Some people suck, definitely, but most people I’ve met in my life have been pretty good. The problem is that the sucky people are very determined to become powerful and inflict their suck on the rest of us.

Wright County Circuit Court Judge Craig Carter wrote, “If we don’t let a 16-year-old buy a six-pack of beer and a pack of smokes

I am normally the last person to give a shit about overly informal language, but for fucks fucking sake Missouri, you couldn’t find one person in your state with the intellectual capacity to realize that “If the state does not permit the purchase of alcohol nor tobacco by minors” maybe sounds a bit more serious? Like, the actual ruling itself is an offensive embarrassment, but I really can’t get over the fact that it’s written like a freakin facebook post.

Law schools get absolutely stupid about the ritual of exams. Some of that is because every law school class has some ambitious and devious people in it who will try to cheat if they think they can get away with it, but a lot of it is because law is dominated by old assholes with distorted memories about how much they suffered and how hard they had to work back in the day and see it as their duty to inflict that imagined suffering on the next generation.

The congressionally mandated agreement allows transition aides to work with federal agencies and access non-public information and gives a green light to government workers to talk to the transition team.

…

Transition aides must sign statements that they have no financial positions that could pose a conflict of interest before they receive access to non-public federal information.

I’m sure none of them would ever lie about that /s

They kept the good stuff under wraps and tried to play it safe but not spooking anyone with “communism.”

This is it exactly, and I feel like this bit of this Salon article (arc’d) perfectly captures why this happened

Tobias described a dynamic where campaign staff and candidates are hesitant to publicly push back on the assertions of billionaire donors like Hoffman, even if the campaign doesn’t intend to let them direct policy.

Tobias indicated that the apparent influence of the super-wealthy has a dual effect. It undermines the Democratic Party’s support from its traditional base by steering policy discussions away from economically populist ideas that go against the interest of the wealthy, while simultaneously helping support candidates who are charismatic but don’t come into politics with a consistent ideological framework.

The influence of billionaires was directly early in Harris’ bid for the presidency when moguls like Mark Cuban warned the Harris campaign that a billionaire tax, for example, would be too aggressive, according to the Washington Post. Other business executives, like Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and Harris’ brother-in-law, also served as advisors and, according to the Atlantic, helped steer the campaign away from criticism of corporate power.

Been reliable allies to the United States

I think the way more important thing (if only because we can do something about it) are all the rich idiots ostensibly on our side getting out of pocket

Tobias described a dynamic where campaign staff and candidates are hesitant to publicly push back on the assertions of billionaire donors like Hoffman, even if the campaign doesn’t intend to let them direct policy.

Tobias indicated that the apparent influence of the super-wealthy has a dual effect. It undermines the Democratic Party’s support from its traditional base by steering policy discussions away from economically populist ideas that go against the interest of the wealthy, while simultaneously helping support candidates who are charismatic but don’t come into politics with a consistent ideological framework.

The influence of billionaires was directly early in Harris’ bid for the presidency when moguls like Mark Cuban warned the Harris campaign that a billionaire tax, for example, would be too aggressive, according to the Washington Post. Other business executives, like Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and Harris’ brother-in-law, also served as advisors and, according to the Atlantic, helped steer the campaign away from criticism of corporate power.

Like Musk and Putin are shitheads who are going to do shithead things until we force them to stop, but at least our ostensible allies could stop screwing us over in the meantime

e; Just now noticing that I forgot which thread I was commenting in and I just relinked the OP, which was a silly thing to spend effort on, but spending the effort to delete it at this point also seems silly

Yeah, but they’re also kinda canaries in the coal mine. If corps don’t feel pressured to do this lip service (which I will fully admit is almost always meaningless in and of itself) that’s a bad sign for society in general.