A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I'm an anti-democracy Deep State troll.
Plus I live in a fantasy-world where my side is always good, and everyone who disagrees with me must be a foreign agent. And aside from that, I have OCD. Let's not forget the OCD.
So anyway ... anyone up for a rational, fact-based, and civil discussion about the topic? Certainly not SECOND RATE, who is so bankrupt of ideas and ethics, his only way of dealing with information he can't grasp is to hide behind the "Russian troll" meme.
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To get back to the thread topic - A thread for Democrats Only
Aside from Hillary (who's biggest goal was to get through the campaign chore on her way to the coronation, because who needs to actually appeal to voters in a democracy), Pelosi is another symbol of what's wrong with the party. I read, literally years ago, that dems had decided their strategy would be to ride the 'demographic' wave. Identity politics is one tactic to do that.
But the demographic wave isn't a given. You have to have something to offer even the 'demographic' voter, besides an aggrieved sense of victimhood (while you triangulate away their livelihoods to international corporations). Sooner or later, that message will wear out, and people will look around and realize "I'm NOT better off than I was 8 years ago". When they realize that - despite glib words of solidarity - DEMS ARE NOT ON THEIR SIDE, they will not be on the dems side, either.
Nancy Pelosi is a huge doubled-edged sword for Democrats
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/02/politics/nancy-pelosi-democrats/index.h
tml
Nancy Pelosi says she will run for speaker if Democrats win the House
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: Democrats will win the House
Nancy Pelosi won't bet her job on a Democratic win
On Nancy Pelosi, most Dems in Pa., NJ keep their distance
Nancy Pelosi's mistake on identity politics
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/03/opinions/identity-politics-pelosi-opini
on-sheffield/index.html
So anyway ... anyone up for a rational, fact-based, and civil discussion about the topic?
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Quote:Fixed that for ya.
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Nancy Pelosisaysthreatens she will run for speaker if Democrats win the House
Almost as good as when Alec promised he would leave America if only we would elect Bush43.
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Quote:Funny.
Originally posted by second:Quote:I have to admit that not all Republicans are prima facie crazy. The rich Republicans certainly know what they are doing. The poor who voted for Trump? Not so much.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And you live in the alternate reality where you can immediately judge whether a person is Good or Evil simply by if they are Democrat or Republican.
Simple lives for simple minds.
But what is going on with you? Does the delicate little snowflake 6ixStringJack melt when his core beliefs are rejected with contempt? Too bad for the unworkable delusions haunting your brain. Here is another delusion being backed by Republicans:
The rationale behind super-majority laws
https://qz.com/1245033
Supermajority bills were heralded as ways to ultimately improve economic growth, and force lawmakers to spend money more wisely. The idea is often buttressed by some variation of the “trickle down” theory of economics—cutting taxes encourages businesses to invest and hire more, and people with disposable income to spend more.
The economic reality
Making it harder to raise taxes hasn’t necessarily resulted in the economic growth or wiser spending that it was supposed to, however. While states that passed supermajority tax laws spent about 2% less on general state funding, that was offset by local spending (ie. from villages, cities, and counties), an Urban Institute report found (pdf, pg. 64).
There’s a broader lesson about “trickle down” economics that the US seems to be learning again and again, since the phrase was first coined to mock president Herbert Hoover’s depression-era tax plan. “We’ve got a good base of evidence from tax cutting in the states that shows tax cuts are not a recipe for economic growth,” said Johnson. “They just lead to reductions in services that people need.”
The Result:
On May 3, teachers in Arizona ended a six-day walkout after the state government agreed to a 20% salary raise over the next three years. While it sounds like a lot, it’s much less than what teachers were originally asking: Overall, Arizona’s school funding is still below the levels of the 2008 recession, later raises are not guaranteed, and they’re being financed by cash set aside to clean up pollution.
Striking teachers believe they may be the forefront of a new grassroots movement in the US, one that makes voters reconsider taxing companies and the wealthy.
Some teachers who were on strike have adopted a new chant as they come off: “Vote them out.” They intend to go to the polls in huge numbers in the mid-term election, and vote against candidate running on platforms of tax cuts and caps.
Teachers are so stupid they can't even find the polls, even when it is in their school the whole day.
Teachers are so stupid that they boast they are incapable of learning to fire a weapon like 10 year olds do every day.
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Quote:The video start arrow covered up a letter. When I scrolled past it, I read Godless America. No kidding. "My side" over all. All day. Every day.
Originally posted by JJ:
God Bless America Lyrics
So anyway ... anyone up for a rational, fact-based, and civil discussion about the topic?
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I have to admit that not all Republicans are prima facie crazy. The rich Republicans certainly know what they are doing. The poor who voted for Trump? Not so much.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And you live in the alternate reality where you can immediately judge whether a person is Good or Evil simply by if they are Democrat or Republican.
Simple lives for simple minds.
But what is going on with you? Does the delicate little snowflake 6ixStringJack melt when his core beliefs are rejected with contempt? Too bad for the unworkable delusions haunting your brain. Here is another delusion being backed by Republicans:
The rationale behind super-majority laws
https://qz.com/1245033
Supermajority bills were heralded as ways to ultimately improve economic growth, and force lawmakers to spend money more wisely. The idea is often buttressed by some variation of the “trickle down” theory of economics—cutting taxes encourages businesses to invest and hire more, and people with disposable income to spend more.
The economic reality
Making it harder to raise taxes hasn’t necessarily resulted in the economic growth or wiser spending that it was supposed to, however. While states that passed supermajority tax laws spent about 2% less on general state funding, that was offset by local spending (ie. from villages, cities, and counties), an Urban Institute report found (pdf, pg. 64).
There’s a broader lesson about “trickle down” economics that the US seems to be learning again and again, since the phrase was first coined to mock president Herbert Hoover’s depression-era tax plan. “We’ve got a good base of evidence from tax cutting in the states that shows tax cuts are not a recipe for economic growth,” said Johnson. “They just lead to reductions in services that people need.”
The Result:
On May 3, teachers in Arizona ended a six-day walkout after the state government agreed to a 20% salary raise over the next three years. While it sounds like a lot, it’s much less than what teachers were originally asking: Overall, Arizona’s school funding is still below the levels of the 2008 recession, later raises are not guaranteed, and they’re being financed by cash set aside to clean up pollution.
Striking teachers believe they may be the forefront of a new grassroots movement in the US, one that makes voters reconsider taxing companies and the wealthy.
Some teachers who were on strike have adopted a new chant as they come off: “Vote them out.” They intend to go to the polls in huge numbers in the mid-term election, and vote against candidate running on platforms of tax cuts and caps.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Hey Sigs....
This is getting too funny.
I've been mislabled as a snowflake by the right and left fringes now, twice in one week.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Review of Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education
April 26th, 2018
www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3678
Scott Aaronson points out the areas in education that truthfully do need improvement in his review. Then he notes how a reform program can go wrong when done by famous name Republicans:
I have a more prosaic worry about Caplan’s program. If the world he advocates were actually brought into being, I suspect the people responsible wouldn’t be nerdy economics professors like himself, who have principled objections to “forced enlightenment” and to signalling charades, yet still maintain warm fuzzies for the ideals of learning. Rather, the “reformers” would be more on the model of, say, Steve Bannon or Scott Pruitt or Alex Jones: people who’d gleefully take a torch to the universities, fortresses of the despised intellectual elite, not in the conviction that this wouldn’t plunge humanity back into the Dark Ages, but in the hope that it would.
When the US Congress was debating whether to cancel the Superconducting Supercollider, a few condensed-matter physicists famously testified against the project. They thought that $10-$20 billion for a single experiment was excessive, and that they could provide way more societal value with that kind of money were it reallocated to them. We all know what happened: the SSC was cancelled, and of the money that was freed up, 0%—absolutely none of it—went to any of the other research favored by the SSC’s opponents.
If Caplan were to get his way, I fear that the story would be similar. Caplan talks about all the other priorities—from feeding the world’s poor to curing diseases to fixing crumbling infrastructure—that could be funded using the trillions currently wasted on runaway credential signaling. But in any future I can plausibly imagine where the government actually axes education, the savings go to things like enriching the leaders’ cronies and launching vanity wars.
My preferences for American politics have two tiers. In the first tier, I simply want the Democrats to vanquish the Republicans, in every office from president down to dogcatcher, in order to prevent further spiraling into nihilistic quasi-fascism, and to restore the baseline non-horribleness that we know is possible for rich liberal democracies. Then, in the second tier, I want the libertarians and rationalists and nerdy economists and Slate Star Codex readers to be able to experiment—that’s a key word here—with whether they can use futarchy** and prediction markets and pricing-in-lieu-of-regulation and other nifty ideas to improve dramatically over the baseline liberal order. I don’t expect that I’ll ever get what I want; I’ll be extremely lucky even to get the first half of it. But I find that my desires regarding Caplan’s program fit into the same mold. First and foremost, save education from those who’d destroy it because they hate the life of the mind. Then and only then, let people experiment with taking a surgical scalpel to education, removing from it the tumor of forced enlightenment, because they love the life of the mind.
**Futarchy is a form of government proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in which elected officials define measures of national welfare, and prediction markets are used to determine which policies will have the most positive effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futarchy
Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
Quote:http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html
Democracy seems better than autocracy (i.e., kings and dictators), but it still has problems. There are today vast differences in wealth among nations, and we can not attribute most of these differences to either natural resources or human abilities. Instead, much of the difference seems to be that the poor nations (many of which are democracies) are those that more often adopted dumb policies, policies which hurt most everyone in the nation. And even rich nations frequently adopt such policies.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.c
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Quote:6ix, you've told stories about yourself melting down under adversity. I'd believe you are not a frail snowflake if you hadn't told them. You need to build a false internet facade for yourself, making you look braver, tougher, smarter, less beaten down by life than you really are. You can start building the strength illusion by ignoring accusations of being a snowflake. For example, every time Trump says "No Collusion!" I know he knows he colluded. When he says "Believe Me" I know he knows he told a lie.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Hey Sigs....
This is getting too funny.
I've been mislabled as a snowflake by the right and left fringes now, twice in one week.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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