Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
After Pam #Bondi's appalling performance in #Congressional hearings, I have seen a number of people wishing her various kinds of harm. Some I understand, others I don't.
Most obviously, #prison #rape. This is something a lot of people who should know better seem to think is an appropriate punishment for sex crimes. There are about a million reasons why this is wrong, and I'll go into them if anyone wants.
TL;DR: if you wish rape on anyone, for any reason, you are bad person. You may be a good person in other ways, but in this particular way you are scum. Either do better, or own it—just don't pretend righteousness. I'm genuinely baffled by how people I call friends don't understand this.
Nor do I want her, or any of #Trump's coterie of crooks, #assassinated or #lynched. I'm more sympathetic to those wishes, but just no. Every revolution in history has been, in every sense, a bloody mess.
What I want is for We The People, in accordance with the #Constitution and the United States Code, to #impeach, arrest, try, and convict every one of them for the numerous crimes of which everyone knows they're guilty, and then sentence them to prison for life without possibility of parole.
I want us to show the world that we can, legally and correctly, clean up our own mess.
And all that said ... I do hope when Bondi is led, stunned and baffled, down the concrete corridor to her final home, that just before the cell door slams shut, a guard whispers to her, "It's okay, Pam. The Dow is doing *great*!"
"Well, it is the ‘20s. So I guess we should all meet up in vaxeasies, where we’ll get illegal jabs and dance the night away. Until ICE bursts in and mows us down with Tommy guns, anyhow."
I slay me.
In the comments on the Quora version of this post:
"Fear not! The truth and power will be fully exploited and realized in other, sane countries. Where there is demand, it will be met with supply!
"When the first shipments are smuggled across the border, I will be waiting to meet the mule and take the load to smuggle it across the country to local distribution networks. Just like the good old days."
"Well, it is the ‘20s. So I guess we should all meet up in vaxeasies, where we’ll get illegal jabs and dance the night away. Until ICE bursts in and mows us down with Tommy guns, anyhow."
This is where my prediction comes true: the insane opposition to #mRNA #vaccines, without any scientific basis, is about to start killing people. Tip of the iceberg, and we’re all on the boat.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/health/fda-moderna-mrna-flu-vaccine
The last time I put my #luggage in an old-fashioned #suitcase, I lifted it too rapidly after check-in because I was in a hurry to catch my flight, and my #massive #manly #musculature propelled it upward so fast it punched a hole in the #airport roof. Air traffic control lost track of it at the #Karman line where it was still traveling at considerably more than escape velocity. It's probably somewhere in the #asteroid belt by now. So I'll stick to the wheeled variety. Just safer for everybody.
As a friend points out, this is bullshit: there were absolutely #protests against #deportations under #Clinton, #GWBush, and #Obama. #MAGA's selective memory is at it again. "Protests/Riots" is also telling. #Cult rules prohibit them acknowledging any distinction.
I do remember a number of #conservatives getting very worked up about the brutal treatment of #ElianGonzalez and his family. They were right to do so, or so I thought at the time.
Years later I figured out that what they objected to was not government agents waving guns in a little kid's face, but rather that it was happening under a #Democrat instead of a #Republican. Sanctioned #violence is only ever supposed to flow one way.
Link posted not for the story, which is paywalled, but the comments. Which are exactly what you'd expect, and crystallize something I've been thinking about for some time. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1ALyANXXqX/
(If you can't or don't want to follow a Facebook link, here's the original story, albeit without the comments I'm talking about: <https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/01/28/london-is-far-safer-than-violent-viral-videos-will-have-you-believe>.)
To paraphrase #UptonSinclair, it is difficult to get people to understand something when their sense of who they are depends on them not understanding it. And for a whole lot of people who don't live in the world's great cities, part of their identity is believing that they're different from and better than those who do.
It's been thirty-five years or so since I was regularly walking around #London late at night. At the time I was young and strong and healthy and it was easy to believe I was immortal. But I wasn't stupid. I knew there was real danger and did my best to avoid it. Most of the time I succeeded, sometimes I didn't.
(My fellow GIs' reaction to my habit of taking off for the weekend was amusing. "You go to London? And stay there? BY YOURSELF?" Dude, it's fine. The Blitz has been over for fifty years, and you may have heard that the folks there speak English.)
The early '90s were a violent time on both sides of the Atlantic. London's #homicide rate declined somewhat through most of the decade with a spike toward the end, jumped again in the early '00s, and since then has been on a downward trend. Other #violent #crimes have declined steadily since 1990-1992. The place is measurably *more safe* now than it was when I was passing a jug of cheap wine outside King's Cross or watching my tablemate get glassed at a pub in Southwark.
Oh yeah, there are no "no-go areas." Grow up.
Naturally, a lot of commenters refuse to believe it. "You're just a privileged snob who never leaves your nice safe neighborhood!" "Bullshit, it's full of Muslim gangs!" And of course, the single-emoji "🤣" response, always your sign of quality internet discourse.
This is not a problem limited to London. For many people all over the world, the nearest city significantly bigger than where they live is *always* a wretched hive of scum and villainy. So the biggest city in any country—London, #NewYork, #Tokyo, whatever—must be the wretchedest and scummiest and most villanous of all.
It happens on a much smaller scale too. I've run into more people than I can count who live less than an hour away from #Denver and are positive that Colorado's fair capital makes Snake Plissken's New York look like Disneyland by comparison.
There's also the opposite effect: lately I've seen a number of people from places like #Chicago and #Philadelphia making fun of the idea that anyone in #Minneapolis is really tough. "You think ICE is having a hard time there? Let 'em come here and they'll learn what real resistance is like!" I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were Muscovites sneering at #Stalingrad, back when.
Of course I am quite sure that you, my dear readers, would ever engage in any such absurd self-aggrandizing rhetoric. Right?
"You raise your voice, I erase your voice." Man, I bet he's been practicing that all month.
Credit where it's due, though: if someone asked me to come up with a single sentence to describe the #Republican Party in a nutshell, I'm not sure I could do a better job. This is what they are, and all they'll ever be.
If you have ever met me, you may have noticed that I am quite #tall. Not NBA-player tall, not quite "how's the weather up there?" tall, but certainly "can you get this thing for me off the top shelf" tall and "watch your head in this low doorway" tall. Just tall enough for the advantages to outweigh the disadvantages, on the whole. If I were any taller, it might go the other way.
Social advantages as much as physical ones, which is the point of this ramble. Men are often judged on their #height at least as much as any other trait. I mean, there are studies.
Height is an inborn characteristic, shaped by the combination of genetics and environment, and very rarely a matter of personal choice. Those are things that decent people don't make fun of, in case you missed the memo.
Gregory Bovino is quite #short, shorter than I am tall. Short enough, I'm sure, for it to make it difficult for him to find clothes and fit comfortably on some furniture. Short enough for people who should know better to be comfortable mocking him for it. Which for whatever reason, they're currently doing in abundance.
Bovino is an asshole. Probably one of the most miserable excuses for a human being ever to walk the Earth. Undoubtedly one of the worst people, using that term in its broadest sense, currently holding power in the United States of America. And you know, that's a pretty tough competition.
He deserves mockery aplenty. For his self-importance, for his incompetence, for his swaggering certainty that he's a central figure in the Fourth Reich instead of the disposable mook he really is. He's not Himmler or Heydrich. At most he's Röhm, and he might want to read up on how that ends, if he read at all. Absolutely, laugh at him now and keep on laughing when the long knives come out.
If you look past all that and laugh at him for his height instead, you're a lot more like him than you are like me, however tall or short you are. Your choice.
My worst fear, of course, is that none of us will live to see the end of the #regime. #Elections, #protests, attempted #revolution—anything we do will be futile. The future is a boot stamping on a human face, forever. Or at least close enough to forever for everyone around now.
If I believed that future was inevitable, I sure as hell wouldn't be talking about it on the internet. In fact I think the probability is less than a coin flip, although I won't even venture to guess by how much. The alleged people currently running things are absolutely as evil as anyone in history, but they're lazy and stupid. Maintaining a #tyranny is hard work.
So my second-worst fear, which I think we're a lot more likely to see, is that at some point things will get back to "normal," but measurably worse than they were before. We'll still have all the machinery of a police state, waiting for the next imperial wannabe to pick it up. Like we already did with the legacies of the Cold War and 9/11. It's a ratchet as well as a racket.
And absolutely none of them will ever face the consequences of their deeds. They may lose office. But they'll go on to profitable second careers as invited speakers and podcasters and talking heads, not as inmates. Pundits will intone that we need to forgive and forget and move on and heal.
We will always have to be lucky all the time. They'll only ever have to be lucky once.
"Sometimes I wonder if you people know how to tie your own shoes." — Me, to half the internet
I swear #climatologists think less about #climatechange, #epidemiologists think less about #vaccination, and #paleontologists think less about #evolution, than the crowd of screeching #denialists who descend like locusts on any news story even vaguely related to any of these subjects.
Well, crap. My #Twinings addiction is about to get even more expensive.
Seriously, in a backhanded way I think this is a good thing. Someone must have explained to him, using small words, that #invading #Greenland would be a very bad idea. He's not capable of true understanding, of course, but he's easily bullied. Like #bullies usually are.
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
