• 54 Posts
  • 622 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I feel like this is a pretty crass joke to make.

    A good friend of mine found a body a few months ago. It’s a pretty shitty experience. And it’s actually a lot like what OP describes. A sense of foreboding and suspicion combined with a conviction that these thoughts are foolish. And an uncertainty whether to check or to alert someone or to just try to forget it.

    Op, I’d report it and ask them to please follow up with you and let you know. It’s probably nothing, and you’ll feel better once you know it was nothing, and that you did the responsible thing in having it dealt with.








  • If I can be frank, I’m reading from your tone that you’re not here for polite, factual persuasion. But if I’m wrong, or someone else sees this, I gotta drop a fact check on the ‘Lina can’t win cases’ myth:

    https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/out-with-a-bang-as-ftc-beats-the

    More practically, this loss discredits the main argument from Wall Street. Dealmakers, and thinkers like Larry Summers, have often said that while Biden antitrust enforcers are aggressive, if corporations are willing to go to court, the government is likely to lose because judges won’t let them rewrite the law. This narrative was so strong that Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter were questioned in Congress as to whether they were even trying to win. It’s always been a narrow and bad faith critique, but this victory, plus, the win in the Fifth Circuit over Illumina, should put that narrative to rest. Antitrust lawyers will tell their clients to go to court at their peril.

    It’s kind of a deep dive, but it’s worth it.


  • While I don’t traffic in such forceful language, I can answer what @criitz means:

    Bernie Sanders raised millions of dollars on the promise to lead a political revolution. For many supporters, that proposition was taken literally. They thought that his campaign was not simply a vehicle to give him the power of the presidency, but was the organizing structure for a persistent movement of activists reengaging with democracy each and every week BETWEEN elections. And when he dropped out, a lot of those people lost their connections to social and organizing structures that were giving them hope and an outlet for meeting like-minded people to find ways to make their communities better. So when he ended his campaign and all that money and infrastructure got instantly packed up and taken away, they felt like they’d been misled.

    Some found their way into activism through the DSA or climate groups, but for many, the way in which he disbanded his campaign without following through on the implied promise to transform it into something durable was a very unexpected and painful surprise.


  • Pete needs to go mayor some more. He had a few good ideas during the primary, but as Transportation Secretary I’m astounded at his lack of ambition.

    There are a handful of administration officials – Lina Khan first among them – who’ve learned to use their power assertively to make changes to broken systems. And Pete… he seems like he just pops up when another piece of infrastructure breaks to let us know that he’s on it. Maybe he’s doing something more, but if so he’s doing it very, very quietly.


  • I like Porter. AOC needs a rest, I think.

    I used to be really captivated by her leadership, but in the last few years, I think things have gotten complicated. Perhaps I’m being too forgiving, but during Biden’s presidency it seemed like she lost her nerve to stick her neck out for what she believed in more and more. Maybe I’m inventing things, but I get the sense that January 6th scared the fucking shit out of her. I think her life flashed before her eyes, and afterwards she felt like being among the most progressive voices while trying not to rock the boat too much or draw too much personal attention from the right was enough, and that challenging Democrats on their bullshit was too stressful and risky.

    If that’s the case, I don’t blame her. I still admire what she’s done, but she does not have the spark she once did.


  • This is a common layman misconception. The term “hitler” isn’t actually based on how much the candidate engages in human rights abuses: it’s just a marker of how widely voters recognize them as “hitler-y” (to use the technical term).

    A fun fact: within the field of meme political science it’s recognized that if we did apply a quantitative rubric, ALL of the US Presidents are actually hitlers!