EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

Not exactly beating the allegations by publicly firing the guy, but I assume letting him quietly “retire to spend more time with his family” wouldn’t have been good enough for the totally-not-death-cultists.

If that’s the case then there is not and was never any reasonable alternative. Might as well get on with it.

How do they get all these people to show up and embarrass themselves like this? Is it just about posting on Facebook groups until you get critical mass, or is there more to it? Surely there must be earnest people who end up in these crowds like “are we really getting excited about celebrating slave-owners?”

“A vote for Bart is a vote for anarchy!”

I could see it, tbh, given how prevalent the brunch meme is on the left.

If they understood that events in the past were linked to events in the present, we probably wouldn’t be here right now.

As if Ryan Gosling couldn’t pull off the before look.

Ms. Rachel is exposing the worst people in the world as craven ghouls by pointing out that it’s bad to hurt children. I hope her haters die extremely mad about it.

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.

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.

Incredibly big dick move to be a career video game designer and respond to controversy by saying “This is all a bunch of dumb nerd shit. Touch grass.”

Trump’s greatest strength is his utter lack of conviction. It usually manifests as disloyalty to even longtime supporters, but he also turns it around and makes friends if he thinks it’ll serve his interests. Ultimately nothing is permanent to him, his world is whatever is most convenient for him in the moment.

Getting older and more mature has definitely helped with this. For example, I completely cut out the part where I promise myself I’m going to change the pattern.