… And it ain’t over yet!
The Third Reich didn't last 1,000 years.
Pinochet was ousted with a referendum.
And the US isn't exactly dealing with the smartest, most competent fascists.
Those of you insisting that 2025 is forever need to read a book, touch grass, go to therapy, anything other than trying to make others quit.— Nicholas Grossman (@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social) September 18, 2025 at 11:02 AM
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trump is at his second-lowest approval rating across both terms and we're not even through the first year of this term, and, just to emphasize it again, *they have no plan to turn any of it around*. everything's getting worse pretty quickly and they're sephiroth posting to each other
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) September 18, 2025 at 4:38 PM
these guys are not popular, they are getting much more unpopular very quickly, and they have absolutely no plan to turn any of it around. i'm not even sure they are aware that they need to, which is not a mistake a more competent regime would make.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) September 18, 2025 at 4:36 PM
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there is no fever to break. i’m sure absolute monarchs of europe thought the “fever would break” over the ideals of religious tolerance and government by consent of the governed but not withstanding fits and starts it’s around.
trumpism is here to stay. may not kill it but keep trying.— not an art thief (@famousartthief.bsky.social) September 18, 2025 at 9:25 PM
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This is the biggest attack on free speech since the McCarthy era but it also has significantly less popular consensus behind it than the second Red Scare. It's being done on behalf of a minority faction led by the most unpopular president in modern history. Organizing against this can win.
— Jeet Heer (@jeetheer.bsky.social) September 18, 2025 at 10:21 AM
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Reminder: before you go full-on defeatist about the rule of law, keep in mind it remains often effective on a micro-level. It’s on the macro- that the FedSoc types have killed it. Hard work and good lawyering can make a difference for regular people — though not always, and not all of them.
— Disney Surrenders Hat (@kenwhite.bsky.social) September 18, 2025 at 1:24 PM
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Note sender:
IS EPSTEIN THE REAL REASON TRUMP HAD KIMMEL CANCELED?!
— Chuck Schumer (@schumer.senate.gov) September 18, 2025 at 4:38 PM
On The Road – Captain C – Netherlands, September 2024 Part 11: Amsterdam Part 4
Baud
Fever won’t break until a majority in society gets over its fear and loathing of liberals.
ETA: People don’t have to be us but they do have to be willing to work with us.
bjacques
These dipshits, from Stephen Miller to Russell Vought on down, fapping to 1938 Germany, have no real appreciation for the effort and professionalism the Nazis put in to get there. Most of these guys are amateurs and idiots and lazy. In the words of a dear departed commenter, fuck ‘em.
MagdaInBlack
Despite Schumer’s best intentions, the comments are not favoring him. Ouch.
Nelle
Meanwhile, the orangeness is taking all the oxygen in the room, the building, the media. What about NATO, Poland, Ukraine, Asia, Africa, South America? Taking us all along on his narcissistic rollercoaster of dysfunction. Some instinct of self-protection, without clear awareness, got me joining slow reads of War and Peace and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy this year. Life through literature is cannily prescient, but it gives me a layer of protection. It helps to step out of this timeline regularly and with purpose. Time to step back in, though, and finish some postcards and make another sign. Think I’ll order a “No Kings” shirt today.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
Internet pile on culture. Stupid and self defeating.
Lapassionara
@Baud: And there may be a bot army involved.
In other news, I see where some beautiful oak trees have been cut down to make room for the massive ballroom. How does Trump get to make the decision to mar our Whitehouse grounds like this?
satby
@Baud: yeah. And that struck me as one of the sharper reactions Schumer’s had lately. The trolls would bitterly complain Schumer and Jeffries “did it wrong” if they both miraculously ended the felon’s administration tomorrow. Because that’s the troll’s jobs and they’re getting paid for it.
satby
@Lapassionara: And there may be a bot army involved.
People, especially in the media, constantly forget that. We never should.
Baud
@Lapassionara:
@satby:
I acknowledge the pile on may be mostly paid trolls. In the past, however, I’ve seen popular accounts comment favorably on pile ons of disliked politicians, so I’m a little jaded.
MagdaInBlack
@Lapassionara: I was thinking about that yesterday. I assume he just does it. Who is there to stop him?
“Permits? We don’t need no stinkin’ permits.”
Baud
@Lapassionara:
@MagdaInBlack:
Presidents have always done thinks like remodel the Oval Office.
satby
@Baud: as I said, people forget other countries have actual armies of Internet disrupters working to disrupt our social order here. And in some cases they never forget, but it furthers their own agenda anyway.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: I had a couple “ya but” responses….but, you’re right. I guess. Damn it.
satby
@Baud: not only that, but the changes become part of the “historical record” and most remain.
Though Reagan took down the solar panels and the felon has undone everything he can that previous Democratic administrations put in, so I hope we’ll see the rose garden restored at least.
NotMax
Question for the hive mind.
Won’;t got into clinical detail, suffice to say Mom will be going in for a eye operation in December. No hospitalization involved. Her long time eye doctor will be performing the operation and said afterward it involves lying on her back for 24 to 48 hours following the operation and full recovery usually takes several months after that.
So she’ll be needing 24/7 in-home care for at least a couple of weeks. Her insurance doesn’t kick in for that until a certain time of using the services of a caregiver has passed; the out of pocket costs for that period is not going to be problematic. Thing is the insurance provider told her that regardless it must be a “certified caregiver,” whatever that entails. I’m totally in the dark regarding that and she doesn’t really know where or how to go about finding such, nor which agencies to check out (or any to avoid), whether just for advice/recommendations or for hiring.
Any ideas, thoughts or warnings?
Baud
@satby:
They might renovate the ballroom, but they probably won’t tear it down. I can’t recall if I have a source other than the liar Trump, but I heard some sort of bigger space for official events has been proposed for some time.
satby
@NotMax: pretty much any reputable agency should have certified, aka licensed LPNs or nurses’ aids. Sometimes it’s nurses too. The license requirements vary by state for all those categories of caregivers; the insurance company just wants to pay for someone with a modicum of professional training.
Lapassionara
@NotMax: I had that issue with a relative. Does she have long term care insurance. If so, most policies kick in when the insured has need for assistance with 2 activities of daily living. I just contacted the carrier directly to find out which agencies were acceptable.
satby
@Baud: my assumption as well.
Edit: but I bet the patio goes and a garden goes back in. 🤞
JoyceH
@Baud: a bigger space might have been discussed, but nobody can convince me that anyone but Trump thought it was a good idea to build a Walmart-sized addition that would dwarf the original building!
Baud
@JoyceH:
Right. Maybe if it’s truly hideous enough architecturally, they’ll have no choice but to tear it down, at least in part. I guess we’ll see.
I’m sure whatever the Dem president decides will be the subject of debate and schism among libs.
NotMax
@satby
IIRC the original garden there was put in by Mrs. Taft, only becoming known as the Rose Garden after Jackie Kennedy’s renovation.
Suzanne
Agree with this, it’s a constant battle, we’ll never be done fighting it. Most people don’t really have political values. They have interests. Sometimes we’re successful in persuading people that we’re better at helping them actualize those interests.
It has been a hard week at work and next week will be even more difficult.
satby
And as to the topic thrown out by AL up top, the pendulum is already swinging. Often when you keep yourself to a tight internet bubble of information you feel is safe or reliable, you miss information that’s important to help understand current events. Clearly shown in the mishegas around the Kirk murder and people’s puzzlement of who Kirk and Fuentes were.
So worry is appropriate, but deep doom probably is not. This administration is riven with internal power struggles, as is the rightwing
griftmovement that spawned it. They’re fuckups, and people who voted for lower prices (aka make the trains run on time) are getting shafted the most. We have to keep pushing back, because it’s crumbling around the edges already and it’s been less than a year.Princess
Again, I do not understand how Harris’s book is helping her and her future goals, or us at this moment in history. They told her to break with Biden and she didn’t, but for some reason she is doing it now? What is this in aid of?
theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/19/angry-and-disappointed-kamala-harris-critical-of-joe-biden-in-ne…
I’m reminded again that our political leadership are not our friends or heroes, but our tools.
Baud
@Suzanne:
IMHO we do this bad thing where we assume that we’re really popular and the reason people aren’t us is because of ignorance or messaging or some element of our coalition that is impure. And if we could just fix that thing, we’d be dominant.
I don’t think we’re popular and certainly not enough to win elections by ourselves, so we have to meet people where they are. Both in terms of policy and in terms of how we relate to other people on a personal level.
But maybe I’m projecting because I’ve never been popular.
JoyceH
@Baud: I don’t think you really comprehend how ridiculous this monstrosity is going to be. The British royals just hosted a state dinner for 150. But Trump needs a blimp hangar that seats 900? Is he going to invite every podcaster who ever said something nice about him so they can brag about it to their dozens of subscribers? This thing will be devouring the White House electric and maintenance budget year round and most events will look stupid filling up a tenth of the space.
AM in NC
@NotMax: We just had to do this for my dad north of Atlanta. Home care agencies (Amedisys, eg) use licensed home care staff and they are used to dealing with long term care insurance. You can just ask the agencies to make sure they and their people are licensed to provide care.
Poodle Mom (fka KM in NS)
OT – the other day we were discussing the effectiveness of boycotts. Of course I’m late but I want to point out that boycotts can work. Here’s an article from today’s CBC: cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-big-step-back-from-us-data-1.7637651
Baud
@satby:
I view everything as ephemeral except election results. Let’s see how VA and NJ go in November. (NYC should be a lock, last I checked, and Cuomo isn’t a Republican anyway).
Not opposed to positive vibes or the absence of doom. Just saying I don’t trust my perception.
Baud
@JoyceH:
The worse it is, the easier it’ll be to destroy it. Nothing to be done until 2029 at the earliest.
Suzanne
@Baud:
Agree very strongly.
I do think effective messaging is part of meeting people where they are. Finding out what they care about and appealing to that.
ETA: One thing I learned from my brief time in the ad industry is that everyone is in a bubble of some type, and basing one’s opinion about what will be effective outreach on one’s personal preferences is blinkered and limited.
Professor Bigfoot
All we have to do is get rid of the Blacks and Jews and white people will vote for us.
THAT’S the intractable challenge I see.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@bjacques: When I saw Kash Patel ask Dan Goldman if he knew how court orders work, I thought Patel is used to working with idiots. Also before his committee appearance, he didn’t even do enough homework to know who’d be grilling him. I mean, Dan Goldman!
satby
@JoyceH: @Baud: Yeah, undoing an unpopular “remodel” won’t be that difficult in the long run, but the colossal waste of money and resources both to build, and then fix the mess is galling. They stole those funds for the felon’s ego, and killed people over it. And the entire Republican party needs to be held responsible for it.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I think when our side talks about messaging, though, 90% of the time we’re talking about what we’d like to see, not what would persuade the target audience.
Professor Bigfoot
@Suzanne: I wish I didn’t believe that the only way to get more white people to vote for us is to ditch the rights of all the marginalized groups and start talking about Jesus all the time… but it sure seems to work that way.
schrodingers_cat
@Princess: Aren’t you Canadian?
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: I’d still like to see just exactly what “messaging” will get more white people to support the party of Negroes, Jews, and women.
The only such messaging I’ve seen throws trans people under the bus… and they’d only be the first ones; eventually they’ll get to us.
ALL of us. As Pastor Niemöller warned.
Gvg
@NotMax: ask the insurance provider. Since they require it, have them explain until you do understand. If they have a list, or an agency that certifies which you can then get a local listing from, so much the better.
I don’t know that I would go with their recommended without outside endorsement, but I would listen if they were willing to say who to stay away from and why.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
I obviously don’t know. And neither does anybody else apparently. We’re completely blanked in half the states.
As I mentioned the other day, the class war people at least have a theory. But they haven’t made it work in my lifetime, so it doesn’t appear to be a good theory.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: Their theory doesn’t explain what we see, what we’ve seen, how we who are not straight white male and Christian LIVE.
Their insistence on following their theory despite REAL EVIDENCE FROM PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT STRAIGHT WHITE MALE AND CHRISTIAN is just another example of white people refusing to listen to the experiences of anyone else.
Only from the left.
ETA: File it with the Bigfoot Dictum: “There is no horseshoe. There is only white people who are at best uncomfortable with any power being held in Black hands. Those white people are at all points of the ‘left-right’ spectrum.”
Suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot: Honestly, I do think that Dems consider themselves the party of civil rights and don’t fully grasp that many whites people think that issue is over and done. But I also think that white people can be persuaded to vote for Democrats! Roughly 40% of white people already do. Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think we can improve that over time.
But this is one of those cases where a different message might be persuasive. Which is not the same as telling racial minorities and Jewish people and immigrants that they don’t matter, or throwing trans people under the bus. It is, however, a recognition that appealing to other things — affordability is the big one right now — could be an effective strategy.
Now, if you ask me, should people be more concerned with civil rights? Of course I would say yes. But, to Baud’s point….. meeting people where they are is important.
Betty Cracker
Re: Schumer’s post on Bluesky — he didn’t get ratioed, so that’s progress! I also suspect there are bots assigned to stir up internecine strife, maybe especially on Bluesky because they want to shore up the fascist oligarch-controlled Xitter by discouraging pols and journalists from posting at an alternative site. That said, I also believe Schumer is genuinely unpopular with Democratic voters.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Yeah, I think people try to shoe horn facts into their preferred ideology. Not just the left by any means.
I’m trying to get away from focusing on people I think are wrong in the hopes of figuring out who’s getting it right. It’s hard to do sometimes.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I agree he’s unpopular. That doesn’t mean that every negative reaction to him is productive IMHO.
Professor Bigfoot
It’s really difficult, as a person who is not a straight white Christian male, to understand how the fuck white people could think civil rights is “over and done,” when they’re constantly railing against civil rights for everyone?
When they’re literally threatening the lives and livlihoods of trans people AS WE TYPE?
Seems far more likely, per Occam’s Razor, that the majority of white people simply are not in favor of “civil rights for everyone.”
They’re just not.
satby
@Baud: @Professor Bigfoot: I think a lot of the frenzy on the right is extinction burst stuff. They’re not dominant in popular culture, they can briefly win elections but the most extreme positions run into strong opposition even in rural red areas, and they can’t hold on to their voters outside the cultists for multiple cycles. They can’t hold on to the majority of their own kids unless they hermetically isolate them from the wider world. They’re taking positions that over the long run weaken them even further in actual terms of life and death.
Know nothing’s have always been with us, but they’re a suicide cult and their own worst enemies. We just have to outlast and outvote them. And we can.
Professor Bigfoot
FROM YOUR KEYBOARD TO GOD’S MONITOR.
Edited to clean up some formatting. But really, from your keyboard to God’s monitor!
Baud
@satby:
That’s really the only option for liberals who remain in the country. I know some folks think forming a circle jerk of doom is a viable alternative, but I don’t.
I wish everyone on our side projected the confidence in ourselves that you are displaying. Liberal self hate is really dispiriting.
Gvg
@Professor Bigfoot: mind your own business. That resonated. This particular subset of “white people” is showing their ass by sticking their noses in everyone else’s business including other whites. They are messing with healthcare, voting rights and personal religion. That last hasn’t sunk in yet but it will. They are telling Christian’s how to be Christian and that’s not going to be accepted. Then they are messing with everyone’s economic prosperity….which they promised pie in the sky. I think they will lose elections. What I want is more people to understand WHY their ideas were stupid and dangerous, not just “this sucks, let’s vote for the other team next time”
Anyway I would stress that they have no respect for privacy, do some convictions for data stealing (I am sure some of them broke existing laws) and use the opportunity to finally strengthen and update our laws for the modern data age. Do something to block spam calls and texts from overseas that evade current do not call laws and prey on the elderly, block calls that are disguising origins. Restrict data harvesting and what info companies can save. Increase liability for not keeping data safe but increase data safety etc.
Suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot:
Because people are DUMB! And being white, straight, Christian, male, etc…. meant that maybe they didn’t develop the cognitive empathy — which is a skill — of imagining oneself in the life of another person.
I have discussed racism with white people who literally think it was solved by the passage of the Civil Rights Act. One of my coworkers literally said, “We fixed all that”. And because they don’t see politics as an expression of values, but instead as a tool to advance interests…. this kind of person often sees zero thematic similarity between civil rights for Black people and acceptance of trans people. They literally do not think there is any connection between those things.
ETA: And this coworker voted for Obama.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I agree it’s not productive. Not a big fan of pile-ons in general.
Shalimar
I have degrees in history, political science, and law, so I do understand all of the past precedents for dictatorships. Still, I think the reason this feels depressingly different is:
nukes – the assholes this time have the majority of the world’s nuclear weapons.
global warming – we’re on the precipice of dramatic decline in the habitability of the planet, and our wannabe dictatorship is intent on reversing the progress we have made to deal with it.
satby
Had a long comment that vanished, so I’ll just agree with what Gvg says so well above.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Professor Bigfoot: I live in a red state and have GOP family and co-workers. You aren’t wrong that racism, sexism, homophobia, etc are part of why we lose. However, I think most liberals underestimate how much other people get mad at our policy decisions. The way the justice system is painfully slow because of rules we put in to protect defendents. The way you have to get a permit that can take weeks to do nearly anything on your home. The way the ACA did raise costs for employers and many employees. (I heard so much ranting about that.) The perception our policies protect wolves more than ranchers. The view that our energy policies raise the cost of vehicles and gasoline. On and on. This drives the backlash. They hate what the GOP are doing. We get into office and pass a bunch of laws they fully or partly don’t like. They throw us out again.
The fusion of evangelical Christianity and GOP politics also gives them a substantial and immutable base of support. We have to figure out how to undermine it.
Ohio Mom
@NotMax: You could try the Jewish card and see what the organized Jewish community has to offer. A quick google found me this: mjhs.org/about/our-history/?gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=9976497822&gbrai…
There may be other Jewish agencies in NYC providing home health care too.
Here in Cincinnati, there is only one such agency and that is the route we took for my MIL, using the local Jewish Family Services’ home care agency. They are set up to deal with long term care insurers, which is one less worry for my BIL, who is MiL’s POA.
The downside has been lots of aide turnover and some last minute aide absences that were not covered but I think that is pretty typical for home health care, unfortunately.
That is definitely a question you should ask, what happens if at the last minute an aide cancels. My MIL can deal for a few hours here and there but it doesn’t sound like your mom will be able to.
narya
Hard agree–but I’ll add that many of those folks don’t fully understand WTF that MEANS. As you regularly remind us, we all have our biases buried in our brains, and if folks haven’t thought about the structural components of racism, for example–things like “public transportation doesn’t go to that neighborhood” or “that 6-lane highway prevents THOSE folks from coming over here, and that was intentional”–they don’t comprehend that “civil rights” isn’t just “nominally has the right to register to vote.” Also too: people want simple solutions, especially ones where they can think their support for some discrete thing means They’re Not Racist. Dismantling systems is harder and takes longer and isn’t simple.
satby
@narya: hey, OT but thanks for mentioning the Sister Fildema series. I just finished book 16, plus both short story collections. I’m addicted
Plus, spending a few hours in the 7th century is a great reminder of the progress humans have made since.
Nelle
@Gvg:This. I suspect that “mind your own business” may be our biggest card.
Kayla Rudbek
@satby: I certainly hope that we can outlast and outvote them. What I really want is twofold 1) that we can get into a position of authority to punish all of them 2) that we can get them to admit they are wrong. I know that I shouldn’t hold my breath on either of those.
@Baud: I have been feeling very depressed about this country and our future, losing all hope. There are times when I wonder why I’m bothering with my medication and trying to limit my carbs intake if we’re going to go into a dictatorship and potentially the collapse of this country and civilization. Sometimes it’s love that keeps me alive (not wanting my niblings to see me die young), sometimes it’s sheer spite and the desire to see these assholes punished and the chance to dance on their graves.
And then coming to the realization that I have more authoritarian tendencies than I ever thought I did, because the right wing only understands money and physical force and I’m responding to that. They have no sense of shame anymore and since they’re convinced they are all on God’s side, religion isn’t a good motivator to get them to behave in a civilized way (they just go find a preacher who tells them what they want to hear). The only things that will work to keep them in line are consistent punishment and loss of money.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@satby: I like to think they’re like the Rs were in California before they flamed out and lost power. They got more and more extreme, trying to hold on.
LAC
@satby: GM! And there it is. Thank you. Meeting cultists where they are? No thank you.
The situation in that Hyundai plant is what i think about regarding the fantasy world that we can’t “message” our way into these cultists head. An electric car plant in Georgia that was supposed to create jobs for AMERICANS was undone by a dumb trump supporter calling into ICE.
You may think we can meet cultists at their level, but can you without sacrificing others ? As Chris Rock joked, you could drive your car with your feet, but should you?
Betty Cracker
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I see that sort of regulatory-based resentment a lot and think it at least in part explains why small business owners skew so heavily Republican.
My dad owned and operated a dive shop and marina until he retired in 2020. He complained constantly about regulation-related expenses. He’s a white, Southern, boomer dude, so I’m 100% sure biases were partly responsible for his Repub lean, but regulatory issues were/are also a factor.
One time about 15 years ago, he called me in a snit to ask for my help writing a letter to some regulatory agency. He’d been informed by the state or feds about new regulations on boat capacity that affected tour boat operations — he couldn’t allow as many people aboard, which would depress profits.
I researched it and found out the rule change wasn’t some evil liberal plot to repress businesses but rather a response to the fact that Americans were much fatter! That shut him up, lol!
Baud
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Not disagreeing, but I think some of that is their information bubble, where they only hear and talk about the stuff they don’t like.
But again, I agree every policy decision we make will push someone away. That’s why it’s pernicious when we don’t earn votes because we didn’t go far enough.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
We do have an opportunity to splinter off some of their voters. To do it, though, we need to support more folks like this guy. youtu.be/qnTkSFkUdSw?si=wiE-AupiWvYEv94p. That’s William Westmoreland, a farmer who is definitely a Democrat. We need more liberal religious people pushing back on their perverted Christianity. We need to take a page out of their playbook and start undermining them where they are perceived to be strong, in addition to genuinely working for the votes of the Hispanic community and others we have taken for granted.
mappy!
Locally, here, they’re the whack-a-mole town drunks. If you put them all in a paper bag and turn the bag on it’s side, add a string leading out, none of them would figure out how to get out. Inside that bag they get a lot of attention and make a lot of noise. Outside, they get lost. They were here in 1700s, 1800s, 1900s and still here in the 2000s. This is why it’s worth knowing your history. Yes there’s a thick strata of this society that is bigoted, racist, misogynistic, ageist and xenophobic. There always will be. They know we know.
Another Scott
@NotMax: Fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly.
This NY State guide may be helpful. There’s a lot of information in that booklet, and a list of resources.
On page 73 it mentions HIICAP counselors for help with insurance issues. Maybe that’s a place to start?
When J’s parents were living with us, we had home health aids via an agency. I don’t remember the details of the training and certifications their workers had to have, but there were some formal processes that presumably covered certification for insurance purposes.
Hope this helps a little!
Best wishes,
Scott.
Baud
Hello Redis my old friend.
You’ve eaten my comment once again…
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Exactly.
Torrey
@NotMax:
I see that many others have weighed in, and, in my experience, pretty much all of them are right, but personally, I’d go with Gvg’s advice. In my experience, where I’ve failed most often is when I try to figure things out on my own and fail to go to the source and ask for specifics. Ask the insurance company for the info, get the name of the person you talk to, and then ask if there’s a place online where the information can be found.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: If you use the back arrow the eated comment reappears. Works for me, most of the time.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I’ll try that next time.
Another Scott
@Baud: What’s stupid and infuriating about it, as we’ve discussed, is that almost just across the street is the huge Ronald Reagan building with a giant ballroom and all the other facilities that big meetings and parties need. And they have space for security and crowd control and all the rest without destroying the White House complex.
It’s a stupid vanity project for 47.
The builders and designers should be slow-walking it, the House should cut funding for it in January 2027, and it should be removed when he is gone.
Grrr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Professor Bigfoot
Ahem. That was “mind your own damn business.” ;)
And betcherass it resonated!
I believe that most white people are driven by the white male supremacist society they were born into and live under… without ever questioning or grappling with their sub- and un-conscious beliefs and choices; so those beliefs and choices seem to always support white male Christian supremacy.
I want white people to look at their choices and ask themselves, “why did I choose this?”
piratedan
@Princess: perhaps she wants to be seen as owning herself as a politician and not as a media extension of Joe Biden?
Because if there’s anything that the media is excellent at, its loading down a Democratic pol with a bunch of unearned and downright fucking wrong baggage.
Example, see Clinton,Hillary, not only that bogus security crap, she inherited Bill’s shit by exhibiting the supposed Xtrian ideal of forgiveness.
satby
@schrodingers_cat: huh. You mean I could have saved my brilliant analysis?? Darn it 😂😂😂
Jeffg166
The felon destroys everything he touches. At least he’s consistent.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud:
I think this is the number one thing that frustrates me the most about leftists. They refuse to believe that their favored policies will provoke enormous backlash and end up completely undermining any effort to make things better. But I’ve seen it happen so often.
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: you forgot the pony. “I want…. and a pony”
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Professor Bigfoot: I’ll mention what fully broke me out of an unconscious version of that mindset: moving to a place where I was actually a minority. Nothing shows you how much privilege you actually have quite like losing some of it.
schrodingers_cat
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Welcome to my world!
narya
@satby: I’m glad you liked it! Have you explored Dorothy Dunnett? Later in time, and NOT as frothy, but interesting. Start with Lymond, not Niccolo, if it’s your jam.
Professor Bigfoot
I hear you.
But I feel it’s analogous to how conservatives have railed forever against “big government.”
The US Federal government (granted, in fits and starts) has been the only defender and guarantor of the human rights of Black people since the end of the Civil War; since Grant fought the Klan; since passage of the Equal Rights Act that Reichsführer Kirk called a “big mistake.”
I hear them talking about these ancillary things; but I do not believe that’s the core of their opposition.
A lifetime of living with white people has convinced me of this.
Baud
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
I think that ties into my comment earlier in the thread about how a lot of people on our side thinks we are more popular than we are.
Soprano2
@NotMax: I assume there are organizations in the area where she lives for seniors. I went to our local Senior Age office to get advice and information about services for my husband. They had lists of “vetted” providers they gave to me. If I were you I’d look online for something like that near where she lives and contact them, because trying to do it yourself will take a lot of time. They can probably e-mail you information.
prostratedragon
AP News:
The word “hustle” figures in the AP description of the process.
Trivia Man
@Shalimar: effective data surveillance and ability to micromanage access to everything changed the game. A simple example – more and more cities are mounting traffic cameras that scan every vehicle that passes. They are linked together and can give alerts when certain cars are seen.
The Stasi had an army of people and machines physically opening letters and listening to telephone calls. Today your cell phone is like a radio tracking collar to someone with access to the data.
The ability to collect everything about us was big. The more recent abilities to store the data, cross reference it, and get the output quickly was a bugger leap in authoritarian power.
Soprano2
@Princess: Harlan Ellison said you should never meet your heroes, because you’ll probably be disappointed to find out they’re just people with faults and foibles like everyone else. To a certain extent that’s true of politicians, too. For her, like everyone else, hindsight is 20/20.
Professor Bigfoot
The shade of Sun Tzu smiles and nods approvingly.
Deputinize America
I think we have to point out that the First Amendment has been rendered utterly meaningless by conservatives.
1. Speak out against the regime, and your employers’ licenses are threatened unless you’re fired.
2. You can’t speak against the regime if you’re employed by any entity with any government funding.
3. Religious dogma of evangelicals is now written into law with relation to reproductive decisions.
4. You have no freedom of expression to choose the outward affect of your appearance.
5. You have no freedom of expression to oppose the ethnic cleansing policies of the apartheid state of Israel, which is itself poisoned by the notion of the claim of being “God’s Chosen People”.
6. You have no freedom of expression to protest at the gates of government.
7. Your prescriptions for routine medical care now go through a religious filter.
God bless America? God DAMN America.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Soprano2
@Baud: I think a lot of what we want to do is popular with people, because polling consistently shows that. We’re not good at persuading people a) that we can do it, and b) that we’re the people they want to put in power to do it. Part of that is right-wing media and its constant portrayal of the worst example possible as a representative for “all liberals”, and part of it is fear of change. Conservatives promise they’ll either keep things the same or roll us back to a “better” past (which is impossible); that’s comforting to people when they feel like everything is too complicated. Most of us wish things were as simple as they seemed when we were children, but things just seemed simple because we weren’t making the decisions. I joked to the boss the other day that he’s trying to get me to retire with all the changes he’s making – I was only half serious.
Betty
@Baud: From what I understand, a great many Democratic policy ideas are popular based on polling, but Republicans, assisted by the the big money boys and the media, have made Democrats appear to be bad people. This is how genuinely good guys like Casey, Brown and Tester get taken out by not good but very rich guys.
Trivia Man
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: “when you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like discrimination”
rikyrah
@NotMax:
🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽For her
Hoodie
@Betty Cracker: No knock on your father, but a lot of the anti-regulatory impulse is based on ignorance and, usually, that ignorance is willful and self-serving. People have a tendency to assume the baseline that gives them advantages over others is fair and think every problem has a simple solution that just happens to favor them. Small businesses get all kinds of help from state and fed governments, including favorable provisions in the tax code. A lot of these businesses would fail if they didn’t have those provisions. Small business is one of the great myths of America; most of them fail. Propping them us is mostly a backdoored form of socialism, mostly to the benefit of white-owned businesses because the legacy of systematic racism has hindered capital formation for minorities and left ownership mostly in white hands.
Deputinize America
@Trivia Man:
For anybody plotting anything, Post-It notes are your friend.
Soprano2
I never base my opinion of our menu on what I personally like; it’s always about what sells best, because I know my personal preferences aren’t everyone’s. For example, I don’t like shrimp, and I know that’s unusual.
Betty
@Dorothy A. Winsor: He didn’t watch the first impeachment hearings? How disqualifying to be a member of the Trump Administration.
Professor Bigfoot
The problem is that people who are not straight white male and Christian will benefit from our policies.
If there were no Black people in this country, we would have universal healthcare and free education and probably a UBI mechanism… but sharing with those people is anathema.
Soprano2
@Professor Bigfoot: You know, Missouri is a good illustration of this. Democratic positions are popular here – the voters repealed right-to-work when the Republicans passed it, the voters approved the Medicaid expansion, they voted to restore abortions rights. They actually voted against concealed carry back in the late ’90’s. However, they won’t vote for Democratic politicians for statewide office anymore. It’s crazy, they vote to put people in office who then do things they are against. How to explain that? What you say explains it pretty well.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
They Call Me Noni
@Betty: He didn’t watch the first impeachment hearings?
Or the second impeachment hearings. Or the J6 hearings.
They just all put their thumbs in their ears and yelled “na na na, I can’t hear you!”.
stacib
@NotMax: From my experience looking for care for my mom – many of the agencies you will need are seriously understaffed and the quality of the staff they do have can leave you with high aggravation. Be prepared to do extensive interviews, and realize they aren’t always truthful. You will have to remain involved at all times, on every decision. This will probably be one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to manage.
UncleEbeneezer
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: All of these examples illustrate the real problem, imo, that too many of our voters are fucking toddlers who can’t/don’t exercise critical thinking. Dems can (and do) explain why their policy choices are the right ones even if at first glance they don’t appear so. But voters (in general) simply don’t want to reconcile with the fact that there’s no policy that doesn’t also have significant (and sometimes painful) costs. They want someone to give them a magical, pony policy with no downsides that makes everyone happy. The thing that really brought this home to me was watching Fed, State and local Dems explain the importance of masking, social distancing and getting vaccinated, only to have most of the public continue to pout with their arms folded and then blame it on “messaging” of public health officials. I don’t know how you get around this problem when so many voters simply refuse to listen and will always, always, ALWAYS blame your messaging, no matter how good it is. This is why I’m so done with anyone who spends their time criticizing the messaging of Kamala, Biden, Obama, whoever…it’s not helping anything and it’s just feeding this fucking immortal beast that continually throws our elections to the GOP by stoking anti-Dem bullshit amongst our electorate.
JML
@Dorothy A. Winsor: The CA example is an interesting one, because for a long time California was the republican state. Post WWII they owned it lock stock and barrel, only losing it in a presidential election once in 10 elections (and that one was the LJB blowout in ’64). Some democrats managed to get elected to state-wide office in that time, eventually, but also got sent packing. This was the land of Dick Nixon and Ron Reagan…until it wasn’t.
I think there’s been an expectation that Texas or FL would flip this way too, but both states had different relationships with their democratic party I think? A lot of the democrats that used to win in Texas don’t exist any longer and they’re still in that period of realigning itself that comes with getting shoved out of power. But you look at vote totals and demographics, and you can see the possibility. FL’s probably more complicated because dems have only gotten totally shut out recently, and the demographic trends are a little different?
The national fever break might only happen when the cult leader dies. as an elderly person who is obese and with other health issues, an awful diet, minimal exercise, etc…natural causes could come at any time…
Soprano2
I agree. We’ve been beaten down by decades of talk radio and Fox News telling us we’re bad, stupid, idiots, etc. Shoot, we started using the work “progressive” because they made the word “liberal” poison to most normal people. I have a friend who I had to call out for calling me an idiot! People might believe stupid things, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are stupid.
Professor Bigfoot
@Soprano2: William of Ockham has been screaming it at me for a very long time.
Baud
@Soprano2:
@Betty:
We have popular planks and unpopular planks. So do Republicans.
I think when you add it all up, including the assist from right wing propaganda, we’re not popular enough to not need people who aren’t us. So the question is how do we persuade enough people to work in harmony with us without losing ourselves.
Obviously, fighting fascism hasn’t been a persuasive message.
Hoodie
@Princess: It seems that Harris intermittently suffers from a lack of confidence that leads her to make bad decisions, mostly involving relying too much on consultants and not trusting her own instincts. She tends to overcorrect, often with bad timing. I have a long time colleague who struggles with the same stuff. I don’t think that effects black men (e.g., Obama) as much because at least they don’t have to deal with misogyny.
UncleEbeneezer
@Professor Bigfoot: Also, polling on policies is a mess. Simply changing the wording of how the question is framed can completely reverse how voters say they feel about something. Also, ask them two minutes later and you can get a completely different answer. Our electorate is extremely inconsistent and incoherent. This is why the famous saying is “voters don’t vote based on policy.”
Baud
@Soprano2:
Good for you for standing up for yourself. People feel so entitled to be horrible to us. Trump exemplifies this, and it’s telling how few people react negatively to it.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I must not be a liberal then, I don’t have any self hate. Some self doubt maybe but not hate
FWIW its worth if Ds had more fortitude to stand up to fucking Ezra Klein and Line My Pod Bros we wouldn’t have been in this situation.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: I believe that Redis II.
🎵Feed me, Baudmor🎵
schrodingers_cat
BTW the tankie view of the US is pretty mainstream in India. And the Orange One’s tariffs have just cemented the view of the US as a mean and a capricious bully.
jlowe
Sent a comment to Regulations.gov last week urging the EPA to not rescind the 2009 Endangerment Assessment which underpins a bunch of regulations controlling greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles. EPA’s received over 110,000 comments so far – they’ve been able to post only a fraction, about 700 to the website. A huge response. Mine isn’t posted – I wonder if I overdid it. In addition to the technical stuff highlighting wildfires and particulate matter (I noted that I was writing comments during a wildfire-caused air quality alert), I speculated that the notorious DOE “Climate Working Group” report, which serves as the technical basis for EPA’s “reconsideration proposal”, constituted disinformation, a tactic used in influence operations. I had said this constituted a threat to national security and asked why were Trump administration officials going to war with Americans. Closed with the request that Congress convene hearings to investigate the EPA and DOE for evidence of fraud, waste and abuse in the rulemaking. I had introduced my comment with a 300-word science fiction short story about the US in 2040 following two decades of one-party rule in a climate-changed future – fragmented, financially ruined, a friendless and nuclear-armed rogue state beset with climate migrants from sea level rise, wildfires, drought, and disease, and now overtaken by the new planetary sovereign: China.
Yep, probably overdid it. I figured whining about how terrible climate change would become wouldn’t be persuasive to the bunch currently running things. But observing that actively sabotaging our role in managing climate change might be giving aid and comfort to an adversary was a good needle.
I’ll send copies to my state and US representatives, in particular, asking my Republican congressional representative about hearings.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I think a lot of libs have internalized the negativity, but I wouldn’t call it a defining characteristic. You’re good.
Professor Bigfoot
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t count myself a “liberal” or “progressive” or whatever, because those are categories of white people.
There also seems to be a general consensus among Black people that we have no allies. That we can only ever rely on ourselves, because everybody else will sell us out.
Liberal, progressive, whatever.
ETA- Black voters have been the most reliable voting bloc for Democrats for DECADES, now; and what do we get? We get told that these “progressive white people” are the “base” of the Democratic Party.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Are they white people, who vote D and are a minority in the social circle.
Soprano2
@Professor Bigfoot: I don’t disagree with that.
schrodingers_cat
@Professor Bigfoot: There is some truth to what you say. Hey I found out the guy who defined what it is to be a liberal was a fucking East India Company operative for decades. Crafted and justified some of their most heinous policies.
Liberty for me, but not for thee if you are not WASP.
I am talking about John Stuart Mill.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Probably, but I can’t say for sure how it compares to the demographic makeup of liberals. My observation is not scientific by any means. More of a feeling from watching people and how they behave.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Soprano2:
Yes, but only until the downsides become obvious. If it was easy and more universally beneficial, we’d have done it already. I think a lot of that support is shallow. Like if you polled me on which cars would I favor, a Porsche Taycan, a Suburu Outback, or a used, slightly dented Toyota Corolla. I’d pick the first one, until you tell me how much it would cost.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Liberal is a squishy term. I’m Australia, the liberal party is their conservative party (probably because they’re in the Southern Hemisphere)
Scout211
@Professor Bigfoot:
Agree.
I think the problem goes even deeper than that. Sociologist have said for decades that in all cultures, there will always be a class or caste problem that eventually develops to give more power and worth to one caste and less to the “lower” castes.
The point being that if this country only had white people, there will still be a caste system that develops and finds (or makes up) a group that is then discriminated against and marginalized.
It’s a real problem, but I 100% agree that it is much worse for racial minorities. I just wanted to point out that eventually all cultures discriminate. It’s a way to gain power and privilege at the expense of whole groups of people. And it’s always horrible.
Soprano2
Not so far, but they’re making it more obvious by the day. I think most people have heard about what happened to Kimmel, and when they hear what was supposed to be “beyond the pale” they think “huh?”. It’s hard to convince people of these things until they actually start happening. I read today that Laura Ingram thinks the only mistake they made was Brendan Carr talking about it publicly! I have to agree, if they had stayed silent that would have allowed ABC to lie about what they did like CBS did. People understand freedom of speech, even if they don’t understand what fascism actually is.
New Deal democrat
@Baud:
Except in dire circumstances (e.g., 1932, 2008) most people will vote their *moral* preferences, even against their economic interests. The right wing for at least two centuries has exploited this to keep the propertied class in power. Frequently it is explicitly religious propaganda, e.g., “godless socialists” want to take away your right to educate your children in your church. Frequently it also has had an explicit moral message, e.g., the left wants to legalize homosexuality, birth control, divorce etc. And of course there are the explicit racial arguments.
This is why (not exclusively why, but mainly why), even though the majority of Americans by substantial margins agree with Democrats on most economic issues, the GOP is able to cobble together pluralities or majorities to win elections
E.T.A.: In most countries where the right wing has become resurgent, immigration is a huge issue. I don’t think it would do Democrats any harm to go it alone on fixing immigration, including cracking down on illegal immigration, along the lines of previously proposed compromises. On economic issues, Democrats should try to frame as many programs as possible along the lines of SS and Medicare, where “everybody pays in, everybody can get the benefit” to minimize White backlash that too many of “them” are getting benefits.
Soprano2
@Baud: I always call people on calling me names like that. I tell them “It’s one thing to disagree with that I believe, but calling me names like “stupid” and “idiot” is counterproductive.” Is that how they’re going to persuade people? I pointed out to him that he’s known me a long time and he knows I’m not an idiot. He did apologize – I think sometimes they do it as a knee-jerk response because so many people don’t call them on it.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I am a mainstream Democrat. And Australians are weird.
Suzanne
@Scout211:
I will also note that there are absolutely already intra-white-people divisions and they are very salient.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@UncleEbeneezer:
I agree, but we still need them.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Is it liberal self-hate or blaming/hating members of the broadly left of center coalition who are perceived to be an albatross for whatever reason? Seems to me a lot of the doom comes from the latter category in addition to a belief in the omniscience and inevitability of the right. But maybe I missed a nuance in your earlier comment.
Scout211
Agree. So many divisions.
JML
@Baud: some of that from progressives came from the desire to keep moving things forward and doing more, which manifested into never being able to celebrate an incremental success. You saw that often during Obama & Biden’s presidencies where no matter what legislation got passed, there was always a big mass of theoretical supporters ready to shout about how it wasn’t good enough.
You combine that with the GOP constantly moving the goalposts in negotiations (and now simply breaking deals after the fact) and we have a legislative process that’s incredibly broken, where there can’t be any compromise.
Look at what happened in MN where there was just a horrific mass shooting at a parochial school. They convened a hearing in the state senate to talk about possible gun control measures, and the GOP refused to even talk about ideas. One GOP member shot down every idea because they wouldn’t consider anything that wasn’t written down in formal legislation. Another one shot down every idea as impractical or unconstitutional simply because he opposes gun control. None of the GOP senators would even articulate an idea about dealing with the problem beyond arming more people and the state paying for armed guards for private schools.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Nominated!
Aziz, light!
@Hoodie: I think Harris is going to be unpleasantly surprised by the lack of traction she will get in the next primary. The safe bet for Democrats will be a standard-issue white male. The risk of not regaining the White House is too great.
Professor Bigfoot
@Soprano2: I always reply with how responding with calling names is such a typically American white male thing… and one more reason why my first sieve is “is this an American white man? Weight the opinion expressed accordingly.”
Matt McIrvin
@Kayla Rudbek: As people who read my comments probably noticed, I’m capable of the most grandiose dark imaginings.
My background as a science-fiction fan doesn’t help. One that’s been nagging at me lately is that the confluence of AI and authoritarianism may herald the end of human thought itself. People will become in some way subhuman, creatures of reflex following directions from electronic mad genii until it becomes impossible to maintain the machinery.
But it’s a genre that has an authoritarian streak itself, and part of that is a kind of detached contempt for the mass of normies that I suspect is surfacing here.
I also keep remembering Umberto Eco’s warning that an obsession with heroic death is part of the “ur-fascist” complex of ideas. If your fantasies revolve around that you’re probably not getting pulled in a good direction. Certainly not a liberal direction.
I recently read what I think was a really perceptive mini-essay on Mastodon by a “formerly-conservative guy who now has some progressive opinions”, pointing out that the acts of political violence now being pinned on “the left” have in common that they’re not really coming from the left per se. They’re coming from culturally-conservative people who have or see problems that don’t fit into a right-wing ideological box, but haven’t been raised to find the outlets for action that liberals have:
mathstodon.xyz/@[email protected]/115218108286041814
He thinks that as the group of people being immiserated expands to include more conservative men, we’re going to see more of these. These are guys who don’t see joining our coalition as in any way productive–they’ve been brought up to think of violence as the way to solve problems, so that’s what they do.
He also thinks the right’s freakout over this is genuine, it’s not just a hammer to bash liberals with (though they’ll use it that way).
Anyway, I don’t think that nurturing these tendencies in ourselves is productive. These violent guys are going to surface one way or another, regardless.
Professor Bigfoot
@Scout211: All of them minuscule compared to WHITE supremacy.
Sure, there are divisions among white people… but those divisions are absolutely minimal compared to the collective white contempt for non-white people.
ETA— this really only make sense considering this country was founded on Genocide and Enslavement strictly for the benefit of white people.
Belafon
@Professor Bigfoot:
The only thing that does is cause Republicans voters to notice that Democrats consist of minorities, women, and LGBTQ.
oldgold
@prostratedragon: This deconstruction/ construction analysis is sophistry on steroids.
Bupalos
In my estimation there have been 2 other “theories” that have been successfully operative in your or my lifetime, and they’ve both crashed out. And they’re both variations on neoliberalism. And I’d say populist class war is in fact the only framework that has ever delivered huge wins for the left ever in the history of this country.
I don’t see even theoretically what else a cross-coalitional solidarity could be built on, prior to spectacular ecological collapse.
Belafon
@Suzanne: i am working on that in my part of Red Texas but when they get truly defensive after you slap down all of their other concerns they turn to abortion.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
To me, self-hate is different than inter-factional fighting. The former is about how we think we’re not worthy of self-respect, much less worthy to lead the country. It’s blaming ourselves for being in the minority rather than acknowledging that the values that we hold dear push people away because of who they are. That sort of thing.
Obviously, this can manifest itself in inter-factional fighting if we allow a faction to our right or left or elsewhere to be insulting to us. But I’m not talking about simply pointing fingers (rightly or wrongly) at others in the coalition.
Trivia Man
@Deputinize America: and be aware that even face to face is more challenging and complicated now. It is easy to tell when a phone is bear a different phone. If they see the same 5 phones at regular covert meetings that calks for more investigation.
schrodingers_cat
@Professor Bigfoot: Don’t worry someone will be here shortly to explain how they were picked on for being redheaded
Indian version: Do you even know how many subcastes are there among Brahmins?
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Got it. I don’t really see that as a big problem, but I’m often wrong.
Baud
@Bupalos:
I don’t know. Maybe we don’t have anything that can work. But if you can turn your ideas into a success, I’m happy to applaud you. The country would be better off if they were more accepting of lefty ideas. But I have lost faith in your movement, so I won’t be an early convert.
Professor Bigfoot
Thus their gun fetish.
They can’t fight a unit of the US Army, but they can indeed kill their neighbors and appropriate the dead people’s stuff.
Would sure solve the problem for them, wouldn’t it?
LONG time SF reader here, also; and I think those mad monkeys on Sol III are just too damn cussed to be turned into automatons. We are a fractions species… for which all the other species in the known universe are grateful. 😉
Bupalos
Right. That’s why 1840’s America was a socialist paradise. When black people were excluded by law from all the benefits, white capital and white labor got along splendidly
These takes always remind me of Eddie Murphy’s SNL mockumentary.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
As am I. I’m just sharing my feelings and observations for conversation purposes. Consider me a human coffee table book.
frosty
True, but they lasted long enough that if this interregnum continues like those I won’t live to see the end.
Nevertheless, I will continue to resist.
Professor Bigfoot
@Belafon: And as we all know, their opposition to abortion was born in their opposition to integration.
Interesting Name Goes Here
@Professor Bigfoot: I’ve been struggling with the idea of calling myself progressive for years now, despite sharing nearly 99% of the goals and views of them, because of those white people you discuss.
Last year finally put that struggle to bed, and then proceeded to put cement shoes on it and dump it into the Chesapeake Bay. I may share their goals, but I never want that label nor do I want any affiliation with them. They will do whatever it takes to see that people like you and I are subservient at best, even if that means destroying their chances at achieving those goals, because those goals aren’t as important as both their principles and a collective conscience they continually refuse to acknowledge isn’t as clean and pure as they loudly proclaim.
Scout211
Agree. And I did say that, but maybe not clearly enough.
But your point that a 100% white culture would benefit everyone with “universal healthcare and free education and probably a UBI mechanism” is something I don’t agree with.
Suzanne
Oh my God.
From Political Wire:
SWING VOTER MY ASS, LADY.
Ohio Mom
@Kayla Rudbek: I hope you will consider seeing a health care professional to discuss antidepressant medication. We are all despondent about the state of the country but most of us are not giving up on the idea of staying alive.
Sign me,
I will never stop taking my antidepressant and that’s fine with me
jlowe
@Professor Bigfoot: Yep. At this moment, the “informal” militias and all their guns and trucks are only locally lethal nuisances to the normies around them and not transformative forces in a future where the everlasting American Civil War has gone kinetic. Let’s hope their incuriosity and aversion to learning keeps them from figuring out such things as unit cohesion, concept of operations and sustainment.
Betty Cracker
@Bupalos: Ever heard TX Rep. James Talarico speak or discuss his theory about how Dems can break through? He emphasizes how rich people are screwing the rest of us. From what I’ve heard and read, he doesn’t run away from Repubs’ culture war bullshit and doesn’t throw anyone under the bus in response. Instead, he says Repubs use culture war bullshit to divide and conquer so they can keep serving donors. That must have resonated in his red district, which he flipped. Now he’s running as an underdog in the Dem primary for the US Senate.
Kristine
@Baud: When I’m concerned about losing what I’ve spent some time composing, I copy it before I hit send. Then if it’s eaten, I just need to paste it and try again.
If I’m really worried, I paste it to Notes or a Word doc first, then save it.
I do one or the other with all sorts of forms and it’s saved me more than once. I admit it’s harder to do on a phone.
moonbat
Sometimes I think a sort of collective amnesia has affected us.
Does no one recall that Obama won election to the presidency TWICE?
Or that OLD Biden beat the orange clown?
Our mistake both times Trump was elected was giving the Republicans the Dem candidate they wanted to run against instead of the one they were afraid they couldn’t beat. In 2016 they were salivating over the chance to run against Hillary Clinton because they had decades of oppo research they could beat her up with. And if the the media’s desperation to push Biden out the last race wasn’t obvious to anyone with eyes, I don’t know what to say to you.
Did misogyny and misogynoir with a big M play a role in out defeat in both those races? For sure! But I don’t think we’re as far out in the wilderness as some regular commentators seem to think. Our ideas and policies are the most popular with the American people. If we could just learn not to shoot ourselves in the foot by playing into the Republicans hands I think we’ll have better electoral success.
Professor Bigfoot
Maybe not a UBI… but I refer you to the New Deal, and how Social Security was specifically written to exclude Black people from its benefits. It would not have passed if Black people had been equal beneficiaries.
American white people have shown again and again and again that they’re certainly in favor of “socialist” policies, they just don’t want Black people to benefit from them.
Belafon
@Bupalos: but the black people were still here. They were still a problem for white people.
Roosevelt got things like Social Security by purposely excluding blacks. Medicare was immensely popular, but that didn’t protect the Democratic Party when it decided that blacks did deserve the same rights as whites,
TONYG
@satby: “Reagan took down the solar panels”. Yeah, I remember that. God, what a piece of shit that man was. And white voters gave him big majorities in two elections.
Another Scott
@New Deal democrat: No links, but I think a very strong case can be made that VVP intentionally weaponized immigration to try to destabilize Europe and the West. E.g. the wars and turmoil in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, etc. Masses of people on the move cause long lasting expensive disruptions to receiving countries (even the good ones that are trying to do the right things) and are an easy punching bag for the RW monsters. And Erdogan and Orban and the rest using the crisis to try to force the EU to bend its policies to benefit their brands of authoritarianism.
And we should recognize similar (though of course, not identical) things happening in Africa, SE Asia, and the western hemisphere.
Adding climate change and weather disasters on top of that, of course.
Sometimes everything really is connected, and we need sensible people in office – and a sensible citizenry that understands that progress is slow – to address these issues.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
The tide must be turning against Orange 2.0 our old familiar trolls are back with us. Telling us how we are doing it wrong.
They Call Me Noni
@Suzanne: Wait, what? So now a polling question is “do you wear a weighted vest?”
Suzanne
@They Call Me Noni: I don’t know, maybe they just go up so women on the street wearing weighted vests and so for their political opinions?
They Call Me Noni
@moonbat: No lies told. Cannot disagree with anything you typed here.
Thank you for the reminder.
schrodingers_cat
@Another Scott: VVP?
They Call Me Noni
@Suzanne: I’ve often wondered how one is selected to participate in a poll.
schrodingers_cat
@They Call Me Noni: No one ever polls me. I has a sad.
Paul in KY
@JoyceH: I hear Hitler had a big ballroom in Nuremburg…
Professor Bigfoot
@schrodingers_cat: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; the sly, wily, KGB trained intelligence office and autocrat who’s been waging war against the entire West for the last fifteen years and most of the West has no frickin’ clue…
Dorothy A. Winsor
@TONYG: And Reagan is still an R hero. They talk about him in reverent tones. Maybe we can get Trump to slam him
Bupalos
I think this is historically problematic. Yes the effect of the exclusions for less bureaucratically formal kinds of work disproportionately affected black people because they were disproportionately in “under the table” employment arrangements because of apartheid. Yes there were no doubt lawmakers who already objected to the idea of these “socialist” programs that were happy that was the case. But it’s really a kind of revisionist backward-looking narrative to suggest that these exclusions were what made progressive action possible and opened the door to these initiatives. Just…. no. This idea that poor whites struggling out of the depression were like “I’d like some help, but first make sure black people don’t benefit” is just a howler.
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: I think we have to make the other side look silly and ridiculous. Real lameos vote GQP and stuff like that.
Worked for Voltaire.
Suzanne
@They Call Me Noni: I have been polled via text message before, multiple times.
Professor Bigfoot
Indeed; and we’ve watch conservatives set fire to the Constitution to make damned sure it never, ever happens again.
From gutting the VRA to gerrymandering to outright voter suppression, conservatives will destroy the Constitution they claim to revere to make damned sure that no other Negro (or woman or any damn thing else) get elected “over” them.
UncleEbeneezer
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Oh, I know. It’s just endlessly depressing/frustrating. But it’s why at the end of the day I blame The People for this shit far more than the GOP, MSM etc.
Professor Bigfoot
@Paul in KY: It’s the ONLY thing that will work.
Bullies cannot stand to be ridiculed… and this lot simply will not quit being ridiculous.
Matt McIrvin
@jlowe: The other thing is, as I was hinting above about lone-wolf shooters… those guys can’t and won’t ever be on OUR side, but shit goes down they may not be on the regime’s side either.
Some of the theatrical violence and property destruction during the George Floyd protests in 2020 were actually started by far-right, white-supremacist guys who decided to just be generally anti-authority. It wasn’t a calculated “false flag”, really; these guys just wanted to burn everything down and saw an opportunity.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: I read a really interesting article about how all the figures of Victorian culture (Dickens, George Eliot, etc.) invested in the East India Company and regarded India and the other colonies as places to send their less employable sons, who often died in short order in the new climate. Maybe it’s obvious, but actually reading the details was kind of shocking.
Paul in KY
@Suzanne: I think we have to show them in concise ways how TACO and the GQP plays them for suckers and rubes.
Maybe a ‘Project Veritas Style’ sting where we get one of their bigwigs to spill the beans on what idiots the average MAGA person is. Laughing and cackling about that. Then, of course, advertise the crap out of it.
Maybe someone could get Eric that way? He’s probably dumb enough to bloviate like that. Remember, he’s TACO’s Fredo.
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: When MAGA says they are ‘over and done’. They mean as much of it that they can get away with will hopefully be rolled back.
Paul in KY
@Gvg: ‘Weirdos getting in your business’ is great messaging, I think.
frosty
@schrodingers_cat: Back arrow, eh? That’s easier to remember than “Don’t forget to copy everything just in case this comment gets wiped by Redis.” Which I haven’t been able to remember.
It wiped an entire OTR segment, complete with 10 pictures. Twice in a row – I haven’t had the nerve to try again for a couple of weeks.
tobie
@Professor Bigfoot: Graham Platner in Maine and a new guy in the IL-08 house district rail against AIPAC in every fundraising message. C’mom…there are other lobbyists and big money groups that pick and choose candidates to support. But, you know, the Joos control everything.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: I am skeptical about the efficacy of ridicule. I remember someone interviewing the great Tom Lehrer about his retirement from satire, and he quoted Peter Cook as pointing out that the highly developed culture of satire and ridicule in Berlin cabarets had zero effect on the Nazis. Lehrer felt like beyond some point it was just a self-congratulatory circle-jerk, though not in those words.
But the fact does remain that they HATE being ridiculed.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: The Victorian Age was the peak of British power in India.
Geminid
@Another Scott: Turkiye is not a member of the EU and had its own refugee crisis to deal with; that being the 3.5+ million refugees from the Syrian civil war. Erdogan took a a liberal line on those refugees, insisting that Turkiye had a moral duty to shelter them. The opposition candidate tried to exploit this issue in the Presidential runoff in 2023, telling voters that the refugees took jobs and committed crime.
You could say Erdogan “shook down” the EU for financial assistance but I think that was justified. This was a Mediterranean Basin problem and the EU had a duty to step up in my opinian.
Your larger point, that the Russians subsidized smuggling networks and propagandized young African men to head for Europe was borne out by contemporary reporting when the refugee surge began earlier this decade. It’s a strategy of disruption.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
If that’s the only thing we do, then I agree that it’s not going to have an effect.
We still need to have a seriousness of purpose. Otherwise, we’re just treating fascists as entertainment.
schrodingers_cat
We just installed a new gas stove it has 5 burners. I am so excited.
Anyway
@They Call Me Noni: they don’t need to poll women wearing weighted vests just target their FB and YT and other online spaces. FWIW I think weighted vest wearers are susceptible to woo and supplements so probably lean R or don’t vote.
the above armchair analysis brought to you by someone that doesn’t work in electoral/ polling sectors …
piratedan
@Professor Bigfoot: well, its certainly an indication that white people can just be as shitty as anyone else given the proper trigger mechanisms.
I hate thinking about race (because I am white and its hard to defend the collective actions of people with a similar amount of melanin content) and want to continue to think about in terms of people, i.e. what would work for all. When I think about it, white people are extraordinarily even-handed in their racism in that we can exclude entire groups based on their melanin content or even if they just live across town or root for the wrong team. White peeps enjoy having life on the easiest setting, at least here in the States.
When I remember to think about who will benefit and at what cost, I tend to reflect on who is against it. If the people that have proven to be bad actors again and again are against it that’s a pretty good indication I should support it. The notion that the New Deal helped poor people was a big move, that Kennedy and Johnson cemented the notion that your race shouldn’t deny you access to those baseline benefits was a big ass deal.
The GOP hated both and had mostly marginalized the racsists because of the optics, they never stopped going after the underpinnings that the civil rights gains built upon with the New Deal. With this current crop of fascists, they think that if they can undo the New Deal foundations, the racist shit will follow as they can go back to making the poor their new indentured servants again, with most of those folks being people of color.
I believe (naively so perhaps) that there is enough for everyone, everyone should have access to healthcare, healthy food, clean water, breathable air, affordable housing and opportunity both in education and the workplace. I believe that life does not have to be a zero sum game. That a life well lived shouldn’t wholly be based on who has the most fucking toys and yet somehow, that outlook is seen as an outlier these days.
New Deal democrat
@Another Scott:
100% agree.
The post WW2 treaty on asylum needs to be re-thought to deal with this. I think part of that re-thinking has to be dusting off and updating the old International Law doctrine, the name of which I have forgotten, that essentially held that one country had the right to intervene, including militarily, in another country if that country’s situation was so chaotic that it was spilling over the border.
Baud
No one polls the pantless.
Bupalos
@TONYG: I think people forget that when the new deal programs came out, America was officially an apartheid state and black people were legally defined as a separate citizenry. They could have been excluded formally. Instead, informal mechanisms and existing inequalities were allowed to persist. This significantly trimmed the benefits that could have flowed to black people. However the fact that blacks were not formally excluded as a class, combined with their profoundly unequal status and greater suffering during the Great Depression in fact meant that the legislation helped black people overall, proportionately, more than it helped white people overall. To put it another way, it was more important to underprivileged minorities than to white people.
I think casting it in this revisionist way, that it was only it’s informally unequal application that made it popular or possible… I think that’s taking a very valid and important modern criticism of the age and using it to create a generally false historical narrative. Again, this was when America was still a formally apartheid state.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Hey may be that’s why I haven’t been polled. I wear dresses in the summer.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Setting trans people up as enemies to be feared is just so bizarre. The trans people I know are just living their lives.
Another Scott
@Professor Bigfoot: You’re right, but the history goes back much father than that. And repressing women was a big part as well.
(Repost) – NPR Throughline – Before Roe: The Physicians Crusade:
As always, there were lots of factors, but a big one behind movements like this seems to always be power and control and punching down.
Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@tobie: The horseshoe left and right are both ultimately a Russian op. But there are plenty of idiots who fall for it. Antisemitism, racism and misogyny are the great unifiers for the ends of the horseshoe.
Fair Economist
@schrodingers_cat:
That’s a different meaning of “liberal”. In the 19th century “liberal” meant a suite of positions that we would call more “libertarian” here – low taxes, minimal regulation, etc. TBF, It was a more justifiable position in an era of aristocracy and authoritarianism. In the US the meaning shifted in the early 20th century to what’s usually called “social democratic” in most of the world – universal franchise, strong labor rights, progressive taxation, anti-monopoly, etc.
In most of the world “liberal” still means more of what Mill meant – in most countries the “liberal” parties are conservative, like Australia.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: The mass media were for the most part superficially oppositional to Trump during his first term in 2017-2021, but they were treating his absurd behavior as hilarious entertainment, and there were all these articles during the lame-duck period (mostly before January 6, 2021) saying things like “come on, won’t you kind of miss him when he’s gone?”
Which was just a sign of journalists-as-entertainers looking out for their own interests and not being able to see beyond the bubble. I think they wanted him back in 2024 because, like too many Americans, they assumed Trump II would be in some sense a repeat of the aspects they liked of Trump I.
Suzanne
@Anyway: If this is true:
Then they are likely a Democratic-leaning constituency. Women under 50 went for Harris by 14 points. College-educated people went for Harris by 16 points.
Amongst white people….. white college grads voted for Harris by 12 points. The degree divide is one of those super-salient white-people divisions. It’s not caste or class, but it is a gulf. (White voters without a college degree voted for FFOTUS by 29 points.)
And there is a lot of research about how people who are heavily politically aware vote for Democrats by a lot. Even readers of the New York Times vote for Democrats by a lot.
Professor Bigfoot
@tobie: Yeah.
AIPAC, “Zionist,” it’s always about the Jews.
Of course, Jews are also the closest thing to an ally that Black people have had in his country ever, so that’s one more reason for them to be hated here.
Matt McIrvin
@Fair Economist: yes, and the horseshoe-left folk exploit that exact language gap to smear American liberals as something like crypto-libertarians.
It’s why the heavy use of “neoliberal” is aways a red flag to me despite the fact that that’s a legit term with a specific legit meaning. If people are complaining about “neoliberals” but somehow their neoliberals are only Democrats and not Republicans, something fishy is going on.
Anyway
@Fair Economist: yep, John Stuart Mills is a big hero to David Fn Brooks, for example. Not to any contemporary US liberal.
stacib
@schrodingers_cat: +1. I don’t ever “identify” as either progressive or liberal.
Another Scott
@schrodingers_cat: Sorry.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Best wishes,
Scott.
tam1MI
Her book has caused me to lose all respect for her. She will never get my vote ever again.
stacib
@Aziz, light!: Not just that, and I know it’s an unpopular opinion around here, but I’ve always believed that Harris is a loser as a presidential candidate. I tried really hard to buy in for 107 days, but I never thought she had a chance of winning even with democracy on the line.
Fair Economist
@Matt McIrvin:
Yep, it’s outrageous that people accuse Democrats of being “neoliberal”. Neo-liberal means supporting Reagan/Thatcher style policies of lowering taxes for the wealthy, deregulation, and privatization. Trump is neoliberal (as well as neofascist). No major Democratic elected official is.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: The Israeli government is genuinely committing war crimes in Gaza and AIPAC (and the Trump administration) are genuinely devoted to smearing any criticism of that as antisemitic. It’s dishonest behavior. A lot of the people I know who are calling it out are Jewish. As has been noted here, it sometimes feels like it’s politically harder to call it out in America than in Israel.
That said, there *has* been antisemitism bound up in the longterm opposition to this (I’ve seen that firsthand too) and I try to tread carefully.
hueyplong
I identify as anti-Republican, which ought to be consistent with everything posted here but somehow feels like it’s not.
Paul in KY
@piratedan: She could have done a bit more of that (separating concretely from Joe) during, you know, the general election.
WaterGirl
@Princess: Canadians welcome here. :-)
Anyway
@Another Scott: yep, Angela Merkel for example became hugely unpopular bcos of her stance on Syrian refugees. And RW candidates in .nl, France all over Europe actually took advantage of ME refugees. This was soon after the breakup of Yugoslavia and European countries took in a lot of Bosnian and other displaced people from that conflict. Dubya’s wars destabilized the ME and caused huge population displacement on top of usual people migrating for more opportunities.
SFAW
Does Grossman remember that it ended because a more powerful adversary (USA and the Allies), fighting for freedom etc. etc., beat it? Who is he thinking that WW2-era-USA proxy will be? China? Super.
Or is he assuming that non-MAGAts will rise up and defeat the threat to our nation? Yeah, I assume he’s thinking about elections; let’s see if we make it through the midterms unscathed.
Matt McIrvin
@Fair Economist: Sometimes it feels like they’re just rhetorically stuck in 1993. You could make a case that the Democratic Party of the Bill Clinton era was a neoliberal party. I don’t think it’s been one in the past 20 years.
Bupalos
@Matt McIrvin: Yup. Ronald Reagan, GHW Bush, Bill Clinton, Shrub, and Barack Obama all dealt primarily in neoliberal policy. They aren’t the same shade of neoliberal to be sure, the Dems tending more or less towards technocratic centrism, and the Republicans towards the populist revanchism that is now all that’s left with the neoliberalism withered away. But neoliberalism was a kind of overarching ethos across administrations.
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: well, I am a loud and proud liberal, and I think confining those words to be defined “white only” is a category mistake. There are aspects of all political theories across all demographic groups. We don’t need to box ourselves in more than we already are. The hill is already high enough.
tam1MI
I can attest to this. The Dem policy that caused the biggest explosions of fury from the moderate to conservative Democrats that I knew, wasn’t trans rights or BLM or #MeToo, but student loan forgiveness. They were LIVID over that, and it didn’t affect them directly at all because their student loans were paid off! But the thought that a younger person might get for free what they had to pay for, turn them purple-faced with anger.
Matt McIrvin
@Bupalos: The Obama administration was the start of movement away from it. But only the start; he was still working under some of the post-Reagan assumptions. Biden’s positions as President actually went a lot further.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: That’s how the Eloi and Morlocks split.
Matt McIrvin
@tam1MI: Yes, and at the same time, most of the people actually benefiting from it didn’t particularly give the Democrats credit (and when the Supreme Court slapped some of it down, they blamed Democrats for that).
satby
@schrodingers_cat: Don’t worry someone will be here shortly to explain how they were picked on for being redheaded
I feel very seen. But then redheads are hard to miss.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: 197?
schrodingers_cat
@Paul in KY: No idea. But there are many..
Another Scott
@Geminid: Re Erdogan and the EU, I was referring to things like this:
(Emphasis added.)
(2016 seems to have been around when the Syrian refugee crisis peaked.)
Yes, the EU should support refugees in Turkey (and elsewhere), but they shouldn’t be railroaded into letting Turkey in (or bending to Orban’s undemocratic demands) because they are supporting (or threatening to unleash) lots of refugees into the rest of Europe.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
satby
@Another Scott: GREAT comment. Thanks!
Matt McIrvin
@satby: I was mercilessly bullied in my adolescence for being a skinny, clumsy, bookish nerd, often violently, and I do see this phenomenon as connected to modern anti-intellectualism…
but I don’t ever pretend that this was more than a tiny fraction of the incessant pain and terror of being Black in America. I could go home from school, avoid certain folk and it would basically stop. And it stopped for me entirely after a few years, when I was no longer forced into very specific social circles. It wasn’t written on my skin.
schrodingers_cat
@satby: I like redheads! They are more striking than blondes. My mother had an aunt with auburn hair and hazel eyes. She must have been a beauty when she was young.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: Thanks for saying that.
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: IMO, that’s why they are so focused on removing talented comedians from their shows/platforms. Mr. Kimmel’s quip about “that’s how a 4 year old mourns his goldfish” was comedy gold and so so true. TACO must have had a meltdown when he heard that one!
satby
@Matt McIrvin: adjust your snark meter
Matt McIrvin
@satby: nah, I understood where you were coming from, probably should have followed up to a different comment.
(There are nerd subcultures that DO outright pretend that their plight is just like racism. And I think these people are very sheltered.)
jonas
Pretty much. Though it’s tough to admit, one reason a robust social safety net works in places like Norway or Japan or New Zealand is that, for the most part, there’s a race-based social contract that lets people believe “the system” helps everyone equally and “everyone” = people that also happen to look like them. Add a bunch of immigrants or refugees to the mix, though, and that starts to fray very quickly, which is why you’re seeing a resurgence of the far right in Europe today. It can work in more diverse places (e.g. Canada), but even there you’re starting to see cracks.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: Talking about the behavior of the State of Israel is not, in and of itself, antisemitic IMHO. As a sovereign nation they’re doing some pretty shitty shit right now; and even though it’s driven by Bibi’s need to stay out of court, the nation has to take responsibility— especially if it considers itself a democracy.
But I stand hard on the idea that regardless of that, it still needs to exist. It needs to address the criminality that has driven it to these extremes, just as the United States absolutely needs to… but that still doesn’t justify “river to the sea.”
schrodingers_cat
@jonas: NZ can be pretty racist. I know at least 2 families of Indian origin who left NZ for the US. One was originally from England and they were physicians and the other from Punjab, they owned their own garage and repairshop.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: Mass media didn’t exist in 1930s Germany the way it does now. That’s for good or ill.
Professor Bigfoot
@satby: I only mean that I don’t think of MYSELF as one of those identifiers because I perceive them to be about white people… I cosign with a whole lot of “liberalism,” but I am not convinced that “the full throated defense of human and civil rights” is a “liberal” thing; and as I’ve said before I have only one hard red line- the defense of the human rights of every human.
I don’t think all “liberals” agree with that; because it permits power to be held in non-white hands.
Aziz, light!
@Professor Bigfoot: My grandparents (aka Bubbie and Zayde) lived all their lives in the city of St. Louis among their many Black neighbors long after most of the whites had decamped for the white flight suburbs. I am white, but they were not. It never occurred to them to leave, although many other Jews did. St. Louis is no larger than it was 200 years ago because it never annexed any of its suburbs, so it remained primarily Black until white people returned with their money to gentrify the grand old pre-war architecture of the old neighborhoods. Jewish people old enough to remember the old days recall the contempt the whites had for them but their Black neighbors did not.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, someone benefitted from citizenship other than them.
White America in a nutshell, even when those others benefitting are their own children and grandchildren.
Paul in KY
@stacib: Not creating distance from Pres. Biden on issues she knew he was being creamed on and then just (meekly, IMO) not doing what it took to get on Rogan’s show (you are trying to become POTUS for God’s sake. Would LBJ or Truman just say oh well…) just leads me to believe she didn’t have the fire in the belly to make the hard decisions (throwing Joe under the bus as politically necessary, etc.) to give herself the maximum chance at defeating TACO.
I think you can look at TACO and just think ‘how can anyone vote for that?!?!’ and maybe get overconfident?
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: IMO, you just have to keep saying Likud Likud Likud Likud Israel Likud Party. That’s what I’m against. Not Jewish people or the state of Israel. Just those whacko, settler loving, Likud assholes.
JML
It’s disgusting and bigoted and immoral for the GOP to set up trans people as the enemy, as people to be feared, etc but it’s sadly not bizarre: it’s the classic GOP playbook. ID a group of people that is small and has little political clout. Do everything you can to make them confusing to your base and paint them as an existential threat to them, defining them as the Other. Lie your ass off and tell them that these people are the biggest threat to the base getting to live their lives the way they want (as opposed to billionaire oligarchs screwing them constantly). Rinse, repeat. It’s disgusting AF, but it’s worked for these swine for decades.
I hate the fact that some dems seem to believe that actively throwing trans people under the bus is a way to win. And sometimes I can’t tell if it’s just because they’re craven or because they share the bigotry.
But hells bells the number of people I know who think Minneapolis is a burned out hulk where gangs roam the street at all times and will murder you for your catalytic converter just because more black people live there than in their home towns tells me I shouldn’t be surprised at this sh!t.
Paul in KY
@tam1MI: I saw that too.
Geminid
@Another Scott: I do not see evidence of “railroading” there. Turkiye had little leverage at the time. And even if Turkiye were to meet the EU’s human rights and governance criteria, France and Germany would be reluctant to admit a new member of Turkiye’s size. It would be tied with Germany as the EU’s largest member.
Plus, Greece and Cyprus oppose membership while Turkiye occupies northen Cyprus, and that won’t change unless Cyprus accepts the Anan Plan for semi-autonomous cantons.
Right now Turkiye is trying to win better treatment under the Schengen visa framework, and more favorable trading terms. From what I can tell, Turks are ambivalent about EU membership. Their GDP growth is higher than the EUs now and it looks like that will continue, so EU membership is not as attractive as it was ten years ago.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: Well, jeez, you’re Indian. I thought you were supposed to know all that :-)
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: well, it’s a logical take for someone black to have.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I noticed that Rep. Morgan McGarvey (D-Louisville) announced recently that he would not accept AIPAC donations. I did not take that as a statement about Israel so much as an expression of resentment towards AIPAC’s heavy-handed tactics.
Personally, I think AIPAC made a big mistake a few years ago when they moved from being an advocacy and endorsement group to being a big fundraiser and donor. It’s like they started pursuing clout for its own sake, and the reaction to that is understandable.
Captain C
@Baud:
People never think the leopard will eat their faces, even when the leopard has stated outright that their faces are the tastiest.
Captain C
@Professor Bigfoot:
Despite the fact that they rarely (and if so reluctantly) vote for Democrats, never donate or volunteer, and spend most of their online time loudly criticising Democrats, often for spurious reasons. “Base” must mean something else to them.
satby
Slightly OT but germane to previous discussions AND a lot of online behavior, here’s a manipulation tactic that’s pervasive today. Everyone should be familiar with it.
Citizen Alan
My understanding is that, if current demographic trends do not change, by 2040 it will be virtually impossible for democrats to ever control the senate or the white house no matter what popular vote advantage, we have.
satby
@satby: edit window closed, so adding this excerpt here:
satby
@Citizen Alan: demographic trends or voter suppression trends?
tam1MI
@Citizen Alan: My understanding is that, if current demographic trends do not change, by 2040 it will be virtually impossible for democrats to ever control the senate or the white house no matter what popular vote advantage, we have.
The same thing was said about Republicans during Obama’s first term.
Geminid
@Citizen Alan: Are you sure? I heard this theory before about the Senate, but I did not see its proponents say exactly which states will become red that aren’t already. I thought that maybe they were extrapolating general demographic trends without regard to actual political units.
MagdaInBlack
@satby: Oh I’ve lived that and it sure does fuk with your head. And yes, thats exactly what trump and his ilk do.
Citizen Alan
My understanding is that, if current demographic trends do not change, by 2040 it will be virtually impossible for democrats to ever control the senate or the white house no matter what popular vote advantage we have.
I’ve always believed that if the straight white christians achieve their ultimate goal of getting rid of everyone who was not a straight white christian, the baptists and the catholics would immediately go to war with one another.
Ohio Mom
@schrodingers_cat: Ohio Family gets polled periodically, I assume it’s because we still have a landline (the wisdom of focusing your polling on people who still have landlines is another question).
Ohio Dad always hangs up immediately, I hang around to see if I can figure out who is paying for the poll. Nothing annoys me more than the standard question, “If the election was held today, would you vote for the Republican or Democrat candidate?” I hate that they leave the final “ic” off my party’s name.
I have mixed feelings about keeping the landline but it is bundled with the internet service and for now, it is cheaper to keep it. Proving that charges for internet services bear no relationship to any actual cost.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I think this is correct. I keep saying that the messaging doesn’t really matter for us. We are already onside and voting for Dems come he’ll or high water. Aiming messaging at us is not a good use of resources.
Citizen Alan
@Dorothy A. Winsor: More like a Republican myth. Reagan’s actual policies would get him labeled a RINO by the MAGA crowd.
Citizen Alan
@Anyway: Man, I had not thought about david brooks in years. But damned if he did not show up in, of all places, a stealth joke in the closing credits to Thunderbolts. The credits played out over a series of editorial headlines expressing disapproval of and disdain for the New Avengers in various media outlets. But right in the middle of it, we see “I kinda like ’em” followed by David Brooks’ byline.
Citizen Alan
@satby: both I suppose. The main issue of the article was that by 2040, the majority of the voting population would live in just fifteen states. And thus, collectively entitled to thirty out of one hundred senators and be chronically disadvantaged by the electoral college.
Citizen Alan
@Citizen Alan: I have no idea why the first part of that got double posted. Weird.
Matt McIrvin
@Paul in KY: It was starting to exist (radio, movies), and Hitler made effective use of it. Even got in one or two TV appearances, though that was crude experimental tech almost nobody could access.
But the mass access to an electronic soapbox wasn’t there.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: The House of Representatives was still a Democratic bulwark during the Reagan years and that made it hard for him to ram hard-right policy through. I think he’d have been much more hardcore had he been able to do it.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: We have the First Amendment BECAUSE the Founders were familiar with bloody European wars of religion in which all of the participants called themselves Christian.
Geminid
@Citizen Alan: I think you have to review the other 35 states one-by-one to evaluate the argument.
Baud
Hahahaha. (Short PDF)
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos: There were no Black people in the USA in the 1840s? Are you sure? Also, come on, man.
Anyway
Happy Cooking! Biden’s EPA was going to ban them- didya know? I heard that so often last year — don’t know where that came from.
Baud
@Anyway:
There were studies into the health effects of gas in the home.
Another Scott
@Baud: [ sincere golf clap ]
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Kent
If you read history it is striking how unprofessional and incompetent a lot of Nazis were also.
The bureaucratic professionalism came when the Nazis co-opted highly professional non-Nazi institutions like the military and bureaucracy.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
Pretty good documentary about TV in Nazi Germany. Includes some programming from that era that was recorded on film. As primitive as the tech was, they even managed to do live remote reporting.
iKropoclast
For me it’s less the compromises that get made, but the unwillingness to argue against the lies passed off as conventional wisdom.
Like I’m happy if they negotiate an immigration law authorizing some (effective) physical security measures in addition to additional processing resources and some regulatory flexibility for people with paperwork SNAFUs so they aren’t so monumentally disruptive.
But as long as Democrats keep tacitly conceding to the lie that we’re being invaded from our Southern border, the physical security will always take precedence. We can’t fix the other problems until we’ve ended this invasion.
You know, the actual demand for purity.
chemiclord
@MagdaInBlack:
It never does. BlueSky’s general reaction to political figures has EVERYTHING to do with who said it, and NOTHING to do with what was said.
Had Jasmine Crockett posted that, word for word, it would have been nothing but laughing emojis and “YAS QUEEN”s.
Paul in KY
@Baud: We went electric cause of that. For cooking, actually prefer gas.
chemiclord
@Professor Bigfoot:
Herrenvolk Socialism, kinda like the Nordic countries that leftists get all wet talking about.
chemiclord
@Bupalos:
Uh no. That was in fact EXPLICITLY what Southern Democrats demanded before they would sign on to the New Deal.
That is plain as day verifiable history, brother.
schrodingers_cat
@Paul in KY: I have wanted gas forever. Its much easier to cook with gas than electric. It was not easy, had to jump through hoops. But it is finally done! Yeah!
Sally
@Another Scott: I am so pleased to see someone else saying VVP is weaponising immigration to destabilise the West, Europe in particular. To me, this has been obvious for years and for the life of me, I can’t understand why everyone can’t see it. I mean, he was providing cars, and then when they were banned, bicycles, for ME and African migrants to get to the Baltics and Finland. It has been a much more effective tactic than anything else he has done. It is the engine powering the rise of the far right in Europe.
Thank you!
Sally
@Professor Bigfoot: QFT!
Sally
@Anyway: Yes, Dubya really set things up for VVP to take it further. Many, many of the world’s current catastrophes go back to that dumb banana.
Geminid
@Sally: This effort by Russia to precipitate an exodus of immigrants from North Africa to Europe got a lot of coverage on security news sites and some Middle East sites like Middle East Eye, which covers North Africa; also on news sites covering the Ukraine war because this was a Russian opp.
It did not get much attention on U.S. news sites though. But I have come to understand that these are very insular and I don’t look to them for news on anything outside of U.S. news and Western European stories.
Geminid
@Sally: Yeah, nations in the Middle East are still dealing with knock-on effects from Bush’s stupid Iraq invasioon.
Kayla Rudbek
@Matt McIrvin: yeah, SF has been described as a fantasy about power, as opposed to romance which is a fantasy about love, and too many of the tech dudebros have fed solely off SF for their inspiration (and usually completely missing the point of the stories to boot; not enough reading the humanities, fantasy, legends, and/or folklore).
Kayla Rudbek
@Professor Bigfoot: have you ever searched for the term “humans are space orcs” and the variations “space elves” or Humanity Fuck Yeah, etc? MediaChomp, Reddit, and Archive of Our Own have some fun stuff on those topics (MediaChomp is a great way to see what’s going on with Tumblr).
Kayla Rudbek
@Citizen Alan: Baptists versus the Pentecostals as well as the Catholics, and the socioeconomic ladder of white Episcopal/(Lutheran/Congregationalist)/Methodist/Baptist/Pentecostal/snake handlers will still be in force as well.
Kayla Rudbek
@Ohio Mom: okay, that is a major check, and thanks for the advice (I should be back on antidepressants again, the problem is finding anything without the goddamned lactose filler in the tablets)
Matt McIrvin
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: People generally want deregulation without the consequences of deregulation. It’d be nice if that were possible.