thejeff

thejeff

@thejefty.bsky.social

236 followers57 following2.8K posts

And just practically: Yes, there's nothing Constitutional that says the Speaker has to be a House member, but doing it to piss off the "uniparty"? The Speaker is chosen by a majority vote of the House. His imagined "uniparty" would have to pick him. To troll themselves.

Decades of running on hate and racism, backed by corporate money, make it easy to pop up things like the Tea Party. Not sure that's a pattern Dems should follow.

One of the more amusing studies I saw years ago showed that people overwhelmingly agreed that we spent far too much on foreign aid, massively overestimated how much we did spend and when prompted for how much we should spend suggested more than we actually do.

Anything's theoretically possible, but what we see in the archeological record is extremely low population densities and incredibly slow technological progress. Stone toolkits remaining almost unchanged for thousands of years, then eventually things starting to change faster with the Neolithic

And once you get sucked into one, you're easy prey for more, since they all involve the elites keeping the truth from you, so even the seemingly harmless ones are dangerous.

He can either stage a coup or do nothing. We elected Trump. There's no Constitutional way to undo that. Don't expect Biden to fix it. That was our job and we fucked it up.

Conceptually, I'm not bothered by there being no ban on felons running. It could be someone who'd served time young, rehabilitated themselves and had years of public service since. Or perhaps convicted on charges that came from protesting in a good cause.

Not really. The current main scholarly theory, which seems supported by the earliest mentions is that his birth date was calculated based on ancient Jewish ideas that led to the belief he was conceived on the same day as his crucifixion. Nine month after Passover lands us in late December.

It's a fascinating book, but unless I'm completely mistaken hardly "seminal". Parts of it have had some influence, but the basic thesis is overwhelmingly rejected.

Not nearly the power of the US military. Also, Syria's been torn by civil war for more than a decade, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions of refugees. This isn't really something we want to emulate: scale those numbers up 10-15x to match US population size

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