TGIF!! [DOT 24/6/22]

24/6/22 MegMegMcGee 51

I am looking forward to a weekend of doing nothing let me tell you. I slept like crap this week, haven’t had time to go to the store, and need to recover in general.

May also spend the weekend in a ball of rage, assuming SCOTUS does what they said they are going to do today.

Yesterday my friend said to me that she “underestimated the damage Trump would do”. Ma’am.

Jan. 6 panel names five Republicans who allegedly sought Trump pardons
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/23/justice-jan6-hearing-thursday/

Something is better than nothing?

Senate passes bipartisan gun violence bill, marking breakthrough
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/23/senate-gun-bill-vote/

And yet…

Supreme court decision to overturn New York gun law met with outrage
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/jun/23/new-york-gun-ruling-supreme-court-reactions-democrats-republicans

Just here for the ratio.

Ukraine Updates:

Ukrainian forces to withdraw from Severodonetsk, regional military chief says
https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-06-24-22/index.html

Sprots! How utterly terrifying!

Awww

Scottish islanders save US couple’s wedding after their luggage gets lost
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/23/scottish-islanders-save-us-couples-wedding-after-their-luggage-gets-lost

Today’s turtle content:

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51 Comments

    • …yup…the miranda ruling was one of the things the pair of SCOTUSblog tweets in that clump I added yesterday was about…& it seems to be trying to remove any need to qualify for that “qualified immunity” thing, which is all kinds of fucked up

      …& as far as the court goes…I might not go as far as one hamilton nolan, who got space from the guardian to go off on the subject

      https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/24/the-us-supreme-court-voted-in-favour-of-people-getting-shot

      …but given that one of the effects of the way the miranda thing previously worked was that illegitimate evidence could be barred on the principle of “fruit of the poisonous tree”…honestly I do find I’m left with some questions about how you might apply that doctrine to a set of rulings that stem from an arguably illegitimate project to pervert the institutions of government from the smallest local level all the way up the federal edifice to the highest reaches of the judicial, legislative & (at times) executive branches

      …it’s not nearly as unfounded as the pretext they tried to spin into an actual coup…& that got a lot closer to working than it seems ought to be credible…so I don’t think it sounds like a viable solution or anything but I guess I do maybe think it’s potentially a valid & pertinent question?

  3. The fact I have to have discussions with people who still say, “all politicians are the same,” or “both parties suck, and Dems are just as and,” is killing me. Sooooooo many people pay absolutely no attention to anything that’s not directly in their lives and rely on old axioms and shit to dismiss the real trouble our society is facing and it’s killing me.

    • …there might be one sense in which the x-is-the-same-as-y thing might make sense to me…when it comes to the objective being removing the incumbent in a ballot with more than one alternative choice

      …in the two by-elections in the UK yesterday there seems to have considerable campaigning on the basis of tactical voting…& even “vote-swapping*…the upshot of which being labour taking back a seat that had been theirs not so long ago…but the lib dems won about a 6k majority in a seat that had been tory for decades & came to the election on a previous majority of 20k+ votes

      …so it seems like persuading people one not-a-tory is arguably as good as another might have something to be said for it

      …not sure it maps all that well to general elections in the states but maybe could be applicable to primary season?

    • “Both parties are the same” is definitely stupid.

      But being pissed at the Democrats for doing basically nothing to address any of the things that have brought us to this point is completely accurate and fair. The party continues to promote GOP-lite options across the country and equivocates on really important shit in the deluded hope that Republicans will come around and … uh, nope, they’ll vote for treason again. Happily.

      If the Dems want to be seen as being different, they need to make a difference and thus far, they have squandered every opportunity to do so.

      • 100 fucking percent, this.  I still hear the same old bullshit about “but if they don’t get elected, they can’t do anything.”  Motherfucker, they’re ALREADY NOT DOING ANYTHING, and they’re losing elections on top of that.  So, maybe, let’s try electing people who actually give a damn and who will actually make shit happen.  Nope.  “Moderates” are still seen as “electable” in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.  It certainly doesn’t help that the party aparatus does everything it can to hamstring liberal candidates to perpetuate this bullshit myth.

        • This is the argument I’m constantly having with my MIL. She has very progressive views but is always voting for the centrists based on “electability”. I keep telling her that “electability” is a huge lie, because if we had a candidate who was actually going to FUCKING DO SOMETHING FOR CRISSAKES, we’d get people out of the woodwork to vote. I can’t count the number of people I went to school with who post on Facebook about both parties being the same, and politicians all suck and none of them do anything for us, so there’s no point in voting… I mean granted, those people are idiots, but they’re not wrong that the democrats accomplish very little. (I just don’t understand why they don’t care that the Republicans are actively taking us back to 1920.)

          • Remind her of Paul Wellstone, please!!!

            Check the section on his US Senate campaigns–particularly the second one, after the Flag-Burning stuff.

            YES, “Minnesota,” and “Blue State”

             

            But Wellstone DID get R votes.

              • Seems like an interesting guy, though I don’t fully understand the argument? I’m afraid I wasn’t that aware of politics outside of Massachusetts back in the 90s. I’m not sure my MIL was either – she’s very much a stereotype of a New England elite – she absolutely looks down on the rest of the country, maybe with the exception of California. My SIL has moved all over and is on the verge of marrying a nice guy from Wyoming. MIL is constantly making snide remarks about him having grown up in uncivilized backwoods.

                I suppose I should have put some qualifications on her “progressive” views… 😂 At least she’s a socialist in name?

                  • But as a senator right? It looks like he explored a presidential bid but then didn’t run. As far as progressive senators go, we’ve got two wonderful ones in MA. I believe it’s my MIL’s dismal view of the rest of the country that keeps her from voting for progressives for president. Back when I was volunteering for Warren, she just kept saying things to me like “I love her too, but they’ll NEVER vote for her elsewhere.”

                    She really thinks she knows what the country will do. She recently brought up rumors that Buttigieg might run and said “people would sooner vote for a woman than a gay man!”

                    • …I know it may truly come down to “a woman couldn’t get elected president”…but having grown up in the era of maggie thatcher the…I don’t know…”reality” of that just doesn’t achieve traction in my mind so I’m left still wondering why her bid in the primaries didn’t get more support

                      …& whether you view it as a positive or a negative the fact that once-upon-a-time she played for other team surely means if nothing else that she’s personally familiar with how a mindset can be persuaded to cross the aisle

                      …sure seems like having some insight into how to achieve that could have been a useful trait both in that campaign season & this presidential term?

                    • @splinterrip (I don’t know why I can’t reply to your comment?) ugh I still think there was a lot of nonsense involved in Warren’s low numbers in the primaries. I think the media played a pretty significant role, and I think there was a popular narrative within the party that she wasn’t “electable”, rather than judging her on any merits. There was a poll around that time, I don’t recall the exact numbers anymore, but a majority of people said they’d be fine voting for a woman, but a majority also said they didn’t think their friends/neighbors would vote for a woman. So there’s a lot of people making shitty assumptions about what others believe.

                      As for her having been a republican, I don’t know that that affected her much either way. She’s always been very clear that she was a republican in name when she first became an adult because it was what people around her had been, and she had just never thought much about politics at all. As soon as she started educating herself about politics, she switched to democrat.

                    • @bigdamnheroes I think the no-reply-option is because the reply threads max out at some point our little crowd doesn’t hit that often…but in terms of the once-republican thing…I wasn’t bringing it up because of the effect of that shift on her – I think you’re right that as she came to understand the political landscape she found that the “inherited wisdom” that told her she belonged on one side of the aisle failed to account for her actual politics

                      …& there may currently seem like there’s enough all-the-way-crazy MAGA acolytes out there to cover the electoral spread…but my bet is there’s maybe enough people who wouldn’t keep propping up the GOP if they grasped that same underlying reality to maybe offset them if someone could make them see the light

                      …& I know courting votes from the right is largely a fool’s errand…but it feels like that assumes the courting involves conceding stuff to pander rightwards…not showing people that by their own standards they’re standing on the wrong side supporting people actively working against their interests & preferences…which seem in the overwhelming majority to be against most of the god-awful shit the GOP is hell-bent on?

                      …either way, if warren had been picked as the candidate I can honestly say that would have been the most optimistic I’d have felt about US politics…well…ever, frankly…so it sucks that the “I’d vote for her but I don’t think other people would” explanation sounds so plausible

                    • @splinterrip Tough to say really, whether we could court voters from the right by educating them. Warren is old and her realization was a long time before the sides got so polarized. I feel like politics is a lot more in everyone’s faces these days, to the point that I’m not sure that there are many people who don’t have an idea of the big issues and where their party stands on them. And Republican brainwashing has really gone off the deep end so that it’s very difficult to get someone to question their beliefs. It’s like deprogramming from a cult.

                    • @bigdamnheroes …the cult thing is less of an analogy at this point than a description so I hear that…but I guess I see polling on a number of issues that says the actual majority (either locally or nationally) has a stated preference for not-the-GOP-way…& then you have people literally testifying to congress about lines they were asked to cross that their conscience wouldn’t allow them to…& in the same day publicly saying they would vote to put the man who made the request back in the oval office

                      …the chasm of cognitive dissonance that’s involved there is incomprehensible…but the extent to which the majority of the votes the GOP relies on to keep them safely barricaded in these positions of authority come from people they are in the business of fucking over every chance they get is equally hard for me to fathom…so I guess it might give her/anyone a head-start to have seen how it used to look from the raised-republican side & maybe still have some sense of how to “speak their language”

                      …it’s a counter-factual so I guess there’s not a lot of point to trying to guess…but I still wonder whether that might have been enough of an edge in a world where she had the nomination for her to have won…& enabled her to get some shit through the senate about voting rights…or…well…other bits of wishful thinking?

                    • @splinterrip Impossible to say what could have been, but I sometimes find myself wishing things had gone differently. I think Biden’s overall tepid mediocrity is certainly not going to do us any favors in 2024. I worry we’re headed towards things getting worse and worse. Congress would still be a mess under Liz, but at least she’d be pushing for the right goals and fighting the good fight. I think the president sets the tone, and it’s possible that the Democrats would be pushing harder. I think she wouldn’t have been afraid to sign some executive orders and take some heat if needed to make progress. I think she’d have the right laser focus on having some big popular changes accomplished ahead of the next election.

    • One of the key ways to break that down is to talk about how both siderism  is exactly what propagandists say. It’s a classic method going back more than a century to sow disengagement and defeatism which authoritarians use to their advantage. The Nazis did it in 1935, William F. Buckley did it to attack the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s, and Russia and the Koch PR induatry do it today.

      Another method is to break down the practically religious belief that stupid contrarianism is the foundation of elite wisdom. From the NY Times to the beardo hipster, there is a belief that all it takes to understand the world is a quick move along some predefined path away from whatever the established (usually liberal) orthodoxy says.

      It’s staggering how actual elites feel they can prove their membership in their class by doing this kind of junk thinking. Environmentalists do slow and painstaking work to build coalitions and work out compromises? Elites will decide in a matter of minutes to toss out a hot take how environmentalists are actually doing it all wrong and spend days patting themselves on the back.

      To be clear, this kind of smug self assured teardown of good hard work has a religious zeal to it. And it’s because pseudo intellectuals know deep in their bones it’s a cultural, class and caste imperative to keep this joke of a process going. Hacks gotta keep hacking, or else their place in the world falls down.

        • I actually think in a shallow way it’s Democrats AND Republicans (irony noted!)

          Or trying to be more accurate, I think there’s a different dynamic at work. I think shallow intellectual elitists think it’s a defining trait of what makes someone smart. What they’re doing is working off of a simplistic left/right axis, and they figure if there’s a problem with the left, the smart thing to do is move somewhere along that imaginary axis, some going full on reactionary and some to a fake moderation.

          I think what’s also at work is cynical right wingers have figured out what’s going on. Most of them just through trial and error of figuring out what triggers the liberal establishment, but a few through more canny study.

          And they’ve turned this kind of concern trolling and baiting into a wildly successful method of turning the pseudo intellectual elite into attack dogs against serious thinkers. It’s how you get endless Atlantic articles by people who consider themselves enlightenment figures endlessly nitpicking dedicated, brilliant public health experts, for example. It’s how you get NY Times op ed pieces by people who consider themselves liberals — They went to a gay wedding! They went to a Black Lives Matter march! – proclaiming that Brett Kavanaugh will back women’s rights.

          These pseudo intellectual, pseudo progressives feel an intense class bond with supposedly “reasonable” conservatives who whisper and plead that the smart path is to see the world in a simplistic opposition of liberals and conservatives, and the way to wisdom is to shout about how Me Too is a case of the cure being worse than the disease.

          To be clear, the pseudo intellectual elites are capable of a lot of this all by themselves — they have their own class pressures encouraging them to fret endlessly about unions and affirmative action. But it’s also the case that wrapped up in it are a lot of Ross Douthat types who add to the discourse in awful ways by encouraging these people to stop thinking any harder.

          It’s a mess, and people who can be encouraged to break with the fake smart set should be helped as much as possible.

        • Meh, most of the “both sides are bad” idiots that I know are druggie burnouts. Firmly not Republicans, but also have given very little thought to politics beyond some vague libertarian ideals.

  4. Here’s a good NYC headline that reflects the great things the city can accomplish once it harnesses its vast reservoir of task-focused grit and ingenuity:

    https://gothamist.com/news/mta-agrees-to-make-bulk-of-stations-accessible-by-2055

    2055. The Americans With Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. The escalator was invented in 1859. The elevator was invented in 1853. There are Greek ruins that have ramps that are more than 2,300 years old. Our stations are not air conditioned. Air conditioning (in its modern incarnation) was invented in 1902, but the ancient Romans had a form of it. Ice would be harvested and quarried into thin blocks or sheets. The sheets would be interposed with layers of straw. This would be stored in icehouses and often a supply could last year-round. It’s one of the reasons Roman had ice cream, although obviously this was extremely expensive.

    I, personally, and I’m only speaking for myself, would like to see more ADA infrastructure in the subways and fewer guns.

    • The ADA is on the target list of the radical right, to be clear.

      The bogus “religious rights” argument that is being used to attack the rights of women, minorities and LGBTQ people is going to be wielded to attack the rights of people with disabilities too. And considering how many are older people, it’s going to have a huge impact on senior citizens.

      The one way to push back politically is going to be to stop thinking it’s smart to balkanize everything — the authoritarians want a worldview where the smart set thinks it’s essential start every discussion by counting the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead and figure all of the ways the ADA is not the same as rights for Muslims or 15 year olds seeking abortions. Good people don’t have to go along.

  5. I still keep up with the Russo/Ukrainian War stuff.  From what I’ve read, the Russians have gone all out in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions blasting everything they can just to secure the last major population centers. It has been a bloody attrition fight with everyone suffering high losses.

    Keep in mind, it took the Russians over a month of repeated attacks supported by heavy artillery just to accomplish capturing the ruins of Severodonetsk.

    The problem is the Urkainians are just as battered holding it.

  6. I was wondering if SCOTUS was going to back away from the precipice of outlawing abortion. It seems to make Republicans nervous that this would be the step too far that would bring non-Republicans flooding to the midterm elections.

    On the other hand, the gun and school funding rulings demonstrate that SCOTUS is now basically the Taliban. They’re so blinded by right-wing ideology and religious mania that I’m not sure they’re capable of understanding or caring about potential blowback.

  9. You know, I keep hearing about how jan 6 was a test of our democracy, etc etc…  And I read HamNos article this morning and it reminded me that more senators have a controlling vote over less people, that several SCOTUS’ were put there by presidents who lost the popular vote..

    So I googled the “simple definition” of ‘democracy’ :

    What is a simple definition of democracy?

    1 : government by the people : majority rule. 2 : government in which the highest power is held by the people and is usually used through representatives

    Majority rule. 

    We are not a democracy.

    I don’t know what we are, but the majority hasn’t gotten what its’ wanted since about 1998. 

      • …depending on how you look at it…not only would the US not be alone in that but it would date back a lot longer

        …possibly even back before anyone talked about the merchant classes & banks as we know them didn’t really exist

        …thinking about it seldom makes me feel better about my day but I get the distinct impression that something of the like is the case pretty much everywhere, really…whether it’s because those with the most power accrue the most wealth or because those with the most wealth wield the most power the two seem to go hand in hand under most regimes I can think of

        …I think there’s a chance that it became something that was overtly the case in the 80s the way you suggest…but if you look at the difference between the way campaign finance is a hotly contested subject in the US in the same period & the almost complete dearth of attention paid to it in the UK by comparison despite…to pick some recent examples…the incestuous nature of tory funders & everything from boris’ interior design bills to the covid-contract-bonanza seeming like they ought to have people as incensed as they were when MP’s expenses were the only story in town

        …so maybe before reagan it all just worked a bit more like it still does in the UK & everyone just sort of informally agreed to pretend that wasn’t the deal while also being clear on the unspoken but binding agreement about how things actually worked…I believe the preferred euphemism is “a polite fiction?

        …there’s a line about how if you owe the bank a bit of money then the bank owns you but if you owe the bank enough money then you own the bank…except at some point the only people banks would lend that kind of money to became the extreme few who could afford to buy the bank outright…most of whom would be “people” in the sense that companies can be…but the actual people at the top of those would include the tiny handful who you could say that about literally…& who…it turned out when they comprehensively screwed the pooch…don’t actually have to cover the debt in the final analysis since the government was prepared to put its hand in the public pocket to make them whole when it all fell apart

        …I seem to recall a lot of people being terribly clear about how the alternative was so cataclysmic that we couldn’t possibly conceive how dire the reality would be so there was simply no other choice…& I’m kind of torturing the metaphor beyond the point it seems likely to survive…but…it does kind of fit a pattern?

  10. These comments are depressing but I understand the frustration y’all must feel as you lose your democracy and literally no one in any place of power is willing to do anything about it.

    Canada is about to go down the same road and I plan to fight to the bitter end…even though I know it is a lost cause as it is merely a matter of when, not if.

     

    Have a good weekend!

    • …I know they don’t make much of a material difference…but for whatever they might be worth you do have my sympathies

      …fridays shouldn’t feel like this

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