*Agnew

Musk is currently trying to negotiate a pay package from Tesla, which, if approved would pay him roughly a trillion dollars over the next decade. It’s into the “not really comprehensible by humans” range.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/musks-1-trillion-pay-plan-doesnt-force-him-to-keep-focus-on-tesla-critics-say/

And his last name is “maligno.” Even Disney wouldn’t use a villain name that blatant. Is reality just a really bad fanfic at this point?

Currently they don’t fear citizens with guns; they’re fishing for them, trying to bait them into violence so they can use that to sell the rest of the public on martial law and mass arrests.

They didn’t wait for the judge.

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2025/10/texas-national-guard-deploying-to-oregon-kotek-says.html

BUT the judge behind blocking the deployment of the Oregon National Guard has issued another TRO. So the situation is still boiling along.

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2025/10/judge-issues-new-broader-order-barring-any-national-guard-from-being-relocating-to-oregon.html

The link you’ve shared here talks about the Führer Oath being created in August 1934 but not becoming law until mid-1935, which seems to roughly agree with the date in the post you’re disputing. I can’t find much to support the claim about a surprise assembly, though, at least from a cursory search.

It looks as though his post is taken almost verbatim from this substack post: https://thecycle.substack.com/p/from-hitler-to-hegseth

which doesn’t inspire the most confidence.

This suggests a whole new kind of D&D alignment chart.

Yeah, it’s a total fascist shitshow here right now.

I’m pretty sure gnutrino was making a different, second joke. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/02/nx-s1-5525984/venezuela-trump-drugs-caribbean

Yeah, I can’t help reading about the Chicago Police Department (CPD) being instructed not to go along with Tom Homan without thinking of the stories about the Homan Square facility in Chicago where CPD would detain people for days without charging them, without giving them access to their lawyers, etc. If we’re thinking CPD are supposed to be some kind of bulwark against fascism, we’re SO fucked.

Edit: To be clear, as far as I know, the shared name is a total coincidence, but it really makes it hard not to think about the history of the department.

I got the number from this page: https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_voter_turnout_in_the_2024_general_election

which lists it as “eligible voters,” which is in turn based on data from here: https://election.lab.ufl.edu/2024-general-election-turnout/

which discusses the methodology:

The denominator for these VEP turnout rates is constructed by estimating the voting-age population or VAP (everyone age 18 and older residing in the United States). Ineligible populations are subtracted from the VAP consisting of non-citizens and felons (depending on state disenfranchisement laws). Eligible overseas voters are added to the national VEP estimates only as no reliable method exists to apportion these eligible voters to states.

So no, it’s not just registered voters. It’s their best estimate of how many people are old enough and not disqualified.

Remember most eligible voters don’t vote.

Voter turnout in the 2024 election was 63.7%. That’s still a lot of folks who didn’t vote, but it’s not “most.”

I dunno. I think a lot of regular people felt really strongly that it was critical that the Republicans not gain control of everything in this last election, and given how things are going at the moment, it’s really hard to argue that was wrong. Which is not to say that the folks criticizing the Democrats were wrong either! The Democrats’ feckless centrism and undermining of leftist candidates has been galling for years. The difficult truth is that the system has been so broken that really good people following genuine motivations were arguing on both sides of the leftist/Democrat divide. I was trying to cling to the hope that if we jollied the current system along, we could get reforms like ranked choice voting and the national vote interstate compact in place that would help shift the underlying incentives in the system away from the two-party system, but it’s probably really been irreparable for years now.

Of course bullying people was never going to be an effective tactic, and I never endorsed that. But that’s just regular tribalism and anger at the nonconformist. That’s just regular dumb human stuff.

Yeah, I think we just disagree about this. You’re implying that letting this go forward would be giving in to the state acting capriciously, but that’s really not what this is. The states have literally already started spending the money–hiring contractors and so forth to physically build things–based on the funds that the government had already decided to send them, but is now arbitrarily yanking back. Note that this is different from “we are accustomed to receiving funds for this”; instead it’s “you made a specific commitment to provide X funds for Y purpose, and are now suddenly stiffing us on the bill.” In that light, withholding a portion of the funds that the state ostensibly owes the government in order to make up that unexpected shortfall really isn’t that unreasonable. You keep portraying this as them withholding money “because they disagree with federal policies,” and saying “what those policies are and why is completely irrelevant,” but the policy they disagree with is the sudden and arbitrary withholding of previously-committed funds to the state, and they are withholding state funds to the feds as a direct way of offsetting that deficit. That makes it feel extremely relevant.

I just don’t think it absolutely has to be the slippery slope you’re portraying it as. I’m getting into technicalities because we’re discussing the law and precedent, and technicalities matter a whole freaking lot when you’re dealing with the law. There’s a reason descending into technicalities is referred to in roleplaying games as “rules lawyering”.

And as for highly populous states having a larger influence on federal policy…isn’t that just democracy? Power derives from the consent of the governed, and at the moment that consent is at a particularly low ebb.

In any case, yeah, I think we just disagree on this, and it’s all moot in the face of the specific court in power. I’ll let you get the last word if you want to reply, but I’ll probably drop it at this point.

I feel like you’re missing a point here. It’s significant that this isn’t just

they disagree with federal policies that are affecting them.

It’s that the federal government has made a commitment to provide funds to the state (e.g. the broadband construction funds, funds to build EV charging stations, etc.) and the federal government is now refusing to disburse those funds because the current administration has decided it doesn’t like paying the bills the previous administration incurred, at least to states Trump feels aren’t adequately supportive of his policies. The proposal in this case is to withhold delivery of funds the state is supposed to give the government in order to offset the funds the government is also contractually obligated to deliver.

I agree with you that this specific supreme court would definitely rule in favor of the feds, but I definitely don’t think the case is as absurdly one-sided as you seem to find it. I think a different court could probably find precedent for this kind of dispute if they were so inclined.

It’s not just Fox News. Bezo’s Washington Post ran an editorial, written by “the editorial board,” about how Mamdani would be “bad for New York and bad for the Democratic Party,” claiming he would destroy public transit, reduce the number of grocery stores, drive away big businesses, depress low-skill employment, etc., etc., etc. Oh, and of course that this would discredit all the other young candidates across the country. The WaPo’s threat earlier this year to make their editorial page aggressively pro-capitalist and anti-public-good was apparently very much in earnest.

💰 💰 💰

I think he’s literally talking about making a credit that’s contingent on a certain IQ test score, or something along those lines. He seems to be a straight-up, unabashed eugenicist.

If Trump was going to agree to a staged shooting, it 100% would not have involved someone actually shooting live ammo in his direction. Collateral doesn’t matter to him, but he matters to himself to a pathological degree, and even a slight chance of serious harm would not have been acceptable to him.