Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software professional
OK, so now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it
But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow
While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.
I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.
…thus showing that the “Law and Order” party was never about law, they just want a particular kind of order- that is, a hierarchy wherein people below them on the status-ladder know not to try to hold them accountable to anything, including the law or even plain decency.
To them, the law is the cudgel to keep the poors and plebes in their place- low in the order- never to be applied to them.
Fun fact: spreading conspiracy theories about the evils of fluoride in the water (it’s mind control! pollutes our precious bodily fluids!) was one of the talking points that crypto-fascists threw against the wall to see if it would stick- if you recall the line about your “precious bodily fluids” in Dr. Strangelove, that was a nod to that particular vein of conspiracy theory that was making the rounds in the far-loony fringes of what was then the Republican party
Sorry- I didn’t know that part off the top of my head But since you asked, Russia’s presence in Hawaii was sort of like its presence in Alaska and California: early 1800s outposts established by agents acting on behalf of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian-American_Company, which the Russian Crown had granted a monopoly on operations in North America and the Pacific but was unable to back or support such claims.
I wonder why we can’t just decode the term ‘settler’ for what it is:
“terrorist”, but with state aegis and pliant media cooking up anodyne narrative cover
Grew up in a rural red state. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to really understand their politics, and as best I can summarize, here it is:
They are angry about how life has gotten worse for them, economically and culturally.
They have very good reason to be angry about that, because it has.
They are misinformed about what changed since the 50s and 60s, and too many of them seem to think more racism and sexism will restore their prosperity and dignity
They have decided the only thing to do about it any more is to burn everything down until they get the respect they feel entitled to
They are sincerely sad and angry it hasn’t worked yet
The shorter story here, of course, is that the establishment GOP of the late 70s underestimated the willingness of its fascist wing to not die and completely didn’t do the necessary things to prevent the party from being almost completely taken over by fascists
23k is the max annual contribution
If you’re over 50, you can put $30,500 in your 401k, the extra $7500 per year is called a ‘catch-up contribution’
All of these locations (Alaska, California, Hawaii, much of eastern Europe) are ones that Russia has at one point in its imperial or soviet history had either outposts or territorial claim to. Of course, much of Eastern Europe was as recently as the 1980s under the Kremlin’s direct control, either as puppet states or as territory Russia or the USSR directly claimed. Finland and Poland in particular have both been completely invaded by Russian forces multiple times, but at the moment they are built up defensively in ways that Russia quite honestly has zero chances of winning against.
Alaska was territory that imperial Russia claimed before any European country did. It was sold to the US during the Crimean war (1853) because Russia needed the money and in all likelihood it was going to lose it to Britain. Russia established early trading outposts in Alaska and California but sold or abandoned them after wiping out the fur animals they’d come to harvest and trade.
This talk for the benefit of Russian audiences is about reminding Russians of former imperial or soviet glory, but the problem with that historically is that it wasn’t actually glorious.
The current propaganda push to get Russians thinking they really have a shot at rolling back the map changes since Imperial times is just an effort to sustain Russia’s modern project: dismantling the post-WWII order in which the West (the US, in particular, but NATO and much of the UN) upholds alliances that Putin sees as against Russia’s interests.
I’m pretty sure California could defeat Russia
California has more blue-water navy in San Diego than Russia has in the world. It also has more air force stationed there than Russia has.
(granted, these are US forces, not California forces, but there is no real-world scenario right now in which California would face invasion without the full military support of United States and NATO)
Where is Russia 2 miles from Alaska?
The international border goes between the islands of little and big Diomede. Both of these islands are remote from land in either direction, and they are situated about midway in the narrowest part of the Bering Strait.
Since you asked where, here it is on a map
Yep, that’s pretty close, but nope, that’s not really tactically meaningful.
It’s true that the cultural left didn’t suppress wages or unions or offshore manufacturing jobs or cause all those farms to fail or any of those other things, but one thing that made the left vulnerable to such charges is that when the Democrats embraced neoliberalism, they implicitly became the party of credentialed professionals. When the Democrats abandoned the working class to compete for the donor dollars the right had long enjoyed, it meant that the working class went from having 1 party for it to having 2 parties actively working against its interests.
It’s so wild to me that the GOP has been considered the working man’s party by anyone since the 1890s
Legitimately, how do they fix this? Like what options are there?
When it’s a feature and not a bug, you don’t “fix” it, it is working exactly as planned.
In the first paragraph the article all but prompts the Fed to jack up interest rates, which makes borrowing money more expensive and when employers don’t borrow or spend on payroll, the result is more people lose jobs and when fewer people have money, in theory that should reduce upward demand pressure on consumer goods prices. In short, jacking up interest rates is the Fed’s way of prompting layoffs and wage cuts- by making working people poorer. They’ve been doing this very effectively to keep wages under control, so much so that even when ‘inflation’ like this is just price gouging it’s the first thing Wall Street wants to hear.
Of course, this ‘interest rates fight inflation’ mantra assumes that the inflation is really caused by too much money out there competing to buy too few goods and services, but when it’s the result of price collusion or just price gouging, it means prices for things went up and wages just went down. (and that in turn makes Wall Street fat and happy)
In the case of real estate, it’s been established that real estate commissions (and prices) have been inflated due to price collusion among realtor groups- in the case of rents, there is a lawsuit over price collusion driving rents up.
When it comes to gas prices, that’s less likely to be price gouging but it is very likely to be the consequence of supply/production decisions made with politics in mind, by people that probably stand to gain politically if voters vote against the incumbent.
Consider the possibility that the game here does not depend on Trump winning in the Electoral college- all that needs to happen is Biden not winning 271 or more EC votes for the congress to decide the presidency via the Contingent Election process outlined in article2, sec1 clause3 of the constitution, later modified in the 12th amendment.
In that scenario, each state delegation has 1 vote- and the GOP has enough state-level gerrymanders to control enough state delegations that if it comes to pass that the 12th Amendment process decides the presidency, they are very likely going to be able to install whoever they want.
If the smart money in the GOP has decided Trump won’t win but it still wants him in the oval, anything that prevents Biden from getting 270+ gets them better odds than any other pathway
When you have financial engineers overriding the decisions of mechanical engineers, you get crashy airplanes and eventually, caught up murdering people that might talk to investigators in order to defend those juicy profits
…sort of like how when administrators and insurance folk and lawyers and judges override the decisions of doctors and nurses, you end up with highly profitable hospitals and people dying for it
…all a bit like when the bean counters run your software company, layoffs designed to boost stock price by showing investors ‘fiscal discipline’ leaves your engineering teams shorthanded and forces them to de-prioritize bug fixes and dealing with technical debt and rigorous testing and you end up shipping lots of bugs when you release your product
“should we get rid of the cap so the rich pay a fair share or keep it and collectively pay for things by way of inflation?”
The problem with the latter is honestly that inflation hurts the poor a lot more than it does the wealthy and if anything, gives the wealthy a lot more power. Power is really the issue here- when the rich have the ability to override democracy by spending money, that’s a big damned problem
Damn you, I’m in
The US is monetarily sovereign and can always issue enough currency to meet any demands upon it.
Yes. When congress appropriates funding and it’s signed into law, the effect is that the US Treasury spends that money into existence. The mechanism, of course, is that Treasury directs the fed to issue bonds to create the money, and when you pay taxes that money doesn’t go into an account Congress can spend from, it goes back to the fed to zero out the bonds used to create it.
Of course, if we continue cutting taxes the way we have, that will eventually balloon the amount of currency in circulation and that can be problematic if it’s untethered to reality
Also it occurs to me that there are other factors that disqualify candidates from being president- the bit about being 35 or older means AOC can’t be president right now and the bit about being a natural-born citizen disqualifies Schwarzenegger and isn’t it interesting that the court hasn’t taken up the issue on how that denies voters their democratic rights? I mean, when you want to understand how to apply the constitution as it pertains to who may not serve in office, don’t you want to consider all the disqualifiers and their mechanisms?
If you’re under 35 or foreign-born, it doesn’t take an act of congress to bar you from office, those things are the law and already in the constitution with plain wording. A plain reading of sec 3 of the 14th amendment basically reads as if the authors of the amendment intended it to take an act of congress (with 2/3rds majorities, in both houses) to allow an insurrectionist that previously took an oath of office to serve again, but the court magically inverted that by asserting the only congress could invoke section 3
Nope, this is the court bending over backwards to deliver a political outcome
At what point does this sort of thing stop being politics and start being organized crime? So now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it
But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow