uspol
💾
#USPol #Democrats
On Pete Hegseth's tattoos:
"Deus vult is the Latin for 'God wills it.' During the First Crusade, it was raised as a battle cry. This is its univocal origin and context, and Hegseth knows it well: In American Crusade, he refers to it as 'the rallying cry of Christian knights as they marched to Jerusalem,' a summons to 'followers of Christ to take up the sword in defense of their faith, their families, and their freedom.' It provides the last words in American Crusade: 'See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!' And have I mentioned that his book is titled American Crusade?"
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/whats-the-deal-with-pete-hegseth-crusader-tattoos
#Hegseth #PeteHegseth #ChristianNationalism #USPOL #Trump
1/5
Photographer Justin Hamel joined Battalion Search and Rescue in their attempt to rescue lost migrants ... or discover the remains of those who hadn't made it through the El Paso desert.
Find his photo essay in our magazine, or on our website: https://www.texasobserver.org/death-in-the-desert/
#SouthTexas #border #immigration #HumanRights #environment #politics #USpol #Mexico #Texas #news
#USPol
I don't have any idea how likely this is to make it out, but some fucked up Rs are trying to remove Washington state's amazing voting through mail in ballots. This morning is a great time to do a quick "NO THANK YOU" comment on this bill: https://app.leg.wa.gov/pbc/bill/1584
"A private citizen with zero Constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions. 🚨
The Constitution explicitly requires Senate confirmation for anyone wielding significant federal power — a requirement Musk has simply ignored"
Here’s a thread with links to articles about the #ElonMusk takeover of the US #government.
Is it a #coup? Will anyone stop it?
#Oligarchy #Politics #USPol #Musk #Trump #GOP #News #USA #US #USNews
an unelected billionaire storming into US agencies, installing his unqualified and unapproved lackeys, purging civil servants, seizing access to sensitive data and payments, unilaterally eliminating federal agencies: fine
identifying the lackeys: illegal
Resistance to the coup is the defense of the human against the digital and the democratic against the oligarchic.
Defense of the human against the digital has been my mission for some time. Resisting the narratives about how #LLMs "reason", "pass the Turing test", "diagnose illnesses", are "better than humans" in various ways are part of it. Resisting the false narrative that we're on the verge of discovering #AGI is part of it. Allowing these false stories to persist and spread means succumbing to very dark anti-human forces. We're seeing some of the consequences now, and we're seeing how far this might go.
#USPol #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #AGI
Everything that is happening right now is because Musk has kicked into high gear the broligarchy’s plan to destroy our government, so that the US will fall apart and replaced with fiefdoms owned by Musk, Zuck, and the rest of the tech bros.
TSA Says Its Credit Cards for Bomb-Sniffing Dogs Are Cut Off
https://mastodon.social/users/404mediaco/statuses/114166923291735865
#US #USPol #AusterityEconomics #austerity #TSA #dogs
The family group/tribe is built on mutual support, but the modern conservative version is transactional, based on membership and loyalty. Actions that look like kindness are in reality actions to reinforce tribal loyalty. I think this is why so many people in conservative communties, who are trapped in entirely conservative information spaces, have a hard time breaking free. They see examples of community support as affirmations of their community goodness, and this narrative is drummed into them constantly. Conservative leaders have the advantage of labeling any disruptive people or ideas as 'foreign' and a threat, even if from within the community, so that they never even have to engage with new ideas on merit.
Kindness isnt a relevant trait to their tribal functioning, because the ability to be unkind and cruel to people who arent toeing the tribal line is necessary to upholding 'family law'. Kindness in others undermines their attempts to police peoples behavior (this is why its so important that men are in charge). Therefore, not only is kindness devalued, it is actively persecuted as a threat to conservative values. And that is only treatment of your in-group. If you reject kindness internally, imagine how easy it is to subject an out-group to cruel inhumanity. You can literally justify anything. What is horrifying is the degree to which everyday members of conservative communities have become willfully blind to the terrible treatment of others in order to hang on to an image of community goodness. I have witnessed far too much of this in my life.
Its worth stating that the left has its own, different kind of tribalism. They embrace kindness but there is a lot of pressure to prove the right kind of worth. It has a distinctly multicultural, anti-authoritarian tribalism, where the rules of the tribe are under constant negotiation. This makes communicating a platform challenging. Its a lot simpler for conservative platforms whose rules come from demagogues and an old book.
The flaw of designing a system without compassion is that the cruelty eventually becomes impossible to hide from the tribe, and the cruelty comes for everyone. #uspol #politics #disability #sociology #anthropology #kindness #geopol
Hey everyone,
With all the craziness going on, please check out and share:
http://www.dontcallthepolice.com
It’s an online directory of local resources available as alternatives to contacting law enforcement if you need help with DV, mental health, housing, LGBTQ+ support, protecting your vote, crisis management, addiction, etc.
#politics #uspol #ice #Police #mentalhealth #housing #lgbtq #votingrights #addiction
BREAKING: A bunch of U.S. Digital Service employees (including me) were fired tonight. It's still unclear exactly how many. There is no visibility whatsoever into what determined who was let go. Legacy USDS (i.e., pre-DOGE) leadership was not involved in the decision about whom to let go and was not notified in advance that people were going to be fired.
#politics #USPol #DOGE #coup #USDS
1/2
Report: Global march to Gaza
Thousands of human rights activists, doctors, students, artists, & unionists from across continents are mobilizing for the Global March to Gaza, determined to break Israel's siege & deliver aid.
"This is no longer about borders. This is about humanity. Either we act now or history will record our silence as complicity.”
~International Coalition Against Israeli Occupation
#USPol #UKPol #EuroPol #GlobalMarchToGaza #Palestine @palestine .
I knew an Iraq War vet who told me the truth: soldiers are killers. That’s it. There are no “sheepdogs”, he said, just killers and the killed. Predators stalking prey. Oaths mean nothing next to the primal bloodlust which feeds every soldier of every nation. Give them an enemy, as Trump has, and they will play their script. They will kill.
News report from Philadelphia where a criminal is posing as ICE assaulted and robbed a woman.
Good luck visiting this lawless land for a holiday, where anybody with a mask and a tactical vest can abduct you off the street and everyone else is supposed to look the other way.
"Pres Trump just fired:
• 90 physicians
• 350 nurses
• at least 25 nurse practitioners
• nearly 20 dentists
• 85+ pharmacists
• 45 lab techs
Employed by the Indian Health Svc to provide HC. This is going to have dangerous consequences for our Indigenous brothers & sisters."
-Sen Luján
Snr officials: ~5,200 ppl on probat. employment -recent hires -across agencies incl. #NIH #CDC will be fired🚨Fri. CDC: ~1,300 WKRs...
#Racism #Trump #PublicHealth #USPol #HHS
https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/14/federal-employee-layoffs-at-hhs-cdc-on-first-day-robert-kennedy-health-secretary/
"..Donald Trump received 750,000 more votes than Republican Senate candidates in those same districts. That’s not just voter preference. That’s a statistical impossibility."
#USPol #politics #nonprofits #americorps #dei
#TheGremlinZoo #USPol #Citizenship
From CNN.com: Trump can’t end birthright citizenship, appeals court says, setting up Supreme Court showdown
Sorry, but Los Angeles is close to my heart. I am boosting #USPol, whether the posts have CWs or not. I can and will CW my own. But this is timely in occurrence.
If you have to, mute boosts from me. Getting info to loved ones out there from afar, and we're three days from a major turn or a huge whiff. Not sure yet.
Tonight, on John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, #Mastodon and #PixelFed got a call out for not falling in line with Trump and as an alternative to Meta products.
#USPol #JohnMastodon
…a film of about 80 minutes, published in January 2025, and worth every minute of your time, which explains the left-right political divide in the Jewish population of the US. This film makes very clear what motivates Jewish pro-Palestinian people in the US to protest since even before genocidal war restarted on 2023-Oct-7, and their reasons are really the most simple, relatable form of peaceful humanitarianism that you will ever see anywhere. I felt moved by how their Jewish faith makes their conviction in peace and humanitarianism so powerful. It seems in light of this most recent genocide, the views of this new generation of Jewish pro-Palestinian rights activists are slowly becoming more mainstream. Of course this invites the reactionaries to fight back against them, and we hear some of their voices in this film as well.
#USPol #Gaza #genocide #Israel #Palestine #FreePalestine #Judaism #SimoneZimmerman #IfNotNow #Documentary