Why would they commit to a story in writing? He asked them for the story directly, and they told him to go fuck himself in open court. Why would responding to that by then asking them to write something down and giving them a later deadline get a different result?

Even before the hearing began, Justice Department officials tried to have it canceled, writing to Judge Boasberg in the late afternoon to tell him there was no point in coming to court since they did not intend to provide him with any additional information about the deportation flights.

It’s hard to come up with a clearer invitation to leave the courtroom in cuffs, if you’re not a special type of person who’s above the law. The judge’s job is to remind people that they’re not above the law, if they ever do this type of stuff, and at that he egregiously failed.

Yeah. All they’re doing is highlighting their lack of action at that point.

If you’re not going to do anything about it, say so. You could at least just end the trial and let someone else take over the mantle of action.

Agreed. The outlandish stuff is actually a little bit safer. Actually dangerous geopolitical stuff that might kick off something he can’t control, because it might realistically happen, he avoids like the plague unless it carries some kind of strong benefit to him personally. He just likes to talk shit because it’s fun. I don’t think it is any more complicated than that.

I suspect that this is why Musk was brought in. Musk is actually willing to take an axe to the main pillars of the building, in a lot more energetic and systematized fashion than Trump would be inclined to.

Yeah, now looking at it again, it’s clearly fake and I feel dumb for being taken in by it. I definitely wanted it to be real, though. I will delete the post.

Wait, really?

Noo… I think you are right. Fuck.

I think mostly it is revealing about Schumer’s priorities. He has a government job. If everything within the buildings in Washington DC is mostly still working the way it’s supposed to, then at the end of the day he still gets a paycheck and some important stuff to do every day. Lots of people across the US going through upheaval, losing their jobs, maybe getting detained indefinitely or not, journalists getting threatened, all that stuff isn’t, like, good, but it’s also not an existential threat to him. The government shutting down would be.

And so, avoiding that is a key priority of his. It’s urgent. All that other stuff is not.

“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

“How dare you, sir! How dare you apply the inhumane standards which I promote and encourage, to myself and people important to me! I’m exempt! Don’t you hear? I’m exempt!”

(Loosely based on The Daily Show from February 1st, 2007)

Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the book is prohibited under a nondisparagement contract she signed as a global affairs employee.

I feel like in the current climate, a lot more people need to be adhering to the doctrine of go fuck yourself.

“But we had the ARBITER say you COULD NOT”

“Yeah good luck with that”

“We will SUE you and RUIN you”

“Hey I’m doing a gofundme then good luck with all your stuff, people definitely know about my book now.”

I don’t know what you expect, an open statement of their intent to break the law? As though that’s going to go better for the school/students?

You’re using a curious definition of “break the law.”

Nothing that is happening to their students is legal. They have the option to say “As of today, we will not cooperate in any form with these particular federal authorities, because they are clearly breaking American law and endangering the safety of people who are in our care.” That would be kind of a bare minimum. If they wanted to use some of that staggering pile of money at their disposal to hire armed security, backed by high-paid lawyers to make sure that they had some legal backing for their use of force against warrantless intrusions, that would be nice too. And also, to sic those same lawyers on the authorities that have Khalil imprisoned, at least try to put some pressure on so he doesn’t just slip away.

There are a lot of municipalities that have that kind of policy against cooperating with ICE, for exactly that reason. Some of their leaders were just summoned to congress to explain themselves, and apparently did so in a pretty vigorous fashion. Is that safe for them? Not really, in the current climate. They did it anyway.

Sometimes shit hits the fan, man. If someone comes in your house and starts snatching your family members, what are you supposed to do? “Oh I can’t stop him, that would be violent”?

Starting to resist illegal violence against you is necessary, even if it’s not safe. Failing to resist is infinitely less safe.

Yes, I know it’s easy for me to sit here at my computer and type all bravely about how they should take a stand when they have a bunch of stuff to lose. Typing is more than they did. They couldn’t even muster the stones to type out a direct statement about how it’s wrong to snatch students and put them in indefinite detention when they haven’t done anything. So, like I said, fuck 'em.

Khalil had some stuff to lose too, and he still tried to fight for the rights of vulnerable people. Go tell his pregnant wife that it would be better for the school/student that they don’t try to make too many waves about what happened / what is happening to him.

1. Their “resistance” to Trump’s fascist bullshit is surely going to be temporary.
2. You assholes had the option not to come out swinging for the bad guys last year, and you chose to deep throat the boot, and now that it’s literally come to the secret police asking to come to your campus and use your student body to get all their field training on unlawful detention in, you all of a sudden have a problem with it? Man, fuck you. I thought you guys were supposed to be smart, I thought you knew history. I’m genuinely confused if you’re now claiming that you didn’t see this coming and aren’t cool with it.

I sort of suspect that they’ve realized, belatedly, that it might come back around on them in some way, and that’s what they are concerned about. Not about freedoms of speech and the civil society in which they have all their fancy buildings, or about Khalil or his wife and family.

Edit: Their statement of support after the modern day Gestapo came to their campus and randomly snatched one of their students is still up as of right now:

There have been reports of ICE around campus. Columbia has and will continue to follow the law. Consistent with our longstanding practice and the practice of cities and institutions throughout the country, law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including University buildings. Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community.

https://communications.news.columbia.edu/news/statement-ice-reports

Then, they realized that wasn’t quite strong enough, and so they made an updated one:

There have been reports of ICE in the streets around campus. Columbia has and will continue to follow the law. We want to again communicate to our campus community that we have a protocol in place, which includes phone numbers to call in case you are approached on or off campus. Consistent with this protocol, and consistent with our longstanding practice and the practice of cities and institutions throughout the country, law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including residential University buildings. Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community. We are also committed to the legal rights of our students and urge all members of the community to be respectful of those rights.

https://communications.news.columbia.edu/news/further-statement-ice-reports

The last one is probably the most tragically hilarious, but too long to politely include in full here:

https://president.columbia.edu/news/leading-through-challenging-time

An excerpt:

We will support our community. I understand the distress that many of you are feeling about the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the streets around campus. I feel it too and am working with our team to manage the response. Resources for students are listed below.

They include contact information for a religious life advisor, in case your university’s absolutely abject lack of giving a shit about your physical safety has caused you to give up entirely on the physical realm.

Setting it to 1.75 speed generally works pretty well for me.

Also, you should know that the second-from-top comment is someone letting him know that her period is synced with his video uploads since 2022. That alone should make it worth a visit.

TL;DR Everything sucks now because companies control it all, and they DGAF about you. To me, the root issue is that people peacefully put up with this bullshit.

Yes, but why do the voters think that? The voters in America thought that Trump would be better on the economy. Why on earth did they think that? It’s a very weird thing for them to think. They have a lot of those weird beliefs that definitely aren’t reality, and have to come from somewhere. Or, maybe they have some kind of grain of truth, but they get blown up into these hugely important things, that emotionally resonate. “He’s arrogant and out of touch” is a perfect example of one of those things.

Like I say, I’m not saying the voters don’t genuinely think that. I am asking where they got that idea.

I actually don’t know the answer, even as far as America and Trump being good for the economy. And I don’t think the answer for America, at least about that instance, is clearly “Russians,” for what it’s worth. And also yes I am totally uninformed about Canadian politics. I just know that with these kind of vibes-based judgements about politicians, it’s almost always based on some kind of bullshit.

• George Bush is the kind of guy you can have a beer with
• John Kerry is aloof and arrogant
• Al Gore is kooky and also arrogant
• Donald Trump is good at business, he can fix the economy

That kind of thing. It’s very malleable. You might as well say that Trudeau is a man of the people, because he was a drama teacher, and this other guy is from a bank, he’s a banker, he’s greedy, he’s everything that’s wrong with society today. It’s just kind of vibes and random judgements. Or, at least, when I look at it within American politics, that’s what it is.

Plenty of US right wing and oil funding for destabilizing Canada, all the while supporting the demonism of war on Russia, by pretending that high diesel/home heating fuel was the result of carbon tax.

full CIA puppetry of all western political leaders

US wants Greenland to gift it to Russia

Trudeau and his Liberal party were seen as arrogant and out of touch. I don’t know that Carney is any better in that regard given his ties to the big shitty businesses which are ruining our society, but he’s certainly more financially literate than Trudeau was and people want that right now. He’s certainly qualified for the job.

See this is exactly what I was talking about.

Who decided that the vibe was that Trudeau was “arrogant and out of touch”? Who decided that a totally different politician – surely one who is equally arrogant and out of touch, on a personal level – was “financially literate” and “certainly qualified for the job”?

It sure seems like the Russians are just attacking any liberal leader, mounting extensive influence operations to get the ordinary people of their countries to hate them and want to get rid of them (and often to replace them with monsters, if any particular monsters are available).

I have not the first idea at all about Carney, I just know Trudeau. He seemed fine. I also have no particular evidence about the Russians being the ones who are doing all this, but the pattern of liberal leaders having all these wild uprisings against them which gets rid of them in the end seems absolutely unmistakable. And little pieces of the uprisings definitely show a consistent pattern of Russian influence, always in precisely the same direction, when little indications show through the cracks.

And, it definitely seems like a significant problem.

I can’t believe that anybody in Washington actually believes that it makes sense to get rare earths in Ukraine.

In at least one conference, Trump repeatedly referred to them as “raw earths.” He just doesn’t know his ass from his elbow. I sort of assume that Putin is at the root of his sudden obsession with raw earths, but who knows. But he doesn’t even really “believe” things in the reality-connected way that you or I would use the term.

they aren’t authorized to speak to the media about the looming crisis

What the fuck un-American nonsense is this?

I do get it. We’ve normalized the “employer” to “employee” relationship, where you’re sort of a free person but also sort of a slave, and that’s carried over into government service. Fuck that though. You are a person. You’re allowed to talk if you want to, and any separate person who’s trying to tell you they are the one in charge of that decision is probably a big piece of dookie at heart.

The EU lady coming up and taking a picture is spot on.

Yeah. I am no physics professional, but it is rare that one of these pop science YouTube videos teaches me some hardcore new stuff. This one is the real deal though.

One of my favorite of the 3blue1brown videos uses that same trick, of summing up roots of 1 in the complex plane so that they spin through the full circle and add up to 0 in every place except where you want them. Seeing that you can do the same thing in the fucking real world to make a laser show up in a different spot from where you’re pointing it is the mother of all mindfucks.