Intellectual Self Defence

Left Libertarian. Punjabi Canadian. "respect strength, never power..."

[agarthanguide]

Link to the article

We regret to inform you that the sunshine and friendship app is actually a children killing app.

[jeffgerstmann]

I have been telling people for years that the company behind Pokemon Go had no-shit, for-realsies ties to the CIA and people never really took it that seriously. Anyway.

Gilman Louie - Wikipedia

[egberts]

prev tags is a good tl;dr of what scanning means

[justinspoliticalcorner]

'It's All Very Scientific': Is The Government Going To Declare 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' A 'Diagnosable Mental Illness'?

Psychiatrist Caroline Lieberman is reportedly working to get the American Psychiatric Association and DHS Secretary Robert Kennedy to classi

Kyle Mantyla at PFAW's RWW:

Last week, right-wing broadcaster Mary Walter interviewed psychiatrist Carole Lieberman about her effort to convince the American Psychiatric Association to classify "Trump Derangement Syndrome" as an official illness and add it to the organization's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. "I put together a classification for mild, moderate, and severe TDS and I'm going to be bringing it into, walking it—literally walking it in—to the American Psychiatric Association very soon," Lieberman announced.

"Each level has approximately 8 to 10 symptoms and you have to have certain number in each category to be able to qualify," she explained. "For example, a mild case would include people who throw shoes at the television set when Trump comes on, or have a meltdown when they hear a song that is associated with Trump, like YMCA. The moderates—and there are many more symptoms, I can't really get into all of them—but for moderates, TDS has taken over more of their lives. And for severe, it's even at a higher level." Lieberman claimed that people like Rosie O'Donnell, Mary Trump, Jimmy Kimmel, "would-be assassins," and "people who attack Teslas because of Elon Musk" would be classified as having "severe TDS" and therefore require psychotherapy so they can "work on the problems in them that make them hate Trump." "For men, it has to do with men who have low self-esteem and they are envious of Trump because Trump has the stereotypically all the things that a man—an alpha male—would and should have," Lieberman said. "He has a great education, Ivy League education. He was successful before he became president. He's become president two times. He has a gorgeous wife. He has a wonderful family. All of these things that these men who have low self-esteem either don't have or don't have enough of or don't feel like they'll ever have. So somehow Trump is to blame for their not having these things."

"The women who have TDS are women who have problems with men, starting with the pussy hats," she continued. "So you would work with them to help them; Trump would be the man, like the worst man, the man that they would imagine it would be worse to be married to, because he's an alpha male and because that's what they can't deal with. So you would work with them to try to get them to not have so much hatred towards men, perhaps have good relationships with men. And so you're really not working on the [hatred toward Trump] because if you get into a conversation about like, 'Why do you hate Trump?' They tell you, 'Well, he does this, and this, and this.' It's not about that. Whatever they would say, whatever executive orders they might say, or whatever political thing or sociological thing, whatever they would say that he did that is bad; it's not really about that. It's about their feelings towards him as a man."

Trump cultist “Dr.” Carole Lieberman is lobbying the APA and DHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to classify “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as an “illness” and “mental disorder” for politically-motivated reasons.

[boomer-mythology-destroyer]

[afloweroutofstone]

DC: Vote for Janeese Lewis George and Aparna Raj!

Janeese Lewis George is the best candidate for Mayor of Washington DC, and Aparna Raj is the best candidate for Ward 1 City Councilor. You should rank both of them in first place on your ballot in the upcoming Democratic primary!

Janeese and Aparna are both running on getting federal agents off of our streets, universal childcare, affordable housing, improved bus service, and expanded public services. They're both endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, labor unions, the Sierra Club, Our Revolution, and Greater Greater Washington.

It will be DC's first instant-runoff voting election (yay!), so you will be able to rank the candidates however you choose. For Mayor, rank Janeese Lewis George in 1st place, and do not rank Kenyan McDuffie at all. If you live in Ward 1, rank Aparna Raj first for your City Council race.

Mail-in ballots for the Democratic primary election are going out this week, and they can be dropped off starting on May 22. Early in-person voting takes place from June 8-14, and election day itself is June 16. You can learn more about how to vote here.

[theconcealedweapon]

[afloweroutofstone]

I've spoken a little before about the various "democracy index" measurements and their various flaws. Personally, my preferred measurement for the level of democracy across countries and over time is V-Dem. It still has plenty of flaws, including the fact that it's fundamentally a measure of experts’ perceptions of democracy rather than democracy itself (a largely unavoidable problem for this type of measurement).

But V-Dem has the benefit of A) producing very detailed results, B) providing multiple different measures of democracy to meet various definitions of the term, and C) producing results that intuitively seem less biased than some of the others indices. So it's my go-to measure whenever trying to quantify democracy.

According to new data from the 2025 edition of V-Dem, the United States witnessed its largest ever decline in democracy last year.

Their primary measure of basic democracy— "electoral democracy"— dropped to its lowest level in the US since 1972, which was the first election year in which 18 year old citizens had full voting rights. The other measures saw similar declines. V-Dem's report said the "speed of decline is comparable to some coups d´états."

The largest areas of change causing this sudden decline are: checks and balances (legislative and judicial restraints on the executive), civil rights and equality before the law, and freedom of expression (which has fallen to "its lowest point since the end of WWII.")

[jethroq]

[afloweroutofstone]

I know that the death of journalism is a classic symptom of fascism, but even I was not cynical enough to foresee the Washington Post, CBS News, and Gallup presidential polling all dying within the same three-month period

[afloweroutofstone]

2025 Writing Highlights

2025 was a busy year, and there was plenty to write about. I published about 49,000 words in articles and reports this year— roughly the equivalent of a 180-page book— on topics ranging from taxes to railroads. Here's a few of the highlights, touching on some of the biggest political stories from this year:

Documenting the Damage: 100 Harmful Policies from the First 100 Days of the Second Trump Administration

The United States of America is a different nation than it was 100 days ago.

The first 100 days of Trump 2.0 represent the most aggressive opening to a new presidential administration in nearly a century. In this full-length report, I summarized 100 different areas of harmful policy change that occurred at the start of this year, providing a semi-comprehensive guide to what was changed by the second Trump administration. The conclusion section then analyzes the ways that Trump is both a break from and a continuation of the pre-Trump status quo. This remains a useful guide for understanding Trump's agenda, and serves as a historical record of the damage that was done.

Rule by Contractor

Like Musk’s dream of building self-driving cars, the [government contracting] industry dreams of a self-contracting contractor. Musk himself is test-driving this concept.

Elon Musk spent the early part of this year sabotaging the federal government through his "DOGE" initiative. I argue that this effort was about privatization, not waste or efficiency. By reducing state capacity, Musk created new opportunities for corrupt government contractors like himself to infiltrate the government and expand their own policy-making powers. In reality, government efficiency requires that we hire more public servants and fewer private contractors.

What You Need to Know About the Budget Reconciliation Bill

Every dollar that the government spends represents a choice: should we fund programs that help people meet their basic needs, or should we fund programs that destroy lives and livelihoods?  

The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" passed by Republicans this year is one of the most important laws of this century so far, enacting deep cuts to social spending in order to spend more on the security state and tax cuts for the rich. To help you understand the problems with it, I came together with two colleagues to write an article explaining how this law is a nightmare from three different perspectives: economic justice, global peace, and immigrant rights.

Unpacking the Dangerous Myth of 'Narco-Terrorism'

So long as the government insists upon seeing non-military problems through a military lens, they will never be solved.

The Trump administration's campaign of murder and intimidation in the Caribbean and Pacific has been justified by the threat of "narco-terrorism." Examining the history of this term reveals that it's been a deeply flawed idea every since its origins in the Reagan administration. Rather than explaining the real world dynamics of the drug trade, the "narco-terrorism" myth serves as a simplified justification for military intervention. This myth distracts us from more important parts of the story, including both the importance of addiction treatment and the US government's own history of helping drug traffickers.

[typenull]

[skarabrae-stone]

Quote by Aldo Leopold, from A Sand County Almanac, published 1949.

[maykitz]

parents will unironically be like if my son, who has been saying fag and watching pornos on his phone since he was 10 years old, takes a single sex education course with a teacher clinically explaining erections to a snickering classroom, he will become sexualized and confused. please respect our decision that he doesn't know about homosexuality yet.

[afloweroutofstone]

More signs from occupied DC

[barabones]

Two Years of Genocide+: Crips Aren’t Done Sending eSims to Gaza

Two Years of Genocide+: Crips Aren’t Done Sending eSims to Gaza   Two years, what the fuck. It really has been two years to the day since Is

[beesmygod]

Are you pro or anti bush

he was a bad president

[beesmygod]

its a good start but i feel like he deserves worse than that

[quoms]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/us/politics/judge-apology-conservative-justices.html

Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with White House in nearly every case it has considered.

But it has done so relatively opaquely through more than a dozen emergency orders — unsigned opinions issued relatively quickly and without oral argument.

Emergency orders are intended to be temporary, outlining whether a policy can be implemented while its legality is still being litigated. In practicality, the court’s orders — often encompassing a few paragraphs and little legal reasoning — have allowed the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people and the elimination of billions in government spending. [...]

Before the Supreme Court acted, Judge Young had ruled in June that the grants could not be canceled, heaping scorn on the Trump administration’s decision to terminate those grants en masse based on what he described as discriminatory motives. [...]

But in the Supreme Court’s order, the two justices suggested that Judge Young had ignored the way the court already addressed the question of terminated grants in the earlier case.

“Lower-court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.

“When this court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts,” he added.

Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University who has written about the case, said in an email that the Supreme Court had put the onus on judges to divine its intentions despite issuing exceptionally short and vague orders. He added that the justices themselves have been inconsistent about whether emergency orders should be considered binding on lower courts, with Justice Samuel Alito saying during a speech in 2021 that “a ruling on an emergency application is not a precedent.”

“The less the court writes, the harder it is to argue that it is ‘clear’ that a ruling in a prior case applies to a subsequent case with even slightly different facts,” Mr. Vladeck said.

Despite Tuesday’s display of contrition, Judge Young, 84, who was confirmed as a federal judge before either of the justices who had scolded him started law school, said the justices’ rebuke was like nothing he had seen in nearly five decades as a judge.

“I have served in judicial office now for over 47 years,” he said. “Never before this admonition has any judge in any higher court ever thought to suggest that this court had defied the precedent of a higher court — that was never my intention.”

He went out of his way to stress that it was never clear to him that the court’s emergency ruling in the education case represented its thinking in other instances of federal grants the Trump administration has slashed since January.

“I simply did not understand that orders on the emergency docket were precedent,” he said. “I stand corrected.”

Courtly Observations is a recurring series by Erwin Chemerinsky that focuses on what the Supreme Court’s decisions will mean for the law, fo

[In the most recent term] the court decided 56 cases with signed opinions after briefing and oral argument. This seems to be the new normal for the court. Last year, the court decided 59 merits cases. In each of the two years prior to that, the court decided 58 cases. The term before that it was 54, and the year before that it was 52, which was the smallest number since 1862.

To put this in perspective, in the 1980s, the court was deciding over 160 cases a year. The smaller docket began when William Rehnquist was chief justice. In his last year, October Term 2004, the court decided 85 cases. When John Roberts went before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the summer of 2005 for his confirmation hearing, he was asked about the smaller docket. He lamented it. He had been a Supreme Court litigator and said that the court should decide at least 100 cases a year. Never in his 20 years as chief justice has the court come close to the 85 merits cases of Rehnquist’s last term. On the other hand, as discussed below, the size of the emergency docket has increased enormously. [...]

A year ago, the Supreme Court decided 44 matters on its emergency, or as it is often called, “shadow docket”. This term, the court has 113 matters on the emergency docket (and that surely will increase over the summer as the term officially continues until the next term begins in October). That is a stunning increase in just one year. Of course, the easiest explanation is the number of applications involving challenges to President Donald Trump’s actions.

I am among those with great concerns about the court effectively deciding major issues without full briefing and oral argument on its emergency docket. Sometimes the court decides without even writing an opinion, such as in Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. on June 23, which allowed the Trump administration to deport individuals to South Sudan despite their not having any connection to that country. It also is troubling that the court pays little attention to rules limiting appellate review of temporary restraining orders and to the usual standards of appellate review, which limit overturning preliminary injunctions to when there is an abuse of discretion by the trial court. Also, it is unclear what, if any, precedential weight lower courts must give to opinions from the emergency docket.

The balls and strikes guy is currently overseeing the systematic dismantling of the concept that evidence, argumentation, and explicit reasoning are essential to the legal system

[philosophybits]

“One could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

[quasi-normalcy]

We have this interesting situation where we basically no longer have privacy nor the expectation of privacy, but we also don't have community or meaningful connection with others, so we're all simultaneously both completely exposed and absolutely alone, and please understand that when I say this situation is "interesting", what I in fact mean is that it's "nightmarish and I wish I could wake up"