democrats leech their votes from the most marginalized classes of society by dangling their basic needs in front of them and using fear based tactics to instill the idea that for poor people, racialized people, people persecuted for their gender or sexuality Dems are the only choice. and when Democrats have usurped the value of those votes, they stand back and allow the persecution of those same people for the sake of maintaining the status quo. if you don’t think that’s sinister in every definition of that term it’s because you’ve never had to face that danger and probably don’t have a place in this conversation
This is why Trump got elected and why Kavanaugh got confirmed and why Roe V Wade is gonna be overturned.
like????
and for like. the 3000000000th time. hilariously clinton won the popular vote. people voted for her. the voting isn’t the issue mayhaps.
“Vote for this one party or you die.” Sounds and looks like a healthy democracy full of free choice!
“You are a lady on fire and I’d be a liar if I didn’t say you are who I desire, I’m here catching fire in the echo of your smile.. if I’m not careful I’ll burn up in your lovely atmosphere like a falling star. All the stars falling from the darkest parts of my heart like magic on the lips of innocence.. I pluck a few from the floor, oh, how about a few more.. I gently place a constellation in your soul so that I can always find you when it is dark, the delightful fire that you are. Burning just for me, burning with me..”
Come with me into the night and let’s see what trouble we can find - eUë
It is now, more than ever in our history that the American people must take the appropriate steps to quell the representation of Neo Nazis, far-right, and White Supremacist terrorist trash. These cowards have gained more traction politically and domestically in the past few months than in the last couple decades. They all live amongst us, hiding behind their claim to moderate conservatism, but any man or woman who openly tolerates the behavior in Charlottesville Virginia, has already chosen their side and their voice needs to be struck down without any capitulations from the side true patriotism. There are many at fault, mainly the political machine that is our modern day GOP that has facilitated this rapid growth, openly accepted unproven and false theories from the executive branch and instilled people in power who have been forward about their ties to white supremacy. The First Amendment is not here to intimidate, threaten and bully fellow countrymen. We are in an ideological war right now, and the most vulnerable minds are buying into the hatred spewed by people in high places who are risking the integrity of our country in order to further their agenda. Zero Tolerance for White Supremacy. Fuck the KKK. Fuck the coward, Donald Trump. Fuck Jeff Sessions. Fuck the Alt Right Terrorists. Fuck White Supremacy. Fuck Sinclair Broadcast Group. Fuck the cowards in the GOP who are shamelessly dividing our country.
When nu metal came along I fell for the new sound just like the rest of us, but there was one band that I gravitated to more than any other because they had something different going on, something SPECIAL. A big part of that OF COURSE had to do with the amazing creative bond that formed between insanely talented frontman Chester Bennington (gods, how we miss him) and the legendary Mike Shinoda, but more than that it’s the fact that these guys kept exploring and evolving their sound as the years went by to become something truly, undeniably SPECIAL. THese are my ten very favourites from them …
10. ONE MORE LIGHT (One More Light)
As fitting musical farewells go, there really haven’t been many others over the years that can match this. The masterful title track on their final (and EXTREMELY divisive) final album is a pretty highlight on an album which saw the band at their most evolved and DEFINITELY far removed from where they started out. Released after Chester took his own life, its haunting, mournful understated quality and incredibly moving lyrics took on new, heartbreaking meaning, making it JUST the goodbye that our boy deserved.
9. BURN IT DOWN (Living Things)
Personally, I loved how they really embraced the more electronic sound they’d started experimenting with in their later years, and their fifth album in particular is RICH INDEED with this sexy, sexy sound. This is UNDENIABLY the best example of them letting rip on this record, a wonderfully addictive little earworm that effortlessly showcases Chester’s powerhouse vocal work as well as Mike’s quirkily talented keys.
8. SOMEWHERE I BELONG (Meteora)
Yeah, sure, I love their later, more experimental stuff, but I can’t deny that their blistering sophomore record is undoubtedly THEIR VERY BEST, and this is pretty much the DEFINITION of their classic early Linkin Park sound that everybody (including me) fell in love with. MIke sure knows how to pen a pounder, and Chester lets rip in full force on a powerful musical rant on the unbearable existential questions that many of us face on a daily basis.
7. THE LITTLE THINGS GIVE YOU AWAY (Minutes To Midnight)
One of my very favourite things about LP was always how fiercely intelligent these guys could be in their songwriting, and their third album, which marked their first real departure from the “classic” sound, is truly AWASH with great examples of their lyrical smarts. The album’s closer is definitely the most interesting of the bunch, a powerful, mournful and truly beautiful song which also delivers a searing indictment of the Bush presidency’s epic indifference to the people’s suffering in the wake of Hurricane Katrina …
6. IRIDESCENT (A Thousand Suns)
It may have really broken out as the main hit single from the soundtrack of the third Michael Bay Transformers movie,Dark of the Moon), but this song really does stand just fine on its own as a powerhouse ballad of intense, haunting beauty, or as a spectacular centerpiece on one of the band’s very best records, a song of hope in the face of indescribable strife and chaos that perfectly fits on an album about apocalyptic doom and how we deal with it.
5. IN THE END (Hybrid Theory)
My favourite track on their debut album is a typical thumper, a particular standout on a record already fit to bursting with incredibly memorable numbers. I was young, dumb and still very much finding my way in the world when this came out, and I had NO LUCK in romance back then, so I knew EXACTLY where Chester and the boys were coming from on this song about trying to save a relationship that’s already doomed to fail.
4. ROADS UNTRAVELED (Living Things)
One of the great fundamental truths about music is that sometimes the best tracks on an album aren’t even the singles, and this is BY FAR the band’s very best album track, a gleefully odd little ballad inspired by the offbeat works of Bob Dylan which perfectly encapsulates a record where the boys bascially just decided to do what they wanted and really go mad with it, and I just love them for it.
3. THE CATALYST (A Thousand Suns)
Bringing their apocalyptic concept album about nuclear destruction to a spectacular crescendo, this really is LP at their most experimental, offbeat and downright ingeniuous, a thumping beast of a track driven by a relentless building beat and vocal through-line that brought us one of the band’s most deliriously addictive tracks. The chorus (beautifully calling back to the album’s haunting opener, The Requiem) just might be my very favourite EVER piece of lyrical work from Shinoda and Bennington …
2. NUMB (Meteora)
The band’s best album closes out which is, UNDENIABLY, their most iconic track EVER, instantly recognisable to even casual listeners who really don’t know LP well at all. Why? Because it’s an absolute MASTERPIECE. Seriously, this track is PERFECT, there’s no fat on it, it’s trim and tight and crafted to a truly insane level of musical precision by a band who were already at the very HEIGHT of their powewrs. Most of all it was a sign that these guys really were just getting started …
1. LEAVE OUT ALL THE REST (Minutes To Midnight)
So you of course have to ask, what could POSSIBLY be better than Numb in my opinion? It’s THIS stone-cold classic, featuring Chester at his most soulful as he belts out a beautifully moving power ballad about being remembered well after you’re gone which shows that even back then Chester was already wrestling with the possibility that he might not be around forever. It’s a whole lot more powerful now, of course, but right from the start it’s always been that one truly indispensible Linkin Park track that I just CANNOT live without …
“It wasn’t so long ago that “conservatives” stood for the proposition that government, especially the federal government, should not control the totality of traditions, habits and decisions made in civil society. The family, for example, should remain undisturbed to work out arrangements that reflect its members’ values, faith and views in a pluralistic society. The principle of limited government posits that — unlike totalitarian states that override personal conscience, family and religion — free peoples do not tolerate an all-pervasive government. As Vice President Harris said on Tuesday at an Emily’s List gathering, reversing Roe would be “a direct assault on freedom, on the fundamental right of self-determination.” She continued: “When the right to privacy is attacked, anyone in our country may face a future where the government can interfere with their personal decisions. Not just women. Anyone.” In sum, the media’s “culture wars” shorthand is an evasion, a refusal to recognize that what is at stake are the rights and lives of those without the resources or power to defend themselves (e.g., travel out of state for an abortion). The Supreme Court is poised to roil the very essence of our constitutional tradition and strike at the heart of a pluralistic democracy. Let’s call it what it really is: state-enforced theocracy, or, if you prefer, religious authoritarianism.”
“The court’s legitimacy rests on the notion that it follows the law, not the personal or ideological preferences of the justices who happen to serve on it at any given time.”
Five Christofascists, three of them appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, have more power than the founders of our country ever intended. In fact, a representative republic cannot exist when five unelected, unaccountable people have this much power.
If our political system wasn’t designed and carefully manipulated to entrench minority rule by evangelical white men, if our people were trulyrepresented accurately, we could use the ballot to impeach these people, expand the court to nullify their extremism, etc.
But that’s now how our system is designed, and I don’t know if it’s possible to even BEGIN addressing the white supremacist rot at its core.
Lawyer here. Please do not try to win this fight by slagging off the judiciary for being “unelected and unaccountable”. The current conservative UK government is playing exactly that card against a UK Supreme Court that has tried hard to defend UK citizens against it’s own government’s worst anti-democratic, human rights violating excesses. By repeating that line, you support the vilification of any judiciary and play right into the hand of authoritarians anywhere.
Justices/judges are meant to be unelected and unaccountable to the legislative and executive branches whose actions they are there to check. That’s the entire point of them in the political system we call democracy. Which, as the saying goes, is a terrible system, except for all the others.
What IS up for debate is how those judges should be appointed, how long they should serve, how many of them there should be, and what code of ethics they themselves should follow. And this is where SCOTUS could indeed do with a revamp.
Germany, 1948: the Allies left Germany with a Constitutional Court that was modeled on SCOTUS but with several important differences:
Judges are appointed for 12 years with no extension.
Parties have the alternate right to propose nominees regardless of who holds the majority in the relevant house at the time.
Half of the Justices are chosen by the directly elected federal parliament and half of them by the representative states council.
In either case a 2/3 majority in the relevant house is required to ensure non-partisanship of those appointed.
tl:dr: Post-war Germany got SCOTUS 2.0 with at least some of the bugs fixed specifically to prevent the country from the abuse of judicial power that happened during Nazi rule. At the same time, the US itself stuck with the older, buggy version, thinking “it couldn‘t happen here“.
But it CAN happen there and that is without even the clear abuse of that old system that we could witness when Trump got to appoint three Justices when it should only have been one.
THAT is the argument you want to make because that is the change you need to see, if you want to protect US democracy.
The problem is not that judges are “unelected and unaccountable”. The problem is that your current system allows your elected officials to stack the highest court of the land with partisan supporters in a way that defies any democratic logic and enables minority rule over generations and way beyond the lifetime of the administrations that put them there in the first place.
Because THAT is what allows the Justices on the Court to put their ideologies before their duty to defend the Constitution without fear or favour.
