sologdin

Biden may as well go into benevolent dictator mode. this is the reason that trump's attorneys argue in obvious bad faith. they have to know that if their argument prevails, then the current president can just go full stalin. some qanonist will spot that problem and then realize further that trump is just a tool of the deep state to bring about socialism.

when he (inevitably) refuses to pay? the law has tools to handle non-responsive judgment debtors. the bankruptcy trustee can undo fraudulent conveyances, for instance. the good thing for trump's judgment creditors is that the financial information is already worked over a bit in the various cases and through the accountant disclosures.

When is political violence ok? I humbly submit this explanation: definitely lower brow than the rationales examined in camus' rebel, derrida's force of law, or agamben's state of exception. right wing politics leaning more toward our potential for chimp-like social dynamics, while left wing politics leans more toward our Bonobo-like dynamics as regards conflict resolution, chimps beat the fuck out of each other whereas bonobos have sex with their adversaries? i get the rightwing chimp thing, but lefties have had a fairly poor showing historically, too.

the notion that the system as it exists is fundamentally broken seems like there's a smooth functionality resulting inexorably from founding documents and statutes enacted under same, sorting benefits and burdens in predictable ways. less broken, i.e., than operating precisely as intended. revising it doesn't require extraparliamentary measures. but if we're at that point that the fascists are organizing against mere revision, and we haven't even gotten to the despotic inroads on the right to property yet, then it's plain that mark fisher remains correct in how it's easier, for some, to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

At risk of being overly optimistic, I think Biden write-in is a very positive sign. a bit. it's difficult to draw inferences from the numbers. write-in biden voting looks good for him, but then again the number of votes counted in the dem primary are 105K, whereas the repubs had 300K voters in theirs. uh oh? (the easy explanation is that no one cared in a primary that doesn't count; cf. 2020 election numbers, 790K for president.) the contrary and very attenuated inference is that NH's semi-closed primary allows non-party members, who want the current president to remain in office, to vote for the former president in the primary so as to set him up as the weaker candidate for the general.

t doesn't seem like the positive sentiments of investors are shared by the vast majority of the population. it does mince the trump cultist contention that biden's policies are bad for investors, though i understand the thesis now is that increasing values for securities simply "makes rich people richer," a bad thing when it happens under an opponent, as described here. standard right populism, right out of lowenthal: somehow the communists in the adminstration are simultaneously plutocrats.

What I dont understand is why Democratic strategists go through the historical archives to see how to tackle these fascist tactics. what is truly amazing is that the tactics have been well understood for many decades. at the level of street demagoguery, leo lowenthal's prophets of deceit works through the basic rhetorical technique from the early 20th century. (my thorough comments here.) adorni's jargon of authenticity handles the highbrow philosophy. (comments.) neumann's behemoth tracks the actual practice of right populism after its elevation. (my notes.) and to round out the frankfurt tour of fascism, maybe horkheimer's eclipse of reason to really tie the room together. (notes.) the truly ambitious might take on adorno's authoritarian personality, a study of the psychological type that enlists in rightwing populism.

Which is why we need all the votes we can get, people! more a matter of triage. those domiciled in irredeemable shithole states might feel at liberty to vote in accordance with pure principle, whereas the recommendation to voters in plausibly contestable states would be to cleave to tactical considerations.

He's somehow managed to maintain his manic energy but learned how to stick to talking points and prescribed attitudes the hypothesis for falsification is therefore whether acting like a regular candidate cools the fervor of magaphiliac expression. my suspicion is that the magaphiliac arises from abject lumpenization and has adopted facile identity politics on the way out. say what you want about the tenets of magaphilia, at least it's an ethos?

these are the sort of articles that flatter my prejudices. the top ten most unhealthy states, it argues, are shithole states, i.e., run by the rightwing: meanwhile, the top ten most healthy are predictably more progressive, except for utah, the relative health of which might be attributable to clean LDS living. good on them: the question accordingly becomes whether rightwing policy causes bad health outcomes generally or that bad health exists for other reasons and leads inexorably to a fascistic electorate.

a giant red cape being waived in front of him no doubt. the reading that the presidency is not an 'office' is crazier than a shithouse rat. textualists such as the justice gros fromage should appreciate art. II sec. 1: emphasis added. i'm sure there's a clever way to explain it away. or maybe a not so clever one. power has never required wit. i'm handling a case that involves a mariner working for the US. even though the FECA excludes vessel crew from its scope, the supreme court has a case that says the FECA is a mariner's exclusive remedy. so plenty of stupid to go around.

Don't know whether or not the CO supreme court is Dems or not all seven have been appointed by democratic governors, but the judges themselves are non-partisan on paper. Are state SC decisions subject to being overturned by SCOTUS or is that the end of the matter as far as Trump's ability to be on the Colorado ballot? they are generally, but a pure question of state law is not something normally within its interest. the question becomes whether this case involves a pure question of state law or not. my reading of the opinion this morning and the dissents is that each is focused on the state election code, with some discussion of the 14th amendment and procedural due process. SCOTUS is going to rule in favor of Trump. what do you think the legal, as opposed to political, basis of reversal would be? politically, i could see several conservative justices think that it's time to shut the fucking circus down. Will that clause have any on the affect the ruling being sent to the SC? that language is discussed in the colorado opinion. one implication to draw from it is that the disqualification clause is self-executing. the section permits congress to remove the disqualification, but it does not require the judiciary to do anything like 'pass it back to congress.' there is no such thing as 'passing back to congress.' this is not a hot potato or a marihuana pipe. Is that reasonable? Who the fuck knows? it is completely unreasonable. the colorado opinion trashes the notion that the presidency is not an office. So does it affect other states findings? because the colorado opinion is focused on its own election code, the supreme court could decline to take the case and just let the states sort it out individually. that would be consistent with the abortion decision. or it could take the case and say that colorado got its election code right or wrong. or they could also take the case and make a determination on the meaning of the section, one way or the other, which would likely filter down universally.

the terribleness rightly or wrongly will be attached wrongly, of course, unless the terrible arises out of an intrinsic characteristic rather than incidental deviations from principle. no one is advocating for anthropophagist rights, but that's what rightwing panic implies.

the st. ronnie puppet in the original 'land of confusion' video highlights the ligottian complication.

should be shocking, but sadly it isn't. this touches on my pet internal leftwing grievance: on what warrant rests the conclusion that one need not educate those whose circumstances have prevented them from understanding a phenomenon claimed to be rooted in irreducible experience? whence comes the corollary entitlement that one need not argue and persuade as part of a demand. You can be on the correct side of an issue and still take it too far. that can be a tactical question, or a moral one. on the one hand, it makes sense to listen to the objections and correct course. on the other hand, i kinda regard DQSH as fairly tame. a consistent moral doctrine might accordingly require us to take it farther. clothing, in itself, as long as one has enough of it, is a trifle--the picayune question of how much fabric cut in which ways covering which anatomical parcels is a question of parity products, fungible in objective terms, varying through market mechanism with high cross elasticity. if subjective import is attributed to some and not others on the basis of gender ideology, it merely means that it is a serious trifle, fictions piled on top of other fictions, a cascade of hyperreal interactions--but a trifle nevertheless. it is trifling because the issue that has been created is entirely one-sided; the conservative end of the debate wholly lacks merit and pursues the matter frivolously as a display of animus. they may believe that sex exists, but that's simply because it says so in genesis 1:27. the offer to extend their unsupported and unsupportable beliefs over the entire world is respectfully declined. as reductio ad absurdum of their objection to DQSH, we note that it's probably child abuse to extend these woeful beliefs over t their own children. i envision therefore a child welfare agency in the atheist future that dispossesses parents of their children for juvenile infliction of religious belief.

role models are important. i wasn't really thinking of it that specifically. more that remaining silent on questions of sex and gender, which are products similar to race ideology, allows the rhetorical void to be filled by whatever quasi-religious construction the right wants to put on them, simply by virtue of their seeming to sell uncontroverted coherence. this would thus be quite a bit less direct than role models, more substratum. hey what's the difference there all fascists, well, then I wouldn't say they're meaningfully anti-fascist. yeah, this reaches its nadir in the stalinists declaring that social dems are basically fascists because they disagree with comintern policy preferences.

Maybe they just want the kid to develop on their own. is that something that happens? isn't consciousness by contrast a product of labor? the right knows this, which is why they want to capture school boards, indoctrinate through religion, and control mass culture. video games cause savagery, not guns, they argue. ban books, not firearms, they contend. the blade itself does not incite to deeds of violence, but rather rock music and role playing games. to let them develop on their own is to allow the right to groom them into little stormtroopers.

some who’ve recently started treating dumb as an ableist slur for instance. i've mentioned from time to time over the years that generally there's heavy reliance on pejoratives related to defects in cognition. they are irrational, a crude argumentum ad hominem at best. making a metaphor out of a common disability for application to nondisabled persons might come across as motivated by discriminatory animus. last time I convinced anyone of anything i bet it's more recently than you think, but the convinced person's pride prevented them from making an admission. it's still a win even if you don't know it. for instance, i recall on these boards several moments of realizing that my position changed through debate. cere, some of our israeli rightists, and os, of all people, balanced my appreciation of the israel-palestinian conflict. jeff, scot, EHK, and other conservative lawyers often had good points on legal and political issues. vico on religion. wade on military doctrine. i bet even dirjj persuaded me of something at some point. but i probably never admitted any of it, definitely not in the moment. these micro-revolutions occurred through confrontation with the right, which provided opportunity to correct error bilaterally, but the nature of those confrontations puffed up participants (or me, anyway) with too much vanity to concede the general point. consider this post therefore a self-criticism. purity-over-politics, identity-obsessed, social-justice faction on the left the vanity aforesaid comes with the identity politics. i can't recommend strongly enough lukacs' destruction of reason. it traces a history of the relation of rightwing epistemology founded on anti-rational and anti-empirical ideas, such as intuition and revelation, and connects them with support for reactionary politics. the connection to identity politics is the modern insistence on a type of knowledge that can only be known through identity--such as one crafted by the experience of oppression. this sounds like an empirical idea, an experience creating a posteriori knowledge, except that it's often presented as not subject to criticism by or even communication to those who lack the experience. that's basically old-fashioned intuition and revelation, specialized knowledge that others can't see or interrogate. to attempt to interpret or critique might be considered an additional affront. i prefer fanon's idea of liberation theory, according to which oppression deforms its objects, creating dependencies and antagonisms. this type of rationale means that some deference is not due to identity, to the extent that the identity is crafted by imperialism. this is one part of all critical theory, including CRT--no uncritical acceptance of reported experience. What the fuck did Mao stand for it's less about him personally than how chinese doctrine developed in the west. people's war, three worlds, cultural revolution, peasants as agent of revolution, and so on. one can condemn the failures of the great leap forward while still adhering to the cultural revolution idea of making oneself both the arrow and the target, say. it gets crazier than that--badiou, for instance is a maoist-platonist. that's totally wtf but he's still awesome to read. ETA-- White well-educated, able-bodied, cisgendered, reasonably well off people who should know better than to lean into the politics of panic. nevertheless, privilege doctrine is just a species of ideology critique. false consciousness works like dubois' veil, descending across the mind to prevent perception and comprehension. if, that is, experience produces a certain type of knowledge, the lack of that experience will create a dearth of knowledge based specifically on these sorts of characteristics. likely therefore the very privileged person described supra is entitled to quite a bit of patience, as their accumulated benefits render them unable to perceive and comprehend the hardships of others. we might thus consider this superlative constellation of privilege to be a mentally disabling condition. such a person might deserve collective assistance and empathy.

fairly simple plain English sometimes a virtue, sometimes a liability. i suspect that little is simple or plain. it reminds me of the MAGA voter who litters casual conversation with the most coarse ideological judgments and then complains when someone brings politics into this. basic language I’m experiencing trouble here, so I feel like my trying to introduce new terminology would lead to an even more fraught a process than it has been the more usage, the more history of reception, and thus the greater likelihood of contrary abstractions accreting around a term. sometimes a new term avoids this problem. passing comments in a thread don’t seem to bad to me! i don't think it's bad, either, to note what's annoying. but even if it were, we shouldn't jump across the author/text chasm to cancel you for it. as a metric on which conduct on the left should be subject to discipline, however, this sort of gustatory objection should be avoided. discipline should probably be exercised only in concrete cases or controversies, rather than through general abstract denunciations. the latter comes across as bit too two-minutes-hatey. also it should likely not be exercised in representative capacity, unless the representative has been specifically retained for that purpose. one is reminded of diderot's complaint about seneca's "defect of letting oneself be carried by the interest of the cause that one is defending beyond the limits of truth," a common defect for those who act even professionally in representative capacity; diderot, indeed, would pardon seneca for it, considering how common it is. but i'm not really inclined to pardon it, as mere commonality is not really self-warranting. who should be adjudicating all of this is difficult--it's all market mechanisms in the recent wave, automatic coordination of grievance, hayekian leftism. gross? uncritical certainty this strikes me as a dunning-kruger problem--ready activism with more energy and principle than knowledge and circumspection. a standard vicenarian defect.

trying to call out specific actions or factions on the left that I find illiberal, good thread. it's likely correct to focus on conduct, over something nebulous like character. faction is a bit different, and has a bit of a rightwing pedigree. it might be difficult, if one is rigorous, to identify a purported group with the offending conduct of one of its alleged members. this thread needs better pejoratives than assholes. it might skip old soviet nomenclature (left and right species of opportunist, revisionist, and so on), as well as disfavored national terms such as philistine, byzantine, &c. i prefer to start with a term describing the objective effect of the doctrine underlying the conduct subject to critique, prefix it with a class signifier, and then qualify it further with an ersatz psychological term--lumpenized antisocial nihilism is fairly standard. am not sure however what tripartite designation fits here, mostly because the object is not obvious. defining the object of critique is accordingly necessary, and that object can only be identified by setting up a standard against which it might be measured unceasingly and perhaps thereunder found wanting. the standard can't be merely aesthetic--so finding someone 'annoying' will be best kept to oneself, lest one be revealed conclusively as an agent provocateur or too delicate to partake of the revolution. measuring conduct against a goal-oriented standard ('counter-productive') is prima facie plausible, but then it falls into russell jacoby's trap about making a fetish of success. we know from badiou's communist hypothesis that 'failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis,' or so. sometimes therefore counter-productive may be worthwhile, and we should expect quite a bit of failure before getting to the end of history. 'problematic' sounds like a reasonable metric, though its import may be limited to doctrinal disputes. 'illiberal' is an accusation that conduct adopts rightwing methods and modes. after a certain point, however, the left is contra liberalism, if construed broadly as including capitalism. we might distinguish between progressive and retrogressive anti-capitalism, and i suppose that's marcuse's argument in repressive tolerance regarding certain forms of conduct. but then where does one draw the line? it would help to know what exactly is considered objectionable here. if it's merely that some theorists seem fanatical, one might forgive me for thinking that objection appears plausible only in the eye of the beholder. a principle of charitable interpretation will compel us by contrast to grant good faith intention to parties opponent and thus assume a basic rationality in their thinking; this means banishing accusations of fanaticism, insanity, and the like.

our catahoula puppy has developed a taste for desiccants--not just the low-end stuff in shoe boxes, but the hard core product that ships with mediocre furniture. i'm not sure if he's a greater connoisseur in that regard than our coprophagic bochi--but certainly the pit bull is indiscriminate in eating doors. completely unrelated, i have three free dogs for sale.

am hoping it's revealed that he's been helping PTA draft his new film, also concerning a parentless but precocious ginger kid dating inexplicably way out of his league.

this thread is descending into familiar ground.

next-level milking of a very minor deal. when engaged in metagnostic milking, all stones no matter how small cover secrets.

assuming it came into being as 1000 pages long, this means the draft is growing backwards like benjamin button. in another 20 years, it will be down to a reasonable length.