Thrashy

I have a friend who had a case before Cannon and told me that she was both one of the stupidest and the meanest judges she's ever dealt with, which is saying something since she practices primarily in Florida. As a representative of the caliber of judges the Federalist Society has to offer, Cannon is pretty damning... and if we get four more years of Trump, the federal bench is going to be stacked with jurists even worse than her.

I've been going back and forth about this all day. On one hand, I think it's obvious that Trump is a symptom of the right wing's systemic slide into open authoritarianism, rather than its architect... but on the other hand, I don't think his cult of personality would have long outlived him (especially if it turned out he was assassinated by a fellow right-winger over his ties to Epstein) and there's not many figures on the right who would be able to reconstitute it quickly. On the other hand, I don't think his cult members would go gentle into the night, and there would be ugly, violent reprisals. On the other hand, I fear there's going to be violence no matter what, and it's probably better for it to happen before the election than after for a host of reasons. But on the other hand, etc., etc...

A combination of resting on their laurels during AMD's lost decade, and failure to retain competitive process technology during the extended gestation and ultimate failure of their non-EUV 10nm node. The arrogance of taking their foot off the gas and assuming nobody would ever catch back up to them backfired hard.

You, just like the rest of us, are an infinitesimal speck of dust on a surface of an unremarkable ball of rock orbiting a star just like trillions of others, whose existence as a thinking entity will likely span less than 100 years out of the 100 trillion years that the universe will exist in a meaningful sense before the stars die and the last black holes evaporate.

The universe owes you nothing; human rights are nothing more than the common decency we owe one another in the face of an uncaring universe, and the idea that anybody other than the ruling class should even have them in any meaningful sense has a surprisingly short history. In contrast, the idea that might makes right is as old as the first predatory microbes. If a society believes in the value of human rights, it needs to be ready and able to vigorously defend them against would-be strongmen who don't feel constrained by rules and norms of behavior, who will happily banish those rights back to the philosophical ether from which they came if it means they can secure more power and comfort for themselves.

Colm Meaney was associated with Sinn Fein (formerly the political arm of the IRA) for a long time, so "Pro-Union Irishman" took me a minute.

Based on how quickly behavioral and morphological changes happened in Soviet experiments on silver fox domestication, I suspect that domestic cats are about as domesticated as they're gonna get.

• Loud voices promoting hopelessness and advocating against voting in left-leaning spaces can have a measurable impact on voter turnout and is also a known tactic of global bad actors like Russia
• "useful idiot" is a term of art
• You're working very hard not to engage with the meat of my responses, aren't you?

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 that the far right intend to target if Trump wins again (nevermind anybody that would be negatively impacted by the geopolitical effects of Trump abandoning NATO, among other things) 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.