A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 712 of 725
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
...the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?
Stop selling civil war, traitor.
Not to worry comrade. Jack, i.e. Gilligan, will be in his ICE uniform any day now. They couldn't possibly stamp rejected on his forehead and kick him out onto the street.
T
Go fuck yourself, faggot.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
My Life in Ambigrammia
By Douglas Hofstadter | October 3, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/ambigrams-words-doub
le-meanings-art/684404/
A few months ago, in talking with my friend Joshua Cynamon, I explained that I’ve recently felt plagued by waves of troubled confusion over putting so much energy and care into a book of doubly readable pieces of calligraphy—just frilly little colorful baubles. What a crazy thing to spend one’s later years on, especially in the frightening times that we’re living through. I said to Josh, “I’m working on this book during a period when many of my dearest friends are growing older and confronting great sadness, when democracy seems teetering on the brink of destruction, when the very concept of truth seems to be going down the drain, when artificial intelligence may soon overtake human intelligence, when global warming is threatening the survival of all sentient life on Earth. At this scary moment in history, doesn’t it seem weird and self-indulgent of me to be working on something so frivolous and flighty as a collection of ambigrams?”
Josh replied, “I can well imagine your doubts, Doug, but actually I feel that it’s very sensible for you to be working so hard on your ambigrams book—in fact, it’s a crucial thing for you to be doing—because bringing beauty into the world is so important to you, and to us all, most especially in dark times.”
Josh’s thoughtful reaction helped me to feel once again that my artistic project was worthwhile, and it brought back a memory of a remark that my daughter Monica made to me late one night over the phone, just as the results of the 2016 presidential election were becoming clear. She asked me, “How can this nightmare be happening?” I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” She asked, “What is humanity coming to?” All I could think of to say was, “The world is unpredictable. Nobody can know where things will go.” And then, out of the blue, Monica said, “In the end, only art can save the world.” It was such a powerful and idealistic statement of faith that I’ve never forgotten it, and I dearly hope that she is right.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
My Life in Ambigrammia
By Douglas Hofstadter | October 3, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/ambigrams-words-doub
le-meanings-art/684404/
A few months ago, in talking with my friend Joshua Cynamon, I explained that I’ve recently felt plagued by waves of troubled confusion over putting so much energy and care into a book of doubly readable pieces of calligraphy—just frilly little colorful baubles. What a crazy thing to spend one’s later years on, especially in the frightening times that we’re living through. I said to Josh, “I’m working on this book during a period when many of my dearest friends are growing older and confronting great sadness, when democracy seems teetering on the brink of destruction, when the very concept of truth seems to be going down the drain, when artificial intelligence may soon overtake human intelligence, when global warming is threatening the survival of all sentient life on Earth. At this scary moment in history, doesn’t it seem weird and self-indulgent of me to be working on something so frivolous and flighty as a collection of ambigrams?”
Josh replied, “I can well imagine your doubts, Doug, but actually I feel that it’s very sensible for you to be working so hard on your ambigrams book—in fact, it’s a crucial thing for you to be doing—because bringing beauty into the world is so important to you, and to us all, most especially in dark times.”
Josh’s thoughtful reaction helped me to feel once again that my artistic project was worthwhile, and it brought back a memory of a remark that my daughter Monica made to me late one night over the phone, just as the results of the 2016 presidential election were becoming clear. She asked me, “How can this nightmare be happening?” I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” She asked, “What is humanity coming to?” All I could think of to say was, “The world is unpredictable. Nobody can know where things will go.” And then, out of the blue, Monica said, “In the end, only art can save the world.” It was such a powerful and idealistic statement of faith that I’ve never forgotten it, and I dearly hope that she is right.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Yup.
I keep telling you two fags to get some hobbies.
Why don't you work on your art again instead of being insane everyday?
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The republican victim mentality at work…
(INTENTIONALLY) LOST IN TRANSLATION
Democrats: We'd like cops to stop killing minorities.
Republicans: Dems hate police.
Democrats: Women should have the right to choose.
Republicans: Dems want to kill babies.
Democrats: We need reasonable immigration policies.
Republicans: Dems want open borders.
Democrats: We kneel in protest of inequality.
Republicans: Dems hate the flag, soldiers and America.
Democrats: We should wear masks to protect others.
Republicans: Dems want to take away your freedom.
Democrats: We should have background checks.
Republicans: Dems want to take your guns.
Democrats: Feds should not be policing in cities.
Republicans: Dems encourage rioting.
Democrats: People should have a living wage.
Republicans: Dems want to give everyone free stuff.
Democrats: We want religious freedom for everyone.
Republicans: Dems want Sharia Law.
Democrats: Taxes should be used for the benefit of everyone.
Republicans: Dems want socialism.
https://imgur.com/gallery/s-that-republican-victim-mentality-work-1BnU
EZP
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
FIFA...
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The republican victim mentality at work…
(INTENTIONALLY) LOST IN TRANSLATION
Democrats: Defund Police.
Republicans: Dems hate police.
Democrats: Come to this building and we will kill your baby for you.
Republicans: Dems want to kill babies.
Democrats: We opened the fucking borders wide open and stopped verifying anyone. Then we called you a racist if you had a problem with it.
Republicans: Dems want open borders.
Democrats: Colin Kapernick kneels because he's a mid-player who was on his way out of the league. Anti-American Legacy Media gives him the world's largest bullhorn in the history of man.
Republicans: Dems hate the flag, soldiers and America.
Democrats: YOU WILL WEAR A MASK AND GET A VACCINE OR WE WILL TAKE YOUR JOB AWAY YOUR FAMILY WILL STARVE TO DEATH!
Republicans: Dems want to take away your freedom.
Democrats: We should have background checks for guns, but we won't bother carding you when you vote.
Republicans: Dems want to take your guns and your vote.
Democrats: Feds should not be policing in cities.
Republicans: You defunded the police and filled them with a bunch of overweight DEI hires who won't do the job. So who's going to do it?
Democrats: People should have a living wage.
Republicans: People should have a living wage.
Democrats: We want religious freedom for everyone except for Christians.
Republicans: Dems want Sharia Law.
Democrats: Taxes should be used for the benefit of everyone, with illegal alien invaders being first in line. And don't ask any of us how we're worth hundreds of millions of dollars with a salary of only less than $200k per year.
Republicans: Dems want socialism.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:‘‘Vertical Morality’ Might Describe Why MAGA Christians Seem So Unchristian
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
FIFA...
This framework reveals why some MAGA-aligned Christians act in ways that contradict Jesus’ teachings.
By Caroline Bologna | Oct 9, 2025
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vertical-morality-maga-christians_l_68d
c8386e4b0b11989f00fb8
For many Americans, the gap between Christian teachings and MAGA politics is baffling. How can people profess faith in Jesus -- who preached love, mercy and care for the oppressed -- while supporting policies that punish immigrants, demonize LGBTQ people and glorify cruelty?
The key to understanding this apparent contradiction might lie in something called “vertical morality.”
This ethical framework measures righteousness not by goodness to others, but by something more simplistic. Below, Christian advocates and former fundamentalists break down what vertical morality means and how it explains our political landscape today.
What Is Vertical Morality?
“Vertical morality teaches that authority, power and a moral code of right and wrong, or acceptable and unacceptable, come from ‘above’ -- an external superior who designates rules, systems and tenets that must be obeyed by those beneath,” said Tia Levings, a former Christian fundamentalist and author of “A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy.”
In the context of religion, the superior is God. In politics, it might be an authoritarian dictator. In a cult, it would be the controlling leader. Whatever the circumstances, the idea is that behaviors are only right or wrong based on what the figure in power says.
“Vertical morality in Christianity is the idea that our ethics and behaviors have a duty to please God alone. We get our morals from God and we must obey him, furthering the will of God no matter the cost,” said April Ajoy, author of “Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding A True Faith.”
The term has become popular in the social media sphere in recent years, thanks to viral videos from content creator and activist Rachel Klinger Cain. She told HuffPost she started using this terminology in her content a few years ago.
“Vertical morality is just how I describe what’s called ‘divine command theory’ in metaethics,” she said. “I’m a teacher, so I’m always looking for ways to make complicated concepts a little simpler. It’s basically the idea that morality comes from authority above, which is what I was taught when I was raised within conservative Christianity.”
Vertical morality stands in contrast to the concept of horizontal morality, another term Klinger Cain has broken down in her videos.
“Horizontal morality prioritizes the well-being of our neighbors, communities and personal relationships,” Ajoy explained. “We act in ways that cause the least amount of harm to those around us, regardless of beliefs. Someone with vertical morality may help someone in need because they believe that’s what God wants them to do, versus someone with horizontal morality may help that same person for the benefit of the person who needs help.”
Rather than unquestioning obedience and superficial optics, this approach focuses on genuine empathy, compassion and love toward others, recognizing the actual effects our actions have on people.
“I think both are important in the Christian faith, but a lot of people today get hung up on the vertical as a priority and forget about the horizontal altogether,” said Malynda Hale, an advocate and executive director of The New Evangelicals, a nonprofit focused on promoting inclusivity, justice and compassion in Christianity.
Similarly, Ajoy believes that the most Christ-like approach is to hold a position of horizontal authority, because doing so also subscribes to vertical morality.
“In Matthew 25, Jesus describes people who fed and clothed those in need, who welcomed the stranger, who took care of the sick and visited those in prison,” she noted. “He then says, ‘What you did for the least of the
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Shut the fuck up, retard.
Posting HuffPost bullshit in here. Jesus Christ....
By: Caroline Bologna
Her last name is appropriate. Baloney.
She works for the HuffPost, so she's full of shit.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Democrats are captive to outdated norms. It’s endangering democracy
The establishment left’s attachment to rigid rules leaves the party out of touch and failing to meet the moment. Their attachment to niceties dulls urgency and narrows the space for bold, breakout leadership.
By Ryan W Powers | Oct 12, 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/12/democrats-etique
tte-dangerous-democracy
In early August, dozens of Democratic lawmakers fled Texas for Illinois, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass new congressional maps projected to give the party as many as five additional seats. Their absence paralyzed the state legislature, turning a walkout into political resistance and drawing national attention.
As the standoff dragged on, Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, offered an unorthodox countermove: a proposal to suspend his state’s independent redistricting commission and draw maps designed to hand Democrats a comparable advantage. He unveiled the plan with spectacle, mimicking Donald Trump’s signature style through all-caps declarations, a mocking nickname for White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt (“KaroLYIN”) and AI-generated celebrity endorsements.
While Texas Democrats ultimately returned and the Republican redistricting plan has advanced, Newsom has been cast as the emerging leader of Democratic opposition to Trump. Why did it take the party nine months to find one?
It wasn’t for lack of need. Just last summer, Trump ousted independent agency heads who contradicted his narrative, deployed the national guard to Washington DC against the mayor’s wishes and granted the attorney general license to enlist the justice department in partisan battles. Each step pushed democratic norms closer to the breaking point.
The real answer is that the most powerful liberal institutions – the Democratic establishment, major donors and the professional class around them – are captive to outdated etiquette. They prize agreeability as an end in itself: disruption is discouraged, compromise exalted, restraint worn as a badge of honor. And because these institutions shape liberal culture from the top down, their attachment to niceties dulls urgency and narrows the space for bold, breakout leadership.
What makes Newsom unique is his willingness to defy convention when circumstances demand it. The lesson is not in his theatrics, but in the reminder that strategically breaking norms can sometimes accomplish more than following them.
California’s independent redistricting commission is written into the state constitution, which means Newsom’s proposal cannot advance without voter approval in November. Even if successful, redistricting alone is only a stopgap. The deeper fight is cultural: whether the Democratic establishment can break its attachment to rigid politeness before democracy withers.
The stakes are not theoretical. The Trump administration has undermined judicial independence, hollowed out federal agencies and run straight through one of elite liberalism’s most entrenched institutions: big law.
For decades, elite law firms have been essential to Democrats, supplying both the funding and talent that sustains the party’s infrastructure. Yet when faced with punitive executive orders, some of these very institutions – once defenders of liberal democracy – folded, signing settlement deals that critics have labeled unconstitutional and undemocratic.
Until recently, I was an associate at a big law firm. After publishing an op-ed about the constitutional dangers of a Trump-Palantir partnership - implicating my firm’s client Trump Media, and a former client, Palantir – I was warned that continuing to speak out could cost me my job. What came next was more interesting: a test of how far one act of dissent could ripple through a system built to contain it.
Instead of leaving quietly, I challenged big law publicly. I announced my firing on Instagram with a caption that began “Candidly, I’m disgusted” and concluded with a stern rebuke of big law’s surrender to Trump “in shadowy
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Can America recover from Trump? Here’s what new data says.
New political science research suggests democracy can survive leaders like Trump. But there’s a catch.
By Zack Beauchamp | Oct 14, 2025
https://www.vox.com/politics/464459/trump-american-democracy-u-turns
The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.
Can any democracy come back from this?
Earlier this year, two teams of researchers published papers trying to answer this exact question — and came to seemingly opposite conclusions.
Both papers focused on what they call “democratic U-turns:” where a country starts out as a democracy, moves toward authoritarianism, and then quickly recovers. The first team’s conclusions were optimistic: they identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.” The second team focused on 21 recent cases and inverted the findings — concluding that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were short-lived mirages.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2024.2448742
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-myth-of-democratic-res
ilience/
So who’s right? To find out, I reexamined the basic data and spoke to researchers from each of the two teams. It turns out that the seemingly opposed findings are actually more consistent than they seem — with implications for the United States that are at once hopeful and disturbing.
What researchers learned about “democratic U-turns”
The scholarly research on U-turns draws from a database called V-Dem, widely considered the gold standard for quantitative research on global democracy. V-Dem works by getting a broad group of experts on individual countries to give numerical assessments of different aspects of that country’s democracy (e.g., how free the press is, or whether elections are administered impartially). These judgements are turned into composite scores that assess how democratic a country is as a whole.
The first team of researchers, the more optimistic ones, are based at the institute that compiles and publishes the V-Dem database. Looking over their own data, authors Marina Nord, Fabio Angiolillo, Martin Lundstedt, Felix Wiebrecht, and Staffan I. Lindberg found that U-turns — defined as a country’s democracy score starting to increase after a recent decline — are very common. Over half of all countries that experience a slide toward autocracy also end up experiencing a U-turn. And those U-turns are typically very successful, hence the topline finding that 90 percent of U-turns saw a country returning to its previous level of democracy or even improving on it.
To understand what a U-turn looks like more concretely, it’s helpful to look at the recent history of Poland. Once considered one of the strongest post-communist democracies, the right-wing PiS government elected in 2015 turned the country’s public broadcaster into propaganda and packed the judicial system with its own cronies. But in 2023, a coalition of opposition parties defeated PiS in national parliamentary elections and began trying to undo the damage. You can see, in Poland’s V-Dem score, the characteristic U-shaped curve — a decline under PiS and an increase after its defeat.
Yet this is all very new, and Poland has not returned to its pre-PiS democracy. Moreover, there’s a real question of whether its progress in the right direction can be sustained. The new coalition has had a lot of trouble fixing what PiS broke, and just this year narrowly lost the presidential election to the PiS candidate.
The second paper argues that such a failure to make sustained gains would be more common than not.
Its authors — Nic Cheeseman, Jennifer Cyr, and Mattías Bianchi — also use V-Dem data and focus their analysis on post-1994 cases of democratic U-turn. Twenty-one cases (out of the initial 102) fit these parameters. The
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
One of the Worst Cases of This Supreme Court Term Has Been Years in the Making
By Lisa Graves | Oct 14, 2025 10:30 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/worst-case-supreme-court-t
erm-john-roberts.html
The following essay has been adapted and excerpted from Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, published last month by Bold Type Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.
Chief Justice John Roberts has been working for years to ensure that a president’s power is as unchecked as possible. Roberts has advanced the unitary executive theory, which basically envisions a president who can fire anyone in the executive branch at any time at will. Project 2025, which Donald Trump repeatedly denied ties to during his run for the White House in 2024, asserted that a president has absolute authority over the executive branch and all of its employees. It called on Trump to demand that the Roberts court formally overrule a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which approved certain kinds of executive agencies whose directors could not be removed without cause. It hears such a case later in the term, which opened this week. But the Roberts court has already laid the groundwork for this particular Project 2025 mission.
Five years ago, in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Roberts authored the court’s declaration that Congress did not have the authority to protect the director of the CFPB from removal even though federal law creating the bureau specified that its director could be removed only on the grounds of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Roberts asserted that allowing Congress to impose such conditions for termination of the CFPB’s director violated the “separation of powers,” although he did not expressly overrule Humphrey’s Executor. The chief justice left the door open for a more propitious time to continue his quest to advance the right-wing program to overturn legal precedents targeted by Leonard Leo and his cadre.
The Roberts court had previously begun to take up part of the Project 2025 agenda, specifically surrounding administrative law judges. The Republican appointees to the court have asserted that the “separation of powers” prevents executive branch agencies from engaging in judicial-type functions. Such procedures have long helped America contend with the complexity of our economy and the growth of our nation, providing vital tools for enforcing our laws without making every matter into a federal court case.
In Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, Roberts struck down decades of administrative law practice to declare suddenly that Congress cannot assign the administration of civil penalties for securities fraud to the SEC. Instead, such cases must be tried in federal court. This dramatic change in the law will make it far more difficult and expensive for the agency to enforce regulations on trading securities, rules that protect investors—literally millions of Americans.
In her fiery dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor took direct aim at Roberts’ famed claim during his confirmation hearings that his job as a judge was to be a neutral “umpire” calling “balls and strikes”:
“Throughout our Nation’s history, Congress has authorized agency adjudicators to find violations of statutory obligations and award civil penalties to the Government as an injured sovereign. The Constitution, this Court has said, does not require these civil-penalty claims belonging to the Government to be tried before a jury in federal district court. Congress can instead assign them to an agency for initial adjudication, subject to judicial review. … The majority today upends longstanding precedent and the established practice of its coequal partners in our tripartite system of Government. … Because the Court fails to act as a neutral umpire when it rewrites established rules in the manner it does today, I respectfully dissent.”
As Sotomayor notes, the delegation of such enf
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME