@curtosis yeah. i definitely agree the whole dead-guy-junk fetish is yet more, and pretty vivid, evidence of weird-and-not-in-a-keep-Austin-way.
i just think pretty overt rhetorical allusions to genitalia are entirely within our norms of political “debate” at this point, for better or for worse. if i recall, the 2016 Republican primaries included some pretty unvarnished mine-is-longer-than-yours contestation.
@paninid “nothing is a Federal crime unless this Supreme Court agrees that it is.” is a different claim than “anything the Supreme Court wishes to be criminalized becomes a Federal crime.”
small mercies.
regardless of who becomes the next President, nothing is a Federal crime unless this Supreme Court agrees that it is.
@curtosis one was laudatory, one was mean? the mean one was more on point, mean in direct service of an electoral contest, where the fawning one was just kind of random?
i just find all the fanning and fainting and assertions the other side would go nuts if the rubber were on the other penis a bit disingenuous, when Obama made a dick joke about Trump and there was no condemnation of norm violation or inappropriateness. 1/
@curtosis Trump is incoherent and decomposing and paranoid and malicious, a terrible person who should be nowhere near the Presidency absolutely. But his adding a vulgar compliment to his bizarre hagiography of Arnold Palmer has nothing to do with that, except maybe as even more evidence he has no good sense of when keep things appropriate and when to take risks. The whole bizarre hagiography, “the weave”, is all evidence of his chaotic mind, perhaps dementia, sure. /fin
the main case people make for capitalism is that it gets incentives right to encourage people to act, to produce.
but a capitalism under which the key to wealth is riding number-go-up by owning the right assets engenders very different incentives than to act, to produce.
am i misreading the joke, or was Trump not the first major figure to allude to genital size during this campaign? https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/21/politics/video/barack-obama-donald-trump-crowd-size-dnc-digvid
if a firm allowed Kamala to do what Trump did today, there'd be a big to-do across conservative media about how real americans are gonna eat at Burger King.
@scott it was prescient. i don’t know if PACs even existed in the 1980s.
what we didn't realize in the 1980 was that those dots were all the votes he was buying and the ghosts were trying to save democracy.
i feel the presence of an absence of a presence.
@carolannie i have friends who in times of great stress want to watch true crime television channels. they say that it calms them. i have never understood.
@stereogum @Jonathanglick That one might actually see Joni Mitchell perform live feels like a fantastical alternative universe.
@carolannie making an effort to understand others’ point of view and way of thinking is a virtue perhaps. but sometimes you wonder what you are letting yourself become by walking even a mile in those shoes.
I wonder if Musk’s game plan is to break black letter election law then run the case to the Supreme Court, so it can declare that much of that longstanding body of law is unconstitutional. 1/
Since, according to this abomination of a Court, spending is speech, paying voters to register is like encouraging voters to register. Encouraging voters to register is your protected free expression, and it is your protected free expression to restrict your encouragements to register only to people who sign your petition. So any prohibition of paying people, or even paying a restricted class of people, to register is unconstitutional. 2/
Of course it follows that since encouraging restricted classes of people to vote is also free expression, paying only people in restricted classes only if they turn out to vote would also be protected by the First Amendment. /fin
i have this sneaking suspicion Israel attacks Iran like November 3.
So if you’re paying someone to sign a petition — or entering them into a daily lottery for $1M — and making being a registered voter a condition of signing, then you are paying people to register to vote if they are not registered already. Which is illegal.
They’ll call it lawfare. But election law exists to prevent precisely this kind of bullshit. https://electionlawblog.org/?p=146397
@freedom_baird We are all just tears in the rain.
there’s a lot of science fiction in which protagonists are living out exciting stories against the backdrop of masses enduring dystopian or at best banal lives. welcome to the science fiction future! who did you, my statistically sophisticated reader, imagine you would end up?
@scott emojis too!
distinguish yourself in character rather than in status.
