A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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PAGE 627 of 725
Yes. It is Soros.
Maybe if you started to call out bad actors in your party instead of pretending everything done under the Democratic Party flag was good and right you could have prevented the collapse of the party.
It's too late now.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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Why do Trump voters act the way they do? Ethan Grey explains, but before getting to the explanation, here is a Supreme Court decision, made yesterday, about the same subject:
Quote:More about the details of that case at
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court abolished individuals’ ability to sue Customs and Border Protection agents who violate their constitutional rights. In the process, the conservative supermajority came close to smothering lawsuits against all federal officers who defy the Constitution, granting them near-impenetrable immunity. The liberal justices, in dissent, took the extraordinary step of identifying the cause of this disturbing development: the addition of new justices appointed by Donald Trump.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/sotomayor-border-patrol-ci
vil-rights-lawsuits.html
The details didn't really make any difference to how the Trump justices decided the case. Change all the details of the case and Trump's justices would have made the same decision because of their psychology. Ethan Grey explains why Trump's appointed judges did what they did and Grey explains why Trump voters do what they do.
Ethan Grey @_EthanGrey
https://twtext.com/article/1534024357957230594
11:08 PM · Jun 6, 2022·Twitter Web App
This is a thread on Republican messaging.
Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:
1. They can tell people what to do.
2. You cannot tell them what to do.
This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy. There’s an additional layer of complexity to this (later in the thread), but this is the basic formula.
You've watched the Republican Party champion the idea of "freedom" while you have also watched the same party openly assault various freedoms, like the freedom to vote, freedom to choose, freedom to marry who you want and so on.
If this has been a source of confusion, then your assessments of what Republicans mean by “freedom” were likely too generous. Here’s what they mean:
1. The freedom to tell people what to do.
2. Freedom from being told what to do.
When Republicans talk about valuing “freedom”, they’re speaking of it in the sense that only people like them should ultimately possess it. Or in the Supreme Court case, Customs and Border Protection agents are granted near-impenetrable immunity.
So with this in mind, let’s examine some of our political issues with an emphasis on who is telling who what to do. And hopefully there will be no ambiguity about what the Republican Party message is ever again.
Let’s start with the COVID-19 pandemic. We were told by experts in infectious diseases that to control the spread of the pandemic, we had to socially distance, mask, and get vaccinated. So, in a general sense, we were being told what to do. Guess who had a big problem with that.
All Republicans saw were certain people trying to tell them what to do, which was enough of a reason to make it their chief priority to insist that they will not be told what to do. Even though what they were told to do could save lives, including their own.
As you can see, this is a very stunning commitment to refusing to be told what to do. So much so that it is not in fact “pro-life.” But Republicans will nevertheless claim to be the “pro-life” party. That is because they recognize “pro-life” can be used to tell people what to do.
The reason they say they are “pro-life” when they are trying to tell women what to do with their bodies is not out of genuine concern for human life, but because they recognize that in this position, they can tell women what to do with their bodies.
That’s why when you use that same appeal—“pro-life”—when you ask Republicans to do something about gun violence in schools, it doesn’t work. Because you are now in the position of telling Republicans what to do. That’s precisely why they don’t want to do anything about it.
Anyway, gun violence in schools is not a problem, but their children having to wear masks in schools is. Because somebody is telling their children
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Researchers find growing ‘mortality gap’ between Democratic and Republican counties
by Marta Hill - Yesterday 9:44 AM
Mortality rates since 2001 have decreased more in Democratic counties than in Republican counties, creating a widening mortality gap, a new study shows.
The study, conducted in part by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, examined mortality rates and federal and state election data across the country from 2001 to 2019. ( https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o1308 ) They found a mortality gap — or a widening difference in death rates — between counties that had voted for a Democrat or a Republican in previous elections.
Specifically, mortality rates fell 22% in Democratic counties, as compared to only an 11% decrease in Republican counties.
“In an ideal world, politics and health would be independent of each other and it wouldn’t matter whether one lives in an area that voted for one party or another,” Dr. Haider Warraich, a corresponding author of the study and member of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham, said in a statement. “But that is no longer the case. From our data, we can see that the risk of premature death is higher for people living in a county that voted Republican.”
This pattern was consistent across various subgroups explored in the study, including sex, race and ethnicity, and urban-rural location.
The study found that the age-adjusted mortality rate for both men and women was lower and improved more in Democratic counties than Republican ones.
When looking at the most common causes of death, Democratic counties saw greater reductions in mortality rate. The researchers found heart disease and cancer remain the leading causes of death in counties regardless of political affiliation. But they discovered declines in death from heart disease were more pronounced, resulting in a widening gap. By the end of the study period, Republican counties saw higher mortality rates than Democratic counties for cancer as well.
More at https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/researchers-find-growing-mort
ality-gap-between-democratic-and-republican-counties/ar-AAYdOya
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Is American Democracy Still Doomed?
Consider America’s incredibly convoluted local government structures. It’s pretty normal for a town or city to have an elected government that is itself subordinated to a county government which in turn is subordinated to a state government. The city government sometimes replicates the Madisonian structure of a mayor “checked” by a city council, and the state government always does. Then the state government is also bicameral (unless you live in Nebraska). And there tends to be a separate school board. The District Attorney is elected separately from the city or county government. The state probably has several statewide elected officials who aren’t the governor.
The actual lines of responsibility are incredibly confusing, the various officials like to point the finger and shift blame to each other, nobody has any idea who the different people are or what they stand for, and absolutely anything that anyone tries to do initiates many rounds of lawsuits. I think it really is true that this madcap festival of voting serves less to generate “democracy” in the sense of popular control over governance than to simply obscure what is actually happening and who (if anyone) is in charge. The skein of local democracy turns out to mostly be a series of low-turnout, low-salience elections that mask an underlying reality of governance by opaque coalitions of insider stakeholders — contractors, cops, bureaucrats, and psychos who have the time to show up to community meetings.
More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-american-democracy-still-doomed?s=r
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Is American democracy doomed?
The classic democratic breakdown scenario stems from something like the 2011 debt ceiling standoff; ideologically driven gridlock in the face of imminent disaster lead to the president deciding (in good faith) that he needs to essentially set the rule of law aside in order to discharge his higher responsibilities to the country. During the Obama administration, we kept walking up to that line only to have Republican Congressmen blink at the last minute.
Now suppose in 2024 the Democrats obtain an average performance in terms of the popular vote, leaving the country with President Donald Trump, a Republican House majority, and 61 Republican Party senators.
Now suppose Republicans enact some right-wing policies, face some public backlash, and lose a couple of Senate seats in 2026. Then in 2028, Pete Buttigieg beats Ron DeSantis and is elected president, and Democrats pick up a couple more Senate seats. Well now the problem is that Buttigieg needs to appoint a cabinet, but the Senate contains 57 Republicans. And each of them feels, legitimately, that they shouldn’t need to vote “yes” on nominees whose ideas they disagree with. But of course Buttigieg (also legitimately) doesn’t want to appoint people whose ideas he disagrees with. He feels, and Democrats agree, that he won the election fair and square and deserves a team that embraces his ideas. But GOP senators feel, and Republicans agree, that they won their elections fair and square and shouldn’t need to vote to confirm people who they dislike.
You end up with a government that is enmeshed in crisis from Day One with acting officials all over the government, a right-wing judiciary nullifying executive actions, the Buttigieg administration dismissing the obstruction as illegitimate, Republican impeachment efforts falling short of the two-thirds bar, and ultimately the question of who governs the country coming down to whose orders get followed. Now of course more moderate members like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and maybe even John Cornyn will try to form a Gang of 12 or whatever to resolve the standoff. But by 2028, there just aren’t going to be enough moderates left for a gang-based deal to work. The doom of the country is going to come not from anyone’s authoritarian impulses, but from the fact that the American system requires constant compromise to function on a basic level, and we increasingly have political leaders who don’t compromise.
More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-american-democracy-still-doomed?s=r
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Bad thinkers
Why do some people believe conspiracy theories? (Trump Won, for example.) It’s not just who or what they know. It’s a matter of intellectual character.
Usually, when philosophers try to explain why someone believes things (weird or otherwise), they focus on that person’s reasons rather than their character traits. On this view, the way to explain why "Oliver" believes that 9/11 was an inside job is to identify his reasons for believing this, and the person who is in the best position to tell you his reasons is Oliver. When you explain Oliver’s belief by giving his reasons, you are giving a ‘rationalising explanation’ of his belief.
The problem with this is that rationalising explanations take you only so far. If you ask Oliver why he believes 9/11 was an inside job he will, of course, be only too pleased to give you his reasons: it had to be an inside job, he insists, because aircraft impacts couldn’t have brought down the towers. He is wrong about that, but at any rate that’s his story and he is sticking to it. What he has done, in effect, is to explain one of his questionable beliefs by reference to another no less questionable belief. Unfortunately, this doesn’t tell us why he has any of these beliefs. There is a clear sense in which we still don’t know what is really going on with him.
Now let’s flesh out Oliver’s story a little: suppose it turns out that he believes lots of other conspiracy theories apart from the one about 9/11. He believes the Moon landings were faked, that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered by MI6, and that the Ebola virus (or covid-19) is an escaped bioweapon. Those who know him well say that he is easily duped, and you have independent evidence that he is careless in his thinking, with little understanding of the difference between genuine evidence and unsubstantiated speculation. Suddenly it all begins to make sense, but only because the focus has shifted from Oliver’s reasons to his character. You can now see his views about 9/11 in the context of his intellectual conduct generally, and this opens up the possibility of a different and deeper explanation of his belief than the one he gives: he thinks that 9/11 was an inside job because he is gullible in a certain way. He has what social psychologists call a ‘conspiracy mentality’.
The gullible rarely believe they are gullible and the closed-minded don’t believe they are closed-minded. In practical terms, one of the hardest things about dealing with people such as Oliver is that they are more than likely to accuse you of the same intellectual vices that you detect in them. You say that Oliver is gullible for believing his 9/11 conspiracy theory; he retorts that you are gullible for believing the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission. You say that he dismisses the official account of 9/11 because he is closed-minded; he accuses you of closed-mindedness for refusing to take conspiracy theories seriously.
It’s important not to be too disconcerted by this attempt to turn the tables on you. True, no one is immune to self-ignorance. That doesn’t excuse Oliver. The fact is that his theory is no good, whereas there is every reason to believe that aircraft impacts did bring down the Twin Towers. Just because you believe the official account of what happened in 9/11 doesn’t make you gullible if there are good reasons to believe that account. Equally, being skeptical about the wilder claims of 9/11 conspiracy theorists doesn’t make you closed-minded if there are good reasons to be skeptical. Oliver is gullible because he believes things for which he has no good evidence, and he is closed-minded because he dismisses claims for which there is excellent evidence. It’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that what counts as good evidence is a subjective matter. To say that Oliver lacks good evidence is to draw attention to the absence of eye-witness or forensic support for his theory about 9/11, and to the fact that his theory has been refuted by experts. Oliver might not accept any of this but that is, a
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“Prove to the World You’ve Lost Your Son”
How a Tulsa grandmother, Kelley Watt, became a vicious Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist—in her own words.
Hours after the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead, it began.
“I’m sorry but I have to say it,” one poster wrote on a far-right message board. “We have to have another false flag shooting, killing small children.”
“Those directing false flags know the emotional response from the Buffalo shooting is wearing down for the sheep,” another person posted online. “So they did another one in Uvalde Texas to reinforce the response. Don’t be fooled. False Flag season is here.”
This script could have come from 10 years ago—and in fact, some of the same people spreading lies about Uvalde have been doing it for a decade. I have spent the past four years tracking the rise and spread of misinformation about a tragedy heartbreakingly similar to Uvalde: the Sandy Hook massacre. The haunting echoes between the two shootings don’t stop at the young victims.
. . .
Whatever drives Kelley Watt, the toll her quests took on her family is clear. Shortly after I learned of Jim Watt’s death, I spoke to their daughter, Madison. In our exchanges, Kelley Watt had spoken proudly of Madison, a gifted artist and linguist, who to Watt’s frustration “doesn’t question things the way her mother does.”
In a fraught, seven-hour conversation, Madison relived the breakdown of her family while her mother pursued self-actualization through conspiracy-mongering. A reserved, cerebral young woman, she left Tulsa for good when she won a scholarship to a prestigious university in New York. Today she lives with her family in Europe, where she works as a consultant. She pushes back against her mother’s beliefs, but has never been able to dissuade her.
When cornered by the truth, Kelley Watt “moves the goalposts,” Madison said, and she didn’t see much hope for changing her mother’s mind. “The only thing that could make her question it would be if that inner circle of hers started to doubt or chip away, but even then, it would be hard,” she told me.
“There’s a great deal of narcissism in this idea that ‘everyone’s got it wrong and we’re in this select group of people that knows.’ It would explode her own persona to allow any doubt to come in. Her whole identity has been built on this for so many years. She’s invested so much.”
Madison recalled years inhabiting the dreams her mother had for her, a shy, bookish little girl dressed in fur and entered in beauty contests. Once, while her mother shopped at Dillard’s, Madison crawled into a hulking four-poster bed on display and fell asleep. Finding her, Kelley was so taken by the tableau that she bought the bed. After the Watts lost their house, mother and daughter slept in the bed together, in an apartment so tiny they put it in the dining room. (Definitely the story of angry poor white trash Kelley Watt.)
More at https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/06/shooting-school-texas-uvalde-
sandy-hook-conspiracy.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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History Says Democracy Will Die if Democrats Don’t Try “Going Big”
by Jon Schwarz
https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/franklin-roosevelt-new-deal-robert
-kuttner-book/
During the 1930s, a beast called fascism stirred to life and began overwhelming societies across the world. Within 10 years, it was clear this had been one of history’s worst ideas. But the unappealing reality is that during the fascist moment, many, many people thrilled to its appeal — and not just in the places that would become the Axis powers in World War II.
Yet the United States didn’t go fascist. Why? In 1941, the journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote an unsettling article for Harper’s Magazine which asked the question, “Who Goes Nazi?” Based on her time spent in Europe — she was the first U.S. reporter expelled from Nazi Germany — Thompson explained, “Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.” Moreover, Thompson wrote, huge swaths of Americans possessed this type of mind.
Looked at from a distance of nearly a century, the reason the U.S. evaded fascism seems clear. It wasn’t that we’re nicer or better than other countries, thanks to our inherent sterling character. We just got lucky. The football of history bounced the right way for the country. And a huge part of that luck was Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Roosevelt was exactly the right president at the right time. The New Deal demonstrated that democracy could deliver unmistakable benefits, both material and emotional, to desperate people, and thereby drained away much of the psychological poison that powers fascism.
Then, over the next 30 years, something terrible happened: America forgot all this. We forgot how lucky we got. We forgot the New Deal was not a mountain range created by nature but an extraordinary achievement that was erected by humans and could therefore either be extended or destroyed.
Robert Kuttner illustrates this eloquently in his new book “Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy.” Kuttner, born in 1943, writes, “I am a child of the New Deal. My parents bought their first home with a government-insured mortgage. When my father was stricken with cancer, the VA paid for excellent medical care. After he died, my mother was able to keep our house thanks to my dad’s veteran’s benefits and her widow’s pension from Social Security.”
The problem, he says, is, “My generation grew up thinking of the system wrought by the Roosevelt revolution as normal. … But this seemingly permanent social contract was exceptional. … Above all, it was fragile, built on circumstances and luck as much as enduring structural change.”
Kuttner has been fighting for the New Deal, and against its ferocious enemies, for his entire life. He started as one of journalist I.F. Stone’s assistants, served as a congressional investigator, was general manager of Pacifica’s WBAI Radio in New York City, and has been a regular newspaper columnist. Perhaps most significantly, he’s co-founded two enduring institutions: the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, and The American Prospect, one of the zestiest liberal publications in the U.S.
During much of this time, Kuttner has been trying to persuade the Democratic Party to care about its heritage and stop collaborating with the U.S. right in undermining the New Deal extended universe. But in “Going Big,” Kuttner makes a scary case that the stakes are now much larger than this. The book’s first words are “Joe Biden’s presidency will be either a historic pivot back to New Deal economics and forward to energized democracy, or heartbreaking interregnum between two bouts of deepening American fascism.” The final chapter is titled “America’s Last Chance.”
“Going Big” is largely the story of how we got to this moment, starting with Roosevelt and ending in January of this year, when it went to press. It’s filled with peculiar and little-known history, such as the fact that at the 1932 Democratic Party convention, candidates required two-
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What's democracy's greatest threat? One historian has a clear answer
There are so many things wrong with our political system: the electoral college, lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices, the ambiguous wording of certain constitutional amendments. But Nick Seabrook’s “One Person, One Vote” argues that many of America’s problems stem from one eternally timely issue.
Gerrymandering involves the redrawing of congressional, state and local districts for political gain. It’s done by both sides and has often been used to sideline minority representation, especially in the aftermath of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that removed obstacles that had long prevented Black people from voting in the South.
Seabrook’s title refers to a series of 1960s Supreme Court decisions that required every district to contain roughly the same number of people. But it’s also an ironic title because the increasingly sophisticated process works around that requirement, stretching and squeezing districts to predetermine outcomes and making votes count for less and less.
“The number of competitive seats has been declining every decade and is now at its lowest point in probably a hundred years,” Seabrook, a professor at the University of North Florida, said during a recent video chat. Moving forward, the conservative-majority Supreme Court seems set to allow further distortions of the map as states engage in furious lawsuits to settle a new round of redistricting.
In our conversation, Seabrook made clear that practical solutions exist but achievable ones are in short supply. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Gun control is just the latest source of frustration with government inaction. Republican members of Congress in safe, gerrymandered districts worry only about being primaried from the right. Is that an additional obstacle to sensible reform?
Yes, but it’s not just gun control. Gerrymandering has magnified the divide between parties and contributes to the disappearance of centrists. So we’re starting to see the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert winning elections and being secure enough in their seats to do the kinds of things they’ve done. They’re obviously outliers, but they’re indicative of a broader trend. It’s manifested on both sides, but the Republicans are more extreme. It's only likely to get worse looking in the latest cycle emerging from redistricting. [Districts are redrawn based on a new census at the beginning of every decade.]
Both parties gerrymander. Are the Republicans more willing to discard democratic norms or just better at the process?
I don’t think the Republican Party has been more devious or underhanded, they’ve just had better fortune and timing. They came into power in the 2010 election, winning control of state legislatures right when the technology was there to much more accurately forecast how districts would perform in the future. Now these gerrymanders hold up for an entire decade.
There’s a sense that Democrats have been unilaterally disarming. In California, with Proposition 11, a lot of powerful Democrats — Nancy Pelosi and others — opposed the creation of that commission. Otherwise, imagine how far the Democrats could go in gerrymandering the 55 congressional districts. California alone might have been sufficient to wipe out all other Republican gains.
More at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-s-democracy-s-greatest-thr
eat-one-historian-has-a-clear-answer/ar-AAYpf6D
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What's democracy's greatest threat?
Democrats.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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