(Anyone else finding Slate unreadable with an ad-blocker these days? And obviously unreadable without)
It'd be fun to have a thread about what countries people are planning to move to.
It all hinges on whether or not there's (ever) a peaceful transfer of power back to the Democrats. If such a thing is no longer possible, then we're in authoritarian regime.
I'm with heebie in #4. If that doesn't happen, then I'm for secession and civil war. This is my country, and I'm not leaving. The locus of protest moves from DC to Sacramento, and the demand is not "do your job" but "secede now, dammit".
Also, there have been and are numerous epic fails on the part of the American citizenry, such as for instance the non-reaction to the spurious impeachment of Clinton, the non-abolition of the electoral college after 2000, or the routine non-voting of most citizens, not even counting the ones that have been literally disenfranchised.
3
In my country (the DR), we've had a succession of extra-legal executives for as long as I can remember. People are recently waking up and taking to the streets however, so if you want to fast-forward to the good part, like hot weather and nice beaches, and don't mind chaotic traffic chaos, I recommend it.
It'd be fun to have a thread about what countries people are planning to move to.
I'm not leaving America. America's leaving me.
Also, and I'm probably repeating myself, but I wonder what more media work the Democrats and whatever rich supporters they have could be doing. I know I'm repeating myself when I say that the Republicans ran ads on the major news channels during the run-up to the renewal of the FISA amendments under a Democratic majority in 2008.
Why weren't we blanketed with "allow a vote on Garland" and "oppose the tax scam" ads?
I'm paying some attention to the torture bill and the upcoming elections, but I can't help thinking that we've been living in a dictatorship* for at least a couple of years, and pretty much no one cares.
If that doesn't happen, then I'm for secession and civil war.
I'm for people shutting up about California secession, and not just because if there's a another civil war, the very best case is that we'd lose and lose quickly, in which case the winners aren't going to be nearly as lenient (read: weak) as the Republicans were during Reconstruction. The worst case is that the conflict would drag on for as long as the actual Civil War, and there would be a similar level of carnage (which seems very conservative to me), which would mean, what, 8-10 million dead or so?
12: because it wasn't a fight Obama, leaders in the Democratic caucus, or, especially, Clinton wanted. They were certain that Clinton was going to win and pick her own justice.
15: And I assume the answer for the tax bill is the same strategists are still running things?
Hillary Clinton's greatest failing, in both the 2008 primaries and the 2016 general, may be an inability to hire people who understand how votes are counted.
15: I'm not following? I think the Democrats ran pretty hard against the tax bill. And it's telling that zero members of their caucus voted for either the House of Senate versions of the bill. ZERO is the lowest possible range!
18: I mean aiming at the public and the media. Democratic party discipline is great, glad they figured that out now, but not enough when you need to push the Republican moderates. I don't think a couple more votes were beyond reach, but I'm just some guy typing away in a comment box.
The tax bill seems to be getting routinely described in "Democrats say this, Republicans say that" terms, despite the overwhelming consensus among all analysts with credibility, experience, and expertise that it's going to destroy the economy and people's lives, so I'm not ready to praise the Democrats' messaging success.
I'm not ready to praise much of anything about the Democratic Party, but I do think they did better in this case than I expected. I'm genuinely surprised that the Republicans weren't able to peel off a few votes in the House and one or two in the Senate. Anyhoo, it'll all get sorted out during the armistice following the next civil war.
Mostly I'm just annoyed with the way "people should have taken to the streets" let's the existing political leadership at the time off the hook.
It's not like taking it to the streets has a great track record.
To be fair, I think the airport protests made a difference.
which would mean, what, 8-10 million dead or so?
California has 22m brown & other immigrant folk. You REALLY think they're gonna put up with the pograms that are comin' with these Fascists keeping power? Really? Sooner or later, ICE is gonna get caps in their asses. And from there to civil war is a very short trip.
24: the United States of Canada is looking pretty good. Of course, the primary pusher of Calexit is Putin. And the Jesusland of 2004 might have to awkwardly take Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and give up Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Virginia. The borders wouldn't be quite as tidy anymore.
I'm genuinely surprised that the Republicans weren't able to peel off a few votes in the House and one or two in the Senate.
Yes, Manchin gave a speech where he basically complaned that he was ripe for the plucking but the Republicans weren't having it.
15: it seems to me that not fighting the destruction of a basic norm of governance like that because the next president was going to appoint a more politically palatable candidate is a real failing on their part. And part of why we're at so much risk.
John Dowd (Trump's attorney and putative author of the "admission" tweet) seems to be taking "if the President does it it's not a crime" out for a stroll, this time with respect to obstruction of justice.
In line with 13 I'm trying to calibrate my degree of concern against the precedents of Nixon and the Rovian aspects of GW Bush's administration. (So not policy, but the subversion of both norms and the law to acquire and retain power.) Nixon is more complicated but I think the Rovian disdain was more at the margins.
Having trouble organizing my thoughts on fleshing out the comparisons but for me the bottom line is that Trump himself clearly cannot really behave as anything other than a pure autocrat. That is the current Trump emergency*. Of course it can be viewed as just a symptom of a the longer, deeper Modern Republican crisis which will still exist post-Trump. (And I think part of what ameliorated my sense of the Nixon emergency was that a much smaller portion of the Republican Party was all in.)
*I think I got "Trump emergency" from Greg Sargent. I like it.
Josh Marshall had a good post* last night which I thought set a good context for looking a the latest Flynn/WH response stuff. He points out that it is hard to go back and remember what it was like early last year without all the stuff that has come out since. His take is that WH realized they were in a race to get their Russia positions cemented early before the "deep state" and law enforcement activites started to frustrate them.
If the fullness of what happened during 2016 became known (even if it was only Russian actions on behalf of Trump and not Trump advisors conspiring with Russia) that would make the grand bargain impossible, as McFarland** clearly understood. It had to become a fait accompli before the full story emerged. Indeed, if the Trump Team could get in place before most of the information was revealed it might never become known at all since they would take over the key agencies doing the investigating. The urgency of reaching out to Kislyak was to make sure a rapprochement was still possible by late January. Yet it was the fact that Flynn got caught doing so that became the central reason the Trump Team's plans for January and February were eventually dashed.
*I think Marshall has been pretty good on the Russian stuff in a non-sensationalist way. (Another decent person to follow is Renato Mariotti who is a former Federal prosecutor.)
Semi-final thought. My wife and I finally got around to watching Bring Me Roger Stone last night. Highly recommended (almost a must see if you really are interested in the roots of the Trump/Republican emergency.) I have been fascinated/appalled by him for along time, but did not appreciate how far back he goes with Trump (and Manafort, a lot more of him in the movie than I was anticipating).
You will probably throw up in your mouth a little* at several junctures but worth a watch (and some grains of salt given his self-promotional nature).
*It was also way more Trumpy than I thought--included many, many lowlights from the 2016 campaign.
Lastly, to aid calibrating my level of concern I should reveal that my wife is someone who spent the campaign reading It's Can't Happen here, The Plot Against America, and The Rise and Fall of the Third reich. She's basically a walking Godwin's Bane.
so I'm not ready to praise the Democrats' messaging success.
Dems can only put out the message. The media does what it's going to do. And if passive citizens accept the crap the media puts -- or actively encourage the media to be nonpartisan in a way that favors Republicans -- it's not within the Dems power to change that. That's up to the citizens, who seem to be starting to figure that out.
It's not like taking it to the streets has a great track record.
On the contrary, the Tea Party has been a huge success. But they were smart enough to recognize that the media as their enemy. Liberals haven't figured that out.
Sooner or later, ICE is gonna get caps in their asses.
You're so brave.
7: I was kind dickish there because there seems to be a tendency on the left to think* that if only Obama had appointed a justice/Comey had shut up/the Russians hadn't meddled/Clinton had tried harder in Pennsylvania/Kennedy hadn't been shot everything would be just great. All of those things were potentially beginnings of alternate histories, but all those alternatives still look very much like the present, because the problems go down to the bone.
*Not to say that Ogged or the OP link necessarily hold this.
12 - at this point what someone with a lot of money should do is give Indivisible enough money to hire a full-time staff person in every congressional district.
On the contrary, the Tea Party has been a huge success. But they were smart enough to recognize that the media as their enemy. Liberals haven't figured that out.
The Tea Party was always Fox News, and started out as regular old Republicans, before it wriggled out from under them.
The National Enquirer has been peddling stories of women birthing litters of piglets and alien abductions for fifty years, but the Republicans looked at that market share and saw a voting bloc.
Voters literally can't comprehend Republicans. I think this is right.
35: I actually think that the public did pretty well regarding Clinton. His popularity rose and they elected Gore in both the popular vote and electoral college.
Except ... the NYT building should have been under siege in that entire period and ever since. The rot that goes deep to the bone exists in two places:
1. A determined right wing that is resolutely impervious to reality and decency and
2. A media that has enabled them to the point that pretty soon they aren't even going to need the media any more, having created their own.
37: Yeah, Roberts is very good on this.
The passage of the tax bill (like the refusal to debate Garland's nomination) should be covered as a scandal, rather than as legislative maneuvering. Once the violation of essential democratic norms becomes one point of view in a two-sided controversy, you're screwed. But that's where the media has brought us.
No offense, but protesting over Garland almost seems outlandish. Protesting in defense of the president! Taking to the streets in defense of moderation!
How big would it have been? A hundred thousand people? A million? And how serious, for lack of a better word? The women's march after the inauguration was both historically big and unusually peaceful. What if there are arrests or counter-protesters at the pro-Garland protests?
Would it have worked? I can't imagine mobilization enough to matter. How many people would have been needed to move the relevant people in the Senate, specifically? Remember, the people you'd need to move are the Republican Senators from on the Judiciary Committee. How big would the marches have been in their states? How responsive are they to procedural liberal concerns among their constituents? If it helps you figure this out, at the time they were from Iowa, Utah, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Georgia, and North Carolina.
When should the march (protest? Demonstration? Riot?) have happened, exactly? In February, when Republicans first said they wouldn't consider any nominee by Obama? In response to any of a dozen or so letters to the Senate and/or Obama by concerned citizens over the following months?
Suppose a protest moves the committee enough to hold a hearing and they voted him down. What happens then? Obama nominates someone else, I assume, and now we're closer to the election. Is there another protest?
What effect does this have on the election? Partisan Republicans would be convinced that a protest in support of the president is autocratic. How many swing voters would be? Well, those are mostly a myth, but what effect would it have on turnout on either side? In February, both of the primaries were still live; does this have any effect on who wins them?
39: All you say is true, but the way you frame things I think isn't. It isn't just the media that have brought you here, it is the entire political nation; first of all the Republican leaders, then the Republicans who followed, but also the non-Republicans who spent decades ignoring the problem while nearly half the country carried out an intellectual secession. The media are disproportionately influential, but they aren't the only actor. Citizens aren't children.
41 last is unduly inflammatory, I apologize. But the general point stands.
In hindsight (and this one really is very hindsightful), I think Obama would have done better to nominate some very openly liberal judge*. Make the focus on Supreme Court less asymmetrically tilted towards the right (evangelicals in particular).
*However, if Clinton won I suspect that nominee never would have been confirmed so they would have needed to fall back on someone like Garland. Which would give the usual suspects more ammo to blast Clinton as a neolib sellout, but I'd certainly take a Scalia -> Garlandesque upgrade any day.
If you have a time machine passcard on the condition not to maim anyone, maybe the best intervention for today would be to mess up Nixon's meds so he doesn't resign and gets removed and ejected kicking and screaming. (I guess do some snooping first to make sure Kissinger did in fact put a breaker in between him and the nukes.)
If you can't trust Kissinger, you can't.... Wait. I see a problem.
I'm depressed, so I'm going to get lunch early.
46: If you had a time machine you could go back in time and have eaten lunch already.
I have two consecutive meetings today where they're serving lunch, you should come eat one of mine. Or maybe I should save one of the sandwiches since in the near future they'll probably tax me on the benefit of being served lunch.
Maybe it's my personal feeling of extreme powerlessness, but it always sounds kind of silly to me when liberals talk about not taking it anymore and going out in the streets.
Sort of like when the conservatives threatened to "Go Galt" after Obamacare passed.
When labor goes Galt, it's just a strike.
Which means going Galt is just a lockout with stupid PR.
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing --
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
Citizens aren't children.
I refute you thus: President Trump.
But sure, yeah, there are other actors involved - the various Republicans and the rest of us who let things drift, including a lot of Democrats. But many of those actors have priorities and professional responsibilities that conflict with the good of the country. The whole point of a free press is to place a check on people like that.
Instead of meeting that constitutional responsibility, the press gave us Whitewater, blowjob journalism, WMD confabulation, "enhanced interrogation," Kenya birtherism, Benghazi, Trump, etc., etc. It's not reasonable to expect citizens, no matter how grown up, to pay the kind of minute attention to these matters that you and I do. But regardless of what we might expect from citizens, the media's conduct has been a gross abrogation of what ought to be its own professional norms.
52: Great pseud. You should try poetry as a profession.
The Tea Party was a exercise in rebranding by the GOP. They channeled their base's anger into electing more Republicans and gave low-information voters a rationale for voting for extremists. By contrast, the Democrats marginalized the left, knowing that only through centrism can one get elected.
I think the press has found a way to simultaneously do "Both Sides Do It" and lie to themselves about what they are doing. I read an article in the Washington Post about winners and losers in the tax bill, and if you read the article carefully you would see that it called out the bill for hurting the poor. But if you didn't read it carefully (and who's going to read it carefully?) you would think it was just reporting the outcome of a sporting event, with no real-world consequences.
I think the media has problems but I'm pretty sure if anybody hasn't figured out that the Republicans are trying to hurt the poor, that's one them.
I will be happy if Trump gets impeached or whatever, but what is the problem with a transition team interacting with another country. They are going to be in charge in a couple months anyway.
I think the problem was lying about it.
And what else that lying might be trying to cover up.
In Flynn's case, it was getting way over market rates to kidnap a guy from Pennsylvania. And he didn't even do it.
I argue that the era of street protest as an effective tactic for political change is past. The best thing they do is in this era enhearten allies and build relationships. They no longer serve as a credible demonstration of political might because, paradoxically, they're too easy to organize and too peaceful.
Unless we're talking about sustained disruptions of normal daily life, or are talking about the genesis of a coherent political movement, politicians have learned that they don't have to care.
Zeynep Tucekci elaborates on this theme more completely and persuasively in her fantastic book, Twitter and Tear Gas.
57: Right. The media sets a really fucked up agenda, and indifference to the poor is definitely part of the problem.
You could understand that Benghazi and emails were rightwing scam if you read deeply enough and didn't watch television. But after the first week or two, the most important and newsworthy aspect of Benghazi and emails is that they were fraudulent concerns -- literally impossible for an informed person acting in good faith to take seriously.
Once that became clear, you shouldn't be able to read two paragraphs into a story on those topics without being told that these concerns are, at best, dubious. The deep journalism should be journalism about how scams like this are perpetrated.
63: What are your rates for kidnapping and rendition to a Turkish prison? Do you charge more or less for right-to-work states?
I completely agree with 65, but I would add that, over the years, the Democrats have enabled this behavior.
Way less than $15 million, even if you figure flights to Philly are stupid expensive.
I agree about the press, and also about the underpants gnomes quality of the 'take to the streets, make McConnell cave to Obama' assertion. Street protests would likely have empowered McConnell.
68: Don't forget to take into account the extra 2% sales tax there. (This might be avoided by handing off your victim in one of the terminals outside the Philly municipal boundaries.)
67 And I think the supposed left has done way way more to empower Republicans than mainstream Democrats, but in the end it don't matter who's right.
I mean, yeah, but massive outcry did thwart multiple attempts at gutting health care. Not permanent solution, but.
And I realize senators weren't likely to feel as threatened by people angry at a SCOTUS justice as by people angry at having health care taken away.
Apparently, even as a way enriching rich people, they fucked up.
Speaking of the failures of democracy, it's remarkable that a full year after Brexit the UK government still hasn't figured out even the most rudimentary outlines of what it wants post-Brexit. In a functioning world they'd have had to work that out before they put something up for a vote.
49: As for going Galt, trying to create a community of like-minded Galt-goers to get away from all the moochers in society would be ridiculous at best. Or I guess I should say, "is ridiculous," since it's not hypothetical, people have done so and mostly been scammed. But individuals withdraw from society all the time. Doing it to the extreme in the novel is rare but not unheard of. 90 percent of time, the choice to do so is sad or risible, but it's possible to imagine admirable reasons for it.
As for taking to the streets, the civil rights movement did it a lot and won. (Won a lot of battles, at least; whether they won the war is a philosophical question.) That movement had clear leaders; unifying principles; actions demanded from specific actors that were urgent, concrete, and realistic; and a long-term transformation of society it hoped to see. I'm not sure the current disgruntled left has any of those things and it definitely doesn't have all of them.
Maybe I'm just making excuses for my own inaction here. I give money to good causes but don't actually do much. Went to the women's march, canvassed for Obama in 2008, a tiny bit of local politics over the past 5 years, that's about it. One further excuse for inaction, FWIW, is that I don't have Congressional representation at all.
75: man oh man, I'm still not actually optimistic about the bill dying, but if it does, in this way, that would be amazing.
60: I think the fundamental problem is that there was a real conflict between the interests of the United States, even broadly interpreted, and the interests of the Trump campaign.
In a normal transition, or on a normal issue, there wouldn't be an issue: policy disagreements could be discussed like adults, and the outgoing administration might very well defer to the incoming one as a courtesy, as with the cooperation between Bush and Obama in 2008.
But this wasn't an ordinary issue. The Trump team couldn't very well sit down with the Obama guys and say, "yeah, we know the Russians tampered with the election, but that's a good thing, so let's not do anything about it." Or if they did, they could hardly have expected the Obama guys to go along with it. No. They had to officially denounce any hypothetical interference, while sneakily meeting with the Russians to undermine the (then) official policy of the United States.
(This kind of illustrates some of the weirdness inherent to waiting the better part of 3 full months before swearing in the election winner. There are presidential systems -- France, Ireland -- which manage to do it in a couple of weeks or less.
Indeed, aside from an informal certification which releases some transition funds and office space, there isn't technically even a "president-elect" until at least late December, when the electoral college officially casts their ballots. Some argue it's not even until those ballots are counted by Congress in January.
And regardless, a 'president-elect' doesn't have any official powers. It's important to maintain some kind of sharp distinction between still-actually-the-sworn-president and not-actually-president-yet. If the incoming administration has any policy role during the transition period, or is otherwise granted access to the machinery, it must be strictly at the invitation of the existing administration.)
||I dropped down one more 50% notch on the SNRI from which I am suffering such weird, heinous withdrawal. apparently drug companies sorta know this stuff--that some people are sensitive to withdrawal and can have serious reactions like self-harm or suicide--for the most part. but they don't do any discontinuation studies because a) they will find bad things and don't want you to know and b) who would want to spend money on something that makes no money? so all the studies are from the UK. the day I dropped down I was nervous again and smacking my hand against the granite countertop pretty hard so we drugged the crap out of me and have been doing the same for the morning dose every time: full dose of .01 clonidine, but then .005 afters. I can see why they're keeping that shit away from me and doling it out, it is strong stuff. most drug suicides are lame-ass failures; this one would get your blood pressure below the "dead" rate pretty fucking fast. not that I'm tempted; wanting to hurt yourself and wanting to kill yourself are practically unrelated. since there's no way I can get away in time husband x and girls x and y are coming on the 19th (maybe I told you). that will be nice finally! thanks for the support, I love y'all ridiculous people.>
As for taking to the streets, the civil rights movement did it a lot and won.
And it only took 100 years or so.
It's important to understand that we're stuck playing a long game. You can have sudden leaps forward - gay marriage was crazy until it wasn't, and there seems to be a lot of momentum at the moment for treating women more like human beings.
But of course, that works the other way, too. Open racism is more acceptable than it has been in decades. And it got that way because the John Birch/White Citizens Council/Moral Majority/Tea Party/Trump right wing spent decades working on it -- and they wisely understood that a key part of the task was to work the refs, which is to say, the media.*
*Has my monomania become tiresome yet? I really do believe what I'm saying. I don't think you can understand, for example, why Democrats suck so much without understanding how the media enforces that suckitude.
Good luck straightening it all out! Once we get the whole incipient fascism thing worked out in the US, we're going to go to work next on drug company malfeasance.
Speaking of the worstening, what happens if there isn't a deal with Brexit?
82
If I were a gazillionaire, I would buy Starbucks just so I could make the cups say "Merry War on Christmas, Fuckers" and watch wingnut heads explode.
79: Sounds super hard. Good luck and I'm really glad you're family is coming out to join you. Do you think you'll be over the worst of this round by then? How many more rounds are there?
Yeah, it wasn't citizens who fucked up the Garland nomination, it was Obama.
Its not like Mitch McConnell and the Republicans were some mysterious entity that maybe could be won over by the forces of moderation. After seven years he knew who they were, and knew that they were never going to allow a vote.
And he accepted that.
83 I assume there's a bunch of this going on.
84: I peaked at the last chapter. Colonel Mustard is killed in the conservatory by a Polish plumber.
84: The UK is kicked out of all EU organizations, and tariff rates return to the levels set by the WTO.
78 I am happy to see trump be hit by bullshit rules but this looks like a bullshit rule to me. Contacts between the trump campaign and russia before the election are a problem considering what russia did, but afterwords, whatever.
The difference between the Tea Party and the left wing equivalent, besides policy, is that Tea Party participated in democracy and used primaries to change one of the major parties, whereas those in the left, even excluding Russian trolls, support vanity candidates, skip voting because " none deserves my vote" and complain about how bad Dems are without doing anything.
92: I see where you're coming from, and, I mean, obviously candidates and president-elects are going to be signalling intentions to foreign governments left and right as par for the course.
And it's one thing to have a public platform that says, e.g., "we think the current approach to Russia and Ukraine is mistaken and we're going to take a different tack when we're in office". Obviously that's a perfectly valid issue to be running on or speaking about, and obviously Russia and other interested parties might be paying close attention to what candidates are promising and take those indications for what they're worth.
And it might be that there are time sensitive components to something like that which the new administration would want to get moving quickly -- to stop wasting resouces in a way they consider unproductive, to start developing new relationships, whatever.
But international diplomacy is complicated shit. For one thing, there might lots of relevant data that a mere candidate is going to be unaware of: secret intelligence reports that put a different light on the reasoning behind the current policy, tangled prior histories and relationships that will be affected and will need to be considered, etc. Plans might well need to be refined, altered or reconsidered entirely.
So the RIGHT way to go about it -- and the way it would presumably be done if the whole thing were actually above board to begin with -- is to sit down and talk with the outgoing administration people and say, "Listen, one of our campaign commitments is X, and we really want to get started changing direction there as soon as possible. What do we need to be aware of? Can we get some of our people read in on the necessary briefings? Will you guys help us get this rolling?", etc. And after that's hashed out, there's no reason the current ambassador can't do at least the initial communication with the other party: "our incoming president has made it clear he's really serious about X, so I wanted to let you know that we're going to go ahead and start ramping down our current policies P, Q and R right away. If you like, I can set up a meeting with the president-elect's adviser on this next week to talk about what they have in mind once they're in office..."
But just unilaterally -- and secretly -- meeting with a foreign government to make commitments before you're even in office? That's...reckless at a minimum. Not illegal, maybe. But profoundly irresponsible, and if there weren't anything shady going on, completely unnecessary.
Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply, himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects.
87: you can maybe still be going through withdrawal up to three weeks after you zero out but we're hoping for two weeks max. I finish pristiq in 4 more doses. the annoying things is that my doc wants to take me off one last drug, clonazepam, which I'm for in principle since I don't need benzos, but it famously either takes a billion years to get off or sucks balls. I guess we'll just keep me on the naltrexone and clonidine as they're anti-withdrawal meds but I slept till 11 and then from 3-6 and want to go to sleep so bad right now. I think I agreed to do a useful thing with my brother in law but I literally don't know if I can make it. and I didn't even take my nighttime dose of elephant tranquilizer seroquel or my last clonidine. it's sort of great sleeping all the time in a way; the dream drug of every insomniac. junkies must not know about this (naltrexone is known and unpopular, plainly.) the dreams themselves are interesting too and sometimes of fever dream intensity. I got shot and turned into a whole flock of birds and could feel the endless rustling and movement as being part of my body. I just don't want to hurt myself anymore. if it takes being asleep all the time, so be it.
Seconding 65's recommendation of of Zeynep Tufekci's work.
Did you know you spell your name wrong?
Masses of sympathy alameida, hang in there asleep if needs be.
If I were offended every time I made a joke, I'd have ulcers.
From filip, filips, from moby, mots.
Seconding dq's 99, alameida.
And vw's 104.
84, 91: And all kinds of other worse stuff, some of it commencing soon as people who have to make a living begin looking at things with run-times longer than one year.
Everything is affected, and the Brits still have no idea what they are doing.
Joint air traffic control between the UK and Ireland, for example, because it's covered by an EU agreement. No EU membership, no agreement. Just by way of example.
https://fora.ie/air-traffic-control-brexit-3546913-Aug2017/
In other worsening news, Trump invited by Mississippi governor to attend opening of state's Civil Rights History museum. White House says he will attend. The black experience in America, let cynical Republican fuckheads show it to you.
So Pensacola "rally" on Friday, This on Saturday. Circle Alabama but don't go into it. In the service of elevating racist sexual predator over prosecutor of a key Civil Rights event in support of tax cuts for the super wealthy.
Heartsickness.
Also with this "key FBIer texted girlfriend 'anti-Trump' stuff" bullshit "scandal"* and the general all-out attack on the Mueller/FBI etc. the outlines of how Trump will blow up Mueller and Congress do nothing are pretty clear. Just a question of timing.
*This is beyond ludicrous anyone the least bit familiar with the partisanship of the Whitewater investigation**, the FBI in general, so many other actors in the HRC investigations (per comments I very recently left on some thread I cannot even found now ...). But I see many "reasonable" commenters saying how "troubling" it is. And it is these, these motherfuckers, these reasonable people who are our death knell.
Other "reasonable" motherfuckery:
Sam Seder dropped by MSNBC for 7-year old joking tweet mocking prominent Polanski defenders*.
People like Matt Yglesias dwelling on how in fact it probably is good policy to make AT&T* purchase not include CNN. "You remember how good it was that one time when they *did* make the train run on time."
When the reasonable motherfuckers teem up with the unreasonable motherfuckers we and our mothers are well and truly fucked.
*It does occur to me that one could justify that fiduciary duty requires that one kowtow to an Administration with a real chance of becoming a vengeful autocracy. I'm feeling good about everything.
109.parenthetical: Ah, the comment was here in the Nazi-huggers thread.
109: In the end there will only be some ongoing investigations in by NY and a few other state DAs, Will be easily subverted.
The timing has probably accelerated a bit with today's news that Mueller has subpoenaed Deutsche Bank's Trump documents.
Mueller now subpoenaing Deutsche Bank records, if Trump is going to blow up Mueller he will want to do it before that gets too far.
I am an overwrought drama queen and I can't help it.
Very belatedly to 4 et seq, there are options short of civil war. The donor class would feel international sanctions bite pretty quickly, for instance.
116 Also the blade of a guillotine.
No self-respecting American would make a guillotine blunt enough to feel. It would be cruel and unusual.
Fuck Everything We're Doing Five Blades.
I think the donor class has already decided to follow the wisdom of Milton's Satan and Khan Noonien Singh.
Lording it in hell will be much less fun when your foreign assets are frozen and you can't go anywhere nice on vacation.
The timing has probably accelerated a bit with today's news that Mueller has subpoenaed Deutsche Bank's Trump documents.
I googled to find this story and found the Bloomberg story - the embedded autoplay video report started to play simultaneously with Johnny Cash, on another tab, starting to sing "The Man Comes Around". A very pleasant coincidence.
116: The donor class would feel international sanctions bite pretty quickly, for instance
I think it is going to be pretty much the opposite of sanctions.
Debbie Gibson says Roy Moore was in a relationship with her during the 80s.
125 strikes me as unduly pessimistic. Not everywhere is as fucked up as America.
And I mean seriously who wants to take their yacht to fucking Sebastopol?
124: I assume that wherever Robert Mueller goes, he is followed by a junior aide carrying a Bluetooth speaker playing either that song or "God's Gonna Cut You Down".
And I mean seriously who wants to take their yacht to fucking Sebastopol?
MY DEAH CHAP, WHO WOULDN'T WANT TO? I MEAN HAVE YOU SEEN THE STATE OF THE TENTAGE ON SHORE? DWEADFUL. NOTHING BUT MUD AND CHOLEWA.
At least, come what may, people will have the chance to fuck up Utah's natural resources for private profit.
You're just proving my point here. you'd have to fucking *airlift* your yacht to Utah.
127: 125 strikes me as unduly pessimistic. Not everywhere is as fucked up as America.
Maybe not. But they sure as hell are not going to boycott just for a little authoritarianism as long as the cash keeps flowing. History would agree.
133: All this speculative, the situation is unprecedented. But sanctions could be fairly targeted. Like, no Schengen visas for Republican politicians or donors, or executive officers of donor corporations, or their families. That shit gets old fast. Admittedly this approach hasn't overthrown Putin, but Russia isn't America.
Speaking of donors, it used to be that Donald Trump was asking me for $200 (along with rating his job on a scale from "great" to "okay"). Now it's Eric asking me for $1.
3- We're working on claiming Italian citizenship to have an in to the EU. Most likely places for me to work are Denmark or Germany; Switzerland also has many opportunities but not sure how work visas function relative to EU citizenship. We'd probably live in Spain most of the time though, if they don't fuck up their country too badly.
Personally, I'm sticking around to do my bit in the coming class warfare.
Watch out for them Pinkertons.
The hill on which my house sits commands the ground over Duck Hollow. That's where they were last time.
Germans are more disturbed about Trump and see relations with him as a bigger challenge than relations with North Korea, Russia, or than the Syrian Civil War.
[...]
Remember I said that Erdogan comes second after Trump as a challenge for Germany? Well, some 74% want to end accession talks about Turkey joining the European Union. They want to end any special relationship with Ankara over the way Erdogan has been behaving. And remember, they find Trump more of a challenge than they do Erdogan.
You can't always tell because he usually looks happy, but Nigel Farage looks just like an older Nathan Fielder.
140: And what was the percentage of Germans who wanted to end accession talks with Turkey before Erdogan?
142: Good question; but my point is just that the US is at this point categorized as an unfriendly nation by large numbers of Germans.
I see Trump as a bigger challenge than relations with North Korea, Russia, or the Syrian Civil War. So does almost everybody I deal with on a daily basis.
Of course he's a bigger challenge. That's what I mean by the situation being unprecedented. We're now in a world where EU sanctions on the US leadership aren't an absurd prospect.
Or maybe I'm just being hopelessly optimistic. How's it hanging, Hungary?
We're certainly in a world where any idea that U.S. will provide stable leadership and serve as a last resort in a crisis has been blown to shreds. That's a huge change.
Debbie Gibson says Roy Moore was in a relationship with her during the 80s.
Did she get pregnant with his two-headed love child?
"With" is entertainingly ambiguous there.
Joke all you want, but two-headed doulas are the best.
Interesting. Naively, one would think they'd scare the kid back inside.
One head can pay attention to mom and one to the baby.
I suppose you could keep one on each side of the curtain?
142, 143: Not unlike the Bush years, though probably worse this time around.
There's always a significant share of Germans (especially West Germans) who think they are inherently superior to Americans.
Looks like the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital is happening. There goes that bargaining chip.
155: What do you mean? Trump is using it for something very valuable indeed -- to distract everyone from Mueller.
134: I am talking about light autocracy relatively speaking ....
Although being even more total dicks than usual on N Korea/ Jerusalem/Iran could trigger something real I guess. Just don;t think any one else gives a fuck enough about our internal affairs to bother.
For instance 154:There's always a significant share of Germans (especially West Germans) who think they are inherently superior to Americans. Fine, they think they are superior, are they going to do something material about it? (Reduced travel maybe ...)
Let's hope they don't cut their collaboration with Americans who work in medical research.
137: Personally, I'm sticking around to do my bit in the coming class warfare.
I'm sticking around to fret uselessly.
I assume most everyone will stick around, outwardly adapting to the ramping up of authoritarianism to some higher level while being torn up inside at the whole thing. Our large entrenched business and other institutions will lead the way on accommodations. Occasionally someone will get massively screwed.
I am planning on attending my next local Democratic Party committee meeting to see if that looks at all promising. Am also reaching out to league of Women Voters for volunteer opportunities. Voting and support thereof seem to be the real avenues to forestall this.
Sorry for being a Grumpasaurus but so many recent examples of the asymmetric warfare* of this has me hating everything and everybody.
*And it isn;t just that Dems/the media suck, in many ways it is just Brandolini's Law in action: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude
bigger than to produce it.
They're freeloaders on "regular order" writ large.
Am also reaching out to league of Women Voters for volunteer opportunities.
Too soon.
I am resentful that I didn't get to enjoy even a moment's self-satisfaction about moving away from America before it was obvious that Brexit foiled any disaster-avoidance value of living in the UK.
Yes, I was going to say how unfortunate it was that the UK took another downward spin of the wheel just as the US was. But I think the USian Repubs are now pretty much in UKIP territory from a policy and messaging perspective (or do I exaggerate?).
163: If the elections had been reversed in time you might have gotten that brief shining moment of self-congratulation.
Interesting that RNC only "lightly" get back into the AL race ($50K I've seen.) NOt sure what the calculation is.
$1,000 per girl from 15 through 17. $2,500 for under 15.
||
Wow, this story is terrible and contains what may be one of the worst "apologies" that I've seen.
Bus company Suburban Express has apologized after sending out a racist ad to college students at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign over the weekend that implied that they wouldn't have to deal with ethnic minorities if they rode on their buses.
...
"We made a remark based on the fact that our competitor mostly handles Chinese international students," the company said in an apology sent over email. "The remark is being interpreted as a slap in the face of all non-caucasians for some reason, and that it not how it was intended."
Despite this apology, the company went on to slam the University of Illinois for admitting so many Chinese students, which account for roughly 12 percent of its current student body.
Gosh it's so hard to imagine why people might take that the wrong way ("for some reason").
|>
168:
"We agree that having a healthy mixture of different cultures and ethnicities is valuable," the message states. "But we're not comfortable with the idea of selling our university to the highest foreign bidder."
It concludes: "In any event, we did not intend to offend half the planet."
I don't suppose that means the racists have decided adequate funding for public education is now important.
I am planning on attending my next local Democratic Party committee meeting to see if that looks at all promising. Am also reaching out to league of Women Voters for volunteer opportunities. Voting and support thereof seem to be the real avenues to forestall this.
Indeed.
I think the USian Repubs are now pretty much in UKIP territory from a policy and messaging perspective (or do I exaggerate?)
I'm not sure what you mean here, but one thing that gives me faint flickers of hope is that in the UK, I don't think shame has completely left the building among conservatives generally to the same degree that it has with the American right. I mean, yes, Farage and other proper UKIPers (and also Boris) are shameless clowns, but they are a minority -- there isn't a single UKIP MP in parliament at the moment -- and there is a palpable (to me, anyway) sense of embarrassment coming from non-frothy conservative quarters over the Brexit negotiations shitshow.
I don't see anywhere in the UK except in small numbers and marginalised fora the kind of aggressive, nihilistic, ignorant destructiveness that essentially characterises all of the American right wing now. (I'm talking political leadership; the press is another thing.) Ignorant destructiveness, yes, but not so much aggressive nihilism I guess.
The aggressive nihilism goes all the way down in Republican party.
I think most UKIP members would resign in protest from the Republicans. Nigel Farage is a clown but he ain't Roy Moore.
176: the DUP, on the other hand, would be right at home.
They're basically the same people, separated by a few thousand miles, a half dozen generations, and some innovative thinking in on religious interpretatoin. Not that all Republicans are displaced Scots Irish, but that's where the perpetually aggrieved, working/lower middle class Southern whites largely came from.
I read 173 and all I can think is that this is because your political candidates aren't chosen by primaries.
Especially since in the UK there seems to be no need for an MP to come from the area he represents. Nigel Farage would surely now be serving his 15th term as Conservative MP from whatever place has the most angry old landowners.
this is because your political candidates aren't chosen by primaries.
They kind of are, but a) Labour and the Conservatives both involve a stage in which the potential candidates have to be approved by the parliamentary party, and b) to be a member of a UK political party you have to apply to join and pay a membership fee, it isn't just a question of registering as a Conservative by ticking a box.
I'm pretty certain 179 is right. UK political parties are membership organisations with rules and subscriptions (fairly nominal in some cases). That excludes the completely loony as long as there is FPTP. If we had AM on a 2/3-1/3 constituency/party split, I would expect to see about 30 Kippers in the Commons. (I'd also expect to see a similar number of Greens).
If 178 is true you'd expect the US to be kind of like Germany.
Yes. It just took us longer to get a Nazi in power via an election he won without a majority.
They kind of are, but a) Labour and the Conservatives both involve a stage in which the potential candidates have to be approved by the parliamentary party, and b) to be a member of a UK political party you have to apply to join and pay a membership fee, it isn't just a question of registering as a Conservative by ticking a box.
Although a Bernard Brother myself, I am exasperated by the constant complaints about the outlandish rules in, e.g. New York that you have to actually be a member of the Democratic Party to vote on who will be the Democratic nominees for office. Apparently when you're in a place where Democrats always win, there's no way you can make your voice heard, because the primary is the real election and nobody votes in the primary. Well... you could, if you wanted to, vote in the primary. And if it has like 3% turnout, you have a better chance to organize and actually win!
