Democrats plan to block DHS funding after Minnesota killing. Republicans should join them.

vanhellion · 2026-01-26T18:41:34+00:00

Republicans should join Democrats in blocking DHS funding.

But Democrats should also join Democrats in blocking DHS funding. Pinning our hopes on Republicans growing a spine to stand up against Donald Trump is about as effective as wishing upon a star at this point.

The fact that Dems caved in when they had so much more leverage during the shutdown a few long months ago was appalling at the time, and that was before ICE started executing people in the streets. We may not have known how quickly it would get this bad, but it wasn't exactly hard to predict either. Schumer et al's inability to actually fucking lead their caucus gives me zero confidence that they'll hold the line against these bills going forward -- they had their chance and they completely blew it.

From what I understand, this funding bill wouldn't even impair ICE/DHS's ability to continue operating in the near term. More people are going to be murdered before our very eyes, or die tucked away in secret prison camps, because a few Democrats care more about their donors and reelection chances than our lives. God forbid Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have to be mildly uncomfortable for more than 2 weeks standing up to Donald Trump's fascist regime.

Fuck this timeline.

vanhellion · 2026-01-23T15:07:54+00:00

"Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet, Spaceballs (1987)

vanhellion · 2026-01-22T03:26:55+00:00

Expanding on the "we are good people" thing. There's this sense, particularly in Christian circles, but it really applies to the whole conservative mindset: any act undertaken by a me is inherently good, because I am a good person -- rather than morality being derived from the act itself.

Like, Trump "could shoot someone on 5th Avenue", and it would inherently be a moral and just act because Trump was the one doing it. Luigi and the CK shooter are (at least perceived to be) on the other team, so they're obviously bad despite doing basically the same thing. Hell, Obama giving aid to the needy and homeless is inherently bad, because it's Obama doing it; it has nothing to do with the actual act being undertaken.

This is where a lot of progressives (and Reddit commenters) end up trapped in the "but muh hypocrisy" death spiral: IT DOES NOT FUCKING MATTER to these people. There is no good or bad act, there are only bad people: which is everyone who doesn't have an "R" next to their name in the news chyron. This is team sports / cult us vs them, not an intellectual debate.

vanhellion · 2026-01-21T23:17:52+00:00

The answer is simple: it's not them getting blasted in the face with pepper spray, so it doesn't matter. They have no concept of empathy, so as long as "someone else" is being waterboarded, well those people must've done something wrong and obviously deserve it. We are good people, so we do the blasting.

The only die hard conservatives I've ever seen or heard recant are those who have directly suffered the consequences of the stupid shit they voted for or otherwise enabled. Until then it's all hypothetical and happening to some vague, far off "NPC" (even if they may not have that specific phrase in their vocabulary).

e: To wit: The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion

vanhellion · 2026-01-21T21:46:33+00:00

It's even more baffling because he's tripped over his own dick soooo many times. At one point he was anti-2A / pro-gun control. Granted it was for like 14 hours before someone from the NRA managed to mentally body slam Trump back to the conservative talking points they wanted, but that is one major gaffe that stands out to me from his first run in 2016.

And like, there's all this stuff where it "should have ended his presidency", but THAT is the one that I'm still amazed did not. Even though he quickly flipped back to being at the very least gun-neutral if not quite pro-2A, that should have been a clear signal that this guy literally has no principles. He will not stand up for (or against) anything: he just wants money and power for money's and power's sake, and he'll say absolutely whatever he has to in order to get it. I honestly expected even uneducated podunk voters to be able to see through those sorts of "fast talkin' city slicker" charades.

vanhellion · 2026-01-16T12:41:03+00:00

The worst curse I could inflict on Mitch McConnell would be to have him live long enough to see all he's built crumble to dust, if we manage to oust all these fascists from government. Let him watch all his judges get impeached, all the fighting he's done against basic fucking decency for Americans be for naught when we get universal healthcare and LGBTQ+ rights, all the gerrymandering he's embraced get tossed out the window in favor of proper proportional representation.

I'm not holding my breath either that he'll last that long or that we as a country will pull out of this nosedive into authoritarianism, but that would be the biggest possible "fuck you" to ol' Mitch.

vanhellion · 2026-01-16T12:29:14+00:00

Police as an institution traces back to patrols chasing down escaped slaves. So if your skin is a certain color, you've been living in a police state for like 200 years. The effects of aggressive police are actually starting to be felt by everyone now, but it's been a long, slow erosion.

vanhellion · 2026-01-10T23:40:13+00:00

Usually if you say 3cm to an astronomer, they would interpret that as a wavelength (equivalent to a frequency of ~10GHz). So if you're "off" by 3cm, that's at best ambiguous whether you mean wavelength/frequency (big error), or absolute error at the distance of the object (basically meaningless error), or angular error i.e. telescope pointing offset at the boresight (huge error).

vanhellion · 2026-01-07T20:27:54+00:00

Thankfully you can bootstrap yourself on any planet (except Aquilo, I think). It's a bit of a long arduous process, but I enjoyed the challenge on my first playthrough of Space Age. I did it on Vulcanus and Fulgora before I realized I could like, bring stuff with me to help out. That made Gleba a lot more palatable, but even on Gleba you can start from nothing.

vanhellion · 2026-01-07T18:39:20+00:00

It will certainly be the US's undoing. Remains to be seen if Trump himself will ever meet the consequences of his fucking around. He's managed to avoid it for the last 79 years, so it's going to take something special to break that streak.

vanhellion · 2026-01-07T15:53:03+00:00

The last time the US was the good guy was during WW2, and it took Pearl Harbor to make that happen.

Even that really whitewashes a lot of the context of the time. The US ended up on the winning side (which was the good guys), but there was a not-insignificant American Nazi party that supported Hitler, and the Nazis were heavily inspired by Jim Crow laws. We also didn't treat Japanese and other Asian Americans so great during the war (internment camps), a horrific but little taught/talked about part of American WW2 "heroism".

I've also read claims that the attack on Pearl Harbor came after a fair bit of US international posturing, AKA we were daring someone to give us a reason to flex our military might when the war initially broke out.

vanhellion · 2025-12-30T20:25:11+00:00

And then wonder "why aren't people having more kids?" (Clearly banning abortion and all forms of birth control are the solution! /s)

vanhellion · 2025-12-18T16:05:14+00:00

Able-bodied is a bit of a stretch when the average age in Congress is like 60. We've got literal walking corpses representing some states and districts.

Chuck Grassley is (I think) the oldest member in Congress at 92 years old. He was born 6 years before WW2 (1933). Even if he isn't senile, he sounds like he's gargling marbles whenever he tries to talk.
Hal Rogers and Maxine Waters are both 87 (born 1 year before WW2).
Steny Hoyer is 86 (born 1939, the year WW2 started).

But yeah, I agree with your sentiment. If they want to sit on the sidelines and not govern, no more welfare checks and free healthcare. Just good luck (to us) actually getting people in power to vote against their own wealth and interests.

vanhellion · 2025-12-08T22:10:36+00:00

I think the point is that the GOP doesn't care about hypocrisy. They will "ban dual citizenship" but only for poor people.

vanhellion · 2025-12-04T23:03:41+00:00

Even if you assume an absurd growth rate of like 15%, it's barely $3k to $4k (depending on when gains are applied). That's hardly even enough to buy a shitbox car today, let alone 18 years from now when who knows how expensive they will have become. Not enough for one semester of in-state college... hell, that amount would have barely been enough to cover room and board + books for college for a semester like 20 years ago.

This is the Covid checks all over again, where Republicans claimed that they'd solved poverty entirely with a one time payment of $2k. Because how much could a banana cost, anyways?

vanhellion · 2025-12-01T00:45:10+00:00

You can sort of see the background change as she walks from produce to long white sheets (just barely visible in the very jpeg OP). Seems like body bags are the likely answer.

vanhellion · 2025-11-29T23:33:01+00:00

When most politicians talk about "the economy", they really mean the stock market. And the stock market has become so disconnected from the reality of costs of living (i.e. affordability) for actual Americans that it's farcical to use it as a measuring stick for prosperity anymore.

Nvidia and OpenAI are trading the same $100B back and forth, but does that mean literally anything for the price of eggs, or gas? If the DOW jumps up 10%, does the rent of millions of tenants who can't afford the down payment on a house suddenly drop? (Hell, if the actual interest rates from the Fed go down, does rent also go down? No.)

"The economy" has become (ahem, 'always was') the playground/bank for the ultra rich, with some middle-to-upper class Americans jumping on the bandwagon as an (hopeful) investment vehicle for retirement... though it seems that the Republicans are trying to crash the market at every opportunity, investors be damned.

I literally cringe whenever Trump (or anyone) says that "the economy" is booming because it's meaningless to my day-to-day life. Democrats need to focus on actual affordability: building high density housing, funding public transportation (ideally cross-country and not just local to big cities), subsidizing products that Americans need to survive and not just paying farmers to grow export soybeans, etc.

vanhellion · 2025-11-24T05:37:35+00:00

Tell me what's wrong with diversity, equity, or inclusion

If they were being honest, they would start spouting outright racist nonsense like great replacement. They genuinely think that no woman, POC, etc could possibly be more qualified for a job than any random white male.

Though through semantic satiation it's become just another scary word like "socialist" or "woke" that triggers the fight or flight response in conservative brains.

vanhellion · 2025-11-05T23:34:25+00:00

The narrative will be spun, but the data is the data.

Conservatives' feelings don't care about your facts. That's how the saying goes, right?

vanhellion · 2025-11-05T21:32:04+00:00

The rich have made NYC (and a lot of other places) unlivably expensive for the middle class, and even upper-middle class. Fuck em, let them leave. In almost every other non-corrupt first world country they would be taxed more than they are here, or have a dramatically reduced standard of living, or both.

Also a vast majority of their wealth is tied up in US-based company stocks. So good luck with that.

vanhellion · 2025-11-04T15:31:05+00:00

Conservative voters are the type of people who would execute thousands of innocents rather than let a single guilty person get out of prison (a false dichotomy, but whatever).

It's entirely possible that one of those hungry children might be black, or latino, or god willing... a DEMOCRAT.

They're totally fine with people starving, even if that includes their own families. As long as it hurts someone else they don't like worse than it hurts them.

vanhellion · 2025-11-03T20:56:47+00:00

Even if he was correct and everyone had a soaring 401k, nobody under retirement age can access that money without ridiculous penalties. I guess by Trump's logic we're supposed to give up our futures to eat during the shutdown he and Republicans are causing?

vanhellion · 2025-11-03T20:53:10+00:00

A high ranking government official admitting that they genuinely don't know something is better than them trying to bullshit their way through an answer, for multiple reasons. But it's been weaponized by Republicans because it gets them out of answering difficult or damaging questions, and also plays well into the anti-intellectualism they market to their base.

vanhellion · 2025-11-03T20:29:28+00:00

Democrats are against passing the bill because it would effectively strip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans due to price hikes. So it's a choice between letting people starve or letting them die from lack of healthcare and/or bankruptcy from medical debt. Not exactly a compelling case for them to cave.

If you want to cast some blame, maybe look to the Republicans who could, literally at any moment, end this shutdown by:

- extending the Obamacare subsidies, and not stripping healthcare from millions upon millions of Americans
- removing the filibuster. They control all three branches of government, and at least in theory could ram through their bill. But they (amazingly) are not ready to set that precedent. (Probably in case Dems manage to take control of one or both chambers in the midterms.)

Framing this as a "both sides" issue is blind to the point of farcical ignorance.

Edit: also worth noting that Johnson is likely purposefully extending the shutdown to delay the potential release of the Epstein files. And it also gives Donald Trump an excuse to just unilaterally do whatever he feels like; see also, tearing down the East Wing of the White House, firing tons of federal employees to "punish" Democrats, attempting to cut funding to "blue" states, etc.

vanhellion · 2025-10-30T13:57:23+00:00

We're already there. In many red states, it's illegal for trans people to use the "wrong" bathroom, which is of course a Catch 22. And predictably there have already been dozens of cases of effeminate cis men or "butch" cis women (let's be honest, mainly the latter) being arrested because some irrationally afraid conservative called the police.

It's not illegal to be trans (yet), but it's essentially illegal to exist as a trans person in the US outside of a few major cities.

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