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You don't make a candidate's children a political football because it's electoral poison. You uphold that norm because it is decent. But I don't think commenting on Vance's hypocrisy is in nearly the same vain as eg attacks on Chelsea Clinton back in the day.

Forums and blogs aren't immune to brigading, but one of the nice features of more fragmented communities is your nuclear option is you can just shut down registration until the storm passes. Or you can implement pre-screening of posts which isn't really possible on hyper scale social media.

You always have to be leery of overiptimism, but the vibes on the MAGA side are the most rancid I've ever seen. You always have your dead enders, but this really does feel different than 2018 when they were rallying around Kavanaugh and in peak lib owning mood.

To the surprise of no one, the reflecting pool disaster was an act of incompetence, not malice. It's a good sign MAGA has failed to completely corrupt the courts that they can't arrange show trials on fabricated bullshit. Take the Senate and we forestall that threat for the time being.

We could just eliminate public primaries and avoid the mess, but I have a feeling we're going to stumble into a system where primary elections continue but parties use financial and media pressure to force losers to drop out and be replaced if Troy Jackson wins. Which will male discourse even worse.

If Democrats do retake the Senate we're going to see levels of lame duckism heretofore unknown to modern science. Crazy looting combined with a petulant refusal to do basic parts of the job I'd guess.

I don't think we need to insert of a lot of complex psychosocial theories into vibescession when hedonic treadmill + money illusion covers so much ground. Let's revisit the topic when we don't have a president actively making things worse to see if the bad vibes tail off like they historically have.

The "affordability crisis" is in part that your baseline nut is a lot higher than it was in the 1980s or 1990s because we have more stuff, like smartphones and high speed Internet, that have been incorporated into baseline expectations.

The resistance to understanding COVID being a natural origin spillover event seems to me a severe inability to cope with Shit Still Happening. If you can blame this on a bad man then you just eliminate that bad man and the world goes back to being safely predictable and subservient to our technology

I'm pretty optimistic the current GOP flirtation with totalitarianism is going to burn out when Trump is gone because their weird obsessions, like completely denying COVID and casting Fauci as history's greatest villain, are radioactively unpopular. Trumpism without Trump doesn't work.

We're getting a solid reminder why FDR was the only president (prior to term limits) to manage more than 2 terms. It is really hard to avoid blame and engineer that kind of performance and Republican all sticks with a culture wars sweetener for the rubes certainly wasn't going to do it.

So I'm thinking a split term can still activate the 6 year itch. This isn't going to be a comparatively mild midterm I think.

*slaps the hood of a van labeled Money Illusion*you can fit so much zeitgeist into this bad boy.

I continue to think it's the expectations, stupid. Food prices were stagnant for a decade, which people experienced as increasing affordability and an explosion in options and seeing nominal prices go up was a shock. I think there's still a mystery why that hasn't subsided which we can argue about.

Municipalities have experimented with subsidizing private sector grocery stories and with running their own and frankly nothing has had much success with addressing food deserts or affordability of healthy produce, and I think that's in part because there are demand side issues.

Anyway, if Alabama wants to start murdering public servants for doing their jobs I say put federal troops back in the state and finish what should have been done in the 1870s.

The raw cynicism of the GOP on display today is truly breathtaking. And I would wager they're mostly educated enough to know this is destructive bullshit that will inflame a mob (except Tuberville and Johnson probably are that stupid), but they don't care.

We call the GOP a criminal conspiracy, which is fair enough but I think we should add suicide pact to the list because it's hard to explain why they're so hellbent on indulging in childish tantrums that will kill their own voters and destroy America's hegemonic power.

I'll just say the dishonest dogpile and fundraising grift are what detach quote and nuclear block are intended to address. Obviously these are not sufficient solutions to handle crowdsourced harassment, but they can deal with high profile offenders.

I do not trust social media to debate the finer nuances of the cost/benefits tradeoffs of this program and it is literally irrelevant anyway. Either thr NYC bureaucrats will pull it off or they won't, and we'll all see how the pilot worked in due course.