A thread for Democrats Only
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Even Michael Rappaport said he's going to vote for Trump. And that dude is a Lefty psychopath.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Book Review: Mount's 'Caesars' Examines How Wannabe Dictators Rise and Fall
A new book looks at how Julius Caesar’s legacy informs the strongmen of today.
By Daniel W. Drezner | December 10, 2023
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/10/mount-big-little-casears-book-rev
iew-wannabe-dictators-johnson-trump/
We appear to be living in an age of aspiring Caesars.
Consider Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and, of course, former U.S. President Donald Trump. All were democratically elected in political systems with varying degrees of freedom and fairness. All weaponized their newfound state control in attempts to preserve their respective grips on power. Though some were more successful than others at doing so, all of these leaders weakened the democratic regimes that facilitated their rise.
This plague of wannabe strongmen is the topic of Ferdinand Mount’s Big Caesars and Little Caesars. To use a Britishism, Mount is a classic “wet Tory” who mixes establishment values with more liberal politics. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church college at the University of Oxford. He holds a family baronetcy; that family includes his first cousin once removed, former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. Mount headed up then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit in the 1980s before losing faith in Thatcherite ideological zeal. He subsequently edited the Times Literary Supplement in the 1990s and has taken to writing for the Daily Telegraph and the London Review of Books in this century.
The first words of his text are these: “Caesars are back, big Caesars and little Caesars, in big countries and little countries, in advanced nations and backward nations.”
From that Seussian opening, Mount’s book explores the concept of Caesarism and Caesars in politics: what causes their rise, and what causes their downfall. In Mount’s telling, a Caesar is an aspiring dictator intent on destroying existing institutions and establishing themselves as the maker and breaker of laws. Big Caesars differ from little Caesars in their ambition and their success. For Mount, where big Caesars distinguish themselves is that “their violence, their law-breaking, their lying, are on a huge, often limitless scale,” whereas little Caesars “go only as far as they need to” in rigging the system to suit their ambitions.
The subtitle of Mount’s book is “How they rise and how they fall—from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson.” This captures one possible problem with the book before it even begins: The text mixes analysis of dictators such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler with the likes of Johnson, the erstwhile British prime minister. The former are most definitely big Caesars, while it is hard to view Johnson as anything but a little Caesar. Fortunately, the book tackles this disparity well: As Mount explains, “the tricks and techniques [are] common to all Caesars, big and little. … They all operate along the same spectrum.”
Chapters exploring episodes such as the 1820 Cato Street Conspiracy—when a small group of radical activists plotted (and failed) to behead the entire British cabinet—or the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich—in which Hitler’s fledgling Nazi Party attempted to forcibly overthrow the Weimar Republic—demonstrate how close tin-pot dictators can become to the real thing. Caesarism that might be viewed as “little” in the West, such as Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency that lasted from 1975 to 1977, had serious repercussions. Gandhi’s moves had costs in the short term in the form of mass arrests and forced sterilizations designed by Gandhi’s son Sanjay to limit population growth. According to Mount, in the long-term, Gandhi’s actions provided an illiberal precedent for Modi to exploit.
In the case of Hitler, history repeats itself, first as farce and then as tragedy. His failed, illegal putsch paved the way for a
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
For example, Trump and his supporters like to present the so-called Make America Great Again movement as an unstoppable force. This spin elides some inconvenient facts. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes; he lost the 2020 popular vote by more than double that number.
This is why California keeps breaking our hearts when they promise that they will secede from the Union and they never follow through.
2016 Presidential General Votes by State:
California: 8,753,788 Clinton / 4,483,810 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 4,269,978
New York: 4,556,124 Clinton / 2,819,534 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 1,736,590
Illinois: 3,090,729 Clinton / 2,146,015 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 944,714
2020 Presidential General Votes by State:
California: 11,110,250 Biden / 6,006,429 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 5,103,821
New York: 5,244,886 Biden / 3,251,997 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 1,992,889
Illinois: 3,471,915 Biden / 2,446,891 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 1,025,024
TOTAL 2016 VOTES: 65,853,625 Clinton / 62,985,106 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 2,868,519
TOTAL 2020 VOTES: 81,284,666 Biden / 74,224,319 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 7,060,347
In 2016 if California was not part of the Union, Trump won the popular vote among all 49 other states combined by 1,401,459.
In 2020 if California was not part of the Union, Trump only lost the popular vote among all 49 other states combined by 1,956,526. Remove New York too, and Trump won the popular vote among all 48 other states combined by 36,363.
Neither of these examples even need to remove Illinois from the popular vote totals for Trump to win.
This is why the Electoral College exists. So California and New York don't end up making policy for the entire fucking rest of the country that doesn't agree at all with how California and New York run things.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Why are Americans getting shorter?
By Andrew Van Dam | December 15, 2023
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/15/why-are-americans-g
etting-shorter/
Elementary school children in the 1950s often received full meals, cooked that day, sometimes as part of a government-funded program. (Camerique/Getty Images)
You already know we’re getting heavier. Rising obesity rates are as American as apple pie — a cliché that seems freshly relevant in this context. But did you know we’re also getting shorter?
We didn’t! At least, not until we tried to use the National Health Interview Survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to figure out which professions boast the tallest workers.
We split the rankings by gender, so our analysis didn’t simply lead us to the most male-dominated jobs, such as mechanics and engineers. Among women, the tallest are public officials — a category that includes top executives as well as legislators — and a broad category that includes writers, artists, entertainers and athletes. Among men, the tallest are, again, public officials, who share that distinction with sales representatives.
This made us wonder: Heights are self-reported in this survey, and the tallest professions are known for their spin skills. So, could the great American height slump somehow be fueled by Americans growing more honest about their stature?
Well, no. We saw similar results in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a separate, gold-standard CDC data set that deputizes trained personnel to measure people’s height, weight and other dimensions according to a 91-page-manual. If anything, that source shows an even sharper decline in America’s height — though we’re still talking about fractions of an inch. Height shifts slowly, especially at the national level.
Similarly, a truly immense analysis of expert measurements in 200 countries and territories found that height had slipped among 19-year-old Americans in the late 1990s and 2000s. Nineteen-year-old American men were the 36th-tallest globally in 1985, but by 2019, they were 47th. Women the same age fell from 38th to 58th, behind China and Lebanon.
Also, we’re not as bad at guessing our measurements as you might think. In a 2020 analysis, American Cancer Society researchers asked more than 2,600 Americans to state their height and weight, and then — without warning — weighed and measured them. Their findings show that a large majority of us know our height within two inches, and our weight within 10-plus pounds. (Though we all tend to err on the svelte side.)
If anything, self-reported heights underestimate our national shortening, according to a separate U.S. comparison of self-reported and expert-measured heights. “Data showed that overreporting of height increased over time in both men and women,” the report’s authors write, “while underreporting of weight increased in men but not women.”
And there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation why public officials and sales representatives are so tall: bias. We prefer towering politicians — we last picked a president of below-average height for his era, William McKinley, in 1896 — and studies of people such as hiring managers often find that they believe a taller salesman, for example, will impress customers.
The most diminutive occupations hold another clue. The shortest men work on farms, while the shortest women clean. Both professions hire the highest share of immigrant workers for their respective genders. And Americans who were born outside the country tend to be much shorter than folks who were born here — it’s one of the biggest height gaps we saw.
The immigrant share of the U.S. workforce has almost doubled since 1994, from 11 percent to 20 percent, according to our analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Could immigration explain American shrinkage?
It’s certainly a major factor. But it’s not the only one. Even among native-born Americans, heights have slipped. That inspired us to look at the other subtle-but-seismic shift in the
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I guess women are going to have to stop swiping left on guys under 5' 10" if they want a hookup in the future.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:You're short, unemployed, toothless, and a diabetic with an insulin pump. I can see your dating future will be worse than now, especially if Trump loses, and that causes you to buy a gun to kill Democrats. Women tend to avoid lazy, poor, and angry white trash men with guns, especially the ones with strong opinions opposing abortion and women's rights.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I guess women are going to have to stop swiping left on guys under 5' 10" if they want a hookup in the future.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You're short, unemployed, toothless, and a diabetic with an insulin pump. I can see your dating future will be worse than now, especially if Trump loses, and that causes you to buy a gun to kill Democrats. Women tend to avoid lazy, poor, and angry white trash men with guns, especially the ones with strong opinions opposing abortion and women's rights.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I guess women are going to have to stop swiping left on guys under 5' 10" if they want a hookup in the future.
Yeah. I'm diabetic, retired and average size. I'm also great looking with an athletic build, extremely skilled and without a want in the world.
I have no desire to date, brother. Have I ever once even said anything that would give you the slightest hint that I'd even be interested in dating since you've known me? The lowest common denominator in all of my failed relationships is me. After the Honeymoon period in a relationship is over and a relationship becomes actual work, I always lose interest and break somebody's heart. I'm better off alone and man enough to admit it. Quite a few people, male and female, are built that way, so you're not going to shame me on this issue.
I already have a gun. As long as there aren't any Democrats breaking into my house to steal something, they're not going to get shot by me.
I'm not poor or lazy. I've got plenty of money and everything is paid for. I get a lot of work done around my house, and I know how to fix pretty much anything whether it's house or car related. Most 20 year old men don't even know how to change the oil in their car or change a tire.
On abortion, my belief is that Republicans should just STFU and let the Democrats have it. If there is a God and he doesn't approve, they'll be dealt with after they die. If not, no harm no foul.
I'm fine with woman's rights too, so long as we're talking about equal rights. Feminists are not for equality. They're for superiority. I'm an egalitarian.
And, by the by... If you were diagnosed diabetic tomorrow you would kill yourself by the end of the year because you're a soy-infused pussy.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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What became of politics in the Long 2010s.
By Mark Dunbar | Dec 20, 2023
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/presentation-and-pow
er
Reviewed Here
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
By Vincent Bevins
New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.
The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession
By Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger
New York: Verso Books, 2023.
Download the books for free from the mirrors at
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Vincent+Bevins
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Borriello+Jager
I “joined” the Occupy movement in my junior year of college. It was my first taste of political activism. Since turning eighteen and having my first real job (security guard), I'd been vaguely socialist. Before then I’d been vaguely right-wing. I was nervous during the first meeting. I didn’t look the part — six-four, athletic-ish, Nike shorts and Under Armour hoodie — and, worse, I knew I didn’t. I didn’t know the lingo. I didn’t know the etiquette. I didn’t know anything. I just knew I didn't like following orders from people who weren’t accountable to me.
The meeting was packed. It was conducted (we wouldn’t want to say “led,” would we?) by a guy who looked the part — short, skinny, long hair. The first red flag was when we were advised (not told, of course) to use spirit fingers rather than clap. The second red flag was when we voted to divide between town and campus groups — the town group would focus on housing, the campus group on student debt. In the campus group, all the ideas for what we should do were theatrical — hold up a banner during a football game, project student debt numbers on the side of a bank. That didn’t interest me. I was there for power, not presentation. But I stuck around for numerical strength, until, one night, after police removed us from occupying the political science building, a fellow Occupier accused me of being an undercover cop. In her defense, I did look that part.
This was during the Long 2010s (2009-2022), a decade during which there occurred more mass protests than any decade in history. The protests were against the usual suspects: capitalism, racism, imperialism, greed, corruption. Two new books, Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution and The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, are about these protests and why they seemed to summon more of what they protested against — more greed, more racism, more corruption. They take different approaches. The Populist Moment is an academic investigation into the electoral failures of left-wing candidates in Europe and the United States (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Greece’s Syriza party), while If We Burn is a journalistic account of street protests in the Third World (Brazil, Indonesia, Chile) as well as Turkey and Ukraine.
While the electoral and protest approaches are different, they yielded the same result. The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies. Protestors couldn’t make demands because they shunned the formal structures of decision-making that could have led to change; protest candidates couldn’t advance concrete policies because they had no confidence those policies would be electorally sustainable. In other words, where there was a will there was no way, and where there was a way there was no will. Still, the shell of failure can contain kernels of success. Bernie Sanders, for example, didn’t become president — he wasn't the Democratic nominee — but he was a viable candidate. And the skill and knowledge acquired during that time (campaign discipline, policy formation, ideological communication) did not disappear overnight. We see these qualities now in the ambition and vibrancy of the labor movement, which has recently won big victories in the film and auto industries, among other plac
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Biden's migrant crisis: Illegal border crossings have jumped 277% from Trump's term
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12930845/Biden-migrant-border
-statistics-Trump-immigration.html
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What became of politics in the Long 2010s.
By Mark Dunbar | Dec 20, 2023
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/presentation-and-pow
er
Reviewed Here
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
By Vincent Bevins
New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.
The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession
By Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger
New York: Verso Books, 2023.
Download the books for free from the mirrors at
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Vincent+Bevins
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Borriello+Jager
I “joined” the Occupy movement in my junior year of college. It was my first taste of political activism. Since turning eighteen and having my first real job (security guard), I'd been vaguely socialist. Before then I’d been vaguely right-wing. I was nervous during the first meeting. I didn’t look the part — six-four, athletic-ish, Nike shorts and Under Armour hoodie — and, worse, I knew I didn’t. I didn’t know the lingo. I didn’t know the etiquette. I didn’t know anything. I just knew I didn't like following orders from people who weren’t accountable to me.
The meeting was packed. It was conducted (we wouldn’t want to say “led,” would we?) by a guy who looked the part — short, skinny, long hair. The first red flag was when we were advised (not told, of course) to use spirit fingers rather than clap. The second red flag was when we voted to divide between town and campus groups — the town group would focus on housing, the campus group on student debt. In the campus group, all the ideas for what we should do were theatrical — hold up a banner during a football game, project student debt numbers on the side of a bank. That didn’t interest me. I was there for power, not presentation. But I stuck around for numerical strength, until, one night, after police removed us from occupying the political science building, a fellow Occupier accused me of being an undercover cop. In her defense, I did look that part.
This was during the Long 2010s (2009-2022), a decade during which there occurred more mass protests than any decade in history. The protests were against the usual suspects: capitalism, racism, imperialism, greed, corruption. Two new books, Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution and The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, are about these protests and why they seemed to summon more of what they protested against — more greed, more racism, more corruption. They take different approaches. The Populist Moment is an academic investigation into the electoral failures of left-wing candidates in Europe and the United States (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Greece’s Syriza party), while If We Burn is a journalistic account of street protests in the Third World (Brazil, Indonesia, Chile) as well as Turkey and Ukraine.
While the electoral and protest approaches are different, they yielded the same result. The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies. Protestors couldn’t make demands because they shunned the formal structures of decision-making that could have led to change; protest candidates couldn’t advance concrete policies because they had no confidence those policies would be electorally sustainable. In other words, where there was a will there was no way, and where there was a way there was no will. Still, the shell of failure can contain kernels of success. Bernie Sanders, for example, didn’t become president — he wasn't the Democratic nominee — but he was a viable candidate. And the skill and knowledge acquired during that time (campaign discipline, policy formation, ideological communication) did not disappear overnight. We see these qualities now in the ambition and vibrancy of the labor movement, which has recently won big victories in the fiNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME