Randomguy

Opinion | Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines

This is a great discussion. What it makes clear to me is that Ezra Klein is lost right now in a way that TNC isn't, and I don't mean that as a dunk.

The past 9 mos, most of us have been navigating w/o magnetic north. Across a range of disciplines, heuristics we took for granted no longer apply.

I’m gonna say armed troops from red states descending on a blue city is just a few inches — or maybe one exchange of gunfire — short of a civil war’s opening stages.

He said nuclear missiles.

My hot take is that I think wind turbines are beautiful. Like if you’re going to tilt against windmills because they ‘ruin a landscape’ my counter argument will be “no they don’t they’re gorgeous”.

"We already have full time jobs."

Sorry to say this but oh well. Put on your big kid shoes and show up. Democracy is a work in progress. Nothing is going to be given to us, we have to fight like hell for it.

I would call myself a professional pessimist and "extremely depressed about the future" but god, please stop going into people's mentions to tell them that the law/courts no longer matter or post "AND YOU'RE SURPRISED???" at them, especially so if they are actively engaged in making the world better

I really don't understand this thinking. If a Dem calls for impeachment, that won't do anything. You need a majority in the House to impeach and then 2/3 of the Senate to convict. We're nowhere close to those numbers. Calling for impeachment does nothing.

one of the stranger phenomena in American life is that hate is supposed to flow in one direction (rural people get to hate urban people, Republicans get to hate Democrats) and if the hate goes the other way people pretend as if this is very upsetting.

Because that was never my point. You're creating a strawman. I said let's not pretend Gallego is a mastermind. Again, my whole point of this argument is that Dems suck on immigration and have sucked at it for decades now.

That's not my point though. My point is that Dems have a history of trending to right on immigration. That just makes it okay for the right to keep being more extreme. Hell this year 12 Senate Dems including Gallego, helped pass the Laken Riley act, a very anti immigration bill pass.

And Gallego has turned around and said things like CECOT are a distraction. Gallego won because the GOP ran a very unpopular candidate. Let's not pretend he's some kind of mastermind. His margin of victory was less than 3%.

And Dems haven't argued what a "secure border" means. Obama tried a bit but gave up after receiving backlash. Also, lol at the "everyone treated humanely" part. Dems a year ago were trying to expand a system that has treated immigrants harshly.

Yes the right has demagogued the issue for over a decade at this point. However, Dems have not pushed back. I haven't seen a single establishment Dem make the argument of why immigration is good for the US. Even people like Bernie are terrible with this.

You're acting as Dems haven't won an election in decades. They have had a trifecta twice in the 21st century. Yet, they haven't passed leg that's pro immigration, hell, they don't even advocate for it.

P.S. My day job involves helping elect Dems across the country, I whine because I care.

Dude the reason I'm anonymous here is because I'm an immigrant. It's a personal issue to me. The bipartisan border bill is a great example of how Dems try to out-flank the right from the right on immigration. That bill would've expanded detention centers among many other problematic things.

It's not about just a single election though. Democrats have been trying to out-flank the right from the right for decades now. That just makes it okay for right wingers to be more extreme. I have yet to hear the Dem establishment be FOR immigration.

Medicaid can be funded again, food stamps and clean energy can be funded, taxes can be increased progressively. But an immigrant prison network with no resources for due process will be very hard to dislodge, and could easily be turned against the citizenry. www.offmessage.net/p/16-thought...

AP DONATE Signin LIVE: House vote Hakeem Jeffries The Mann Act Stock market tc POLITICS Supreme Court OKs Tennessee ban on gender -fffirming care for kids,a - setback for transgender rights

AP DONATE Signin LIVE: House vote Hakeem Jeffries The Mann Act Stock market tc POLITICS Supreme Court throws out appellate rulings in favor of transgender people in 4 states

Supreme Court signals support for Maryland parents who object to LGBTQ books in public schools

AP DONATE Signin / LIVE: Housevote HakeemJeffries The MannAct Stockmarketto POLITICS Supreme Court will takeupanew case about which schoolsports teams transgender students can join

There is only one possible ending to this story, and sports aren't the last chapter. I guarantee that if you haven't lost five decades of rights in two weeks, you have no idea what this feels like, so I'm begging you: protect trans kids right now with everything you've got.

America: We might not have schools or health care, but we're gonna have a LOT OF PRISONS.

This is hilarious 😂

It is beyond infuriating that the GOP literally published an excruciatingly detailed manifesto of their evil plans and we still have people being surprised by what they do.

WELKER: Border crossings are at a record low. Do you give the Trump administration some credit for that?

CHRIS MURPHY: No, I don't give them credit. Border crossings are low because they're violating the law every day.

Democrats have been asked to disavow Zohran more than Republicans have been asked to disavow the guy who murdered two Democrats.

Says a lot about how profoundly fucked up our political and media situation is right now.

i also think that it is only a matter of time before this court rewrites section 1 of the 14th to effectively end birthright citizenship. the 14th amendment is the chief obstacle to a legal regime of tiered citizenship and subordinate castes, and they will not let it stand.

If the Supreme Court thinks universal injunctions are unconstitutional, to wait until *now* to say that, in this of all cases, with this of all presidents, is a devastating indictment of both its impartiality and its prudence.

The thing is that this SCOTUS will pull something out of their ass in order to only apply this to Republican Presidents. If you think this would apply to Dem Presidents, you're not paying attention.

all of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence about executive power - all of it - can be replaced with a simple flow chart. is the president a Republican? if so it’s ok. if not, it’s presumptively not ok.

i am simply asking the press to cover the government sending masked thugs to rip people from their crying children and shipping them to a foreign concentration camp with the same ferocity they cover a trans kid playing jv tennis in sheboygan

The NBA season ended on Sunday and believe it or not, that marks two entire seasons in which I've been running the Shams account. I have put a goofy amount of effort into that account for the sake of trying to make NBA Bluesky a thing - and I take the fact that the NBA now posts on Bluesky as a source of pride because I like to think I played a tiny role in that. I'm saying this because I want you to believe me when I say that I want Bluesky to succeed a lot and only criticize it out of love. I think Twitter is broken and I believe a better community can form here, and you know what, the NBA community here actually IS really good. But here's the thing: Bluesky must must MUST address the scale to which horrible Resistance accounts have been allowed to invade every waking corner of this app, because it's choking the life out of it and will eradicate whatever chance this place has of truly taking off if it's not fixed SOON.

I am very discouraged by how poorly Bluesky has dealt with this situation, because the aforementioned Resistance accounts (I'm using "Resistance" as a catch-all) have been draining the vibes on here for months and little seems to have been done about them. These accounts are rude, they're obnoxious, they're homophobic, they spam people like crazy, they drown the app in slop, and they react confrontationally to everything they see that isn't just about Trump - including sports. It's turned Bluesky into the only app I've ever been on where random users will actually come at you if you post about sports sometimes. It's hard to stress how bad that is for this place's sports prospects. Sports Twitter is never, ever, ever gonna meaningfully migrate over here if this place develops a reputation as Killjoy Land where angry Facebook refugees and scolds will legitimately confront you if you post about sports.

I believe the people running this app have consistently taken the easy way out when it comes to managing its user base - choosing to sit back and do little to nothing time and again as rude users who are poisonous for the community feel empowered to dictate the terms of engagement on it. Add that with the fact that the Discover feed is totally broken (search "Discover feed" on here and you will exclusively see people complaining about it) and is allowing this app's population of insufferable dweebs to find posts about sports/games/music/etc. that they consistently react to with hostility and you have an environment that is not just murky for sports but diametrically opposed to it. This place should be welcoming for sports ppl, but it can't really be that if the devs here never take a meaningful stand against the users who are manipulating the platform in a way that's ruining everyone else's time.

If there's one thing I could say to the people running Bluesky, it would be this: you can either be an app with a fun, chill, healthy environment in which thriving sub communities for things like sports can take hold, or you can be an app that 70-year-old grampas log into to scream at random people in between following grifter accounts that are pretending to be an underground cabal of park rangers, but you can't be both. Taking the path of least resistance will only result in malcontents strengthening their grip on this place. Just because most of the thinkpieces about Bluesky are bullshit doesn't mean the user experience hasn't also plummeted for a lot of people over the last year and will continue to plummet unless you find the initiative to wrestle control of this place away from ppl who are toxic. I still believe the sports community can become huge, but only if this app gives it a chance to be and right now it's unfortunately not.

Since the NBA season ended last night, here's my self indulgent take on where Sports Bluesky is atm. The TLDR is that crappy Resistance accounts are working like antibodies to flush casual sports ppl off this platform and the devs should address this if they actually want sports to take off here.