We can go lower!!!

lots of rights get modified, curtailed, or eliminated by the larger society based on misuse or misbehavior or other transgressions.

(or positions of power, etc…)

Don’t think of it as a race, think of it as an opportunity to find kindred spirits

IF we can get a very strong Congress that recaptures and then vigorously defends it’s Constitutional powers, AND that goes through the trouble of codifying what used to be political norms before Trump, AND amends the Constitution as needed to put a strong leash on the Executive branch, I think it’s possible we could become that anchor again.

But it took a world war and at least 25 years of concerted effort after to build that role for ourselves. Even though the Republicans have damaged or destroyed it in 3 months, it won’t be rebuilt in 3 months.

Those are rookie numbers we can do better

After WWII there was a halcyon era where nearly every adult in America agreed that nerds had been crucial to our winning. That’s why Operation Paperclip came to be where we stole all the former Axis nerds we could find.

It also led to an unprecedented boom in education spending, research spending, etc., mostly aimed at beating the USSR at technological development. Sputnik goosed that significantly, and the Apollo program briefly did as well, until Americans got bored of Moon landings…

That was probably the first major flashing red warning light most of us ignored: Moon landings… boring!!!

Anyway, educated people started doing things that weren’t directly associated with winning the Cold War, like exposing the dangers of lead in everything, the dangers of smoking, the dangers of chlorofluorocarbons, the dangers of greenhouse gasses, etc.

That threatened the ability of grotesquely wealthy hoarders to hoard even more grotesque levels of wealth.

So they started the project to dismantle education in America.

That project kicked into afterburn once the USSR collapsed and the Cold War ended.

And so far, nerds haven’t been successful in regaining their status.

Also the villification of experts as people hell bent on leveraging their expertise to dominate our control non experts.

I recently right that a useful counter to that conspiracy their is to point out that experts should be thought of as tools to be used for different purposes. Like any tool, experts can be misused in a variety of ways, including accidental and purposeful.

those are rookie numbers, we can do better!

everything ought to be transferred to Ukraine, but only the European stuff is likely to be in the near term.

that’s one thing Biden really should have done after the election.

it is “for now” with the justification being they should have a proper hearing.

it’s a combo of trolling and attention seeking. “there’s no such thing as bad press” and all that.

we should point it out, condemn it, but not engage in arguments with them about what is and isn’t a sig heil.

and when they pop up in other places trying to talk about other stuff, just bring up the fact that they threw a Nazi salute from time to time.

the most important thing is to focus on their evil policies and actions. but we can’t forget their performative evil.

this is a rift between MAGA and Ukraine.

or they could say between the US government and Ukraine.

I still support Ukraine and most Harris voters and many traditional Republicans (Eisenhower type) do, too.

I hope that the Biden admin did a good job of building them up and building Europe up to last through 2-4 years of a potential MAGA administration. Even if they were confident it wouldn’t happen. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst and all that.

I’m really hoping that Churchill’s quote about Americans doing the right thing is evergreen, because this first month (!!!) of Trump has been A LOT.

I feel like we’re really close to having tried every alternative by now, right?..right?

the… remarkable… thing about this is the Trump administration probably thinks they’re winning this.

i have, and i may very well again…

I think it’s more likely they’ll go after us than go after Israel, because the world doesn’t have centuries or millenia of anti American bigotry stored up that in a twisted fashion leads them to let the Israeli government do whatever it wants to poor Muslims as long as that means there’s a Jewish state.

What complicates matters is all the military power we have and the certainty most people have that Trump would order it to attack anyone who embargoes us.

the next campaign isn’t for 2028 or even 2026, it’s 2025. We will see what the Democrats do very soon. If they run the 2024 campaign again, they will lose.

Edit: and no part of the next 4 years’ campaigns will be about the Ranking Member position of the House Oversight Committee…

If most voters were tuned in to politics to the point they cared about the outcome of a party committee ranking member vote, we wouldn’t be in the 2nd Trump administration, and MAGA probably wouldn’t exist.

The Oversight leadership vote is the product of the bad 2024 messaging and bad outreach.

That’s why I mentioned upcoming elections: they will show us what the Democrats learned about messaging to voters they need to win.

There are Democratic Party people and aligned people who are realistic about why they lost and who they lost. They have contacts within the Party. Hopefully they’ll be listened to.

We’ll probably get a sense of what if any changes we will see in the upcoming special elections to fill House seats Trump is looting for his Cabinet. Then I believe Florida law requires an election pretty soon to replace Rubio, so that will be a national race we can watch.

Presumably whoever DeSantis appoints will have a pretty big advantage, but we should watch the message and the votes. It will be too early to be a full reaction against Trump, so we can learn a lot about what resonates with voters.

for clarity he built Facebook to rate how hot women at his college were…