A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:6ix, pretend you're not a Republican:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You are a liar. And a very poor one at that.
Anybody can pretend that they're rich.
Just don't go telling people to kill themselves and Haken won't have to ban you like he did your Communist sock puppet.
The Rotting of the Republican Mind - When one party becomes detached from reality.
www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/republican-disinformation.html
In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
. . . Much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. . . . Millions have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Who use words like “epistemic”. . . . (epistemicmeans relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.)
People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. . . .
For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.
Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. . . . The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.
What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.
Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.
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:6ix, pretend you're not a Republican and pretend you haven't lost your mind:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You are a liar. And a very poor one at that.
Anybody can pretend that they're rich.
Just don't go telling people to kill themselves and Haken won't have to ban you like he did your Communist sock puppet.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
The Rotting of the Republican Mind - When one party becomes detached from reality.
6ix's signature: I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/republican-disinformation.html
In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
. . . Much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. . . . Millions have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Who use words like “epistemic”. . . . (epistemic means relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.)
People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. . . .
For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.
Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. . . . The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.
What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.
Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I'm not a Republican, and I haven't lost my mind.
The rest of your post was TL;DR. Plus it came from NYT. Nobody cares.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Why are Senate Republicans just fine with Joe Manchin calling them every name in the book?
In the immediate aftermath of the Senate voting down a bipartisan commission to conduct a soup-to-nuts review of the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, the West Virginia Democrat let loose on his Republican colleagues.
"Choosing to put politics and political elections above the health of our Democracy is unconscionable. And the betrayal of the oath we each take is something they will have to live with."
Oh man! He sure is mad! He called them "unconscionable!!!"
Cut to Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, smiling broadly. Why? Because McConnell, who was the driving force in killing the January 6 commission, couldn't care less about Manchin condemning him. All -- and I mean ALL -- McConnell cares about is whether Manchin has changed or will change his opposition to getting rid of the legislative filibuster. As long as Manchin stays opposed to getting rid of the legislative filibuster, he is McConnell's best buddy -- no matter what the West Virginia Democrat says about his Kentucky Republican colleague.
Unless Manchin changes his mind, the January 6 commission could be only the first in a series of proposals that die in the Senate at the hand of the still-extant filibuster. The next fight is likely to be over Democrats' massive election reform law. President Joe Biden's infrastructure package could also be a filibuster fail.
Manchin will continue to blast Republicans in the Senate for their recalcitrance on issues of critical import to the country while being unwilling to bend on the elimination of the legislative filibuster. Cut to McConnell, smiling broadly.
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:Are you an Independent? An "Independent" who votes almost exclusively for Republicans is not independent.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm not a Republican, and I haven't lost my mind.
Technical Note: Voting for 3rd party candidates doesn't make you "Independent" because voting for candidates who can't win is effectively the same as you can't vote.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Daniel Ellsberg Explains Why Now Was The Right Time To Release Top-Secret File On Nuclear Weapons
June 1 2021, 3:21 p.m.
“The whole idea is to kill the bastards,” Gen. Thomas Power, commander of America’s nuclear forces from 1957 to 1963, once said about the use of atomic weapons. “At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win.”
The hold this nuclear lunacy had on the top of the U.S. government is terrifyingly illuminated in a top-secret study of U.S. war plans newly publicized by famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. The document, produced by the RAND Corporation and copied by Ellsberg at the same time he exfiltrated the Pentagon Papers from RAND, examines the U.S. response to the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis. The study’s contents were first reported on May 22 by the New York Times.
The crisis, now completely forgotten, began when China attempted to seize several small islands off its coast from Taiwan. The study shows American generals enthusiastically planning for the use of nuclear weapons against China. It is not simply that the officials looked with equanimity on the possibility of killing millions; rather, many seemed frustrated that there were any delays forced upon them by the rest of the government. If China had not changed course, civilization could have ended then and there.
Ellsberg is now speaking out about the study, he said in a phone interview, for a straightforward reason: “I got scared.” The issues that led to the 1958 crisis between the U.S. and China have never been resolved; both countries are now ramping up confrontational rhetoric; and most importantly, the strategic rationale that led the U.S. to consider nuclear war then remains exactly the same today. Speaking about today’s generals, Ellsberg said, “You shouldn’t be confident that the current calculations are any less crazy.”
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/06/01/daniel-ellsberg-china-atomic-nucle
ar-weapons/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How Authoritarianism Spread And The U.S. Faltered As A Model For Democracy
I was anchored in a belief that all of these movements somehow needed to coalesce... As I walked the class through a syllabus based upon country after country that had drifted to the nationalist, authoritarian right - Hungary, Turkey, Russia, China, India, Brazil - it was glaringly obvious how interconnected these right-wing nationalists were.
They used common tactics, common narratives, and common conspiracy theories to legitimize their rule; many of them shared common sources of financing, corruption, and political consultants.
Isolated, the resistance movements that gave me hope would likely fail. But if they were connected, perhaps some of them could succeed. That would require an America that came to its senses while recognizing how much had gone wrong.
America had helped shape the world we lived in before descending into the cesspool of the Trump years. We now had a government that was busy radicalizing a huge swath of American society, with pockets of the country turning to violent white supremacy or a QAnon conspiracy theory positing that America is secretly run by a cabal of child sex traffickers.
At precisely the time that progressive forces around the world were under siege, America absented itself from the defense of the most basic propositions that had once defined it in the eyes of the world: The idea that individuals are entitled to a basic set of freedoms that should be applied equally to all people. The idea that democratic governance will compel a society to organize itself around a common set of facts. The idea that people of different races, religions, and ethnicities can peacefully coexist by forging a common sense of identity. The lifelines offered to those who struggled for those things in their own spaces... validated by the results that America itself could produce. We did big things.
Over the past thirty years, we had lost our grip on that lifeline.
From the book After the Fall, Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes
www.amazon.com/s?k=ben+rhodes
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:Are you an Independent? An "Independent" who votes almost exclusively for Republicans is not independent.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm not a Republican, and I haven't lost my mind.
Technical Note: Voting for 3rd party candidates doesn't make you "Independent" because voting for candidates who can't win is effectively the same as you can't vote.
I vote for whoever I like. I've voted for a lot of Democrats in my life. I still do to this day, particularly on the local level. I benefit from living in a state where the Democrats are centrists, and not insane fringe Leftists like in California, New York and Illinois. It just so happens that in the last decade I vote for more Republicans than Democrats.
But I sure as hell wasn't going to vote for a Democrat for Indiana Governor last time... Not in 2020, but Holcomb has to go. Rainwater, the Libertarian candidate got 11.4% of the vote this time, which was up nearly 8% from what the Libertarian got the prior election.
I still think that anybody who has ever pressed that button to vote Party Line should have their right to vote revoked. I'm assuming that includes you. You shouldn't be allowed to vote. You're too stupid to vote.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How Authoritarianism Spread And The U.S. Faltered As A Model For Democracy
If you have a problem with Authoritarianism, fix your fucking party.
And then tell them to go after Big Tech.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:There is a problem, but you are unaware of it. A historian named Peter Turchin studied beetles before he switched to history. Bark beetles and bean beetles, which killed forests and crops. The pest beetles are unaware of being an ecological problem. Then Turchin switched to studying humans. Certain kinds of pesky humans, like beetles, lack self-awareness as they destroy societies:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How Authoritarianism Spread And The U.S. Faltered As A Model For Democracy
If you have a problem with Authoritarianism, fix your fucking party.
And then tell them to go after Big Tech.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news: Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst. . . .
In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more aspirants fighting for a single job at, say, a prestigious law firm, or in an influential government sinecure, or (here it got personal) at a national magazine. Perhaps seeing the holes in my T-shirt, Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one. (He doesn’t view himself as a member of either. A professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. “You reach hundreds of thousands.”) Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.
Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies. Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a “paradigmatic example” of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. “He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge,” Turchin said.
Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising insecurity becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.
Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if the disintegration were not happening now, roughly as the Seer of Storrs foretold 10 years ago. If the next 10 years are as seismic as he says they will be, his insights will have to be accounted for by historians and social scientists—assuming, of course, that there are still universities left to employ such people.
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After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology
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