A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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PAGE 301 of 725
Too bad he's not Orwell.
That guy wrote books that still hold up 70 years later.
This dude can't even write a book that holds up before it gets published.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Too bad he's not Orwell.
That guy wrote books that still hold up 70 years later.
This dude can't even write a book that holds up before it gets published.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
It used to be, Gibson had told me, that a defensive membrane divided his life from his work. He could consider the future as a professional, without picturing his own life, his kids’ lives. “I never wanted to be the guy thinking about ‘Mad Max’ world,” he said. “I had some sort of defense in place. . . . It’s denial, some kind of denial. But denial can be a lifesaving thing, in certain lives, in certain times. How on earth did you get through that? Some reliable part of you just says, It’s not happening.” The membrane, he went on, “which I very, very much miss, actually held until the morning after Trump’s election. And I woke up and it was gone, whatever it was. It was just gone, and it’s never come back.”
At dinner, Jack Womack joined us. The restaurant was loud and dimly lit, its tables and chairs artfully cheap, the specials written on mirrors in white pen. Attractive drinkers, dressed in black, raised coupe glasses. At our corner table, conversation turned to the jackpot.
“What I find most unsettling,” Gibson said, “is that the few times that I’ve tried to imagine what the mood is going to be, I can’t. Even if we have total, magical good luck, and Brexit and Trump and the rest turn out as well as they possibly can, the climate will still be happening. And as its intensity and steadiness are demonstrated, and further demonstrated—I try to imagine the mood, and my mind freezes up. It’s a really grim feeling.” He paused. “I’ve been trying to come to terms with it, personally. And I’ve started to think that maybe I won’t be able to.”
Womack nodded. “My daughter’s sixteen and a half,” he said. “Sixty years from now, she’ll be in her mid-seventies. I have absolutely no idea what the physical world will be like then. What the changes will be.”
“It’s totally new,” Gibson said. “A genuinely new thing.” He looked away from us, into the room. Another song came on the sound system. Incandescent light gilded the mirrors. A young woman in round glasses leaned back in her chair. I felt, suddenly, that we were all living in the past.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-sci
ence-fiction-real
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:All topics I've attempted to address in my posts. For my pains, I get called a "Russian troll", and hardly anybody wants to engage in thinking these Big Thoughts.
William Greider obituary
William Greider tackled gigantic subjects: the Federal Reserve (“Secrets of the Temple,” 1987), the evaporation of American democracy (“Who Will Tell the People,” 1992), globalization (“One World Ready or Not,” 1997), society’s deformation by the military-industrial complex (“Fortress America,” 1998), whether we can reinvent the U.S. economy (“The Soul of Capitalism,” 2003), and what to do when the people running this country seem determined to destroy it (“Come Home, America,” 2009).
Quote:YOU, SECOND, should take a lesson from him! Stop adding to the garbage tornado! TRUMP is NOT ... I repeat NOT ... the source of our problems, and getting rid of him won't solve them!
Each of these books is still completely relevant — something that almost never can be said about aging political writing. Pick up, say, “Game Change,” the bestseller by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin about the 2008 election, and you’ll find it’s now as fascinating as gossip about the Harding administration.
Greider pulled this off because he didn’t care about the daily political garbage tornado. Instead, his focus was always on the huge subterranean battles that actually determine our lives, i.e., capital vs. labor, creditors vs. debtors, marketing vs. people, and capitalism vs. democracy.
Our problems are decades in the making, rooted in our collective failure to tackle Big Thoughts and question our Big ASSumptions. What are our problems? What are our interests? How did we get here? What is right and what is wrong? How can we fix things?
How about making a New Year's resolution, SECOND? Kill that snake in your head and start thinking straight?
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
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Quote:I agree with you that getting President Trump out of the W.H. will not solve our problems. Mike Pence will step in. He is Trump, without the stupid lying, lazy/disorganized management style, and the personal tax cheating.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
YOU, SECOND, should take a lesson from him! Stop adding to the garbage tornado! TRUMP is NOT ... I repeat NOT ... the source of our problems, and getting rid of him won't solve them!
Our problems are decades in the making, rooted in our collective failure to tackle Big Thoughts and question our Big ASSumptions. What are our problems? What are our interests? How did we get here? What is right and what is wrong? How can we fix things?
How about making a New Year's resolution, SECOND? Kill that snake in your head and start thinking straight?
It wasn’t Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, who turned America upside down. It was the 1.5 million who followed him. It is not Trump, or Pence, who will turn America upside down. It is the 63 million who follow him. What did Jeff Davis’ followers believe was right and true and worth fighting for? Interestingly enough, William Gibson, Science Fiction writer, brings it up in an interview about the present. Midway through his career, the inventor of “cyberspace” turned his novel-writing attention to a strange new world: the present. www.historynet.com/confederate-army
In Wytheville, people owned books like “The Lost Cause,” an encyclopedic account of the Civil War, published in 1866, which depicted slavery as benign. In his library, Gibson unfolded himself from his chair, retrieving a copy of “The Lost Cause,” which he had salvaged from Wytheville.
“In our house, there were these objects that no one ever said anything to me about,” he said. “I just found them myself, and reverse-engineered what they meant. These were being sold from the very beginning of Reconstruction, and within them—actually, there’s another one. . . .” He bent low, and picked up a smaller volume, blowing dust from its binding.
“This is the most evil object in the house,” he said. “It’s just, like, unspeakable!” He handed it to me. The book was “The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin Before the War,” by James Battle Avirett.
“Check out the inscription,” he said. It was dedicated to “the old planter and his wife—the only real slaves on the old plantation.”
Gibson settled on a hard-backed chair, adjusting the cuffs of his perfectly reproduced mid-century chambray workshirt. “It’s just the foulest revisionist text,” he said. “It was given to my grandmother when, I think, she was sixteen years old, signed by the author. She took me aside, on one or two ritual occasions, to try to indoctrinate me into the crucial, central significance of the ‘War of the Northern Invasion.’ ” He grimaced. “This is why the South is still so fucked up—because this stuff never quit. It never quit! It’s the formation . . .” He trailed off.
“Of our past?” I asked.
“Of our present,” he corrected me.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-sci
ence-fiction-real
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
You've never answered that SECOND, even though I've posted it hundreds of times.
You seem to like history, so here's some history. In the entire history of the democratic party, they've not once altered the course of the US contribution to global warming. They've not done it when they controlled the WH, or when they've controlled one House of Congress, or both Houses of Congress, or any two out of the three, or all three together. That's their history. Based on their history, why should I expect anything different from them in the future?
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Quote:The growing climate awareness is mainly taking place among Democrats; the Republican base is largely unmoved. And the anti-environmental extremism of conservative politicians has, if anything, become even more intense as their position has become intellectually untenable. The right used to pretend that there was a serious scientific dispute about the reality of global warming and its sources. Now Republicans, and the Trump administration in particular, have simply become hostile to science in general. Hey, aren’t scientists effectively part of the Deep State?
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
You've never answered that SECOND, even though I've posted it hundreds of times.
You seem to like history, so here's some history. In the entire history of the democratic party, they've not once altered the course of the US contribution to global warming. They've not done it when they controlled the WH, or when they've controlled one House of Congress, or both Houses of Congress, or any two out of the three, or all three together. That's their history. Based on their history, why should I expect anything different from them in the future?
Science Under Attack: How Trump Is Sidelining Researchers and Their Work
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/climate/trump-administration-war-on-science
.html
Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus.
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?
Aside from the dip at the Great Recession public opinion HASN'T CHANGED WITHIN A VERY NARROW RANGE IN OVER 30 YEARS.
So what did democrats do about global warming with all that public support - yanno, the ~ 60 - 65% who felt that the global warming threat was as important or more important than stated during those over 30 years?
And, since you yet again failed to answer the question, maybe you need to see it better, to help you focus on it.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
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Quote:There is a list of bills from Democrats that have gone to the Senate only to die very quietly. If the Democrats get control of the Senate the bills will die loudly, with much screaming as they are horribly killed by the GOP filibuster. So, I guess you are right, Congress won't get any better. It would if a Democratic Senate Majority leader kills the filibuster, but how likely do you think that would be? www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
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:Name one - specifically. Tell me how EXACTLY that bill is going to do the job.
There is a list of bills from Democrats that have gone to the Senate only to die very quietly.
Are there - oh - increments of progress written in? Assignment of departments to calculate cost effectiveness? Granting of authority? Anything at all to indicate it's a serious bill and not just and empty position statement like the DNC platform was?
I'll wait.
And - as long as I'm here, let me just indulge in a little bit of SLOPPY snark on you.
You know, if you were able to run your life in any successful way, you'd understand that the way to bring this debate to a definitive close is to show me the democrats have DONE SOMETHING EFFECTIVE in any one of those 30+ years to address global warming,
But you're a loser in life, and you'll never be able to grasp what it means to be working from facts.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
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Quote:I will name two: A bill to regulate assault weapons, to ensure that the right to keep and bear arms is not unlimited. Read the 125 pages of text for exactly how this works. www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s66
Originally posted by 1KIKI:Quote:Name one - specifically. Tell me how EXACTLY that bill is going to do the job.
There is a list of bills from Democrats that have gone to the Senate only to die very quietly.
The GOP will make sure it won’t pass in this session . . . or any other.
A bill to establish an improved Medicare for All national health insurance program. Read the 120 pages to see how this expands Medicare to people younger than 65 years. www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/hr1384
Not gonna happen, except over the dead bodies of Mitch McConnell and all the other GOP Senators.
But then most good ideas die because people fearfully won't try them, which has been humanity's way for hundreds of thousands of years, until certain capitalists figured out brutal, complex, and unreliable ways to get around that tendency in Congress in order to do things the way the capitalists think are best for themselves. Since those capitalists are less than 0.1% of the population, the other 99.9% will often be out of luck. The "good" idea works best for the 0.1% and isn't particularly good for anyone else.
Many health professionals support Medicare for All, including a majority of doctors and the largest nurses union in the US, as do a majority of registered voters in the US overall. But it ain't gonna happen. The GOP has stopped it dead.
www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/opinion--health-reform-in-america--
where-are-the-scientists--66884
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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