A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Are Democrats, Independents and Republicans psychologically different? Yes.
https://www.google.com/search?q=are+democrats+independents+and+republi
can+psychologically+different
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:
Are Democrats, Independents and Republicans psychologically different? Yes.
In other news...
The sky is blue and water is wet.
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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:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You would think most Americans could learn from history, but you would be wrong:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And meanwhile... nearly every person I've ever known is a wage slave to this day. Even the ones clearing six figures.
Gotta keep buying all that shit you don't need with money you don't yet have.
13 Things Benjamin Franklin Said about Money that are Still True Today
https://www.moneymanagement.org/blog/things-benjamin-franklin-said-abo
ut-money-that-are-still-true-today
“If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher's stone.” -- B. Franklin
But for Americans who don't remember that the Philosopher's stone changes base metals into precious metals, Franklin's meaning is lost for them.
Another aphorism that goes completely over the heads of most Americans:
“Our necessities never equal our wants.” -- B. Franklin
It can be hard to tell the difference, but it’s crucial to learn what you really need and what you only want.
My saying is every dollar I don't spend is another dollar I don't have to earn.
Not sure if I heard that one before or if I came up with it on the fly.
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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:Every dollar in tax cuts is a dollar I . . . blah, blah:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
My saying is every dollar I don't spend is another dollar I don't have to earn.
Not sure if I heard that one before or if I came up with it on the fly.
It’s now a matter of public record that the immediate response of Bush administration officials to 9/11 was to use it as an excuse for an unrelated project, the invasion of Iraq. “Sweep it all up, things related and not,” said Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, to his aides while the Pentagon was still burning.
The exploitation of 9/11 by people who wanted a wider war — and the selling of that war on false pretenses, which should have been considered an unforgivable abuse of public trust — has faded from public discourse. And you hear hardly anything about the parallel way in which terrorism was exploited for domestic political goals.
When the nation is threatened, we normally expect our leaders to call for shared sacrifice. But leading Republicans responded to a terrorist attack by trying to enact … tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Indeed, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee tried to ram through a cut in the tax rate on capital gains less than 48 hours after the twin towers came down.
Later Republican Tom DeLay, the House majority whip, would declare, “Nothing is more important in a time of war than cutting taxes.”
And in May 2003 Republicans exploited the illusion of success in Iraq by pushing through sharp cuts in tax rates on capital gains and dividends.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/opinion/foreign-terrorists-domestic
-extremists.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Why won't Donald Trump go away? Because Americans can't tell appearance from reality
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Are Democrats, Independents and Republicans psychologically different? Yes.
In other news...
The sky is blue and water is wet.
Many people believed he'd lose the election and simply disappear. But we live in America, where nothing is real.
Americans have a huge problem. It manifests itself in our politics and we see it in our daily lives. It is exacerbated by the commercials on television, the internet and our cell phones.
Many of us can no longer tell the difference between appearance and reality — if in fact we ever could.
This inability explains the appeal of Donald Trump, why some people believe professional wrestling is "real," why some of us won't take a COVID vaccine and why some of us will take a deworming drug meant for horses versus a vaccine designed by scientists for humans. It enables people to scream out "I don't trust the scientists," while at the same time checking themselves into the hospital if they get sick.
Flooded by a glut of misinformation that overwhelms actual facts, the American public seems to have reached a new level of mistrust and arrogant stupidity, further eroding our ability to take on problems and thus increasing our chances of a calamity heretofore unseen except in gothic horror stories or "Mad Max" movies.
It is why as recently as this week, scientists told NPR they needed to do better in communicating the problems of climate change. It's one of the reasons why a passenger on an American Airlines flight had to be restrained after he began screaming about Joe Biden. It's also why CNN published an opinion piece with the headline: "Let's be clear why the U.S. economy is weakening."
There are those who argue we've long been unable to tell the difference between appearance and reality, while others believe it is a recent phenomenon caused by misinformation. But rather than arguing which came first, we need to focus on those who don't recognize the problem at all.
In the case of Donald Trump, he has spent his life making bank on separating people from their cash by claiming to have answers he doesn't actually have. His ex-fixer, Michael Cohen, once told me that Trump is a master at stating the obvious. "He tells us we have a problem," Cohen explained, "that everyone will agree is a problem. But he has no answers."
For example: The wall. How simple. How stupid. Building a wall to stop the importation of illegal drugs and immigrants may sound appealing, but that assumes you've never heard of a ladder and can't build a tunnel. Since most drugs are smuggled into the country via ports of entry — that is, in aircraft, motor vehicles or boats and ships — the reality is that a wall does nothing to solve either problem.
Time and again, Trump has sold us the appearance of leadership, but the reality is best represented by what Trump told me on the South Lawn when I asked him whether he would take any responsibility for people ingesting Clorox and becoming sick trying to treat the coronavirus, because of something Trump had said recently in the White House briefing room.
"I take no responsibility," Trump reminded us.
He took no responsibility for the insurrection — while he provoked it. He took no responsibility for anything when pressed as president, though he and his surrogates drowned us with claims of his leadership prowess. His greatest sleight of hand came when he lost the election and refused to admit it — based on the "Big Lie" that tried to sell the appearance of a rigged election — when in reality he was the one trying to rig it. Thankfully, that failed.
But Trump's efforts have led to the rebirth of modern sadistic fascism, predominantly in the Bible Belt and specifically in Texas and Florida, where you have freedom to
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Every dollar in tax cuts is a dollar I . . . blah, blah:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
My saying is every dollar I don't spend is another dollar I don't have to earn.
Not sure if I heard that one before or if I came up with it on the fly.
You don't benefit from tax cuts because you don't have a business.
Meanwhile, having only paid federal income taxes on 2,000 one year out of the last 11 years, it will be quite easy for me to continue going on without needing a jab to live.
It won't even require me cutting back on anything.
It will be fun watching this one play out from the sidelines.
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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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In a 2004 Esquire article, a “senior Bush administration official” explained why the U.S. had needed to invade Iraq. It turned out that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s continued existence in power “resulted in a very bad message to the world, including to Islamic terrorists, that America … could be defied.”
This emotionalism about Saddam was bipartisan. In 1993, the Clinton administration proclaimed that Iraq, having been defeated in the 1991 Gulf War, had tried to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush while the elder Bush was taking a victory lap in Kuwait. This later turned out to have been made up in exactly the same way as all the tales about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, Clinton officials were filled with rage about it. As the New Yorker reported at the time, they were furious about Saddam’s “near-suicidal defiance of American pressure. … Many officials in the Pentagon and the State Department had become increasingly angry with Iraq in the early months of the Clinton Administration, feeling that Saddam Hussein had been ‘getting away with things.’”
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s similar worldview was described in journalist Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial”:
“Why did you support the Iraq war?” Bush aide Michael Gerson asked him.
“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.”
Why are all these people lost in these disturbing fantasy worlds? After witnessing the last two decades, I’d suggest that we need to understand a peculiar quirk of human psychology: The powerful always loathe those with less power. My grandfather was a historian who spent his life studying the Spanish conquest of the so-called New World, and as he put it:
“The hostility of those who have power toward those who can be called inferior because they are different — because they are others, the strangers — has been a historical constant. Indeed, at times it seems to be the dominant theme in human history.”
Of course, this doesn’t make “sense” in the way we want to think of it. But neither has the “war on terror.” It’s been 20 years of mindless violence, cruelty, and waste, the U.S. lashing out like a gigantic beast without a functioning frontal cortex, visiting numberless 9/11s on innocents as it staggered around the globe. But that does make sense if you ignore all the speeches and op-eds and instead start from the presumption that the political class running this country is overflowing with the primate wrath of the powerful who are nonetheless not omnipotent.
On September 11, 2001, I realized that I was on Al Qaeda’s list. Since then, I’ve learned that I’m also on the list of the far more mighty people in charge of America, just a little further down. Even with the most concrete dangers facing us — the destruction of a livable biosphere, an enduring pandemic, and much more — they are absolutely committed to following the same path, driven onward by complex delusions. Power tends to corrupt, not just in a standard moral sense but also intellectually and emotionally, and they’ve held extreme power for a very long time. What I know now that I didn’t know then is that if we let them, their corruption will surely destroy us all.
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/09/10/september-11-america-response/
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:
In a 2004 Esquire article, a “senior Bush administration official” explained why the U.S. had needed to invade Iraq. It turned out that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s continued existence in power “resulted in a very bad message to the world, including to Islamic terrorists, that America … could be defied.”
This emotionalism about Saddam was bipartisan. In 1993, the Clinton administration proclaimed that Iraq, having been defeated in the 1991 Gulf War, had tried to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush while the elder Bush was taking a victory lap in Kuwait. This later turned out to have been made up in exactly the same way as all the tales about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, Clinton officials were filled with rage about it. As the New Yorker reported at the time, they were furious about Saddam’s “near-suicidal defiance of American pressure. … Many officials in the Pentagon and the State Department had become increasingly angry with Iraq in the early months of the Clinton Administration, feeling that Saddam Hussein had been ‘getting away with things.’”
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s similar worldview was described in journalist Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial”:
“Why did you support the Iraq war?” Bush aide Michael Gerson asked him.
“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.”
Why are all these people lost in these disturbing fantasy worlds? After witnessing the last two decades, I’d suggest that we need to understand a peculiar quirk of human psychology: The powerful always loathe those with less power. My grandfather was a historian who spent his life studying the Spanish conquest of the so-called New World, and as he put it:
“The hostility of those who have power toward those who can be called inferior because they are different — because they are others, the strangers — has been a historical constant. Indeed, at times it seems to be the dominant theme in human history.”
Of course, this doesn’t make “sense” in the way we want to think of it. But neither has the “war on terror.” It’s been 20 years of mindless violence, cruelty, and waste, the U.S. lashing out like a gigantic beast without a functioning frontal cortex, visiting numberless 9/11s on innocents as it staggered around the globe. But that does make sense if you ignore all the speeches and op-eds and instead start from the presumption that the political class running this country is overflowing with the primate wrath of the powerful who are nonetheless not omnipotent.
On September 11, 2001, I realized that I was on Al Qaeda’s list. Since then, I’ve learned that I’m also on the list of the far more mighty people in charge of America, just a little further down. Even with the most concrete dangers facing us — the destruction of a livable biosphere, an enduring pandemic, and much more — they are absolutely committed to following the same path, driven onward by complex delusions. Power tends to corrupt, not just in a standard moral sense but also intellectually and emotionally, and they’ve held extreme power for a very long time. What I know now that I didn’t know then is that if we let them, their corruption will surely destroy us all.
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/09/10/september-11-america-response/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Hey. You've got a huge house and a ton of money and a successful business.
Get in contact with somebody from the Administration* and tell them that you'll take in a sand-people family and that you won't even accept the $67,000 per person for it.
That, or shut the fuck up.
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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
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Quote:Your demand is along the same lines as Jeff Bezos could give all Amazon workers $105,000 and still be as rich as pre-Covid, therefore he must give the money away: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/jeff-bezos-could-give-all-amazo
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Hey. You've got a huge house and a ton of money and a successful business.
Get in contact with somebody from the Administration* and tell them that you'll take in a sand-people family and that you won't even accept the $67,000 per person for it.
That, or shut the fuck up.
n-workers-105000-and-still-be-as-rich-as-pre-covid-212545/
Or your demand is along the line of if Warren Buffett advocates higher taxes for the rich, he should stop advocating and just give his wealth to the U.S. Treasury: https://www.newsweek.com/warren-buffett-who-advocates-higher-taxes-def
ends-paying-least-among-americas-richest-1598830
Dream on, 6ix, but Bezos, Buffett and I didn't get rich by doing as the poor want us to. We do the opposite and that is why we prosper and the poor don't. If you don't like it, get your government to pressure the rich to change their ways. I'm sure a government with Trump as President would be very open minded about pressuring the rich to pay all their taxes, raise wages and benefits, etc. Or maybe Trump won't if his first term is a guide to his second.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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You don't have a business or money.
But thank you for proving my point regardless.
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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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