bearistotle
@gnrosenberg
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actual bear pretending (poorly) to be human professor @DukeGSF | w @jan_dutkiewicz FEED THE PEOPLE! coming soon from @BasicBooks |
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Saying slavery was a "necessary evil" to American economic and national development is, without Cotton realizing it, the most damning and incisive indictment of America imaginable.
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A pathetic aspect of rightwing “intellectuals” is their eager moral self-infantilization: only people on the left exercise moral agency. Reactionaries, by contrast, are always helpless before their worst urges, their most evil choices an unavoidable reaction to leftist action.
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I think it’s important for people to recognize that the “groomer” panic being instigated by the right is categorically different and more dangerous than what we have seen historically and has greater potential to lead to widespread political violence. My analysis follows.
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What... what does Larry Kudlow think beer is made from exactly?
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If you learn that a nurse might make more on unemployment than working as a nurse, and your response is to lower unemployment benefits rather than to raise nurse salaries, you are the problem.
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Student would receive an A+ in my class after sending this basically no matter what else happened
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Ok y'all did it: A thread about hogs, ferality, and race in American history.
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I think it should be decriminalized too, but it's objectively hilarious that The Economist, the lifestyle magazine of opinionated London banking lads, is first through the breach for cocaine.
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All the conversations about free speech and cancel culture would be greatly improved if they started from the objective and obvious fact that, for most people, the number one threat to your free speech is your boss.
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Re: student self-censorship, we have robust evidence that current college students are highly risk-averse in comparison to students 20 years ago.
They drink less. Do fewer hard drugs. They smoke less. They have less sex. They are more health, diet, and exercise conscious.
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I know for a fact that Goody Proctor lead a lunchtime discussion with the devil in which 7 out of 14 of the 10 year old girls danced with him in the forest. I have seen screenshots of a Discord in which 20 girls in the same class all danced with the devil. cc
@benwritesthings
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Biden is in a tough bind, but the reality is that, absent action on voting reform and an effort to head-off the GOP's plan to refuse to certify a Democratic victor in 2024, most of his wins will be trivial and fleeting. That's the huge looming catastrophe and it needs action.
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If I could beam just one thought into the brains of every person to help them better understand the politics of food in the US it would be this:
Farmers are mostly rich, politically conservative white people.
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It seems to me this extremely predictable outcome is exactly why you shouldn’t tweet about sensationalistic and implausible accusations on topics you know little about and that the net effect is it’s very likely that you have helped to misinform people on this issuec. Do you
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(2) According to the “groomer” panic, pedophilia isn’t tied to specific acts, but to political claims that are not related directly either to children or sex. IOW pedophilia becomes shorthand for anything the right doesn’t like and any non-conservative speech act can disclose it.
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A better explanation is that college students, burdened with incredible debt, are more sensitive to their professional futures. They recognize that the absence of a robust social safety net means the difference between professional security and lifelong precarity is a fine line.
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(1) The strategy use the language of child sexual abuse as a metaphor for disagreements about educational content. This muddles the water about what constitutes abuse by confusing speech acts directed at children, whether good or bad, with physical harm.
A predictable but horrible consequence of rightwing forces using the language of sexual predation as a metaphor for educational material they don't like is that it evacuates any specificity or material harm from the actual crime of child sexual predation and trivializes it.
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Muddying the waters about a crime that harms real actual children is reckless and disgusting but, in addition, it redefines evidence of child sexual abuse. It need not be acts, nor even soliciting speech, nor even general speech, but is, in fact, ideas that motivate the speech.
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If Lawrence v Texas (2003) were overturned tomorrow, courts in AL, FL, ID, KS, LA, MI, MS, NC, OK, SC, TX, and UT could begin prosecuting people under existing but currently unenforced sodomy statutes, no new laws necessary.
Why am I posting that fact this morning? No reason.
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So true. Backlash. The toddlers always get so pissed whenever I assign Edelman no matter how much I tell them they have to *understand* his critique of reproductive futurism even if they don't *agree* with his critique of reproductive futurism.
@wil_da_beast630
Here's my best guess. Critical queer and gender theory being compulsory in public schools for toddlers pushed this way too far. This is backlash.
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This is why, as
@jasonintrator
argues, these sex panics have been rhetorically central to fascist movements and other eliminationist political projects.
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If you believe your adversaries are a gang of pedophiles, normal transactional politics is unlikely to proceed. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how democratic governance can be sustained when a large part of the electorate believes that their enemies should be put to death.
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Every college town has a parasitic restaurant—expensive, mediocre, fussy, pretentious—that, thanks to inertia and location, survives as the path of least resistance for faculty dinners.
Its only virtue is furnishing a good metaphor for everything else wrong with academia.
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If evil is the necessary condition of the act we call the act evil.
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tired: staff mistakenly booked four seasons landscaping
wired: staff booked four seasons landscaping for blue collar optics
inspired: staff booked four seasons landscaping because it wasn’t within 1000 feet of a school
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"Perhaps the county’s brutal response to the girl’s act of mercy came because she reminded adults that they were not metaphysically bound to cruelty to animals; they could choose mercy but did not."
@jan_dutkiewicz
and I on a girl and a goat.
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We need a german word for when everyone is subtweeting a tweet but you didn't see the original tweet they're subtweeting and can't find it.
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JD is right. We should be like the French. Elections should be governed by federal law to ensure standard voting procedures and reporting no matter where you are in the country. Also, elections should be on Sunday.
I have a buddy in France, and they just had an election there. Polls closed a few hours ago and they already know who the winners are. Must be nice to live in a first world country.
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(3) "Pedophile" is different than most slurs because, for the right, it incites and justifies direct fatal violence. It is different than general subjugating speech, which can justify violence, but is not always or intrinsically eliminationist.
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The paranoid and conspiratorial nature of this–totalizing, manichean, immaterial, and entirely unfalsifiable–is everything that folks like Lindsay and Rufo *project* onto their leftwing adversaries, but turned up a notch. Where did they get it? Qanon.
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Take this accusation, from Candace Owens, that anyone who disagrees with the Florida statute must be a predator, a charge she then levies at Disney, a line similar to what Rufo had claimed.
Candace Owens slanders LGBTQ teachers: "Pedophilia is around the corner...We must not give these freaks and predators so much as one inch”
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Or the accusation that Judge Jackson and any Senator who votes to confirm her, including Romney, Murkowski, and Collins, are "pro-pedophile." Merely disagreeing with the rightwing framework about Jackson and Disney reveals them to be pro-predator.
1. Any Senator voting to confirm
#KJB
is pro-pedophile just like she is.
There are MANY more qualified black women judges, that actually can define what a woman is, but Biden chose the one that protects evil child predators.
And then Romney, Murkowski, and Collins vote for her.
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That defense of assault weapons is almost too on the nose: hordes of unmanaged life invade domesticity and managed reproduction (the daughter) and must be culled with massive and indiscriminate violence. Six hundred years of settler colonialism is speaking in that tweet.
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America’s “fertility rate” is an extremely normal thing to worry about, my dude!
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"Pedophile" doesn’t attempt to justify the unequal distribution of status, privileges, or resources. The right doesn’t want to make pedophiles “second class citizens.” It wants to put them to death. It regards their existence as an intolerable threat to society's most vulnerable.
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Ah, just yesterday this tragic murder was being used by police state enthusiasts as evidence that San Francisco needed to crack down on the homeless and drug users and maybe publicly hang more fetanyl dealers or something.
The suspect is a tech CEO.
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My alternative proposal: work with the IRS to “reimagine” billionaires as millionaires.
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If you swapped today's GOP for the one that existed only 6 months ago and re-ran the 2020 election, you would have had dueling slates from all of the swing states sent to the electoral college. That's how fast it's moved and it's not slowing down.
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Whether "self-censorship" is part of this is, again, far from clear, but it's notable that students from marginalized backgrounds--POC, first-gen, and low income--tend to report more, not less concern about stigmatized speech and expression.
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How this effects intellectual inquiry, attitudes around speech and expression, and desire for conflict or debate is hard to say.
But I would suggest *ideological conformity* is a poor explanation, if not a red herring altogether.
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A predictable but horrible consequence of rightwing forces using the language of sexual predation as a metaphor for educational material they don't like is that it evacuates any specificity or material harm from the actual crime of child sexual predation and trivializes it.
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Liberals (in the broadest sense) should recognize that generalized charges of pedophilia are a limiting horizon for a liberal polity. They set up the conditions for exactly a winner-takes-all conception of the political order and sanction the most extreme forms of violence.
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A crucial insight of sexuality studies is that identity, behavior, and desire are not interchangeable. They are related, but conceptually and functionally distinct.
MPX shows that once again our collective inability to learn this one simple lesson causes incredible suffering.
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In this sense, there is nothing “new” about charges that a 5th grade teacher is “grooming” his students by casually mentioning his husband to them. This kind of homophobia is very old indeed.
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Well, there it is. No culture war stays only in the ether forever. People start buying their own bullshit, start believing their own propaganda. I’m not making predictions about where this goes beyond that it seems to me that political violence is likely.
And it is terrifying.
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The Big Bird thing is a really remarkable piece of rightwing derangement. The purpose of the segment isn't to convince kids to get vaccinated--the kids don't get to choose, you doofuses--it's to help assuage the fears of kids who may not want to get any shot.
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And this circles back to a point
@lastpositivist
made in his post about liberalism: liberalism is intended to avoid a winner-takes-all political order precisely because that causes endless cycles of disastrous political violence.
I wrote a longish blog post on why I'm not a liberal. Ultimately of course the boundaries of any political coalition or ideology are fuzzy. But I hope this at least clarifies what I mean, and reject, and think you ought reject, in Liberalism.
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(4) But those charges are also as old as politics. What’s new now? Many people have correctly noted that the charge of pedophilia has been historically directed at sexual (and racial) minorities to justify violence.
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While there is a deep historical precedent at work here, what we’re seeing is also unique in another way: the charge of pedophilia is not just being directed just at sexual (or racial) minorities as it has in the past, but at powerful conservative dissenters.
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I think the general public, despite the absolute shitshow of January 2020, is unaware that the American constitutional order has no good way to deal with dueling slates. Trump seizing the office through a House vote would be massively unpopular, but Trump and his GOP DO NOT CARE.
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Sure, that's nice. But at-will employment laws mean that it is substantively meaningless. Boss fired you for being gay or trans? He'll lie and say it was for trivial other reason. You want *substantive* protection for LGBT employment? Ax at-will employment and strengthen unions.
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Part of what makes reducing this issue to "cancel culture" or "ideological conformity" so deeply corrosive is because it refuses to take seriously these valid and concrete concerns about precarity, risk, and professional success.
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To conclude, the charge of “groomer” (1) conflates disagreements about educational content with actual child sexual abuse; (2) has come to mean offering any view that dissents from conservative orthodoxy;
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I think most people will be ok with plant-based beer if they just give it a chance.
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If you learned something from this thread, please read the work of the many historians working on agriculture who helped form my thinking. These include: Anderson’s Creatures of Empire, Cronon’s Changes in the Land and Nature’s Metropolis, and Specht’s Red Meat Republic.
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Somewhere near half of GOP respondents polled say they believe that it “was ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ true that top Democrats were involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”
Poll: 49% of Republicans said it was “definitely” or “probably” true that top Democrats were involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.
QAnon conspiracies are genuinely going viral.
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In fact, it is increasingly central to rightwing in-group/out-group identification such that it is used to discipline and even potentially exclude from the right otherwise powerful people.
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I am grudgingly impressed by the ability of American newsmedia to continue horse race coverage even when one of the two horses running has clearly collapsed and died on the track.
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While it's shocking that they're openly signaling they're going to try to do it even if it would be massively unpopular, they will absolutely try if given the chance. And Democrats seem to be just hoping that it won't happen, which, of course, makes it much more likely to happen.
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IOW this framing may be rooted in homo- and transphobia, but it can be used to advance all the right's projects: militarism, evangelical Christianity, white nationalism, anti-labor and anti-abortion policies, and simply the partisan interests of the GOP and Donald Trump.
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And that makes obvious sense. The more precarious one's class-status and the less access one has to family wealth and support networks, the more perceptual risk and consequent anxiety one might experience around conflict.
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This shows that while the homo- and transphobic provenance of the charge are obvious, the violence that it can unleash is unlikely to be limited to just queer and trans people, though, as always, they and other racial, ethnic, and religious minorities will be at greatest risk.
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(3) carries strongly an eliminationist implication that is the limiting horizon of liberal governance; and (4) is actively reformatting conservative political identity according to a binary "anti-" and "pro-pedophile" division.
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And as
@thematthewbaker
and
@DavidAstinWalsh
note, this is essentially the empirical (not normative) finding of the 1619 project and the new histories of capitalism.
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Maybe they’re only talking about Epstein, maybe they’re yanking the pollster’s chains, but, whatever it is, this strikes me as an alarming result and one that hardens the in-group/out-group boundary no matter what kind of signaling work was intended by the respondents.
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Can you even comprehend the total cocaine budget of The Economist's readership?
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But beyond whether *Democratic elites* are active sex-trafficking children, you can scroll through James Lindsay’s timeline and see who he’s willing to call a groomer. It includes many powerful straight white people who were, until recently, conservatives in good standing.
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It is in this context that the concept of “feral” can begin to emerge as a distinct and threatening concept to white American culture: a form of unmanaged reproduction and life that exists outside and apart from property ownership and settled agriculture.
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Hell, they're making that accusation about the 2012 GOP Presidential candidate! Obviously, some of this is countenanced because of Romney's criticism of Trump, but that's rather beside the point. It's the use of the slur to settle other political beefs that's notable.
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Early on in my career I sometimes used exercises where I asked students to adopt opposed positions from texts and debate each other. It usually didn't work well.
Now I use exercises where I ask students to imagine how they would teach texts to other people. It works well.
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Political pundits and Twitter folks are accustomed to treating the culture war as a spectator sport that is mostly detached from material political struggles. Every new outrage draws shrugs; it’s just more of the noise machine, distracting us from the real struggles.
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For the people I call “culture war hustlers,” the job has been to turn small scale material conflicts into fodder for this culture war. I suspect some are oblivious to what they were doing, and others thought that the culture war didn’t really matter, so what was the harm?
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This is why I have not time for
@conor64
and
@bariweiss
and bleating about ideological conformity.
They don't know these students. They'll criticize them as woke crazies if it suits them. And they won't engage the material realities that inform their attitudes towards speech.
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Instead of offering students assistance in navigating these problems, the culture warriors try to enroll them in their endless political pissing matches.
If you care about the *actual well-being* of students, let alone good pedagogy, this is irresponsible and deserves contempt.
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I...worked on this story for a decade and a half… and… he just… he tweeted it out.
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I find the place of Judith Butler in the anti-woke imaginary so fascinating. Butler is allegedly both indecipherable and inaccessible and, at once, the author of mind viruses that radically transformed gender norms.
Butler cannot be understood and yet cannot fail to inform.
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You’d have to be a sociopath to find this fact uncomfortable
Neither Biden nor Pelosi reckoned with an uncomfortable fact: Slain Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknich was a Trump supporter.
Far from sharing the views of the
#Resistance
, he had written letters to his congressman opposing Trump’s impeachment.
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1) it’s FFA not Future Farmers of America, as anyone actually from a farm community could tell you.
2) the loadstone concept of the piece is mercy, a virtue once cherished by conservatives. That you see this as an attack from the left speaks to the sad depravity you trade in.
FFS. Don't look now, but the left is going after 4-H and Future Farmers of America. via
@voxdotcom
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Meanwhile, another great empiricist is at work gathering yet more ironclad evidence.
The knowledge ecology of these doofuses is an epistemic human centipede.
A gay friend confided in me the other day: “If I’d been born twenty years later I would have been put on puberty blockers.” Protect gay kids from the TQIA+ extremists.
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I’m not saying you should take horse drugs.
I’m saying that if you’re going to take horse drugs, veterinary ivermectin paste isn’t the one I’d start with.
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If one adds to this the pandemic and the looming existential anxiety over global climate change, the stakes will seem only higher: as a comfortable future seems harder to obtain, the need for professional security will feel ever greater.
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I know kale is supposed to be a big class marker, but the truth is that I eat lots of it mostly because it comes in a big cheap bag and it usually doesn't wilt or brown as quickly as any of the other greens.
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It doesn't matter what happens in the world, conservative comedians will still only have one joke and it will still be staggeringly stupid and unfunny.
Congressional Prayer Lasts Two Days As Democrat Includes All 5,787 Genders
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Show me a person who thinks free speech is about whether you can place an essay with the New Yorker and I will show you a person who never bit their tongue when the boss said some ignorant shit or got canned because a customer overheard something they didn't like.
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My prediction for 2024 absent action on this issue if Trump runs: All states with GOP-controlled state legislatures that Biden wins by less than a 5% margin will send Trump electors to EC authorized by those state legislatures. (They may also send dueling Dem slates.)
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Also, Logan O’Laughlin’s forthcoming work, Wood’s Herds Shot Round the World, Franklin’s Dolly Mixtures, Mizelle’s Pig, Blanchette’s forthcoming Porkopolis and many many more. Oh and read some Sylvia Wynter too!
Fin.
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Somewhere someone is about to say “um this is probably fake” and I’m like SO WAS THOR: RAGNAROK DORK BUT WHO CARES IT DELIGHTS IT DELIGHTS IT DELIGHTS
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Overturning Roe is appalling, but I don't think people fully realize how sweeping Alito's vision is in the leaked draft. If this decision fully represents the Court's majority, it would mean same-sex intimacy and access to contraception are also on the chopping block.
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That the free speech brigade frames the issue around access to prestige publications and elite institutions tells you something important: they haven't ever really had a boss.
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This is LibsofTikTok mask off. She's saying all LGBTQ people are evil predators.
To the rightwing gays who blamed teachers and drag queens: They don't separate good from bad gays, patriot homos from nasty drag queens, LGB from T and Q. We're all evil and they want us gone.
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Y'all are just catching up on Richard Epstein, huh? Epstein wrote a 1988 law review article arguing that employers should be able to fire HIV-positive workers even if they posed no health risks and the employer knew they posed no health risks.
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If you should find yourself in a "food justice" movement that centers the interests of US farmers, I have some bad news for you: you are part of a conservative political movement.
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