A plague. A series of politicians in denial. Blaming everything on the Chinese. A disease only brought under control when the citizens finally pay attention to what the scientists are saying.
Sound familiar? Sure does. It’s the Bubonic Plague outbreak in San Francisco over a hundred years ago.
Some of them have said the quiet part out loud — all the ones who think the economy is worth more than old people — but this is the underlying reality of every Republican’s policy ever.
I had no idea that there was any relevance in ancient and medieval history to current events, but the history of the antipopes is shockingly on point and surprisingly much more complicated than I imagined. I’ll cut to the chase here, but the whole post is fascinating.
So what can we learn from this? History is full of venal, self-interested rich guys who do not take no for an answer, and the thing is a lot of the time they actually get their way. People with weaker claims to the papal throne have in fact won when they managed to get other powerful people on their side. Moreover, “official” titles and lineages are not necessarily proof of moral worth. We should approach pontiffs on a case by case basis when we start making generalisations about Antipopes. The more you know about Urban VI and his election the more you can sympathise with trying for a do-over and fucking back off to Avignon.
In the grand scheme of things, however, whether or not we think of any particular Antipope as, well, an Antipope doesn’t really matter to them. What care do they have for us hundreds of years later and how we feel, when they were able to live out their days in luxury, writing screeds about how they were wronged.
There is a lesson here, as well as a warning. Rich dudes are not good at being told no. That can mean a number of things. It can been an amusing story in a blog six hundred years later, or it can mean a destabalisation process which feeds into military conflict. The difference is largely based on clout, but one should never assume that the powerful and rich who bestow such things do so because of procedure or some sort of nebulous concept of morality. They do so based on what it gives them. It is our job to make our feelings about that clear so that poor decisions are not made and retroactively forgiven. (*cough* Bush v. Gore)
I think I already knew that answer.
He loves that movie, don’t you know, but I don’t think it counts as legitimate legal precedent.
rudy giuliani, citing that key election law case, "my cousin vinny" pic.twitter.com/OVhxnUIvAB
— Oliver Willis (@owillis) November 19, 2020
Where’s the hook to drag this clown offstage?
This is getting ridiculous.
President Trump has abandoned his plan to win reelection by disqualifying enough ballots to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s wins in key battleground states, pivoting instead to a goal that appears equally unattainable: delaying a final count long enough to cast doubt on Biden’s decisive victory.
On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign wired $3 million to election officials in Wisconsin to start a recount in the state’s two largest counties. His personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has taken over the president’s legal team, asked a federal judge to consider ordering the Republican-controlled legislature to select the state’s electors. And Trump egged on a group of GOP lawmakers in Michigan who are pushing for an audit of the vote there before it is certified.
Giuliani has also told Trump and associates that his ambition is to pressure GOP lawmakers and officials across the political map to stall the vote certification in an effort to have Republican lawmakers pick electors and disrupt the electoral college when it convenes next month — and Trump is encouraging of that plan, according to two senior Republicans who have conferred with Giuliani and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter candidly.
But that outcome appears impossible. It is against the law in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin law gives no role to the legislature in choosing presidential electors, and there is little public will in other states to pursue such a path.
Behind the thin legal gambit is what several Trump advisers say is his real goal: sowing doubt in Biden’s victory with the president’s most ardent supporters and keeping alive his prospects for another presidential run in 2024.
Trump is openly trying to corrupt a democratic election in the United States, and he’s shameless about it, and his Republican cronies are turning a blind eye to the whole degrading process. Is there nothing that can be done? Do we just sit back and watch this boob commit fumbling, bumbling crimes that embarrass the country in the eyes of the world, and do nothing? It’s like standing outside the plate glass window of a bank, watching an idiot pound on the vault with a sledgehammer, while Rudy Giuliani stands at the door speed-talking nonsense at the crowd.
Oh, and almost half the crowd is cheering the crooks on.
Can we please put an end to our ongoing national humiliation and frog-march the whole mob of blithering grifters out of their positions of authority now? Can we at least strip Rudy of his license to practice law? It looks like we’re not even capable of that.
All right, Brenden. I’ll wear the mask and accept that I look like a stupid dork, and you can point and laugh all you want.
MAGA life coach Brenden Dilley will not be wearing a mask because it's "better to be dead than a fucking dork." pic.twitter.com/QVgTgmdE1D
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 19, 2020
You can die.
Could you please get it over with quickly, though, before you infect others? The whole point of the mask is to protect others from your pernicious vapors, so it really doesn’t help contain the pandemic for you to ramble about spewing in public.
Nice.
Civility –> Complacency –> Complicity –> Corruption
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) May 29, 2019
This does not imply that being pointlessly rude is productive. But the Democrats do have to stand up for specific goals and and be unafraid to express them clearly.
I was just thinking…with Donald Trump out of office, are the comedians going into mourning? He is such an easy target! I suppose they could milk the aftermath of his failure for humor for a while, but honestly, I’m so tired of the Orange Twerp that I don’t want to see him as the butt of jokes anymore. I just want to see him and his crooked cronies in jail.
I think it’s time for all the internet comics to pivot and start making Biden jokes. He’s an easy target, too, and you know he’s so conservative at heart that he’ll be making all kinds of bad policy decisions that will deserve skewering. Start now, please. We’ll all know the election is settled when the satire swivels to aim at the Biden administration.
Or, in other words, ratfuckers gonna fuck rats.
A day after it was revealed that GOP state Sen. Dave Senjem tested positive for COVID-19 after attending a Nov. 5 party caucus, news broke that Republican senators and staffers were informed in a Tuesday memo that “a number of [GOP Senate] members and staff have been diagnosed with COVID-19.”
DFLers were not informed of the rash of cases on the other side of the aisle.
I wonder how many of the Republicans saw this as an opportunity to mingle with their Democratic colleagues and spread the virus before the fact that they were plague ratfuckers got out?
