We’re not as right as we think we are Loss of the ability to laugh at oneself is the first warning sign of fundamentalism. It’s a personal maxim that has served well. Not unrelated is a shtick that comes in handy now and again. Jab your finger in the air toward someone as if punctuating an argument, and declare confidently, “Oh yeah? Well, I’m not as smart as I think I am.” Let’s back up. Heather Cox Richardson in her “Letters from an American” installment for July 9 observes that on this date in 1868, Americans ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. It eradicated the infamous Dred Scott decision by a Supreme Court then controlled by states’ rights advocates and “southerners and Democrats … adamantly opposed to federal power.” The drafters meant to ensure that southern states who recently fought a war to preserve slavery could not reimpose it under color of law in their legislatures. They did anyway for the next 100 years under Jim Crow until the post-World War II Supreme Court flexed the equal protection and due process clauses to dismantle it.
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We will not allow you to exploit the innocence of our children to advance your agenda. When you come after our kids, we fight back. We are no longer silent. We are united. We are Mamas for DeSantis. …and we will elect @RonDeSantis President of the United States. Join our… pic.twitter.com/jo6HUATaVa — Casey DeSantis (@CaseyDeSantis) July 6, 2023 I’ll just leave that here.
Dan Pfeiffer with the bad news: Why Threads Won’t Solve the News Crisis Like more than 70 million other refugees from Twitter, I downloaded Threads — Meta’s new Twitter clone — and immediately started “threading.” This wasn’t an easy decision. I generally believe that through a toxic combination of avarice and incompetence, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have done tremendous damage to the world. My most recent book was subtitled “How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media are Destroying America.” So, it’s safe to say that I am not exactly a Zuck stan. But despite my trepidation, I started using Threads. Compared to other erstwhile Twitter replacements — Mastodon, Bluesky, Post, etc. — Threads was a huge success. It was easy to set up and even though I joined only a few hours after it launched, many people and media outlets were already posting on the app. The utility of a Twitter-like product is dependent on two interconnected questions — one, will enough interesting people share interesting content; and two, is the audience large and engaging enough to make sharing feel worth it?
And yes, I’m talking about Chris Christie He may not try to overturn an election but if you think this guy wouldn’t use his power to go after his enemies you are mistaken. He hasn’t changed: GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie weighed in on the investigation of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden and the plea deal reached in the case, calling the probe as well as the U.S. attorney who oversaw it not truthful or incompetent. “U.S. Attorney [David] Weiss has to explain himself and he has to explain himself in public,” Christie told Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday. “You know, the fact is that this investigation of Hunter Biden in Delaware is either a lie or it’s incompetent.
Seriously??? Trump is honest and trustworthy enough to run the most powerful country in the world but you couldn’t trust him or his people to do business with your software company. Is this guy for real? These people are so far gone it’s beyond all reason. Luckily, this cipher isn’t going to be in the race very long but it’s instructive to hear him speak anyway. They are all so tribal that they are willing to twist themselves into pretzels to stay in the GOP fold for Dear Leader but grasp at these straws to show that they are somehow different. It’s pathetic. I hope you enjoy looking in the mirror Bergum. If it looks a little bit distorted, check your conscience.
Here’s my bold statement for 2023: Social media companies in the United States need to be regulated. Before you start agreeing and explain why it’ll never happen… you should know Meta didn’t launch Threads in the EU. Because of the EU’s REGULATION. It would have led to massive NEW fines and Meta doesn’t want MORE massive fines. It was recently hit with an order to stop sending EU users data to the US for processing and was fined almost $1.3BN for breaching the GDPR’s requirements on data export. When companies’ actions or inactions harm the public, the public demands something be done. In the EU they’ve recognized the harm being done by social media companies and enacted regulation. Short term, companies pay the fine and change their behavior to stop new fines. This is what we want, what the public deserves. Protection from harm. Here’s a good piece by Natasha Lomas’ in Tech Cruch that spells out Meta’s current privacy problems and reminds us of the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, sending a strong sign of Democratic unity from one of the party’s most liberal members. “I think he’s done quite well, given the limitations that we have,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the “Pod Save America” podcast Thursday. “I do think that there are ebbs and flows.” Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist from New York, has sometimes bucked Biden and the party’s leaders, including voting against the deal the president negotiated with Republicans in May to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and casting the lone Democratic vote against a spending bill to keep the government operating and avoid a partial government shutdown. She endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and demurred in an interview last year when asked if she would support the incumbent president in 2024. Biden is facing nominal primary challenges for next year’s election in self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The denialists will never, ever accept climate change The world is burning up right now with temperatures soaring even in places like the arctic. The scientific consensus is that this is caused by climate change and common sense can tell any yokel on the street that this is not normal. However, the wingnuts will never accept this presumably because they either care more about their fossil fuel portfolios or they care more about owning the libs than anything else in this world. Here’s an example from Paul Hindraker (aka Hindrocket for those of you who remember the good old days of blogging.) This last week, the press has been full of alarmist headlines: Tuesday was the hottest day ever! No, Wednesday was the hottest day ever! Of course, you have to 1) define “ever,” and 2) believe that we have any idea what the average temperature is, over the whole Earth, on a particular day–let alone a particular day 1,000 years ago. At Watts Up With That?, Paul Homewood comments: Then there is this: Wait, what? I didn’t know they had SUVs 125,000 years ago. What made it warm then? You’re not supposed to ask.
It isn’t really news that Donald Trump tried to “weaponize” the federal government against his political enemies. After all, he did it right out in the open many, many times. Here’s just one example from October of 2020, before the election: Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough. Trump twice amplified supporters’ criticisms of Attorney General William Barr, including one featuring a meme calling on him to “arrest somebody!” He wondered aloud why his rivals, like President Barack Obama, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton hadn’t been imprisoned for launching a “coup” against his administration. “Where are all of the arrests?” Trump said, after several dozen tweets on the subject over the past 24 hours. “Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!” How about this?
Apparently, he wants to bring fascism faster: “By refusing to speak to the needs of the poor and working people, the Democratic Party helps to facilitate and enable the Trumps and the DeSantises and others. So, you end up with neo-fascism being in some ways dependent on neoliberalism and vice versa. That cycle, going around and around, means that we’re going to end up with fascism sooner or later. Every Democratic administration will just be a caretaker and a postponement for fascism to come. I am profoundly anti-fascist, and therefore I am trying to get at the roots of fascism.” Right, yeah. That makes sense. Sure it does. Meanwhile he’s running as the Green Party candidate and will probably be on the ballot in the swing states. And he could easily siphon off enough votes to put Donald Trump back in the white house. That’s how we’ll get at the roots of fascism? I hope the Democrats take this threat seriously. Quite a few people think that protest votes are their way of sticking it to the powers that be. But the people who will be hurt won’t be those in power.