A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 691 of 725
Quote:You fail to recall the existential threat from WWII, which had been in motion for many years (already killing millions and millions) before the Republicans and Southern "Democrats" in Congress were forced by Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war to vote very grudgingly for a declaration of war against Hitler. Then those same Republicans and Democrats from Dixie angrily and bitterly claimed that FDR had secretly allowed Pearl Harbor to occur to force a vote for a declaration of war.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Democrats say Trump is an existential threat. They’re not acting like it.
Because they know it's horseshit and they're not drinking their own Kool-Aid.
Drink up, boy.
There is a strong connection between how Republican voters acted in the days of FDR and how Trumptards act today. Trumptards won't accept what they truly are and why that truth makes life so hard for them but that's how it is with seriously flawed people. They seldom become aware (and soon forget) how their flaws make life hard for themselves.
No, FDR Did Not Know The Japanese Were Going To Bomb Pearl Harbor
December 6, 2016 3:16 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2016/12/06/504449867/no-fdr-did-not-know-the-japan
ese-were-going-to-bomb-pearl-harbor
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
His excoriating critique of Western liberalism is more relevant than ever.
Eliot A. Cohen | February 20, 2024
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/solzhenitsyns-warnin
g-for-the-united-states/677508/
While clearing out a storage room filled with books, I came across a slim volume, A World Split Apart, the text of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address. I remember listening to the speech at the time and being disconcerted by the petulant commentary it elicited. Solzhenitsyn had been in the United States only three years, having been expelled by the Soviet government and living as a recluse in Vermont. The consensus—certainly among the great and the good of Cambridge, Massachusetts—was that he was an ultranationalist, a reactionary, and, above all, an ingrate. At the time, I thought the reaction peevish and beside the point. Rereading the speech, it seems even more urgent that we pay heed to his excoriating critique of Western liberalism.
Read at https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart
Quote:Solzhenitsyn did misunderstand some of the key elements of Western, and specifically American, liberal democracy. He was no democrat, although he unreservedly opposed cruel and arbitrary government. It is true, too, that his deep religious faith and mystical belief in Russia’s destiny were and remain alien to most non-Russians. And it is true, as well, that he had cordial if cautious relations in the early 2000s with Vladimir Putin, although he was staunchly in favor of letting the Soviet Union’s subject nations, including even Ukraine, go their own way.
I am sincerely happy to be here with you on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and illustrious university. My congratulations and best wishes to all of today’s graduates.
Harvard’s motto is “Veritas.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord.
But what matters now as it did then is his critique of us. We have just seen a feckless House of Representatives pass a ludicrous impeachment of a Cabinet secretary by one vote—and then skip town while avoiding a vote on aid to Ukraine. We have seen the West’s inability to prevent the murder, by direct or indirect means, of a heroic dissident, Alexei Navalny, and the gleeful insouciance of the Russian dictator hours after it was reported. We have seen a foreign war used as an excuse to hound Jews on campuses and in the streets, and we have the horrifying spectacle of a possible return to the presidency of one of the most corrupt and dangerous politicians in American history. Which makes it worthwhile to return to Solzhenitsyn’s speech, a dark reflection for a different dark time.
The speech begins with a slap to our face: “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.” That is as true now as it was then, possibly truer. At home, a great political party collapses in craven subservience to a demagogue. Abroad, we fear to arm Ukraine adequately to defeat a monstrous aggressor; we fear to punish an Iranian regime that has repeatedly sought to kill our people and occasionally succeeds; we fear to face the fact that all of us in the liberal-democratic world are spending way less than what we need to defend ourselves.
Domestically, we fear to dissent from the orthodoxies of our respective subcultures. Nowhere is this more true than among those who should prize intellectual courage, as Solzhenitsyn did. “Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.” When the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression consistently rates America’s oldest and most prestigious university one of the very worst for freedom of speech, something is deeply amiss. And that is, of course, Harvard, the very university at which Solzhenit
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You fail to recall the existential threat from WWII, which had been in motion for many years (already killing millions and millions) before the Republicans and Southern "Democrats" in Congress were forced by Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war to vote very grudgingly for a declaration of war against Hitler. Then those same Republicans and Democrats from Dixie angrily and bitterly claimed that FDR had secretly allowed Pearl Harbor to occur to force a vote for a declaration of war.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Democrats say Trump is an existential threat. They’re not acting like it.
Because they know it's horseshit and they're not drinking their own Kool-Aid.
Drink up, boy.
There is a strong connection between how Republican voters acted in the days of FDR and how Trumptards act today. Trumptards won't accept what they truly are and why that truth makes life so hard for them but that's how it is with seriously flawed people. They seldom become aware (and soon forget) how their flaws make life hard for themselves.
No, FDR Did Not Know The Japanese Were Going To Bomb Pearl Harbor
December 6, 2016 3:16 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2016/12/06/504449867/no-fdr-did-not-know-the-japan
ese-were-going-to-bomb-pearl-harbor
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You've already shown everybody many times what a piece of gutter trash you actually are.
Nobody takes your judgement about anybody else seriously when it's clear that you are incapable of self-reflection. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat these non-truths.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:6ixStringJack, do you remember being an alcoholic? Then, almost instantaneously, you stopped. After decades, you figured out that alcohol was bad and saved yourself, but you lost years of life and your teeth. Perhaps you will eventually see what is wrong with Trump and Fascism (so many things more than wrong with alcohol) and will stop sooner than decades.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You've already shown everybody many times what a piece of gutter trash you actually are.
Nobody takes your judgement about anybody else seriously when it's clear that you are incapable of self-reflection. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat these non-truths.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
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
Solzhenitsyn Warned Us
The great Russian writer understood the West and predicted its future with frightening precision.
By Gary Saul Morson | July 2024
https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn
-warned-west/
Western intellectuals expected that novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, once safely in the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, would enthusiastically endorse its way of life and intellectual consensus. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead of recognizing how much he had missed when cut off from New York, Washington, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, this ex-Soviet dissident not only refused to accept superior American ideas but even presumed to instruct us. Harvard was shocked at the speech he gave there in 1978, while the New York Times cautioned: “We fear that Mr. Solzhenitsyn does the world no favor by calling for a holy war.”
For his part, Solzhenitsyn could hardly believe that Westerners would not want to hear all he had learned journeying through the depths of totalitarian hell. “Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!”
The West “turned out to be not what we [dissidents] had hoped and expected; it was not living by the ‘right’ values nor was it headed in the ‘right’ direction.” America was no longer the land of the free but of the licentious. The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West’s likely future. Having written a series of novels about how Russia succumbed to Communism, Solzhenitsyn smelled the same social and intellectual rot among us. He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient. We have continued to follow the path to disaster he mapped.
_____________
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose collects the most important speeches Solzhenitsyn delivered between 1972 and 1997. (See footnote 1) Inspired by various occasions—Solzhenitsyn’s winning the Nobel Prize, arriving in the West, and delivering that Harvard University commencement address, among others—these speeches convey a single message: Western civilization has lost its bearings because it has embraced a false and shallow understanding of life. The result is the accelerating decay of the West’s spiritual foundations. The very fact that the word “spiritual” sounded suspiciously outdated to so many intellectuals at the time shows how far the decay had already progressed. Sooner or later, Solzhenitsyn warned, Western civilization as we know it would collapse.
Solzhenitsyn would not have been surprised that, three decades after the collapse of the USSR, American intellectuals again find Marxist and quasi-Marxist doctrines attractive. Young people embrace “democratic socialism,” a phrase that Solzhenitsyn calls “about as meaningful as talking about ‘ice-cold heat.’”
Today we can ask: Why do so many cheer, or at least not object, when they witness mobs embracing the bloodthirsty and sadistic Hamas? Perhaps for the same reasons that young, pre-revolutionary Russians once celebrated terrorists who murdered innocent citizens? Having studied his country’s history, Solzhenitsyn foresaw the process that would lead to today’s chants of “globalize the intifada” and “any means necessary.” He repeatedly cautioned that Russia’s past may be America’s future.
How can it be, Solzhenitsyn asked, that so many Russians found the strength to “rise up and free themselves…while those [in the West] who soar unhindered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and fatefully, almost [seem] to crave slaver
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose
By Peter Augustine Lawler | February 11, 2015 6:41 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/we-have-ceased-
see-purpose-peter-augustine-lawler/
On the question of whether America is worse off after its victory in the Cold War, I will deploy what I think is the great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s most penetrating speech — “We Have Ceased to See the Purpose” — which he gave before the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein 1992.
I sure have “sampled” a lot from this speech, sometimes without remembering that was what I was doing, in my various writings on education.
1. Solzhenitsyn writes of “the howl of existentialism” that lurks just below the surface of our happy-talk pragmatism about our material pursuits. We howl because we lack the words that correspond to our truest and deepest personal experiences. We howl because the foundation of said pragmatism really is loneliness all the way down.
2. “Man has lost a sense of himself as a limited point in the universe, albeit one possessed of free will. He begins to deem himself the center of his surroundings, adapting not himself to the world but the world to himself. And then, of course, the thought of death becomes unbearable: It is the extinction of the entire universe at a stroke.” Think here, of course, of the anti-extinctionism of the transhumanists, which is an extreme form of the general tendency of our autonomy freaks to identify being itself with me. It’s my indefinite sustainability that’s the real issue here!
3. Certainly, “nothing so bespeaks the current helplessness of our spirit, our intellectual disarray, as the loss of a clear and calm attitude toward death.” It’s impossible to really know or love without accepting — without subconsciously raging — against death. And it’s impossible, as the dissidents Solzhenitysn and Havel say, to truthfully separate intellectual freedom from courageous deeds, from the willingness to surrender one’s own life to that which gives life meaning.
4. “There can be only one true Progress; the sum total of the spiritual progress of individuals; the degree of self-perfection in the course of their lives.” So political, economic, and technological progress must be judged according to how they contribute to or detract from “true Progress.” Certainly, “all hope cannot be pinned on science, technology, or economic growth.”
5. So: “It is time to stop seeing Progress (which cannot be stopped by anyone or anything) as a stream of unlimited blessings, and to view it rather as a gift from on high, set down for an extremely intricate trial of our free will.” Technological progress can be understood to be, most of all, as a demanding “gift” that might contribute to our true progress as an “intricate trial,” a test that we may or may not pass in subordinating the “how” of technology to the “why” of properly human purpose, of being free and relational beings living in the truth under God.
6. For now: “The victory of technological civilization has also instilled in us a spiritual insecurity. Its gifts enrich, but enslave us as well.”
7. The main cause of the enslavement? We think “All is interests, we must not neglect our interests . . . ” The result: “We have ceased to see the purpose.” It’s not that we don’t have interests, but each of us is so much more than a being with interests. Thinking of oneself as being with interests and nothing more is, for some, a way bragging about one’s individual freedom from spiritual illusions and aristocratic despotism. But it’s actually an affirmation of the slavish denial of free will in favor of material determination. No one who lives in the truth thinks primarily in terms of interests.
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:Quote:6ixStringJack, do you remember being an alcoholic? Then, almost instantaneously, you stopped. After decades, you figured out that alcohol was bad and saved yourself, but you lost years of life and your teeth. Perhaps you will eventually see what is wrong with Trump and Fascism (so many things more than wrong with alcohol) and will stop sooner than decades.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You've already shown everybody many times what a piece of gutter trash you actually are.
Nobody takes your judgement about anybody else seriously when it's clear that you are incapable of self-reflection. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat these non-truths.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Shut the fuck up, retard.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Hitler Would Have Been Astonished
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up, retard.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
The German dictator would not have recognized his description on The Tucker Carlson Show.
By Thomas Weber | September 6, 2024, 12:50 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/09/tucker-carlson-darry
l-cooper-hitler-churchill-propaganda/679730/
In some ways, Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, would have been impressed by the podcaster Darryl Cooper’s appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show earlier this week. Hitler and Goebbels were masters of disinformation and demagoguery, and Cooper’s tirade against Winston Churchill and his whitewashing of Nazi Germany’s crimes reflected several of their insights. As the author of books on Hitler’s radicalization and Nazi disinformation campaigns, and as the historical consultant for Goebbels and the Führer, the first major Hitler feature film in 20 years, I found it eerie to watch the conversation between Cooper and America’s best-known political-talk-show host.
As Hitler put it in Mein Kampf, “The task of propaganda is to attract followers”; Cooper has been boasting that his podcast is now ranked first on iTunes. Goebbels used provocation as a tactic to achieve that goal, trying to trigger reactions from his opponents that would make headlines. Or, as Cooper said on X, “I like posting provocative shit, seeing how close I can step up to various lines with[out] going over them.”
Yet had Hitler lived to hear Cooper insist that after 1940, he had tried to achieve a comprehensive peace only to be foiled by Churchill, the German dictator would have been astonished. Hitler had, in fact, long favored a peace settlement with Britain. In Hitler’s view of the world, however, a peace deal with Britain on its own would have been insufficient to secure Germany’s future. Only grabbing more territory to the east and eliminating Jews and Jewish ideas, he believed, could deliver enduring security. Hitler saw Jews as the originators and agents of the greatest existential crisis that Europe had experienced for hundreds of years. Churchill wasn’t the obstacle to peace; without Churchill, Hitler would have had an even freer hand to implement a program of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Eastern Europe.
The focus of Cooper’s provocations, though, was not whitewashing Nazi Germany but, rather, lashing out at Britain’s wartime leader as the “chief villain” of World War II. Seconded by Carlson, Cooper assailed Churchill, arguing that he was “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.” And he charged that “the psychopath” was motivated by a quest for “redemption.”
In keeping with his focus on “sacred symbols” and his affinity for national “redemption,” Cooper attacked Churchill as the embodiment of what is most sacred to American conservatism. Churchill is revered by the GOP establishment, which Cooper and Carlson disdain. During President George W. Bush’s years in the White House, he placed a little statue of Churchill in the Oval Office. Hillsdale College, the Christian liberal-arts school, hosts a Churchill Project to secure his legacy. Churchill is also, as Cooper stressed, a symbol of the Western world order established after 1945; he added that today, only those parts of Europe that experienced American and Western indoctrination after 1945 are rotten. Attacking Churchill, then, is Cooper’s means of attacking that postwar order.
And Cooper attacked these values in another way. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the host of a show called Martyr Made, he exhibits, at the very least, an acceptance of violence in the service of political goals. Unprovoked, for example, he stressed that he would “refuse to judge” the mob violence directed at Britons of color this summer.
There is nothing surprising about the flourishing of extremist ideology at times when people believe that their individual and co
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.
tick tock
T
TRUMP FADING AWAY
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Harris Exposed How Easy Trump Is to Manipulate. Dictators Have Known This for a Long Time. She homed in on a dangerous weakness.
By Fred Kaplan | Sept 11, 2024 1:24 PM
Tuesday night’s debate devoted little time to foreign policy, but a few key moments revealed—more dramatically than half an hour of dedicated discussion might have—just how much a renewed Donald Trump presidency could weaken the United States and make the world a more dangerous place.
Many noted, after the debate, how readily Vice President Kamala Harris lured the ex-president into traps. All she had to do was push one of his buttons—to remark that the crowds at his rallies are bored, or that he inherited all of his wealth (then blew it in successive bankruptcies), or that world leaders laugh at him—and he exploded in paroxysms of fury, ranting over grievances, rambling down ratholes of conspiracy theories, thrown off course from the issues at hand.
What we were seeing was the flip side of how easily foreign heads of state, especially tyrants, manipulate Trump to their favor. All they have to do is call him “Sir” (as he often recites them doing in stories, some possibly true, most clearly fictitious), and he will eat poison right out of their hands.
After showing how deeply she could rattle him with the slightest personal insult, Harris turned the tables and spelled out how deeply others can win him over with the slightest compliment. “It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again,” she said, “because they’re so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favors.”
Harris said all this while looking straight at Trump. Many people who have dealt with Trump know this about his vulnerability to flattery, his envy of strongmen, his puzzlingly desperate need for approval and praise. Some of his aides have recounted this compulsion in books they’ve written after leaving office. But it’s quite possible that Harris is the first person ever to say these things straight to his face.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/09/presidential-debate-kamala
-harris-donald-trump-dictators-orban-foreign-policy.html
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