@dpp yes. i agree with that. they imagine, perhaps, they can take back what they have given, they hold a leash upon what they’ve unleashed on everyone else.

they hold no leash. they have the power to applaud, to rubber stamp, occasionally to performatively block but not on anything thay really matters.

@dpp i agree there’s a kind of stupidity, in that they believe that following their ideological priors will lead to a good and virtuous rather than a broken, poor, and violent society. but they mean for what’s happening to happen. they mean to enable it. in that sense, i think it’s only malice, not stupidity.

they are not in fact shocked, shocked by what the rest of us call abuses. they are constructing the loopholes, the protections against judicial protection of the public, with care.

so many possible names — the “pollute the planet act”, “kill the poors act”, “rich get richer act”.

but i think i’d go with the simple “gestapo act”

a thing i find weird is, was there even any meaningful debate on the whole new Gestapo thing?

i know legislators talked about Medicaid, rural hospitals, deficits and baselines.

but it seems like the new Gestapo was unproblematic, a shoo in, not any not even one of Republican legislators’ concerns.

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Resilience is a dimension of epistemology we (at least I) have too little considered.

However we know what we know, how resilient is it to interests that seek to snow us, or leave us without what had once been our capacity to know?

what’s the inverse of Hanlon’s Razor? i think that’s what applies to the current Supreme Court.

@ryanlcooper on elite impunity: “any country that completely gives up on accountability for its political class will eventually produce someone like Trump. Open the door to criminals, and sooner or later one will walk through.” https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-trump-prosecution-law-felonies-fascism/

plutocrats are the ultimate degrowthers, because serious growth requires unpredictable change, and plutocrats want to fix current hierarchies in amber.

you see this now in the Trump Administration’s reinforcement of fossil fuels and suppression of solar / batteries / etc.

you’ll know evil when you see what people will do in the name of god.

“A method of legal interpretation that relies on this kind of historical inquiry only when it will yield the answer it wants is clearly far more opportunistic than principled.” #KateShaw https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/opinion/supreme-court-trump.html

“Republicans are literally subsidizing dirty, cheap steel production in India and China.” @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/environment/2025-07-02-big-beautiful-bill-green-energy-climate-china/

“Boasting about incompetence is signaling that you can be trusted to be corrupt.” @henryfarrell https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/elon-musk-and-the-power-of-the-bro

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the whole “alligator alcatraz” thing is unfair to the alligators.

@BenRossTransit huh! new to me, but pretty interesting.

if i built a vanity LLM, i'd name it @delphi.

why doesn't the existence of sex or gender segregated sports constitute unlawful discrimination? sports could legitimately be segregated by weight, musculature, skill, lots of characteristics rationally related to competition on like terms.

but sex and gender are noisy proxies for any of this, and constitute categories discrimination by which demands elevated scrutiny under all circumstances.

i’m beginning to think President Miller might be even worse than President Musk.

too much algorithmic social media consumption is like receiving one of those serial killer notes written in clipped-out magazine letters and being like “hey, this ‘Q’ is from The NewYorker so what the note says must be true!”

a collage of a lie is not redeemed by the quality of elements collaged.