It’s also the best way to get things done. If you can get Trump’s ear, he’ll say yes to anything you suggest. There’s no reason not to lean into being a Trump ghoul, and I doubt that’ll change until they start ramping up for the next election, at the earliest.
Getting a couple policy wins is tablestakes when you’re in a literal supply and confidence agreement. They appeared to do very little to use their position to make noise or twist the knife on the government.
That’s just armchair quarterbacking from me, though. The real tragedy was the loss of seats. They had the opportunity to be an alternative as the Liberals lost popularity, and they were losing disaffected voters to the Conservatives doing bad Trump cosplay. Completely unforgivable performance, and should by now prove that the NDP has no future trying to appeal to the center. They could carve out a substantial position for themselves by staking out firmer, clearer positions on socdem policies, but they seem allergic to that idea. I’m guessing they believe that if they’re not taking a straight line path to forming government then they’re not being serious, a deeply unserious position.
The Onion’s “no one will stop me” loophole joke is just real real now. All the checks against presidential power are based on someone having to use discretion to enforce the law, and no one is willing to set the precedent that laws apply to the executive branch. It’s not worth hurting the power of the office just to deal with one oaf who still agrees with the status quo on a very fundamental level. Trump isn’t a revolutionary; this is pure infighting among the elites.
This whole thing is a gigantic display of that observation about how conservatism boils down to having an in-group protected but not bound by the law, and an out-group bound but not protected by the law. Laws are for poor people, and Trump is not an exception.
Singh was just another pivot to the center. He was supposed to be the answer to Justin Trudeau, in that he embodies vaguely progressive aesthetics with no substance. He should absolutely have resigned after the last election. He got elected in 2019 having lost like 15 seats, then failed to manifest any gains in the following election.
That would have been a perfect time to bow out and allow for a robust leadership contest and a chance for some renewed enthusiasm for the party going up against an unpopular incumbent and a differently unpopular opposition. The fact that Trudeau resigned and Singh didn’t is damning. I’m so glad he lost his own riding.
I wonder if the NDP realizes at this point that they can’t win the triangulation war. They had years of real leverage over the government and they got neither policy gains nor political gains to show for it. They have a great opportunity to reinvent themselves as a legitimate alternative to the two default parties, and I look forward to seeing how they manage to fuck it up for themselves.
While you’re almost certainly right about that, it’s also a near-certainty that there are a few people who genuinely believe that Vance killed the Pope.
Harvard must be so confused, like “I thought we were already supporting fascism? What happened?”
“Bolsonaro in the hospital” is the new “dog bites man.”
Like, unless there’s some crazy way for these molecules to be created that defies our current understanding of all of biology, there are living organisms on that planet
Defying our current understanding of biology would be pretty neat, too.
This exactly. What they want is the benefits of organized labor and central planning, but that’s communism, so they’re forced to focus on the jobs themselves. It’s really stupid when you think about it even a little.
On Tuesday, the former president will deliver a speech to disability advocates in Chicago focused on protecting Social Security and Republicans’ attempts to attack it
Is he mad that Republicans are stealing his material?
It cannot be overstated how much the American government’s legitimacy relies on the honor system in a very literal way. The “checks and balances” only work as an internal governance mechanism when everyone involved is invested in maintaining the system. The moment someone comes along who doesn’t give a shit, the game is over.
I have, and that’s obviously the ideal outcome, but I’m trying to set realistic expectations. You know if China minted a trillion yuan coin it would be the size of an elephant. They’d send it to parades so that people got to see it.
No amount nor variety of thinking emojis could adequately respond to this chart.
It would be pretty cool if Hamas took down the UN on the way to defeating Israel.
I am violently opposed to the idea of the trillion dollar coin unless they actually mint a suitably giant coin. It doesn’t need to be so big that it needs its own room or anything, but it should be big enough that you need both hands to hold it.
Bots are stupid, throw rocks at them
YouTube used to have the most toxic comment sections on the internet, and that was definitely real people being shitty to one another. The bots are an improvement.
Many such cases.
People were wringing hands and clutching pearls about Trump destroying democracy and here he is actively talking about the next election.
Yeah, the concept of a state should make sense to any leftist as a formal mechanism for organizing society towards equal and collective participation in said society. The difference, as you say, is whether or not you think it’s possible to execute on that, or if a state will always trend towards ensuring its own existence, and therefore inevitably run into the iron law of institutions and end up corrupted.
I think a state-like mechanism could and probably does need to exist, but it would have to be truly dedicated to facilitating its own dissolution from the start. Whether that would work is dependent on a lot of things, but a big problem with institutions in general is that they almost always come with the fundamental assumption that the institution should persist. If, however, the primary mission of the institution is to obviate the need for the institution to exist, then I think it could be stable. There may never be a moment where there is no state, but I could see society approaching the dissolution of the state asymptotically, which on a long enough timeline would be indistinguishable from complete dissolution.
The alternative, no matter how well-intentioned, is likely vulnerable to the nonsense you describe. I do think that the reason to be optimistic about that is that such a thing hasn’t really been tried, or at least not on a long enough timeline, while the status quo systems are clearly unstable long-term.