A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I "love" your and Signym's "logic" and "knowledge".
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The only part where Second gets it right here is . . .
I "love" how you're going to read a bullshit book by a hack fraud and apply it to every situation.
You have no idea what my childhood was like. I just told you. But some dipshit with a degree says my life didn't happen the way that it did.
According to your book, my brothers who had a stable childhood with two parents (who are married to this day) and a stay at home mother, had absolutely no leg up on my brothers who didn't.
So I guess we're not going to keep blaming the disproportionately high incarceration rate of black males to the fact that a large majority of them do not have a father figure in their life then?
I mean... I'm not going to do that, but you're free to believe whatever fantasy bullshit you want.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:So let me begin with a true story, told by my late colleague David Lykken, about a pair of reared-apart twins—one of the pairs studied at the University of Minnesota by the research team of which he was a member.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I "love" your and Signym's "logic" and "knowledge".
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The only part where Second gets it right here is . . .
I "love" how you're going to read a bullshit book by a hack fraud and apply it to every situation.
You have no idea what my childhood was like. I just told you. But some dipshit with a degree says my life didn't happen the way that it did.
According to your book, my brothers who had a stable childhood with two parents (who are married to this day) and a stay at home mother, had absolutely no leg up on my brothers who didn't.
So I guess we're not going to keep blaming the disproportionately high incarceration rate of black males to the fact that a large majority of them do not have a father figure in their life then?
I mean... I'm not going to do that, but you're free to believe whatever fantasy bullshit you want.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
They are identical twins separated in infancy; they grew up in different adoptive homes. One became a concert pianist, talented enough to perform as a soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra. The other cannot play a note.
Since these women have the same genes, the disparity must be due to a difference in their environments. Sure enough, one of the adoptive mothers was a music teacher who gave piano lessons in her home. The parents who adopted the other twin were not musical at all.
Only it was the nonmusical parents who produced the concert pianist and the piano teacher whose daughter cannot play a note.
From Chap.14 What Parents Can Do, of Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption
You didn’t read the book, did you, 6ixStringJack. But you could not stop yourself from giving an opinion on it and then telling even more of your life story and then seeking pity: “You have no idea what my childhood was like.” Very Republican of you, to be wimpy, tearful, fearful, pitiful. Do your angry thing next, now that I have "insulted" your honor. That’s what thin-skinned Trump would do.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Trump gave a long interview Tuesday, exposing his fantasies, which he explained in great detail with absolutely no evidence for the truth of his fantasies.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
You're free to believe whatever fantasy bullshit you want.
www.wsj.com/articles/transcript-of-president-trumps-interview-with-the
-wall-street-journal-1540388205
Speaking of possibly imposing consequences on the Saudis for their crimes, Trump muses, “you have people that do not want to lose $450 billion worth of investment and you have others that think that we should. I disagree with them.”
Saudi Arabia’s investment in the US is a bit less than $13 billion, so the president was off.
Separately, Trump explained why he doesn’t want to reduce arms sales to Saudi Arabia: “They buy tremendous amounts of things from our country. It probably amounts to millions of jobs, you know, a million jobs. That’s a lot of jobs.”
There are only 355,000 workers in the entire American defense industry, most of which is not making things to sell to Saudi Arabia, so the president was off.
Here is the point Trump missed throughout the whole interview: The Saudi government gains a lot from the US-Saudi relationship. It’s a very good deal for them. They are the ones who need to share a neighborhood with Iran, but we are the ones who are the global military superpower. We have all the leverage, and are in a position to influence Saudi behavior.
But Trump simply can’t see that clearly, and instead he fantasizes that the situation is one in which he is dangerously dependent on Saudi Arabia for America’s economic stability.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/25/18019554/trump-wsj-intervie
w-transcript
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Okay. So civility was a ruse with you. I've warned you several times about this, yet you continue to be uncivil.
Gloves are back off then.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:This next one will really piss you off: Democrats need to get serious on statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. Assuming you still want the US to be rid of Puerto Rico, as you were after Hurricane Maria. And DC was 90.86% for Hillary and you didn't vote for her.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Okay. So civility was a ruse with you. I've warned you several times about this, yet you continue to be uncivil.
Gloves are back off then.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
In DC and Puerto Rico, roughly 4 million American citizens are denied representation in Congress. By any normal application of democratic principles, this is an outrage. But Democrats are complacent about it. They’re worried that might seem unfair. And that is why they are a minority party, they worry too much about being unfair to Republicans.
More about how silly the Democrats are at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/26/18024542/dc-puerto-rico-sta
tehood-senate-democracy
The real point is not about two more states.
The point is America is in an unstable equilibrium. Its current political system is producing outcomes that feel illegitimate to the left. Any effort to reform that system would produce outcomes that feel illegitimate to the right. We cannot stay here, but we cannot move.
What’s needed is some principle beyond the short-term composition of Congress that can act as a guiding star, that can help Democrats both choose process reforms to prioritize and explain them to the public.
Democrats have one close at hand: democracy. The Democratic Party can be, and should be, the party of democracy. It should be the party that wants more people to participate in the political process and wants to make sure more people can participate in the political process.
Under that rubric, representation for DC and Puerto Rico are no-brainers; so too is a voting holiday, automatic voter registration, enough voting machinery that long voting lines are a thing of the past, and much more. (The Brennan Center has a number of good proposals along these lines.) If Republicans believe that more democracy is bad because it would disadvantage them at the polls, force them to argue that point explicitly.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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You misread anything I said about Puerto Rico.
Read it again if you want to have a conversation about it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Anyway jack ... I suppose disadvantage is relative. Imagine being in your situation ... except your family is really poor, you don't have enough to eat, and everyone you know is in a gang, selling drugs, doing drugs, or some combination, and your schools are crap.
I'm not going to recount my childhood, but I can point to critical places where my life would have been different if I was male. I'm not talking about the subtle discrimination of expectations or social roles. I WAS TOLD, EXPLICITLY, THAT I WOULDN'T BE CONSIDERED BECAUSE I WAS FEMALE. For example, when I applied for apprenticeships in the electrical and pipe-fitters unions. Or when I inquired about going to medical school.
On the other hand, I also know I had benefits. I went to safe, if backwards, schools. My home life was safe and physically sufficient. My parents were educated and pushed us all to college. And so on.
I might have gone further, or differently, without the blatant discrimination. But I wouldn't have gotten as far without the unearned advantages.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Anyway jack ... I suppose disadvantage is relative. Imagine being in your situation ... except your family is really poor, you don't have enough to eat, and everyone you know is in a gang, selling drugs, doing drugs, or some combination, and your schools are crap.
I'm not going to recount my childhood, but I can point to critical places where my life would have been different if I was male. I'm not talking about the subtle discrimination of expectations or social roles. I WAS TOLD, EXPLICITLY, THAT I WOULDN'T BE CONSIDERED BECAUSE I WAS FEMALE. For example, when I applied for apprenticeships in the electrical and pipe-fitters unions. Or when I inquired about going to medical school.
On the other hand, I also know I had benefits. I went to safe, if backwards, schools. My home life was safe and physically sufficient. My parents were educated and pushed us all to college. And so on.
I might have gone further, or differently, without the blatant discrimination. But I wouldn't have gotten as far without the unearned advantages.
Advantage and disadvantage is relative. Each and every person's situation is different.
My unborn kid would be in high school today if I were the woman and she were the man. But fuck that kid, and fuck me, I guess. My opinion clearly had no bearing on that situation. My son or daughter didn't have any say in the matter either.
I've earned everything I've ever had. And yes, that includes the teeth that are falling out of my face.
I'm not a victim. Maybe the world would be a better place if everybody stopped thinking of themselves as being one and just owned their situation. I know my life has gotten a lot better after I did that for myself.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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The Trump tax cuts were supposed to set off an investment boom. The cuts aren’t according to the latest GDP numbers, which show nonresidential fixed investment was only up 0.8 percent in the third quarter of this year, adding a measly 0.12 percentage points to the economy’s better-than-expected 3.5 percentage points of growth.
Looking at the last 4 quarters, the economy is growing around 3 percent per year right now because of all the short-term stimulus it’s getting, but will soon go back to the 2 to 2.5 percent it was before because that stimulus isn’t changing companies' long-term behavior like the Trump administration thought it would. They were convinced that cutting the corporate income tax would make investing here so attractive that money would come pouring in from overseas. That would then fund the investments we needed to increase growth today, and the fruits of it — higher productivity — would increase growth tomorrow as well.
Except, well, it’s not. The problem is that while the tax-cutting story the Trump administration was telling might be true for a small, open economy like, say, Bermuda’s, it was never going to be for a large and slightly closed one like our own. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that we’re seeing perhaps a modest increase in investment, but not the bonanza we were promised.
The big picture is how little Trump has done to change our long-term economic outlook. His tax cut certainly seems to have juiced growth this past year, but, since it wasn’t paid for, it’s also made the Federal Reserve raise rates enough more that its net effect should be pretty close to zero by the end of the next year or so. Unless, of course, companies do start investing far, far more than they are right now.
More at www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/27/trump-tax-cuts-were-suppose
d-set-off-an-investment-boom-they-arent-so-far/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.09c6c5cade23
Republicans are looking for proof their tax cuts will pay for themselves. They won’t find it. Republicans have a math problem.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/01/republicans-are-looking
-for-proof-their-tax-cuts-will-pay-for-themselves-they-wont-find-it/?utm_term=.2c3a584a3149
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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