BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software pro

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2 yr. ago

Colorado GOP Chair Dave Williams on the Liberty Roundtable Podcast. “It will be done, you know, in a civil war, and we don’t want that, no one wants a civil war.”

Looking at the rhetoric, this could be a cue to get ready for political violence, or it could be a prediction that sadly there will be violence- and that's a textbook example of plausibly-deniable stochastic terrorism

The thing to understand about making the border harder to cross is that it drives permanent immigration instead of allowing temporary seasonal immigration.

Before they made the border harder to cross, seasonal/migrant workers could go home and come back relatively simply. When they made it harder to go home and come back, the incentive was created for temporary workers to become permanent immigrants, legal or otherwise (but given the drastically underfunded legal immigration system is bottlenecked and legal immigration takes decades, that means farm workers have to come illegally and work under the table and that's not something the anti-immigrant folks seem to want to end). That there is demand for their work (and basically without them it's not met) should tell us all that there's no will to enforce labor law and attempts to control immigration at the border (and not in the labor force) drive illegal immigration

If supporting pride is a 'political viewpoint', being against it is one too

Gay existence is not an offense against anyone, it's the folks trying to ban gay existence that are playing offense. LGBTQ folk resisting their own erasure and persecution (and for their allies to support them) is a straightforward matter of human rights these cretins want to deny

Russia getting mad about it when Finland beefs up explains why Finland (and most of the rest of Eastern Europe) have been beefing up and applying to join NATO.

Russia having tantrums when their neighbors strengthen their defenses

"We regard you being able to defend yourselves as an aggressive act, so we will now threaten you"

Finland has spent the whole time since the Winter War building up defenses. They've got hardened shelters capable of holding the whole population of major cities and their military doctrine is entirely designed around defending itself against Russian forces. If you think Ukraine has been messy for Russian forces to invade, Finland would be an unmitigated disaster for them.

The couple of seconds' worth of video I saw told me a few things:

• the truck had been spinning out for a long time there
• that situation was going to be tough for most trucks
• it had terrible traction, possibly a matter of not having all-season or snow-specific tires
• it appeared to be driving all wheels, can't say whether or not they were distributing traction or slip intelligently
• couldn't tell if anything was high-centering anywhere but it didn't look it
• driving in situations like that are why I leave tire chains in my truck
• the tree sticking out of the back was comical

The cybertruck is a pavement princess

Yeah I remember when the cable tv folks pitched cable like there wouldn't be ads, vs. public airways that had to be ad-supported because there wasn't any subscription for it. When they turned cable into ad wasteland I felt that like the fucking betrayal it was

Yes. More to the point, there's a lot of things that we use cops and prisons for that cops and prisons are just plain unqualified to do.

When your solution to mental illness is cops, you tend to kill or imprison people without helping them. When your answer to homelessness is cops, you still have homeless people but they end up in prisons or dead when it's cheaper and more humane to give them housing and some time with a social worker etc, etc

Translation: when we elected Obama it upset the racists so badly they had a great big meltdown about it

There's a lot to unpack in this statement, but the short of it is that he's thinking like a terrorist- that the role of police is to instill fear and the thing keeping them from fulfilling it is that they fear being sued. He's telling his supporters that he wants cops to do crimes with impunity

While I am mightily amused to see the God Squad fighting amongst themselves...

Clickbait title. It means arty can't be spent on groups of 2 or 3 troops, not that Ukraine's artillery is "Forced to stop shelling Russians".

This will be spun in Russia to give Russians the sense that they are winning, and that will make like politically that much easier on Putin.

Moral of the story: when you invade a sovereign country, make sure you have political influence over its allies, enough that if they win political control in their election you can prevail on them to cut funding to support those allies.

Also moral of the story: don't vote for Republicans, they're the modern version of Nazi sympathizers in the run-up to WWII that "didn't want the US to prolong the war in Europe" and that really just meant they wanted to live in a world run by fascists like them

The one sure way to end the fighting is to fund Ukraine's defense. When the right defunded Ukraine's defense, they didn't do it to promote peace, they did it to advance the interests of their allies (that is, Putin).

The reality of 'ending the fighting' is going to mean the violence will continue in the territory Russia controls, even after the 'hostilities' as such are ended. When Russia gains some territory, the russification of that territory involves punishing the people there for not having surrendered more quickly, liquidating institutions of local culture and replacing them with Russian ones, the separation of families, the internal displacement of locals on trips to the far east that many won't survive, the 'political reeducation' camps, etc.

When US politicians try to pass off enabling a certain genocide as an 'end to hostilities' or in anodyne terms like 'cede some territory', don't let them do it. They're not acquiescing to the inevitable, they're actively partnering in genocide.

Russia is not a communist state- if anything, its politics are fascist. The American right has been looking at post-soviet Russia as a model for how it wants to run the USA.

It worked when they did it in Crimea. Of course the votes were a sham, but they did it and nobody called their bluff. The next week official maps of record (notably Google's) proclaimed Crimea to be Russian territory.

It's a substack blog with a custom top-level domain, pretty safe. Matt Stoller writes a lot about the tensions between monopoly/corporate power and democracy in the context of US history- he's legit.

It's as if it hasn't occurred to him that he's an NPC

On the one hand, their pro-Palestinian politics are morally valid and increasingly popular as the world watches horrifying human rights violations in Gaza- I agree with them, it's important to put pressure on the Democrats to get on the right side of this issue.

On the other hand, I honestly think we are one GOP sweep victory away from an end to democracy in the USA- and my take on that is that the establishment-Dems probably think a 4-year stint of being punished by Republicans will teach those uppity leftists and minorities to toe the line better and in the interim they're pretty sure they'll be fiiine.

The reason I lose sleep over this sort of thing is I believe that once political power becomes decoupled from the consent of the governed, the rights and protections that arise in the constitution will become instead favors granted by an unaccountable power, contingent on whether or not they find you supplicant enough. Also we shouldn't count on being able to vote our way out of a situation where the rules prevent voting from making a difference- should it come to that, it's dark days friends

Consider using a dropbox- that's more secure in chain-of-custody terms.

'Guard the vote', here, seems pretty likely to mean go into liberal areas and do what it takes to prevent them from voting