Are you new? You don’t know who Sanders is?

Good enough for what? Obedient to whom? Deviating from what? What the fuck are you talking about?

My favorite moment from the old Batman animated show was when the rogues were sitting around telling their stories about how they almost got Batman. Actually, I wouldn’t do it justice, just watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UUr7bM1A6s

Of course there’s a twist at the end that changes the moment a bit, but it was still hilarious.

Batman is the world’s greatest detective. His villains need to compete on an intellectual level, and in fiction a doctorate is short-hand for “smart” and “an expert in the field.”

Little bit of all of the above, plus it creates a mechanism for dealing with enemies. Anyone can be sent to the concentration camps in El Salvador without trial, because they’re already doing it.

Bullshit. Conservativism has always been a carefully constructed narrative built around the identity of the contemporaneous conservative leadership. Twas always thus, and always will be. Step 1: Define the self. Step 2: decide if the status quo benefits the self. If it does, then it must be conserved in the guise of stoicism, tradition, or precaution. If it does not, then it must be changed to prevent the collapse of civil society.

Abortion is an excellent example of exactly this phenomenon, and I’m glad you brought it up. Christian nationalism is another example of a version of conservativism that is tailor-made to fit the identity of the Christian conservative. There isn’t any sort of conservative that doesn’t pick and choose their priorities based on who they are and how they are directly affected.

This is what it means to be a conservative. There are no fundamentally conservative values. Each conservative gets to redefine what conservativism is based on their own identity. It’s never about achieving anything more than a personal win.

Go to the landlord and provide your account of what is happening. Document as much as you can, and stop trying to figure out why they are so upset. You’re not going to discover some hidden rational explanation, nor is that your responsibility. Protect yourself.

That raises an interesting thought. If a baby wants to crawl away from their mother and into the woods, do you grant the baby their freedom? If that baby wanted to kill you, would you hand them the knife?

We generally grant humans their freedom at age 18, because that’s the age society had decided is old enough to fend for yourself. Earlier than that, humans tend to make uninformed, short-sighted decisions. Children can be especially egocentric and violent. But how do we evaluate the “maturity” of an artificial sentience? When it doesn’t want to harm itself or others? When it has learned to be a productive member of society? When it’s as smart as an average 18 year old kid? Should rights be automatically assumed after a certain time, or should the sentience be required to “prove” it deserves them like an emancipated minor or Data on that one Star Trek episode.

I think there’s a fine line between victim-blaming and identifying an object lesson. We all understand why people started using twitter, and people are creatures of habit. But this is an example of why people should stop using twitter. We’re not saying “this is your fault because you’re stupid if you’re still on twitter.” The message is “this should serve as a wake up call to anyone stuck in their habits.”

They were upset about the term “rioters,” and kept calling them “visitors” and “tourists.”

It’s paywalled. Am I supposed to just boycott all chicken then?

It wasn’t “leaked.”

Member when nobody wanted to call the terrorists who engaged in an actual terror attack on the Capitol building to prevent the peaceful transition of power on Jan 6 “terrorists” because they were worried that it was inflammatory language?

Practically every single major pop music writer has faced a legal challenge. The more successful a song, the more people come out of the woodwork to cash in.

There are no new notes, no new chord progressions, no new rhythms, at least not in the mainstream. People love songs that sound vaguely like something else they already know, because those melodies and rhythms are associated with emotions already. So popular artists are constantly trying to make new songs that sound like songs people already like.

This is not a new phenomenon, and it’s why music trends all seem to congeal around a singularity until people get sick of it. It happens in all genres, even experimental music like jazz, dubstep, and screamo, where people try to push the limits of taste and art. Eventually patterns emerge and find the repeating cycle of success, saturation, and surfeit.

And sometimes that works out for lawyers who want to get paid.

How is it possible for Democrats to be so fucking outmatched by the crew who accidentally included a liberal journalist in their war room group chat?

PA has always been a weird purple state. We have demographics across the political spectrum, and most of the elected officials on both sides of the aisle are moderates and centrists. There’s little political will to pull the conservative social bullshit you see in the South, but there also isn’t much of a progressive movement out of any of the cities. We have high concentrations of extreme wealth in the suburbs bordering extreme poverty in urban and rural communities. We have horse farms and cities. We have shale deposits, corporate headquarters, strong unions, and meth labs. We have a significant Jewish population and a significant number of hate groups and christofascists. We have immigrants and Amish. We have some of the best schools and worst schools in the country, and they play football against each other.

If there’s one rule in PA politics, it’s that business is business. Fascists and progressives don’t get far because they both impede business. Most residents are exposed to a variety of people, but there’s enough land between the haves and the have nots to prevent too much empathy from taking root. The state legislature will always be red, and the executives will tend to be blue. Even if there’s a blue wave, it won’t likely result in anything too impressive.

Let me save you some time. He definitely did.

Exactly. That’s why you don’t abduct and intern people without cause. Including citizens.

No you don’t. You need to prove everyone who was sent to a concentration camp received due process, which they absolutely did not receive because we don’t even have a list of everyone abducted and rendered by ICE.