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Piper

@the-pied-piper.bsky.social

2.5K followers 1.8K following 11K posts

We have the potential to love like the sun does—a golden cup over flowing without expectation of return. Trying to do that. NC Courage | Steelers | Dolphins| he/him State Democrat staffer in a red state The inequities of others do not excuse our own.

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Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · Dec 13

If there were 38 shootings that injure or kill a CEO in 2025 instead of school shootings we would have robust national gun reform before July 4.

Screen grab of 2024 US school shooting stats and map showing where the shootings happened. Marks on map correspond to the number of people killed or injured.

Injuries & Deaths
38 School shootings with injuries or deaths.

69 People killed or injured in a school shooting

16 People killed

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 4h

Hitler is just a little guy uwu
-NYT

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 4h

Newsom really kirked that choice.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 4h

I maintain that the Levitico Divinatus is an equally valid basis for political debate as the Bible, and insist any interlocutors treat it as such.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 5h

Rumor is the inflatable frog costume is the antifa uniform.

Really hard for inflatable frogs to look intimidating. Still accomplishes other goals.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 5h

Murdoch does mean we kinda play on easy mode for that though.

You can just point at any evil in world, angrily say his name, and it’s like, 90/10 odds he has at some point spent money to facilitate that evil even if he wasn’t directly leading it.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 5h

—
I agree with you that we have had prior periods where more powerful people than are punished today got punished.

But, imo, there has always been a class of people who were too big to fail, even before Nixon. (Ex: Jefferson Davis never facing trial).

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 5h

doesn’t much excuse it imo.

Individuals under Reagan get punished, but mostly for their sloppiness (same as those of Trump’s first term that faced punishment, it was usually because of how sloppy they were while doing crimes but there was no punishment any of the true power brokers behind him).

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 5h

By Clinton we get a tough on crime anti welfare “Democrat” who demolished the barriers to finish media consolidation.

It’s nearly impossible to reconcile FDR and Clinton being in the same party, so far apart are not just their policies but their apparent basic beliefs. That Clinton is now contrite

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 5h

By Reagan no one even seriously considers punishing him for IranContra.

Already the same media that used to show the conspicuous suffering that made the Civil Rights movement so compelling than thus successful had already mostly become police stenographers and media consideration takes off.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 5h

violence of the red scare did not get punished. Just as we didn’t punish the officers or even the generals of the Civil War. Just as we didn’t punish most of the people who carried out the violence of the robber barons. Hell, the Pinkerton still exist.

Nixon resigns but doesn’t get punished.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 5h

him by the nose the moment FDR died.

That it ultimately stalled out was part of the same civic spirit legacy that gave us FDR to start with imo, but was also critically one of the first times television media bit the powerful. We’ve all seen the clip.

But the majority of people who inflicted the

"Have you no sense of decency, Sir?" Joseph Welch to Joe McCarthy

YouTube video by Witnify

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 5h

only sustained punishment for the people who created the hardship, as you rightly point out, chiefly directed by FDR.

But just as we learn from those movements, so too do the capital class. McCarthyism directly arises from the successful effort of that class to take over Truman’s cabinet and lead

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 5h

Now we see the apotheosis of their work.

Roger Aisles’ prophecy—and Murdock’s power—is manifest: they have completely captured the press, and thus Trump can sail through repeated scandals worse than watergate with no real consequence.

At the end of the Robber Baron and Progressive eras we got the

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 5h

FDR being the exception that proves the rule is kinda the entire story of our entire post Civil War history.

Everything post him has been the ultra rich responding to him and trying to build the tools to ensure he can’t happen again. As you said, Nixon and even more so Reagan were too big to fail.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 6h

I hear you, I do.

But it depends on how we define fraud. He had an aura of possibly being considered the true coaching goat before Brady left and won a ring while Bill crashed and burned.

Bill was a fine coach with moments of genius, but imo his consideration for goat status was always fraudulent.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 6h

Our nation has simply never been willing to hold powerful people accountable. I agree things were importantly different by Nixon’s time, but I think the underlying tradition of “consequences are only for the little people” is the same one, enshrined at the Civil War but begun even earlier.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 6h

Yo but we can’t provide the pregnant woman with a termination even if the consequence of denying her that is the loss of her ability to get pregnant again (either because she’s dead or complications).

No healthcare, only births.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 6h

I’ve seen increasing focus on the decision to simply not go after the many officers, legislators, and other holders of power that fomented and prosecuted the treason of the Civil War.

If we don’t hang people for leading uniformed troops against us, why punish Nixon for enthusiastic record checking?

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 6h

The baby Manning isn’t great but the drama mill around him is overblown.

Meanwhile, the drama mill about what ever unmitigated disasters happened in Chapel Hill to end what had to be the juiciest documentary of the year is catastrophically under developed.

I wanna know everything that happened.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 6h

Give the general vibe of things lately, I’m kinda expecting a paper before the start of next season where someone figures out this behavior reveal some new, even scarier, even more imminent horrible climate impact.

Something with what ever is driving the temperature gradients directing the storms.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 6h

Same party that keeps ending maternal mortality boards because they kept finding that their anti abortion laws were murdering women by denying them routine healthcare now claims the real problem is an entirely fictional scenario.

Also, I’m pro my taxes providing healthcare to everyone.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 7h

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."

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 7h

Elon Musk murdered children. He continues to murder children. He is a mass murderer.

Amanda Katz @katzish.bsky.social · 11h

Horrific reporting from the AP on the Myanmar families watching their kids starve to death from Trump and Musk’s aid cuts apnews.com/article/myan...

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

Reposted by Piper

Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 7h

Local cops are not on the side of Democratic politicians or under their actual control. People refuse to understand this too even though we've been making this point for decades.

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 8h

It is nuts he got that tilted over windmills not even on his property.

He keeps saying “transgender for everyone and windmills everywhere” & that’s what I’m hung up on. Why would that be scary?

“Oh nooo, I’d have access to life saving care if I want it! Also there would be windmills! The horror!”

Piper @the-pied-piper.bsky.social · 8h

TIL a career as a necromancer is possible after all. Gonna have to look into what it takes to change fields.

Prune60 @prune602.bsky.social · 21h

I’m not quite sure what message Russian controlled media is trying to send at the moment

www.mk.ru/politics/202...