A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Democracy seemed to be advancing nearly everywhere, and this could be explained by the fact that democratic governments generally did a better job than military juntas, one-party states and charismatic dictators or demagogues.
Looking to the future, I’d still have some optimism if it weren’t for the situation in the US. Far-right parties have mostly stayed marginal in Europe, and those that have managed to gain power in Hungary and Poland are looking shaky. Putin and Xi look secure in power, but both have made big mistakes. Elsewhere, the demagogues and would-be dictators (Bolsonaro, Duterte, Erdogan, Modi) have generally shown themselves to be incompetents.
But all of this relatively good news is canceled out by what’s happening in the US. As President, Trump handled the pandemic worse than any leader except perhaps Bolsonaro, but still came close to re-election. And he has paid no political price for attempting to overturn the result.
The Republican Party is now openly committed to overturning US democracy, and retains the support of close to half of voters. With a rickety and politicized electoral system and a partisan Supreme Court that’s sufficient to ensure control of the outcomes.
As far as I can see, Trump is virtually certain to be the next President, (whether by winning under the current Electoral College rules or by overturning the results in key states) and, once he is in, certain to establish some kind of dynastic rule. Even if Trump is somehow removed from the picture, the Republican party he has created has already committed itself to seizing and holding power by whatever means necessary. That includes violent insurrection, as we have seen, but it seems unlikely that anything so drastic will be necessary.
Republican state governments can entrench themselves forever, and guarantee that their electoral votes and the overwhelming majority of their congressional delegations will be Republican, whatever the voters (and disenfranchised non-voters) might think about it. That’s more than enough to entrench national Republican rule for the indefinite future.
Since about the 2020 US election, there been presidential elections in Bolivia, Equador, Honduras and Chile (among others). All of these are countries with a recent history of coups and authoritarian / dictatorial rule. (The Chilean right wing candidate Jose Kast openly endorsed Pinochet during the campaign). In Bolivia, Honduras and Chile, left wing candidates won, in Ecuador the right wing candidate. In each instance, the losing party quickly accepted the outcome and conceded defeat. I think on the same day or the day after the election. (Peru, where the left wing candidate also won, was an exception. Here, the election was extremely close, and the right wing candidate alleged election fraud.)
It is remarkable that the US GOP cannot be counted on these days to have even as much commitment to democracy than right wing authoritarians in countries like Honduras.
The current identifying ideology of the Republican Party is this and only this, that Trump Really Won. Belief that Trump Really Won both justifies and requires the overthrow of the current govt by any means necessary. There seems little prospect on the Ds agreeing among themselves to take any dramatic course of action, so it’s not as if we have to worry much that they will start another US civil war. The Ds will predictably do nothing and let events take their course.
Basically, if Republicans get what they think they want (which is far from guaranteed, still) they will inevitability preside over one or more historic disasters, whether Trump or some other figurehead is immaterial. The combination of laissez-faire economics and neo-Victorian enforced morality guarantees an unstable economy and society.
More at https://crookedtimber.org/2021/12/21/getting-it-wrong-on-the-future-of
-democracy/#more-49407
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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^
LOL. The hypocrisy is strong with this one.
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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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This is a good example of a situation where it’s better to bet than argue:
Yale prof thinks the “most likely” scenario in the 2024 election is that the loser of both the popular vote and the electoral college will win.
"All of those things set us up for a scenario where the candidate who loses by every measure, not just by the popular vote, but by the Electoral College, the candidate who loses by every measure will nevertheless be installed as president of the United States," Snyder says. "I think that is probably the most likely scenario in 2024 as things stand now."
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1474120478147194886
What is meant by “This is a good example of a situation where it’s better to bet than argue” ?
It frequently happens that a man delivers his opinions with so much boldness and assurance, that he appears to be under no apprehension as to the possibility of his being in error. The offer of a bet startles him, and makes him pause. Sometimes it turns out that his persuasion may be valued at a dollar, but not at ten. For he does not hesitate, perhaps, to venture a dollar, but if it is proposed to stake ten, he immediately becomes aware of the possibility of his being mistaken - a possibility which has hitherto escaped his observation. If we imagine to ourselves that we have to stake the happiness of our whole life on the truth of any proposition, our judgment drops its air of triumph, we take the alarm, and discover the actual strength of our belief. Thus pragmatical belief has degrees, varying in proportion to the interests at stake.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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From Kyle Rittenhouse to Donald Trump, conservatives are obsessed with being the victim
By all accounts, the principal reason why omicron is causing such havoc in the United States is our low rate of vaccination. The United States, at slightly over 61 percent full vaccination, is among the lowest of the developed world. Cuba has over 84 percent fully vaccinated. Even Brazil, under anti-vaxxer President Jair Bolsonaro has almost 67 percent fully vaccinated. Bolsonaro, like Trump, has been skeptical of the threats of COVID from the start. Yet, he took Trumpian irrationality to a whole new level, claiming a year ago that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine "could turn people into crocodiles or bearded ladies" — and even his country is more vaccinated than the United States.
While there remains much to be learned about omicron and its consequences to public health, one thing is clear: The only reason why the nation is at such extreme public health risk is because the GOP weaponized the pandemic for political gain, convincing their supporters to distrust science and resist any policy, no matter how reasonable, if it came from a Democrat.
We've spent time analyzing the head-scratching right-wing ploy of sowing distrust in vaccines within the GOP constituency, a move which has literally killed off supporters and occasionally GOP leaders and pundits as well. But what we haven't done is recognize that the right-wing response to the pandemic is part of a larger political practice: Victimized Bully Syndrome.
Some of you will be familiar with DARVO, an acronym for deny, attack and reverse victim and offender. DARVO describes the behavior of psychological abusers when they are being held accountable for their behavior. Donald Trump and his supporters clearly exhibit DARVO habits. Rather than accept blame for anything they do, they turn around and accuse those blaming them of creating the problem. Victimized Bully Syndrome (VBS), as I'm describing it, though, is slightly different from DARVO. With DARVO the abusive behavior comes first and DARVO only emerges if the attacker is asked to take responsibility. But with VBS the cries of being victims come first and are used to justify the underlying bullying behaviors. The bully under VBS is always already acting in self-defense.
Take this example: In a recent interview with Fox News, Dr. Mehmet Oz, candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania suggested that Americans had been victimized by President Biden's "one-size-fits-all" COVID-19 "rules that limit our freedom." According to Oz, U.S. citizens "want government to get out of their way to stop scaring them into submission."
If we set aside the sheer stupidity of a doctor suggesting that we need "as many different approaches as possible" to the pandemic, the critical takeaway is Oz's claim that Biden's policy is designed to victimize the public by scaring them, taking away their freedoms, and destroying their dignity. According to this logic, refusing to wear a mask, get vaccinated, or support public health policy is a valid defense, rather than bullying behavior that puts everyone in peril.
And lest there be any doubt, the right isn't just refusing to be vaccinated and to follow public health guidelines; in the face of the pandemic they have chosen to respond with aggressive bullying: engaging in violent confrontations over masking policies, attacking teachers, threatening school board members, violently trolling scientists who speak to the media about COVID, and more. In fact, the violent far-right has exploded in the United States along with COVID-19.
Similar to the "sore winner syndrome" we saw emerge in the wake of former President Trump's election, VBS posits that those on the right are all the time being victimized by their government and that it makes perfect sense to respond aggressively.
It is this exact same logic that was the backdrop to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and we can see the same logic in
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We want, as the X-Files movie once told us, to believe.
“When someone sees a hairy eight-foot-tall apelike man walking through their yard it makes legends real.” Jason Offutt writes in Chasing American Monsters. “It brings the unknown into our homes, and makes the impossible seem all too possible.”5 If cryptids exist, why could the Red Sea not have parted? Why could Jesus Christ not have come back from the dead? A world with Loch Ness monsters and Mothman and Momo and the Jersey Devil is a world where singular things happen, where things more complicated, more joyful, and above all else more incarnate can and do exist. It is a world where folklore is true, and where your grandmother’s reminiscences are as authoritative a source on All That Is as the Journal of Zoology. It is a world that confounds human logic and reveals “natural law” as the boundaries of human cognition. It is a world that is not just enchanted, but also — in its potential for chaos — subordinate to a God who wills things into being, that makes something from nothing, that has fashioned the limbs of the chupacabra. Things exist that should not exist, and that renders our sense of should meaningless. The absurdity of these singular beings, benignly monstrous, makes their existence all the more precious, all the greater a gift. Whatever law governs the birth and death of these rough beasts cannot be contained within the pages of The Botanic Garden.
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/monsters/articles/desperately-seekin
g-mothman
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Deaths of despair: the unrecognized tragedy of working class immiseration
By David Introcaso, Dec. 29, 2021
Given the socioeconomic effects of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, it should have come as no surprise that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths during the 12-month period ending in April 2021, a 28.5% increase over the prior year. Most of these deaths were attributed to the use of synthetic opioids by middle-aged white men. The question immediately begged is: What is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) doing about these so-called deaths of despair?
The answer is sobering.
The term deaths of despair comes from Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who set out to understand what accounted for falling U.S. life expectancies. They learned that the fastest rising death rates among Americans were from drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease. Deaths from these causes have increased between 56% and 387%, depending on the age cohort, over the past two decades, averaging 70,000 per year.
Case and Deaton learned that these deaths disproportionately occurred in white men who had not earned college degrees. In their 2020 book, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” they argued that a key driver of these deaths is economic misery.
The phenomenon was first examined more than a century ago. In 1897, French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined these deaths as “anomic suicides” — anomic meaning alienated — in his book “Le Suicide.” These deaths, he argued, result from a breakdown in social equilibrium or social norms, or when individuals believe there is a lack of communal spirit or conclude the government is indifferent to their needs.
This psychological state is largely the result of economic hardship or the loss of work or wages, something that today is disproportionately experienced by approximately 66 million white workers without college degrees between the ages of 25 and 64 years, or 38% of working-age people. As Case and Deaton showed, this population has seen the purchasing power of their wages decline by 13% since 1979 while per capita income increased 85% over the same period.
The resulting health effects are altogether predictable. Insecurity, deprivation, the loss of possibilities, the lack of belonging, hopelessness, and social maladjustment lead to negative emotions including loneliness, unhappiness, worry, and stress that in turn lead individuals to, in part, experience more pain and pain sensitivity both physical and psychological. Over approximately the past three decades, survey data show that Americans, particularly middle-aged white people, report more pain than respondents in 30 other wealthy countries. Pain, especially chronic pain, can become a gateway to opioid use and addiction.
Factor in the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s no wonder that 911 calls for opioid-related use increased 250% between 2019 and early 2020.
Echoing Durkheim, Case and Deaton concluded, “Jobs are not just the source of money; they are the basis for the rituals, customs, and routines of working-class life. Destroy work and, in the end, working-class life cannot survive. It is the loss of meaning, of dignity, of price, and of self-respect that comes with the loss of marriage and of community that brings on despair.”
Brian Alexander’s recent account of a hospital in Bryan, a small town in Ohio’s northeast corner, offers a glimpse into how destructive anomie can be. Particularly noteworthy is Alexander’s discussions of Keith Swihart, who experiences the worst outcomes from uncontrolled diabetes, including blindness and amputation; his wife, Stephanie, dead at age 46 from cervical cancer; and several of his friends who kill themselves by handgun, rifle, rope, or overdosing on fentanyl and amphetamines. One friend, Zach Rhinard, before fatally shooting himself in the head, wore a baseball cap that read, “ich bin innerlich tot.” Translation: “I am dead inside.”
As sobering as Alexander’s ac
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Our fondness for narratives is driving us mad - The Boston Globe
By Jonathan Gottschall
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20220101161112/https://www.bostonglobe.com
/2021/12/30/opinion/our-fondness-narratives-is-driving-us-mad/
Stories are celebrated by great artists, thought leaders, and scientists as our best hope for reducing bigotry, building empathy, and ultimately encouraging us to behave more humanely. But how does this match up with the current state of the world?
We are living inside a digitally driven big bang of storytelling — a stunning expansion of the universe of stories across all media and genres. A 2020 Nielsen study reported that average Americans now consume a whopping 12 hours of media per day, much of it in narrative form, including hours upon hours of fiction. Now that we have more storytelling than ever, has empathy increased apace? Are we doing a better job of understanding each other across ancient divides of race, class, gender, religion, and political orientation? If stories have such sunny effects, why has the big bang of storytelling coincided with an explosive growth of hostility and polarization rather than harmony and connection?
First, the good news. Well-publicized studies have shown that empathy is a bit like a muscle: The more we flex that muscle by consuming fiction, the more it swells. Research conducted around the world has repeatedly found that merely watching television shows or listening to radio dramas featuring diverse protagonists reduces a variety of viewer prejudices with more power and durability than do more conventional approaches to prejudice reduction like diversity training. Moreover, in an age of furious polarization, a 2021 study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that humble personal anecdotes can bridge fraught moral and political divides even when factual information can’t.
But there’s bad news too. Classically told stories tend to divide the world into good people (protagonists) and bad people (antagonists), which means they generate a unit of callousness for every unit of empathy. The act of generating empathy can also produce empathy’s inverse: a kind of moral blindness to the humanity of whoever is forced into the villain’s role. Fiction, as Fritz Breithaupt explains in his 2019 book “The Dark Sides of Empathy,” conjures not just empathy but “empathetic sadism,” which he defines as “the emotional and intellectual enjoyment that most people feel in situations of altruistic punishment” — for example, when the hero kills, captures, or humiliates the villain.
Empathetic sadism can spill over tragically from fiction to reality. A classic example is “Birth of a Nation,” the 1915 film that spread the mythology of the KKK. But its effects are most destructive in the narratives we label as nonfiction. Research in the emerging field of narrative psychology shows that people don’t come equipped with two narrative modes — one to cope with the neverlands of fiction and another to cope with the complexity of real life. Regardless of where stories sit on the fact-fiction continuum, they have a tendency to divide people into a moralistic trinary of heroes, villains, and victims. The same narrative psychology that allows us to pleasurably suspend disbelief for “Game of Thrones” or “Star Wars” is precisely what draws people into similarly rousing fantasies of good against evil laid out in the overlapping plots of QAnon, COVID-19 dis/misinformation, and the Big Lie of Donald Trump.
The rampant spread of powerful narratives of dis/misinformation is the most disturbing example of the awesome power of stories to drive a whole civilization mad in both senses of the word — to push us into epidemics of intense irrationality while revving up our rage and hostility. Here’s the question: In a world where new technology is making storytelling ever more powerful and weaponizable, where debunked conspiracies reliably out-compete truth in the marketplace of narratives, and where an American cold war of rival narr
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“Remember,” John Adams wrote in December 1814, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a Democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”
In the 207 years since, we came close to proving our second president right.
The United States barely survived a terrible civil war in the 1860s, when 2.5% of the population was killed, the equivalent to losing about 8.25 million Americans today.
Civil war in the United States is far more likely than you think. America’s far-right extremists fit the mold of those who’ve started insurrections in other countries.
There have been some 200 civil wars since 1946. What’s eye-opening here is that when you look at the civil wars since 1946 and their root causes, it sounds eerily like America right now.
People have a false impression that it is the most down-trodden, the poorest, the most discriminated against who tend to start civil wars. In reality, that’s not true. The people who tend to start civil wars are what experts call ‘sons of the soil.’ These are citizens who had either been dominant politically and culturally but were now in decline, or who had once had power and had lost it. (Think Trump and his lost reelection)
This group believes that the country belongs to them, that they have the right to be in power, and when they lose it, they find it incredibly disconcerting. (Think Trump’s ongoing Stop the Steal campaign)
They’re very resentful of groups that are ascendant, and they’re the ones who tend to mobilize and fight to try and re-establish control.
When you hear the term “civil war,” images of Union and Confederate forces slaughtering each other on blood-soaked battlefields like Antietam and Gettysburg come to mind. Twenty-first-century civil wars aren’t like that. Civil wars today tend to be fought by multiple factions, militias, paramilitary groups. Sometimes they work together and are coordinated, sometimes they’re not. And their preferred methods are terror and sometimes guerrilla warfare. They’re not planning to meet the U.S. military in a conventional war.
You can think of prominent examples like the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, failed kidnapping plots two years ago involving Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, and, of course, last year’s attack on the Capitol.
But beyond these high-profile events are countless groups that individually may not seem like much, but in the aggregate constitute a genuine national security threat. So much so that in October 2020, the Department of Homeland Security reported that “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists—specifically white supremacist extremists (WSEs)—will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.”
What do these groups want? The groups know they can’t create a white America (“that ship has sailed”) but they could try and create white ethno-states by targeting synagogues and black churches, in a campaign of terror designed to intimidate non-whites and convince them to not vote.
The overturning of a free and fair election was nipped in the bud on January 6th. Kidnapping the Vice President failed. But for a few brave police officers here, a few seconds there, things might have gone very different.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220106020135/https://www.marketwatch.com
/story/civil-war-in-the-united-states-is-far-more-likely-than-you-think-in-fact-it-may-have-already-begun-11641418149
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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2021 has taught me so much. Like if aliens started invading Earth, half of America would be like "no they're not." Actually, half of the country would be like "No there not"
Jimmy Carter: I Fear for Our Democracy
Mr. Carter was the 39th president of the United States.
One year ago, a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians, stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power. All four of us former presidents condemned their actions and affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 election. There followed a brief hope that the insurrection would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy.
However, one year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over one political party and stoked distrust in our electoral systems. These forces exert power and influence through relentless disinformation, which continues to turn Americans against Americans. According to the Survey Center on American Life, 36 percent of Americans — almost 100 million adults across the political spectrum — agree that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” The Washington Post recently reported that roughly 40 percent of Republicans believe that violent action against the government is sometimes justified.
Politicians in my home state of Georgia, as well as in others, such as Texas and Florida, have leveraged the distrust they have created to enact laws that empower partisan legislatures to intervene in election processes. They seek to win by any means, and many Americans are being persuaded to think and act likewise, threatening to collapse the foundations of our security and democracy with breathtaking speed. I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally — the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power — has become dangerously fragile at home.
I personally encountered this threat in my own backyard in 1962, when a ballot-stuffing county boss tried to steal my election to the Georgia State Senate. This was in the primary, and I challenged the fraud in court. Ultimately, a judge invalidated the results, and I won the general election. Afterward, the protection and advancement of democracy became a priority for me. As president, a major goal was to institute majority rule in southern Africa and elsewhere.
After I left the White House and founded the Carter Center, we worked to promote free, fair and orderly elections across the globe. I led dozens of election observation missions in Africa, Latin America and Asia, starting with Panama in 1989, where I put a simple question to administrators: “Are you honest officials or thieves?” At each election, my wife, Rosalynn, and I were moved by the courage and commitment of thousands of citizens walking miles and waiting in line from dusk to dawn to cast their first ballots in free elections, renewing hope for themselves and their nations and taking their first steps to self-governance. But I have also seen how new democratic systems — and sometimes even established ones — can fall to military juntas or power-hungry despots. Sudan and Myanmar are two recent examples.
For American democracy to endure, we must demand that our leaders and candidates uphold the ideals of freedom and adhere to high standards of conduct.
First, while citizens can disagree on policies, people of all political stripes must agree on fundamental constitutional principles and norms of fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law. Citizens should be able to participate easily in transparent, safe and secure electoral processes. Claims of election irregularities should be submitted in good faith for adjudication by the courts, with all participants agreeing to accept the findings. And the election process should be conducted peacefully, free of intimidation and violence.
Second, we must push for reforms that ensure the security and ac
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The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future by Stephen Marche can be downloaded for free from the mirrors at
https://libgen.unblockit.how/search.php?req=Stephen+Marche+Civil+War
In this deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction, a journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds.
The book begins with Lincoln’s speech on lynch mobs:
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
—Abraham Lincoln, January 27, 1838
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln1/1:130?rgn=div1;view=full
text
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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