A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 658 of 725
You call me a Nihilist and then you post shit like that unironically?
OK, Arthur. 
As for this part:
Quote:
And it’s not just conventional arms that are profitable. Building nuclear weapons systems is also quite lucrative. With these kinds of financial incentives in place, it’s incredible that human civilization still exists.
Your Democrat buddies teamed up with the Bushite NeoCons in Congress and just sent a 1.7 Trillion Dollar bill to Joe* for him to sign that will release another $858 Billion to the cause.
Yay!
And why doesn't it surprise me that people who work at the Intercept are going to be alone with their cats and blow up dolls on Christmas?
Quote:
So the downside here is our unending Covid nightmare. The upside is we now have 10 vaccine billionaires! We’d like to believe they’re spending this Christmas Eve together, downing negroni sbagliatos somewhere on the Amalfi coast, toasting the freedom that is capitalism.
There is no Covid nightmare. Feel free to triple mask and stay in your safe room all day if you'd like though. The rest of your family will be relieved that you didn't take up their invitation.
You're right about the 10 vaccine billionaires though. I was telling you stupid fucks about that for two years now. And nobody is going to forget how you were cheerleading the Democrats when they made deals with Big Pharma stating that nobody can sue them when the vaccines start ruining lives and killing people.
I'll let you get back to writing clickbate hate articles for what I can only assume is government cheese wheels since it's very clear that you would never accept money as compensation for your "hard work". Nosir. Never that.
--------------------------------------------------
Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
A Tale of Two Presidents
President Joe Biden on Twitter:
"There is a certain stillness at the center of the Christmas story: a silent night when all the world goes quiet. And all the clamor, everything that divides us, fades away in the stillness of a winter's evening. I wish you that peace this Christmas Eve."
Donald Trump on Truth Social:
"Merry Christmas to EVERYONE, including the Radical Left Marxists that are trying to destroy our Country, the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is illegally coercing & paying Social and LameStream Media to push for a mentally disabled Democrat over the Brilliant, Clairvoyant, and USA LOVING Donald J. Trump, and, of course, The Department of Injustice, which appointed a Special 'Prosecutor' who, together with his wife and family, HATES 'Trump' more than any other person on earth. LOVE TO ALL!"
https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/109580927119071130
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Fuck Joe Biden*.
How many babies did he and Dr. Jill eat this year?
--------------------------------------------------
Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I was watching His Dark Materials. In the TV show, the goal of establishing “the Republic of Heaven” is repeated several times. What is that Republic? Sounds very political, especially in contrast to the more common phrase "the Kingdom of Heaven". Since the show is based on three novels by Philip Pullman, I went to essays written by Pullman to learn what was meant. To my surprise I discovered that Trumptards think like Gnostics without even knowing or caring what Gnostism is:
The Gnostic religion, like the Christian one, tells us a story that involves ourselves. Some characters we know from Christianity appear in the Gnostic story too, but they have a very different aspect. To sum it up briefly and crudely, the Gnostic myth says that this world – the material universe we live in – was created not by a good God but by an evil Demiurge, who made it as a kind of prison for the sparks of divinity that had fallen, or been stolen, from the inconceivably distant true God who was their real source. These little sparks of god-ness are known as the pneuma, or soul, and each of us has a portion inside us. It’s the duty of the Gnostics, the knowing ones, to try and escape from this world, out of the clutches of the Demiurge and his angelic archons, and find a way back to that original and unknown and far-off God.
Now whatever else this is, it’s a very good story, and what’s more it has an immense explanatory power: it offers to explain why we feel, as so many of us do, exiled in this world, alienated from joy and meaningfulness and the true connection we feel we must have with the universe, as Jane Eyre feels that she must have love and kindness.
So Gnosticism fits the temper of the times. It lends itself to all kinds of contemporary variations: a feminist one, for example, partly because of the important role it assigns to the figure of the Sophia, or Wisdom, the youngest and paradoxically the rashest of the emanations of the divine being. Somehow we’re not surprised to learn that it was all her fault that the material universe came about in the first place.
And Gnosticism appeals powerfully too to the sense of being in the know, of having access to a truth not available to most people. And not least, it appeals because the story it tells is all about a massive conspiracy, and we love massive conspiracies. The X-Files, for example, is pure Gnosticism. ‘The truth is out there,’ says Mulder: not in here, because in here is permeated by evil conspiracies that reach right to the heart of the Pentagon and the FBI and the White House and every other centre of power in the world. The Demiurge is in charge, in here. But out there somewhere is that distant unknowable God, the source of all truth, and we belong to him – not to the corrupt and dishonest and evil empire that rules this world.
So it’s a powerfully dramatic myth, and it has the great advantage of putting us human beings and our predicament right at the heart of it. No wonder it appeals. The trouble is, it’s not true. If we can’t believe the story about the shepherds and the angels and the wise men and the star and the manger and so on, then it’s even harder to believe in Demiurges and archons and emanations and so on. It certainly explains, and it certainly makes us feel important, but it isn’t true.
And it has the terrible defect of libelling – one might almost say blaspheming against, if the notion had any republican meaning – the physical universe; of saying that this world is just a clumsy copy of a perfect original which we can’t see because it’s somewhere else. In the eyes of some Christian writers, of course, this sort of Platonism is a great merit. C. S. Lewis, at the end of the last book in the Narnia series, has his character the wise old professor explaining: ‘Our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world…’ In fact, the two things are ‘as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.’ And then he goes on to add under his breath ‘It’s all in Plato, all in Plato:
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So it’s a powerfully dramatic myth, and it has the great advantage of putting us human beings and our predicament right at the heart of it. No wonder it appeals. The trouble is, it’s not true. If we can’t believe the story about the shepherds and the angels and the wise men and the star and the manger and so on, then it’s even harder to believe in Demiurges and archons and emanations and so on. It certainly explains, and it certainly makes us feel important, but it isn’t true.
I know you think you're super intelligent enough where you can decide what is and isn't true, Mr. Pullman, but you don't know any more than I do what is and isn't real outside of this meatsack that our consciousnesses have been shoved inside of. And you won't until you die. Or maybe you won't know because nothing happens when you die and the 7 Octillion atoms that make up these finite vessels are just to where our scattered bodies go.
Other than the word itself, I didn't know anything about Gnosticism except for what I read here. But it's not just the X-Files that is heavily Gnostic, but The Matrix as well.
Scientific American (The Serious Article in their "Space and Physics" section): Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-
chances-are-about-50-50/
Scientific American (The Parody Article in their "Opinion" section 6 months later): Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation
We must never doubt Elon Musk again
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-we-live-in-a-simu
lation/
Quote:
So Gnosticism fits the temper of the times.
It fits the temper of all times. Past, present and future. Regardless of how right or wrong it is.
Quote:
What are the implications of this monumental find? Well, first of all we can’t question Elon Musk again. Ever. Secondly, we must not forget what the simulation hypothesis really is. It is the ultimate conspiracy theory. The mother of all conspiracy theories, the one that says that everything, with the exception of nothing, is fake and a conspiracy designed to fool our senses. All our worst fears about powerful forces at play controlling our lives unbeknownst to us, have now come true. And yet this absolute powerlessness, this perfect deceit offers us no way out in its reveal. All we can do is come to terms with the reality of the simulation and make of it what we can.
Here, on earth. In this life.
This wrap-up to Fouad Khan's parody article from April of 2021 matches the points Pullman was making about Gnosticism in his own article.
But I offer another solution. Just live your life and don't worry about what comes after this, because nobody who lives among us knows. And if you need religion or superstition as a crutch, there's no harm in letting it guide you if it helps you be a better person than you were going to allow yourself to be without it.
And hopefully if there is a God out there in one form or another, it was mankind itself who wrote the parts in all those holy books that said that anybody who doesn't believe in THEIR GOD (or any god for that matter) is not going to a better place.
Otherwise, I wish you luck in that Lottery!
--------------------------------------------------
Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Brief though the transition period was, during it Lyndon Johnson not only rescued his predecessor’s programs but launched one of his own. Barely into his second month in office he seized on a concept that had just begun to surface—a suggestion, a gleam in the eyes of a few members of the Kennedy Administration, that the late President had endorsed in theory but had done almost nothing to push forward—seized on it the moment a Kennedy adviser mentioned it to him, seized on it with such passion (“so spontaneous … instinctive and intuitive and uncalculated”) that the adviser knew in that moment that he had been very wrong about Lyndon Johnson. Enlarging it far beyond anything previously envisioned, he pushed it forward, prodded his advisers into bringing their imagination to bear on it, and, in the second major speech of his presidency, the State of the Union address he delivered to Congress on January 8, 1964, announced it, and it was a program whose title, however hyperbolic, made clear that he viewed it—this crude, coarse, ruthless, often cruel man, who all his life had made a mantra of pragmatism (“It’s not the job of a politician to go around saying principled things”)—as nothing less than a crusade. It was a crusade for a noble end.
The speech made clear on whose behalf the crusade would be launched. “Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both,” he said in that State of the Union address. “Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”
The speech made clear also the weapons he was going to deploy in the crusade, and the enemies—ancient enemies, hitherto invincible, whom he named by name—that he intended the crusade to conquer. “Our chief weapons … will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment,” he said.
And the speech announced also the crusade’s goal, which was revolutionary: “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”
By the time Lyndon Johnson stepped down from the dais after that speech, it was apparent that the program to which he was committing his still-infant Administration was one whose purpose was to right, on a vast scale, vast wrongs, to use to an extent rare in history a great nation’s wealth to ameliorate the harshness of life for a portion of its citizens (a substantial portion: one-fifth of America’s 150 million citizens in 1964 was 30 million people) too often overlooked by government in the past. It was clear that it was a program whose aim was to launch America on a course toward social justice that, were it to be completed, would result in nothing less than a society’s transformation.
If, as Martin Luther King Jr. had said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” during the two centuries since the United States of America had come into existence, the arc had bent slowly indeed. During those transition weeks (and, in fact, during the following years, as Lyndon Johnson widened the War on Poverty by introducing legislation on a dozen fronts to transform not just low-income America but the nation as a whole into “the Great Society”) one can see the new President trying to bend it faster. That State of the Union speech—delivered forty-seven days, just short of seven weeks, after the assassination of John Kennedy—marked the moment when Lyndon Johnson, moving beyond a continuation of Kennedy’s policies, made the presidency fully his own, so it is therefore the event that signifies the end of the transition, the moment when the passage of power from Kennedy to Johnson is completed. And to see Lyndon Johnson take hold of presidential power, and so quickly begin to use it for ends so monumental is to s
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
House Republicans are making America the opposite of great
I admit it: Like many liberals, I’m feeling a fair bit of MAGAfreude — taking some pleasure in the self-destruction of the American right.
There has, after all, never been a spectacle like the chaos we saw in the House of Representatives last week. It had been a century since a speaker wasn’t chosen on the first ballot — and the last time that happened, there was an actual substantive dispute: Republican progressives (yes, they existed back then) demanded, and eventually received, procedural reforms that they hoped would favor their agenda.
This time, there has been no significant dispute about policy — Kevin McCarthy and his opponents agree on key policy issues like investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and depriving the Internal Revenue Service of the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax cheats. Long after he tried to appease his opponents by surrendering his dignity, the voting went on.
But while the spectacle was amazing and, yes, entertaining, neither I nor, I believe, many other liberals are experiencing the kind of glee Republicans would be feeling if the parties’ roles were reversed. For one thing, liberals want the U.S. government to function, which among other things means that we need a duly constituted House of Representatives, even if it’s run by people we don’t like. For another, I don’t think there are many on the U.S. left (such as it is) who define themselves the way so many on the right do: by their resentments.
And yes, I mean “resentments” rather than “grievances.” Grievances are about things you believe you deserve, and might be diminished if you get some of what you want. Resentment is about feeling that you’re being looked down on, and can only be assuaged by hurting the people you, at some level, envy.
Consider the phrase (and associated sentiment), popular on the right, “owning the libs.” In context, “owning” doesn’t mean defeating progressive policies, say by repealing the Affordable Care Act. It means, instead, humiliating liberals personally — making them look weak and foolish.
I won’t claim that liberals are immune to such sentiments. As I said, MAGAfreude is a real thing, and I’m feeling a bit of it myself. But liberals have never seemed as interested in humiliating conservatives as conservatives are in humiliating liberals. And a substantial part of what has been going on in the House seems to be that some Republicans who expected to own the libs after a red wave election have acted out their disappointment by owning Kevin McCarthy instead.
And does anyone doubt that resentment on the part of those who felt disrespected was central to the rise of Donald Trump? Are there any pundits left who still believe that it was largely about “economic anxiety”?
I’m not saying that the decline of manufacturing jobs in the heartland was a myth: It really did happen, and it hurt millions of Americans. But the failure of Trump’s trade wars to deliver a manufacturing revival doesn’t seem to have turned off his base. Why?
The likely answer is that Trump’s anti-globalism, his promise to Make America Great Again, had less to do with trade balances and job creation than with a sense that snooty foreigners considered us chumps. “The world is laughing at us” was a consistent theme of Trump speeches, and his supporters surely imagined that the same was true of domestic globalist elites.
And I have a theory that Trump’s own underlying ludicrousness, his manifest lack of the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity to be president, was part of what endeared him to his base. You fancy liberals think you’re so smart? Well, we’ll show you, by electing someone you consider a clown!
The irony is that the MAGA movement has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of sinister globalists (if any exist) in making America the opposite of great. Right now the world really is laughing at us, although it’s terrified, too. America is still the essential nation, on multiple fronts. When the world’s greatest econom
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
There was nothing wrong with what happened last week.
It was 100 years overdue. It should happen every 2 years.
--------------------------------------------------
Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The all-but-certain debt ceiling crisis of 2023, explained
Joe Biden can use executive power to defuse the debt ceiling bomb
The Republican House rebels who voted against Kevin McCarthy in the speaker election over a dozen times forced a promise from McCarthy to never pass a debt ceiling increase without spending cuts attached.
How Biden can kill the debt ceiling
There are at least four different ways a president could nullify the debt ceiling without Congress.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/1/10/23542845/joe-biden-d
ebt-ceiling-kevin-mccarthy
Beth Ann Bovino, chief US economist at Standard and Poor’s, predicted that “the impact of a default by the U.S. government on its debts would be worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, devastating markets and the economy.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The all-but-certain debt ceiling crisis of 2023, explained
Joe Biden can use executive power to defuse the debt ceiling bomb
The Republican House rebels who voted against Kevin McCarthy in the speaker election over a dozen times forced a promise from McCarthy to never pass a debt ceiling increase without spending cuts attached.
How Biden can kill the debt ceiling
There are at least four different ways a president could nullify the debt ceiling without Congress.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/1/10/23542845/joe-biden-d
ebt-ceiling-kevin-mccarthy
Beth Ann Bovino, chief US economist at Standard and Poor’s, predicted that “the impact of a default by the U.S. government on its debts would be worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, devastating markets and the economy.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Keep on cheerleading that one-man dictatorship now that your guy is in office and see where it gets you when Trump is reelected.
--------------------------------------------------
Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME