A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
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Quote:Trump on Saturday, however, said that Republicans should wait until after the midterm elections to vote for any infrastructure bill . . .
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol
Things aren't going the way you wanted them to after you got what you wanted, huh Second?
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/566838-trump-slams-mcconnell-infra
structure-package-a-disgrace
Translating Trump's meandering bullshit into English: Don't pass infrastructure until January 2023. Trump is a complete asshole because he told any GOP Senators who vote for infrastructure that he will do what he can to remove them from the Senate.
Senators voted 67-27 to advance the infrastructure bill. Eighteen GOP senators voted with all Democrats to help get the legislation over the 60-vote hurdle. The bill will face another vote on Sunday to formally shut down debate and put the bill on a glide path to passage. If every Democrat continues to vote yes, that means they need to have 10 GOP senators in order to get over the final hurdle for the bill. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/566855-1t-infrastructure-bill-pass
es-key-test-vote
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:... no matter what the polls say, no matter that Trump was completely unexpectedly elected when Hillary voters stayed home. A majority of Americans' words ... and actions! ... are all lies!
The real problem is that a majority of Americans don't want any of this to change ...
Because that makes so much sense. /
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Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid
https://psyche.co/ideas/why-some-of-the-smartest-people-can-be-so-very
-stupid
Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. This is easiest to introduce with a tragic case. British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: ie, as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand.
Such stupidity is perfectly compatible with intelligence: Haig was by any standard a smart man. Indeed, in at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalization: when Harry Houdini, the great illusionist, took Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, through the tricks underlying the seances in which Conan Doyle devoutly believed, the author’s reaction was to concoct a ludicrously elaborate counter-explanation as to why it was precisely the true mediums who would appear to be frauds.
Stupidity has two features that make it particularly dangerous. First, stupidity is primarily a property of groups or traditions, not individuals: after all, we get most of our concepts, our mental tools, from the society we are raised in. Suppose the problem with Haig had been laziness: there was no shortage of energetic generals to replace him. But if Haig worked himself to the bone within the intellectual prison of the 19th-century military tradition, then solving the difficulty becomes harder: you will need to introduce a new conceptual framework and establish a sense of identity and military pride for it. Once stupidity has taken hold of a group or society, it is thus particularly hard to eradicate – inventing, distributing and normalizing new concepts is tough work.
Second, stupidity begets more stupidity. Take politics, where stupidity is particularly catching: a stupid slogan chimes with a stupid voter, it mirrors the way they see the world. The result is that stupidity can, ironically, be extremely effective in the right environment: a kind of incapacity is in effect being selected for. Stupidity is compatible with high educational achievement, and it is more the property of a political culture than of the individuals in it, needing to be tackled at that level.
There will be many cases that aren’t fully fledged stupidity but that mimic its effects. Imagine someone who had been blind to all evidence that they were being cheated on finally asking themselves ‘How could you be so stupid?’ Here the problem is not pure stupidity: the concept of a cheat is common enough. What we have here is rather someone ‘acting as if they were stupid’. It’s not just that they failed to apply the concept of betrayal, but that they literally didn’t think of it: it was effectively ‘offline’, due to emotional and other pressures. In this kind of case, agents possess the necessary intellectual tools but unwittingly lock them away. This marks an important contrast with dumbness – we can make ourselves stupid, but we don’t make ourselves dumb.
Stupidity is tough to fix. This is exacerbated by the way it dovetails with other vices: stubbornness stops me from revisiting my concepts even as they fail me. But once we understand stupidity’s nature, things are a little brighter than they might seem. To view political opponents as primarily cynical transforms them into Machiavellian monsters, leaving no space for anything but a zero-sum battle for domination. To view political opponents as primarily dumb is to suggest an irreparable flaw – one that, in our deeply hierarchical soci
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Quote:Are you aware that if only a few thousand votes had changed, Hillary would have been President in 2016?
Originally posted by 1KIKI:Quote:... no matter what the polls say, no matter that Trump was completely unexpectedly elected when Hillary voters stayed home. A majority of Americans' words ... and actions! ... are all lies!
The real problem is that a majority of Americans don't want any of this to change ...
Because that makes so much sense. /
A shift of fewer than 80,000 votes in three states (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) — or 0.06% of 137 million cast — would have made Hillary Clinton president.
https://www.axios.com/hillary-clinton-2016-election-votes-supreme-cour
t-liberal-justice-1b4bc4fc-9fad-44b4-ab54-9ef86aa9c1f1.html
I would say that if America is that closely divided, by only a few thousand votes, America does NOT know what it wants. How about in 2020? How close was the vote then?
When you look at the smallest popular vote shift needed to give Trump a victory, the 2020 election was close. Indeed, it was even closer than 2016. If Trump picked up the right mix of 42,921 votes in Arizona (10,457), Georgia (11,779), and Wisconsin (20,682), the Electoral College would have been tied at 269 all. The House would have then decided the election. Republicans will hold the majority of state delegations in the new Congress, and they undoubtedly would have chosen Trump. If Trump had also picked up the one electoral vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which he lost to Biden by 22,091 votes, he would have won the Electoral College outright. Back in 2016, Clinton needed to pick up the right mix of 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to win the Electoral College.
https://www.cfr.org/blog/2020-election-numbers
Again, 2020 was much the same as 2016. A few thousand votes separate the winner from the loser. And again America does not know what it wants. Congress will not make bold decisions when the country is split 50/50 about the difference between Trump/Biden or Trump/Hillary. Even the Senate is split 50/50 between D and R Senators. Even the House of Representatives is split almost exactly 50/50.
This is crazy when America cannot get a clear majority for either party. It is as if America is flipping a coin when it goes to vote rather than comparing the obvious differences between D vs R and choosing one or the other.
1kiki: Does Russia have crash barriers where roads split? If you are unfamiliar with those crush-able barrels on the Interstate Highway System, this analogy will totally confuse you: When America comes to the split in the road between going left or right, America always hits the crash barrier. This is a crazy way to drive. Either go left or right, America. Please stop trying to go both ways.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump won. Democrats stole it.
You're watching the country and the world fall apart as a result of it.
I think we'll survive another 3 years though.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:America is falling apart because it can't decide whether to go left or right. If a few thousand voters changed their minds, the other party would win the Presidency. Same with the Senate and the House of Representatives. So America keeps running into the crash barrels where the road splits to go left and right. Crashing America over and over into the barrels is a continuous and wonderful moneymaking opportunity for tow truck owners and collision repair shops (the top 1% wealthiest Americans) who will keep getting more and more of America's wealth until they own 67% of the country, unless American voters pick either left or right instead of crashing at every election. Once at 67% ownership of America, Congress can be shutdown because the top 1% will be making all political decisions. How soon until the richest own 67%? Probably another 50 years if present trends continue:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Trump won. Democrats stole it.
You're watching the country and the world fall apart as a result of it.
I think we'll survive another 3 years though.
Newly released data from the Fed show that the top 1 percent of income earners now hold 32.1 percent of all wealth in the United States. That is the highest percentage of wealth the top 1 percent has held since the Fed began publishing the data set in 1989 (see below). That’s up nearly 20 percent from the period following the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, and nearly 35 percent from 1990. This data should not be surprising.
https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/the-top-1-hold-a-record-amoun
t-of-wealth-in-the-u-s-heres-how-much-and-why
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Critical Race Theory (CRT)
In Idaho, one state legislator, in the service of promoting anti-CRT legislation, cited To Kill a Mockingbird to call for banning Critical Race Theory from public schools because the book supposedly makes white people look bad.
Frederick Douglass could just as easily be banned from school systems in states adopting anti-CRT legislation, for this is a man who from the beginning of his career in the late 1830s to his death in 1895 viscerally and intellectually understood the centrality of slavery and race to American history and culture. Consider the most famous lines from his most famous speech, his 1852 “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Douglass declares about the supposedly democratic nation in which slavery is the law of the land:
“Roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
Could such a speech be taught in Idaho, Texas, Florida, or any other state with anti-CRT legislation on the books? Would educators be willing to take this risk? In his 1845 Narrative, Douglass displays white people’s anti-Black racism in action: he shows Black people being indiscriminately killed and tortured under slavery and depicts racism penetrating the North as well. In the autobiography’s devastating appendix, he attacks white Christianity, North and South, for its hypocrisy and cruelty, stating sarcastically that white Christians profess “to love God whom they have not seen, whilst they hate their brother whom they have seen.” Douglass did not relent on white racist practices after the Civil War, attacking Radical Republicans for not moving quickly enough to help the freedpeople, proclaiming that Lincoln was “preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” laying bare the prejudice that made it difficult for his sons and other Black people to find jobs in the Northeast, and condemning the nation for becoming a charnel house of lynching in his last major speech, “Lessons of the Hour” (1894).
Douglass was also a student of the law, and some of his greatest speeches expose the racist underpinnings of Supreme Court decisions supposedly made in relation to an objective or originalist vision of constitutional law. In this way, Douglass could be considered a founder of CRT practice. He wrote and spoke powerfully about the racist underpinnings of the 1857 Dred Scott case, which at the time denied Black people citizenship in perpetuity, and he later assailed the Supreme Court’s 1883 nullification of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 for the way it upheld white supremacist racial hierarchies. It was a “deed,” he said, “done for slavery, caste, and oppression.” Had he lived another two or three years, his would have been a powerful voice speaking out against the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), showing how its “separate but equal” outcome ultimately meant separate and unequal — which he would have critiqued for violating the nation’s founding principles.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/frederick-douglass-and-the-trouble
-with-critical-race-theory/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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It's not that the people of the US don't know what they want. It's just that the choices they're offered are not it.
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Quote:You are wrong. Americans allowed their choices to be made for them. An example: Healthcare is more expensive in America than anywhere else in the world. Millions get no healthcare. Bankruptcy because of medical expenses is common. But when there is talk of fixing this system which is obviously designed to make the maximum amount of money for people who own the healthcare system, the talk always turns to America has the best healthcare in the world and to change it would be socialism and do you want the government to interfere with the doctor/patient relationship? At that point, 99% of Americans lazily decide they will tolerate things as they are because changing anything would make it worse.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
It's not that the people of the US don't know what they want. It's just that the choices they're offered are not it.
Republican politicians know it is easy to herd American opinion to do nothing about everything, especially when the Democrats start talking about the price tag for changing things. Americans don't want to pay. Things will not change swiftly because Americans are so easily discouraged and don't want to think about solutions to problems.
Not one American in 100 would click the link below:
Health Care in the U.S. Compared to Other High-Income Countries
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2021/aug/mi
rror-mirror-2021-reflecting-poorly
Not one American in 1,000 would read the Conclusion: Four features distinguish top performing countries from the United States:
1) they provide for universal coverage and remove cost barriers;
2) they invest in primary care systems to ensure that high-value services are equitably available in all communities to all people;
3) they reduce administrative burdens that divert time, efforts, and spending from health improvement efforts; and
4) they invest in social services, especially for children and working-age adults.
All this information is easy to find by googling https://www.google.com/search?q=healthcare+compared+to+other+countries but Americans are NOT going to do it. Therefore, the Democrats can't get it done in Congress.
There will be nobody but a very few Democratic voters pushing Republican Senators to solve this healthcare problem and the GOP Senators won't vote for what a Democrat wants. I have seen that dynamic with the two Republican Senators from Texas. Those two guys don't give a damn about what the Democrats want. And Republican voters won't push their GOP Senators to solve the healthcare problem.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Not one American in 100 would click the link below:
You're so Elite.
Quote:
Not one American in 1,000 would read the Conclusion... Americans are NOT going to do it. Therefore, the Democrats can't get it done in Congress.
1 in 1000 voted for Biden*.
That sounds about right.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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