Watching Linus take a big public dump on someone who deserves it is one of life's finest guilty pleasures. It's like a Maya Angelou poem. You can tell he really cared, and meant it, and took some time to get it right.

If you ask someone if they are Nazis, and their answer is to get confused and ask about the premise of the question, there is about a 90% chance they are Nazis. Non-Nazis will say, "What? No, definitely not."

The article is misleadingly phrased.

He “tried to fire” her. She’s obeying the law by not leaving, since he had the exact same authority to fire her that my nieces do. And there’s no “arguing” about it. She’s not arguing, she’s just ignoring his invalid order.

More federal employees should do this. Don’t just go along with his random illegal bullshit.

UnitedHealth Group’s Facebook post sharing its statement on Thompson’s death received more than 46,000 reactions, with about 41,000 of respondents clicking the platform’s “haha” option displaying a laughing emoji.

Holy shit.

Good. Get punished. Don't go along with it. If you start bowing and scraping so you won't get ejected from the oval office, then that will enable that much more the gradual evolution that will lead you along with many other people to get "punished" in ways that are far more severe. Like, barges floating off of Gitmo or working in the fields on a prison labor system severe. It is insane to me that people are taking all of this so lightly and going along with it.

Under Trump’s new orders, ICE is now allowed to target migrants at sensitive locations, like schools and churches, for arrests and potential deportations.

And FUCKING HOSPITALS. And quizzing people about their immigration status when they seek help for a medical emergency.

It would have taken fewer words to just not excise hospitals from your partial list of "sensitive locations," but I can see why you wouldn't want to talk about it. It's real fucked up.

I am moderately surprised that this didn’t have anything to do with Trump or Elon Musk. I was pretty curious what activist organization Erik Uden ran. But, the punchline wasn’t that, and was in the Mastodon replies.

Interestingly, two days before Oracle deleted my account and all servers associated with it, I publicly criticized Oracle's CEO in a viral post for promising dystopian AI surveillance technology to his investors.

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113879369270806353

What a weird coincidence

You fucking idiots.

The instant you bought into it, you signed up for this. He's going to keep fucking with you. The day after you pay, he's going to be fucking with you again. The FCC's going to pull your license. He's going to sue you again for something you allegedly did in 2014. It'll never stop, until you actually stand up for yourself.

And now you're out $15 million, for nothing. You got nothing at all for it.

a bench warrant was issued for Sullivan.

There you go. Go after the little people. Put them in prison. They're committing crimes, kidnapping and battery among others. Tackle them and put cuffs on them. Let their defense team explain how they were acting under legal authority, what statutes were involved, where their warrant was.

I understand that things have gone insane on the federal level, but they're still committing crimes in municipal places.

In a perfect world, we could impeach Trump for causing these things to happen, but it's still absolutely possible to interfere with the actual people who are committing crimes in order to implement the stuff.

This is just how things worked back when unions were in the equation. If you sold TVs or drove a truck for a living, you got a house. If you had a good job, you had a house like this and basically everything you wanted.

We traded that life for a few hundred people having yachts instead.

I like how he clarifies that he lives alone.

"Sure, one of my roommates could have come in and poked around in my butthole while I was sleeping. But no one was in a position to do such a thing."

When a friend of mine was a little kid, someone drove past, jumped out of their car, and ran over and grabbed him trying to kidnap him.

He was just confused about what the guy was even doing, but grabbed onto a chain-link fence and wouldn't let go, so the guy was yanking him and yelling at him to let go, but he was able to hold on. Eventually the guy gave up and ran back and sped away. While he was being yanked on the fence, he was worried because the ball he'd been playing with was rolling down the hill, and he was worried it would go somewhere he wouldn't be able to find it and he would lose his ball.

When the guy left, he went and retrieved his ball, psyched that he was able to get it back. He thought no more about it and kept playing, and then later that day told his mom about what happened.

She lost her mind. For some reason, he thought she had also been worried about the ball, and he kept telling her he'd been able to get it back after, so it was all good.

Holy shit. Teen Vogue FTW.

They're not even fucking around about it, either.

After we began offering trainings in immigrant neighborhood parking lots and circulating Spanish-language videos with tips for how to spot ICE agents, our volunteers came into contact with federal agents. After a volunteer confirmed an officer’s identity, they would alert neighbors to the agent’s presence, and our dispatch team would send a text message to our contacts in the area. ICE agents almost never carry judicial warrants giving them the authority to enter private homes or businesses without permission, so they often wait to make an arrest when the person they’re looking for leaves their home or car. And in every case we worked on, when the agents realized they were being watched, they abandoned their stakeout.

Almost every creature that lives in a harsh environment understands about looking out for your buddies. The next day, it might be you snapped into the trap. Allies are a precious thing. A lot of people prominent in our society have forgotten, but the rats have not, nor many of the people, either.

Remember this when they start deporting your neighbors next year.

FUCKING YES

Make them work. Say no. Don't hope that someone else will stop it for you.

There's a wonderful story from the Nixon years. This is heavily edited for clarity:

I said to Henry, “You remember what I said in my letter when I came here? Well, you have just called my bluff and my loyalties are to the American people and I’m refusing the assignment, I am leaving.”

And then Kissinger said something that I will never forget. He said, “Your views represent the cowardice of the Eastern Establishment.”

I just came up out of my chair swinging, I was so damn mad, and missed him. He ran behind his desk and said, “I am only kidding.”

I said, “Well, you don’t kid about something like this,” and just stormed out of the room.

Later:

Haig came flying out of Henry’s office. He said, “What the hell did you say to Henry? He is furious. He’s throwing books around the room and screaming and yelling.” So I told him that he said I was to be the staff coordinator and I wouldn’t do it.

At that point Haig then looked at me. He said, "You have had an order from your Commander-in-Chief and you can’t refuse."

I looked at him and said, "Fuck you, Al, I just have."

Edit: "Henry" is Henry Kissinger. Kissinger asked William Watts to violate the constitution, Watts said no, Kissinger insulted him for it, so he tried to punch Kissinger and cursed out the secretary of defense and quit to get a different job. Be like William Watts.

"The Republican bill is a terrible option," Schumer said in his remarks. "It is deeply partisan. It doesn't address far too many of this country's needs. But I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option."

You fucking twat

Brian Thompson killed a whole bunch of people. That's, to me, the more salient comparison to make.

Not only that: They rely on people pre-emptively obeying them before even being threatened. Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, all those guys, they know better. They're also doing fine money-wise. They had every option to just tell Trump to get fucked, and mess up their company if he wanted to make that decision. They wouldn't have been out on the street, whatever happened, and they would have had a chance to do something noble instead of just optimizing for the money function like a malfunctioning AI superintelligence.

One of the critical factors in fascists taking power is "obeying in advance." Because, yes, they can't be everywhere. Fuck that. I fully support this message.

Edit: Typo

He still thinks that tariffs are paid by the exporting country. Any time someone tries to tell him different, he gets really mad at them.

I am not joking. It’s real life. I think the US is headed for a pretty big collapse, hopefully we can make it through to something better on the other side.

It’s that way in almost every country that isn’t America or America-light. Japan does it in over-the-top performative ways, but pretty much everywhere else, people care about random strangers, people invest time into their days and activities being nice just for the simple pleasure of human stuff and taking time to be a human and be pleasing with other people. Food, gifts, clothing, respect and value for travelers and gestures of good-will. If you’re from America, it feels “normal” here but something is clearly missing, and if you ever spend any length of time overseas you see exactly what it is and how badly wrong things are here, that it is missing.

I’m not trying to be prejudiced about it, just saying that every culture has its good stuff and its failings and not giving a shit about other people or life in general is definitely an American one.