Just a blog

Mostly US politics or fandom posts

[ibetteracethatinterview]

POLITICO Pro: USDA confirms first case of screwworm in the United States

The pest has been eradicated from the country for decades.

USDA confirmed detection of the New World screwworm in a calf in Texas, marking the first detection of the pest in years and a serious threat to the United States cattle industry and other livestock and animals.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that the department has deployed a response team to the area and started the process of implementing quarantines, limits on livestock movement and increased surveillance of animals. Screwworm larvae were detected “in the umbilical cord” of a three-week-old calf, Rollins said.

This has been eradicated in the US for 60 years but thanks to the DOGE cuts last year it has made this inevitable

[afurioushawk]

Reminder that the primaries aren't until next week and to vote for Janet Mills, she's still on the ballot!

[stephenroot]

(Responding here because you have replies turned off)

Leadership experience for candidates is a great qualifier that voters should consider, but the whole point of popular democracy that isn’t restricted to a class is that absolutely anyone could run and even be supported, giving everyone a voice and a chance at power and change. It also gives voters (especially if they’re not restricted to a class) the responsibility to be educated on issues (which often becomes a class issue in itself) and candidates and to organize, which also gives agency. This all leads to populism, which is frequently dangerous, but it’s the alternative to elitism. The logic of monarchism, when it’s not divine right and inheritance squabbles, is that it ideally manufactures the most qualified leaders, as they are groomed for the role from childhood and get a number of leadership nepo positions preparing them to eventually take the throne, all while being able to look at their ancestors for additional experience. The common citizen can never have a preparation for leadership like that, but popular democracy attempts to argue that it is better that leadership not go through that system, as it ensures the leaders who are elected are more authentically of the people (or it would if there wasn’t nouveau riche aristocracy that took power, which is another of popular democracy’s inherent risks).

I don't have replies turned off, the person whose blog you saw my post on does.

Yeah, absolutely anyone can run; people shouldn't support candidates for executive or statewide offices who have no previous experience in public office, because they are not entry level jobs and voters should stop treating public service as an unserious vocation that can be learned on the fly.

I do not respect candidates who felt no need to get involved to try and influence or improve problems in their own backyards for their entire lives by participating in local politics who suddenly decide they should be in charge of a city or a state or a country or should get to decide who sits on the Supreme Court.

If you're too good to be dog catcher or sit on a school board, I'm too good to vote for you.

[ulyssessimpsongrant]

It’s 2026 and getting frothing at the mouth angry at rainbow capitalism is still stupid because it’s always been a neutral barometer for the social climate around LGBT+ stuff by the way.

[socialmaya]

Occasionally forget people genuinely think capitalism is thousands of years old

One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism

reminder that capitalism was literally invented in the 16th century

[tayefeth]

That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.

Capitalism is only 200 years old and I have to say, they have not been an impressive 200 years

[downtroddendeity]

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.

Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.

[implicatures]

I scrolled past this and like two posts later saw this absolutely perfect example of the way people use “capitalism” completely divorced from its meaning.

People have been dangerously adulterating their products to make a bigger profit for THOUSANDS of YEARS. Rome famously had problems with people selling counterfeit bread and doctored wine.

Capitalism might make these problems worse by concentrating power in the hands of fewer and larger corporations, but ultimately the problem vastly predates actual capitalism. Unscrupulous sellers have been endangering and ripping off their customers since there was such a thing as a marketplace, and governments have been regulating the market for almost as long.

[tuulikki]

Time to deploy my favourite history meme:

[ibetteracethatinterview]

[afurioushawk]

There is no difference between leftists propping up candidates with zero experience like Platner just because he says things they like and Trump appointing cronies who also have zero experience just because they tell him what he wants to hear btw.

[mariacallous]

[notaplaceofhonour]

“SJP chapters are independent & autonomous”

And? So is the Klan.

[notaplaceofhonour]

The “autonomous cell” structure is in fact incredibly common among hate groups & extremist organizations for exactly this reason.

Neo-Nazis use it. Terrorist organizations use it. For the same reason White Supremacist violence usually takes the form of “Lone Wolf” attacks.

It’s an entirely intentional & incredibly effective tactic for vast radicalization networks to isolate and limit responsibility for the inevitable fallout of their rhetoric & actions.

[mariacallous]

[afurioushawk]

[afurioushawk]

[aweekerfuffle]

You're a doctor. You've been taught the phrase "first, do no harm."

A patient comes in with a flesh eating bacteria that is rapidly spreading up their leg. The only way to save their life is to remove their leg.

So what do you do? To help the patient is to accept that you must also harm them.

You're a good doctor. Of course you remove the leg and save the patient's life, because trying to exercise a choice that will result in no harm is impossible where there are only two bad outcomes, but one is unquestionably worse.

This post is for for leftists in the US who still think either not voting or going with a protest vote in the next two major election cycles is an acceptable choice, when you know full well the Republican will cause more harm.

[doomhamster]

One of the many things that infuriate me about recent trends on the left is the way they talk about solidarity, but what they demand looks and smells an awful lot like loyalty.

Read theory. Read the commentaries on the theory. If you don't understand, that proves you haven't read enough. If you disagree with any of it, that proves you're a bad person.

Follow the right influencers. Support the right politicians. Follow the leaders of our movement. Until we decide they're bad people, anyway.

March in our protests. Commit to our boycotts. Donate to our causes. Don't ask what we hope to achieve or how we think we're going to get that effect from what we're doing. Only a bad person would ask those questions.

Wave the flags and shout the slogans of people who want to kill you. People who don't see you as human because you're a woman, because you're queer, because you're Western. If you think solidarity requires any element of reciprocity, even to the point of both sides recognizing each other's human rights, that proves you're a bad person.

[mariacallous]

[afurioushawk]

[uroko]

Rainy day in Daira Pond, Japan // 雨の日の平池