Friendly reminder that if you ever tried to crush Facebook, it has the option to retreat to India, where it’s already the platform most of “the Internet” and the economy run on, where the regime appreciates its ability to amplify ethnomajoritarian organizing
California politics make most sense when you understand the state understands itself as the shining future as seen from 1974
Xavier Becerra at HHS, like Hilda Solis at Labor before him, is about installing a good state party machine loyalist atop one of the most machine-potential departments and is mostly significant for how it affects California politics – as he was state AG this opens up a new statewide office for climbers.
With a huge population, a term-limited state legislature, only two senators, one set of constitutional offices, and waiting lists for every federal district, the musical-chairs aspect of just providing enough places for ambitious pols to go is getting to be an important way the national Dems service the state party.
In theory, the California Dems should be the party of everybody. And, they are, that’s kind of the issue, they’re the party of Scott Weiner and of everyone who hates Scott Weiner. Keeping promises to retirees that they can always live like it’s 1966, established yuppies that they can always live like it’s 1978, immigrants that they can always live like it’s 1995 (Texas took over the promise that the white get-er-done class could always live like it was 1984)
Meanwhile no one really wants to live in 2020, but addressing that threatens to upset the state Dems in a way that the national party sees no advantage in over a stable one-party state
an underappreciated thing is the distinction between “non-racism” and “anti-racism” is exactly what the term “affirmative action” was coined to signify
It is convenient (or mutually downstream from structural position or something) how high culture maps to erotic culture so well now that once you find your discourse community you can trust they’ll know about the same kinds of niche porn and fetishes you do
You know, there’s a really refreshing thing about the individualist radical right these days – their rhetoric is often really violent but they don’t tend to show off by fighting each other (or by alienating potential allies) in the process.
The old-school skinheads and whatnot all had this weird fetish for fighting each other. They didn’t care about “winning” or even winning the moral arguments, they just cared about being the sort of people with whom they would be the most likely to fight. If someone challenged you, you had a pretty good shot of getting punched but getting punched was not considered a moral good in and of itself. They weren’t really into democracy or pluralism, they just cared about punching other skinheads.
And of course they would all talk about how they “respected” you if you had to defend yourself against them – which made sense, because it was in their immediate self-interest to maintain this image. Surely everyone knows leftists are the equivalent of violent thugs? But if you actually talked to them you wouldn’t find this at all the case. Nowadays there are far, far fewer skinheads, but they are still out there and tend to show up in the news in far bigger numbers than usual, I experienced this firsthand. So they don’t just show up in groups once a month or so and fight – they show up in larger and larger numbers, and they show up and fight more and more often. But most of these fights are things like “oh you’re a Trump supporter, so I’m going to punch you and I won’t even have to call the police,” and that works well enough even though it’s a bad system.
in the new COD you can be nonbinary in the CIA and when u meet Ronald Reagan he respects your pronouns. i dont know how to process this information at all
