we were as zealous about defending democracy from corrosive nonsense like this shit as we are about criminalizing the homeless

Remember when tech workers dreamed of [...]

Yes, I remember. I had some of those dreams.

I was never a candidate for starting my own tech company, I was a self-taught dev living with undiagnosed autism and if anything, the plan was to work for a tech giant my whole life or until I could cash in some options and retire with some security.

I worked for Microsoft from the mid-90s to 2014 and it was all going basically to plan until one fine day 18,000 of us were called to a meeting to be told we were being laid off. I understand why they did this (there were groups in the company that did more or less the same things but with different tooling and I'd been working to align those things, because obvs we could use resources better and strangely management didn't want that) but it hurt a lot to learn that a big part of the mass-layoff logic was not so much about efficiency or doing better work, it was about juicing the stock by making the market happy about cutting labor costs, and it was about depressing the kinds of wages folks like me could bargain for. (There's nothing quite like a sudden dump of ~18k new job-seekers in a regional market to press those salary offers down by 20%)

It's 9 years on and I'm working at a smaller shop, writing open-source software and I still don't make what I was making then (and I've been watching as Amazon and Microsoft and Google keep on running this mass-layoff play every other year). I could probably make better money if I jumped around from job to job, but frankly where I'm at is a good fit, they're accommodating of my neurodivergence, and there isn't the specter of immanent buyouts or mass layoffs to juice the stock.

Looking down-thread, I see some dispute about whether folks in my position are petit bourgeois or the proletariat, and really I don't care what label you lot think is the right one- at this point I'm a middle-aged professional, I work for a living, even though in my 20s I was pretty hopeful I was tracking to be able to retire by the time I'd reach my current age. (yeah, short of winning the lottery that's not happening and when I think too hard about that it's not bitterness I feel, but chagrin)

Looking back, I recall being abruptly 'let go' from a contract when I was passing out union leaflets while working as a contractor at Microsoft, and frankly I hope they press to unionize again and the new rules about union-busting are in effect when they do it.

Y'know, if you're going to spend the money anyways, just subsidize the sellers for the season and let them cut costs to the point that demand tips up. That way they'll make some money themselves and learn for the next season where the price point is.

All paying to destroy it in order to keep prices up does is... keep it expensive above what the market will bear and cost the taxpayers while making them thirsty and sad

Maga people said they would do this

Maga people called for things like this to happen

Maga people have been making threats that this sort of thing would be done

Maga cops can't figure out why anyone would do this

So basically his campaign promise is to violate the constitution, his strategy to get into office is to tell lies designed to divide Americans and it looks like the MAGAs are thirsty AF for it

Gruesome.

I'm not convinced the death penalty is worthwhile except to feed someone's wrath.

What if, (and hear me out,) we did for corrections the sort of thing that countries with low recidivism do? Like, not use for-profit prisons with incentive to turn out re-offenders, and not use prisons that turn out hardened criminals that aren't equipped to function in the world without resorting to crime, and actually take the 'corrections' or 'rehabilitation' parts of their nomenclature seriously?

If all we do with our prisons is punish and humiliate (and squeeze slave labor out of) convicts, we're just creating future crime and all that's left at that point is killing convicts at industrial pace unless you can figure out that crime is more driven by poverty than anything else, and the USA just doesn't want to figure that out because it just doesn't want to solve poverty or crime, it wants to make money creating and punishing both.

Well since the USA has brought back debtor prisons anyhow, I know someone that ought to be in one

It's the return of company scrip.

The most-garbage/toxic notion of tech platforms these days is when they masquerade as tech platforms but are really unregulated banking platforms.

Yeah this isn't just about Tuberville wanting concessions to get the military to stop protecting female service members from state laws against abortion- it's also a fine pretext to hold open a raft of leadership positions to be filled with political appointees by the next GOP administration

Translation: get over that we're taking away your rights. We'll give you some privilege we can take back whenever we want to in exchange for your votes for long enough for us to take away voting rights and then we won't have to offer you shit

The article could have, but didn't, make the point that our politics and the rhetoric surrounding it today serve the right by subverting faith in democracy, and by exhausting likely voters' critical faculties:

Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety.

One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government.

source

There's also the tendency for people to assign to the incumbent all of the problems that happen on his watch- at this point, even with material improvements for most people, it's a hard sell to convince people that they're better off when every bit of right-wing media is devoted to telling people they're worse off and the mainstream media just both-sides it like there isn't one party trying mightily to end American democracy.

This sounds fantastic on its face, but I seem to keep on hearing about how desalination will solve all kinds of problems and we still have this particular problem.

The missing piece, it seems, is the will for it to be used as infra at scale. Meanwhile selling bottled water taken for free from public lands for several dollars a liter in single-use bottles remains a multi-billion dollar industry. (an industry, I might add, that is aggressive about lobbying to protect its interests)

The logic of this rhetoric is essentially the same as the logic of modern Russia- "we need a buffer zone", and the target country "is not a country" and it's not genocide or imperialism when we have a reason to do it but we don't have a reason so we have to tell lies to convince our people that we do have one.

The whole reason sick days are a thing is that giving employees paid sick time costs you less when they don't come in and make other employees sick. If enough people get sick in a given org, that has a way of really impacting everything about a workplace, it really is cheaper if they stay home until they're not contagious.

The worst part of this situation, to me: that anyone is pressing for sick leave to be tightly audited, or seeking to frame its use as a sort of graft or taking from the employer, or a pretext for preemptively firing employees deemed guilty of being too sick. This kind of talk creates pressure for employees to come to work sick in order to avoid being seen as slackers or thieves, and that in turn (especially in an environment full of flu and covid variants, doubly so on the heels of a fucking pandemic so we should all know better by now) defeats the point of having sick days in the first place.

Just when you thought he couldn't get any more cartoonishly evil

"Prosecutors describe how he used the credit card of a donor, identified only as “Contributor No. 12,” repeatedly, without the person’s awareness or approval, charging $15,800 to Mr. Santos’s campaign and associated committees. In the following months, prosecutors say, Mr. Santos charged that same donor an additional $44,800, some of which was routed through a Florida company associated with the Devolder Organization. At least $11,000 of that money was transferred directly into Mr. Santos’s bank account, prosecutors said in the indictment."

In the primaries, I supported progressive candidates like Sanders and Warren because I think their policy prescriptions would make for a better America. In the general, I voted for Biden. That was a harm-reduction vote.

What I don't like to hear, in the primary, is the 'you have to vote for the candidate who can win' line of argument, which begs the question it pretends to answer- if everyone who says "I'd vote for x but x can't possibly win" just voted for x, x would actually win. This gives whoever tells you that "x can't possibly win" the power to get you to give up on voting for what you want, which seems to wag the dog.

In the general, between dem and gop control, it's not a close contest for me; it's between a party afraid to do progressive things the voters want and a party that will do whatever the fuck it wants no matter that nobody wants that.

Yes, our electoral system of first-past-the-post demands that we hedge our bets and compromise in order to avoid the calamity of electing a fascist in this election cycle, but it's hard to support with evidence the idea that what makes a progressive candidate "risky" isn't just a self-fulfilling misperception that causes the party to spend (or not-spend) money to prevent progressives from becoming party nominees. After all, research consistently shows that politicians of both parties routinely overestimate the conservatism of the voters.

I'm glad to see the Biden admin embracing the progressive changes it has been able to get to, but I'm also sooo tired of being told 'we can't nominate a progressive, they'll be called a communist' when no matter who we nominate they'll be called a communist and decades of voting a harm-reduction ticket has rolled back much of the New Deal

It's wild to me that when the phone companies need to bill for a phone call they know exactly who to bill for it, but when it's something like this everyone is helpless because you can't track these things

Yeah and it's also accusing libraries of being drug-infested sex dens

::: spoiler spoiler

::: It's as if Fox News is not a reasonable source for anything but counterfactual nonsense

The best time to de-schedule cannabis was 10 years ago

The second-best time to do it is now

Unfortunately, the War on Drugs is just Jim Crow 2.0, enacted shortly after the end of Jim Crow 1.0 (fun fact, Jim Crow laws remained in force until 1965, the War on Drugs started in 1971). In the end it was just a massive expansion of police discretionary authority, and in the beginning it was explicitly intended to give police the ability to crack down on political enemies of the Nixon administration- that is, black people and the anti-war left.

The GOP will never let cannabis be de-scheduled; they understand that without it more minorities won't be convicted felons and will be able to vote against them (and never forget that convicts are slave labor and there's a lot of money in that)