#Sabotaging Democrats

[qqueenofhades]

Normally, this whole "the entire Republican Party from Trump on down is now a willing Russian asset/actively working to regurgitate Russian disinformation to hurt Biden" thing would be a huge scandal. However, because we live in the worst timeline, I expect it will get 3-4 days of coverage max, the media will largely shrug and give the GOP a pass, and go back to writing 248402935 concern-trolling pieces about Biden's age.

#hilary for ts #politics for ts #like i cannot emphasize enough how this is NOT NORMAL #and yet the media has collectively decided it will give the republicans a pass for everything and work on sabotaging biden #because it isn't that they learned nothing from 2016 #it is that they learned exactly how to sabotage the democrat and they're doing their best to run it again #BUT HIS AGEEEEE is the new BUT HER EEEEEEMAILS #i repeat: 🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃

[thats-on-point]

Clip: Biden Says He Has Cancer But the White House Says Its COVID

#biden #covid #democracy #democrats #doccomeau #entertainment #inept #kensantos #news #packthecourt #podcast #podcasts #politics #primaries #republicans #sabotage #supremecourt #thatsonpoint #thatsonpointllc #top

[notesfromachair]

Declaring Your Independence

I’m not a patriotic guy in the same way I’m not a religious guy and for the exact same reason I hated day camp.  I truly despise mandated group activities. You will never find me on a cruise or part of a tour group.  And even as a member of several unions, a political party and any number of biological and chosen families, I like to leave my options open. This makes perfect sense to me This is…

View On WordPress

#democrats #destination weddings #eleven #Fourth of July #hard pass gif #independence #kate bush running up that hill #lil edie flag gif #Netflix #Self sabotage #stranger things

[moonlight26posts-blog]

BREAKING: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell makes the shocking confession that Republicans are intentionally sabotaging the border to help Trump win the 2024 election.

It’s astonishing that he would admit to plotting something so truly indefensible...

For months, Democrats and Republicans have been crafting bipartisan legislation that would tighten immigration restrictions and also provide much-needed aid to Ukraine.

Now, Republicans don’t want to move forward with it after all of that work because they’re afraid fixing our immigration problems would help Biden in the election. They’d rather let the problem worsen then let Biden get credit for anything.

During a closed-door meeting with Republicans this week, McConnell suggested splitting the immigration and Ukraine funding initiatives into different bills.

“When we started this, the border united us and Ukraine divided us,” said McConnell, according to a source knowledgable about the remarks.

“The politics on this have changed,” McConnell went on, explaining that a chaotic border situation is advantageous for Trump. The ex-president can’t run on fixing immigration if immigration is already fixed.

“We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” said McConnell. “We’re in a quandary.”

Clearly, despite all of their ranting and whining, Republicans don’t actually care about the border situation. They care about exploiting it — and the suffering that flows from it — for cheap political points.

Republicans love power more than they love this country. It’s that simple.

#vote blue no matter who #vote blue #vote democrat #vote biden #please vote #voting matters #vote so there will be no doubt

[mostlysignssomeportents]

John Deere's repair fake-out

Last week, a seeming miracle came to pass: John Deere, the Big Ag monopolist that — along with Apple — has led the Axis of Evil that killed, delayed and sabotaged dozens of Right to Repair laws, sued for peace, announcing a Memorandum of Understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation to make it easier for farmers to fix their own tractors:

https://www.fb.org/files/AFBF_John_Deere_MOU.pdf

This is a move that’s both badly needed and long overdue. Deere abuses copyright law to force farmers to pay for official repairs — even when the farmer does the repair. That’s possible thanks to a practice called VIN locking, in which engine parts come with DRM that prevents the tractor from recognizing them until they pay hundreds of dollars for a John Deere technician to come to their farm and type an unlock code into the tractor’s console:

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

Like all DRM, VIN locks are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law that criminalizes distributing tools to bypass “access controls,” even if you do so for a lawful purpose (say, to fix your own tractor using a part you paid for). Violations of DMCA 1201 carry a penalty of 5 years in prison and a $500k fine — for a first offense.

This means that Deere owners are locked into using Deere for repairs, which also means that if Deere decides something isn’t broken, a farmer can’t get it fixed. This is very bad news indeed, because John Deere tractors are just computers in a fancy, mobile case, and John Deere is incredibly bad at digital security:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

That’s scary stuff, because John Deere is a monopolist, and a successful attack on the always-connected, networked tractors and other equipment it supplies to the world’s farmers could endanger the global food supply.

Deere doesn’t want to make insecure tractors, but it also doesn’t want to be embarrassed by security researchers who point out that its security is defective. Because security researchers have to bypass Deere tractors’ locks to probe their security, Deere can leverage DMCA1201 into a veto over who gets to warn the public about the mistakes it made.

It’s not just security researchers that Deere gets to gag: the company uses its repair monopoly to threaten farmers who complain about its business practices, holding their million-dollar farm equipment hostage to their silence:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

This all adds up to what Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business model,” an abuse of copyright law that allows a monopolistic corporation to reach beyond its own walls and impose its will on it customers, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

If Deere was finally suing for peace in the Repair Wars, well, that was wonderful news indeed — as I said, a seeming miracle.

But — like all miracles — it was too good to be true.

The MOU that Deere and the Farm Bureau signed is full of poison pills, gotchas, fine-print and mendacity, as Lauren Goode documents in her Wired article, “Right-to-Repair Advocates Question John Deere’s New Promises”:

https://www.wired.com/story/right-to-repair-advocates-question-john-deeres-new-promises/

For starters, the MOU makes the Farm Bureau promise to end its advocacy for state Right to Repair bills, which would create a repair system governed by democratically accountable laws, not corporate fiat. Clearly, Deere has seen the writing on the wall, after the passage in 2002 of Right to Repair laws in New York and Colorado:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

These two bills broke the corporate anti-repair coalition’s winning streak, which saw dozens of state R2R bills defeated:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

Deere’s deal-with-the-devil is a cynical ploy to brake R2R’s momentum and ensure that any repairs are carried out on Deere’s terms. Now, about those terms…

Deere’s deal offers independent repair shops access to diagnostic tools and parts “on fair and reasonable terms,” a murky phrase that can mean whatever Deere decides it means. Crucially, the deal is silent on whether Deere will supply the tools needed to activate VIN locks, meaning that farmers will still be at Deere’s mercy when they effect their own repairs.

What’s more, the deal itself isn’t legally binding, and Deere can cancel it at any time. Once you dig past the headline, the Deere’s Damascene conversion to repair advocacy starts to look awfully superficial — and deceptive.

One person who wasn’t fooled is sick.codes, the hacker who has done the most important work on reverse-engineering Deere’s computer systems, culminating in last summer’s live, on-stage hack of a John Deere tractor at Defcon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/15/deere-in-headlights/#doh-a-deere

Shortly after the announcement, Sick.codes tweeted how the fine-print in the MOU would have prevented him from doing the work he’s already done (including “a direct stab at me lol”):

https://twitter.com/sickcodes/status/1612484935495057409

As with other instances of monopolistic, corporate copyfraud — like, say, the deceptive Open Gaming License — the John Deere capitulation is really a bid to take away your rights, dressed up as a gift of more rights:

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/706163316598407168/good-riddance-to-the-open-gaming-license

[Image ID: Hieronymus Bosch's painting, 'The Conjurer.' The Conjuror's shell-game table holds a small John Deere tractor that the audience of yokels gawps at. One yokel is wearing a John Deere hat. The conjurer is holding a wrench.]

#pluralistic #copyfraud #right to repair #r2r #headfa #deerlife #john deere #tractors #big ag #licenses

[vote-democrat-president-congress]

BREAKING: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell makes the shocking confession that Republicans are intentionally sabotaging the border to help Trump win the 2024 election.

It's astonishing that he would admit to plotting something so truly indefensible...

For months, Democrats and Republicans have been crafting bipartisan legislation that would tighten immigration restrictions and also provide much-needed aid to Ukraine.

Now, Republicans don't want to move forward with it after all of that work because they're afraid fixing our immigration problems would help Biden in the election. They'd rather let the problem worsen then let Biden get credit for anything.

During a closed-door meeting with Republicans this week, McConnell suggested splitting the immigration and Ukraine funding initiatives into different bills.

"When we started this, the border united us and Ukraine divided us," said McConnell, according to a source knowledgable about the remarks.

"The politics on this have changed," McConnell went on, explaining that a chaotic border situation is advantageous for Trump. The ex-president can't run on fixing immigration if immigration is already fixed.

"We don’t want to do anything to undermine him," said McConnell. "We’re in a quandary."

Clearly, despite all of their ranting and whining, Republicans don't actually care about the border situation. They care about exploiting it — and the suffering that flows from it — for cheap political points.

Republicans love power more than they love this country. It's that simple. source: Occupy Democrats 

[fuckyeahhistorycrushes]

Tamara Wiszniewska (1919-1981) - Polish actress

Tamara Wiszniewska was born on December 19, 1919 in Dubno, Poland (now a region in western Ukraine) on the banks of the Ikva River. It was here that she spent her younger years during which she picked up dancing, which eventually led her to her career in film. In her 1981 obituary in the Democrat & Chronicle, it was reported that Tamara, at age 15, “Was a ballet dancer, when German film director Paul Wegener discovered her and gave her a role in the historical film, August der Starke (August the Strong)” which premiered in 1936. This German/Polish co-production is a biographical look into the life of Augustus II, ruler of Saxony and Poland-Lithuania from 1694-1733. Although Tamara played only a small role it marked her debut and eventual rise to fame within the Polish film industry.

Following her appearance in August der Starke, Tamara appeared in thirteen other films between 1936 and 1939, including Trójka Hultajska (The Trio Hultajska, 1937), Ordynat Michorowski (Ordinate Michorowski, 1937), and Kobiety nad Przepaścią (Women Over the Precipice, 1938). Wladyslaw (Walter) Mikosz, Tamara’s future husband, produced two of these films. In an interview, Tamara and Walter’s daughter, Irene, states that, "The two met because of their film careers, and were married [late that same year] in 1937".

Life for the Mikoszs was happy for a time. Tamara continued to pursue her acting career through 1938 and 1939 and had welcomed a new born daughter into the world alongside her husband, Wladyslaw. Unfortunately, these happy times did not last long as the Mikosz family experienced the rise of Nazi Germany and their occupation of Poland in 1939 during World War II. The following excerpt from an interview with Tamara in a 1974 Times Union tells how drastically their lives were changed:

"I always played a rich spoiled girl who had lovely clothes, and for a short time I lived that kind of life too. It was a short, beautiful life that ended when the Germans took over Poland in 1939. We were wealthy and the toast of the town then. We’d go to Prague and Vienna just to see an opera or to play in the casinos. When the Germans came, my intuition told me I should have something on me to exchange. I sewed my jewelry into my clothes. Later, it bought us passes to freedom and bread so we were never hungry."

The German occupation of Poland during World War II brought then “beautiful” life of the Mikosz family to an end. Gone were their illustrious careers in film and the rewards that such a life had brought to them. In a later interview, Irene mentioned that her mother "was preparing to sign a contract for a film career in Hollywood, but Hitler’s invasion of Poland derailed the plans". Sadly, Tamara’s last appearance on the silver screen was in 1939 prior to the invasion of Hitler’s Germany; she never again starred in any films.

Although her dreams had been crushed, Tamara and her family did not lose hope. They made the best of their current situation, and were able to survive by selling the fruits of their labors that they harvested during their days in the film industry; their lives had been consumed with a fight to survive rather than a dream to thrive. However, not being ones to live quiet lives, the Mikoszs volunteered for the Polish Underground, the exiled Polish government that fought to resist German occupation of Poland during World War II. As civilians with backgrounds in film, Tamara and Walter were most likely engaged in spreading Polish nationalistic and anti-German propaganda. Such efforts of the civilian branch of the Polish Underground was in support of what Jan Kamieński refers to as "small sabotage" in his book, Hidden in the Enemy's Sight: Resisting the Third Reich from Within: "In contrast of major sabotage, the idea of small sabotage was to remind the German occupiers of an enduring Polish presence, to ensure that they felt a constant sense of unease and generally undermine their self-confidence". While attending to these duties within the Underground, the Mikosz family was separated and shipped off to separate countries: Tamara and her daughter, Irene, to Czechoslovakia (where Tamara’s parents had been sent) and Walter to Bavaria. The family was not reunited until 1945, when they were sent to the same refugee camp in Bavaria. The Mikoszs remained in the Bavarian refugee camp until the year 1950, in which they emigrated to the United States of America. Tamara and Walter lived quiet lives in Rochester, NY after arriving from a war-torn Europe, and did so until they passed away.

Although they have long since passed away from this Earth, the stories of the Polish film star, Tamara, and her film-producer husband, Wladyslaw Mikosz, will live on so long as there are people around to tell it.

#history #history crushes #submission #tamara wiszniewska #polish #actress #film history #1930s #30s #old hollywood #women in film #women in history #poland #wwii #world war 2 #ww2 #ww2 history #old movies #old phography #20th century

[txttletale]

do you have any response to people who treat voting like a trolley problem? because that seems to be where a lot of people here are coming at it from. like no faith in electoralism no care for the process, just a decision with a level of four bad and a level of five bad. to be clear thats not the way i come at it but i do think thats how many people think abt it

i mean the response is that, like, voting is not like the trolley problem because it happens more than once and not in a vacuum. it's more like... i don't know, one of those game theory games that unfolds across multiple play sessions. there will be a 2028 election and a 2032 election and the results of the previous elections will inform democratic party strategy, candidate selection, and policy in both of those. if you pledge to always support the democratic party as long as they're better than the republican party, then they can do 99.9% of what the republican party does without worrying about your unwavering support. if you have actual red lines (and this is you, as a bloc, as a group, individual political actions never matter) then the party will in fact think twice before crossing them about whether the hit to electoral support is worth it.

obviously, i'm a communist, i don't think you will ever get anything good out of the democratic party. bourgeois elections are ultimately choices of which representatives will repress you (that's some vintage marxist humour for ya). but if you think it's worth voting at all then you should also be aware of how your vote and the withdrawal thereof can be used to play chicken/hardball with political parties that need it. the right is well fucking aware of this--right-wing labour party members in the UK ran a huge sabotage campaign against the social democrat jeremy corbyn, losing the election and using that loss to oust all the left-wing elements of the party. the tea party have been using threats like this to push the republican party rightwards for decades now.

of course, you will never get something outside of the overton window of acceptable ruling-class politics by voting but if you believe there are meaningful gradations within that window (as, if you plan to ever vote at all, you logically must) then those concessions should still matter and should still be worth pursuing if you're already making the decisions to engage with electoral politics at all

#ask #rain-rome

[tanadrin]

Honestly, I *don't* want to mix things with proportional representation. I see proportional representation as an excellent way of increasing the importance of dealings between politicians and reducing the incentive effects of the voters. But in my ideal world I'll need to negotiate with people who do like proportional representation, and this system is a compromise I could get behind. Plus you can plug and play any three different electoral systems for different compromises.

First past the post is a bad, undemocratic electoral system. First past the post privileges large parties by making small ones unviable, and distorts the composition of parliaments by wasting votes. It can be gerrymandered in a way proportional representation cannot be. It produces highly unrepresentative outcomes. It is a bad electoral system! All good voting systems are to some degree inclined to more proportional results.

I've never heard the accusation that PR "increases the importance of dealings between politicians," but look. I don't know how else to put this. That is a stupid objection. Just absolutely boneheaded. You haven't thought about this at all, I reckon.

People hate on "politicians" as a generic class, but it's like hating on lawyers as a generic class. You need politicians. You want politicians. You want people whose specialized job it is to read legislation, fight about what should go in it, represent your interests, and come to balanced compromises about those interests. People percieve politics as messy, venal, and corrupt, and it can be all those things, but guess what? The alternative to career politicians is part-time citizens who don't know what the fuck they're doing, have no expertise in the legislative process, and therefore are at the mercy of lobbyists who can walk them like a dog because they're naive and inexperienced.

There's this especially (but not exclusively) American pathology that is a suspicion of government that works too well. This peculiar notion that if only we sabotage government a little bit it will keep tyranny in check and make politicians more honest... somehow. But filling government with random yahoos doesn't get you a noble collegium of Tocquevillian citizen-lawmakers, it gets you a pack of Marjorie Taylor Greens and Lauren Boberts. You know--morons. Americans will support all these ballot initiatives that fuck up government on purpose, like term-limiting legislators and keeping their salaries low so only rich people can afford to go into politics (and even then are only willing to do it as a stepping stone to other gigs), and vote for people who promise to make government work even worse by cutting the budget and lowering taxes, and then have the absolute gall to whine about how badly the government works. My fellow Americans, you did that on purpose.

(And there's this weird paradox where Americans all loathe Congress. Who keeps voting these creeps in? Well. You do. Congresscritters are generally pretty highly approved of by their own constituents. The stereotype of lazy, stupid, venal politicians always seems to apply to the other guys.)

And you will also note that since the abolition of things that used to facilitate deals between politicians in the U.S. congress--since the abolition of earmarks and chummy socials between congressmen and the post--generally, since the post-Gingrich upheaval in the House--it has gotten harder to pass even necessary, basic legislation, because it is harder to make the basic compromises necessary to keep government functioning. Having three separate legislatures that each can claim a different sort of democratic mandate isn't a recipe for good legislation, it's a recipe for paralysis and constitutional crisis.

[qqueenofhades]

I should ask more specifically if you have any thoughts on Marianne Williamson's bid for the presidency and her campaign. She's a bit of a kook, but her PLATFORM seems really solid and definitely might appeal to the "vote republican for the economy!" moderates.

To be honest, I haven't looked up her platform or any of her policies, and I don't care if they appeal to the mushy middle who always wants an excuse not to vote for Democrats because they're "too socially liberal." Considering that whatever candidate the GOP runs, be it Trump or DeSantis or another of their terrible people, will be an unrepentant, unreconstructed, full-out fascist who can't be allowed to win at any cost, any person selfish enough to deliberately increase the odds of that candidate winning, as prominent third-party candidates always, ALWAYS hurt the Democrats, is not a serious figure or someone who should remotely be given any attention or artifical media prominence.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts #i hope she and any other would-be third-party/'democratic' candidates disappear and are never seen again #also her thing about 'moving on from biden!!!' is bullshit #and again indicative of someone who knows nothing about politics #biden is the sitting president #the incumbency advantage is huge #also he has done genuinely good things! which i like and support! #anyone who insists we have to ~mOvE oN #for REaSoNs #in an election that will again be against a full-blown fascist #is not a person who should be allowed any airtime #though i am sure she will get it as the media will desperately want to sabotage biden and/or make it a 'horse race' #the 2024 election will be equally as monumental for the fate of the country as 2020 was #and this is less than zero the time to fuck around #the end

[memingursa]

This new wave of American politicians pretending to be progressive/democrats only to do a massive heel turn and shit on the people who voted for them and sabotage any leftward momentum is so empire crumbling core like good god

[thats-on-point]

Clip: Orthadox Jewish Circumcision Is Pedophilia

#biden #covid #democracy #democrats #doccomeau #entertainment #inept #kensantos #news #packthecourt #podcast #podcasts #politics #primaries #republicans #sabotage #supremecourt #thatsonpoint #thatsonpointllc #top

[irregularincidents]

Twelve days into the Korean War, on 7th July 1950, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover approached President Harry S. Truman with a list of 12,000 names.

These names (97% of which were American citizens) were of people that Hoover felt should be indefinitely arrested and placed in concentration internment camps due to his claims that the people named were necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage" in the event that America were to go to war against the Soviet Union.

The letter wherein he proposed these arrests stated that eventually the interned people would be allowed to have a hearing. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

Who would have been these people that Hoover wished to detain? His usual suspects. People with socialist or communist beliefs or sympathies (real or manufactured), pacifists, early members of the civil rights movement such as the African-American singer and actor Paul Robeson...

Truman, to his credit, didn't agree with Hoover's suggestion and chose to veto it, although Congress reportedly would later vote to overturn his veto.

This was one of several documents declassified in the mid-2000s that underlined for as terrible as J. Edgar Hoover was, there were still even worse things he wanted to do that even Truman (who was brought on as FDR's vice president because the Democrats thought he'd make them look tougher on communism than Roosevelt's former VP, the socially progressive Henry Agard Wallace*) was against it.

*Wallace wanted to do things like ending segregation, bringing about gender and racial equality, and establishing a national health service (like the UK eventually adopted several years later), so OBVIOUSLY he had to go.

#irregular incidents #the cold war #j edgar hoover #history #american history

[meret118]

Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points, or 76 percent, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats.”

. . .

At this point, it seems safe to say that one of the key reasons why the U.S. failed where other countries succeeded is because right-wing leaders and media sought to sabotage the effort—in particular by casting doubt on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.

-----

They spread anti-mask propaganda too.

#Covid 19 #Antivaxxers

[thebreakfastgenie]

"This is the new November 5th" "This is just like November 5th" No. There will never be another November 5th.

Do you even remember what late 2020 was like? It was before the COVID vaccine. We were still at the stage of the pandemic where it wasn't really safe for anyone to go anywhere. The Republican Party was acting like it wasn't happening and if it was, it wasn't a big deal. The month before, Amy Coney Barrett got COVID at her super-spreader confirmation party in the Rose Garden after Mitch McConnell reversed everything he said about election year appointments in 2016. Also in October, one of the presidential debates was cancelled because Trump had COVID. He was hospitalized and we all spent a couple of days waiting to see if he was going to die of the virus he told Americans not to worry about. Democrats encouraged their voters to vote by mail in order to be safe during the pandemic, so Republicans sabotaged the postal system in the middle of a pandemic. Mail was taking weeks to arrive. Election Day came and we all held our collective breath and waited for them to count the vote. Election Day went and we still didn't know. I was trying so hard to make myself do literally anything else but all I could do was sit in the couch and refresh electoral maps and stare at Nevada. Sometimes I clicked over to Arizona instead.

And then in the middle of that, destiel. It was such a welcome and desperately needed distraction. It was so completely insane and unexpected. There were perhaps no ships with the same level of history. There will never be anything like it ever again.

#i probably missed at least three things that happened in fall of 2020 #because that's just what literally every day in the trump administration was LIKE

[soberscientistlife]

I cannot quit laughing at this. This is what America is like now when Republicans are in charge. Democrats pay to fix it and republicans start sabotaging everything!!