TGIF [DOT 21/3/25]

21/3/25 MegMegMcGee 36

Greetings and happy Friday! Hope everyone had a nice week. Mine’s been semi-productive, and tonight (last night at press time lol) I met a friend for happy hour and had a lovely time. Didn’t get home til after 9 though so this may be short and sweet.

The dumbest people are going to ruin our lives.

White House scrambles after JFK files expose Social Security numbers
https://wapo.st/41JFadh

Military was instructed to search keywords including ‘first’ and ‘history’ during rushed purge of Pentagon websites
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/20/politics/pentagon-search-keywords-website-purge/index.html

Pentagon restores webpages of Black veterans, Navajo Code Talkers and others after outcry
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/20/nx-s1-5334461/pentagon-black-veterans-navajo-code-talkers-website-diversity

Judge says Trump administration can’t deport Georgetown University fellow
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/20/politics/badar-khan-suri-georgetown-university-fellow-detained-dhs/index.html

Tesla Recalls Most Cybertrucks
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-recalls-most-cybertrucks-71ef6fee?st=8f76qu&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Have a great weekend!

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36 Comments

      • In 10 years, when Barron Trump is the Lord and Saviour King of Trumpville, the peasants working the fields will be saying, “I can’t believe Biden did this to us!”

        • I thought the same thing. Trump will tell MAGAs it’s all Biden’s fault, and they’ll swallow that whole.

          It’s an interesting cognitive dissonance. Like how Trump assured them that prices would come down on Day 1, but now high prices are Biden’s fault. So can the president affect prices? Yes or no? MAGAs never get to that point.

        • Shit’s bleak right now but I have a slightly more cheerful thought on this.

          It took Americans decades to admit that, OK, maybe those Vietnam protesters actually had a point.

          It took Americans years to catch on to Iraq being a shitshow, despite there being plenty of evidence (even before it started!) that it was.

          You’re never going to reach the real red hat chuds, but I don’t actually think it’s going to take a year let alone “years” for the median voter to be like “What are these fucking clowns doing?!” If Social Security goes down in a meaningful way, it’s fucking over. W shot himself in the foot just TALKING about changing it; if Elon/Felon actually do it, public opinion is going to go from “bad” to “poisonous” to “the Secret Service is actively telling you it is not sure if it can protect you from the mob outside.”

          Now are they going to monkey with elections so it doesn’t matter, I think, bigger wider scarier question, but what they are doing is not going over well now and it’s going to hit a point where even unengaged citizens are not going to be able to ignore what’s happening.

          • I actually share your belief. The sheer speed at which they’re wrecking things is going to be their ultimate downfall. If Elmo and Orange were smarter, they’d have moved more slowly to destroy everything, basically putting the frog in the pot and slowly increasing the heat (yes, I know that’s a complete myth but it’s still a useful metaphor).

            Firing the inspectors general isn’t going to hit MAGA chuds, but stopping the Social Security checks and forcing them to make 6-hour round trips (with an 8-hour wait in line in the middle) to prove they’re alive absolutely will. 

            By ripping things apart in a matter of weeks, they’re both breaking things that will enrage most people and not giving them time to absorb the damage, which makes it even worse. It also utterly demonstrates that THEY ARE THE PROBLEM, since none of this happened under Biden.

            Yeah, you can’t reach 29% of the population because they are cultists and will happily boil themselves to death to please Orange (citation: Crazification Factor). But the others are going to feel the hurt, feel it hard, and feel it fast. And things will happen. I’m not sure what things, but you don’t want to be in a Tesla when it happens.

            • It’s sadly probably even higher — I’m not sure you can expect less than 40% of voters to not pull the lever for the GOP literally no matter what.

              That said! Selfish voters cut both ways; if they were like “well Trump will lower my taxes” and he doesn’t, that’s not a Democratic problem. Even some of the real shitheads might be mad enough over losing Social Security (or their parents losing their nursing home over Medicare cuts) that they might sit things out. Racism is incredibly popular but outside of the South, it’s not always going to be the thing that swings a swing voter if everything else sucks!

              • I’m not really thinking in terms of voters any more. I feel increasingly certain that the mobs you referenced are going to be the way this whole mess ends. I hope I’m wrong and we do resolve all this through the democratic process, but it seems less and less likely to me every day.

    • As someone who’s watching his nation become increasingly under threat of military invasion because those fucking chuds voted for Trump, I am of entirely mixed emotions.

      On a basic human being level, yeah I feel bad as I generally don’t like seeing people suffer.

      At a lower lizard brain level, I don’t feel bad at all. I grew up in a rural area. I know the type who would be MAGAts. Small brained, closed minded resentful, greedy, miserable fuckwits who think they’re wise and smart but are neither who feel that they deserve every dollar they can squeeze out of the Feds while ranting how everything’s a fucking mess because of Libs or commies or socialists while being too stupid to realize that if it weren’t for the very people they’re ranting about’s policies they’d be eating cat food on a good day. They really believed Trump would never ever hurt them.

      Funny enough, I don’t blame city slicker/educated Dems for not reaching out to such morons and for GOPers to look at them with contempt.

      • Yeah my goal is “no suffering” but if those people have to suffer to get to that goal, I feel a lot less bad for them than I do for, say, trans kids or Black kids or disabled folks who didn’t ask for any of this.

        But similarly, if ossified centrist Dems and rich people also need to suffer to make things better, welp, I don’t exactly have my little violin out to play them a sad song either.

      • …at this point you don’t even need to make it a link for r/nottheonion to be a punchline

        …it’s like whynotboth.gif…or sure jan…that life imitating art thing has got way out of hand with the parody paradigm

      • I do think you can — and should! — separate what specific elected Democrats are doing vs. what “The Democrats” are doing, because there’s a big difference in many cases and some of them (AOC, Walz, in particular, but not just them) are out there. Whether or not it moves the party, which is definitely not doing enough, is a different problem, as I note Chuck Schumer remains Senate minority leader and that’s A Problem.

        • I also don’t think you should discount the value of even small gestures. I distinctly remember reading about a Trump voter who basically said he got their vote by passing out water bottles. If you’re dealing with “feelings,” taking the time to let people vent will be remembered. The smart Democrats are doing just that, even though they can’t fix it. They’re out listening.

          The stupid Democrats … well, all I can think about is Schumer cancelling his book tour because he’s afraid.

          • Online, I nearly got sucked into a discussion about whether Schumer did the right thing. The person I wanted to argue with said that caving was no big deal and that fighting was pointless.

            I and most aware people knew that the Dims would lose the senate vote, but that’s not the point. Even in the most hopeless of situations you still gotta try.

            I’m pretty sure the person I was discussing this with has never actually had to fight before or confronted a bully. Losing is not the worst thing in the world. Caving is.

            In this fight, morale of your side is just as important as breathing. Despite losing, at least your side knows that you’re willing and maybe able to fight. Caving is surrender.

            So in short, those small gestures do mean something. I’m glad that those Dems are doing something about it. As for Chuck and others like Durbin, they’re as fucking hopeless as Susie Collins is.

            • …forget who said it but someone had a line about “get caught trying”…& I can see that being sound if you’re getting in what that one guy called “good trouble”…but it’s also stunningly bad advice that the wrong people seem to be running with like it’s the literal idiot ball…& I am officially not down with that being an interception play on the world’s largest nuclear football

          • Yeah this (and what Manchu said below) is it — not winning is not winning. Sucks. Can’t be avoided. Not trying is complete bullshit and it only sends the messages that nobody should try (wrong and bad) and that this is unavoidable (even wronger and badder) and that no effort may be forthcoming in the future (the wrongest and baddest).

            Human beings are weird; we often want to join in a struggle, even if it’s hopeless! By refusing to struggle you’re basically telling people not to care at all instead and guess what? That inspires literally nobody.

    • …way back I remember some military type going on a bit of a tear about how the term “al quaeda” wasn’t necessarily the right one to plug in to certain sorts of statements as it referred to…more or less…the “wrong” sort of org-chart to treat the way those implied you could…this isn’t quite the same thing but it’s somewhat along similar lines

      https://www.brookings.edu/articles/comparing-al-qaeda-and-isis-different-goals-different-targets/

      …anonymous…in that hacker-collective sense…or so I have been told…is sort of similar…if you want to “be” anonymous you’d need to sort of self-select your way through some hoops that would make you a fairly specific sort of internet denizen…but anyone can go out there & say some shit & put their name on it…or wear those v-for-vendetta guy fawkes masks or whatever

      …if I had to guess the ones that made some waves a while back are that much older these days & their lives moved on & they don’t have the sort of free time they did then or they think they’d go about some things different if they tried again

      …but for all I know they have a dues paying union collective thing going on & everything I’ve been told about them is wrong?

      …greenpeace just lost a pretty big deal case with a 9-digit settlement they have to pay…& if you look at the just stop oil lot & that extinction rebellion bunch there’s a few different ways you could see that action provoking an equal & opposite one…but it’s hard to know exactly what one of those would be without the kind of chaos & undesirable side-effects of direct action that costs a fossil fuel concern the better part of a billion bucks

      …that’s getting into blowing up undersea pipeline territory…& with heathrow down for the day on account of some sort of fire at an electrical sub-station speculating about that kind of thing feels like asking to have us all wake up in a damn die hard movie just so there’s a white christmas?

    • You won’t have to worry about it if you cross the border in the right direction, but if you want me to do anything, lmk.

      You could just remove DS from your browser’s history and they’d be none the wiser.

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