[new draft post] If we weren't idiots, Balance of Payments edition https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/04/01/if-we-werent-idiots-balance-of-payments-edition/index.html
@Canevecchio (thanks! happy day in these times when all of us are somehow fools.)
my wife suggests maybe everyone should get a Trump tattoo to ward off deportation, rendition, enslavement.
it’s #pathetic that this administration mistakenly sent to foreign prison a US resident with legal status but can’t get the authoritarian leaders of a tiny little country to give him back.
what would be the appropriate due process under our laws for sending someone into enslavement for an indefinite, perhaps life, term, without possibility of appeal or parole?
nobody was indefinitely detained and enslaved under conditions tantamount to torture when a bunch of bumbling operatives broke into an office in the Watergate building.
there’s nothing more lawless than a law-and-order party.
fascism is like a prion it folds everything it touches into an instance of itself.
when discrimination becomes indistinguishable from hypocrisy, all is lost.
there's a level of virtuosity in being corrupt in the way you prosecute your corruptions. and the very corruption of your corruption (in PA at least) was why you can't be prosecuted! it became fraud, not vote buying, and who's going to prosecute elon musk for fraud? it's like a pigeon for jaywalking.
@Phil maybe it was shady. but it was open. courts could review and perhaps appropriately review the selectiveness. Trump constantly challenged vote counts in urban districts. it's ugly, but not unlawful. meanwhile… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
i wasn't so exercised at the time, but i now agree that Bush v. Gore was the beginning of our long catastrophe.
privately asking a governor to "find votes" is quite a different thing. one of Trump's many novel contributions.
one of the many ironies of the moment is it's the people who style themselves defenders of western civilization that are the greatest threats to the achievements of western civilization.
@Phil We can agree on the claim, "You are probably one of the most credulous people I have ever encountered." But we probably disagree on the referents.
@Phil He said he returned them all! And then he hadn't! He was caught in subterfuge. He wasn't negotiating. Gore did not privately ask to find votes. He asked for public recounts. So did Trump! Nobody prosecuted Trump for that. It was desperate, but fine, entrely appropriate.
@Phil Come on. The classified documents case was a slam dunk, anyone who was asked for return of classified docs and refused and lied about it would be convicted. Yes, others, including Biden, were sloppy, but always cooperated. The Georgia case was also a slam dunk, literally asking a governor to find votes. It's hard to find comparables because no one has been so brazen. Some of the J6ers may have been overprosecuted, but the violent ones certainly were not.
if you call it lawfare without making a persuasive, affirmative case for why others whose similar behavior came to public and prosecutorial light wouldn't be pursued, then you are just in favor of elite impunity.
seems kind of gratuitous to have gone through so much trouble to kill affirmative action in the university when you're just going to kill off the university.
“Right wing accelerationism is not a backlash *against* globalization and its combination of exit and constraint, but an argument that its logic should be extended downwards into the nation state.” @henryfarrell https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-reactionary-right-is-not-a-monolith ht #WilliamCullerneBown
the law in its majesty permits rich and poor alike to hand out million dollar checks to buy votes.
Elon Musk is a man who cheats at everything, and so presumes any adversary is cheating extravagantly against him, and he's fucking morally outraged about it.
Wilhoit's Law to him is not merely descriptive. It is the first and only commandment on a tablet set down by God. And he is the definition of the in-group.