A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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People ask for what politicians cannot possibly deliver
Q: Given the widespread disenchantment with political institutions that you describe, does it seem paradoxical that, in the United States, people are still intensely passionate about candidates and elections?
A: The public makes demands of politics that are crushingly existential. Many of us used to be more religious, or more community-minded, and we used to have bigger families that we were more closely involved with. I think that today, instead, we find a lot of empty spaces in our lives. We then turn to politics and ask that it provide meaning for our lives somehow. Unfortunately, political institutions have repeatedly shown that they cannot even deliver many of the practical goals that they were designed to fulfill. Modern societies are extremely complex and there are a host of unintended consequences to even well-intended policies. To expect that politics will be able to overcome this complexity and deliver predictable results — while also providing people a sense of meaning and identity — is asking for what cannot possibly be delivered.
The dilemma is that politicians still talk as though they can deliver whatever the public wants. After all, they want our votes. We force politicians who wish to be elected to promise the impossible — to offer us utopia. Once they are elected, when it becomes clear that utopia isn’t coming, the public feels betrayed and is driven to negation and revolt. We treat government like a divinity that has failed, yet we still continue badgering it for existential guidance that it cannot provide. The end result is disenchantment with every form of modern government.
Q: What I found interesting about your book is that in addition to criticizing the elite, you’re also quite skeptical of this newly vocal public.
A: When this new wave of information began to rise, I initially thought that I was on the side of the public. But on analyzing the statements and pronouncements of many of the new popular movements, I began to see that they had a distinctly nihilist streak. They were mired in negation towards the status quo, but rarely proposed clear alternatives to the order that they were bashing away at. The Arab Spring, as well as the Occupy movements and the Spanish “indignados,” among others in the West, were movements united on the basis of what they were against. They were far less clear about what they were in favor of or how they were going to build that future. The 2016 Brexit referendum and election of Donald Trump — both of which were based primarily on the angry repudiation of the status quo — provided further compelling evidence of this public sentiment.
Q: Do you think that this was a reflection of naiveté on the part of the public?
A: My favorite philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, talked about “mass man,” or modern man as being the end product of a long historical process. Previous generations struggled to put him in a place of relative affluence and education, with material comforts and freedoms that were achieved at tremendous cost and usually involved bloodshed at some point. Mass man doesn’t see it that way. He feels that all these material gifts are as natural as the air he breathes. The good things in life are taken for granted. Meanwhile, the smallest desire that goes unfulfilled is a source of outrage. Much of the public’s sentiment today — that impulse to negation — is driven by a failure to understand or remember history. Or if they do remember history, to see it purely as the mother of all injustices and a source of problems that must be now be abolished. If there is one thing I would ask people to do, it would be to study history. When you abolish history, you lose your memory and it’s like you’ve had a stroke. That condition can lead you to do crazy things.
More at https://theintercept.com/2019/03/03/revolt-of-the-public-martin-gurri/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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On Monday, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer published an explosive expose on "the Fox News White House". The story makes clear in vivid detail that the headline question about Fox News — "Is it propaganda?" — is a resounding yes.
More at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white
-house
On one level, everybody knows that television news is a big deal, everyone knows that Fox News is the most widely viewed cable network, and everyone knows that there is a complicated interrelationship between Fox and the GOP that is qualitatively different from the relationship between the Democratic Party and any media outlet.
But this relationship is rarely taken seriously enough in the analysis of American — or even global — politics.
It’s commonplace, for example, to treat the contemporaneous and narrow electoral victories of Donald Trump and Brexit in the United States and United Kingdom as revealing some important, deep-seated truth about the nature of global capitalism. An alternative explanation, however, is that Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, is a very powerful person in both US and UK media and he intervened decisively to put the Trump and Brexit phenomena over the top.
A study by Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimates that watching Fox News translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates.
Specifically, by exploiting semi-random variation in Fox viewership driven by changes in the assignment of channel numbers, they find that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. Without Fox, in other words, the GOP’s only popular vote win since the 1980s would have been reversed and the 2008 election would have been an extinction-level landslide.
More at www.vox.com/2019/3/4/18249847/fox-news-effect-swing-elections
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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So come right out with it. What are you trying to say?
SGG
Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Jussie Smollett’s sisters, actresses and activists, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, and Jazz Smollett-Warwell, worked as leading campaign surrogates for former President Barack Obama, and less than a year ago, videos of Jussie dancing with Michelle Obama went viral.
https://canadafreepress.com/article/jussie-smolletts-sisters-worked-fo
r-barack-obama
Jussie Smollett
?Verified account
'With my big bro Jojo'
https://twitter.com/jussiesmollett/status/965781389261070337
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Trump’s nuclear policy could get us all killed
https://qz.com/1566325/
Drastically reducing America’s nuclear arsenal will strengthen US national security, nonproliferation expert Bruce Blair, a former US Air Force nuclear launch officer, told Congress today (March 6).
The MacArthur “genius grant” recipient said Donald Trump’s plan to expand US nuclear capabilities (pdf) will make the world a more dangerous place—and leave America more vulnerable to attack.
Appearing before the House Armed Services Committee, Blair called for the US to “return to the original, and generally accepted, basic premise of nuclear weapons”—using them solely for deterrence. Fighting war should be left to conventional forces, Blair insisted, according to prepared testimony he shared with Quartz.
“Our hair-trigger launch posture, which the Russians matched, continues to run the risk that fear, misperception, miscalculation, accident or false warning could trigger a nuclear exchange,” Blair said. “This risk of blundering into a nuclear war, rather than a cold-blooded sudden attack, presents what is by far the greatest immediate physical threat to the United States today.”
Trump’s proposed overhaul of nuclear forces would cost at least $1.7 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Blair lays out plans for a dramatically scaled-down version of current US capabilities, which he described in a phone interview as “massive overkill.”
Blair, a research scholar at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, told Quartz he hopes his alternative gets traction in the Democrat-controlled House. It will face opposition from the Republican Senate, the White House, and Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton, whom Blair characterized as a “one-man wrecking ball when it comes to arms control.”
“As you consider funding a makeover of our nuclear forces, it is a good time to choose between these competing worldviews. Should dangerous and unrealistic notions of warfighting continue to shape our nuclear posture and drive our investments, or should we pivot to a secure second-strike deterrent posture and leave warfighting to other weapons?”
More at https://qz.com/1566325/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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When problems reached Obama in the White House, he said, it was because they were unsolvable. He generally was being asked to choose between bad options. “By definition, if it was an easily solvable problem, or even a modestly difficult but solvable problem, it would not reach me, because, by definition, somebody else would have solved it,” he said. “So the only decisions that came were the ones that were horrible and that didn’t have a good solution. They said, ‘Let’s send this to Obama, I don’t know what to do.'” That way, he joked, “when things got all screwed up,” people could blame him.
Examples at https://qz.com/work/1567301/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
When problems reached Obama in the White House, he said, it was because they were unsolvable. He generally was being asked to choose between bad options. “By definition, if it was an easily solvable problem, or even a modestly difficult but solvable problem, it would not reach me, because, by definition, somebody else would have solved it,” he said. “So the only decisions that came were the ones that were horrible and that didn’t have a good solution. They said, ‘Let’s send this to Obama, I don’t know what to do.'” That way, he joked, “when things got all screwed up,” people could blame him.
Examples at https://qz.com/work/1567301/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Sounds to me like he is whining about the job he did for 8 years.
He's so eloquent though. I really admire his ability to so expertly pass the buck here.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, it is as plain as day that Obama is saying "The Buck Stops Here". That you misunderstand that, 6ix, says everything about your understanding. Informal definition: the responsibility for something cannot or should not be passed to someone else. Example: "in the past you could spread the blame, but now the buck stops here"
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Sounds to me like he is whining about the job he did for 8 years.
He's so eloquent though. I really admire his ability to so expertly pass the buck here.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Maybe I should quote more from https://qz.com/work/1567301/
Moving forward, and fairly quickly, with impossible decisions about wars or a global financial crisis required, Obama said, “being comfortable with the fact that you’re not going to get a 100% solution, and understanding that you’re dealing with probabilities, so that you don’t get paralyzed trying to think that you’re going to actually solve this perfectly.”
“If I had set up a good process in which I could get all the information, all the data, all perspectives, if I knew that I had around the table all the angles…then I could feel confident that even if I didn’t get a perfect answer, that I was making the best decision that anybody in my situation could make,” Obama explained.
“Probably the last piece of this that was most critical was having the confidence to have people around you who were smarter than you, or disagreed with you, or have perspectives that were different than yours,” he said. This helped keep him from wasting time thinking he had reached solutions when he hadn’t.
“I think one of the problems with people who are in big jobs is they start feeling as if they have to project that ‘I have every answer,'” he said, “when, in fact, most of the time, you may not.”
https://qz.com/work/1567301/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, it is as plain as day that Obama is saying "The Buck Stops Here". That you misunderstand that, 6ix, says everything about your understanding.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Sounds to me like he is whining about the job he did for 8 years.
He's so eloquent though. I really admire his ability to so expertly pass the buck here.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
That is ABSOLUTELY NOT what he was saying. Especially when he "joked" about how everyone could blame him when things went wrong.
What he was saying was that he got all the impossible decisions that nobody else wanted to deal with, and since they were impossible he obviously didn't have to be held accountable for any of them.
The fact that YOU don't recognize that says everything about YOUR ability to understand the way con men... AHEM!... Politicians work.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Compare Obama to Trump. Trump's chief of staff John Kelly and his Secretary of State and dozens of Trump's staff have said Trump understands nothing, knows nothing, but yet he feels the need in meetings to pretend he is the smartest guy in the room. Trump also felt the need to call Obama a dumb nigger that would have flunked out of school if Obama had been white, but it was Trump who has hidden his own report-cards and would have flunked out if his daddy had not been rich.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, it is as plain as day that Obama is saying "The Buck Stops Here". That you misunderstand that, 6ix, says everything about your understanding.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Sounds to me like he is whining about the job he did for 8 years.
He's so eloquent though. I really admire his ability to so expertly pass the buck here.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
That is ABSOLUTELY NOT what he was saying. Especially when he "joked" about how everyone could blame him when things went wrong.
What he was saying was that he got all the impossible decisions that nobody else wanted to deal with, and since they were impossible he obviously didn't have to be held accountable for any of them.
The fact that YOU don't recognize that says everything about YOUR ability to understand the way con men... AHEM!... Politicians work.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
John Kelly Unloads: Working for Trump Was Awful, and His Wall Is Stupid
www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/03/john-kelly-unloads-working-for-trump-w
as-awful-his-border-wall-is-stupid
Trump’s Report-Card Threats: How bad could those Penn grades have been, yo?
www.phillymag.com/news/2019/03/02/best-thing-donald-trump-college-grad
es/
You’d think a guy who once tweeted, “Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it!” would be more, how shall we say this? Secure.
Was Trump really a top student at Wharton? His classmates say not so much.
www.thedp.com/article/2017/02/trump-academics-at-wharton
Trump, who graduated from Wharton in 1968, claims he "graduated first in his class". He did not. Nor did he come in 2nd, 3rd, 4th or even 54th. He had zero honors.
Trump flaunts Wharton degree, but his college years remain a mystery
www.thedp.com/article/2015/08/donald-trump-wharton-classmates
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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These days, when people talk about the robot apocalypse, they don’t usually think of things like strip mining and mountaintop removal. Yet these technologies utterly transformed coal mining: Coal production almost doubled between 1950 and 2000 (it only began falling a few years ago), yet the number of coal miners fell from 470,000 to fewer than 80,000.
Or consider freight containerization. Longshoremen used to be a big part of the scene in major port cities. But while global trade has soared since the 1970s, the share of U.S. workers engaged in “marine cargo handling” has fallen by two-thirds.
Technological disruption, then, isn’t a new phenomenon. Still, is it accelerating? Not according to the data. If robots really were replacing workers en masse, we’d expect to see the amount of stuff produced by each remaining worker — labor productivity — soaring. In fact, productivity grew a lot faster from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s than it has since.
So technological change is an old story. What’s new is the failure of workers to share in the fruits of that technological change.
I’m not saying that coping with change was ever easy. The decline of coal employment had devastating effects on many families, and much of what used to be coal country has never recovered. The loss of manual jobs in port cities surely contributed to the urban social crisis of the ’70s and ’80s.
But while there have always been some victims of technological progress, until the 1970s rising productivity translated into rising wages for a great majority of workers. Then the connection was broken. And it wasn’t the robots that did it.
What did? There is a growing though incomplete consensus among economists that a key factor in wage stagnation has been workers’ declining bargaining power — a decline whose roots are ultimately political.
Most obviously, the federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by a third over the past half century, even as worker productivity has risen 150 percent. That divergence was politics, pure and simple.
The decline of unions, which covered a quarter of private-sector workers in 1973 but only 6 percent now, may not be as obviously political. But other countries haven’t seen the same kind of decline. Canada is as unionized now as the U.S. was in 1973; in the Nordic nations unions cover two-thirds of the work force. What made America exceptional was a political environment deeply hostile to labor organizing and friendly toward union-busting employers.
And the decline of unions has made a huge difference. Consider the case of trucking, which used to be a good job but now pays a third less than it did in the 1970s, with terrible working conditions. What made the difference? De-unionization was a big part of the story.
And these easily quantifiable factors are just indicators of a sustained, across-the-board anti-worker bias in our politics.
More at www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/opinion/robots-jobs.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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