Former Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan giving some great advice on the TeeVee:
[…]What does it mean to be a Democrat? People want to trust us. They don’t want to go to Donald Trump. I’m telling you, the middle-of-the-road people, they’re holding their nose to vote for him but we did not give them enough, like, we are reindustrializing, we are talking about American competitiveness. We are moderate on things like natural gas in western PA which ended up being a big issue which we can’t be for natural gas replacing coal. We are in a big fight with the crypto industry. What are we doing? Why are we in a fight with crypto right now? We’ve got to get back to the bread and butter policies.”
I don’t know about you, but when I think of issues that middle-of-the-road Maws and Paws talk about around the dinner table, crypto is number one. “Dangit, Paw, if only Bitcoin would clear $100K, then maybe we could afford new tires for the pickup and braces for little Timmy. But those durn Democrats want to slap regulations on it, so I guess we just have to ride around on bald tires and Timmy’s gonna have buck teeth! Dang them to heck!”
Anyway, back in the real world where centrists aren’t cloaking their desire to get their paws on some sweet crypto cash with nonsense, this is happening:
Robert Almonte, a former U.S. Marshal and deputy chief with the El Paso Police Department, told NewsNation that cartels have taken advantage of modern technology, including cryptocurrency, to enhance their criminal endeavors.
As appears to be the case with Tether, cartel members often hire professional cryptocurrency money launderers to move the money and then pay them a commission based on the total amount of cash they launder, Almonte said.
Once the money from the drug proceeds is moved around, it eventually ends up back in cartel hands to further finance their global operations, he added.
“It’s difficult to track the cryptocurrency and the exchange of the cryptocurrency,” Almonte said. “In many cases, these money launderers are moving it around several times before it reaches its final destination. So that’s one of the main reasons they are using cryptocurrency because it is so hard to detect.”
If any issue was more full of the intent to lose than crypto, I don’t know what it is. It is fake money dreamt up to let people do illegal shit without being traced. The exchanges are more often than not scammy — if FTX taught us nothing else, it should have at least taught us that. I mean, shit, Trump has his own crypto, which should tell you everything you need to know right there. Yet there are Democrats who want to lead us into disaster by getting in bed with the grifters who inhabit the crypto world. These Dems should be ignored, if not shunned.
trollhattan
Can Russia bomb two nations at the same time? Perhaps inspired by Israel, the answer is yes.
Undoubtedly, that restored order is a great comfort to the locals, who do have experience having the utter shit bombed out of them, in addition to bonus gas attacks.
Melancholy Jaques
Tim Ryan, bless his heart, is probably still trying to figure out why the voters who repeatedly voted for him for congress turned on him when he ran for senate.
Democrats are the party that has black people in it. They don’t want to be in a party with black people. Doesn’t matter what the economy is doing, or who saved their pensions, or who wants them to have clean water and safe workplaces. They would give all that away and more if you could guarantee a return to Jim Crow.
ETtheLibrarian
Did Dems really not “give them enough” or were they just up against 40+ years of GOP conditioning and nothing anyone could have said convinced them otherwise?
prostratedragon
Just ask Ohio State.
m.j.
I’m paying my taxes in crypto.
Geminid
@trollhattan: Russia did not need Israel’s inspiration to bomb in two countries at once. They’ve been bombing civilians in Syria for 10 years now; its just that very few people outside of Syria cared.
I have come to understand that for many, Arab blood is cheap unless it’s Israel that is shedding it.
Baud
@Melancholy Jaques:
As I said in the earlier thread, I agree.
This is true, insofar as these voters want the Jim Crow Democratic Party back.
prostratedragon
“these voters want the Jim Crow Democratic Party back.”
So true, and blatant when you take a more historical view of how we got here.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Speaking of trouble with losing, a brawl broke out on the field in Columbus after Ohio State lost to Michigan. Apparently, Michigan tried to plant a flag on the Ohio State mascot picture on the field. There are now multiple videos of players and fans on the field slugging one another
Josie
@Geminid:
Why is it in Russia’s interest to bomb civilians in Syria?
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
No, it’s like this:
There’s always a lot of bad shit happening in the world. We ignore most of it.
But most of that bad shit has nothing to do with us. The bad shit Israel does, very much has to do with us because we prop them up.
That makes us responsible for that bad shit. Maybe not 100% responsible, but we certainly share in that responsibility.
This blood is on our hands. What, for instance, Myanmar is doing to the Rohingya, is not. It’s that simple.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: A majority of white women still couldn’t bring themselves to vote against the people who want them to die if they have a pregnancy that goes wrong. Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
Urza
@Baud: Hey now, the black men that sat it out and the Hispanic men that switched also don’t want a lady in charge most likely.
I have no idea how to make society get over thousands of years of conditioning so that any color skin or reproductive bits is fine with everyone. But I also don’t know how to make people stop falling for con men that are obvious and actually vote for the boring technocrat who can get things done and help them.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
Yep. The reality is, the number of women affected by Dobbs directly is still pretty small, given blue free states and the availability of abortion pills.
It reminds me of how people are less environmentallly conscious because rivers are no longer burning and the air is less polluted.
Or how people feel safe rejecting vaccines.
Will it change if things get a lot worse? Maybe. But we know from history how hard people cling to racial privilege.
Baud
@Urza:
Sure, there are assisters. But the base division is along racial lines.
trollhattan
@Geminid:
They have not done so since 2016 and have been otherwise occupied since. What’s interesting is Assad’s lack of the ability to do this themselves.
Sounds promising!
sab
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Stay classy, Ohioans.
prostratedragon
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Quelle dommage!
oldgold
Meanwhile, the Orange Menace has nominated Jared Kushner’s father to be Ambassador to France.
He is a convicted felon, who was pardoned by the Short – Fingered Vugarian.
One of the more salacious crimes Charles Kushner admitted to was retaliating against a cooperating witness — his own sister — by hiring a prostitute to seduce and have sex with her husband. Charles Kushner had this sexual encounter recorded, then sent the videotape to his sister.
Geminid
@trollhattan: Russia has been bombing Idlib all year and all last year as well. They picked up the pace after Hamas started the Gaza war.
chopper
@lowtechcyclist:
saudi arabia spent a decade bombing yemen into the stone age with our planes, our bombs, and our support. nobody gave a single crap about it.
different-church-lady
BECAUSE LEFT TO ITSELF CRYPTO WILL CRASH THE ENTIRE ECONOMY YOU FUCKING DOPE!
catclub
Except for all the people who were totally traced through their transactions recorded on an infinite memory transaction record.
The key part is still where you convert the crypto stuff to more real stuff you can spend.
kindness
Democratic (& Republican) consultants are essentially ‘Influencers’ and their main job is promoting themselves, more so than the party. I don’t have a high regard for influencers. Usually they babble the current meme and act as if they thought it up.
MagdaInBlack
@different-church-lady: Thank you.
Lapassionara
In my lifetime I have seen two celebrities as Republican presidential candidates. One had prior political experience and one did not. Both won, and one of them had a so-called revolution named after him, served 2 consecutive terms, and put the Democratic Party on the defensive.
The other served one term and probably would have won a second consecutive term if it had not been for the pandemic, which led states to increase opportunities for voting by mail, a process disfavored by the second celebrity, who wanted his voters to vote in person. But he remained a celebrity with a cult-like following that seemed to grow with each attempt to hold him to account for his crimes. His mugshot appeared often on social media and elsewhere. Running against this celebrity in this economic environment was a daunting task, and the fact that the candidate Democrats chose was a woman and a minority made the task even more difficult.
Naturally, the Democrats blamed themselves for the loss and are going through a process of soul-searching and finger pointing. What else are they to do, blame the Republicans for failing to hold the second celebrity accountable for his crimes? Or blame the cult members for their irrational belief in this man’s prowess?
I am with those who think we need to let the dust settle before we try to sort out what to do next. But I think if the Republican candidate had not been a celebrity, we would be in a very different place today.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: I was not talking about Americans here. This true of Westerners in general. Some of the so-called “pro-Palestinian” advocates are the worst in this respect, but that’s beside the point
And why would you not care about civilians being killed just because it’s Russian ordinance that killed them, not American? You care about Ukrainians, so why not Syrians?
catclub
Crypto left to itself will only crash… itself.
Crypto woven into the real economy? Why do we want to find out?
lowtechcyclist
@chopper:
How much money does the U.S. government give to Saudi Arabia each year?
The Saudis would buy armaments from someone, so we’ve got no control there. They could be doing the same thing with planes and bombs they bought from Russia.
different-church-lady
@catclub: “Left to itself,” it will get woven into the real economy. In the same way bad housing loans got marbled into the real economy.
chopper
@lowtechcyclist:
israel would buy armaments from someone if it wasn’t us. that doesn’t matter at all when it comes to our responsibility for their actions. we literally provided extra materiel to KSA during their war on yemen – we went out of our way to support it. again, nobody gave a single crap.
Gin & Tonic
@oldgold:
Do you think that’s a crime in France?
different-church-lady
@oldgold: Government by sex criminals, for sex criminals.
Martin
As I noted in the previous thread, I think dismissing crypto as opposition to the current US financial system is a mistake. Others have noted that crypto is a direct response to the 2008 economic crisis. And while maw and paw aren’t sitting around the table discussing crypto (though you’d be surprised) they sure as shit are discussing the $50 overdraft fee, the $105 annual fee (national average), the average interest rate of 25%, the $4.75 average ATM withdrawal fees.
Crypto solves none of these problems, and creates a bunch more, but it at least serves as something of an escape from a system that they hate. Note, the ‘coastal elite’ charge is most strongly applied to both bankers and the DC Democrats and Republicans in the wake of the financial crisis who did almost nothing to return the trillions of dollars that citizens lost, change how the system worked in material ways, or arrest the people who took those trillions of dollars.
WaterGirl
@Lapassionara: I like your story.
prostratedragon
Comment on two graphs that show Leon’s increasing and focussed twitter activity:
It’s rather dramatic.
Geminid
@chopper: I cared about Yemen. The UN said that was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, up until the ceasefire that went into effect last year. I paid close attention to the process that produced the agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. It was signed in Beijing but it was mainly the Omanis who facilitated it.
But I noticed something funny about that ceasefire. A left wing news site I follow, Common Dreams, had closely covered attempts in Congress to restrict American military sales to Saudi Arabia, but when I checked them after the ceasefire I could not find even one article about the it.
That told me they did not care about the suffering of Yemen’s people except insofar as they could weaponize it to serve their own political agenda. There’s a lot of that going around now.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
Why not the Rohingyas, why not the Uighurs?
Again, the answer is, there’s a lot of bad shit happening in the world, and as a semi-decent human being, I wish that bad shit would stop so that people can just get on with the business of survival and trying to find a bit of happiness along the way. But there’s just a limit to how much of it I’m going to learn enough about to know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, even. (Are the Syrian rebels ‘good guys’? I don’t know. I remember the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s; there wasn’t a good guy in sight.)
So it makes a difference, IMHO, if one is already educated about a conflict. In the case of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, that’s been covered by U.S. media since the late 1960s, shortly after Israel’s continuous occupation of the West Bank began in the wake of the 1967 war. After awhile, even if one isn’t paying much attention to it, it’s hard not to learn about it anyway. So what Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza is harder to ignore than bad shit going on in Syria or Yemen or to the Uighurs or the Rohingya.
And that’s even if we weren’t propping up Israel with our money. But that’s happening. Our tax dollars at work.
Lapassionara
@WaterGirl: thank you. I like your pie saga.
tobie
I’m having a hard time understanding that quote from Ryan. He is all over the map. As best I can tell, most Americans are not fans of crypto. What he is right about is that neither Harris nor Walz talked about the revival of US manufacturing under Biden, and both flubbed the economic questions during their respective debates. Walz left unchallenged Vance’s repeated assertion that jobs were being shipped to China under Biden. That was political malpractice.
chopper
@lowtechcyclist:
the answer is, most left of center americans see these conflicts in terms of who they can assign whiteness to. people don’t care about yemen because it’s arabs fighting arabs. people don’t care about the rohingya because where are the white people?
leftists have assigned whiteness to the jews. this is why people focus much more on this one part of things.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
OK, I’m genuinely confused here.
As long as U.S. armaments were being used by the Saudis against Yemen, our arms sales to Saudi Arabia mattered to Common Dreams. But after the cease-fire, they stopped covering those arms sales.
To me, that says they cared about the arms sales insofar as they were being used against the Yemenis. From your summary, it seems to me that it was the issue of arms sales that they were weaponizing only while it served their agenda to stop the carnage in Yemen. Sounds reasonable to me.
Have I misunderstood something here?
Martin
@tobie: Most Americans are not fans of crypto but:
It’s a dumb fight to be taking, particularly if you don’t understand why crypto is popular. And there’s a mess of lessons for Democrats for why crypto is popular.
lowtechcyclist
@chopper:
There’s a lot of truth to that, but it’s hardly just left-of-center people who’ve assigned whiteness to Israel. I only started to pay attention to Israel with the 1967 war (I was only 13 then, so no surprise that I didn’t pay attention to Israel before), but Israel’s been assigned whiteness by about 98% of the political spectrum and by the mainstream media for the entire time since.
Martin
@chopper: I think that’s part of it. I think part of it is that Israel is an American project. It’s something we invested the credibility of the nation in and so we have a vested interest in its success. See China/Taiwan as compared to China/Hong Kong from the UK perspective as Hong Kong is a British project. This tends to break down along nationalistic/patriotic lines – some people are invested in Israel as a nation coming out on top, and some people are invested in the goals the US put forward for Israel coming out on top (secular democracy, all that). In the moment, those are nearly at odds with each other.
How people attach to one viewpoint or the other might be rooted in how they attach whiteness. I’d need to think about that some.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: It’s not hard to learn about any of these humaniarian crises now. One just has to take an active interest and not passively wait for their favorite US news sites to inform them.
Middle East stories are covered so well by regional news sites like Middle East Eye, Haaretz and Al Arabiya that I hardly bother with US sites.
Those may be valuable insofar as this war has political ramifications in the US. Obviously, that aspect of this conflict is important to many people and for some it’s the most important, but I try to take the view that these conflicts are about the people directly affected first, and about Americans second.
Barry
@Geminid:
Buh-bye!
Gin & Tonic
@Geminid:
What are you, some kind of commie?
Martin
@Barry: This is rude, and damaging to the community. This is why I’ve left here twice before and am actively avoiding getting invested in being here, anticipating having to leave a 3rd time.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: They did not report on the ceasefire at all! Anyone who really cared about the people in Yemen would have told their readers about the ceasefire. I thought it was important news, and the best news out of Yemen in years. But they were not interested in informing their readers about Yemen itself, only the US’s misdeeds. So, no mention of the ceasefire or the Biden administration’s role in bringing it about.
I have no respect for for this kind of advocacy journalism. It does not inform, but instead uses human suffering to advance a political agenda. I would say the same about the advocates for Israel who weaponize Hamas’s savage October 7 attack in order to stigmatize and dehumanize all Palestinians.
Like I told Tony Jay over a year ago, this war is bad enough without people trying to exploit it for their own political purposes. I’m pretty fucking sick of it now.
Quinerly
OT….interesting piece.
First Trans Lawyer to Argue at Supreme Court.
Bloomberg reporting.
https://ssnews.page.link/v1m8v5R3n3uAaPtZA
Professor Bigfoot
@Melancholy Jaques: EXACTLY THIS.
Then to watch the great Sherrod Brown run the same “I’m not REALLY a Democrat” campaign and lose to a crooked car dealer?
Black people have no real allies.
Geminid
@Josie: in 2013, when the Syrian rebels had Bashir Assad’s back against the wall, he called upon Russia and Iran to save him. For Russia this was an opportunity to build their power in the region by establishing an airbase and training their Wagner Group mercenaries. Once they had crushed the Syrian resistance in Aleppo, they transfered the Wagner Group formations to Libya to help Benghazi-based warlord Genaral Haftar wrest control of that nation from the UN recognized Tripoli government. They almost succeeded before Turkiye intervened in 2020.
Iran also used this opportunity to build its power in the region. They brought in their ally Hezbollah, a tough disciplined fighting force which proved instrumental in crushing the opposition including Palestinians.
Some of the pictures circulated early in the Gaza war that purported to show Palestinians killed or injured by Israel were in fact Palestinian victims of Assad’s forces including Hezbollah. This aspect of the Syrian civil war is why when Israel killed Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, some Palestinians took a break from denouncing Israel’s violence in Gaza to celebrate Nasrallah’s death.
The Syrian civil war is in large part a sectarian war, and as such was especially bitter. Assad is a member of the minority Alawite community, while the opposition forces were almost all Sunni. The Alawites are a Shi’ite sect and as such were natural allies for Iran.
The Ottomans mostly succeeded in suppressing the various communal and sectarian rivalries while it controlled the Levant, but when the French took over after WWI they used a classic colonial tecnique: they filled the Syrian officer corps with the minority Alawites. Bashar Assad’s father was one of those officers, and his Baathist regime kept the Sunnis down through brute force.
The Syrian civil war began in 2011 as part of the “Arab Spring.” Assad’s forces put down demonstrations with live fire and by torturing the prisoners they took to death. Then the opposition took up arms, and they had Assad’s regime on the ropes when he called on Russia and Iran to save him.
Now that Russia has transferred many of its forces in Syria to its war on Ukraine, and many Hezbollah formations have rreturned to Lebanon to fight the IDF, Assad’s weakness has been exposed. The rebels have prepared for this offensive for years, but their unxpected success is due to these factors.
WaterGirl
@Martin: Thanks for saying the first part.
I really hope you don’t leave again, Martin. We need all the good and smart people for what’s coming.
Our coping mechanisms are being tested, and clearly some of them need to be beefed up. But if the good and smart people walk away, we are screwed.
We should all be calling out drive-by people who want to shit on others. And call out the regular people who are still doing the same thing.
We need to hang together or we will surely hang separately.
George
@Lapassionara:
The first celebrity at least had a political track record to stand on, and had managed a state government, and taken positions on issues that he was held accountable for. He understood political and international negotiations.
What has made the second celebrity so damaging to the country and the world is that he had no political track record when elected the first time around. He could do and say whatever he wanted and few in the media questioned him on it. All he did was spout opinions that had no more substance than someone standing on a soap box in a town square and jabbering madly.
The second time he was elected, he had that jabbering, damaging track record, but with an assist from the complicit media and help from organized religion, he will continue damaging the country and the world until he drops dead.
Geminid
@chopper: One irony here is that Mizrachi Jews– descendants of Jews expelled from North African countries like Morocco and Middle Eastern countries like Iraq in the 1950s– now outnumber Israel’s Ashkenazi population who came from Europe. The Mizrachi are no “whiter” than a typical Palestinian Arab, not that this should matter in the least.
This area was a melting pot under Ottoman rule. There are large numbers of Circassians, descendents of Muslim refugees from Russia’s conquest of the Caucusus region in the 1850s. Jordan’s capital of Amman was founded by Circassians, and there is also a Circassian community in Israel.
Kristine
@Geminid:
Speaking of Tony Jay, has he been around lately?
Starfish
@chopper: Many other people would not sell to Israel, and we sell them stuff they could not get elsewhere.
Starfish
@Martin: Thanks for saying that.
Lapassionara
@Martin: Please don’t leave. I echo WaterGirl’s comments. I look forward to reading your insights and ideas.
tam1MI
They couldn’t, because the obvious follow-up question to any talking up of the successes of the Biden administration would be, “If they were such hot shot great achievements, how come you kicked the guy who achieved them to the curb?”. It’s kind of hard to talk up the glorious victories of your commanding officer if you’ve just gotten done fragging him.
Geminid
@Kristine: Hardly at all, but I’m pretty sure Tony Jay dropped by not long after the election. He said earlier this year that a new job claimed a lot of time, and between that and his family I expect Tony is pretty busy. And watching the new “NuLabour” Government could be a depressing experience for him.
It probably keeps Tony pretty pissed off as well, and I’m hoping he’ll share his thoughts about his former party with us before too long.
Jackie
The teevee just announced Kash Patel is officially the FBI director nominee.
different-church-lady
@Martin: Cigarettes were popular once.
YY_Sima Qian
Lest anyone thought that monied interests would be reliable allies against the reactionary counter-revolutionaries, the vast majority of monied interests will accommodate themselves to any powers that be to protect their monies, choice bits from the WSJ article (emphasis mine):
The US will resume its rapid descent into a banana republic (which is an insult to LATAM countries), interrupted by 4 years of Biden, where corruption becomes much more extractive rather than lubricative, from “speed money” to “access money” & “grand theft”. Meanwhile, the “Blob” will continue to wax lyrical about “rules based international order”, “US leadership” & pursue US primacy, as if the ROW cannot see that the emperor has no clothes.
UncleEbeneezer
@Geminid: I just learned on the Unpacking Israeli History podcast, which I must say is really great all around, that the earliest Zionists were Ethiopian Jews. Which kinda obliterates the whole Zionism Is Racism thing.
Geminid
@UncleEbeneezer: I just reject the whole racial framework some people try to impose on this conflict. But a few months ago I saw something that made me laugh. Some people were arguing that Azhkenazi Jews had no connection to ancient Israel because they actually descended from a Khazar tribe that was living somewhere northeast of modern day Ukraine when they converted to Judaism.
Then some Turkish guy jumped in to say, “Of course the Azhkenazi are descendents of the Khazars. The Khazars were Turks. That’s why the Azhkenazi are such good fighters!” This struck me as a very Turkish thing to say.
Turks attract some of the same kind of animus Israelis do. A lot of Turkiye’s neighbors consider Turks to be late arrivals who ruined the neighborhood. Historians might debate the exact geographic origins of the Turkic people, but Greeks, Armenians, Arabs and Kurds all seem to agree that wherever the Turks came from, they need to go back there ASAP.
WaterGirl
@Kristine: I exchanged emails with Tony Jay this week.
He will be back at some point, but not soon. He said he just can’t engage with the political world right now, he doesn’t have it in him right now. I get that, because that’s a bit where I am at the moment.
I know we can’t just disengage and tend our own gardens, and I know we need to be politically active to fight against all the awfulness and protect the people who most need protecting, but I just don’t know what we should do.
So I’m mostly keeping my mouth shut on that until I get at the least the start of a feel for some constructive stuff we can do.
In the meantime, I am tired of the blame game, and I’m tired of all the people who pretend they know what the outcome would have been if we had done this instead of that. Or the folks whose hot takes just happen to coincide with what they want anyway.
But I digress.
Tony Jay asked me to give everyone his best wishes and to tell you guys to stay strong. And, where applicable, to “put some bloody pants on.”
chopper
@lowtechcyclist:
a majority of jews in israel are mizrahi or “arab jews”. people in america assign whiteness to the jews because they think of people like jerry seinfeld instead