Pagliacci

I’ve had Pixels since the first one, this is news to me.

Edit: Just went looking for it, not installed. It’s in the play store but not sure how it could be unavoidable when it’s not pre-installed.

He’d probably have to put all of his eggs in the reincarnation basket and start doing some good deeds.

Or bad deeds, depending on your opinion of actors.

The major question doctrine acts as a “get-out-of-text-free card” that conservative justices make “magically appear” whenever they see an executive branch policy that goes against their ideological “goals,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent in the 2022 case of West Virginia v. EPA.

Apparently legislating from the bench is fine for Conservatives as long as you make up your own judicial doctrine as justification.

I don’t know how we fix the problems we face. The court is seated by politicians, Congress is seated by grifters and ideologues, and the people are too defeated/controlled to make meaningful changes.

I’m not sure what could be done. It’s an executive order, not a bill, and it’s scope is fairly limited. It doesn’t create any new powers, just uses what’s outlined in the HEROES Act to reduce the burden of student loans. Since it’s an executive order the next President could revoke it, but the cancelled amounts can’t be brought back so that would just wipe away the changes to how interest is handled.

This is just bizarre…what’s the goal here? Putin already declared their acts as treason, how can he let this go unpunished? Is the Russian state really so weak that they have to forgive literal treason just to maintain power? What did Prigozhin gain from this? What about Kadyrov’s movement towards Rostov, does he stand down as well? Was this all a weird performance?

Just…bizarre.

Some live updates:

https://meduza.io/en/live/2023/06/23/yevgeny-prigozhin-s-coup

It’s pretty incredible how out of step Alito and Thomas seem to be even with the other conservative justices. Anytime there’s a 7-2 or 8-1 ruling you can almost guarantee they’ll be writing the dissent.

I know Wikipedia isn’t the ultimate arbiter of truth, but this is how it’s article on Fascism begins, and I think it would be fairly common for people to consider fascism a form of authoritarianism:

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

FWIW I’m not meaning to attack democracy here, I find it to be far preferable to the other systems we have at our disposal. But it is a tool that can be used for good or bad.

How so? If the majority votes in authoritarian laws that are violently enforced on minority populations, is that not authoritarian?

That answer assumes democracy can’t be authoritarian, which isn’t true.