Allen Woke 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🌐

“No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”

It must've been wild living in a time when the major elements of human culture weren't yet developed or known

Eat some random mushrooms you found while grazing your herd on the Pontic steppe and suddenly you're a proto-Indo-European prophet preaching Sky-God to people with no religious immunology

Of course the real lesson here is that the ~same (or better) outcome could have been achieved at far less cost - both in terms of civilians but also public opinion/pure strategic value - by going about this in a manner that wasn't stupid, senseless, and brutish

But it happened under Netanyahu, so 🤷‍♂️

The more interesting question is whether *Israel's response* has been a success

Imo? Yes in the tactical sense, ambiguous in the strategic. Again long-term public opinion trends are negative but the war(s) have reasserted Israeli military superiority in a way Im not sure anything else would've

Pretty clearly a failure, frankly

I think it had very little impact on long term trajectory (already moving towards viewing Israeli policy as untenable), and was absolutely disastrous for every element of the "Axis of Resistance" and the Palestinian people generally

Claim: 10 cars rammed ICE
Truth: No cars rammed ICE

Claim: She boxed ICE in
Truth: ICE boxed her in

Claim: She shot a rifle at ICE
Truth: She did not have a rifle

Claim: ICE returned fire
Truth: Only ICE fired

Claim: She drove herself to the hospital
Truth: Paramedics found her

soul khan @soulkhan Follow calling on@ZohranKMamdani to recant this because it reinforces imperial propaganda at an especially dangerous time with trump's actions toward venezuela. .. James @GoodVibePolitik • 11h Yanno it gets to a point... Clarification from the current New York candidate on his stance on the regimes in Cuba and Venezuela The episode highlighted that just days after the interview, Mamdani's campaign clarified its position by stating that both Nicolás Maduro and Miguel Díaz-Canel were "dictators." "I want to be clear about my position. I believe both Nicolás Maduro and Miguel Díaz-Canel are dictators. Their administrations have stifled free and fair elections, imprisoned political opponents, and suppressed a free and fair press," Mamdani emphasized.

it’s pretty remarkable how the most annoying online leftists are addicted to losing elections.

also, Maduro is a dictator. that’s just an objective fact. doesn’t mean we should invade Venezuela.

Okay, look, I gotta ask because I feel like I’m having a stroke. Did we switch teams on the democracy versus economics messaging? Because the way I remember it, the libs ran on democracy and the left said they should focus on material issues like healthcare instead and now it’s opposite, I think?

why are you having discourse. stop it. stop it. do you want me to get the spray bottle

if you ask the average American to describe what they think a tougher immigration system should look like, they will describe something a degree of magnitude softer and more generous than the current reality.

The lesson here is that people are both better and dumber than they appear.

Part of the reason I try to stress this point is because a lot of people have not really read enough history to know what The Moment - the tip-over point in one direction or the other - actually looks like

As of yet, we have not reached such a Moment, and the goal is to prevent us from doing so

Judges continue to block executive actions and opposition to those in power continues to be both very public and quite effective

Until this ceases, the system has not failed, only become stressed

There is a time and place where Navy SEALS really are the thing you want and need but that's like, a handful of occasions, and most of them during a) peacetime or b) low-intensity wars where losing is not really that big a deal

In every other circumstance "side with more JDAMs" wins

The thing about elite units is they are legitimately very useful but the reason they are elite and useful is specifically because there are only a very limited number of circumstances in which that particular set of skills is actually required

Everywhere else, the blunt instruments work better

"Does not strictly follow" =/= "will not follow"

But the point is that the system in which you (currently) operate dictates what the best course of action is, and the best course of action against an authoritarian leader is not usually the same as that required against an authoritarian *state*

Judge: That's what I'll do. Prohibit federalization or deployment of any NG troops into Oregon. For all reasons in prior opinion. Deployment of federalized military is ultra vires and contrary to law, violating Title 10, section 12406. I also find it's likely that defendants violate 10th Amendment.

At last we are doing Sicario from the hit movie “don’t do Sicario”

I think Woodrow Wilson's administration was pretty much authoritarian, for example, but I don't know of anybody who considers 1917-1920 America to have been "no longer a liberal democracy"

(Well except those who contend it never could be one under Jim Crow but that's a whole other can of worms)

I think there is an inability among a lot of people to distinguish in the moment between a *leader* who is authoritarian and a *state* that is

But these are two very separate things and one does not strictly follow the other

I increasingly think the subreddit model is the best conceptual way to structure a social media platform, even if actually existing Reddit I’m pretty meh about. You gotta let people enforce their own community norms, but those norms have to be opt-in

Anyways ever since I looked at the econ numbers of Germany and Russia in like 2013 I decided Russia was Just Another Country in Europe and should be treated as such and nothing that has happened since has ever made me feel any less vindicated in that belief

Middle power with nukes, big whoop

I say this because I'm basically a realist but not a jackass (aka I don't give a shit about "great power" labels guiding decision making and think moral authority is real and important), but since those terms have become increasingly mutually exclusive I have to settle for ~nebulous third thing~

The most baffling thing about them is that any realistic assessment of affairs would come to the conclusion that we are more powerful than Russia, a country which threatens us because they think they can get way with it, the solution to which is using our power to make them know fear

some of the things people are saying about and to the Bluesky staff right now make me wonder if there’s an entirely separate set of posts the staff is making that for whatever reason I can’t see

I'm not really sure how you can view a ~majority of people thinking even these fairly unthreatening deployments do not constitute opposition to a police state

Hell even these two month old numbers for ICE/DOJ/etc are pretty bad

Most people have strong opinions on whether we're a police state or not

That apartheid state was basically dismantled within 20 years of World War II, and that had a lot to do with being against fascism and the experience of WWII.

This is classic activist history, where if you aren't socialist revolutionary, you're a de facto fascist.

I also think that the relative ease of national protests disguises how much harder a general strike is, again especially when spread over a large and diffuse environment

Strikes require organization and coordination in a way that protests generally don't

It's just a whole lot easier when you can focus your efforts on one or two key locations with high physical density and political salience and assume that success there will lead to dominos elsewhere

But the US doesn't have that - what are you gonna do, strike in D.C. (population 700,000)?