Hi gang. Hope everyone had a really great week. Mine was super stressful, so I’m super happy to be off this week. Brain Drain will be around shortly to keep you entertained.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this whole case is based on a fiction.
Colorado web designer told Supreme Court a man sought her services for his same-sex wedding. He says he didn’t – and he’s straight
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/politics/colorado-web-designer-court-filings/index.html
Insert “Good For Her” dot gif
Fox News settles suit by Tucker Carlson’s former booker for $12 million
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/06/30/abby-grossberg-tucker-carlson-settlment/
Sometimes you gotta hand it to the French. Of course if we did this every time a kid got shot the whole country would be in flames all the time.
France protests: nearly 500 arrested as riots surge in Marseille and Lyon
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/01/france-riots-nearly-500-arrested-as-protests-surge-in-marseille-and-lyon
Good luck to all who are traveling this weekend.
United CEO apologizes for flying private as airline cancels thousands of flights
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/business/united-scott-kirby-private-jet/index.html
This rates a rewatch #RIP Alan Arkin
Have a fantastic weekend!
Not Alan Arkin!
The CO case and last year’s abortion case are blatant examples of how the right wing doesn’t give a fuck about the reality of standing (or reality generally). This case should never have gotten past the very first court. But, it helps them shove their bullshit down everyone’s throats so damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.
That weird Colorado thing was like a test case or something. The Court wanted to carve out religious exemptions and they needed a case to come before it. Who cares if it was fiction. The thing is with every passing year the Supreme Court overturns its own precedents, which also used to be (ironically) unprecedented, so who knows, in five years maybe this will be overturned. “I Like Beer” Brett, despite his youth, doesn’t look like he’s long for this world, and Clarence Thomas is 75 and looks like a walking (or sitting) heart attack waiting to happen, so who knows.
This is why I’m against stacking the Supreme Court. They might have lifetime tenure, but they’re not immortal. So, whatever. Let’s say there are 15. At some point there’s going to be 10 or 12 conservatives, so this is all unnecessary.
And by the way, the lifetime tenure was supposed to guarantee that they were non-partisan and unbeholden to temporal popular manias. Hasn’t turned out that way recently.
Yeah I have some pause about the stacking the court because Republicans have already demonstrated that they can and will game the system any way that can to get their supermajority.
The lifetime tenure thing wasn’t initially such a big deal because we used to appoint people who had, you know, experience, and were, you know, qualified. So they might sit on the court for 10-15 years. Now it’s all about finding the first person who can legally vote and happens to wear a robe.
…I think the problem is analogous to the “norms” that we hear so much about being respected by politicians of one stripe & bulldozed by others…the lifetime appointments were (as I understand it) intended to place the supreme court beyond concerns of fear or favor…but just as with the other branches of government relying on a good faith approach that seems largely conspicuous by its absence with the court it presupposed a faithful & diligent approach that held justice to be its guiding star…& it seems to be going about as well as the other thing these days…far from sidestepping undue influence it seems that the majority are fully shackled to patrons in various shapes & forms that prize them because they offer the end run around all end runs on the basis that their word is law & no one can lawfully deny their will…including the minority members of their own bench whose dissents are so much more coherent as to make the binding opinion read like a bad taste parody
…I don’t know if elon’s current round of API fuckery will allow this to embed but if it does it ought to be obvious why I think if the arc of moral history truly does bend toward justice the future citations for which the roberts court will be known are liable to be drawn from scathing dissents
It’s like the Second Amendment, which they were only thinking would apply to a musket which was barely more deadly than a spear.
Back in 1789 they figured a 40 year old who was appointed was going to serve for about a dozen years before cholera got him. Now it’s potentially 50 years.
The GOP has already shown that there are no rules as far as running the courts — just look at how quickly they changed them to stop Merrick Garland and then changed them back with Amy Comey Barrett.
It’s pointless to worry about them following some precedent as long as the Democrats do. They’ve already made up their minds they have the right to do whatever they want to maintain control, and one piece of fixing this is to stop pretending the game is any different.
…not disagreeing…although I confess I’m none too clear on how one effectively brings that fight to the likes of uncle thomas or brett-likes-beer…but to take a brief 2nd amendment detour via that thing I quoted the other day which cited the “originalism is bunk” stuff
…best as I understand the “well-regulated militia” thing would have had a pretty specific meaning when written…which has not a lot in common with the way I would have taken it at face value
…I’m told that the “regulate” would have been along the lines of the “regulators” from the lincoln county war that were popularized on account of the connection to billy the kid…rather than overseen in the way I’d much rather people who get to own things expressly intended to kill & maim living things would be…but also that the whole thing was sort of a semantic (& fiscal) dodge to further disassociate their fledgling nation from the regimes whose yoke they sought to cast off…since those had standing armies…which have attnedant levies in the taxation sense…& press gangs…so their “antithesis” was a purely voluntary force willing to muster in its nation’s time of need…& do so while supplying its own kit…which its prospective members were charged with having on hand & well-maintained
…so…leaving aside the question of whether the existence of the US military-industrial complex renders the entire thing obsolete…it seems like a strict originalist reading of that clause ought to see some of the most ardent supporters of that amendment & their attendant god-given right to own military-grade hardware being seen as an available asset just like the other forms of ordnance being provided to ukraine as material support for its opposition to russia’s war of aggression
…I don’t genuinely think it’s a reasonable or effective tactic…but sometimes I’d confess the thought of giving them what they claim to want & then forcing them to put their money where their mouth is with their ass on the line…might be a lesson some strident people would find nasty, brutish & short?
It’s really time to understand that there is no way to pull off quadruple bank shots over 20 years.
Find a clear message and push it. Figure out their real motives and expose them. Don’t fight fake fights.
The founders weren’t orginalists, the current batch of right wingers aren’t originalists, and the entire originalist project is leading us over a cliff. Don’t get hung up on long debates on their terms — start making your own terms.
…again, I’m sympathetic to the point of agreement with the basic gist of that…but I’m hard pressed not to see the problems that currently beset so many at the hands of the GOP & its pet “justices” as proof that you can in fact pull off some extreme trick shots over a decades-long span…not least if you’re prepared to fuck with the basic physics of the table on the fly
…so I can’t entirely divest myself of a suspicion that a workable long-term solution demands both approaches working in concert…& even then confers no sort of immortality to whatever better way it might succeed in bringing to pass…if it were otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing so much back-sliding in so many places into patterns that harrowing lessons of history have shown to be hard learned & painfully forgotten?
…I guess I think of the long term thing as akin to a critical path analysis…some things have what programmers refer to with a more or less literal meaning as “dependencies”…while other things can be identified as fulcrums or bottlenecks…& that kind of thing can be very helpful when it comes to deciding how to pick your battles & deploy your resources in the short term even if it models a longer term than anyone can really know for a fact
Yeah I’d be fine with rolling term limits like 10 years or something and then fuck off and someone else is appointed. Someone dies? Oh well, wait for the next round of appointments.
Term limits are an excellent idea, but the argument for increasing the size is specific to making the group more representative of the American population. Both should be implemented. Stagger the term limits so one is shifted off every four years. And boost the size of the court, with perhaps a random selection to determine who hears a specific case. The bribery would stop if the billionaires couldn’t count on the grifters getting to hear a case.
…I swear it seems like every time I blink the arrest count in france jumps another hundred or two…up around the 1,000 mark as of when I dragged myself upright today, anyway
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/01/france-riots-nearly-500-arrested-as-protests-surge-in-marseille-and-lyon
…the BBC generally post the front pages of most of the national papers overnight…so I know the telegraph quoted someone as saying the police over there are engaged in a “war with vermin” but not what the phrase was translated from…just like I know the UK government’s plan to solve the problem of hundreds of thousands of migrants by sending a few hundred to rwanda was ruled by 2/3 to be unlawful (because even if rwanda itself gets to be a “safe country” there’s every chance they’d be fine with moving those folks along to one no safer than the place they originally fled for their lives) so naturally boris took the opportunity to run off a “let’s get rwanda done” column for the mail
…&…if climate change really does end my chances of staying well supplied with coffee…I’m not at all sure I’m going to be able to resist the temptation to just go back to bed & see if things look any less unbearable when tomorrow comes?
…& by the time I got the pages of the NYT…that’s north of 1,300 arrests
France Arrests Over 1,300 in Unrest on Eve of Slain Teenager’s Funeral
I just said au revoir to my French dog walker, who is absolutely lovely, and actually has a fairly prestigious appointment to a beloved NY institution but I guess it doesn’t pay the bills. This morning I jokingly accused her of being a Socialist. She, laughing, assured me that she was no such thing.
As part of her duties, I am trying to speak to her in French. She, in turn, corrects my pronunciation and my usage. Apparently I am far too formal and 20th century. The thing is we’ve been to France in the 21st century but I guess my interactions were with restaurant servers and hotel personnel.
She also told me I sound slightly like a Canadian, which is a very subtle insult. Happy Canada Day, everyone! I hope you can see the fireworks through the haze.
…I can see being compared to a canadian as shade in the context of french pronunciation…but if it helps at all, I can also see a way it might not be?
…I spent some time in france as a teen & while I wouldn’t lay claim to fluency these days I did once spend most of a sunday lunch earnestly trying to convince somebody’s grandparents that I really was from the UK & wasn’t pulling their leg…so I at least had a passing familiarity with some attitudes about foreigners & their accents when speaking french at one point…& in my (somewhat dated & in any case limited) experience…to be mistaken as a canadian when american could be much like being taken for a scot when english
…they…like the scottish & the canadians…americans & the english…are not always viewed as welcome visitors?
In her case, it was because she knew that in North America there was a contingent of francophones, but they were in Canada, and had a particular accent. So they were not French.
I said to her (because she seems up for chats; I have her until Monday, by which time we’re going to be best friends) I wish I could speak French more fluently. And she said (blasphemously) “There is no reason to learn French. The only language to know is English and you were born speaking it. The rest of us have to go through a painful education learning it so we can do anything online or get any kind of decent job.”
That was food for thought. I’ve been in European hotel rooms where the TVs (blessedly) didn’t offer English-language programming. But I guess that’s true in a more general sense.
…one of the things I doubt I’ll live to see but like to ponder on account of overdoing my intake of sci fi is what might one day overcome english’s claim to its title as the lingua franca…after all, it managed to fill the dead men’s shoes that latin left behind…& its mongrel makeup & willingness to beg, borrow & steal from other languages with abandon has made it pretty resilient in the role so far…but…things change…& there’s a lot of people who speak something you could consider spanish if that gets to count the portuguese speakers & other associated latin american dialects…& then there’s china & india vying for the top spot in terms of raw native population numbers along with geopolitical influence
…feels like something that couldn’t happen quickly but might seem that way when it hits some sort of tipping point…at least if the romans are any kind of an example?
the french love to riot…..this time they actually have a good reason…..and the ones trying to stop them from rioting are in fact the cause of the riots
they’re going to burn the country down
Happy Canada Day everyone!
As punishment, the United CEO should FLY ON HIS OWN FUCKING AIRLINE!
But some folks might consider it cruel and unusual punishment.
Only if he’s treated like an Asian male passenger on United.
Sorry to hear about Alan Arkin. He was hilarious as the scared out of his mind psychiatrist of Martin Q Blank in the film Gross Point Blank.
We finally got rain last night! Sure, lightning took out a transformer and like 800 houses including mine had no power for about 5 hours, but it’s back now.
Bonus, we got a lot of rain and it’s raining again!
its keti koti today
https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/01/hundreds-join-parade-keti-koti-amsterdam-racist-slogans-sprayed-slave-monument
the surinamese and i assume all other minorities know this country is not heading in the right direction….tho it is definitely heading towards the right
like most of europe…..we are headed towards an epic shitshow….at the rate we’re going…probably in the not too far away future
…yeah…that part’s a real worry…it’s always hung around threatening to play the populism card but the footholds fascism has been trying to worm its toes into across europe are getting a lot less tenuous than they deserve to be
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/30/far-right-on-the-march-europe-growing-taste-for-control-and-order
…with the sheer amount of baggage it brings with it you’d think it would have failed to cling on & fallen to its doom but somehow instead it seems to find perches that allow it to throw a lot of undue weight around…& it does not help me rest easy about these interesting times we seem to be stuck with?
rich white people are fucking everything up for everyone from the cost of living to the climate….and dumb white people are blaming everyone but them for it
that seems to be pretty much the root cause for the rise of the right….
much as i hate to say it as a white people…
Unfortunately I think that is how it is supposed to work.
i think you are right
i am also amazed we made it this far as a species without going extinct
you can probably thank religion for that
pumping out babies faster than we can stupid ourselves out of existence
…banking that one, ta…although I think historically we seem to be most at risk of doing so while trying to be ever so clever
…it’s…not exactly a comforting thought if you think about it too much…but I sort of like to tell myself that there (in at least some ways) has maybe never been a time when humanity wasn’t both capable of finishing itself off & easy to mistake for actually trying to…& I suppose the jury’s out on whether we shall in the end prove to have sown the seeds of that sort of destruction…but…in a way…the fact we’ve bucked those odds so far…despite what sometimes seems like a pretty concerted effort…is a little bit like humanity’s saving grace…or superpower, if you prefer…& most days it seems as though we ought to make it to tomorrow providing that most people, in most places, at any given moment…can just resist the temptation to “be a dick about it”
…& while I don’t think any of us manage to never cross that line…keeping the ones actively doing it at a given instant in the minority at least sounds like it might be achievable?
we’ve never pissed off the planet s0 much it might do it for us before tho
me finks we are at the fuck around stage
and find out is incoming
interesting times are here to stay
…would that it were otherwise…but that’d be a big ol’ yup from me, I think
…factor in the delayed reaction aspect of climate change & the fact that we’re still busily upping the numbers for the rate we add to problems we’re only seeing the results of happening as pertained to inputs on a smaller scale a fair while back…& maintaining my sunny disposition is…not as straightforward as I’d like
…but…well…hopelessness I find doesn’t really suit me & feels like a default vote for “fuck it, let’s just let it all go to hell”…so…stubborn optimism remains my compromise du jour?
im half british
forlorn is not in my vocabulary
im going to keep calm
and make rent
till the world ends around me
and if a time comes where i cant make rent or keep calm
well….thats not going to be pretty
i know how to make drugs and explosives ^.^
i miss spent my youth well
…sigh…they appear (at least for the time being) to have murdered that nitter.net option I only just found out about…& at least as long as my general levels of ornery remain high enough to not want to reward bad behavior by logging into twitter in some fashion that doubtless comes with being shown what a man I wish we could wish away to mars with nothing but one of his battery powered cars for company thinks I should be shown…rather than dipping my toe in when I come across something interesting being said by somebody worth listening to just to see what the responses look like…I’d seem to be down to whatever a google search will preview…& things posted in places twitter still allows embeds
…can’t confirm or deny without picking some sort of free account to log in with but just saw something claiming twitter is “down” for non-paying accounts at the moment
…could be chinese whispers or just another commit pushed live prematurely without adequate understanding of how the platform actually functions…but if anyone who does fuck with twitter that way knows what’s up (or not) with that, I’d be curious to know
…just…apparently not curious enough to log in & see if that still gets me nowhere?
…hah…it is to laugh, as they say…so…only got some borrowed screencap for the first bit…the elon tweet is real but I’m not in a position to find the replies & would only get one out of two if I were…so
…& it gets better…or maybe I’m just saying that because it sounds like I might not have been far wrong with my guess earlier
hahahahaha…..just stumbled across this channel
pretty much everything on it is hilarious
Oh I love them! I watch a ton of their videos on facebook!