A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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The benefits of vigilance
In Finland, preparation – in this case, preparation for the possibility of war with Russia – is not just sensible policy, but somewhat of an antidote to the spiraling hyperpolarization seen in many other countries.
By Mark Sappenfield | July 20, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/From-the-Editors/2025/0720/finlan
d-russia-preparation-vigilance
Preparation is hard, and it doesn’t offer many political advantages. The benefits, after all, always seem to be further down the road.
But that’s not how the people of Finland see it, particularly when it comes to national security.
Last month, I spent a week in Finland reporting the cover story in the July 21 issue of the Monitor Weekly. (‘It’s everyone’s business.’ In Finland, national security is a shared responsibility.) I came back with the strong impression that preparation is something of an antidote to the spiraling hyperpolarization we see in many countries, particularly in the United States.
In Finland’s case, it is preparation for war with its neighbor Russia. The Ukraine war might have come as a shock to the rest of the world. But Finns have been expecting something of the sort since World War II, when the Soviet Union came within a whisker of conquering them.
The last 80 years have been spent in preparation.
That has meant sacrifice. Most obviously, there is conscription for males 18 years old, who then serve in a reserve unit for decades. But it also means taxes on fuel and electricity to allow the state to maintain large reserves, making the country less vulnerable if Russia were to attack.
Yet the most interesting “tax” is the absolute necessity for cooperation. Finns know that if everyone in a nation of 5.5 million people doesn’t work together seamlessly, then they have no hope against a threat like Russia. This forces them all – businesses, government agencies, the military, and civil society – to put one common calculation above all others: national safety.
The result is a shared purpose and a sense of mutual trust that felt (to this American, at least) almost like stepping into a time machine. The United States hasn’t experienced similar levels of trust since the Cold War, when President Ronald Reagan was able to unify the country against a Soviet threat.
Today, Finland shows how the benefits of vigilance go far beyond strategic preparation. Preparedness demands the sacrifices of self that are the fuel for healthy democracies. Working with a common goal often has a unifying effect.
Finland would certainly rather not have a menacing neighbor. But that has played a part in helping it ward off the most toxic elements of partisanship now undermining effective governance across the West.
The question for Democracy 2.0, it seems, is how to create this shared purpose without needing an enemy to do it for you.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Six characteristics of authoritarian breakthrough, all of which are currently in play.
By Tim Dickinson | July 18, 2025
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-authorit
arian-no-kings-playbook-1235388347/
This dictatorial to-do list includes
“directing investigations against critics”;
“giving license to lawbreaking”;
“regulatory retaliation”;
“deploying the military domestically”;
“federal law enforcement overreach”; and
holding tight to power, i.e. “the autocrat won’t leave.”
Trump is hewing to this well-worn playbook, Hunter said, by
pardoning violent Jan. 6 felons,
sending masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to round up law-abiding immigrants,
deploying the National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles,
making “capricious threats” to deport U.S. citizens like Rosie O’Donnell, and
openly plotting an unconstitutional third term.
The pro-democracy trainer offered the encouragement that “Trump didn’t write this playbook. This is a global phenomena … the growth of autocracies.” He added that the experiences of allies across the globe offer strategies that have succeeded in turning back Trumpian figures in their own countries.
But the odds of success are sobering. The training included a study of 35 countries that experienced “democratic backsliding” in the last 30 years, and their track records for overcoming the authoritarian assault. Without a movement of mass “civil resistance,” less than eight percent of countries were successful at righting the democratic ship of state. Active civil resistance — such as the movement that No Kings is building in the U.S. — has historically increased the odds to 52 percent. “I don’t love those numbers,” said Hunter, but he added that the payoff for victory can be profound. Successful resistance movements typically forge societies that are “more democratic” on the other side — offering “an advancement” rather than a return to the status quo ante.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why Don’t Americans Rise up Against Unpopular Policy Anymore?
The last time a political party paid a price for legislation was in 1989.
By Julian E. Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University | July 21, 2025
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/21/medicare-cuts-unpopular-policy/
Congress has passed one of the most draconian cuts to social safety net programs in modern American history. President Donald Trump proudly signed the bill into law. As a result of the legislation, which opponents agree is deeply destructive, over 11 million Americans will lose their health care coverage. Many rural hospitals will likely have to close their doors, thereby widening the health care deserts. Millions will lose access to food stamps. Educational services for lower-income and disabled children will shrink.
The big political question is whether the Republicans will face serious political repercussions for what they have done to the American people, red and blue, all to pay for the extension of supply-side tax cuts and a massive expansion of immigration control enforcement. Fiscal conservatism has nothing to do with the decision, as the legislation is going to blow a hole in the debt that Americans will be paying for over generations.
In an earlier era, political logic would dictate that Republicans would pay a steep price. Taking so many concrete goods away from a wide range of citizens, including those who make up the core of a political coalition, has traditionally been considered a bad idea. But will that fallout happen by 2026? The central political question is whether the GOP will face electoral consequences or once again escape them. In an age of hyperpolarization and media fragmentation, outrage has a shorter shelf life, attention spans are fractured, and accountability is harder to achieve.
In 1989, though, a Democratic Congress was forced to repeal a major new health care benefit, along with the taxes that had been included to pay for it. How did this come to pass, and why wouldn’t such a reversal happen now?
Throughout the 1980s, health care experts became increasingly concerned about the costs that elderly Americans were facing as a result of catastrophic medical situations, such as strokes, spinal cord injuries, and heart attacks. Medicare, created in 1965, did not cover most of those conditions. Elderly Americans and their families were forced to find other ways to pay for treatment.
In 1988, the Democratic Congress, working with President Ronald Reagan, decided to do something about the problem. Secretary of Health and Human Services Otis Bowen, who had been the chair of an advisory council in 1984 that recommended a policy response, crafted much of the proposal. After regaining control of the Senate back from the GOP in 1986, Democrats mobilized to pass the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act. They added benefits such as premium protection to support lower-income beneficiaries. The historic bill passed with sizable margins and substantial bipartisan support. The vote was 328 to 72 in the House; 86 to 11 in the Senate.
The legislation expanded coverage in a number of critical areas, including hospitalization and skilled nursing, hospice stays, home health care, respite care, and strict caps on hospital and doctors’ bills. Congress also included a prescription drug benefit for the first time in the program’s history.
Reagan had insisted that the benefits be self-financing. In response, Congress included higher premiums for Medicare Part B (the section of Medicare that covered doctors’ visits), and then, to cover the remaining two-thirds, a progressive surtax that would increase depending on the income of the beneficiaries. For the highest brackets, the maximum amount would be $800 on individuals and $1,600 for couples.
“This legislation will help remove a terrible threat from the lives of elderly and disabled Americans,” Reagan stated upon signing the bill, “the threat of an illness requiring acute care, one so devastating that it could wipe out the savings of a
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The Dismantling of American Health Care
By Adam Gaffney, David U. Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler | July 8, 2025
We must resist Trump’s war on medical access and knowledge today, even as we prepare to rebuild something better tomorrow.
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/07/08/the-dismantling-of-american-
health-care/
1.
On July 4 President Donald Trump signed into law a piece of legislation that amounts to a declaration of war on the working-class and the sick. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” will slice more than $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade, stripping health coverage from more than 11 million lower-income Americans by 2034 and sending tens of thousands to an early grave—all in exchange for tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy. Despite Trump’s promises to the contrary, the law will also cut nearly $500 billion from Medicare over the same period by making the deficit surge past a point at which the Office of Management and Budget “is required to order a sequestration to eliminate the overage.”
This assault on the nation’s major public insurance programs is only the latest front in an ongoing right-wing campaign against health. On April 1 Trump’s hammer fell on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the sprawling agency that encompasses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicaid and Medicaid Services (CMS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among other health-focused agencies. Having already forced out 10,000 HHS personnel earlier in his term, the Trump administration terminated 10,000 more on dubious legal grounds, devastating entire teams focused on major public health problems like tobacco control and occupational health. Altogether 25 percent of HHS’s workforce was dismissed. Since then a minority of the fired employees have been reinstated in the face of political pressure—but the depth and capriciousness of these chaotic cuts is without precedent. Disease surveillance, outbreak investigation, vaccine uptake, violence prevention, infection control, food safety, and opioid overdose prevention will likely suffer.
Meanwhile the nation’s biomedical research enterprise—in large part conducted by publicly financed scientists employed at universities—has been facing a sustained attack. NIH research grants that address important but now illicit health issues—like HIV/AIDS, racial health inequities, vaccine hesitancy, and LGBTQ health—have been wiped out in recent months. Not all of the cuts stem from specific bêtes noires: the administration has broadly decimated funding by canceling more than $1.8 billion in existing NIH grants in less than a month and a half (although some have been temporarily reinstated by court orders), reducing the issuance of new grant awards by 28 percent, and attempting to slash the “overhead” payments that cover universities’ costs for space and utilities via a now-stayed order that would have reduced grants from multiple federal agencies, including the NIH. This is on top of the funding blockades that the administration has imposed on many elite universities to bring them to heel—including all of the Ivies except Dartmouth and Yale.
The three fronts of this assault—on tax-funded medical coverage, public health, and medical research—have overlapping aims. The campaign to slash Medicaid—relied on by the poor since its establishment in 1965—follows a long neoliberal tradition of prescribing austerity for the working class and largesse for the rich. Trump and his allies seem to view public health, for its part, as waste that can be excised (DOGE-style) to fund tax cuts, as a source of regulatory excess that constrains profit-making, and as a locus of “woke” ideology and inconvenient facts. The assault on medical research is driven by similar concerns, with the added benefit of dominating rival centers of power like universities and the professions.
Yet such economic and ideological motivations do not explain the full measure of the admin
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By Heather Cox Richardson | Jul 26, 2025
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-25-2025
Quote:
An all-white jury took just over an hour to find Bryant and Milam not guilty. A member of the jury said, “We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop.”
Immune from further prosecution, Bryant and Milam told their story to Look magazine for $4,000. They said they had kidnapped and beaten Till to frighten him, but when he refused to beg for mercy, they drove him to the river. Milam asked, “You still as good as I am?” and when Till answered, “Yeah,” they shot him, tied a 75-pound cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and threw him in.
“What else could we do?” Milam said. “He was hopeless. I’m no bully. I never hurt a n*gger in my life. I like n*ggers, in their place. I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, n*ggers are gonna stay in their place.”
How the South won the Civil War:
Oligarchy, democracy, and the continuing fight for the soul of America,
Oxford University Press, [2020]
By Heather Cox Richardson
A history professor writing Letters from an American, a newsletter about the history behind today's politics.
https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/morrissey/departments/history/people
/faculty-directory/heather-cox-richardson.html
Download the book for free from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Heather+Cox+Richardson
Introduction
The moment in July 1964 when Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater took the stage at the Cow Palace outside San Francisco and beamed at the cheering Republicans who had just nominated him for president is iconic—but not for the reasons we remember. Goldwater delivered the line that became a rally cry for a rising generation of conservatives in the Republican Party, saying that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” But the moment did much more than galvanize activists. It marked the resurrection of an old political movement by a modern political party. In Goldwater’s time, people claiming to be embattled holdouts defending American liberty called themselves “Movement Conservatives.” A century before, their predecessors had called themselves “Confederates.”
While Goldwater’s supporters in 1964 talked generally about liberty, their actual complaint was specific: the business regulation and social welfare legislation of FDR’s New Deal and Eisenhower’s Middle Way had trampled their rights. In the wake of the Great Depression, the U.S. government had focused on creating economic security and equality of opportunity. These widely popular policies became known as the “liberal consensus,” because most Americans agreed that government should protect the country’s most vulnerable citizens and regulate the economy.
Movement Conservatives, however, maintained that the liberal consensus was destroying America. People should be free to operate however they wished, without interference from government bureaucrats and regulations. They hated that the government had taken on popular projects since the 1930s. Highways, dams, power plants, schools, hospitals, and social welfare legislation cost tax dollars. This, they warned, amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to the poor, often to poor people of color. Such a dangerous trend toward an activist government had to be stopped before it destroyed the liberty on which America was based.
Although Goldwater was a westerner through and through, it was the delegation from South Carolina that put him over the top to win the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. This was no accident. Movement Conservatives embraced the same ideas that, a century before, had led South Carolina slave owners to attack the United States government.
Like elite slaveholders before the Civil War, they believed in a world defined by hierarchies, where most people—dull, uneducated, black, female, weak, or poor—nee
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Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI: Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM
THGRRI
I am an independent myself, but I figured too many would make the same claim that are actually far right nuts. To tell the truth they are the ones I expected to post here first. Glad it's you guys.
Oh look Gilligan. It's me declaring I'm an independent 8 years ago. Again, I've proven you wrong. I'm claiming to be an independent in 2017. Of course, because you're a liar through and through you'll still call me one.
As I've said, you do not have the brain power to insult me politically as an independent so you insist I'm a dem. Too funny and no matter. I enjoy you not being able to face facts. It's right in character for you. This post will be a good metaphor for you being a troll and not someone who will acknowledge fact.
T
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How Yard Sales Could Explain the Rise of Billionaires and Challenge Libertarian Thinking
By Ken MacVey | Sunday, Aug 10, 2025 6:00AM
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/08/how-yard-sales-could-exp
lain-the-rise-of-billionaires-and-challenge-libertarian-thinking.html
. . . Interestingly, physicists and mathematicians have also taken on the subject of wealth inequality. They have developed mathematical models of wealth distribution now known as the “yard sale model.” Proponents of this model claim that under very simple assumptions, “wealth condensation” (transition from more even wealth distribution to wealth concentration in the hands of a few) is inevitable unless remedial action is taken. They claim that this model remarkably matches the actual state of wealth inequality in the world. What is intriguing is that under the model, by an unbiased random process, a small group or even a single individual will randomly end up holding all the wealth. It’s not a matter of the survival of the fittest or the best getting more than the rest—it’s a matter of the luckiest. Who is lucky is random. The fact that there will be a winner taking it all is not random, it’s almost inevitable.
Physicist Anirban Chakraborti first developed a mathematical version of the model borrowing from statistical mechanics. Formally, versions of this model are considered to be agent based random exchange asset models. There can be different variations of such models. One version of the mathematical model assumes a group of agents each have the same amount of wealth. Each is randomly paired with another agent to make a trade. This is similar to a yard sale, which is how the “yard sale model” label came about. Physicist/mathematician Bruce M. Boghosian has developed and elaborated on the yard sale model in published scientific articles. In his fascinating article in the Scientific American “Is Inequality Inevitable?” (which I have used in a university public policy class I taught and which is currently available on-line without a paywall https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ ) he explains the model while leaving out most of the calculus. He gives the example of an agent being randomly paired with another agent out of 1000 to make a bet based on the random toss of a fair coin. Then another pair of agents is randomly selected from the 1000. But it is also assumed that the poorer person in the bet won’t want to blow all their wealth on a single bet and will bet only a fraction of their wealth. This random selection of bettors and coin tosses in a computer simulation can be run thousands or even millions of times. Even though initially each agent has an equal amount of wealth, ultimately only a handful or even a single agent will end up holding all the wealth. It seems that losing bettors keep getting deeper in the hole and would need a very lucky streak of wins to get out of it. There will also be an accompanying increasingly narrow group of winners. . . .
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
. . . Interestingly, physicists and mathematicians have also taken on the subject of wealth inequality. They have developed mathematical models of wealth distribution now known as the “yard sale model.” Proponents of this model claim that under very simple assumptions, “wealth condensation” (transition from more even wealth distribution to wealth concentration in the hands of a few) is inevitable unless remedial action is taken. They claim that this model remarkably matches the actual state of wealth inequality in the world. What is intriguing is that under the model, by an unbiased random process, a small group or even a single individual will randomly end up holding all the wealth. It’s not a matter of the survival of the fittest or the best getting more than the rest—it’s a matter of the luckiest. Who is lucky is random. The fact that there will be a winner taking it all is not random, it’s almost inevitable.
So... wealthy people ... such as yourself ... don't get wealthy bc of anything they did, specifically. Has nothing to do with self restraint, intelligence, or upright moral character.
Conversely, poor people aren't poor bc of anything they did or didn't do.
There is one thing inevitably associated with wealth: Rich people think they're better than everybody else. They totally underestimate how much luck played a part in their wealth.
It's the same with singers or actors who become viral sensations v equally talented singer it actors. The stars really think they're hot shit, don't they?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI: Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM
THGRRI
I am an independent myself, but I figured too many would make the same claim that are actually far right nuts. To tell the truth they are the ones I expected to post here first. Glad it's you guys.
Oh look Gilligan. It's me declaring I'm an independent 8 years ago. Again, I've proven you wrong. I'm claiming to be an independent in 2017. Of course, because you're a liar through and through you'll still call me one.
As I've said, you do not have the brain power to insult me politically as an independent so you insist I'm a dem. Too funny and no matter. I enjoy you not being able to face facts. It's right in character for you. This post will be a good metaphor for you being a troll and not someone who will acknowledge fact.
You were a stupid person and a bad liar back then. Nothing has changed.
I literally destroy you every day here. I've shut down hundreds of your threads and posts where you never come back to make a reply because you know anything you say next is just going to look foolish.
Everything you've posted in the last year is 100% false. The election went down even better than I predicted, even though I was the person who got closest to the results. Not only here, but I did better than anybody in the media did with my predictions too.
And your party is fucking dead.
If you're not a Democrat, what the hell are you?
You've got NOBODY to vote for.
I'm the Independent here, you stupid, ideologically captivated dipshit.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:My goodness, Signym. Are you feeling bitter about your misfortunes? Scientific American came to different conclusions than you about who deserves what:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
. . . Interestingly, physicists and mathematicians have also taken on the subject of wealth inequality. They have developed mathematical models of wealth distribution now known as the “yard sale model.” Proponents of this model claim that under very simple assumptions, “wealth condensation” (transition from more even wealth distribution to wealth concentration in the hands of a few) is inevitable unless remedial action is taken. They claim that this model remarkably matches the actual state of wealth inequality in the world. What is intriguing is that under the model, by an unbiased random process, a small group or even a single individual will randomly end up holding all the wealth. It’s not a matter of the survival of the fittest or the best getting more than the rest—it’s a matter of the luckiest. Who is lucky is random. The fact that there will be a winner taking it all is not random, it’s almost inevitable.
So... wealthy people ... such as yourself ... don't get wealthy bc of anything they did, specifically. Has nothing to do with self restraint, intelligence, or upright moral character.
Conversely, poor people aren't poor bc of anything they did or didn't do.
There is one thing inevitably associated with wealth: Rich people think they're better than everybody else. They totally underestimate how much luck played a part in their wealth.
It's the same with singers or actors who become viral sensations v equally talented singer it actors. The stars really think they're hot shit, don't they?
Luck plays a much more important role than it is usually accorded, so that the virtue commonly attributed to wealth in modern society—and, likewise, the stigma attributed to poverty—is completely unjustified.
Moreover, only a carefully designed mechanism for redistribution can compensate for the natural tendency of wealth to flow from the poor to the rich in a market economy. Redistribution is often confused with taxes, but the two concepts ought to be kept quite separate. Taxes flow from people to their governments to finance those governments' activities. Redistribution, in contrast, may be implemented by governments, but it is best thought of as a flow of wealth from people to people to compensate for the unfairness inherent in market economics. In a flat redistribution scheme, all those possessing wealth below the mean would receive net funds, whereas those above the mean would pay. And precisely because current levels of inequality are so extreme, far more people would receive than would pay.
Given how complicated real economies are, we find it gratifying that a simple analytical approach developed by physicists and mathematicians describes the actual wealth distributions of multiple nations with unprecedented precision and accuracy. Also rather curious is that these distributions display subtle but key features of complex physical systems. Most important, however, the fact that a sketch of the free market as simple and plausible as the affine wealth model gives rise to economies that are anything but free and fair should be both a cause for alarm and a call for action.
More at Is Inequality Inevitable?
Wealth naturally trickles up in free-market economies, model suggests
By Bruce M. Boghosian | November 1, 2019
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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