Speaking of NC, is there cause for hope that McCrory's coup will be prevented? Anyone know wtf is happening there?
I just read that he conceded.
I think for prescience it is hard to beat Sarah Kendzior. https://sarahkendzior.com/
What's the source for the terrifying plan of attack from Cohen? The link is to a truncated and completely anonymous image.
First NC governor to lose a re-election bid.
Found it, Cohen's _On Democracy_, pages 142-143.
Not an immediate thing, but something that could become the seed for a wholesale discrediting of Republicanism in 10 or 20 years, based on how things are going now, is to thoroughly identify them with the "climate change is a hoax / we must do nothing" position, so when the disasters come they can't memory-hole it all.
What can we do now to help ensure that is how the current state of climate change politics is remembered?
Reading Sarah Kendzior is a big piece of why I'm not sleeping well.
I had a few days after the election when I only slept a couple of hours a night.
Those of you with kids: what are you telling your kids about the future?
"Today is a school day, so you'll ride bicycle with Daddy to the big kid room. We can tell Ms. Tracy that you want to try to pee-pee in the potty. Tonight we will play at home, have dinner, big bath with bubbles and soft bed time."
You have a soft and a hard bedtime? I guess we do too.
Naw, I just use the nice adjectives to try to influence the outcome.
Oh, Kendzior. I think I mailed that Trumpmenbashi piece to Heebie, then forgot about it.
The contrast between Republican planning based on an analysis of real institutions and bureaucratic minutia and whatever the fuck all the liberal election postmortems go on about is pretty stark. Cohen and others know full well that what holds them back isn't well-organized opposition but the deep unpopularity of their goals. So they're doing everything they can to minimize the role of popularity in governance.
I tell them that some day we probably won't get snow at our house anymore.
10: I tell them that the bad people of their parents' generation are all old and are going to be dead before too long, and they will take over and make things right.
I have a sister and brother in their twenties. I tell them their anger is legitimate because they are truly getting fucked over.
10. Things will get worse for a while, then they'll get better again. It's possible to live a good life in difficult circumstances.
I think dictatorship is unlikely-- something much more like Mexico or Brazil. That still means that honest journalism will be harder and less safe next year than it is today. But elimination of political opponents, I don't think so. Destruction of competing tycoons for profit and gain, also unlikely. Watching gov't behavior toward Bezos and Amazon would be an early warning.
I do not think it was a competent act to start a messy conflict with Beijing over Taiwan before securing domestic matters.
10: Mercifully, kids (or at least my kids) don't ask long term questions. I've told them about global warming and about Trump, but they can't really picture anything beyond summer holidays.
10: Vote vote vote and be active politically all the time. Learn the system. Protest and defend yourselves peacefully if something is wrong to you - don't be shy. Save your money - you're going to need it.
Especially for my son in Baltimore: You're a brown man who lives in a "gentrifying" neighborhood in a poor and touchy city. Know your neighbors and be careful on the street (He loves that town, by the way).
As long as he keeps his oily mitts off her beloved Sponge, my stepdaughter could care less.
So consider yourself warned, Donald! Don't mess with He who is absorbent and yellow and porous!
One of my students today: "We must eat Trump, otherwise he will eat us." Go get 'im, kid!
Mara still mutters "Throw Donald Trump in the dump" whenever his name comes up.
Today we were at a science museum and in the kids room they had those giant lego-like foam blocks. My kids made a big wall, then build a giant man with a yellow head (they didn't have orange) and put it behind the wall and said it was Trump. My 4 y.o. said "It's stupid Trump!" Then they punched the Trump lego guy in the face so he exploded into pieces.
I don't tell my two year old nephew anything about politics, but I'm trying to get him waitlisted at the School of the Americas.
McCrory's conceded the battle but not the war. He can still pack the court. The only reason I can muster why he wouldn't is the non-gerrymandered elections next year. Court-packing is not a good look for the Republican Party.
27: We have yet to determine how low the Republicans can sink before it costs them.
Reading material? Have I linked this before?
A Time For Treason ...long linklist of long serious material, for the most part concrete
I think the "The Shock of Recognition" by J Sakai near the beginning may have changed my life.
About halfway down is "How to Survive a Knife Attack" followed by Black Reconstruction and Angela Davis
Things will get worse for a while, then they'll get better again.
It's comforting to think that there's a political pendulum which must inevitably swing back our way once it lurches too far to the right. It's not necessarily true, though.
I just started watching The Man in the High Castle. Maybe not the best form of escape from my post-electoral anxiety disorder. I may have to return to the twee comforts of The Great British Bake Off.
25 shows evidence of good parenting.
(I normally object to parent as a verb, and therefore also dislike the gerund parenting. I apologize for using it. And yes, I am a coastal elite liberal who often [not always! but often enough] gives a flying f*ck about grammar. Apparently it's my fault that Trump was elected. For this, too, I apologize).
Hey now, lots of us linguistic descriptivists voted against Trump too.
I am a coastal elite liberal who often [not always! but often enough] gives a flying f*ck about grammar
But not about polarity!
parent as a verb
First attested in 1663.
I affirm it, teo: you are ever right.
It's been all downhill since heliocentrism.
38 was about James I, of course. James II would be totally down, and he seems more like JPJ's type.
James II would be totally down, and he seems more like JPJ's type.
A good friend of mine once accused me of being "half-Jacobite, half-Jacobin." Naturally, I would find James II more to my liking.
It was reported to the King that he had the flatteries of an good Canadian to his credit; at which he was not a little pleased.
He did have a bit of an affection for the French.
Neb, I give up: what is the "noted NCGOP donor Joshua Cohen" reference?
The first three quoted words in particular.
He did have a bit of an affection for the French.
Teo gets it. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British North America, a Canadian/Canadien was someone of Gallic origin, someone who spoke French. The massive British Isles immigration to Canada (from England, Scotland, and Wales; and, it's 1847, and in come the Irish...so, yeah, the Irish too) happened about a century later.
I could hardly not, to be fair. My last name is as Quebecois as they come. (I'm pretty sure we're FB friends, so you can check for yourself. But if we aren't, I'm very easy to find.)
50: Do you have a biblical, Hebrew forename, combined with a quintessentially Quebecois surname? An unusual combination; and yeah, I'm pretty sure I've seen you around.
Yep, and I just accepted your friend request.
Menachem Tremblay, how the hell are ya?
I really hope that isn't your real name.
But this is yet another reason you should give up on Twitter and join Facebook.
I don't have the heart to try to riff on 51, knowing it will never be as great as "Toonces El-Shabazz," because nothing will.
52: Merci bien, mon ami. And please ignore my aunts, who clog up my FB feed with meaningless "inspirational" tripe, and with puppy porn.
And the rest of you can just call me Hezekiah Trudeau.
46. Understatement of the year, if you're referring to James VII and II. He was a paid agent of Louis XIV.
A good friend of mine once accused me of being "half-Jacobite, half-Jacobin."
I suspect this is an insult. It's kind of "I don't care what kind of government I get as long as it's arbitrary, violent and tyrannical!"
It's kind of "I don't care what kind of government I get as long as it's arbitrary, violent and tyrannical!"
That message is enough to win the electoral college.
A half-Jacobite speaks only every other sentence in verse. Challenging.
ll
Am with beloved stepchild & stepchild's spouse for visit. They have a dynamic that I fear may not end happily, or they could figure it out and grow into blissful decades of mutual joy and devotion. So painful as last thing anyone welcomes is hinted advice from stepmother(in-law).
On other fronts, the Abastos market is the fucking BOMB, and amidst all the necking teenagers in every single nook and cranny of this town I saw yesterday afternoon the apex of public intimacy - she was extracting his blackheads.
l>
Sarah Kendzior is... not entirely levelheaded and sensible.
I'm still playing at being a re-enactor in the struggle between Parliament and the Stuarts -- you'll all recall that the articles of impeachment of the Earl of Clarendon included the following charge: That he hath advised and procured divers of his Majesty's subjects to be imprisoned, against law, in remote islands, garrisons and other places, thereby to prevent them from the benefit of the law, and to introduce precedents for imprisoning any other of his Majesty's subjects in like manner -- but right now I'd just like rules of against hearsay, and confrontation. That's a Tudor thing, right?
Oh, whoops, Stuarts again what got Raleigh.
Guess we'll be great again after all . . .