Raven Onthill
@ravenonthill.bsky.social
1.1K followers 580 following 22K posts
Just a dilettante amateur political science bird who lives in the US Pacific Northwest. If you want to know what I think, try my blogs at adviceunasked.blogspot.com and shinycroak.blogspot.com.
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Reposted by Raven Onthill
brooklynmarie.bsky.social
Yes well those of us who would got fired first and no one said shit so
aphclarkson.bsky.social
If this was happening in any other country you'd have journalists and analysts discussing risks of state failure
ravenonthill.bsky.social
The ones who elected President Johnson and the 88th United States Congress, in conjunction with the Civil Rights movement.
Reposted by Raven Onthill
driftglass.bsky.social
Now that antifa has teamed up with antiphon, antihistamine and antidisestablishmentarianism, I anticipate we will be the antithesis of and antidote to MAGA'a antimonic, antisocial antipathy for facts and reality.
ravenonthill.bsky.social
I think it shouldn't be as rare as it was; the supermajority requirement for impeachment has turned out to be an impediment to removing unqualified people from the bench. Supermajority requirements have I think in general turned out to be problematic in US governance.
Against Supermajority Requirements in a Partisan System
(First in a series on needed constitutional reforms.) Very sharp Twitter commentator Pé ( @4everNeverTrump ) pointed out that in a two-...
adviceunasked.blogspot.com
ravenonthill.bsky.social
The population of India is nearly twice that of Europe. Of course there are a lot of languages! India isn't a nation-state the way France or Germany sort-of are; it's a gigantic federation.
ravenonthill.bsky.social
"Nothing about us without us."
trance.bsky.social
No. This is a false dichotomy. But please listen and let me explain as much as I can on social media where nuance is hard, because we want the same things probably, but we're not agreeing on how we get there.

You argue for unity while embracing what is not unity. And I find that when people ...
ravenonthill.bsky.social
Reform the Supreme Court. The Court as it stands has been a roadblock for two centuries; the Warren Court was a happy exception.
It was, usually, a reactionary, racist, anti-labor, pro-business institution. The Roberts Court is much more typical of the Supreme Court in history than the Warren Court.

Writing before the Warren Court, in 1942 liberal historian Henry Steele Commager gave a series of lectures at the University of Virginia, later published as a short book under the title Majority Rule and Minority Rights. It must have taken some courage to give those lectures at the school which Thomas Jefferson founded, a center then of racist thought. The second section of the book, “Democracy and Judicial Review,” is a nearly 30 page review of reactionary decisions by the Court. Towards the end of the section he summarizes:

    This is the record. It is familiar enough to students of our constitutional law; less familiar, perhaps, to the layman who, not unnaturally, supposes the court continuously intervening to protect fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property from congressional assault. It discloses not a single case, in a century and a half, where the Supreme Court has protected freedom of speech, press, assembly, or petition against congressional attack. It reveals no instance (with the possible exception of the dubious Wong Wing case) where the court has intervened on behalf of the underprivileged—the Negro, the alien, women, children, workers, tenant- farmers. It reveals, on the contrary, that the court has effectively intervened again and again to defeat congressional efforts to free slaves, guarantee civil rights to Negroes, to protect workingmen, outlaw child labor, assist hard-pressed farmers, and to democratize the tax system. From this analysis the Congress, and not the courts, emerges as the instrument for the realization of the guarantees of the bill of rights.
ravenonthill.bsky.social
🎶 You can't take the sky from me…
Reposted by Raven Onthill
emptywheel.bsky.social
I can't emphasize how important it is for people to understand that unless something FAR BIGGER than an election win happens, this is a pipe dream.

It would take quite a bit to get past qualified immunity.
jesseberney.com
I can't emphasize enough how important it is that the next attorney general set a team to go through ICE records with a fine tooth comb and prosecute individual agents.

It's the only way to stop this from happening again.
longtimehistory.bsky.social
ICE secretly kidnap autistic boy during bathroom break—never notify parents.

Mother reported him missing a week ago—turns out ICE had him detained the whole time.

He was helping sell fruit and asked to go to the restroom—by the time she was done helping a customer he was gone.

Houston, Texas
ravenonthill.bsky.social
…any two-party system, duh. I think there's an equilibrium dynamics that operates even in multi-party systems. A party will not stay permanently weak; it either requires enough new members so that it gets occasional wins or it fades out entirely.
ravenonthill.bsky.social
Impeachment was not supposed to be as hard as it became; as the two-party system emerged—it wasn't anticipated by the founders—impeachment became near-impossible because it's near impossible to assemble a 2/3 supermajority in the US two-party system, probably anything party system.
Reposted by Raven Onthill
kevinjkircher.com
Over 40% of corn grown in Indiana is used to make ethanol that cars burn. One acre of corn yields about 16,500 vehicle-miles per year of ethanol, which sounds high until you realize that one acre of solar yields about 2,700,000 vehicle-miles per year: 16,000% more driving for a given plot of land.
ravenonthill.bsky.social
"The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour."

It was never intended to be life tenure. The combination of the constitutional supermajority requirement for removal and the two party system broke that constitutional mechanism.
ravenonthill.bsky.social
by two world wars. After the second world war, a truce was made, but it has been broken by various elite factions in the United States, not only the some of the very wealthy, but also white supremacists and power-hungry religious leaders.

The struggle continues.
ravenonthill.bsky.social
a turn to sometimes-violent radicalism; it became reasonable for Marxists to point to "bourgeois democracy" and hold that the only solution to the abuses of the US system was violent revolution. And so revolution and counter-revolution dominated the first half of 20th-century US politics, punctuated
ravenonthill.bsky.social
This is why for so many years US reformers became radicals; whatever one passed through electoral process could be overturned by stacked law courts. The Taney Court issued Dred Scot, the Waite Court neutered the Reconstruction Amendments, the Fuller Court issued Lochner.

What followed on was
matthewstiegler.bsky.social
Roberts is presiding over, and driving, a stunning collapse in faith in the U.S. Supreme Court, not just among the public, but among federal judges.

What a failure. The Titanic captain of chief justices.
murshedz.bsky.social
“More than three dozen federal judges have told The New York Times that the Supreme Court’s flurry of brief, opaque emergency orders in cases related to the Trump administration have left them confused about how to proceed in those matters and are hurting the judiciary’s image with the public.”
Reposted by Raven Onthill
jfruh.bsky.social
there's a years ago tweet that basically said that anyone writing TV or movies by definition managed to land their extremely-hard-to-get dream job and it colors how they think about work and jobs and wish fulfillment in the stuff they write, and i think about it a lot
Reposted by Raven Onthill
mtsw.bsky.social
It is a good sign for us that the effective-for-our-side framing "Trump's Argentina Bailout" is how it's being referred to in NYT headlines. If that's the language being used we've already won the argument on the issue. Trump's Argentina Bailout
abdulelsayed.bsky.social
When the bailout for Argentina…is actually a bailout for the Treasury Secretary’s hedge fund billionaires.

They get richer…and it just gets harder for you.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/u...
Big Investors Await Windfall From Trump’s Argentina Bailout
www.nytimes.com
ravenonthill.bsky.social
"The rich person speaks and all are silent; they extol to the clouds what he says." — Ecclesiastes

This is not a new problem.
disabilitystor1.bsky.social
Among the greatest mistake societies across the world have made is believing that because someone is talented in one thing enough to make them outrageously wealthy, they absorb all the wisdom of the universe by osmosis and must be considered the Wise Old Sages of our time
Career
Rowan joined the mergers and acquisitions department of Drexel Burnham Lambert where he worked in New York City and Los Angeles.[9][4] The firm collapsed in 1990.[4] In 1990, Rowan co-founded the asset management firm Apollo Global Management with former Drexel colleagues Leon Black and Josh Harris.[8][10]

In July 2020 Rowan took a "semi-sabbatical" from Apollo, but remained involved in strategy and on boards, until taking over as CEO in March 2021.[11][12][13] He intended to focus in areas including strategy and culture.[14]
ravenonthill.bsky.social
@support.bsky.team consider this
ravenonthill.bsky.social
Ai slop videos presented as true I guess has to become a moderation category. Bah!
ravenonthill.bsky.social
Ai slop videos presented as true I guess has to become a moderation category. Bah!
ravenonthill.bsky.social
And if this attitude is common, the fascists will roll right over us.

Oh, well. It was a nice country while we had it.
ravenonthill.bsky.social
The media, concentrated in few hands, is conservative-to-fascist.
Reposted by Raven Onthill
slothropsmap.bsky.social
I think my least favorite thing about this era of history is that technology and obscene wealth have synthesized in such a way that the haunted pathologies of rich men spread across the global until they warp reality itself.

We are to some extent living inside Trump and Elon’s brains.