Should have done instead? In order to achieve what goal?
If the goal was "to avoid being compared to Apartheid South Africa", I'd probably point to something like "avoid being particularly comparable to Apartheid South Africa".
If the argument is that, hey, sometimes ethnostates are necessary and the steps required to maintain an ethnostate can be distasteful but they're a price worth paying, well... I guess we're going to have to establish that sometimes ethnostates are necessary and the steps required to maintain an ethnostate can be distasteful but they're a price worth paying. Or having someone else pay them, I guess.
It's more that ethnostates and the mindsets required to maintain them are incompatible with the current year.
"But Jewish Ethnostates are different than White ones!", you may wish to argue and I wish you well in doing so but, lemme tell ya, the number of folks willing to agree with that seems to be getting smaller every year.
I would say that if Jews want to be treated the way that Native Hawaiians are, doing so is possible, but it involves being treated the way that Native Hawaiians were first.
they believe the type of decisions necessary for Jews to have a country of their own will poison the Jewish soul.
I don't know about "poisoning the Jewish soul" but I will say that the last few months of stuff like showing Israeli soldiers acting like whites during Apartheid and posting it to social media doesn't reflect well on, at least!, the people posting it thinking that it'll get updooted.
More than that, the updooters are not showing themselves as being particularly awesome either.
If Israel has to exist in the state that it's currently in, it's doing so in such a way that has a lot of bad apples.
Who, surely, aren't representative of the culture at large. Why, it'd be anti-Semitic to suggest that it's representative of anything at all.
5.3M borrowers are in default on their federal student loans.
Restarting loan payments now will cause credit scores to plummet and risk millions of Americans' ability to participate in the economy. It’s time we forgave student loans for working- and middle-class families.
It's like this weird "broken windows" fallacy come to life.
If we want to play the "well, now we're haggling" game, we're quickly going to be finding ourselves saying "but *THAT* was never supposed to be on the table!"
This is weird. Because I found it because people were talking about them.
Are you in a place where you never encounter such stories? That's a good way to be surprised by them. Maybe a statement like "well, *I* never heard that!" will be a sufficient counter-argument...
As for "neither side has moral standing", you misunderstand. It's more of a "your moral authority isn't legible".
The main talking point seems to be invoking PPP loans from the middle of Covid and how since those didn't have to be paid back, student loans shouldn't have to be paid back either.
The counter-argument to that is something to the effect of "PPP loans were to cover payroll and some other business expenses because it would have been worse for businesses to close than for them to have been paused".
When the pandemic ended, the businesses could start back up and no problem. The PPP loans did their job (and the only theoretical problem were the non-businesses who got loans and spent the money on non-business stuff). In theory, the PPP loans were spent to keep the business alive.
Student loans, on the other hand, resulted in a student degree that, in theory, makes the individual student potential earning power worth that much more over the lifetime of having the degree.
Unfortunately, as the cost of college went up, that potential earning power got bigger and bigger bites taken out of it.
And now we get to wrestle with the question: "What to do with a loan for a degree that wasn't worth it?"
National Review was one of the first Anti-Trump right-wing institutions out there. They wrote an editorial against him all the way back in 2016.
Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.
After that, it just became a game of "wow, this is worse than I thought!" for everything that happened next.
In the absence of the patriots, the capitalists seem to be stepping up. The (stupid) tariffs and the lack of the actual trade deals in the wake of the art of the same are resulting in mini-revolts.
I suppose we should be relieved that he didn't go for even freer trade with the TPP while deporting people. We'd merely be stuck crying out about the tyranny of the price of strawberries while we discussed the prisons.
Part of the fundamental problem is that there has been an epistemic divorce between the right and the left. They have two separate overton windows.
Stuff that isn't bait and stuff that is get conflated with each other and real, serious, issues get ignored because, hey, that's just bait. That's not a real issue.
And, wouldn't you know it? We were in a bubble.
As for whether the Right-Wing-o-sphere is talking about it, I can't say for certain.
I can just link to The Harvard Crimson's article. Maybe we can spin it as being a "legacy" paper...
Oh, you don't want to argue the point that I made but a different point?
I agree with the different point you're raising.
Donald Trump's moral authority is worse than Harvard's. And that's taking into account all of the egg that Harvard got on its face over the last few years from the various letters that got signed to the various presidents that abdicated to, yes, the stolen bodies.
My 1970s dentist had one of those in the waiting room. There were three or four cards with various busy street scenes from various cities in the early part of the century.
"It's like a View-Master", my mom explained. (Huh. View-Master was discontinued back in 2019. So now those can show up in the funny pages and people can ask about them in a few decades.)
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
Should have done instead? In order to achieve what goal?
If the goal was "to avoid being compared to Apartheid South Africa", I'd probably point to something like "avoid being particularly comparable to Apartheid South Africa".
If the argument is that, hey, sometimes ethnostates are necessary and the steps required to maintain an ethnostate can be distasteful but they're a price worth paying, well... I guess we're going to have to establish that sometimes ethnostates are necessary and the steps required to maintain an ethnostate can be distasteful but they're a price worth paying. Or having someone else pay them, I guess.
"
It's more that ethnostates and the mindsets required to maintain them are incompatible with the current year.
"But Jewish Ethnostates are different than White ones!", you may wish to argue and I wish you well in doing so but, lemme tell ya, the number of folks willing to agree with that seems to be getting smaller every year.
I would say that if Jews want to be treated the way that Native Hawaiians are, doing so is possible, but it involves being treated the way that Native Hawaiians were first.
"
they believe the type of decisions necessary for Jews to have a country of their own will poison the Jewish soul.
I don't know about "poisoning the Jewish soul" but I will say that the last few months of stuff like showing Israeli soldiers acting like whites during Apartheid and posting it to social media doesn't reflect well on, at least!, the people posting it thinking that it'll get updooted.
More than that, the updooters are not showing themselves as being particularly awesome either.
If Israel has to exist in the state that it's currently in, it's doing so in such a way that has a lot of bad apples.
Who, surely, aren't representative of the culture at large. Why, it'd be anti-Semitic to suggest that it's representative of anything at all.
"
You know how "racism" doesn't really work as well as it used to?
I bring it up because it strikes me as something that will soon be fairly relevant.
On “US Department of Education Announces that it is Restarting Loan Collection”
Imagine loan payments being suspended for this or that in your own life.
Is there *EVER* a time that you'd think was good enough for them to kick back in?
On “The Lawless Lying Duplicitous Bastards of Abrego Garcia”
It wasn't a made-up story, Dave.
Seriously. It actually happened.
On “US Department of Education Announces that it is Restarting Loan Collection”
Ro Khanna is now tweeting about it:
It's like this weird "broken windows" fallacy come to life.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
If we want to play the "well, now we're haggling" game, we're quickly going to be finding ourselves saying "but *THAT* was never supposed to be on the table!"
On “Less Than a Decade Prior to the MPAA”
I'm guessing that, maybe, this was "The Actor's Children".
Here, check this out:
That's kind of close to what might be in the cartoon? Maybe?
If it's not, I don't have any leads at all.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
Where are the people asking where are the free-speech absolutists now now?
On “US Department of Education Announces that it is Restarting Loan Collection”
"That's why you shouldn't give them a mortgage's worth of debt without the ability to pay it off after four or five years of drinking beer."
"
The 5th is, what? 12 days away? If we don't hear anything, I guess the automatic payments won't have kicked in.
On “Back When Patriots Opposed Kings”
See where eating healthy gets you.
On “US Department of Education Announces that it is Restarting Loan Collection”
That will result in people not getting loans and, presumably, not going to college at all.
Or, instead of going to their preferred SLAC, they'll go to a state school. Or, instead of a state school, they'll go to a community college.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
Obscure stories no one else is talking about?
This is weird. Because I found it because people were talking about them.
Are you in a place where you never encounter such stories? That's a good way to be surprised by them. Maybe a statement like "well, *I* never heard that!" will be a sufficient counter-argument...
As for "neither side has moral standing", you misunderstand. It's more of a "your moral authority isn't legible".
"
Yeah, last week one of the crypto-right wingers on the board posted an article that got into that.
Apparently, May 2020 at the height of COVID had 51 ships blank sailing. April 2025 has over 80 ships blank sailing. That is without cargo.
On “US Department of Education Announces that it is Restarting Loan Collection”
The main talking point seems to be invoking PPP loans from the middle of Covid and how since those didn't have to be paid back, student loans shouldn't have to be paid back either.
The counter-argument to that is something to the effect of "PPP loans were to cover payroll and some other business expenses because it would have been worse for businesses to close than for them to have been paused".
When the pandemic ended, the businesses could start back up and no problem. The PPP loans did their job (and the only theoretical problem were the non-businesses who got loans and spent the money on non-business stuff). In theory, the PPP loans were spent to keep the business alive.
Student loans, on the other hand, resulted in a student degree that, in theory, makes the individual student potential earning power worth that much more over the lifetime of having the degree.
Unfortunately, as the cost of college went up, that potential earning power got bigger and bigger bites taken out of it.
And now we get to wrestle with the question: "What to do with a loan for a degree that wasn't worth it?"
On “Back When Patriots Opposed Kings”
National Review was one of the first Anti-Trump right-wing institutions out there. They wrote an editorial against him all the way back in 2016.
After that, it just became a game of "wow, this is worse than I thought!" for everything that happened next.
"
In the absence of the patriots, the capitalists seem to be stepping up. The (stupid) tariffs and the lack of the actual trade deals in the wake of the art of the same are resulting in mini-revolts.
I suppose we should be relieved that he didn't go for even freer trade with the TPP while deporting people. We'd merely be stuck crying out about the tyranny of the price of strawberries while we discussed the prisons.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
Part of the fundamental problem is that there has been an epistemic divorce between the right and the left. They have two separate overton windows.
Stuff that isn't bait and stuff that is get conflated with each other and real, serious, issues get ignored because, hey, that's just bait. That's not a real issue.
And, wouldn't you know it? We were in a bubble.
As for whether the Right-Wing-o-sphere is talking about it, I can't say for certain.
I can just link to The Harvard Crimson's article. Maybe we can spin it as being a "legacy" paper...
"
Oh, you don't want to argue the point that I made but a different point?
I agree with the different point you're raising.
Donald Trump's moral authority is worse than Harvard's. And that's taking into account all of the egg that Harvard got on its face over the last few years from the various letters that got signed to the various presidents that abdicated to, yes, the stolen bodies.
"
We're nowhere near an election, true (though I understand the next one is the most important of our lifetimes).
As such, it's just a fight in the PR arena.
Another place where memes show up from time to time.
"
Not sure how "right-wing" this particular one is but you're definitely overstating my belief about the power of memes.
I wouldn't compare them to bombs as much as to elections.
"
Best to not have a Rounder be fired for stealing bodies smack dab in the middle of the PR campaign.
On “Somebody is Always Taking the Joy out of Life”
My 1970s dentist had one of those in the waiting room. There were three or four cards with various busy street scenes from various cities in the early part of the century.
"It's like a View-Master", my mom explained. (Huh. View-Master was discontinued back in 2019. So now those can show up in the funny pages and people can ask about them in a few decades.)