Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.
My guy… I am trying to point out here that the mentality of “I feel hopeless about the current situation, so I’m going to agitate to throw it to a guy whose whole platform is ‘I’m gonna make everything so much worse!’ because that will somehow ultimately make things better” is pushing for an outcome that puts literal millions of vulnerable people in actual, immediate, mortal danger. In fact, tankies and others on the left making the argument that there’s no difference between Biden and Trump can only be making that argument from a place of privilege, because for anybody belonging to the many vulnerable minority groups (nevermind anybody that would be negatively impacted by the geopolitical effects of Trump abandoning NATO, among other things) that the far right intend to target if Trump wins again, the difference is fucking stark, and you’d have to be far removed from any of those groups to think otherwise.
Are you confusing my argument that “tankies are useful idiots for authoritarianism whose actions have no relationship with their professed values” to imply that they’re somehow in the driver’s seat on anything? Or hell, that they’re even sincere Marxists?
An interesting question, with (I think) a range of viable answers, in the angels-on-pinheads sense of pure theory. I personally think the sweet spot would be a broadly social-democratic system where basic industries are socialized to varying degrees, a regulated free market exists for novel industries and goods we would think of as “discretionary spending” items, and the market regulator has the capacity to move industries gradually from the latter category towards the former as they mature and become foundational to the society and economy.
Funny how the self-proclaimed vanguard of the radical left are just incoherent anti-western reactionaries wearing Marxism like a fig leaf, isn’t it? Like, I’m all for breaking down the current neoliberal capitalist hegemony, but you’ve gotta have a hole in your head to want to replace it with a literal crime syndicate masquerading as a government or an oppressive hyper-capitalist dictatorship with imperialistic ambitions.
If I was to give this point of the benefit of the doubt (which, to be clear, I don’t) what you’re saying is that tankies are accelerationists. And I get it, to an extent – a comfortable middle class isn’t going to be concerned about the depredations of the right until they start to find themselves in the crosshairs – but the last time fascists got their way in the world, more than 73 million people died. Arguing, in effect, that the aftermath of another world war will be better for the survivors is a… challenging point to defend when it requires you to dismiss the deaths of a significant percentage of the world’s population, especially when those most in danger from a rising right wing are those that a supposed left-winger should most want to protect. Sacrificing religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities on the altar of a better future for religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities doesn’t sit well with me.
The reverse. OceanGate saw how planes were being built and said, “let’s do that for submersibles!” even though in airplanes, composites are subjected to <1 atmosphere of tension loading and <2g aerodynamic loading, whereas their submersible was going to be subjected to >400 atmospheres of compression loading, and a much more corrosive environment.
Composites in aircraft have a fairly long and uncontroversial history, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with them in that application. The biggest problem with composites is what happens with them at the end of their service life. Finding ways to recycle them without compromising safety is a good thing, and if it weren’t for Boeing having such a damaged reputation at the moment I think nobody would bat an eye.
I lived in co-op housing during college, which was (loosely) administered by the university and separated into different buildings by gender. One year my hall started a rapidly-escalating prank war with a women’s hall when some guys testing a water balloon launcher accidentally put a balloon through their back window from like 100 yards away. Things culminated in a massive water balloon fight on the campus quad that both sides referred to as the “Bitches and Bastards Brawl.”
The past truly is another country.
Eeeeexactly. My wife is lobbying for it (because she loathes air travel, mostly) but I have no interest in moving to Cold United States just for a marginal and temporary gain in freedom. It’d be a last-ditch option.
EU politics generally seem to be taking a sudden rightward lurch of late, with immigration being a major driver. All that history of African colonialism coming home to roost is making people with a fixed, racially-homogenous sense of their national identity into very unhappy campers. Of the countries not actively sliding into fascism, Putin seems to be ogling with hungry eyes in anticipation of NATO’s defanging. Things look pretty dire across the board, to be honest – between fascism, looming war, and climate change it’s all about least-bad options right now.
We’re looking in the same direction, since I qualify under the same program. I’m looking at companies to start communicating with about job opportunities now.
The “easiest” would be Israel since my wife qualifies under the Law of Return, but we’re both staunchly anti-Zionist, so… ugh. Right now I’m looking closest at Ireland, since my profession is on the Critical Skills Employment Permit list and I work in a niche that is well-matched to the Irish pharma/life sciences sector. In a pinch I’d lobby for a transfer to my company’s Canadian branch office, but that’s not optimal for a few reasons.
ETA: for permanent emigration, the thing you want to do is find a country where you can speak or at least quickly learn the language, and where you can get employment in a sector that’s on their list of critical needs. In most cases you can’t get a visa that lets you stay and work long-term without first getting a job offer. In terms of flexibility, someplace in the EU has a lot of appeal, since you can work basically anywhere in the Schengen area after you gain permanent residency. Australia and New Zealand are attractive mainly for being well-isolated from all the regional wars that seem like they’re waiting to kick off just as soon as American muscle isn’t backing up NATO or Taiwan, but it’s a lot harder to get those visas.
Yeah, no, I’m literally making escape plans. Just this week the street between our house and our kid’s daycare got shut down in the middle of the day for an unannounced parade, and my wife had a fucking panic attack thinking it might be some sort of Proud Boys or Oathkeepers-type march and they were gonna run amok and we’d be cut off from him. I don’t plan to stick around long enough to see that happen for real when Project 2025 kicks off, thank you.
The founders did anticipate direct democracy, the two-party system, and demagoguery. These were much discussed.
…and notably not a part of the constitution they eventually drafted, which was my point. Rather than try to build a democratic system with effective safeguards against demagoguery, they chose to have a system where only “the right sort of person” got a say in the running of government, and assumed that the separations and limitations of power they wrote in to the rest of the document would be sufficient protection against bad actors in that scenario. Now, we have (more or less) representative democracy, but with no additional guardrails to protect against someone like Trump, and SCOTUS is peeling away what we do have day by day.
The argument, such as it is, is that impeachment is the remedy for a Mad King Trump situation, rather than the courts. In fairness, this is not a completely unreasonable reading of the Constitution, but the framers’ intent is almost completely irrelevant to the reality of our current political system. As originally written, the federal government was basically designed to be a vaguely-representative oligarchy, with states free to appoint senators and presidential electors however their legislatures saw fit – the majority of states did not consistently hold a popular Presidential vote until the 1820s, for example. Impeachment by 2/3rds vote is not an unreasonable bar to set when it’s assumed that everybody in government is going the part of the class and social structure, and the President acting as a class traitor would put all of Congress into uproar. The founders did not anticipate more direct democracy, the two-party system, or the vulnerability to demagoguery that those things would introduce into the system.
So here we are now, with a nakedly partisan Supreme Court majority holding that the only way to interpret the law is to ignore the world as it is and instead imagine things are still as they were at the end of the 18th century (mostly because that philosophy plays into the hands of the right wing) and pretending that a 2/3rds vote in the Senate is still a reasonable bar, when in fact the present political reality is that you will never peel 12+ sycophantic Senators away from a dangerous demagogue’s camp for long enough for an impeachment process to succeed in removing him from power. Of course that’s by design, but textualism and originalism paved the road to this ruling.
At this point I’m not even ironically suggesting that Biden should call their bluff and start offing prominent right wingers. The Roberts court is clearly working in the assumption that Democrats won’t play dirty with the tools they’re laying out for their incipient god-king, and it’s looking increasingly like the only way to keep those tools out of their hands is to strike first.
Here’s the weird part though-
Four in 10 hiring managers said they always contacted workers who applied for made-up jobs. Forty-five percent said they sometimes contacted those job seekers. Among companies that contacted applicants, 85% report interviewing the person.
Does that part make sense to anyone?
This strikes me less as fraud and more as a way to stay open to talent that you may not need immediately but still want to be able to add to your organization, in an era when basically nobody sends unsolicited resumes anymore. Like, maybe you don’t have a project in need of a Whatever Specialist right now, but it’s a field your company works in, and if a really exceptional Whatever Specialist is on the market, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to bring them on.
My high-school friend group adopted “it goes” from our French class (“Comment ça va?” “Ça va!”, roughly meaning “How goes it?” “It goes!” being the common neutral greeting taught in French classes) and I slightly resent it being described negatively here.
The context of those passages, as I recall, is basically that “Jesus is gonna come back any second now, so don’t bother with worldly concerns like marriage and making babies. Just devote your life to being a good Christian and leave the fornicating to the heathens, unless you absolutely can’t live without getting laid on the regular.” It’s hard to understate the degree to which the early church was basically a doomsday cult. They were certain that the Rapture was going to happen in their lifetimes, and that short time horizon had a big impact on how they thought their society should be organized.
I wonder if the lack of decisions in some of these cases may betray a three-way ideological split on the court that makes it impossible to write a true majority opinion?
Something like Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson off in one corner saying “actually we shouldn’t burn it all down for no reason,” Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barret in the other chanting “NO CHEVRON DEFERENCE! NO WOMEN’S RIGHTS! BURN IT DOWN, BURN IT DOWN, GIL-E-AD, GIL-E-AD!” while Roberts and Gorsuch are sitting in the middle asking both sides “won’t one of you just sign on to this opinion that only burns it down a little bit? We’d like to go home to our nice comfy lives as wealthy white men who aren’t affected by any of this, please.”
It’s the Chicago mob all over again!
