Anybody else think this is kind of significant? The vice president effectively saying, "Behave yourself, Donald, or I'll have you fired."
— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 10, 2021
Gotta say I'm a little impressed. Of course when Trump made clear he didn't care if Pence was murdered or not it prolly got Pence thinking. https://t.co/iJtpNGpijb
Not really sure it's sunk in for anybody else that Pence could be in a legitimately tetchy mood about this:
There are basically two ways of overthrowing a reasonably established government: through violence or the threat of violence—the continuum from coup d'état to revolution in which one power is overwhelmed and replaced by another; and through the Machtübergreifung, as Hitler called it, the "snatching over" of the existing power apparatus and then transforming it according to existing forms. I don't think it gets sufficiently recognized that Hitler, or Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, didn't exactly break any laws in their accessions to absolute power (except to the extent that they used law-breaking ascribed to their enemies, the Reichstag fire that provided Hitler with his excuse to declare an entirely legal emergency, the apparent terrorism of the apartment-house bombings crisis that Putin was charged by Yeltsin with managing, which made the otherwise unknown vice president a national figure who could win an election). Hitler's brownshirt thugs didn't play a role in pushing him into the chancellery; that was the conservative aristocrat politicians, Field Marshal von Hindenburg and Erbsälzer Franz von Papen (the title, "hereditary salt maker", dates to the 13th century, when the Papens were one of 48 families of Werl in the Westphalian Basin entrusted with the monopoly on mining the local salt), who found him more sympatisch than the Social Democrats. Putin spent 12 years shoring up his position by legal means before he began having the proper authorities rewrite the law to give him a vehicle for exercising permanent power.
And why did Putin have Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politkovskaya murdered in 2004 and 2006? And what were Hitler's brownshirts for? To make them look like strongmen as they achieved their aims in a less risky way, as Teri Kanefield writes:
Because being overestimated is how strongmen and wannabe strongmen appear invincible. It makes them feared and respected. It elevates their stature, which gives them power.
The revolutionary and the coup artist seize power, directly, because they have power. The Machtübergreifer bashes his way into the power that is there by being a conman, convincing you he has the power, bluffing and shouting, with more lawyers than thugs, asserting the legality of what he's doing. How many times, indeed, have you heard Trump or his agents explaining some action by claiming that he's "allowed" to do whatever it is, evading the question of what he's hoping to accomplish?
Trump loves you to see the kind of shit he can get away with, but he's pretty careful, in fact, to wrap it in legalisms, often bogus, but enough to keep him looking as if he cared. From the first day in office, when he showed us how he could force his press secretary to tell a ridiculous lie about how many people were on the Mall, he was also getting some henchman of his to get somebody in the GSA to reverse the ruling that Trump was not entitled to hold the lease on the Old Post Office building he was operating as a hotel, in the interregnum between administrators.
And when he and Sessions and Miller decided to contravene US and international law by refusing to hear asylum claims from Central American migrants, they didn't simply do it: they created an entirely new interpretation of the law (section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act), which criminalizes crossing the US border at an undesignated location, applying it to asylum seekers for the first time, allowing the Border Patrol to throw them into criminal detention and herd their children into concentration camps.
When courts stopped Trump from doing the things he wanted to do—banning Muslims from entering the country, building the border wall on the Pentagon's dime, eliminating the DACA program, and so on—he obeyed the judges, but sent his people back to the drawing board to come up with another way of doing it, or allow him to claim he'd done it. The final version of the Muslim ban wasn't a Muslim ban at all, just a pointless difficulty imposed on an almost random selection of people from "shithole" countries, but it looked to supporters and opponents as if he'd shown he had the power to get his way regardless. They're still trying to curtail the census, they're still trying to cripple the Postal Service, but they don't just march in and bash a few heads; they always deploy the lawyers, and try to wear their enemies down.
Which is why I can't quit insisting that he can't overturn the election, meaning, precisely, that he doesn't have the power—unless we give it to him.
Well then since that was the kind of reasoning on which Bush v Gore opinion was built all the more reason why it shouldn't be applied again. Have you tried to imagine what the 2020 Trump v Biden case looks like btw? I have but I'm not smart enough.
— Will You Shut Up Man? (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2020
"Trump specifically asked people not to vote by mail except in Florida, so it was cruel and unusual for voters to insist on doing it anyway."
— Will You Shut Up Man? (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2020
that could be correct, though there may be timing issues that prevent it. There's generally no point in it though because in those states there's a more or less assured majority matching state control. Watch Texas Florida Georgia though.
— Will You Shut Up Man? (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2020
Seems to me the most plausible outcome of a crisis on this scale is the one that's laid out in the Constitution: the House (the new House that takes office January 3), with one vote per state. (In the old House that favored GOP 26-24. So VOTE AND VOTE ALL THE WAY DOWNBALLOT!!!!)
— Will You Shut Up Man? (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2020
Most of the above. Democratic governors in the 4 key states, the 78% of federal judges who weren't named by Trump, the House of Representatives which has the ultimate constitutional responsibility for presidential elections, the FBI and the military if it comes to that.
— Will You Shut Up Man? (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2020
I might add it would be nice to remember how ceaselessly Trump has insulted those people, and how ceaselessly he's mocked their power. If you want to foment a real coup, of course, you don't alienate the military or the premier national law enforcement agency, but even if it's just a bogus coup you shouldn't think you can count on them just because they love their hierarchy. The Pentagon publicly rejected Trump's idea of deploying active duty servicemen in quelling the George Floyd protests in Lafayette Square and elsewhere, a national guardsman denounced the propaganda version of how the Lafayette Square event was handled, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff felt compelled to apologize for putting himself in a position where it looked as if he was taking Trump's political side; and the brass have been sending out signals just this week that they're not prepared to be used in the election:
Several Pentagon officials said there could be resignations among many of Mr. Trump’s senior generals, starting at the top with General Milley, should troops be ordered into the streets at the time of the election.
The Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the officials said, would also be unlikely to carry out those orders. In the days after the killing of Mr. Floyd in police custody, General Brown released an extraordinary video in which he spoke in starkly personal terms about his experience as a Black man in America, his unequal treatment in the armed forces and the protests that gripped the country.
this is a weird argument to cite since the author also holds that Bush v. Gore was decided wrongly. I agree with his point (the equal protection clause should apply to voters) but don't think you should need this anti-democratic opinion to establish it.
— Will You Shut Up Man? (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2020
Yes, and it won't be used. If there is a suit, it will be to stop the initial count (of mailed-in ballots), not a recount, and the Bush v. Gore argument would apply only to the 14th-Amendment rights of the voters whose ballots were ignored.
— Will You Shut Up Man? (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2020
It also took cooperation, in the first place from Gore, and from the rest of us, in the name of "national unity". And to be fair to Gore, the Republicans of 20 years ago weren't an out-and-out criminal organization in the sense they are now.
— Will You Shut Up Man? (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2020
What does Barr do to stop the counting of mail-in ballots by STATE authorities when FBI certifies that there is no fraud? How does Mr. illegally acting secretary Chad seize ballots from over 36,000 precincts in 50 states? Are there enough marshals and Proud Boys to do it for him?
— Will You Shut Up Man? (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2020
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| Pablo Picasso, Girl With Mandolin (1910), via PabloPicasso.org. |
David Brooks has a column predicting that the post-Trump GOP will be thoughtful and compassionate. Alongside that, there's an op-ed arguing that the GOP is getting serious about the climate.
— Steve M. (@nomoremister) August 7, 2020
In other words, the Failed Biden Presidency has already begun at @nytopinion.
working-class emphasis is the only way out of the demographic doom loop. If the party sticks with its old white high school-educated base, it will die. They just aren’t making enough old white men. To have any shot of surviving as a major party, the G.O.P. has to build a cross-racial alliance among working-class whites [non-old high school–educated?], working-class Hispanics and some working-class Blacks.
None of this works unless Republicans can deracialize their appeal — by which I mean they must stop pandering to the racists in the party and stop presenting themselves and seeing themselves as the party of white people — and wage a class struggle between diverse workers in their coalition and the highly educated coastal manager and professional class in the Democratic coalition.
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| Trump's new fence has become a democratically created memorial on Black Lives Matter Plaza. Photo by Brian C./Popville. |
In the first stage it was liberals and portions of the public health establishment (including, fatefully, key decision-makers in New York City) who treated the virus as something to “be spun or narrativized away,” trying to define the real contagion as xenophobia or racism rather than the disease itself.
By the time this effort at reality-denial collapsed, the baton of narrative delusion had been passed to President Donald Trump, who spent crucial weeks behaving as though the power of positive thinking could suffice to keep his glorious economy afloat.
The guy who have Strom Thurmonds eulogy is not going to be the most progressive.— Who will police the police? (@JinxSocialist) May 27, 2020
The piece is not about the "guy" it's about the party. If you want to be a leftist you should obsess less over personalities and pay more attention to institutions and structures.— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 27, 2020
The makers of this window need to use this in their ads. Gotta give the person credit for trying. And knowing when to give up. https://t.co/xAlIQipz4R
— Writing Our Destiny in Hand Sanitizer and Booze (@planecrazy) June 1, 2020
White lefty academic basically saying that the fires are being started by people like him. I think he’s right. https://t.co/iYVOj56ln5
— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) May 31, 2020
to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.
— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 31, 2020
Sadly, no, it sucked. But the young well-protected white folk--I like to think it's mostly from private colleges--think they missed something great.
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| Last time David Brooks referred to Compton was in a column of 2012 when he alleged that Tupac (born in Harlem, ranged from Baltimore to Marin City and is most associated with Oakland) represented the city, which in fact had far less to do with his artistic development than his career as a Shakespearian actor, since he never spent any significant time there at all). Via Spin |
Shorter David Brooks, "Who Is Driving Inequality? You Are", New York Times, 23 Aprl 2020:
Apparently inequality is my fault, for being better than everybody else. And you too, probably, if you read the column and you waited till after your kids grew up for your first divorce, contributed financially to their music lessons and SAT tutoring, and read aloud to them at bedtime. Unlike some people who were working night shifts at the 7-Eleven instead. This is why your law partner children earn 40 times as much as a secretary, while in 1960 they only earned five times as much, though I'm not sure if that's because future law students back in the day had more music lessons or there wasn't any 7-Eleven for a future secretary's parents to work in in those days. But who would refuse to read bedtime stories to their kids or fail to marry their mothers or insist on working in a 7-Eleven just to prevent inequality? That would be perverse!
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| Edmond van Daele as Robespierre in Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927) |
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| Feast of the Supreme Being, France 1794, via AlphaHistory. |
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| The moth Darwin predicted must exist, Xanthopan morganii praedicta, using its preternaturally long proboscis on the orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, pollinating it, via Encyclopedia Brittanica. |
I'm so sick of idiots tied to masts: the First Amendment Liberals obsessed with Antifa, the Socialists obsessed with single payer health care (now that the economy makes it harder to obsess about nationalizing the banks), and the Conservatives convinced that they have to come up with some deeply principled reason for everything they do. Because trying stuff and seeing what works is just so... unprincipled.Well, there you go. "What works" at accomplishing what? What do you want to get done? That's a question of principles, which don't necessarily have to be based on a big philosophical system. I want cops to stop killing black people, and I want the government to make sure everybody in the US gets good medical care as is done without too much fuss in other countries, because duh, or because I'm a Rawlsian, or because I'm an unbelieving Jew, or whatever, or because I picked a goddamned side from my Democrat parents. But the other side won't let me, for reasons I consider specious and unprincipled indeed, and on the basis of arguments made in what I call "bad faith". That's my problem, Republicans, Not being tied to a mast, though I understand how one gets annoyed with the one-issue hobbyhorse who won't even allow you to agree with him if you don't use the magic words.
Reality that politics is about identity and that ideology is just identity for educated elites from the majority race.So really, he's a Marxian thinker himself, this being the fundamental point of the manuscripts Marx and Engels assembled in 1845-46 but couldn't find a publisher for, that came out at last in 1932 under the title The German Ideology. Blindness to the identity origins of one's ideology is where bad faith comes from.
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| Office in the sky. By Qantas, 2014. |
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| Tent in the background. Photo by Karim Kadim/AP via Salt Lake Tribune. |
Thousands of supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held what they billed as a “joint” Sunni-Shi'ite prayer service Friday outside the main entrances to the government-controlled “Green Zone.” Sadr has given Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi a Saturday deadline to carry out governmental “reform” and install a new Cabinet composed of technocrats instead of political loyalists. (Voice of America)Yes, it's the Orson Welles–resembling "renegade cleric", in the Homeric (Simpson?) epithet beloved of the US press of ten or twelve years ago, and the mass Sunni-Shi'a cooperation without which there will be no change for the better in Iraq (as I've been saying for a while now), in a huge effort to force the Abadi government to purge itself. When Abadi failed to meet his deadline on Saturday, Muqtada made his way into the Green Zone, with the assistance of the security forces, to begin a sit-in, ensconced in a tent:
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| Betty Amann in Gustav Fröhlich's Asphalt (1929). Via Fritzi. |
This is a thrilling moment to be a conservative!
For an entire generation, the Republican party has vegetated, stuck with the sclerotic ideology of Reaganism, which used to be conservative back in the day but is now liberal. Reaganism was based on the idea that voodoo economics, by creating more wealth for the wealthy than the wealthy could comfortably accommodate, would force them to let some of it out, and the resulting trickle would turn into a mighty tide upon which the dinghies of the lowly would float as high as the yachts of the great, but that's not true any more, though of course it was in the 1980s.
What happened? How did Morning in America turn into the Twilight of the GOP? When did the Lifting of the Boats become the Disintegration of the Drydock? How did these fresh and cheery metaphors turn anxious and bitter?
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| Don't try this with a real bagel. Especially if you're using real water! But if you do, don't panic, you'll probably be fine. Image from Swimline Water Sports. |
There’s a certain type of person who came of age around the time that I did—or just before or not long after—whose entire political identity is shaped around the idea of being realistic, of shedding childish enthusiasm and adolescent dreams. They were anarchists or activists or God knows what in high school or college. But now they know better. They can sling phrases like “How are you going to get it past Congress?” with all the bark of a short-order cook. They’re unafraid of clichés. They’re more mood than mind. And their world is about to come to an end.
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| Robespierre and Danton. Oil and collage by Zuka, 1988. |
Iowa did see a record number of caucusgoers … for the Republican candidate. The number of Democratic caucusgoers fell significantly, and half of those went to Clinton.
As RealClearPolitics reported:
“The trend line is positive for Republicans (turnout up 54 percent from 2012) and negative for Democrats (turnout was down 22 percent from 2008).”It's just one state, and a pretty peculiar one at that, but if it does indicate anything it doesn't look good for the political revolution, or the "half a revolution" Clinton proposes either. I wonder, too—given the evidence, such as it is, that negative campaigning may tend to discourage Democratic turnout in particular—if the increasing nastiness of the atmosphere, between the "Bernie bros", to whatever extent they exist, and Gloria Steinem, might be making things worse. It's certainly having a dispiriting effect on me. When I see old Bill Clinton out slinging poison as we do this morning—
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| Image via Sodahead. |
