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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 11h

A couple of days ago, a dementia-addled man who has always had a short attention span left a meeting and claimed that a specific number of feds had been deployed into the January 6th rally as agents provocateur. The aforementioned blister is noted for accusing opponents of his own crimes.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 13h

Sorry for the rant and the sarcasm. Having now read up on it, the Banner seems like a fine institution. This article ain't it, but it is no worse than the standard.

Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 14h

Newspapers suggesting that "He's done good work, but he's failing on messaging" infuriated me in 2022 through 2024. They are mistaking his job and their job.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 14h

Further, why allow the poll itself to be so vague? Voluntary-response polling is not an innocuous capturing of public opinion, it's a tool for shaping it. Ask whether people are aware that he raised the minimum wage. Ask whether people know that he was instrumental in joining the Climate Alliance.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 14h

Perhaps I'm crotchety, but this style of reporting public opinion without informing is one of the many things I blame for the rise of MAGA. The only quotes are from the uninformed. Why not include some quotes from those who cited his specific accomplishments?

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 14h

Everything isn't, but failing to mention in the article any of the accomplishments they're saying people don't know about is a journalistic failing.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 14h

Funny, I'd have thought based on the name that the Baltimore Banner was some sort of news reporting service, responsible for making people aware of the notable events going on around them. I guess it's actually a polling organization, since it's so blasé about public ignorance and passing on rumors.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 2d

I am as firmly against ICE as I am against the carceral state, and for the same reason. Our entire immigration law structure is built around slave labor, and "immigration enforcement" is the sanitized modern term for slave catcher.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 10d

Louder for those in the back.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 11d

Fair enough. I understand "dork" more as the outward appearance of awkwardness than the internal sensation of awkwardness. By that meaning, anyone who's seen him try to dance, or to shake hands, or to speak to a non-sycophant need never look for a better example.

Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 11d

That's not what distinguishes them from Donald Trump, whose dork stench is richer, deeper, and more nuanced. What distinguishes them from Donald Trump is that they are capable of feeling shame.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 12d

Or to borrow a summary from Dickinson, "A quality of loss / Affecting our Content / As Trade had suddenly encroached / Upon a Sacrament."

Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 12d

Terry Pratchett famously brought this up to Bill Gates in a 1995 GQ interview, and received an answer that smacked of not understanding the danger. The following year, he had this to say of Gates:

"A lot of the Internet is just a really, really glamorous way of becoming really, really stupid. It has its uses, but the thing is, it's going to have to settle down. Now Bill Gates has discovered it, after a long time of saying that it was just a flash in the pan, so no doubt he's going to come and mould it in his image."

Terry interviewed Microsoft Chief Bill Gates last year for GQ magazine, and is sure that there's a tendency for everyone who meets him, "to try and look behind the eyes, to try and see the real Bill Gates in there. I'm not certain I've got a big enough telescope. But, curiously enough, I don't actually dislike the guy. A lot of the things which people consider to be wrong with him, are things which are wrong with capitalism. He introduced capitalist ideas in an area when most people just sort of slobbed about. So, instead of selling code, you licensed it. He did things, which, in other fields, people were doing all the time - but you get the impression that a lot of the people he dealt with still had yoghurt juice still dripping down their t- shirts."

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 12d

Okay. That's a pleasant dream, and I wish I could join you in it. Here's to miracles.

Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 12d

Calling for revolt doesn't accomplish revolt, but it does lay the caller open to impeachment and to criminal charges up to and including treason.

Why do you mention the military?

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 12d

Als God het wil, zal hij zo herinnerd worden.

Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 12d

Not because legislators couldn't participate in a revolt, of course, but because the instant they do, they cease to be legislators.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 12d

Just extending the smothered mate metaphor. Democratic legislators have two options: accepting the CR (abandoning the people who need them and whom they need) and rejecting it (allowing the fascists a new and potentially decisive avenue of attack). Revolt is only available to non-legislators.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 12d

That's not so much "the third option" as "the third player." And unfortunately, the only members of the public who are as yet taking the necessary actions for a revolt (i.e. violently breaking the law in concert) are the fascists.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 12d

The shutdown provides them with opportunities for more and faster mass layoffs, physical infiltration and theft, and sham emergency declarations under which they will seize even more power.

And yet, the alternative to giving these opportunities to them is worse. Legislators are in a smothered mate.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 12d

Cf. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

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Interstician @justinterstician.bsky.social · 12d

I'm about your age, Zach, and that was never my received opinion as a kid. The people who talked about it with me always framed it as mass appeal meaning an appeal to the lowest common denominator. Corporations advertised to the basest instincts of an ignorant multitude because that's what worked.