Time to bring back gibbeting!

The counterargument is that Missourians keep passing progressive ballot measures while simultaneously voting for people who vocally oppose said measures and immediately repeal them because they see politics as a team sport rather than anything that actually affects them. A progressive message might speak to these voters, but voting R is, some reason, as baked into their identity as rooting for the Tigers is.

That’s a strategy as old as Reconstruction, utilizing an antidemocratic compromise baked into the Constitution by slavers who didn’t want the anti-slavery popular vote to have the power to take away their chattel. The brain trust behind Trump’s win aren’t especially clever. They’re just the latest schmucks to be soulless and hollow enough to fully embrace that hate-filled lowest common denominator, half a century after the last bunch finally got pushed out of power.

Well then I hope I can have your vote, because my platform will be to use the sweeping new executive powers carved out by the current administration to throw every member of said administration along with every employee of ICE ERO into the “unextraditable foreign gulag detention” black hole, and only then work with Congress and the courts to make that impossible again.

Got a reference? Pro-UBI and anti-billionaire as I am, I’ve done the math and I don’t think that checks out. Meaningful UBI has an annual price tag in the trillions, and even if you assume 90%+ top bracket tax rates there aren’t enough billionaires in the US to foot that bill. Other programs would have be discontinued and/or rolled in, and tax rates increased across the board.

As ever, working to build the post-apocalyptic wasteland that would finally justify their insistence that they need 500 guns and a fleet of milsurp Humvees to traverse the miles of crumbled roadways between their compounds and the last operating Fortress Hospital in the Dakotan Oil Wastes.

And of course this would be a massive harm to their own voters, because Medicaid expansion has been the only thing keeping most rural community hospitals afloat for a long time. If they cut it, then it’s likely that many small towns are going to lose their only medical providers within a hour’s drive or more.

Can’t wait for the inevitable companion pieces: one from Conor Friedersdorf entitled Actually You Are Wrong And I Am Very Smart and the other from Jeffery Goldberg, with the headline This Will Be Catastrophic For Israel’s Capacity To Bomb Palestinians.

By the time he’s done with the economy those $1000 bills will be the cheaper alternative to Kleenex.

We already can’t economically build ships for the navy because we’ve so dramatically hollowed out our steel refining and commercial ship-building industries. We’re looking at a future where the US military is primarily a client of the international arms industry for everything but guns.

Eugh, daylight.

When the base is mad enough to throw them out if they don’t. The Florida special elections didn’t flip any seats, but they showed a 15-point swing away from the GOP in deep red parts of the state. That’s gonna make them sweat. Unless they can sufficiently rig the midterms or sway Trump off his current “crash the economy for lulz” trajectory, it may well be a bloodbath, and that’s the sort of math that starts peeling sycophants away from Trump.

Back in my day us hermit types just did our grocery shopping after 9PM, this is a whole other level.

Libertarianism also was my first stop out of my childhood religious right upbringing. I still tend to see issues from a libertarian framing – i.e., if it’s not hurting anybody why should the government care? – but most US libertarians seem weirdly fixated on ideas like “why can’t I dump 5,000 gallons of hydrofluoric acid into a hole in the ground if the hole is on my own property?” or “why shouldn’t I be allowed to enter into a contract with somebody that allows me to hunt them for sport?” or especially “why can’t I have sex with a minor if they say it’s OK?”, where there’s really obvious personal and societal harms involved and the only way that you can think otherwise is if you’ve engaged in some serious motivated reasoning.

Whereas my thinking these days is more like, “who does it hurt if somebody decides to change their outward appearance to match how they feel inside?” and the like – i.e., the right to personal autonomy and free expression, rather than the right to do whatever I want to others as long as I can somehow coerce them into agreeing to it. I don’t have much patience for the anarchist side of left-libertarianism – in my experience you need robust systems in place to keep bad actors from running amok, and a state without a monopoly on violence is simply ceding that monopoly to whoever wants to take it up for their own ends – but that starting point of libertarian thought, that people sold be free in their choices until those choices run up against somebody else’s freedoms – is still fundamentally valid.

In anything like a competitive district, a progressive Independent challenger is more likely to split the vote for a milquetoast Democratic incumbent and hand the seat to the Republican challenger. Working within the Democratic primary system has its challenges, but also clears the field so that there’s one clear choice for left-leaning voters rather than two.

First past the post sucks ass, but it’s what we’ve got to live with until we’ve got enough power to change it.

Have you seen who’s writing code these days? Everything is computer, computer is transgender, ergo everything is transgender.

But you repeat yourself…

I won’t lie, the fact that Americans got a taste of this and then voted to go back for another bite of the apple (not to mention the global rightward shift that’s been happening along with it) has soured me a bit on representative democracy. Democratic modes of government seem to be fundamentally incapable of defending themselves against demagoguery, and too large a percentage of the population prefer to be told what to do and who to hate rather than put in the work of engaging seriously with the civic duties required to make a democracy work. I’m at a loss as to what a viable alternative might look like – various forms of autocracy are what we’re trying to avoid, and I’ve never seen any anarchist ideas that seem like they could work at scale, but clearly democracy falls apart when too many of the people participating in it refuse to participate in good faith.

Worse than that… The commercial weather services aren’t doing much more than repackaging or (questionably) refining NWS forecast data, which is derived from a global weather simulation that runs on a supercomputer cluster four times a day, incorporating data from NWS radars, government weather satellites, ground stations, etc. Musk and company want to blow this up because providing all that sophisticated data free of charge undercuts the ability of commercial services to charge for the same thing, but there’s no private infrastructure capable of generating the data underlying the base NWS forecast. Unless they plan to simply privatize all of that (a distinct possibility) destroying the NWS just means that there will be no high quality national forecasting at all, and even if they do privatize the infrastructure the expertise to make it all work won’t necessarily follow.