Trump presents a real collective action problem for the GOP. His die hards are a big enough portion of the GOP base that no individual office holder can risk pissing him off, but collectively he’s looking more and more like a stone around the whole party’s neck.
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs) April 5, 2023
If recent history is any guide, since they’re true believers, it’ll take some time for this to lead to meaningful moderation on anything.
If that means cementing further losses, good.
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs) April 5, 2023
And if it means that anti-Trump Republicans are able to break out as a meaningful force and splinter the vote further, extra good.
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs) April 5, 2023
I sense a theme here… pic.twitter.com/591kEgIcxi
— @mbaram (@mbaram) April 5, 2023
Per Rolling Stone, Trump Team Says Only ‘Thirsty’ ‘Cockroaches’ Would Claim He’s Sad About Getting Arrested:
Donald Trump wants everyone to know that he was not at all saddened about getting arrested and having to plead not guilty to 34 felony charges stemming from an alleged sexual encounter with a porn star. “I can say that at least for this moment right now, I am in great spirits,” Trump wrote in an email blasted out to supporters after his historic arraignment in Manhattan on Tuesday. But behind the scenes of that crafted public image, cracks have begun to show in the former president’s famous self-confidence, according to those who know him well.
Despite the bravado, one person close to Trump was struck by how “shitty and pissed off” he has sounded in private the past few days when discussing the charges. Two other sources who currently work for Trump note to Rolling Stone, one completely unprompted, how “unhappy” or obviously “deflated” the former president looked in the video and photos of his Tuesday court appearance…
Trump’s team is taking pains to make sure none of that brooding reaches his supporters. According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Trump has cared so much about curating this perception of being unshaken that he himself in recent days encouraged allies to tell the press and public that his mood was “great,” and he was stronger than ever.
And in a sign of just how much the former president wishes to convince the public that he wasn’t feeling down about getting criminally charged, in the earliest hours of Wednesday morning, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung sent Rolling Stone a statement fervently disputing the characterizations of the ex-president’s mood. “These unnamed sources who speak about President Trump’s mood have no idea what they’re talking about and are simply lying to make it seem like they know what’s going on,” Cheung says. “In fact, they are on the outside looking in, and it’s desperate, sad, and thirsty beyond belief. They are cowards and should stop acting like cockroaches scurrying around in the dark.”…
Trump had hoped, Rolling Stone reported Monday, to turn the booking into a high-profile display of public persecution, sending a message to his supporters and galvanizing his campaign. Instead, he got a more muted proceeding, with few statements to the public. By evening, he was back to running for president, delivering a short — by his standards — address to supporters at Mar-a-Lago. In a rambling speech filled with grievances, a hoarse and tired-looking Trump fumed at what he claimed were “racist” and “radical-left lunatic bomb-thrower” prosecutors pursuing him in New York, Georgia, and the special counsel’s office…
Humorous coda!
… Trump’s outrage was not solely performative, as he was also expressing his fury and dismay in private communications. Alan Dershowitz, the celebrity lawyer who served on Trump’s legal defense for his first impeachment, tells Rolling Stone that he received a morning text message from Trump himself on Monday.
“Alan, getting ready to leave for New York and can’t really believe it. These maniacs want to destroy our country. So SAD. Nothing on Hunter or Biden, and their crimes are so bad. Anyway, your words are so important,” Trump texted the lawyer, according to Dershowitz. “Save America!” Trump texted, before signing the message “DJT” and adding, “P.S. congrats on the book.”
(Do we believe this? On the one hand, it’s Deshowitz; on the other, it does sound like pre-indictment Trump… )
No reporter should be this dazzled by a political event. No sentient primate should be this dazzled by a political event.https://t.co/jBpfEJluAa
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) April 5, 2023
Would you like to see two A-1, prime examples of how not to cover the 2024 presidential election as long as The Defendant is blighting the ballot? You know you would. First, from what we must call (again), Tiger Beat On The Potomac…
When Trump eventually arrived on Tuesday evening, there was an aura of anger and defiance about him. Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” played over the speakers before Trump walked out. When he finally spoke, he ticked off the list of scandals he’s endured and the prosecutors and opponents he’s faced. Each one — he claimed — was biased against him. Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan D.A., was the real “criminal.” Jack Smith, the special prosecutor investigating the lead up to Jan. 6, a “lunatic.”
Tuesday, in a way, was like a campaign relaunch, still grievance-filled but with Trump world feeling that they are in a better position. The polling that just months ago was used as evidence of his failure to rally the base has dramatically shifted, now showing the former president with leads upward of 20 percentage points over DeSantis. It underscored the central paradox of Trump’s political career: His standing benefits from the crises he endures.
The same could have been said, of course, of Al Capone. There’s nothing paradoxical about a leader’s having a mob.
Surely, then, we can find an antidote to this fanzine burbling somewhere in the deep gravitas of the Paper Of Record? Hello? Is this on? Hello?
Americans could be forgiven if they momentarily forgot the most powerful person in the country. As helicopters and cameras followed every step of the Donald J. Trump legal drama in New York more than 200 miles to the north with white Ford Bronco-level intensity, President Biden faded into the background, ceding the stage to his defendant-predecessor. He seemed content to do so, at least for now. The White House made no effort to compete for attention with the arrest of a former president. Mr. Biden’s only appearance came during a meeting with his science advisers. Reporters were escorted in at 2:59 p.m., a hoarse Mr. Biden, fighting a cold, said a few words and the reporters were ushered out again at 3:03 p.m. Ten minutes later, the White House announced Mr. Biden was finished with public events for the day..
… One of the primary acts of journalistic malfeasance that made the previous administration* possible in 2016 was the unspoken assumption that the elite political media has no agency over how it covers a candidate. Endless shots of an empty podium during the 2016 primaries just sort of, you know, happened. How ever did El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago command such an audience? What dark magic did he wield over national editors and news directors? What is this mysterious phenomenon that kept him on television for hour after hour? Apparently, the same mistakes will be made again this time around. We are being told that criminal indictments are political advantages, which puts us so far through the looking glass that we can barely see it behind us any more. How ever could that happen?…
Tom Nichols, at the Atlantic, reports on Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook:
… Trump, for his part, didn’t dwell on the case when he returned to his safe space in Florida. He spoke for only about 25 minutes, which is usually just the amount of time it takes him to clear his throat. But in that short time, he talked about everything—and I mean everything.
There were the usual cries of “Russia Russia Russia” and “Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine,” which Trump now tends to repeat as a kind of ritual invocation without context. He went off about the Georgia investigation involving his call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger looking for more votes in the 2020 election, referring to that call as “even more perfect” than the call to Ukraine that helped get him impeached. He railed against the “lunatic” Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the probes into Trump’s handling of classified documents and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, and called the former investigation the “boxes hoax.” He even went after the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, which he called “a radical-left troublemaking organization.” If you’ve ever wondered why America is in trouble, you need look no further, apparently, than those unruly Trotskyite archivists.
As usual, Trump’s histrionics would be comical if the stakes were not so high…
Donald Trump has never faced serious criminal consequences—or, really, any consequences—that he could not smother with enough money. (Losing the 2020 election was likely the first time in his life that large numbers of people disobeyed him, and his current troubles stem from his inability to cope with that realization.) He may yet wriggle out of the criminal charges in Manhattan, but there are likely more to come from Georgia and Washington, D.C.
And yet, Trump is still the choice of millions for the presidency, despite his attacks on the rule of law and the judges who oversee it. We cannot say we have not been warned: The authoritarian rule and personal threats Trump will bring back to the White House were on full display last night in a resort ballroom in Florida.
"It's so embarrassing that this is what the leadership of the Republican Party has become– some two-bit televangelists hocking for Donald Trump."
— @MichaelSteele calls out Lindsey Graham's tearful message to donate to Trump's legal fees or to pray https://t.co/hfkFsq8Wn7
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) April 5, 2023
Even then the party will be all about everyone claiming to be his rightful successor.
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs) April 5, 2023
In other words: the Republican Party is going to get worse before they get even worse
— chatham harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison) April 5, 2023
Trump is horrible, & the Republican Party is awful.
But step back, and you can see the root problem: the GOP is the party of the roughly 20% of Americans—& a higher % of voters—who are assholes.
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) March 31, 2023
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Bruh. What a bizarre way of speaking
RaflW
“it’s desperate, sad, and thirsty beyond belief”
Since every denial is a confession, it sounds to me like cases of Diet Coke are being schlepped up to the Orange Suite at Mar-a-Woego.
Yutsano
Jeebus. The FTFNYT miss him so bad. Covering him was just so…EASY. It’s just gross how indifferent they are about how bad he was as President.
Ohio Mom
Love those magazine covers. Such clever graphic design.
RaflW
Hmmm, Tiger Beat says “It underscored the central paradox of Trump’s political career: His standing benefits from the crises he endures.”
Fig Economy is correct. Fpotus’ standing with his base benefits. But that base is likely now at about the Keys constant/crazification factor of 27% of the electorate.
And hooooboy, as we just saw in TN (and KS with their ‘students, show your peen’ law, etc) the GOP is crazificating at warp speed.
Citizen Alan
To expand on something I said in an earlier thread, my sister angrily asked me point black earlier this evening “Why do you support Joe Biden?” I took a deep breath and said simply “Because on every issue that is important to me, Joe Biden reflects my beliefs far more closely than any Republican in the country.” And that was enough to make her run out of the room crying saying she needed to take her anxiety meds. And she stayed gone for half an hour, and when she came back, we both pretended the conversation had never happened.
I genuinely feel like our basic moral frameworks are alien to one another. And it’s very saddening to me.
piratedan
@RaflW: reminds me of that old Hank Snow tune….. going 90 miles an hour down a dead end street……
eclare
I read some of the comments DeSantis made about Disney in a speech last night. WOW! He has declared all out war on the state’s largest private employer and a driver of its tourism industry. I’ll try to find them, seriously breathtaking.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/06/desantis-disney-hotel-taxes-toll-rodes-00090959
I thought R’s were supposed to like bidness.
Ksmiami
@eclare: He’s in the “fuck around” phase… soon to be run over by the “find out” phase. The GOP is utterly mad. Has the Party faithful been mainlining lead paint ?
eclare
@Citizen Alan:
What you said was about as non-confrontational as you can get. I’m sorry your sister has become foreign to you.
bbleh
@RaflW: the GOP is crazificating at warp speed.
And per many previous comments and the OP, it’s inevitable. Anyone who wants to distinguish him/herself in the party and to the electorate — especially the primary electorate — has to be crazier than the current crazy. That ratchets up the “current crazy,” and the cycle starts again. They are crazifying themselves into a smaller and smaller corner. And they get all the free media they can use, because crazy sells. But the overall result is a continuing degradation of the brand.
You almost feel sorry for the Establishment Republicans, who just want tax cuts and business deregulation, and would like to keep it to code-words for various kinds of bigotry rather than having all this overt … unpleasantness.
Almost.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Citizen Alan:
That’s pretty rough when your own family isn’t on the same page as you morally and politically. Sorry about that. You handled it very well.
I have aunts and uncles like that.
Geminid
@Citizen Alan: I am sorry about you estrangement from your sister.
Of course I do not know her, but the story made me wonder if your sister has her own doubts that she tries hard to suppress.
GibberJack
@Ohio Mom: Very apt for someone who is indeed a short-fingered vulgarian.
C Stars
@Citizen Alan: That sounds tough. What is it in her moral framework that causes her to see Biden as such a threat? Do you know?
GibberJack
@Ksmiami: The GOP base is of the leaded gasoline and paint generation.
bbleh
@Citizen Alan: It IS sad. And I sympathize thoroughly with the let’s-just-pretend-this-never-happened instinct. She’s family after all. I have a few very close cousins with whom I never discuss politics because I’m pretty sure that, were things to come to it, they’d follow orders to drive the truck hauling me and mine to a camp, perhaps with some minor misgivings, but …
That said, you were straightforward, and you certainly weren’t the one to end the conversation. Should you wish to explore bridging the gap, you might ask “well, whom do you support?” and explore from there. Maybe eventually get around to asking why your support for Biden is so upsetting.
One other observation: in my admittedly limited experience, someone who asks such questions and apparently overreacts to straightforward answers might be doing so because s/he has begun questioning his/her own beliefs. That is, it may not be an entirely bad sign.
gwangung
@bbleh: Seems to me that this is the result of the drive for ideological purity (and indirectly, from eating from the fruit of gerrymandering). Freed from the constraints of appealing to all segments of the society, I think it’s inevitable that a party will spin off into craziness and extremism.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@bbleh:
Wow, I’m so sorry you have family like that. That’s horrible
HumboldtBlue
I am laughing out loud.
@Ohio Mom:
So do I, very creative, very clever.
Chetan Murthy
@Citizen Alan: first what @eclare: said. Wow, I’m so sorry you have to deal with that. I’ve banished friends b/c of Trumpism, but …. *family* would be a lot tougher, I don’t know if I could do it. With @C Stars: I also am curious if you know what moral reasoning makes her see Biden as such a threat?
But above all that, *wow*, it’s a painful thing when family goes so far away, morally speaking. B/c even so, they’re *family*. I really feel for you.
ian
I bet he is getting push fundraising auto text messages from the Trump campaign and mistakes them for personal contact.
bbleh
@gwangung: Some of it may indeed be because they’re safe — MTG’s district isn’t gonna vote her out no matter how nuts she is — but I think more of it is because they feel no need to act as though they care about governing. For a lot of Republicans today, it’s pure performance. Both Madison Cawthorne (remember him?) and George Santos are said to have hired staff purely for communication and not at all for policy or governance. Their base wants WWE, and when they finish this gig, they’ll move on to Fox or something. That’s the market they’re in, and they’re responding to the competitive forces in it.
Geminid
@Chetan Murthy: This may not be a matter of defective moral reasoning but rather one of effective propaganda. I have a customer I talk politics with from time to time. She is an educated and in most respects a rational person, but there is an entire mythogy about Biden and the Democratic Party that she has swallowed whole. The problem there is not so much moral as intellectual. I imagine this sister might be the same.
RaflW
@eclare: “I thought R’s were supposed to like bidness.”
I wish I could credit the person who pointed this out, but on a thread about whichever RW ass/musician shot up Bud Light cans because of some mild corporate pro-transgender advert:
Mass market businesses strive to reach the largest audience of customers. They typically reflect what the preponderance of their customers also value. What conservatives hate — what DeSantis is trying like hell to attack at Disney — is the reality that most Americans are mildly and uncontroversially pro-LGBTQ (even if they’re not yet sure about the “T”) and businesses explicitly catering to that acceptance points out in very stark, not-at-the-voting-booth terms that the conservative view is the minority view.
These businesses being comfy with teh ghey shatters the GOP myth that Repubs/cons are the ‘silent majority.’
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Geminid:
Out of curiosity, did Dobbs ever come up with this client?
Kent
It isn’t just in red states. It is in the blue states as well. I live in Camas WA which is on the border of Portland so I observe two states closely. Here in the PNW the GOP minority party is getting crazy at warp speed as well. In WA the best they could do is throw up MAGA election denier tiny town “Constitutional Sheriff” Loren Culp for governor. Who was a dipshit of the highest order.
Down in OR they ran a truly crazy Q-Anon candidate against Ron Wyden. And here in the WA-3rd a complete white supremacist election denier backed by dark money beat Jaime Herrera Beutler in the primary and allowed Marie Gluesenkamp Perez to walk into the seat.
There was a time in my living memory when there were intelligent centrist Republicans running for and winning office in the PNW. Mark Hatfield and Tom McCall in OR and centrist GOP governors as well. And in WA John Spellman, Slade Gorton, Dan Evans, etc. Disagree with them on policy, but they were absolutely not crazy.
These days I know of no place in the country where a sane GOP exists. It just doesn’t. And it isn’t completely Trump. He is riding the wave not creating it.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@RaflW:
Exactly. It’s just more salt in the wounds for them, on top of the recent and seemingly accelerating electoral losses they’re suffering because of Dobbs and rejection of other anti-democratic actions, like in the Midterms and most recently the WI Supreme Court Dem victory by nearly 11%
eclare
@RaflW: Good points.
Chetan Murthy
@Geminid: I’m curious: can you give some examples of what you mean? B/c I’m somewhat convinced that at root, it’s all “those uppity mudpeople/wimmin/gheys, don’t know their place!” That is to say, I cannot imagine how someone can accord equal rights to PoC/women/LGBTQ, and *also* somehow see Biden as the Antichrist.[1] It seems impossible.
[1] maybe a better way to put it is: i don’t see how you can accord equal rights to those categories of people, and *also* see the GrOPers as a moral party. There’s a basic hypocrisy there.
RaflW
@Kent: Oh, definitely. The MN GOP hasn’t won a statewide office in multiple cycles. The response to these losses is to run covid-denialists for high office, and send people to St. Paul who claim they’ve ‘never met a hungry person’ in their district (where 1000s are on various government programs, of course).
I sat next to former MN governor (and former Republican) Arne Carlson at a lunch many years ago. We had a very pleasant conversation, and I’d have no qualms whatsoever interacting with him anytime again. Modern (cough, cough) MN GOPers? Nooo, thank you.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: @Geminid: *Perhaps* you mean that this client *thinks* they’re according equal rights to these categories of folks, and *also* supports the GrOP ? So they don’t think they’re being hypocrites ? B/c …. if that’s what’s going on, then I believe they’re not actually believinig that first bit. Instead, they *tell* themselves that they believe that stuff, b/c it’s good stuff, and they don’t want to see themselves as evil. It’s like “I have a Black friend, so I can’t be racist”.
That’s not an intellectual problem: that’s just plain old hypocrisy. And of course, Harry Frankfurt had their number: “In the end, sincerity is bullshit.”
Brachiator
I don’t understand people who want to be courtiers and flunkies of celebrities or political figures, or hangers on or members of an entourage. I am not special or a saint, and there are people I admire and am dazzled by, but I lack that thing that would allow me to kiss up to a piece of crap like Trump or to even be impressed by his tired, rancid ego driven bullshit.
And it’s good to know that his mindless bravado may be starting to crack. Anything that shakes his confidence and makes him stumble is good for the future of the country.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Brachiator:
It helps to be just as bad a person as Trump is
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
It goes back to the old saying: Everyone is the hero of their own story. Nobody really thinks of themselves as evil
Humans are very weird. Hitler was a vegetarian who hated animal abuse yet sent tens of millions of people to their deaths because he thought they were either subhuman or expendable cannon fodder
different-church-lady
Let’s review the week:
TUESDAY: Trump is arraigned on criminal charges
ALSO TUESDAY: MAGAts get pummeled in special elections
THURSDAY: Tennessee State House breaks out the hoods and crosses
ALSO THURSDAY: WaPo (?) drops bomb on Clarence Thomas
FRIDAY: Totally non-activist judge makes sure women stay outraged about reproductive health.
I feel like I’m missing some things…
different-church-lady
@Brachiator:
Soooooo… what’s his mood, Sparky?
different-church-lady
@Citizen Alan:
Ah, so at least it ended well.
Brachiator
@Yutsano:
Many reporters keep referring to Trump’s emergence and triumph in 2016 instead of his 2020 election defeat. They want to see a return to his glory days. Some of them briefly tried to prop up DeSantis as a New Hope, but now they mainly complain about how DeSantis lacks charisma and won’t fight back.
But Trump is not the new guy on the block, or a blank slate. He is a former president with a paper trail. He is trying to sell the lie that he wants to pick up where he left off and continue making the country great again. But it will be up to the Democrats to focus on his actual, crappy presidency, because too many in the media just want to watch a rerun of his stale antics.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator:
Hang around “enterprise software salesmen” (or heck, hardware) (and sadly, the “men” there is necessary: the saleswomen I worked with were uniformly more ethical) and you might begin to understand. I mean sure, there are lots of good ones. But there are also lots of awful ones who are willing to say anything — *anything* — to make quota, to get that contract signed.
One of the *first* customer problems I worked on, was a clustered UNIX boxes with special fast interconnect that some salesman had sold to a a customer on the promise that it would allow fast file access between nodes (over that fast interconnect). Turned out, you could *push* files from one machine to another (== FTP) fast, but you couldn’t run NFS over that interconnect fast. And the customer had told the salesman they needed for NFS to work fast. No way to do it. No way.
Another time, a customer in NY had a bit of webserver software from a vendor at version 3. It had some performance problem (actually, a *bug*). The vendor claimed on a stack of bibles that it wasn’t their fault. After I spend 5 weeks isolating and exonerating every other component, we caught the vendor’s software exhibiting the slowdown. The vendor sent a guy from across the river in New Jersey to fix the problem: without even diagnosing, they just whipped-up a new C library and slapped it in: it worked. Turned out there was a multithreading bug in the vendor’s version 3 product. But the vendor wanted to sell the customer on version 4, and so they just said “no problem with our product; could you sign the contract for version 4?” The vendor’s salesman put the customer thru months of torment, trying to get that new license agreement&sale.
These aren’t two isolated instances — I have a neverending list. My point is that for some people, the allure of money and access to power, the *greed*, will cause them to do all manner of awful things. All. Manner.
HeleninEire
@Ohio Mom: Yes. They are different and at the same time they are the same.
JWR
Los Angeles CBS 9:00PM news, (KCAL), opened with a pretty good story about the Texas judge’s Mifepristone ruling and its conflict with the WA judge’s ruling. Good.
Also, the TFG-Dersh text sounds real to me, as evidenced by the way he ends his sentences with that ridiculous downward change in pitch. (eg. “So SAD! Nothing on Hunter or Biden, and their crimes are so bad.”) Probably learned during his days listening to Jesus grifters. Then again, maybe it was dictated by a flunky, or a speech-to-text program?
RaflW
Oh, and as my goodnight for tonight, this tweet that perfectly reflects this thread’s title:
🍿🍿🍿
different-church-lady
@Chetan Murthy: Did a project for EMC just before the dot bombed. We were following their top salesman out to his clients. Between set-ups the camera guy asked him a question about the product* and he just muttered, “I don’t know a fuckin’ thing about computers.”
(*Their flagship product at the time was a terabyte drive. It was as large as a refrigerator and cost a million dollars.)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
Memory Unlocked
I hate dealing with salespeople, too. Especially car salespeople I tried telling one a few years back I had to think about the deal we had been discussing and the guy would not let me end the conversation! I ended up going to another dealer because I had such an unpleasant experience and he was the Sales Manager 💀
Kent
Idaho made it a felony for pregnant women to leave the state and for anyone to help them do so.
DeSantis got pantsed by Disney
Bunch more anti-trans laws got passed in red states.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@RaflW:
I’m out of the loop. What’s deal with Loomer and the MAGA faithful?
Kent
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Trump appointed her to his 2024 campaign which enraged MTG. So…catfight.
Geminid
@Chetan Murthy: The basic mythology is that Biden is senile and being manipulated by others, and that socialists like Representative Ocasio-Cortez run the Democratic Party and are intent on running the nation into the ground economically amd socially. My customer gets a lot of this from the Epoch Times, but it’s standard fare on other right-wing news sites.
Jane drives a Range Rover and her husband reads the Wall Street Journal. I guess I would call them Ranger Rover Republicans, or Chamber of Commerce Republicans. They did not like Trump but voted for him anyway in order to stop the Democrats- the dynamic of negative partisanship.
I was talking Republican presidential politics.with Jane a few days ago. She definitely did not want Trump and was not yet sold on DeSantis. When I mentioned Mike Pompeo she said, “Oh, I like him.”
Brachiator
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
RE: but I lack that thing that would allow me to kiss up to a piece of crap like Trump or to even be impressed by his tired, rancid ego driven bullshit.
More to it than that. I recall that in one of my first full time jobs, I saw people who would suck up to the bosses, run errands for them and serve as low level flunkies. One of these people was actually a nice guy. I could never quite understand why he decided to be a whipping boy and court jester to the big boss.
Others were more craven and more obvious in trying to court power to try to get ahead themselves. But those who seemed to be genuinely loyal were always a mystery.
eclare
@RaflW:
Meeeeoouuch!!!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kent:
Shades of Fugitive Slave Laws.
On a related note, I wonder what those highly paid professionals who moved to Texas from California for lower taxes are thinking about their home now with the Ledge and the Governor going full metal wingnut crazy?
RaflW
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Orangemandias is said to be wanting to hire Loomer for his totally perfect and going really great Presidential campaign. MTG wants all the crazy angry lady oxygen and thinks Laura will chain herself to the internet and overshadow her. Or something like that??
OK – really – good night, all!
different-church-lady
@Kent:
That’s just a day that ends in “…day” now.
Chetan Murthy
@different-church-lady: Two sayings that several different enterprise software salespeople have repeated to me:
In short: yeah, that EMC salesdroid was no outlier.
different-church-lady
@RaflW:
A sane ally would tell him he’s making a bad move quite and behind the scenes. But Marge has to do literally everything at full volume.
eclare
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
According to an LA real estate agent in an article that I read, people who moved to TX and FL to escape the tyranny of taxes are moving back.
Soprano2
@Citizen Alan: For too many R’s their basic moral foundation seems to be “my morals are the correct ones, and I’m going to force them on you whether you believe in them or not.” I heard the lt. gov of VA say on Maher’s show that she’s a “live and let live” person, but in my experience most R’s aren’t like that. I think she’s probably lying about it, but no one challenged her at all. I don’t care how they live their lives except that they’re trying to force it onto me. They don’t seem to care about the rights of parents who think differently than they do about what kids should be able to read and see, for example. Every space has to be a “safe space” for them.
different-church-lady
@Chetan Murthy: I was just shocked he said it out loud so readily. We were right there in the customer’s data center.
Chetan Murthy
@Geminid: OK, so your garden-variety evil-but-don’t-wanna-see-the-suffering-with-their-own-eyes GrOPer. Like Himmler, who was bodily ill during a tour of a concentration camp (but that didn’t stop him from working to improve their efficiency).
different-church-lady
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I am not fuckin’ kidding: it’s a genuine possibility we’re going to need to create a new underground railroad.
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): probably still thinking that nothing could ever get them to live in California again. There are fortunately states that aren’t total basket cases. Like the one I moved to!
mdblanche
“and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.”
Ohio Mom
@Citizen Alan: Your sister is a piece of work. it’s not her political views that is the problem (though of course they are problematic), it’s her attempt to manipulate you.
Running off, declaring she needs her anxiety medicine? Wow. Talk about over-reacting.
And on that note, my bedtime. Sweet dreams to one and all, whenever it is you go off to sleep.
eclare
@different-church-lady:
According to Kay there are several groups that have started their own networks. For obvious reasons, they do not want publicity.
Here in west TN, I bet there are several groups that rent a van and go to southern IL a few days a week.
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): A friend of mind knows a few who changed their minds and moved back when they realized that they’d need full-house generators for the winter *and* summer blackout seasons. Heh.
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
I understand sales weasels. I have worked with salespeople who can barely disguise their contempt for customers and who were only interested in maximizing their bonuses. And fortunately I have worked with some sales people who treated potential customers like royalty and helped them get exactly what they needed.
But I am talking about glib hangers on who want to be in the same room as the rich and powerful even though they only get scraps.
It’s sad how many people who work for Trump end up getting stuffed by him, or tossed aside despite promises of protection. And yet he is able to find new suckers willing to take the fall for him.
Soprano2
@Chetan Murthy: My mother was way down the rabbit hole. I found stuff where she had written down links to vdare.com, for example. I think she was horrified by “modern mores” and thought the repression of the ’50’s was better. She was normal except for politics, somehow she became radicalized by the right wing. I blame her second husband, he was a person who thought he knew more than his college professors and thought they were just prejudiced against him because he was conservative. No, moron, it’s because you’re an asshole, is what I wanted to say to him.
piratedan
@different-church-lady: your list was close to mine in the previous thread, I added the state lege abominations passing handmaid laws and then I added on an all points bulletin on the Senate Minority Leader, who no one has seen in a month and yet the media has yet to speculate if he’s been replaced by a pod person or if the position would be filled via a series of challenges based on a series of necessary challenges that would include, but not be limited to:
grifting mega donors
lying to the media with a straight face
coordinating big lies with the House
screwing up the WH/DOJ/government agencies with threats of investigations on spurious shit.
which person can shove a NYT Op-ed columnist the furthest into their colon
Geminid
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Republicans like to say that companies move to Texas and their employees come along because of the low taxes. I think that the abundance of flat, buildable land and the corresponding lower housing costs are a bigger factor.
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid:
California has plenty of one but not the other, policy plays a big role. You have to actually build the housing.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
Are you saying that California is a “basket case”?
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The joke about Texas is: “housing prices too high? Go five (ten, fifteen) miles further out, and they’ll be fine”.
piratedan
@Major Major Major Major: other factors that may soon loom large…
peeps are finding that working from home isn’t a bad gig and as much as businesses don;t care to admit it, people are MORE productive working from home… turns the whole middle management and facilities needs business models on their collectives heads.
So when a business “relocates”, they may be finding that their cadre of employees don’t care to move from a blue state infrastructure to a red state one.
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Don’t take my word for it, ask the 870,000 net residents they lost in the last two years. Highest in the country, third-highest per capita.
mrmoshpotato
BWAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!
Holy! Shit!
Did Michael Steele wipe 2009-10 from his memory?
AlaskaReader
@Geminid: If someone accepts/adopts the immorality of Republicanism, it’s not an intellectual matter by any measure.
mrmoshpotato
@Yutsano:
You have the generosity of a saint. 😁
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
The state government looks out for workers and the general public. They’re national leaders when it comes to progressive policy
Brachiator
@Citizen Alan:
Wow. An interesting and sad exchange.
It’s funny. I’ve seen MAGA folk interviewed and ask why they support Trump. Often they will spout Trump’s own lies about his record rather than his actual achievements. Trump is a very effective salesman.
Of course the other thing is that there are people who believe that Trump is the only thing standing between the people and a communist or socialist takeover of the country.
Mallard Filmore
@Kent:
Last I heard, it was only for underage girls without parental consent. Like an aunt, or sister, or friend helping spirit the girl out of the state.
West of the Rockies
I dont know, this Is Trump pissed off about the indictment business is futile speculation, not unlike speculating if Putin is ill. I’d prefer both just fucking die already.
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: What with all the mountains and with the Central Valley tied up in productive agriculture, buildable land is getting scarce in California. Texas, on the other hand, has hardly put a dent in its stock of buildable land. Availabity of land is a factor that helped the Atlanta metropolitan area grow, and is boosting growth in the North Carolina Piedmont now. Texas has way more good land than those two states have together. Texas has 10 inches less rain per year, but 33-35 inches per year is still enough to support more industry and people.
A secondary factor with Texas is that its system of higher education can support most companies’ human resource needs.
These considerations are a bigger factor than Texas’s purported lower taxes and looser regulation, I think.
Kelly
and they ran the SAME truly crazy QANON candidate against Jeff Merkley the election before that. The crazy is well rooted in OR Republicans.
Brachiator
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
California is great, but the cost of living is not sustainable for many people. This is especially true for younger people with families.
In some cities, some public schools are closing because of declining enrollments.
And even though job growth is uneven but good and wages are increasing in many trades, housing costs and food costs are too high for many.
And the sad thing is that a number of cities oppose reasonable efforts to increase affordable housing stock.
Geminid
@AlaskaReader: A lot of people here say that.
AlaskaReader
@Geminid: Pompeo, having clearly demonstrated his utter disqualification from being morally or ethically capable of holding any public position of trust whatsoever, you ‘mentioned’ him as an alternative for your relative’s consideration?
Wot?
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid:
I spent seventeen years in the Bay Area and am happy to say this is not at all true! And, if you’ve run out of room because you built a bunch of single-family residences, you can always build up! Which California only very recently started to care about, more or less—and mostly only at the state level, they’ve had to pass laws strong-arming cities into building apartments. There’s much to recommend about California but there’s a reason those wages you mentioned can be so high.
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): M4 has at least one (perhaps more) point: CA is in many areas (where the jobs are, where people want to live) rabidly NIMBY. This drives housing costs to the point where people can’t live here. He’s right about that. And sure, that coexists with all manner of progressive policies. But every time I take the BART outside SF, as I look out the window (from the elevated tracks) I can see unbroken lines of RVs parked along the roads next to the BART tracks. These are all people who can’t afford apartments. It’s a big, big problem.
M4 isn’t wrong about that. Perhaps they mean more than that, I’m not saying that that’s the only problem. But it’s a glaringly obvious problem, and it isn’t getting fixed. Ugh.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: California’s big cities have also suffered sort of a double whammy recently—crime is up everywhere, but CA’s homeless population has gotten really big too, for various reasons, some self-inflicted, and it can make those cities pretty unpleasant especially if you have kids. I do not personally know anybody who’s moved back… maybe a coworker…
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: Well, I guess I would have done better to say unbuilt land.
Texas still has a much greater amount of buildable land, and it’s cheaper than in California generally and the Bay Area in particular. And that is a major factor in companies setting up in Texas.
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid: oh I meant unbuilt land too. Marin County is famously empty, Sonoma has a surprising amount of rangeland, drive to Sacramento and count the cows… and then there’s every single town between San Jose and San Francisco…
I personally benefit from this since American software engineer salaries are basically pegged to the Bay Area cost of living, but it’s really bad for a lot of people.
Chetan Murthy
@Geminid: TX is also cheaper (tax-wise) for the rich. I forget where the crossover is, so if you’re making less than that number, taxes are greater in TX. But there’s that, too: the bosses prefer to be domiciled in TX.
Geminid
@AlaskaReader: Pompeo’s going to run whether or not you think he’s fit for the office. So I mentioned him, and you can like it or lump it.
AlaskaReader
@Geminid: …and no surprise in that.
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: I thought you meant built up land since you spoke of subdivisions where there could be more vertical development. But I will stand by my assertion that one reason Texas attracts development is because of a relative abundance of land that is flat and easily buildable.
AlaskaReader
@Geminid: Part of the reason we have the more extreme candidates on the right is some folks continue normalizing those same extremists.
It used to be that unqualified candidates were simply ridiculed or pilloried, roundly rejected as they deserved to be roundly rejected.
That you would normalize those candidates or attempt to qualify them is regrettable.
sab
@Major Major Major Major: I lived in California twenty years ago and it was fun but unbelievably expensive. So I came back to Ohio where with a normal job I could afford a house.
My nephew just bought a house in Oakland that is smaller than mine but cost ten times more. A tiny million dollar house.
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid: for sure! California has ample space with which to address its housing crisis, that’s all.
@sab: it’s crazy to think that my modest house in Denver would probably be like two million dollars in the Bay Area (and wouldn’t exist since it’s new construction). My in-laws have a ranch house by San Jose with the same square footage (if you count the backyard ADU) that was built in like the fifties and is constantly being fixed up, and it’s like a million five I think. ETA 2.2 million! Good lord.
Chetan Murthy
@sab: I remember when my aunt&uncle bought a house in Palo Alto in 1991 for $450k. My mind was boggled. Of course, if they still own it, today it’s worth …. 10x that *at least*. It was a *small* house. But then, I was comparing it to houses in *Texas*.
1
900 sqft is … small in Texas.AlaskaReader
@Geminid:Texas attracts business development because of vast tax breaks and incentives they offer to corporations.
Those corporations are ‘allowed’ to skate on school taxes and other public interest taxes, thereby increasing the burden on citizen taxpayers and resulting in degraded infrastructure and services for the public.
Great for corporate profits, bad for humanity
It’s not for nothing that Texas is known as an Incubation Laboratory of Failed Policy.
Geminid
@AlaskaReader: Well, just wait until Pompeo announces. There’ll be at least one entire thread that will give you plenty of opportunity to scold people about “normalizing” the guy.
And then, “regrettably,” people will still talk about him.
Geoduck
@Kelly: Also WA state Republicans. During the last election for governor, they went with a guy who was sheriff of a small Eastern Washington town, where he was literally the only law officer.
AlaskaReader
@Geminid:None of which is any kind of justification for attempting to normalize what should be unacceptable.
Geminid
@AlaskaReader: I’m not “attempting to normalize” Mike Pompeo and I think you know that.
Origuy
@Major Major Major Major: Where are you seeing this land to build on between San Jose and San Francisco? I live in San Jose and most of the land that isn’t build on is either bay marshes, very steep, or owned by the San Francisco Water Department, who won’t even let hikers in. There are patches of commercial property being converted to residential, but not many.
Citizen Alan
@Ohio Mom: In her defense, she learned that from our late mother who was a master of strategic crying. Which sounds worse than it was. Mom wasn’t a narcissist or anything like that, but I think she lived her whole life with untreated anxiety disorders (much like my dad almost certainly had untreated clinical depression), and bursting into tears at the drop of a hat was her way of avoiding situations that were triggering to her.
Of course, based on her enduring love of Xena: Warrior Princess and La Femme Nikita, I also have always suspected that my mother might have been a lesbian if she’d been born 30 years later and in a blue state.
AlaskaReader
@Geminid: Excuse me?
You offered his name as if he was a viable option for the highest public office in the land.
John Revolta
So, I have a couple California questions seeing as how some folks here seem to know stuff…….
1. All these homeless folks, are they mostly people who got priced out of these housing they had? Or are they people who moved out there and found they couldn’t find anyplace to live?
2. With all these people leaving the state this means the tax base will be shrinking………. also I understand the real estate taxes are already buggered up by Prop 13. Is there maybe trouble ahead getting money to run the state?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
Whoa! That’s nuts.
HumboldtBlue
@Major Major Major Major:
Fleeing a hellscape.
Major Major Major Major
@Origuy:
Menlo Park, Atherton, Los Altos, Woodside, Half Moon Bay, you get the idea. Tens of thousands of homes’ worth of infill/new development space. Sure it might be a little dense, but this is all a policy choice.
ETA north bay’s worse of course.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Geminid
@AlaskaReader: I mentioned Pompeo because he’s a viable Republican candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination. That’s just a fact.
I could say that you overestimate my ability to “normalize” or “qualify” Pompeo for the office, but you are playing a game here and I’m through playing with you.
Geminid
Deleted
AlaskaReader
@John Revolta
Ronnie Reagan began the overall decline of the public commons in California, and the concurrent rise of homelessness.
Shouldn’t be any surprise, but wealth inequality and wealth disparity are certainly primary drivers of homelessness. Productivity has skyrocketed but wages have not. Add in America’s continuing lack of accessible affordable health care, especially the lack of mental health services and care. The lack of affordable housing cannot be discounted, nor can the erosion of much of the social safety net.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
So I take it Colorado is much more affordable than California in your experience?
AlaskaReader
@Geminid: Yeah, no. Pompeo is no more an acceptable candidate than is Trump.
Try fooling someone else.
…and I don’t play games in regards to politics, ..ever.
lgerard
This quote from the Rolling Stone article made me laugh out loud
Burns is a pretty crappy faith advisor if he thinks trump has ever spent a moments thought repenting about anything
Chetan Murthy
@John Revolta: I don’t know for sure, but every time I read about it in the news, it’s mostly people who were already living in the Bay Area, in housing, and then got priced-out. Now, maybe they moved here recently ? Idunno. But the thrust of the articles I’ve seen, is that these are *not* people who moved here and became soon-thereafter homeless.
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
Biggest drawback? Being surrounded with friggin’ Texans.
//
Chetan Murthy
@NotMax: Oh no “//” necessary. I *grew up* there in East Incest (Weatherford), and I know all of what you speak. Hell, the surface conditions are getting *worse*, not *better*. I could tell stories about what my mom has experienced, and …. I have *no* idea why she still wants to live there. But the heart wants what it wants.
HumboldtBlue
I need help.
Origuy
@HumboldtBlue: What’s going on?
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
Heh. Made me remember the town of East Peck from the legal mockumentary show Trial & Error, which was west of North Peck.
;)
HumboldtBlue
@Origuy:
beer
Major Major Major Major
@HumboldtBlue: too much or too little?
sab
@Geminid: I think you are right about Pompeo, which I find horrifying.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
See the article linked the other day about the Saudis dropping forty billion dollars into becoming a computer gaming powerhouse? If not, repeat linkage.
prostratedragon
The problem of the 21st century is the problem of the asshole.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: I did! May it end badly.
NotMax
@prostratedragon
Ooh, a cheeky crack.
:)
Citizen Alan
@C Stars: Just too much Fox News. She is absolutely convinced that Biden is in the grip of senile dementia.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: Heh, gosh I can imagine Saudis working hard on coding …. NOT. Maybe they’ll invest the money in nearby Arab states, where they actually know how to work.
sab
@NotMax: Ouch.
MikefromArlington
I’m starting to believe the only explanation of someone like Linsey being so far up Trumps ass is because Trumps dirty tricksters must have “the pee pee tape” equivalent on him.
Citizen Alan
@bbleh: I know exactly who she supports. She fully expects Ron Desantis to be the next president and she “loves him to death.”
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: or just import people for the actual work, they’re good at that.
ColoradoGuy
I live in Erie, Colorado in a 2700 sq foot (250 square meters) house and current market prices in this Denver/Boulder exurb are $700K. Significantly more than Texas, but a small fraction of California prices for a newish 2005-era house complete with mountain view and green space adjacent.
New construction is still going on around here, just not at the ferocious pace of a year ago. I suspect that Colorado is the alternative to Texas for many people moving out of the West Coast cities, along with Utah. High quality of life, abundant outdoor sports, good air quality, and many high-tech employers who pay good salaries. Texas has cheap housing and plenty of jobs, but the quality of life compared to here … well, it’s not the same.
The question in my mind for all of the West Coast cities is the lack of buildable land for single-family housing, or reasonably priced low-rise apartments in decent condition. Yes, the Bay Area could be built up to the point it looks like Hong Kong. Plenty of housing then … but that’s a completely different Bay Area, or Seattle, or Los Angeles. And the cost of demolishing millions of single-family homes and building new high-density apartments (or condos) goes into hundreds of billions of dollars … who’s going to pay for that?
Simple example: a house comparable to mine would probably cost $2 to $3 million in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, or Seattle. OK, let’s tear down that “charming” Sixties-vintage house with the pretty view and replace it with a brand-new, energy-efficient condo that houses several families instead of just one. What does that new condo cost in the exact same West Coast location? I doubt it will cost the $700K my place is valued at, or the $500K it would cost in a desirable Texas metro area.
A family, or young couple, who can no longer afford the West Coast cities can’t wait decades for pie-in-the-sky proposals for “affordable housing” that never comes. They need something next year, which basically means a job search and comparison of existing house prices, monthly mortgage payment, or rental rates. This is where Texas, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona compete with each other.
NotMax
@Citizen Alan
“I’ll be fervently praying your love proves powerful enough to hasten that.”
//
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: My manager once ran a project to install very, very complex IT systems in KSA. My employer had offices in many Arab countries (and all over EMEA). He was unable to convince *any* of our colleagues in these countries to travel to KSA to do the setup, config, customization, etc. And the KSA colleagues were *uniformly shit*. I mean, even people in Egypt and Jordan, just *next door* were like “nah brah, you go on ahead without us”.
People with options will need to be paid a shit-ton to go there. And they won’t stick around, which is something you’d need if you were serious about any tech business.
NotMax
Missing reply citation. Fix.
@Citizen Alan
“I’ll be fervently praying your love proves powerful enough to hasten that.”
//
Major Major Major Major
@ColoradoGuy:
San Francisco is seven miles on a side and has eight hundred thousand people and is hardly Hong Kong, four-story buildings are practically illegal. There’s plenty of room to grow before you’d even reach New York City density, to say nothing of Paris levels, both far cry from Hong Kong. Adding ten thousand apartment homes along the peninsula is nothing. Ten extra homes per square mile.
AlaskaReader
@ColoradoGuy: Curious, what is the economic engine of Erie, Colorado?
I recall driving through parts of Colorado and being amazed that it just seemed to be miles of subdivisions sandwiched between identical malls and apartment complexes popping up about every 20 to 30 miles.
Can it all be driven by franchise restaurants and branded retail stores?
Chetan Murthy
@AlaskaReader: Looks to be easy commuting distance to Denver, Boulder. Wikipedia lists no notable businesses, so I’d say “bedroom community”.
Major Major Major Major
@AlaskaReader: you do know you just described most exurban areas?
AlaskaReader
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, it makes me crazy to realize just how much of our economic base is nothing more than self replicating service jobs that feed franchises and branded retail. Nought but simplistic consumerism for an economic basis.
None of that is sustainable. We need to break that cycle.
Chetan Murthy
@AlaskaReader: Ehhh ….. the high productivity of industrial civilization means that *most* jobs are service jobs, servicing other people. It’s erected on the back of insanely high agricultural and manufacturing productivity. The fact that it’s feasible to employ vast numbers of people to do other people’s hair, nails, wash cars, etc, is a sign that we live in a rich, rich society. In a poor society, there would be far fewer physical therapists, for example. Another sign that we live amongst riches.
AlaskaReader
@Chetan Murthy:
I have to question that ‘high’ productivity because I can’t lend too much actual value to the insane amount of replicated varietal products we find on shelves, no society needs 35 or 80 or however many varieties of cereal we ‘produce’, or the insane number of look alike vehicles being manufactured, for just a couple examples.
Big Ag is out of touch with any kind of sustainable model, little of that is being done right, if we aren’t subsidizing it, we are creating more crap products to enable it’s continuation in the short term.
A reset has to happen, development for development’s sake has to stop.
Beyond the capitalism and consumerism, just because something can be developed isn’t justification for doing so.
ColoradoGuy
@AlaskaReader: Erie is mostly a bedroom community for Boulder, Lafayette, and Louisville, and partially Denver. All of them are more expensive … Boulder is about double the prices here. You have to be pretty wealthy to own a home there, or be a retired academic who bought their home forty years ago. Basically the Colorado version of Berkeley, on a smaller scale. Longmont house prices about the same as here, and it has a cute little downtown as well.
I think the point about West Coast pricing holds. The existing housing stock would have to be substantially increased to actually drive prices downward, and existing homeowners would not appreciate that. And … if prices went downward, it would draw more people from the rest of the country, so it’s a good question where prices would end up. The price equilibrium might end up right where it is now, just with more residents in a higher density. The US West Coast is probably the most desirable area in the world in terms of business opportunities combined with quality of life, and prices reflect that.
Here, as in Texas and Utah, there’s plenty of cheap rural land, especially East of I-25, which locals refer to as “Kansas”. Electric power is much more reliable than TX, the summers aren’t as scorching hot, and compared to Arizona, Utah, and Texas, we are a Blue state (with an openly gay governor) that protects women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. That’s probably why Colorado is attracting a lot of high-tech workers, and we see a lot of new start-ups in this area.
It’s kind of a middle ground between the West Coast and Texas, without the awful politics.
eclare
@ColoradoGuy: Sounds nice!
AlaskaReader
@ColoradoGuy: About that cheap rural land and how it’s valued.
If and when all that ‘cheap rural land’ is bought up and filled in, the actual costs are going to start showing up. Parks and set asides defined as ‘greenspaces’ aren’t going to balance the loss of open space and habitat. Not to mention the cost in resources to support that increase of unchecked and unlimited ‘growth’.
This repeats everywhere we ignore the additional unacknowledged costs of our folly. Your cheap rural land today can turn exponentially more expensive to everyone in the long term.
=
ColoradoGuy
The land here is cheap because it’s mostly suitable for cattle ranching, which is a low-profit business. Other crops can be grown, but require irrigation, and water isn’t cheap here. In fact, that’s what restricts new development; the land is cheap all right, but without water (and sewage) rights purchased from a nearby town, it can’t be developed for housing. So that’s an inherent rate-limit to the growth rate. No town water, no sewage connection, no new houses, end of story.
By contrast, the West Coast cities have plenty of water but are physically boxed in. Portland technically isn’t, but they have a self-imposed Urban Growth Boundary that is pretty rigidly enforced. Otherwise it would sprawl southward into the Willamette Valley without limit. Seattle is tight against the mountains and the Puget Sound. The Bay Area is full unless the Bay itself was filled in, which isn’t going to happen (in this century). Los Angeles is slowly filling everything between Tijuana and the coastal mountains to the North.
lowtechcyclist
@ColoradoGuy:
It doesn’t matter if they can’t get water, of course, but I’d think that septic systems would work for sewage. Calvert County, MD, where I live, has been pretty thoroughly developed with only a small corner of the county being on a sewage system.
rikyrah
@eclare:
Don’t PHUCK with The Mouse😒
rikyrah
@Citizen Alan:
I would have said values. But, what you said was so benign
Gvg
@RaflW: oh that is insiteful!
Also I am brooding about the death of a salesman and how the protagonist and his wife actually believed in all the salesmanship and ads. They always believed what was advertised even though he was a salesman and it left them in financial binds. If marketing shifts towards normalizing gays and trans, then a certain malleable set of our population will quickly change its views and I speculate that the conservative leadership that has benefited from the old not normal model knows it. Perhaps by intellect perhaps by instinct. That may be why they attack it so desperately. Disney is a big leader in this. Some big name pop stars would be too.
I wonder if that advertising, changes in Tv programming are why society changed its views on gay marriage so fast? Other civil rights acceptances were slower in my memory but I also think they were slower in pop culture?
Most people have a certain skepticism about what’s on TV, but the conservatives have collected some of the most credulous marks to their cause. They might not also watch say MSNBC but I bet they still watch Disney…..even if they watch Fox they watch Marvel. The only other rival might be the gaming company producers. I don’t know what they are doing.
RedDirtGirl
What is the image in the Time cover? Is that supposed to be him screaming inside the fingerprint?
lowtechcyclist
@bbleh:
And the MSM minimize the degradation by bothsidesing everything.
Suzanne
@RaflW:
Yes.
I will also add that most companies that hire college grads are facing a very tight labor market, and are competing for employees. Things that reflect values that appeal to college grads (who, as we know, are a Dem constituency) is also an attempt to be an employer of choice.
The fact that the aspirational views presented by marketers are pro-LGBTQ, multiracial, etc…. pisses them off more than anything. Trump was really just the way they raised their middle finger.
dnfree
@AlaskaReader: Reading this conversation, maybe you’re misinterpreting the question about Pompeo. It doesn’t appear to me to be a recommendation for Pompeo, but maybe just more like trying to figure out where the person stands along the Republican spectrum of choices.
Xavier
I’ve been saying the thing about party of assholes for years, with the caveat that assholes can be charming when they want to be.
Geminid
@dnfree: There was no maybe about it. Republican presidential primary dynamics interest me, and I wanted my customer’s opinion about one of the probable candidates.
MomSense
One of the replies to the New Yorker and Time covers tweet was “those fingerprints look awfully big for him”
LMBDAO
Bill Arnold
@Ksmiami:
Technically, the most of the GOP is happily living in an echo chamber (really, multiple overlapping echo chambers), that severely warps their understanding of the broader reality. This is a good discussion; an easy read for an academic paper:
Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles (C. Thi Nguyen, Episteme 17 (2):141-161 (2020)) (pdf download button at link)
What this means is frequent GOP mistakes that look to be due to misreadings of American society, because they are.
If one is looking to destroy the GOP (or any group or entity, really), echo-chamber reinforcement (there are other frameworks for this too) is one approach. Dangerous though, with collateral damage likely.
Mike in NC
He is the most pathetic, needy man-baby that ever saw the light of day.
No One You Know
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Yeah. I once tried to get a salesman from Jacuzzi out of my house. It was impossible to get the conversation closed even when I was visibly angry. I was naive. I really did think Anji meant it when they said “no obligation free estimates.” I’m still angry with myself.
Tony G
@bbleh: Yup. The “Establishment Republicans” are largely responsible for this debacle. They created this monster, and were dumb enough to think that they could control it. This accelerating craziness started with Nixon and Reagan more than a generation ago.
AlaskaReader
@dnfree: …maybe it’s okay to suggest an unqualified morally bereft fascist for consideration?
Nope.