My version of red-pilling is when I teach people the Boston Tea Party was triggered by England *LOWERING* the tea tax, and the Sons of Liberty were the wealthiest Boston businessmen who made their money smuggling and didn't want the competition. Smuggled tea was cheaper than legal tea because it evaded the tea tax, see, and men like John Hancock and Samuel Adams got very, very rich smuggling tea and selling it cheap.
Reducing the tea tax made legal tea competitive, cutting into their business.

There's another point here which is that voters SAY they dislike partisanship, which is why the Dems are like this... but how do voters even define partisanship?

https://twitter.com/keeltyc/status/1455908265418760198

I just recently had an exchange where I posted on a community message board to explain what New York's ballot propositions did. I was studiously non-partisan, just explaining the mechanics of each, not the implications or who would benefit, etc.

It seems to me that a great way to lose elections is to commit to civility and bipartisanship in an era of record polarization among the electorate. The Dems seem to think they can make politics less polarized by leading from the top? Meanwhile they GOP wins because they listen to their voters and appeal to that polarization.

I think this has everything to do with the GOP being much, much younger on average.

I’m seeing the bad reviews for Eternals, and really wondering if, post-Thanos, viewers want to be done with big MCU epics for a while. Like, it’s over. You told a good story, it was satisfying. Now let’s just chill for a while. That, and I do think they’re a bit clumsy with how they’re introducing new arcs. With the initial roll-out of Thanos, they made a bunch of stand-alone movies and just dropped TINY hints about the bigger arc that was coming.

Again, it's a shame Americans are never taught how the Nazis came to power (our history classes skip to the war and the Holocaust) because Hawley's arguments here are verbatim how the Nazis recruited young German men.

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1455559833709645828

Americans are raised to think the definition of Nazi is "hates Jews," but what lured millions of Germans to the party were promises to restore traditional masculinity, fight social corruption (porn/sex/homosexuality) and restore Germany to national pride instead of shame.

Now I'm watching Little Shop of Horrors, and it's fun how much you can see Frank Oz is used to directing Muppets. The staging, the camera movements, the timing... It's all extremely Muppety. And not in a bad way.

I think I'm not going to have time to make the tombstones I had planned for the yard, which is a shame... I was writing pandemic-related poetry for the headstones. Here lies Chuck
Cleansed of sin
Ivermectin did him in

Lord, I just realized a lot of you are too young to have lived through Norm Macdonald's run on Weekend Update, and that's a tragedy. One of the greatest eras in SNL history. Looking back it was such a clash of generations: "Hip" Boomers, who adored Dennis Miller, absolutely hated Norm Macdonald. But as the weeks went by he dug in his heels and intensified all the things they hated. It was performance art.

I avoided the topic yesterday, but what happened on 9/11 was al Qaeda killed 3,000 people and destroyed some buildings, and the US commenced a 20-year attack on itself. In NYC, the lasting consequence of 9/11 was the expansion of the NYPD into a militarized occupying force, a financial parasite that sucks resources away from quality of life and terrorizes city residents more than al Qaeda ever did.

CONSERVATIVES: “We believe in liberty and personal freedom!!”

QUEERS: “Great! We’ll marry the people we want, then.”

CONS: “No, you can’t do that.”

TRANS FOLKS: “We’ll identify as a gender other than that assigned at birth!”

CONS: “Absolutely not.” QUEERS: “Okay, so… what kind of liberty and freedom do you mean, then?”

CONS: “Well, religious freedom!”

MUSLIMS: “Great! That means a lot to us.”

CONS: “NOT YOUR RELIGION!!!”

I am really hoping we change course, but if things continue the way they are headed, I think his failure to anticipate the GOP turn to fascism and antidemocracy will be Obama’s greatest legacy.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1402304402791223300

Obama could have told the country that Trump and his campaign were colluding with the Russian government long before the 2016 Election. He didn’t because he “didn’t want to appear partisan.”

[And because polls had everyone believing Hillary was going to demolish Trump.]

I need to give this more thought, but my instinct is that the concern in journalism about not using hacked information is naive.

Once the information is out there, it’s findable for those who seek it. Obscuring it from reporting just empowers those people over the public.

https://twitter.com/propublica/status/1402208799973314562

The nature of information in today’s world is that power comes not from what is revealed, but from what is successfully hidden. The majority of secrets are open; to privilege THESE secrets over others just reinforces the power of the super-rich.

NYC has given up pretending city government has any authority over NYPD, and openly declared themselves a police state. “Asked if the curfew had been lifted, a spokesperson for the Parks Department referred Gothamist to the NYPD.”

Robert Moses is spinning in his grave.

** I HAVE A PLAN TO SAVE THE POST OFFICE **

YOUNG PEOPLE: Call your grandparents and ask if they got the card you sent.

IMPORTANT: DO NOT SEND A CARD.

When they say no, you sound very sad. "Oh, that's too bad. I heard that Trump was really underfunding the post office." You want to see how fast Congress and the White House are bombarded with calls to fix the Post Office?

Let them deal with a nation full of old people who think they missed some mail.

This has bothered me for a long time, but I've never spoken about it: In my career I've managed around 20 people or so at various times. Two of those people were Black.

I cannot tell you how different my supervisors were toward me about how I managed the Black direct reports. The level of scrutiny and suspicion I got from my bosses was really striking. If they called out sick, it was "Do you believe them?" If they were away from their desk for five minutes it was "Where's so-and-so?"