Do you honestly believe we would be here right now if we hadn’t let the Biden administration and moderate Dems bungle this issue? The only thing proposing that noxious piece of trash legislation did was allow the fascists to say “see? even the libs know migrants are a problem.”

This lesser evil canard completely misunderstands politics and racism, it doesn’t work like an inoculation where doing a little racism keeps us from going full racist down the road, it works like heavy metal poisoning where the shit just builds up in our systems.

Agreed til the final paragraph, but that 2024 bill was authoritarian trash that never should have been proposed in the first place

Yeah, the fact that Epstein was a fan of 4chan and hung out with moot makes everything about this moment make a lot more sense in retrospect

If you needed a lawyer for some reason, would you refuse to hire a woman because you thought your jury might have misogynists on it?

Song for Alicia by Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover

Pride Anthem (Molotov Cocktails & Bricks) by Garlic Bread & Roses

Heavy Foot by Mon Rovia

Push by Terrace Martin

Violet by Jeremy Messersmith

The Day by The Roots

Very Much Money by Open Mike Eagle

Drive by El-P

Freebird II by Parquet Courts

History Lesson Pt. II by Minutemen

Megapunk by Ela Minus

Wedding in a Wasteland by Parts and Labor

My Body Fell by Kasko Lunsford

Hold Each Other Up by Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer with Chao Tian

Sounds pretty Presidential to me

deleted by creator

“American culture will not be mocked or corrupted without consequence,” Ogles said.

Fuck all the way off you fucking illiterate dipshit. The best parts of “American culture” are and always have been mocking evil puritanical shitheads like you who really just hate art in general and people you don’t own.

Clearly the answer is to give even more funding to the people creating inhumane conditions and to ask them nicely to stop /s

Could very well be they’re worried that would end up compromising their source

They’re wealthier and whiter on average so ICE probably isn’t starting shit over there as often, but it’s my understanding that tons of people from St Paul are going to Minneapolis on the regular to do mutual aid stuff

The newly released evidence is also part of a pattern. It is one of many examples of DHS immigration agents lying and providing false information to justify shootings and other uses of excessive force against US citizens and immigrants. These claims have collapsed again and again once DHS is forced to defend them in court.

They are also part of another very disturbing pattern - in this case, Pretti, and Good’s there was a) evidence that the ICE/CBP agents recognized their victims as legal observers, b) evidence before and after the fact that the ICE/CBP agents were pissed off at these legal observers for doing that legally protected thing, c) no evidence that the agents had any reason to fear for their lives

They got pissed at people questioning their authority and killed (or attempted to kill) them for it. That behavior absolutely must be publicly condemned and punished and an example needs to be made of all the agents who demonstrated it. We are not a free country in any meaningful sense until that happens.

I wonder how many gen x voters you could pull with a “Make America great again … like it was in the 1990s!” bit

Yep, you can tell by how the prosecutors went out of their way to bullshit about how the police were totally justified in arresting these people in the first place

“Although sufficient evidence exists to support this prosecution, considering the totality of the circumstances, we are declining to proceed,” the Cook County state’s attorney’s office said in a statement Monday.

Also how they let protesters twist in the wind for as long as possible

Woolf, of Lake Street Church of Evanston, said it shouldn’t have taken three months to dismiss the cases.

Also also,

Of the two people arrested that day whose cases were not dropped, one is charged with mob action and the other is charged with resisting a police officer.

Good to see that protesters and voters were able to force these prosecutors to do the right thing, but the whole system is still completely fucked

First of all, we shouldn’t just talk about crime rates without acknowledging that the justice system that renders those verdicts is full of shit (arc

Louisiana is a hotbed of wrongful conviction. It has the second highest rate of known wrongful convictions in the nation. New Orleans has the highest rate in the country among cities. There have been documented exonerations in 17 Louisiana parishes.

Secondly, whatever you think about the people of Louisiana, there’s no real basis for saying they’ve changed a whole bunch recently, but what has are their laws -

Two years after Louisiana overhauled its sentencing laws to lengthen prison stays, the corrections department says it needs another $82 million in state funds for its annual operating budget.

Yeah, only reason this is happening is because they would’ve run into legal problems trying to say this was a Governors Association dinner when their vice chair and about half their members objected

First, that was a really nice story, thank you for taking the time to write all of that out

Secondly, yeah, the intellectual colonization of Christianity is a really tragic thing. I was personally raised by people who had been abused by the kind of conservative and dominating religion you described when they were kids and who had left their churches, so I was allowed to believe whatever I wanted growing up and just relate to the Bible as a collection of cool stories and good quotes (as well as some weird and bad ones), imo not as good as Kurt Vonnegut but better than Tom Clancy (look I read whatever was on the shelves of my local library whether it was good or not as a kid).

What I’m trying to say there is it isn’t a personal thing for me either way, because I never really got bullied by a bad church or had a strong family connection with a good one. But I have seen both of these things in other people, and either way, whether they hate/fear the church or associate or with family and community, the reflexive emotional responses those people have had were undeniably genuine and persistent. Those experiences (along with a lot of neurological research suggesting most human beings have brains that are structurally predisposed towards wanting a connection with a god-like force and that’s why so many separate groups have independently come up with religions) have really convinced me that religious belief is an almost inextricably deep part of a person’s psyche (a lot like sexuality and gender actually).

And yeah, there have definitely been concerted efforts by states and rich people and tyrannical assholes of all sorts who want to use this thing that has such a deep hold on most people to justify themselves since Constantine. But also there’s a bunch of examples of this backfiring and religion causing people to rebel, from Martin Luther to John Brown. And also, there’s a ton of examples of religion bringing people together from sides that shouldn’t have gotten along and getting them to work together, from the Christmas truce in WWI to the American Civil Rights movement bringing white churches from the north to volunteer alongside black churches in the south to register black voters.

So, yeah, religious belief is a really complicated thing with good and bad aspects, but it is a powerful thing and something everyone needs to sort out for themselves one way or another. It sounds like you’re walking your path now and I’m glad to hear it!

The Clash’s “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”

All over people changing their votes

Along with their old codes

If Adolf Hitler flew in today

They’d send a limousine straight away

Everyone’s afraid of their own life

If you could be anything you want,

I bet you’d be disappointed,

Am I right?

…

It’s hard to remember, it’s hard to remember

We’re alive for the first time

It’s hard to remember, it’s hard to remember

We’re alive for the last time

Speaking as an agnostic, this site is a bit too eager to shit on religious folks. Only a bit, because I know a whole lot of evil has been done in the names of gods and I know the frustration of arguing with someone who just explains everything with “god’s got a plan” or some other unverifiable claim,

But ffs, read the fuckin’ room. Fascism is ascendant and we need the biggest coalition we can get to beat it back into a corner. Besides that, Christians in particular are all about righteously walking into lion’s dens in the face of certain death over things they believe, and honestly that is the exact kinda energy we are going to need from a lot of people if we are going to get through this. Also, doesn’t hurt that they are organized as fuck and a lot do praxis like food pantries and other mutual aid on the regular. You don’t have to believe anything to recognize we’d be doing the fascists a favor by not try to ally with these people.