in hindsight the lack of foresight is 20/20.
not the first time i’ve seen this i think, but i love that people do this.
a bit of well-placed graffiti turns a kind of coat hook into a smiling octopus.
when one finds oneself describing a thing one does as “ethical”, there’s a question.
“Can't quantify it, but really I think federal level corruption is so much worse than it used to be. I think practices that would shock ‘normal’ people are absolutely normal, but since ‘everybody’ is doing it, there's no way to even cover it for journalism.”
“We can start with how net worths just seem to blossom from the moment someone enters Congress, but that's certainly only the starting place.”
by @Atrios, to whom i apologize for quoting the whole post.
from whom do we have to buy property at inflated prices to get the Court to bless #MintTheCoin?
hear me out.
i know it might seem like a reasonable request.
but those neighbors, they were really the deep state. even if they didn’t know it.
infected by woke mind virus, they were bringing in bicoastal “civility” norms which, by a thousand tiny strings in a thousand tiny knots, would entangle and block every manly freedom.
and of course even in death they were found on top of children. of course.
Chris Rufo is getting his way at #NewCollege. He understands the people are the battlefield.
It may feel good to walk out, rage quit, as several prominent faculty have done. It may very well be the best decision from a personal perspective. But it is ceding the only terrain that ultimately matters.
Can the faculty not hold out long enough to see if DeSantis and his cheap culture wars flame out as a political force in two years? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/new-college-florida-republican-desantis.html
“If he had been a dog, she said, somebody would have rescued him long ago.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/us/bend-oregon-mayor-homeless.html
This Supreme Court sounds like an implausible parody of public corruption.
"[Jane] Roberts' apparent $10.3 million in compensation [for recruiting lawyers to prestigious law firms] puts her toward the top of the payscale for legal headhunters… she was 'the highest earning recruiter in the entire company 'by a wide margin.'' ... 'The monetary value of a senior government official will depend on the value they bring to a law firm's client base,' she said" https://www.businessinsider.com/jane-roberts-chief-justice-wife-10-million-commissions-2023-4
[new draft post] Urgency https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/28/urgency/index.html
// corrected very bad misdating of post and URL in prior announcement, thanks @blakeashleyjr!
The Roberts Court is a cesspool of open corruption that works to legalize the same.
People like to describe John Roberts as an institutionalist a bit overwhelmed by how contentious his Court has become and how far and fast it has swung. Given his unwillingness to meaningfully address behavior that justifiably destroys public confidence in the Court, I don't think that's a fair description. Any "institutionalism" is eclipsed by… something else.
"It is with real chutzpah…that Roberts has claimed judicial independence in order to circumvent an investigation into judicial independence… [O]ur Supreme Court does not exist in the constitutional order as much as it looms over it, a robed tribunal of self-styled philosopher-kings, accountable to no one but themselves." @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/john-roberts-clarence-thomas-supreme-court.html
“Preventing monopoly formation is infinitely preferable to breaking up monopolies after they form.” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/27/convicted-monopolist/ ht @eARCwelder@mastodon.sdf.org
i periodically repost this, and now seems like a good moment.
Merge the Court https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7964.html
A thing I did not know, from @ryanlcooper:
The US Supreme Court "struck down a law prohibiting political candidates from repaying personal loans to their campaign with post-election donations, meaning that interested parties can effectively place bribes directly into the pockets of our elected representatives."
https://prospect.org/justice/2023-04-26-democrats-supreme-court-corruption/
( i may switch to a different instance — i love fosstodon.org, i'm a long-time free software guy and i love that world — but most of my posts are politics-ish and i've gotten a bit of pushback that some fosstodoners prefer the local timeline to be respite from all that. i could CW politicsy posts, but that doesn't seem to be the norm among the people i converse with. anyway, i may a bit sadly be looking for a new home, and am open to suggestions. )
Jerry Springer’s passing reminds us of a more innocent, less decadent America.
some people find writing a function to reverse a string even just once to be annoying, but i've found a solution that is very concise and will reverse a string *twice*.
what if Biden cut a deal with McConnell to support an impeachment of Gorsuch and Thomas in exchange for agreeing to two McConnell-acceptable replacement nominees? the idea would be to separate ethics accountability from the political composition of the Court by holding the latter constant. would this be wise or terrible?
Apparently organic chemistry is a fake, woke discipline. https://apnews.com/article/new-college-florida-tenure-conservatives-desantis-ce711c9169ebe84e9d062ebbb281ebce