Dachshunds having fun on a dirt pile: #AGoodPlace
Source: www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmil…— Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ?? (@snarkysillysad.bsky.social) September 11, 2025 at 6:20 AM
===
(H/t commentor Prostratedragon)
My name is Jasmine Clark. In 2018, I flipped a Georgia House seat Republicans held for 20+ years. Since then, I’ve defended it again and again, even after Governor Kemp redrew my district 3 times. I don’t back down from a fight, and now I’m running for Congress to fight for GA-13.
— Rep. Dr. Jasmine Clark (@jasmineclarkforga.bsky.social) September 4, 2025 at 3:02 PM
===
That's the problem with shamelessly lying about the price of things at stores. Donald can lie about Ukraine, and average Americans will be oblivious, but they notice grocery prices every week.
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social) September 14, 2025 at 2:38 PM
The biters, bitten:
… The economy grew faster in the second quarter than initially anticipated, productivity was revised upwards, inflation hasn’t surged despite new tariffs and gas prices have fallen to levels not seen in decades. Republicans also avoided what would have amounted to a major tax increase with Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill earlier this year.
But polls show Americans remain anxious about high prices, and there are signs the economy’s resilience is starting to fray, making it harder for the administration to close the delta between how the economy looks on paper and how people feel. The Congressional Budget Office also said Friday that the megalaw will have little effect on economic growth before the 2028 election, its gains blunted by the president’s tariffs and immigration crackdown.
“That’s a thing that I know the White House political team is nervous about because there’s a reality and there’s a perception. And the reality is the economy is doing fine and the perception is people are still worried about things like grocery prices, which are still high, and still growing,” said Stephen Moore, an outside economic adviser to Trump who the president featured in an impromptu Oval Office press conference last month…
Trump in public: If SCOTUS takes away my illegal tariffs it'll be the Great Depression all over again!!!
Trump's White House in private: We'll be lucky if they do.
www.politico.com/news/2025/09…— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 10:29 AM
===
American soybean farmers don’t have a single order from China as they head into harvest season. China usually buys 25% of the entire crop.
Crisis looms for the farmers and there’s only one man responsible.— Mark Chadbourn (@chadbourn.bsky.social) September 14, 2025 at 3:06 PM
On The Road – Albatrossity – Downward Facing Duck
p.a.
The left-left-lefty trans vegan Prius driver in MAGAs’ heads.
ETA: Utah gov doing yeoman’s work turning groyper assassin into Karl Marx.🤢🤬
Baud
That politico excerpt seems to have a different tone from stories written about the economy when Biden was president.
Baud
@p.a.:
Goddamn Carl. Ruins everything.
satby
@Baud: Noticed that, did you?
Well, they all are getting what they voted for good and hard. They haven’t even started harvesting soybeans in MI, I noticed yesterday.
Citizen Alan
Words cannot express how little compassion I have for American soybean farmers.
Matt McIrvin
Why do they even care? As Sarah Taber was saying the other day in reference to him screwing farmers over, Trump no longer needs voters. Either he’s a term-limited lame duck, or we’re not really “doing the Constitution any more” so it hardly matters whether people like him or not.
Princess
@p.a.: They can pretend to us that the grouper assassin was a Marxist. But they know he wasn’t and they also know the super creepy online gamer world is targetting them, not us.
Baud
@satby:
Also too: Deficit, what that?
lowtechcyclist
If that’s so, Stephen Moore, why do interest rates need to be lowered?
Would be really nice, right about now, to have independent media that would ask good questions.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: The bro/quack right decided years ago that soy products are poison that turns you into a woman, so they’re not going to promote domestic consumption.
MagdaInBlack
Going to bed at 6 pm because I felt like crap means I missed the Northern Lights visible over Chicago-land last night.
And just saw on Reddit the Utah Gov saying the alleged shooter was radicalized in the “deep dark recesses of reddit”
We’re doomed, Baud.
lowtechcyclist
Dear soybean farmers: here’s those leopards you ordered up.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
At least they haven’t discovered Balloon Juice yet.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
I wonder if they even remember blogs. And since we’re not even in the top 10,000, I think we’re safe. 😁
Deputinize America
Time to make some hard choices, and this time, the farmers can’t be bailed out. We can’t afford it…. 😂🤣😆
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
I’ll point out that Reddit has plenty of right wing recesses, even if they’re not the majority.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
A fair number of Congresspersons may need voters next November – at least, that’s the hope! And a Democratic Congress would be a good deal less supine.
But the article says there’s 500,000 soybean farmers in the U.S. That’s not a lot, especially since they’re probably overwhelmingly in solidly red states. If they all stay home next November (we know they won’t vote for us Demon Rats), it probably won’t flip a single seat.
NotMax
In search of rationality?
30 minutes of insight from David Cay Johnston.
Long ask for a Monday but promise you won’t be sorry if you click on the link.
p.a.
@lowtechcyclist: It’s not just the farmers. Processors, transporters, buyers, sellers, accountants, lawyers, farmer’s suppliers; equipment, fertilizer, insecticide, and the banks that lubricate the whole process, the stores & groceries the farmers use…
Baud
Question for people who still watch MSNBC: Are they talking about what Kirk stood for honestly, or have they all been cowed because of Dowd’s firing?
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: I’m not really convinced that a Democratic Congress will be allowed to be seated either. The special elections are encouraging though.
trnc
@lowtechcyclist:
His answer would be “Because the economy is doing fine, but the Fed hates Trump so they’re purposely keeping interest rates high.”
Our media does suck, but never underestimate a maga’s ability to lie his ass off without breaking a sweat.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Man, if that happens, social media will really be mad at Democrats.
Gvg
@lowtechcyclist: oh please. It’s not just soybeans. All kinds of crops are not being bought by overseas buyers. And all kinds of crops can’t be harvested or even produced because of ICE except in states like California where they fight to protect ALL their workers, including may I point out native born citizens.
Prices are also up because we have to pay tariffs for what we buy not what we sell (Trump is wrong) which means foreign goods cost more and we can’t afford as much, which the sellers knew and also planned and looked for other markets or cut production. It means foreign buyers found other sources for what they needed and will do without American goods that they only liked. They probably won’t come back when Trump is gone. Possibly some will if Republicans as a whole get defeated by a lot in most states for several cycles but I don’t see signs of that happening.
Unless Putin sinks American ships or attacks Hawaii or maybe Alaska, I don’t think the republican voters will understand what is really going on. The economic consequences aren’t big enough to penetrate yet. The news is still slanted. I am afraid of living in consequences big enough to penetrate the bubble these other people live in. I don’t want my old age to be the second Great Depression. Note, the rest of the world is not sinking themselves with retaliatory tariffs.
Soprano2
@Baud: I noticed that too. For Biden, they buried the facts about the economy in the last paragraph of a story, for FFOUS they put them in the beginning where everyone reads. Of course, as long as prices keep increasing people won’t buy it now, either.
I don’t know about where you live, but here gas prices aren’t at lows. A couple of weeks ago I saw $2.99/gal, which is the highest price I’ve seen for a couple of years.
Soprano2
@satby: FFOTUS told everyone what he was going to do. If farmers didn’t listen, or thought they would be exempt, that’s their fault.
Baud
@Soprano2:
I have an EV so I don’t care about gas prices. I’ve seen reports that analysts are expecting a glut of oil, so it wouldn’t surprise me if gas prices do come down.
Geminid
I see Republican Rep. Michael McCaul says he’ll retire from Congress. He’s the second Texas Republican to announce retirement plans, the other being Rep. Morgan Luttrell.
Also, New York Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, in a New York Times editorial.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Heard a bit of Chris Hayes’s show, and he wasn’t sugar coating it.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Thanks. Good to hear.
Baud
@Geminid:
You were predicting that Jeffries was going to do that last week. But maybe the Kirk killing pushed that off. Hopefully, he’ll do it this week and then our long national nightmare will be over.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: That’s exactly what Taber was saying. Trump has done some things they wanted: they get tax cuts and loose to nonexistent regulation. But he promised to one and all that he was going to start trade wars, and they just assumed he was blowing smoke, in part because they came out fine during his first term in office (he started trade wars then too, but he paid them off to make them happy).
They’re complaining now that Trump lied to them, but none of the stuff that’s happening to them was a secret.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: Hochul endorsing Mamdani is actually kind of a surprise, isn’t it?
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Why?
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I don’t have an EV but my car gets 50 miles to the gallon, so yeah, it’s not the biggest concern for me either. But I get gas at BJ’s where all the Escalades and Suburbans go to fill their monster tanks for cheap, and it impresses on me that there are a lot of people around here who probably do care.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: She struck me as the type who’d consider him a dangerous commie and endorse Cuomo.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Soprano2: I do recall them talking about how the economy was good under Biden but people’s perceptions of the economy were bad. That was the whole reason Democratic messaging was so bad on the economy…we couldn’t claim success, they told us, because people weren’t feeling it. So they basically decided not to talk about it at all which was probably a mistake.
That said that Politico blurb seems to paint an inaccurate picture. Prices are rising, the job market has definitely softened. Gas isn’t by any means expensive but it’s over $3 a gallon where I am which is not by any means “the lowest it’s been in decades” so…yeah maybe growth was a little better than anticipated but that doesn’t completely outweigh the other stuff. But if we get another year of people thinking the economy sucks whether it does or not well turnabout is fair play.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: I’m not unhappy if people are unhappy with Trump. But I don’t think current gas prices are that high, given inflation. But I haven’t looked it up based on inflation adjusted prices.
New Deal democrat
According to the latest reports, employment has actually *declined* by over 100,000 jobs, excluding healthcare, since April. Add on the severe downward revision of over 900,000 jobs since March 2024. The only silver lining is that layoffs haven’t picked up, at least not yet.
And inflation *has* already increased, from 2.3% year over year in April to 2.9% in August. Some of which has been in things people notice daily, like coffee and other groceries. Meanwhile the full effect of the tariffs hasn’t really hit sellers and consumers.
The only thing keeping the economy afloat right now is that consumer spending continues to be robust – but the suspicion is that it is driven by the top 10%-20% of income earners.
And yes, China is deliberately killing America’s farmers – the vast majority of whom probably voted for T—-p, and will do so again if given the chance. I have very little sympathy.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Soprano2: I wondered about that gas price claim too. Around me in Chicagoland, it’s around $3.20
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
You need to spend less time online. Has a single Dem endorsed Cuomo since the primary? Maybe some low level NY Dems, at most.
Most of the sturm und drang is about people not affirmatively endorsing Mamdani.
p.a
Hochul endorses Mamdani
MagdaInBlack
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Youre up in Lake County, Few miles down the road here its $3.59. God Bless Cook County taxes. Still, I paid that much before pandemic, so…..normal?
MagdaInBlack
Dup: bless you redis error.
Baud
@New Deal democrat:
The right wingers latest butt hurt is that Kirk said he hated “empathy” because he preferred “sympathy.” So we’re being misleading.
2liberal
@p.a.:
mrmoshpotato
I wonder who currently owns the farmland across the road from my grandparents’ old summer house in downstate Illinois.
It was a soybean field far back as I can remember.
EarthWindFire
@Baud: Have they told us who Kirk had sympathy for? I bet they haven’t.
montanareddog
@Baud: You mean like this:
https://www. reddit.com/r/Groyper_Army_/
(I deliberately did not post as a link and it seems to be restricted anyway)
Baud
Trump is being pretty gentle with China, unlike India, because China has Trump’s balls in a vice. If they do reach a deal, it’s possible that it’ll bail out farmers in some way. So it’s premature to anticipate electoral consequences.
TONYG
@p.a.: “American soybean farmers don’t have a single order from China as they head into harvest season. China usually buys 25% of the entire crop.” So … the same ignorant assholes who bitch and moan about the globalized economy are, in fact, extremely dependent on the globalized economy.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Jeffries’ spokesman was kind of an ass about it when Chris Van Hollen criticized the endorsement foot-dragging. Could be an ember or two under the smoke, but my guess is they’ll all come around.
New Deal democrat
in case you haven’t seen this, it’s a great timeline cleanse.
A man follows national guardsmen around in DC while playing the Imperial March from Star Wars, and it clearly gets to them:
bsky.app/profile/iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social/post/3lysvy2pt7s2z
Their whole body language says they would like to be anywhere else in the world. To know that you are hated by your own fellow citizens, who you are allegedly protecting ….
mrmoshpotato
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh, ok! You soyboy! /S
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I’d imagine no one likes being called out.
I don’t know and don’t really care, especially if it’s a question of when rather than if. I suspect any endorsement will come too late to mollify people. But we’ll see.
mrmoshpotato
@lowtechcyclist:
Order up! Here’s your meal – that’s going to eat you.
TONYG
@lowtechcyclist: Blogs contain all those “words” that have to be “read”. One-minute Tik Tok videos are much better.
Princess
@Geminid: TBH I think a slow late parade of moderate NY Dems endorsing Mamdani is better for him than a bunch of immediate endorsements would have been.
lowtechcyclist
@trnc:
But if the economy is doing fine at the current interest rates, then aren’t those the right interest rates? If not, why not?
My econ education started and ended with Econ 101, but even I can think of questions like this.
prostratedragon
For September 15, 1963:
WereBear
@TONYG: They live in denial.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I was not surprised. For one thing, Hochul is titular leader of New York’s Democratic party, and she wants the party to prosper. This election basically is between Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, and a Cuomo win would be much more divisive for the party.
And for another, Mamdani has shown humself to be a, smart, pragmatic politician who wants to be successful New York Mayor. Hochul can work with him to that end, and this endorsement is the first step.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Suzanne
My heart, it bleeds.
I went to Costco this weekend and beef prices are nucking futz. Got chicken instead, $1.79 a pound. I am glad that I spent so many years as a vegetarian, as I learned how to make many delicious meals without meat, and it seems like that skill is about to come in handy again.
Ramalama
Another timeline cleanse:
Video of the two women who make all of the popcorn that is sold at the Barclay Center in NY (WNBA games).
Their friendship makes me feel optimistic and calmed.
lowtechcyclist
@Gvg:
1.
2.
3.
OK, #2 and #3 above are forces that are pushing prices UP.
#1, the one I was talking about, is causing prices in that sector to crash. What do #2 and #3 have to do with this? I’m not seeing the common thread here.
mrmoshpotato
@rikyrah: Ahoy ahoy!
Steve Paradis
@p.a.:
The man in the mirror.
New Deal democrat
That ICE raid on the Hyundai plant in Georgia is going to have massive negative consequences for S Korean (and other foreign) investment in the US.
From Carl Quintanilla:
bsky.app/profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3lytqfmwjo22z
“I will never visit the United States again,” Mr. Jeong said.
“ It should be way bigger news that Trump effectively killed any attempt by foreign countries to build new factories in the United States with this idiotic ICE move. Just incalculable long term damage. Trump just killed his “build America” push”
“ Their waists and hands were tied together, forcing them to bend down and lick water to drink. The unscreened bathrooms contained only a single sheet to cover their lower bodies. Sunlight barely penetrated through a fist-sized hole, and they were only allowed access to the small yard for two hours. Detained by US immigration authorities for eight days, the workers and their families expressed shock, describing human rights violations and absurdities they could not have imagined as ordinary Koreans living in 2025.”
There has also been an editorial in one of S Kore’s newspapers explicitly blaming the raid, and the way the workers were treated, on MAGA being a white racist ideology.
Baud
@New Deal democrat:
Truth that American media won’t tell.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: The month-to-month changes are what’s more politically relevant.
GasBuddy’s historical charts show the nationwide average price holding pretty flat since Trump reentered office, at about $3.15 a gallon. Not a lot of motion nationwide, but there are some dramatically different local trends in different places. Prices on the West Coast (which are always way higher) are going up for some reason.
Baud
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: American media has shown itself to be a friend of racists. Time and time again,
JML
The phraseology being used by FauxNews and it’s ilk to describe the Kirk assassin is essentially word for word repeats on the Satanic Panic of the 70’s going after Dungeons & Dragons with the whole “lost in a fantasy world” and “unable to distinguish from reality” stuff. It’s just pointed (for now) at video games.
It’ll be “interesting” to see if this stick for the right-wing MAGA crowd as the “reason” or if they’re going to to keep flailing around looking for ways that this is all the fault of black/brown people or the LGBTQ community and try to ignore the fact that this is the sort of thing that happens when someone is thoroughly marinated in a gross, insular culture that encourages hate and violence and others…
lowtechcyclist
@Soprano2:
Huh. Yesterday the local gas stations in my corner of southern Maryland were down to $2.99.9, which was as low as I’ve seen in years.
Occasionally I’ll see lower prices than that up in Edgewater (just south of Annapolis), but not very often.
trnc
@lowtechcyclist: It doesn’t have to make sense. They’re Republicans.
Matt McIrvin
@New Deal democrat: There are places where the newspapers are allowed to state the obvious.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: I think it’s good to remember that the Senate hates the House and vice versa, also too. Comments by members of one about members of the other are usually (but not always!) meaningless.
Yeah, they’ll come around, or at least be civil about it. Democrats usually know their lanes.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
It’d be easier to compile a list of the enemies of racists.
AM in NC
@Suzanne: I’m going to Costco this morning and have pre-written a bunch of little post-it noes with the question: “Are your groceries cheaper?” that I will be sticking on coffee, beef, milk, etc.
Also going to a “no more billionaires” overpass protest this Saturday and will be using that question on one side of my sign. Other side: “We have a billionaire predator problem”.
Hoping that gets the both financial AND sexual predator association with Trump into people’s brains.
Baud
@Steve Paradis:
I’m asking him to change his ways.
Matt McIrvin
@JML: So much of MAGA’s youth support comes directly from the fever swamps of macho gamer-bro culture that demonizing video games could be a real problem, if they actually still care about retaining popular support.
Demonizing “trans ideology” with McCarthyite “I have here in my hand a list” stylings seems like a better bet since they’re going after a smaller minority, and a lot of the gamer bros are more gender reactionaries than anything else. Though even there, trans and nonbinary and genderqueer people are way more normalized among Gen Z’ers than among older folk and the ideological lines don’t necessarily fall where you would expect.
Betty Cracker
@New Deal democrat: Trump posted some lame nonsense yesterday in an attempt to placate foreign investors. Even that moron knows raiding the Hyundai plant was a giant fuckup.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
We’ll see. Even if video games are the gateway drug, I think most gamers will stay for the bigotry, which is the true opioid.
Betty Cracker
@Another Scott: The entire endorsement kabuki is a stupid own-goal, IMO, but yeah, I agree it’s unlikely to matter in the long run.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: From the NYT yesterday:
Jeffries’ spokesman was responding to Van Hollen’s statement the Democrats refusing to endorse Mamdani were engaging in “spineless politics.” Considering the Van Hollen had implied Jeffries was spineless, I thought Chermol went pretty easy on the Senator.
There is a double standard here. Last year, Aemblyman Mamdani did not endorse his party’s candidate for President, Kamala Harris. So why are Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer required to endorse Mamdani now?
Ed. I exect Jeffies will endorse Mamdani. But he’ll do it on his terms and timeframe, not Chris Van Hollen’s.
BlueGuitarist
@AM in NC:
awesome!
Baud
@Geminid:
Did he issue an affirmative statement of nonendorsement or stay silent?
Agree that people only care about the endorsement game because they are excited about Mamdani. We’re not going to see endorsement policing generally.
CCL
@Geminid: that’s interesting. What was the reasoning for the non-endorsement of Harris?
narya
@Baud: I only watch weekday evenings; I’ll be interested to see what Rachael does tonight.
Suzanne
@AM in NC: It is undeniable what is happening with groceries. I buy a lot less prepared food, meat, and snacks than many other people I know, and I have definitely noticed a significant increase. Fall and winter will be a lot of bean soups and pastas, it looks like.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: on the Charlie Kirk topic, I received a text about him last night. Maybe it’s from the time my number was my republican mom’s number, but good grief:
“Charlie Kirk lived for Christ and gave his life for truth. Watch this powerful tribute to his legacy of faith and courage: (link)”
A. This is pretty intrusive, I’m not in their circle.
B. What ridiculous garbage. It doesn’t seem like he was about truth, or living for Christ, or anything to do with the kind of values (and teachings of Jesus) I learned growing up Episcopalian. I don’t know much about him, so I don’t understand what he was really about, but it’s irritating that his fans think they lost a hero. Yesterday it was top of YouTube suggestions, some young white pretty girl goin* on about how sad she was and how much he meant to her. I gave her 3 minutes, out of irritated curiosity. Normally, YouTube knows what I watch, and that isn’t it. Ick.
Trivia Man
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Of all inflation measures, this is by far the easiest to check. The DOE publishes average prices for gas and diesel every tuesday. They have all prices back to 1994 in a very simple excel sheet you can download. National average and by region.
Fun fact: before the Ukraine war spine, the biggest one week price spike was after hurricane Katrina.
Prices are not at record lows right now. Every truck trip gets a fuel surcharge- ballpark about 50 cents a mile right now.
Baud
@Gloria DryGarden:
Right wingers have been speaking for Christ for at least 40 years. Until enough other people start speaking something different, Christ will be who the right wingers say he is.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@p.a.: Killing their entire communities to pwn the libs.
Suzanne
@Gloria DryGarden:
Charlie Kirk was very much of the low-class right-wing evangelical megachurch milieu. Arizona has a ton of them.
And please don’t forget that much of this cohort loathes mainline Christian denominations like the Episcopals.
mappy!
So creating an issue of how good the Economy was (the Numbers) into how bad the price of groceries are (the Check-out) kinda backfired?
The broke farmers don’t matter since they’ll continue to vote R. Same with the bankers, truckers, processors, sellers and buyers, et al. Local businesses affected will blame it on the conglomerates. For the R echo chamber media pablum, the messaging just needs to be palatable enough.
With Hochul on board, the rest of the NY D’s will join. Cuomo does nothing for the brand, the hacks know this.
stacib
@Dorothy A. Winsor: A lot of stations on the southside are at $3.89 for 87 octane. Well over $4.00 for any other grade. Even the E-85 is over $3.00 on this side of town.
It’s “weird” that the most economically depressed areas that have the highest costs for gas.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Moral panics about video games go back to the beginning of video games, of course, and both liberals and conservatives get into it, though liberals are more likely to just raise critiques about gross and sexist imagery rather than calling for bans.
But I think some of the way “Gamergate” was able to mobilize late-Millennial/early Gen Z gamer boys of ten years ago into a misogynistic army came from the fact that they were used to video games being under political attack from religious-right types who kept lobbying for bans and restrictions, and thought the feminists critiquing sexist games were just doing the same thing.
Geminid
@Baud: Mamdani stayed silent regarding an endorsement. After the election, he said he voted for Harris on the Working Families Party line. Under New York’s weird Fusion voting system, Harris’s votes on the WFP line were aggregated with her votes on the Democratic Party line.
@CCL: Mamdani was a vocal supporter of the “Uncommitted” movement, so my guess is that the Biden administration’s policies on the Gaza war were the sticking point.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I think you are correct about GamerGate being a catalyzing event.
Another wrinkle….. there will be an urge to categorize some of these young gamer men as being on the Left. It will come from the right wing, but it will also come from some progressive-hating Dems. It is untrue. This cohort is mostly apolitical, holds incoherent views, and loves them some sexism and racism. They are, if anything, socially conservative and utterly self-centered.
Baud
@Geminid:
Thank you.
Trivia Man
@stacib: It is expensive to be poor
Shalimar
@Baud: I haven’t listened to MSNBC since the night of the groyper revelations online, when no one on the network even mentioned the word. I am curious what they’re saying now though and will turn it on in the background today as soon as Scarborough is over.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Van Hollen has courage. That’s why he stands out.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I’m also thinking all the way back to how in the first really huge video-game craze of the early 1980s, there were moral panics about arcade games being violent and the arcades themselves being unsavory places, and Ronald Reagan made the politically shrewd move of remarking that acktchually, video games were fine because some Air Force general had told him that they were training the top-gun pilots of tomorrow. So he got in on the pro-gamer side of that one, though it didn’t stop the panics from continuing.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I still have nightmares about being chased by four ghosts.
ExPatExDem
I saw that Megyn Kelly blamed former President Obama for the CK shooting, because the “country was never the same” after 44 was elected POTUS.
She is correct that the country was never the same. The Rs promptly lost their shit and have spent the last 17 years becoming more and more unhinged.
Trivia Man
From the thread last night on the modern interpretation of a virgin mary statue – i shared the picture with friends to see if they had the sane reaction. We all had the same immediate recognition.
And one shared a picture of the hotel map posted at the San Diego Mariott Marquis with a very similar representation. It is always a question of – did they do it on purpose, didnt see the resemblance, or saw it but figured nobody else would see it the same way.
Matt McIrvin
@Shalimar: I know that the governor of Utah is hitting the “shooter was a pro-trans leftist” line hard. I don’t have a feel for whether there’s any mainstream pushback to that.
stacib
@Trivia Man: People who aren’t broke or have never had a late notice for their power bill have no idea just how expensive it is. One example – in Chicago, if you can’t pay your red light ticket at $100 and need a payment plan (some people do), the city makes you wait until the ticket defaults to $200 before you can get a plan. Please explain how that makes any sense at all.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@p.a.: Killing their entire communities to pwn the libs.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: There’s nothing courageous about calling other Democrats “spineless;” Van Hollen is just running with the herd.
And Hakeem Jeffries has much courage as does Chris Van Hollen. Jeffries has different responsilities though.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Baud: India has its own vises to deploy. X, Meta, Oracle, Alphabet and the rest better be braced for it.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I am also increasingly convinced that the terms left/right, or conservative/liberal…. are getting less accurate with subsequent generations. Not sure if this is a US thing or an everywhere thing. But there seem to be more and more people who are socially conservative, but not necessarily economically so. The GOP is cleaning up with these people. Incoherent is a nice way to describe it.
zhena gogolia
@Geminid: Thank you.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Trivia Man: I can’t see Tesla’s emblem without seeing an IUD. Evidence they had no women on the design team
mappy!
@Geminid: Electorial Fusion, third party cross endorsement was so successful that almost every state banned it.
Electorial Fusion – Wikipedia
Soprano2
Well, I just went to an impromptu meeting where people were warned to be careful what they say on social media because people are getting fired from their jobs for making comments. The boss says he doesn’t want to lose any employees over this. At this point I feel like we’re living in “1984”.
CCL
@Geminid: thanks! The voting for Harris on the Working Families line doesn’t bother me … The supporting the “uncommitted” is irksome.
Soprano2
@Baud: I’ve read that the Gulf states are trying to reclaim their dominance in the oil market, that’s why they’re doing it. All these “America First” people will see is that gas prices are cheaper.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Of course the main thing that fueled “Gamergate” was that they didn’t like the idea of women and girls coming into their subculture and trying to change it to be more accepting of them and more to their liking, instead of just being sexually available mascots.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Unless Donald Trump’s corrupt state capitalism in support of social conservative values is not considered conservative, I’m not sure what the evidence is that these social conservatives aren’t also economically conservative (or at least indifferent to economics).
LAC
@Geminid: Thank you!
p.a.
Local a.m news had a segment on market prices, especially beef. Did mention tariffs, bad weather, amorphous “supply issues” (scared workforce?🤫), but no mention of a Preznit, or who controls all the gubmint’s branches.
New Deal democrat
@Betty Cracker:
If he were actually serious, or competent, he would have sent Noem and Rubio to South Korea personally to apologize, both privately and publicly. Instead he sent a relatively low level functionary who stood with one of those plastic fake tv smiles side by aside to his South Korean counterpart, who looked more stern. That plus T—-p’s B.S. online message only helps to amplify the damage.
Soprano2
@New Deal democrat: I think the financial adviser whose talk I attended last week is whistling past the graveyard. He seemed to think if the Fed lowers interest rates a total of one percent over the next year, everything will be OK and we’ll make it through the “FFOTUS storm” just fine. I was so tempted to ask him if he thought we could land the plane safely considering it’s being piloted by a crazy man, or if he thought we could withstand four years of this kind of storm, but I wasn’t that impolite. I’m already a minority in that room.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: They’ll often express vague anticapitalist feelings that sound almost socialist or Bernie-esque. That was happening even in the 2016 MAGA movement. The “horseshoe left” bros who saw civil rights for minorities and women as a corporatist-bourgeois distraction were drawn toward it for that reason.
(So it’s socialism with an ethnic-nationalist twist. A National Socialism, as it were.)
But if it doesn’t drive votes, it doesn’t matter, and the cultural stuff almost always takes precedence.
Suzanne
@Baud: Lots of them love them some Social Security and Medicare. They support Medicaid and various other safety net programs, as long as they can keep Those People from receiving benefits. Not especially conservative to support those programs.
As I said….. incoherent.
p.a.
@Soprano2: My FA earlier this year: “well he may mess the economy up but your taxes will be lower.”
Me: “I’d rather pay 25% of something than 20% of nothing.”
IRA was already 50/50 so not much to change since these boobs will fuck up enough that both equities and bonds will suck. Maybe more foreign investment…🤷🏻
OGliberal
@Baud: Empathy = “I really understand how you feel.”; Sympathy = “Sucks for you.”
Princess
@Soprano2: I think the view of the money guys is that there are enough rich people whom Trump has made richer (though all he did was keep a tax cut; it’s not new stimulus, right?) to float the market past the rocks. I also know those guys were hoping for deregulation which would also help the market but I’m not sure if they’ve got what they wanted there.
Baud
@OGliberal:
Agreed. Empathy can lead to problem solving. Sympathy is really about emotions.
geg6
@Geminid:
These idiots in party leadership positions are high in their own farts. Mamdani is vastly more popular than any of them. Acting like they are the gatekeepers to what and who it is permissible to endorse, regardless of who wins the party primary, essentially showing they think they are more important than the voters is why people dislike/hate them. I know it’s why I don’t like them and am praying for new leadership that actually listens to voters and leads from that starting point. These idiots, like Schumer and Jeffries, are NOT up to the task we face.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: There’s also the fairly large cohort of poor and working-class people who think that Trump loves them and would never cut their benefits.
I have no idea what to do about this level of delulu.
Princess
@Matt McIrvin: I heard the trans myth reported as fact in the Canadian news last night. They are so desperate to avoid looking at themselves and what their own culture has created. A friend comes from that part of the world and described it on fb today as maga before maga. Really hard to imagine it as a place trans roommates could even survive.
Belafon
@Baud: Sympathy only requires thoughts and prayers.
Gloria DryGarden
@stacib: people who have never been broke don’t know…
indeed.
meanwhile, I’m happy that in Denver, you can dispute the street sweeping tickets – available every month if you park on the wrong side of the street, by your house, but anywhere you go in town. You used to have to go downtown and stand before a magistrate, usually a dour dry unempathetic interaction, but now you can dispute it online. Three times I’ve succeeded in getting a reduction, or the fine waived, by writing my little dispute letter, requesting mercy because of ____. Sorry it doesn’t happen like that in Chicago.
and a red light ticket might be different. So far, I don’t have that experience.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Van Hollen isn’t “running with the herd.” Months ago, when the party was thoroughly demoralized and examples of courage were rare, he showed how to stand up to this lawless regime when it kidnapped and deported one of his constituents to a foreign gulag.
He went to El Salvador to raise awareness and find out what was going on, even as pollsters and pundits were warning Dems to stay quiet on “immigration issues” because Trump had public support on that. Van Hollen stood on principle there, and it took courage.
Van Hollen isn’t the only one who’s shown guts, not by a long shot, but he was among the first. He’s also had the guts to tell AIPAC to take a hike and encourage other Dems to do the same, and good for him because that needed saying too.
geg6
@mappy!:
Yep. But don’t tell Schumer or Jeffries that! Can’t rile up the few big money boys they have, after all.
Betty Cracker
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Same!
lowtechcyclist
@Betty Cracker:
I’m really happy with my senior Senator this year.
WereBear
@New Deal democrat:
AKA the screaming obvious to anyone with a brain.
H.E.Wolf
The looters in charge of the economy in Atlas Shrugged are the spittin’ image of the current president’s grotesque crew… right down to the loss of the soybean crop.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
I didn’t see a big herd of Congresspersons down in El Salvador. Saw a few out in front of USAID, but still less than a herd.
lowtechcyclist
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Oh good, I’m not the only one. And I’ve never even been in a relationship with a woman who’s used one.
Yeppers.
And then there’s the rather gynecological Dodge Ram logo.
Another Scott
@Trivia Man: +eleventy-billion.
Too many middle-class and above people refuse to accept that.
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Princess: I have no idea what the deal is there. I also see zero evidence that this guy was radicalized by Democrats.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: If you you look at the context, you’ll see I was talking about calling other Democrats “spineless.” There’s a big market for that bullshit but still, Van Hollen ought to know better.
WereBear
Southern Protestantism made white supremacy their religion. Living as a minority with people they routinely oppressed and mistreated, they got a bunker mentality, like those South African farmers who lived in fear of their own uprisings.
Because that’s what we are, all of us, who don’t think that’s right. We have risen up and invaded their secret space.
We have to quit treating MAGA as a political problem, when it is mental illness.
Another Scott
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Made me look.
The logo was created by “RO Studio”. About shows a button saying “certified WBENC Women’s Business Enterprise”
Maybe a bit of guerilla imagery??
I can’t quickly find any information about the principals.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Anyway
@Suzanne: Price of beef/chicken/coffee etc is through the roof – these are things used a lot by the BrainWormJr demo – crossfit, Rogan, keto people. they should be feeling the pinch.
Belafon
@Gloria DryGarden: There’s a post floating around where a man was talking to a relative – his grandmother I think – about Kirk. She mentioned his Christian speaking and he mentioned his white supremacy statements, and both were shocked, so they presented videos to each other as evidence, because wherever each were getting their information from, they weren’t presenting the other part.
A Christian white supremacist is still a white supremacist. I will leave it to the Christians to decide if he was a Christian.
Ken B
@AM in NC: I like that, but wonder if predatory billionaire’ might sound better.
rikyrah
@Citizen Alan:
Teeny tiny 🎻 🎻
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: Nobody can beat a white evangelical neo-Confederate for feeling like a persecuted minority even when they’re the elite of an authoritarian police state.
gene108
Our current tariff policy is a major tax increase.
rikyrah
@Princess:
ICAM
He went to college for ONE SEMESTER in 2021.
Once again
..WHAT THE PHUCK HAS HE BEEN DOING FOR THE LAST FOUR YEARS 🤔 🤔
Belafon
@Suzanne:
That is literally all most white people are in this country. What got us really in trouble last year is a black woman was at the top of the ticket, and minority men waffled just enough.
Belafon
@mappy!: Interesting. So we have been making laws preventing the adoption of third parties on a major scale.
ExPatExDem
@gene108: Our current tariff policy, along with the medicaid cuts and the enormous tax cuts for the wealthy are the biggest upward transfer of wealth in US history.
Baud
@ExPatExDem:
Hence the glowing politico story.
Suzanne
@Belafon: Yeah, agree. My point is that they aren’t leftists. They’re social conservatives who happen to love Social Security and Medicare, and their own benefits.
Gloria DryGarden
@Dorothy A. Winsor: good point.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I think the problem with pretending they are not economically conservative is that people think we can align or ally with them on particular issues. IMHO that’s extremely hard to do, especially on a mass scale.
Baud
I’ll take Tesla’s IUD over Bezos’s penis rocket.
Chief Oshkosh
@satby: In the last three weeks I’ve had to travel through some rural parts of KS, GA , and SC. All three trips I saw and was told about full-grown crops that are now essentially overgrown and dying. Because they can’t sell the product, farmers don’t plan to harvest them, and so of course are not watering them or otherwise tending them. The farmers that survive will plow them under and hope for a better year next year. The rest aren’t even going to do that, because why waste the diesel if they’re not sure there will be a next year?
Sadly, among all of the people I met on those trips, exactly one couple stated that Trump caused this.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I got mine fuck you is the conservative ethos. They want herrenvolk democracy, not whatever DSA is selling
Many wp in our coalition seem to be eager to throw to black people, immigrants and Jewish people under the bus if they can tokenize a good looking nonwhite guy or gal and do it spouting economic justice rhetoric
Another Scott
@Belafon:
Via Ragnarok Lobster – Ifill points to another post
HTH!
Best wishes,
Scott.
rikyrah
@Suzanne:
I only get stuff on sale. 75% of my grocery list is from the sale.paper.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: This to me is the problem with the popular assertions that the Democrats lost the youth or the masses by not being progressive/anticapitalist enough. I would *like* a more social-democratic platform from the party. I think that in many ways, they’ve been moving in that direction. I don’t think it helps us electorally at all, because what the median white voter (and even some of the non-white voters) we lost really wants is more bigotry and social conservatism with their quasi-socialism.
chemiclord
The fascinating thing about the “economic anxiety” (especially among the white working class), is that when they tell you what they want to see, they describe nigh perfectly a heavily regulated “socialist” leaning economy.
But the instant you tell them that, they lose their minds and start screeching about the “evils” of socialism and don’t you dare bring that evil upon them.
How do you govern such a country that refuses what they want, and embraces what hurts them?
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: I will buy that when a DSA type can win a seat in a purple area or a blood red area. Until then its just wishful thinking. I don’t think Schumer or Jefferies is stopping these brave heroes from doing that.
Suzanne
@Baud: They aren’t coherently conservative, though. That word has a meaning, and it doesn’t include the social safety net. But I agree that they are not reachable through normal political means.
These used to be Democratic voters, twenty years ago.
Geminid
@Gloria DryGarden: Good morning, Ms. Drygarden. Are you up early or up late?
You mentioned the other day that you talk with T-Bone some by email. If you would, please pass on my regards. I see T-Bone commenting over on Mistermix’s blog, and I’m glad to see she’s still scrappy and happy.
iKropoclast
Vote blue
no matter whoas long as they don’t scare my donors…Belafon
@Another Scott: Thanks.
Baud
@iKropoclast:
Do you have evidence that Jeffries won’t vote for Mamdani? That would be big news.
Matt McIrvin
@chemiclord: The key to that puzzle is that for these people “socialism” and “communism” are code words for anti-segregationism. That goes back to the McCarthy era, when the USSR liked to (accurately but rather hypocritically) bash American racism and support civil-rights movements, in part so that US Red-baiters would freak out and identify civil rights with Communism, making the whole situation worse.
I was just reading Teri Kanefield’s blog and she reminded me about the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific”. This play is probably considered cringey in multiple ways today, but the thing that freaked people out about it when it first appeared was that it had an openly anti-racism song called “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught”. The lyrics were about how people aren’t naturally racist but have to be trained into it. Huge panic about this Communist song. There was actually an attempt to pass a law to ban the show because it was a Commie play that had a song “inspired by Moscow”.
Jackie
@AM in NC:
Stick them right next to the price display marker.
I’m going to Costco on Wed. I already looked up current cost of Kirkland coffee – a good $10 higher than the already higher price from last trip. Thankfully, that’s my only “need” this trip – outside of grabbing a rotisserie chicken and getting my glasses reframed.
chemiclord
@Geminid: I suspect that Jeffries remembers that the DSA had decided he was a target to primary and remove from office, and Jeffries is understandably chilly towards members of the DSA that use the Democratic Party machine.
There’s no small amount of bad blood that is to be expected. What’s really funny about it, though? The one guy who doesn’t seem the least bit bothered that Jeffries hasn’t endorsed Mamdani yet?
Mr. Mamdani.
This is an entirely media driven effort to foment division, and if anything, I’d like one of the two to call that out.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
The problem I have with this argument is that we didn’t lose the youth. Of all the age cohorts in the last election, we did the best with the youth. We did second-best with the 30-44s.
But I agree with you. I want a more social democratic platform, but that isn’t going to win elections everywhere. Some places are more amenable to that and they will elect more progressive candidates. But I’ve seen no evidence that it’s a broadly winning platform, for all the reasons you mention.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Ridiculous. It should have been banned for “I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair.”
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: The Democrats lost ground with almost every demographic, every group, including ones where they still have a huge lead. A lot of the talk about losing this or that group goes around in circles because some people are talking about the overall number and others about the 2024 delta.
Suzanne
@chemiclord:
Most people have no fucken idea what they want, other than things to just work, things to be cheap, low taxes and high services. I remember a discussion I had with a colleague who described himself as libertarian (Arizona, many many many such cases). We discussed prescription drug prices. It took ten minutes before he said that the government should set a limit prices. Only in my central-planning fever dreams would there be a governmental price control on drugs.
Having had many incidents like this, I can only conclude that the left-right descriptors are less meaningful now. Most people don’t have ideology, they have interests. That’s it.
Gloria DryGarden
@Belafon: as a raised Christian person, I don’t consider th3 white suoremacists ti be Christian.
Then again, I just chatted with a guy of no religion, but clearly raised in some form of “Christianity, who explained Christianity has no behavioral norms or requirements. I said, well, yes, “love your neighbor as yourself.”
He said, no. You just have to accept Jesus is your savior/ god, and repent, and that gets you to heaven. Maybe these are the two main brands of “ Christianity.” Boy are they different.
I have been dragged to those evangelical meetings, by friends long ago, and I did hear the strong push to join, proclaim, accept..
Suzanne, speaking of being loathed:
in early education, and childcare, we’re coached to hate the behavior not the child. I think I heard it in the church days, hate the sin, but not the sinner. Weird language, but using for the parallel and metaphor.
so these evangelicals that go for loathing and hating others, are nutso.
It’s just our darned behavior, loving our neighbors, being kind, giving a shit about the world and other people, including people of all colors, nationalities, ethnicities, languages, sexual orientations, and genders.
Othering people labeling them, marginalizing them, that’s a technique the military uses, so that soldiers become willing to shoot their “enemies”. So, is this war, now, USian society? Brand A (love thy neighbor) vs brand B (sign up w Jesus and hate all non white, not like you, non cis, non heterosexual people)?
I shudder to think of a military model being applied across many aspects of our pr society.
maybe we need more deprogramming than I had thought..
Jackie
@Soprano2:
We ARE. I read that Rubio is culling born in the USA citizens passports! If one says anything that he disagrees with – he’ll pull that passport. I simplified his exact words, but… I’m thinking that offers a twofer – culling eligible voters maybe as soon as ‘26 – because a valid passport will be mandatory for proof of citizenship in order to vote. (My prediction)
eta:
More at the link.
Gloria DryGarden
@Jackie: $10 higher. That’s outrageous. And it a lot. Might have to switch to maté, imported from Paraguay, or tea, from China and India.
Oh, but tariffs. FFS!
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: I could see some of the reasons why a DSA-endorsed candidate would be unlikely to wina purple district in an article about last month’s national convention It was written by two party members for the socialist magazine International Viewpoint, and titled:
It’s a long article, but I found it illuminating; at least, I finally got a good handle on the term “Campism.”
This link ought to work:
internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article9126
iKropoclast
The establishment wing set and pushes the standard. I actually have no problem if Jeffries doesn’t endorse Mamdani. If he prefers Cuomo, he should endorse him.
Vote blue no matter who was always a bad argument. Dems are basically telling people to turn off their brains with that old bullshit. In a way I’m glad Jeffries seems reluctant to honor it. May kill the whole argument off forever by showing it to be what it always was, a weapon the party’s elites use to quiet and denigrate dissent
Oh, people never trot that old gem out just when someone is showing reluctance months prior to an election?
Come on, you know better than that.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Oh, agree. But it’s interesting how many people want to blame young voters specifically. Not sure why we hold them more responsible than older voters.
Matt McIrvin
@Gloria DryGarden: The evangelicals I knew growing up pushed that line hard, that the demands of “Christianity” are entirely otherworldly, having to do with accepting Jesus as an anti-hell talisman, and nothing at all to do with behavior. It is as weird as it is disturbing.
Baud
@Suzanne:
It’s because there was a lot of puffing up of young voters as our future. So when many of them shifted to the older candidates and the right wing party, it was a bigger letdown.
You’re correct that older voters are still worse as a group, just like white male voters are worse as a group.
Belafon
@Gloria DryGarden: Yours is the “follow Jesus” kind of Christianity.
What he’s describing is the Christianity of way too many, the “How do I get into heaven with little effort?” version. This version allows you to skip over the parts where you’re judged by your works. It’s also how they can reconcile calling the US a Christian nation when Jesus literally describes that type of nation and we’re not following it.
Betty
Deleted as this was already covered by Betty Cracker above.
iKropoclast
It’s easy to do. There has been a cottage industry writing articles blaming the youth for this that and the other thing since our very oldest were, themselves, youths. And before!
Matt McIrvin
@Jackie: And anyone who protests Israel’s actions in Gaza then becomes a “Hamas supporter,” and anyone with the wrong kind of tattoos is Tren del Aragua. We’ve read this story before.
Gloria DryGarden
@Geminid: I’m up early. I now obey that early tired signal, and go to bed. It helps, that I’m still outside camping on my deck, so when I’m done with yard work and garden things (still the darned yard police come by every few weeks, endless outside tasks at their pace and requirements, so that the main stuff I’m doing, besides going to food banks, is yard stuff) it’s only a few feet to my lair.
I love camping. The morning light is probably good for my melatonin, and diurnal retraining, too. Just a few more days of hanging out with Pollyanna, to have his help or “supervision“ to get heinous tasks done. Nights have been cooling off though. This bliss might have to shift soon, to indoor sleep, and then, retraining the new daytime, early bedtime routine for indoors.
I will certainly tell TBone you send your regards.
Are you going to the Virginia meetup?
I wish this Chattanooga/ Tennessee idea for next Sunday had taken off. I’d love for Pollyanna to get to meet Grace and H in TN. He’s definitely keen. Maybe they’ll set something up.
Shalimar
@rikyrah: Two years of a 22-year-old Mormon’s adult life should have been spent on a mission. I have not seen any mention of him having actually been on one.
Gloria DryGarden
@Matt McIrvin: yes, yes! So weird. So disturbing!
Geminid
@iKropoclast: I attribute some of Jeffries’ reluctance to endorse to Mamdani’s other party. The DSA has given Assemblyman Mamdani and fellow party member Rep. Ocasio-Cortez some latitude to stray from party doctrine, but they’re still party members and DSA policies attach to them whether they like it or not.
The article I linked to at #190 gives a good look into DSA politics. I think it t also suggests why Democratic politicians might want to hold the DSA at arm’s length.
Geminid
@Gloria DryGarden: Thanks.
I probably won’t make it to next month’s meetup at Pirate Dan’s, but I bet it will be good.
Suzanne
@Baud: I think we also feel like we have earned some votes more than others, and thus we consider some voters less rational and thus harbor more resentment. But how that manifests makes, like, no consistent sense…. anyone receiving Social Security should vote for Democrats. Anybody who’s ever made use of the social safety net at all, or sent their children to public schools should vote for Democrats.
UncleEbeneezer
Ah, good old antisemitic, Global Conspiracy Theories framed in Left-wing terminology…just lovely.
Gloria DryGarden
@Belafon: follow the teachings of Jesus, or be like Jesus. Be Jesus. More like that. If there’s anything about Christianity that interests me, it’s that.
Those other people, in category Brand B, do what you will, as long as you register with Jesus. It’s like a privilege card. they weird me out.
Anyway
Anyone who says anything about AIPAC and their lopsided support for RThugs/MAGAs is an anti-semite
Matt McIrvin
@Gloria DryGarden: They had lines mostly from Paul about faith and grace versus works to support it. Of course anyone who truly accepts Jesus’s sacrifice would, they thought, ipso facto behave like a white Southern Republican, but that’s secondary.
iKropoclast
@Geminid: @Geminid: Interesting article. Makes it pretty clear the DSA gives party members latitude to vote their conscience while still calling our votes that didn’t support the party line. I think that’s a reasonable way for a party to operate.
I hear so much we need to unite against fascism. It would be nice if DSA and Democrats could unite on some common goals and support each other for each other’s benefit. A few things may get us there, cross-party endorsements both ways and expansion of any form of ranked voting come to mind.
And I honestly want Jeffries to do what he thinks is right. Others will then be free to judge that decision, of course.
Gloria DryGarden
@Geminid: phooey. It sounds like a good time., but maybe too far a drive, in the end of garden season, too. So much to do.
If I had my private jet back from the shop, I’d offer to pick you up, and fly you over there. “My Lear jet’s in the shop” is my ongoing joke for stuff I’d go to if it were easier, or closer. I have not, so far, been the owner of private air transportation. Ah, well.
Miss Bianca
@Matt McIrvin: I remember talking with my dad about that musical and specifically about that song. Surprisingly, for an older-generation WASP and casually racist country-club Republican, he was all about that song and how it pointed out an inconvenient truth, and how stupid the wingers of his day sounded when they freaked out about it.
chemiclord
@Gloria DryGarden:
The best way I try to explain it to the Calvinists is that if you had truly taken Jesus in as your lord and savior, then your actions would reflect that and you’d be following his teachings as best you can. Since you aren’t, you very clearly haven’t. To hell you go, heretic.
Geminid
@Gloria DryGarden:
So do I. Some of my favorite spots are Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina; Fort Pickins near Pensacola, part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore; Mt. Pisgah, on the Blue Ridge Parkway west of Asheville; and Santa Rosa Lake State Park near Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
Santa Rosa Lake is nothing special, but when I travel to New Mexico it’s usually my first stop. I’ll pick up some green chile from Santa Rosa’s Comet II Restaurant on my way out to the campground.
Anyway, better a camper than a Campist.
WaterGirl
@lowtechcyclist: Wasn’t there some thing that was branded PMS a few years ago, that wasn’t well received by women?
I don’t recall any of the details, just the shock that a company would be that stupid. And yes, no women were in the chain that would have approved that. Unless they hated their company, whatever it was.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: Christ will be who the right wingers say he is.
religion as political control, once again. 21 st century variation. It’s not spiritual. It’s not good guidance. It’s norms vs heresy, for control.
gol darn it.
OGliberal
@Belafon: There’s an episode of 30 Rock where Tracy Jordan is looking for a religion to join and Jack’s brother, Eddie (Nathan Lane), tells him he’s Irish Catholic and while the Church has experience some controversy, “…what’s great is you can do anything – anything – and as long as you go to confession, it’s forgiven.” So Tracy becomes Irish Catholic.
Later, Jack tells him that it doesn’t exactly work that way, because being Irish Catholic comes with a tremendous amount of guilt and Tracy decides he is no longer Irish Catholic due to the guilt.
Problem in this country – and most countries – is that Christians, especially of the evangelical flavor, don’t feel the guilt…it’s not a concept to them.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: Like I pointed out to another commenter, I said Van Hollen was running with the herd with respect to his criticsm of Democrats who had not endorsed Mamdani. It was not a general judgement on the Senator and I think that was clear, but if you want to treat it like it was, have at it.
Matt McIrvin
@Miss Bianca: There was a mid-20th-century conception of anti-racism that would let a lot of casually offensive stuff slide but still drew a line at open white-sheet hate and blatant segregationism. It’s the liberalism of my parents’ generation.
I’m not one to say we have to go back to that, we shouldn’t and I don’t think it would help, but I do think it’s worth recognizing that there’s a sliding scale and it’s deeply concerning that many of today’s right-wingers are rejecting even that.
OGliberal
@Belafon: Socially Conservative, 2025 – Hate/Scared of brown people, non-straight people and Jews.
Actually, it’s not just 2025 – has pretty much always been that way.
As for socially conservative folks’ willingness to tolerate financial hardships resulting from the actions of their guy – it has been said before but will say it again, as long as their guy is making the folks they don’t like hurt even just a bit more than they are hurting, that guy is doing a great job!
Gloria DryGarden
@Jackie: hope your glasses and chicken are more affordable than that coffee.
WaterGirl
@Suzanne: A 9-point swing to Trump in young voters is a big fucking deal.
OGliberal
@Matt McIrvin: Used to be folks would say it’s better for the racists, misogynists, homophobes, etc, to be out and proud than lurking in the shadows. I used to agree but after too many years of “out and proud”, I welcome the return of the shadows. Them being “out and proud” has only made things worse.
iKropoclast
We’ll all be living in mud holes by the end of next year. Probably for the best, long term. Trump may save life on earth by destroying human civilization. Damn shame for humans, though.
WaterGirl
@Geminid: For what it’s worth, I took it the same way as others who have spoken up. But I’m glad to see that wasn’t your intention.
Gloria DryGarden
@Geminid: those all sound like wonderful spots. New Mexico is a long drive from Virginia..
AM in NC
@Jackie: Yep – I put them right next to the price sign so when people check the price they see the post-it. I plan on doing this everywhere I shop for groceries. And I’ll be making trips to less blue areas around me to do the same.
OGliberal
@Suzanne: I think it’s because we expect this behavior from old, scared white people. Young people shouldn’t be partying like it’s 1959. Also, if you believe the exit polls – and other polls – young people moved right recently – old white people just mostly stayed where they were. I get that shit sucks for young people currently but my white, male ass graduated college in 1992 and job/economic prospects at that time just sucked. I lived with my parents for several years after college, had a series of crappy jobs, a crappy car, minimal disposable income and no girlfriend. Didn’t push me into the realm of folks like Trump, Kirk and/or Nick Fuentes.
Suzanne
@WaterGirl:
Young voters voted for Harris by 19 points. Men under 50 only went for FFOTUS by one point.
Meanwhile, the older generational cohorts went for FFOTUS. Men over 50 by TWENTY POINTS. I think that’s a far bigger deal.
Matt McIrvin
@Gloria DryGarden: Jesus is, to them, not a person who said things about how to live, but a human-shaped key that unlocked the door to Heaven by dying, in a manner that can be accessed by certain mental rituals to be propagated on the pattern of an MLM downline, and that’s essentially the only important thing about him.
iKropoclast
In that young group I suspect you’ll find a LOT of people who didn’t think further than “Trump sent me a $600 check that one time.” It’s not ideological. It’s ignorant.
Trivia Man
@OGliberal: Malcom X had that view. I think his point still applies – he preferred the open hostility so he could fight. His anger was for “allies” who pretended to support black liberation but worked against him in the shadows.
The problem with out and proud racism is it becomes normalized >> easier to recruit new followers >> emboldens ever more extreme and violent exercise of their views
Matt McIrvin
@OGliberal: I feel like at age 19 I could have been sucked into incel world if (a) it had existed then like it did 20 years later, but also (b) if I hadn’t been raised feminist to an unusual degree for an American boy. As it is, I just spent a decade and a half kind of anxiously clueless about dating. If I could go back in time and give myself advice I’d just tell myself to chill and not worry about it, you can NOT be in a relationship, it doesn’t matter and nobody is keeping score (and if you really do want it, knowing that fact makes you more attractive!) I think it was what I needed to hear.
Tenar Arha
@Ramalama: I loved that. Thank you!
George
@2liberal:
As a gentile and long-time resident of Zion, I will repeat this often: Spencer Cox is the (figurative) devil. I have no doubt that the Mormon hierarchy sees him as their golden boy through which they finally will realize their dream of having a Mormon in the Oval Office. As a sane person, I think that potentiality should be avoided at all costs. Nothing against the Mormon faithful per se, but the leadership of the church is rightwing and business-loving.
Cox’s prayers that the shooter not be “one of us” had nothing at all to do with the shooter not being from Utah and everything to do with the shooter not being a white Mormon. Ditto with his prayer that the shooter come from another state or another country. What kind of a perverted prayer is that to make?
Those were dog-whistle comments and I’m sure the Quorum of the Twelve smiled when they heard them.
Cox excels at portraying himself as a moderate and he is gobbling up all the airtime possible now to increase his name recognition. The mainstream media are all too willing to play the fools as well. Due largely to him shifting to the hard right since he got re-elected, Utah has lost the Sundance Film Festival to Boulder, Colorado. Collective bargaining rights have been removed. Fluoride in the drinking water is no longer required. It is a crime punishable by a $500 per day fine to display the pride flag in any publicly funded office building. Open carry of firearms is now legal on college campuses with a permit. College students don’t need a permit at all to have a firearm in their dorm rooms. Funding for state universities had been cut drastically.
Yet Cox goes on CNN or wherever and with his Stepford smile and concerned tone, even sensible if not-savvy people might think he is on the up and up.
Don’t believe a word of what he says.
bluefoot
@Matt McIrvin: ironic since I was programming games for fun back in the 80s….and I’m a woman of color. My opinion as games became more mainstream was “what are all these newbie sexist idiots trying to do gatekeeping my hobby.”
Geminid
@WaterGirl: Why would you take it any other way than how I intended? This is what I wrote:
I did not impugn Van Hollen’s courage; I just said he wasn’t being courageous when he impugned Hakeem Jeffries’ courage. And I think it was clear I wasn’t making a general statement about the Senator when I said Van Hollen was “running with the herd” on this question.
If people didn’t like what I said, fine. But they read stuff into the comment that I did not say, and refuted arguments I did not make, maybe because they did not like what I actually said.
Geminid
@Gloria DryGarden: New Mexico is about 1700 miles from where I live. The last two times I drove there, I jumped off from Atlanta, where a good friend lives. That was a somewhat shorter trip, and the first leg was simple: take I-20 west for 820 miles, then turn right at Sweetwater, Texas. From there it’s a hop to Lubbock, then a skip to Clovis, New Mexico and a short jump to Santa Rosa.
There’s a nice stop just outside Sweetwater: the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots Museum. It tells the stories of the hundreds of women pilots who delivered airplanes from.the factories to Army Air Corps bases throughout the country during WWII.
Kosh III
Open thread so here goes:
I am calling my worthless congresscritter+senators weekly. I tell them thoughts and prayers are not working. The only workable solution is do do what Australia did in 1996. And I end by saying s/he doesn’t care anyway.
NotMax
@Geminid
“How soon can we put these planes into service?”
“Cooties removal squads working on them now, sir.”
//
arrieve
@Suzanne: I usually don’t pay much attention to what groceries cost–I’m not reckless in my spending but lucky enough to be able to easily afford what I need.
But even I was taken aback when shopping this weekend. I grabbed the brand of blueberries I usually get and they were $18! I checked the box and saw that they’re imported from Colombia. So picking another brand was an easy enough fix. But coffee is just as bad. I’m glad I never buy beef.
MisterForkbeard
@Suzanne: Right. “Let’s vote for the guy who repeatedly fucks the middle class and gives huge giveaways to the rich, but not vote for the lady who actually got us our current benefits, has plans to help the lower and middle classes”
It’s insane how far people’s perceptions are from the actual facts. Propaganda works, to an incredible degree.
Matt McIrvin
@bluefoot: Yeah, how about that. Everything to do with computers is actually an area men went to a lot of effort to *drive women out* of over the course of my lifetime. But they never succeeded 100% and it chaps their asses.
Ruckus
@Soprano2:
$2.99/gal is way below the last gas I brought here in SoCal and I just looked, gas is $4.25-4.85 near me.
Geminid
@NotMax: The Wikipedia article on the WASPs is pretty good. One anecdote: at one airbase, pilots complained about how unsafe the new B-29 bombers were and refused to fly them. When Hap Arnold heard of this, he made sure the next B-29s were delivered by WASP pilots, and the revolt collapsed.
There was political opposition to the WASPs though, much of it orchestrated by a D.C. journalist by the name of Drew Pearson. The rationale for employing WASP pilots to deliver planes was to free up male pilots for training and combat. By 1944, there were enough trained male pilots, and Pearson and others began agitating about the women taking men’s jobs. So the WASPs were demobilized in November of that year.
Because they were civilians, WASP pilots were not eligible for veterans benefits. Senator Barry Goldwater was able to rectify that injustice with legislation signed in 1977 by Jimmy Carter. Goldwater had flown alongside WASP pilots during his service in WWII.
Matt McIrvin
@Trivia Man: King expressed similar sentiments in the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”– saying the white liberals who kept telling him “be patient, not yet” were almost a bigger problem than the open haters. Almost.
It’s totally understandable. Taken to the logical extreme, of course, it leads to attacking your allies. But I reserve my personal biggest scorn for the “leftists” who wanted to embrace white racism in the name of the Revolution that would somehow fix everything.
iKropoclast
@Matt McIrvin: Leftists embracing white racism? The horror. Who are these people? Name names, I’m sure they’re very influential and important.
Suzanne
@OGliberal:
I’d submit that we shouldn’t let old people off the hook, no matter how scared or how white they are. Old people should have greater understanding of the interdependent nature of society and what they owe to future generations.
And again….. if you are at Social Security/Medicare age, you should be voting for Democrats.
Matt McIrvin
@iKropoclast: Walker Bragman, Matt Taibbi, everyone who went Sanders->Stein->Trump “left MAGA” in 2016. Most of ’em were being sexist harder, to be fair. Some of them eventually left the fold.
Scuffletuffle
@Dorothy A. Winsor: MINDMELD!!! I call it the birth control car every time I see one…
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Boomers are currently voting to the left of GenXers. I think part of what happened is that “Boomers” were a more complicated group with age differences and the younger ones were more liberal than the older ones who are dying off.
Ruckus
@stacib:
Please explain how that makes any sense at all.
Can’t be done. But I’ll give it a try.
They don’t get their $100 immediately so they charge $200 in smaller segments. Think of it like buying anything using a time payment plan. They WANT their money now and you are taking more time to pay them and have to check every time you are supposed to make a payment to insure that you have. That costs them more money. When I owned my specialty manufacturing company I charged more for people that wanted to make payments, first because it cost me time and effort to do that and didn’t give me my earnings in as timely a fashion. Also it is a fine on the non payment concept, you didn’t pay the original fine in a timely fashion, so your fine goes up.
iKropoclast
@Matt McIrvin: That’s two names and I had only ever heard of are Taibbi. I’ll grant you he is a racist, what with his cancel culture hobbyhorse. Though I don’t think he aligns the way you say he does, a review of recent Twitter posts and he once mentioned the people who attack him ideologically.
He referred to them as “leftists.
Obsession with cancel culture, leftists are the enemy, but still okay to criticize Republicans? Sounds like one of your dipshit view-from-nowhere centrists to me
ETA: So found Bragman. Read about the last week and a half of his writings. Only thing I saw in his writing where race may have been considered an issue, he is advocating for a non-white political candidate. The left cause celbré candidate of the day, granted, but that’s not nothing. Not saying you’re wrong but can you point something out for me, please?
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Gen X deserve a ton of blame.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: I only get about 33 mpg with a Honda CRV Hybrid (it’s better on the highway, I think). But I never go anywhere and fill up my tank roughly once a month.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Getting paid to be a democrat?
OK just kidding, I do understand your comment, as I am
ata not insignificant ways past SS age, worked into my early 70s and now live off the money I invested into SS over decades. Paid into might be a better way to say it but it is investing money for the future. If you get old enough to collect it. It’s not a treasure chest of gold but if you work long enough at a reasonable salary it is a reasonable amount. I’d bet I’m not the only person on this blog collecting.Citizen Alan
@Geminid: I wonder if the issue with slowness to endorse Mamdani is in part due to him being somewhat unknown before this. No one wants to endorse the DSA guy and then have it come out that there’s video of him saying he wants to abolish capitalism and execute all the billionaires or some such thing.
(I am still salty about the DSA in Florida dragging Andrew Gillum’s sorry ass over the finish line in the Dem primary for governor way back when. He lost the race and then promptly got involved in, IIRC, a drug-fueled gay orgy. I remain convinced that Gwen Graham could have won the general election, reducing Ron DeSantis to nothing more than a trivia question.)
iKropoclast
We all have our ways of coping. This one has my full, enthusiastic endorsement.
Matt McIrvin
@iKropoclast: They wanted Trump to win in 2016. That’s the long and the short of it. Bragman seems to have repented of left-Trumpism since then. Of course they’re gonna claim it was about something else, foreign policy or corporate Dems or whatever. But Bragman literally wrote “The Liberal Case for Donald Trump.” Fuck him, I’m done.
There’s this other guy whose name I keep blanking on, wrote for the Nation, was a high-profile guy in the Bernie movement then went to Jill Stein then went full MAGA.
And the whole Greenwald and Wikileaks/Assange crowds. They got lumped in with the left for being anti-Bush but arguably never were. That was their original fan base though.
iKropoclast
@Matt McIrvin: I’ll find the article. Though I bristle at the notion that standing against Democrats makes you per se racist.
Truth be told, I think the Democrats are too racist for most who identify with left movements. I don’t do the whole movement thing, myself, but the Democrats express more bigotry than I’m comfortable with.
Betty Cracker
@UncleEbeneezer: It’ll probably surprise the many Jewish liberals who are AIPAC critics that they are antisemites. Fuck outta here with that bullshit.
iKropoclast
@Betty Cracker: AIPAC = Israel = the solitary voice of all Judaism. Both parties trained us well on these talking points, you can’t expect everyone to just drop them so easily.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
Yabbut doing one thing like that isn’t “running with the herd.” That has to be a pattern, and I don’t see one.
Ruckus
@iKropoclast:
We are all human beings. With all the good, not so good and not at all good possibilities. We often have to work to be the person we want to be, or think we should be because we are all human, in all the ways to measure humans. We all have the possibilities to be pure shit, it is us not wanting to be pure shit that we work at, or being the biggest piece of shit we know. And at every level in between. We are living creatures, some live well (that’s not meant in a monetary manner), some/maybe most live reasonably, and some are pure shit walking. As it has always been in humanity. Some think they deserve EVERYTHING, most realize that’s bullshit. We have a wide range of emotions, desires, abilities mental and physical. We live as long as we can. I had a cousin that lived 6 months. His siblings have lived a lot of decades. It’s life. I say live it well, live it like tomorrow may be your last day because it might be, and be a worthy human being by being the best you can. That is all anyone can ask of you, even as some will ask for a hell of a lot more.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
The difference being I never see Bezos’ penis rocket. (I’m not gonna bother to Google it to see what you’re referring to.)
iKropoclast
@Ruckus: Sometimes I wonder if the only decent option left to me is to self-immolate amid a spray painted denunciation of ::gestures around generally:: all this.
OGliberal
@Suzanne: Yup, my generation and we – well, they….most of them – suck. Not as “enlightened” a generation as some may like to believe. Also, I always go back to the fact that a lot of my generation thought Gordon Gekko was the hero of Wall Street, still think that being rich is right around the corner (and for almost all of them, that corner does not exist), and have some mythological memory of the Reagan years and believe Carter was flat out terrible based on bad shit they heard about him and high gas prices and dad calling him a pussy because of Iran back when they were 7, 8, 10-years old and didn’t know shit about what the olds were talking about – just that Reagan = Good, Carter = bad. All that shit stuck with Gen-X – little to no evolution. To many of them, Trump is what they aspire to be or the person they want to marry. Gen-X can also be incredibly racist and sexist and homophobic.
They also probably represent a large portion of the folks in this country who think every city in the US is Times Square circa 1977, multiplied by 10.
BarcaChicago
@Betty Cracker: Ugly and ignorant comment to one of our community members. Do better.
iKropoclast
@BarcaChicago: No, Ebeneezer is a full time hater and bigot. If you haven’t figured out the pernicious violence that defense of AIPAC/Israel as equivalent to all the Jewish people causes, that harm extending to Jewish people, I don’t know what to tell you.
Betty Cracker
@BarcaChicago: I said what I said, and if you find that sort of thing offensive, feel free to pie me. I’m not going to stand for being accused of engaging in “antisemitic, Global Conspiracy Theories” for approving of a Democratic senator’s rejection of a Likud-aligned political action committee.
BarcaChicago
@Betty Cracker: I don’t pie people, and I definitely wouldn’t pie you because I value your thoughts and writing.
Geminid
@Citizen Alan: Mamdani has been a New York Assemblyman for a couple trrms now. He came in breathing fire, but has modified his rhetoric since. He has campaigned for mayor as a pragmatic progressive.
I think the sticking point for Democrats is the DSA’s foreign policy platform, which could have been written by Noam Chomsk; in particular their “Anti-Zionist” policy. If you read the report on their national convention I linked to at #190, you’ll see that Mamdani could potentially be expelled from the DSA for advocating for a Two-State resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Same with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
The article’s authors– two DSA members of one of its “lefter” caucuses– say the National Political Committee will exercise discretion over the policy adopted last month. This may be another source of tension amongn the DSA’s many caucuses (I think eight are mentioned in the article).But I think the DSA would be doing Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez a favor if they were kicked out.
The authors say the recent convention saw DSA leadership shifting left, and attributed that the Gaza ws1ar.
There’s a lot mythology about the DSA. One problem is they’re the most prominent organization on the American Left. They get blamed for a lot of stuff other people adjacent to them say or do. I’m so critical of the DSA, but I do think it’s a problematic organization, and if you read article I linked to at #190 you might see why I do.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: I did not say there was a pattern. If I’d wanted to say so, I would have said “Van Hollen *runs* with tbe herd.”
But I said he was “running with the herd” because I was speaking to this particular instance. I guess I could have added “…in this particular instance,” but I expect people to read the the plain meaning of a comment when expressed in simple form, which this one was.
Gloria DryGarden
@Matt McIrvin: the thing is, religion doesn’t make a difference, once you cross over. Some people are going to be surprised at the life review and study hall meeting, with their guides, when they see that Being an asshole actually affects them. I know this is esoteric, but I’m pretty sure. They’re in for a surprise.
you can’t buy a stairway to heaven, over there. Maybe here, you can buy things w money..
mini Ted talk. Oh well.
BarcaChicago
@Geminid: I would just like to say how much I appreciate your thoughtful comments, particularly regarding Israel and Palestine. You bring much-needed context both historical and contemporary to a subject that often becomes a simplistic binary serving various peoples’ agendas (See:DSA). The fact that you read so widely and include many non-western sources is critical to me. Thank you.
Ruckus
@iKropoclast:
Will that help? Anyone?
Because otherwise you’d be better off to help bring this whole pile of rightwing bullshit under control. None of us will fix the whole thing but working together, however loosely can work to make this a better place. The basics are in place but the money has at least seemingly brought the uber wealthy to be even greedier. They have billions, but it’s not enough. And other than that part of humanity known as Fully Fucking Greedy, most of the rest of us could use a far better working political party than the current day rethuglican leaders, many of whom seem to have lost their fucking minds seemingly within the concept of too much money is never enough, more commonly known as Fucking Greed.
And I have zero answer, because supreme greed is built into humanity, which one has to really see that it’s not a valid way to be to fix most everything. And that ain’t all the humanity that we have. For many humans too much is never enough. And yes too much what is a valid question. Never forget that greed is a human trait. How many people do you know that always eat too much? How many do you know that have to have the latest whatever? Once again never forget that greed is a human emotion, or at least an aspect of it.
iKropoclast
I can’t do that. But I can stop participating. But not as long as I live and breathe.
Geminid
@BarcaChicago: Thanks, I appreciate the thoughts.
I’ve tried to see these problems for themselves, outside the context of U.S. politics which are important but not nearly the whole story.
Ruckus
@Gloria DryGarden:
This comment reminded me of the Vice Principal of the all boys, Catholic, technical HS I was sent to although I’m not Catholic. School was next to a seminary and a number of priests taught classes. Most were at least reasonable especially to the few none Catholic students. Except vice principal Father Schafer. When I worked in professional sports I traveled to every state, was in the USN and traveled far and wide throughout the Atlantic Ocean countries. Out of all the humans I’ve met in over 3/4 of a century, Father Schafer was the absolutely worst human being. Ever. Not even a contest, he’d win 97% of the votes of anyone who’d known him for more than 10 minutes. The other 3% just didn’t want to commit. I’m pretty sure his final ticket said stairway to HELL.
dnfree
@Matt McIrvin: When I became a programmer in the mid-1960s, I’d say that at least a third of programmers in my workplaces were women (like me). It wasn’t controversial at all, and in fact there were comments from some men that women were good programmers because they were detail-oriented. It seemed to me that the attempts to drive out and exclude women started around when client-server architecture became prevalent, but I don’t know why. Plenty of women programmed mainframe and minicomputer systems.
Ruckus
@dnfree:
More money to be made as the growth of computers grew. Now greed is a HUMAN trait but given our country that long ago most of the heavy or technical work was done by men. Today a lot more women do a lot of the work that used to be done only by men. I believe that not a lot of women went to college before WWII era. That changed, slowly, after that. But it did change. And for the better.
Ruckus
@dnfree:
More money to be made as the growth of computers grew. Now greed is a HUMAN trait but given our country that long ago most of the heavy or technical work was done by men. Today a lot more women do a lot of the work that used to be done only by men. I believe that not a lot of women went to college before WWII era. That changed, slowly, after that. But it did change. And for the better.
Kayla Rudbek
@Matt McIrvin: and as men have taken over computers, the field gets more and more disorganized, inefficient, and user-unfriendly.
Matt McIrvin
@dnfree: One of the theories I heard was that it actually had to do with the rise of home computers in the late 70s-early 80s. A generation of kids learned programming as a hobby at home, but that population was mostly boys, because the home computers were basically jumped-up video-game machines, the gaming culture of the time was already extremely boy-slanted, and home computers were much more likely to be bought for boys.
Then, by the late 1980s or so, college computer-science programs became dominated by these kids who came in with home programming experience and it became generally understood that if you weren’t already a “whiz kid” on entry you’d be left behind (even though, honestly, what the CS curricula taught probably didn’t have a lot in common with what most of these kids already knew from their hobbyist messing around, but they could fake expertise).
Don’t know to what extent that explains it, since, obviously, there were girls doing this too. But it makes some sense.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: That was likely another aspect of it. Early on, computer hardware engineering was the high-status job, and programming was seen as a mere clerical task, like doing keypunch or being a human “computer”–these were jobs primarily given to young women.
Once “software engineering” (a term promoted by a woman, Apollo software lead Margaret Hamilton) became a high-status job and became understood as being just as important and complex as hardware engineering, the writing was on the wall. Time for men to take over.
Kayla Rudbek
@Matt McIrvin: yeah, I was one of the rare girls in that timeframe who had a TI computer at home with the cartridges to plug in to play games or to code, and I did an engineering camp in high school where we did program in Fortran.
Personally I thought that coding was boring and frustrating (the computer is stupid because it does what you tell it to and only what you tell it to, in those days before AI) and I preferred using computers to write fiction instead of coding. Which is probably what led me to the dark side of becoming a lawyer…