Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 13h

I don't know if I was supposed to click on them when I was asked to click on all the motorcycles or not. I just know if the engine is small enough, you don't need a driver's license to ride one around the streets and highways of North Carolina.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 13h

Y'all, I just failed a CAPTCHA.

In the process, had a semi-comic/semi-nightmarish flashback to being a baby public defender in traffic court a quarter-century ago, arguing with ADAs, cops, and judges about what constitutes a motorcycle.

Folks, some of those CAPTCHA images were of mopeds.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 14h

I find the "people without children pay for schools they don't use" framing pretty terrible, actually: there's a very real sense in which everybody in a community uses public schools regardless of whether or not they have children, since everybody in a democracy benefits from an informed citizenry.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 14h

And in the case of schools, we're talking about the training grounds for my future neighbors, my future doctors and garbage collectors, the future authors of books I might want to read, the future cop directing traffic, and the people who will join me in deciding who represents us in government.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 14h

I pay for schools for the same reason I pay for public transit, libraries, museums, and parks: because whether or not I directly use those things and regardless of how often, their presence makes my community a better place.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 14h

They're not, though: a public school is a common social good that benefits everybody in society by producing an educated citizenry, while a childlessness tax is essentially a punitive measure for a mixture of life choices and circumstance.

K. Chen @tznkai.bsky.social · 15h

Something I've found is that people respond to this idea very differently depending on if you put any effort into hiding you're doing this. Broadly speaking, childless people are fine paying taxes for public schools and not fine paying a childlessness tax even though they're basically the same thing

William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 16h

My most controversial take on this is probably that while I think reproductive freedom should be sacrosanct, I don’t really have any problem with additional taxes on (high income) childless people. Someone gotta pay into the pensions!

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 16h

Trump is basically cashing the blank checks Congress gave to Bush and Obama with a wink and a "don't go spending it all in one place". And, *for the most part*, Bush and Obama didn't do everything they *could* and attempted to argue reasonable legal justifications for what they did.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 16h

The skill that was always demanded, if you want to call it that, was in *not* using the powers Congress has ceded to Presidents over the last 25 years or longer. I'm not optimistic, but one hopes there's a reckoning that includes a '70s-ish claw back of Congressional authority.

Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social · 16h

Tremendously bad

It’s just that a lot of it is masked by the fact that “use federal government and awesome powers of the presidency and White House to terrorize millions of people” doesn’t take a tremendous amount of skill or care, u just hit a button basically, and it takes years often for life…

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 21h

Only a strong and powerful leader like Trump can bring this war ravaged city back from the brink of destruction and anarchy.

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

Grudgie the Whale @grudgie.bsky.social · 16h

“ICE needs to go into Chicago because the Chicago police are incapable of protecting the city but ICE can’t protect themselves so the Chicago police must protect them”

God I hate fascism so much

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

J. C. Cantwell 🌻 @segfaultvicta.aludel.xyz · 16h

the problem with "things were always this bad" is that it is rhetoric that exists, specifically and exclusively, to deny the lived reality that Republicans Fucking Make Shit Worse, and it usually comes from a place of "both parties serve the same masters!!" performative, weaponised cynicism

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 16h

I think this is part of the reason the creative arts skew in a left/progressive direction. Writers imagine somebody who isn't them, actors work in costumes and on sets made by somebody who isn't them, musicians try to learn techniques from somebody who isn't them...

R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 16h

There's also the issue that art calls for/opens the mind to empathy, to imagining other perspectives (not to mention the collaborative arts bringing different kinds of people together in myriad combinations), and it's hard to win an identitarian culture war when people keep experiencing diversity.

Joanne Harris @joannechocolat.bsky.social · 18h

The reason the Right are so invested in the myth that the arts have no value isn’t because the arts don’t generate wealth (they do); it’s that studying the arts teaches people to imagine better ways of judging the value of an idea than by counting how much money it makes…

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 16h

Strike the ”missed I"; it should only read "muddled”. Guess I'm getting back to the point where I have to clear the Gboard cache again, huh.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 16h

Under the current system, Johnson's claims sound more like the insurance provider's problem for not competitively negotiating billable ER costs, TBH?

R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 16h

I'm confused, not by the racism, but by the fact Republican talking points have gotten so missed l muddled that a blood and soil statement sounds like an argument for transparent medical billing and/or single-payer healthcare.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 17h

Mike Johnson: "If you're a young, pregnant American citizen women who shows up in an ER and you get treated and they pay the hospital less for treating you than some illegal rabble rouser who came in from some South American country to do us harm, that is wrong."

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

Vaquera Elisa @boxelderdust.bsky.social · 1d

If liberty and law are to be conserved, ICE and CBP must go the way of the slave catchers of the 1850 Compromise from which they draw their lineage, and “progressive” concerns about immigration must go the way of the American Colonization Society and the 1820 Compromise from which they draw theirs

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

Ghostly Bree @mostlybree.kitrocha.com · 18h

The fact that they can't get a random sampling of citizens from any city to indict people for interfering with ICE seems more informative than any political poll, tbh

Seth Stern @sethstern.bsky.social · 1d

A federal grand jury declined to indict two people charged with assaulting law enforcement agents outside a suburban Chicago ICE facility, an attorney for one of the defendants said, Megan Crepeau and @benjaminpenn.bsky.social report

news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/...

Grand Jury Declines to Indict Two Chicago-Area ICE Protesters

A federal grand jury declined to indict two people charged with assaulting law enforcement agents outside a suburban Chicago ICE facility, an attorney for one of the defendants said.

news.bloomberglaw.com

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

Bill Amend @billamend.bsky.social · 1d

My friend Matt Inman made a great comic about AI…

A cartoonist's review of AI art - The Oatmeal

This is a comic about AI art.

theoatmeal.com

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 1d

It troubles me that I’m starting to feel the same way about Bluesky that I do about the UK. Like: it sounds great, and some of the people I know are great, but the leadership is making some weird choices and I’m a bit worried it may all be over in a couple of years.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 1d

TBH the bigger issue is when all these people come out of the hinterlands to shop and bitch about the traffic and parking and online rumors about our supposed crime rates; I dunno, if you're going to be jackasses, stay in the country and let us city mice be; we don't miss you.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 1d

Oh, goodness me, yes, I'm leaving my big city to come to your [checks notes] economically distressed village where all the mills closed 30 years ago and you're in a culture war panic because some of your kids come back on college break having met a trans student and decided they're okay.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 1d

Saying that as if the libs are going anywhere in red America that isn't the beach or mountains, and the people whose lives depend on tourism have way too much sense to wave guns at their revenue sources, regardless of how they vote for the off-season.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 1d

J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson need to drag themselves out of Hell to do something about this. What, I've got no idea; but something.

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social · 1d

All year, we’ve seen this administration treat appropriations bills less as laws-to-follow and more like Lucy playing football with Charlie Brown. What should make this moment any different? www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/there-is-n...

There is no budget "deal" to be made

President Trump in has so broken the constitutional framework as to make joint normal, responsible government impossible.

www.doomsdayscenario.co

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