A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Where Have All the Grown-ups Gone?
Bob Dole, the former Senate Republican leader and presidential candidate, died on Sunday at age 98. The media were filled with encomiums, which was understandable even for those who opposed much of what he stood for.
It’s not just that he was a war hero, or that he reminds us of an era in which the two parties were willing to work together in the national interest. His life story also reminds us of a time when public figures were supposed to show some sense of responsibility — to possess basic decency, to admit to mistakes when they made them, even to put their lives on the line in time of war. Human nature being what it is, many people who pretended to have these virtues were hypocrites. But at least that was the ideal, and being an obvious crook, liar or coward was politically disqualifying.
Not anymore.
As it happens, Dole’s death came just a few days after we learned what Donald Trump did after he tested positive for the coronavirus last year. He not only concealed the result but also proceeded to put hundreds of people at risk by continuing his normal activities while refusing to wear a mask or practice social distancing. And when he came down with a life-threatening case of Covid, he suggested that he might have caught it from Gold Star families he had met with after his positive test — that is, he blamed people he himself had callously endangered.
At some level, nobody is surprised; we knew that Trump was malignant to a degree never before seen in high office. But what does it say about the state of modern America that nobody expects him to pay any price for this revelation? The loyalty of his base won’t be shaken; he’s still the favorite for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Nor has he paid any price for other character defects that would once have been considered damning. A generation or two ago, could a national political figure have gotten away with being constantly self-pitying, complaining about how badly he’s being treated? Could he have paid no penalty for always refusing to admit error, even if the cover-up required altering weather maps with what appears to have been a Sharpie?
And Trump seems to have set the standard for many of his devotees. Many of the rioters who tried to overturn the election on Jan. 6 seem to be very sorry — for themselves. Kyle Rittenhouse wept on the witness stand, not because he felt remorse over killing people but over the pain of being put on trial. The Crumbleys, who gave their son the gun with which he shot up his Michigan school and killed four students, also seemed very upset — over having been arrested.
All this from a movement obsessed with the idea of masculinity. Weren’t real men traditionally supposed to be strong, silent types who took responsibility for their actions and accepted burdens without complaining? Of course, these are human virtues, not specifically masculine; still, they used to be qualities we expected and admired.
It didn’t start with Trump. We’ve been heading this way for a long time. Back in 2006, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses and the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, I wrote about the “mensch gap” — the unwillingness of the people then running the country to accept responsibility for their own failures, their eagerness to blame others when things went wrong. Later, during the Obama era, it was striking how many critics on the right refused to acknowledge error when their predictions of runaway inflation or the abject failure of Obamacare failed to come true.
But now the transformation of American conservatism — the same movement that complains about liberal “snowflakes” — into a collection of malignant whiners seems to have reached apotheosis. Yes, there are self-pitying hypocrites on the left too; but they don’t dominate the way Trump and Trump-like figures dominate the right.
I’m not entirely sure why this has happened; the degradation probably began decades ago, maybe as early as the Vietnam years. But there’s no question that it has
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Where Have All the Grown-ups Gone?
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Democrats have slit their own throats
Neutral commission maps in the blue states of CA, CO, NJ, VA and WA (93 seats total) will end up costing Dems 10-15 House seats they could have seized by gerrymandering, making Republicans even stronger favorites for House control.
https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1468986740618797070
Nonpartisan commissions draw House of Representative district boundaries that treat Democrats and Republicans equally. But no state controlled by Republicans has ever created a truly nonpartisan redistricting commission. In nearly every red state, the legislature controls district maps and gerrymanders them as ruthlessly as they can. There are a couple of blue states that also do this, but not many. The end result is that blue states tend to draw maps fairly while red states draw maps that heavily favor Republicans.
On the bright side, Democrats can all feel good about themselves for being so dedicated to fair voting. On the down side, Democrats will lose the House of Representatives because of this.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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When a shared national crisis can’t bring people together (Pearl Harbor, say, or a pandemic), a society may have passed the point of no return.
The U.S. is at dangerous "level of polarization,” political scientists warn
By Nicole Karlis, Published December 8, 2021
Politics in the United States have become an increasingly polarized affair for decades, driven largely by the right moving further to the right. Observation of political polarization is not merely anecdotal; studies repeatedly bear this out.
Now, some researchers say the partisan rift in the United States has become so extreme that the country may be at a point of no return.
According to a theoretical model's findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the pandemic failing to unite the country, despite political differences, is a signal that the U.S. is at a disconcerting tipping point. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102144118
Quote:"We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a little bit closer initially . . . but if polarization is too extreme, eventually the effects of a shared fate are swamped by the existing divisions and people become divided even on the shock issue," said network scientist Boleslaw Szymanski, a professor of computer science and director of the Army Research Laboratory Network Science and Technology Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "If we reach that point, we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change, pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society."
Our study was motivated by a highly disturbing puzzle. Confronted with a deadly global pandemic that threatened not only massive loss of life but also the collapse of our medical system and economy, why were we unable to put partisan divisions aside and unite in a common cause, similar to the national mobilization in the Great Depression and the Second World War? We used a computational model to search for an answer in the phase transitions of political polarization. The model reveals asymmetric hysteresis trajectories with tipping points that are hard to predict and that make polarization extremely difficult to reverse once the level exceeds a critical value.
As I've reported before, sociologists and experts in disaster resilience studies often observe that a "therapeutic community" surfaces in the wake of a disaster — whether that's a hurricane, wildfire, or a terrorist attack. While that was the case to some extent after 9/11, the pandemic hasn't united the nation the same way. Experts have argued that any possibility of unity was doomed from the start of the pandemic, in part because of how politically divided and polarized the nation was before the novel coronavirus began spreading. This latest paper adds to this theory, and suggests that the U.S. is so divided that it is at an irreparable point at which unity is not possible.
Szymanski and fellow researchers reached their conclusion by simulating the views of 100 theoretical legislators around 10 polarizing issues. The researchers had their theoretical legislators interact and network with theoretical neighbors and like-minded groups to see the influence these interactions had on polarization, too — akin to a "Sims"-like video game. When manipulating the group's "control parameters" — such as increased party identification, intolerance for disagreement, and extremism — the model found that polarizing behavior among politicians is one reason why the country is as politically divided as it is today.
At various points, the research team introduced an outside threat, like a pandemic, and then recorded how the group behaved. Interestingly, it appeared that when the group introduced an internal threat that failed to unite the country, that meant that the level of polarization was beyond repair.
"If the polarization is very, very deep in these 10 issues, then we are at the very dangerous stage in which it is very difficult to re
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Democrats have slit their own throats
Neutral commission maps in the blue states of CA, CO, NJ, VA and WA (93 seats total) will end up costing Dems 10-15 House seats they could have seized by gerrymandering, making Republicans even stronger favorites for House control.
https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1468986740618797070
Nonpartisan commissions draw House of Representative district boundaries that treat Democrats and Republicans equally. But no state controlled by Republicans has ever created a truly nonpartisan redistricting commission. In nearly every red state, the legislature controls district maps and gerrymanders them as ruthlessly as they can. There are a couple of blue states that also do this, but not many. The end result is that blue states tend to draw maps fairly while red states draw maps that heavily favor Republicans.
On the bright side, Democrats can all feel good about themselves for being so dedicated to fair voting. On the down side, Democrats will lose the House of Representatives because of this.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Already coming up with bullshit excuses for why Democrats will lose big a full year in advance instead of learning any lessons, huh?
Classic Leftists.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
When a shared national crisis can’t bring people together (Pearl Harbor, say, or a pandemic), a society may have passed the point of no return.Quote:
Our study was motivated by a highly disturbing puzzle. Confronted with a deadly global pandemic that threatened not only massive loss of life but also the collapse of our medical system and economy, why were we unable to put partisan divisions aside and unite in a common cause, similar to the national mobilization in the Great Depression and the Second World War?
Bullshit.
Nobody is dying.
Even if we use the bullshit numbers up on Johns Hospkins, the amount of people dying of Covid is so tiny that even when added up with all other causes of deaths it's not even putting a dent in the birth rate.
Get back to me when Covid-20 gets unleashed by Fauci and the Chinese and we're looking at a net negative of -10% or more to the population count year over year.
--------------------------------------------------
Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:815,413 Covid-19 deaths. The example of the USA pulling together was Pearl Harbor. Only 68 civilians died there: "The attack killed 2,403 U.S. personnel, including 68 civilians." The Navy guys volunteered to die for their country, so the only deaths that count are the civilians. Trump has even said that about military deaths. Before those 68 civilians died at Pearl Harbor, the Republicans in the Senate refused to join World War II and the Democrat President couldn't change the Republicans' mind. And yet Nazis were bombing London and had conquered Europe. Japs were invading Asia. And Republicans were saying America First. But after only 68 civilians died, the Republicans in Congress finally, after years of delays and stalling, declared war. Nowadays the Republicans wouldn't care what happened at Pearl Harbor because the 68 civilian deaths (versus 815,413 covid deaths) would most likely be Democrats in Hawaii, a Democrat controlled state.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
When a shared national crisis can’t bring people together (Pearl Harbor, say, or a pandemic), a society may have passed the point of no return.Quote:
Our study was motivated by a highly disturbing puzzle. Confronted with a deadly global pandemic that threatened not only massive loss of life but also the collapse of our medical system and economy, why were we unable to put partisan divisions aside and unite in a common cause, similar to the national mobilization in the Great Depression and the Second World War?
Bullshit.
Nobody is dying.
Even if we use the bullshit numbers up on Johns Hospkins, the amount of people dying of Covid is so tiny that even when added up with all other causes of deaths it's not even putting a dent in the birth rate.
Get back to me when Covid-20 gets unleashed by Fauci and the Chinese and we're looking at a net negative of -10% or more to the population count year over year.
Trump won't have worried about Pearl Harbor Navy deaths. Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’
The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-w
ho-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/
Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Blah, blah, blah...
What a waste of carbon.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Storytelling, a tradition that built human civilization, may destroy it.
Jonathan Gottschall wrote “The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down”
You can download that book and also “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human” from the mirrors at
https://libgen.unblockit.tv/search.php?req=Jonathan+Gottschall+Storyte
lling
Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.
In The Story Paradox, Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains. The results challenge the idea that storytelling is an obvious force for good in human life. Yes, storytelling can bind groups together, but it is also the main force dragging people apart. And it’s the best method we’ve ever devised for manipulating each other by circumventing rational thought. Behind all civilization’s greatest ills—environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare—you will always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story.
Gottschall argues that societies succeed or fail depending on how they manage these tensions. And it has only become harder, as new technologies that amplify the effects of disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and fake news make separating fact from fiction nearly impossible.
With clarity and conviction, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, “How we can change the world through stories?” and start asking, “How can we save the world from stories?”
Why Stories Are Like Taking Drugs
https://lithub.com/why-stories-are-like-taking-drugs/
This is an excerpt from Storytellers Rule the World, chapter 1 from the book “The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down”.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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BAN STORYTELLING!!!!
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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