#destroy the oligarchy

[freyan2973]

[mikkeneko]

"The contemporary sovereignty movement remains splintered regarding statehood. Some, who argue that the U.S. has illegally occupied the islands, have advocated for a restoration of land, along with compensation. Others, who believe a complete restoration is impossible, have sought federal recognition of Hawaiians as Native people—with some lands returned. Some have argued against the kingdom’s restoration and national recognition; instead, they’ve sought the decolonization of Hawaii under the International Trusteeship System created by the United Nations for territories under the control of foreign powers.

"In 1993, the federal government issued a formal apology for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy—and acknowledged that the Hawaiian people never formally relinquished their lands. In 2009, a bill seeking federal recognition of Native Hawaiians as an Indigenous tribal group passed the U.S. House but has since stalled. Known as the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, a.k.a. the Akaka bill, it would allow Native Hawaiians to form their own government on par with that of the federal government. If passed, it would provide their first self-determination since America overthrew the monarchy in 1893."

I don't think it's a radical ideal for the want of Hawai'i to become their own independent country. It should have never been taken over by the US in the first place. For a country whose entire foundation is based upon "separation from a colonial country" it's laughable that they made an entire population that was self governed into a state. It's insulting. It's already blatantly obvious that this whole country was based on lies and blood, and it only continues to perpetuate that. I'm shocked that the Hawai'ian sovereignty movement isn't mainstream even though they have been fighting for it since 1997. Fuck the American government.

[forgetriestowrite]

Allura got me thinking about M9 again

she said they have a "resilience to [the weave mind's] strengths" which is true but I haven't truly thought about HOW true it is, I was too busy screaming MIGHTY NEIN VOX MACHINA over and over in my head

but like... they really are the best people to take down a hostile hive mind

not only have they literally done that before, but Beau fought off the mind-controlling hold of a demon that had kept her wife captive for years

Then Yasha broke that hold on herself

Jester literally believed so hard in an archfae that she turned him into a deity, and she made friends with an ACTUAL HAG in order to get her friend's curse broken, and it WORKED

Fjord started the campaign in a soul-eating pact with a demigod and ended it as a champion of the Wildmother, which was jumpstarted by him doing the most insane thing he could have done to break Ukotoa's control

Caleb's whole journey was self-love and healing and learning to accept the dark parts of his past and use them for good

Veth not only helped him with that, but also spent the whole campaign working on herself so she could be the person her husband and son knew her to be

Caduceus found a way to bring Kingsley back even though it should have been impossible, because he saw how much his friends wanted it, and he knew what happened to Molly and Lucien was unfair

And to top it all off, they found out one of their own had been manipulated and abused his entire teenage and technically also his adult life, and proceeded to find the person responsible and bully him relentlessly ("I hope someone will mourn you when you are gone" is still the rawest line in cr history), then beat his ass and eventually kill him

these people have shown time and time again that they will not tolerate any kind of authoritative control, especially if it hurts one of them. They refuse to buy into it, and they will destroy anyone who even tries to manipulate someone else.

There is no one else who can go to the moon and completely dismantle their oligarchy. I don't know if there is anyone else who would be willing to do it.

[renfaires]

Quick note about Biden’s FAA Chief pick (Phil Washington).

In the not even two years that he’s been at DIA, the man has personally allowed rampant homophobic and transphobic biases to pervade DIA’s ops department (the primary group of people responsible for keeping you safe at the airport).

I’m not saying he’s a transphobe, but I do know he was personally aware of the discrimination going on with ops, and decided to intimidate those with complaints by bringing in Denver’s “expert” defense attorney against discrimination charges (Wild the city has an expert like that on retainer), who proceeded to gaslight victims and try to get one trans person to admit they were mentally handicapped (rather than, idk, listen to them or address their concerns about what’s going on in that dept.). He’s someone who’s clearly motivated by money rather than service to the people, and in that regard, he might be perfect for the job (incompetent with aviation, sure, but honestly you don’t need to run an airport to know how run a “corporation,” which is how the govt. would like the FAA to be operated)

[scottguy]

Fight sociopathic oligarchs and their henchmen like Alito, Thomas, and speaker Mike Johnson.

They are destroying America just to benefit the rich!

[balteus]

actually re: fromsoftware politics. i do think it's very interesting that the anti-colonialist RLF, ostensibly considered the 'good guys' of the game, were initially explicitly called the communist faction. armored core always has been a series critical of oligarchies and hyper-capitalism, but it's... very interesting to see just how blatant that is in ac6 specifically

you'd think that fromsoftware would eventually drop the ball on the "the ruling class will kill you and cannibalise itself in order to stay alive" considering that they're considered elite AAA devs rn, but thinking about elden ring and ac6's narratives, they've really only gotten more obvious about it - the horrors of colonialism and genocide and the sympathy given to the rage of its victims is something that's actually insane to see, to me, from such a big studio - fromsoft doesn't even attempt to be centrist about it.

for example, the frenzy flame ending. the only thing melina can tell you to dissuade you from pursuing it, ie literally destroying the world forever, is that there's still beauty in the world, apart from the suffering the golden order had caused. at no point however is the sheer despair of the people that the flame represents villanized. if anything, it's portrayed as a self-fulfilling prophecy, it is a tragedy. the only villain is the order who slaughtered all of these people, the flame of despair is something that emerged in them as they were buried alive. and the flame isn't even intended as a revenge upon the world, it's simply a means to end the pain they feel for being subjected to this.

their grief isn't something for the player to judge, it isn't something they're forced to overcome, it's simply a physical manifestation of the reality that was forced upon them. and these people, the merchants, are still kind to us, even knowing the order that we pursue. (in fact, the true, considered best ending of elden ring, is literally just sacrificing yourself in order to achieve complete anarchism. and getting a cool wife to endure the loneliness of space along the way)

in ac6 then, ayre is so terribly forgiving towards us, knowing what we are, knowing what made us, knowing what we participate in. some of this undoubtedly is because of her narrative role, she has to be a sympathetic character. but we do get to see her rage at the end, her grief for her species being seen as nothing more than a resource to be exploited or burned fully vocalized. but the RLF is sympathetic too as resistance fighters who want their home back. the only criticism the game ever leverages towards the RLF is that they're actually not radical enough in their pursuit of freedom, and that criticism is made by a villain.

it's so... i almost want to say optimistic? other games would have tried to pull a "ooh but what if the good guys did bad things (poor attempt at moral grayness)" but no, the RLF is justified at every step of the way. idk it makes me feel things. i dont particularly want to portray fromsoftware as these bastions of political correctness or sth - they're not perfect and i don't expect that ever lmao, but it's so fucking weird that their games are this progressive and have been for a long ass time.

[progressivepower]

Elon is out to destroy democracy and create an oligarchy autocracy. Get a spine and #DeleteX

[crushingthebroken]

the fact ryan condal keeps hitting with the villain bat anyone who has a problem with rhaenyra and daemon's absolutely destructive behavior is beyond me

he turned corlys and rhaenys into simps who don't give a fuck that rhaenyra and daemon conspired to murder their son & daemon executed corlys's brother in the middle of the throne room for standing up for his family's blood right to driftmark to not pass to bastards who were being passed off as trueborn(a literal crime in westeros)

he removed all of rhaenyra's negative traits and made her out to be this tragic righteous angel who everyone should cheer for no matter what

no one cares about the random person daemon murdered to use as laenor's body double but we get 50 scenes of the serving girl aegon SA'd and she's coming back for season 2 - a character who does not exist in the books

vaemond is portrayed as a greedy and grasping fool instead of a man desperate to keep his family's seat in his family - westeros's world means blood is everything

daemon's crimes of murdering his first wife, grooming his niece/wife, being the westerosi equivalent of a neo nazi(except with valyria, a eugenicist oligarchy built on slavery and slaughter) are all brushed under the rug for "YAS MALEWIFE" (do you honestly think he would allow his wife's bastards to inherit ahead of his kids with her? nope)

meanwhile criston cole has his honor violated by rhaenyra who uses him like a glorified dildo - a sacred vow of the kingsguard that means death or castration for any who break it - and calls her a cunt one time and he's the worst man alive

corlys pimped out his 12 year old daughter to viserys and no one cares, but otto does it with alicent and he's somehow the most evil man alive next to criston cole

corlys in 1x10 was fucking hilarious

"rhaenyra was complicit in our son's death. that girl destroys everything she touches."

-minutes later-

"you have the full support of my fleet and house"

condal says the show isn't biased. and i'm the empress of austria.

[bleedingseeds]

The problem with the Gale-Mystra situation is bigger than you probably realize.

In Forgotten Realms lore/cosmology, people that worship gods only for lipservice go to endlessly wander the fugue plane (no gods come get them) until they are found and ripped to the hells by raiding demons, or the god of death, Kelemvor, chains them and makes them serve him for lack of a better option/because he can.

Atheists, agnostics, or people who actively scorn the gods have a worse fate. They become the brick and mortar of The Wall of the Faithless and their souls are decayed and destroyed over a long period of anguish and sufferring.

So, regardless of Mystra's B.S. , if Gale doesn't find another god fast, he is going to have one of these fates when he dies.

Not that Mystra isn't being a bitch, because she IS... but there is also the possibility that she has forgotten what it was like to be mortal (because again, FR lore: she was once a mortal woman named Midnight, just as Kelemvor was once a mortal man of the same name)... If from her perspective, she sees a mortal trying to become a god like she became a god and thinks that it is through killing her he was trying to do it (it happened before to the last Mystral. But it wasnt Midnight who killed Mystral, it was someone else ), it would be very bad for the Realms (SEE ALSO : THE SPELL PLAGUE that ravaged not only the mortal Realms but the actual god planes. When Midnight-Mystra was murdered in the future relative to BG3, it was catastrophic.)

So if , from her perspective, she is trying to not let something like that happen, and she got very spooked when a mortal wizard found something that could kill her... MAYBE she's not just saying he should kill himself to be a royally petty bitch (still could be though), because when Gale dies with the Favor and regained trust of Mystra, she would ideally bring him to her god-plane where he could be happy and live forever in the afterlife. The dream of any wizard. Even if they never get back together, his soul would be immortal and potentially happy instead of enslaved or destroyed.

Now-- That all being said. All the options are not great. The pantheon of Gods in the Forgotten Realms are basically an oligarchy and the anarchist in me, and the pissed-off teenage me who played Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer is like "OK. We gotta join Kaelyn's Crusade against Kelemvor and tear down the Wall of the Faithless.

Play Neverwinter Nights 2 and NWN2: MoTB.

Let's replace some shitty gods. Who's with me?

[freyan2973]

[wings-of-fire-confessions]

Since one anon talked about MudWing parenting culture I'd also like to say that I don't really like how Glory fully changed the RainWings' family system either.

I would have liked it better if she just made it so that everyone knew who their bio families were and the eggs were tracked but that RainWings were still raised communally.

Actually, I really don't like a lot of the culture changes imposed on the tribes. Snowfall destroying IceWing artifacts, Glory taking over the RainWings and remaking their government to be an oligarchy now... Clearsight (albeit, unintentionally) getting rid of Pantala's original language and culture. It just makes each tribe less interesting, IMO.

.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Thankful for class consciousness

On November 27, I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Before the term "ecology" came along, people didn't know they were on the same side. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer – what does the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere?

But as James Boyle has written, the term "ecology" welded together a thousand issues into a single movement. When we talk about "looking at our world through a lens," this is what we mean – apply the right analytical lens and a motley assortment of disparate causes becomes a unified, coherent project:

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=dlj

Unfettered, planet-destroying, worker immiserating corporate power is only possible in the absence of such a lens. Before neoliberalism can destroy our lives, it must first convince us that we are all disconnected. "There is no such thing as society," isn't just an empty slogan: it's a weapon for dismantling the democratically accountable structures that can stand against industrial tyrants.

That's why neoliberalism is so viciously opposed to all kinds of solidarity, why corporate apologists insist that the only elections that matter are the ones where you "vote with your wallet." It's no surprise that the side with the thickest wallets wants to replace ballots with dollars!

Today, at long last, after generations of deadly corporate power-grabs, we are living through an ecology moment where all kind of fights are coalescing into one big fight: the fight to save democracy from oligarchy.

There are many tributaries flowing into this mighty river, but two of the largest are antitrust and labor. Antitrust seeks to ensure that our world is regulated by democratically accountable lawmakers who deliberate in public, rather than shareholder-accountable monopolists who deliberate in smoke-filled rooms. Labor seeks to ensure that contests between profit for the few and prosperity for the many are decided in favor of people, not profit.

This coalition is so powerful that the ruling class has never stopped attacking it. Indeed, the history of US antitrust law can be viewed as a succession of ever-more-insistent laws enacted solely to make it clear to deliberately obtuse judges that competition law is aimed at corporations, not unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

Rising corporate power and declining worker power is bad for all of us. The failure of successive US administrations to block airline mergers led to sky-high prices and a proliferation of "junk fees" that can double the price of a ticket. The monopoly carriers stand to make $118b this year from these fees:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90981005/airlines-fees-118-billion-dark-patterns

The consolidation of the agricultural sector led to cartels that conspired to rig the prices of our food. These Les Mis LARPers rigged the price of bread!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-bread-price-fixing-1.6883783

Remember eggflation? Nearly all the eggs in US grocery stores come from a single company, Cal-Maine, which owns dozens of brands, including "Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes eggs":

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/13/business/egg-prices-cal-maine-foods/index.html

With all our eggs in one basket, it was easy for a single company to rig the egg market, blaming everything from bird flu to Russian invasion of Ukraine for doubling egg prices while their profits shot up by 65%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

Antitrust isn't just about monopoly – it's also about oligopoly. The American meat cartel pretends that it's not rigging markets by outsourcing its price-fixing to a "clearinghouse" called Agri Stats:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

Agri-Stats gets data from all the Big Meat companies, "anonymizes" it, and publishes it back to its subscribers, who use the service to coordinate across-the-board price-hikes that have cost the public billions in price gouging (meanwhile, Big Meat was able to secure $50b in public subsidies).

For forty years, governments have ceded power to "autocrats of trade" who usurped control "over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

But that era is coming to an end. In the past year, American regulators have blocked airline mergers and promulgated rules banning junk fees. They've dragged price-fixing clearinghouses into court:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-turkey-eggs-and-air-travel-just

They're getting results, too: for the second year in a row, turkey prices are down. Cranberries, too (18%). Same for whipping cream (25%). Pie crusts are down. So are russet potatoes. Airfares are down 13.2%.

The egg cartel just lost a long-running court case over the last egg price-fixing campaign, which gouged Americans from 1990-2008:

https://www.pymnts.com/cpi_posts/kellogg-kraft-secure-victory-in-price-fixing-lawsuit-against-egg-producers

The same fact-pattern that was revealed in that court case is repeated in this year's eggflation scandal:

https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Farm-Action-Letter-to-FTC-Chair-Lina-Khan.pdf

That's terrific ammo for the FTC, and will doubtless benefit the Democrats running against would-be Indiana senator John Rust, whose family owns convicted egg cartel member Rose Acre Farms and whose wife just stepped down as chair of the board.

One underappreciated aspect of the global war on corporate power is that the same corporations commit the same crimes in countries all over the world, which means that whenever any government establishes evidence of those crimes, they are of use to all the other governments. Competition enforcers from the UK, EU, USA, Singapore, South Korea and elsewhere are coordinating to target the Big Tech cartel. Maybe Google and Facebook and Apple are bigger enough to resist any one of those governments – but all of them?

https://cmadataconference.co.uk/

One notable absence from the anti-monopoly coalition is Canada. While other countries merely stopped enforcing their competition laws in the neoliberal era, Canada never had a good competition law to enforce. Canada's official tolerance for monopolies has allowed a handful of companies to seize control over the economy of Canada and the lives of Canadians:

https://www.canadaland.com/shows/commons-monopoly/

These monopolies are largely controlled by powerful families, Canada's de facto aristocracy, whose wealth and power make them above the law and subordinate the country's democratic institutions to billionaires' whims:

https://www.canadaland.com/tag/dynasties/

At long last, Canada has called time on oligarchy. Last week's Fall Economic Statement included an announcement of a muscular new competition law, including new merger guidelines, a new "abuse of dominance" standard, and Right to Repair rules:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7132855021548769282/

The law also includes interoperability mandates for Canada's highly concentrated – and deeply corrupt – banking sector. These measures are strikingly similar to new measures just introduced in the US by the CFPB:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

The arrival of Canada's first fit-for-purpose competition rule coincides with all kinds of solidaristic movements in Canada that are fighting corporate power from the bottom up. Even Ontario, led by one of the most corrupt premiers in provincial history, can't break its teachers' union:

https://globalnews.ca/news/10105600/ontario-elementary-teachers-reach-contract-deal/

It's not just workers who benefit from solidarity: Tenants' unions have formed across the province in response to corporate takeovers of scarce rental stock. These finance-sector landlords have armies of lawyers who've figured out how to bypass rent-control rules and evict tenants who balk. Rather than rolling over, tenants' unions are organizing waves of rent-strikes:

https://macleans.ca/longforms/rent-strikes-canada/

As with Big Tech, the illegal tactics of the rental sector aren't confined to a single nation. In America, Wall Street landlords have dramatically increased the price of housing and kicked off an eviction epidemic the likes of which the country has never seen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

And as with Big Meat, landlords use arm's-length clearing houses to rig rental markets, coordinating across-the-board rent hikes:

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

In other words: to fix the housing market, tenants all over the world need to learn the tactics of labor unions. Housing regulators have to learn from agricultural regulators. Americans tenants have to learn from Canadians. These aren't 1,000 different fights – they're one big fight, and the coalition for dismantling corporate power is vast and powerful.

The most powerful weapons our bosses have is convincing us that we are weak and they are strong – so strong that we shouldn't even try to fight them. But solidarity is absurdly powerful, which is why they go to such great lengths to discredit it. In Sweden, the solidarity strikes against Tesla – who refuses to recognize its maintenance workers' union – have spread to nine unions.

Tesla can't get its cars offloaded at the ports. It can't get its showrooms cleaned. No one will deliver its mail. No one will fix its chargers. The strike is spreading to Germany, and workers at its giant Berlin factory is set to walk out:

https://www.metafilter.com/201514/Swedish-Tesla-workers-go-on-strike

There's something delicious about how palpably frustrated Elon Musk is by all this, as he realizes that neither his billions nor his bully pulpit are a match for workers in solidarity:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-23/elon-musk-calls-swedish-tesla-strikes-insane-as-impact-spreads

It's a reminder of just how fragile and weak billionaires are, when we stop believing in them and deferring to them. Rebecca Solnit's latest Guardian column adds up the ways that allowing billionaires to run the show puts us all in danger:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/20/billionaires-great-carbon-divide-planet-climate-crisis

They are the unelected "autocrats of trade" who control "the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life." They are the force that this new ecology movement is coalescing to fight: across borders, across sectors, across identities. No matter whether you are a worker, a tenant, a voter, a shopper or a citizen, your enemy is the billionaire class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/24/coalescence/#solidarnosc

[tobiasdrake]

I've never liked Hypocrisy Gotchas in political discourse. First, because it doesn't really matter. "He said we should kick all the illegal immigrants out but his company employs undocumented migrant labor!" Uh. Yeah. He's a fascist who hates minority races but enjoys slave labor. There may be a semantic contradiction between his words and his actions but there is no contradiction with his values.

The thing about the Right is that they don't really care about integrity of values or whatever. They're just making sound bytes. They want to cut taxes for the rich, restrict voting rights to the oligarchy, control women, reduce minorities to a slave labor class, etc. and they do not care what they have to say or do to make that happen.

They do not care if you catch them being inconsistent with their words. Because the words are just marketing. Their words are the juicy hamburger on the billboard that looks 10x better than what they're serving in the diner. Cool, you pointed out the hypocrisy. They're still gonna say it anyway.

But what really gets me about hypocrisy gotchas is that. Like.

So much of the Right's platform exists in opposition to the Left. Much of what they want is to claw back the victories that the Left has won. What we like, they hate. What we seek to create, they want to destroy. So on a certain level, trying to catch them in a Gotcha is, itself, a Gotcha back at us.

Because when we point and jeer at them for saying one thing and doing another, we're pointing and jeering at something we're supposed to be for.

"Republicans hate sex work but they routinely hire prostitutes! SHAAAAME!"

Uh. We're supposed to be pro-sex worker. Why are you shaming people for hiring sex work?

"Republicans want to kill abortions but this Republican got three abortions! SHAAAAME!!!"

Uh. We're supposed to be pro-abortion. Why are you shaming people for getting abortions?

"Republicans want to destroy LGBT rights but this Republican had an affair with a man! SHAAAAME!!!"

Uh. We're supposed to be pro-LGBT. Why are you shaming people for being gay?

Trying to score zingers off of Republican failures to uphold conservative values is not just politically inconsequential, it also necessarily accepts the premise that conservative values should be upheld. Shaming them for doing things they speak against casts those things they are doing as shameful.

I don't believe in going high when they go low. The Right is up to a lot of shady shit, and they should be called on it. But being gay or indulging in sex work or getting abortions, this stuff isn't shady. And we shouldn't treat it like it is, because then we're accepting their premise as a foundational belief for our argument.

In my opinion, speaking out against the very people we're supposed to support, potentially making people feel unsafe or unwelcome within the party, for the sake of scoring zingers against the enemy side? That's as much of a Hypocrisy Gotcha against us as it is against them.

And we're supposed to be the ones who actually mean what we say.

[thelostdreamsthings]

‼️"Democracy" in the Great Britain 🤡

▶️ 80% of British adults did NOT vote for the Labour Party, which gets to choose the new Prime Minister!

How’s this democracy?

The math:

57% turnout, of which Labor party won 34% of the votes.

57% x 34% = 20%

▶️ The UK's new Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a pro-war, neoliberal Blairite who is closely linked to British intelligence and the US government. He was backed by big business interests after the corporate media destroyed popular left-wing, anti-imperialist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Ben Norton discusses how Britain is an oligarchy, not a democracy.

‼️"Democracy" in the France: 🤡

National Rally: 10 million votes

NFP: 7 million votes

But look at the seats won in the French parliament!

It’s 142 versus 178!

Whatever Melenchon is really up to, he's making the - two - right noises so far:

1️⃣ Recognize the state of Palestine.

2️⃣ Talk to Russia.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Charles P. Pierce: Hard after Thursday night’s television debacle, the Supreme Court leaped in to destroy the separation of powers and, as Elie Mystal pointed out on Xwitter, to engage in the biggest power grab since Marbury v. Madison. Through the now-customary 6–3 vote delivered by the carefully manufactured conservative majority, the precedent of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, aka the Chevron deference, is now as dead as Julius Caesar. And thus forty years of administrative law comes to a rude and abrupt end. The decision further illustrates that the dedication of the carefully manufactured conservative majority to corporate oligarchy is utterly unshakable, expertise—scientific and otherwise—be damned. Don’t believe me? Ask Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion.

“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

So instead of career scientists deciding that the E. coli convention in your pork loin makes it inadvisable to eat, some twenty-two-year old law clerk fresh out of Regent University School of Law will. Bon appétit!

Getting rid of Chevron was one of the golden dreams of the country’s oligarchs and the judges and lawyers in their pay. Along with Roe v. Wade, it was number one on the conservative hit parade. But Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose concurrence is chock-full of the kind of tinhorn erudition so beloved by the carefully manufactured conservative majority, has perhaps a special reason to dance on Chevron’s grave. His mother, Anne Gorsuch, was hired by the Reagan administration to run the EPA—into the ground, apparently. From The Washington Post:

Anne Gorsuch—like Reagan then and President Trump today—was a firm believer that the federal government was too big, too powerful and too eager to issue regulations that restricted businesses. As a result, she slashed the EPA’s budget by nearly a quarter and, according to a Washington Post story at the time, boasted that she had reduced the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half inch. She filled various departments at EPA with subordinates recruited from the very industries the agency was supposed to be regulating.

By the end of her stint at EPA, Anne Gorsuch was under siege. A half dozen congressional committees were looking into allegations of mismanagement of the Superfund program, which was designed to clean up abandoned toxic waste sites around the country. The House voted to cite Gorsuch for contempt of Congress for failing to turn over subpoenaed records.

In addition to its dollar-store history, Gorsuch’s concurrence pretty much turns the concept of stare decisis into Silly Putty. Return with us now to those thrilling days of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Justice Neil Gorsuch, your host.

"Other consequences followed for the role precedent played in future judicial proceedings. Because past decisions represented something “less than a Law,” they did not bind future judges....At the same time, as Matthew Hale put it, a future judge could give a past decision “Weight” as “evidence” of the law....Expressing the same idea, William Blackstone conceived of judicial precedents as “evidence” of “the common law.” And much like other forms of evidence, precedents at common law were thought to vary in the weight due them."

Matthew Hale died in 1676. He was a notorious witch hunter and once argued that the existence of laws against witchcraft proved that witches existed. What the hell he has to do with PFAS pollution or workplace safety in a chicken plant is beyond me. But we live in his universe now, and Neil Gorsuch got his own back for his mom.

https://www.esquire.com/.../supreme-court-chevron.../...

[highly-important]

The other thing I’ll say about Venture Bros since it is over.

“The Unicorn in Captivity” introduced a really interesting new layer to the show that isn’t ever really explored ever again.

That being: OSI are tools of the oligarchy. They intentionally throttle progress in order to keep capitalism in power. Anything that undermines big business or upsets the international balance of power is bought off or destroyed. The teleporter could have increased the economy and raised standards of living for the world- at the cost of making some fat cats from the global oligarchy lose money. And the reality is this makes the OSI actual, legitimate bad guys for stunting humanity's progress and hampering a genius. The OSI exist to maintain the status quo.

They were building up to this in other episodes: the Guild and OSI exist to keep powerful revolutionaries distracted. The villains abide by a bunch of inefficient rules and stick to small-scale crimes like revenge and bank robberies rather than world domination plots. And I think this would serve a similar distraction to super-scientists and other protags, who are too distracted by the experience to make significant world-altering progress.

I think that in the universe of the show there is practicality to this. But as much as it is about preserving some level of stability, it’s just as much about preserving the status quo. There exists the means and technology to revolutionize the world, but OSI and the Guild prevent this from happening.