There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
According to Emerson Polling, Andrew Cuomo is leading with 35% support, followed closely by Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani at 32%.
Polymarket is selling Cuomo for 50 cents, Mamdani for 49.
You are burying the lede: “The survey allowed voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. The ranked-choice voting simulation over eight rounds ends with Mamdani at 52% and Cuomo at 48%. “
Texas bill to ban hemp products has been vetoed.
That was a surprise. You’d think that this is something that would have been discussed a couple of months ago to avoid this silliness.
But maybe it was merely some oblique 2026 campaigning, maybe.
I’m a Mamdani agnostic and have some worry that a Mamdani primary victory is going to lead to a four way November race with Cuomo, Adams, Mandami, and Silwa. This ends up with Silwa or Adams as mayor somehow.
If I were still a New Yorker, I would be on team Lander (which has a lot of my friends from college) and tearing my hair out about why the guy who is progressive but also a competent manager can’t get any traction.*
*I’ve heard he is an uncharismatic speaker.
Lander has cross-endorsed Mamdani, if that helps.
I would not rank Cuomo and I do know they cross-endorsed each other
Nate Silver points out that negative advertising might do this weird thing where it boosts people you don’t like because it reminds you to put them on the ballot at all.
Like, if there are 10 people on the ballot… Candidates A-J and you want to vote for A, you’re willing to put up with B, I guess, and you HATE HATE HATE J, your ballot may look like this:
1. A
2. B
3. J
AND THAT IS A HUGE BOOST FOR J!!!!
So, anyway, all of the negative campaigning may help Mandami.
Welp, Iran launched missiles at U.S. bases in Qatar and I assume this was after Qatar closed its airspace
And Bahrain and Kuwait, apparently.
This, too, will have 2nd order effects.
Now that we’ve abandoned the ‘stay out of it option’ the best case scenario is that we swat their little bottle rockets out of the sky and move on rather than treating it as requiring any kind of retaliation.
Tansim news reports that Iran just said this:
(I’m using DeepL’s translator for this.)
“Cofefe.”
No, I’m just kidding. They’re saying this:
I’m told that I should read this as “you hit us, we hit you back, *NOW* the fight is over, please and thank you”.
I have no idea.
From the NYT:
I’ve read a lot of comic books and so my question is “doesn’t ‘symbolically’ stop working after you do this enough times?”
My worry is that, since the drums of war in this country are beating so much more loudly than they were in 2020, it wouldn’t matter if the Iranians threw a couple small rocks in the general direction of a U.S. base in response, we’d still their retaliating for our unprovoked attack as yet another reason to escalate.
Yeah, this was clearly a symbolic move. They know there’s about a .00001% chance that any of those rockets would be able to penetrate American defenses. Hell, they announced the strike publicly as the rockets were launching, to remove any element of surprise (since the U.S. base in Syria was hit by a surprise drone attack a year or two ago). I’m even seeing reports that they launched the exact same number of rockets as there were bombs were dropped by U.S. planes.
The Iranians also did the the last time Trump struck their home soil, but with a U.S. base in Iraq.
As further evidence:
https://x.com/LailaAlarian/status/1937203106242011425?t=mormpXnHYiP18tovhwp0Wg&s=19
this was clearly a symbolic move
Let’s hope they don’t kill anyone.
Even if they did, which they won’t unless one of the rockets malfunctions and lands nowhere near its intended target, we should treat it as a small, symbolic retaliation against a nation that just used the majority of the largest non-nuclear bombs on the planet to attack them unprovoked.
Too many Americans remain woefully ignorant of how much honor plays a role in these decisions as a cultural expression. Strategically Iran knows it can’t win. But Iranian leaders have to “save face”
And so they have.
Too many Americans remain woefully ignorant of how much honor plays a role in these decisions as a cultural expression.
To what extent is woeful ignorance of American culture a problem?
I mean, might it result in negative 2nd or 3rd order effects?
Too many Americans remain woefully ignorant of how much honor plays a role in these decisions as a cultural expression. Strategically Iran knows it can’t win. But Iranian leaders have to “save face”
Calling it ‘honor’ and talking about ‘saving face’ is, I feel, making it sound weirdly exotic. It’s extremely silly how we only talk about that in the context of ‘foreigners who aren’t on the same side as us’ and pretend it doesn’t apply to literally everyone.
Their country was attacked, part of it was bombed, in ways that looks pretty successful and they can’t brush off. Not in retaliation for anything, but to stop the country from doing something.
The leadership has to respond to that. If it doesn’t, it will be seen as weak. That’s true of basically every country on the planet, that’s sorta how countries and popular opinion works, everywhere.
Americans are not ‘woefully ignorant on how much honor plays in a role’, it’s just that Americans think that only Americans and perhaps some allies automatically have any sort of opinion about their own country and how it is treated by the world and are startled when people in other countries do.
The European countries are saying in lockstep that Iran can’t have a bomb… but a few of them are calling for negotiations or otherwise questioning the attack.
Unfortunately we need to choose.
If we’re serious about “Iran can’t have nukes” that means “we need to bomb them”. The alternative is Iran gets nukes because we’ve spent decades trying to talk them out of it and failed.
See the Obama peace plan for the limitations on negotiations. Iran would become a nuclear state but slowly.
One of our dear readers and commenters made the point, when I recently noted that Israel has the bomb, that it’s an unusable weapon. Why would this be any less so for Iran?
I believe that the theory is that Mutually Assured Destruction only works if you believe in the MA part.
If you have reason to believe that Allah, the most merciful, will protect his own, suddenly the MA becomes “Divinely Avoided Destruction”.
It’s risky to use the weapon, you say?
Only because you refuse to Believe in DAD.
Every country thinks it’s special. See also Manifest Destiny.
I’m not sure what the argument is.
Iran should have a nuke because of the Mexican-American war?
Don’t be ridiculous. Anyone can think of a reason for another country to not have nukes. In a perfect world no one would have them, but that horse is out of the barn.
That aside, are we to believe that a country as impoverished as Iran, a country that gives a heads up to countries it’s going to bomb (Israel and the U.S.), is so millenarianist that it’s willing to have itself wiped out so it can kill only half of the world’s Jews?
If we’re willing to ascribe rational actor status to North Korea, then why assume Iran is any different?
To the extent that I ascribe rational actor status to North Korea, it’s that I assume that Kim wants to make it as costly as possible to remove him from power.
As such, he is going to do *EVERYTHING* he can to make it painful to be removed.
And so I’m not ascribing “rational actor” to “North Korea” as much as I am ascribing it to “Kim Jong Un”.
“Why is this different than Iran?”
Well, partially, because Iran is run by a bunch of religious leaders who may actually believe things.
Eh, there is no love lost between India and Pakistan and there fingers have not touched the button for 25 years. If Iran’s leaders were that suicidal, *they* would be the ones wearing the suicide vests.
Pakistan is run by the Westminster government system and is not a theocratic republic.
Iran, specifically, *IS* a theocratic republic.
https://qantara.de/en/article/prostitution-islamic-republic-iran-open-minded-loving-and-desperate
A theocratic muslim country where prostitution is legal? Come on, that’s a moderate Muslim country that has a theocracy (aka “there are some guys, and they say religious things”). Kinda like Israel has a theocracy (which governs marriage and conversions, both of which are unlikely to be deemed “okay” if done in America by the majority of American Jewry).
Iran has terrible demographics. The Priests need people to be cannon fodder and to generate money. God always wants what is best for the Priests.
It only *HAS* a theocracy and that doesn’t mean that it *IS* a theocracy?
Why would this be any less so for Iran?
1st) Israel is one nuke from all the Jews dying, and Iran might be willing to take 10-15 nukes in exchange with the priests hiding in bunkers. They might even call that the will of Allah.
2nd) Iran might give that one nuke to some proxy idiot and claim they’re not involved.
3rd) MAD reasoning is “they wouldn’t dare because they know we’d kill them”. We just saw Hamas and Hezbollah ignore that because Allah will protect them against Jews.
4th) Iran wouldn’t stop funding it’s various terror armies. So after the next mass murder where Israel has to go to war, what do we think will happen? Does Iran insist that Jews aren’t allowed to go to war? Does Israel really listen to that? Does Iran simply take this non-nuclear punishment? Does Iran let Israel win against all of it’s proxies?
5th) Iran is a big problem to countries other than Israel. When they threaten Saudi Arabia, what do we think will happen? Shouldn’t Saudi Arabia go nuclear too? How about Turkey and Egypt?
Bryan Alvarez is reporting that WWE employees are currently stuck in the Qatari airport. I’m guessing that this isn’t Talent but Production Staff getting ready for the show in Saudi Arabia.
There are calls to cancel the show.
New barrage of missiles in the direction of Israel. American jet fighters scrambling over Saudi.
Closest Domino’s to the Pentagon is booming.
Donald Trump problematically sums everything up:
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing.”
The Daily Wire’s Kassy Akiva, a woman, gives her summary:
Everyone is determined to have the last word.
In which Mississippi has to spend money it doesn’t have to defend against litigation because a bad bill badly written is as clear as mud.
https://mississippitoday.org/2025/06/24/mississippis-dei-ban-challenged-in-court-as-boards-adopt-new-policies/?utm_source=Mississippi+Today+Supporters&utm_campaign=df522b4346-The_Today_2_7_2025_15_26_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2ac1d8600e-df522b4346-169036478&mc_cid=df522b4346&mc_eid=dac5637214
Al Green has introduced articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.
Call your congresscritter *NOW*.
He’s gonna take him to the river while Trump cries “Let’s stay together.” Let’s hope everything’s gonna be alright. Sha-la-la.
5th time is the charm, or something…
We’re due!
This guy has been filing unserious impeachment charges against Trump since 2017.
2017, attempted to impeach Trump over firing of James Comey.
2019, attempting to impeach Trump over Trump saying something about four congresswomen of color (probably the squad).
2025, over the bombing raid (note Biden did something very similar).
He’s not the only one to use impeachment for political theater.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_impeach_Donald_Trump
Initial reports are that the strikes only set the Iranian program back by months. What a disaster. Not that anyone who supported this will consider that their whole approach to geopolitics has been discredited. Again.
They “looked dominant” which was the point. You can’t “win” negotiations by looking “weak” and diplomacy is “weak.”
On the success of Don’t Rank Cuomo:
“In these troubled times we live in, we need that.”
Dawn Phelps, 50, a teacher who lives in Co-Op City in the Bronx, cited Andrew Cuomo’s “steady and competent” leadership during Covid as her reason for ranking the former governor first on her ballot. She ranked Zohran Mamdani second. “He’s very new to me,” she said. “Is he consistent?”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/24/nyregion/nyc-democratic-primary-election-mayor
Most voters are just not consistent people or necessarily ideological.
If Mamdani wins NYC, AOC needs to start her Presidential run for 2028 starting, oh, Thursday.
Cuomo has just called Mamdani and conceded the primary.
Which means, I think, that it’s a three-way between Adams, Mamdani, and that Guardian Angels guy.
We are governed by morons.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/24/politics/doge-fired-workers-rehired
Silicon Valley claims that its motto is move fast and break things. They think nothing of canning off thousands of people to goose stock prices and then rehiring them six months later when actual sales or launches or whatever start to fail. That they applied the same functionality to “right sizing” agencies they did not lie or did not seek to understand should surprise no one.
It should also tell you mission dedicated my federal colleagues are that they are willing to come back.
SNL could not have come up with a more buffoonish president than DJT. I’m currently listening to his press conference at the NATO summit and it’s just laughable, but then I remember he’s leading the most powerful, heavily armed country in the world.
Silly math question. Yamiche Alcindor points out:
I’ve been told over and over again that paperless visitors have lower crime rates than legacy residents.
What percentage of legacy residents have been convicted of homicide?
You’d better read the article. The tweet is a gross (in all senses) misstatement of the story.
Ooof, Yamiche slaughtered that.
This seems to be an argument that ICE needs to be doing more…
They definitely need to get back to investigating and arresting high-risk targets.
Trump wasn’t in office until Jan. Holding him responsible for Oct to Jan seems a bit much.
This seems to be an argument that ICE needs to be doing more
‘more’ is not a thing.
ICE needs to get back to spending the time and resources to locate and deport one undocumented person who is a known murderer instead of four undocumented people who have lived peacefully here for years, especially ones _attending immigration court_ and doing whatever the system tells them to do.
Is that ‘more’? I have no idea. It’s certainly more useful. And it’s probably more work. But Trump and turbo-racist Miller demands numbers instead of that.
Incidentally, I am actually uncertain why we apparently have 12,500 (what 752 is 6% of) undocumented immigrants _convicted_ of murder. Something here isn’t adding up here. And when it doesn’t add up, people are lying. Wanna guess who?
It’s Trump (And NBC news has basically fallen for the lie?):
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/09/trump-vance-wrong-about-illegal-immigrant-murderers/
That number (Actually 13,099) _includes people in prison_, for one. Yes, when you are undocumented and murder someone in the US, we don’t go ‘Oh, you’re here illegally, off you go home, you little scamp.’ No, you serve your sentence, then get deported.
It also includes green card holders, which people can indeed lose for serious crimes, but that is an actual process that has to be done, ICE cannot just deport them. And, really, that a lot of work and it’s more fun to shove grandmothers into vans at gunpoint.
There are, indeed, a few people (The amount is unknown because DHS will not provide numbers, so I suspect it’s not much.) who cannot be deported, because their home country will not accept them or they are refugees that the courts have barred from sending back, but I feel at some point we have to realize: There are actually a lot of _American_ convicted murderers walking around in public also, who we also can’t deport.
Yes, immigration is a privilege, not a right, but it is a little weird to say ‘If you murder someone, are convicted, serve your time, and are released, if you are an American citizen we _cannot_ remove you from this country for that (exile is unconstitutional), but if you are not an American we _must_ remove you, even if doing so violates some of our core principles or renders you stateless, and if we don’t remove you the system is horrible broken’.
No it’s not. We live with a bunch of American convicted murderers walking around free after they serve their time. Like, a whole bunch. A few more released convicted murderers who happen to be undeportable immigrants is not particularly important except for fear mongering.
We release people from prison because the prison is done. We did whatever we were trying to do by putting them in prison. I have no idea _what_ that is, perhaps someone who is in favor of prisons could explain, but whatever the purpose was, it is now done, we did the amount of prison the courts said to do to them. We should not take some subset of people and _demand_ they get punished more than that and act horrified when they don’t.
One of the problems going around is that prison was the compromise position.
And then going from that to “they served their time!” as if we’ve already agreed on what should be done with undocumented visitors who commit murder is to invite a new conversation about what is to be done.
There seem to be a surprising number of folks who have third-world attitudes about justice and the number is getting bigger, not smaller.
It takes all kinds, I guess.
… Prison was the compromise position to what? What are you talking about?
Prison is not the compromise to deportation. Prison is worse than deportation, most undocumented people who go to prison would much rather be deported and be free!
And again, _they then get deported_.
We’re talking about a very small amount of people who _can’t_be deported, it’s such a small amount of people that the Trump Administration will not actually release the actual amount of, probably because it is laughably small.
And no, we probably shouldn’t have a conversation about how we need to punish immigrants more than we punish natives, because guess what? That is just straight up bigotry.
Yes, in this environment, it’s easy to get people angry about immigrants doing bad things. It’s easy to get people angry about minorities doing bad things if you spend decades degrading and dehumanizing minorities, congratulations on figuring that one out.
The death penalty. Or, less formalized, death.
I appreciate that your personal overton window is so narrow that it didn’t even occur to you that “killing a murderer” is on the spectrum and so “imprisonment” was the worst punishment that you could think of but, seriously, in much of human history “prison” is the compromise position for a foreigner killing a citizen.
Heck, even today, you can find pockets in the US where it still is.
And what is the compromise position for a citizen murdering a citizen? I mean, since deportation of citizens is not on the table (is it not? Are you sure? We can debate). Is it the compromise between the death penalty and going home, no biggie?
I mean, compromise implies there’s an A position, a B position, and a compromise position between A and B.
And how did we go from discussing how many convicted murderers have Trump deported to talking about capital punishment in general?
I’d say that prison seems to be.
Well, excepting especially egregious cases.
ICE arrested 752 people convicted of homicide…the Trump administration has detained only 6% of the undocumented immigrants known to ICE to have been convicted of homicide
Math time. 752/0.06 means 12,533 immigrant murderers.
We had 19,252 murders last year, some of which involve more than one person. Multiply that by 30 years (to adjust for life expectancy) and we end up with something like 600,000 murderers in the US.
We have about 15 million illegal immigrants.
At a glance it’s obvious immigrants commit fewer murders, less than 1% of them ever commit murder while more than 1% of non-immigrants do.
Of course there are multiple handwaves here but whatever.
Assume all undocumented immigrants convicted of homicide are behind bars. How could this be otherwise? Assume 6% of these convicted murderers are handed over to ICE custody. Myself, I would prefer this figure to be zero as convicted murderers should serve their time in US prison and not be transferred to ICE custody.
This seems entirely reasonable to me. If they were turned over to ICE they would presumably be deported. At the least, at that point it may become problematic about whether they stay in prison, or are released and potentially return to the US.
There are probably a _few_ who cannot be deported, because, you know, the courts have barred them from being sent back to their country, and just because someone killed someone, and was duly punished by the system, does not then mean they should be sent back to a place to be tortured. They were sentenced to prison, not sentenced to ‘First prison, and then deported home to be tortured to death by roving death gangs for being whatever random minority you are’.
However, the fact DHS will not state the actual numbers and just vaguely admits that some of of them are in prison (and hence completely irrelevant) means that ones who are not in prison are probably pretty small.
Over a million people… over a million people at the time when Trump took office, were in this country illegally, having already had their asylum requests denied. (That is to say, the court system already told them to leave, and they Just Haven’t Left Yet).
All of these people are counted in censuses. All of these people stuff California’s electoral count (which is otherwise dropping significantly).
Mark Rutte apparently called Trump Dad or Daddy and it apparently wasn’t sarcastic or ironic.
The right-wing rhetoric about “Daddy’s home” is some of the creepiest things this time around.
It’s just another manifestation of the “strict father” world view in conservative circles.
What’s next, girls making songs about how they want to suck him off?
Depressing analysis from the Times on if everybody voted, Harris would have still lost. The TL/DR version is that Harris lost is because many young and/or non-White voters soured and the Democratic Party and either voted for Trump or stayed home. If all of them showed up, just enough would have broken for Trump to give him a bigger victory.
I think the basic issue is that as the diversity party, the Democratic Party has a lot of factions. This prevents them from taking a strong or passionate stance on any domestic or international issue because doing so is going to piss off when faction or another in the party. The I/P conflict is a big example on international issues and YIMBY vs. NIMBY works for domestic issues. Another issue is that the causes that motivates the most popular activists in the Democratic Party are at best nothing to most voters and worse electoral poison like police reform, immigration, and trans rights. So the things that might motivate the most passionate Democratic Party voters could end up not motivating enough people. I think other liberal and center left parties in developed democracies in general and Anglophone democracies in particular suffer from this issue. There needs to be a way to create a liberal party that is both diverse but not faction ridden or dominated by identity politics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/upshot/turnout-2024-election-trump-harris.html
Might it have been that Harris was an awful candidate? Like, if they had an open convention, we might have found a better one?
San Francisco secret Republicans attempt to derail Democrat progress made in the rest of the country by refusing to sell Harry Potter books in their bookstore.
NBC News colludes with them by publicizing their stunt.
What the hell are you talking about?
Wrecking.
That isn’t an answer.
I get your nonsense idea where you pretend people are claiming this is a conspiracy by Republicans to discredit Democrats, but you do understand that no one understands what the f*ck you mean by ‘progress’, right?
Political thermostatic reaction.
He means the Harry Potter series is both popular and non-political, so banning it because of the Author’s views is a bit of a thing. Further, judging purely from her wiki, her views are mostly pushing back on aspects of the movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people
He means the Harry Potter series is both popular and non-political, so banning it because of the Author’s views is a bit of a thing.
No longer selling a product in your own store is not ‘banning it’.
Further, judging purely from her wiki, her views are mostly pushing back on aspects of the movement.
Right there in the text: She also voiced opposition to the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill, aimed at allowing transgender people to change their legal gender more easily and subsequently she donated £70,000 (About $95,000) to the legal challenge brought by For Women Scotland against the Scottish Ministers in the UK Supreme Court, which, on 16 April 2025, ruled that the legal definition of a woman in the UK Equality Act 2010 is based on biological sex.
She literally funded the legal challenge that erased trans people from being recognized _at all_ by the UK government in anti-discrimination law. (And because transphobes are liars, they are using this to argue that the ruling means trans people do not exist at all, which is not what the actual decision said. But it is, nevertheless, what they are determined to pretend it says.)
That’s not ‘pushing back on aspects of the movement’.
This, to be very clear, is not the correct interpretation of that law, which has other parts that explicitly talk about ‘reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.’, in the part that bars about discrimination based on gender reassignment (1). It does not go on to say ‘But keep treating them as their assigned birth sex for the purposes of this act’.
1) This particular section, incidentally, was already somewhat useless because it only triggered if the person was ‘undergoing a process’ to change sex and you could show the discrimination was based on that specifically. It was a well-intentioned law for 2010, but somewhat stupid. Almost all anti-trans discrimination legal cases happened under the _sex_ discrimination part that the courts just completely neutered. (Because, all anti-trans discrimination is fundamentally sex discrimination.) I only mention that useless section to show that the bill was not intending there to be some magical different reading of ‘sex’ that was contrary to other UK law, and in fact explicitly treated someone’s sex as changing.
Do you remember how, when we were talking about European law WRT to trans kids, how I pointed out that the UK had been completely taken over by explicitly transphobic forces who asserted trans people didn’t exist at all and how they felt about trans kids was not based on science?
Here, in case people suddenly don’t believe me, this literally just happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGt4cLXNM3c
That’s Mandy Clare, British member of Parliament, being removed by the police from a UK Pride because she was running around calling people with kids pedophiles and taking pictures of them and generally harassing and threatening people.Yes, she is a member of the wackadoodle Reform party, but that just means the mainstream parties aren’t doing _that_. They are repeating transphobic talking points.
As for Rowling, she is literally a good chunk of the funding and momentum for that. It doesn’t matter what she _says_ about trans people, she’s funding people who literally wish to remove them existence entirely.
And she does actually say things like ‘I believe, absolutely, that there is something dangerous about this movement and that it must be challenged,’ and ‘I am fighting what I see as a powerful, insidious, misogynistic movement that I think has gained huge purchase in very influential areas of society. I do not see this particular movement as either benign or powerless’
Her position is not ‘pushing back on aspects of the movement’, unless the movement is considered ‘trans people exist’. But regardless of her actual stated ‘position’, which she is usually a bit more cagey about, she can be judged by the company she keeps and more importantly, by _what legal cases she funds to to produce outcomes she wants_.
Rowling was sexually abused (and abused in general) by her husband and comes from a “men abusing women” background. That forms the basis of her opinions.
She’s opposed to letting people simply decide what their gender is because that massively opens the door to game playing. The Canadian weight lifting coach setting a woman’s record by “deciding” he was a woman for the duration of the competition is a good example
She’s opposed to the concept that there is no such thing as gender because that gets rid of women’s safe places, presumably like battered women’s clinics.
If we look at what she’s actually said about trans, we have… “I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.”
“I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable … trans people need and deserve protection … I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people
Her arguments deserve better than just shouting them down and/or being attacked with strawmen.
No one’s providing more grease to the skids of authoritarianism than law enforcement.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/huntington-park-border-patrol-agents-door-explosion/3734095
Something something jack booted thugs something something.
This shows up every now and then.
Someone made a SWAT team, and now the team and their management need to justify their existence somehow. The problem is the sorts of situations where SWAT would be the right solution are rare, in many communities they never come up. So we end up with the team delivering warrants or arresting non-violent “criminals”.
That’s a group of Border Patrol agents. They need to blow open doors to serve arrest warrants why?
I seriously doubt that every group of Border Patrol agents is also trained for this sort of thing. My expectation is we’ll find out this is a “special” “elite” group, i.e. SWAT with a different name.
ICE should be less understood as ‘law enforcement’ and more as ‘a fascist government agency we created two decades ago to do low grade fascism against immigrants, but mostly lay around and wait to be allowed to do more fascism’.
They’re the people who cannot get into police forces because they are incompetent fascist buffoons, and do you know how incompetent and overtly fascist you have to be to not be let into the police?
In case anyone thinks I’m kidding or exaggerating about the competency of ICE agents, a reminder that they are taking pencil pushers from other federal agencies, slapping paintball guns into their hands, giving them two days of training or whatever, and pretending those are ICE agents. And no one can tell the didifference. It’s not because those borrowed people are surprisingly competent.
Your last point is an excellent one.
Hey, remember how people claimed that the firing on people at the aid center was debunked, and I pointed out it wasn’t, and in fact still going on, yada yada.
Anyway, the full story has now come out:https://archive.is/2025.06.28-004332/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-soldiers-ordered-to-shoot-deliberately-at-unarmed-gazans-waiting-for-humanitarian-aid/00000197-ad8e-de01-a39f-ffbe33780000
Israeli soldiers in Gaza told Haaretz that the army has deliberately fired at Palestinians near aid distribution sites over the past month.
Conversations with officers and soldiers reveal that commanders ordered troops to shoot at crowds to drive them away or disperse them, even though it was clear they posed no threat.
You know, if we want to pretend for a second any of this matters.
The BBC had Bob Vylan on for a concert and told him “Don’t say ‘Free Palestine’.”
So he got a “Death, Death to the IDF!” chant going.
Bob Vylan has released a statement:
And, underneath that, he adds: “I said what I said.”