Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

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

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

“They all knew.”

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

How stupid are these people?

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Information Warfare

Information Warfare

Late Night Open Thread: I, Too, Am Still Bitter

by | 85 Comments

This post is in: , ,

There's a lot that could be said about this on a cultural level or a political level, but we have forgotten the personal level: people owe Joseph Biden, the man specifically, an apology.

[image or embed]

— Cai (@annenotation.bsky.social) January 1, 2026 at 10:57 PM

There should be publications, or at least individuals involved with publications, who should specifically apologize to him, not as a politician, not as a former president, but as a person. They slandered a person as part of a Russian intelligence operation. They should apologize for that.

— Cai (@annenotation.bsky.social) January 1, 2026 at 10:58 PM

If I had done something of this nature against my neighbor, promoted an attack that was biased and not founded and meant to damage him specifically for something that he did not do, I would owe him an apology. Well, these people owe him an apology.

— Cai (@annenotation.bsky.social) January 1, 2026 at 10:59 PM

This is not a game, this is a real person. He had to address a claim against him that was not true. He was slandered in the media for something that he did not do, when due diligence made it clear even at the time that he did not do it. He was treated unjustly and deserves an apology for this.

— Cai (@annenotation.bsky.social) January 1, 2026 at 11:00 PM

I do not believe a community that cannot take accountability for this. I cannot trust a community that will not take accountability for this. People who supported this claim, even when it was clear at the time it was not true, have eroded society to the benefit of evil persons.

— Cai (@annenotation.bsky.social) January 1, 2026 at 11:01 PM

Late Night Open Thread: I, Too, Am Still BitterPost + Comments (85)

Late Night Open Thread: Peter Thiel Wants to Speak to *All* the Managers

by | 83 Comments

This post is in: , ,

All I can say about this Peter Thiel op-ed in the Financial Times is that it reads like something he actually wrote. No comms team or AI chatbot is capable of producing this strange paranoid string of sentences www.ft.com/content/a46c…

[image or embed]

— Micah Loewinger (@micahloewinger.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 8:21 AM

Back on Friday, the Financial Times published an op-ed by Peter Thiel which has attracted a certain amount of internet scorn attention, even over the weekend. Some people say that Thiel, after spending lavishly of his own money & effort to install J.D. Vance on the incoming maladministration undercard, is just annoyed that his old running buddy Musk has side-stepped the official rules and moved into the top slot through the sheer leverage of money. Others point out that Thiel, like Elon, is a known (‘but of course he has a prescription’) ketamine user, and ketamine may assuage depression but it has concerning side effects.

Or then again, comes the rejoinder, maybe these Very Important Tech Dudes all got lucky — just happened to be standing outside with buckets when it started raining soup — and this is what the insides of their sweaty little brains have always looked like. In any case, here’s (ex South African) Thiel on A time for truth and reconciliation…

In 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump’s election victory was “not the apocalypse”. By any definition, he was correct. But understood in the original sense of the Greek word apokálypsis, meaning “unveiling”, Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien regime’s secrets. The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance — reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.

The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative…

We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about Covid-19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser David Morens, we learnt that National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from Freedom of Information Act scrutiny. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval plague epic The Decameron, “is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.” …

show full post on front page

Late Night Open Thread: Peter Thiel Wants to Speak to *All* the ManagersPost + Comments (83)

Important Read: The Case for A Shadow Cabinet

by | 179 Comments

This post is in: , ,

The case for a Shadow Cabinet – a positive form of opposition.
snyder.substack.com/p/shadow-cab…

[image or embed]

— Timothy Snyder (@timothysnyder.bsky.social) January 6, 2025 at 9:11 AM

Timothy Snyder, who famously warned us Do Not Comply in Advance, has a very interesting proposal in his latest SubStack post:

When I moved to Great Britain to study, I found the politics very exciting. The parliamentary system was different, so that new elections immediately led to new governments. The press was excellent but political, so that one could read the newspapers and be informed both of the facts and the sentiments. And, when reporting government policy, journalists always had an opposition voice to quote: members of the “shadow cabinet.”

Like so much else in British public life, the institution of the shadow cabinet was unfamiliar to me, but I soon grew to appreciate and admire it. The “cabinet,” of course, was the assembly of government ministers, led in Britain by the prime minister. The party in opposition (the Labour Party when I arrived in Britain in 1991) appointed its own leading members to “shadow” each government minister, including the prime minister.

Shadow meant follow. The shadow ministers “shadowed” the actual ministers, in the sense of following their every move, criticizing policy and offering alternatives. Importantly, the shadow minister was always available to offer commentary to the press on his or her area of expertise. This greatly enriched public life. At any point a journalist, and thus the public, had access to an alternative point of view, one which was both pertinently expert and politically relevant. Shadow ministers did not always become real ministers after the next elections, but often they did.

Four years ago today, Donald Trump led an attempt to overthrow a democratic election and thereby undo our constitutional system. In two weeks, the same man will be inaugurated president of the United States, this time with a centibillionaire as the unelected de facto head of government and with anti-qualified anti-patriots as his cabinet nominees. What to do? People talk about resistance, and about opposition. What forms should these take? I have written elsewhere about what citizens can do. Leading politicians of the opposition party, the Democratic Party in the United States, have a special responsibility, and also special opportunities. One of these is to form a shadow cabinet. I want to join the voices of those advocating for this. (Here I am speaking for the idea on television a few weeks ago.)

In Great Britain, the shadow cabinet represents “the loyal opposition.” The loyalty in question is to the state and to its head, the monarch. In the United States, a “loyal opposition” would be loyal to our Constitution — and, indeed, that could be the basis of its activity. We face the unusual situation of a government — a president and his cabinet — who seem indifferent to the rule of law itself. By beginning from the principle that we have a government of laws, not men, a shadow cabinet would reinforce the American way of politics. It would be a very good thing to have a constitutional lawyer or two on the shadow cabinet.

And a shadow cabinet would remind us of how much better things can be. The regular reactions of its members to Musk-Trump would flow from different sense of politics and policy. That is material that the press needs, and that we all need. As Trump and his cabinet undertake their unpredictable whorl of destructive policy, journalists and others will be at a loss as to what to say. The worse things get, the harder it is to think of an alternative. As time goes by, the chaos of Musk-Trump might seem like the only possible reality. That, of course, will be the goal of the new regime: to persuade us that government just means dysfunctionality, spectacle, and repression. At every moment, members of the shadow government can remind us what government could instead be doing, positively, for the people. They are there to remind us that a better America is always possible…

Yes, there is a problem in that we Democrats are infamously ‘not an organized political party’. But that can be its own strength — we’re not an intellectual monoculture, uniformly susceptible to every passing blight! In any case: Go read the whole thing, and let’s discuss.

Important Read: <em>The Case for A Shadow Cabinet</em>Post + Comments (179)

Late Night Interlude Open Thread: Smirnov Lied. So Did, and Will, Jim Comer

by | 51 Comments

This post is in: ,

This story has been (temporarily) overwhelmed by the Great Budget Bullsh*t Kabuki, but I’m sure Jim ‘Second Time As Farce’ Comer is keeping his oversight gavel warm. So, getting it on the record: The whole ‘Burisma paid off Hunter and probably Joe Biden’ story was based on lies from an actual, breathing, self-identified Russian asset. And Comer’s Crew was either too dumb to pick that up, or too eager to impeach President Biden not to leap at the lies like a pig at a truffle…

A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.

Alexander Smirnov entered his plea to a felony charge in connection with the bogus story, along with a tax evasion charge stemming from a separate indictment accusing him of concealing millions of dollars of income…

Smirnov will get credit for the time he has served since his February arrest on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015.

Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said.

But Smirnov had only routine business dealings with Burisma starting in 2017, according to court documents. An FBI field office investigated the allegations and recommended the case be closed in August 2020, according to charging documents.

No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous office as vice president.

show full post on front page

Late Night Interlude Open Thread: Smirnov Lied. So Did, and Will, Jim ComerPost + Comments (51)

Monday Evening Open Thread: Let Us Learn from the Koreans…

by | 201 Comments

This post is in: ,

To summarize: The Korean president told the army “hey guys, come over here, I’m doing a coup” and they came with unloaded guns and just kinda dicked around and when he was like “wtf is u doing” they were like “hey man, you said *you* were doing a coup.”

[image or embed]

— Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty (@irhottakes.bsky.social) December 5, 2024 at 11:56 PM

Trump and his henchmen have been saying a lot of terrible things, because ‘saying’ is all they’ve got at the moment, and the thought of doing terrible things to people who can’t retaliate is what gives them joy. But talk is cheap, and the actions they propose require coordination — a degree of cooperation we can make sure they don’t get.

Korea has, I am informed, a rather different social culture than ours (‘ornery’ seems to be the default term), a textbook dictatorship on its border, and a living memory of what civil war actually entails. These factors seem to have given the Korean public a head start on stopping the Six-Hour Coup. But we can learn from them!

I'm gonna hit the Clausewitz bong for a sec
What we're trying to do is create friction.
Everything is very simple in war, and the simplest thing is difficult.

[image or embed]

— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:06 PM

Those little speedbumps might individually mean little but in aggregate, they run down the clock and force the GOP to expend political capital where they don't want to

— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:06 PM

If I'm gonna run with "war is politics by other means, therefore politics is war by other means" I need people to understand that tactical defeats do not result in strategic ones and the costs we can impose over the course of those tactical defeats will have consequences that can be exploited

— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:33 PM

This wasn't over on November 5th, it won't be over on January 20th, and it won't be over if he declares himself god-emperor of America
It will be over when all of us are dead

— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:34 PM

Monday Evening Open Thread: Let Us Learn from the Koreans…Post + Comments (201)

Late Night Schadenfreude Open Thread: They Did Nazi That Coming

by | 84 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Per the Columbus Dispatch, “Body cam footage: Neo-Nazis who marched in Short North claimed to be victims of violence”:

A group of neo-Nazis who marched through the Short North this month were not arrested because police determined they were not the aggressors in a fight that broke out, according to documents and video footage.

In body camera footage Columbus police released Monday, the neo-Nazis told police they had never experienced a response like the one they received in Columbus. They said people pulled guns on them and threw cans and vegetables as they marched, waved flags and yelled racial slurs. One of the officers noted the men were “covered in” pepper spray.

The Nov. 16 march drew stern condemnation from city hall to the White House, but no arrests were made. A group of Black men organized a counter-march the next day, following the same route in the Short North with a message of peace. In a statement, Columbus police previously said they could not find sufficient probable cause to file any charges against the neo-Nazis.

Police initially made contact with the neo-Nazis in a chaotic scene on a sidewalk near Goodale Park at about 1:15 p.m., according to a radio log printout from Columbus police. There the neo-Nazis, wearing black and red clothing and carrying black flags with red swastikas, told police they were leaving because they were under attack. In the background, bystanders shouted at them to take off their masks.

They told police they were marching because “our country is being invaded and white people are being ostracized.” While they refused to tell police where they lived, they referenced past marches in other cities.

Police said they’d received a report that they were spraying people with pepper spray and hair spray. The neo-Nazis said they were pepper sprayed first, and hadn’t instigated any violence. Footage previously obtained by the Dispatch showed one of the neo-Nazis spraying something in a person’s face, and 911 callers said the neo-Nazis had pepper sprayed people.

Several officers, including multiple Black officers, were present at the scene on the sidewalk. One Black officer tried to reason with the marchers, pointing out that they were bound to see confrontation from people for shouting hateful things.

“I definitely feel your First Amendment rights to say whatever nonsense this is, but c’mon, man,” the officer said. “The Buckeyes are playing. Man, come on.”…

A police report identified the group as “Hate Club 1844.” The driver is the only neo-Nazi named in the report. The others are identified only as about 10-11 unknown white men.

“We do this all over the U.S., and we’ve never been attacked like this, man,” the driver told police from his seat in the U-Haul.

Late Night Schadenfreude Open Thread: They Did Nazi That ComingPost + Comments (84)

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Joe Biden, Still Our President

by | 80 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

******

Tuesday Morning Open Thread 17

(Clay Bennett via GoComics.com)

 

show full post on front page

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Joe Biden, Still Our PresidentPost + Comments (80)