Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

T R E 4 5 O N

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Dear legacy media: you are not here to influence outcomes and policies you find desirable.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

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Rumbling Stumbling Border Bumbling

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Maybe I’m naive, but I think it’s possible that the GOP tanking the border bill will be disastrous for them politically and may handicap the entire party coming into a critical election year. The bill has provisions Republicans demanded — on camera! — as necessary to address an “existential threat” to the nation.

And now they’re killing it on the say-so of a defeated, unpopular, criminally indicted buffoon because he wants to preserve border demagoguery as a signature issue for his campaign? How is that a good look?

Even Fox News is skeptical, citing the Border Patrol Union’s endorsement of the bill. Biden-Harris HQ highlighted this exchange on Threads that shows a Fox couch clown accusing Republicans of tanking the bill because Trump told them to:

 

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Yes, our political media sucks rancid raccoon dicks and cannot be counted upon to report the story straight, and yes, U.S. citizens have approximately half the attention span of a fruit fly, so maybe none of this will matter come November. That’s the conventional wisdom. But the confluence of events weaves a simple narrative that is supported by copious foreshadowing, and none of it is flattering for Republicans.

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Steady As She Goes (Open Thread)

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The Compromise Border Deal, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, Chris Murphy

The compromise deal that includes Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, the border.

It’s decent.  It’s awful.  It’s not bad, but it’s not good enough.

We’re all talking about it but do we really have any idea of whether it sucks or not?

I’ll get to that in a minute.

After learning that the Republicans were trying to kill the exact fucking bill that they asked for, and had negotiated, I was lying in bed, starting to feel like I did after Trump won, though at least my whole body wasn’t shaking in shock like was that night in 2016.  Still, a sense of terrible sadness.  Disbelief that this could actually happen in our country.  Knowing that terrible times were ahead.  A terrible sense of dread and dismay.  Feeling betrayed.  Filled with grief, tears running down my face.  For our country, for Ukraine, for our democracy.

My only consolation was Miss Willow who had tucked herself in by my side, and she had stayed by my side for so long that I finally needed to pee.  I wasn’t going to get up because I needed the comfort from Miss Willow, but she must have sensed something different from me because she jumped down off the bed, and I headed for the bathroom.

When I headed back to bed, I decided to listen to a podcast, and I’m glad I did because listening to Chris Murphy talk about the deal left me in a completely different place.  (Sorry for the ugly image on the YouTube video.)

For about 11 minutes, Chris Murphy talked about the bill.  Talked about what was in the bill.  Made it clear that this wasn’t like Lucy and the football.  Our side went into the negotiations knowing full well that there were no guarantees.  Though it’s pretty ballsy to actually make a deal and then announce that you’re gonna block it.

Chris Murphy talked for about 10 minutes.  He was calm and thoughtful and explained what is in the deal, and I felt a lot less hopeless.

Chris Murphy starts about 50 seconds into the broadcast and ends at about the 12-minute mark.  If you want to get a sense of what’s in the bill and whether Democrats were so stupid as to sign onto a terrible bill (hint: they didn’t) and dumb enough to be duped (they weren’t) I would encourage you to listen to the interview with Chris Murphy.

I am thanking the universe for the ruling from the circuit court today; I suspect I’m not the only one who needed that shot in the arm today.  All is not lost, though the Republicans are shockingly nihilistic; they are truly willing to burn it all down and betray our allies in the process.

Fuck them, they only truly win if we give up and stop fighting.  Thank goodness for the Chris Murphys and the Chef Joses in this world.  They aren’t giving up, and neither should we.

I’m thinking that Biden needs to make this real for people – with a video that shows the realities of what not funding Ukraine will mean.  Real people are getting hurt and dying in Ukraine, and we need to be there to help them win.  Real people are suffering in Gaza.  I was recently referred to as “that” by someone – as if I’m not even human, no better than a dog to kick.  That’s how rapists see their victims; that’s how people justify their terrible behavior.  We need to find a way to reach regular people in our country and help them see what’s really happening.

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Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! (A guide to getting started)

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Bluesky is now open! Sign up today!I’ve been writing posts keeping track of Bluesky development for you all. If you haven’t been following along, Bluesky is a social network, roughly in the style of Twitter. It was hip and new last year. Maybe it will be hip and new again now! Why? Because you can finally sign up without an invite. While it lacks some of the features that more mature services have, like video uploads, it is also not thoroughly saturated with nazis and crypto scam bots, and does not promote the posts by the biggest dumbasses in the world everywhere you go. I think that’s an acceptable trade-off.

More importantly, it has what I think is a true killer feature–custom feeds. Anybody can make one, and you can subscribe to them and have them live natively in the app, and have their posts inserted into your chronological feed. At their most basic they’re just posts from a list of users, but more advanced ones surface content via hashtag or emoji, or an AI recognizing pictures of cats or flowers, etc. There are even several good algorithmic recommendation feeds to choose from, in addition to the default one run by Bluesky itself.

It’s also allegedly going to open to federation this month; click the link at the top of this post for details on how that will work.

There’s a lot more great stuff in the pipeline. Composability will be the name of the game–choose your algorithms, choose your moderation services, choose your host, choose whatever you want. Here’s what WaPo has to say:

That system is a work in progress. So far, Bluesky is the only social network using its protocol. But it already has some features that set it apart. […] For instance, users can subscribe to feeds where algorithms prioritize the most popular posts overall or the posts most popular among the people they follow. There are also options for feeds geared to their specific areas of interest, such as science or art. And users can toggle personal moderation settings that either “hide,” “warn” or “show” categories of content such as nudity, violence, spam and hate-group iconography.

Along with today’s public launch of Bluesky, the company said it will roll out in the coming weeks a step toward its broader vision, inviting some outside developers to host servers that plug in to the main Bluesky network. It also announced a new feature that will let users and organizations begin todevelop their own content moderation services, which other users can then subscribe to. For instance, a fact-checking organization could apply “false” or “misleading” labels to certain posts, which would then be seen by users who opt in to seeing them.

With that out of the way…

A guide to getting started at Bluesky

  1. Sign up at bsky.app!
  2. Give yourself a profile picture and bio. Anything will do, really; it helps set you apart from other users and makes you more approachable.
  3. Find some custom feeds. It’s in the left column on desktop, or the hashtag icon on the bottom on mobile. I recommend:
  4. Under Moderation -> Content Filtering, you can set your preferences for showing/warning/hiding NSFW stuff, hate group iconography, gore, etc.
    1. Note that they’re still working out the, ah, kinks, and you might see some NSFW stuff slip through the filters.
    2. If you signed up on iOS, all mature content is removed from your feed by default; this cannot be changed from your iPhone. Log in at bsky.app and change your preferences there.
  5. Speaking of changing your preferences: I recommend this at Settings -> Basics -> Home Feed Preferences. It will show all posts by people you follow, including when they’re replying to somebody. The one at the bottom is important too–it inserts select posts from your feeds into your chronological following timeline. I also recommend Threaded Mode at Settings -> Basics -> Thread Preferences.Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! 1
  6. Almost everything you do is public on Bluesky, but you can set it so that people have to be logged in to see your posts under Moderation (not in preferences) -> Logged-out visibility, which includes some important caveats in the description.
  7. I maintain a large moderation list of authoritarian communists, Russia simps, etc. I recommend subscribing to it, which will block or mute everybody on it.
  8. Post, post, post! And reply to people, politely of course. It’s the recommended way to get noticed.

You can find me at @thearchduke.bsky.social. Many other jackals are there, please share in the comments. Plus:

Happy posting!

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Manslaughter

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Kay pointed this out in the last thread and it’s worth a post of its own:

PONTIAC, Mich. (AP) — A Michigan jury convicted a school shooter’s mother of involuntary manslaughter Tuesday in a first-of-its-kind trial to determine whether she had any responsibility in the deaths of four students in 2021.

Prosecutors say Jennifer Crumbley had a duty under Michigan law to prevent her son, who was 15 at the time, from harming others. She was accused of failing to secure a gun and ammunition at home and failing to get help for Ethan Crumbley’s mental health.

The guilty verdicts — one for each student slain at Oxford High School — were returned after roughly 11 hours of jury deliberations.

Did the founders have gun safes and trigger locks?  I’ll await the appeal of this verdict to the Supreme Court to litigate that crucial originalist question.

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Trump Speaks, They Jump

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I might have just as well not written a post yesterday about the terrible, no good immigration bill, because Trump killed it yesterday evening.  The Post makes the following impossible to link, but you get the gist:

Trump Speaks, They Jump

Republicans aren’t shitty opponents.  They have one issue — immigration — and they’re going to hit it as hard as they can.  Today’s impeachment vote on Mayorkas signals their response to killing the immigration bill:  “Why bother giving Biden any more money to secure the border when his administration is too corrupt to spend the money they have?”  I haven’t seen anybody’s whip count, but I’ll bet that the impeachment resolution squeaks by, since these fuckers can unite when power is at stake.

(Also, speaking of unity, I learned yesterday that Democrats are now down a seat in the House because Brian Higgins, formerly a Buffalo-area Democrat, resigned effective this month.  Here are his initial reasons:

“I’ve always been a little impatient, and that trait has helped us deliver remarkable progress for this community,” Higgins said in a statement. “But the pace in Washington, D.C. can be slow and frustrating, especially this year.”

“Therefore, after thoughtful consideration, I have made the difficult decision to leave Congress and explore other ways I can build up and serve Buffalo and Western New York,” he continued.

That was his original statement, but it turns out he quit to run a Buffalo-area performing arts center.  I always thought that Higgins was a decent rep, but decent reps just announce they won’t be running for re-election.  With the House on a razor-thin margin, any Democrat resigning for reasons that aren’t family or health related is just making it easier for Republicans.  I guess I’m naive enough to still be astonished at the selfishness of some of our party when faced with an existential threat.)

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DC Appeals Court News (Open Thread)

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Paging all BJ attorneys

PDF of the ruling

For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.

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