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:
6ix, did you catch the hint from Senator Whitehouse that he disapproves of billionaires purchasing the loyalty of Supreme Court justices with “gifts, travel and hospitality”?
Meaningless pablum.
Where Senator Whitehouse fails is exactly where you fail.
If you're going to go out of your way like the both of you have to brand yourself with a political identity, then you'd better goddamned well be the first to call out bad behavior on your own side.
But neither of you never do this, so everything you say is hypocritical.
I will once again say, as I've said many times in the past, that as much as I can't stand Ted, he's the only one on your "side" in the last 5 years who EVER does this.
He doesn't do it nearly enough, but at least a small part of him deep down realizes that everything isn't black and white and that he doesn't stand on the side of everything right and virtuous in the world while everybody on the other side is evil incarnate.
Nuance is a thing, there are a billion shades of grey in between, and there are many, many bad actors on both sides.
So Ted has at least a sliver of credibility.
You, Second, have none.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:If you paid attention to what the Senator said, you would note that he did NOT imply that Democrats could take bribes while Republican judges would be prosecuted for taking gifts without reporting them. It is more than a little strange how your mind works with the concept of hypocrisy, 6ix. I bet your strangeness gets you into trouble with people who can see that you are mentally malfunctioning. Every Trumptard I know has unemployment, work, money, family, addiction, health (physical and mental) problems that saner and smarter people can easily avoid because they are not screwed up in the head like Trumptards are. Trumptards are a funny bunch.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix, did you catch the hint from Senator Whitehouse that he disapproves of billionaires purchasing the loyalty of Supreme Court justices with “gifts, travel and hospitality”?
Meaningless pablum.
Where Senator Whitehouse fails is exactly where you fail.
If you're going to go out of your way like the both of you have to brand yourself with a political identity, then you'd better goddamned well be the first to call out bad behavior on your own side.
But neither of you never do this, so everything you say is hypocritical.
Ben Shapiro on "hypocrisy," a concept which always trips up Trumptards. Ben is an American conservative political commentator and media host:
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Gross dude.
Get some new talking points. Broken record and despicable with every post you make.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:It was your suggestion but I think the correct move is to shoot you in your house, Trumptard.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Gross dude.
Get some new talking points. Broken record and despicable with every post you make.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
The Banality of Democratic Collapse By Paul Krugman
America’s democratic experiment may well be nearing its end. That’s not hyperbole; it’s obvious to anyone following the political scene. Republicans might take power legitimately; they might win through pervasive voter suppression; G.O.P. legislators might simply refuse to certify Democratic electoral votes and declare Donald Trump or his political heir the winner. However it plays out, the G.O.P. will try to ensure a permanent lock on power and do all it can to suppress dissent.
But how did we get here? We read every day about the rage of the Republican base, which overwhelmingly believes, based on nothing, that the 2020 election was stolen, and extremists in Congress, who insist that being required to wear a face mask is the equivalent of the Holocaust.
I’d argue, however, that focusing on the insanity can hinder our understanding of how all of this became possible. Conspiracy theorizing is hardly a new thing in our national life; Richard Hofstadter wrote “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” back in 1964. White rage has been a powerful force at least since the civil rights movement.
What’s different this time is the acquiescence of Republican elites. The Big Lie about the election didn’t well up from the grass roots — it was promoted from above, initially by Trump himself, but what’s crucial is that almost no prominent Republican politicians have been willing to contradict his claims and many have rushed to back them up.
Or to put it another way, the fundamental problem lies less with the crazies than with the careerists; not with the madness of Marjorie Taylor Greene, but with the spinelessness of Kevin McCarthy.
And this spinelessness has deep institutional roots.
Political scientists have long noted that our two major political parties are very different in their underlying structures. The Democrats are a coalition of interest groups — labor unions, environmentalists, L.G.B.T.Q. activists and more. The Republican Party is the vehicle of a cohesive, monolithic movement. This is often described as an ideological movement, although given the twists and turns of recent years — the sudden embrace of protectionism, the attacks on “woke” corporations — the ideology of movement conservatism seems less obvious than its will to power.
In any case, for a long time conservative cohesiveness made life relatively easy for Republican politicians and officials. Professional Democrats had to negotiate their way among sometimes competing demands from various constituencies. All Republicans had to do was follow the party line. Loyalty would be rewarded with safe seats, and should a Republican in good standing somehow happen to lose an election, support from billionaires meant that there was a safety net — “wing nut welfare” — in the form of chairs at lavishly funded right-wing think tanks, gigs at Fox News and so on.
Of course, the easy life of a professional Republican wasn’t appealing to everyone. The G.O.P. has long been an uncomfortable place for people with genuine policy expertise and real external reputations, who might find themselves expected to endorse claims they knew to be false.
The field I know best, economics, contains (or used to contain) quite a few Republicans with solid academic reputations. Like just about every academic discipline, the field leans Democratic, but much less so than other social sciences and even the hard sciences. But the G.O.P. has consistently preferred to get its advice from politically reliable cranks.
The contrast with the Biden team, by the way, is extraordinary. At this point it’s almost hard to find a genu
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:It was your suggestion but I think the correct move is to shoot you in your house, Trumptard.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Gross dude.
Get some new talking points. Broken record and despicable with every post you make.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Austerity’s Hidden Purpose
Back in the 1830s, Thomas Peel decided to migrate from England to Swan River in Western Australia. A man of means, Peel took along, besides his family, “300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children,” as well as “means of subsistence and production to the amount of £50,000.” But soon after arrival, Peel’s plans were in ruins.
The cause was not disease, disaster, or bad soil. Peel’s labor force abandoned him, got themselves plots of land in the surrounding wilderness, and went into “business” for themselves. Although Peel had brought labor, money, and physical capital with him, the workers’ access to alternatives meant that he could not bring capitalism.
Karl Marx recounted Peel’s story in Capital, Volume I to make the point that “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons.” The parable remains useful today in illuminating the difference between money and capital.
Suppose for a moment, and for argument’s sake, that everyone agreed that printing another trillion dollars to finance a basic income for the poor would boost neither inflation nor interest rates. The rich and powerful would still oppose it, owing to the debilitating fear that they would end up like Peel in Australia: monied but bereft of the power to compel the less monied.
We are already seeing evidence of this. In the United States, employers are reporting that they cannot find workers as pandemic lockdown rules are lifted. What they really mean is that they cannot find workers who will work for the pittance on offer. The Biden administration’s extension of a $300 weekly supplementary payment to the unemployed has meant that the combined benefits workers receive are more than twice the federal minimum wage – which Congress refused to lift. In short, employers are experiencing something akin to what happened to Peel soon after he arrived in Swan River.
More about Austerity’s Hidden Purpose at
www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/austerity-goal-to-compel-workers-
low-wages-by-yanis-varoufakis-2021-05
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Yup. And we're already feeling inflation too. You can't just decide that printing trillions of dollars doesn't do this, you clown.
Doubling the prices you pay workers is also going to do the same thing.
I'm fully on board with paying livable wages. $7.25 isn't even worth working for in 2021. If you're living in a state like Illinois, you could work part time for $7.25 an hour all year long and just barely cover your property taxes with that. (I think their minimum is $8.25, but that hardly makes a difference).
Assuming you can swallow your pride and take all the rejection, you could make A LOT more money begging people for money all day long.
There's too many shit jobs out there. Not enough good jobs certainly, but not enough jobs in general too.
The problem is that not even $15/hr is going to be a livable wage the way things are going.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:Half of Americans are doing fine because the economy was designed to benefit them. The higher up you go in wealth, the better the design gets for the wealthy.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The problem is that not even $15/hr is going to be a livable wage the way things are going.
The bottom half of the economy is full of people who sharply sense that they are being screwed but they can't seem to think about the details rationally. They do count their pennies but they also throw away thousands of dollars out of ignorance. If a guy like me starts explaining to them what is happening, they get mad, but not at the system. They are mad at me for telling them the only system they have ever known was carefully designed in all the smallest to largest details in order to cheat them out of their money.
It is actually ridiculous that most Americans, rich or poor, do not understand the system that they live in. If they understood, they be on the way to wealth. But they don't really understand anything at all and they refuse to learn because they think they know it all. It is sad that they cannot even bother to understand that there are better functioning systems, but there are. Within 60 to 120 seconds, rich or poor Americans get too bored to care:
https://confrontingpoverty.org/poverty-facts-and-myths/americas-poor-a
re-worse-off-than-elsewhere/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The laws that Democrats can pass are contingent on getting the most moderate member of the caucus on board. If Joe Manchin (D-WV) says, “I won’t do $15 minimum wage, I’ll do $12.” Then you’re stuck with $12 or you get nothing. And so that’s a reality.
But I think the problem with this analysis is the assumption that Manchin is an ideological roadblock for progressivism, where he seems to me more of a procedural roadblock to the constitutional hardball that needs to get played here. I mean, he voted for the Covid-19 relief bill, and that was one of the most left-wing things I’ve ever seen come out of Congress. So I don’t actually think that Manchin is that far from the center of the caucus in terms of policy.
Where Manchin seems to be very far away from what House Democrats want to do is on the democracy reform stuff. It’s maddening because nothing that Manchin wants to do policy-wise can get done without abolishing the filibuster. Democrats are not going to have a majority after next year if they don’t do some of these things now. So it’s a mistake to assume Manchin can’t be moved. That’s the job of leadership. That’s Joe Biden’s job. That’s Chuck Schumer’s job.
Let’s just say that Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, for whatever reason, refuse to respond to the realities of the moment — then what? It’s bleak. There’s not much else the Democrats can do the next two years as far as legislation. I don’t know what else to say other than the Democrats have to get extremely lucky in next year’s elections. They need to luck into the most favorable environment for the president’s party that we haven’t ever had for a midterm election.
More at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22432229/democracy-america-dem
ocratic-party-reform
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:Half of Americans are doing fine because the economy was designed to benefit them. The higher up you go in wealth, the better the design gets for the wealthy.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The problem is that not even $15/hr is going to be a livable wage the way things are going.
The bottom half of the economy is full of people who sharply sense that they are being screwed but they can't seem to think about the details rationally. They do count their pennies but they also throw away thousands of dollars out of ignorance. If a guy like me starts explaining to them what is happening, they get mad, but not at the system. They are mad at me for telling them the only system they have ever known was carefully designed in all the smallest to largest details in order to cheat them out of their money.
It is actually ridiculous that most Americans, rich or poor, do not understand the system that they live in. If they understood, they be on the way to wealth. But they don't really understand anything at all and they refuse to learn because they think they know it all. It is sad that they cannot even bother to understand that there are better functioning systems, but there are. Within 60 to 120 seconds, rich or poor Americans get too bored to care:
https://confrontingpoverty.org/poverty-facts-and-myths/americas-poor-a
re-worse-off-than-elsewhere/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
You're a liar. You need to stop interjecting yourself into any of your arguments.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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