"[T]he Republican Party and its associated institutions of movement conservatism, at least since George and Jeb Bush stole the 2000 election in Florida, has been ratcheting remorselessly toward an understanding of the accumulation of political power, to which they believe themselves ineluctably entitled as the only truly legitimate Americans, as a question of will—up to and including the projection of will by the force of arms." #RickPerlstein https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=f83630579d055dc5843ae693e7cdafe0.2515&s=ce07d2b5feef04b26a83a61bce292370

the loud and fêted are so unwise.

a pox on both houses. except we live in those houses, there are no others.

we tried to warn you.

but so many people tried to warn you, about so many inconsistent and diametrically opposite things, you couldn’t possibly have heeded even a fraction of the warnings.

still. we told you so.

“Sometimes I wonder if dying is like waking from from a dream, hopefully with friends and loved ones waiting for you, like going to a diner after seeing a movie together and you all talk about how you liked it, and if you want to see it again.” @davew http://scripting.com/2023/12/31.html#a032723

Happy New Year. Here’s hoping for better days.

Early fireworks, rising moon.

The sun has now set on 2023.

with a view of Presidential immunity so expansive as to encompass the whole republic, individual vaccinations become superfluous.

then there is the theory that
if you provoke
a deluge of tears
somehow the trail
will simply appear.

you can identify members of the uniparty by their unibrows and unique unitard uniforms.

how ordinary and extraordinary that the sky is blue.

the best authentic is a fake fake.

just by observing their current states, we can infer that asteroids were sites of great vengeance.

“It’s not the proportionality of self defense that must be resolved… but the question of what the action is defending, if anything.”

a thoughtful meditation on proportionality by @philipncohen https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/ethical-fault-lines-and-empirical-assumptions-in-israel-gaza/

This essay by @g_shullenberger on wokeness and its discontents is worth reading.

Ultimately it portrays identitarian politics in a way I’d describe as akin to neoliberalism. Both tendencies have spawned whole academies in opposition, and lost whatever broad public approval they might once have claimed. Yet they remain the organizing fabric of our economy and institutions because no positive alternative has emerged to do the job.

https://compactmag.com/article/the-poverty-of-anti-wokeness

CW: dismissal of trans concerns

"Centrists are the great noticers because their essential purpose is to resist the critiques of the left. Not every leftwing analysis will turn out to be correct, and not every prescription emerging from the left effective, but enough will be such that the passage of time will oblige centrists to accommodate and absorb many of those analyses and prescriptions." #DavidTimoney https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2023/12/a-low-dishonest-decade.html

@admitsWrongIfProven too many seem to itch for them.

@noracodes your brother-in-law always makes the best ones.