A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 721 of 725
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you are completely fucked up in the head.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only problem with that story is that you've had plenty of opportunity to reverse it, but it always gets worse when you guys run the show too.
Go fuck yourself, Paul.
Nobody trusts the likes of you either.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
I know you are, but what am I?
Go fuck yourself, retard.
The Democratic Party is dead. Finished. You lose everything.
Move out of my country. Everybody hates you.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Above is an example of 6ix's Nihilism.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you are completely fucked up in the head.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only problem with that story is that you've had plenty of opportunity to reverse it, but it always gets worse when you guys run the show too.
Go fuck yourself, Paul.
Nobody trusts the likes of you either.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
I know you are, but what am I?
Go fuck yourself, retard.
The Democratic Party is dead. Finished. You lose everything.
Move out of my country. Everybody hates you.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Below is an example of Trump’s Nihilism.
Trump, after getting a private talking-to from Xi, now wants to know why any of this is a big deal.
Trump was asked about concerns that China was inserting code in crucial systems that control various parts of American infrastructure, such as energy, communications, and water. “You don’t know that,” he answered. “I’d like to see it, but it’s very possible that they do. And we’re doing things to them. I told them, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about, and you are doing stuff to us that we probably do know about.’ We do plenty. It’s a double-edged sword.”
Instead of saying that these cyberattacks were real threats and that the country’s national-security professionals were working to stop them, the president of the United States gave an answer that just as easily could have come from a Chinese official: Secret code in your power grid? You don’t know that. We’d like to see the proof. But you Americans do plenty of things to us that we probably don’t even know about.
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
Trump’s deportations are costing Americans jobs
May 19, 2026
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2026/05/19/trumps-deportations-are-co
sting-americans-jobs/
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration has long claimed that mass deportations would deliver more jobs and higher wages to American-born workers. But a new study casts doubt on that assertion, undermining a central tenet of the president’s immigration policy.
Recent surges in deportations have led to job losses for both immigrant and American-born workers, while wages have stayed flat, according to the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan research organization. Construction, which depends heavily on immigrant labor, was impacted more than any other industry studied, with American-born workers losing more jobs as a result of the deportations than the undocumented workers who remained. https://www.nber.org/papers/w35129?utm_campaign=ntwh&utm_medium=em
ail&utm_source=ntwg5
The study offers the first national analysis of the effects of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation operations on the labor market, comparing communities that experienced surges in deportations between January 2025 and October 2025 with those that did not.
Analyzing federal labor data, researchers focused on four industries that rely heavily on undocumented immigrant workers: agriculture, construction, manufacturing and wholesale. Deportations had a chilling effect on each of those industries, disproportionately affecting men, who accounted for more than 90 percent of the immigration arrests. Taken together, the affected industries saw a 5 percent drop in employment for male undocumented workers and a 1.3 percent drop for male American-born workers without a college degree.
The researchers found no evidence that employers increased wages to attract American workers. Instead, work slowed.
In construction — where the researchers estimated 15 percent of the workforce is undocumented — American-born workers have paid a price for the deportations, the study found: Employment dropped by 3 percent for male American-born workers without a college degree, and 7.5 percent for undocumented workers. For each arrest, six American-born workers lost a job, and four undocumented workers lost one.
“Construction companies view it as easier to reduce production, reduce the construction of new homes and new buildings in general, rather than try to increase wages for U.S.-born workers,” said Chloe East, an author of the study and an economics professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Previous research has also shown that increased immigration enforcement slows housing construction, drives up home prices and leads to job losses for American-born workers.
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
Barney Frank, now in hospice care, has an urgent message for Democrats hoping to bounce back from Trump
Democrats have a chance to defeat President Donald Trump's brand of right-wing populism, but only if the party embraces core economic issues instead of polarizing culture fights.
By Anthony Brooks
May 14, 2026
https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/05/14/barney-frank-hospice-congress-dem
ocrats-trump
Brooks: Let me start with a very general question. You've been talking to CNN, Politico and other journalists, including me. What is it you want to say about this moment?
Frank: "That it is essential for the values that have driven me into politics to defeat right-wing populism, and that the major obstacle to doing that is the insistence by part of the left wing of pushing everybody to adopt politically unacceptable views. I'm not telling people I don't want them to advocate for those things — I filed a bill to legalize marijuana in 1972 and I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. My problem is that instead of treating some of these reforms as issues which are currently unpopular — for which you have to build support — they instantly make them litmus tests for everybody and therefore make it harder for us to win."
Brooks: What specific examples of litmus tests are you talking about?
Frank: "Open borders is one. Defunding the police would be another, along with insistence on political correctness and transgender participation in girls' sports. And environmental issues like the Green New Deal — they just go too far."
Brooks: Your book is entitled "The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy." [Publication date September 15, 2026] What other ways does the left have to reform itself?
Frank: "Beginning in the '80s there's a sharp divergence between economic growth and the extent to which that's shared. After the financial crisis, there's anger about inequality and I was one of those trying to get Democrats to move on this. And finally, after the emergence of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and people like like Marine Le Pen [in France], there was movement on the economic issue. At that point I had hoped, 'OK, now we're all for fighting inequality and we'll diminish the anger.' But the problem was that those on the left, who had been right on the economic issue, decided that they could do even more changes. They said, 'Good, let's do the economics, but let's get rid of all these cultural and social evils.' And they went way too far. Like a lot of ideologues, they convinced themselves that the public agreed with them far more than it did."
Brooks: I want to ask you about the last 10 years, which have been dominated by Donald Trump. Is the dream of furthering liberal democracy gone for good, or do you think it will come back?
Frank: "It's not gone for good but there's been a lot of harm done. That's why I have a sense of urgency and why I'm taking advantage of this situation to talk about it. If liberal Democrats, not just here in America but elsewhere, do not repudiate the extremism that drives away a lot of voters, we're going to have this kind of [right-wing] populism for the long-term. And as to Trump, I have developed my theory about him: It's not just that he's bad on all these values, but he is an idiot savant. He has just one talent: an ability to exploit anger that got him into power. But having gotten into power, he's got nothing left, and that's why now he's just floundering."
Brooks: You've said that you think he's "imploding."
Frank: "Yes. I cannot think of an issue on which he's popular. The Iran war, the fight with the Pope, the economy, even immigration, where the left was dead wrong in its excessive openness, he's managed to make himself more unpopular. His anger, his narcissism, all of the negative parts of his personality have asserted themselves, and he rea
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Final Five and U.S. Competitiveness
by Jerry Cayford | Posted on Thursday, May 21, 2026 5:00AM
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/author/jerrycayford
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/final-five-and-u-s-compe
titiveness.html
California’s primary is in about two weeks, and it’s a mess. The panic is slightly subsiding, though, since Democrats have started polling in one of the top two spots in the race for governor. For months, Republicans were polling first and second, with eight Democrats trailing because they split the vote. The California Democratic Party chair even urged low-polling candidates to drop out so as not to be spoilers.
This can all look like an amusing soap opera. Will the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, again? But studying it led me to literature I hadn’t found before, coming from a quarter I hadn’t expected: the Harvard Business School (HBS). An HBS study of American economic competitiveness shows that a surprisingly short path leads from an amusing soap opera to the gravest of questions: why is American society failing?
The Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project was a large-scale, eight-year investigation of the causes of America’s poor recovery from the Great Recession. Its final report, A Recovery Squandered: The State of U.S. Competitiveness 2019, looks at many factors that combine to determine the health of a society and its economy. https://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/a-recovery-squandered.pd
f
The finding that connects their project to California’s primary is this: “the most important reason the United States has made so little progress during the long expansion [is]: deep dysfunction in our political system” (17).
California’s nonpartisan top-two primary system is a reform-that-is-really-half-a-reform of American states’ usual dysfunctional system. In top-two voting, all candidates compete in a single, nonpartisan primary, and only the top two qualify for the general election. This half-reform avoids giving voters a realistic choice outside the top two parties and, as we will see in the HBS report, thereby preserves the dysfunction of our politics. The full reform needed is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections” (26), in which the top five candidates advance from the nonpartisan primary, and voters then choose among them in the general election by ranked choice (aka instant runoff voting). One of the HBS report’s authors, Katherine Gehl, expands on this reform in a 2023 article, “The Case for the Five in Final Five Voting.”
The Wider Crisis
Harvard Business School comes to electoral reform inadvertently, not as a choice but as a discovery in its survey of the business community. The U.S. Competitiveness Project, co-chaired by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin, surveyed American business leaders working in a wide range of industries, almost 6,000 HBS alumni (along with some current MBA students and a cross-section of the public). They repeated this survey six times between 2011 and 2019. You can get a quick snapshot of the Competitiveness Project—and of America—from Figure 7 in the introductory chapter of A Recovery Squandered. It shows nineteen “elements of the national business environment” graphed by how America is doing compared to other countries (X-axis) and whether America is improving or deteriorating (Y-axis). (The scale of both axes is the net percentage of respondent positive/negative views.) Notice the dot in the lower left corner: “Political System” ranks worst for on-going deterioration, and only “Health Care” ranks worse compared to other countries.
Three points from the report’s big picture deserve mention before we focus on the political system. First is the report’s thesis statement on our recovery from the Great Recession: “despite a decade of steady economic growth, the United States has done remarkably little to address underlying structural weaknesses in our economy and our society. The nation has squandered the recovery” (3). Second, the report points out that Fi
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Are you tired of the Trump era yet?
Every few weeks there's a new disaster that would have sunk any other president.
By Noah Smith
May 25, 2026
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/are-you-tired-of-the-trump-era-yet
I get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive governance, both of which have gotten much worse over the last decade. Yes, I support the Democrats, but that support is contingent — if their ideology and competence deteriorate to the point where the Republicans are less bad, I’ll switch to supporting the GOP. So it’s worth it to fight to halt and reverse the deterioration; in the long term, the cost of ignoring extremists and policy failures in order to have “no enemies on the left” is very high.
And yet right now, despite all of the negative trends on the left, the choice of which party Americans should support has never been clearer. The second Trump administration has unleashed a dizzying array of measures seemingly tailor-made to weaken the United States of America — sometimes at the behest of rightist extremists, sometimes due to Trump’s own mercurial whims, and sometimes in order to enrich Trump and his clique.
Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything Trump is doing to tear down the America I grew up in. In his first term, it was often said that he avoided criticism using a “DDOS” strategy — rhetorically attacking so many opponents at such blinding speed that they couldn’t focus on any one outrage for long. In his second term, the DDOS is actual policy; Trump inflicts real damage on such a broad array of U.S. institutions, with such incredible speed, that the news can’t keep track of them all.
To illustrate this, I decided to write a post about three mostly unrelated pieces of Trumpian insanity:
• The assault on international tech industry employees and founders
• The disastrous Iran War
• Trump’s unprecedented corruption
Either the second or the third of these would have been a presidency-ending disaster for Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, while the first would have alienated broad swaths of the business community. But for Trump, it’s just business as usual. The stories crowd each other out of the headlines, and everyone just sort of gets overloaded and starts tuning out the news. Trump’s approval ratings drift slowly downward, but nothing else really happens. Hardcore MAGA supporters just keep screaming that everyone has “TDS”, while Trump’s wavering allies eventually manage to convince themselves that Democrats would be even worse.
But anyway, if you were paying attention, here’s the latest round of Trumpian disasters.
Much more at https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/are-you-tired-of-the-trump-era-yet
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
There’s One Thing All Democrats Must Agree On, or They’re Dead in 2028
The DNC’s 2024 autopsy is a waste of your time. The answer to the party’s woes lies deep in a New York Times poll released the same day.
Michael Tomasky / May 22, 2026 / 10:26 a.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/210843/democrats-autopsy-2024-electoral-s
trategy-2028
I started reading the Democratic autopsy of their 2024 loss that was belatedly released Thursday, but I stopped on page eight, when I got to this sentence: “In 1989, after losing three straight presidential campaigns, our party refocused the conversation around policy and purpose to reclaim the vital center of American discourse.” The second I saw that indefensible sentence, I clicked away.
Why? I’ve written this a few times, but I’ll write it again: There is no comparison whatsoever to be made between the Democrats’ situation after the 1988 election and their situation now, post-2024. In 1989, the Democrats had been absolutely pasted in three elections in a row. In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan by nearly 10 points and 440 electoral votes; in 1984, Walter Mondale lost to Reagan by 18 points and 512 electoral votes; in 1988, Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush by 8 points and 315 electoral votes.
Meanwhile, the last three presidential elections have been decided by razor-thin margins. Hillary Clinton lost narrowly, though she won the popular vote by a fairly substantial margin (2.8 million); Joe Biden won; and Kamala Harris lost by a combined 230,000 votes in three states. There is no parallel to 1989.
So why would someone write this? I can think of only two reasons. The first is a combination of historical ignorance and allowing emotion to push aside facts. Democrats were so crushed by 2024 that it kinda felt like 1988. But feeling that without looking at the actual numbers is either dumb or lazy.
The second reason someone might write that sentence is ideological. That is, they are firmly committed to the view that the Democratic Party needs to “move to the center” or even “to the right,” and so they invoke the anemic ghost of 1988 to help them make their case. And if they did happen to stop and look at the numbers from the 1980s and wrote the sentence anyway, well, that would make the writing of it a deeply cynical exercise as well, because the writer would know there’s no truth to the analogy.
That “someone,” by the way, was Democratic consultant Paul Rivera. The Democratic National Committee hired him on a pro bono, part-time basis to conduct the autopsy even though he hadn’t worked on a presidential campaign in more than two decades. Apparently, he never finished the job, as the document released on Thursday was shockingly incomplete. “For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” DNC chair Ken Martin said. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”
No wonder I couldn’t read it any further. Lazy and inapt historical analogies, and indeed carrying on a detailed argument about why Harris lost, is irrelevant to what’s needed most in this moment: a discussion of how the Democrats can win in 2028. But before doing that, let me quickly offer three broad reasons why Harris lost:
1. Joe Biden didn’t exit the race in time.
2. Harris didn’t do an adequate job of reminding voters of Trump’s incompetence on a range of fronts in his first term (this is a point the autopsy apparently does make, in fairness).
3. Harris didn’t make a compelling or aggressive enough economic case.
Always in presidential campaigns, there are dozens of factors, but I would hope about 97 percent of us can agree that if Biden had exited in the spring and the Harris campaign had done a better job of 2 and 3, she’d likely have won those 230,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and more. OK? And that’s all the autopsy that’s really needed. (There are separate question
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
How many lynchings ended with a trial of the murderers followed by a conviction for something, anything, not just murder?
AI Overview
There is no exact total number for how many lynchings ended in a trial and conviction. However, historians and civil rights archives estimate it was exceedingly rare.
Because a lynching is defined as an extralegal, mob-driven execution without due process, the vast majority of perpetrators were never held legally accountable.
Why Convictions Were Rare:
• Complicity and Scale: Dozens or hundreds of individuals often took part in a lynching, and local law enforcement frequently turned a blind eye or actively participated.
• Acquittals: When mob members were actually arrested and put on trial, all-white juries in the Jim Crow-era South almost universally refused to convict anyone for the murder of an African American.
• Lesser Charges: If a trial did result in a conviction, it was almost exclusively for a minor, peripheral offense like rioting or arson rather than murder.
The Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP both maintain extensive documentation regarding the thousands of documented racial terror lynchings that occurred in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings of Black Americans in the United States between 1865 and 1950.
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
The Four Ideas That Explain America’s Democratic Crisis
By Brynn Tannehill | Jun 9, 2026
https://www.damemagazine.com/2026/06/09/four-ideas-explain-americas-de
mocratic-crisis/
Now that I’m an American living in Canada, something I hear all the time is some variation of, “What the hell is going on in the United States?” spoken with a tone of mixed bemusement and horror. The people I work with come from all over the world, and it’s the same message from everyone. The very short answer is “fascism”. However, people outside the U.S. can’t square the circle when it comes to understanding how the Americans they meet are generally friendly and helpful yet elected a government that revels in cruelty. The answer to why America is the way it is today lies in four central concepts: the “Chesterton’s fence” thought experiment, the Dunning-Krueger effect, Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity, and social dominance orientation (SDO).
The U.S. is diving deeper and deeper into a constitutional, political, economic, and military crisis, and it’s too much for most people to absorb. Understanding the root of these problems is critical to responding to them and the current regime, and hopefully, to finding a path toward future repair.
Chesterton’s Fence
This rule states that one should not remove any established system until you understand the purpose it serves. In 1929 novelist G.K. Chesterton wrote the following on politics and reform:
“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
By understanding the “why” behind the “what,” we avoid situations where removing something leads to unexpected problems or negative outcomes. This is crucial for avoiding unintended consequences when making changes. Even if a system appears inefficient or outdated, there might be a hidden purpose or benefit that is not immediately obvious.
The modern MAGA and Trumpist movement refuse to do this. They make their decisions from the “gut” or on the fly, guided by common sense or Christian religious beliefs. If they don’t understand something, it needs to be eliminated; no further thought is required so long as the person regards themselves as intelligent or Christian.
For example, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claimed massive fraud at the Social Security Administration (SSA). This belief was caused by their misunderstanding of the system’s data. They assumed that the system was wrong, never considering it was their comprehension that was flawed. It never occurred to them to dig deeper to understand why they were seeing what they were seeing. Instead, they chose to kick down Chesterton’s metaphorical fence.
Musk and Trump believe that their great wealth is a sign of their intelligence and infallibility, despite all evidence to the contrary. This belief in their superiority leads them to assume that their decisions to kick down fences are, naturally, correct because no one could possibly be smarter than them or better at deciding what needs to be destroyed. In reality, it is more reflective of their sociopathy and amoral ability to exploit the system for personal gain.
Which leads us to the next fundamental concept for understanding American fascism:
More at https://www.damemagazine.com/2026/06/09/four-ideas-explain-americas-de
mocratic-crisis/
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:
So autopsy, schmautopsy. Stop arguing about 2024, Democrats. Talk about the future. And talk about the bad guys who are making working people’s lives harder. That’s where today’s “vital center” is—they’re sick and tired of getting screwed—and that way lies victory.
SPOILER ALERT: You ARE the bad guys.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME