Finally, an actual progressive candidate for senate in Maine. Graham Platner calls things by their name: oligarchy, genocide. He supports medicare for all and minimum wage increase and scolds the democratic party for not fighting for what people really need. West Virginia also has an outspoken working class candidate. More of this please

...historically, nobody's been here before, not like this. No wealthy democracy with nuclear weapons has ever fallen to fascism. The 1930s examples everyone cites were broken countries. Weimar Germany was weakened by World War I and hyperinflation. Italy was barely industrialized. Spain was largely agrarian. They didn't have the world's reserve currency. They didn't have thousands of nukes. They didn't have surveillance technology that would make the Stasi weep with envy. America has all of that. Plus geographic isolation that makes external intervention impossible. Plus a population where 30-40% genuinely wants authoritarian rule as long as it hurts the ‘right people.’ The historical playbook is useless here. We're in unprecedented territory. But that also means the old rules about what's possible might not apply.

California's economy is bigger than the UK's. New York controls global finance. The blue states collectively represent over 60% of America's GDP. They could, theoretically, make the federal government irrelevant. Imagine if California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, and others started coordinating directly. Ignoring federal mandates. Creating their own interstate compacts for everything from climate policy to civil rights. They already started this with climate agreements when Trump pulled out of Paris. But I'm talking about going much further. State-level cryptocurrency to avoid federal monetary control. State-funded healthcare systems that ignore federal restrictions. State-level immigration policies that simply refuse to cooperate with ICE. Make the federal government have to physically enforce every single policy, stretching their resources to breaking. The precedent? The way Northern states nullified fugitive slave laws in the 1850s. The way states are currently ignoring federal marijuana prohibition. But coordinated and comprehensive.
...
Irish Democracy: Don't protest. Don't riot. Just don't comply. Red states need blue state money. Blue state taxes fund red state governments. What if millions of people in blue states simultaneously decided to claim exempt on their W-4s and simply... stopped paying federal taxes? Not as protest but as a coordinated ‘forgetting.’ Overwhelm the IRS. Make enforcement impossible.

We already have two incompatible visions of what America should be. One side wants a multi-ethnic democracy with a social safety net. The other wants a white Christian ethnostate with unlimited corporate power. These cannot coexist indefinitely... Yes, the last time states tried to leave it caused a civil war. But that was over slavery, with clearly defined geographic boundaries and two relatively equal economic systems. This would be the economic powerhouses leaving the welfare states. What would the red states do, invade California? With what money? The mere serious threat might be enough to force structural changes. Quebec nearly left Canada twice and got massive concessions both times just from credible threats.

Chasing views of Katahdin, from Peaks-Kenny, Twin Lakes, outlook north of Medway. First time in Millinocket. Reading the Heather Christle memoir, I realized I know her sister from One Small Step conversations. So that's why her hair is that way; it's the family hair and cannot be changed. Two thirds through the book, I skipped to the epilogue, not being willing to hear any more about her beef with her mother. Sooner or later, hopefully sooner, you realize that your parents did the best they could in the time they were living and just move on. The author tries to recreate her mother's and Woolf's experiences in places like Kew Gardens, as Melissa was recreating her parents memories of Peaks-Kenny. The Virginia Woolf references did make me buy the library a new copy of Orlando.

Are there degrees and flavors of passive-agressive behavor? Or is it not resistance, but what Kari named "weaponized incompetance"? Is resistance and complexity a shield for incompetance? What's the motivation for turning a simple previously defined process into a three dimensional corn maze? And what is the proper response? Google says "Weaponized incompetence, sometimes called strategic incompetence, is a manipulative behavior where someone pretends to be incapable of completing a task to avoid doing it." Maybe weaponized complexity is a variation: the 3D corn maze inside a Rube Goldberg machine.