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I don't much think there's a lot worth saying that isn't boringly obvious, fer realz.
Last time, he was fooling around at random whim w/o any plan, and the worst harm he did -leaving out the Treason and felony murder on his way out- was arguably the unknowable large number of people he killed screwing around about Covid. I'm afraid I can't find an actual crime in that last, killing a few hundred thousand Americans, just incompetence. -Elok wasn't entirely wrong, last time, notwithstanding a few Hundred Thousand Needless Deaths and a few Treason Murders.
I recall specifically saying to Momma, when he returned from his first G7, that I was relieved he had not embarrassed our nation internationally near so much as I had feared.
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Well.
Project 2025 and all that since, four bitter years to prepare while somebody who wanted to pull on his big boy pants every morning and DO THE WORK actually acted as the actual POTUS, not just hogging the space so no one else could.
And there looks to be a plan this time. And we are utterly humiliated before the world right out of the gate. --And probably will still be for about a generation. And the tank parade on Dear Leader's birthday seems to have hurts his feelings with a poor crowd turnout, emblematic of the death of a million cuts to which Liberty is systematically being subjected.
We are in Hell. I don't wanna talk about it.
I must add, as both forum managment and thread-starter, that I'm not trying to discourage YOU from talking about it. I don't want to read about it, either, and you may not give The Pig oxygen in my house using its name -it has a childish need for attention that's at the heart of all problems related to it- but it would be stupid to start the latest politics thread and expect members to not point at the Elephant In The Room...
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-HowEVER, I DO want to talk about stuff where his name doesn't come up constantly...
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An observation: I've spent most of my time for the last week since I finally got my life back re-reading old threads, and seen a few times where I got attacked ad hominem for trying to do my job as host w/ accusations of suppressing dissenting views. Ho-freakin'-ho, considering one was from someone I'd encouraged to come in here because I disagreed with him. Another had led off kicking me in the jimmies for throwing around the "Nazi"-word so much. -Yeah; zero freakin' apology for being so angry at the police state turn this country took 24 years ago, and not being more tactful in its manifestation. ZERO.- (A third was someone being dim after I called them on manners.)
-The punchline? I've yet to be attacked in any of a number of excellent conversations about religion we host, and I've been attacked way more -and pretty much as passionately- for somewhat loudly preferring Star Trek to all things misusing the name since Wrath of Khan. WAY more. I don't participate much in my own damn Star Trek thread in my own damn forum any more, what with all the impostor shows under discussion. It's not a funny punchline.
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I'm pondering a post about North Carolina's new Governor, w/ much comparing/contrasting him w/ his two immediate predecessors. Still percolating, but probably soon...
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So about NC Governor Josh Stein:
Pat McCrory, two governors back, was a nationally famous reactionary for the transgender bathrooms ban - far less covered, even locally, was that he worked for Duke Energy -North Carolina's power monopoly, which owns pretty much every riverbank in the state, and pretty much pollutes and raises rates at will- for 28 years -I gather as a PR flack- prior to getting into politics, and it showed as governor. So, not only did he embarrass us before the world, he was always on the wrong side of one of our most major issues that nobody much talks about in proportion to how bad and important it is. We did NOT have a good time.
Towards the end of the trans bathrooms debacle, the State Attorney General at the time, Roy Cooper -who had never really been on my radar before- publicly announced that he wouldn't be defending the ban in court. I said "I didn't know he was running for governor." The next month, I think, he announced he was running for governor.
Well, Cooper whipped McCrory, and our Klan rally of a state legislature promptly demonstrated their commitment to democracy by stripping the office of Governor of half its powers. Did this stop Roy? Heck no; they couldn't strip Roy of his office's greatest power - leadership. He vetoed what he could, and spent a good deal of his two terms making speeches at personal appearances across the whole state.
Now, Roy has an amiable and mild presence -which helped get him on the short list as a possible running mate to cousin 'Mala's presidential campaign, as no threat to overshadow the top of the ticket- but the greatest mark of his success with the touring making speeches is that that got him on that short list, too, as he was effective and accomplished while put in a bad situation.
Also, Roy was term-limited. His successor as State Attorney General, Josh Stein, became his successor as Governor - beating "black NAZI" Mark Robinson, another state embarrassment. And our Klan rally of a state legislature promptly demonstrated their commitment to democracy by stripping the office of Governor of more if its powers. Did this stop Josh? HECK no; he seems to have learned at the feet of Ascended Master Cooper. He does nothing to embarrass us, and all he can to lead, notably spending a lot of time up in the mountains since Hellene -which, indeed, did us greek-style and hard. Leadership in an emergency is pretty freshman 101 politics stuff, but he must have made an A in the class. Good man.
Interestingly, there's a real pattern emerging. Go find out more about our new State Attorney General -and former congressman- Jeff Jackson. I predict you're going to hear about him in the future, possibly even in other countries. I like the cut of his jib, the job he's done so far, and he's working his way up the qualifications list fast. ;nod
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There's a thing about Pat McCrory, BTW, that reminds me of my high school principal, a world-class butthole I've never told any of the many stories about online, and barely referenced him sidewise even though he's the star of my best personally-witnessed Bad Journalism story. I should probably tell it sometime, but man, that was 43 years ago.
It's not hard to put a finger on it, either. That thing is, Trossie -my principal, and that's not a nickname- would always get carried away/go to any lengths to force his opinion on others, a very bad trait for a professional manager of teachers and students alike, both of whom he treated like dirt. He not a malicious person, IMO. He just didn't know he was doing it, and doing WAY too much, too hard.
I'm pretty sure that's McCrory all over for you. I imagine Pat's also really tall.
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Politics are like the weather. Unless you have a very privileged position in life, there is little you can do except adapt.
I mean, it's nice to know if a Category 5 hurricane is coming. Check the weather. But the real deal is not that the seas will rise and it will get 135 heat index to where you almost need an environmental suit. It's what YOU do.
We know very little about these people in real life. Most of us probably would not be allowed within 10 feet of these people unless it was an approved photo op. All we know is what media - who is all owned by the same 10-15 families- tells us. And what they do. And they are going to pass things for THEM, not us. But are glad to take credit if they do have something that helps us and them (lions share to them).
When I took a journalism class in the 1980s, they used to say "make an attention grabbing headline" and there were examples and deep dives into what attention grabbing is. But in that day and age, there was less media. Nowadays, it's say the most out there thing to pull yourself away from the noise even if you may or may not believe it yourself.
Just like former pro wrestler and MN Governor Jessie Ventura once said, "In front of the crowd, in front of TV, they pretend they hate each other. They pretend like they are big adversaries and that’s the sell job they do to us, the citizens. Just like pro wrestling, my job was to go out and piss everybody off so bad they would pay their hard earned money to go out and see me get my butt kicked. Well, the point is, we are all friends in the locker room. We all work together. It’s entertainment. We put on a show and this is no different. They are putting on a show, because behind the scenes, they are all friends. They go out to dinner together and cut their deals together. It’s a show."
Though that dude to make money started going off on conspiracy rabbit holes and hanging around people like Alex Jones and wring for Russia Today. Saying off the wall things for recognition himself. Just like he did a s a pro wrestler.
I personally take former MN Governor Jesse Ventura's take on it that it's all like professional wrestling.
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I gather, though, that what Jesse-The-Governor-Ventura observes is obsolete since the T-party became a thing, and increasingly so over time. He wasn't wrong about it being Wrestling at the time, for sure, a government tradition a lot older than him or us. That's an essential component of how they made deals and Got Things Done, and most of why the T-party knuckleheads most never accomplish anything but showing their butts.
I really like your first line; yeah, it's like the weather - you have to wait storms out and survive best you can.
I still insist on voting, but for decades have regarded over 90% of that activity as stubbornly insisting on registering my protest, not as anything effective.
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Please all notice the fresh edit at the bottom of the OP. I obviously can't expect no one to talk about The Pig in a politics thread. Didn't mean to give that impression.
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"The Beast" is barely 200kms away atm *shudder*.
If there was a missile attack on Den Hague now, I might be able to see the 'show' with the air defenses.
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Fun fact: there are two different wars going on for about two years now that both/either look promising for if you needed to escalate something into WWIII...
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Well, same could be said about the Korean -and Vietnam Wars.
Nothing of the sort happened.
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Well sure, but those were both proxy wars - inherently less potential for escalation, McArthur threatening to use the bomb in Korea notwithstanding.
One of these is a major nuclear power -led by something of a conscienceless butcher- getting a bad bloody nose on its own doorstep ... and the other is Israel in the middle east, always a match-fight in a gasoline tank, now w/ The Pig just actually stuck his hand in.
We should be crapping ourselves w/ terror over either, I submit. We really should.
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Things in the Middle East didn't turn nuclear with the Iran-Iraq War of the Eighties, nor with both Gulf Wars. And those were a lot closer to the oil sources, and at least one of them turned out to be genocidal as well.
As long as Putin is in power, there won't be a nuclear launch from Russia towards NATO territory. Not as long as NATO armies don't pour into Russia (the Kaliningrad exclave might be an exception). Not sure about an atomic bomb on Kiev though.
In short, its like in my youth: living with the fear of a nuclear holocaust, but that's about it.
Post-Putin, things are way too much in the air as who would become Putin's successor, and if Russia survives his death as a unified state.
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But Iran and Iraq didn't have nukes - Israel does, it's been said about all my life. If they found themselves loosing a war for once, do you trust them to be wise? I don't trust anyone that much, and they'd be right to think their -whole nation- lives are at stake. And Bibi's an evil SOB.
And dunno about Russia - they may well be set up for further splintering as you speculate, but I guess you could point at the nukes being settled out peacefully after the chaotic Soviet breakup years, and defend a little optimism? Crap precedent, really, even so - people weren't as scared as they should rationally have been, which is true of my entire lifetime and several years before.
We just can't live with being as scared as we ought to, and so don't think about it much.
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Is any of it really as scary as when the US was directly
at war with fighting China in 1950, only on third/forth parties' land and pretending that wasn't what was going on? Daddy's least favorite war story was about pulling rotten Chinese bodies out of a Korean river. (As technically a medic, Dr. Potter couldn't always get him out of being put on corpse details several times, and it scarred/scared him for life.)
Not much of a proxy war, really, and McArthur's big mouth in the mix. It's probably a Very Good Thing for the entire human race that the Chinese didn't have a nuclear option yet, but maybe precedent is still that if we got out of THAT mess alive, maybe I'm too pessimistic.
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But Iran and Iraq didn't have nukes - Israel does, it's been said about all my life.
At least one of those countries had the means to deliver and the possession of a biological WMD - remember the Scud attacks on Israel in 1991?
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At least one of those countries had the means to deliver and the possession of a biological WMD - remember the Scud attacks on Israel in 1991?
[shrugs] I remember - and if stuff like that was reliable, effective and not-so-prone to bite the perpetrator on the butt, they could have been doing it since Victorian times...
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This ends up belonging here...
I've been on Medicaid for about a year-and-a-half.
Yeah; I'm pretty sure I'm screwed in the coming months -probably before my next appointment in five months- and will have to go back to the charity I'd used since I got back to America. -It's a badly-run operation, frankly, but not that much difference in quality of care, just more bureaucratic overhead/disrespectful waste-of-my-time.
You know, this is a thing where Pig and the T-party directly hurt me, if it turns out that way - and I have to pray they don't undermine my fall-back medical charity, too, which does depend on gov'ment subsidies, partly.
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A few words on Biden's Brain are in order.
That crap goes back 13 years or so ago, during his first successful run for President - I said on these boards at the time that he held up his end of a debate with Bernie Sanders -another man already inarguably too old even back then, but one no one has ever accused of senility- without getting humiliated. I ain't senile, but I doubt I could hang with Bernie in a debate. Case closed on a mountain of loose talk everywhere at the time. People's lack of memory in politics makes my brain want to explode - it just wasn't true, and it was, indeed, everywhere.
So maybe I'm just having observer bias on what went down last year - I'll never believe that boy after he Cried Wolf that time. But Nancy Pelosi and that Barely Democrats crowd behind the turmoil and pushing Joe out have proven themselves collaborators and Political Idiots a million times over for about 24 years straight. It's way past time for what's left of them to retire, joining Joe and Bakrama and the Clintons, especially Mrs. Pelosi. I simply never saw the evidence that Joe was out of it, more, an old man who had some days better than others, as one does. ;nod
Now, Cousin 'Mala -Harris is my maternal family name, and "Claimin' Kin" is a 'Southern' thing- and what she maybe did wrong is a whole 'nother subject. I was frequently like Fritz Mondale in 1988, asking "Where's the Beef?"...
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A few words on Biden's Brain are in order.
That crap goes back 13 years or so ago, during his first successful run for President - I said on these boards at the time that he held up his end of a debate with Bernie Sanders -another man already inarguably too old even back then, but one no one has ever accused of senility- without getting humiliated. I ain't senile, but I doubt I could hang with Bernie in a debate. Case closed on a mountain of loose talk everywhere at the time. People's lack of memory in politics makes my brain want to explode - it just wasn't true, and it was, indeed, everywhere.
So maybe I'm just having observer bias on what went down last year - I'll never believe that boy after he Cried Wolf that time. But Nancy Pelosi and that Barely Democrats crowd behind the turmoil and pushing Joe out have proven themselves collaborators and Political Idiots a million times over for about 24 years straight. It's way past time for what's left of them to retire, joining Joe and Bakrama and the Clintons, especially Mrs. Pelosi. I simply never saw the evidence that Joe was out of it, more, an old man who had some days better than others, as one does. ;nod
Now, Cousin 'Mala -Harris is my maternal family name, and "Claimin' Kin" is a 'Southern' thing- and what she maybe did wrong is a whole 'nother subject. I was frequently like Fritz Mondale in 1988, asking "Where's the Beef?"...
My take on it is this:
Biden was an experienced statesmen and well liked and probably was the only one who could unify the democrats at the time versus DJT. I mean, who else could? Warren, no one took seriously. Harris had issues but was a political compromise and everybody thogh she'd just get VP and an expanded wikipedia page then retire. And hell no if they'd let Sanders or Yang or Williamson anywhere near the presidency, They buried them.
Biden originally wanted just to send DJT to jail, endless legal battles, and retirement for things DJT legit did that were shady. Wash his hands, everyone retires. After all, DJT IS a Hollywood character actor AND a big city and luxury property landlord with mob ties. Of course, dude's banging supermodel pron stars. But Biden's condition was getting harder to hide and DJT did not just go away. Yes, an amendment lets you remove incapable presidents due to health, but that looks bad and opposing propaganda would not spin it as an elder statesman gained a bad condition and we should thank him and wish him luck but the Dems are "hiding" stuff and incompetent.
When Biden's condition was getting bad, bad they just anointed Harris without taking this into Convention or letting the people or party decide. And while Hariss WAS entitled to run by right as a sitting vice president, it was not the best choice. Even in the 20 primary, Harris was never popular. She had a reputation from her years in CA as locking people up right and left for weed in a time when weed legalization was insanely popular. Really destroyed lives. Plus the avoidance. She would not come on any show to prove her case unless it was heavily curated and certain questions that apply to the working man like housing, drug issues, medicaid for all, etc were forbidden. But she did hit high on ID POL which brings engagement, but mostly divisive rage and people were tired of it.
In effect, handing this to DJT and his alliance.
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My take is largely that yours is factually challenged in too many places - past my bedtime already, but I'll surely have time to get into a counternarrative tomorrow when I'm woke up good and get bored, no worry. I'm no news/politics wonk, haven't been -out of disgust- for 25 years; maybe I'm wrong.
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Turns out we got us a tech volunteer to help t_ras - another busy morning multitasking w/ keeping different people in the loop. I'll get back to this when I can...
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Prospects not looking like soon. Busy with my job here -getting moved and tech stable has to come first of all- and I'm tired.
Green, pal, take another turn and save me some quibbling by re-reading and thinking about my post on Senile Joe - and try to actually prove your case for he was senile in office. Relate facts, informing your opinion; I'll tend to believe facts. It'll save time, as that's much of what I want to argue in your last.
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for somewhat loudly preferring Star Trek to all things misusing the name since Wrath of Khan. WAY more. I don't participate much in my own damn Star Trek thread in my own damn forum any more, what with all the impostor shows under discussion. It's not a funny punchline.
Star Trek... people can get wound up about it. I seem to remember some forum debate I had with someone about Star Wars, quite awhile ago, which pretty much stopped me from participating further in the Rec Commons. Think it was Star Wars. I'm much more of a Trekkie than whatever people call Star Warsers. And I'm a nominal Whovian. But I'm sure I've watched A New Hope the requisite 50 times in my life or something, before that was trivially easy to do. I still quote lines occasionally, but I'm in danger of getting them slightly wrong. I see the world slightly through that lens, as geeks of my age typically would.
The Orville was better Trek then Trek for awhile recently. Not sure what's going on now. I managed to swallow all of Discovery because it finally came on one of the cable streams at no additional cost. Trek hasn't done anything I'm willing to go behind a paywall for. Neither has Star Wars.
Wouldn't mind some kind of Stargate reboot. Yet another franchise where occasionally, you'll meet people that are getting pretty wound up about it. At least there's commonality of material though. Star Trek has become so broad in treatment, in all its various incarnations, that Trekkies of one generation or another cannot necessarily recognize each other as belonging to the same community. I ditched r/StarTrek quite some time ago on that basis. Too much noise. Too many people who like things that "aren't Trek".
I've seen documentaries on the origin and trajectory of Trek and it's pretty remarkable. I didn't previously realize that Lucille Ball was a big reason it went anywhere.
Yeah, so, verbal violence about Trek. I'm not exactly surprised.
One can only ask, what is the thing, and what underlies the thing.
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That damn Star Trek thread IS on the first page in here. :)
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It appears on a page 2 for me. I notice a fair number of topics that have had new posts since the June revival, so perhaps it's been bumped down. Not the Trek thread though. The ending of the thread seems innocuous enough. I don't think I'll be digging through 125 pages to find what any hubbub was about.
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Dunno what to say here; I was pretty convinced by that debate performance that Biden was simply not competent to be president anymore. Of course the other fellow was unfit to be president any number of ways, but it remains a matter of concern that they concealed, for an unknown but apparently substantial period of time, that the president sometimes descended into utter senility. Some unknowable percentage of decisions from the White House were made not by the elected president but by unidentified minders nudging him along. That this was hushed up to such an extent was a serious unforced error that definitely contributed to [Sleezebag]'s return. Yes, [Sleezebag] is awful, but he passed the very low bar of being able to complete comprehensible, if rambling, ugly, and stupid, sentences. He never said we have to beat Medicare.
As for me, I remain an atypical libertarian. We are spending money that does not exist and a reckoning will inevitably come due and when it does it will be ugly. Neither party is serious about addressing this--the Democrats are presently somewhat less spendthrift but that doesn't really count for much with me--nor are they interested in serious and comprehensive defense of civil liberties. Each party is in hock to illiberal radicals, which it refuses to condemn because it needs their help against the other side's illiberal radicals, who are ostensibly much worse. This is not new. I hate them both and generally turn my eyes away from the problem because I have no power to fix it. I wrote in Justin Amash in the last election.
EDIT: I sort of wish Elon Musk well in the VERY narrow context of his America Party venture. It will fail, because he is an arrogant nerd who is very good at a very particular kind of leadership but sucks at politics, and also probably whacked out on ketamine. But he is at least trying, ineffectually, to draw attention to the problem before we either default on our debt, or hyperinflate and THEN default on our debt.
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Agreed about both parties. DO BETTER.
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To be clear - Not, BTW, any equivalency. The Rebublikkkans and the opposition are NOT at all equivalent in their failure of the electorate. Just, the dems do also suck, and they fail to oppose sufficiently in the Face Of Evil. ;nod
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Now, Biden sucked v. Pig --- but any ordinary wonky adult ought to destroy The Pig in debate like Dr. Warren kneecapped Bloomberg. For some reason -people are stupid?- professional politicians cannot do it - Joe is hardly the first.
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Also on Joe - abruptly late last year, I finally got me some Medicaid - nothing we'd done led to that, I think. We just got a letter out of the blue.
I don't know how Joe did it, but Joe did it. -Not Bakrama, not Mrs. Clinton. Joe Biden.
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Also on Joe - abruptly late last year, I finally got me some Medicaid - nothing we'd done led to that, I think. We just got a letter out of the blue.
I don't know how Joe did it, but Joe did it. -Not Bakrama, not Mrs. Clinton. Joe Biden.
We have a saying here, the public gets what it wants or needs in an election year. Maybe someone, somewhere, was trying to sway your vote.
In my country its most visible one year-6 months before a community council election: lots of public road infrastructure works.
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It was post-election, but that might just be blown timing...
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Warren, no one took seriously.
Dr. Warren kneecapped Bloomberg.
You SHOULD take Professor Warren seriously, Green. Earlier that day, I'd seen one of the Liberals Screaming On Twitter comment that if Bloomberg won the debate, we'd probably seen our last President who wasn't a billionaire. -Chilling; I thought the point had weight.
She, as Jesse-The-Governor Ventura would probably put it, Ended His Career. That's her signature piece, BTW, loudly and angrily slapping around Rich and Powerful Bossmen -for their proven crimes- in public - WELL. We ALL owe her forever for Bloomberg alone.
Selah-amen.
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Also on Joe - abruptly late last year, I finally got me some Medicaid - nothing we'd done led to that, I think. We just got a letter out of the blue.
I don't know how Joe did it, but Joe did it. -Not Bakrama, not Mrs. Clinton. Joe Biden.
Without knowing more I couldn't say, and certainly I'm no expert, but isn't Medicaid administered at the state level, with only broad guidelines at the federal level? I would be predisposed to credit some change in the local NC bureaucracy first.
Also, no, sorry, not taking Liz "Sandwich shop monopoly" Warren seriously. Ain't gonna do it.
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I'll be ruder than I would to someone I didn't love - does that Kool aide taste good?
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I mean, googling that gives me an article by the Cato Institute on the first page, which is discredited by being the Cato Institute. If they declared for chocolate ice cream and Baby Jesus in a Manger, I'd consider switching to vanilla and joining the Church of Satan.
Monopolies are BAD, son, and our government has failed us on fighting them your whole life.
Posted courtesy of a Microsoft computer.
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You realize that, if Subway or any other chain acquired 100% market share for fast-food sub joints and used it to do unspecified terrible things--and for whatever reason nobody was able to break into the niche--Americans would be faced with the cruel inconvenience of buying bread, deli meat, and condiments, and putting them together themselves? I mean, I can't picture what they would do with their terrible power; if they raised prices enough people would just buy their cold cuts premade from Wal-Mart, or get burgers, or something. Subway, Jimmy Johns et al just don't have the leverage to be monsters, but she felt compelled to have the acquisition blocked anyway. Liz Warren, AFAICT, runs on a set of simplistic assumptions, such as "big business is inherently bad," and follows them to absurd conclusions.
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Elizabeth Warren humiliates criminal bossmen, which is priceless, and not enough of that action going around.
-Still posted from a machine w/ operating system forced on me, and not for free.
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Forced on you? How? I have Windows on this laptop, because it came with the device five or so years ago. I assume I technically paid for it in the sense that it was bundled in the cost of the laptop, but it keeps trying to update to Windows 11 without charging me anything--I had to stop it by looking up how to disable the updater. Microsoft has been continually updating security holes in the OS the whole time, gratis, and I will eventually have to update it when it stops supporting Windows 10 in ... soon. Or, if I really disliked Windows, nothing is stopping me from getting a different OS for this device, that I know of. They just don't annoy me enough to be worth the hassle that would be.
Thought this over on my morning walk, and really MS is a very poor example of an abusive monopoly. I mean, they used to sort of be a monopoly when I was in high school and dial-up internet was huge. Microsoft was everywhere in tech, thanks to insidious practices such as ... okay, I can't remember what they did besides give lots of computers to schools so everybody grew up using Microsoft stuff. Even then, Mac and Linux were always an option, but the former was for artsy nerds with too much money and the latter was for plain old nerd nerds with too much free time. But then, virtually every time a challenger appeared in a new sector of the tech industry, MS lost ground.
--The partial exception: console games. They saw Nintendo, Sony, and (sort of) Sega making big bucks with game platforms, so they created the XBox. And it did okay. It might have helped that (I noted this at the time) the commercials did not mention it was a Microsoft product. Didn't really dominate the market at any point, but did okay, and you can still buy an XBox Something (is it the "XBbox One" now?) if you don't want a PS5 or a Switch. My uninformed opinion (last console I owned was a refurbed Gamecube c. 2010) is that XBox appears from a distance to be something of an also-ran. When I hear people excited about a new game, it usually seems to be on one of the other two. And the XBox is pretty much Microsoft's success story in terms of new market entry in the current millennium.
-Everybody used to use Internet Explorer. Then Firefox came along, followed by Chrome, Brave, and a bunch of other browsers. Internet Explorer doesn't even exist anymore, now it's called "Microsoft Edge," and nobody uses that either. When I downloaded Firefox to this laptop, the OS actually said, "hey, you already have Edge, the coolest and best browser ever!" and I laughed and continued using Firefox. Like millions of other people.
--A scrappy start-up named Google shook up the late nineties with a search engine that actually worked. Microsoft said, "who, there! We own all this online stuff!" and launched a competitor named Bing. Do you use Bing? No, you do not. Had you thought of Bing in the past six months, prior to my mentioning it just now? Probably not. Does Bing still exist? I'm not sure.
--Everybody used Microsoft Office. Until they didn't. Personally, I grew up using Corel WordPerfect, and kept using it because Word had an annoying tendency to try to guess what you wanted and do something stupid to your formatting. I now use LibreOffice, which is a mutated open-source descendant of WordPerfect. Nobody has ever tried to stop me from using it. Many others prefer Google Docs.
--IDK if anybody uses Outlook except for work. I have free yahoo e-mail. Others have gmail. I interact with Outlook roughly once or twice a workday to see if the CEO is talking about giving us another raise or something. There's two versions of Outlook on our work computers, and generally when one is working to access e-mail the other isn't. Not sure why, or if this is somehow MS's fault or if we just have bad sysadmin or what. My work computer also has Microsoft Teams. I don't know what that does, it just pops up when I login sometimes, and I have to X it out to get it out of my way, and sometimes people on Facebook make fun of it.
--EDIT: I seem to recall they briefly tried to compete with the ipod, and it was some kind of hilarious failure? Was it called Zune? That sounds right.
--I don't remember if MS even tried to compete on smartphones, but if so they got whooped there too. Android is Google and their big competitor is Apple. They have no presence on social media that I know of; do they own anything like Instagram? Or Amazon?
Basically, AFAICT, in the past twenty-five years Microsoft has gone from an industry-dominating titan to a sort of boring, stodgy, but respectable utility company that makes most of its money selling group licenses to corporations. There's a competitor, frequently an open-source competitor or two, for everything it does or makes. People are starting to worry about Google being too powerful instead, and now I mostly search with DuckDuckGo unless I really really need the superior results Google provides. Though lately AI seems to be infecting everybody's search results with useless crap, so which engine you use is much less important, but I digress.
The closest I can recall to Microsoft abusing its purported monopoly power over me is when I bought this laptop. It came with some lame version of Windows that wouldn't let you download non-Microsoft software for "safety" reasons. I had not known this when I bought it, and got very angry for about an hour. Then I looked around online and found you could permanently disable the "safety" feature by digging in some menu. I did this. It begged me not to, but I did it anyway, and they didn't try to stop me further. No issues since.
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...Microsoft has famously faced multiple antitrust investigations and judgments in the US and EU (and probably other places) over the last ~30 years. There's a reason we didn't see successful competing web browsers until the late 2000s, for example.
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Thanks, Lori.
It was basically no choice when my old machine died last fall - absolutely everything in my price range and so on was W11. I could do like you mention, Elok, but don't want to and shouldn't have to. Yes, Microsoft is basically IBM these days, but still a virtual monopoly - that's why lefties have a strong hatred of Walmart, too, that you may not find rational, but should.
Monopolies are BAD, m'kay?
-This is such a self-evident thing that I have trouble even putting it into words. Warren is about the only effective monopoly fighter in the government -along w/ Bernie- that I know of off the top of my head. The reactionaries HATE her for that.
I only did the most cursory research into this, admittedly, it being a new one by me. It's not like she called for ABOLISHING Subway that I saw, just a look into it by the appropriate authorities. Your remarks on her -including the disrespectful "Liz"- look like reactionary talking points, and I wouldn't respect you so if you did that much. Please do not follow up calling her "Pocahontas", thanks.
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I mean, I haven't done tons of research, obviously, since I spent most of the late nineties and early aughts thinking about sex. I'm just saying that Microsoft, far from being a dominating monopoly, has spent the last generation losing nearly every battle it fought, and not apparently due to state action but from market forces. A quick lookup: at stake in one major case was that MS bundled Internet Explorer with Windows. It still bundles Edge with Windows. Nobody cares. We use Edge to download a browser we actually want. Apparently it also attempted to block third-party software installation on Windows, which sounds like it would have bit them in the arse pretty hard even without federal intervention (obviously that's a counterfactual so nobody knows). I would further argue that MS's reputation for domineering was a big factor in its decline/failure to expand in new markets. Everybody despised them, back in the day. I remember writing a college paper half-seriously comparing Bill Gates to Genghis Khan ... who the hell wanted a Zune? Who's going to try Bing?
Wal-Mart is not a monopoly in my neck of the woods, can't speak to yours. There's an Aldi right down the street which offers comparable prices but inferior selection; it's easier to get in and out of so I go there when I don't want to bother with Wal-Mart because I only want a couple of things. If I were feeling poorer than I am, there's also Grocery Outlet (which frankly scares me), and the DG Market down the street (a Dollar General project which seems to exist to milk EBT, been in there once). Also down the street from me--both are closer than the nearest Wal-Mart--is a Publix. Publix is employee-owned and rather froo-froo, don't know if their reach extends up to NC but they're a Southern institution. I go there only when I want something fancy, because that's their weird market niche and most of their stuff is simply too expensive. I wish we had a Piggly-Wiggly (also iconic!) in this city, but sadly we don't. The P-W where I went to RT school was great; they bought up miscuts from butcher schools and sold them cheap.
A third Southern institution is Winn-Dixie, but they were recently bought out by Aldi and it's unclear what Aldi is going to do with them. I greeted this as good news, because I spent half my pharmacy years working for Winn-Dixie and frankly they were a grocery chain struggling to find a reason to exist. Basically they weren't as nice as Publix or as crappy as Wal-Mart so if you didn't want to hang out with the grubby peons at the latter but didn't feel rich enough for the former, you went to Winn-Dixie. Their being bought out will allow a bunch of WD locations to be converted to Aldis. If Aldi were bigger, I'm sure somebody would be talking about blocking the merger.
Outside my area, I understand Wal-Mart's biggest competitor is Target, which follows a similar business model. Progressives like Liz Warren don't, as far as I know, hate Target. I don't know if we have one in this city but if they do it's nowhere near me--yep, looked it up, they're in nicer parts of town. I never went to Target in other cities because they were too bloody pricey and offered hoity-toity wares I wasn't interested in. I go to Wal-Mart regularly, and while I'm there I see a lot of fairly obviously poor people there, shopping with me, because Wal-Mart works aggressively to control costs to maintain market share. Part of that is controlling labor costs, which is part of why progressives don't like them. Those same progressives, if they had their druthers, would rather have it so that all grocery stores must offer very good wages (for largely unskilled labor), and allow unions, and follow XYZ environmental regulations, and in general do all these expensive things that drive up prices and are worse for actual consumers (I don't know if that's what Target does). Meh. I don't think Wal-Mart are heroes, but capitalism doesn't create heroes. It just forces selfish people to compete so their selfishness works out better for everyone in the long run. I like capitalism. It's worked out fine for me and a lot of other people. I don't think the market should be allowed to decide everything, but when it works, it works pretty well.
I mentioned the sandwich shop thing because it was the last thing I recalled hearing about Liz Warren, and it was ridiculous. She actually used the words "sandwich shop monopoly," like this is something the Federal government needs to be concerned with. I would never call her Pocahontas, that's not even clever. My impression of her is of a rather tedious Don Quixote who thinks the government needs to protect everyone from everything all the time. But our government is going bankrupt and frankly can't afford to continue most of the services it currently offers.
I am aware that "everyone knows" monopolies are bad, but aside from the fact that you haven't cited an actual monopoly yet, that's one of the things everyone knows because they learned it in history class, and when I ask them they struggle to mention real-world examples. Everybody just remembers some stuff about Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Teddy Roosevelt. I was actually there myself, years ago. I posted this whole theory about how, from an individual business's perspective, the end-goal of competition is to defeat the rest so it doesn't have to cut prices or do R&D anymore. Somebody asked me if I could cite an example of this actually happening. I couldn't. I changed my mind. Without government collusion, it's very hard for a company to get so big they can actually abuse their customers. It's much easier for the government to get so big it can abuse its citizens. Not that I expect Warren and Sanders to do that. Mostly they just waste everyone's time.
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You don't understand a thing I've said, clearly. That there's pure motivated reasoning.
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Well, what are you saying? What's a "virtual" monopoly? MS has the default OS for most large private-consumer computing devices (desktops/laptops), plus corporate networks and thin clients and all that. There are, and always have been, other options, including stable Linux builds. I just looked it up, and yes, I could download an Android OS for this laptop if I wanted to. Most people, including me, don't bother with this stuff because (it seems to me) MS is struggling mightily not to be quite so annoying that they lose that too. They were on top of the world once; now they have one niche of software, and much larger companies (like Google and Amazon, which both started quite small when MS was dominant) are king in their place.
What makes something a "virtual monopoly"? Is it size alone? Wal-Mart is big, no question, but it has plenty of competitors even in my one not-that-metropolitan city, and I didn't mention Amazon (with whom it is also attempting to compete, in a totally different way) in my last post. Monopoly, to me, summons up an image of a bloated, lazy company taking its customers for granted. Wal-Mart doesn't strike me as complacent. They're perpetually changing up inventory and trying new approaches. In the past few years I've noticed a growing trend towards grocery delivery, and I share the aisles with Wal-Mart employees loading up giant carts full of bins for delivery. Not something I want myself, but it doesn't get in my way. Why do I need protection from Wal-Mart?
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Because 40 years ago, you could buy A LOT of batteries there for four dollars, to use an old King of the Hill joke. Now K-Mart's gone, Sky City is gone, local non-chain competition anywhere you'd remember is long gone. AND now you can't buy all that many batteries at Wallmart for whatever the current equivalent price is to four dollars.
Target continues to exist, frankly, by not being Wallmart, not because Target is much good.
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When it comes to things that aren't groceries, Wal-Mart has even stronger competition, since they aren't bound by refrigeration and such. Dollar General is everywhere if you still need it quick. Amazon will ship you batteries from anywhere, at bulk rates. In fact, I think we bulk-order batteries for various boy gadgets from Amazon. Out of curiosity, I looked it up, and eight Great Value AA batteries are $3.77 on Walmart.com. Haven't looked into S&H. Skimming Amazon, you can get some no-name brand of AAs, 24-pack for less than $8, eligible for free shipping at variable times depending on member status and total order. That strikes me as a fair amount of batteries! How many batteries would you expect for this price, given inflation?
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No idea, and I wasn't keeping records of it back in the 80s - just, it weren't such a great deal anymore by the turn of the century. I know that sounds weak and purely intuitive, but I'm not invested in this enough to do homework - guess you had to be there...
That's how monopolies work, though, and why they're bad.
Now, let me point out that you're fighting on the hill of Microsoft is not a monopoly, Walmart is not a monopoly - that a bad hill, my man. It's built out of landmines, not dirt and rocks.
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I legit don't know what you mean by the hill being made of landmines. They're your examples, and I've argued this whole time that both of them face robust competition (I'd say Wal-Mart more so, but Microsoft is fighting over a much smaller bone than Wal-Mart these days). The example of Microsoft is more illustrative precisely because most of today's tech giants were a couple of nerds in a garage when Gates was king--if they even existed yet. This appears to be a remarkably competitive era; how much of that can be credited to government intervention? And hasn't Senator Warren been complaining about the new giants just as much as people used to complain about Microsoft, even though (ISTM) all they did was fight their way to top of their respective hills in the face of stiff opposition?
I'd say that Amazon is much closer to a real monopoly in the US, in the sense that it is THE big online retailer. But it's THE big online retailer because it's very hard to compete with on price and service! I tried a couple of inflation calculators and they seem to agree that four bucks in '85 is about twelve now. First hit on Amazon for AA batteries is a $15 48-pack from Amazon Basics. I have no idea how much the cost of batteries has changed relative to anything else, but thirty-one cents a battery sounds fairly cheap. Could four bucks buy roughly thirty-nine batteries forty years ago? Beats me.
In the event that Amazon starts abusing its position by offering crummier deals and assuming people won't jump ship to Walmart.com, or ebay if that still exists, or whoever, I expect they will get a rude awakening. And they will deserve it. And five, ten, or fifteen years later people will be arguing that NewOnlineBehemoth is too big.
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... And five, ten, or fifteen years later people will be arguing that NewOnlineBehemoth is too big.
By then they'll call it Quantum Behemoths'. ;cute
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Among other things, the judgment against Microsoft in the Internet Explorer case forced them to open up the Windows APIs to third-party developers, which made it much, much easier for other companies to build and release powerful, competitive browsers on Windows. Again, there's a reason Microsoft's dominance in the browser market didn't come down until after that decision. You think it was just the natural cycle of businesses outcompeting each other, but only because you weren't paying attention; it was state action.
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So they weren't making it possible for third parties to develop browsers for their platform. That, in itself, strikes me as a pretty dumb idea. In a world where they were not so compelled, would we all be making do with internet explorer until such time as they changed their minds, or made IE better? Or would the obvious growing importance of the internet lead businesses and private consumers alike to simply use alternative OSes that weren't run by morons forcing us to use bad proprietary software? We can't know for sure, obviously, but I suspect this would have simply led to the decline of Windows.
EDIT: My point here is that it's not clear that state involvement was necessary to improve the common weal. I can see no obvious, principled reason why MS was not free to insist on allowing only its own, crappy, sluggish browser to interface with their OS. I remember Gates's bizarre attitude to the internet, and that one version of Windows where, for reasons unknown, Internet Explorer replaced File Explorer so you used IE to look at your own stuff. It was his right to have a counterproductive and proprietary attitude towards internet use. Just as it would have been within, say, Apple's rights to spend a couple of years developing a new, cool OS for non-Macs that embraces a new, fun, collaborative approach to internet use.
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For that matter, they FORCED me to drop crappy IE, when the time came - they made it stop working at all. That's playing Monopoly for you. Force.
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Well, you really have me at a disadvantage there, since I didn't even notice when IE disappeared in favor of Edge. Is this like old versions of Windows, where they just stopped supporting it, or what? Were you not allowed (say, by an employer) to use a browser that the other browsers didn't make fun of? My only memory of IE is that everything took twice or three times as long as it did on Firefox, even on the same connection. Was there a particular reason you wanted to keep using IE?
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Nerd conservatism.
Really. I don't like change, and I'm not going to even say screw all browser snobs forever this time. Suddenly, the only way I could even open it was it was set as the default for clicking on .gif files. Something must have downloaded w/ a Windows update. I can't believe there was a good reason to not even LET me wallow in the suck... Had to just force me.
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It was his right to have a counterproductive and proprietary attitude towards internet use.
This is the key here. You have a moral opposition to the kind of market interference antitrust policies produce, and you use that moral opposition + shallow research to confirm your suspicions + long, reasonable-sounding paragraphs to backfill your rationalizations for opposing any particular action against monopolistic behavior.
You can have an ideological allegiance to the free market on moral grounds without also needing to believe it is functionally superior in all (or some specific subset of) relevant situations. Requiring that concordance forces you to generate ad hoc rationalizations that you're able to convince yourself are sufficient because you're such a thoughtful, reasonable, moderate guy.
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I'm tagging out in favor of Lori.
MSEdge didn't hit the ground running gracefully, BTW.
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I have come to dislike state interference precisely because, in my experience, it works out poorly. I'm not married to it or averse to all state participation/interference in the economy, but in this particular case ... okay, can we start by drawing some limits around the concept of monopoly here? We've called Wal-Mart a monopoly, when it plainly competes against multiple rivals in various subsets of the retail market, and Microsoft a monopoly, when it never really was (Macintosh was always an option) and certainly isn't today. What makes behavior monopolistic, and what makes monopolies bad? I can concede that Microsoft's behavior twenty-five years ago hurt consumers by denying us access to decent browsers; it's not clear to me how it actually profited from doing so as opposed to it just being a dysfunctional neurosis or control-freak tendencies. IE was always bundled in gratis; they were effectively doing extra work to earn no extra money, for ... reasons. Were there plans to actually make a profit from this later?
EDIT: Also, if you could knock it off with the Bulverism, that would be nice. I don't try to psychoanalyze your arguments, I just address them. Or try to, anyway.
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Both engage in unfair trade practices that suppress competition, leveraging their indisputable dominance in their respective fields into lowering consumer choice. Yer dictionary misses the entire point.
You worry about the gub'ment wanting to enslave us, and you're not wrong. It's the innate nature of government. I worry about the bossmen wanting the same -ever worked for minimum wage? Been migrant labor? I have- and want the gub'ment and them to fight - maybe neither will succeed in stomping the little guy while they're distracted and busy.
Bulverism?
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EDIT: Also, if you could knock it off with the Bulverism, that would be nice. I don't try to psychoanalyze your arguments, I just address them. Or try to, anyway.
Your arguments about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior shift each time you learn what the actual facts of the matter are, but your position doesn't. What point is there in addressing each new argument? You'll surely come up with another.
I stopped discussing or even consuming politics online six months ago because it was making me too angry. I thought maybe I had calmed down a bit in the interim. Apparently not. Sure, I'll knock it off.
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Bulverism--it's a CS Lewis coinage, but it's an ad hominem variant that responds to arguments by explaining the flaw or bias in your opponent's psychology that you think makes him want to believe the thing he argues, instead of actually addressing the argument.
As for suppressing competition, let's be clear. Do you mean they are, for example, bribing or otherwise persuading city officials to deny permits to rival grocery stores? Or intimidating their suppliers into not dealing with them? Because just leveraging economies of scale is not suppressing competition, it is the act of competition itself. And also how the consumer gets stuff cheap. And also their legal obligation to their shareholders; if they're a publicly traded company, they could in theory be sued for being insufficiently cutthroat if it could be argued that it screwed somebody out of stock value.
I have worked minimum wage. And barely better than minimum wage, for more than half a decade. The way out was to get skills anybody would actually want to pay better than minimum wage for. Kinda wish I'd gone into pharmacy much earlier. But that's on me, not the mismanaged pizza place, the Census Bureau, the gas station, various public school systems, or anybody else. Of course the flip side of this position is that it should apply to the big people too. Nobody gets bailed out, nobody gets subsidies. Sink or swim for the common good.
(This is distinct from the social safety net, which I agree should exist, but is a much more complex question tied up heavily in things like the dysfunction of our healthcare system)
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I had this argument once w/ a boy wonder at WPC - he was coming from theoretically it -a monopoly- ought to be more efficient. He was a lot easier to slap down.
I dunno why I care about being in this, it being one of those things like arguing about Reagan sucked that anyone who doesn't see it is speaking in tongues in my book, living a dream. I shouldn't engage.
Minimum wage, like the standup comedian said, is the bossmen's way of saying "If we could pay you less, we would." It's all of a piece, and you're siding with the bad guys this time.
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EDIT: Also, if you could knock it off with the Bulverism, that would be nice. I don't try to psychoanalyze your arguments, I just address them. Or try to, anyway.
Your arguments about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior shift each time you learn what the actual facts of the matter are, but your position doesn't. What point is there in addressing each new argument? You'll surely come up with another.
I stopped discussing or even consuming politics online six months ago because it was making me too angry. I thought maybe I had calmed down a bit in the interim. Apparently not. Sure, I'll knock it off.
You're not obligated to continue the discussion or anything, but I wanted to think it over before replying. I think I earned this reply with my little weasel-dodge after you brought up the outcome of the case. I should have acknowledged it more directly: yes, this would be an example of the state forcing a corporation to discontinue obnoxious behavior, and if nothing else it certainly would have accelerated and streamlined the road to the desirable outcome of getting us all functional browsers. But all this was in the context of Warren's fight to regulate large companies, so I wanted to ask, A, was the behavior in question monopolistic in intention (was he actually securing a present or future revenue stream for MS, as opposed to being a Frank Lloyd Wright style megalomaniac who wanted control for control's sake, even though it was stupid?) and B. did all this actually cause Microsoft to be a less dominant player overall? The way I see it, Microsoft made itself such a pill that it poisoned its brand by the late nineties, making it very hard for it to expand into new opportunities when they arose. With the result that now it's a pathetic appendage to the industry. The lawsuit itself may have done them a small favor by forcing them to stop doing something self-destructive (and MS absolutely did self-destructive things in the name of its vision for how things ought to be).
But I hate admitting I'm wrong even about trivial things so I came off looking like a little weasel [complaint or disagreeable woman]. So yeah, fair. For the record, I think of myself as a practical, rather than principled, libertarian; I would be perfectly open to the government regulating the hell out of everything if it got better results. It's just that our government, if not every government, seems to be really good at messing everything up. It picks dumb goals and pursues them in dodgy ways for half-baked reasons, and unlike Microsoft it doesn't shrink into a joke when it screws up.
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I had this argument once w/ a boy wonder at WPC - he was coming from theoretically it -a monopoly- ought to be more efficient. He was a lot easier to slap down.
I dunno why I care about being in this, it being one of those things like arguing about Reagan sucked that anyone who doesn't see it is speaking in tongues in my book, living a dream. I shouldn't engage.
Minimum wage, like the standup comedian said, is the bossmen's way of saying "If we could pay you less, we would." It's all of a piece, and you're siding with the bad guys this time.
A real monopoly could in theory be terrifyingly inefficient. The government is a monopoly. Where I disagree is this idea that a monopoly is actually all that easy to acquire, without doing things I think we both agree should be illegal (which basically means street-criminal behavior against rivals, or getting favors from the government).
The bossman would pay everyone but themselves less, if they could. There's no point taking that personally. They'd pay me less for sure, and they did. Then they noticed that all their RTs kept jumping ship for the hospital across town, so they told HR to look into it, and hey, turns out you can't get away with paying RTs crap wages post-covid! So I got a big raise last year, with everyone else. The hemorrhaging of labor promptly stopped and we are now fully staffed, at least for day shift.
With minimum wage, this kind of calculation doesn't apply, because literally anyone can do the job so you are always, always replaceable. Those jobs are good for high schoolers and kids working their way through college, bad for anybody else. There are always more kids saving up for a first car. Ideally, all those people should be moving up to more skilled labor as they age. If they are not, that is the problem that needs solving. Making the employer pay more, well, you can get away with that up to a point, but ... crikey, it's late. We can get into Elok's General Argument Against Protectionism some other time. Or not. Gotta get up early for work tomorrow.
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I had a PM political argument on Facebook a few years ago -that's a quadruple yuck by my lights- the topic "You say you're not a republiKKKan, but you take their side every single time and have little to say that isn't their talking points, and mostly nasty conservatroll slams at that. -He's a cousin's son I used to play with a lot when he was little, so I didn't need to be super-polite. I didn't bring it up, but he's big into th' Jesus these days, I suspect in an actual KKK church.
In the course of things, I posted a .gif of AOC shaking her head in a reproving NO. I was trolling, yes; I did it aware of how rationally those people react to her. I got flooded with about 20 memes and .gifs in very short order, which would have won the argument for me had there been an impartial judge, and I did declare victory - but you know, no real victory w/ conservatrolls, ever.
So, the point of the story is, the meme that stuck with me was a defacement of Rachel Maddow, no joke that's lingered in memory. Like her or not, that woman is gracious to an actual fault and ought to be left out of such monkeyshines. She ended her show one night wishing corrupt war criminal and ground-breaking fascist Dick Cheney the best when he was going in for surgery. She used to have Pat Buchanan on regularly -he's far-righter than right, but one of the people who GENERATES rightwing talking points, and reliable about having new ones- for a goodly part of a year until he said something too racist and horrible. Gracious. to. a. fault., she is, and ought to be left out of the dumbest, ugliest poo-slinging stuff, by any standard of decency.
And that relates to how I feel about disrespecting Dr. Warren. -Absolutely NOT gracious to a fault, but a rare example of a democrat at the national level with adequate fight in her in these loathsome times we find ourselves trapped in. She's SO much better than the cheap-shots and koolaide that goes around about her, as is Ms. Occasional-Cortez and Dr. Maddow.
-Note that I haven't even mentioned Mrs. Pelosi and Mrs. Clinton, and that all are women and, coincidentally, prime targets of the cheap shots and koolaide - Elok, YOU'RE better than that, too, or at least should be. The koolaide has poo in it.
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Erm, okay? She's a pit-bull for the economic left. I don't think she's corrupt or actually stupid, merely fighting a battle that doesn't need to be fought out of bad principles. Since the hard economic all-business-is-bad left pretty well consists of her and Bernie, like you said, she does little harm that I can see. But I like American economic dynamism and don't want her message to spread. I can respect that she is sincere, I suppose. But so was Lev Trotsky.
EDIT: I should specify that I don't think every idea she has is bad. I have no objection to being more aggressive towards white collar criminals, for example. Let out some prostitutes and druggies to make room.
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Honestly, this is probably not a particularly productive conversation to have, or one we are going to find common ground on. I'd suggest we leave off here, or at least I should leave off here and let somebody else talk politics with you if they like.
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Pretty much agreed on all that.
American economic dynamism is in zero danger these days, though.
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I picked up a booklet called Work by the Antifa-aligned group CrimethInc at a zine shop in New Orleans—one of those places filled with "banned" leftist books like Steal This Book, The Anarchist Cookbook, The Ethical Sl-t, etc as well as very obscure more modern titles that would be at home with any book burning.
Now, I don’t agree with the anarchist endgame. A lot of them seem like trust fund kids playing revolutionary tourist. And The Beatles and The Who wrote great songs about what's messed up about it. But one image from the book stuck with me: a backstage photo of the president, flanked by armed guards, captioned:
“You will never make it to that stage. You are not even allowed to talk to these people. You do not know these people. They don’t know you.”
And it’s true. Most of us never interact with real power. We just get the media version or what the bots or power moderators allow on comment boards. I used to work banquets for politicians at a 5 star hotel. Senators, governors, mayors, even a president. They’re all smiles in person, as long as you’re the help or one of them. Even the 'bad" ones.
But here's the reality: a group called RepresentUs found that when the public wanted something, and business interests wanted the opposite, the public lost—70% of the time, regardless of who was in charge.
That tells you who really runs the show.
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On background to what I articulated so poorly/weakly to Elok here, an old lefty thread: Fight the System (http://165.22.181.213/index.php?topic=2334.msg7967#msg7967)
-Starts out more personal finance talk w/ Green, picks up Cryopyre and Jarlwulf, an American socialist and an actual Russian communist who'd put his life on the line for his belief. Worth reading in full once the topic broadens to the whole system we talk of fighting...
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Dunno what to say here; I was pretty convinced by that debate performance that Biden was simply not competent to be president anymore. Of course the other fellow was unfit to be president any number of ways, but it remains a matter of concern that they concealed, for an unknown but apparently substantial period of time, that the president sometimes descended into utter senility. Some unknowable percentage of decisions from the White House were made not by the elected president but by unidentified minders nudging him along. That this was hushed up to such an extent was a serious unforced error that definitely contributed to [Sleezebag]'s return. Yes, [Sleezebag] is awful, but he passed the very low bar of being able to complete comprehensible, if rambling, ugly, and stupid, sentences. He never said we have to beat Medicare.
As for me, I remain an atypical libertarian. We are spending money that does not exist and a reckoning will inevitably come due and when it does it will be ugly. Neither party is serious about addressing this--the Democrats are presently somewhat less spendthrift but that doesn't really count for much with me--nor are they interested in serious and comprehensive defense of civil liberties. Each party is in hock to illiberal radicals, which it refuses to condemn because it needs their help against the other side's illiberal radicals, who are ostensibly much worse. This is not new. I hate them both and generally turn my eyes away from the problem because I have no power to fix it. I wrote in Justin Amash in the last election.
EDIT: I sort of wish Elon Musk well in the VERY narrow context of his America Party venture. It will fail, because he is an arrogant nerd who is very good at a very particular kind of leadership but sucks at politics, and also probably whacked out on ketamine. But he is at least trying, ineffectually, to draw attention to the problem before we either default on our debt, or hyperinflate and THEN default on our debt.
I agree with the analysis in your first paragraph up until the final sentence.
The truth is, because Biden aspired to play by the rules of conventional politics, including answering some hard questions and treating the debate as a serious forum (however inadequate) to address policy questions, he was subjected to a different set of expectations than [Sleezebag], who is generally allowed by media and his own voters to behave in a manner that is problematic in a way that is equivalent to senility, or worse.
[Sleezebag] lied his way through the debate. I don’t think we can really say he “answered” questions except inasmuch as his replies gave us a sense of how seriously he takes the implied obligation of a politician to speak to his constituents, and how dishonestly he planned to govern, if elected. [Sleezebag]’s own command of facts is questionable at best, and his own communications are frequently incomprehensible until they are either sanewashed by “conventional” media that is trying to report something coherent to its readers, or spun by friendly media that is trying to advance his candidacy in order to achieve desired policy goals. More than “rambling, ugly, and stupid,” Donald [Sleezebag] is often incomprehensible, factually wrong, and, plainly, imbecilic. He says whatever his audience wants to hear. He is a performer.
The two parties are not equivalent. Democrats are largely powerless right now because they don’t have majorities in any of the three branches of federal government, but make no mistake: the Republican Party of the 1990s and early 2000s has been completely replaced by social media grifters whose success in the polls rests entirely on their willingness to enable a leader they know is corrupt, stupid, and racist. [Sleezebag]’s success essentially rests on his willingness to tell unhappy people that their problems and anxieties are the fault of someone else and that they needn’t accept uncomfortable realities. His voters long ago gave up on electing people to try to solve actual problems—they are willing to settle for someone who will use his bully pulpit to stroke their ego. They don’t really care about fiscal austerity or civil liberties. Policy explanations are increasingly just a shield they throw up to avoid having to admit that what they really like is the emotional catharsis they receive when [Sleezebag] upsets people who Fox News tells them are responsible for making life too complicated.
All that to say, the 2024 election was like the decision about whether to apply a tourniquet. Joe Biden was the tourniquet: an unwelcome choice that wasn’t really good, but would have avoided much bad.
Does anybody really believe that [Sleezebag] doesn't farm out major decisions to underlings? And what's the difference between someone who abdicates power to others and someone who is unwilling to accept accountability when things go wrong? What's the difference between a leader who sometimes can't tell you where he stands, and someone who never will?
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You're not obligated to continue the discussion or anything, but I wanted to think it over before replying. I think I earned this reply with my little weasel-dodge after you brought up the outcome of the case. I should have acknowledged it more directly: yes, this would be an example of the state forcing a corporation to discontinue obnoxious behavior, and if nothing else it certainly would have accelerated and streamlined the road to the desirable outcome of getting us all functional browsers. But all this was in the context of Warren's fight to regulate large companies, so I wanted to ask, A, was the behavior in question monopolistic in intention (was he actually securing a present or future revenue stream for MS, as opposed to being a Frank Lloyd Wright style megalomaniac who wanted control for control's sake, even though it was stupid?) and B. did all this actually cause Microsoft to be a less dominant player overall? The way I see it, Microsoft made itself such a pill that it poisoned its brand by the late nineties, making it very hard for it to expand into new opportunities when they arose. With the result that now it's a pathetic appendage to the industry. The lawsuit itself may have done them a small favor by forcing them to stop doing something self-destructive (and MS absolutely did self-destructive things in the name of its vision for how things ought to be).
But I hate admitting I'm wrong even about trivial things so I came off looking like a little weasel [complaint or disagreeable woman]. So yeah, fair. For the record, I think of myself as a practical, rather than principled, libertarian; I would be perfectly open to the government regulating the hell out of everything if it got better results. It's just that our government, if not every government, seems to be really good at messing everything up. It picks dumb goals and pursues them in dodgy ways for half-baked reasons, and unlike Microsoft it doesn't shrink into a joke when it screws up.
I probably could have just linked you here (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/but-vs-yes-but) rather than get angry. I don't even have a strong stance on what to do about monopolies or how bad they are. I've just become increasingly agitated by our (society's) inability to even agree on what the basic facts of the world are. So when I see an instance of that, it can set me off.
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I probably could have just linked you here (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/but-vs-yes-but) rather than get angry. I don't even have a strong stance on what to do about monopolies or how bad they are. I've just become increasingly agitated by our (society's) inability to even agree on what the basic facts of the world are. So when I see an instance of that, it can set me off.
I actually read that Scott post, embarrassingly enough. I see that everybody disagrees on ground-level reality--and just wrote about 370K words of weird fantasy meditating on that general theme over the past few years--but I'm at the point of more or less accepting it as a fact of life, and wondering in a vague just-how-hosed-are-we-way how this will all shake out. It's possibly not totally coincidence that you work in the hardest of hard sciences and I make up magic systems for fun when I'm not doing a medical job that frequently entails dispensing placebos.
The particular instance that got you mad was mostly me trying to type up replies in a hurry and then not wanting to face up to typing up replies in a hurry (yes, I write enormous posts, but as noted, I've kinda had practice at writing a tremendous amount in one go). Anyway, you're my oldest friend and you deserve better.
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Elok, you're only guilty of being stubborn on the internet. It's infuriating at times, but nothing to be contrite about.
You do you. ;nod
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Here's how hard-up for conversation I am at the moment...
Jeffery Epstein. <- There's a name and a man whose picture I wouldn't' mind never seeing again if it wasn't for political reasons. The Pig is not only politically vulnerable to this kind of thing -I wasn't there and do not know- but he's a proven serial philanderer, semi-convicted rapist and so openly obsessed with what he considers attractive women that the Attorney General and his press secretary could be sisters - and it's the former who's prettier. It actually seems likely that he's done something, there, him being him, and given his well-known problems with his pants.
When he was convicted of the 34 felony fraud counts, mind, I looked over at Mom's smiling face and said "let's make this" -supper when we heard- "an actual party". -And we got out ice cream.
It was almost nothing, but it wasn't actually nothing for him to be actually convicted of 34 of his thousands of serious crimes...
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It was almost nothing, but it wasn't actually nothing for him to be actually convicted of 34 of his thousands of serious crimes...
And still he was allowed to run for president.
The other day I saw a short of a press member asking to some I think Judicial member of the current US government how she felt about [Sleezebag]'s presidential immunity for things done during tenure 'protects' former president Obama from [Sleezebag]'s latest set of accusations and threats to Obama.
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Weeelll - nobody was INVENTING a thing w/ presidential immunity. There's a legal principal that's been there all along, and a look at why Julius Ceasar crossed the Rubicon tells you why - the Cato crowd was going to sue him off the face of the Earth the second he lost the immunity of the proconsul office, so he had to resort to desperate measures. It's necessary for it to be difficult to harass an official going about officiating, see also Clinton and HIS Cato-suing problem.
They just went and took it to ridiculous lengths.
It IS good that it tends to protect Bakrama from something stupid....
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Ceasar crossing the Rubicon was bad, actually. He was an imperialist warmonger who conquered large parts of Europe with an army personally loyal to him and then set his sights on Rome.
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I didn't say overthrowing the republic was a good thing - I said petty, petty reactionaries harassed him into doing it in self defense.
Cato sucks.
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Leaders should be harassed, especially when they have authoritarian and cult of personality tendencies. Honestly I think we should get rid of "leaders" and mostly just have boring anonymous department heads. Gotta curb the tendency for people to want their elected officials to be inspiring saviors they follow to the ends of the earth. The current guy certainly isn't, obviously, but Obama wasn't, either.
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I don't disagree with a word of that - I was explaining to a filthy Belgian. -And it's true. We don't want the trap Clinton sprung being set, do we, and however bad it is to have nazis in our country, we can't fight them by bending the system, but rather trying to preserve it -at least the good parts left- and get rid of the nazis somehow.
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Kato, btw, is win and awesome. The Green Hornet's chauffer is a Kato of another color.
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Leaders should be harassed, especially when they have authoritarian and cult of personality tendencies.
Are you saying we should harass our residential hiAppalachian, Lori?
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When they issued the decision, I got the impression the Supreme Court punted on [Sleezebag]'s ballot eligibility so as to avoid accusations of rank partisanship. The wanted to claim that they had deferred to the people even though, to the best of my understanding, it appeared [Sleezebag] had very clearly met the criteria for ballot disqualification. That said, I am not a lawyer.
Subsequent decisions suggest to me that Thomas and Scalia, at least, have come to believe in conservative propaganda hook, line, and sinker. Their opinions are clearly designed to enable and protect a Republican imperial presidency. Scalia in particular is apparently hoping that [Sleezebag] will enact a Christian Dominionist agenda. I see no other way to find consistency of approach, or even logic, in their decisions. Roberts seems not to be far behind. Although in the past I think he has tried to vote in ways that allow him to pretend non-partisanship, it seems to me that, when the Republican agenda is on the line, he breaks right. And it's patently obvious that Thomas is bought and paid for, although I think he is only just slightly less arch-conservative than Scalia.
This is compounded by the fact that tens of millions of Americans don't actually seem to care about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or separation of church and state. Every day, Donald [Sleezebag] speaks for them. If they find that somebody else's presence is off-putting, either because that person lives a different lifestyle, has opposing political views, or is a scapegoat for their resentments, they want them literally gone--and they don't care if that person suffers or dies. So the Court has a lot of room to maneuver.
Republicans don't care about Jeffrey Epstein, his crimes, or those of [Sleezebag] in the sense we imagine. Part of this is because Fox News and other [Sleezebag]-friendly outlets suppress stories unfavorable to [Sleezebag], lessening the extent to which his supporters actually get to see his manifest deficiencies of intelligence, morality, leadership, management, or mental stability. Part of this is because the propaganda about Democrats is so effective that no actual Republican will ever do anything nearly as bad as an imaginary Democrat--and this gives an important escape hatch for anyone ever confronted by compelling evidence of [Sleezebag]'s wrongdoing by allowing them to claim they had only a binary choice between bad ([Sleezebag]) and much worse. Part of this is because a lot of Republican voters just like that [Sleezebag] is prepared to stroke their egos and only use policy as a shield to discourage questions about their vote. If it looks like they can use Epstein as political ammunition to press the case for their side, that excites and delights them because it makes them look smart, wise, or virtuous, but when it becomes inconvenient, you quickly discover that they don't actually want blind justice.
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Former NC Governor -and democratic presidential running mate contender- Roy Cooper is reported to be about to announce for a Senate run circa Monday.
I'm not convinced he won't be another Democrat with not enough fight in him -as I said on page one, an amiable presence- but not-a-nazi with such name recognition as to have a really strong shot? VERY good news. ;nod ;nod ;nod ;nod ;nod
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I forgive the Democrats for engaging in limp stunts because, given their lack of control in any of the three branches of government, all they have left is their voice.
That said, [Sleezebag] appears to be governing so ineptly that Democrats will probably be returned to legislative control by swing voters in the 2026 mid-terms.
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Limp stunts? Pray elucidate.
I doubt there's any probably to it. Losing congress mid-term is pretty traditional, though the Dems will have to be smart fighting a movement they don't understand.
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Right now, I think everyone is down on Democrats.
Conservatives still have every incentive to hammer Democrats for political reasons, and to resist the idea that [Sleezebag] is failing on his own merits. Given the dominance of the GOP right now, however, I think it's going to be hard for them to argue that Democrats were genuinely to blame if people are still fed up by 2026. Plus, the conservative media does a great job of strawmanning the Democratic Party for conservative and, increasingly, swing voters, partly because conservative media is eating an ever-increasing share of the media marketplace, and partly because Democrats often feel compelled to defend coalition members even when doing so is politically disadvantageous--because it is natural, morally right, and also often necessary inasmuch as certain groups are over-represented in the Democratic Party apparatus.
The Far Left and people who sat at home are upset with Democratic Party moderates, who they see as failing to have stopped [Sleezebag]. This always strikes me as nonsense. When you're politically powerless, you can only really undertake performative outrage, especially when the other side has no real agenda to try to influence.
Voters of all stripes also see Democratic weakness right now and naturally feel Democrats can do nothing for them, so the sense that Democrats are feckless and worthless and not to be trusted to fix anything is a self-licking ice cream cone, and I think pollsters should be careful of over-stating things. For example, I think Democrats are really powerless to fix things right now, but I still intend to vote for them in 2026.
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Dunno, I blame Nancy Pelosi for a LOT of wrong moves; Cheney Bund collaboration back in the day, through to the outrageous stupidity last year.
If they know for a fact -that didn't actually go public to my knowledge- that Joe's really gone stupid, it was too late to push him out like that that late in the cycle. The smart play would have been to roll the dice on him campaigning and push hard for a strong chief of staff and general good staffing/handlers, to probably way outdo the Reagan administration, which suffered horribly for six years from no one really being in charge after he went senile. But we pulled through that one, albeit painfully, and could have this. Instead, we got the worst of all worlds.
-A lot of that's what I thought at the time, not just hindsight.
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Roy has indeed announced for Senate: https://abc11.com/post/roy-cooper-us-senate-former-north-carolina-governor-announces-bid/17274141/
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...Democrats often feel compelled to defend coalition members even when doing so is politically disadvantageous...
lol? Democrats eat their own and hate everyone who isn't their precise brand of left-ish. Republicans stand behind every Republican and loudly proclaim that terrible behavior X has always been core to the party.
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Democrats are all -famously so- circular firing squads, all the time.
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Dunno, I blame Nancy Pelosi for a LOT of wrong moves; Cheney Bund collaboration back in the day, through to the outrageous stupidity last year.
If they know for a fact -that didn't actually go public to my knowledge- that Joe's really gone stupid, it was too late to push him out like that that late in the cycle. The smart play would have been to roll the dice on him campaigning and push hard for a strong chief of staff and general good staffing/handlers, to probably way outdo the Reagan administration, which suffered horribly for six years from no one really being in charge after he went senile. But we pulled through that one, albeit painfully, and could have this. Instead, we got the worst of all worlds.
-A lot of that's what I thought at the time, not just hindsight.
One of the following two options must be true. Either Joe Biden wasn't as badly incapacitated as we now suspect, or he and his inner circle thought so little of Kamala Harris's leadership abilities that they preferred a caretaker government. That's ironic given how well I think Harris did with the little time available to her, her underwhelming and even disappointing role in the administration theretofore, and in light of her manifest failings in the previous election cycle.
I actually really liked Biden as president, even though I expected very little of him.
While I don't think it excuses his great misjudgement in deciding to run for a second term given his obvious mental infirmities, I am also doubtful Republicans would have treated a managed transition as legitimate in this age of hyper-partisanship. I think that rather than scream from the rooftops about Biden's mental collapse, they'd have instead seized on each of his good moments to accuse Harris of organizing a palace coup. It puts Biden is a position not very dissimilar from the position I think John Roberts feels he is in, although, again, I think both men made the wrong decisions. When push comes to shove, Biden should have stepped back to let Harris govern, while Roberts destroyed his reputation by issuing mealthy-mouthed decisions that fooled nobody.
To move on to the circular firing squad problem, Republican set up the perfect trap. They demonized queer communities until the Democratic leadership felt compelled to defend them in the strongest terms, which Republicans were then able to use as evidence that the Democrats were ignoring "bread and butter" issues more relevant to most voters. This was possible because Republican media penetration had reached unprecedented levels by 2024. Fox News is simply ubiquitous. It frames the shared public narrative even if you're a liberal. (Conservative media domination is even more complete now, as once-centrist or left-leaning media organizations have moved right in pursuit of viewership.)
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Degree in broadcasting here, and you got that last right.
The Democrats have ALWAYS had that circular firing squad problem, at least in my lifetime. Mr. Murdock, powerful trash that he is, need not apply. Don't tell the nazis one of us admitted it, but I think that one has its roots in actual communism - like, those self-criticism meeting that the commies have w/o much of the self in the mix? Welll, unions have deep original roots in the workers philosophy of Mr. Marx, and I think it trickled up to the rest of the left from there...
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Quick question: what the median age of viewership for the major networks? I did a quick google before work and got answers for MSNBC, CNN, and Fox that all hovered around 70, but I didn't have time to dig for sources and some of that may be AI-generated slop. I'm just one person and this may be a "nobody I know voted for Nixon" thing, but I think of CNN as that thing that gives my dad half his opinions and Fox as that thing that's always playing in old people's rooms when I go to give them albuterol. Now, it's true that the elderly take their voting seriously, but I'd think the elderly would also be much more crystalized in their opinions than the young.
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"nobody I know voted for Nixon" is a new one by me.
1972 is the first year I have memories of that I knew the year - and I actually remember of myself in person that pretty much everyone voted for Nixon, not that anyone was bragging about it two years later. The morning after the election, as I walked into home room at school, a girl was chanting
"Nixon, Nixon - He's our man!/McGovern's in - the garbage-can!"
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SOMEbody who knows what to google do answer Elok's question, but -
I wanna throw it out there that I tentatively like Mayor Pete for President next time. That there underqualified 'mo got in the habit of going on FOX as Secretary of Transportation and giving as good as he got, or better. I wish he had a round in the national legislature under his belt, and I DO NOT relish the prospect of the intensity of the hatred he WILL draw for his personal life/leanings, but I sense the Democratic Leadership, who -openly- never wanted cousin 'Mala to begin with, will never forgive her for failing last year and she's, for sure, in for a sandbagging like she's ten Bernie Sanders IF they don't talk -threaten- her into not showing up.
Don't blame me; I voted for Dr. Warren.
I wish we could do better than Pete Buttigieg, I wish there was time for him to qualify up a level first, but I just don't see a soul out there who looks to have any shot, or any 'prettier' to my cynical eye, and not too old.
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...In before a wiseacre says AOC because I said pretty. Same qualification problem, only HE's at least qualified in the Executive Branch...
I think she could be a future contender, but this stupid country doesn't seem ready for a woman, and she's not ready for the Presidency yet. I also have my eye on Jeff Jackson, if he keeps running the table, but that's also years/cycles from now.
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I'm over here as a registered libertarian, it's fun getting the hate from both sides. I'd vote for a main party candidate if I saw one I could actually believe in... until then it's 'I didn't vote for them' anytime someone complains about el presidente.
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I'm not sure the Pig isn't the Antichrist.
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I'm over here as a registered libertarian, it's fun getting the hate from both sides. I'd vote for a main party candidate if I saw one I could actually believe in... until then it's 'I didn't vote for them' anytime someone complains about el presidente.
Yeah I'm a registered libertarian and I'm just staring at the debt and wondering if I'll be a secure homeowner before the fatal inflection point hits. I don't think they notice us enough to hate us anymore.
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I'm not sure the Pig isn't the Antichrist.
Power-hungry narcissism, I see it ending either with him pardoning himself/buddies for all past crimes and leaving to a retirement of grifting, or him starting some kind of coup that splits the country. I hate to say he has a weaker VP than Mike Pence now because I can see Vance not having the guts to advance the peaceful transition of power in '28.
I don't see him as the antichrist though, the USA is too small for the antichrist.
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I'm over here as a registered libertarian, it's fun getting the hate from both sides. I'd vote for a main party candidate if I saw one I could actually believe in... until then it's 'I didn't vote for them' anytime someone complains about el presidente.
You probably pay taxes, though, so you're still morally unclean.
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I'm over here as a registered libertarian, it's fun getting the hate from both sides. I'd vote for a main party candidate if I saw one I could actually believe in... until then it's 'I didn't vote for them' anytime someone complains about el presidente.
Yeah I'm a registered libertarian and I'm just staring at the debt and wondering if I'll be a secure homeowner before the fatal inflection point hits. I don't think they notice us enough to hate us anymore.
Post in my banking thread if you want. We can talk about how to get you into a home.
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I'm over here as a registered libertarian, it's fun getting the hate from both sides. I'd vote for a main party candidate if I saw one I could actually believe in... until then it's 'I didn't vote for them' anytime someone complains about el presidente.
You probably pay taxes, though, so you're still morally unclean.
;lol ;lol ;lol
Taxation is theft, which is why I own a business, to reduce the tax liability as much as I can. Eventually I'll be to a point where I'm living off borrowed money instead of earned income and will be effectively not paying taxes.
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At which point you'll just be benefitting from the environment created by immoral taxation.
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You rich, fat BOSSMAN!
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At which point you'll just be benefitting from the environment created by immoral taxation.
I don't disagree... although I do pause at the assumption that morality plays a part in it, my most moral purpose is providing the maximum resources to my family with the least amount of hardship. I use my First Amendment rights to speak against taxation in most forms, while also living my life in deference to the leadership and rules that come with living where I do. Taking a 'moral' stand seems pointless to me because we're ruled mainly by the representatives of the majority, and regardless of my personal beliefs, willful disobedience to the rule of law is contrary to my highest moral purpose.
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I'm over here as a registered libertarian, it's fun getting the hate from both sides. I'd vote for a main party candidate if I saw one I could actually believe in... until then it's 'I didn't vote for them' anytime someone complains about el presidente.
Do you have to be registered though?
The large majority of people in my country aren't in any official way affiliated with whatever political party. People just vote on their preference when the time comes (or not at all).
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Taxation is theft, which is why I own a business, to reduce the tax liability as much as I can. Eventually I'll be to a point where I'm living off borrowed money instead of earned income and will be effectively not paying taxes.
So El Presidente is a thief in forcing import tariffs on foreign nations? ;cute
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More or less. He's fundamentally a grifter by nature, and no doubt sees this as too good/lucrative to pass up. The cost gets kicked down the road, and free money for the Pigsty meanwhile.
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I have to catch up with a few different posts here.
First, Democrats are not the only ones with the circular firing squad problem. Republicans struggled throughout the Biden era to whip their own majority, resulting in embarrassing leadership fights. Right now, Democrats can't figure out whether they can afford to alienate the Far Left by moving right to appeal to swing voters who broke for someone as odious as [Sleezebag]--which means, inherently, compromising not just on politics, but on the basic dignity of certain members of their own coalition. The Far Left, meanwhile, is more able to influence change in the Democratic Party than to successfully battle [Sleezebag], so they have turned their most withering fire toward their own party. It doesn't help that a lot of people on the Far Left don't seem to appreciate that a political party is a corporate (little-c) entity that exists to push a particular platform, and doesn't just exist to follow the popular vote from moment to moment. Hence nobody should have expected Bernie Sanders, an Independent, to be able to rally the Democratic Party to his cause just because he was riding a wave of temporary enthusiasm back in 2015.
Second, the Republican tarring of Democrats as people obsessed with niche issues (or, in this case, the allegedly special interests of queer communities) only really works because Republicans have descended into total immorality. Decent people stand up to bullies, which is what the Democrats tried to do. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans like bullies. And too many others simply don't treat bullying as disqualifying behavior. Because conservative propaganda has convinced conservatives that they're being spit on, laughed at, and locked out, there's a very high tolerance for [Sleezebag]'s worst antics.
Third, don't discount Gavin Newsom.
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My sister, who keeps up far better than I on this sort of thing, didn't disagree about Mayor Pete, but did say Gavin Newsome to me just a few hours ago, and mentioned several others. I should have taken notes.
The Republican party is profoundly schizophrenic, which is not circular firing squads, though it may look like, it's social "conservatives" not belonging in the same party with the small-government conservatives. The Regan revolution had party discipline, at least, for all it's where the split personality comes from - and now has lost the party discipline, and nobody's in charge w/ a useful idiot hogging the White House.
OKAY - the fundamental mistake of Democrats collectively this century? People -everyone, nearly- keep saying they just keep moving further left. [nonsense]. -I typed the swear for emphasis.
The Democrats meet an implacable foe on an irrational and unAmerican REACTIONARY track BY TRYING TO MEET THEM IN THE MIDDLE, the middle always further right. That is spineless and it doesn't work, provably. The fundamental error was stepping away from labor/working-class politics in 1975 post-Watergate. That's where the votes were, and moving left on social policy -they have done that this century, and how- masks that they're only the LESS bossman-supporting party. [nonsense]. Sorry, the gays and the minorities, the votes are with the working class, since suckered into supporting the slaver party.
[nonsense]. A better balance is called for.
Don't blame me; I voted for Bernie the time before.
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Eh, at this point, it's not clear to me what the laboring class wants that isn't culture war garbage--which Democrats can't give them without becoming contemporary Republicans. That is, to wit, philosophically rootless people who have taken up performing anger and inflicting humiliation and set aside the work of solving shared problems.
Democrats are too quick to complain that [Sleezebag]'s voters are being suckered. They aren't. They would rather have a form of spiritual absolution from Donald [Sleezebag] than an extra $200 from a Democrat. It just feels better.
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They ARE suckers.
Money. Everybody wants money to buy them some more American dream. I would go into politics myself and prove it can be sold if I wasn't a mentally ill hippy pauper... I'd sell them a square deal for the gays and minorities, to boot -once I'd gotten some traction going- them being our brothers in the same boat.
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I always wonder what's going to happen first in the USA: another secession attempt, or a third major political party. ;popcorn
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Literal secession, like a state trying to leave -unlikely- or just more treason -very likely, already going on IMO-?
Third major political party? Never, it looks like; the small government Republicans -note the lack of Ks- should have migrated to the Libertarians and turned it into a real party nine years ago.
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The real issue is the very rich and the very poor. The very rich want to keep the things going on that keep them very rich. The poor would really rather not be poor.
The problem is that there is no upper limit to wealth. There IS a lower limit to poverty. While yes, you can have a negative number on some database somewhere saying you have negative worth, past owning nothing it's all imaginary numbers.
And it takes A LOT of poor people to make one person wealthy. So they have to fight other wealthy people.
They also control the narrative on many, many forum boards, YT, the major news, etc to distract and divide from this fact. The people in power must keep workers commuting harsh commutes, having to be at places, having to pay large percentages to rent so they can't save up to not work, and tie everything like healthcare to work as to make them a second class citizen if they don't work and are not rich. Then feed you media and video games the only time you have to yourself to pacify you. Or make you drink/ take drugs but ONLY the ones they want. You can drink till you pee out bits of your liver and get addicted to oxies but smoke weed you are barred from even some menial jobs.
AI is going to accelerate what has been going on for decades.
I predict a time when there are no websites on search. Just an AI that tells you what the AI company has been paid to show. Google is almost there and most of the halfway legit searches point to Reddit, which is in itself heavily altered and I predict will be mostly AI posts.
But there are changes coming. Big ones I don't think anyone is ready for. What if there is not much work and everything is AI?
Andrew Yang may be right...
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It's all about what's fair, isn't it? This is a great deal of what the suckers harp on when they're not being simply racist - welfare is unfair to the people supporting it.
They're being short-sighted, not seeing the worth of collective action that would NEVER BE in a privatized context, not accounting for they're a bad week or two from It Happening To Them, but they're still not COMPLETELY wrong.
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It's all about what's fair, isn't it? This is a great deal of what the suckers harp on when they're not being simply racist - welfare is unfair to the people supporting it.
They're being short-sighted, not seeing the worth of collective action that would NEVER BE in a privatized context, not accounting for they're a bad week or two from It Happening To Them, but they're still not COMPLETELY wrong.
The problem is fairness is a matter of perception.
For instance, if you ask the insurance companies if denying stuff is fair they will point to false claims and people trying to get over. Plus, they need mansions and private jets too. Plus, some of those people brought it on themselves. After all, they are idiots and if they can be rich and someone else can't something must be morally/spiritually/culturally wrong with them and they deserve it.
But you ask the guy on medicaid who has cancer that get denied because they are broke and worked all their life, that would be far unfair.
I am sure Bezos and Musk having private space programs and multiple lovers and doing whatever they want is fair to them.
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As I said...
I mean, pretty much all of politics boils down to what people think is fair.
You've been homeless in the Big City, I've been a homeless-adjacent migrant laborer in a showbiz venue that counted on not paying most people enough to afford to live in a trailer. Our world view is fundamentally not Elok's or Rusty's or Trennacker's as a result.
I'm not really a liberal outside of labor issues - but in these extreme times, the labor issues are everything.
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People want money, but they want it to come from magic.
One of the most powerful Republican lies is the tax cut, which succeeds in large part because of motivated reasoning on the part of the Republican voter.
Republican voters preach and demand austerity mostly based on a simple model of household finance that applies only poorly to national economics, but they don't actually enforce it at the ballot box. A Republican like [Sleezebag] can spend like a drunken sailor as long as his spending also includes "tax cuts" and doesn't involve social programs that help groups that Republicans disfavor.
If those tax cuts have to be financed with future debt, or even (as in the case of tariffs), higher prices for goods and services, that's not obvious enough to matter. Republicans are flattered to be assured that, yes, they are surely more knowledgeable about how to spend their money than the government.
Republicans tend to be self-focused, like their leader. They don't resent [Sleezebag] the way liberals do because they share many of what liberals have come to see as his greatest failings: an obsession with his own circumstances, including how he is regarded by others, and a tendency to be unhappy when he sees others receiving attention (since, in his zero-sum view, it could be better spent on himself instead).
[Sleezebag] is popular with the working class because he feeds their ego, not because he is filling their pockets. And a huge part of that equation is Fox News, which reassures its viewers everyday with the Puritan's Great Fear™: that someone, somewhere, is laughing at them.
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Complete agreement.
And not a single word of that disagrees w/ anything I said last page, aside from just who's a sucker. I'd submit that your whole latest set of true assertions clearly points at who.
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I'd like to share this from five years ago, when I was still resenting Biden hard over being forced down our throats in the primaries:
-And back to the senile talk about Joe ALL OVER the nets allasudden-
-My two next-door grandparents and my dad all died with several years of dementia under their belts - I was there and an important part of their care. I think I can claim a little expertise.
The schedule Biden's working, traveling and speaking? You couldn't do it and speak so sensibly and well after a few days, let alone over a year now. He's healthier than I am, just tired and suppressing a stutter. I rather think if he was only a teeny bit senile, right now he couldn't hold up his end of a breakfast conversation.
I have hopes for the next debate, but don't kid yourselves; Joe's good at that. It ain't going to be a Warren v. Bloomberg knockout.
In fact, I find I was in better form articulating some truths still at issue than I have been lately, for the early half of that thread, if anyone wants to back up and skim...
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I saw someone say on Twitter -I've been following some liberals screaming on Twitter lately, of which I have a lot to say soon if I can work up the energy- Thursday, that it felt a lot like the day after The Pig was 'elected'.
-^That^, yes, if only one tenth as intense. I did not, because it hurt so much, talk about politics to a single soul for about six months. Some of us, Bernie got our hopes up that the rightward drift in the Democratic Party, decades old, might finally be arrested. It's not about Sanders/Warren, though the latter is FANTASTIC and the former quite good - it's not about Joe being a mediocre hack; it's about the people trying to steer the party back into proper opposition being bulldozed by the Republican Lite wing on behalf of the mediocre hack.
And Lori's right; even Dr. Warren is too old. This country has drifted into a very bad place, Obama gets called a socialist when he's barely even a Democrat, we still openly torture, and a geriatric who will. not. FIX. things is not an acceptable alternative to the Pig wallowing in his own [poop] and lying about an epidemic, killing people among endless other outrages.
I'm turning out to vote for the rat sorbet -featuring LESS rat- in November, the fix being in, make no mistake.
But not as bad isn't good enough. We can do better. We MUST.
Turns out he did fix some things. He was actually a pleasant surprise.
So, I've been intensely following some Liberals Screaming On Twitter since the actual primaries began and the democratic field had winnowed down to few enough people to keep track of. As is my wont, I've naturally fallen into thought and study about --- and here I need your help, Rusty, 'cause you're so brilliant at generating pithy tags --- I started out calling it Liberals Eat Their Young, but that's not quite right; Liberal Cannibalism is the best I've come up with.
There's a set of jokes about democrats so old that I recall hearing them on TV in my childhood in the 70s. "The Democratic Party is like cats you hear squalling in the night; they sound like they're fighting, but they're making more cats." -An old democratic congressman told that one to CBS. Just in the last week I heard Joe say something about not forming circles, a reference to the old chestnut about the shape of Democratic Firing Squads.
And like, I've noticed it being the liberals doing that -all day, every day, bitterly- not so much the centrists I rail against. There seems little doubt of a causal connection between that factor and the Republican Lite wing stomping the Liberal wing last week for the million-and-first time since 1975 - they can shut up and pull together briefly when they have to and it won't annoy the Republicans too much.
And I do have some thoughts about why the Left is so exhaustingly, eternally Internecine, but I'd love to have a better label to slap on it, if you can coin something short and awesome, please, Rusty...
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Mylochka was shouting at me yesterday -she's not shouty- about her frustration of late with Jon Stewart and way too many others both-sides-ing. I pointed out in my own defense that I take a whiz on Senator Charles Schumer for there being a quorum present when the bad guys stole a Supreme Court seat - which is complaining about collaboration with evil, NOT both sidesing.
The Democratic leadership have consistently failed this century to swing when presented w/ Ku Klux Klan chins, and thus failed America and the world.
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*
Ku Klux Klan Republikkkan chins. -Actually punching Nazis is a Very Bad Idea, but it's a metaphor...
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Speaking of quorums, denying of in extremis, I see democrats in the Texas legislature doing exactly that this week over outrageous gerrymandering.
;santidance ;santidance ;santidance
THAT'S fight.
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Texas redistricting fight goes national as GOP, Dems prepare for more battles over future House maps (https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/texas-redistricting-fight-goes-national-as-gop-dems-prepare-for-more-battles-over-future-house-maps-202000826.html)
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dPutin is due to visit the state of Alaska...
[Sleezebag]: Welcome to America!
Putin: ;mad This Russian Empire is!!!
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Not any stupider than the Pig has said on foreign policy stuff...
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...The National Guard is not a toy. The police are not toys. Playing with them is hitleriffic...
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I've never known Jon Stewart to bothsides anything. It's more that he's quick to mock anything worth mocking, and if Democrats do something contemptible he will cheerfully mock them too. Which, in a satirist, only builds credibility. Now, he will tend to mock Rs more, both because of his own predilections and because Rs in actual power tend to be more frequently and obviously contemptible. When Ds are contemptible it's either ridiculous prog internet warriors who can't do anything, or nasty little bureaucrats, or occasionally a representative being economically illiterate in a way that isn't easily broken down into soundbites.
There's also the problem that [Sleezebag] is often too facially absurd to satirize in a way that really satisfies as comedy (as opposed to satisfying one's vindictive impulses in a form that happens to involve laughter). This pretty well killed political humor for a couple of years, while JS was absent--he picked a good time to bail! You'd have [Sleezebag] saying or doing something asinine, cowardly, or brutal, usually in a way that's not very different from the ways he's been asinine, cowardly, or brutal before, and then some comedian saying, "haha, look, the thing [Sleezebag] said or did is asinine/cowardly/brutal!" Which isn't really joking so much as explaining a joke, which is never funny, especially when it's a joke we've all heard too many times before.
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How much Daily Show you catching these days? She talked like it was something a bit new...
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Every now and then I go on YouTube and check Stewart's highlights (I avoid his new crew as I find most of them annoying and unfunny most of the time). So, sometime within the last month? I don't check religiously or anything. The most recent thing I recall was his (hysterical) bit on the Elmo social media hacking, where he video-interviews an excuse-slinging Elmo.
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I only see a little here and there myself - not enough to fight that hill...
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https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/08/a-median-voter-theory-of-right-wing-populism.html
Somebody did a study last year finding that European parliamentarians are on average much more liberal on "social" questions (most meaningfully, immigration) than the median voter in their respective countries. Which is to say that right-wing populist movements appeared in those countries for a reason. It may be the same in our own; certainly Trumpism seems to speak closer to the average American on immigration than Democrats and pre-2016 Republicans. This suggests (to me, at least) that the most reliable way to beat Trumpism would be to move to the center on those questions. At present the D strategy seems to be staying hard-left on immigration (and other issues) and trusting in their more palatable stances on other issues, and our current president's abrasiveness, to turn out votes for them. Which doesn't seem to work very well so far.
Personally, I'm somewhere between apathetic and ambivalent on immigration, and getting all het up about it mystifies me. But it's one explanation why the American left can't seem to reliably beat the single stupidest figure in US politics ...
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Chasing the center is a mug's game they been playing like fools since before you were born. It IS a chase, the center being further right every year - EXACTLY not what the country needs.
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Okay. So, why is the moron beating you? What is your side doing wrong here? I mean, I can buy the elections as three specific outcomes with no ties to larger phenomena (2016 came out of nowhere; 2020 he lost to relative normie Biden because we were getting tired of the zaniness, plus COVID; 2024 you have the cumbersome aftermath of Biden's abrupt stand-down) but that avoids the bigger question of why the ape has any staying power at all. He is very bad at basically everything politicians are supposed to be good at. He has essentially no talents. He has essentially never had a positive approval rating. Somehow, this yields him getting re-elected after a sort of bizarre abortive half-coup involving a half-naked painted guy in a racoon/bison hat storming the capitol. That didn't sink him. The man is not doing a bang-up job. He would be hard-pressed to do worse. He's just bouncing between unforced errors at this point. The explanation that he is giving some sizable percentage of the country what they want (and not just his true believers), while your folks are not, is unpalatable but more persuasive to me than any others at this point.
(I find myself circumlocuting to avoid saying his name and triggering the censor autoreplace. This is annoying and I am registering my protest. He is not Voldemort. Voldemort was sometimes competent.)
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The Democrat strategy on immigration is just not hard left, unless anything short of mass deportation and ethnic cleansing is to the left. The borders certainly weren't "open" during Biden and Obama's terms; they both detained and deported millions. As conservatives love to mention in a weird, incoherent gotcha, Obama built the cages [Sleezebag] put kids in. The primary difference between them and [Sleezebag], ironically enough, is that they were much more likely to detain and deport undocumented migrants with criminal records/charges.
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[Sleezebag] lost the popular vote, lost the House, lost the popular vote by a lot and lost the Senate, and won the popular vote by the second smallest margin of the century, ahead of only 2000's hanging chads, in a century with extremely close margins. Maybe ask Republicans why they keep nominating him.
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The Democrat strategy on immigration is just not hard left, unless anything short of mass deportation and ethnic cleansing is to the left. The borders certainly weren't "open" during Biden and Obama's terms; they both detained and deported millions. As conservatives love to mention in a weird, incoherent gotcha, Obama built the cages [Sleezebag] put kids in. The primary difference between them and [Sleezebag], ironically enough, is that they were much more likely to detain and deport undocumented migrants with criminal records/charges.
I was thinking more of sanctuary cities, which are a very, very bad look. You are correct that Obama and Biden deported plenty. I have no idea why this isn't sufficient, or why anybody cares this much that their fruit gets picked by people without appropriate paperwork. I just know that this is something which a lot of Americans, and not just Rs, seem really worked up over, and the President, for whatever reason, appeals to them on that. Or did until he actually engaged in his current round of mass deportations, and his approval rating on immigration specifically dropped. Even so, the fact that he is being a stereotypical autocratic thug with armies of inept club-swinging goons rounding up utterly random brown people without even checking if they're illegal, and four out of ten Americans STILL think he's doing a fine job on this ... that says something!
Looking at a -immigration-deportation-poll-el-salvador-81f8040599b9c585554678371e12ed5a]poll (https://apnews.com/article/[Sleezebag) conducted in April, eighty percent of Republicans said he was deporting enough or should be deporting more. No surprise there. But fifty percent of independents and twenty percent of Democrats said the same thing. And he started the El Salvador thing well before April. Moving on to mid-July (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-immigration-falls-lowest-level-his-term-reutersipsos-poll-finds-2025-07-16/), you've got about 60% of Republicans approving of work raids, of officers wearing masks, and of arrests being conducted like military operations. Another 15-20% unsure. For independents, about a quarter outright approve and another quarter are unsure, for all three. 10-15% of Democrats, give or take, approve, and equal margins unsure. Conclusion: the typical American doesn't want this, exactly, but he probably wants something between this and what Obama did. What does that look like? Beats me.
I know why the man keeps getting nominated; he's turned the GOP into his personal cult and he will primary anyone who speaks against him. The more interesting question for me is why is he winning, by any margin at all?
EDIT: The stupid autocensor broke my first link. Leaving broken link up as support for my case that the autocensor is a nuisance. https://tinyurl.com/49n7xtup
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Okay. So, why is the moron beating you? What is your side doing wrong here? I mean, I can buy the elections as three specific outcomes with no ties to larger phenomena (2016 came out of nowhere; 2020 he lost to relative normie Biden because we were getting tired of the zaniness, plus COVID; 2024 you have the cumbersome aftermath of Biden's abrupt stand-down) but that avoids the bigger question of why the ape has any staying power at all. He is very bad at basically everything politicians are supposed to be good at. He has essentially no talents. He has essentially never had a positive approval rating. Somehow, this yields him getting re-elected after a sort of bizarre abortive half-coup involving a half-naked painted guy in a racoon/bison hat storming the capitol. That didn't sink him. The man is not doing a bang-up job. He would be hard-pressed to do worse. He's just bouncing between unforced errors at this point. The explanation that he is giving some sizable percentage of the country what they want (and not just his true believers), while your folks are not, is unpalatable but more persuasive to me than any others at this point.
(I find myself circumlocuting to avoid saying his name and triggering the censor autoreplace. This is annoying and I am registering my protest. He is not Voldemort. Voldemort was sometimes competent.)
Several reasons.
Premise One. [Sleezebag] understands, probably intuitively, that social media has transformed what elections do in the eyes of many Americans.
[Sleezebag]’s core support comes from people who are humiliated—both by the unhappy circumstances of their own lives as well as by what they see in media. Fox News has been assuring them for decades now that dinner party liberals are laughing at them, that their way of life has been characterized as “bigoted” or “backwards,” and that the Democratic Party wants to make it impossible for them to live and believe as they do. Well, here comes Donald [Sleezebag] to send you constant uplifting messages of glorification. You’re one of the “true” patriots. It’s okay to be you. It’s everyone else who’s bad. He’s like their psychiatrist. He’s juicing their self-worth, and that’s more important to them than any legislation or money or policy achievement will ever be.
Never forget that, "You're good just as you are" is something more people wait to hear their whole lives. It's one of the most reassuring phrases in the English language. It means we can rest easy. The hard work of change is over, or unnecessary to begin with. For many, it's liberating.
Why is it possible for a politician to offer emotional rewards to the exclusion of more traditional results? Because voter confidence in public institutions has cratered. Despite unprecedented levels of partisanship, it is also extremely common to hear voters complain that the two parties similarly inept, similarly corrupt, and both committed to policies that “don’t do anything for people like me.” This isn’t objectively true, but it is deeply felt. So a large number of people don’t vote because they think a politician will do the work of actually governing. Just ask them. They’ll happily use “bad leadership” and “poor results” as a bludgeon against Democrats, but when it comes to a Republican, well, [Sleezebag] just needs more time, or else the President really can’t control costs. In other words, they’re happy to be hypocrites when it might add to their rhetorical arsenal, but it’s not really about the tangible results that [Sleezebag] can deliver. It's about the pleasure they get when [Sleezebag]--their proxy--wins the vote, escapes punishment, gives them sanction using all the most legitimate symbology our society can muster, and gives their alleged detractors a taste of the bitterness they've been choking on for so long.
So what can a politician do? He or she can perform, using their celebrity to project loud messages of praise and criticism that give supporters an increased sense of self-worth.
Premise Two. The market position of Fox News is so dominant, conservative spin is increasing the starting point for all news discussion. Hence, [Sleezebag] appears less incoherent. Conservatives don’t see the full range of his misdeeds, his frailties, his poor judgement. Inconvenient facts are suppressed. Lies are told. All cities are crime-ridden wastelands. All universities are overrun by lazy protesters. Democrats care only about deciding who is “woke” and who must pay and letting shoplifters get away with it. Fox News is starting to become ubiquitous in the way Johnson & Johnson products did a few decades ago. Did you know Band-Aid™ is a brand name for adhesive bandages (plasters in the UK)? That a Q-Tip™ is a brand of cotton swab?
Large number of voters are unsure what the Democratic Party stands for anymore because conservative media has successfully rebranded it. And the conservative media model is so successful, formerly liberal institutions like MSNBC and CNN are tacking right in search of greater market share from viewers who only want their own views repeated back to them. How many liberals do you know who talked about Sydney Sweeny’s jeans? How many conservatives do you know who talked about liberals talking about it?
Fox News created a world in which no crime that could possibly be committed by real [Sleezebag] is nearly as bad as what imaginary Hillary Clinton would surely do in his place.
Premise Three. [Sleezebag] brought paranoids back into American life, and he created a permission structure to disbelieve any information that causes distress. Americans are now fully authorized to live in a fantasy land where any inconvenience can be waved away as “fake news” or potentially suspect. And they often lack the education and experience to fight their way out of misinformation traps.
Even better, [Sleezebag] wants nothing of his supporters beyond their vote. If they don't like bad news, they don't have to keep it! Climate change? Not real! COVID-19? Not real! It's life in Easy Mode.
The reason the Democrats can’t move their platform right in search of voters is that there’s already a party for narcissists, and they’re not going to outflank it. The Democrats can rebrand themselves—that is, they can potentially tear down the strawmen that have led some moderates and swing voters to bolt temporarily right—but they shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that success will lie in adopting Republican positions.
The media bubbles also help explain why blind partisans--the conservatives who aren't much fans of [Sleezebag] but haven't abandoned him--stick around. Because if you hum loud enough, and don't go looking too hard for disconfirmation, Fox News will eventually lull you into complacency.
Premise Four. A sizeable percentage of the American electorate has no interest in democracy. They don’t understand what is actually Constitutional. They aren’t concerned about the fates of others—only themselves. [Sleezebag]’s behaviors, including his coup, don’t bother them because they wouldn’t have minded had he succeeded. America isn't an idea to them--just a piece of land where too many other people have a say in what goes on. To them, the worst thing about January 6 was that it was temporarily inconvenient for them to have to explain why they supported Donald [Sleezebag].
Thanks to Fox News, they are convinced that the United States is gripped by a border crisis that doesn’t exist, and because they are zero-sum thinkers, they are jealous of every minute that politicians talk about or help anyone who isn’t them.
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I know why the man keeps getting nominated; he's turned the GOP into his personal cult and he will primary anyone who speaks against him. The more interesting question for me is why is he winning, by any margin at all?
Again, the last quarter century has been nothing but very tight margins. We're currently extremely polarized, so anybody who manages to get the nomination of a major party is going to get roughly half the votes. You can point to declining party membership as evidence against the thesis that we're polarized, but that quickly evaporates if you look at actual voting patterns. Most unaffiliated voters are, well--I hate to say this--like me: despite their non-affiliation, they still identify as leaning in one particular direction... and almost always vote in that direction. They are unaffiliated in name only.
So, no, I really think the more important question is why the Republican party decided to sacrifice any inkling of integrity or backbone for such an obvious, demented, and not especially popular crook. They have agency, dammit. It is not unreasonable to ask why they let this happen. And they did, very clearly! You can easily pull up videos from 2015 and 2016 of just about every Republican who hasn't since quit the party saying, "jfc, don't elect that guy. we're ruined if we do!" They knew, and they were right, and they did it anyway. They are not required to give in to demagoguery just because they want to win. Somehow, Democrats manage not to. They keep sending out Clintons and Bidens. Their most extreme candidate was... a Black man.
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Elok, we ain't feeding the attention-hog the attention it's willing to ruin the world just to get - not naming it on my dime.
See y'all, there's a really basic -stupid- political principal in play here, one I used to get a girl liked elected student body president when I was in the ninth grade - the name most out there wins. I PLASTERED the building with her name, and she didn't have any real negatives to overcome. Her opponent had a serious chance, mind you - Wildman was an amiable mildly retarded boy who everyone knew and liked, and the novelty candidate factor -it would be funny- was considerable. -But papering the world with "Be for Bonner" -and probably enough kids who refused to play with their own poop while voting- did do the trick.
I saw a deacon get elected once on the same name recognition principal - the preacher didn't mean to, but had to mention him every time he talked about upcoming deacon elections over some point of eligibility.
The Pig's negatives are what they are -arguably the mildly retarded w/o the amiable, plus SO much more- but they've ALL been saying his name incessantly for NINE Years now, the only7 mystery being how people -including Republikkkan leadership- could be SO stupid/credulous as to take the -rotten, stinking- bait. I can only conclude that about half of everyone is also venal/evil.
I also still half-believe that he's the Antichrist; for doing signs and wonders he's got that anyone ever supported him, and getting away with all the crows deaths and doing treason on live TV.
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Again, the last quarter century has been nothing but very tight margins. We're currently extremely polarized, so anybody who manages to get the nomination of a major party is going to get roughly half the votes. You can point to declining party membership as evidence against the thesis that we're polarized, but that quickly evaporates if you look at actual voting patterns. Most unaffiliated voters are, well--I hate to say this--like me: despite their non-affiliation, they still identify as leaning in one particular direction... and almost always vote in that direction. They are unaffiliated in name only.
So, no, I really think the more important question is why the Republican party decided to sacrifice any inkling of integrity or backbone for such an obvious, demented, and not especially popular crook. They have agency, dammit. It is not unreasonable to ask why they let this happen. And they did, very clearly! You can easily pull up videos from 2015 and 2016 of just about every Republican who hasn't since quit the party saying, "jfc, don't elect that guy. we're ruined if we do!" They knew, and they were right, and they did it anyway. They are not required to give in to demagoguery just because they want to win. Somehow, Democrats manage not to. They keep sending out Clintons and Bidens. Their most extreme candidate was... a Black man.
Trying to organize my thoughts on this. You may be on to something in the sense that the GOP famously has greater party discipline, so their coalition, such as it is, will hold together. I'm sure you've read the old Scott piece on Conservative vs. Moderate, where conservatism is defined by exclusion from a center-left norm. Democrats really do have a broader and more unwieldy coalition to manage, or so it seems to me--everyone from raging moonbats (of different stripes, economic and social, and they frequently disagree) through to basically my center-left parents and now I guess a few NeverTrumpers who jumped ship, plus whichever moderates can't stomach Trumpism at the moment. Possibly an Orange Man couldn't take over the Dems, in that one who tried would flail as everybody took their toys and went home rather than fall in line. If he did get the nomination, though, I suspect he would lose much more badly than T ever has because the floppy moderates would sit out the general rather than support him.
I mean, realistically, try to imagine a leftist Donald who makes insane campaign promises about nationalizing every company and legally mandating race and gender quotas, and indulges in off-the-cuff musing about airdropping heavy weapons into the Gaza Strip, or whatever the equivalent would be (fill in your own if you like). I'm pretty sure he or she would get pummeled. Polarization would not matter. That person would not get anywhere near half the vote.
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Party discipline? Not since 2008 - but they're united in hatred of the imaginary left, no discipline to it.
Can you say speaker fight?
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