Yeah, AOC’s record on Israel isn’t as good as Tlaib’s or Omar’s, but it’s still better than 95% of Democrats. Only an idiot or a liar would call her a Zionist because she didn’t vote for a symbolic amendment for a bill she voted against anyway.

Also, you’ll notice that the people who gleefully brand her a Zionist or a Neoliberal never have an alternative to tell you about. They’ll tell you why every promising progressive is actually an imperialist, or why the DSA are actually corporate shills, why no one is actually a real leftist, but they never have someone they actually want to get elected. They just want to say “no,” or at best, they demand, “next,” without doing any work to find that next person.

Well, we could start sending him some red meat gift baskets, but it might get a little pricey.

You know, Fetterman has talked openly about his struggles with suicidal ideation. Just saying, with the right letter campaign, we might be able to solve this one.

Honestly, I remember similar vamp lore dragging down the first one. There some interesting stuff with Frost being lower class because he was turned Vamp instead of born Vamp, but the third-act vampire-god thing was kinda meh, ending with some horribly dated CGI.

Also, while the world building was cool, it’s not as though Blade is a super interesting character. He’s a super cool bad-ass, but I find myself checking out when they get into his emotional backstory. Whistler id mich more of the emotional core of fhat movie, which is probably why they had to bring him back in the second (which ie something in fhe second movie that I thought was a cheap cop-out).

Yeah, I thought that was the general consensus too, but I couldn’t be sure that wasn’t just an echo chamber I’d created with my friend group.

I would argue that Blade II is the better movie. Guillermo del Toro is a much more interesting director, and the Reapers are basically a dry run for his take on Vampires in The Strain.

I don’t know what Stalin thought, but I do know that he was able to rule for so long because he was broadly popular throughout the Soviet Union. Also, Victor Orbàn clearly cared about public opinion, as did Ferdinand Marcos, Hosni Mubarak, and Alexander Lukashenko, to name a few.

You can’t control a country where the vast majority of people hate you. Even if the military remains loyal to you (and they won’t), if the majority of people are out in the streets protesting you instead of going to work, your economy will implode, and gunning everyone down won’t help. You need your opposition to be small enough that they seem like a trouble-making minority, while you remain popular enough that most people either support your violent suppression of dissent or at least don’t hate you enough to stick their own necks out.

Generally speaking, authoritarians want the support of at least a plurality of the citizenship. Even in well established authoritarian regimes, widespread public discontent will lead to regime collapse, even if it’s a military coup that just leads to another authoritarian regime.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, but the problem is that the President can only pardon federal crimes, so if a mob drags Steven Miller from his house in California and kills him, the President can’t do anything to intervene. However, I’m pretty sure that the President could pardon crimes committed in D.C., and the Supreme Court has basically said the President can’t be held accountable for crimes committed in office, so in theory, a future President could order agents to take Miller into custody, bring him to D.C., and execute him. He could then pardon everyone involved and no one could be held accountable.

The response to this needs to be a resounding, “LOL, no,” from whatever administration comes next. The constitution gives the President the power of the pardon? Well, if gives Congress power of the purse, but we let him ignore that. The Supreme Court will intercede? One of them is married to a J6er, another one is openly taking bribes, and ar least three of them committed perjury when they told Congress said they wouldn’t overturn precedent. Our country can’t continue without accountability.

Oh, I guess that’s just Massachusetts. Here you’re required to pay time-and-a-half for federal holidays and, for some industries, Sundays. I knew that Sunday-pay was state law, but I assumed federal holiday pay was required by federal law.

If it’s a federal holiday, employers are forced to give you time-and-a-half, which makes smaller businesses much more likely to close for the day (and large corporations much more likely to understaff and fuck over the people who do work that day).

If the Democrats were a functioning opposition party, they would have forced Fetterman out when his staffers started reporting his erratic behavior. But Chuck Schumer needs Senators to, “go against him,” and thwart any legitimate opposition the party can muster, so we let this brain damaged, mentally ill man occupy one of fhe highest positions of power in the nation.

Good. He’s an authoritarian who had his paramilitary goons invade an American city. All you achieve by going to the State of the Union and listening politely is the normalization of fascism. Only deeply unserious people who are incapable of meeting this moment would consider attending without disrupting him.

Wonder how they snuck this by Bari Weiss.

“Please be aware that I have instructed ICE and/or Border Patrol to be very forceful in this protection of Federal Government Property.”

Well, they just gassed a bunch of peaceful protesters in Portland, including children, so I guess that part is true.

Trick will be that pressing the murder charge would be federal since a federal agent dies in the line of official work (though illegal), which would give the president grounds to push for death.

Federal prosecutors are having a real tough time getting juries to convict, and sometimes even indict, citizens accused of assaulting ICE and CBP agents. They have 30 cases against Chicago residents, and so far they’re 0 for 15. They couldn’t get a felony indictment for the sandwich-throwing guy in DC, so they went for a misdemeanor; he was aquitted despite clearly having done it. It is not at all clear to me that the feds could get a conviction for killing someone during what is, legally, a home invasion.

(This is not an incitement of violence towards any federal agents, nor am I advocating for anyone to break any state or federal laws. To any FBI agents reading this, I think you’re very smart and handsome.)

“You Europeans need to learn how to stand up to Trump and the far-right fascists! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my podcast, where I platform people like Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk, rest his soul.”

Sure, ICE should be scared that someone might kill them, but a more interesting question is if a prosecutor could find 12 people in an ICE-occupied city that would convict someone of that killing.

I’m sure they’re just planning to quietly delete their comments once they’re sure everyone’s stopped paying attention.