Lmao WaPo has fewer than 100K circulation now. It turns out “alienate your liberal subscriber base” is not a good strategy when the Republicans also hate you. www.forbes.com/sites/andyme...

Thinking fondly of all the pre-election fact-checks that said we couldn’t possibly know whether Republicans wanted to get rid of pre-existing condition protections.

a foundational belief of the modern right is that there is no such thing as organic disagreement with their policies, it’s all directed from the top down

they just can’t conceive that ordinary people find them horrifying

lol theyre doing breencasts as political propaganda

antifa are literally removing their skins to evade capture

Arguably, Trump 2.0 is all about stochastic authoritarianism.

He lacks the ability to punish multiple cities with an iron fist. He can't even really punish all of ONE with an iron fist. ICE and associated unnamed Fed LEOs roam Chicago, but only strike a limited number of places at a time.

What Trump is doing is very bad. But I want to push back against some of the numbers here.

ICE did not hire 10,000 agents. It WANTS to. That it keeps running ads suggests it is struggling. And when it does, it seems to cannibalize local police, who don't like that.

More significantly:

I actually think Trump himself was also significantly more constrained in his first term. He actually acted like a politician who believed in certain political gravities and got rid of people who made things a clown show.

He's basically diminished significantly and become a golem of insecurity

The great thing about those costumes is their humor & nonviolence, of course.

But also, they *take up more space*. They make the crowds bigger. The visuals that create footage are important.

What if the unidentified masked men with guns don't accept the validity of your papers?

I never posted this here, but I made a pretty big write-up over on Tumblr for anyone interested in learning #pixelart!
It's a guide on software, fundamentals, jargon and resources.

Since links are legal on Bsky I can share it: www.tumblr.com/tofupixel/75...
#tutorial

Hope someone finds it useful!

never say never, i guess, but neither ellison nor weiss have the kind of experience that should give anyone strong confidence that they’ll be able to even maintain CBS’ current viewership levels, let alone improve them. both have basically only ever run niche projects.

Combine this with the RFK Jr. antivaxxer stuff and you get a pretty clear and coherent eugenicist policy agenda.

I really can’t imagine a more ideal scenario for anti-Trump politicians than MAGA spending a week explicitly turning the size of the 10/18 protests into a referendum on MAGA and Trump, while simultaneously making the protests the center of media attention. They are setting themselves up for disaster

I now realize that for my entire adult life, I've had a very narrow conception of what "supporting and defending the Constitution" means. Standing on business when armed agents of the State are knocking on your door is way more important, by a country mile, than anything I did overseas

He thinks Obamacare was designed to fail?

Why?

What?

good one from @garbageday.email today.

full piece here: www.garbageday.email/p/the-war-ag...

The controversy over Columbus Day used to be kind of Tony Soprano type guys who were taught that Columbus was a great explorer in grade school and just didn't want to think hard about it. Trump by contrast explicitly likes and endorses the genocidal stuff

I've been blaming memes for this, and I think it fits. A lot of the angriest people out there aren't actually consuming news, they're consuming news-flavored content, and the content is a funhouse mirror version of reality that they're mistaking for being real.

Why is the old lady you hate "Democrats" but the young progressive you expect to be the Democratic nominee not "Democrats"?

It's weird to say "Leftists know how to win elections, unlike Democrats" while also taking it as a given that a 78-year-old Democrat is guaranteed to win the primary against the leftist candidate there who's endorsed by Bernie Sanders and has Mamdani's team behind him.

protests against this government should include white Boomer grandmothers who meet for pilates class, get a pitcher of mimosas & walk together to the public space

we need people in the street who think everyone can talk their way out of a speeding ticket, they're key to winning

The fact that protests now feature people who don’t normally have to worry about what might happen to them in an adverse encounter with security forces is a HUGE DEAL.

It means that the “real” victims don’t have to suffer alone. It means that some people care about something more than themselves