Text: The ranger, Alex Sienkiewicz, had infuriated the ranchers by tearing down their “No Trespassing” signs. In the summer of 2016, he sent a staffwide email that read, “This is my regular reminder: NEVER ask permission to access the National Forest Service through a traditional route shown on our maps EVEN if that route crosses private land. NEVER ASK PERMISSION; NEVER SIGN IN.”
as billionaires buy media, bribe voters with “petitions”, finance dark money influence groups in order to buy a Supreme Court and now an election for a fascist, will center-left liberals finally concede that top inequality is a problem, that it’s not sufficient to just try to “raise the bottom”?
@artcollisions i think that’s right. there are economic efficiencies to scale, but political and social institutions really need a foundation at human scale. i think the unworldliness of this election has to do with the reduction of an activity with incredibly profound consequences to media spectacle that terminates with filling out a bureaucratic form. we’d be and act more sane if we actually got together to form and express our views.
@GuerillaOntologist reading the full piece, it doesn’t sound like they are all that much reformed.
@_dm gonna die with my keyboard in my hand *lawd lawd*
gonna die with my keyboard in my hand.
when throwing one scapegoat off the cliff doesn’t resolve the problem, well you need to find another scapegoat to throw off the cliff for that!
@curtosis i’ve really only ever been able to muster dipshit, in almost any activity i’ve tried…
@Transportist I think @mhs’s use of “inflection point” was right. It’s not that the anti-hero was unknown prior to 24. But it accelerated, became kind of the norm, during the edgy “golden age of television”.
(The Soprano’s also, also a bit earlier, I think. In general, maybe mafia tales were kind of a ghetto of popular anti-heroism before 9/11.)
A very good interview by #LexFridman of #BernieSanders, a guy who through all the twists and turns has retained my admiration.
It's also quite remarkable how quick and on-point he remains, compared to his contemporaries, Joe Biden, Donald Trump.
https://lexfridman.com/bernie-sanders/
@mhs Yes! That was the show that really broke ground, in a bad way. We knew it at the time, talked about it, watched it.
Culturally, we’ve grown accustomed to rooting for anti-heroes. I wonder if that hasn’t primed us to be able to vote for someone like Donald Trump, in full(ish) knowledge of who he is.
Are we just collectively Breaking Bad?
Text: Here is one thing we can say for sure about union members who vote for Trump: The fact that they are union members is not the most important part of their own identity. If it were, they could be easily persuaded not to vote for Trump, a literal billionaire scab who we have already seen act like a typical anti-labor Republican during his term in the White House. Hell, J.D. Vance gave a speech opposing the PRO Act just a few days ago! The interesting question here is not whether these guys are full of shit when they ask union members for support; the interesting question is why many union members care so little about being union members that they allow themselves to be tempted into the Republican camp. Their competing identities — as macho guys, or as racists, or as anti-elites, or as Christians, or whatever — have overtaken any hold that their identity as a union member may have had on their hearts and minds. That is a problem that cannot be solved by any politicians. It can only be solved by the labor movement itself.
Ads for candidates I support don’t motivate me. I resent the manipulation. I feel like they cheapen causes that matter to me, and turn them into grifts.
But ads by their opponents—the shamelessness and dissembling—infuriate me. The other guy going negative is, for me, the most effective positive.
it’s weird that in development and geopolitics there’s a sense in which the opposite of West is South.
@scott i don’t think we can know anything. everything we learn before the election is not offered to provide predictively meaningful information, but tailored towards neutralizing threats to her election.
once elected, everything changes, the only things that really bind—even these only to a very limited degree—are promises made directly by the candidate (not by her “surrogates”).
@scott the entire Harris administration is an echo of Nancy Pelosi’s line on the ACA: “We have to pass the bill [elect the lady] so that you can find out what’s in it [what she really means to do].”
i’m hoping for a sharp turn on Israel policy. i have no idea how likely that is, especially since i think Netanyahu may well drag our military into active combat before she gets her chance.
