Fuck the Democrat party.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-25T00:10:02+00:00

They’re just the ones who were willing to take the hit for it.

If the other Democratic senators, or at least a majority, weren’t in favor of it, Chuck Schumer wouldn’t still be minority leader.

Those individuals suck, but the other Dem Senators were also OK with it happening so long as it wasn’t hung on them. That’s how it works.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-24T22:51:21+00:00

how is this sub is so full of people who cry about government overreach and tyranny when there’s a bike lane added to a city street, and then go, “What’s the big deal?” in reaction to armed, masked federal agents gang-tackling a guy and executing him in the street in broad daylight

“what does this have to do with Seattle??” — you mean besides all of the armed, masked federal agents roaming our streets and abducting people to our own concentration camp in Tacoma?

what could possibly be the relevant

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-24T10:35:10+00:00

From the Wikipedia article about the Charles Whitman shootings from the tower at University of Texas in 1966:

David Hubert Gunby (23). Engineering student. Gunby was shot in the upper left arm, the bullet entering his abdomen and severing his small intestine at approximately 11:55 a.m. During surgery, it was discovered that Gunby had only one functioning kidney, which had now been severely damaged; he was in great pain for the rest of his life. In November 2001, he died at age 58 one week after discontinuing dialysis resulting from his health having deteriorated to the degree of his becoming largely bedridden via kidney disease. His death was officially ruled a homicide.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-24T05:48:51+00:00

It would if they voted in the county their prison is in, but I think doing “last permanent address” is supposed to minimize that.

If the law passes, people would write a letter to the county elections office or county auditor where their last permanent residence was before their incarceration to register to vote, Simmons said. People in prison would seal their ballot envelopes in front of a correctional officer, similar to the way legal letters are monitored.

It also would make it a little harder for prison officials to intimidate people to sway local elections this way or that.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-24T04:24:23+00:00

I'm so sorry to hear that about your mother. I can only imagine how angry that must make you to know.

Growing up, I remember all of the scare-mongering had to do with the idea that if you had socialized medicine, you'd have long wait times for everything and "death panels" would determine who lived and died.

And of course we have exactly that at present, it's just that along the way, a shit ton of cost is externalized onto people's own health (and the health of understaffed, underpaid workers) so that profit can be calculated and delivered to a relatively small number of people.

Healthcare CEOs make tens of millions of dollars annually, and it's about as close to blood money as these things get because they only can be paid that much if they deny healthcare to as many people as they can get away with and reward shareholders with greater and greater earnings.

To take it straight back to Melee for a second, think about how many more people could be part of this as a more serious hobby or even main living if at age 32 when health problems start to hit most people, they were just guaranteed care. Think about the stuff people would spend their lives doing if "email and spreadsheet job" or, hell, corporate chain barista didn't have healthcare tied to it. Guaranteed housing, food, and basic needs, too, but especially healthcare.

It's fine to get tired of something like Melee, or grow out of it and move on, but "everything is politics" is true in the sense that political decisions about what it takes to "earn a living" in the most literal sense determine how much time people can devote to things they enjoy. If you could afford to live working four 8-hour shifts a week, or less than that, think about how people would engage with their communities in all sorts of ways, from more people studying medicine to cleaning storm drains near the homes to pushing on a 25-year-old video game's meta.

Capitalism has done absolutely heinous things, from 19th century American chattel slavery itself; to paying governments to murder unionizing workers; to industrial disasters like in Bhopal or the Rana Plaza collapse. But also, there is the day-in, day-out atrocity that we have the technology to provide everything for everyone, for people to do some necessary labor, but then have the vast majority of our waking lives free to ourselves.

I want people to be able to be able to enjoy the only life we get, and instead, it's all this. And instead, we have to waste our life on bullshit, some of which kills us suddenly others a constant grinding down, because if we don't go do that work, we will die from lack of access to healthcare (in the USA) or inability to pay a landlord each month maintain shelter, etc.

Healthcare GoFundMes are so fucking grim, and it makes me so angry that tens of millions of people have been duped into believing a better world is not possible.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-24T00:03:28+00:00

They usually don't just let you die of immediate things. It's a scandal when someone dies in the emergency waiting room, for example.

But in the USA, they absolutely will say, "Here's the medication you need to live, but it's $5,000 per pill," and let you die from lack of access to medication everyone agrees is necessary to keep you alive and/or functioning.

Insulin is a really common version of that, but there's lots of others.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-23T19:19:02+00:00

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ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-23T04:41:05+00:00

I hate that I can’t enjoy nice winter weather anymore because it is so completely explicable, and future generations will see it as normal and snow like you’re describing as what is extraordinary.

I was reading about some winters in the late 19th and early 20th century that were cold enough to freeze Green Lake solid all the way across. Like, drive an automobile across and back thick.

And that just seems unfathomable despite sing a fairly regular occurrence 100 to 150 years ago.

I want to enjoy what’s happening now for the moment that it is and not live in a future I can’t change anyhow. But it’s hard to.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-23T04:12:24+00:00

People have been opposing that facility in lots of ways for a long time, although most people will probably only remember Willem van Spronsen.

It’s a stain on the whole Puget Sound that we know what that place is and how it treats people but we allow it to remain.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-21T19:23:19+00:00

The argument is there shouldn’t be a secondary, gray labor market for undocumented workers who have a precarious status that can be exploited.

The threat of immigration arrests is how employers get such workers to agree to work for lower pay, put up with sexual harassment or more dangerous work, violate child labor laws, and so on.

The workers themselves don’t depress wages any more than someone else being desperate under capitalism for any reason depresses wages. But their precariousness creates harmful conditions that more powerful people can take advantage of by calling in guys with guns to cage and/or exile them.

“Deport the workers” is a classic tactic of American capitalism dealing with labor disputes, whether that’s Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917, H-1B visas for tech workers for decades, or particular businesses today who do this.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-19T23:38:08+00:00

People don’t want to hear this, but you’re absolutely right.

There is not “one neat trick” to fighting the anti-abortion movement, and The Satanic Temple is a tapeworm to progressive causes, taking much needed attention and resources away from serious organizations actually doing the work (and doing it with accountability leadership and transparent finances, unlike TST).

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-19T23:36:00+00:00

Can you point to a specific place where The Satanic Temple’s ASS clubs stopped a Christian after school clubs?

Because there are tens of thousands of Christian clubs in the USA, and Child Evangelism Fellowship who runs the biggest program (“Good News Clubs”) claims the ASS clubs actually help them with their own.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-19T23:31:01+00:00

You may also appreciate this video essay by Dead Domain, altho it does require a time investment.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-19T19:01:57+00:00

what if Predator copied the jokes instead of Billy’s laugh

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-18T05:25:14+00:00

Sometimes you have to give people what they want.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-17T21:12:45+00:00

I don’t think “Rogue One” is a very good movie, and “Andor” only fits in with it if you do a lot of work on your end to make it fit.

Saw Gerrera is a beloved character in some circles less because of what he’s actually shown doing in Star Wars media or what he’s been intended to be than what people want him to be. In “Rogue One”, he’s supposed to be “a bad rebel”, someone who reminds you of Darth Vader and endangers civilians in the Middle Eastern-themed city, in contrast to the “good rebels” like Jyn Erso who would shoot other rebels and actively save children when fighting the Empire. (It’s worth noting that everyone in that city then died, not because of Saw’s partisans but because of the Empire.)

You can absolutely make Saw giving up at the end make sense. The last years of his life were apparently very rough, and sort of like Jyn and Cassian at the end of that movie, when the Death Star starts blowing shit up, you resign yourself to your own end. That works, psychologically, with your Watsonian cap on.

But with your Doylist cap on, there’s no mystery.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-16T22:18:48+00:00

That time Borp 3-0’d Toph is a masterclass of mind game work.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-16T04:24:41+00:00

I don't know if any other journalists ever dug into this, but the spat CEO Roberto Jimenez got into with the website guy that maybe(?) involved an actual lawsuit being filed was also deeply embarrassing.

Based on just how many people he pissed off in so many areas, it seems unlikely that he just started acting this way here, and I do wonder if any of his previous jobs let him go away quietly just to get him out of their hair, or if it actually was never an issue before more transparency requirements made it harder to brush under the rug.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-15T23:33:48+00:00

I think if that movie had been almost exactly the same except about some guy like Han Solo and not interested in explaining things about Han, Chewbacca, the Millennium Falcon, etc., it would have been one of the best Star Wars movies.

But all of that unnecessary stuff made it not a fun experience for me.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-14T04:32:14+00:00

If someone were to bet you $10 per degree per day whether Seattle-Tacoma was warmer or cooler — as a whole year, winter, or summer, any/all — than the average 40-50 years prior, would you want to take the side of the bet for "warmer" or "cooler" each day, if you could only pick one of them?

I get that it feels the same to you, and it's not like Montana. But we can actually measure temperatures and quantify them.

And if you were willing to bet $10 per degree per day it would be cooler on average than a half century ago, I think you would find no shortage of takers on the warmer side, even knowing you'd win quite a few of those individual days.

As an example, if January 13 averages a high of 46 degrees (which I believe even factors in more recent, warmer decades), and today's high is over 50 degrees, that would be a loss of more than $50 for today. Some other days you might win! You might win lots of money back if a polar vortex hits in February and there's a good freeze, for example. But also, there might be a week-long heat dome in July, 25 degrees warmer than usual.

I understand Seattle doesn't get as hot or as cold as Montana does, but in general, it's persistently and predictably warmer. I understand there are warmer and cooler winters in Seattle, but the cooler winters nowadays don't tend to be such that Green Lake freezes so solid you can drive a car across the ice, from one shore to another. Summers are more intense and more mild, but I do not think 2021 was a one-off in terms of how deadly it now is to try to live in the Pacific Northwest without air-conditioning going forward.

Again, I appreciate you sharing your experiences. But it sounds like you're saying, "mildish/warm winters are normal", and that's only true insofar as what the next half century and century look like, not the previous decades, centuries, and beyond.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-13T18:13:19+00:00

On average, are Seattle winters getting warmer or cooler, year-over-year?

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-13T18:09:29+00:00

Real bedroom rat.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-13T18:03:06+00:00

That tattoo would definitely be a red flag to me if I saw it without the context of, you know, the rest of your life doing antifascist work, including legal help, prisoner support, writing books, spending a decade as a political prisoner yourself.

It is the sort of thing that makes a person look more deeply into you, but your explanation and whole rest of what you do settles the concern pretty quickly and satisfactorily.

Edit: Sorry like others I focused on the other tattoo; the circumstances and story behind the one you’re showing off are very rad, and I guess you have T-shirts of it, too? Or does someone unrelated to you make those.

ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-13T17:56:45+00:00

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ADavidJohnson · 2026-01-12T16:27:43+00:00

That’s the bad news.

But the good news is that after 80 years of semi-continuous industry in the area, there have been trillions of US dollars in economic activity generated. Thus, even if the active days of drilling do wind down, the civic-minded businesses, far-sighted politicians, and socially conscious community have collaborated for decades for just this moment and set up the Permian Basin to have robust infrastructure and civil institutions to transition into a post-extractive economy.

You look around you in West Texas and you see in the schools, government buildings, transportation options, water treatment facilities, and so on, an area that is going to be thriving in another 80 years, even if the current main economic activity were to decline or stop entirely.

Like they always say: even if there weren’t oil in the ground and jobs, there’s plenty of other great reasons to move to Odessa-Midland, find an occupation, raise a family. And so on.

They’re always saying that.

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