i'm really a single issue voter at this point: electoral reform.
if we don't "break the two-party doom loop”, as #LeeDrutman put it, it's hard to see how we don't escalate to killing each other even more than we are, let alone get any kind of sane and sensible governance.
i just had a call from a very polite gentleman running for state house in a state not mine, seeking a donation. good luck to him, but it’s getting a bit ridiculous.
@nicholas all the links i’ve checked say exactly what’s claimed. i’ve not checked them all, maybe there’s some that are weak. maybe you can argue about context, but i don’t find the context very exonerating. i’m not sure which you looked at that you think weak. and i suspect that a lot if what sounds rancid to me may seen in-bounds and reasonable to you. but these are a far cry from those clips where he’s bending over backwards to find a meeting of minds with his sparring partner.
@nicholas to be very clear, he can be as rancid as he wanna be and no one should have murdered him. but, god rest his soul, he really did have an extraordinary Jekyll and Hyde public persona.
@realcaseyrollins i mean READ THE PIECE. every quote is a link. you may dislike the author, i certainly agree he’s a partisan, but the text is well documented.
@realcaseyrollins The Coates’ piece is a one-sided presentation! But that’s precisely my point. Kirk had two very distinct sides, a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and each community will see one and refuse to see the other.
@realcaseyrollins There is tons of him with outstretched hand speking thoughtfully and reasonably, with extraordinary good will, and tons with him really fucking spewing bile. If you call even the latter moderate, well, it’s not me telling on myself. I at least can perceive both.
one thing to say about Charlie Kirk is he had enormous emotional range. he could project — very effectively! — reasonableness, bonhomie, good will, even across deep social chasms. he could also spew bile, hatred, and bigotry in a way that left little doubt he meant it. 1/
this range renders him extraordinarily divisive. some communities will select to portray and remember him through (videoclips of) extraordinary openness and good will extended to putative adversaries. others will recall the crushing epithets and hatefulness. 2/
each will feel righteous speaking and acting in ways the other finds deplorable, unforgivable. 3/
there are few public figures whose murder could be so effective a fuse. /fin
i despair i may never stand on land that isn’t sliding.
as kind of a rule of thumb, try not to be governed by people who like palaces.
@Phil (They’re the three most dangerous in per capita murder terms, 2023 stats.)
@Phil “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.“ – Mark Twain
@Phil as we often end our conversations, i endorse this, but disagree about to which of us it attaches: “the reason you eat up the bs is because of your ignorance. Your ignorance is because you seek confirmation of your existing opinion and thus quite effectively close your mind to anything that challenges your world view.”
@Phil i know it was a tiny fraction of the Federal budget, saved thousands of lives for a tiny cost, was an institution on which people relied upon for decades but was then abruptly uprooted when Elon decided to skip some great parties one weekend. i know the people who destroyed it understood nothing at all about the institutions and ultimately lives they were destroying beyond the prejudices and arrogance they brought with them to instant power.
@DavidM_yeg a fine religion, not great when it morphs into a political movement.
@DavidM_yeg (and also a bit unusual for a martyrdom inspired institution in that avenging the martyr or ensuring his martyrdom not be in vain isn’t a big part of the ethos, though some European antisemitism may constitute an exception to the exceptionalness.)
@VeroniqueB99 they’re doing their best to make it a rain check.
@Phil no. it’s murder when it is gratuitous. sometime policy leads to death. a higher speed limit. gun laws. we make considered tradeoffs. that’s not murder. but when ideologues mindlessly pull the plug on someone’s lifeline without any judicious consideration of the tradeoffs or consequences, yeah, that’s murder.
it’s rather astonishing how a news event that to a first, second, and third approximation has nothing at all to do with trans people has nevertheless been dominated by controversializing about trans people.
@Phil you have supported murderers, quite actively. it’s understandable at a human level that you are reluctant to recognize that.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/04/14/g-s1-59863/hiv-aids-drugs-usaid-zambia
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/world/africa/south-sudan-cholera-children-deaths.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doge-rubio-usaid-musk-death-toll-malaria-polio-tuberculosis
@Phil you are suffused to in what to me are obvious evils. the first thing your movement did in power was to gratuitously murder thousands of people by withdrawing food and medicine abruptly, and you actively defend it. i love to spend time in cities, even though yes they are badly misgoverned in the US. of course the most dangerous cities in the US are in red states (New Orleans, Memphis, St Louis), but that’s inconvenient.
@Phil surely not. but we disagree about what constitutes evil and destruction. so we must tolerate one another, or destroy one another, which would be evil.
@Phil founding principles like religious toleration, separation of church and state, freedom of conscience and way of life?
