A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 698 of 725
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The fact that Biden got 100 times more scrutiny for ending a failed war than any of his predecessors got for continuing it will never cease to infuriate me. https://t.co/FnIoP5vB5Z
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 2, 2025
Biden* didn't end shit. Trump already ended that and it would have been done professionally had you not voted in Joe Biden* via massive mail-in fraud votes and murdered Laken Riley.
Your asshole did this, and now the Middle East is more fucked up than it ever was under his lack of leadership.
You suck. Matthew Yglesaias sucks. Joe Biden* sucks. Democrats suck.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Lessons From New York’s Congestion Fight
“Car brain” is part of a broader syndrome, which we can’t ignore
By Paul Krugman | Jan 06, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lessons-from-new-yorks-congestion
. . . it’s essentially crazy for people to imagine that they’re entitled to impose those costs without paying a fee for the privilege. As I wrote back in 2023, it’s like arguing that some people should have the right to dump trash on their neighbor’s land because they don’t feel like paying the fees for garbage pickup.
What does the fact that it has been so hard to do something so obviously right tell us?
Komanoff attributes it to “car brain.” It’s true that a significant number of people, some of whom I know, feel a sense of control when driving that makes them reluctant to take mass transit. (I’m the opposite: the great thing about taking the train is that I can read.) Such people aren’t necessarily conservatives, but some conservatives really seem to lose it over any suggestion that maybe people should drive less. Back in 2011 George Will wrote a column titled “Why liberals love trains” in which he declared that
Quote:Personally, I don’t want people to ride trains to weaken their resistance to collectivism; I just want their cars off the damn streets. But Will’s bizarre rant does illustrate Komanoff’s point that there’s something about people’s attachment to their cars that all too often makes them irrational.
the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.
To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
Yet while cars may be special, there’s a broader syndrome — change rage? — in which a significant number of people go wild at any suggestion that they should change their behavior for the common good. The change doesn’t have to involve major cost or inconvenience; seriously, even masking up during the pandemic wasn’t that big a hardship. It’s more the principle of the thing: How dare you tell me how to live my life?
Like it or not, anger over any hint of social engineering is a potent political force. It tends to fade once new rules or restrictions have been around for a while, and become part of the background scenery: There would be a huge backlash if we were currently trying to implement the policies that reduced smoking, but at this point everyone takes those policies for granted. If other cities’ experience is any guide, New York’s congestion charge will eventually be seen as a normal fact of life, which is why it was important to get it in place even at a low rate.
But change rage is real, and trying to argue people out of it rarely succeeds. Which is why fighting negative externalities** should, where possible, leave the way people live more or less untouched. Outside New York and a few other dense urban areas, Americans aren’t going to stop driving to work. But subsidizing electric cars and renewable energy may be a workable strategy, precisely because it has so little visible effect on how we live.
Still, sometimes we really do need to persuade people to change their behavior. So yes, I am taking a subdued victory lap over New York’s congestion fee.
** There are, alas, many Americans who still deny that climate change is happening, or if it’s happening, that it’s caused by greenhouse gas emissions. After all, to take climate change seriously you have to take scientists seriously, and what do they know? (In case you’re wondering, I believe that they know a lot.)
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Richard Nixon once called in staff to help him open an allergy-pill bottle. It was the childproof type of bottle, with instructions saying “Press down while turning.” The cap had teeth marks on it where Nixon had apparently tried to gnaw it open.
https://www.knoxviews.com/richard-nixon-and-child-proof-cap
Some additional context on behalf of Nixon for those who care. Childproof prescription bottles were supposedly first invented in 1967, but were not required until a law was passed in 1970 and signed into law ironically by Nixon himself in the 2nd year of his presidency. So for what it's worth they were likely a very new thing when he struggled to open the bottle and the early designs were more difficult to open than modern bottles if you had poor grip strength.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows
Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state. (Trump is their prophet and sword against evil.)
By Stephanie McCrummen | January 9, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/new-apostolic-ref
ormation-christian-movement-trump/681092/
On the Thursday night after Donald Trump won the presidential election, an obscure but telling celebration unfolded inside a converted barn off a highway stretching through the cornfields of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The place was called Gateway House of Prayer, and it was not exactly a church, and did not exactly fit into the paradigms of what American Christianity has typically been. Inside, there were no hymnals, no images of Jesus Christ, no parables fixed in stained glass. Strings of lights hung from the rafters. A huge map of the world covered one wall. On the others were seven framed bulletin boards, each representing a theater of battle between the forces of God and Satan—government, business, education, family, arts, media, and religion itself. Gateway House of Prayer, it turned out, was a kind of war room. And if its patrons are to be believed, at least one person, and at peak times dozens, had been praying every single minute of every single day for more than 15 years for the victory that now seemed at hand. God was winning. The Kingdom was coming.
“Hallelujah!” said a woman arriving for the weekly 7 o’clock “government watch,” during which a group of 20 or so volunteers sits in a circle and prays for God’s dominion over the nation.
“Now the work begins!” a man said.
“We have to fight, fight, fight!” a grandmother said as they began talking about how a crowd at Trump’s election watch party had launched into the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”
“They were singing that!” another man said.
Yes, people replied; they had seen a video of the moment. As the mood in the barn became ever more jubilant, the grandmother pulled from her purse a shofar, a hollowed-out ram’s horn used during Jewish services. She blew, understanding that the sound would break through the atmosphere, penetrate the demonic realm, and scatter the forces of Satan, a supernatural strike for the Kingdom of God. A woman fell to the floor.
“Heaven and Earth are coming into alignment!” a man declared. “The will of heaven is being done on Earth.”
What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy. It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is transnational, multiracial, and unapologetically political. Early leaders called it the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, although some of those same leaders are now engaged in a rebranding effort as the antidemocratic character of the movement has come to light. And people who have never heard the name are nonetheless adopting the movement’s central ideas. These include the belief that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions. That the Church is not so much a place as an active “army of God,” one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times.
Although the secular establishment has struggled to take all of this seriously, Trump has harnessed this apocalyptic energy to win the presidency twice.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows
Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state. (Trump is their prophet and sword against evil.)
Jesus christ.
Shut the fuck up.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Richard Nixon once called in staff to help him open an allergy-pill bottle. It was the childproof type of bottle, with instructions saying “Press down while turning.” The cap had teeth marks on it where Nixon had apparently tried to gnaw it open.
https://www.knoxviews.com/richard-nixon-and-child-proof-cap
Some additional context on behalf of Nixon for those who care. Childproof prescription bottles were supposedly first invented in 1967, but were not required until a law was passed in 1970 and signed into law ironically by Nixon himself in the 2nd year of his presidency. So for what it's worth they were likely a very new thing when he struggled to open the bottle and the early designs were more difficult to open than modern bottles if you had poor grip strength.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Video or it didn't happen.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Assessing Biden’s Presidency
Eric Kramer | January 15, 2025 7:07 am
https://angrybearblog.com/2025/01/assessing-bidens-presidency
Under Biden’s leadership, the Democrats failed to strengthen conflict of interest laws, disclosure laws, or laws protecting the civil service. And they failed to rein in the emergency powers Congress has granted to the President, even though experts had been warning for decades that these laws were the legal equivalent of a loaded handgun lying on a table in a community center for unsupervised teenagers. Now we face the very real prospect of the National Guard or military being used domestically to uproot millions of peaceful immigrants, and possibly even to suppress domestic protest or interfere with the conduct of elections. Unbridled executive discretion will also allow Trump to use his office to reward friends and punish enemies, a point that is well understood by the business “leaders” flocking to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage to the president-elect.
According to Dalmia, Biden’s failure to address these issues was due in part to a desire to win re-election by getting things done using executive power, and partly due to conventional thinking:
The other reason is reflexive turf-protection and hanging on to the power of the office no matter how it was amassed and how much it departs from the balance-of-power that the Constitution envisioned. “The Biden administration did not see the hardening of institutions as a political priority and let the normal bureaucratic mentality expand executive authority by default,” laments Soren Dayton, Niskanen Center’s Director of Governance, who has closely followed the administration’s foot-dragging for the past four years in frustration.
In other words, Biden remained stuck in an old mindset of governing in which enacting his policy priorities rather than addressing the new threats to America’s liberal democracy was prized. Hence, he is leaving the country deeply vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover. He warned that Trump was an existential danger, but he never took his own warning seriously and so couldn’t convince the voters to do so either.
Every country experiencing democratic backsliding can testify that their authoritarian leader was far more determined and dangerous in his or her second term. Biden had an opportunity to help America break that pattern and put some solid guardrails around the office of the executive. Unlike other countries facing similar threats, he would have been aided in his effort by America’s strong liberal democratic institutions built over 250 years, not an asset any other country in the world has. Alas, he squandered it.
Biden fell into a business-as-usual mindset and defended discretionary executive power against legislative efforts to control it. This reflects either a catastrophic complacency and failure of vision (did he not take seriously the possibility that he or another Democrat might lose the 2024 election? did he not understand that business as usual would leave the country highly vulnerable to Trump or another personalist demagogue?) or, if he did understand the threat of a Trump victory, his inaction suggests a stunning failure to exert leadership within the executive branch and Congress.
Much more at https://angrybearblog.com/2025/01/assessing-bidens-presidency
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:There was no video connecting Nixon to Watergate or anything at all, and yet he resigned and 40 people who worked for Nixon went to jail. There was no video of any of their crimes. It was circumstantial evidence, the evidence that Trumptards fail to understand, which is doubtlessly why they are also failing in the non-political parts of life such as family, finances, health, and work.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Video or it didn't happen.
40 of Nixon's people go to prison
https://www.google.com/search?q=40+of+nixon%27s+people+go+to+prison
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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California still burns, LA destroyed in fires, smoke, flames, ash and a toxic smell in the air
This is Los Angeles.
https://x.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1879553813956456656
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Why America Can’t Conquer Canada
Donald Trump’s nonsensical threats are an attempt to distract from his own country’s self-destruction
By Stephen Marche | January 9, 2025
https://macleans.ca/society/canada-51st-state-america/
The president-elect of the United States, the man about to be commander-in-chief of the most powerful military the world has ever known, is talking about invading Canada. Of course, he’s also talking about invading Greenland and the Panama Canal. He has declared that he plans only to use “economic force” against Canada, whatever that might mean—tariffs as shock troops perhaps. Canadians need to get used to this kind of terrifying nonsense. There’s going to be a lot more of this pirate king blather over the next four years.
Trump’s fantasies of annexation and conquest are nothing more than that. At this point in its history, America has come off of 70 years of failed imperialist adventures, in which it discovered it couldn’t hold onto Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam or anywhere else. America’s military position in the world is shrinking rather than expanding. West Africa is kicking out American forces and replacing them with Russians. Niger vacated its American military bases in August. At least one of the reasons that Trump is boasting about his plans for territorial conquest is that the United States, in its current position of radical instability and a complete collapse of national solidarity, has never been less prepared for conflict.
Trump has promised to return America to its traditional way of life—and, to be fair, losing wars of occupation is traditional for the United States. In the 21st century, it has become harder, not easier, to occupy populations against their will. Ordinary people have become used to controlling their own destinies, and the means of resistance have developed to the point where occupiers are always at a disadvantage. More than any other country, the U.S. has learned this lesson the hard way. When I wrote my book The Next Civil War in the late 2010s, the U.S. had recently published its manual on counterinsurgency, Joint Publication 3-24, or JP 3-24. On the surface, it was a guide to strategies for occupying and pacifying countries. Underneath, it was a big flashing sign to its own military leadership: do not do this ever again. The process of ending a counterinsurgency involves reconfiguring the basis of society from the ground up, a process which a military force, any military force, is incapable of undertaking.
The lesson of JP 3-24 is that counterinsurgency strategies have an implicit weakness: the occupiers cannot overcome the host populations except by annihilation. To hold countries, you need to impose order. To impose order you need to control populations. To control populations you need to use violence. Violence leads to violence, which is inherently antithetical to order. American forces have found that, even with the support of local governments and control of the state-building machinery, tiny pockets of resistance can make chaos more or less permanent and the attempts to quell that chaos counterproductive by their nature. To stop sectarian violence, to give peace a chance, occupiers have to put cities under surveillance and impose zones of control and eliminate terrorists. Each imposition on the local population makes their position less tenable.
That’s why America wins every battle and loses every war. They can perform military actions perfectly but they can’t recognize the ultimate consequences of those actions. War, for them, is a kind of hobby. They only enjoy it on foreign soil, when the stakes are on the other side. They cannot process attacks on their homeland, which a conflict with Canada would provide. September 11 was the most successful military action of the 21st century exactly because it exploited American vulnerability toward spectacles of violence in their homeland. The Americans played right into their enemies’ hands after a single attack. Their foreign policy decisions in the subsequent decade could not have been m
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