I enjoy the schadenfreude as much as the next guy, but there is a frame in which this kind of confusion does actually make sense.

It’s the frame in which you acknowledge that our system of justice isn’t about holding everyone equally accountable to the law, it’s instead been an institution to keep the poor and marginal in their places- that is, it’s about enforcing an unspoken social, class, gender, and racial hierarchy that a lot of the MAGA folks take for granted and really want to defend and uphold.

That is the order they’re talking about when they say ‘Law and Order’. The order is a social, racial, gender, and class hierarchy, and the law is the means by which the hoi polloi are kept in whatever the powerful in it regard to be their ‘rightful places’.

For these people, the idea that the law might actually apply to everyone is an attack on the basis of order as they understand it. Of course they’re mad.

At what point does this sort of thing stop being politics and start being organized crime? So now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it

But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow

OK, so now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it

But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow

While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.

I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

Its consistently worse than home cooking. But not everyone has the luxury of a functional kitchen or a stocked fridge or the time to prepare the meal.

You’re not wrong here. It’s not good food, but it’s easy and touches the makes-me-crave-it neurons, it’s often available in food deserts (where it’s legitimately difficult to really stock a kitchen) and sometimes it’s only cheap in the context of whether or not you have that home infra and time to use it or not.

I just use my privilege (I have a pretty functional kitchen and the ability to stock it mightily) to not fund a business model that looks to me like it’s hostile to labor (yeah you, McDonalds and most of the rest), tends to give money to politics I can’t abide (looking at you, chick-fil-a), and I really prefer to patronize businesses whose employees don’t have the energy of beaten animals. I get that it’s my privilege to do that, but being someone with that to work with, using it appropriately seems the right thing to do.

If inflation isn’t based on most prices increasing… What is it based on?

It’s the devaluation of currency that happens when too much of it chases too few goods in the marketplace. It’s purely a monetary thing, you get that when the supply of money grows more quickly than the value of real goods in the economy does.

Ideally, we print money (and take it out of circulation) at a pace that keeps the money supply more or less balanced to the value of available goods and services in the economy. If we were to print too much money, or not take enough out of circulation (note: paying taxes does this; when you pay taxes the money doesn’t go into some account somewhere, it’s used to zero out the bonds issued to create it), the amount of money in circulation would become greater than the amount of real valuable goods in the economy. When that happens, the resulting bidding contest to secure those goods (after all, money doesn’t have intrinsic value, it’s only good for buying things that do) drives up the price of those goods in monetary terms.

…thus showing that the “Law and Order” party was never about law, they just want a particular kind of order- that is, a hierarchy wherein people below them on the status-ladder know not to try to hold them accountable to anything, including the law or even plain decency.

To them, the law is the cudgel to keep the poors and plebes in their place- low in the order- never to be applied to them.

It’s been maddening to watch people call price-gouging “inflation”, honestly.

That’s not fucking inflation when someone in the supply chain made things more expensive and pocketed the difference as a wider profit margin; it’s the symptom of non-enforcement of antitrust laws.

I mean, most foodstuffs markets (in the supply chain between farm and grocer or farm -> restaurant) are controlled by very few people or corporations; when the farmers get less for their products but the grocer must pay more for them, that’s not inflation. It’s price-gouging, the symptom of the kinds of market failures that follow regulatory failures to prevent corporate mergers that would reduce competition in those markets.

When you look at food, fuel, housing, the enshittification of basically everything, the acquisition of yesterday’s hot-fresh-streaming services and re-packaging them to be just as predatory as the cable was when you cut the cord and went to streaming- it’s all what we get when private equity owns a piece of everything and they’re running it all to squeeze more out of everyone they can, and they also ensure regulators don’t do a damned thing about it.

There was once a time when regulators had the will to block corporate mergers, and they had the will to tax windfall profits at 100%.

It’s not so bad once you’ve got your teeth into the problem

assuming you can code, that is

Fun fact: spreading conspiracy theories about the evils of fluoride in the water (it’s mind control! pollutes our precious bodily fluids!) was one of the talking points that crypto-fascists threw against the wall to see if it would stick- if you recall the line about your “precious bodily fluids” in Dr. Strangelove, that was a nod to that particular vein of conspiracy theory that was making the rounds in the far-loony fringes of what was then the Republican party

Sorry- I didn’t know that part off the top of my head But since you asked, Russia’s presence in Hawaii was sort of like its presence in Alaska and California: early 1800s outposts established by agents acting on behalf of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian-American_Company, which the Russian Crown had granted a monopoly on operations in North America and the Pacific but was unable to back or support such claims.

You mean something like a third Reich?

Well, yeah. In very real ways WWII was about upending the post-WW1 order (which was punitive of Germany generally). It’s really interesting to understand how crazy the flows of money were, and how badly the US in particular bungled its role as the issuer of the world’s de facto reserve currency at the time- in the aftermath of WWI, Germany and its allies were made to pay reparations, France occupied the industrial territory on their border, and any money France or Belgium or Holland received in reparations promptly went to American banks, to repay war bonds borrowed to finance the fighting (which had, in turn, been spent in American factories on war materiel, weapons, munitions, etc).

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/the-real-story-of-how-america-became-an-economic-superpower/384034/ (sorry this is paywalled now, it was a really good read when it was available so I’ll summarize briefly)

By the end of the first world war, all of the belligerent nations’ economies were in tatters, their leadership were forced to inflate their currencies to make payments- but the US declined to inflate its own currency to make it workable for them- and when the US didn’t think about its new role in maintaining a viable world order, it put everyone that owed it anything in the position of paying their debts not in their own inflated currencies, but in US dollars. This essentially collapsed the German economy and its currency, and it was just unnecessary.

I wonder why we can’t just decode the term ‘settler’ for what it is:

“terrorist”, but with state aegis and pliant media cooking up anodyne narrative cover

Grew up in a rural red state. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to really understand their politics, and as best I can summarize, here it is:

• They are angry about how life has gotten worse for them, economically and culturally.

• They have very good reason to be angry about that, because it has.

• They are misinformed about what changed since the 50s and 60s, and too many of them seem to think more racism and sexism will restore their prosperity and dignity

• They have decided the only thing to do about it any more is to burn everything down until they get the respect they feel entitled to

• They are sincerely sad and angry it hasn’t worked yet

The shorter story here, of course, is that the establishment GOP of the late 70s underestimated the willingness of its fascist wing to not die and completely didn’t do the necessary things to prevent the party from being almost completely taken over by fascists

23k is the max annual contribution

If you’re over 50, you can put $30,500 in your 401k, the extra $7500 per year is called a ‘catch-up contribution’

All of these locations (Alaska, California, Hawaii, much of eastern Europe) are ones that Russia has at one point in its imperial or soviet history had either outposts or territorial claim to. Of course, much of Eastern Europe was as recently as the 1980s under the Kremlin’s direct control, either as puppet states or as territory Russia or the USSR directly claimed. Finland and Poland in particular have both been completely invaded by Russian forces multiple times, but at the moment they are built up defensively in ways that Russia quite honestly has zero chances of winning against.

Alaska was territory that imperial Russia claimed before any European country did. It was sold to the US during the Crimean war (1853) because Russia needed the money and in all likelihood it was going to lose it to Britain. Russia established early trading outposts in Alaska and California but sold or abandoned them after wiping out the fur animals they’d come to harvest and trade.

This talk for the benefit of Russian audiences is about reminding Russians of former imperial or soviet glory, but the problem with that historically is that it wasn’t actually glorious.

The current propaganda push to get Russians thinking they really have a shot at rolling back the map changes since Imperial times is just an effort to sustain Russia’s modern project: dismantling the post-WWII order in which the West (the US, in particular, but NATO and much of the UN) upholds alliances that Putin sees as against Russia’s interests.

I’m pretty sure California could defeat Russia

California has more blue-water navy in San Diego than Russia has in the world. It also has more air force stationed there than Russia has.

(granted, these are US forces, not California forces, but there is no real-world scenario right now in which California would face invasion without the full military support of United States and NATO)

Where is Russia 2 miles from Alaska?

The international border goes between the islands of little and big Diomede. Both of these islands are remote from land in either direction, and they are situated about midway in the narrowest part of the Bering Strait.

Since you asked where, here it is on a map

Yep, that’s pretty close, but nope, that’s not really tactically meaningful.

It’s true that the cultural left didn’t suppress wages or unions or offshore manufacturing jobs or cause all those farms to fail or any of those other things, but one thing that made the left vulnerable to such charges is that when the Democrats embraced neoliberalism, they implicitly became the party of credentialed professionals. When the Democrats abandoned the working class to compete for the donor dollars the right had long enjoyed, it meant that the working class went from having 1 party for it to having 2 parties actively working against its interests.

It’s so wild to me that the GOP has been considered the working man’s party by anyone since the 1890s

So if I’m mathing correctly, logic dictates that we break them both