The incentives for even a hard-right majority in Parliament are different from Congress’s. A parliamentary majority can depose a mad PM and send him to the back-benches; a majority in Congress is stuck with their mad Pres, who can continue to use his power to undermine them. So they stick with him.

Partly because the existence of the president together with strong partisanship encourages a Congressional (and Judicial) majority from the Pres’s party to ignore their own prerogatives and hand him a dictatorship.

Worse for lots of reasons. Partly because once you have a maniac installed the US it’s very hard to de-install him before the four years are up. Partly because the Rube Goldberg apparatus of veto points etc makes it easy for him to squid-ink the question of who is to blame for bad outcomes. Etc

Stancil and Baloney are both right: yeah, (A) something new and disastrous has happened to the info environment across the Anglosphere, but also (B) it’s playing out worse in the US because of the presidential system.

Right! How are people still failing to grasp that the uniqueness of J6 was not violence per se, but violence *in the service of preventing the transition of power after an election!

How are people still failing to grasp that the uniqueness of J6 was not violence per se, but violence *in the service of preventing the transition of power after an election*!

Today I learned that guys who call each other “bro” usually aren’t really related. They’ve been lying to us all this time!

Next they’ll come for the KiSS logo and the Heavy Metal Umlaut

It’s actually stupider than if they did that, because Joy Division weren’t trading on the idea that Nazis are in any way cool or metal, but rather on what the existence of the so-called ‘Joy Division’ under the Nazis reveals about the crooked timber of the human condition.

Next they’ll come for the Kiss logo and the Heavy Metal Umlaut

There should be some shorthand term for the phenomenon that makes it clear how pitiful falling for it is. Maybe “Twitter-slop psychosis”? Mobilise the mechanisms of social disgust in the service of the forces of good.

Fables of the Reconstruction FTW

Maybe…? Nah

www.instagram.com/reel/DOMMKrG...

Gilbert Ryle: See that greasy burger in your hand? That’s America! See that big statue over there of a lady with a torch? That’s America! See that big white house… Half torn down by earth-moving equipment you say?… I’ll come in again

The Pope? Not Catholic? Get outta here!

Damn right. What she should have said was: “Fuck off - if you’re not a piece of shit you won’t be offended.”

What feels most intuitively revolting is uprooting people who’ve lived in the US productively for decades. It’d be possible to avoid this without open borders by putting a sort of statute of limitations on eligibility for removal - if you’ve broken no laws for > 5 yrs you (normally) get to stay.

This is the thing I don‘t understand about in particular about finance bro quants who voted for Trump: Did y’all not factor the downside risk of economic collapse into the expected value of voting for him? How do you stay employed if this is the way you deal with money?

They have no meaning in their lives and imagine that they‘d feel less empty if they were in a position to attack/bully (or at least witness the suffering of) certain scapegoat classes of people, which they imagine they would get to do in a lawless hellscape ruled by the naked will of tyrant and mob.

Liberalism! So cringe!

Let’s not forget also the (understandable but practically disastrous) tendency in smart people to begin by wanting to avoid ideological sentimentality (“Whig history” etc.) when doing theory and sliding into undermining any popular practical emotional attachment to existing institutions/laws/norms.

*Senators* get thrown face-down to the floor over nothing and no-one bats an eyelid. Would not fly in any other rich country.

(Also “threat” meant in the broad sense in which you are in fact a threat if I can’t know beyond reasonable doubt that you aren’t in a position to be able to kill me.)

I dunno. Americans shrug at violence/homicide by authorities. Y’all don’t en masse react like normal people. Reason is, the 2nd amendment means, by inexorable Hobbesian logic, that anyone *can be*, and so everyone in fact *is*, a threat to LEO’s. So you can always explain it away as reasonable.

(In the broad sense in which you are in fact a threat if I can’t know beyond reasonable doubt that you aren’t in a position to be able to kill me.)

I dunno. Americans are used to shrugging when people are killed violently by the authorities. The 2nd amendment means, by inexorable Hobbesian logic, that anyone *can be*, and so everyone in fact *is*, a threat to LEO’s. So y’all don’t en masse react like normal people.

The point of the broken English schtick was a to get people to engage in fascist ideation while maintaining the option of claiming it was only for the lulz and not meant entirely seriously. The usual crap, in other words.

More seriously, CS and maths are formal sciences

It’s all scientia, man. Just like theology…

Depends on whether it was humus made from hummus, or hummus made from humus. Spooky either way.

Cool story, Scocca - next you’ll be telling us that Biden wasn’t president when Epstein was knocked off