A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Thursday, September 17, 2026 12:03
VIEWED: 757717
PAGE 71 of 73
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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The Supreme Court’s new religion case could devastate American workers
Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin risks giving employers a sweeping new power to ignore laws protecting their workers.
By Ian Millhiser | Mar 24, 2025, 5:30 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/scotus/404678/supreme-court-catholic-charities-wis
consin-religious-liberty-workers
If you know the name of a case the Supreme Court will hear on March 31, Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, you can probably guess who will prevail.
The Court’s Republican majority almost always rules in favor of Christian litigants who seek an exemption from a federal or state law, which is what Catholic Charities is looking for in this case. (Notably, the Court’s Republicans have not always shown the same sympathy for Muslims with religious liberty claims.)
But, while the outcome in Catholic Charities seems unlikely to be a surprise, the stakes in the case are still quite high. Catholic Charities seeks an exemption from Wisconsin’s law requiring nearly all employers to pay taxes that fund unemployment benefits. If the Court grants this exemption, the justices could give many employers a broad new power to evade laws governing the workplace.
Like every state, Wisconsin taxes employers to fund benefits for workers who lose their jobs. Like most states, Wisconsin’s unemployment benefits law also contains an exemption for church-run nonprofits that are “operated primarily for religious purposes.”
The state’s supreme court recently clarified that this exemption only applies to nonprofit employers that primarily engage in religious activities such as holding worship services or providing religious education. It does not apply to employers like Catholic Charities, which provide secular services like feeding the poor or helping disabled people find jobs — even if the employer is motivated by religious faith to provide these secular services.
Catholic Charities, however, claims that it has a First Amendment right to an exemption, arguing, among other things, that Wisconsin’s limited exemption for some religious nonprofits and not others discriminates against Catholics.
None of its arguments are persuasive, at least under the Supreme Court’s existing decisions. But precedent plays hardly any role in how this Court decides religion cases. The Republican justices routinely vote to overrule, or simply to ignore, religion cases that they disagree with. The Court’s very first major decision after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment gave Republicans a supermajority on the Court effectively overruled a decision governing worship services during the Covid-19 pandemic that was only a few months old.
Realistically, in other words, the Court will likely decide Catholic Charities based on the justices’ personal preferences, rather than by following the doctrine of stare decisis, which says that courts should typically follow their own precedents.
That said, it remains to be seen how far this Court might go in its ruling. It could choose to distinguish Catholic Charities — which is a legitimate charity that does genuinely admirable work — from employers who claim religious exemptions only to hurt their own employees. But if it chooses to be expansive, it could overrule a line of precedents that protect workers from exploitative employers who claim a religious justification for that exploitation.
“Religious liberty” doesn’t mean religious organizations get civil society’s benefits and none of its costs
In order to understand the Catholic Charities case, it’s helpful to first understand the legal concept of a “corporation.” Corporations are entities that are typically easy to form under any state’s law, and which are considered to be entirely separate from their owners or creators. Forming a corporation brings several benefits, but the most important is limited liability. If a corporation is sued, it can potentially be liable for all of its assets, but the owners or controllers of that corporation are not on the hook for anything e
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very little remaining of Traditional Democrats
the mob of NeoDemocrats have taken over
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Trump's war on science
By Matthew Yglesias | Mar 27, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-on-science
. . . in the course of life, scientists would occasionally discover various health hazards that were inconvenient to the interests of private industry. It turns out, for example, that nicotine is addictive and that inhaling smoke causes cancer and lung disease. It turns out that while fossil fuels are incredibly useful, they cause greenhouse gas emissions, and coal generates incredible amounts of particulate pollution that seems to have wide-ranging negative consequences for human health. It used to be the case that industrial activity was releasing tons of sulfur dioxide into the air, causing acid to rain down on major American cities. In a well-functioning market economy, we study these kind of externalities and try to come up with cost-effective ways to address them.
But Newt Gingrich (who deliberately dismantled Congress’ scientific expertise) and George W. Bush made it clear that any finding of fact that could justify regulatory intervention was per se unwelcome.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/it-is-time-to-restore-the-us-office
-of-technology-assessment/
Republicans could have responded to neutral presentation of scientific facts by saying something like, “It’s true that stricter tobacco regulation would save lives, but I’m opposed to it on philosophical grounds of freedom.” Instead, we had Mike Pence running around telling people that smoking doesn’t kill.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/mike-pence-defend
ed-his-smoking-doesnt-kill-op-ed-in-a-2000
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Chief Justice Roberts Hands Trump the Keys to Power
By Keith Raffel | March 26, 2025
https://www.creators.com/read/raffel-ticket/03/25/chief-justice-robert
s-hands-trump-the-keys-to-power
First, there's the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee. In that case, Roberts cast the deciding vote to reverse a century of precedent by authorizing corporations, other outside groups and wealthy donors to spend unlimited sums on elections. Just days after the decision, President Barack Obama warned the decision "will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections." Unlimited contributions have indeed tilted the American electoral process toward the interests of corporations and the rich. Today, the largest contributor to Trump's 2024 campaign, Elon Musk, is playing an unprecedented role in the current administration.
Second, in 2013, Roberts assigned himself to write the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which threw out a key section of the Voting Rights Act. A 2024 article in the Journal of Political Economy found evidence that the Shelby County holding decreased turnout of minority voters due to "voter suppression tactics that have occurred in the absence of federal oversight." As two professors wrote in an American Economic Association paper: "Our findings suggest that perhaps Chief Justice Roberts should be slightly less optimistic about the state of democratic equality in the South."
Third, in 2023, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump should be taken off the state's ballot because of the 14th Amendment's bar on candidates who have "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the United States or "given aid or comfort to its enemies." Upon review, Roberts and four associate justices held that a statute must be passed by Congress for such a disqualification to take effect.
Fourth, Roberts again assigned himself to write for the majority in last summer's United States v. Trump. In his opinion, the chief justice conjured up a right to immunity for the president "from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority." In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor says Roberts "invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law."
Trump agrees wholeheartedly with Sotomayor's analysis. He has said, "I have the right to do whatever I want as president" and "He who saves his country does not violate any law." He appears to know, too, that he owes Roberts a debt of gratitude. On March 4, cameras caught Trump patting Roberts on the arm and saying, "Thank you again. I won't forget."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How to collapse America from the inside out
By Thom Hartmann | March 31, 2025
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/how-to-collapse-america-f
rom-the-inside-out/
If Putin wanted to kill America, how would he best do it? Exactly like this:
— Install a puppet or ally inside the government; as Lincoln foresaw, a tyrant doesn’t need to invade. He just needs to rise from within. Trump has repeatedly echoed Kremlin talking points, undermined NATO, attacked Ukraine, praised autocrats, and created chaos at home. If Putin picked a candidate, it would be Trump — and the intelligence community has confirmed Russian efforts to help him win in both 2016 and 2020.
— Dismantle American institutions from the inside; Putin’s best move would be to encourage the erosion of U.S. government capacity: devalue science, underfund law enforcement, defund agencies, destroy trust in elections, and sabotage public health. All are happening as you read these words.
— Stoke internal division; a divided America is a weak America. Putin’s cyber and propaganda ops have long stoked racial hatred, anti-government sentiment, anti-vax ideology, and far-right extremism. Trump accelerates all of it. Musk’s X (Twitter) has become a vector for disinformation, propaganda, and fascist apologia.
— Weaken U.S. alliances around the world; Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO, praised Putin’s invasions, and undermined Western alliances. Now he is threatening our allies with the possibility of invasion. This is textbook Kremlin strategy — divide the West, and conquer its influence.
Whether Trump and Musk are taking direct instructions from Putin or simply operating in ideological lockstep is a question of degree, not direction. The destruction they are today inflicting on America is strategic, not accidental; coordinated, not chaotic; and oligarchic, not populist.
And whether Trump and Musk are doing it on Putin’s instructions, acting out the Dark Enlightenment vision of a CEO America, or simply trying to wipe out any institutions that might challenge their exercise of raw power, that’s exactly what’s happening right now. The outcome is the same: the deliberate disempowerment of the American people and the dismantling of a liberal democratic order that has stood for 240 years.
These two men and their enablers in the Trump regime are quite literally taking apart our American government while, at the same time, doing away with our protections against wealthy predators and destroying our international alliances.
The Founders had this noble idea that, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy, they’d largely borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy and other northeastern tribes: people can govern themselves when power-hungry psychopaths are kept in check.
It animated George Washington when he wrote:
“As mankind become more liberal, they will be more apt to allow, that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community, are equally entitled to the protection of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality.”
And Abraham Lincoln, who rescued our nation from the fascist Confederate oligarchs who’d taken over the South and then dared try to bring down our democracy through warfare:
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
And here we are. So far, Trump and Musk have or are in the process of:
— Gutting the IRS so badly that the country will lose an estimated $500 billion to morbidly rich tax cheats
— Killing off the EPA, so polluters can run free and profit from giving us cancer
— Disbanded the Public Integrity Section that once prosecuted corrupt politicians
— Shut down the DOJ unit that was prosecuting violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
— Moved the ATF under Kash Patel’s overview with the goal of neutering
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How to collapse America from the inside out
Unless this is a 4-year breakdown of Joe Biden*'s Presidency, nobody is interested.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
very little remaining of Traditional Democrats
the mob of NeoDemocrats have taken over
And the polling for Democratic Party approval continues to plummet.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Solving the Trolley Problem: Towards Moral Abundance
by Kyle Munkittrick | Friday, Apr 18, 2025
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/04/solving-the-trolley-prob
lem-towards-moral-abundance.html
Trolley Problem meets ‘I Want To Go Home’ meme
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, inadvertently exposes a blind spot in our collective moral calculus. In making their case for a better politics, I think they’ve also, as an accidental by-product, solved the infamous Trolley Problem. Free download at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Ezra+Klein+Derek+Thompson
Abundance argues that improving the supply of things like housing and energy is good on its own term and that material abundance can help address collective problems, like homelessness or climate change. The choice between allowing people to sleep on the streets in tents or forcing them into shelters is, as Klein and Thompson point out, a false dilemma caused by poor housing policy. The choice between growth and progress vs climate change is a false dilemma caused by poor energy and construction policy. Klein and Thompson are, justifiably, focused on the political thorniness of these issues, but, in their efforts, also demonstrate something startling: they implicitly demonstrate that material abundance can obviate moral quandaries.
The Trolley Problem is so well known and over-explored it’s easy to forget that it is relatively new. The Trolley Problem is a modern moral dilemma. There are no trolleys in nature. You cannot replace the trolley with a bear or a hurricane or an opposing tribe—those things do not run on tracks, their brakes can’t go out, and there is no simple lever by which you choose their behavior. The Trolley Problem is a problem of technology, yet none of its solutions are allowed to be.
The Trolley Problem is, as it is usually presented, a false dilemma. There is no correct answer to the problem; both options are tragedies, neither better, regardless of permutations. Even being asked to make the choice is morally corrosive (as I’m sure Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thompson would agree). The Good Place demonstrates this to absurd comedic effect.
Michael from The Good Place pointing at his diagram of how to kill everyone in the Trolley Problem
Another ‘solution’ to the Trolley Problem
It is the ridiculous Sisyphean repetition of The Good Place trolley episode, along with our own decades of obsession over the problem, that resonates most with Abundance. What if instead of trying to figure out if one or five is the better choice with infinite variations and philosophical arguments, we just fix the trolleys? This is the core insight of what I call Moral Abundance—the idea that technological and material progress can eliminate moral dilemmas entirely.
Consider climate change. Abundance not only recommends choosing among existing tech like moving from coal to solar, but also explores near-future examples like cultured (aka lab-grown) meat. This tech does exist, but it’s niche, nascent, and expensive. It’s also unsettling and popular for politicians to oppose it. But Abundance, correctly, holds up cultured meat as a worthy goal because in addition to helping address climate change (agriculture is a major contributor), it would also allow us to effectively end the moral stain that is factory farming.
Yes, we can remove factory farming by just banning it, but that’s a political non-starter. It would mean less food choice (not great), inequity where only millionaires get steak, eggs, and bacon (sad!), potential food shortages (bad) or, worse, famines (very bad). In a Trolley Problem-esque version of the dilemma, the question we’re asked is who should suffer, animals in cages or people in famine?
The answer of Abundance is neither. We can obviate the question with progress. The implicit claim of Abundance is that material abundance not only makes things cheaper, easier, or higher quality, but also makes it easier for people to be better. Abundance, yoked to technological and social progress, can mitigate root cau
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The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.
Ezra Klein is a douche bag.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Trumptards and Confederates are/were absolutely evil but they feel/felt that their behavior is normal and necessary for their happiness and they won't stop until dead. Lincoln chose killing Confederates rather than endless talking to them in vain about ameliorating their atrocious behavior. Democrats are facing the same choice with Trumptards.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.
Ezra Klein is a douche bag.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Was the Civil War Inevitable?
Before Lincoln turned the idea of “the Union” into a cause worth dying for, he tried other means of ending slavery in America. What we feel when we study Lincoln’s life through the war is not so much the force of fixed convictions imposed on others as a sense of his discovery, in real time, of what he believed.
By Adam Gopnik | April 21, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/28/lincolns-peace-michael-v
orenberg-book-review-1861-jay-winik
Out of guilt or amnesia, we tend to treat wars, in retrospect, as natural disasters: terrible but somehow inevitable, beyond anyone’s control. Shaking your fist at the fools who started the First World War and condemned millions to a meaningless death seems jejune; historians teach us to say that the generals did their best under impossible conditions. Mournful fatalism is the requisite emotion, even when mad fury would be more apt. Efforts at de-escalation are cast as weakness or cowardice, while those who lead nations into catastrophe are praised for their “strength of character,” or for stoically accepting what was supposedly unavoidable. We rarely honor those who turn back at the brink. John F. Kennedy’s compromise during the Cuban missile crisis is an exception, though only because prudence and caution—our removal of nuclear missiles from Turkey—were neatly covered up and presented as pugnacity and courage: we had made the Russians “blink.”
The habit of describing war with metaphors drawn from natural disasters is as old as war writing. Homer himself uses natural metaphors to ennoble violent human actors: Achilles is a wildfire sweeping across the Trojan plain. Given what Greek warfare actually entailed—pitched battles of close combat, where victory meant cutting others to death with edged weapons—the figure feels less like a metaphor than a mask.
So it is with us. The Civil War lingers in memory as brutal and heartbreaking, but also as heroic and tragic, accompanied by an Appalachian campfire fiddle. It is the altar of American existence—a sublime sacrifice and a perpetually contested example—so thoroughly sanctified that to ask if it might have been avoided by pragmatic compromise feels almost obscene. No war, no Lincoln, no Emancipation Proclamation, no Gettysburg—neither the battle nor the address—to inspire and instruct us? And yet three-quarters of a million people died, and the enslaved people in whose name the war was fought emerged still trapped in an apartheid terrorist state. Was it worth it?
In “1861: The Lost Peace” (Grand Central), Jay Winik—the author of several fine works about American history—takes up that question of whether the Civil War might have been avoided. The title overpromises a little. Nowhere in the book do we encounter a truly plausible compromise that might have averted the conflict. What Winik offers instead is a portrait of two sides talking past each other, rather than with each other. Still, he traces the efforts of those who genuinely wanted to prevent war and the trauma of secession—and shows how Abraham Lincoln tried at first to listen and then at last refused. Download Jay Winik’s books at https://libgen.rs/search.php?&req=Jay+Winik
The early chapters are given over to what will be, for many, a familiar story. We hear again how an underrated, grotesque-looking backwoods lawyer with scant experience (one term in Congress and two failed Senate runs
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trumptards and Confederates are/were absolutely evil but they feel/felt that their behavior is normal and necessary for their happiness and they won't stop until dead. Lincoln chose killing Confederates rather than endless talking to them in vain about ameliorating their atrocious behavior. Democrats are facing the same choice with Trumptards.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.
Ezra Klein is a douche bag.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Do it tough guy. You keep talking about it every day, but you're a dirty little pussy and you have no stones.
Stop being a whiny little faggot and go start your Civil War.
Give me one good reason to put you into the fucking ground for good.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.
Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.
Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.
T
OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!
We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.
We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.
These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.
And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.
It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.
Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.
T
OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!
We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.
We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.
These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.
And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.
It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.
I’m independent Gilligan. It means I don’t blindly follow any political party. I’ve told you this many times. Yet you still cannot grasp the concept of someone being their own person. Not just another follower. You are MAGA. This means you are a follower. And, influenced by stories created by others who avoid the truth.
The trillions lost in the stock market crash is just the beginning. It is MAGA that’s dying. It is destroying itself. Which is why the whole world is laughing at Trumps’ intellect, well, lack thereof.
And Gilligan, there is something else that I am. I am a truth teller. As you post bullshit, conspiracy theories and lies because you hate, I post the truth.
OH yeah, as for me posting in threads I’ve created, don’t you? I've been to a few of your threads over the years. I'm pretty sure I've seen you posting there. You're a funny guy Gilligan.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.
Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.
T
OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!
We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.
We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.
These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.
And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.
It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.
I’m independent Gilligan. It means I don’t blindly follow any political party. I’ve told you this many times.
And it's been a lie every time you've made that claim.
You don't have any thoughts of your own. You speak in headlines and political cartoons.
You are 100% Democrat through and through and you are the stupidest person I have ever known.
And your bit about being a "truth teller" is beyond hilarious. Everything you ever posted here turns out not to be true in retrospect. You should stop cataloging all of your failures to figure out when you're being lied to in all these threads.
Your dead party is all the evidence anyone needs to see this.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.
Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.
T
OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!
We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.
We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.
These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.
And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.
It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.
I’m independent Gilligan. It means I don’t blindly follow any political party. I’ve told you this many times. Yet you still cannot grasp the concept of someone being their own person. Not just another follower. You are MAGA. This means you are a follower. And, influenced by stories created by others who avoid the truth.
The trillions lost in the stock market crash is just the beginning. It is MAGA that’s dying. It is destroying itself. Which is why the whole world is laughing at Trumps’ intellect, well, lack thereof.
And Gilligan, there is something else that I am. I am a truth teller. As you post bullshit, conspiracy theories and lies because you hate, I post the truth.
OH yeah, as for me posting in threads I’ve created, don’t you? I've been to a few of your threads over the years. I'm pretty sure I've seen you posting there. You're a funny guy Gilligan.
T
And it's been a lie every time you've made that claim.
You don't have any thoughts of your own. You speak in headlines and political cartoons.
You are 100% Democrat through and through and you are the stupidest person I have ever known.
And your bit about being a "truth teller" is beyond hilarious. Everything you ever posted here turns out not to be true in retrospect. You should stop cataloging all of your failures to figure out when you're being lied to in all these threads.
Your dead party is all the evidence anyone needs to see this.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Nothing else to say
T
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So shut the fuck up for once then.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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You still didn't tell us what you were doing when you went into hiding for 3 weeks after the election, Ted.
You weren't cutting yourself, were you?
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Forced Amnesia
By Fintan O’Toole
The metamorphosis of J. D. Vance from economic realist to champion of Trump’s grievance-fueled politics reveals how little Democrats have done to connect with working-class Americans.
May 29, 2025 issue
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/05/29/forced-amnesia-fintan-otoo
le/
In Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of “a family and a culture in crisis,” J.D. Vance, now vice-president of the United States, gives an evocative account of the relationship between his hometown and the heroic age of American industrial capitalism.1 The beating heart of Middletown, Ohio, was its steel plant, then called Armco. Vance encapsulates the self-respect and sense of purpose that came from working there:
My grandfather loved the company and knew every make and model of car built from Armco steel. Even after most American car companies transitioned away from steel-bodied cars, Papaw would stop at used-car dealerships whenever he saw an old Ford or Chevy. “Armco made this steel,” he’d tell me. It was one of the few times that he ever betrayed a sense of genuine pride.
Yet the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy, coming to consciousness toward the end of the twentieth century, knows very well that the world of Papaw’s pride is gone. Indeed, Papaw himself knows it. He has no interest in seeing his grandson follow him into the steel plant:
“Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” he once told me. The only acceptable career at Armco was as an engineer, not as a laborer in the weld shop. A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move up was to move on.
What both Vance and his grandfather understood back then was the ruthlessly dynamic nature of capitalism. Vance was born into Ronald Reagan’s America, when neoliberalism—the belief that market forces must be liberated from regulation, high taxes, overactive government, and any real sense of social obligation—was reshaping the “commonsense” understanding of the economy and society. In the 1980s this ideology was pulling off the great trick of credibly presenting itself as a set not of ideas or value judgments but of undeniable facts that everyone had to accept. As Gary Gerstle writes in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), “A key attribute of a political order is the ability of its ideologically dominant party to bend the opposition party to its will.” Neoliberalism became a political order in exactly that sense. Both Republicans and Democrats effectively told the industrial working class that its life of manual labor was over. Market forces had to be obeyed, and what they demanded was precisely what Papaw told J.D.: America had to do something different.
Papaw’s wisdom is most potently dramatized in a pivotal scene in the 1998 movie Primary Colors. The film, based on Joe Klein’s roman à clef, is a thinly disguised account of Bill Clinton’s dramatic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. John Travolta’s Jack Stanton is an obvious proxy for Clinton in his Comeback Kid phase, when he overcame lurid revelations about his sexual promiscuity to open a path to the presidency.
The critical moment in the movie comes when the embattled Stanton addresses a meeting of workers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It is based on a speech Clinton gave in the city in February 1992, but in the movie the location is the cavernous shop floor of a factory that has already closed. As Travolta speaks, the camera cuts away frequently to men in hard hats and women with hard faces, most of them white—anxious representatives of the declining American working class. The candidate lays on his good old boy southern charm. But then he becomes deeply serious:
I’m gonna do something really outrageous. I’m gonna tell the truth…. No politician can reopen this factory or bring back the shipyard j
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An Autopsy Report on Biden’s In-Office Decline
“Five people were running the country,” a political insider told the authors of the new book Original Sin. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”
By Tyler Austin Harper | May 16, 2025, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/05/biden-original-sin-d
ecline/682818/
Halfway through King Lear, storm clouds gather, and Shakespeare’s protagonist rages, “You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, / As full of grief as age; wretched in both.” And so, the mental unraveling of one of literature’s greatest characters begins. That Lear starts to lose his mind in this moment, in Act II, is important: If he were mad from the jump, the cause of his eventual downfall would be medical, not moral, and the king would bear no responsibility for the catastrophe that greets his kingdom. Precisely because the aging ruler is of sound mind in Act I, during which he sets into motion the events that threaten his sanity and his life, the blame is his to bear in Act V, when he has lost both.
Last year, the United States went through a presidential election filled with Shakespearean echoes. As Joe Biden tottered and fell (literally as well as metaphorically), more than a few pundits compared him to Lear, a man who was ruined by age, pride, and the flattery of sycophants. That analogy is picked up by Original Sin, the latest and most significant book to date about Biden’s cognitive decline, which was written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson and draws on hundreds of interviews. It features an epigraph from Lear, and its first chapter gives airing to the view that, like Lear, Biden bears responsibility for his country’s fate. Quoting a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, the title of that chapter is simply: “He Totally Fucked Us.”
Tapper and Thompson’s exposé joins a growing list of post-election appraisals blaming Biden for Harris’s loss. (I wrote one of these myself.) Yet the curious thing about the experience of reading Original Sin is that one comes away unable to lay the blame, or the majority of it anyway, at the feet of Scranton Joe. Here, the Lear analogy falls apart.
Original Sin suggests that, unlike Lear, who begins his rule flawed but with his mind intact, Biden may have been losing his grip before he took his oath of office. If this is true, Americans unwittingly voted for and were then led by a president who was not up to the job, a state of affairs that certain among the Biden faithful seemed committed to concealing. Tapper and Thompson studiously avoid saying this outright; to their credit, they do little editorializing. The book is written not unlike an autopsy report, describing a gruesome political car crash in dispassionate, clinical detail. The American people, however, must confront the possibility that the book raises: that we may not have had a president capable of discharging the office since Barack Obama left the White House, in 2017.
One might debate whether the former president can be held fully responsible for his disastrous reelection bid given his seemingly shaky mental acuity (which he continues to deny, saying that reports of his decline in office are “wrong”; Original Sin does not include his responses to any of the book’s allegations). Biden’s claims that he would have won a rematch with Donald Trump—which he reiterated in an appearance on The View last week—suggest that he is not fully tethered to political reality. But Original Sin leaves little doubt that his enablers, at least, understood what they were doing. (Former first lady Jill Biden denies this as well. She said on The View that her husband was “a great president”; though she did not mention Original Sin by name, she said, “The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us.”)
In an author’s note, Tapper and Thompson offer a forewarning: “Readers who are convinced that Joe Biden was little more than a husk from the very beginning of his presidency, barely capable of stringing two sentences toge
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Deindustrialization: Causes and Consequences
It’s not mostly about globalization, and it’s not what ails workers
By Paul Krugman | May 18, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/deindustrialization-causes-and-cons
equences
A few months before the 1992 election, I, along with some other Democratic-leaning economists, flew to Little Rock to meet with Governor and presidential candidate Bill Clinton. The ostensible purpose was to discuss policy, but it was obviously also an audition for a job in the administration. At one point, Clinton asked what could be done to restore manufacturing to its previous share of employment.
Heads turned to me; this was clearly my department. I said something like this: “Sorry, governor, but that’s really not feasible. Even if we could eliminate the trade deficit, manufacturing employment would only rise modestly and would still be a much smaller share of the economy than in the past.”
Needless to say, I didn’t get a job. It was one of the best things that has ever happened to me.
The inconvenient fact is that economy changes over time, and so do the industries in which people work. A century and a half ago, despite the growth of manufacturing, America was still largely a nation of farmers. Today, hardly any of us work on the land:
Source: Census, BLS
Oh, and many, possibly a majority of farm workers are foreign-born, and many of them undocumented.
Although some politicians still portray rural areas and small towns as the “real America,” you don’t hear a lot of nostalgia for the days when agriculture dominated American employment. (If you ask me, Queens, New York comes a lot closer to being who we are now.)
There is, however, a lot of nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s, when more than a quarter of U.S. workers were employed in manufacturing. Income inequality was much lower in that era, so much so that many blue-collar workers considered themselves middle-class. And there’s a widespread narrative that (a) attributes those good times for American workers to the availability of well-paid jobs in manufacturing (b) attributes the relative decline of American manufacturing to overseas outsourcing and trade deficits.
But is this narrative right? Yes, it’s a simple, compelling story. But as I tried to explain to Clinton all those years ago, the math behind the story doesn’t work. To preview the conclusions: Even if we could somehow eliminate our trade deficit (which Trump’s tariffs won’t do, but that’s another story), America would not reindustrialize. — our manufacturing sector would be slightly bigger, but nothing like what it used to be in the 1950s and 1960s. And any wage gains for ordinary workers would be trivial at best.
I should say that some people who have bought into the deindustrialization-through-globalization story get annoyed if you point out that it’s mostly wrong. They seem to believe that pointing out the weakness of the deindustrialization story means that you don’t care about American workers. So let me be clear: I do care, a lot, about the fate of American workers. But as I’ll explain later, trying to recreate the economy of the 1950s won’t help them.
This post will, by the way, be a somewhat wonky exercise. But it’s important to understand that policies based on misplaced nostalgia (especially those being wielded so disastrously by Donald Trump) will hurt workers, not help them.
Beyond the paywall I’ll discuss:
1. The limited (not zero) role of international trade in deindustrialization
2. The limited (again not zero) role of deindustrialization in depressing wages
3. What would actually help restore the middle-class society I grew up in
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Talented Mr. Vance
J. D. Vance could have brought the country’s conflicting strands together. Instead, he took a divisive path to the peak of power.
By George Packer | May 19, 2025, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/07/jd-vance-reinvent
ion-power/682828/
J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America’s social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump’s first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J.D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition.
Both versions suggest the protagonist of a 19th-century novel—Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Lucien in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. A novelist who set out to narrate the decline of the American empire in the 21st century might invent a protagonist like J. D. Vance. He turns up in all the key places, embodying every important theme. He’s the product of an insular subculture (the Scots-Irish of Appalachian Kentucky) and grows up amid the ills (poverty, addiction, family collapse) of a dying Ohio steel town ravaged by deindustrialization. He escapes into the Marine Corps in time for the Iraq War, and then into the dubious embrace of the cognitive meritocracy (Yale Law School, West Coast venture capital, East Coast media). At a turning point in his life and the country’s—in 2016, with the surprise success of Hillbilly Elegy and then the surprise victory of Trump—Vance becomes a celebrity, the anointed spokesman for the 40 percent of the country that comprises the white working class, which has sudden political power and cultural interest. He’s tasked with explaining the world he came from to the world he recently joined.
With his gifts of intellect and rhetoric, Vance might have brought the country’s conflicting strands together. They had combined to make him, and he knew them deeply—their flaws, their possibilities, their entwined fate. Instead, he took a path of extreme divisiveness to the peak of power, becoming a hard-line convert to the Catholic Church, post-liberal populism, and the scorched-earth cause of Donald Trump. Vance became a scourge of the elites among whom he’d found refuge, a kingpin of a new elite, avenging wrongs done to his native tribe.
At every step the reader wonders: Is our hero motivated by conviction, or is he the creature of a corrupt society? Does he deserve our admiration, our sympathy, or our contempt?
Still only 40, Vance is likelier than anyone to be the next president. (The biggest obstacle, for several reasons, is Trump himself.) His rise has been so dramatic and self-dramatized that he calls to mind those emblematic figures from history who seem both out of a storybook and all too human, such as Shoeless Joe Jackson and Huey Long. In the end, the question of Vance’s character—whether his about-face was “authentic”—is probably unanswerable. Few people are capable of conscious, persistent self-betrayal. A change that begins in opportunism can become more passionate than a lifelong belief, especially when it’s rewarded. Ventriloquize long enough and your voice alters; the mask becomes your face.
What’s more important than Va
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
An Autopsy Report on Biden’s In-Office Decline
What decline, you stupid fuck?
I have 4 years worth of posts out of you telling me that Joe Biden* was fine.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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The Coming Democratic Civil War
By Jonathan Chait | May 25, 2025, 9 AM ET
A seemingly wonky debate about the “abundance agenda” is really about power.
What has drawn many Americans to Trump is his claim that the system is so broken that, as he promised, “I alone can fix it.” The last time they held power, Democrats did little to rebut that claim. Now they must decide if they will abandon their legalistic commitment to fragmentary proceduralism or allow Trump’s boast to be vindicated.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/abundance-democrats-
political-power/682929/
A civil war has broken out among the Democratic wonks. The casus belli is a new set of ideas known as the abundance agenda. Its supporters herald it as the key to prosperity for the American people and to enduring power for the liberal coalition. Its critics decry it as a scheme to infiltrate the Democratic Party by “corporate-aligned interests”; “a gambit by center-right think tank & its libertarian donors”; “an anti-government manifesto for the MAGA Right”; and the historical and moral equivalent of the “Rockefellers and Carnegies grinding workers into dust.”
The factional disputes that tear apart the left tend to involve wrenching, dramatic issues where the human stakes are clear: Gaza, policing, immigration. And so it is more than a little odd that progressive activists, columnists, and academics are now ripping one another to shreds over such seemingly arcane and technical matters as zoning rules, permitting, and the Paperwork Reduction Act.
The intensity of the argument suggests that the participants are debating not merely the mechanical details of policy, but the very nature and purpose of the Democratic Party. And in fact, if you look closely beneath the squabbling, that is exactly what they are fighting over.
The abundance agenda is a collection of policy reforms designed to make it easier to build housing and infrastructure and for government bureaucracy to work. Despite its cheerful name and earnest intention to find win-win solutions, the abundance agenda contains a radical critique of the past half century of American government. On top of that—and this is what has set off clanging alarms on the left—it is a direct attack on the constellation of activist organizations, often called “the groups,” that control progressive politics and have significant influence over the Democratic Party.
Quote:In recent years, the party’s internal divides have been defined almost entirely in relation to the issue positions taken by the groups. The most progressive Democrats have been the ones who advocated the groups’ positions most forcefully; moderate Democrats have been defined more by their relative lack of enthusiasm for the groups’ agenda than by any causes of their own. The Democratic Party’s flavors have been “progressive” and “progressive lite.” The abundance agenda promises to supply moderate Democrats with a positive identity, rather than merely a negative one.
What initiated this Civil War? A book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson – Abundance – Simon & Schuster (2025)
Download a free copy from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Ezra+Klein+Abundance
That dynamic has only raised the stakes of the abundance agenda within the party. Its ideas are ambitious enough, but its political implications have set off a schismatic conflict not just over a collection of proposals and the Democratic Party’s direction—but over who should have the standing to direct it.
After percolating for years among policy wonks, the abundance agenda—a term coined by my colleague Derek Thompson in a 2022 essay—ascended suddenly in response to the deflating failure of the Biden administration’s policy program.
“We have to prove democracy still works,” Joe Biden said in his first speech to Congress. “That our government still works—and can deliver for the people.” That summer, after the Senate had approved a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, Biden declared the mission accomplished. “Today,” he announ
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Been watching Ezra Klein recently.
He sounds more MAGA every time a camera is put in front of him.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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An article about Trump, Trumptards and the Republican Party without mentioning those proper nouns.
5 ‘Argument Tactics’ That Narcissists Rely On — By A Psychologist
By Mark Travers | May 31, 2025, 04:15pm EDT
Mark Travers writes about the world of psychology.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2025/05/31/5-argument-tactics
-that-narcissists-rely-on---by-a-psychologist/
To strip the power from an emotional abuser, you must recognize their argument tactics for what they are: logical fallacies.
Narcissists tend to vastly overestimate the accuracy of their own beliefs. They become defensive, or even combative, when confronted with viewpoints that don’t align with their own. As a 2023 study published in Frontiers in Psychology explains, this is due to the fact that narcissists often exhibit very low levels of intellectual humility.
As a result, they rely heavily on manipulative argument tactics that serve to protect their inflated self-image. At face value, these tactics might seem clever, or maybe even intellectually sound. In reality, however, these tactics focus more on control than they do logic.
A 2024 study in published in Memory & Cognition also notes that individuals prone to such poor argument tactics are highly likely to accept and perpetuate information that confirms their existing beliefs.
Narcissists exploit this cognitive bias to others’ wits end: they frame their arguments to align with their victims’ fears or insecurities, or in ways that defend their warped self-image.
As such, they’re adept at spinning webs of flawed reasoning that feel convincing — but, under any actual scrutiny, they fall right apart. In other words, many of their go-to argument tactics are riddled with errors that are designed to deflect blame and derail conversations. In turn, they keep themselves in a position of control.
Here are five logical fallacies narcissists often rely on, and why they keep them in their repertoire.
1. Ad Hominem
The ad hominem fallacy occurs when someone chooses to attack the person making an argument instead of addressing the actual argument itself. They refuse to engage with the issue that was brought up, and instead discredit the speaker by focusing on their personal traits, emotions or past behavior. As a result, they shut down the discussion in its entirety.
For instance, say you confront a narcissist about their manipulative behavior. With an ad hominem attack, they might respond with, “You’re just insecure and bitter, that’s why you’re making such a big deal out of this.”
Rather than addressing your very real concerns, they attack you instead. As a result, your criticisms are rendered “irrational” in their eyes.
Narcissists heavily rely on ad hominem attacks, largely due to the fact that they will avoid engaging with facts that threaten their self-image at all costs. By turning the discussion into a critique of the accuser rather than their own actions, they change the course of the conversation. They make the victim feel self-conscious about raising concerns, which ensures the narcissist remains in control.
2. False Dichotomy
The false dichotomy fallacy arises once someone presents two extreme options as the only possible choices; they ignore the existence of middle-ground or nuance. This type of reasoning serves to force the victim (and the conversation as a whole) into a total gridlock. In turn, they prevent the possibility of any thoughtful discussions ensuing.
For instance, if you critique something that a narcissist says or does, they might respond in black-or-white statements like, “Either you agree with me, or you’re against me.” They equate any disagreement whatsoever with outright hostility.
But, in reality, relationships cannot function without compromise. Nor can discussions be productive without acknowledging the existence of both parties’ perspectives. Regardless, the narcissist limits the conversation to two opposing sides, which takes reasonable discourse out of the question entirely.
Narcissists favor false dichotom
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Shut up, faggot.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Hating New York
Paul Krugman / Jun 2, 2025 at 5:33 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/hating-new-york
MAGA and MAGA-adjacent types are very good at finding things and people to hate. They hate immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans), LGBTQ people and wokeness. They hate universities and are doing their best to destroy American science. The New York Times reports that they hate Europe. And they very much hate New York City.
OK, I’m not impartial on this issue. I grew up on Long Island and still think of NYC proper as “the city.” I live in Manhattan now, and my experience is that if you can afford housing — which is admittedly a huge problem — it’s actually a very good life, with an incredible range of things to do either in walking distance or a short subway ride away. Not everyone wants to live this way, but nobody is saying they should. All we ask is that some Americans be allowed to have favorable views of a place that provides the advantages density and, yes, diversity can offer.
But that, of course, is exactly what the U.S. right refuses to accept. New York is one of the safest places in America, yet much of the country insists on seeing it as a terrifying urban hellscape. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, insists that everyone is afraid to ride the subway:
If you want people to take the train, to take transit, then make it safe, make it clean, make it beautiful, make it wonderful, don’t make it a shithole.
Indeed, the subway is such an intolerable shithole that more than 4 million people ride it every day, myself among them. To be honest, the subway isn’t beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, and you can’t take it without coming into close contact with people who don’t look like you. But it’s quite safe — more on that in a minute — and it works very well at getting people quickly across the heart of a densely populated city.
As an aside, it’s remarkable that federal officials — who are supposed to work for all of us — feel free to trash-talk major American cities, as long as the cities in question vote Democratic.
But anyway, Duffy is an idiot, so I found it more interesting when Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, who reputedly isn’t an idiot, declared that “We want the U.S. to be more like Florida and less like New York.” I guess that he gets some points for trash-talking the whole state, not just the big city. But still.
What was he going on about? Well, Florida spends considerably less money on government programs and hence manages without an income tax. “And I can tell you having lived in both, it’s better not to have an income tax, and Florida gives better services.”
So is Florida clearly a better place than New York? Let’s look at some numbers:
Sources: Centers for Disease Control, KFF, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy
Start at the top. In my opinion, one important aspect of the quality of life is not being dead, and New Yorkers on average live three years longer than Floridians. Life expectancy is even higher, 81.5 years, in New York City.
Why do New Yorkers live longer? One answer is that city life — which involves a lot more walking than suburban life — is generally good for you.
Another is that New Yorkers are considerably less likely than Floridians to be murdered. In my experience many Americans simply refuse to believe that New York in 2025 isn’t what it was in 1975, that it’s actually a low-crime city. But it is.
And New Yorkers are much less likely than most Americans to die in traffic accidents. Why? In the city and surrounding areas, one main answer has to be that so many people take public transit rather than driving.
Which brings us to the whole issue of subway safety. Last year was unusually bad, with ten people murdered on the subway. Some of the murders were grueso
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Shut up, faggot.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America
Yarvin wants to destroy democracy. J. D. Vance, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen are among his fans.
The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee.
By Ava Kofman | June 2, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile
In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”
Moldbug acknowledged that his vision depended on the sanity of his chief executive: “Clearly, if he or she turns out to be Hitler or Stalin, we have just recreated Nazism or Stalinism.” Yet he dismissed the failures of twentieth-century dictators, whom he saw as too reliant on popular support. For Moldbug, any system that sought legitimacy in the passions of the mob was doomed to instability. Though critics labelled him a techno-fascist, he preferred to call himself a royalist or a Jacobite—a nod to partisans of James II and his descendants, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opposed Britain’s parliamentary system and upheld the divine right of kings. Never mind the French Revolution, the bête noire of reactionary thinkers: Moldbug believed that the English and American Revolutions had gone too far.
If Moldbug’s “Open Letter” showed little affection for the masses, it intimated that they might still have a use. “Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky, and Václav Havel,” he wrote. “What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd.” The best place to recruit this crowd, he said, was on the internet—a shrewd intuition. Before long, links to Moldbug’s blog, “Unqualified Reservations,” were being passed around by libertarian techies, disgruntled bureaucrats, and self-styled rationalists—many of whom formed the shock troops of an online intellectual movement that came to be known as neo-reaction, or the Dark Enlightenment. While few turned into outright monarchists, their contempt for Obama-era uplift seemed to find voice in Moldbug’s heresies. In his most influential coinage, which quickly gained currency among the nascent alt-right, Moldbug urged his readers to rouse themselves from their ideological slumber by taking the “red pill,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in “The Matrix,” who chooses daunting truth over contented ignorance.
In 2013, an article on the news site TechCrunch, titled “Geeks for Monarchy,” revealed that Mencius Moldbug was the cyber alias of a forty-year-old programmer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin. At the same time that he was trying to redesign the U.S. government, Yarvin was also dreaming up a new computer operating system that he hoped would serve as a “
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That Book About Biden’s Decline
By Jim Newell | June 03, 2025 11:37 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/joe-biden-original-sin-dem
ocrats-2024-election.html
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet was at the event. He’d never felt as if the White House had a coherent policy. “It seemed like there were two competing sides of the debate within the administration … but no one had publicly articulated the president’s view on the matter.” Bennet “had come to believe that Biden’s inability to mediate between the people in his administration with different political viewpoints had led to an incoherent overall position on the issue. . . .
As the presidency went on, decisions that would once have been two weeks late started coming months late, if they arrived at all. It took until June of a presidential election year for Biden to recognize the festering political wound of his immigration policy and take executive action to stanch the flow at the border. The administration’s plans for resolving the Israel–Hamas war were clear to no one, and pleased no one. Even on the issue nearest to his heart—the defense of Ukraine—the administration was trapped between a growing GOP base that wanted to drop involvement altogether and Ukraine supporters of all persuasions who felt the administration was taking it too cautiously. And the defining decision of them all—to drop out of the race due to loss of confidence from the American public—came a year and a half too late.
There have been endless debates since the election about whether it was Biden’s decline or Biden’s governing missteps that did Democrats in. The short answer is that it was both.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Shut up, faggot.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Notes from an Occupation
America is an occupied country, ruled by partisans hostile to democracy.
By Marilynne Robinson | June 26, 2025 issue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilynne_Robinson
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/06/26/notes-from-an-occupation-m
arilynne-robinson/
A well-planned occupation seizes the heights of the defeated civilization, so that the people will see their leaders ousted or humiliated and made docile. It will likewise discredit and weaken those features of the culture in which its people placed confidence and pride. If this model were applied to our situation, we might expect to see the Supreme Court diminished, the Congress disempowered, and the Constitution desacralized by indifference or contempt. The press would come under attack. Our incomparable universities and research institutions would lose autonomy and resources. The mighty dollar would be weakened. Bonds with allies would be breached, and the occupied country would be held in contempt for the damage its default had done to the world order, and to democracy, having put aside its responsibility for demonstrating the viability of popular government.
Examples of the seizing of cultural heights abound. In 70 AD the Romans utterly razed the Temple at Jerusalem and Jerusalem itself in order to deal with the Jewish population’s resistance to their oppression. In 1814 the British, still wanting to break the back of the Revolution, burned the American Capitol Building, destroying the Library of Congress. Someone among the insurrectionists of 2021 might have read a book on imperialism and realized how easily the same results could be achieved if the occupiers were not an alien force, but merely partisans hostile to what the idea of democracy had made of the country over the decades and centuries of its flourishing.
Historically, in America, two contending factions have had enough in common with each other to maintain a basic coherency in government. Then in the late twentieth century their differences became inflamed. The competition became both brutal and unserious. On the right, real interest in the general welfare became secondary to a crusade bent on unconditional and permanent victory. An entanglement with something resembling religion gave it claims to a special righteousness that owed nothing to fact or reason or to the conventions of civilized politics.
Homegrown insurrectionists would have special knowledge of a culture’s vulnerabilities and sensitivities. They would know how to induce corrosive shame, for example. They might have resentments specific to the culture’s measures of status and accomplishment, which would add piquancy to the neutering of centers of influence. None of this is normal, though it has consolidated itself under cover of the customary transfer of power. It claims a mandate to transform the country fundamentally, to return it to its competitors, if there should be another election, irreversibly changed and damaged.
I am proposing, of course, that America actually is, at present, an occupied country. I will call the occupiers Red and the occupied Blue, since these colors are in general use for distinctions of this kind and seemingly cause no offense. To the extent that this statement is complicated by the fact that those in power were elected, their conduct in office seems not to be what many of their voters were led to expect or would have chosen. So the polls tell us. Elections do indeed have consequences, and should have them. The sovereignty of the people must be honored even as they begin to repent of their choices. This is among the many crucial norms that depend altogether on respect. It cannot mean only that the electorate must be deferred to, even when it is misinformed or aroused to unhealthy excitements.
Democracy cannot decline far without ceasing to be democracy. The spirit of its politics might well become so degraded that the people, whose authority can have no legitimate successor, are ousted altogether. We can see who would displace them—the ultra-rich, the tech vis
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Shut up, faggot.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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What’s behind Trump’s assault on Harvard and crown-jewel US universities?
Decades-long suspicion of elite universities has evolved under President Trump into a full-scale war against institutions deemed to have grown overtly political – punctuated this week by curbs on the flow of international students to Harvard.
By Simon Montlake | June 05, 2025, 1:22 p.m. ET
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2025/0605/trump-universities-ha
rvard-international-students
The escalating battle between President Donald Trump and Harvard University is a high-stakes cultural and political standoff that echoes far beyond higher education. Public deference toward the scholarly excellence that Harvard represents has been eroded by a backlash against elite universities now seen by many voters as bastions of political liberalism. This growing resentment, mostly on the political right, has fueled an assault on their exalted status.
It’s a battle that has been years in the making: Conservatives have long seethed at the ideological tilt on most college campuses and accused administrators of stifling free speech. But it took the reelection of Mr. Trump, a businessman who started his own failed eponymous university and is finely attuned to status and slights, to light the fuse.
New actions this week expand what amounts to a multipronged assault on elite universities. On Wednesday, the Department of Education asked for a review of Columbia University’s accreditation status, citing antisemitism on its campus. That evening, President Trump issued a proclamation suspending visas for new foreign students at Harvard for national security reasons.
Asked recently in the Oval Office about the dispute with Harvard, Mr. Trump blamed the university for being defiant. “Harvard has got to behave themselves,” he said. “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They’ve got to behave themselves.”
The Trump administration has already slashed federal funding of scientific and medical research, of which Harvard is a major recipient. In February it began investigating 10 universities – all in Democrat-run states – accused of failing to protect Jewish students during a wave of campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas. Columbia bowed under pressure; other universities sought to reach agreements to unlock federal funds. But Harvard balked at the maximalist demands of the White House.
Now it finds itself squeezed from all sides. In addition to the billions of dollars in frozen grants and federal contracts, and the administration’s repeated efforts to block the enrollment of international students – Wednesday’s proclamation came after an earlier effort was halted by a federal judge – Mr. Trump has also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, which would impact donations. The spending bill passed recently by Republicans in the House of Representatives would hike the 1.4% tax on Harvard’s $53 billion endowment to 21%, adding to the financial and political pressure on the university.
The Trump administration argues that universities including Harvard have done too little to address rising antisemitism.
“If you want to make an example and to demonstrate your power, how better to do it than to go after the university that’s at the top of the heap?” asks Brian Rosenberg, a former president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, who now teaches at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “It sends a chilling message.”
A dispute years in the making
As far back as 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr. penned his book “God and Man at Yale,” colleges were catching conservative criticism for diverging from traditional values. But the relationship between GOP leaders and elite universities grew far more hostile during the past decade, as universities became more explicitly political in their messaging – often in direct opposition to Mr. Trump and his movement.
In 2019, Mr. Trump signed an executive order th
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Fuck Harvard and your Anti-American "intellectuals" working there.
If they love the Chinese so much, I suggest they all move to China.
Maybe it would be good for them. They could get a real taste of what they're trying to turn America into.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Harvard and your Anti-American "intellectuals" working there.
If they love the Chinese so much, I suggest they all move to China.
Maybe it would be good for them. They could get a real taste of what they're trying to turn America into.
You understand nothing. You’re anti education. Do you understand what that says about you? What you’re telling everyone about yourself? That you are anti knowledge. Anti being well read. Anti competent, aware and skilled.
You say you are a jack of all trades. Hey dummy, you knew nothing until you learned. Until you educated yourself and acquired the skills. And that Gilligan applies to all life skills. Too bad your education ended where it did. You might have amounted to something. But it did end and you didn't.
You’re not a genius like you said in one of your posts about when you were young, you’re a moron. Big difference, big difference. Hurry now, try to find where I misspelled words. Too funny...
T
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Where Is Barack Obama?
The “audacity of hope” presidency has given way to the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.
By Mark Leibovich | June 8, 2025, 8 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/obama-retirement-
trump-era/683068/
Last month, while Donald Trump was in the Middle East being gifted a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, Barack Obama headed off on his own foreign excursion: a trip to Norway, in a much smaller and more tasteful jet, to visit the summer estate of his old friend King Harald V. Together, they would savor the genteel glories of Bygdøyveien in May. They chewed over global affairs and the freshest local salmon, which had been smoked on the premises and seasoned with herbs from the royal garden.
Trump has begun his second term with a continuous spree of democracy-shaking, economy-quaking, norm-obliterating action. And Obama, true to form, has remained carefully above it all. He picks his spots, which seldom involve Trump. In March, he celebrated the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act and posted his annual NCAA basketball brackets. In April, he sent out an Easter message and mourned the death of the pope. In May, he welcomed His Holiness Pope Leo XIV (“a fellow Chicagoan”) and sent prayers to Joe Biden following his prostate-cancer diagnosis.
No matter how brazen Trump becomes, the most effective communicator in the Democratic Party continues to opt for minimal communication. His “audacity of hope” presidency has given way to the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.
Obama occasionally dips into politics with brief and unmemorable statements, or sporadic fundraising emails (subject: “Barack Obama wants to meet you. Yes you.”). He praised his law-school alma mater, Harvard, for “rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt” by the White House “to stifle academic freedom.” He criticized a Republican bill that would threaten health care for millions. He touted a liberal judge who was running for a crucial seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. When called upon, he can still deliver a top-notch campaign spiel, donor pitch, convention speech, or eulogy.
Beyond that, Obama pops in with summer and year-end book, music, and film recommendations. He recently highlighted a few articles about AI and retweeted a promotional spot for Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds, a new Netflix documentary from his and Michelle’s production company. (Michelle also has a fashion book coming out later this year: “a celebration of confidence, identity, and authenticity,” she calls it.) Apparently, Barack is a devoted listener of The Ringer’s Bill Simmons Podcast, or so he told Jimmy Kimmel over dinner.
In normal times, no one would deny Obama these diversions. He performed the world’s most stressful job for eight years, served his country, made his history, and deserved to kick back and do the usual ex-president things: start a foundation, build a library, make unspeakable amounts of money.
But the inevitable Trump-era counterpoint is that these are not normal times. And Obama’s detachment feels jarringly incongruous with the desperation of his longtime admirers—even more so given Trump’s assaults on what Obama achieved in office. It would be one thing if Obama had disappeared after leaving the White House, maybe taking up painting like George W. Bush. The problem is that Obama still very much has a public profile—one that screams comfort and nonchalance at a time when so many other Americans are terrified.
“There are many grandmas and Rachel Maddow viewers who have been more vocal in this moment than Barack Obama has,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute, told me. “It is heartbreaking,” he added, “to see him sacrificing that megaphone when nobody else quite has it.”
People who have worked with Obama since he left office say that he is extremely judicious about when he weighs in. “We try to preserve his voice so that when he does speak, it has impact,” Eric Schultz, a close adviser to Obama in his post-presidency, told me. “There is a dilution factor th
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Harvard and your Anti-American "intellectuals" working there.
If they love the Chinese so much, I suggest they all move to China.
Maybe it would be good for them. They could get a real taste of what they're trying to turn America into.
You understand nothing. You’re anti education. Do you understand what that says about you? What you’re telling everyone about yourself? That you are anti knowledge. Anti being well read. Anti competent, aware and skilled.
You say you are a jack of all trades. Hey dummy, you knew nothing until you learned. Until you educated yourself and acquired the skills. And that Gilligan applies to all life skills. Too bad your education ended where it did. You might have amounted to something. But it did end and you didn't.
You’re not a genius like you said in one of your posts about when you were young, you’re a moron. Big difference, big difference. Hurry now, try to find where I misspelled words. Too funny...
T
I'm not anti-education. I'm anti-indoctrination.
I bought my house with cash when I was 32 years old and haven't held a single cent of debt since I was 25 years old. Virtually retired now for going on 15 years.
Don't talk to me about "success", mutt. You keep living your sad little life alone in that shitty little apartment because you spent your entire adult life buying shit you didn't need and paying interest and high taxes just to be able to keep paying those bills. Meanwhile you have no family or friends that care a lick about you and your time on earth has almost run out.
Your life sucked. Your life continues to suck. And when you're gone there will be nobody there to mourn you because your dead whore of a mother is already dead and everyone else you ever knew hates being around you.
You are a complete failure.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Real talk about FDR
Big progressive change has always involved massive compromise
By Matthew Yglesias | Jun 09, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/real-talk-about-fdr
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is one of the most important presidents of American history, a man who stabilized the economy during the Great Depression, laid the foundations of the social safety net, won World War II, invested in public infrastructure and beyond. So it’s no surprise that he’s often held up by contemporary progressives as a model for how to get things done, including in progressive publications like The Nation. Nor is it particularly surprising that the Roosevelt Institute is the name of a leading think tank on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
At the same time, I can’t help but think that the actual historical Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a much more complicated figure than the iconography would suggest.
He was, like everyone who gets things done in politics, a fundamentally pragmatic person who cared a lot about things like winning elections and building political coalitions. That meant, in his case, a lot of bowing to reality on the cultural issues of his time. These days, essentially every conference I go to features some procession of speakers who talk about how Democrats need to be pragmatic but also that we can’t just “abandon our values.” But on certain issues, FDR really did ruthlessly abandon progressive values. In some instances, he did this in ways that I think were tough-minded and admirable and that contemporary progressives should take more seriously as a model.
But in others, he did so in ways that make me profoundly uncomfortable and seem clearly much too far. Mass internment of Japanese-Americans, for example, really was more of a major historical crime than a concession to political reality.
I’m not arguing for FDR’s cancellation. But I do think it’s important to recall the complexity of history and the complexity of politics.
It’s relatively easy to find historical activists or writers whose ideas are uncomplicatedly admirable — people who took principled stands that were ahead of their time and helped shift long-term public opinion in a better direction. But nothing happens without practical politics, and practical politics is a fundamentally ugly business. It’s hard to know, really, how to definitively judge historical figures. But whatever you make of FDR’s choices, it’s just not the case that he’s a model of uncompromising progressive governance. The impulse on the left to claim him as such despite the facts is telling about the basic unworkability of the purist approach.
FDR’s devil’s bargain with segregation
Probably the biggest example, in terms of both scope and significance, is the way the political power of the midcentury Democratic Party depended on hard-core segregationist politicians elected from the Jim Crow South.
Almost every white person at that time had ideas and attitudes about race that would be considered retrograde today. But FDR was not simply a person of his time.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Economics expert pinpoints the exact moment in 2012 when 'America went to hell'
Geography was more important than we thought.
By Tod Perry | June 16, 2025
https://www.upworthy.com/economics-expert-pinpoints-the-exact-moment-i
n-2012-when-america-went-to-hell
America has never been a perfect place, but since the Civil War, it has been one where most people bought into the idea of the country and supported the institutions that keep it running. People may disagree on politics and culture, but when America was threatened, whether it was 9/11 or World War II, people came together to fight for the country they love, even though the reasons may have differed.
However, it’d be naive to say that sentiment is still as strong as it once was. Since The Great Recession, many people have felt that the vibes are off in America, and polls and research back those feelings. Right around 2012, when smartphones became ubiquitous, there was a considerable rise in the number of people who felt that America was on the wrong track and that racism and sexism were considerably worse than they were just a year before. There was also a big spike in mental illness.
So what happened in 2012? Did the world suddenly become drastically worse overnight, or had our perceptions been changed?
Why does it feel like America is on the decline?
Other developed countries have experienced similar vibe shifts since 2012, but it has hit America the hardest. Economics blogger Noah Smith explains why this feeling of malaise has hit America so hard, and he illustrates it perfectly in a viral Substack piece called “Social media destroyed one of America's key advantages.” Smith is an American blogger and commentator on economics and current events and former assistant professor of behavioral finance at Stony Brook University.
In his Substack post, Smith postulates that the technological change hit America the hardest because it punctured our geographical buffers. “A hippie in Oakland and a redneck in the suburbs of Houston both fundamentally felt that they were part of the same unified nation; that nation looked very different to people in each place,” Smith writes. “Californians thought America was California, and Texans thought America was Texas, and this generally allowed America to function.”
Why did America fundamentally change in 2012?
Here’s an excerpt from Smith’s piece. Please check out the entire piece on the Noahpinion Substack.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/social-media-destroyed-one-of-americas
Quote:It may sound cynical to believe that America was a better place when people were less likely to talk to people with a different worldview. But, given how things have gone in the past 15 years, it’s fair to say that putting every American in a proverbial ring to fight it out just makes everyone feel under attack... and the fight never ends.
Like some kind of forcible hive mind out of science fiction, social media suddenly threw every American in one small room with every other American. Decades of hard work spent running away from each other and creating our ideologically fragmented patchwork of geographies went up in smoke overnight, as geography suddenly ceased to mediate the everyday discussion of politics and culture.
The sudden collapse of geographic sorting in political discussion threw all Americans in the same room with each other — and like the characters in Sartre’s No Exit, they discovered that “Hell is other people.” Conservatives suddenly discovered that a lot of Americans despise Christianity or resent White people over the legacy of discrimination. Liberals suddenly remembered that a lot of their countrymen frown on their lifestyles. Every progressive college kid got to see every piece of right-wing fake news that their grandparents were sharing on Facebook (whereas before, these would have been quietly confined to chain emails). Every conservative in a small town got to see Twitter activists denouncing White people. And so on.
The problem with the Like button
Another developmen
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Harvard and your Anti-American "intellectuals" working there.
If they love the Chinese so much, I suggest they all move to China.
Maybe it would be good for them. They could get a real taste of what they're trying to turn America into.
You understand nothing. You’re anti education. Do you understand what that says about you? What you’re telling everyone about yourself? That you are anti knowledge. Anti being well read. Anti competent, aware and skilled.
You say you are a jack of all trades. Hey dummy, you knew nothing until you learned. Until you educated yourself and acquired the skills. And that Gilligan applies to all life skills. Too bad your education ended where it did. You might have amounted to something. But it did end and you didn't.
You’re not a genius like you said in one of your posts about when you were young, you’re a moron. Big difference, big difference. Hurry now, try to find where I misspelled words. Too funny...
T
I'm not anti-education. I'm anti-indoctrination.
I bought my house with cash when I was 32 years old and haven't held a single cent of debt since I was 25 years old. Virtually retired now for going on 15 years.
Don't talk to me about "success", mutt. You keep living your sad little life alone in that shitty little apartment because you spent your entire adult life buying shit you didn't need and paying interest and high taxes just to be able to keep paying those bills. Meanwhile you have no family or friends that care a lick about you and your time on earth has almost run out.
Your life sucked. Your life continues to suck. And when you're gone there will be nobody there to mourn you because your dead whore of a mother is already dead and everyone else you ever knew hates being around you.
You are a complete failure.
It’s always the same with you. Your entire understanding of the world revolves around buying your house and debt, if it can be believed.
You possess zero sophistication, zero worldliness.
You keep defining my world even though you know nothing about me Jack. What’s my name, Jack?
You have a need to project onto me what you perceive to be a dismal existence. An existence you created because I don’t post all my personal shit here.
Like hospice’s and how my mother died. It’s like I said Gilligan. This site for you is about therapy, revenge and forgiveness. Only to start the process over again. You’re chasing your tail here. Get some real help before Trump, your fearless leader, takes away your health care. Why, because you voted for him. Another brilliant decision.
And since you are not smart enough to figure it out for yourself, I'll clue you in. If you post in chat, that shit disappears.
T
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At the end of the weekend, your party is still dead, you have no friends or family and you hate America.
That's all anybody needs to know about you Ted.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, you described yourself and every Trumptard I know. You Trumptards have daily lives so very fucked up and you think being fucked up is normal, that everyone including the Libtards, live that way. It is not a secret, but the less that a Libtard shares with the coping mechanisms, the strategies people use to manage difficult emotions and situations, of Trumptards, the longer the Libtard lives.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
At the end of the weekend, your party is still dead, you have no friends or family and you hate America.
That's all anybody needs to know about you Ted.
A little window into 6ix's experience of life in America. Top-most comments are the most recent, and the bottom-most comment is the oldest:
6ixStringJack: Sorry to hear about your friend's mom. Sounds like you guys are pretty tight. That's how it was with my friend's dad. I spent more time with him than either of his sons the last few years of his life. I feel bad for my buddy because his life was nothing but chaos at the time and he didn't spend nearly enough time with his dad. But nobody knew that it was happening except for his dad, who kept all of that to himself until he got the bad news that it was terminal. He'd been living with cancer for years and taking care of it without even letting his family know about the diagnosis.
6ixStringJack: Its a shame that people judged you like that when your mom was passing. Everybody has their opinions and most people cant keep them to themselves. I haven't seen my mom or step-dad for probably over 5 years at this point. Not since they moved to Florida. We talk on the phone maybe 3 times a year now. There's probably a good chance that I never see them again, so I'm not really worried about it. I hope it's quick when it happens though. I don't want her to suffer.
6ixStringJack: Had my grandma's kids known that it was a murder drug, I don't think they would have been so quick to give it to her. That's not how it was sold to them by the lying doctors. There were plenty of lesser drugs in that kit like codine and similar stuff, but we jumped straight to the murder drug because that's what the doctors and the hospice nurse told them to do.
6ixStringJack: I hope that 17 years on you don't think about it too much anymore. It's only been 2 and I know I think about it way more than I should, but I don't think about it as much as I used to. It was just made worse with my friend's Dad dying 6 months later, and he was the most positive person I had in my life. 2 very important people died that year and I just haven't been doing what I need to do ever since. Kinda buried myself in projects and keeping my mind as busy as I can.
6ixStringJack: Sounds like you mom and my grams basically had the same diagnosis. That was the 6-months-to-a-year diagnosis. Outside of a hip surgery and glaucoma surgery a few years prior, she was never in the hospital for anything and rarely ever got sick. She quit smoking in her early 40's and all of the sudden she got sick and it was stage 4 lung cancer.
6ixStringJack: My dad and uncle didn't do anything. Then again, they had just around the same relationship with their mom as I do with my own, so I can't judge. I did things for my grandma that I would never do for my own mom. Fortunately, my step-dad's kids and my brother's wife are rich, so I think she's going to have a pretty nice time of things in her last few months when that time comes without me needing to be involved. My old man is rather well set up too, so I should be good there.
6ixStringJack: My grams was pretty overweight by the end. My aunt took a few weeks off of work and was ready to take a leave of absense, and I was there every night with her. If you had asked me only 1 week before that I would never be caught dead wiping anybody else's butt or even helping out with that process, but it's amazing what you do in the moment for the ones you love. It was a rough week without
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In Trumptard country, they die young (Expressing Personal Freedom by smoking and over-eating and getting drunk)
Century-Long Study Reveals Startling Differences in Life Expectancy Across U.S. States
By Yale University | June 16, 2025
https://scitechdaily.com/century-long-study-reveals-startling-differen
ces-in-life-expectancy-across-u-s-states/
Published in JAMA Network Open, the study found that some states, especially in the Northeast and on the West Coast, saw big improvements in life expectancy. But others, particularly in the South, showed little to no progress over the entire century.
The researchers pointed to California and Kentucky as examples of how local health policies can influence mortality rates. California was an early adopter of smoke-free workplace policies in 1995, which led to entire generations of young people growing up in smoke-free environments, as well as generations of working-age adults who were prompted to quit, the research said.
In contrast, Kentucky essentially made no effort to control cigarette smoking, resulting in higher cigarette use and, therefore, higher mortality compared with California. Similar patterns for smoking and higher mortality were observed in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, the study said.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Shut up, faggot.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Speak Our Truth
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, faggot.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
By Jerry Cayford | Jun 17, 2025 6:00AM
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/06/speak-our-truth.html
I was always attracted to that old dichotomy: people must be either stupid or lying when they claim to believe some obvious falsehood. This dichotomy is a staple of Democratic theorizing about our political culture. (Sometimes the choice is between stupid and evil, which amounts to the same.) For example, Adam-Troy Castro’s social media classic “Why Do Liberals Think Trump Supporters Are Stupid?” has been circulating since halfway through Trump’s first term. https://brucegerencser.net/2019/05/why-do-liberals-think-trump-support
ers-are-stupid-by-adam-troy-castro/ But this simple dichotomy is losing its appeal. It is just not plausible that tens of millions of ordinary Republicans — our neighbors, friends, and families — are stupid or evil. There have been many proposed explanations of this puzzle: information siloes hide the obvious from otherwise intelligent people; tribalism exerts a powerful evolutionary draw. I believe, though, that there is a different and hidden complexity here.
. . .
Perverse consequences follow bad thinking. Twenty years ago, in the difficult Iraq war terrorism and torture cases, we established that courts have oversight of government actions even in Guantanamo and black sites. It should be laughable today to suggest that any executive action on American soil is beyond judicial review. Lawyers should be threatened with contempt of court for daring to claim such a thing before a judge. Yet exactly this immunity from review is relentlessly claimed by the Trump Administration.
. . .
In that old picture, we look at reality, call a spade a spade, everyone sees what’s true, and then we fight about values. But that’s a fantasy. We have all been in enough political arguments to know that this is not how they go. Republicans do not breezily grant the charges, but rather dispute them: that statement was ironic; this action is reasonable when seen in context; that one was distorted by the media; this one is done by your side, too; and so on. Every word of every charge will turn out to be elastic and debatable.
An exchange between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Bernie Sanders (recounted in “R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise” (New Yorker) by Daniel Immerwahr) shows how these partisan disputes really go:
At the confirmation hearing, Bernie Sanders invoked “sixteen studies done by scientists and doctors all over the world saying that vaccines do not cause autism.” Kennedy was unfazed. “Look at the I.O.M. assessment of those sixteen studies, Senator,” he replied, referring to the Institute of Medicine.
Sanders batted this away. “You have said, ‘The vaccine was the deadliest vaccine ever made.’”
“The reason I said that, Senator Sanders, is because there were more reports on the system,” Kennedy explained, referring to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which collects self-reported data. “There were more reports of injuries and deaths than any, than all other vaccines combined.”
Sanders continued: “You disagree with the scientific community that—”
“Oh, I just, I’m agnostic, because we don’t have the science to make that determination.”
Immerwahr’s article puts questions of “epistemology” — how we know what’s true — at the center of our political problems: “Kennedy’s rise represents a growing epistemological rift in the country. Increasingly, ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t just describe divergent political judgments but also sealed-off understandings of what is true and how we know it.” He does not try seriously to defend that thesis, however, and mostly documents the difficulties that experts, policymakers, and all of us — left and right — have deciding what is true. And really, the two sides do not have d
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Nobody cares. Your party is dead. The Legacy Media is dying. Anyone you're posting will not be employed within the next 3.5 years.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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I don’t want to be Mr. Wet Blanket Scold, yelling at Democrats to stop talking about immigration.
But I do wish all these members of Congress making a show of demanding entry to ICE detention facilities and hoping to provoke conflict and news on this question could take a minute to think. Picking fights with Trump is smart. Making news is smart. Being confrontational in selective ways is smart. But if it’s possible to be smart and creative about picking fights and making news, shouldn’t it be possible to be smart and creative about picking fights and making news on Democrats’ best issue (Medicaid cuts)? Can’t you make news at a hospital facing closure if these cuts go through? Visit a clinic providing care to the poor? I liked this effort.
It’s not, again, that the ICE visits are bad. But they offer a reminder that it’s possible to put effort into your political messaging and try to get attention for things, and yet the attention-getting instinct seems largely absent around this reconciliation bill. Where are the protests? Where are the stunts? This bill is deeply unpopular, and yet massively undercovered despite being objectively important.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-parliamentary-cities
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Inequality, Part IV: Oligarchs
The rise of mega-fortunes
By Paul Krugman / Jun 22, 2025 at 5:33 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/inequality-part-iv-oligarchs
Share of the top 0.01% in total wealth, from the GC Wealth Project
https://wealthproject.gc.cuny.edu/wealth-inequality-trends/inequality-
trends/#countryview
Who said this?
Quote:No, it wasn’t Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s a quote from The New Freedom, Woodrow Wilson’s campaign platform in the 1912 presidential election.
If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.
Wilson was a vile racist, even for his time, and his reputation has suffered appropriately. But he was also a progressive on economic policy. And I’ve always been struck by the fact that in the early 20th century a politician could declare that great concentrations of wealth were a threat to democracy without being considered a radical, un-American Marxist. Wilson won that election!
Politicians, even progressives, are far more timid these days. Yet we are once again living in an era in which there are men big enough to own the U.S. government — and to a large extent they do. For a while Elon Musk exerted more power over the operations of the U.S. government than any cabinet member or elected official short of Donald Trump himself. Musk is currently on the outs, but the Trump administration is stuffed full of billionaires and people who take their marching orders from billionaires. Congress appears to be about to enact legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that billionaires love even though the broader public hates all its main provisions.
How did we get here?
This is my latest entry in a series of primers on inequality; here are Part I, Part II, and Part III. Today my focus will be on extreme wealth concentration — the rise of an American oligarchy. Beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. Tracking the rise of extreme wealth
2. How did our modern oligarchs get so rich?
I’ll eventually want to talk about the political and social consequences of extreme wealth concentration, and how it undermines democracy. But that will have to wait for later posts.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Looks like your garbage towelhead socialist Democrat won the NYC mayor primary.
NYC's only chance at saving itself now is if Adams wins as an independent, or the people of the city finally wake up and vote for the Republican.
Otherwise NYC is dead forever.
Good job, Democrats. You'll get what you deserve.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare
The U.S. is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. What should Canada do then?
By Thomas Homer-Dixon
Published December 31, 2021
Updated January 2, 2022
This article was published more than 3 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-american-polity-is
-cracked-and-might-collapse-canada-must-prepare/
Thomas Homer-Dixon is executive director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University. His latest book is Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril.
By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.
We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.
Leading American academics are now actively addressing the prospect of a fatal weakening of U.S. democracy.
This past November, more than 150 professors of politics, government, political economy and international relations appealed to Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would protect the integrity of US elections but is now stalled in the Senate. This is a moment of “great peril and risk,” they wrote. “Time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching.”
I’m a scholar of violent conflict. For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto.
Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals.
I’m not surprised by what’s happening there – not at all. During my graduate work in the United States in the 1980s, I sometimes listened to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk show host and later television personality. I remarked to friends at the time that, with each broadcast, it was if Mr. Limbaugh were wedging the sharp end of a chisel into a faint crack in the moral authority of U.S. political institutions, and then slamming the other end of that chisel with a hammer.
In the decades since, week after week, year after year, Mr. Limbaugh and his fellow travellers have hammered away – their blows’ power lately amplified through social media and outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax. The cracks have steadily widened, ramified, connected and propagated deeply into America’s once-esteemed institutions, profoundly compromising their structural integrity. The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war.
How should Canada prepare?
In 2020, president Donald Trump awarded Mr. Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The act signalled that Mr. Limbaugh’s brand of bullying, populist white ethnocentrism – a rancid blend of aggrieved attacks on liberal elites, racist dog-whistling, bragging about American exceptionalism and appeals to authoritarian leadership – had become an integral part of mainstream political ideology in the U.S.
But one can’t blame only Mr. Limbaugh, who died in early 2021, and his ilk for America’s dysfunction. These people and their actions are as much symptoms of that dysfunction as its root causes, and those causes are many. Some can be traced to the country’s founding – to an abiding distrust in government baked into the country’s political culture during the Revolution, to slavery, to the political compromise of the Electoral College that slavery spawned, to the overrepresentation of rural voting power in the Senate, and to the failure of Reconstruction after t
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The Psychology of Trump Voters
They're not following Trump because of what he does. They're following him because of how he makes them feel. Understanding it is the first step in breaking the spell.
By Jayne jayneconverse3 | June 27, 2025
https://www.tiktok.com/@jayneconverse3/video/7520454365123972365 (5 minutes: 36-second long video which is worth checking out)
I’ve been dying to dig into this. I’ve been asking myself why Trump’s followers can’t see reality. So I did my research, and I’m going to share it with you.
Let’s talk about the psychology behind the Trump Cult, because that’s what it is. It’s not a normal political movement anymore, it’s a cult of personality and if we want to fight it, we have to understand it. So, let’s break it down.
First, Trump doesn’t offer policies, he offers identity. He’s not popular because of what he does, but because of what he represents. To many of his followers, he’s a walking, talking middle finger to a system they believe has failed them.¹
They see him as “their guy,” not because he’s honest, not because he helps them, but because he talks like them, rages like them, and punches the people they’ve been told to blame for everything.²
In psychology, there’s a term for this: “Identity fusion.” It’s when your personal identity becomes fused with your group or leader. That’s why criticism of Trump feels like a personal attack to his supporters. It’s not just “he’s being criticized,” it’s “I’m being criticized.”
Second, he offers revenge, not solutions. He doesn’t promise to fix healthcare, or raise wages, or protect your rights; he promises to go after “them.” Whether it’s immigrants, the press, Black activists, LGBTQ people, liberals, college students, elites, anyone outside the tribe… that’s classic authoritarianism.
Give people a sense of loss, tell them who stole it, then promise to make them pay. And to some people, that rage, that promise of vengeance is more emotionally satisfying than actual policy. It doesn’t fix their problems, but it feels like power.
Third: People crave order, and Trump promises strength. When institutions fail, when you don’t trust the media, the courts, elections, schools³, you start to look for a savior: Someone who says, “Only I can fix it.” That’s why Trump acts like a strong man. He creates the crisis, then sells himself as the only one tough enough to stop it. He’s done that over and over and over again. He’s not leading a movement, he’s leading a dependency.
Fourth: His followers are trapped in an information bubble. They don’t just believe lies, they live inside them. Fox News, MAGA influencers, far-right churches, Trump’s own app Truth Social is a closed-loop ecosystem that tells them every day, “The elites hate you, the media lies, only Trump tells the truth.” 4 This is called “epistemic closure.” It’s cult logic. If Trump says it, it’s true. If the world says otherwise, the world is lying.
And then fifth: Shame is too powerful, so they double down, just like Trump does. Some Trump supporters know deep down that they’ve been conned. They’ve seen the cruelty, the corruption, the chaos, but they’ve already invested years of their identity into defending him.5 To walk away now would mean confronting shame, losing their community, admitting they were wrong, and that’s terrifying to them, so instead they dig in deeper.
And finally, and this one matters, Trump makes them feel seen. He tells them, “They’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way.” That line is emotional manipulation, but it works… because for millions of people who feel ignored, dismissed, mocked by elites, Trump says, “You matter. You’re not crazy, they are.” He gives them belonging, and in a country where loneliness is rising and inequality is everywhere, belonging is everything.
So when people ask, “Why do people love him? Why would they follow him off a cliff?” it’s not just politics, it’s psychology, it’s identity, and it’s fear. This is deliberate. Trump di
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Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?
The work of the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre helps illuminate some central questions of our time.
By David Brooks | July 8, 2025, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-administration
-supporters-good/683441/
There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?
I’m going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It’s a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It’s a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.
The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle. In that city, the question “How do you define the purpose of your life?” would make no sense. Finding your life’s purpose was not an individual choice. Rather, people grew up within a dense network of family, tribe, city, and nation. They inherited from these entities a variety of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. They also inherited a social role, serving the people around them as soldiers, farmers, merchants, mothers, teachers.
Each of these social roles came with certain standards of excellence, a code to determine what they ought to do. There was an excellent way of being a warrior, a mother, a friend. In this moral system, a person sought to live up to those standards not only for the honor and money it might bring them, but because they wanted to measure up. A teacher would not let a student bribe his way to a higher grade, because that would betray the intrinsic qualities of excellence inherent in being a teacher.
Read: The Trump voters who like what they see
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/satisfied-trump-v
oters/682645/
By being excellent at my role, I contribute to the city that formed me. By serving the intrinsic standards of my practice, I gradually rise from being the mediocre person I am toward becoming the excellent person I could be. My life is given meaning within this lifelong journey toward excellence and full human flourishing. If I do this journey well, I have a sense of identity, self-respect, and purpose. I know what I was put on this Earth to do, and there is great comfort and fulfillment in that.
If all of this sounds abstract, let me give you a modern example. At his 2005 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the former Chicago Cub Ryne Sandberg described his devotion to the craft of baseball: “I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third-base coach and get ready to run the bases.”
Sandberg gestured to the Hall of Fame inductees seated around him. “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you, and to the game of baseball we all played growing up.” He continued: “I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do—play it right and with respect.”
Sandberg’s speech exemplifies this older moral code, with its inherited traditions of excellence. It conferred a moral template to evaluate the people around us and a
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The Contradiction at the Heart of All Conflict
By Daniel Shotkin| Sunday, Jul 13, 2025 5:30AM
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/07/the-contradiction-at-the
-heart-of-all-conflict.html
Conflict follows us everywhere. Terrible drivers, horrible friends, evil politicians—the list goes on and on. For me, most conflicts never really made much sense. I avoid clashing with people as much as possible. It feels self-righteous, almost cringey, to be in a state of dispute. Ironic, because my favorite club in high school was debate. Still, I know people who, far from avoiding conflict, thrive in argument. So why do we conflict?
On a basic level, almost every human can agree on a core set of moral principles. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These are fundamental truths present in every culture. The three Abrahamic faiths, Hinduism, and Confucianism all espouse that last point independently. Even cultural practices that are, to us, morally questionable (think human sacrifice, headhunting) can’t be chalked up to evil intentions. Can you really blame the Aztecs for wanting to appease Quetzalcoatl?
At the end of the day, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who acts without explicit good intentions. Look at a morally deplorable historical figure, and you’ll see that even they acted with “good” in mind. Regimes don’t declare war, restrict speech, or commit genocide for evil’s sake; they do so in the name of national security. Similarly, ask any two beefing high schoolers, and you’ll see that neither did anything, and even if they did, it wasn’t on purpose—and actually, it was the other one who wanted to start shit.
So, logically, we’re in agreement. Then why do we still conflict?
Personal conflicts have been the focus of countless psychologists. John Dollard coined the frustration-aggression hypothesis in 1939, focusing on frustration as a root cause of conflict. Leon Festinger proposed that conflict occurs when people’s actions misalign with their beliefs. Finally, social psychologist Albert Bandura believed that children learn aggressive behavior from parents, media, and their environment—his social learning theory. A common thread among these explanations is a focus on a specific trait—frustration, dissonance, learning—as the cause of conflict.
On a broader level, sociologists have tried to explain conflict through a focus on societal traits. Critical theory proposes that conflict arises through power structures and imbalances. Its contentious namesake, critical race theory, focuses on race as a source of division. Extend sociology to broader political ideologies, and Marxists will tell you all conflict is class conflict, while Fascists argue it’s racial or national.
Global conflicts are tougher to pinpoint, mainly because of the countless factors involved. Realist international theorists argue that conflict is rooted in the rational actions of self-interested states. All international conflict is, therefore, the result of overlapping security interests. Liberal theorists posit a global international order based on rules, statutes, and conventions. Conflict comes when states fail to participate in the rules-based order.
All these theories focus on traits at various levels of conflict, but there’s a broader way to unify them. If you’ve ever talked to someone who radically disagrees with you, you understand that conflict is more than just a difference in opinion, cognitive traits, or social circumstance—it’s a clash of realities.
A perfect example of this, in my experience, comes when discussing current events at my high school. The war in Ukraine is a central talking point in the news, and so it’s come up more than once in discussions with friends. As someone who speaks Russian at home, has friends and family in Russia, and has visited more than once, I’m inevitably asked about my thoughts on the war. Of course, I’m no supporter of Putin—I am against the war in every way. Then comes the follow-up: Do they support the war in Russia? I’
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Lasching Out - The Ideas Letter
By Soli Özel | July 10, 2025 | The Ideas Letter 44
https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/lasching-out/
(Christopher Lasch leading a student Seminar at the University of Buffalo in the 1980s. Photo courtesy of the University of Buffalo)
“Everything in Trumpworld happens twice,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole wrote recently—“the first time as performance and the second as reality.” He was commenting on the deployment of the U.S. National Guard and U.S. Marines in Los Angeles against protesters challenging President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. If Trump’s victory in 2016 was performance, the aftermath of his 2024 victory is reality. And that reality, now manifest daily, is one that most liberals, leftists, or middle-of-the-roaders had not fully anticipated, despite warnings.
Among the most prescient, consistent, and insistent critics to warn the United States of its own frailties was the historian Christopher Lasch.
Some observers were blinded by their belief in the rootedness and resilience of the country’s institutions, its liberal political tradition, and the irreversibility of progress. Others failed to fully appreciate how money would corrode the American political system and would so deepen cultural-cum-class polarization. But beginning several decades ago, Lasch identified the growing divide between the educated managerial elites and the bulk of the lesser educated public.
Writing of “an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself),” he argued that it “seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or ‘alternative’ institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.” American democracy would deteriorate based on “the routine acceptance of professionals as a class apart.”
Lasch was erudite. He was engaged in intellectual conversation with different disciplines, theories, and approaches worldwide, including the Frankfurt School, which inspired his texts from the late 1970s and 1980s. His major works present an archeology of social and political upheavals today: He identified long ago the roots of the current crisis of liberalism in the United States. After arguing that neither socialism nor fascism represented the future, Lasch asserted that “the danger to democracy comes less from totalitarian or collectivist movements abroad than from the erosion of its psychological, cultural, and spiritual foundations from within.”
Lasch’s last book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, was published posthumously, in 1995; he had rushed it into print as he was fighting cancer. In that work, along with what is arguably his most famous book, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), and his most substantive one, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), he identified, with alarm, the corrosive influence of markets and bureaucratization on individualism and responsible citizenship. He also tracked the economic and cultural trends that turned citizens into consumers and created an environment in which “indifference, not the fear of deeply divisive disagreements, underlies the public’s refusal to get excited about politics.” And, for Lasch, “this indifference betrays the erosion of the capacity to take any interest in anything outside the self.”
To read Lasch, therefore, is in part to read the history of the transformation of capitalism, class, and cultural conflict in America over the last few decades—the rise of a mainly white, middle-age, and middle-class rebellion with patriarchal leanings—well before all those issues crystallized over wokeness and the inequalities caused by globalization.
Writing The Revolt of the Elites in the heyday of the West’s triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, Lasch questioned its self-congratulatory tone over t
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More walls of text that nobody will read from failed "intellectuals" who got too high off of their own farts...
*yawn*
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare
The U.S. is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. What should Canada do then?
By Thomas Homer-Dixon
Published December 31, 2021
Updated January 2, 2022
This article was published more than 3 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.
We're a lot more governable than we were 3 years ago.
We're kicking out millions who don't belong here and people are going to prison for breaking the law again. And the world gets to see how you Leftoids burning everything down are insane. AND the NGO money that was funding all of these inorganic protests is basically gone, so that won't be happening much if at all anymore either.
This article came from long ago, years before the end of the shithole world from 6 months ago that you're still stuck in.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Trump is failing to deport millions. His promise will eventually be that despite only deporting a million in the first 3 and a half years, he'll deport the next 10,000,000 in his final 6 months:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We're a lot more governable than we were 3 years ago.
We're kicking out millions who don't belong here and people are going to prison for breaking the law again. And the world gets to see how you Leftoids burning everything down are insane. AND the NGO money that was funding all of these inorganic protests is basically gone, so that won't be happening much if at all anymore either.
This article came from long ago, years before the end of the shithole world from 6 months ago that you're still stuck in.
The discrepancy between arrests and deportations highlights the challenges the Trump administration faces to make good on Trump’s Inauguration Day vow to deport “millions and millions” of immigrants.
According to ICE data, its agents arrested roughly 30,000 immigrants last month, the most since monthly data was made publicly available in November 2020. But the number of immigrants deported in June — more than 18,000 — amounted to roughly half the number of arrests, according to internal figures obtained by NBC News.
The difference between arrests and deportations was similar the previous month. The Trump administration took roughly 24,000 immigrants into custody in May and deported over 15,000, according to the ICE data.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trumps-immigration-record
-far-high-arrests-low-deportations-rcna217752
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The benefits of vigilance
In Finland, preparation – in this case, preparation for the possibility of war with Russia – is not just sensible policy, but somewhat of an antidote to the spiraling hyperpolarization seen in many other countries.
By Mark Sappenfield | July 20, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/From-the-Editors/2025/0720/finlan
d-russia-preparation-vigilance
Preparation is hard, and it doesn’t offer many political advantages. The benefits, after all, always seem to be further down the road.
But that’s not how the people of Finland see it, particularly when it comes to national security.
Last month, I spent a week in Finland reporting the cover story in the July 21 issue of the Monitor Weekly. (‘It’s everyone’s business.’ In Finland, national security is a shared responsibility.) I came back with the strong impression that preparation is something of an antidote to the spiraling hyperpolarization we see in many countries, particularly in the United States.
In Finland’s case, it is preparation for war with its neighbor Russia. The Ukraine war might have come as a shock to the rest of the world. But Finns have been expecting something of the sort since World War II, when the Soviet Union came within a whisker of conquering them.
The last 80 years have been spent in preparation.
That has meant sacrifice. Most obviously, there is conscription for males 18 years old, who then serve in a reserve unit for decades. But it also means taxes on fuel and electricity to allow the state to maintain large reserves, making the country less vulnerable if Russia were to attack.
Yet the most interesting “tax” is the absolute necessity for cooperation. Finns know that if everyone in a nation of 5.5 million people doesn’t work together seamlessly, then they have no hope against a threat like Russia. This forces them all – businesses, government agencies, the military, and civil society – to put one common calculation above all others: national safety.
The result is a shared purpose and a sense of mutual trust that felt (to this American, at least) almost like stepping into a time machine. The United States hasn’t experienced similar levels of trust since the Cold War, when President Ronald Reagan was able to unify the country against a Soviet threat.
Today, Finland shows how the benefits of vigilance go far beyond strategic preparation. Preparedness demands the sacrifices of self that are the fuel for healthy democracies. Working with a common goal often has a unifying effect.
Finland would certainly rather not have a menacing neighbor. But that has played a part in helping it ward off the most toxic elements of partisanship now undermining effective governance across the West.
The question for Democracy 2.0, it seems, is how to create this shared purpose without needing an enemy to do it for you.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Six characteristics of authoritarian breakthrough, all of which are currently in play.
By Tim Dickinson | July 18, 2025
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-authorit
arian-no-kings-playbook-1235388347/
This dictatorial to-do list includes
“directing investigations against critics”;
“giving license to lawbreaking”;
“regulatory retaliation”;
“deploying the military domestically”;
“federal law enforcement overreach”; and
holding tight to power, i.e. “the autocrat won’t leave.”
Trump is hewing to this well-worn playbook, Hunter said, by
pardoning violent Jan. 6 felons,
sending masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to round up law-abiding immigrants,
deploying the National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles,
making “capricious threats” to deport U.S. citizens like Rosie O’Donnell, and
openly plotting an unconstitutional third term.
The pro-democracy trainer offered the encouragement that “Trump didn’t write this playbook. This is a global phenomena … the growth of autocracies.” He added that the experiences of allies across the globe offer strategies that have succeeded in turning back Trumpian figures in their own countries.
But the odds of success are sobering. The training included a study of 35 countries that experienced “democratic backsliding” in the last 30 years, and their track records for overcoming the authoritarian assault. Without a movement of mass “civil resistance,” less than eight percent of countries were successful at righting the democratic ship of state. Active civil resistance — such as the movement that No Kings is building in the U.S. — has historically increased the odds to 52 percent. “I don’t love those numbers,” said Hunter, but he added that the payoff for victory can be profound. Successful resistance movements typically forge societies that are “more democratic” on the other side — offering “an advancement” rather than a return to the status quo ante.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why Don’t Americans Rise up Against Unpopular Policy Anymore?
The last time a political party paid a price for legislation was in 1989.
By Julian E. Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University | July 21, 2025
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/21/medicare-cuts-unpopular-policy/
Congress has passed one of the most draconian cuts to social safety net programs in modern American history. President Donald Trump proudly signed the bill into law. As a result of the legislation, which opponents agree is deeply destructive, over 11 million Americans will lose their health care coverage. Many rural hospitals will likely have to close their doors, thereby widening the health care deserts. Millions will lose access to food stamps. Educational services for lower-income and disabled children will shrink.
The big political question is whether the Republicans will face serious political repercussions for what they have done to the American people, red and blue, all to pay for the extension of supply-side tax cuts and a massive expansion of immigration control enforcement. Fiscal conservatism has nothing to do with the decision, as the legislation is going to blow a hole in the debt that Americans will be paying for over generations.
In an earlier era, political logic would dictate that Republicans would pay a steep price. Taking so many concrete goods away from a wide range of citizens, including those who make up the core of a political coalition, has traditionally been considered a bad idea. But will that fallout happen by 2026? The central political question is whether the GOP will face electoral consequences or once again escape them. In an age of hyperpolarization and media fragmentation, outrage has a shorter shelf life, attention spans are fractured, and accountability is harder to achieve.
In 1989, though, a Democratic Congress was forced to repeal a major new health care benefit, along with the taxes that had been included to pay for it. How did this come to pass, and why wouldn’t such a reversal happen now?
Throughout the 1980s, health care experts became increasingly concerned about the costs that elderly Americans were facing as a result of catastrophic medical situations, such as strokes, spinal cord injuries, and heart attacks. Medicare, created in 1965, did not cover most of those conditions. Elderly Americans and their families were forced to find other ways to pay for treatment.
In 1988, the Democratic Congress, working with President Ronald Reagan, decided to do something about the problem. Secretary of Health and Human Services Otis Bowen, who had been the chair of an advisory council in 1984 that recommended a policy response, crafted much of the proposal. After regaining control of the Senate back from the GOP in 1986, Democrats mobilized to pass the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act. They added benefits such as premium protection to support lower-income beneficiaries. The historic bill passed with sizable margins and substantial bipartisan support. The vote was 328 to 72 in the House; 86 to 11 in the Senate.
The legislation expanded coverage in a number of critical areas, including hospitalization and skilled nursing, hospice stays, home health care, respite care, and strict caps on hospital and doctors’ bills. Congress also included a prescription drug benefit for the first time in the program’s history.
Reagan had insisted that the benefits be self-financing. In response, Congress included higher premiums for Medicare Part B (the section of Medicare that covered doctors’ visits), and then, to cover the remaining two-thirds, a progressive surtax that would increase depending on the income of the beneficiaries. For the highest brackets, the maximum amount would be $800 on individuals and $1,600 for couples.
“This legislation will help remove a terrible threat from the lives of elderly and disabled Americans,” Reagan stated upon signing the bill, “the threat of an illness requiring acute care, one so devastating that it could wipe out the savings of a
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The Dismantling of American Health Care
By Adam Gaffney, David U. Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler | July 8, 2025
We must resist Trump’s war on medical access and knowledge today, even as we prepare to rebuild something better tomorrow.
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/07/08/the-dismantling-of-american-
health-care/
1.
On July 4 President Donald Trump signed into law a piece of legislation that amounts to a declaration of war on the working-class and the sick. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” will slice more than $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade, stripping health coverage from more than 11 million lower-income Americans by 2034 and sending tens of thousands to an early grave—all in exchange for tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy. Despite Trump’s promises to the contrary, the law will also cut nearly $500 billion from Medicare over the same period by making the deficit surge past a point at which the Office of Management and Budget “is required to order a sequestration to eliminate the overage.”
This assault on the nation’s major public insurance programs is only the latest front in an ongoing right-wing campaign against health. On April 1 Trump’s hammer fell on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the sprawling agency that encompasses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicaid and Medicaid Services (CMS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among other health-focused agencies. Having already forced out 10,000 HHS personnel earlier in his term, the Trump administration terminated 10,000 more on dubious legal grounds, devastating entire teams focused on major public health problems like tobacco control and occupational health. Altogether 25 percent of HHS’s workforce was dismissed. Since then a minority of the fired employees have been reinstated in the face of political pressure—but the depth and capriciousness of these chaotic cuts is without precedent. Disease surveillance, outbreak investigation, vaccine uptake, violence prevention, infection control, food safety, and opioid overdose prevention will likely suffer.
Meanwhile the nation’s biomedical research enterprise—in large part conducted by publicly financed scientists employed at universities—has been facing a sustained attack. NIH research grants that address important but now illicit health issues—like HIV/AIDS, racial health inequities, vaccine hesitancy, and LGBTQ health—have been wiped out in recent months. Not all of the cuts stem from specific bêtes noires: the administration has broadly decimated funding by canceling more than $1.8 billion in existing NIH grants in less than a month and a half (although some have been temporarily reinstated by court orders), reducing the issuance of new grant awards by 28 percent, and attempting to slash the “overhead” payments that cover universities’ costs for space and utilities via a now-stayed order that would have reduced grants from multiple federal agencies, including the NIH. This is on top of the funding blockades that the administration has imposed on many elite universities to bring them to heel—including all of the Ivies except Dartmouth and Yale.
The three fronts of this assault—on tax-funded medical coverage, public health, and medical research—have overlapping aims. The campaign to slash Medicaid—relied on by the poor since its establishment in 1965—follows a long neoliberal tradition of prescribing austerity for the working class and largesse for the rich. Trump and his allies seem to view public health, for its part, as waste that can be excised (DOGE-style) to fund tax cuts, as a source of regulatory excess that constrains profit-making, and as a locus of “woke” ideology and inconvenient facts. The assault on medical research is driven by similar concerns, with the added benefit of dominating rival centers of power like universities and the professions.
Yet such economic and ideological motivations do not explain the full measure of the admin
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By Heather Cox Richardson | Jul 26, 2025
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-25-2025
Quote:
An all-white jury took just over an hour to find Bryant and Milam not guilty. A member of the jury said, “We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop.”
Immune from further prosecution, Bryant and Milam told their story to Look magazine for $4,000. They said they had kidnapped and beaten Till to frighten him, but when he refused to beg for mercy, they drove him to the river. Milam asked, “You still as good as I am?” and when Till answered, “Yeah,” they shot him, tied a 75-pound cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and threw him in.
“What else could we do?” Milam said. “He was hopeless. I’m no bully. I never hurt a n*gger in my life. I like n*ggers, in their place. I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, n*ggers are gonna stay in their place.”
How the South won the Civil War:
Oligarchy, democracy, and the continuing fight for the soul of America,
Oxford University Press, [2020]
By Heather Cox Richardson
A history professor writing Letters from an American, a newsletter about the history behind today's politics.
https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/morrissey/departments/history/people
/faculty-directory/heather-cox-richardson.html
Download the book for free from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Heather+Cox+Richardson
Introduction
The moment in July 1964 when Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater took the stage at the Cow Palace outside San Francisco and beamed at the cheering Republicans who had just nominated him for president is iconic—but not for the reasons we remember. Goldwater delivered the line that became a rally cry for a rising generation of conservatives in the Republican Party, saying that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” But the moment did much more than galvanize activists. It marked the resurrection of an old political movement by a modern political party. In Goldwater’s time, people claiming to be embattled holdouts defending American liberty called themselves “Movement Conservatives.” A century before, their predecessors had called themselves “Confederates.”
While Goldwater’s supporters in 1964 talked generally about liberty, their actual complaint was specific: the business regulation and social welfare legislation of FDR’s New Deal and Eisenhower’s Middle Way had trampled their rights. In the wake of the Great Depression, the U.S. government had focused on creating economic security and equality of opportunity. These widely popular policies became known as the “liberal consensus,” because most Americans agreed that government should protect the country’s most vulnerable citizens and regulate the economy.
Movement Conservatives, however, maintained that the liberal consensus was destroying America. People should be free to operate however they wished, without interference from government bureaucrats and regulations. They hated that the government had taken on popular projects since the 1930s. Highways, dams, power plants, schools, hospitals, and social welfare legislation cost tax dollars. This, they warned, amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to the poor, often to poor people of color. Such a dangerous trend toward an activist government had to be stopped before it destroyed the liberty on which America was based.
Although Goldwater was a westerner through and through, it was the delegation from South Carolina that put him over the top to win the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. This was no accident. Movement Conservatives embraced the same ideas that, a century before, had led South Carolina slave owners to attack the United States government.
Like elite slaveholders before the Civil War, they believed in a world defined by hierarchies, where most people—dull, uneducated, black, female, weak, or poor—nee
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Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI: Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM
THGRRI
I am an independent myself, but I figured too many would make the same claim that are actually far right nuts. To tell the truth they are the ones I expected to post here first. Glad it's you guys.
Oh look Gilligan. It's me declaring I'm an independent 8 years ago. Again, I've proven you wrong. I'm claiming to be an independent in 2017. Of course, because you're a liar through and through you'll still call me one.
As I've said, you do not have the brain power to insult me politically as an independent so you insist I'm a dem. Too funny and no matter. I enjoy you not being able to face facts. It's right in character for you. This post will be a good metaphor for you being a troll and not someone who will acknowledge fact.
T
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How Yard Sales Could Explain the Rise of Billionaires and Challenge Libertarian Thinking
By Ken MacVey | Sunday, Aug 10, 2025 6:00AM
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/08/how-yard-sales-could-exp
lain-the-rise-of-billionaires-and-challenge-libertarian-thinking.html
. . . Interestingly, physicists and mathematicians have also taken on the subject of wealth inequality. They have developed mathematical models of wealth distribution now known as the “yard sale model.” Proponents of this model claim that under very simple assumptions, “wealth condensation” (transition from more even wealth distribution to wealth concentration in the hands of a few) is inevitable unless remedial action is taken. They claim that this model remarkably matches the actual state of wealth inequality in the world. What is intriguing is that under the model, by an unbiased random process, a small group or even a single individual will randomly end up holding all the wealth. It’s not a matter of the survival of the fittest or the best getting more than the rest—it’s a matter of the luckiest. Who is lucky is random. The fact that there will be a winner taking it all is not random, it’s almost inevitable.
Physicist Anirban Chakraborti first developed a mathematical version of the model borrowing from statistical mechanics. Formally, versions of this model are considered to be agent based random exchange asset models. There can be different variations of such models. One version of the mathematical model assumes a group of agents each have the same amount of wealth. Each is randomly paired with another agent to make a trade. This is similar to a yard sale, which is how the “yard sale model” label came about. Physicist/mathematician Bruce M. Boghosian has developed and elaborated on the yard sale model in published scientific articles. In his fascinating article in the Scientific American “Is Inequality Inevitable?” (which I have used in a university public policy class I taught and which is currently available on-line without a paywall https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ ) he explains the model while leaving out most of the calculus. He gives the example of an agent being randomly paired with another agent out of 1000 to make a bet based on the random toss of a fair coin. Then another pair of agents is randomly selected from the 1000. But it is also assumed that the poorer person in the bet won’t want to blow all their wealth on a single bet and will bet only a fraction of their wealth. This random selection of bettors and coin tosses in a computer simulation can be run thousands or even millions of times. Even though initially each agent has an equal amount of wealth, ultimately only a handful or even a single agent will end up holding all the wealth. It seems that losing bettors keep getting deeper in the hole and would need a very lucky streak of wins to get out of it. There will also be an accompanying increasingly narrow group of winners. . . .
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
. . . Interestingly, physicists and mathematicians have also taken on the subject of wealth inequality. They have developed mathematical models of wealth distribution now known as the “yard sale model.” Proponents of this model claim that under very simple assumptions, “wealth condensation” (transition from more even wealth distribution to wealth concentration in the hands of a few) is inevitable unless remedial action is taken. They claim that this model remarkably matches the actual state of wealth inequality in the world. What is intriguing is that under the model, by an unbiased random process, a small group or even a single individual will randomly end up holding all the wealth. It’s not a matter of the survival of the fittest or the best getting more than the rest—it’s a matter of the luckiest. Who is lucky is random. The fact that there will be a winner taking it all is not random, it’s almost inevitable.
So... wealthy people ... such as yourself ... don't get wealthy bc of anything they did, specifically. Has nothing to do with self restraint, intelligence, or upright moral character.
Conversely, poor people aren't poor bc of anything they did or didn't do.
There is one thing inevitably associated with wealth: Rich people think they're better than everybody else. They totally underestimate how much luck played a part in their wealth.
It's the same with singers or actors who become viral sensations v equally talented singer it actors. The stars really think they're hot shit, don't they?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI: Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM
THGRRI
I am an independent myself, but I figured too many would make the same claim that are actually far right nuts. To tell the truth they are the ones I expected to post here first. Glad it's you guys.
Oh look Gilligan. It's me declaring I'm an independent 8 years ago. Again, I've proven you wrong. I'm claiming to be an independent in 2017. Of course, because you're a liar through and through you'll still call me one.
As I've said, you do not have the brain power to insult me politically as an independent so you insist I'm a dem. Too funny and no matter. I enjoy you not being able to face facts. It's right in character for you. This post will be a good metaphor for you being a troll and not someone who will acknowledge fact.
You were a stupid person and a bad liar back then. Nothing has changed.
I literally destroy you every day here. I've shut down hundreds of your threads and posts where you never come back to make a reply because you know anything you say next is just going to look foolish.
Everything you've posted in the last year is 100% false. The election went down even better than I predicted, even though I was the person who got closest to the results. Not only here, but I did better than anybody in the media did with my predictions too.
And your party is fucking dead.
If you're not a Democrat, what the hell are you?
You've got NOBODY to vote for.
I'm the Independent here, you stupid, ideologically captivated dipshit.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:My goodness, Signym. Are you feeling bitter about your misfortunes? Scientific American came to different conclusions than you about who deserves what:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
. . . Interestingly, physicists and mathematicians have also taken on the subject of wealth inequality. They have developed mathematical models of wealth distribution now known as the “yard sale model.” Proponents of this model claim that under very simple assumptions, “wealth condensation” (transition from more even wealth distribution to wealth concentration in the hands of a few) is inevitable unless remedial action is taken. They claim that this model remarkably matches the actual state of wealth inequality in the world. What is intriguing is that under the model, by an unbiased random process, a small group or even a single individual will randomly end up holding all the wealth. It’s not a matter of the survival of the fittest or the best getting more than the rest—it’s a matter of the luckiest. Who is lucky is random. The fact that there will be a winner taking it all is not random, it’s almost inevitable.
So... wealthy people ... such as yourself ... don't get wealthy bc of anything they did, specifically. Has nothing to do with self restraint, intelligence, or upright moral character.
Conversely, poor people aren't poor bc of anything they did or didn't do.
There is one thing inevitably associated with wealth: Rich people think they're better than everybody else. They totally underestimate how much luck played a part in their wealth.
It's the same with singers or actors who become viral sensations v equally talented singer it actors. The stars really think they're hot shit, don't they?
Luck plays a much more important role than it is usually accorded, so that the virtue commonly attributed to wealth in modern society—and, likewise, the stigma attributed to poverty—is completely unjustified.
Moreover, only a carefully designed mechanism for redistribution can compensate for the natural tendency of wealth to flow from the poor to the rich in a market economy. Redistribution is often confused with taxes, but the two concepts ought to be kept quite separate. Taxes flow from people to their governments to finance those governments' activities. Redistribution, in contrast, may be implemented by governments, but it is best thought of as a flow of wealth from people to people to compensate for the unfairness inherent in market economics. In a flat redistribution scheme, all those possessing wealth below the mean would receive net funds, whereas those above the mean would pay. And precisely because current levels of inequality are so extreme, far more people would receive than would pay.
Given how complicated real economies are, we find it gratifying that a simple analytical approach developed by physicists and mathematicians describes the actual wealth distributions of multiple nations with unprecedented precision and accuracy. Also rather curious is that these distributions display subtle but key features of complex physical systems. Most important, however, the fact that a sketch of the free market as simple and plausible as the affine wealth model gives rise to economies that are anything but free and fair should be both a cause for alarm and a call for action.
More at Is Inequality Inevitable?
Wealth naturally trickles up in free-market economies, model suggests
By Bruce M. Boghosian | November 1, 2019
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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More Intellectualism from Intellectuals who don't know shit about anything because they've never faced any adversity or had to work a single day in their lives.
*yawn*
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:One of your big flaws is your reading comprehension. It sucks, big time.
Originally posted by second:Quote:My goodness, Signym. Are you feeling bitter about your misfortunes? Scientific American came to different conclusions than you about who deserves what:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
. . . Interestingly, physicists and mathematicians have also taken on the subject of wealth inequality. They have developed mathematical models of wealth distribution now known as the “yard sale model.” Proponents of this model claim that under very simple assumptions, “wealth condensation” (transition from more even wealth distribution to wealth concentration in the hands of a few) is inevitable unless remedial action is taken. They claim that this model remarkably matches the actual state of wealth inequality in the world. What is intriguing is that under the model, by an unbiased random process, a small group or even a single individual will randomly end up holding all the wealth. It’s not a matter of the survival of the fittest or the best getting more than the rest—it’s a matter of the luckiest. Who is lucky is random. The fact that there will be a winner taking it all is not random, it’s almost inevitable.
So... wealthy people ... such as yourself ... don't get wealthy bc of anything they did, specifically. Has nothing to do with self restraint, intelligence, or upright moral character.
Conversely, poor people aren't poor bc of anything they did or didn't do.
There is one thing inevitably associated with wealth: Rich people think they're better than everybody else. They totally underestimate how much luck played a part in their wealth.
It's the same with singers or actors who become viral sensations v equally talented singer it actors. The stars really think they're hot shit, don't they?
Luck plays a much more important role than it is usually accorded, so that the virtue commonly attributed to wealth in modern society—and, likewise, the stigma attributed to poverty—is completely unjustified.
Moreover, only a carefully designed mechanism for redistribution can compensate for the natural tendency of wealth to flow from the poor to the rich in a market economy. Redistribution is often confused with taxes, but the two concepts ought to be kept quite separate. Taxes flow from people to their governments to finance those governments' activities. Redistribution, in contrast, may be implemented by governments, but it is best thought of as a flow of wealth from people to people to compensate for the unfairness inherent in market economics. In a flat redistribution scheme, all those possessing wealth below the mean would receive net funds, whereas those above the mean would pay. And precisely because current levels of inequality are so extreme, far more people would receive than would pay.
Given how complicated real economies are, we find it gratifying that a simple analytical approach developed by physicists and mathematicians describes the actual wealth distributions of multiple nations with unprecedented precision and accuracy. Also rather curious is that these distributions display subtle but key features of complex physical systems. Most important, however, the fact that a sketch of the free market as simple and plausible as the affine wealth model gives rise to economies that are anything but free and fair should be both a cause for alarm and a call for action.
More at Is Inequality Inevitable?
Wealth naturally trickles up in free-market economies, model suggests
By Bruce M. Boghosian | November 1, 2019
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
All I did was reiterate your post about the source of wealth inequality (Luck, not merit. I even highlighted that part for you)
THAT PART HAS BEEN PUBLISHED FOR Y
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Quote:I ALWAYS factor in the Trumptards' delusions of superiority. I KNOW for a fact that their delusions make it impossible for them to understand simple things. But for the record:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
One of your big flaws is your reading comprehension. It sucks, big time.
All I did was reiterate your post about the source of wealth inequality (Luck, not merit. I even highlighted that part for you)
THAT PART HAS BEEN PUBLISHED FOR YEARS.
I combined it with other studies which say that successful people ... the wealthy or famous ... credit their success to themselves and overlook luck's presumably greater contribution.
You constantly self-aggrandize, crediting yourself instead of good luck. And you constantly blame “Trumptards" for their lowly status, also not crediting BAD luck.
You're the only one I know, except THUGR, who can so totally misread their own posts, and then so totally misread someone else's.
What's wrong with you, old man? Got dementia? Or just a psychotic liar?
*****
Also, I don't totally believe the study.
And I don't believe in your "solution", which is direct wealth redistibution as the answer.
Unless people are BORN with a disability or a predistibution to genetic diseases... something that is entirely a roll of the dice and out of their control ... work and self restraint DO play a roll in how well people do. And if you want to make society fair, make it fair by rewarding the behavior that you want to see, not by throwing money at people for nothing. That will probably involve limiting the potential rewards of things like speculation (luck) and excessive profit, breaking up monopolies etc..
And I'm sure you'll find a way to misstate this post too.
There is a real and measurable distribution of wealth. There is also a simplified model of real life called The Yard Sale that simulates the distribution of wealth. These two distributions match very closely, but The Yard Sale assumes humans have no individuality, no personality beyond being coin-flippers who can't stop gambling. The Yard Sale says nothing about individuals, but it does reveal something profound about how Capitalism works, because the model strips away all individuality and life spans. Capitalism treated as a simplified game gives the same wealth distribution as Real Life Capitalism:
Winners, Losers
The yard sale, a simple mathematical model developed by physicist Anirban Chakraborti, assumes that wealth moves from one person to another when the former makes a “mistake” in an economic exchange. If the amount paid for an object exactly equals what it is worth, no wealth changes hands. But if one person overpays or if the other accepts less than the item’s worth, some wealth is transferred between them. Because no one wants to go broke, Chakraborti assumed that the amount that can potentially be lost is some fraction of the wealth of the poorer person. He found that even if the outcome of every transaction is chosen by a fair coin flip, many such sales and purchases will inevitably result in all the wealth falling into the hands of a single person—leading to a situation of extreme inequality.
To extend the casino metaphor to the movement of wealth in an (exceedingly simplified) economy, let us imagine a system of 1,000 individuals who engage in pairwise exchanges with one another. Let each begin with some initial wealth, which could be exactly equal. Choose two agents at random and have them transact, then do the same with another two, and so on. In other words, this model assumes sequential transactions between randomly chosen pairs of agents. Our plan is to conduct millions or billions of such transactions in our population of 1,000 and see how the wealth ultimately gets distributed.
If you simulate this economy, a variant of the yard sale model, you will get a remarkable result: after a large number of transactions, one agent ends up as an “oligarch” holding practically all the wealth of the economy, and the o
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I read the study results, SECOND.
DID YOU??
There's no such thing as "It's Trumptards' own fault" in there. There's no such thing as "superior intelligence or moral character/ survival of the fittest" in it either. So if you really believe the results, you can stop mentioning "Trumptards" and you can stop thumping yourself on the back so hard, and accept that the fault is with THE SYSTEM, as I and SIX and others have said all along.
Not only that, but this study says what I've been saying in different words: Money behaves gravitationally ... the more you have, the more you get. That has been my primary argument against libertarians all along: A "free market" without any form of coercion will inevitably generate extreme inequality.
Try to stick that in your brain for more than six seconds, old man, m'kay?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI: Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM
I am an independent myself, but I figured too many would make the same claim that are actually far right nuts. To tell the truth they are the ones I expected to post here first. Glad it's you guys.
T
September 28th 2017, I declared myself as being an independent. Eight years ago. Some here would still deny that, but these same people still deny when they shit themselves. Too funny...
T
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When people don’t vote, Democrats win
Everyone needs to learn the new politics of turnout
By Matthew Yglesias | Aug 28, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/when-people-dont-vote-democrats-win
Back on August 5, there were two special elections for state legislative seats.
Democrats won them both. In Delaware’s House District 20, the Democratic candidate narrowly won a seat that Kamala Harris carried by a 54-45 margin — a poor showing for Democrats, even though they won the seat. The other race was in Senate District 4 in Rhode Island, a 55-44 Harris district. And here, Democrats won by a whopping 83-16 in a massive overperformance.
We can’t learn much from any one special election race, since there are dozens of idiosyncratic factors at work. But special elections in the aggregate do convey some information about the national political climate.
So far in 2025, Democratic candidates in special elections are running 15.5 points ahead of Kamala Harris and 11.1 points ahead of Joe Biden’s (much stronger on average) baseline from 2020.
This is telling us that the national political climate not only favors Democrats, as you would expect for the out-party under an unpopular president, but massively favors them. Slow Boring readers know I’ve been dooming about the upcoming Senate races, but if Dems can actually run nearly 16 points ahead of Harris, then Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Florida, Alaska, and potentially even Kansas are all on the map. And that’s exactly what the party needs to meaningfully contest for a Senate majority, check the MAGA-fication of the federal judiciary, and actually make policy change in 2028.
So is everything fine? Am I totally wrong about the need for ideological adjustments?
More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/when-people-dont-vote-democrats-win
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What cash can and can’t do
My take on the ongoing Universal Basic Income wars
By Matthew Yglesias | Aug 27, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-cash-can-and-cant-do
Poor people in Kenya are average people who happen to live in an extremely poor country. Basic habits of hard work, diligence, and thrift don’t necessarily pay off in an environment where everybody is so poor that hardly anyone can hire you or pay for anything you make. Dumping cash on people in these circumstances really lets them level-up. By contrast, the domestic poor are — unless they are recently arrived immigrants — often people who, for one reason or another, are struggling to get their lives together in a very wealthy country. If they were thrifty and diligent, they wouldn’t be poor in the first place. Putting money in their pockets doesn’t make them thrifty and diligent, so it doesn’t really alter their lives that much.
(My take on why Trumptards don't prosper in America is that they are stupid assholes with mental problems. Trump can give them tax cuts, but they will still be stupid assholes with mental problems. Expressed more poetically and abstractly: "Constant tragic undercurrent that concerns a people who are completely lost, who are lost within their families and lost within their nation, and lost within their time, and who only want some sort of direction or purpose or sense of community or love.")
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI: Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM
I am an independent myself, but I figured to many would make the same claim that are actually far right nuts. To tell the truth they are the ones I expected to post here first. Glad it's you guys.
And again, just to prove that every post Jack directed at me based on the premise I'm a democrat is wrong. I posted this 8 years ago. And it's why I refer to him as Gilligan. He's not too bright. It's the third post in this thread.
Gilligan, I'm falling over laughing again!
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI: Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM
I am an independent myself, but I figured to many would make the same claim that are actually far right nuts. To tell the truth they are the ones I expected to post here first. Glad it's you guys.
And again, just to prove that every post Jack directed at me based on the premise I'm a democrat is wrong. I posted this 8 years ago. And it's why I refer to him as Gilligan. He's not too bright. It's the third post in this thread.
Gilligan, I'm falling over laughing again!
You laugh all the time because you're a mindless hyena from The Lion King.
You may have once been independent before TDS rotted your brain.
In 8 years the only anti-Democrat Party stance you've ever actively voiced a negative opinion about is that they needed to take CRT out of schools. That is the ONLY single time you haven't either been in full lock-step with Democrats, or you just turned a blind eye to all the horrible shit they've done to Americans and America.
So if you're really Independent, here's your opportunity to list off all the things that YOU believe the Democrats did wrong that lead to the destruction of their party. Because make no mistake... The Democratic Brand is dead.
I'm all ears...
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
I'm an actual, registered Democrat.
But I'm not sure what the topic is. Democrats can post in here,
and talk about themselves ... about why they are democrats ...
or what democrats believe in?
My parents were Republicans.
I was an adult in my 40's before I found out I was a democrat.
I didn't really know what the 2 parties stood for, so I asked a
friend who loves politics what I was.
Republicans tend to be conservative. Democrats tend to be liberal.
Can I even say what those words mean? Not very well.
Conservatives stand for law & order. i.e., Authority.
Democrats believe in human rights and equality. i.e., Freedom.
Anarchists believe in every man for himself?
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
Miss ya friend.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI: Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM
I am an independent myself, but I figured to many would make the same claim that are actually far right nuts. To tell the truth they are the ones I expected to post here first. Glad it's you guys.
And again, just to prove that every post Jack directed at me based on the premise I'm a democrat is wrong. I posted this 8 years ago. And it's why I refer to him as Gilligan. He's not too bright. It's the third post in this thread.
Gilligan, I'm falling over laughing again!
You laugh all the time because you're a mindless hyena from The Lion King.
You may have once been independent before TDS rotted your brain.
In 8 years the only anti-Democrat Party stance you've ever actively voiced a negative opinion about is that they needed to take CRT out of schools. That is the ONLY single time you haven't either been in full lock-step with Democrats, or you just turned a blind eye to all the horrible shit they've done to Americans and America.
So if you're really Independent, here's your opportunity to list off all the things that YOU believe the Democrats did wrong that lead to the destruction of their party. Because make no mistake... The Democratic Brand is dead.
I'm all ears...
Still laughing Gilligan. You just can’t, on any level, deal with the truth. Which means what? You're wrong again. Way too funny...
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI: Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM
I am an independent myself, but I figured to many would make the same claim that are actually far right nuts. To tell the truth they are the ones I expected to post here first. Glad it's you guys.
And again, just to prove that every post Jack directed at me based on the premise I'm a democrat is wrong. I posted this 8 years ago. And it's why I refer to him as Gilligan. He's not too bright. It's the third post in this thread.
Gilligan, I'm falling over laughing again!
You laugh all the time because you're a mindless hyena from The Lion King.
You may have once been independent before TDS rotted your brain.
In 8 years the only anti-Democrat Party stance you've ever actively voiced a negative opinion about is that they needed to take CRT out of schools. That is the ONLY single time you haven't either been in full lock-step with Democrats, or you just turned a blind eye to all the horrible shit they've done to Americans and America.
So if you're really Independent, here's your opportunity to list off all the things that YOU believe the Democrats did wrong that lead to the destruction of their party. Because make no mistake... The Democratic Brand is dead.
I'm all ears...
Still laughing Gilligan. You just can’t, on any level, deal with the truth. Which means what? You're wrong again. Way too funny...
T
You say that, but I continue to be right about everything.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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I noticed you don't have a rebuttal to my post in "Winds of Change" about baked-in corruption in both parties, THGR. So you decided to bump more of your irrelevant opinions instead.
Typical.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI: Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM
I am an independent myself, but I figured to many would make the same claim that are actually far right nuts. To tell the truth they are the ones I expected to post here first. Glad it's you guys.
And again, just to prove that every post Jack directed at me based on the premise I'm a democrat is wrong. I posted this 8 years ago. And it's why I refer to him as Gilligan. He's not too bright. It's the third post in this thread.
Gilligan, I'm falling over laughing again!
You laugh all the time because you're a mindless hyena from The Lion King.
You may have once been independent before TDS rotted your brain.
In 8 years the only anti-Democrat Party stance you've ever actively voiced a negative opinion about is that they needed to take CRT out of schools. That is the ONLY single time you haven't either been in full lock-step with Democrats, or you just turned a blind eye to all the horrible shit they've done to Americans and America.
So if you're really Independent, here's your opportunity to list off all the things that YOU believe the Democrats did wrong that lead to the destruction of their party. Because make no mistake... The Democratic Brand is dead.
I'm all ears...
Still laughing Gilligan. You just can’t, on any level, deal with the truth. Which means what? You're wrong again. Way too funny...
T
You say that, but I continue to be right about everything.
1kiki
"Jack disagrees with, no matter how much evidence is provided, how much logic is used, how neutrally it's stated, he trolls the person rather than debate the subject? It happens every time."
I think I'll answer you by quoting 1kiki. What she says is your reputation here. Regardless of what or how many times you post. This is what people think and say about you.
too funny...
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
I think I'll answer you by quoting 1kiki. What she says is your reputation here. Regardless of what or how many times you post. This is what people think and say about you.
too funny...
Yeah. Kiki was an emotional one.
We got along fine until she started chugging Covid Vaccine like it was Kool-Aid.
Meanwhile, this is yet another self-own on your part.
You've spent the better part of the last two days pouring through Kiki's post history and even making posts of your own in Troll Country disparaging Kiki and saying that she's completely full of shit. You hate her so much that you've actively celebrated her alleged death on several occasions since her absence over the years.
So why do you believe her when she says something negative about me then?
You really don't think things through much before you post, do you?
So how about you answer the question now and stop trying to hide behind your witless wit?
Here it is, in case you've already forgotten:
Quote:
You may have once been independent before TDS rotted your brain.
In 8 years the only anti-Democrat Party stance you've ever actively voiced a negative opinion about is that they needed to take CRT out of schools. That is the ONLY single time you haven't either been in full lock-step with Democrats, or you just turned a blind eye to all the horrible shit they've done to Americans and America.
So if you're really Independent, here's your opportunity to list off all the things that YOU believe the Democrats did wrong that lead to the destruction of their party. Because make no mistake... The Democratic Brand is dead.
I'm all ears...
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Signym, there is a split between those parties. Both Republican and Democratic politicians have an emotional attachment to Capitalism. But one thinks that the customers will police the capitalists to not be too outrageous and the other thinks that government has to police the capitalists.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I noticed you don't have a rebuttal to my post in "Winds of Change" about baked-in corruption in both parties, THGR. So you decided to bump more of your irrelevant opinions instead.
Typical.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Capitalism: The Nastiest of Men for the Nastiest of Motives Will Somehow Work for the Benefit of All
("Somehow" is where Democrats and Republicans disagree. Republicans leave "Somehow" vague and undefined. If "Somehow" does become solidified, Republicans try to vaporize it.)
Posted byquoteresearch February 23, 2011
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/02/23/capitalism-motives/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:Quote:Signym, there is a split between those parties. Both Republican and Democratic politicians have an emotional attachment to Capitalism. But one thinks that the customers will police the capitalists to not be too outrageous and the other thinks that government has to police the capitalists.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I noticed you don't have a rebuttal to my post in "Winds of Change" about baked-in corruption in both parties, THGR. So you decided to bump more of your irrelevant opinions instead.
Typical.
Capitalism: The Nastiest of Men for the Nastiest of Motives Will Somehow Work for the Benefit of All
("Somehow" is where Democrats and Republicans disagree. Republicans leave "Somehow" vague and undefined. If "Somehow" does become solidified, Republicans try to vaporize it.)
Posted byquoteresearch February 23, 2011
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/02/23/capitalism-motives/
Oh puhleez!
Both Democrats and Republicans have an attachment to campaign contributions, insider trading, and pork barrel spending.
The only difference is who buys their loyalty. Dems since 1990 were typically beholden to finance, "free trade" for transnationals, globalist power structures (and the CIA)... think Bill Clinton and Obama. More recently big tech, big pharma, "clean energy" and Soros et al destabilization funds. And of course Israel and the MIC.
The Republicans were beholden to oil, gas, and coal (think Dick Cheney). And of course Israel and the MIC.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
I think I'll answer you by quoting 1kiki. What she says is your reputation here. Regardless of what or how many times you post. This is what people think and say about you.
too funny...
Yeah. Kiki was an emotional one.
We got along fine until she started chugging Covid Vaccine like it was Kool-Aid.
So why do you believe her when she says something negative about me then?
You really don't think things through much before you post, do you?
Because she and I shared the same experience. Being trolled by you.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:Quote:Signym, there is a split between those parties. Both Republican and Democratic politicians have an emotional attachment to Capitalism. But one thinks that the customers will police the capitalists to not be too outrageous and the other thinks that government has to police the capitalists.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I noticed you don't have a rebuttal to my post in "Winds of Change" about baked-in corruption in both parties, THGR. So you decided to bump more of your irrelevant opinions instead.
Typical.
Capitalism: The Nastiest of Men for the Nastiest of Motives Will Somehow Work for the Benefit of All
("Somehow" is where Democrats and Republicans disagree. Republicans leave "Somehow" vague and undefined. If "Somehow" does become solidified, Republicans try to vaporize it.)
Posted byquoteresearch February 23, 2011
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/02/23/capitalism-motives/
Oh puhleez!
Both Democrats and Republicans have an attachment to campaign contributions, insider trading, and pork barrel spending.
The only difference is who buys their loyalty. Dems since 1990 were typically beholden to finance, "free trade" for transnationals, globalist power structures (and the CIA)... think Bill Clinton and Obama. More recently big tech, big pharma, "clean energy" and Soros et al destabilization funds. And of course Israel and the MIC.
The Republicans were beholden to oil, gas, and coal (think Dick Cheney). And of course Israel and the MIC.
A typical signym post. I understand the part directed at me in the beginning. It’s you acting like I ran away from your post. Fuck no, I just don’t respond to your subjective rants. 99% of the time I ignore it because it’s the same old shit, accusations, and never what's most important; solutions.
What we have currently is one party that needs a lot of work and another that is trying to pull off a coup and install a dictator. I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll worry about the pedophile who is involved in a coup.
T
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“How,” asks Trevor Jackson in our September 25 issue, “in conditions of runaway climatic disaster, can the future be recovered? What visions of a shared transformative future are possible, and what happens to emancipatory politics, and to democracy itself, without them?” Two new books—Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and Overshoot, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton — offer wildly different answers: The mood of Abundance is that of a chirpy regional sales manager giving a PowerPoint; Overshoot’s is a wild-eyed buccaneer swinging onto a burning frigate with a cutlass in his teeth. Klein and Thompson blame liberals and liberalism for the decline of an abundant future; Malm and Carton blame fossil capital for planetary destruction, and they do not hesitate to analogize oil executives to Nazis, slave owners, serial murderers, and arsonists. Klein and Thompson believe that we live in a post-material political world, one constituted by ideas, narratives, and verbal persuasion, where “policy is downstream of values” and “political movements succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past.” Malm and Carton believe we live in a world ruled by the profit imperatives of capital.
How to Blow Up a Planet
By Trevor Jackson
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/09/25/how-to-blow-up-a-planet-ab
undance-klein-thompson/
What happened to the future? When did we lose it, and what has taken its place? Political scientists have found a continual decline in visions of a shared transformative future since the early 1980s. Around the world, in party manifestos, inaugural speeches, and programmatic policy documents, principled statements about an open-ended future have given way to numerical targets like GDP growth achieved, emissions reduced, or people deported. The political right has been more interested in returning to an imaginary glorious past; consequently, the change has been most pronounced on the left, where the politics of an alternative liberatory future have ceded to the policies of technocratic governance and market discipline.
This story fits the interregnum of the 1990s and 2000s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the slide of social democratic parties into neoliberalism. When Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history,” he was looking ahead to a melancholy time when we would be “jaded by the experience of history.” The conflict over the best way to organize human society had ended, and liberal capitalist democracy would remain triumphant, but the future appeared to be an empty stretch, without passion, without struggle.
The financial crisis of 2008 did not recover the future so much as reveal that its absence was an ideological project. Writing in the aftermath of the crash, the radical cultural critic Mark Fisher diagnosed a phenomenon he called “capitalist realism,” meaning “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Elsewhere he wrote that the future had been “foreclosed,” and the metaphor was apt: we had been evicted from it, and now it belonged to the banks.
But nothing has depleted the future quite like climate change. As target after target has been passed and promise after promise broken, the time remaining to avert global catastrophe has been squandered. There is no noncatastrophic future left, and in fact it’s already here. How, in conditions of runaway climatic disaster, can the future be recovered? What visions of a shared transformative future are possible, and what happens to emancipatory politics, and to democracy itself, without them?
Abundance, by two American journalists, provides one answer. American liberals in positions of governance should commit to deregulation, which the authors believe will unleash the power of the market and of technology to provide cheap and plentiful housing
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Don’t these people have grandchildren?
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Posted on Monday, Feb 5, 2024, 2:00AM by Barry Goldman
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/02/the-fungus-among-us.html
Reading about corporate greed and depredation over the past few years, I keep getting stuck on the same question: Don’t these people have grandchildren? How can corporate decision-makers spend their days actively working to destroy the environment, pollute the water, kill off the animals, melt the glaciers, and incinerate the biosphere? Even if what they care about the most is making more money no matter how much money they already have, don’t they care at all about the world they’re leaving for their kids?
I’ve arrived at a theory. But first I need to back up a few steps.
Readers of 3QD may be familiar with the brain fungus that causes “zombie ants” to leave the safety of the forest floor and climb up the stalks of plants to die. Or the parasite that causes mice to lose their fear of cats. In both cases, the parasite has evolved to hijack the brain of the host and cause it to behave in ways that are suicidal to the host but beneficial to the parasite. The behaviors the parasite causes are often exquisitely complex and particular. It seems impossible that something as primitive as a fungus could be the explanation. But evolution has come up with lots of similar strategies. She is very clever. She doesn’t have a sense of fair play or sportsmanship. If a behavior increases the chances of getting the genes of one generation reproduced in the next, it succeeds. Nothing else matters. And she has lots and lots of time to experiment.
So that’s the first idea we need – the fungus that hijacks the brain of one species to improve the reproductive success of another.
Then we need the idea of cultural evolution. Human beings don’t have to wait for genetic evolution. We have evolved the ability to get information from one generation to the next without having to wait for it first to be encoded in the DNA. We don’t have to start from scratch with each generation, and we don’t have to proceed by trial and error. We have culture, language, and traditional practices.
In the modern world, I don’t have to know how anything works. I don’t have to know how cars or computers work, for example, or how to build them. It’s enough for me to know how to drive and how to type. As long as somewhere in my culture there are people who know how cars and computers work and how to build them, I can off-load that responsibility to them and spend my time on other things.
One more idea and we will be ready for my theory. That’s the idea of a meme. A meme is to cultural evolution what a gene is to the biological kind. It’s the unit of transfer, the basic building block. Cooking is a meme. When the idea of cooking enters into a culture, lots of things change. People live longer because cooking releases more nutritional value from food. People get bigger and stronger. Their teeth get smaller. Jaw muscles get weaker and on and on.
The corporation is a meme. It is a legal invention, a legal fiction if you like. Corporations don’t exist in the way that tables and chairs exist. They don’t have weight or take up space. They have no natural lifespan. Some of them are much older and vastly richer than any person. They can own property, enter into contracts, sue, and be sued. And, since the US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and related cases, they can donate unlimited amounts of money to the political causes of their choice.
I quote here from The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs, by David Runciman:
The 18th century jurist Edward Thurlow famously complained: ‘Corporations have neither bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned; they therefore do as they like.’ Sentient beings with bodies and souls disappear inside the group once it has acquired its own identity. They can shrug their shoulders as the victims of the group’s decisions come looking for justice. Meanwhile, the group has no shoulders to shrug.
Fascinated by how the behavior of the people who took three pieces of pizza at the pizza party because they thought it would run out and the people who took one piece for the exact same reason is such a perfect encapsulation of American beliefs about community.
I raised children who take one piece, and I'm unleashing them into a world of people who want three.
Quote:
AI Overview
This observation, about how people taking multiple slices of pizza at a party because they fear it running out reflects a broader societal dynamic concerning American values, particularly individualism and a focus on personal security, sometimes at the expense of collective needs; it highlights the contrast between those who prioritize ensuring their own needs are met and those who consider the needs of the group as well. Taking one slice, with the assumption that others will have enough, demonstrates a sense of trust and community, while taking three slices can be interpreted as a display of self-interest and a fear of scarcity.
Key points:
Individualism vs. Collectivism: The behavior of taking multiple slices can be seen as a manifestation of a more individualistic mindset, where prioritizing one's own needs is paramount, compared to a collectivist approach where individuals consider the needs of the group as well.
Fear of Scarcity: Taking extra slices could be driven by a fear that the pizza will not be enough, which might reflect experiences of scarcity or a general sense of insecurity.
Social Norms and Expectations: There are unspoken social norms around how much food to take at a party, and deviating from these norms, by taking more than one slice, can be interpreted as being self-centered or inconsiderate.
Parenting and Values: How parents raise their children can influence their behavior in social situations, potentially shaping their attitudes towards sharing and resource allocation.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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There are no Democrats anymore, so nobody should be posting in this thread anymore.
There are just crazy, hateful Leftists, and everybody else.
--------------------------------------------------
The Democrats are the party of Murder.
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Oklahoma versus Massachusetts (70 seconds).
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOYPhbcES8s/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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There's a bigger problem brewing than Trump
By Robert Reich | September 26, 2025 | 07:47AM ET
https://www.alternet.org/trump-dark-money-2674043086/
It’s too easy to accept the conventional view that the widening polarization of our society, and the decline of democracy, are due to the demagogue in the Oval Office.
That conventional view is way too simple. Follow the money. The underlying cause is the tsunami of legal bribes flowing from huge, wealthy corporations (and their oligarchic CEOs and major investors) into American politics.
That tsunami has grown dramatically over the last forty years. It underlies the crisis of democracy. It is fueling polarization. Democracy and social cohesion are impossible to sustain when big money is dictating political outcomes.
Over the last four decades, corporate political spending has more than quadrupled, adjusted for inflation.
Labor unions no longer provide a counterweight. Forty years ago, union PACs contributed about as much as corporate PACs. In the 2024 election, corporations outspent labor by more than 3 to 1.
According to a landmark study published in 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, the preferences of the typical American have no influence at all on legislation emerging from Congress.
Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens. Their conclusion:
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Gilens and Page found that lawmakers listen mainly to the policy demands of big business and wealthy individuals — those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns and promote their views.
It’s far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from the period 1981 to 2002 — before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in the Citizens United case, before Super PACs, before “dark money,” and before the Wall Street bailout.
Decades before Trump, corporations were already getting a high return on the money they invested in politics. I know. I was there. I had a front-row seat.
Over the last 40 years, corporate tax rates have plunged. Regulatory protections for consumers, workers, small investors, and the environment have been defanged. Antitrust has become so ineffectual that many big corporations face little or no competition.
Corporations have fought off safety nets and public investments that are common in other advanced nations, such as universal health care and paid family leave. They’ve attacked labor laws — reducing the portion of private-sector workers belonging to a union from a 35 percent forty years ago to just over 6 percent now.
They’ve collected hundreds of billions in federal subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees and sole-source contracts. Corporate welfare for Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Tech, Big Ag, Wall Street, and the largest military contractors now dwarfs welfare for people.
The profits of big corporations have reached record highs, and the ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to nearly 300-to-1 now.
Most Americans, however, are going nowhere. The typical worker’s wage is only a bit higher today than it was forty years ago when adjusted for inflation.
The biggest casualty has been public trust in democracy.
In 1964, only 29 percent of voters thought government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” By 2013, 79 percent of Americans thought so.
A large portion of the American public has become so frustrated and cynical about democracy that they believe the blatant lies of a self-described strongman and support a political party that no longer stands for democracy.
Capitalism is compatible with democracy only if democracy is in the driver’s seat. But the absence of democracy doesn’t strengthen capitalism. It fu
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Robert Reich is a much bigger problem than Trump.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Oklahoma versus Massachusetts (70 seconds).
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOYPhbcES8s/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Wow, loved the video. You know Jack doesn't understand his generation's failures. Far too many men don't have what it takes to compete. So instead, they want to deport the competition. They believe that will fix everything, it won't.
Surprise, they can't even compete with the women. And boy are they in for a shocker if Trump pulls off a coup this time. That's when they'll realize they should have worked to fix things instead of tearing it all down.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Oklahoma versus Massachusetts (70 seconds).
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOYPhbcES8s/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Wow, loved the video. You know Jack doesn't understand his generation's failures. Far too many men don't have what it takes to compete. So instead, they want to deport the competition. They believe that will fix everything, it won't.
Surprise, they can't even compete with the women. And boy are they in for a shocker if Trump pulls off a coup this time. That's when they'll realize they should have worked to fix things instead of tearing it all down.
T
Literally everything has been stacked against white men for the last 30 years.
Personally, I don't have to compete with anyone. Despite what they tried to do to us, I bought a house with cash when I was 32 years old because I'm the smartest person in any room I've ever walked into.
How's dying alone in that sad little studio apartment with no friends going for you, Ted.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:Trump World is the same as Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One: 2.5 gigabit per second squalor. The 2018 movie’s backstory starts this year and jumps ahead 20 years to a stupid and nasty future for Columbus, Ohio’s white people, who have no jobs, travel nowhere, do nothing but tend to their little houses, and spend the rest of their time playing games at the Oasis. "It's the only place where I feel like I mean anything."
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Literally everything has been stacked against white men for the last 30 years.
Personally, I don't have to compete with anyone. Despite what they tried to do to us, I bought a house with cash when I was 32 years old because I'm the smartest person in any room I've ever walked into.
How's dying alone in that sad little studio apartment with no friends going for you, Ted.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Seventeen thoughts on the government shutdown
Democrats can’t back an appropriations deal that Trump can claw back with a party-line vote.
By Matthew Yglesias | Oct 01, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/seventeen-thoughts-on-the-government
1. It takes 60 votes to pass appropriations legislation, but only 50 votes to pass a rescission package clawing appropriations back. Rescission authority has rarely been used in practice, because passing rescissions on a party-line vote blows up the logic of bipartisan appropriations. But Republicans have, for the first time ever, done party-line rescissions, and the administration has further pushed the procedural envelope with unprecedented pocket rescissions. Trump is now asking Democrats to provide cross-party votes for appropriations that they can unilaterally backtrack on and not even offering verbal promises to refrain from doing this. This is why the government is shutting down.
2. The high socioeconomic status liberals who dominate the Democratic Party are most fired up not about the logic of congressional appropriations, though, but about (as Ezra Klein wrote on September 7) the fact that “We’ve watched Trump deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles and then to Washington, with more cities expected to come under federal military occupation soon. We’ve watched masked ICE agents conducting raids all over the country, refusing to reveal badge numbers or warrants.”
3. Even though Trump’s numbers on crime and immigration have declined, and most voters think he’s gone too far, these remain his two best issues, and ones where the G.O.P. retains a daunting trust advantage vis-à-vis Democrats.
4. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are trying to channel the rage of (2) in a way that is mindful of the politics of (3) by turning this into a fight about health care funding, which is Democrats’ area of strongest issue trust.
5. The problem with (4) is that everyone knows that refusing to vote for a continuing resolution unless you win an unrelated policy demand never works. The upside to (4) is that, whether or not it works, Democrats get multiple news cycles about the expiring Affordable Care Act premium subsidies. The Democratic position on this is very popular, but the issue had received almost no news coverage until the shutdown grew near. If Democrats don’t get what they’re asking for on this, they’re at least dramatizing the ask, and when premiums soar next year, they’ll have already set up the argument that it’s Trump’s fault.
6. Brian Beutler changed my mind over the course of two episodes of Politix. He argued that the best fight to pick is the real fight — that Democrats cannot provide votes for appropriations that are going to be clawed back. This is emotionally unsatisfying among thought-leaders and too boring for swing voters to care about. But it is an argument that is logical and correct and persuasive on the merits, that a person could defend in an extensive back-and-forth or in a hostile interview. We can’t do a deal if the president is saying he’ll break the deal. We’ve all seen what Darth Vader did to Lando Calrissian.
7. The logical endgame of Democrats picking a logical fight is that Republicans nuke the filibuster and start appropriating with 50 votes.
8. I think that’s a totally fine outcome; appropriations should be done with 50 votes. The way to stop the majority party from doing bad appropriations should be to beat them in an election. The filibuster obscures lines of accountability and gets us stuck in bizarre conversations about congressional procedure rather than competing visions for the country. However, to the extent that people want Democrats to use “leverage” and “stand up to Trump,” it’s a reminder that there is very little actual leverage here. If Trump and Thune and Johnson believed that a government shutdown was a big problem, they would have nuked the filibuster already. The shutdown is happening because Republicans believe they will not feel pain from this. If they’re proved wrong and do feel pain, they have the n
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