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Wordle 1,580 3/6 ⬛⬛🟨🟩⬛ ⬛🟩⬛🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Connections Puzzle #858 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟦🟦🟦🟦 Messed this one up. 🙂 Daily Quordle 1361 🟥5️⃣ 6️⃣9️⃣ m-w.com/games/quordle/ ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟩 ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟨⬜🟩🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟨⬜🟨🟨⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜🟨🟩⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟩 🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ 🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ 🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
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It'd be fucking righteous if they then formed a punk cover band called The Socially Dead Milkmen, but alas those dudes will forever be dorks.
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The Leopards Eating Faces and Unlubed Dildo of Consequences Thread
bolverk replied to Horn Dog's topic in Cloak Room
She's also Ethan Hawke's ex-wife in The Lowdown (great show, btw). -
I'll put this here since it's the general resistance thread. Maybe this will become a trend for more kids publicly shaming their shitty politician parents. When Children of Public Figures Go Public With Their Dissent The conversation heats up on social media. Maddie Block was scrolling on social media last month when she saw a post from a New Mexico state senator about his recent trip to Israel, where he heard remarks from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ms. Block, 28, who lives in New York and is a vocal defender of Palestinian rights, was stopped in her tracks. The post dismissed the idea that Israel was committing genocide in its war in Gaza, saying that “Israel does everything possible to avoid killing Gazan civilians.” To Ms. Block, the post amounted to misinformation, and sought to excuse Israel for killing tens of thousands of people in Gaza, she said in an interview. So she decided to post a TikTok video disagreeing with its author — who also happens to be her father. “It looks like my dad and a bunch of other, just like, loser politicians from New Mexico went to meet with Netanyahu,” Ms. Block said in a video that has been viewed more than 1.8 million times and gained national media attention. In the video and a series of follow-up posts, she speculated that her father, State Senator Jay Block, a Republican representing parts of northwestern Albuquerque, was being paid to repeat pro-Israel talking points. (He denies this.) She questioned why a state senator needed to get involved in the Middle East, anyway: “How does meeting with Netanyahu help the local people of New Mexico?” she asked. The political rifts that exist in families across the country often play out behind closed doors. But in an era of intense polarization, some young family members of political figures have taken to social media to condemn the positions of their elders. Social media has had a “profound impact in terms of taking these disagreements public,” said Ioana Literat, an associate professor of communication at Teachers College, Columbia University, and an author of “Not Your Parents’ Politics.” Whether or not they are from high-profile families, members of Gen Z “don’t have to rely on traditional media gatekeepers or family approval to be heard.” The phenomenon has left some lawmakers in the awkward position of having to field phone calls from reporters about their child’s TikTok account. Reached by phone last week, Senator Block said he was proud of his daughter, and that he supported her right to say whatever she wanted about his political positions. The two are not currently in contact, he said. “I love my daughter very much,” he said. “Anything she has said to hurt me, whether politically or financially or relationship-wise, I forgive her.” In the interview, Mr. Block reiterated his support for Israel, which he thinks has been justified in how it has conducted its strikes in Gaza. He said he had visited as part of a bipartisan cultural exchange program paid for by the Israeli government, motivated in part by his concerns about rising antisemitism in the United States after the Oct. 7 attack. He said that after his daughter posted her video, he and a member of his staff had received death threats. “Reckless comments can really push people toward violence, and unfortunately we’ve seen that a lot today, quite frankly, with the left,” he said. The Block family is not alone in navigating their political disagreements in public. Political scions have long applied public pressure to their parents. Patti Davis, for instance, the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, was a thorn in her father’s side throughout his presidency, loudly denouncing his policies on nuclear weapons. In recent years, the dynamic more often results in political sparring and family drama that tends to draw an audience online. Take Jack Schlossberg, who called his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign “an embarrassment” and has continued to oppose his efforts as President Trump’s health secretary. Or Christian Walker, a conservative social media figure who publicly criticized his father, the Senate candidate Herschel Walker, in 2022 after reports that he paid a girlfriend to have an abortion. And then there is Vivian Wilson, a daughter of Elon Musk, who wrote on Threads last year that her father had misrepresented her experience as a transgender woman “in a last-ditch attempt to garner sympathy points.” She called the Trump administration, which her father helped into office, “cartoonishly evil” in an interview this year with Teen Vogue. Some of the young, digitally savvy family members speaking up are estranged from the relatives whose politics they oppose. But not all of them. Claudia Conway, daughter of the former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, made news as a 15-year-old for a series of posts disapproving of her mother’s political views. (In one, she begged Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to “adopt” her.) In an interview with The New York Times last year, Ms. Conway said she regretted the way she had worded some of her posts in 2020. In the years since, she said that she and her mother had worked to repair their relationship. Ms. Block, who has not spoken to her father in more than two years, does not expect that kind of reconciliation. In a recent interview, she said she grew up mostly sharing the Republican viewpoints of her father, a former lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. When he retired from the military and ran for a seat on the Sandoval County Commission in 2016, Ms. Block helped with his campaign. “I couldn’t have won my first election without her,” he said in the interview. The two began to have private arguments about abortion rights and immigration as the Trump administration got underway, Ms. Block said. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 strained their relationship further. “He was so anti-vax and not wanting to wear masks and saying this was some form of government tyranny,” Ms. Block said. Children of politicians are already exposed to the public’s approval or disapproval of their parents’ politics, said Christopher Ojeda, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. In many cases, those young people end up choosing between conflict with their families and conflict with their peers. “They’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place,” he said. Ms. Block, who now works for a nonprofit and is pursuing a master’s degree, said she would have been more willing to overlook their disagreements if her father were not in office. However, he was influencing policies that she believed were hurting people, she said, and he had not been receptive to her private confrontations. “That was when I was like, I think I kind of need to start speaking out about this,” she said. Ms. Block said she did not want her posts to result in threats for either her or her father. She said she hoped her videos on TikTok, where she has more than 50,000 followers, would encourage people to pay attention to politics at the local and state level. She is quickly learning that even criticism can become fodder for more content. When she saw that her father had spoken to The Daily Mail about their relationship, describing her actions as “horrible,” she posted on TikTok again. “I had a good laugh,” she wrote [Nice use of Glover's "This is America"].
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The Leopards Eating Faces and Unlubed Dildo of Consequences Thread
bolverk replied to Horn Dog's topic in Cloak Room
I haven't looked it up either but would guess they've got the same etymology, meaning "mixed," though in everyday French mélanger is used for mixing. -
We don't have quite the same checks and balances on billionaires that other Western countries do.
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Appreciate the response. One benefit of going to public school in a one-high-school town was exposure to all elements of society, good and bad, and having the opportunity to associate with all social classes. Both of my parents were teachers, so we weren't rich, by any means, but we went to the "right" church and lived on the "right" side of town. Also, being white and fairly smart, I was in all the same "honors" classes with them. Somewhat embarrassing to say on a football board, but being in marching band with 125+ other kids from all social backgrounds also helped immensely in my getting out of that bubble.
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I don't think this will be helpful in Immamac getting folks to attend his tailgates.
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Not here to argue with you about it, but the Southern Strategy was an explicit appeal to southern racists who were abandoning the Democratic Party in droves following the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. In that moment, the party embraced the racism. Nixon's Law and Order bullshit to crack down on urban Blacks; War on Drugs. The Party's embrace of "States' Rights” was an appeal to Southern racists. Reagan's Welfare Queens stereotypes; campaigning in Philadelphia, MS. The framing of affirmative action as "racial preferences" and all the other coded language. Bush Sr's Willie Horton ad, Jesse Helms' very existence. Targeted voter suppression: strict ID laws, gerrymandering, and closing polling stations in minority districts, etc. All of this partial list was going on well before 2008. Again, I'm not faulting you for being slow on the uptake, and I definitely see you as an ally. My personal breakthrough happened in high school when all this shit was readily apparent growing up in a small town and seeing how all the oil-rich White Christian kids who didn't earn shit but who loved Reagan at the First Baptist Church were total dicks to the Blacks, Browns, Poor White Trash, and the Gays (yes, I had a couple of gay friends in a rural West Texas high school during the 1980s). It was (is) a stark reality and quite open, and holy shit, come to think of it, local economies built on oil, ranching, and cotton farming are really fucking feudal: the haves always putting down the have-nots. Serious Wilhoit's law stuff, in practice, with what they could get away with. Once I got to Tech after a year in France, the same kinds of fuckers dominated all the frats and sororities, student government, using the "free speech" area on campus outside the Student Union Building (similar to the West Mall at UT) to promote their bigotry and hate, further reinforcing the notion that Republicans were the party of bigotry. Then, I took a few polisci, sociology, cultural anthropology, and upper-level French literature courses that began to give me a slightly better insight into what the fuck was going on. We're all products of our upbringing, and my exposure to the GOP's blatant hypocrisy in those environments simply led me to the earlier conclusion that it was the party of oppression above all else. None of that makes me more intelligent or more insightful than you, because I actually think the opposite is true.
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The Leopards Eating Faces and Unlubed Dildo of Consequences Thread
bolverk replied to Horn Dog's topic in Cloak Room
From that link, here's a coal-powered one. Imma gonna have to assume that's a pile of coal under a tarp on the roof. -
The Leopards Eating Faces and Unlubed Dildo of Consequences Thread
bolverk replied to Horn Dog's topic in Cloak Room
Since you're on Surly, I'll also assume you've watched Letterkenny, and you'll recognize this Métis actress. -
"We're not Nazis! Stop calling us Nazis!"
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You're describing fiscal responsibility, not conservatism as a political philosophy. The GOP hasn't been fiscally responsible since it embraced Reagan's voodoo economics. It was never about "balanced budgets," an idea they sold to the public to win campaigns. The "conserve" in conservatism is all about retaining the proverbial status quo, i.e., maintaining a specific social hierarchy, protecting the rich from the poor, ensuring the wealthy keep their money, etc. It's a political movement inherently designed to keep the hoi polloi in check, and you can draw a through-line all the way back to feudalism, where it was assumed a specific social class had the divine right to get richer off the backs of the serfs, with knights acting as enforcers. If that also sounds like the Antebellum South and the Post-Reconstruction South, then you can start connecting the dots to modern-day Conservatism. ETA: Oh shit, I just realized I'm in the Peter Thiel thread. You know, the guy who follows Curtis Yarvin, a crazy fucker who wants us to live in a world of technofeudalism.
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The Leopards Eating Faces and Unlubed Dildo of Consequences Thread
bolverk replied to Horn Dog's topic in Cloak Room
The article doesn't say for whom he voted. It also mentions other aspects of the ongoing boycott, including some resort in Plattsburgh whose clientele *was* 70% Canadian. Link if you want to read it: https://archive.is/dkdDl -
"Two Guys on Your Head" Art Markman?
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Papers, please. Surly thread of deportation cruelty dominance
bolverk replied to Captainant's topic in Daily Texan
Where my First Amendment absolutists at? *crickets*- 1241 replies
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Papers, please. Surly thread of deportation cruelty dominance
bolverk replied to Captainant's topic in Daily Texan
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Suspect it's a sock account for StassneyHorn, since he's utterly lost his fucking mind and has been posting really provocative shit the last few months. Regardless, they're both on the ignore list.
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I just posted this in the Daily Texan to hopefully get some views from folks who don't visit the Cloak Room, but this article about how Chicagoans are starting to organize should be seen here, too.
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Papers, please. Surly thread of deportation cruelty dominance
bolverk replied to Captainant's topic in Daily Texan
ICE Is Cracking Down on Chicago. Some Chicagoans Are Fighting Back. Residents have begun forming volunteer groups to monitor their neighborhoods for federal immigration agents. Others honk their horns or blow whistles when they see agents nearby. Federal agents deployed tear gas on Chicago residents and more than a dozen police officers on Tuesday, the latest clash in the nation’s third-largest city as the Trump administration has carried out its immigration crackdown. The clash began on Tuesday morning when federal agents were seen chasing a car through a working-class, heavily Latino neighborhood on the city’s far South Side, witnesses said. An S.U.V. driven by the federal agents collided with the car they were pursuing, the Chicago Police Department said, sending that car into another vehicle that was parked nearby [SEE BOLDED BELOW]. After the crash, dozens of additional immigration agents in masks arrived and residents emerged from their houses, gathering on streets and sidewalks, throwing objects at agents and shouting, “ICE go home!” As the agents left, they released tear gas, apparently without warning, sending people coughing and running for cover. Among those affected by the gas were 13 Chicago Police Department officers, the police department said, and at least one officer was seen rinsing his eyes out with water from a neighbor’s garden hose. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said that the federal agents were conducting an immigration enforcement operation when two people tried to flee and hit the agents’ vehicle. “This incident is not isolated and reflects a growing and dangerous trend of illegal aliens violently resisting arrest and agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers,” the D.H.S. said in a statement. The statement said that federal agents used “crowd control measures” after a group of people gathered and turned hostile [THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED]. The agents repeatedly have been observed releasing smoke bombs, tear gas and pepper balls to disperse residents who gather or capture videos on cellphones, including when the agents were making arrests in densely populated neighborhoods. Chicago police officers, who have been called to the scenes of some clashes, have been exposed to tear gas from federal agents twice in the last two weeks. As the intensity of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has risen, residents of Chicago are increasingly pushing back with fury. In the last several weeks, Chicagoans have formed volunteer groups to monitor their neighborhoods for federal immigration agents, posting alerts on Facebook and in Signal group chats when agents are seen. People carried milk jugs, sometimes used to rinse eyes after tear gas, as they linked arms after a clash with federal agents the Brighton Park neighborhood in early October. If agents are spotted on the street, motorists lean on their horns as a warning and sometimes give chase. Around the city last weekend, pairs of volunteers were seen with orange whistles around their necks, blowing the whistles at the first sight of immigration agents. One Chicago resident, Chris Molitor, stationed himself on a street corner on the North Side on Tuesday, holding a sign denouncing President Trump and wearing a shirt critical of ICE. “We’re seeing videos of people being abused,” said Mr. Molitor, 64, who works in hospitality, nodding in the direction of a local taqueria whose owners were questioned by ICE. “There’s got to be a pushback of some kind.” Last month, Andre Vasquez, a City Council member who is chairman of Chicago’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, sponsored a “community defense workshop” to inform residents of their rights and help them organize politically. A Chicago police officer rinsed his eyes with water on Tuesday after federal agents used tear gas on the far South Side. “Chicago’s been doing just fine, and then these guys showed up,” Mr. Vasquez said of federal immigration officers. “There is big concern about what these unidentified, masked men are doing in this city without accountability. Chicagoans are just trying to live their life. We’re not going to tolerate unconstitutional authoritarianism.” Bystanders have posted videos of arrests that appear unrelated to violations of immigration law. Debbie Brockman, an employee of the TV station WGN, was pinned to the ground and arrested by Border Patrol agents on Friday while walking to a bus stop. A Border Patrol official said that Ms. Brockman had thrown an object at federal agents. Ms. Brockman’s lawyer called the arrest an attack. Ms. Brockman was released without charges. Yarelly Jimenez, 21, a resident of Chicago’s East Side neighborhood, said that immigration arrests had been the talk of the neighborhood and among her family. Ms. Jimenez and two others were recording federal agents in a Walgreens on Tuesday and hurriedly left the store to get away from them, she said. Inside, shoppers yelled at federal agents, videos taken by bystanders show. “Real Americans don’t want you here!” one man said. An agent grabbed one of Ms. Jimenez’s companions, Warren King, 19, on his way out, asking him why he was running and pinning him to the ground. It was uncertain what Mr. King was accused of, and D.H.S. officials did not immediately provide a reason for his arrest. Video taken by another bystander and posted to social media captured Ms. Jimenez shouting at the agent in a panic. “He’s a citizen!” she said. Residents linked arms in the Brighton Park neighborhood after a confrontation with federal agents earlier this month. -
Everything is Shit: Tracking the Great Enshittening
bolverk replied to 956 Worldwide's topic in Daily Texan
90% of the time I've used either is when I'm in a hotel and too tired or lazy to leave my room. -
What is your higher authority, moral, spiritual, or otherwise? A Lesson From the German Resistance That Applies Today As authoritarian rules gain ground across the democratic world, making inroads not only in Hungary and Turkey, but even in the United States, a question from the 20th century has resurfaced in the 21st, one that presses on individuals as well as institutions. Put simply, who bends the knee to tyranny and who stands up to it? A clue can be found in an extraordinary episode from inside the Third Reich that has lain, almost forgotten, for nearly 80 years. At the heart of it is a loose grouping of 10 or so friends and acquaintances drawn from German high society, both the aristocracy and professional elite. Their circle included not one but two countesses, an ambassador’s widow, a diplomat, high-ranking government officials (current and former), a doctor, a pioneering headmistress and a former model, among others. What they found in one another was a shared willingness to defy Hitler, in ways large and small. Except their assumption of common purpose was fatally flawed. In September 1943, they met for a tea party — unaware that one of them was poised to betray all the rest to the Gestapo. That act would lead to arrest and jail and, for several of those present that day, death, whether by the guillotine or the hanging rope. Its ramifications would eventually reach the apex of the Nazi state. The core mystery that runs through this story is not just the identity of the betrayer, but also why people of privilege and rank, who could so easily have kept their heads down, risked everything. Had they fallen in line, their fortunes, careers and country estates likely would have remained intact. They could have survived the war unscathed. But they chose another path. Consider Otto Kiep, 57 years old at the time of the tea party, a diplomat who had secured the glamorous post of German consul general in New York City in the last years of the Weimar Republic. In 1933, an invitation had come to attend a dinner in honor of an eminent fellow countryman, Albert Einstein, who also happened to be the world’s most famous Jew. To accept would be to incur the wrath of his new Nazi masters, installed in power just a few weeks earlier. To refuse would be to side with their campaign of antisemitic persecution. Kiep accepted the invitation and delivered a toast in Einstein’s honor. That brought a summons back to Berlin where he would be hauled before the Führer himself. Or take Maria von Maltzan, the young countess who turned her Berlin apartment into an unofficial refuge for “submarines” — Jews forced to live in hiding, whose safety depended on staying silent and unseen. (Among them was Ms. von Maltzan’s own forbidden Jewish lover.) Or her fellow countess, Lagi Solf, who broke the rules banning contact with Jews, in order to fetch groceries for the submarines. Carrying full shopping bags, one in each hand, had long been her habit. That way, if she ran into someone on the street she would be unable to give the requisite Heil Hitler salute. In scouring the archives, including letters, diaries and court testimonies left behind by the group, and by speaking with their surviving relatives, I’ve begun to form an answer to why some were capable of saying no to a mighty and terrifying regime while the vast majority of their neighbors were bowing their heads and saying yes. Several were committed Christians, adamant that they would ultimately have to answer not to Adolf Hitler but to Jesus Christ. Perhaps the most devout was the hostess of the fateful tea party: the innovative educator, Elisabeth von Thadden, whose school, the Evangelical Rural Education Home for Girls, founded six years before the Third Reich, discreetly took in Jewish pupils while their families scrambled to secure the papers that would enable them to flee the country. Her belief that she was accountable to God alone helped Ms. von Thadden face down the Gestapo inspector who came to examine her school for “deficiencies of conviction,” after the authorities learned that she had recited an Old Testament psalm, which, to them, bore the unforgivable taint of Hebrew scripture. (A 13-year- old pupil was the informant.) Others among the rebels were children of the nobility, convinced their highest loyalty was not to national socialism but to their own ancestors. Hitler might have dreamed of a 1000-year Reich, but these families had already ruled Germany for centuries. They believed that those of their class represented the deep and true Germany, defined in part by its patrician ideal of compassion for the weak. Nazism would be a passing fad; it was they, and the aristocratic inheritance they embodied, that would last. So it was that Maria von Maltzan could speak to the Gestapo men who raided her apartment with imperious impatience. When they demanded she open up the wooden compartment under a sofa-bed — inside which her lover was hiding, holding his breath — she explained that it could not be opened, and that if the secret police were so certain someone was hiding inside, they should aim their guns at it and shoot. She all but dared them to do it. But, she insisted, if they did, they would have to compensate her for the damage, and promise to do so in advance and in writing. Her gambit, deployed with all the hauteur of her caste, worked. Her lover survived. Several key players in the drama were women whose upbringing shared another striking aspect: a close relationship with a strong father. That was true of Ms. von Thadden and both countesses, Maria and Lagi. In all three cases, the women were not just loved by their fathers; they were trusted by them. In a way that was unusual in the era before modern feminism, they were deemed by their fathers to be the equal of any man, capable of taking on any task. Long after their fathers were dead, the women carried that confidence with them. By the time the Nazis ruled Germany, it had blossomed into courage. The strength of those women was buttressed by that deeper conviction that is perhaps the key determinant of who defies an oppressive regime and who buckles before it: belief in an authority higher than the government of the day. Most rebels at the tea party also came to understand that such a belief demanded action as well as thought. For some, that translated into small gestures of defiance, like Lagi Solf and her shopping bags. For others, such as Otto Kiep, it meant acts of audacious resistance, coming within touching distance of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Through deeds large and small, they demonstrated — to themselves and one another — that obedience was not the only option. To be clear, most aristocratic Germans did not rebel against Hitler. On the contrary, the German nobility largely fell in line behind the Nazis, drawn in part by the Führer’s pledge to restore titles abolished in the Weimar era. And of course, we cannot neatly read across from that place and that time to our own age. But if there is a lesson to be gleaned from the deadly fate of those men and women, it might just be that the best safeguard against tyranny is a legion of people who believe in an authority higher than any political program, prince — or president.
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I usually skip most of these YT videos -- when I do watch them, it's at 1.25 or 1.50 speed -- but in this case, it's Anne fuckin' Applebaum. Of course, I'm going to watch it.
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