TSA is a worthless self-inflicted wound to the country. If I could fly on “I’ll Take My Chances” Air, I absolutely would just to reclaim my time from the security theater.

This is something that literally happened during the BLM protests and against the SWAT-like CBP BORTAC units that one of the shooter was a part of. He might have been there.

Alex was killed in a 8 on 2 with little potential for external threat and every nearby actor well recognized. Turn that into an 8 on 50 with enough people that the perpetrator is hard to identify and the threat charges. Handguns aren’t magic and if they escalate against random crowd members and don’t immediately control the scene (something they can’t be guaranteed happens) they can’t be sure they come out of that alive. If they do they may have just started the revolution and their fun cosplay power trip job turns into hoping they don’t catch a sniper shot during patrols.

Unarresting is risky as hell even without the threat of gunfire, it literally involves performing a felony, but if they’re attacking people at polling stations things are serious enough for people to not just continually back down.

They’re not going to try to make a voting barrier, they’re going to be circling it trying to intimidate citizens and hoping to grab a non-citizen they can claim was trying to vote even if he was really just showing up to his shift to clean the school. They don’t need to arrest people, they just need to suppress the vote where it will matter.

The vanguard who doesn’t have to fear ICE can go vote in the morning then just start gathering next to wherever they’re hanging out. By midday the concept of anyone being stopped by the voting station will look infeasible.

Also, wherever MAGA is not firmly in control, protect vote by mail and early voting. And make sure people send their votes early enough to avoid postal manipulation.

That’s exactly how it works. You don’t let them get to the back of the SUV in the first place, but there are more of us than there are of them.

Few people here are talking about radical reforms that would change the existing power dynamics and politicians are even less ambitious. Centrists are continually looking for off-ramps so that we don’t “go too far” (e.g., don’t abolish ICE, reform the courts, ban money from politics, reestablish the balance of powers). Even with a blue wave and a reformist president, expect there to be enough of those sorts to bog down any momentum for change and enough voters eager to reconcile and return to business as usual that nothing changes.

Other countries should be planning to insulate themselves from us, because we’re not going to become safe to trust. We may go back to Obama levels of foreign engagement and the slow grind of neoliberal economic policy, but we’re going to be teetering on the edge of another Trump for decades at least. His 40% of supporters are fanatical and have no exposure to outside viewpoints that would deprogram them, and the judges he’s put in place will allow insanity to stay mainstream.

A reminder that using chemical weapons is literally a war crime. Our non-cosplay soldiers are banned from using chemical weapons on opposing forces, but ICE can flood American streets with it because someone wasn’t standing where they wanted them to.

Musk wanted to bring his wife to the pedo island and when Epstein warned him she might not like the “ratio” he said she wouldn’t mind. Spouses of famous and powerful men may either be so beholden or devoted to them they will excuse their actions, or they might also be just as bad. Epstein’s girlfriend was his primary co-conspirator.

I don’t know that Chomsky is bad, he could just be a clueless professor, but inviting his wife along isn’t an indicator that he didn’t know what the island experience was.

In her video announcing it she said she consulted with her lawyer and it’s not actually illegal to spend donations on doing good things rather than just pissing billions of dollars away every election. The key is that it can’t be conditioned on voting.

One of the interesting tactics she’s been using in her campaign is spending donated funds to help the residents of the district. I don’t know how much she spends on traditional campaign ads and consultants, but it’s less than the 100% most do and she’s held events that were just volunteering for public benefit.

Just like that Boeing whistleblower who committed suicide after taking a lot of effort to travel to and prepare himself to testify against them. People just tend to feel the most depressed after they make plans to take down (other) powerful people.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the law enforcement agency that patrols unincorporated Los Angeles County, said that federal law makes the department unable to enforce the ban.

This is at best a question for the DA or a court, not the chief of police. He’s the top worker bee, not a decider of what could in the most tolerant interpretation be an area of ambiguous law. If he doesn’t like enforcing the law as dictated by his civilian overlords and the current instructions of his corresponding court system, he should quit. And since he won’t, he should be fired.

YouTube being broadcast in Israel is not an inherent moral good to be balanced against censorship. And honestly Israel’s threats are almost certainly bullshit. Israel is culturally integrated with the West and YouTube is a vital platform for their businesses and propaganda efforts. They wouldn’t “just block YouTube”.

Feels like it’s probably the first agency that said yes to the regime. If there was a case here it would clearly be a FBI matter, with no masks, but since FBI has a higher strain of professionalism, the fascism is taking longer to fully take hold.

IIRC, he’s starting negotiations in the middle and is eager to give up even more.

Private property existing isn’t state repression though. It’s morally cool to fuck with their private property, but it’s not repression to acknowledge the business owner (or manager probably) does get to call the cops to trespass people fully on their property who refuse to leave.

Getting arrested is a statement of convictions, you’re going to do something even though it’s illegal because the cause is worth it. It’s not a statement that whatever you’re being arrested for is inherently an illegitimate law.

And ban every field agent from ever working for the government or local law enforcement in the future. No renaming and keeping most of the staff. No shuttling them off to be brown shirts elsewhere. They’re all tainted.

I’m confused by this whole story. How were the Hostage Response Team or even Mexican police involved if he was surrendering himself at the US embassy? I’m also confused by his lawyer’s account about being surprised to be handcuffed. How did he think this was going to work?

That’s gotta be part of a bit. That’s about as useless a weapon or tool as you can get.

Because getting arrested means more coverage. Which is a good thing, but also not some big scandal these weird accounts want to make of it. There’s a long history of protesters getting intentionally arrested as part of their protest.