A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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I guess the Republicans base would seem to be radicalizing from the perspective of Democrats swinging so far left they're falling off of a cliff.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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When the country’s as divided as it’s been, it really is unhealthy and dangerous for all of us. We really can’t escape each other and we need a sense of what it means to be part of this country that doesn’t simply dismiss half the population, whether it’s the half that is in the service worker class, or the half that is of a different political party, or the half that’s a different color.
I’ve long thought that Sarah Palin’s nomination was a kind of Rubicon-crossing moment for the country. Palin was Donald Trump’s “John the Baptist,” a messenger being sent ahead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Baptist#Gospel_narratives
Trump has so many of Palin’s qualities, her love of attention and celebrity, and her willingness to say anything and her contempt for people who are experts. We were still moving in that direction, but we just weren’t quite ready for her or Trump yet.
I remember being in Ohio in September 2008, just after McCain picked Palin and she made her sensational debut at the Republican convention, and I was sitting in a diner with some Ohio women who were saying how much they liked her and how she reminded them of themselves and she could fit right in here with us, and she’s just like us.
And I remember thinking, “Why do you want to be led by someone just like you who knows no more than you do, who has no more expertise than you? Would you want your heart surgeon to be someone just like you?” It told me that there was a sense that government, among some voters, was no longer something that required expertise or qualification or excellence, but rather it was more like a show. People just wanted someone to stick it to the other side. Partisanship isn’t new, it’s as old as the republic, but partisanship leading to the collapse of government felt new.
Something like 62 million people voted for Trump, and that was a vote for chaos, for disruption, and it was a vote against expertise, against experience. Now, I know there are a lot of reasons why people voted for Trump and it’s complicated, but we also can’t deny this part of the story and we can’t pretend that a lot of people didn’t want to break the government.
One thing that struck me about Trump’s rallies was that they had very little positive content, very little uplift. Even a demagogue needs to give his people a vision that inspires them, that makes them willing to work long hours and to sacrifice. That was not Trump. He’s something else altogether. Trump was a showman who brought out people’s lowest instincts and made them acceptable, made them desirable.
I remember in 2015, before the primaries began, I was talking to some striking steelworkers in eastern Ohio and I wanted to talk to them about politics, and they were on a picket line and so they were willing and able to talk, and it turned out none of them were for Jeb Bush, who was the frontrunner, and none of them were for Hillary Clinton, who was the frontrunner. They were all for either Bernie Sanders or Trump. And that had something to do with their general disgust with things as they are.
And I asked one of the guys about Trump, and he said to me something like, “He is like a mirror that reflects back the way they see us.” And the “they” was people who were going to vote for Clinton, who talked about the “deplorables.” The steelworkers knew Trump was a buffoon, but they also had this feeling of, “Okay, you want deplorable, I’ll give you deplorable.” And Trump was a vehicle for that feeling, a nihilistic vehicle, and he just had no vision of any good society behind any of it.
The failures the US is witnessing predate Trump. Sarah Palin’s nomination for vice president in 2008 was a real sign that things had gone off the rails during George Bush’s train-wreck Presidency. Palin showed that the Republican Party had given up on the idea that government can solve problems and that there’s a common good for all Americans – for Americans not like Palin.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200420133805/https://www.theatlantic.com
/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/6102
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
When the country’s as divided as it’s been, it really is unhealthy and dangerous for all of us.
Any graph will show you the wild swing to the left that a majority of people who align themselves with the Democratic Party have taken while the Conservative needle hasn't moved much.
Fix your party. Fix the country.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The last big fix was the end of slavery. Were the abolitionists able to persuade millions of Southern citizens to peacefully and reasonably change? No. It had to be an all out war. Other countries could end slavery without a million tragic deaths, but not the US. We went for the maximum drama and irrational shouting and killing. It was not the abolitionists that started the Civil War. To see how less emotionally unstable nations solved the slavery problem, read Slavery Abolition Act United Kingdom [1834]. www.britannica.com/topic/Slavery-Abolition-Act
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Any graph will show you the wild swing to the left that a majority of people who align themselves with the Democratic Party have taken while the Conservative needle hasn't moved much.
Originally posted by second:
When the country’s as divided as it’s been, it really is unhealthy and dangerous for all of us.
Fix your party. Fix the country.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital and Ideology, published in March 2020, coincides with what could prove to be a strong leftist assault on the citadels of Capitalism. In the US, his collaborators Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman at Berkeley simultaneously advised Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who both proposed wealth taxes, during their Democratic nominee campaigns.
Capital and Ideology starts from the premise that inequality is a political choice. It is something societies opt for, not the inevitable outcome of technology and globalization. To Piketty, history is a battle of ideas.
Every unequal society, he says, creates an ideology to justify inequality—that allows the rich to fall asleep in their townhouses while the homeless freeze outside. He recounts the justifications that recur throughout history: “The wealth will trickle down”. “The rich will give it back through philanthropy”. “Property is liberty”. “The poor are undeserving”. “Once you start redistributing wealth, you won’t know where to stop”. “Communism failed”. “The money will go to black people”—an argument that explains, Piketty says, why inequality is extreme in countries with historic racial divides such as Brazil, South Africa and the US.
Another common justification is that the rich deserve their wealth. Piketty, who describes entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg as “oligarchs”, disagrees. He points out that both men benefited from public infrastructure, public education, decades of computer science and the invention of the internet. He sighs, exasperated: “Because they own $100 billion in the current state of the legal system, the current state of the fiscal system, the current way the international economy is organized, people say, ‘OK, $100 billion, exactly the right level.’ But with a different legal system, different international taxation, it could be 200, it could be 50. So what would be the story? Any level that they will attain, it will be the best? This kind of sacralization of special individuals is a form of religious thought. People who use this kind of argument: ‘He's great, therefore—‘ therefore what? Therefore we should subsidize him so that he's even richer?”
All these justifications for inequality add up to what Piketty calls “sacralization of property”. But today, he writes, these justifications have frayed. Ever fewer people believe them. There’s growing belief that so-called meritocracy has been subverted by the rich, who get their children into the best universities, buy politicians and dodge taxes.
Capital and Ideology draws on a more global array of data than the previous book. Piketty has assembled his figures into a shocking picture. Russia—which from 1990 to 2000 experienced the largest rise of inequality ever recorded—and notionally communist China have no inheritance tax at all, marvels Piketty. “They privatised everything to people close to the political regime, and then they can transmit everything with zero percent tax.”
Even in relatively equal Europe, the concentration of wealth is “stunning” and growing: “The bottom 40 percent owns barely five percent of the wealth, while the top ten percent owns 50-60 percent.”
But it’s Piketty’s data for the US that is so breathtaking that you sometimes have to read a sentence twice to be sure it says what you think it does. The top 1 percent of Americans now earn a total of over 20 percent of national income; the bottom 50 percent has just 12 percent. The average income of an American top one-percenter in 2015 was $1.3 million. For those in the bottom half, it was $15,000, a figure almost unchanged in 40 years. Five years later, it’s about $16,000.
Inequality is a political choice. It is something societies opt for, not the inevitable outcome of technology and globalization.
More at www.wired.co.uk/article/thomas-piketty-capital-ideology
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:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The last big fix was the end of slavery. Were the abolitionists able to persuade millions of Southern citizens to peacefully and reasonably change? No. It had to be an all out war. Other countries could end slavery without a million tragic deaths, but not the US. We went for the maximum drama and irrational shouting and killing. It was not the abolitionists that started the Civil War. To see how less emotionally unstable nations solved the slavery problem, read Slavery Abolition Act United Kingdom [1834]. www.britannica.com/topic/Slavery-Abolition-Act
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Any graph will show you the wild swing to the left that a majority of people who align themselves with the Democratic Party have taken while the Conservative needle hasn't moved much.
Originally posted by second:
When the country’s as divided as it’s been, it really is unhealthy and dangerous for all of us.
Fix your party. Fix the country.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It must have been tough for Democrats to lose their slaves.
Not really though. They still have them. They just pay them better today.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:An extremely short story about the mental difference between liberals and conservatives:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The last big fix was the end of slavery. Were the abolitionists able to persuade millions of Southern citizens to peacefully and reasonably change? No. It had to be an all out war. Other countries could end slavery without a million tragic deaths, but not the US. We went for the maximum drama and irrational shouting and killing. It was not the abolitionists that started the Civil War. To see how less emotionally unstable nations solved the slavery problem, read Slavery Abolition Act United Kingdom [1834]. www.britannica.com/topic/Slavery-Abolition-Act
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Any graph will show you the wild swing to the left that a majority of people who align themselves with the Democratic Party have taken while the Conservative needle hasn't moved much.
Originally posted by second:
When the country’s as divided as it’s been, it really is unhealthy and dangerous for all of us.
Fix your party. Fix the country.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It must have been tough for Democrats to lose their slaves.
Not really though. They still have them. They just pay them better today.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
One day, little Frank told his mother, Agnes, that his younger brother, Michael, was, unfortunately, a conservative:
You see, I asked him, “Michael are you a liberal or a conservative?” And he said “What does that mean?” And I said “Do you want to make things better by changing them or do you want to keep things as they are?” And he said—“I want to keep things.” So he must be a conservative.
The two brothers later diverged in religious matters as well. Frank was an atheist by the age of thirteen; Michael entered the Anglican Church and became the Archbishop of Canterbury.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200430131521/https://www.newyorker.com/m
agazine/2020/05/04/the-man-who-thought-too-fast
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Whatever.
Back on the topic of Democratic Slavery...
You can't tell me a party doesn't view their people as just cattle when I drive through Gary, IN and see signs everywhere that just say "Vote Democrat" with the date on them.
No candidates named whatsoever. Just pay your vote to keep all the free shit we're giving you while oppressing you and assuming that you will always be stupid and just do what we tell you to do while we keep all the rewards to ourselves and let the towns fall into disrepair and allow the violence in your neighborhood to stay so bad that even the cops won't go there. And if you dare vote anything other than Democrat we will shame the fuck out of you, Uncle Tom.
Remember. Vote Democrat, Tuesday November 3rd.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, like natural born Republicans in Texas, you hate niggers, but will loudly claim you are not a racist so I checked for the reason Gary, Indiana bothers you: In Gary 80.92% of the population is Black or African American. Gary is #2 on the list of Cities with the largest percentage of black or African American people.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Whatever.
Back on the topic of Democratic Slavery...
You can't tell me a party doesn't view their people as just cattle when I drive through Gary, IN and see signs everywhere that just say "Vote Democrat" with the date on them.
No candidates named whatsoever. Just pay your vote to keep all the free shit we're giving you while oppressing you and assuming that you will always be stupid and just do what we tell you to do while we keep all the rewards to ourselves and let the towns fall into disrepair and allow the violence in your neighborhood to stay so bad that even the cops won't go there. And if you dare vote anything other than Democrat we will shame the fuck out of you, Uncle Tom.
Remember. Vote Democrat, Tuesday November 3rd.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_large_African-A
merican_populations
Unsurprising that 6ix is a flat out racist. Trump says he is the 'least racist person anywhere in the world' LOL
"Trump Is a Racist. If You Still Support Him, So Are You."
www.thedailybeast.com/trump-is-a-racist-if-you-still-support-him-so-ar
e-you
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:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, like natural born Republicans in Texas, you hate niggers, but will loudly claim you are not a racist so I checked for the reason Gary, Indiana bothers you: In Gary 80.92% of the population is Black or African American. Gary is #2 on the list of Cities with the largest percentage of black or African American people.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Whatever.
Back on the topic of Democratic Slavery...
You can't tell me a party doesn't view their people as just cattle when I drive through Gary, IN and see signs everywhere that just say "Vote Democrat" with the date on them.
No candidates named whatsoever. Just pay your vote to keep all the free shit we're giving you while oppressing you and assuming that you will always be stupid and just do what we tell you to do while we keep all the rewards to ourselves and let the towns fall into disrepair and allow the violence in your neighborhood to stay so bad that even the cops won't go there. And if you dare vote anything other than Democrat we will shame the fuck out of you, Uncle Tom.
Remember. Vote Democrat, Tuesday November 3rd.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_large_African-A
merican_populations
Unsurprising that 6ix is a flat out racist. Trump says he is the 'least racist person anywhere in the world' LOL
"Trump Is a Racist. If You Still Support Him, So Are You."
www.thedailybeast.com/trump-is-a-racist-if-you-still-support-him-so-ar
e-you
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Somebody ought to do a google search on your handle and see how many times you've used that word. No less than a dozen by now. I honestly don't know what makes you feel entitled to use it... and so often too.
You don't get to win an argument by calling somebody a racist without any actual evidence to back that up.
Democrats are the party of racism. Period.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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