It’s not quite true that we “never” hear about Ukraine’s far right. We hear about them fairly regularly in fact - from Putin’s apologists and sycophants.

I assume they’re not sucking up to Bibi, but to AIPAC.

That’s not a bug - it’s a feature.

The ultimate goal is to bring back Victorian workhouses, updated for the modern age of privatized prisons and officially sanctioned corporate slave labor.

So I clicked this expecting to just find that they’re lying pieces of shit.

But actually they’re lying racist pieces of shit.

Not that I’m surprised really… just noting that fact.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen that much projection in a single article before.

Essentially every single thing that he accuses the left of planning to do is actually something that the right has already done, and is in fact one of the reasons that reform is necessary.

The most frustrating part of it is that it’s not simply that he self-evidently has no integrity and no principles, but that he’s a short-sighted moron. Like every useful idiot in every authoritarian coup ever, he’s defending the autocrats simply because their actions currently align with his shallow self-interest, and is completely oblivious to the fact that they could just as easily (and sooner or later will) oppose his interests, and by then, in part specifically because of his shallow stupidity, it’ll be too late to do anything about it.

This is an interesting thing to come along right now.

On the one hand, it seems odd in the face of the fact that the Supreme Court appears to be doing everything they can to normalize and even legalize overt corruption. It would seem that all Congress has to do is let them, and they’ll benefit from it just as much as the justices will.

But on the other hand, the Supreme Court is also trying to expand their power to legislate from the bench, and that cant be sitting well with Congress. And Alito and Thomas, at least, are so vividly and plainly corrupt that it could be to Congress’s advantage, ironic as it might be, to set themselves up as the arbiters of government ethics, specifically to undermine the grotesquely corrupt SC.

I don’t think Manchin has ever, in his entire life, actually done something “with a heavy heart,” since that would require a conscience.

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I think that for many of them, it’s actually sincere. It’s not a cynical strategy to continue failing to actually represent their constituency and get elected anyway - they actually believe that those on the left who oppose them should be ashamed of doing so.

As a general rule, people aren’t consciously evil and destructive. Some certainly are, but many (most?) live in a sort of fantasy world in which they’ve framed their evil such that it’s at least justified if not actually good. They rationalize and excuse all of the concessions they make and build up this whole framework in which what they’re doing is right.

And then when they look out at other people from within that (warped) framework, it really does appear to them that those who have not chosen to do as they do are wrong for having done so, and thus justifiably shamed.

And they never stop and pull back and try to analyze things from another perspective, since to do so would risk destroying this whole fantasy world they’ve built - all of their rationalizations and excuses and comforting misconceptions would come crashing down. And they can’t allow that. So they just cling to the fantasy, which means, among other things, charging ahead with the (mis)perception that their critics are shamefully wrong.

I just hope that maybe with the death of the Boomers and Trump turning the RNC into a circus that is very much a minority with younger people that the republican party as we know it is not long for this world. Maybe the current democrats move into that spot, and someone a little further left will emerge.

If ours was a reasonably healthy system, I think that’s exactly what would happen. And it wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened.

The problem though is that the Republicans - or more precisely their think tank advisers - recognize that that’s the way things are headed, and the party is determined to stop it by any means possible, which basically boils down to undermining education and access to information to keep as much of the public as ignorant and misinformed as possible, and to destroy democratic institutions, discourage voting, gerrymander and expand the police state in order to counter those who will stubbornly end up opposing them anyway.

Broadly, there are three possible paths a party that’s gotten to the point that it no longer represents the will of enough people to be a contender can follow. It can reform itself, it can allow itself to be eliminated and replaced, or it can arrange things so that people are conned or forced into supporting it anyway, in spite of the fact that it’s really in almost nobody’s interests to do that. And the Republicans have very obviously chosen the third path.

And our system is so broken that they might just succeed.

Pretty much, yeah.

The Republicans are able to overtly promise to do things the corporate jackals want, and just spin it a bit so the voters will think it’s for them. They can promise to cut taxes (and not mention that that’s just taxes for the rich) or promise to downsize government (and not mention that they’re just going to eliminate regulations to which corporations and rich people don’t want to be subject), and so on.

The Democrats are in a much trickier position, since there’s no way to spin their intention of working for the benefit of the corporate jackals as representing the will of their supporters, and they can’t sincerely promise to do the things their supporters expect without alienating the jackals and cutting into the flow of that sweet, sweet soft money. So they’re stuck either making vague, wishy-washy promises that they then don’t keep, or just being overtly moderate-at-best and trying to shame leftists into supporting them anyway.

Cynically I presume that the Dems keep trying to court moderate Republicans because if they can get enough support from them, they can justify sticking with a moderate platform that allows the DNC to continue collecting enormous piles of soft money from corporations.

In order to appeal to the more progressive younger voters (and make no mistake about it - appealing to them would GUARANTEE victory), they would have to adopt a platform that would cut into thise enormous piles of soft money.

And they’re just not willing to do that. The simple fact of the matter is that the DNC values the money more than it values actually winning the election. If guaranteeing the ininterrupted flow of soft money requires tactics that mean the Democrat loses, then that, to them, is just the way it goes.

And after the fact, they’ll just blame someone else - almost certainly the progressives.

Churches getting in on the “privatization” racket and Republicans getting another source for kickbacks.

It’s a win/win for… well… nobody actually, other than the churches and the politicians.

Rereading Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!

I’ve just been getting burnt out on the literal insanity of the world and most notably of the people in positions of power, and needed a complete diversion. I had been reading Haruki Murakami 's 1Q84, but I just couldn’t stay with it - too many loathsome characters. So I set it aside and pondered what to read instead, and Discworld just seemed the obvious choice. I read the entire series over the last ten years or so, so it’d been long enough that I could at least reread the earlier ones. And this time through, I can skip the ones I didn’t like so much (like pretty much all of the Rincewind books). So I started with Equal Rites, then went on to Mort and Wyrd Sisters and am now on Guards! Guards! And it’s just as good as I’d remembered.

Just makes me wonder how many Palestinians they’ve murdered in similar circumstances, and we just didn’t hear about it because they weren’t Israelis, so it was treated as if it didn’t matter.

And tomorrow, they’re going to drop a bomb on her.