A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:And that would be an error roughly equivalent to shooting yourself in the head when your girlfriend dumps you when, 4 years later, you finally realize you would have eventually dumped her if you gave yourself enough time to realize what has always been wrong with her and still is wrong.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
And 4 years from now it will be reversed again.
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:And that would be an error roughly equivalent to shooting yourself in the head when your girlfriend dumps you when, 4 years later, you finally realize you would have eventually dumped her if you gave yourself enough time to realize what had always been wrong with her.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
And 4 years from now it will be reversed again.
Maybe.
Or maybe she would have just taken 4 more years to figure out you were the problem and dumped you anyway.
There's always two sides.
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Imagine the hypocrisy of a government who will allow businesses to card people to get a job or buy groceries, but won't card people to vote in elections and gives millions of non-citizens free money from taxpayers.
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Quote:But there is only one Earth and climate change will kill it. But if you want to believe liars who are paid to tell you the Earth can't die, who can stop you?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
There's always two sides.
I forgot to say that I am well paid for selling natural gas, which is mostly methane, and when burnt makes CO2, so I know why the liars are being paid to say methane and CO2 won't kill the Earth.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Global capital, crony capital and the centre-left
by John Quiggin on April 29, 2021
https://crookedtimber.org/2021/04/29/global-capital-crony-capital-and-
the-centre-left/
Writing in the New York Times, Elizabeth Bruenig makes the case against an alliance of convenience between liberals and “woke” corporations against the threat posed to democracy by Trumpism. After acknowledging how desperate the situation has become, she presents the argument, to which I’ll respond bit by bit.
Quote:This is the nature of alliances of convenience. When the Western Allies joined Stalin to fight against Hitler they had no (or at least few) illusions about him, and didn’t rely on him to keep his word any longer than necessary, or to refrain from undermining them in other quarters.
Capital is unfaithful. It can, and does, play all sides. Many of the courageous businesses that protested North Carolina’s 2016 “bathroom bill,” for instance, also donated to political groups that helped fund the candidacies of the very politicians who passed the bill.
Quote:This simply isn’t correct as the Biden Administration is showing. Despite co-operating with capital on social matters. Biden has proposed substantial increases in corporate tax rates and global action against corporate tax avoidance. In this context, it is the position of capital that has been weakened by the toxicity of its usual allies, the Republicans.
It isn’t possible to cooperate with capital on social matters while fighting them in other theaters; capital can fight you in all theaters at once, all while enjoying public adulation for helping you, as well.
Quote:Again, this is what happens in an alliance of this kind. Fights over unionization go on, in parallel with an alliance over the right to vote. Once again, it’s the corporations who face the bigger problem here, with opportunistic Republicans pretending to back the rights of the workers.
Setting aside the fact that capital can in a single moment be both heroic and diabolical — Amazon wants you to be able to vote, but it would prefer if you didn’t unionize — it is, incredibly, even less democratic, accountable and responsive than our ramshackle democracy. Capital rallies to the defense of democracy while aggressively quashing that very thing in the workplaces where its workers labor.
Quote:This is a counsel of despair, without any real basis. Bruenig gives no reason to suppose that the fight for democracy can’t be won, even if it requires alliances between groups with interests that are otherwise opposed. But if the Republicans can be held at bay long enough to allow the passage of strong voting rights law, they will have to reform themselves or face permanent minority status. Getting to that point (for example, by winning bigger majorities in both Houses of Congress in 2022, then scrapping the filibuster) will be difficult, but not impossible.
I have no idea what to do about this other than know it for what it is. If it were ever the case that knowledge was power, it certainly isn’t so anymore: Knowledge is more widely dispersed than ever; power remains notably concentrated. But knowledge confers a certain dignity. It’s worse to be powerless and unaware than to be powerless and perfectly clear on where you stand.
An important limitation of Bruenig’s analysis is that she treats “capital” as a unitary force. There is a sharp division between global corporations, with a long-run interest in the preservation of the rule of law under a democratic government, and the crony capitalists, epitomized by Trump himself, for whom the object is to extract as much as possible from the US economy, as quickly as they can.
Someone with more expertise than me could interpret all this in terms of the “fractions of capital” idea put forward by Poulantzas and others in C20. A search on those terms produced this piece in The Guardian, which covers some of those points: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/20/understand-politics-capi
tol-breach-authoritarianism
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Getting to that point (for example, by winning bigger majorities in both Houses of Congress in 2022, then scrapping the filibuster) will be difficult, but not impossible.
LOL
So are we finally admitting I was right all along and the Democrats can't break the filibuster even though the media told you for months now that they can and will?
You're obviously not a chess player, because if the Democrats ever actually broke the filibuster they'd have also better damn well made sure they broke the election process so thoroughly in America that Republicans could never hold a majority again.
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Imagine the hypocrisy of a government who will allow businesses to card people to get a job or buy groceries, but won't card people to vote in elections and gives millions of non-citizens free money from taxpayers.
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Quote:I think it would be an excellent idea if there was no filibuster. The Republicans would have no excuse for not, giving one example, replacing Obamacare with something better. The GOP didn't have anything better for Obamacare. There was no draft bill. Nothing at all. That was why their strategy was repeal and, who knows when, replace Obamacare. The entire policy of the GOP is to do nothing. When in the majority, they do nothing, other than not enforcing tax laws and pollution laws. When in the minority, they need the filibuster to make sure the Democrats do nothing.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Getting to that point (for example, by winning bigger majorities in both Houses of Congress in 2022, then scrapping the filibuster) will be difficult, but not impossible.
LOL
So are we finally admitting I was right all along and the Democrats can't break the filibuster even though the media told you for months now that they can and will?
You're obviously not a chess player, because if the Democrats ever actually broke the filibuster they'd have also better damn well made sure they broke the election process so thoroughly in America that Republicans could never hold a majority again.
To repeat what I don't think a Trumptard can ever really understand: When the government does nothing, the top 1% wealthiest Americans become the de facto rulers of America, which is very fine with the 1%.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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In 1751, Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay that makes clear that anyone can be classified as “white” or read out of the white race, depending on the needs of the moment.
Franklin was desperate to keep the British colonies “white,” but by white, he didn’t mean European. For Franklin, only the English and Saxons counted. Germans, Swedes, Russians, and the French were “swarthy,” and thus “will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”
At the same time, the English were colonizing Ireland and demoting its nearly translucent inhabitants to nonwhite. A famous British clergyman named Charles Kingsley, extremely liberal by the standards of the day, wrote home from a trip to Sligo that the people somehow had skin “as white as ours” but nevertheless were subhuman “chimpanzees.” In the U.S., the Irish were the standard by which nonwhiteness was measured, to the extent that African Americans were sometimes referred to as “smoked Irish.”
Of course, America eventually promoted the Irish to white, on the condition that they would be team players. Across the world in South Africa, the apartheid regime decided that Japanese immigrants were loyal enough to be “honorary whites.” The sorting process can even be seen in real time in a 1949 Atlantic article by a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt about his trip to the newly born Israel. The country, he explained, could be useful as “the best guarantee” for Western interests in the area. Jewish people, who had previously been “moth-eaten” and “grease-spotted,” now possessed “physical beauty, healthy vitality, politeness, good nature” and were comparable to Thomas Jefferson. Arab people were in the way but “about as dangerous as so many North American Indians,” and therefore nonwhite and “foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and pullulating with vermin.”
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/05/02/exterminate-all-the-brutes-hbo/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Vanished From the Earth
As an evangelical kid, I was terrified of the rapture—and so was everyone I knew. Years after I left the faith, I wanted to understand the power it held over us all.
My father still goes to the same church I haven’t been to in five years. He still believes many of the same things. He works for a telecommunications company, making sure the servers and circuitry that bring the internet to you don’t shut down. He knows his overtime hours will never accrue into meaningful wealth; he knows that despite his best efforts he is one bad day from losing his home, his car, his life. He sits in a congregation of people who are also aware of this, the cheapness of life.
So they make a bargain, the only one that makes sense, the one that countless others have made in countless pews: They will stake their claim on the imagined apocalypse of the rapture because, at the very least, that is the doom that will save them in the end. If they’re wrong, they get what’s coming to them anyway: an unremarkable death in a world that was hostile to them, their hopes firmly planted on what comes next. And if they’re right?
“There’s an underlining of joy,” my father tells me, “because you know he’s preparing a place where all these elements that affect us and are attacking us here, in this flesh now—he has promised us that we won’t have any of that when he comes to get us. Because he’s preparing a perfect place. It’s not something to be feared. It’s a reward.”
He recites this like it’s a passage he’s committed to memory, because it largely is. I know those words, that language; I’ve heard it countless times from countless pulpits. I also know how my father sounds when he’s not reciting things, when he’s interested, passionate, amused, curious. It’s not like this. Then I ask him about a TV show, just so I can hear what his real voice sounds like again before I hang up the phone.
The specter of the rapture is unavoidable in America now. I see it in pastors’ sermons urging people to get right with God. I see it in the curricula of Christian schools that still maintain the United States has a part to play in the fundamentalist idea of the End Times, that state that the country must once again assert itself as a Christian nation, a light to a doomed world. I saw it in the callous inaction on and lack of concern from evangelical leaders about the COVID-19 pandemic and our now-regular cycles of gun violence and hate crimes. There’s a reason why the cliché is thoughts and prayers.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210503021128/https://slate.com/human-int
erest/2021/05/rapture-fear-evangelical-americans-church-miller.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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I think it would be an excellent idea if there was no filibuster. The Republicans would have no excuse for not, giving one example, replacing Obamacare with something better. The GOP didn't have anything better for Obamacare. There was no draft bill. Nothing at all. That was why their strategy was repeal and, who knows when, replace Obamacare. The entire policy of the GOP is to do nothing. When in the majority, they do nothing, other than not enforcing tax laws and pollution laws. When in the minority, they need the filibuster to make sure the Democrats do nothing.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Getting to that point (for example, by winning bigger majorities in both Houses of Congress in 2022, then scrapping the filibuster) will be difficult, but not impossible.
LOL
So are we finally admitting I was right all along and the Democrats can't break the filibuster even though the media told you for months now that they can and will?
You're obviously not a chess player, because if the Democrats ever actually broke the filibuster they'd have also better damn well made sure they broke the election process so thoroughly in America that Republicans could never hold a majority again.
To repeat what I don't think a Trumptard can ever really understand: When the government does nothing, the top 1% wealthiest Americans become the de facto rulers of America, which is very fine with the 1%.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Yanno what?
Fuck your arguments too.
You want to talk about religion, and regurgitation of bullshit?
Look at your posts since I've become sober.
There's thousands of them. Even when half of your posts make the other half look like pure hypocrisy, they all say the same thing.
"Democrats good. Republicans bad."
I'm better off buying a pet rock, giving it an iPhone, and then having a political conversation with it than I am talking to you.
--------------------------------------------------
Imagine the hypocrisy of a government who will allow businesses to card people to get a job or buy groceries, but won't card people to vote in elections and gives millions of non-citizens free money from taxpayers.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Canadian adds Proud Boys to a list of Number 1 Nuclear Terrorist Threats?
Proud Boys Canada says it was never a ‘white supremacy’ group, dissolves itself, founder of Proud Boys on RebelMedia also co-founded VICE media?
What kind of theme tune would they use?
The Proud Boys are calling. On their way back from the fire
In august moon's surrender to. A dust cloud on the rise
Wild boys fallen far from glory
Reckless and so hungered
On the razors edge you trail
Because there's murder by the roadside
In a sore afraid new world
They tried to break us,
Looks like they'll try again
PROUD BOYS never lose it. Proud boys never chose this way
Wild boys never close your eyes
Wild boys always shine
You got sirens for a welcome. There's bloodstain for your pain
And your telephone been ringing while
You're dancing in the rain
Gavin McInnes, had already quit the Proud Boys
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/gavin-mcinnes-quits-proud-boys
Canadian Proud Boys Disband After Being Designated a Terrorist Group
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/5/3/headlines/canadian_proud_boys_di
sband_after_being_designated_a_terrorist_group_in_february
A Proud Boys organizer Joseph Biggs who worked for Alexjones Infowars arrested and charged
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/proud-boys-joe-biggs-arrested-capitol-rio
t/
Proud Boys Canada says it was never a ‘white supremacy’ group, dissolves itself
https://globalnews.ca/news/7828120/proud-boys-canada-dissolved/
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