The White House is more than 40 hours away from here driving non-stop.

The number of people from here who could have participated in a march at the White House (maybe taking a week off work in order to get there and back traveling 16 hours a day by bus) would have been very small. Instead, thousands of us marched in our local downtown yesterday in a solid throng.

Protests at a specific location convey a message, but mass protests everywhere convey a message too.

https://m.xkcd.com/2566/

Hubris is a kind of boastful pride–like a sense of invulnerability. It also implies a kind of dramatic irony, that this sense of invulnerability will eventually prove false. (The term comes from ancient Greek theater, where it’s often the Heroic Flaw that will eventually be the undoing of the tragic hero.)

Chutzpah is more…audacity, nerve, gall. A person with chutzpah doesn’t believe they can’t be harmed; they’re just willing to bald-face it out in the hopes you won’t actually call them on it. In English it can have a positive connotation, the way “cojones” tends to, but it can also have a negative connotation, like “cheek” or “gall.” It comes from Yiddish, where apparently it’s more uniformly negative. (Leave it to us Americans to interpret a condemnation of shameless effrontery as somehow laudatory.)

I guess I would say the key difference is that someone with hubris thinks they are invulnerable, whereas a person with chutzpah is aware they are vulnerable and absolutely refusing to act like it.

They’re definitely kind of related, but they just have really different feels to them

Funny thing about that–the authors had no significant ties to West Virginia and were instead inspired by a road trip through Maryland. https://www.baltimoreexaminer.com/john-denver-country-roads/

Sean Duffy is the transportation secretary.

I assumed the stunning part was this:

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

It’s just pretty blatant.

According to Wikipedia at least, there are no members of Congress who even have a net worth over $500 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the_United_States_Congress_by_wealth let alone an annual income that high.

So I think it’s that they’re beholden to their donors, as usual.

My guess is that the reason they bothered with this, rather than leaving it with the courts, is that this version would allow Trump to abruptly reverse the things that were previously decided under Chevron deference.

Yeah, agreed.

I think you’re wildly underestimating the influence of those sites. And even beyond those sites, think about how many sites can only exist because of payments from ads served by those same operators. It’s true they don’t control the whole Internet, but they sure have a ton of power.

I also don’t think the level of control Trump will have over PBS is worse than the influence he’ll exert over mainstream media sites through the threat of legal harassment alongside his indirect control of the discourse on Twitter.

I guess mostly I remember the Internet in the days before it got so corporate, when it was wild and wooly, and all the sites were bizarre little labors of love created purely because someone just really wanted to post information about their Special Interest. (E.g., I had an old Tripod site that was just a detailed explanation of the shape of a module for a five intersecting tetrahedra origami model, complete with folding diagrams and descriptions of the approximations I’d used to simplify it and how the lengths related to each other. Then my hard drive crashed and I went to grab those files back from my site and discovered they’d deleted the whole thing because I hadn’t updated the site, which had never occurred to me because, well, it was just this info, it didn’t need updating. Those were the early days of corporatization.)

So when I picture a public-subsidized Internet, that’s pretty much what I think of. People being people, sharing information out of weird enthusiasm. I think it would work in practice because we’ve had that kind of thing before. Lemmy is honestly kind of a similar thing right now; it’s just that some kind, generous souls are paying for the servers, which is likely going to be hard to sustain eventually.

I dunno. It’s dark times for sure.

Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Pichai were all sitting behind him at his inauguration.

I wouldn’t really say Republicans deliver what they say they’ll deliver. A week before election Trump was saying he’d have grocery prices lower on day one, and then as soon as he was elected he suddenly became aware that was complicated and the wouldn’t be anything he could do about it. Part of his campaign the first time around, too, was that he would provide a brilliant replacement for Obamacare, but after four years he’d done absolutely nothing on that front, and four years after that he still insisted he was going to do that, but admitted that he only had “concepts of a plan.”

They carry out a lot of the culture war aspects of their promises. And they carry out the promises they make to their billionaire megadonors. Everything else they hope gets forgotten about.