“When unions are strong, America is strong!” – @VP at Labor Day rally in Michigan. https://t.co/2MdTarJesH
— Vincent Evans (@VinceEvans) September 2, 2024
Vice President Harris: When I am President, we will pass the PRO Act and end union-busting once and for all#LaborDay pic.twitter.com/OfQ9RnzKve
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 2, 2024
Tim Walz continues to be very good at this pic.twitter.com/he2ovVCDUg
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 2, 2024
Walz: They talk about small government. Small enough to be in your bedroom, small enough to be in your exam room, small enough to be in your library telling you the things you should make decisions about. pic.twitter.com/CxsPsAYhZw
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 2, 2024
Walz: The Wall Street Journal… they did another story that said oh, he's actually richer than his statement says because he has a “defined benefit pension plan.” That is my wish for every American to have a defined benefit pension plan. pic.twitter.com/kVYYLa3rNK
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 2, 2024
Can't keep up? pic.twitter.com/DYaczApLIi
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 3, 2024
Biden on Trump: "Do you think this guy gives a damn about your pensions? No, I'm serious. Do you think he loses even an instant of sleep over it? … Hell, he regards picket lines — he'd rather cross one than walk one." pic.twitter.com/bskUHC0n6P
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 2, 2024
Weird AI of the weekend:
You’d think the guy with all the money would get someone on his payroll to write better tweets for him and make him better AI pictures pic.twitter.com/LR7O6Zqwd2
— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) September 2, 2024
The Angry Incel Brigade, and their chosen ‘God-Emperor’, seem to be… deeply conflicted about VP Harris. If The AI just produces what it’s told its users want, it would almost appear that what they really want is a fierce, stunningly attractive woman in a Repub-red authoritarian uniform, a mommy-domme who’ll tell them they’re filthy little piglets to whom she shall mete out the punishment they so richly deserve. Well, that should be some consolation when we win in November!
On The Road – JanieM – On the Road
TBone
We have our very own Fulton County here in Pennsylvania and they just Found Out!
A million times😆😍
https://crooksandliars.com/2024/09/pa-election-deniers-ordered-pay-1m-voting
Baud
BDSM fantasy will save democracy!
EthylEster
I am confused.
Does Musk think the AI pic of Harris is real? Does he think she wears that outfit?
Betty
Those were fantastic speeches. I love your explanation of their Kamala obsession.
zhena gogolia
Okay, I thought it was a “Weird Al tweet,” and I was wondering what had happened to Yankovic.
And I do not understand the caption on that picture of Kamala in the stunning red ensemble at all.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Think Hot Stalin.
ETA: Stupid sexy Stalin!
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
zhena gogolia
@Baud: The cap is perched fetchingly on her flowing raven hair.
Ken
Wait, Biden is still alive? And campaigning?
Cue Trump rant about Harris cheating by having three people out there when he’s only got Vance, followed by sad tears from Don Jr. who thought he was helping too…
dmsilev
@EthylEster: I think he believes that she wears a uniform like that underneath her street cloths, sort of like Clark Kent before he turns into Superman.
Unfortunately for Elon’s fantasy life, phone booths are essentially extinct these days.
Baud
@Ken:
Does he really have Vance?
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
twbrandt
I watched both speeches from Harris and Walz. They are both really good at this, and they both seem so happy, especially compared to whats-his-face.
dmsilev
@Ken: RFK Jr. erasure!
Ken
@EthylEster: Ketamine is not meant to be sprinkled on breakfast cereal.
satby
Aaron Rupar’s work on reporting all of the campaigns just by quoting what’s said is so old school it’s cool again. His site Public Notice has a great article up this morning:
Kamala Harris is cutting off Trump’s oxygen.
Matt McIrvin
@EthylEster: I think he thinks you’re stupid enough to believe it’s real.
Or he thinks SOMEONE is stupid enough to believe it’s real. He’s probably right about that.
Ken
@Baud: I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. But yes, in that scenario he’d be more likely to claim he was doing it all himself.
satby
@EthylEster: long time, no see! Or, it could be my own lowered involvement here and you’ve been back commenting awhile.
sdhays
@zhena gogolia: If I had seen that photo without context, I wouldn’t have known who it was supposed to be.
jonas
@EthylEster: He thinks the AI-enabled election disinformation infesting his platform is hilarious.
hueyplong
It’s amateur hour until they come out with that Harris picture in black.
satby
@rikyrah: Good morning 🌄
TBone
@Ken: don’t forget Brain Worms! He’s got all of them “helping” too!
Matt McIrvin
@jonas: Right, he thinks there’ll be no social penalty for him for just lying outrageously in this public forum he owns. That, in the words of that old Arendt quote, his fans will, if they understand he’s lying, just “take refuge in cynicism” and snicker about what that scamp is getting away with.
Baud
@satby:
Thanks. My only issue with pieces like that is that they always emphasize actions by people at the top and miss the evolution of the culture that make those changes possible.
TBone
@satby: I really like that
visualheadline 😎lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
The sex workers had better be getting their outfits ready!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Did anyone hear about a group arguing that Kamala is ineligible to run for president and citing… the Dred Scott Decision?
IANAL but I’m pretty sure Dred Scott is no longer considered the law of the land.
I think it was a Michael Popok video at Meidas Touch Network who flagged this. I’ll see if I can find the link.
Baud
@EthylEster: In the words of the current vernacular, Elon Musk is weird.
Steve LaBonne
@satby: That is a great article, thank you.
dmsilev
Some good news: Harris to transfer nearly $25 million to help down-ballot Democratic candidates
Honestly would have liked to had the state legislature effort get a bigger piece of the pie. There’s a lot of fuckery that happens in GOP dominated state legs, and supporting people who can block that sort of crap and push better policies is important.
BR
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Here is a video on the Dred Scott attempt:
https://www.tiktok.com/@levertthebassman/video/7407495908990029102
Baud
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Because of the makeup of the current Supreme Court, there’s no fantasy legal theory that is too extreme to put out there.
Baud
@dmsilev:
Agree. Happy to see that.
Dave
@EthylEster: He’s just a schmuck; kidding on the sly.
And treating it as if it’s real signals to him is minions that you are an “NPC” who doesn’t get it.
Regardless if you think Musk counts as a fascist or not it is a classic fascist approach.
He is just a not that effective troll with far too many resources and far too much reach
Also aimed at platinum tier members of the common clay of the new west. You know morons that will see it and believe and our boy Elon’s ideas about how many of them are as well as their voting tendencies. This may actually be the area where is closest to in touch with reality.
jonas
@Matt McIrvin: Yep. And the Arendt reference is particularly apropos of so much Musk, Trump and the rest of MAGA do with their lies. It’s not that people literally believe them. They’re meant to make you accept that they can tell them with impunity.
Baud
@jonas:
At some point, they’re so far down the rabbit hole that they do believe the lies.
lowtechcyclist
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
If Trump is to believed, he’s ineligible to be elected again. He was elected in 2016, and he claims he was elected in 2020. And the 22nd Amendment states very clearly that nobody can be elected to the office of the President more than twice.
Matt McIrvin
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: yep. Their claim, which is ridiculous, is that being a “natural-born citizen” requires being born to citizen parents, not just being born a citizen. There is of course no credible precedent for this, but one of the cases they cited as precedent was Dred Scott. Another one, IIRC, specifically stated the opposite of what they claimed.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Depending on which party would benefit from that theory, of course.
Dave
@lowtechcyclist: Yeah but he gets a mulligan because he is very special boy that we treated very poorly or something. It isn’t supposed to make sense or be applied across the board.
The entire movement is in some ways a failure to understand the lessons of history and why we try to keep political conflicts and the exercise of power channeled and pruned.
Musk also doesn’t grok this he cares about his liberty but not your freedom and doesn’t imagine that the world he wants significantly increases the likelihood that he would meet a very ugly end.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Also too, until Congress passes a law about it, it’s unenforceable. As with insurrection. So they can suck it.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Yes, I left out “right wing.”
Matt McIrvin
@jonas: If I may pearl-clutch for a moment, the reason I stayed away from the “couchfucker” jokes about JD Vance wasn’t that they were vulgar (vulgar is great), it’s that they were based on a hoax that was intended to be taken as real and was briefly taken as real. I’d rather bend over backwards to avoid that. Even if pretty much everyone knows it’s a joke by the time it goes big. Too close to this kind of Big Lie japery, where you accept the lies because “it’s saying something that it even seems plausible”.
PST
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: The theory that Kamala Harris was ineligible to be president or vice president was popularized by the notorious John Eastman back in 2020. Writing in Newsweek, where legal scholars typically publish their most important academic theories, he claimed that she is not a “natural born citizen” because at the time of her birth, admittedly in the United States, her parents might not have been permanent legal residents. They might have been here only temporarily, on a student visa or something like that, and still owe their allegiance to foreign powers (Jamaica or India). In other words, she could be like the child of a foreign diplomat, born here but not within the meaning of the 14th amendment. This has been convincingly refuted many times by real lawyers, which is why it gets hardly any play even from the likes of the Trump campaign.
satby
@Baud: well, these are younger writers and some of that evolution is “normal” context to them. I get frustrated trying to get the historical context across to my kids sometimes too. But the echos of 1933 Germany, those most of them get. And that’s what matters right now.
hueyplong
@Dave: In fact, it’s just about the only way he meets an ugly end, unless he’s driving himself in one of his company’s vehicles and strays too close to a lake or pond.
rusty
@Ken: You raise a good point. There are only Trump and Vance, neither of their wives are campaigning as surrogates. Harris has Doug, Walz has Gwen, and with also have Joe and even Jill. Along with just the families, there are the Obama’s and various cabinet members and senators that are reliable surrogates. Bush wasn’t even invited to the Republican convention, and I don’t see any Republican senators outside of their states, other than the Sunday morning political shows where they would show up normally. I’m hoping this turns out to be an advantage. Every time a surrogate is in a state, the local news picks it up and it’s a chance to rally volunteers and maintain enthusiasm. Finally, the Democrats are willing to campaign, I was frankly stunned that neither Trump nor Vance had a single campaign event over Labor weekend, the traditional kick-off for the intense part of the election.
Dave
@hueyplong: Exactly even if you think the guy is genuinely intelligent he has used wisdom as his dump stat. Miserable dude
Musk reminds me of the sort of Christian who defines true freedom and liberty to be the liberty to follow their particular interpretation of what they “know” The Bible tells them he just doesn’t bother to launder it through an ancient source.
lowtechcyclist
@Dave:
I didn’t intend my comment to be taken seriously – it’s a bit like the old joke about ‘how many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?’ The answer is still four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one, and Trump repeatedly claiming he was elected in 2020 doesn’t make it true. But if you know people who claim it IS true, then it can be useful for (briefly) shutting them up.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: Yes, but he has also openly claimed the presidential term limit doesn’t apply to him, because of [nonsense word salad]. The idea seems to be that he deserves extra terms as compensation for something “unfair” that was done to him, as he always complains about (I think it was originally something about Obama “spying on him” back in 2016).
Baud
@satby:
It’s a good approach to getting people excited about Kamala. But we have a big problem IMHO with people believing that finding a Great Man/Woman will solve all our problems. So I cringe a little when I see comparisons between people that ignore context.
trnc
True, but that idea has no real value for us since shameless hypocrisy is their superpower.
Baud
@PST:
The early presidents also weren’t children of American citizens.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@BR:
@Matt McIrvin:
OK, thanks. This is where I heard it mentioned.
Anyway
@Baud:
TBF the fantasy legal theories all emanate from the RW and John Eastman-Leonard Leo Axis of EvilCrazy.
My candidate for LW (or non-RW) fantasy is “Combine the Dakotas – who needs two?”
BellyCat
Central Pennsyltucky Report: Just saw a Bush/Cheny 2004 yard sign! 😂
Here for it!
Dave
@Anyway: To be fair two Dakotas is at least two too many.
Falling Diphthong
@Ken: He’s got RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, too.
Any minute now people are going to remember that RFK dropped out shortly after a lone reporter said “Hey wait a minute, accusing the Jews of being behind the covid-19 pandemic is an alarming take for a presidential candidate.”
(Though for his dropping out, I believe it was actually the Quinnipiac poll released at the same time that showed Democrats though RFKJ was an annoying twit, while 30% of Republicans were intrigued by his conspiracy theories.)
rodwell
I am pleased with how the Harris/Walz campaign is performing. It is just another sign that our side has a strong organization at nationally. Harris at the top of the ticket has really generated enthusiasm (donations and volunteers) with the part of our coalition that was not enthused with a second Biden term. Also, the Trump campaign has not figured out how to proceed. Trump thought the three years of dirty up President Biden (he is old, senile and his corrupt family) with the help of the MSM was enough to win this election. They do not know how to campaign against MVP.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: The Constitution says “a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution”, specifically to deal with that.
PST
@Matt McIrvin: I don’t recommend that anyone waste time on this stupid argument, like I’m doing, but if interested, the place to go is a letter signed by 40 eminent constitutional scholars that can be found on a blog called Balkinization from 08/17/2020. I was surprised how many names I recognize, including regulars on cable news like Erwin Chemerinsky, Melissa Murray, and Laurence Tribe. It’s a real Who’s Who and includes some conservatives.
Matt McIrvin
@Anyway: We have a lot of fantasies about how to make the Constitution better that would require amendments that are not happening because the same antidemocratic inequities locked into the current system go double for the Constitutional amendment process itself.
New Deal democrat
According to Dan Guild, national polling (as he predicted) has now caught up with the state polling which has plateaued over the past 10 days, giving Harris a 4.7% lead over Trump:
https://nitter.poast.org/dcg1114/status/1830958778172264478#m
This by the way is slightly better than the percentage by which Biden defeated Trump in 2020, 51% to 47%.
satby
@Baud: agree with you on that. It was part of the push to replace an already great president because he wasn’t in the Green Lantern mold after his debate. Every time someone announces they need to be excited to vote they in reality announce they never mentally got out of high school. Voting is a collaboration with other people to achieve desired policies, and collaboration can be frustrating and mundane as well as occasionally exciting. That shouldn’t matter. We have a childish electorate.
Matt McIrvin
@PST: There was also a huge Congressional Research Service document on the subject of presidential eligibility and “natural-born citizenship” that was released during the heyday of Obama birtherism. It’s a great read (PDF link):
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R42097.pdf
One of the things it covers is the slightly murky question of John McCain’s eligibility–he was born in the Panama Canal Zone during a window of time for which the citizenship status of babies born there was only decided retroactively. So are you natural-born if your citizenship is by birth but it was only decided after you were born? Someone actually tried suing over that and it got laughed out of court.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Those guys thought of everything.
Baud
Of course the crazy legal theory might be an attempt to get a wingnut legislature not to certify a Harris win.
TBone
Schadenfreude videos at link
https://crooksandliars.com/2024/09/maga-gov-glenn-youngkin-shouted-down-labor
Baud
Via reddit, readership capture.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
Which is why we need to defeat him this year, because if he wins, it won’t matter whether there’s any rational justification for a third term – he’ll have one anyway, even if he’s deep into dementia by then.
Absent that, his word salad means nothing. For one thing, he’ll still only have been elected once, and as long as that’s true, the question of a third term is moot.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I think it’s not the arguing about “natural born citizen” that shocks me so much. As people point out, that’s one they’ve been trotting out for years.
I think it’s specifically someone trying to cite Dred Scott that shows me I’m still capable of being shocked. But maybe I’m naive (wouldn’t be the first time) and that’s always been part of the natural-born citizen argument?
Belafon
@Ken: He’s only got RFK Jr. Who’s this Vance guy you’re talking about?
TBone
@BellyCat: 😆 I love how quirky we can be
Baud
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
My guess is that Dred Scott is the only case that says anything about it specifically.
trnc
Perkins v Elg
TBone
@Belafon: we seem to have him stuck in a doom loop here in Pennsylvania.
Chris
@Baud:
He does, yes. But whether he’s better off with Vance on his side than against him is another question.
Sort of reminds me of what Rommel once said about the Italians: “well, if they’re on our side, we’ll need one division to support them, if they’re on the other side, we’ll need one division to defeat them.”
trnc
@Baud:
It doesn’t have to be “enforceable.” If SCOTUS rules in favor of NFRA, that’s all Georgia needs to remove her from the ballot and create chaos around the election even if she wins.
I guess we’ll see just how much Calvinball they have in them this month.
Baud
@trnc:
Then they can witness the firepower of this fully armed and immunized Dark Brandon. 😎
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
It’s still worth pushing some amendments (like the ‘no one is above the law’ amendment, a right-to-vote amendment, and hell, let’s give the ERA another go) just to make the Rethugs show their true colors even more blatantly than usual by opposing them.
It’s not like Congress has been doing much for these past few months, so it isn’t like there’s never the time for it.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: points for use of “japery.”
sdhays
@satby: It’s a good article, but I feel it’s a bit unfair to Hillary. In the media environment of 2016, I don’t think Hillary would have been able to do what Harris is.
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: the debt ceiling/fiscal cliff fuckery is soon upon us. Shutdown talk abounds.
They will fuck up the fucking up of the fuckup.
Matt McIrvin
@TBone: We could win without Pennsylvania though it’d be harder. Trump can’t win without Pennsylvania.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
This doesn’t feel like an accident. Nor does it even feel like it’s primarily about Harris. Birthright citizenship is right there in black and white in the Fourteenth Amendment. They’re doing this because they’re hoping to entice the Supreme Court, or at least some wingnutty court somewhere in the system, to come right out and nullify the Fourteenth Amendment.
cmorenc
@hueyplong:
Are you referring to GOP ads / pics on Fox back in 2008 in which Obama’s skin color was deliberately darkened to make him appear more starkly AA-featured? And predicting that it’s only a matter of time before they tweak Harris’s image in ads and on Fox to emphasize her black Jamaican heritage such that it strongly overdominates the Asian-ish elements thereof?
sdhays
@Matt McIrvin: I see it closer to “Al Gore said he invented the internet”. It was a “joke” which was treated as “true” by our very savvy media because, that Gore guy really is insufferable, am I right?
Whats good for the goose…
BritinChicago
@satby: About people who need to be excited to vote: For some reason I’ve been thinking about the line: “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”
That version of it (more or less) apparently goes back to Pericles, in Fifth Century (BCE) Athens, so we’ve had a little time to think it over. (The version using “war” instead of “politics” is attributed to Trotsky.)
satby
@sdhays: I don’t think it’s unfair, because it’s just stating how the media coverage changed and how the normal responses in a new, but abnormal situation didn’t work. Eight years on, we know better now and the Harris team is using the lessons learned. That’s not a slam on Hillary at all.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
“I know he’s not a pig fucker. Make him deny it anyway.”
LBJ.
sdhays
@satby: It’s not a slam on Hillary, but it kind of suggests she made a mistake, and I’m not convinced. The media environment has shifted, and Harris’s truncated campaign has challenges but also opportunities that other candidates didn’t have.
Still, interesting analysis!
satby
@BritinChicago: Molly Ivins had a few great quotes on the subject:
Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don’t much care for.
You can’t ignore politics, no matter how much you’d like to.
What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: The standard wingnut argument against 14th Amendment birthright citizenship is to read all sorts of strange things into the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (basically, extending the exemption for people born with diplomatic immunity to all sorts of other people, and somehow making it about blood relations more generally). It’s something that sounded completely insane when I first heard it from an Internet rando but has traction among Republican politicians now.
Jackie
@sdhays:
At first glance, I thought it was Tulsa Gabbard – because of the uniform. That would be much more believable!
catclub
@cmorenc: That person in the red suit and hat has only a passing similarity to Kamala Harris, to my eyes.
BritinChicago
@Matt McIrvin: “We could win without Pennsylvania though it’d be harder. Trump can’t win without Pennsylvania.”
I wish I thought this was right, but in some polls Michigan is more likely than PA to go to Trump, and if it does then he may well not need PA after all. Harris needs all of the ‘Blue Wall’ states OR enough EC votes from the southern swing states to make up for the loss of any Blue Wall state she loses.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: It always comes back to Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS fantasies with these guys.
BritinChicago
@satby: Yes, good. I like that last one especially. We have created an exceedingly complex social/legal/political world, and the connections are not at evident. A lot of people have busy and stressful lives, and that of course makes it worse.
UncleEbeneezer
Hey now, just remove the “Repub-red authoritarian uniform” and it’s all good! (Though definitely not a reason to base anyone’s voting on.)
Gloria DryGarden
@zhena gogolia: it’s poetry! ( what you said about her Cap…set Fetchingly, on her flowing hair..)
I think the pic means, “ oh for real she’s a communist, be afraid, be very afraid, even pretty women can be communists, be afraid and believe she’s dangerous”
( her daddy’s a Marxist, see, he wrote this economics book; therefore miss Kamala is also a Marxist commie thing)
I have a former close friend who posts hate-ish scary stuff, to blame dems and state that we’re the dictator commies. She must be watching fox or worse. I can look up whatever she posts on Facebook, if I can bear to. But this is the sort of talking point she posts, or makes statements about. I’m done responding to her, but this is exactly the message content she posts. It’s awful to read it, but at least I can infiltrate, just by looking at what she posts.
im not as astute as lots of y’all, but that’s my take.
nice shade of red, don’t like that style of suit though. weird to try to imply that an art looks anything like MVP Harris.
cmorenc
@Matt McIrvin:
The Dred Scott decision is a turgidly difficult, laborious read, because the actual legal reasoning is so deeply entwined within the elaborate legal procedural jargon of the mid-19th Century. Take just the initial statement of the nature of Scott’s cause of action: “It was an action of trespass vi et armis instituted in the Circuit Court by Scott against Sandford.” The punch line of the decision is that as a person of negro descent, Scott is not a citizen (because the
But what does come through as an articulately understandable narrative is the way Justice Taney describes the historical theory why the US Constitution (1857 version) was implicitly only intended to grant citizenship to people of Western (e.g. British) descent who were born in the US, not negroes whose ancestors were imported as slaves and are considered as an inferior race subject to white subjugation. Taney also added that Native Americans were separate (if subjugated) sovereignties, and not within the class of people the (original pre-14A) Constitution intended to include.
Yeah, wow – worth reading if you can get past the arcane legal-jargony parts. Vivid picture of America’s dominant original racial mindset c. 1850s. Faint echoes in the RW of today – only it’s directed at Latin American immigrants.
OId Man Shadow
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: “Not a natural born citizen” is just another way for them to shout a racial slur against Black people or Latinos.
rk
She looks like Marina Sirtis (Diana Troy counseller in Star Trek: The Next Generation).
Jackie
@Matt McIrvin:
A few days back, we were talking about this, and I pointed out this would have made our first seven presidents ineligible to be POTUS. 🤷🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️
linnen
So Elon is showing Harris cosplaying Bison from the Street Fighter game.
Didn’t these people learn when the “Dark Brandon” meme was turned around and used against them?
Jeffro
@Baud: “Hot Stalin” – great band name!
lowtechcyclist
@TBone:
Sure, there isn’t the time now, but my point is, there is periodically time available to push a Constitutional amendment or two. It’s almost never a case of “Congress can’t take up a Constitutional amendment any time in the next year or two because then there won’t be time to pass X, Y. or Z.” In almost every Congress, there are times when Congress isn’t doing much at all.
Matt McIrvin
@Jackie: No, because there’s another phrase in there specifically allowing them.
Jackie
@Falling Diphthong: I love that RFK jr can’t remove his name from FOUR?Battleground states! I haven’t heard a word from TCFG about this dilemma – has anyone else? TCFG has to be stewing! 😂
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: 👍
I am ever hopeful!
Matt McIrvin
@linnen: “For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.”
You know, Election Day is a Tuesday.
TBone
Quote of the Day (so far):
https://digbysblog.net/2024/09/03/teaching-the-choir-to-sing/
(I was forced to add commas by my inner proofreader.)
Gloria DryGarden
@Chris: no wait. Can the scotus eliminate an amendment!.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@Matt McIrvin: That movie might be the pinnacle of obviously bad and dumb but highly watchable and quotable.
DFH
Anne, your last paragraph made me laugh. Thanks!
Jackie
@Baud:
Sadly, they didn’t define a president is NOT ABOVE THE LAW specifically enough for today’s Supreme Six.😡
catclub
@TBone: No japery with the napery!
lowtechcyclist
@satby:
I don’t think that’s hard to understand at all. The MSM gives barely any coverage to policy, either before or after the fact. They don’t even try to help people see how Washington affects them. And of course state governments have been covered poorly as long as I can remember.
AFAICT, most state legislatures meet for just two or three months every spring, and then go back to their day jobs (most states don’t pay their legislators enough to not have a side gig) so most of the time if you want to find out what your state legislators are doing, the answer is, nothing. The whole setup is weird.
different-church-lady
Well, um… no.
gvg
@lowtechcyclist: Trump mentioned that he should get more than 2 terms before he was elected once and I thought that is when the whole electorate should have rejected him as treasonous. I knew people weren’t paying attention and were being tribal, but to me, that was a significant point. Voters who actually understood their countries legal foundations should have said NOPE to him right then It also would have saved us grief down the road with the next one.
He never intended to follow the law.
RaflW
Wow. That Walz clip where he says Republicans want a gov’t “small enough to fit in your bedroom”. Tim is clearly not just stump-speech mad. He means it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gloria DryGarden: No, but they can twist it while interpreting it. They interpreted the “well-regulate militia” portion of the 2d Amendment into a nothingburger,
Other MJS
@dmsilev:
There was already a gag about that in the 1978 Superman movie.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone:
So deliciously said. if that weren’t totally fucked, and we weren’t about to get fucked some more… I would love it more
Now I need to rinse my
mouth out w soapbrain out w some positive statement of a desired , desirable outcome.“Somehow this can all turn out ok.”
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: One of the big problems with the extreme nationalization and polarization of our politics is that it makes it that much harder for local and state politics to be responsive to local concerns. If people vote mostly on the basis of negative partisanship, and most states are either very red or very blue, that makes general elections very uncompetitive. You can run a primary challenge against an incumbent who’s not delivering, but most of the time, people will be OK with their incumbent because they’re mostly thinking about partisan divisions in the general election. And the incumbents coast.
lowtechcyclist
Totally off topic, but today is absolutely a glorious early fall day here in southern Maryland. And it’s a very distinct changeover – yesterday was summer, today is fall.
It always seems to me that the change from summer to fall is the most definitive change of seasons: spring and summer kinda tease you as they come in – is it here yet? maybe, maybe not – and of course it’s hard to say when the muddle that passes as winter anymore has definitively begun. But fall? Man, it’s here. Today is fall, and ‘we won’t go back.’ ;-)
Cheryl from Maryland
Hmm, I need Elon’s fantasy outfit for Madame Vice President for Halloween …
catclub
@Jackie: Link?
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin: I’m with you.
gvg
@Chris: How can you nullify an amendment except by showing it did not get the required votes in Congress, votes of states, signature of the President? The process is spelled out in the Constitution.
They can interpret the meaning somewhat, but not cancel the law, except by another amendment which they don’t control either.
And if they interpret too badly, it will speed up “reform” that will mean their power gets diluted or they get impeached and removed. People are already pretty unhappy with them. Push it much further and its going to explode.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Western states have moved to nonpartisan primaries. Ranked choice voting is also spreading.
Matt McIrvin
@Gloria DryGarden: If the Supreme Court decides to declare that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment means I have to give Donald Trump a blowjob, and they have a relevant case before them, they can make it so.
Omnes Omnibus
@lowtechcyclist: That switch is expected here on Friday. Highs in the upper 70s-low 80s through Thursday and then, boom, highs around 60. Woohoo!
Gloria DryGarden
@gvg: that is a really good point. I missed it. But I believe you that he said it.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
Well sure, but the absence of information on how legislation affects or might affect voters, and which party supports or opposes it, is what leaves nothing for them to vote on besides partisan divisions. Those divisions would still be there, but at least there’d be information to support or detract from people’s partisan loyalties. Now so much of it is sheer tribalism because there’s little else to go on.
TBone
@catclub: 😆 I am still laughing!
Omnes Omnibus
Well, yeah. I think the possibility that they try something like that is quite low, but it is not impossible. And, if they do, it will have far reaching consequences for them.
StringOnAStick
I saw on Reddit that people are receiving scare mail postcards from “the Harris administration” that say ” your Medicare has been eliminated”. We are tuned in enough to know this is R bs, but I wonder about the common clay of the new west…
Jackie
@catclub: Here’s one:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rfk-jr-name-ballot-poses-100000577.html
TBone
@Gloria DryGarden: see the Quote of the Day at #113.
No rule says the book has to be Xtian in nature…
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Trump v. McIrvin is what lawyers would call a seminal case.
RaflW
@satby: What’s key in Harris’s success is that she doesn’t actually ignore his attacks, because as we’ve seen the “go high” strategy doesn’t work.
What she and Walz do is variations on “Get a load of this weirdo” responses. Her social media team is great. They judo Trump and Vance by using what they say against them. (Vance makes it easy — who else would look like a twerp in a donut shop, besides dead in the water Desantis that is — with all his deeply creepy misogyny).
I know Pravda on the Potomac (Politico) tried to make a thing out of her refusing to engage the “turned Black” uh, question, but that line, like others, didn’t stick, because readers don’t care. We’re not clamoring for Kamala to ‘respond’ to absurdities like how black she is/isn’t.
And, really, what was Bash’s question? Did she think she was actually asking Kamala if she ‘turned black’? Because “How do you respond to his attack?” is an absolutely moronic question. The answer was in the record of the Harris campaign in the days after.
Anyway, that’s a great column. Thx for linking!
Gloria DryGarden
@Matt McIrvin: better you than me.
Nothing against blow jobs. It’s the person..
BR
@Jackie:
I guess brain worms are contagious:
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: usually I get very mournful at summer’s end…
This year, however, I am strangely invigorated.
LFG!!!
PST
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh, man, I read that thing a long, long time ago. I don’t think I’ll do so again, but I agree that it was thorough and even interesting. It occurred to me earlier that John McCain’s case represents the flip side of Kamala Harris’s IF (and it’s a big IF) you concede that Eastman’s speculative facts are true and her parents were just passing through. McCain was born an American citizen because his citizen parents were in Panama on official assignment of a temporary nature, not residents of Panama.
TBone
@Cheryl from Maryland: find a Mario videogame costume – it’s close! 😆
Citizen Alan
@zhena gogolia: ItIt’s an a I picture of kamala harris in a red uniform with a hammer and sickle logo. Apartheid Clyde is literally publishing fake pictures of Harris as some sort of communist Supervillain.
TBone
@Gloria DryGarden: 😆
Any rules say that using teeth are off limits?
Hawk TUAH!
TBone
@BR: “ballot strategy”
😆
BR
Yet another example of a media double standard:
https://mastodon.social/@GottaLaff/113074013792360315
Rusty
We seem to have people that understand citizenship. Our youngest was born in the United Kingdom, my wife and I are US citizens, the UK does not have birthright citizenship, and so they have never been anything but a US citizen. (As an aside, we had to get on official US birth certificate, issued by the US state department at the US embassy in London, it’s very fancy!).
Could our youngest run for president?
Baud
@Rusty:
Depends. Would they run as a Dem or a Republican?
PST
@Baud: One more sign, I think, that AOC has made her choice. She plans to be more an Elizabeth Warren than a Bernie Sanders: defining one end of the mainstream, not an disruptive outlier. (Not quite fair, since Bernie has been a pretty good Democrat these days, even if he won’t call himself one.)
Omnes Omnibus
@Rusty:
Yes.
Gloria DryGarden
@lowtechcyclist: we’ve got 93 today, 2 cooler days , 86, 74, then 91 for another week, here in Denver. We have truly got zigzag weather here on the steppes. All 3 seasons are possible within a few days of each other, anytime until around Election Day. For reals. It could snow. Then be Indian summer, 80s. Then some autumn cool nights decent days, then too warm or too chilly. Rough on the plants.
of course, the first day of changing seasons w a hint of autumn is the beginning of august, w a change in the insect songs at night.
enjoy your crisp lovely autumn.
Chris
@lowtechcyclist:
The more local the level of government is, the more sparse coverage of it gets. Trying to find out anything about people running for office locally is a goddamn nightmare. If they’re running for an office like “mayor” or “U.S. representative,” you can at least usually find some stuff about them, but for offices like “member of the city council,” “comptroller,” “judge of the court of appeals?” Forget it!
And polls keep showing that large numbers of people think as many decisions as possible should be made locally, and yet the more local the election is, the fewer people show up to vote. Partly it’s just brainwashing, with our civic culture having trained people to think that “well of course power should be local” is the Right Answer, so to speak. But the total lack of coverage has a lot to do with the discrepancy as well.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
…once they achieve 35 years of age.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: why didn’t I think of that? What is wrong with me this morning? Something to sink my teeth into… I’d need a big dental dam, though. Ptooey
Omnes Omnibus
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation: A mere technicality,
BR
@PST:
I’ve seen signs that the horseshoe left’s disinfo machine has been successful in convincing “leftists” (who are anything but) that AOC is a neoliberal sellout or whatever they want to throw at her.
I know someone who claims to be antiwar and economically left on all issues and thinks that AOC is a sellout, but he *just so happens* to think that Russia and China are entitled to take over Ukraine and Taiwan and thinks that incels are just young men who have been badly treated by an anti-men society. Fortunately he lives in Northern California where his vote for some random third party will make no difference.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: lol. Roflmao
planting bad seeds w this joke…
Chris
@gvg:
By declaring in their ruling that the law doesn’t actually mean what it plainly says. Something conservative courts have some experience with.
I doubt if the Nine would actually side with anyone bringing that lawsuit, at least for now (some of the crazier lower courts, on the other hand…) But it’s the kind of thing conservatives like to float just in case someone’s out-there enough to run with it. If they’re not, well, at least you’ve gotten the idea out there, and you can come back at it again in a few years.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: I’m curious about ranked voting. But I really want to know their party, to catch typical trends and attitudes. Like if it’s a Republican, odds have been high they’re anti choice, or lately huge into denial and a big lie, and might staunchly believe in trickle down economics. Knowing just their party, I d assume so. Thus, I need to know.
Chris
@BR:
You’ve got to appreciate on some level the fact that the Greens have completely given up on even pretending to be anything other than a Republican ratfucking operation.
Jeffro
Show of hands: are we all pretty well in agreement that
Sure looks that way to me
Jackie
@BR: I snorted out loud at that claim! Brain worms 🐛 is a likely cause😁
I
don’tbelieve RFK jr is on WA’s ballot.edited to correct WA .
Baud
@Gloria DryGarden:
You still know the party. You just have more opportunity when it comes to avoiding a binary choice.
Chris
@PST:
I think AOC realizes that she has credibility with a certain kind of progressive voter, the kind that’s sour on more mainstream candidates like Biden and Clinton or even Harris and Walz, but isn’t actually a full-blown “Obama is worse than Bush he sold us out!” Red-Brown Alliance type, and tries to use that credibility to make sure as many of these kinds of voters as possible don’t tip over into that kind of bullshit and stay engaged in the right kind of politics. Which is good for her.
Jinchi
Does Musk think people are gullible enough to believe Kamala woulg wear that outfit, or is this one of his “jokes” withoutb any attempt at delivery?
BR
@Jeffro:
I dunno — it does seem like at least in a few states (PA, NC) there’s an active GOP campaign on the ground, whether run by Trump’s campaign or by PACs. But yes, in general I think there is a lot of grift.
Baud
@Jinchi:
Every right winger fundamentally believes that people are gullible enough.
sdhays
@Jackie: It would be cathartic if he was on the Florida ballot and Harris wins it by a few hundred votes. Reverse Nader, baby!
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro: Not quite.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
I’m more concerned that people would believe that she pledges to be a Communist dictator on day one. I’ve heard a similar pledge, but it wasn’t from Kamala Harris.
Also; why, whenever I listen to actual Communists, do they say they want no government. Seems a little antithetical to dictatorship, Russian history notwithstanding.
Geminid
@Baud: Ranked-choice voting has been mainly implemented in cities, New York being the most notable example. They’ll be using it a second time next year. Formerly, NYC mandated a runoff of no candidate exceeded 40%. Had this system been in place last time, Eric Adams probably would have faced Kathy Garcia in a runoff.
I think only Maine and Alaska have adopted ranked-choice voting at a state level. Alaska has a hybrid system where the top four finishers in an all-comer, “jungle” primary advance to a rank election in November. That’s how Mary Peltola and Lisa Murkowski won in 2022. I suspect Alaska’s system will spread.
The Audacity of Krope
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation: Just realized I didn’t fix my name on all the devices I use.
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@Dave: We could give them back, and let the previous residents decide what to call the area.
Jinchi
@Jeffro: Let’s hope that Trump bankrupts the Republican party and then loses it all in court fines and judgements against him before fading into obscurity.
Chris
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation:
Well, theoretically, it kind of fits. Communism is supposed to be the end stage of society. After the workers have seized the means of production and instituted a dictatorship of the proletariat, government institutions are supposed to somehow fade away and leave behind a self-sustaining self-regulating… anarchist nirvana? This part of the theory isn’t all that well developed or maybe I just don’t remember it very well, but IIRC the state fading away is supposed to be the end point of communism.
Naturally it never happens that way in real life, but I’m not surprised that self-described communists would say that they want no government at all.
TBone
Listening to college rawk station driving the country back roads on a procurement mission 😎😍
🎶
https://youtu.be/tbKjMVcB7No
What a glorious morning!
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: There were contested primary races for Clerk of Courts and Register of Deeds in my district this year. (Register of Deeds was the one that was actually kind of interesting: the candidates were a longtime state politician with court and real-estate experience, and a longtime Registry of Deeds employee, stating broadly similar goals. You could make a case for either of them, but why is this even an elected position again?)
It was quite difficult to find out anything about either race.
BR
@Chris:
I think this is where the two-axis / political compass approach makes sense:
https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2
The USSR and Mao were authoritarian leftists. There are some authoritarians around on the left these days, but fewer than there used to be. Over history there haven’t been many prominent leaders who are left libertarian — I think mainly anti-colonial leaders like Gandhi and Mandela.
Geminid
@RaflW: Virginia State Senator Louise has good variation on the “When they go low…” trope:
Senator Lucas keeps a pair of boxing gloves prominently displayed in her Richmond office.
The Audacity of Krope
No, I agree with you. This is why I never support Communists, I don’t understand how their ideas can be functionally applied without some form of societal enlightenment where we just automatically know what to do and come to somehow universally agree on big decisions without, like, voting.
TBone
@Gloria DryGarden: 😆
This is why I adore you.
Seminal wit!
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: AOC came in through the Bernie/DSA movement, but she’s very smart and understands how things happen in politics, so isn’t about to torpedo liberal government over some theoretical crusade.
Geminid
My apologies to the moderators. I fat-fingered my address in my first two comments.
The Audacity of Krope
@Geminid: Glad to see I’m not the only one having username drama.
Gloria DryGarden
1 First generation can refer to a person born in the U.S. to immigrant parents or a naturalized American citizen. Both types of people are considered to be U.S. citizens.
2 I want that red suit. It looks like a nice weight of cashmere blend wool. I’ll take it to the tailors to alter it; I just don’t find that lapel and collar to be a flattering style. But the fabric, the color, I want it. And I don’t really have much occasion for dress ups.
Steve LaBonne
@Chris: They got there via Willie Sutton logic- that’s where the money is.
Kirk
@Chris: IIRC, end state communism intersects with absolute libertarianism and the anarchists – and fails at that same state – by assuming all people will be reasonable and good; that not only will there be no bad actors but what constitutes “reasonable” and “good” will be mutually agreed upon by all parties.
Fantasy is fantasy – it may give good ideas for dealing with the real world but it’s still not reality.
Matt McIrvin
@The Audacity of Krope: I think a lot of Communists have an idea that human nature is basically good and generous, most people even want to do productive work, and it’s capitalism, driven by the greed of a powerful few, that corrupts us.
The capitalist/Yankee work ethic is kind of the opposite: most people are sinful and lazy and need a kick in the ass and the threat of starvation to accomplish anything.
I think people are complicated, with aspects of both things, and I suspect it’s not a coincidence that every rich modern economy (including ours) has some kind of mixed system with capitalist and state-socialist elements. Most of the time, we’re really arguing about the dial settings of the mix.
It’s kind of amazing that Communism ever took hold in Russia, a profoundly cynical society as far as I can tell. But one has to consider what the alternative was at the time.
Kent
I have always understood someone born in the US to immigrant parents to be a 2nd generation immigrant. The first generation is the generation that moved here, whether or not they ultimately became citizens or not.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: god I laughed for a minute straight.
did you see baud at #142?
(it sticks in my throat to say it, but Matt might be at risk….)
MisterForkbeard
I’m super late on this thread this morning, but I’m impressed how even whenever the rightwing tries to make Kamala look scary, they end up making her look pretty badass.
I mean, thanks to them I now believe that Kamala would rock a militaristic, colorful uniform. Not that she would do that, as someone who actually respects the military.
Kent
He has RFJ Jr. and Elon so it evens out.
The Audacity of Krope
I do mostly agree with this sentiment, though I don’t even think it requires a powerful few. Capitalism perverts societal incentives.
Think of the practice of land and home ownership, our strongest remaining legacy from feudalism. This is a major investment vehicle for a lot of people, from the biggest to smallest investors. Everyone needs somewhere to live, however, so this creates tension between those who have yet to attain status as an owner and those who have.
The owners have more influence and more comfort and are simply more likely to participate in our system of government. The government will prioritize their needs, propping up the value of residential property, over the needs of those struggling to keep themselves in rentals or even simply lacking shelter.
It doesn’t require anyone to be greedy. There are two classes of people with distinct sets of needs. People rightly want to protect their investments, even if they think everyone should be housed in the abstract. This is true even for entry level owners who are also, most likely, struggling themselves.
Gloria DryGarden
@Kent: I just googled it, and some of the listings did agree with you, though others fit what I posted. In my esl and bilingual education life, there was some discussion of a different mindset in what we were calling first gen Americans, the ones born here from immigrant parents. Because they have the outlook, and often the languages, of both cultures, and might grow up with their parents language as L 1, so they be natural born Americans, but English language learners.
it dies get confusing, since it also says if you become a naturalized citizen, you are also considered first gen. By the time one is getting citizenship, one has to take an English test, and show some ability w speaking and reading our official language.
I had a student from Iran who passed her English and citizenship tests, and came back to class to celebrate, bringing the most delicious nut honey pastry.
Ksmiami
@Kirk: I welcome our AI overlords…
The Audacity of Krope
I’m now dreaming of baclava.
Chris
@Kirk:
Fantasy for fantasy, I think the anarchists are my favorite pick out of the three. The Zapatistas in the Chiapas and the Rojava Kurds likely have plenty of warts and aren’t nearly as ideal as their publicity brochures, but they seem to’ve managed to steer clear of producing anything like Stalinism and Maoism. Or, on the other side, the Belgian Congo.
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin: …Oh, yeah, and: the challenger for Clerk of Courts is apparently campaigning on the grounds that it shouldn’t be an elected position.
He has a point, right? Yeah, then I googled him and started finding out about his peculiar arrest record.
Citizen Alan
@BR: Willie Horton has entered the Chat.
Citizen Alan
I’ve mentioned before that I would give anything to peer into alternate realities like the Watcher and find the universe where Sanders won the primary in 2016 and went on to beat Trump in the general just so I could see that exact moment when the Leftists turned on him and condemned him for being a sell-out. My guess would be the moment he picked a VP who was anywhere to the right of Nina Turner.
SatanicPanic
@Jeffro: 2. isn’t going to work. He has to win it outright and he very well might.
hueyplong
@BR: “A drug kingpin convicted of murdering a police officer, Jamie Davidson, whose life sentence was commuted by #Trump on his last day in office, was charged with strangling his wife and convicted of domestic violence in Florida earlier this year.”
I’d bet money that Trump charged that guy $1 million or more for the commutation. Why should that particular “drug kingpin” be the only one who got released for free? Find some credible corroboration and then make the political ad to end all political ads.
Citizen Alan
MisterForkbeard
@Matt McIrvin: That’s my interpretation, too.
Trump wants to win outright, but he’s not actually very good at it. He depends on a cult-like following, a huge propaganda machine and a media willing to go to bat for him for some reason, but his ability to affect the race just isn’t that big right now. He’s not the one in control and he doesn’t have a strategy, but he’s going to try to win.
So this the plan:
Matt McIrvin
@Gloria DryGarden: It’s a good thing that this business of what “generation” you are doesn’t have a host of legal consequences!
(I just think that any effort to heighten the legal distinctions between people in America based on blood and ethnicity is, and ought to be considered, fundamentally un-American. Obviously, our Trumps and Stephen Millers don’t think so. But I’ve never liked the “natural-born citizen” requirement for the Presidency in part because it’s basically the only place where it actually matters to the law how a US citizen got their citizenship. There shouldn’t be any, I think.)
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Pedantic quibble and not arguing with the main point, but one of the legacies of the Reagan revolution I really hate is the way we’ve come to the point where we use “capitalist” and “socialist” as synonyms for “private” and “public.” I don’t really consider “socialist” an insult, but public institutions and regulations and the other things that are designated with that phrase have existed in virtually every successful society since forever. Heck, those same Yankee-capitalists who were big on the work ethos also spent the whole nineteenth century supporting things like public schools and infrastructure development.
Gloria DryGarden
@Matt McIrvin:
I agree it’s complicated. I’ve lived from the idea that people are basically good, and discovered it was a lot of projection, that I thought people were intending what I would intend. But that an astonishing amount if people weren’t good, and were up to a lot of things I would never…So, I kind of learned the hard way, that it’s just not so.
and now we’re getting a view of how far basic goodness seems to be missing from a whole lot of hypnotized sometimes stupid ill-intended poorly educated black-and-white thinking weirdos and haters, here in the USA
im pretty disappointing to know how much, how many Americans are falling for an obvious grifting lying conman.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gloria DryGarden: Immigrants who become citizens are first generation citizens. Their children who are born here would be the first generation of natural born citizens.
Gloria DryGarden
@The Audacity of Krope: real good points; more discussion later. Still trying to understand where capitalism fucks up so many people and yet seems more free choice that some other systems.
Gloria DryGarden
@The Audacity of Krope: it was very much like baklava. Maybe w pistachios, and rosewater.
Ishiyama
I immediately thought of Lovely Rita:
Matt McIrvin
@MisterForkbeard: I think the perception that the fix is in, and Trump has some Weird Trick up his sleeve that can make him win even if he loses, is being encouraged by Republican chatter as a means of voter suppression on our side. It makes people depressed and demotivated.
I see people all over claiming that the election-fuckery situation is actually worse this year than it was in 2020. There’s probably a more organized push to prepare wingnut election officials to refuse to certify the election, but all that relies on a legal theory that basically implies that the losing party could have nullified any past presidential election in history at any time, if they didn’t like the result! Is that going to fly even with this SCOTUS? I don’t know but I do think they are political animals.
What they don’t have is control of enough swing-state legislatures to even try what they were trying to do in 2020.
hueyplong
@Ishiyama: Give us a wink and make me think of you.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Communism only took hold in Russia because Lenin adapted it to practical organizing organizing template: a vanguard party that inserted its cadres governmental and non-governmental institutions, in order to dominate and then monopolize the revolutionary movement. Decentralized leftist or liberal parties could not match the Bolsheveks’ single-minded effectiveness.
This template could be adapted to any revolutionary situation, regardless of ideology. Under Bolshevik tutelage, the Chinese Kuomintang Party adopted it in the 1920s and quickly overshadowed Sun Yat-Sen’s liberal nationalist movement. The Kuomintang became a conservative, anti-Communist party organized on Leninist principles.
Citizen Alan
Or to put it more simply, I laugh at Communism because it is based entirely on the ludicrous suggestion that if we just got rid of all the rich people and the governments who support rich people, everyone left would just happily agree to be nice to one another and share everything according to their needs because greed, selfishness and bigotry would have ceased to exist.
Evangelical Christianity posits that at some point in the near future, all the Real-True Christians(tm) will be teleported up to space and then, a few years later, Jesus will come back to earth and brutally murder 99% of the human race and condemn everyone who doesn’t believe what Evangelicals believe to unimaginable, neverending torment.
I find that far more plausible than the predictions that Communism rests upon.
The Audacity of Krope
So capitalism is essentially an undemocratic way of allocating power. When paired with democratic government, this pairing can provide a lot of choice. Everyone gets their own little bit of choice and freedom. But vast swathes of that choice and freedom is explicitly tied to the value and nature of your assets, the amount of power you have.
So, essentially capitalism is nominally empowering but doesn’t empower equally and probably can’t.
Scout211
It’s Politico so it’s a bit heavy on the drama, but still.
Ha ha ha ha.
Kent
Both are based on magical delusional fantasy thinking that completely ignores human nature.
H.E.Wolf
My father came to the US at age 7. I’m a first-generation American, per my family’s usage of the term.
It doesn’t invalidate the other uses of the phrase. We Americans contain multitudes. :)
SatanicPanic
@Gloria DryGarden: having spent time around Communists I think we give Communists too much credit for actually thinking about human nature at all. To a person, every communist I’ve ever interacted with will simply lay out their logic and then assert that it will work because it has to.
Communists are very simil ar to libertarians or fundamentalists in that they don’t give a shit what actual humans want, they have a vision of society that must be enacted and fuck anyone who doesn’t agree. It’s not surprising that Communism is so thoroughly authoritarian, in fact I don’t think you can be a real communist without being an authoritarian.
I would add that American communists are basically in a secular cult.
The Audacity of Krope
I’ve had something sold to me as baclava with pistachios and rosewater. It was phenomenal, haven’t been able to find it since.
Reminded me of a better tasting Fruity Pebbles.
Matt McIrvin
@Gloria DryGarden: I kind of see things in game-theoretic terms. In the short term, there are usually selfish strategic advantages to stabbing others in the back, or just free-riding and letting other people do the work. In the long term, that kind of behavior kills cooperative alliances that could move mountains if they were allowed to thrive. I don’t think we’re prisoners of our genes but I do think that a lot about our social monkey selves is some kind of deep effort to deal with those two contradictory facts.
Belafon
@dmsilev:
I had read somewhere that there are rules about separating the state and federal election funding, like the national groups can’t give to state level. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Another Scott
@dmsilev: [Flashback!]
One of the gags in the 1978 Superman movie (0:11) was Clark running down the street, desperately looking for a phone booth, and only finding one of those things that only surrounded the phone.
[ laff! ]
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Audacity of Krope: Capitalism is an economic theory on how to efficiently manage/maximize limited resources. It requires a stable and transparent governing system to function. It does not require the people to have any voice. People who equate capitalism with democracy are making a category error. In addition, capitalism as described by Adam Smith is not the let business do whatever the fuck it wants that the right insists that it is.
Gloria DryGarden
@Gloria DryGarden: ok, so human nature most usually starts out basically good, and generous. I do still believe that, it would be spiritually bankrupt for me to say otherwise. However, we get twisted up, and learn biases, and have a variety of beliefs and values ground into us, in the family upbringing situations. And really crappy, hating behaviors, and belief systems and judgements get handed down through the crucible of culture, and economic class, and caste or “race” or ethnicity, and adversities of all kinds. So that goodness can get pretty squished.
and then there are the psychopaths. We need a psych major to tell us what the research is, whether it’s inborn, or learned.
anyway, human nature, we’re born good, then shit happens, people lose sight of it, can’t live from it, or it gets pretty twisted. Not everyone. But many.
Belafon
@Baud: Yes, but they built an exception for themselves in the constitution by including “at the time of ratification.”
Falling Diphthong
@SatanicPanic: I was struck by David Sedaris’s observation about working for a communist (as a mover) that he had known a lot of Communists, but they always assumed that after the glorious revolution they would be the people holding the clipboards. He hadn’t meant one who envisioned “according to my means” as carrying around heavy objects.
More broadly, there appear to be people across the political spectrum who believe that we’re just one global apocalypse away from everyone realizing that they are right, and their plan for society is the one everyone will now freely adopt. Like, there will be 10 survivors with 12 and a half manifestos between them, and they will each be astonished that the other 9 are not falling into line with their glorious vision, now that all the impediments to it have been swept away.
Gloria DryGarden
@Kent: was it “1984”, or “animal farm”, where they ran that experiment, and the new leaders rose up to be just as dominating and greedy?
cmorenc
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
The 13-15th Amendments, and especially the 14th, were specifically intended to overrule Dred Scott, including its underlying restrictive reasoning about the nature of US citizenship.
Baud
@Gloria DryGarden:
Animal Farm. The pigs.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Another Scott: I still fondly remember that gag. I think the premise was that he was off-earth fro a couple decades, also explaining a somewhat dated mode of talking and thinking.
Belafon
@Gloria DryGarden: Tim Walz and his brother grew up in the same household. Analyze that with your comment.
Matt McIrvin
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Nah, it was just that Clark Kent was raised as a humble Kansas farm boy, with all the salt-of-the-earth stereotypes associated with that.
Mostly, it all worked in the movie because Christopher Reeve was so good at selling it.
TBone
@Scout211: I just heard a golden toilet flushing 😆
SatanicPanic
@Falling Diphthong: yeah I think that there is a large group of people who want political ends without engaging in politics. Because politics are bad and dirty their perfect vision.
TBone
@Gloria DryGarden: Animal Farm
mrmoshpotato
@zhena gogolia:
LOL! Same here!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Hey I’m Google famous! The Google Maps car passed me a few weeks ago while I was walking the dog. Just checked and my pic is now part of the street view
Gloria DryGarden
@Matt McIrvin: I only find it interesting for cultural awareness, esp in education settings. Just a different angle.
I recognize the discussion here was more about who gets to be considered a voting member/ citizen of USA. And that some weird republicans are coming up w weird shit about it, to exclude some folks.
Falling Diphthong
@Matt McIrvin: I think society tries to solve the problem of how to get people to cooperate in groups when the group is way too big for you to know everyone personally. (One solution: Clay figures with giant freaky eyes scattered throughout the settlement, watching everyone.)
Interesting idea I read in a recent Scientific American: humans were self-domesticating. The flatter faces, lower aggression in adults, etc, all tied to being able to work together in larger groups of adults, fed by a positive feedback loop.
Trollhattan
Don’t know if this is already posted upthread–equal parts inevitable and hilarious Elmo pushback.
https://crooksandliars.com/2024/09/elmo-posts-ai-image-kamala-communist-garb
Another Scott
@sdhays: +1
The apparent chainmail under the red jacket (visible at the neckline) is a nice touch.
[ grocho-roll-eyes.gif ]
Seriously – “Republicans don’t lie to be believed – they lie to be repeated.” – LOLGOP.
It’s a tribal signifier. It’s to make Democrats upset. That is all.
Forward!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Trollhattan:
Out: Fascists
In: Fashionistas.
mrmoshpotato
@Jinchi:
I wish that had happened back in the 80’s (70’s?).
Gloria DryGarden
@The Audacity of Krope: try the Persian markets, I’m guessing.
The Audacity of Krope
It may seek to do that, but when the funding gets fucked up everything stops. This does nothing to manage or maximize resources. Workers of all stripes get laid off; even though we still need the food, the medicine, the good and services the workers were providing. This because there is no way to ensure the owners, who typically did nothing more than own, get their share.
So capitalism really maximizes the accrual of limited resources to those who can say “that’s mine” under threat of government enforcement.
The Audacity of Krope
@Gloria DryGarden: That would be smart and I definitely have access to Persian markets here. Where I originally encountered this heavenly pastry was a restaurant, but next time I went back they stopped making their own and started selling some mass-produced version.
TBone
@Trollhattan: I really enjoy crooksandliars. They’re unfailingly on top of all the latest weird and also the serious news. That portrait is hilarious 😂.
Also, the comments section is great. I steal a lot of my best memes there.
Matt McIrvin
@Omnes Omnibus: Modern Americans tend to associate capitalism with democracy as an artifact of the 20th century Cold War and the associated propaganda. But I think that association is fraying now.
I recall some recent survey that found that younger generations rated democracy, in itself, as an important value to a much lower extent than older people. But those older people are the same demographics that go for Trump–they think they’re protecting democracy when they do it! Which made me wonder if “democracy” as these various people understand it is anything we’d recognize as a textbook definition. Or if it’s based on a world-model with any similarity to reality. I suspect they’re equating Democracy with fighting Commies, or something along those lines.
BethanyAnne
@Gloria DryGarden: I think one factor is that folk frequently expect people to be like them. That can be a rude shock to many decent people, but it just means that there are more categories of people to account for
billcinsd
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Dred Scott was never overturned so it can technically be used as precedence. Few do that these days, although the Kansas Solicitor General did use Dred Scott in 2016
https://penncapital-star.com/commentary/we-dont-want-to-say-it-but-165-years-later-dred-scott-is-alive-and-well-michael-coard/
Omnes Omnibus
@The Audacity of Krope: Like I said, Adam Smith’s original concept had a lot more in common with the highly regulated capitalism of a social democrat’s dream than it does with Randian fantasies.
Matt McIrvin
@The Audacity of Krope: Capitalism seems to be genuinely good at providing a wide variety of desirable consumer goods.
It does that at a cost, of course. It’s exploitative, it fundamentally runs on inequality, and it does it with no regard for the welfare of consumers, workers or the environment. And left to its own devices it will kill its own enterprises in operations resembling a mafia bust-out. But, sufficiently regulated to mitigate these things, it really is an amazing productivity engine.
But then people imagine that it can do the same thing in sectors where the same conditions and goals don’t apply. Education, health care, public transportation. And it sucks at those things.
The Audacity of Krope
Make it so.
TBone
I often wonder if Dad ever regretted giving me this album for my 13th birthday. It had to annoy him, and it was all downhill from there on out, I was never the same, sweet summer child. 😆😎 mood music
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EllEztdbBhg
Omnes Omnibus
@Matt McIrvin: Equating capitalism and democracy was a remarkably pernicious act. IMO the more broadly democratic our society, the more fair it will be required to be.*
*The usual caveats regarding protection of minorities and unpopular speech, etc., apply.
M31
lol the original (“Turn in your hymn books to page Tim Walz”) made me think “So I give them the books and they call Walz on his pager? that’s kind of unusual but OK”
so thanks for the commas lol
TBone
@The Audacity of Krope: seconded!
Chris
@SatanicPanic:
History seems to suggest as much.
It’s interesting that when you look at the progressive revolutions of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries (American, French, Irish, all of Latin America)… They all had authoritarian aspects. They all fell off the liberalism and democracy bandwagons an eye-watering number of times. Both in terms of suspending or abolishing democratic rights (Jacobinism, Bonapartism) and in terms of their vision of democracy being notably incomplete (slavery, restricted suffrage). But they never managed to kill off the idea of liberal democracy either and it kept coming back even if it took a while (republicanism didn’t really dig its roots in in France until the 1870s, for example).
Starting in 1917 with Russia and with communism pretty much cornering the market on violent revolution, that’s no longer the case. For most of the remaining century, revolutions are made on the explicit notion of “dictatorship is good, civil liberties and free and fair elections are lies of the bourgeoisie.”
TBone
@M31: 👍 I couldn’t let it go! 😁
Dave
@BethanyAnne: It’s most noticeable when you encounter total crap people (Not explicitly aimed at DJT but he is an excellent example); those that use people without thought enthusiastic dedicated liars etc. Fairly often they rationalize their behavior (it’s by no means the only way they justify their behavior) because they either believe or profess to believe that everyone is just like them.
Decent people almost certainly do the same but it doesn’t stand out so much beyond enabling bad actors to take advantage of this.
Omnes Omnibus
@billcinsd: It was superseded by the Post-Civil War Amendments. The fact that it was not overruled by a later Court decision does not change that fact that it is no longer valid precedent.
rikyrah
@RaflW:
Especially from the muthaphucka who was at the forefront of Birtherism against Obama.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
If I were a cynic, I’d say that forty years (and some change) of “capitalism” being equated with “democracy” and “liberalism” has done a lot to poison the last two notions for anyone who didn’t grow up in fear of the Khmer Rouge crossing the Rio Grande.
rikyrah
This is the guy running against Tester:
Portia ♍️ McGonagal
@PortiaMcGonagal
Disgusting. Vote #JonTester
“Sheehy trashed his relationship with Crow Reservation tribal members, saying, “a great way to bond with all the Indians while they’re drunk at 8:00 A.M.”
https://x.com/PortiaMcGonagal/status/1830968237775036573
billcinsd
@Gloria DryGarden: Did you miss the end of prohibition? That required a new amendment
TBone
Today’s long(ish) read by Tom Sullivan – a fount of information about toxic and tonic masculinity. Some real, important insight and some doozy zingers slung at the toxic:
https://digbysblog.net/2024/09/03/assholery-as-a-lifestyle/
Omnes Omnibus
@billcinsd: It wasn’t done by the Sup. Ct., was it? That was the question.
Repatriated
And then you have local elections in Los Angeles, where the city itself has a higher population than 23 states…
(…each. not combined. That would be silly.)
Gloria DryGarden
If you’re not just being cutesie, or rhetorical, I can only think to answer w an example, and where else would I do my research but in my own experience?
I have a sister. All is not well between us. I’m going to cry.
We were born w different natures. one extrovert, athletic, Gemini, one highly sensitive, introvert, clumsy, academics oriented. Really different natures and inner resources. The birth order. The older one bossing the younger one, which can set up some long term resentments. The way my mom was into health food when the sister was born, but I was silenced by putting food in my mouth to shut me up, plus I was the first, ie the practice model. Some bad things happened to me, that didn’t happen to her, but she felt it in the dynamics, I’m sure, so it plays out differently in our psyches. We wanted different things from the other, and have both been disappointed, but have sometimes tried to mend it, but other times hurt feelings or judgements shut it down. I’m good, try to do my best. I think she does too, and I can recognize many ways she is good. Our styles of self protection don’t seem to mesh well, we didn’t learn enough skills yet to manage the conflicts and built-up resentments. So we got twisted up in different ways, and we were sometimes pitted against each other, compared to each other. I can’t even write a poem about it, which would help. She’s been fair, and nominally civil at all times that it was required. Plus, sometimes two people both think they’re right, about subjective things, but w opposite pov. Delicious.
I’ll let you apply this bits of examples to your Q about the Walz brothers. Did you not have siblings?
Or did you grow up in a skilled emotionally intelligent family with always harmonious relationships and no insurmountable difficulties? ( if you did, please pour me a bowl of the qualities you learned, the more pure parts of goodness you have, and I will eat that like peach ice cream along with my virtual pistachio baklava), while looking at some nice trees or photographs.)
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@satby: Great article! Thanks for the link 😀
Matt McIrvin
@Omnes Omnibus: I also am reminded of how performatively gleeful 1980s right-wingers in places like the conservative campus rag were about anti-Communist dictators in Central and South America. They really loved those guys, thought it was hilarious when they dumped dissidents out of helicopters and tortured nuns. Still do. It really came out when they thought they were speaking among friends. I don’t regard Trumpist authoritarianism as a recent aberration.
Gloria DryGarden
@BethanyAnne: well said. Expecting people to be like one, and then it’s a rude shock when they aren’t.
on a good day, I can be this succinct.
Citizen Alan
@Geminid: My (limited) understanding is that Communism has never worked the way its originators intended. Because the whole point is that factory workers would rise up and seize control of their factories away from the capitalists who owned them. And that never really happened. Communism took root among the serf class (or whatever passed for serfs in China and Southeast Asia) and owed more to the French Revolution than to Marx’s ideas. And then, those countries fell to pieces because anti-intellectual farmers who sent people off to camps for wearing glasses and having a professional degree were not capable of running an industrialist society.
Misterpuff
@Ken: Dumb Donald has Vance and RFK Jr and a side order of Tulsi.
Doc Sardonic
@TBone: This album, along with Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf and Mary Jane I’m sure made my parents wish they never taught me how to work the stereo.
https://youtu.be/5hqG-29NTSU
Jackie
McCain republicans take note:
I believe several of John McCain’s family members voted for Biden in ‘20 without necessarily changing their party registration.
This announcement may encourage other Arizona republicans to follow suit.
karen gail
@Gloria DryGarden: I don’t believe that human nature is born “good;” we have to teach children to share, to be good, to have empathy, to even care about another person. I know it is a question of nature verses nurture; but I also know that even some children who are taught to be good aren’t and there are some that refuse to learn to be good and enjoy total selfishness. As well as there are pathologies that seem to be hard wired; those that my great grandmother called “lacking a soul.”
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: To me the most absurd demonstration of this is how obviously capitalist modern Chinese Communism is. It’s basically a right-wing crony-capitalist dictatorship of over a billion people, flying the red flag like they’re some workers’ collective. Amazing.
Omnes Omnibus
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, authoritarians will always be with us. On both the right and left. That’s why we need to turn out for every election. We have to save ourselves every time. It’s a Sisyphean task. But, as Camus said, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Doc Sardonic
@Misterpuff: And they still are an order of spare ribs short of a PuPu Platter
Dorothy A. Winsor
@BethanyAnne: That’s right. We judge people by ourselves, which is why Trump assumes everyone is cheating
ETA: I once read a study in which job applicants were asked if they ever took anything from work. You’d think everyone would say no, but some people confessed. They figured everyone did it and if they said they didn’t, the prospective employer would think they were lying.
Trollhattan
Given per SCOTUS it’s hunky dory for a president to sell pardons, this takes on a whole different light.
How much, Donny?
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
In the US, the risk has been from the right about 95% of the time. Internationally, it’s a different story, although left wing ideologies have really taken a beating everywhere.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Vietnam is a smaller example of the same.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Who hasn’t taken a pen?
Citizen Alan
@Omnes Omnibus: Many years ago, I wrote a short allegorical story that, in retrospect, was so cynical I don’t think anyone outside a communist journal would have ever published it.
The gist was that Capitalism, Religion, and Democracy, fresh from their success in finally killing the monster Communism, retired to Capitalism’s palatial home to decide what to do next. Capitalism just wanted to maximize profits. Religion wanted to force everyone to live according to its dictates. Democracy insisted that everyone should work together so that everyone is treated fairly but otherwise be allowed to do their own thing. This enraged Christianity to the point that a fight was about to break out when Capitalism separated them and offered to take Christianity into another room so he could calm her down.
“In the meantime, Democracy, why don’t you stay in here and watch TV. Here, have some Cheetos and ice cream. There’s cold beer in the mini-fridge.”
And while Democracy slowly fell into a stupor while watching TV and eating junk food, Capitalism took Christianity into the kitchen where he seduced her with the addictive taste of pride, white supremacy, and unjustified feelings of moral superiority.
Sometime later, Democracy is passed out on the couch, when Capitalism comes back in and slits his throat, while Christianity (now effectively a junkie for Prosperity Gospel) stands in the back watching pensively.
SatanicPanic
@Chris: I think that’s a feature of armed revolution. It’s almost always going to end up in the hands of the authoritarians because they are the ones most likely to pick up guns. Nonviolent revolutions are much more often concerned with democracy and as a benefit, they sometimes work.
BritinChicago
@MisterForkbeard: 1. and 2. worry me; 3. and 4. don’t. As for 3., the big difference between now and Jan 6 2021 is that the Biden administration is in charge, and would no doubt make sure that insurrectionists were confronted with adequate numbers of National Guard troops. The kind of mob that invaded the Capitol on Jan 6 does not stand a chance against trained and disciplined troops. 4. doesn’t bother me: let him grift as much as he can from in prison.
Chris
@Citizen Alan:
Yeah. A pet theory of mine is that communists always had a major case of what TV Tropes calls Wrong Genre Savvy: the enemy that made their ideology so popular wasn’t capitalism, it was aristocracy. In a world of class distinctions that are explicitly hereditary, often supported by governments that are monarchies or at least autocracies, the idea that class struggle is the defining conflict of our times and that the lower classes have no choice but violent revolution makes a lot of sense. A world that’s at least theoretically meritocratic and doesn’t care how you made your money as long as you’ve got it is a completely different animal.
By the mid twentieth century, most of Europe (the parts that didn’t claim to be communist) was now democratic and capitalist, and communism as a viable and potentially revolutionary force died out pretty quickly in the next couple decades. It got a huge second wind in the Third World, however, by latching on to the local anti-colonial nationalism. You don’t have the same class dynamics there as you did in Europe, but what you have instead are a literal racial overclass of foreign rulers, which is even better.
Citizen Alan
@Falling Diphthong: I would love to see a sequel to Atlas Shrugged in which the inhabitants of Galt’s Gulch fell to fighting among themselves literally the day after the novel ended, with most of the main characters eventually deciding to murder John Galt and take his invention for themselves. Which is, after all, the very definition of late stage capitalism, I think.
scav
The whole generation thing is a mess because there are completely different definitions and contexts of what a generation is. Take this. My great-grandfather immigrated to the US with his parents. Meaning he and his parents are both first generation immigrants. He and his parents are of the same generation . . . clearly, only for the immigration definition of generations. Add in the different rules for immigration and citizenship generation-definition and my grandfather would seem to be a first generation citizen, second generation immigrant and third generation to live in the US. It’s rather like the definitions of what is a fruit. Cooks and botanists staring at a tomato have different definitions and using the same undifferentiated word fruit confuses the conversation no end.
Booger
@Citizen Alan: So, a documentary?
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: My biggest problem with Superman is the statistical probability that he landed in Kansas and was raised by a random farm couple. And they just happened to be morally upright, socially liberal people who raised him to be completely ethical and self-sacrificing instead of teaching him to hate whatever minority they blamed for everything wrong with the world.
Not all Kansans, obviously, but Kansas farmers are simply not a demographic I associate with Truth, Justice, and the American Way, as I understand it. “Superman in a MAGA hat” is perhaps the most terrifying mental image I’ve ever conceived of.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud: True. God knows I’ve taken pens. As I recall, this was about bigger things, but I don’t remember the exact wording.
matt
The ‘can you believe she actually wears that outfit’ is what makes the joke fail. She does not wear that outfit. What are you talking about, weird little drug addict guy?
BritinChicago
@Gloria DryGarden: “im pretty disappointing to know how much, how many Americans are falling for an obvious grifting lying conman.”
Yes, it’s very disappointing. It’s also, to me, really baffling. I used to think I was pretty realistic about human beings and their deficiencies, not cynical but also not harboring illusions, but now I think they (we, alas) are a worse lot than I thought.
frosty
@rikyrah: What an asshole. Let’s send Four Directions Montana some more money!!! LFG!
The Audacity of Krope
@Citizen Alan: Superman does seem to be one of their favorite characters to align with evil in an alternate universe. See the Injustice books, movies, and games.
Chris
@Baud:
Seconded. Heck, for all intents and purposes a hundred percent. We’ve never had Jacobins or communists here. In the literal sense, maybe, but never in any way that was statistically significant enough to actually gain any power.
Left-wing authoritarianism in this country pretty much always means “three dozen college students in Che Guevara T-shirts, two thirds of whom will be bankers and lawyers within ten years and Republican voters within twenty.” (In thirty, when they’re cleaning out their parents’ attic, they’ll stumble across the old Che posters and chuckle and reminisce about that wild phase they had in college).
mrmoshpotato
@Chris:
Oh how true this is.
Doc Sardonic
I have been told on many occasions that I have a very cynical, pessimistic outlook with regard to my fellow human beings. I always expect the worst from them, that way I am rarely disappointed or saddened, when they act in the manner of our current MAGA examples. But when you see a Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Tim Walz come along it is a wonderful surprise and source of joy.
Chris
@SatanicPanic:
Not to the same degree, though. The legacy of the American or French or Irish or Mexican revolutions isn’t the uncomplicatedly authoritarian one that it is for the Russian or Chinese or even Cuban or Vietnamese ones.
Chris
@Citizen Alan:
… that is a masterpiece. I hope you saved it somewhere.
The Audacity of Krope
The authoritarianism sticks more than the egalitarianism.
Chris
@Citizen Alan:
That’s pretty much the backstory of the Sith in Star Wars. They embrace a creed of extreme selfishness, but that pretty much means they inevitably end up killing each other, and all the Jedi have to do is mop up.
(At least that was the origin story Lucas came up with. It may have been changed since).
Gloria DryGarden
@karen gail: I think you’re right. They do have to taught. I’m in that business. All the points you make, I agree.
some kids take to the goodness and cooperative behavior more easily, some don’t.
I just also have a feeling that it’s inherent.
But, yeah, I guess we’re born feral and selfish, doing all we can to just survive. Maybe goodness and cooperation are just advanced niceties, and the self domestication process is actually taught each generation. Or becomes possible in later development stages, when we’re older, way past toddlers.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: The desire for someone to just fix things without anyone having to lift a finger is common. On the left, it can take the form of someone trying to protect the Revolution. Napoleon, for example.
Gloria DryGarden
@Citizen Alan: omg. So fucking apt. Dang it
karen gail
@BethanyAnne: Over the years (am over 70) I have heard a number of lecturers, teachers, speakers talk about how we view people. Nearly every one of them used the example of asking a group of people who recently met to describe another person; the thing is we rarely pay attention to what another person is saying when they are talking to us much less pay attention to their behavior. So when you describe that other person what you end up doing is describing the way that you see yourself.
cw moss
@Matt McIrvin: I don’t think it was ever intended to be taken as real. The original was so transparently false (citing to a specific page in Vance’s book) that I believe it was an intentionally false troll from the beginning.
geg6
@Gloria DryGarden:
Huh. I must be the most spiritually bankrupt person ever because I didn’t even believe that as a child.
Chris
@Citizen Alan:
I think that’s a modern take.
The rural Midwest, Great Plains, and Mountain States used to be a lot less monolithic and reactionary, for a whole bunch of reason (not least of them being that a lot more people in general used to live in the rural areas). Abolitionism was a big thing there for a while in the mid nineteenth century. So was economic radicalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The people settling it were often immigrants from all kinds of different backgrounds, who took generations to flatten themselves into a “white” and socially conservative monoculture. Bringing infrastructure and civilization to the region was a big political issue, as were class conflicts with the local bigwigs, ranchers and landowners at first and extraction industry robber-barons later on. There were very sharp political conflicts for a generation or two after the Civil War between Northern Republican transplants and Southern Democratic ones…
Suffice it to say that I have no trouble at all believing that a guy landing in rural Kansas in the early twentieth century could find a family of good liberals to take him in. It’s not the only possible outcome, but it’s not an implausible one either.
The same thing happening in the early twenty-first century is suddenly much less likely, so if you’re just taking the story as is and moving it forward with history so that it’s always twenty years before the current date, yeah…
Bill Arnold
@EthylEster:
Do you think Musk believes that Kamala Harris has vowed to be a communist dictator on day one?
He’s just trying his inept hand at “flooding the zone”, with a side of “kidding on the square”.
Trump has actually said he would be dictator on day one. (More direct kidding on the square.) Musk’s tweet, with enormous reach due to his high followers count, is intended to obscure that a bit.
Also, he almost certainly used twitter’s image generator, “Grok-2”. It is unfiltered, and will provide images for anything asked, allegendly.
Matt McIrvin
@The Audacity of Krope: Superman is an insanely powerful superhero, almost god-level, so he’s utterly terrifying if he’s bad, and that’s what makes the idea of Bad Superman superficially interesting. He’s also got several longstanding enemies that are basically Bad Superman in some form or other.
But it’s also fundamentally less interesting than Superman himself, since power corrupting is pretty ordinary. The central fantasy of Superman is the idea that it’s possible that someone with this kind of power wouldn’t be corrupt.
zhena gogolia
@matt: That’s my reaction too.
Chris
@The Audacity of Krope:
That seems to be the story of a lot of the post-communist world, too.
wjca
If their attention spans exceeded
155minutesseconds, they might remember that every time they have shut down the government it has hurt them. Every single time. (And without gaining them anything they wanted either.) But they don’t, so they won’t.Sometimes I could almost hope that they do decide to shoot themselves in the foot this way. Except for all the collateral damage it would cause.
Gloria DryGarden
@Citizen Alan: seconding that it’s a masterpiece. Can we read the whole longer version?
scav
@Gloria DryGarden: Just looking at the spectrum of the animal world, it would seem to make sense that some patterns of behavior that facilitate communal or pack existence would be hard-wired. The one against any and all-comers is not generally how critters work. Even solitary apex predators seem to have semi-ritualized combat so that every encounter doesn’t necessarily end with one dead body on the ground afterward. And as selfish and parallel playing as little tots can be, they also seem to have an instinctive and fierce sense of fairness (even if sometimes imaginatively defined).
wjca
All they would have to do is rule that its ratification was flawed. For them, it doesn’t even qualify as a moderately heavy lift.
Villago Delenda Est
The WSJ editorial board can fuck off. Forever. Tim is of course right.
karen gail
@Gloria DryGarden: I have seen firsthand how a child can grow up in a loving, giving, compassionate extended family and still end up selfish, self-centered and willing to kill siblings later own children. I have also seen loving, giving, empathic adults who were raised by a series of uninvolved, unloving, uncaring people some of whom tried to kill them. Great grandma called the ones we knew, “old souls who have been here before.”
I think there are some things about human nature that we will never truly understand.
I can empathize with you and your sister; I have three younger brothers who ignore me for years until they want or need something. Part of it is way they were raised and part of it is they never felt the need to be anything other than what they have been since their teens.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Matt McIrvin: Superman is the example I always use when I critique other writers’ use of characters with magic. You have to limit it in some way, or the reader doesn’t worry about the character so you have less tension. We need kryptonite for Superman to be interesting.
...now I try to be amused
@Chris:
I think that anti-colonial nationalists embraced communism more or less by default. The Soviet Union was the only power willing to back them. Meanwhile, the US and the rest of the West backed post-independence dictators in the name of opposing communism. We made the Cold War in the Third World a self-fulfilling prophecy.
lowtechcyclist
@Gloria DryGarden:
BJ* After Dark didn’t even wait until noon today. ;-)
*more appropriate than usual
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m sure I’ve taken pens but for the last 10 years of my working life the net flow of pens was certainly toward my employer, as I hated what was in the supply cabinet and bought my own.
Supplied my own whiteboard markers for the same reason.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Citizen Alan:
In that case, you may want to avoid the show The Boys – but at least their super MAGA characters are the bad guys.
Matt McIrvin
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Well… I think the more interesting Superman stories “limit” him by playing on the fact that he’s good and he cares about people (who are, themselves, not Super). You give him a moral dilemma where he could accomplish his goals if only he were a pure gangster.
Gloria DryGarden
@geg6:
(Meaning, I would feel spiritually misaligned, if I believed otherwise.)
You said : Huh. I must be the most spiritually bankrupt person ever because I didn’t even believe that as a child.”
Back to Gloria: I maybe came in w a big streak of light and “good” so I expect others to be like me and care about that. For ME to not assume goodness is inherent, would be bankrupting me. I sort of need to believe that, like how some people need to believe in god (s).
And I’ve had the rude awakenings.
I’m not interested in converting anyone to my pov, in fact I just broadened and reassessed my pov from Karen Marie’s comment.
you do you. as you guys say, ymmv
im not taking an interest in your spiritual solvency, that’s between you and your case managers, your moral compass, and what fits for you.
sounds like even as a child you had a realistic view of things, and maybe didn’t need rude awakenings.
for all I know half my idea about “inherent goodness” is rooted in the kind of people pleasing I learned at home, and is part of a lot of “girl-training” for folks in my generation. And only half is rooted in my theological beliefs.
rikyrah
@satby:
I don’t think it’s right towards Hillary. I think that even those who are critical of the MSM, are uncomfortable with really admitting not just the ‘but her emails’, but, also the depth of the misogyny IN THE MEDIA that was towards Hillary.
All we need to do is look at the members of the MSM who were exposed later in the Me Too movement, and then, go back and look at their work with regards to Hillary. The misogyny was obvious.
I admit that I underestimated the misogyny that Hillary faced in 2016, from both the public and the MSM.
NutmegAgain
Love the energy in those stump speeches! Really gets a person going.
JML
@Dorothy A. Winsor: totally agree. If you don’t have limits and parameters for your magic in a story then it’s nothing but a deus ex machina. Even David Eddings Belgariad had limits on the Will & the Word, expansive as the abilities were.
Gloria DryGarden
@lowtechcyclist: (giggling)
Peke Daddy
@Dorothy A. Winsor: And magic for his opponents, too.
Peke Daddy
@Dorothy A. Winsor: That line from The Grifters: “If they aren’t stealing a little, they are stealing a lot.”
wjca
If you haven’t encountered it before, you might be amused by Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex
mrmoshpotato
@rikyrah: Yes, also decades of ratfucking directed at Bill and Hillary.
Mel
@sdhays: An AI mashup of Madame VP, Eva Longoria, and Isabella Rossellini’s character from “Alias”?
Coyoteville
I just donated $55 for Four Directions Montana 2024 Phase II.
Coyoteville
And I see that it shows up on the Thermometer.
SomeRandomGuy
Hey, hey, hey! No shame for kinks! Did you ever see me even once denigrate JD’s Big (couch) Love? No, not for an instant! I even mentioned the wisdom of using a rubber glove for prophylaxis (though my inner 12-year-old does get a giggle from the word “prophylaxis” – which isn’t another name for a rubber, that’s a prophylaCTIC! – having learned it at 12).
Now, that said, she’d be a fierce disappointment, negotiating consent and discussing what a person *really* wants, and needs, and desires – any SECRETS that make the scene super-special? Stuff you don’t want to reveal yet, because you’re not ready for getting a hearty spank across the back, just the bottom, or don’t want to do the scene in frilly panties (or with a “filthy piglet” costume, including a little curly-tail that is suitable for insertion), ahem, maybe you don’t want that *this time* but maybe later, for a special occasion?
It’s amazing how many people, who want a domme, who have never once thought these things through. Like, you might not realize this, but a mommy domme is more likely to be wearing a nice dress and pearls, cooking dinner and vacuuming a la June Cleaver, whose troublesome, rambunctious children need some caretaking. Again, no shame, some such dommes change diapers, taking mommy to an extended level.
That said, most Republicans imagining a prominent Democrat in such cosplay are probably imagining raping (aka “hatefucking”) her, or, at least, that’s what they’d claim. Republicans are one of the last vestiges of that sort of misogyny, where every woman is viewed only as a penis receptacle, and terms like “rape the shit out of her” get replaced with barely-eu euphemisms like hatefucking.
Contrast that with the actual empathy and difficulty – just the emotional *work* – in domming someone, all those *questions*, understanding all the *answers*, learning to do it *just right* – did you know, even people who want hard, make-them-HOWL spankings, need a warmup to get to that level? – and then judging those reactions, are we in the groove, or is something going wrong (see again, for the spank-to-howling – knowing when that’s gone wrong can be tricky!)
I know which side I’d rather be on. And I know what side I’d be willing to die to protect. I’d far rather have sex like a man, with a brain, and empathy, and a whole woman who trusts me so much, we can have orgasms that shake the foundations.
I have no desire to be a naughty little piggie, gnawing at the foundations of democracy so I can bring it all down to the mudpit with me. I’d rather build an edifice called civilization, with a foundation of trust and consent underlying it all. Go figure – once you’re into the advanced sex topics, like consent, empathy, and understanding other people’s needs, and desires, you have the foundation of good government sitting right in your lap, metaphorically speaking.
catclub
@Gloria DryGarden:
I just read a book on ‘The Enneagram’,
and although I am very unconvinced about many of the details, the key point to me was that there are many people who look at the world in fundamentally different ways than I do. And they are essentially ‘made that way’.
SomeRandomGuy
@Gloria DryGarden: The SCOTUS can do anything it wants to do, because there’s nothing explicitly forbidding it from doing anything. If there was, they’d just need to invent some bullshit lie (which they’d immediately christen “a doctrine”) to avoid the “point at laugh at the obvious corruption,” outcome.
Alas, the Constitution assumed honor, and our founders never considered that truly honor-free men would take over.
(Huh? Oh, “honor-less” would be like saying “childless” – “you DON’T HAVE SOMETHING MISSING, CHILDREN!!!!” The Child-free say “we don’t have something missing – we don’t want children. We’re not missing children, we’re merely *free* from children.” Well, “honorfree” for Republicans is the same thing – they aren’t *missing* honor, they want no truck with it, and, just as “childfree” sounds like people with children are are burdened, so, too, does “honorfree” describe the Republicans.)
Ruckus
@BritinChicago:
That grifting, lying, conman has/had/thinks he has a lot of money. It is possible that he owes more than he actually has. And given his age, health, legal issues, working IQ and gross stupidity it really has about zero chance of getting any better. In his public speaking he almost sounds as if he’s gone over the edge – head first. With a landing like jumping off the edge of the Grand Canyon. Which is a ways down, I know I’ve stood on the edge of it. IOW a lot worse than he’s been in the not too distant past. As an old myownself, who lives in a senior’s apt complex, I’ve seen old. Was handed about 15 minutes ago by one of the ladies who lives here an invite to her 90th Bday party. She’s in far better mental health than SFB. And yes I used to be a mental health counselor so I have some concept of what his mental health level is. It ain’t good.
Misterpuff
@Jackie:
We need to start a whispering campaign in those 4 states that a vote for RFKJr is a vote for Trump (since he endorsed Dump) and you won’t have to hold your nose.
The Rs would do in a shot.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
This country (at least a not insignificant percentage) has not done a good job of getting rid of misogyny, although I think we are doing better than not all that long ago. Kamala Harris seems to have done a lot, intentionally or not, to get rid of the worst of it. Joe Biden helped a lot by choosing her as VP. I wonder how much of humanity still hangs on to that stupid, asinine concept.
TerryC
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I have a relative who, when asked at the end of an interview if there is anything else about her they should know, tells them about her depression and that she may have to miss a few days because of her kids.
Origuy
Not all that big, according to Stormy.