REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Monday, October 21, 2024 20:59
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Sunday, May 29, 2022 11:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

He finishes off the article with this paragraph:
I look forward to Republicans taking over the country. That will put extra money into my pocket. I won’t vote for Republicans, but I prefer the money over the feeling I voted for the winner. Feelings have zero cash value. Maybe a history lesson will help you understand how badly Republican voters are screwed when they are ruled by Republican politicians. But probably this is TL;DR for you.

Remember President George W Bush? He cheated his way out of service in Vietnam. I did not.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220406212933/https://theintercept.com/20
15/10/27/george-w-bush-was-awol-but-whats-truth-got-to-do-with-it/

Then Bush was a terrible governor of Texas. Gov. Bush destroyed the official records that show he went AWOL from the Texas National Guard.

Then Bush was a terrible President. Ignore Afghanistan and Iraq. Focus on Bush's appointment powers for Federal regulators, who then crashed the economy. https://www.google.com/search?q=why+was+there+a+crash+in+2008

That crash caused by Bush made me richer. When stocks crash, they are selling at a huge discount. People who aren’t like the typical Trump voter will buy those stocks. I wouldn’t vote for Bush, but I will take the money Bush sent my way.

The next Republican, Trump, stopped paying his own taxes and stopped collecting taxes from the wealthy. May I refer you to articles with titles such as Tax cheats cost the US $1 trillion per year, IRS chief says / IRS chief says $1 trillion in taxes goes uncollected every year.

If Trump wouldn’t pay, why should I? The IRS can’t thoroughly audit me unless I cooperate. Why should I pay when I can be as difficult to audit as Trump if I want? Instead, the IRS only thoroughly audits people who received child tax credits.

Then the stock market crashed because Trump wouldn’t handle the covid pandemic. That was another buying opportunity, just like in 2008 under Bush, for me to make money.

Then Trump spent $7.8 trillion more than the taxes collected. All that extra money was to win votes. It almost worked but what did work as I expected was that the $7.8 trillion would land in my bank account, not yours, 6ix.
https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump

If Republicans take over the country, that puts more money into my pocket. I won’t vote for Republicans, but I will take the money. Unfortunately for the people who vote for Trump, they never have the extra cash to take advantage of the crashes, but they get a warm fuzzy feeling when Republicans win. I prefer the cash I get when Republicans win.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, May 29, 2022 11:36 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

He finishes off the article with this paragraph:
I look forward to Republicans taking over the country. That will put extra money into my pocket.


You and everybody else.

Quote:
I won’t vote for Republicans, but I prefer the money over the feeling I voted for the winner. Feelings have zero cash value.


You spend all day long jacking off your asinine opinions here.

Your net worth and your feelings have a lot in common.

Quote:
Maybe a history lesson will help you understand how badly Republican voters are screwed when they are ruled by Republican politicians. But probably this is TL;DR for you.


Yes it is. Only because it's coming from you though.



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Sunday, May 29, 2022 11:43 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


70.6% of Americans now say the country is headed in the wrong direction. It never once went to 70% during Trump's four years, and it's been nine years since we last saw numbers that bad under Obama.

Democrats are fucking done.

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Friday, June 3, 2022 6:19 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
70.6% of Americans now say the country is headed in the wrong direction. It never once went to 70% during Trump's four years, and it's been nine years since we last saw numbers that bad under Obama.

Democrats are fucking done.
I'm doing fine. All the Democrats I know are well, too. Why are Trump voters not? I know perfectly well why, and I have known long before Trump went into politics . . . Trump voters have mental problems. Crazy Americans lose jobs, families, money, their minds. They go from crisis to crisis, hoping somebody will save them. Trump is the somebody. You'd have to be crazy to make Trump that somebody, but you are crazy!

Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:

That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.” You might have even paid Trump money.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/04/10/tru
mp-university-settlement-judge-finalized/502387002/

That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, “Okay.” You might have even cheated, just like Trump does.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hotel-paid-millions-in-fines-for-u
npaid-work

That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, “No problem.” You might even have a similar history to Trump's.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/list-trumps-accusers-allegations-sexua
l-misconduct/story?id=51956410

That when he made up stories about seeing Muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, “Not an issue.” You might have even told the same false stories.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/23/president-dona
ld-trump-could-shoot-someone-without-prosecution/4073405002/

That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn’t care, you exclaimed, “He sure knows me.” You might have a gun for "protection" but guns aren't light-sabers which deflect bullets. Guns only kill.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/23/president-dona
ld-trump-could-shoot-someone-without-prosecution/4073405002/

That when you heard him relating a story of an elderly guest of his country club, an 80-year old man, who fell off a stage and hit his head, to Trump replied: “‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away. I couldn’t—you know, he was right in front of me, and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him. He was bleeding all over the place. And I felt terrible, because it was a beautiful white marble floor, and now it had changed color. Became very red.” You said, “That’s cool!”
https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-howard-stern-story

That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-criticized
-after-he-appears-mock-reporter-serge-kovaleski-n470016

That when you heard him brag that he doesn’t read books, you said, “Well, who has time?”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/americas-first-po
st-text-president/549794/

That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, “That makes sense.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/19/what-trump-has
-said-central-park-five/1501321001/

That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, “Yes!”
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-trump-campaign-protests-2016031
3-story.html

That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man’s coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, “What a great guy!”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/donald-trump-orders-proteste
r-s-coat-is-confiscated-and-he-is-sent-into-the-cold-a6802756.html

That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, “Thumbs up!”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/why-cant-trump-ju
st-condemn-nazis/567320/

That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, “That’s the way I want my President to be.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-insult-foreign-countries-leaders_
n_59dd2769e4b0b26332e76d57

That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they’re supposed to be regulating and you have said, “What a genius!”
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/12/29/138-trump-policy-chan
ges-2017-000603/

That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, “That’s smart!”
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-05/how-is-donald-trump
-profiting-from-the-presidency-let-us-count-the-ways

That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was in the middle of water and you have said, “That makes sense.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/09/26/the-very-bi
g-ocean-between-here-and-puerto-rico-is-not-a-perfect-excuse-for-a-lack-of-aid/

That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, “falling in love” with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, “That’s statesmanship!”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/02/politics/donald-trump-dictators-kim-jon
g-un-vladimir-putin/index.html

That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids, has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas – he explains that they’re just “animals” – and you say, “Well, OK then.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/more-5-400-children-split-border-
according-new-count-n1071791

That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/confronting-cost-trumps-corru
ption-american-families/

What you don’t get, Trump supporters, is that our succumbing to frustration and shaking our heads, thinking of you as stupid, may very well be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also…hear me…charitable.
https://kzoodems.com/2020/07/what-republicans-and-anyone-else-who-supp
ort-trump-need-to-know/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 4, 2022 7:07 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

That line has become a popular aphorism to sum up the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the modern Republican Party.

https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservatives-frank-wi
lhoit.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 4, 2022 9:00 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

That line has become a popular aphorism to sum up the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the modern Republican Party.


Fuck off.

Affirmative Action and Identity Politics have been strangling America since 2008. That's all Democrats.

And it's all over.

--------------------------------------------------

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Wednesday, June 8, 2022 6:09 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Three positive things I can say about the presidency of Donald Trump:

1. He killed fewer foreigners than any president in my lifetime.

George W. Bush followed up his dad’s massacre and overtly killed a million people. Clinton killed at least a half million through the wanton cruelty of the Iraq sanctions he maintained for his entire presidency. He also bombed four separate countries. Obama bombed seven, all while initiating a policy of murdering people with flying robots, including Americans abroad. Ronald Reagan. Just… Ronald Reagan.

The painful irony of Trump’s isolationism was it made him completely disinterested in the American empire, and so he spent all his time killing his own citizens instead. I hope you didn’t know any of them. You probably did.

2. He derided and dismissed the White House Correspondent’s Association, who completely deserved it.

For four years we have not had to deal with the self-righteous masturbatory decadence of the DC media reporting on the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, a small annual fundraiser that about a decade ago the DC media elevated into a grotesque spectacle where they all pretend their profession is a celebrity class by hosting a dinner with the President attending that they eventually just straight-up invited actual celebrities to. Trump, who hates the media that allowed him to exist, eschewed ever attending the Dinner, an activity that involved spending about fifteen minutes having the tamest of carefully-reviewed jokes levied at him while CNN correspondents bragged about sitting next to Dr. Oz as this happened.

Trump did not consider this worthy of his time or the dignity of his office and he was completely right.

3. He rendered the title of “fact-checker” meaningless, which is good, because it is.

Somewhere in the mid-2000’s the press came up with this weird idea that they would have a dedicated position in their newsrooms of a person who would report on whether or not politicians were lying. This job used to held by people known as “reporters,” who would explain lies in difficult-to-understand terms for their audience, such as “this isn’t true” or “the president is lying.”

Instead, the role of “fact-checker” was created, who would analyze things the president said using a “fib-o-meter” or “three Calvins pissing on a crying George Washington.” This left reporters to be relieved of the job of saying when things were a lie, in favor of more compelling explanations of how one side said something, and the other said the opposite, and really, who’s to tell who is right anyway? This broad redefining of the role of contemporary journalists was heartily embraced by the nation, who rewarded them by eliminating about 90 percent of their jobs.

In totally accidental irony, Trump lied so much, on such an astronomical level, that it became impossible for reporters to avoid doing their job. By the end of his presidency, it became so unavoidable that it was embarrassing for any correspondent to not immediately point out if what Trump said was actually true. The role of “fact-checker” became irrelevant in the wake of an even stronger group of people with the skills to identify falsehoods from a particular politician, known as “everyone.” Will this save journalism? It’s too soon to tell.

It is not lost on me that two of these three things are, basically, an indictment of our media, who bear much of the responsibility for facilitating the last four years of Trump, including his election. If anything, it’s probably worth it for a lot of people in our media to consider that when I took seriously a challenge to think of something, anything nice to say about Donald Trump, most of them were about how he treated them like they deserved.

http://www.someguywithawebsite.com/orange-man/#more-314

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 8, 2022 9:49 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Yup. Even Some Guy is starting to get it.

Nope. Trump didn't kill anybody you knew because he didn't kill anybody here.



--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Wednesday, June 8, 2022 9:50 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


If San Fransisco can remove a Soros planted DA, anybody can.

Democrats are fuckin' done.



--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Wednesday, June 8, 2022 10:56 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
If San Fransisco can remove a Soros planted DA, anybody can.

Democrats are fuckin' done.
It is NOT Soros. The recalled DA's father, a former member of the left-wing extremist Weather Underground group, spent 40 years in prison for second-degree murder. His mother, who was also a member of Weather Underground, spent more than 20 years in prison. He was raised by a co-founder of Weather Underground. How did this guy get elected to DA? Only because the other candidate, a staunch Republican, was a complete and obnoxious asshole.

Since the DA was elected with only 50.8% of the vote, which is not exactly a landslide, it is not a surprise, considering the DA's family and background, that the DA was un-elected with 61% of the vote.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/san-francisco-district-attorney-recal
l-election

Sometimes neither candidate is worth a damn. When that happens, hopefully the least worst candidate wins. Later, that so-called "winner" gets recalled.
Quote:
Yesterday, San Francisco voters decided to turn their district attorney, Chesa Boudin, out of office. They did it because he didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. To understand just how noteworthy Boudin’s defenestration is, please keep in mind that San Francisco has only a tiny number of Republicans.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220608162725/https://www.theatlantic.com
/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 8, 2022 10:23 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Yes. It is Soros.

Maybe if you started to call out bad actors in your party instead of pretending everything done under the Democratic Party flag was good and right you could have prevented the collapse of the party.

It's too late now.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Thursday, June 9, 2022 7:05 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Why do Trump voters act the way they do? Ethan Grey explains, but before getting to the explanation, here is a Supreme Court decision, made yesterday, about the same subject:
Quote:
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court abolished individuals’ ability to sue Customs and Border Protection agents who violate their constitutional rights. In the process, the conservative supermajority came close to smothering lawsuits against all federal officers who defy the Constitution, granting them near-impenetrable immunity. The liberal justices, in dissent, took the extraordinary step of identifying the cause of this disturbing development: the addition of new justices appointed by Donald Trump.
More about the details of that case at
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/sotomayor-border-patrol-ci
vil-rights-lawsuits.html

The details didn't really make any difference to how the Trump justices decided the case. Change all the details of the case and Trump's justices would have made the same decision because of their psychology. Ethan Grey explains why Trump's appointed judges did what they did and Grey explains why Trump voters do what they do.

Ethan Grey @_EthanGrey
https://twtext.com/article/1534024357957230594
11:08 PM · Jun 6, 2022·Twitter Web App

This is a thread on Republican messaging.

Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:
1. They can tell people what to do.
2. You cannot tell them what to do.

This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy. There’s an additional layer of complexity to this (later in the thread), but this is the basic formula.

You've watched the Republican Party champion the idea of "freedom" while you have also watched the same party openly assault various freedoms, like the freedom to vote, freedom to choose, freedom to marry who you want and so on.

If this has been a source of confusion, then your assessments of what Republicans mean by “freedom” were likely too generous. Here’s what they mean:

1. The freedom to tell people what to do.
2. Freedom from being told what to do.

When Republicans talk about valuing “freedom”, they’re speaking of it in the sense that only people like them should ultimately possess it. Or in the Supreme Court case, Customs and Border Protection agents are granted near-impenetrable immunity.

So with this in mind, let’s examine some of our political issues with an emphasis on who is telling who what to do. And hopefully there will be no ambiguity about what the Republican Party message is ever again.

Let’s start with the COVID-19 pandemic. We were told by experts in infectious diseases that to control the spread of the pandemic, we had to socially distance, mask, and get vaccinated. So, in a general sense, we were being told what to do. Guess who had a big problem with that.

All Republicans saw were certain people trying to tell them what to do, which was enough of a reason to make it their chief priority to insist that they will not be told what to do. Even though what they were told to do could save lives, including their own.

As you can see, this is a very stunning commitment to refusing to be told what to do. So much so that it is not in fact “pro-life.” But Republicans will nevertheless claim to be the “pro-life” party. That is because they recognize “pro-life” can be used to tell people what to do.

The reason they say they are “pro-life” when they are trying to tell women what to do with their bodies is not out of genuine concern for human life, but because they recognize that in this position, they can tell women what to do with their bodies.

That’s why when you use that same appeal—“pro-life”—when you ask Republicans to do something about gun violence in schools, it doesn’t work. Because you are now in the position of telling Republicans what to do. That’s precisely why they don’t want to do anything about it.

Anyway, gun violence in schools is not a problem, but their children having to wear masks in schools is. Because somebody is telling their children what to do. Dead children don’t bother them, but telling their children what to do? Only *they* should do that.

They claim to be for “small government”, but that really means a government that tells them what to do should be as small as possible. But when the Republican Party recognizes it has an opportunity to tell people what to do, the government required for that tends to be large.

The reason Republicans are so focused on the border isn’t because they care about border security, it’s because they recognize it as the most glaring example of when they can tell other people what to do. That's why it’s their favorite issue. See yesterday's Supreme Court decision about the Border Patrol.

You want in? Too bad. Get out.

If Republicans could do this in every social space—tell the people who aren’t like them too bad, get out—I’m here to assure that would be something resembling their ideal society.

Now, there are economic policies that we’ve proposed that we can demonstrate would be of obvious benefit to even Republican voters. So how do Republicans leaders kill potential support for these policies? Make the issue about who is telling who what to do.

They focus on the fact that Democrats may raise taxes. Even when it’s painfully obvious that Democrats aren’t going to raise taxes on everyone (or on very few people), what’s important here is that Democrats are the people telling certain people what to do.

If you want to know why Republicans can easily be talked out of proposals from the Democratic Party that are shown to be of benefit to them, it is precisely because they have to entertain the idea of Democrats telling certain people what to do.

What you didn’t understand from the very beginning is that Democrats should not ultimately be in the position to tell anyone what to do. Only Republicans should be in the position to tell people what to do.

On the issue of climate change, a lot of them don’t regard it as a serious issue to the extent that they think it is a hoax. This is because when you tell Republicans to do something for the sake of the planet, you are still ultimately telling them to what to do.

Furthermore, you are conceiving the planet as a thing that all human beings should have to share. I am here to assure you that the GOP’s main concern with the planet is to ensure that they don’t have to share it.

Now here’s where things get interesting: when you explain to Republicans you want them to do something and explain it’s on the basis of benefiting other people. Now you have really crossed a line. Not only did you tell them what to do, you told them to consider others.

The whole point of an arrangement where you can tell people what to do, but you can’t be told what to do, is precisely to avoid having to consider others. This is why this is their ideal arrangement: so they don’t have to do that.

As you can see, this is a very toxic relationship with the idea of who can tell who what to do. So much so that it seems like the entire point is to conceive of a “right” kind of people who can tell other people what to do without being told what to do. Yep, that’s the point.

So let’s add one more component to the system for who tells who what to do:

1. There are “right” human beings and there are "wrong" ones.
2. The “right” ones get to tell the “wrong” ones what to do.
3. The “wrong” ones do not tell the “right” ones what to do.

The press has chosen to accommodate the Republican Party in a very specific way:

1. It normalizes the Republican agenda.
2. It normalizes framing the responsibility for stopping that agenda as ultimately being on Democrats.

Anyway, I made this thread mostly because I realize that the press has a "messaging problem." Namely, in the sense that they seem extremely averse to explicitly identifying the message of the Republican Party.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 9, 2022 7:40 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Researchers find growing ‘mortality gap’ between Democratic and Republican counties

by Marta Hill - Yesterday 9:44 AM

Mortality rates since 2001 have decreased more in Democratic counties than in Republican counties, creating a widening mortality gap, a new study shows.

The study, conducted in part by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, examined mortality rates and federal and state election data across the country from 2001 to 2019. ( https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o1308 ) They found a mortality gap — or a widening difference in death rates — between counties that had voted for a Democrat or a Republican in previous elections.

Specifically, mortality rates fell 22% in Democratic counties, as compared to only an 11% decrease in Republican counties.

“In an ideal world, politics and health would be independent of each other and it wouldn’t matter whether one lives in an area that voted for one party or another,” Dr. Haider Warraich, a corresponding author of the study and member of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham, said in a statement. “But that is no longer the case. From our data, we can see that the risk of premature death is higher for people living in a county that voted Republican.”

This pattern was consistent across various subgroups explored in the study, including sex, race and ethnicity, and urban-rural location.

The study found that the age-adjusted mortality rate for both men and women was lower and improved more in Democratic counties than Republican ones.

When looking at the most common causes of death, Democratic counties saw greater reductions in mortality rate. The researchers found heart disease and cancer remain the leading causes of death in counties regardless of political affiliation. But they discovered declines in death from heart disease were more pronounced, resulting in a widening gap. By the end of the study period, Republican counties saw higher mortality rates than Democratic counties for cancer as well.

More at https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/researchers-find-growing-mort
ality-gap-between-democratic-and-republican-counties/ar-AAYdOya

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 10, 2022 5:32 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Is American Democracy Still Doomed?

Consider America’s incredibly convoluted local government structures. It’s pretty normal for a town or city to have an elected government that is itself subordinated to a county government which in turn is subordinated to a state government. The city government sometimes replicates the Madisonian structure of a mayor “checked” by a city council, and the state government always does. Then the state government is also bicameral (unless you live in Nebraska). And there tends to be a separate school board. The District Attorney is elected separately from the city or county government. The state probably has several statewide elected officials who aren’t the governor.

The actual lines of responsibility are incredibly confusing, the various officials like to point the finger and shift blame to each other, nobody has any idea who the different people are or what they stand for, and absolutely anything that anyone tries to do initiates many rounds of lawsuits. I think it really is true that this madcap festival of voting serves less to generate “democracy” in the sense of popular control over governance than to simply obscure what is actually happening and who (if anyone) is in charge. The skein of local democracy turns out to mostly be a series of low-turnout, low-salience elections that mask an underlying reality of governance by opaque coalitions of insider stakeholders — contractors, cops, bureaucrats, and psychos who have the time to show up to community meetings.

More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-american-democracy-still-doomed?s=r

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 11, 2022 6:56 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Is American democracy doomed?

The classic democratic breakdown scenario stems from something like the 2011 debt ceiling standoff; ideologically driven gridlock in the face of imminent disaster lead to the president deciding (in good faith) that he needs to essentially set the rule of law aside in order to discharge his higher responsibilities to the country. During the Obama administration, we kept walking up to that line only to have Republican Congressmen blink at the last minute.

Now suppose in 2024 the Democrats obtain an average performance in terms of the popular vote, leaving the country with President Donald Trump, a Republican House majority, and 61 Republican Party senators.

Now suppose Republicans enact some right-wing policies, face some public backlash, and lose a couple of Senate seats in 2026. Then in 2028, Pete Buttigieg beats Ron DeSantis and is elected president, and Democrats pick up a couple more Senate seats. Well now the problem is that Buttigieg needs to appoint a cabinet, but the Senate contains 57 Republicans. And each of them feels, legitimately, that they shouldn’t need to vote “yes” on nominees whose ideas they disagree with. But of course Buttigieg (also legitimately) doesn’t want to appoint people whose ideas he disagrees with. He feels, and Democrats agree, that he won the election fair and square and deserves a team that embraces his ideas. But GOP senators feel, and Republicans agree, that they won their elections fair and square and shouldn’t need to vote to confirm people who they dislike.

You end up with a government that is enmeshed in crisis from Day One with acting officials all over the government, a right-wing judiciary nullifying executive actions, the Buttigieg administration dismissing the obstruction as illegitimate, Republican impeachment efforts falling short of the two-thirds bar, and ultimately the question of who governs the country coming down to whose orders get followed. Now of course more moderate members like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and maybe even John Cornyn will try to form a Gang of 12 or whatever to resolve the standoff. But by 2028, there just aren’t going to be enough moderates left for a gang-based deal to work. The doom of the country is going to come not from anyone’s authoritarian impulses, but from the fact that the American system requires constant compromise to function on a basic level, and we increasingly have political leaders who don’t compromise.

More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-american-democracy-still-doomed?s=r

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 13, 2022 5:00 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Bad thinkers

Why do some people believe conspiracy theories? (Trump Won, for example.) It’s not just who or what they know. It’s a matter of intellectual character.

Usually, when philosophers try to explain why someone believes things (weird or otherwise), they focus on that person’s reasons rather than their character traits. On this view, the way to explain why "Oliver" believes that 9/11 was an inside job is to identify his reasons for believing this, and the person who is in the best position to tell you his reasons is Oliver. When you explain Oliver’s belief by giving his reasons, you are giving a ‘rationalising explanation’ of his belief.

The problem with this is that rationalising explanations take you only so far. If you ask Oliver why he believes 9/11 was an inside job he will, of course, be only too pleased to give you his reasons: it had to be an inside job, he insists, because aircraft impacts couldn’t have brought down the towers. He is wrong about that, but at any rate that’s his story and he is sticking to it. What he has done, in effect, is to explain one of his questionable beliefs by reference to another no less questionable belief. Unfortunately, this doesn’t tell us why he has any of these beliefs. There is a clear sense in which we still don’t know what is really going on with him.

Now let’s flesh out Oliver’s story a little: suppose it turns out that he believes lots of other conspiracy theories apart from the one about 9/11. He believes the Moon landings were faked, that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered by MI6, and that the Ebola virus (or covid-19) is an escaped bioweapon. Those who know him well say that he is easily duped, and you have independent evidence that he is careless in his thinking, with little understanding of the difference between genuine evidence and unsubstantiated speculation. Suddenly it all begins to make sense, but only because the focus has shifted from Oliver’s reasons to his character. You can now see his views about 9/11 in the context of his intellectual conduct generally, and this opens up the possibility of a different and deeper explanation of his belief than the one he gives: he thinks that 9/11 was an inside job because he is gullible in a certain way. He has what social psychologists call a ‘conspiracy mentality’.

The gullible rarely believe they are gullible and the closed-minded don’t believe they are closed-minded. In practical terms, one of the hardest things about dealing with people such as Oliver is that they are more than likely to accuse you of the same intellectual vices that you detect in them. You say that Oliver is gullible for believing his 9/11 conspiracy theory; he retorts that you are gullible for believing the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission. You say that he dismisses the official account of 9/11 because he is closed-minded; he accuses you of closed-mindedness for refusing to take conspiracy theories seriously.

It’s important not to be too disconcerted by this attempt to turn the tables on you. True, no one is immune to self-ignorance. That doesn’t excuse Oliver. The fact is that his theory is no good, whereas there is every reason to believe that aircraft impacts did bring down the Twin Towers. Just because you believe the official account of what happened in 9/11 doesn’t make you gullible if there are good reasons to believe that account. Equally, being skeptical about the wilder claims of 9/11 conspiracy theorists doesn’t make you closed-minded if there are good reasons to be skeptical. Oliver is gullible because he believes things for which he has no good evidence, and he is closed-minded because he dismisses claims for which there is excellent evidence. It’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that what counts as good evidence is a subjective matter. To say that Oliver lacks good evidence is to draw attention to the absence of eye-witness or forensic support for his theory about 9/11, and to the fact that his theory has been refuted by experts. Oliver might not accept any of this but that is, again, a reflection of his intellectual character.

Gullibility, carelessness and closed-mindedness are examples of what the US philosopher Linda Zagzebski, in her book Virtues of the Mind (1996), has called ‘intellectual vices’. Others include negligence, idleness, rigidity, obtuseness, prejudice, lack of thoroughness, and insensitivity to detail.

Once you get past the idea that Oliver has somehow managed to turn the tables on you, there remains the problem of what to do about such people as him. Both in respect of his motives and his responsibility for his intellectual vices, Oliver might not be strictly blameworthy. That doesn’t mean that nothing should be done about them or about him.

More at https://aeon.co/essays/the-intellectual-character-of-conspiracy-theori
sts

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 13, 2022 3:37 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


“Prove to the World You’ve Lost Your Son”

How a Tulsa grandmother, Kelley Watt, became a vicious Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist—in her own words.

Hours after the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead, it began.

“I’m sorry but I have to say it,” one poster wrote on a far-right message board. “We have to have another false flag shooting, killing small children.”

“Those directing false flags know the emotional response from the Buffalo shooting is wearing down for the sheep,” another person posted online. “So they did another one in Uvalde Texas to reinforce the response. Don’t be fooled. False Flag season is here.”

This script could have come from 10 years ago—and in fact, some of the same people spreading lies about Uvalde have been doing it for a decade. I have spent the past four years tracking the rise and spread of misinformation about a tragedy heartbreakingly similar to Uvalde: the Sandy Hook massacre. The haunting echoes between the two shootings don’t stop at the young victims.

. . .

Whatever drives Kelley Watt, the toll her quests took on her family is clear. Shortly after I learned of Jim Watt’s death, I spoke to their daughter, Madison. In our exchanges, Kelley Watt had spoken proudly of Madison, a gifted artist and linguist, who to Watt’s frustration “doesn’t question things the way her mother does.”

In a fraught, seven-hour conversation, Madison relived the breakdown of her family while her mother pursued self-actualization through conspiracy-mongering. A reserved, cerebral young woman, she left Tulsa for good when she won a scholarship to a prestigious university in New York. Today she lives with her family in Europe, where she works as a consultant. She pushes back against her mother’s beliefs, but has never been able to dissuade her.

When cornered by the truth, Kelley Watt “moves the goalposts,” Madison said, and she didn’t see much hope for changing her mother’s mind. “The only thing that could make her question it would be if that inner circle of hers started to doubt or chip away, but even then, it would be hard,” she told me.

“There’s a great deal of narcissism in this idea that ‘everyone’s got it wrong and we’re in this select group of people that knows.’ It would explode her own persona to allow any doubt to come in. Her whole identity has been built on this for so many years. She’s invested so much.”

Madison recalled years inhabiting the dreams her mother had for her, a shy, bookish little girl dressed in fur and entered in beauty contests. Once, while her mother shopped at Dillard’s, Madison crawled into a hulking four-poster bed on display and fell asleep. Finding her, Kelley was so taken by the tableau that she bought the bed. After the Watts lost their house, mother and daughter slept in the bed together, in an apartment so tiny they put it in the dining room. (Definitely the story of angry poor white trash Kelley Watt.)

More at https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/06/shooting-school-texas-uvalde-
sandy-hook-conspiracy.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 14, 2022 5:32 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


History Says Democracy Will Die if Democrats Don’t Try “Going Big”
by Jon Schwarz
https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/franklin-roosevelt-new-deal-robert
-kuttner-book/

During the 1930s, a beast called fascism stirred to life and began overwhelming societies across the world. Within 10 years, it was clear this had been one of history’s worst ideas. But the unappealing reality is that during the fascist moment, many, many people thrilled to its appeal — and not just in the places that would become the Axis powers in World War II.

Yet the United States didn’t go fascist. Why? In 1941, the journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote an unsettling article for Harper’s Magazine which asked the question, “Who Goes Nazi?” Based on her time spent in Europe — she was the first U.S. reporter expelled from Nazi Germany — Thompson explained, “Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.” Moreover, Thompson wrote, huge swaths of Americans possessed this type of mind.

Looked at from a distance of nearly a century, the reason the U.S. evaded fascism seems clear. It wasn’t that we’re nicer or better than other countries, thanks to our inherent sterling character. We just got lucky. The football of history bounced the right way for the country. And a huge part of that luck was Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Roosevelt was exactly the right president at the right time. The New Deal demonstrated that democracy could deliver unmistakable benefits, both material and emotional, to desperate people, and thereby drained away much of the psychological poison that powers fascism.

Then, over the next 30 years, something terrible happened: America forgot all this. We forgot how lucky we got. We forgot the New Deal was not a mountain range created by nature but an extraordinary achievement that was erected by humans and could therefore either be extended or destroyed.

Robert Kuttner illustrates this eloquently in his new book “Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy.” Kuttner, born in 1943, writes, “I am a child of the New Deal. My parents bought their first home with a government-insured mortgage. When my father was stricken with cancer, the VA paid for excellent medical care. After he died, my mother was able to keep our house thanks to my dad’s veteran’s benefits and her widow’s pension from Social Security.”

The problem, he says, is, “My generation grew up thinking of the system wrought by the Roosevelt revolution as normal. … But this seemingly permanent social contract was exceptional. … Above all, it was fragile, built on circumstances and luck as much as enduring structural change.”

Kuttner has been fighting for the New Deal, and against its ferocious enemies, for his entire life. He started as one of journalist I.F. Stone’s assistants, served as a congressional investigator, was general manager of Pacifica’s WBAI Radio in New York City, and has been a regular newspaper columnist. Perhaps most significantly, he’s co-founded two enduring institutions: the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, and The American Prospect, one of the zestiest liberal publications in the U.S.

During much of this time, Kuttner has been trying to persuade the Democratic Party to care about its heritage and stop collaborating with the U.S. right in undermining the New Deal extended universe. But in “Going Big,” Kuttner makes a scary case that the stakes are now much larger than this. The book’s first words are “Joe Biden’s presidency will be either a historic pivot back to New Deal economics and forward to energized democracy, or heartbreaking interregnum between two bouts of deepening American fascism.” The final chapter is titled “America’s Last Chance.”

“Going Big” is largely the story of how we got to this moment, starting with Roosevelt and ending in January of this year, when it went to press. It’s filled with peculiar and little-known history, such as the fact that at the 1932 Democratic Party convention, candidates required two-thirds of the delegate vote to secure the nomination. This rule was championed by the conservative white Democratic powerbrokers of the South — whose ideological descendants are now Republicans — to give them a veto over who would lead the party. Kuttner quotes a New Deal historian as saying, “Roosevelt came within an eyelash of being denied the nomination” thanks to this; he only squeaked through by allying with the extremely unpalatable Southerners.

Kuttner highlights examples of the 200-proof racism then at the commanding heights of the Democratic Party. At the 1936 convention, the invocation was delivered by Marshall Shepard, an African American pastor from Philadelphia. “Cotton Ed” Smith, a senator from South Carolina, called Shepard “a slew-footed, blue-gummed, kinky-headed Senegambian,” and that was the nicer part. Smith walked off the floor in outrage.

Kuttner identifies this type of racial insanity as one of “two potent undertows” that would hobble the New Deal and make it vulnerable to attacks in the future. But while “racism remains pervasive,” writes Kuttner, the U.S. is not the same place as it was in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the Democratic “failure to deliver economic gains for ordinary people” has “allowed white racism once again to fill the political vacuum.” This is thanks to the second factor undermining New Deal politics: “the residual power of capitalists in a capitalist economy.”

The book’s more recent history features the enjoyable intellectual dismantlement of some of the personifications of this power — particularly two of Bill Clinton’s treasury secretaries, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. The 2008 economic collapse can to a significant degree be laid at their feet. Kuttner takes deserved satisfaction in pointing out that they or their followers were regnant in the Obama administration but have largely been marginalized by Biden. Summers in particular was reduced to griping from the sidelines as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Act Plan — far larger than anything dreamed of by Obama — was passed in March 2021.

And that’s great. But that brings the book to the obvious, core problem of U.S. politics right now. Biden could try to make the 2022 midterms and the 2024 election a referendum on his Build Back Better agenda, or the PRO Act (which would make union organizing much easer), or abortion rights, or expanding Social Security, or a crackdown on corporate villainy, or any and all of the many popular positions that Democrats theoretically hold.

Roosevelt would have relished the fight and going big. But Biden and the Democrats now seem intent on going small — so “smol” and petite and inoffensive that no one notices or gets mad at them. One especially dispiriting example of this that Kuttner does not address in the book, but has elsewhere, is inflation. The Biden administration could have gone on the offensive and made the case that inflation is being driven by supply chain issues, corporate price-gouging, and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince — as opposed to rising wages and government spending — but instead has largely settled into a silent defensive crouch. Now Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve reappointed by Biden, is saying that the Fed’s policy is to “get wages down,” something Americans will enjoy even less than inflation.

The novel “Love in the Ruins” by Walker Percy was published in 1971, just as the energy of the New Deal was quietly dissipating. It begins:
Quote:
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last? …

Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?
We’re about to find out whether that luck in fact is over. But part of that charmed existence has always been people like Kuttner. We’re fortunate to have him, and now it’s up to everyone else to take his warning seriously, and try to make our own luck.

Download the free book Robert Kuttner’s Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.name/search.php?req=Robert+Kuttner+Big

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 14, 2022 6:34 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


What's democracy's greatest threat? One historian has a clear answer

There are so many things wrong with our political system: the electoral college, lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices, the ambiguous wording of certain constitutional amendments. But Nick Seabrook’s “One Person, One Vote” argues that many of America’s problems stem from one eternally timely issue.

Gerrymandering involves the redrawing of congressional, state and local districts for political gain. It’s done by both sides and has often been used to sideline minority representation, especially in the aftermath of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that removed obstacles that had long prevented Black people from voting in the South.

Seabrook’s title refers to a series of 1960s Supreme Court decisions that required every district to contain roughly the same number of people. But it’s also an ironic title because the increasingly sophisticated process works around that requirement, stretching and squeezing districts to predetermine outcomes and making votes count for less and less.

“The number of competitive seats has been declining every decade and is now at its lowest point in probably a hundred years,” Seabrook, a professor at the University of North Florida, said during a recent video chat. Moving forward, the conservative-majority Supreme Court seems set to allow further distortions of the map as states engage in furious lawsuits to settle a new round of redistricting.

In our conversation, Seabrook made clear that practical solutions exist but achievable ones are in short supply. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Gun control is just the latest source of frustration with government inaction. Republican members of Congress in safe, gerrymandered districts worry only about being primaried from the right. Is that an additional obstacle to sensible reform?

Yes, but it’s not just gun control. Gerrymandering has magnified the divide between parties and contributes to the disappearance of centrists. So we’re starting to see the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert winning elections and being secure enough in their seats to do the kinds of things they’ve done. They’re obviously outliers, but they’re indicative of a broader trend. It’s manifested on both sides, but the Republicans are more extreme. It's only likely to get worse looking in the latest cycle emerging from redistricting. [Districts are redrawn based on a new census at the beginning of every decade.]

Both parties gerrymander. Are the Republicans more willing to discard democratic norms or just better at the process?

I don’t think the Republican Party has been more devious or underhanded, they’ve just had better fortune and timing. They came into power in the 2010 election, winning control of state legislatures right when the technology was there to much more accurately forecast how districts would perform in the future. Now these gerrymanders hold up for an entire decade.

There’s a sense that Democrats have been unilaterally disarming. In California, with Proposition 11, a lot of powerful Democrats — Nancy Pelosi and others — opposed the creation of that commission. Otherwise, imagine how far the Democrats could go in gerrymandering the 55 congressional districts. California alone might have been sufficient to wipe out all other Republican gains.

More at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-s-democracy-s-greatest-thr
eat-one-historian-has-a-clear-answer/ar-AAYpf6D

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 14, 2022 8:13 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What's democracy's greatest threat?


Democrats.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Tuesday, June 14, 2022 8:15 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
History Says Democracy Will Die if Democrats Don’t Try “Going Big”


No. But Democrats are about to die.



--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Tuesday, June 14, 2022 8:58 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
History Says Democracy Will Die if Democrats Don’t Try “Going Big”


No. But Democrats are about to die.
My idea of "Going Big" is not your idea, 6ix, of what those words mean. A box of bullets (20 to 50 rounds in a box depending on caliber ) fired in the Senate would have prevented the Civil War by assassinating the future leaders of the Rebellion: On January 9, 1861, Mississippi became the second state to secede. This action prompted Senator Jefferson Davis (the future Confederate President) to address the Senate on January 10, imploring his colleagues to allow for peaceful secession of the Southern states. (Killing Davis during that speech would have avoided a war.) On January 21 five senators from Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi, led by Davis, bade farewell to the Senate. The secession of Southern states and the withdrawal of their elected representatives forced an unprecedented constitutional crisis in Congress.

More at https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/expulsion_cases/Ci
vilWar_Expulsion.htm

Save one bullet for Robert E Lee. He wasn't a Senator, but he did contribute significantly to the Rebellion. Republicans will hate the 2nd Amendment when they discover that it is perfectly Constitutional to kill them. And as a special bonus, the 5th Amendment protects the killers who are innocent until proven guilty.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 20, 2022 7:28 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Two things the Texas Republican Party did this weekend by passing their Party Platform:

Line 126: “We support repeal of the 16th Amendment (Federal Income Tax)”

Line 201: “Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.”

https://texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Permanent-Platform-C
ommittee-FINAL-REPORT-6-16-2022.pdf

There is much more, but those two are the biggest events that Republicans want. They want the right to not pay taxes and the right to leave the Union. They are calling for a new Civil War.

One bright spot was that Republicans are not demanding the repeal of the 13th Amendment (which banned slavery) , but the 14th (which made slaves into citizens) is repealed, plus the repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The 13th Amendment nearly preserved slavery — with Lincoln’s support. In a last-ditch effort to prevent Southern states from seceding on the eve of Abraham Lincoln’s presidential inauguration in 1861, Congress passed a constitutional amendment that would have prevented Congress from abolishing slavery in states where it already existed. Had three-quarters of states ratified this proposal, it would have become the 13th Amendment to the Constitution — which we know today as the amendment that banned slavery after the war.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-13th-amendment-nearly-preserved-
slavery-with-lincoln-s-support/ar-AAYDt0X

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 20, 2022 8:09 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Two things the Texas Republican Party did this weekend by passing their Party Platform:

Line 126: “We support repeal of the 16th Amendment (Federal Income Tax)”

Line 201: “Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.”

https://texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Permanent-Platform-C
ommittee-FINAL-REPORT-6-16-2022.pdf

There is much more, but those two are the biggest events that Republicans want. They want the right to not pay taxes and the right to leave the Union. They are calling for a new Civil War.

One bright spot was that Republicans are not demanding the repeal of the 13th Amendment (which banned slavery) , but the 14th (which made slaves into citizens) is repealed, plus the repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The 13th Amendment nearly preserved slavery — with Lincoln’s support. In a last-ditch effort to prevent Southern states from seceding on the eve of Abraham Lincoln’s presidential inauguration in 1861, Congress passed a constitutional amendment that would have prevented Congress from abolishing slavery in states where it already existed. Had three-quarters of states ratified this proposal, it would have become the 13th Amendment to the Constitution — which we know today as the amendment that banned slavery after the war.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-13th-amendment-nearly-preserved-
slavery-with-lincoln-s-support/ar-AAYDt0X

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Nancy Pelosi wants that to happen.

I don't want that to happen.

It's the only way Democrats can win in the future since California never follows through with its threats of leaving the Union and taking it's 55 electoral votes with it.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Monday, June 20, 2022 8:19 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Nancy Pelosi wants that to happen.

I don't want that to happen.

It's the only way Democrats can win in the future since California never follows through with its threats of leaving the Union and taking it's 55 electoral votes with it.
What was fascinating was that Lincoln supported giving the Confederacy everything it wanted with HIS Constitutional amendment allowing slavery forever and ever. But everything wasn't enough for the Confederates. They wanted all future states to be slave states. Read about it here, where the slavery forever amendment actually did pass the Senate, but the Confederates States won't vote for it because they had already left the Union:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-13th-amendment-nearly-preserved-
slavery-with-lincoln-s-support/ar-AAYDt0X

Think about it. If the Confederates States had not left the Union, but instead had ratified Lincoln's amendment to the Constitution, there would still be slavery in America in 2022 in all states that were slave states in 1860. It is funny how the Confederates wouldn't accept half the United States being slave states. All states had to be slave states was the only acceptable "compromise."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 20, 2022 10:02 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Nancy Pelosi wants that to happen.

I don't want that to happen.

It's the only way Democrats can win in the future since California never follows through with its threats of leaving the Union and taking it's 55 electoral votes with it.
What was fascinating was that Lincoln supported giving the Confederacy everything it wanted with HIS Constitutional amendment allowing slavery forever and ever. But everything wasn't enough for the Confederates. They wanted all future states to be slave states. Read about it here, where the slavery forever amendment actually did pass the Senate, but the Confederates States won't vote for it because they had already left the Union:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-13th-amendment-nearly-preserved-
slavery-with-lincoln-s-support/ar-AAYDt0X

Think about it. If the Confederates States had not left the Union, but instead had ratified Lincoln's amendment to the Constitution, there would still be slavery in America in 2022 in all states that were slave states in 1860. It is funny how the Confederates wouldn't accept half the United States being slave states. All states had to be slave states was the only acceptable "compromise."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Even funnier that they were all Democrats.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Racist.




NEWSWEEK: The Democrats Are Choosing White Liberals Over Black and Hispanic Americans. And We Know It

https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-are-choosing-white-liberals-over-bl
ack-hispanic-americans-we-know-it-opinion-1716940

No shit, Mr. Morrow.

But I'm mighty glad to see that the wool isn't pulled over your eyes.


Quote:
Doubling down on wokeism, alienating half of the country, being poor stewards of the economy and choosing white liberals over Blacks and Hispanics has led to a confluence of circumstances that could lead to Republican dominance for a generation.


Well now you're just reading like my post-sobriety post history in the RWED.



SPOILER ALERT: Ted and Second won't want to read Darvio Morrow's opinions in Newsweek because Darvio Morrow is a black man and Ted and Second are racists.



--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Tuesday, June 21, 2022 6:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Even funnier that they were all Democrats.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Racist.
Even funnier, you might not be aware of it, but words such as Democrat and Democratic are recycled all over the world for political reasons, even in North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea). I have never known a Republican who knew what that meant. It is kind of a angry poor white trash characteristic to not know that the Democrats of the Confederacy and the Democrats of North Korea aren't the Democrats of the USA.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 21, 2022 7:02 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Funniest of all: The Democrats of FDR's day are not the dems of today, and the Republicans of the 70s are not the Republicans of today. But SECOND has not kept up with the times. He's still stuck in 1975. Or 1860, for that matter.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake


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Tuesday, June 21, 2022 8:15 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Even funnier that they were all Democrats.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Racist.
Even funnier, you might not be aware of it, but words such as Democrat and Democratic are recycled all over the world for political reasons, even in North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea). I have never known a Republican who knew what that meant. It is kind of a angry poor white trash characteristic to not know that the Democrats of the Confederacy and the Democrats of North Korea aren't the Democrats of the USA.


I guess they fooled Hillary Clinton too. Yanno... Since you could never find her without Senator Byrd's dick in her mouth.

I wonder if she liked the taste of his dick better with his hood on or off.



--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Friday, June 24, 2022 6:40 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Funniest of all: The Democrats of FDR's day are not the dems of today, and the Republicans of the 70s are not the Republicans of today. But SECOND has not kept up with the times. He's still stuck in 1975. Or 1860, for that matter.
Names change, Signym, but people keep sorting themselves into the same old groups. I know people in 2022 who would be a good fit with the Confederates, for example, despite there being no Confederacy. Or who would be Abolitionists, despite there being no slaves. Or, the biggest group by far, who in 2022 would object to doing anything about slavery, either pro or con, because the price of gasoline is too high. It's always something external with weaklings. It's never their personal weakness.

Chapter 10, Believe In Truth, from On Tyranny (2017), by Timothy Snyder

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism. As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.

The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.

The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.

Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.”

The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.”

Eugène Ionesco, the great Romanian playwright, watched one friend after another slip away into the language of fascism in the 1930s. The experience became the basis for his 1959 absurdist play, Rhinoceros, in which those who fall prey to propaganda are transformed into giant horned beasts. Of his own personal experiences Ionesco wrote:
Quote:
University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, becoming Iron Guards, one after the other. At the beginning, certainly they were not Nazis. About fifteen of us would get together to talk and to try to find arguments opposing theirs. It was not easy….From time to time, one of our friends said: “I don’t agree with them, to be sure, but on certain points, nevertheless, I must admit, for example, the Jews…,” etc. And this was a symptom. Three weeks later, this person would become a Nazi. He was caught in the mechanism, he accepted everything, he became a rhinoceros. Towards the end, only three or four of us were still resisting.
Ionesco’s aim was to help us see just how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it. By using the absurd image of the rhinoceros, Ionesco was trying to shock people into noticing the strangeness of what was actually happening.

The rhinoceri are roaming through our neurological savannahs. We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call “post-truth,” and we tend to think that its scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern. Yet there is little here that George Orwell did not capture seven decades ago in his notion of “doublethink.” In its philosophy, post-truth restores precisely the fascist attitude to truth—and that is why nothing in our own world would startle Klemperer or Ionesco.

Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.

Post-truth is pre-fascism.

Free Download of On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder at the mirrors for
https://libgen.unblockit.name/search.php?req=On+Tyranny+Timothy+Snyder
Or cloudflare at https://libgen.unblockit.name/libraryp2/main/C4832134090A0EE899ABCE7CC
168B302

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 24, 2022 9:03 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Post-truth is pre-fascism.


Yeah.

Stop being a fascist.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Friday, June 24, 2022 5:57 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


A concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas on abortion explicitly cites as up for debate past Supreme Court decisions that gave Americans the right

to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges);

to obtain contraceptives (Griswold v. Connecticut);

and to engage in private, consensual same-sex activities (Lawrence v. Texas).

"In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell."

(pdf, page 119) https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 24, 2022 6:19 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Post-truth is pre-fascism.


Yeah.

Stop being a fascist.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
6ix, you and half the Trump voters I know have said hundreds of times that Trump won. "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." - Joseph Goebbels
Maybe that name is familiar? The amusing part is that neither Goebbels nor Hitler ever admitted to lying, so even the quote is a lie, but now that they are dead, it is a fact they both did lie continuously, as did millions and millions of Germans. It didn't end well for those millions, did it? And not because the Germans lost a carefully reasoned series of debates on 'What is Truth?'

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-goebbels-on-the-quot-big-l
ie-quot

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 24, 2022 10:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Trump did win.

Mail-in fraud election was fraud.


I'm not salty though. What a wonderful time for Democrats to steal an election. All the woke shit is falling apart, Democrats of all flavors are turning on each other, and it will be at least a generation until Democrats are in power again, if they even survive as a party until 2030.

Thanks Joe*! Keep that inflation coming baby!

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Saturday, June 25, 2022 6:34 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Trump did win.

Mail-in fraud election was fraud.


I'm not salty though. What a wonderful time for Democrats to steal an election. All the woke shit is falling apart, Democrats of all flavors are turning on each other, and it will be at least a generation until Democrats are in power again, if they even survive as a party until 2030.

Thanks Joe*! Keep that inflation coming baby!

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
When I was a child, I asked my parents about why my father's relatives in Texas had so many problems. My father and his relatives blamed politics and particular politicians. My mother put the blame where it belonged, on my father's relatives. There were so many things wrong (and all the wrongs had right solutions that my father's relatives psychologically could never accept as right). A few examples of wrongs were adultery (causing divorce), drunkenness (causing job loss and car wrecks), tobacco chewing and smoking (causing cancer), spendthrift habits (causing bankruptcy), gluttony (causing heart attacks), the list goes on and on. My father's relatives hated, absolutely hated, Democrats as the cause all their problems. This is the 1960's, by the way.

Jump forward 60 years to the present day. My grandparents are dead. Their children are dead. My cousins are dead. Half of their children are dead. But what they all have is the same belief they had in the 1960's -- their problems (and their low economic status) are still the fault of Democrats.

I wrote this before, but my parents worked at Burger King, so not a lot of money coming in, but my mother invested her money in the stock market. My father's relatives, being who they are, either refused to invest or took the most ridiculous gambles and lost. My mother's own father took the gambler's route and lost everything. My mother's estate was worth $2.3 million when she'd died in 2013. She knew what she was doing. You can add together the entire net worth of all my father's living relatives and the sum total is less than that. Those relatives, all Trump lovers angry at wokeness, are just psychologically unable to prosper in America, but they continue to blame the Democrats, not themselves.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 25, 2022 9:09 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


And just like the rest of your family, you're poor and stupid too.

Nobody cares.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Saturday, June 25, 2022 12:46 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And just like the rest of your family, you're poor and stupid too.

Nobody cares.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
So, to sum up the Supreme Court's week: life begins at conception and ends in a mass shooting. I checked with my Trump loving relatives. They are very pleased with the Supreme Court rulings this week for guns and against abortion, which is the perfect opposite of my positions. Funny thing about that, I'm the only one who is competent with guns for the intended purpose -- killing enemies and deer with one shot per kill. My relatives' competence extends as far as scaring away deer and killing themselves. Same dynamics on abortion: they have all been involved with abortion, secretly, but publicly they are opposed to abortion. That's the way it is when you're angry poor white trash -- you can't control yourself any better than Trump could control his sex life.

My Ne'er-do-well relatives identify with this part of Trump's life:
Trump Admits To Authorizing Stormy Daniels Payoff
Donald Trump sexual misconduct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegatio
ns

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, June 26, 2022 6:47 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Despite the South losing the Civil War, the Supreme Court was the dead hand of the Confederacy. Confederate sympathizers did not leave the Supreme Court. And in the aftermath, sympathizers were made new Supreme Court Justices.

In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the pro-slavery Supreme Court described Black people as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Dred Scott went after the Missouri Compromise’s provisions limiting the scope of slavery in the territories.

Three constitutional amendments — the 13th, 14th, and 15th — eradicated Dred Scott and ensured that Black Americans would, in the 14th Amendment’s words, enjoy all of the “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”
https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amendment/amen
dment-xv

But Confederate sympathizers on the Court spent the next three decades dismantling these three amendments.

Just 10 years after the Civil War, the Supreme Court handed down United States v. Cruikshank (1875), a decision favoring a white supremacist mob that armed itself with guns and cannons to kill a rival Black militia defending its right to self-governance. Black people, the Court held in Cruikshank, “must look to the States” to protect civil rights such as the right to peacefully assemble — a decision that should send a chill down the spine of anyone familiar with the history of the Jim Crow South. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/58/united-states-v-cruiks
hank

The culmination of this age of white supremacist jurisprudence was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which blessed the idea of “separate but equal.” Plessy remained law for nearly six decades after it was decided.

Decisions like Plessy effectively dismantled the Reconstruction Amendments’ promise of racial equality. The Court spent the next 40 years transforming the 14th Amendment into a bludgeon to be used against labor. This was the age of decisions like Lochner v. New York (1905), which struck down a New York law preventing bakery owners from overworking their workers. It was also the age of decisions like Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), which struck down minimum wage laws, and Adair v. United States (1908), which prohibited lawmakers from protecting the right to unionize.

One of the most striking things about the Court’s jurisprudence is how willing the justices were to manipulate legal doctrines — applying one doctrine in one case, then ignoring it when it was likely to benefit a party that they did not want to prevail.

The point is that decisions made this week are entirely consistent with the Court’s worst history. People who want to dismantle government programs can accomplish far more, when they control the courts, than people who want to build up those programs. And, as the Court’s history shows, when conservatives do control the Court, they use their power to devastating effect.

More at https://www.vox.com/2022/6/25/23181976/case-against-the-supreme-court-
of-the-united-states

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, June 26, 2022 8:35 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Decades Ago, Alito Laid Out Methodical Strategy to Eventually Overrule Roe v. Wade

A slow-burning hostility to constitutional abortion rights runs through the career of the author of the Supreme Court opinion overturning them.

In the spring of 1985, a 35-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department, Samuel A. Alito Jr., cautioned the Reagan administration against mounting a frontal assault on Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that declared a constitutional right to abortion. The Supreme Court was not ready to overturn it, he said, so urging it to do so could backfire.

In a memo offering advice on two pending cases that challenged state laws regulating abortion, Mr. Alito advocated focusing on a more incremental argument: The court should uphold the state's regulations as reasonable. That strategy would “advance the goals of bringing about the eventual overruling of Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime, of mitigating its effects.”

Years later, when those documents were disclosed during his Supreme Court confirmation, he assured senators that while that statement reflected his views in 1985, he would approach abortion cases with an open mind as a justice, with due respect for precedent and with no ideological agenda. (Ha-ha-ha! Can you believe the gall of this liar? But if he hadn't lied, he wouldn't have been able to write his predetermined anti-abortion decision.)

“When someone becomes a judge,” he said, “you really have to put aside the things that you did as a lawyer at prior points in your legal career and think about legal issues the way a judge thinks about legal issues.” (But once you have a lifetime judgeship, you can do whatever pleases yourself. Why? Because never has a Supreme Court Justice been impeached, even justices sympathetic to the Confederacy long after the Confederate defeat.)

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220626013011/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/06/25/us/politics/samuel-alito-abortion.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, June 26, 2022 9:38 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And just like the rest of your family, you're poor and stupid too.

Nobody cares.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
So, to sum up the Supreme Court's week: life begins at conception and ends in a mass shooting. I checked with my Trump loving relatives. They are very pleased with the Supreme Court rulings this week for guns and against abortion, which is the perfect opposite of my positions. Funny thing about that, I'm the only one who is competent with guns for the intended purpose -- killing enemies and deer with one shot per kill. My relatives' competence extends as far as scaring away deer and killing themselves. Same dynamics on abortion: they have all been involved with abortion, secretly, but publicly they are opposed to abortion. That's the way it is when you're angry poor white trash -- you can't control yourself any better than Trump could control his sex life.

My Ne'er-do-well relatives identify with this part of Trump's life:
Trump Admits To Authorizing Stormy Daniels Payoff
Donald Trump sexual misconduct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegatio
ns

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quit talking about your make believe family and your made up life.

Nobody cares.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Monday, June 27, 2022 6:13 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Quit talking about your make believe family and your made up life.

Nobody cares.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
You convinced me years ago that you are a meat robot, same as the other Trump voters I see careening around Texas, a meat version of a Roomba vacuum robot. An electronic robot has no consciousness. The meat robots can make words, pretending to have experiences and feelings, but I am not convinced there is a soul inside the animated corpses of Trump voters by what I see those machines do with their time or what the meat machines post on the internet. Fortunately for the Republican party, most Democrats have not yet seen Trump voters for what they are: soulless machines going through the motions, pretending to be real. If Democrats ever figure you machines out for how useless you are, they will pull your charging plug out the wall. Having Trumptards around buzzing and vacuuming really doesn't save any labor. You're always underfoot and in the way, like a Roomba.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 27, 2022 6:14 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Here’s the thing, guys.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter when life begins.

It doesn't matter whether a fetus is a human being or not.

That entire argument is a red herring, a distraction, a subjective and unwinnable argument that could not matter less.

It doesn't matter whether we re talking about a fertilized egg. or a fetus, or a baby, or a five year old. or a Nobel Prize winning paediatric oncologist.

NOBODY has the right to use your body, against your will, even to save their life, or the life of another person.

That’s it.

That’s the argument.

You cannot be forced to donate blood, or marrow, or organs even though thousands die every year on waiting lists.

They cannot even harvest your organs after your death without your explicit written, pre-mortem permission.

Denying women the right to abortion means we have less bodily autonomy than a corpse.

https://m.facebook.com/InsufferableIntolerance/photos/a.26892878326824
7/1419362368224877/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 27, 2022 8:36 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Quit talking about your make believe family and your made up life.

Nobody cares.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
You convinced me years ago that you are a meat robot, same as the other Trump voters I see careening around Texas, a meat version of a Roomba vacuum robot. An electronic robot has no consciousness. The meat robots can make words, pretending to have experiences and feelings, but I am not convinced there is a soul inside the animated corpses of Trump voters by what I see those machines do with their time or what the meat machines post on the internet. Fortunately for the Republican party, most Democrats have not yet seen Trump voters for what they are: soulless machines going through the motions, pretending to be real. If Democrats ever figure you machines out for how useless you are, they will pull your charging plug out the wall. Having Trumptards around buzzing and vacuuming really doesn't save any labor. You're always underfoot and in the way, like a Roomba.



Funny that you of all people, are calling me a Roomba now, since that was one of my nicknames for your sockpuppet.

I care not about the opinions of sub-humans.

You are less than dogshit on my shoe.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Monday, June 27, 2022 8:38 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Here’s the thing, guys.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter when life begins.

It doesn't matter whether a fetus is a human being or not.

That entire argument is a red herring, a distraction, a subjective and unwinnable argument that could not matter less.

It doesn't matter whether we re talking about a fertilized egg. or a fetus, or a baby, or a five year old. or a Nobel Prize winning paediatric oncologist.

NOBODY has the right to use your body, against your will, even to save their life, or the life of another person.

That’s it.

That’s the argument.

You cannot be forced to donate blood, or marrow, or organs even though thousands die every year on waiting lists.

They cannot even harvest your organs after your death without your explicit written, pre-mortem permission.

Denying women the right to abortion means we have less bodily autonomy than a corpse.

https://m.facebook.com/InsufferableIntolerance/photos/a.26892878326824
7/1419362368224877/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two




You have plenty of autonomy, lady.

What comes out of it is a consequence of what you stick in it.

All your facebook post shows is what a sociopathic psycho you are.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Tuesday, June 28, 2022 6:02 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

All your facebook post shows is what a sociopathic psycho you are.
Why Did Republicans Become So Extreme?

It’s all about resentment of what makes America great.

Many political analysts have spent years warning that the G.O.P. was becoming an extremist, anti-democratic party.

Long before Republicans nominated Donald Trump for president, let alone before Trump refused to acknowledge electoral defeat, the congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein declared that the party had become “an insurgent outlier” that rejected “facts, evidence and science” and didn’t accept the legitimacy of political opposition.

In 2019 an international survey of experts rated parties around the world on their commitment to basic democratic principles and minority rights. The G.O.P., it turns out, looks nothing like center-right parties in other Western countries. What it resembles, instead, are authoritarian parties like Hungary’s Fidesz or Turkey’s A.K.P.

Such analyses have frequently been dismissed as over the top and alarmist. Even now, with Republicans expressing open admiration for Viktor Orban’s one-party rule, I encounter people insisting that the G.O.P. isn’t comparable to Fidesz. (Why not? Republicans have been gerrymandering state legislatures to lock in control no matter how badly they lose the popular vote, which is right out of Orban’s playbook.) Yet as Edward Luce of The Financial Times recently pointed out, “at every juncture over last 20 years the America ‘alarmists’ have been right.”

And over the past few days we’ve received even more reminders of just how extreme Republicans have become. The Jan. 6 hearings have been establishing, in damning detail, that the attack on the Capitol was part of a broader scheme to overturn the election, directed from the top. A Republican-stuffed Supreme Court has been handing down nakedly partisan rulings on abortion and gun control. And there may be more shocks to come — keep your eyes on what the court is likely to do to the government’s ability to protect the environment.

The question that has been bothering me — aside from the question of whether American democracy will survive — is why. Where is this extremism coming from?

Comparisons with the rise of fascism in Europe between the wars are inevitable but not all that helpful. For one thing, bad as he was, Trump wasn’t another Hitler or even another Mussolini. True, Republicans like Marco Rubio routinely call Democrats — who are basically standard social democrats — Marxists, and it’s tempting to match their hyperbole. The reality, however, is bad enough to not need exaggeration.

And there’s another problem with comparisons to the rise of fascism. Right-wing extremism in interwar Europe arose from the rubble of national catastrophes: defeat in World War I — or, in the case of Italy, Pyrrhic victory that felt like defeat; hyperinflation; depression.

Nothing like that has happened here. Yes, we had a severe financial crisis in 2008, followed by a sluggish recovery. Yes, we’ve been seeing regional economic divergence, with some ugly consequences — unemployment, social decline, even suicides and addiction — in the regions left behind. But America has been through much worse in the past, without seeing one of its major parties turn its back on democracy.

Also, the Republican turn toward extremism began during the 1990s. Many people, I believe, have forgotten the political craziness of the Clinton years — the witch hunts and wild conspiracy theories (Hillary murdered Vince Foster!), the attempts to blackmail Bill Clinton into policy concessions by shutting down the government, and more. And all of this was happening during what were widely regarded as good years, with most Americans believing that the country was on the right track.

It’s a puzzle. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking for historical precursors — cases in which right-wing extremism rose even in the face of peace and prosperity. And I think I’ve found one: the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

It’s important to realize that while this organization took the name of the post-Civil War group, it was actually a new movement — a white nationalist movement to be sure, but far more widely accepted, and less of a pure terrorist organization. And it reached the height of its power — it effectively controlled several states — amid peace and an economic boom.

What was this new K.K.K. about? I’ve been reading Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the K.K.K.: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition,” which portrays a “politics of resentment” driven by the backlash of white, rural and small-town Americans against a changing nation. The K.K.K. hated immigrants and “urban elites”; it was characterized by “suspicion of science” and “a larger anti-intellectualism.” Sound familiar?

OK, the modern G.O.P. isn’t as bad as the second K.K.K. But Republican extremism clearly draws much of its energy from the same sources.

And because G.O.P. extremism is fed by resentment against the very things that, as I see it, truly make America great — our diversity, our tolerance for difference — it cannot be appeased or compromised with. It can only be defeated.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220628013648/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/06/27/opinion/republicans-extreme-abortion.html/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 28, 2022 6:06 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The unborn, as pointed out by Methodist Pastor David Barnhart:

'"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for "the unborn."'

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10357009-the-unborn-are-a-convenient-
group-of-people-to-advocate


Despite Their Flaws, Democrats Are The Last, Best Hope Against Fascism

If you doubt whether the Democrat Party is worth supporting, take 79 seconds to watch this.

You can start at the 59-second mark . . . “It was Winston Churchill who said . . .” and quit at 2:18 “. . . in the privacy of your own bedroom.”

Mika Brzezinski weighs in on the impact of the Supreme Court's ruling on Roe v. Wade and why Democrats are the last, best hope against 'an extreme, autocratic, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-contraception, anti-freedom collection of fascists who dominate the Trump wing of today's GOP.'



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 28, 2022 11:33 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Democrats = Fascism.

I'm very much looking forward to the Death of the Democratic Party.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Tuesday, June 28, 2022 9:10 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) says she is “tired” of the long-standing separation between church and state in the U.S., adding that she believes “the church is supposed to direct the government.”

In a Sunday speech at the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colo., ahead of her primary election on Tuesday, Boebert argued that “the government is not supposed to direct the church,” falsely claiming that dividing religion from the system of government was not what the Founding Fathers intended.

“I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk — that’s not in the Constitution. It was in a stinking letter and it means nothing like they say it does,” Boebert said, earning a round of applause from the audience.

The concept of a separation between church and state is derived from the establishment clause in the Bill of Rights, which says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island, was the first to decipher the clause as “a wall or hedge of separation” between the “wilderness of the world” and “the garden of the church.”

In 1802, then-President Thomas Jefferson penned a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, in which he wrote the American public had built “a wall of separation between Church and State.”

States have long adhered to the principle since Jefferson’s letter. The Supreme Court applied the clause to states with the 14th Amendment and has used the doctrine to uphold such a wall.

However, the current high court, which has a conservative majority, has recently ruled increasingly in support of religion in public spaces.

The Supreme Court this month 1) struck down a Maine policy that prohibited religious schools from receiving taxpayer-funded tuition aid and 2) ruled in favor of a football coach in Washington state who prayed at the 50-yard line after public school games.

Conservative justices also 3) ruled in May that the city of Boston violated the Constitution by declining a request from a religious organization to fly its flag at city hall.

4) This month the Republican Catholics on the Supreme Court ruled against abortion, as does the Catholic Church.

After the Maine ruling, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the court “continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3540071-boebert-says-she-is-tired-o
f-separation-between-church-and-state-the-church-is-supposed-to-direct-the-government/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 28, 2022 10:22 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Democrats are dying.



--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Wednesday, June 29, 2022 10:45 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Supreme Court finds that the Civil War was wrongly decided, reinstates the Confederacy.

Other rulings expected to come soon:

Federal payments for health care (Medicare, Medicaid) will be limited to treatments available when the constitution was written.

Schools that receive government subsidies are prohibited from teaching that the earth is a sphere, or that the earth is older than 6,000 years.

The Pope has been found by Republican Catholic Supreme Court justices to have veto power over proposed legislation.

The authors of our constitution were divinely inspired, and so we have no rights that people in 1783 would not recognize or understand.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/25/2106272/-Supreme-Court-find
s-that-the-Civil-War-was-wrongly-decided-reinstates-the-Confederacy

There is also a survey you can take at the above URL:

Which eighteenth century belief are you most excited about re-adopting?

1) Women who express opinions are possessed by Satan and should be disciplined by their fathers or their husbands.

2) Black people are not fully human beings and therefore have no human rights.

3) Political disputes (among men) are best settled by duels.

4) Treaties with Native Americans shall last forever, or until a group of white men decide they don't.

5) People who speak English are inherently smarter than those who don't, obviously.

#3, Dueling, received the most votes. I would love to see Democrats bringing pistols into the Senate to solve disputes the old-fashion way. I can train any Senator to make every bullet a kill shot. Or, if the Democratic Senator prefers, I shall be a substitute for those who don't want to get blood on themselves. I'm willing to risk death for my country, something that no Senators now serving have ever risked.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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