If only the Democrats had that much spine.

If the Democrats take the House and Senate, it will be soul-crushing if they don’t pursue a strong liberal-restoration agenda and fiercely prosecute the Republicans for engaging in blatant self dealing.

Thanks to the history I’ve lived, I don’t expect them to, especially as the DNC shows signs of capture, but it will be very sad.

Then the Republicans will get back into office, and the US will fall in earnest, possibly attacking Canada and Greenland when the government bankrupts the state, and eventually ending with China and Europe bombing the snot out of DC.

If we’re lucky, by then, chunks of the US will have seceded from the union to form smaller clusters of states, so that the entire nation doesn’t have to be conquered by the Allies.

Rome lasted a thousand years, and has become a benchmark for nationalist regimes that imagine they’re ushering in a new golden age (right before they run out of money and attack Poland). NSDAP was notorious about aspiring to a thousand-year reich which they obviously did not achieve.

The US is making similar golden age noises.

Checking Wikipedia, the British empire was ~450 years, so I’d be interested in examples of ~250 year reigns.

The wealthiest 0.00001%, about 20 individuals, hold wealth equal to 12% of the US’s gross domestic output, according to data compiled by the French economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, about four times greater than levels seen during the gilded age.

We are at unprecedented levels of fucked.

Note that while a billionaire can buy elections and control governments, a trillionaire can buy all the elections and control all the governments.

Our first trillionaire, even if temporary, is an apocalyptic sign, the breaking of a seal.

In the aughts, I had accumulated about $30 in debt, but managed it through consolidation programs, and got it down to about 3%.

Then the subprime mortgage crisis happened, and my creditors said sorry, but we’re fucking you over no matter what the contract says. Your interest rate is 12% and feel lucky we don’t raise it again.

Apparently companies will do that. I didn’t pay them at all and just waited seven years to wait out statute of limitations.

San Francisco since the 21st century has had four or five public restrooms that are automated and self cleaning, and free! Why? Because even then poop from the homeless and impoverished was a problem.

Not allowing people to use your business restroom is just a good way to end up with occasionally cleaning up poop on your grounds, and your back alleys perpetually smelling like urine. In the meantime, if you do let people use your restroom for free, they’re more inclined to return to your establishment to patronize it.

Small businesses in the US like restaurants and cafes will lock their bathrooms anyway more out of habitual miserliness: Laws in the US immensely favor large chains and franchises, so small business owners and managers get used to doing everything they can to raise revenues and lower costs (including stealing tips and underpaying staff) so the petit bourgeoisie for a while seemed crueler than big corporations. (As workplace regulation violations are not being investigated, big businesses are catching up, as per Amazon and Facebook). In 2026, small resellers rarely open their restrooms up to the public, and some restaurants and cafes don’t feature restrooms at all.

And so major cities all have poop problems, either managed by municipal cleaners or by ordinance requiring property owners keep their grounds clean.

In the years after the epidemic lockdown the RTO mandates started coming hard and fast, and it was evident for two clear reasons.

a) Upper management was feeling lonely and wanted its entourage back. They feel powerful when they see busy workers being busy for their benefit. See also BULLSHIT JOBS, and…

b) Companies were stuck in leases of expensive business space that was now empty, and that just felt too wasteful, so the vibes solution was RTO mandates.

Ugh. I have Medicare so I get notices from Dr. Oz on occasion.

This is frustrating but not surprising. Progressives and Democratic Socialists have been the red-haired stepchildren of the Democratic Party since Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Right after AOC won her primary, the DCCC changed its rules to deny support to other Democratic Socialist candidates. They were later pressured to revert the policy change.)

But we’ve already seen in the last decade evidence of active capture of the Democratic party and its institutions. Corporate lobbyists really prefer officials who are soulless and obedient and would rather get super wealthy than serve the public.

Sadly, it’s the same neoliberal disease that infects all of the industrialized world, which factors into why authoritarianism and even fascism are gaining traction in those nations as well.

The Democrats may not be effective in taking back power, but if they do, we have to remake the entire system to address corruption, the influence of money, and to create social safety nets stronger than before. If we appease the capitalists and neoliberals even a little bit, then we’ll be right back here again with some Trump-like figure in power and the Heritage Foundation wrecking the country’s institutions all over again.

In the US, we are under a massive oligarch-owned far-right propaganda machine that dominates social media and television viewership.

It works so well that rich people in other countries are trying to adopt the same model as a means of popular control.

I’m not Christian, but from what I’ve read of Jesus, he’d want us to love and respect trans folk. You know, along with the widow, the orphan, the disabled, the foreigner and so on.

What the bible shows us is that hatred of the other, to the point of violence, is an old, old problem, and we actually have to put effort into exercising tolerance.

I learned this stuff from Sesame Street and Saturday-morning cartoons in the 1970s, a message that seems to have been lost since.

There are a number of ideas to help regulate the power of the court. Adding more members is a popular one, but that isn’t going to prevent Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society from conspiring to pack the court again with ideologues, partisans and corrupt crooks (looking at you, Clarence Thomas).

And impeaching and removing a justice is as difficult as impeaching and removing a president, which is to say, nearly impossible.

One option is to add a lot of new justices, like bringing the total to one hundred. A small number of them would bench a committee to choose the cases to be heard, and then for each individual case, six to nine of the pool would be tapped to hear it, the way that the other courts operate. That way it takes a lot more effort and resources for corporations and billionaires to bribe all the justices. It’s also a lot harder for organizations like the Federalist Society to dominate the court. (They’ll try, but it’ll be evident they are trying long before it creates an unbreakable veto on the rest of government.)

Currently, legal experts are looking at a multi-pronged approach, installing term limits (that will require a constitutional amendment), adding judges, and chartering a mandatory code of ethics enforced by congressional committee. I’m afraid that doing these three will not be enough, and it won’t fix the problem quickly enough.

We’re beyond mild reforms of the Supreme Court. We need to break it, and then create something else new in its place. And stripping it of its jurisdiction as the last court of appeals that decides constitutionality, will go far in that effort.

I’d love to see it but we are struggling to get enough people organized to take any action. It would take a large percentage of organized jurors to hold the courts hostage that way.

If we could get 5% of the population to just plum stop paying taxes, by comparison, that would force the state to the negotiating table. 3.5% participating in a general strike would do it as well.

I’ve been imagining so, like in the Star Trek episode What Are Little Girls Made Of? in which the mad doctor has ma444stered the ability of making android duplicates of people, only its revealed in the end he’s an android, himself.

I think revolution can be accomplished without violence, at least until the ownership class resorts to violence to retain their wealth and power, at which point violence is thrust upon us.

As Nelson Mandela put it, A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire.

Although Elie Mystal noted if a Democratic triumvirate were to strip SCOTUS of jurisdiction (they can do that without a Constitutional amendment) then SCOTUS might declare that law unconstitutional (it’s not, but this SCOTUS doesn’t really care) and then we can have a situation where some states think the court’s rulings are legit, while others think they’re not, and states might be willing to go to war over it.

Zuckerberg doesn’t really want ruthless efficiency. He wants ruthless control.

One gets productivity from happy, well-cared-for workers. Like Bezos, he tries to micromanage them instead.

In the early 2010s, there was a lot of Ayn Rand fans in the Republican party. I think in the 2012 Republican Primary, the favorite book question either yielded Atlas Shrugged or the Reagan biography.

Eventually, as Steven Colbert would note in The Colbert Report, none of them were chosen, and the Republican party decided reluctantly to support Mitt Romney.

Oh, there are peaceful movements that work. But then the autocrats can sometimes be eager to fire the first shots. Take January 6th, 2021 for example.

As Nelson Mandela put it, A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire.

They could also remake the prequels and get some real writers on them and make them good.

Looking at Disney’s MCU ouvre, it’s a blend of hits and misses, so I don’t fully trust the company to not mess it up.