by liberal japonicus
“Sometimes the shit comes down so heavy I feel like I should wear a hat.”- Ned Racine, Body Heat
An open thread. Have at it.
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
and now, Customs and Border Patrol shoots two people in Portland OR.
what the actual fuck is going on.
From maddowblog:
* When university philosophy professors are told to avoid Plato, academic freedom is losing: “Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M University, was thunderstruck when he was told on Tuesday that he needed to excise some teachings of Plato from his syllabus. It was one way, his department head wrote in an email, that Dr. Peterson’s philosophy class could comply with new policies limiting discussion of race and gender.”
Would be new to me that Plato was a liberal. But of course the Allegory of the Cave could be (mis-)interpreted as woke.And in the same book he contemplated equal rights for the women of the ruling class. On the other hand his idea of “Unable to work for three days? You should commit suicide in order not to be a burden on society!” would fit well with RW economics.
he was told on Tuesday that he needed to excise some teachings of Plato from his syllabus.
I wonder if I could win a sucker bet here. I’d bet most** of those exercised by Plato have never actually read any of it. Beyond, perhaps, whatever quotes out of context an AI might include in response to a query about possible “woke” material in the college curriculum. Any takers?
** Actually, if any have I would be surprised. But there are always a few college students who, for whatever reason, have had occasion to read with utter incomprehension.
I’ve always thought that Plato’s arguments by analogy are tosh. But it never occurred to me that they could be censored for not being sufficiently fascist.
Was it for not being sufficiently fascist? Or for not being sufficiently sexist? (Could be both, I suppose….)
Well, the “Republic” – at least when taken literally – is actually a blueprint for a totalitarian state, so I don’t really know what they’re on about.
The killing of Renee Good is truly shocking – could this be a tipping point?
On the evidence of now 5 years of Trump administration(s), there seems no way to guess in advance what, if anything, will turn out to be a tipping point. One only notes that numerous events which might reasonably be expected to be a tipping point have turned out not to be.
No doubt 20/20 hindsight will allow future historians to write “Obviously….” But us living thru events? No way to make a meaningful prediction.
Plato is out at Texas A&M because of the Symposium, not the Republic. It’s Aristophanes’ speech about the Myth of the Androgyne.
Too gay for Texas.
Thanks, nous. I just thought it was ironic that they want to ban an author whose central work literally could be used as a blueprint for what they are aiming for as a nation.
But then it has always been risible how conservatives try to claim ancient Greece for themselves and the “West” when upon closer inspection it turns out they were a pretty colourful bunch to put it mildly. The same goes for authors like e.g. Goethe.
Wj, yes. My comment was very much an expression of hope that something good might come out of this tragedy.
This is funny
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-08/us-spy-chief-gabbard-excluded-from-maduro-plan-over-past-views
The move to cut Gabbard out of the meetings was so well-known that some White House aides joked that the acronym of her title, DNI, stood for “Do Not Invite,” according to three of the people. They asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. A White House official denied there was any such joke.
>The killing of Renee Good is truly shocking – could this be a tipping point?
nah.
Americans’ capacity for apathy is unlimited. just look at school shootings.
this will be both-sided and dissected by the clowns in the news/entertainment industry until something else comes along to distract us.
“The killing of Renee Good is truly shocking – could this be a tipping point?”
I second cleek’s “nah”.
Based on the reaction so far, folks are generally responding to Good’s killing exactly as you might predict.
MAGAs and right-leaning people in general respond with some mixture of “she tried to kill the cop”, “she should have complied”, “she had no business being there in the first place”. Or just that old favorite, FAFO.
Folks holding, for lack of a better term, a progressive point of view see it as further evidence of an autocratic regime gone out of bounds.
Folks who, for whatever reason, don’t want to line up on one side or the other generally think it’s terrible, a shame that such things “happen”.
Most news sources stick to a neutral stance. Either “this happened’ with no further comment, or some version of “both sides”.
I don’t think this will move the needle, in any direction.
My own point of view is that ICE and the CBP in their current form need to be disbanded. They are a public menace. We need to manage immigration, but not like this. Shut it down and start over from a clean slate.
The pattern I see, and I would expect everyone else here sees, is that this administration, when they aren’t going after imaginary problems, find solutions to real problems that are worse than the problems. That or they have solutions that might work, but they execute them in such a thoughtless and hamfisted way that the solutions still end up being worse than the problems.
ICE is going into our cities and making things far worse than they would be if ICE instead sat around playing cards in a warehouse. They aren’t catching nearly enough truly dangerous people. On the contrary, ICE are truly dangerous people. And it’s not entirely their fault. It’s partly due to the dumbasses in charge putting them in situations they’re ill-suited for.
My inclination would be to shut them down and lay off everybody working at either. Those who worked there pre-Trump are welcome to reapply. But no promises. Those hired under a Trump administration? Don’t even bother to apply, because that’s an automatic reject.
What cleek, russell, hsh and wj said. And coincidentally I’ve been listening to Phil Ochs for the first time in a long time, but I’d never heard this, which seems appropriate to the times:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgrehW44g5s
Having contributed money to all sorts of Dems over the years, I am bombarded with fundraising emails, texts, and the occasional phone call even. I’m sure many of you are in the same boat. So I’m asking for advice here:
Is there an effective way to communicate to candidates begging for “help to meet our goal before the FCC deadline tomorrow” and similar pitches? Specifically, to say something like “Publicly and loudly declare that deMAGAfication is your first priority, and then you get my support”?
I know campaigns need money to “get their message out” but if it’s a namby-pamby let’s-not-offend-anybody consultant-generated message, they can kiss my ass.
So: any suggestions?
–TP
To me, shocking as the murder, it is even more shocking that people in Minneapolis can’t go about their routine lives anymore without running into harassment by shit tons of ICE border patrol prosecutors and, apparently, armed militias who have empowered themselves to join it. And this is being covered with headlines about “surges” in response to “protests breaking out” language that assumes the invasion by Trump forces is legit while supposedly there is something scary about the protests.
I desperately hope the people of Minn can stay nonviolent. When the George Floyd protests degenerated into riots, that movement died and all that was accomplished was help for the Republicans in the midterms.
there’s a way these things work:
1) law enforcement (or some kind) does something abhorrent
2) people get angry about #1, Democrats benefit
3) somebody does something abhorrent in response
4) the conversation changes to #3, Republicans benefit
we’re at step #2 right now.
You know it’s bad when you have Bulgarian friends checking in with you and saying how much they are glad that they did not emigrate to the US – all while worrying about Putin in their own back yard.
I have to think the administration is betting on cleek’s step #3 happening soon and will do everything they can to ensure it happens or at least find a way to convince people that it has.
(Sorry if I’m stating the obvious.)
For anyone interested in what kind of poet she was in life, this is Renee Good’s poem from 2020 which won “one of Old Dominion’s most prestigious accolades, the Academy of American Poets Prize”:
https://poets.org/2020-on-learning-to-dissect-fetal-pigs
” I have to think the administration is betting on cleek’s step #3″
Stephen Miller has wet dreams about invoking martial law.
I’m trying to figure out why anyone in the Trump administration, particularly JD Vance, thought Jonathan Ross’s phone video supported their version of the story. It’s bizarre.
Dude was holding his phone the whole time, while they claim he was hit by the car and while he was shooting. It also clearly shows her turning her steering wheel hard to the right. Good and her wife weren’t at all menacing, just lightheartedly mocking Ross.
I don’t know what people think they’re seeing.
particularly JD Vance
He isn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier – the US is ruled by Bif Tannens.
If a viewer is motivated to believe Ross, then they will take the moment where the phone jerks upward as an indication that Ross was hit by the vehicle. Viewed in isolation, that video would allow someone to believe the narrative reported by Noem and Vance.
I just watched a documentary about women war correspondents in WWII. One of the current war correspondents said that when she arrives at a scene of conflict, one of the first things she does is look for someone she identifies as being her equivalent in that place and situation to give her a point-of-view she can connect with.
MAGA’s version of that is to put themselves in the shoes of the ICE/BP enforcers and impute good faith to them and bad faith to the people who are obstacles to the enforcers. With that as a starting point, this video will justify Ross violence in their minds.
The converse, that ICE/BP are acting in bad faith, is too disturbing to contemplate.
Well, sure. The question is – how many people are so motivated? I know this crew plays almost exclusively to their base, but everyone else is seeing it, too. Everyone, the base and otherwise, is seeing the other videos.
But Vance et al act as though the first-person video from the shooter is a slam dunk of some sort. Do they really believe that? Or is it just a performance to bolster the belief that it is in the minds of the willing?
On another note, Ashli Babbitt was murdered!
>Or is it just a performance to bolster the belief that it is in the minds of the willing?
Poe’s Law means it’s impossible to know. but, NRO is fully committed to She Had It Coming.
It’s her fault, so there. https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/01/the-minnesota-tragedy/
Tragic but justified: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-tragedy-but-a-justified-use-of-force/
She belonged to a group that wants to interfere with ICE, ZOMG! https://www.nationalreview.com/news/minnesota-ice-watch-group-renee-good-belonged-to-trained-activists-to-interfere-with-agents-block-vehicles/
Democrats are insurrectionist! https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/blue-state-and-city-democrats-walk-an-insurrectionary-fine-line/
“To hell with Minnesota” ! https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/to-hell-with-minnesota/
A review of the National Review articles.
“Incident Overview: On January 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three, was fatally shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis during an immigration enforcement operation. Evidence suggests she blocked the road with her vehicle, potentially as part of anti-ICE activism, before accelerating forward, leading to the shooting, which federal officials describe as self-defense…”
Minnesota Shooting: Controversy and Bias