A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:An absolute truth would be 6ixStringJack is on hiatus.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your party is dead.
A possible falsehood is 6ix is dead.
But we can't be sure whether it is a hiatus or death without more information. The only certainty is that a hiatus in 6ix's posting started on Tuesday, December 2, 2025 3:33:55 PM. See 6ix postings at http://fireflyfans.net/mthreaduser.aspx?u=20928
When Ideas Round to False
When concepts shed complexity and gain memetic fitness, they often cross from true to false; the false version spreads faster and replaces the original. Epistemic damage follows
Eric Drexler | Dec 04, 2025
https://aiprospects.substack.com/p/when-ideas-round-to-false
A Pathology in Knowledge Transmission
Complex ideas often require conditions and qualifiers to remain true. When these ideas are rounded off to something simpler (as always happens when ideas spread), the effects vary: Sometimes, a concept rounds to a simplification that still pushes beliefs toward truth.1 Sometimes, a concept rounds to something thoroughly false yet memetically fit — and toxic. And sometimes, the false version replaces the original,2 and true lends credibility to the false, or the false discredits the true.
This pattern — ideas that are “rounded to false” — breaks societal learning. In the past, ideas rounded to false have led to large-scale death and misery through misguided actions and missed opportunities.3 When toxic rounding happens today, we lose both insights and the ability to recognize what we’ve lost. Understanding this pattern gives us tools for recognition and defense. It also flags a warning for gatekeepers
As we’ll see, rounding to false is a particular problem when exploring ways forward in a time of transformative change.
Mechanisms of Distortion
The crossing from true to false follows predictable patterns. Conditional truths lose their qualifiers and become absolutes. Realistic mechanisms get replaced with cartoons little better than magic. Multi-component architectures and conditional strategies collapse into simple proposals that will surely fail in practice. In each case, the elements that made the original true — conditions, mechanism, structure — are lost.
Rounding market virtues to false
Consider the virtues of markets, and the results of rounding: The conditional claim that “markets efficiently process distributed information and allocate resources under conditions of competition, price transparency, and absent externalities” rounds to the unconditional slogan “markets optimize resource allocation.” The original insights from Hayek and others describe an information-processing mechanism operating within institutional constraints. The rounded version treats markets as universal, self-governing optimizers in all domains, and leads to predictable failures: financial crises from unchecked speculation, environmental damage from ignored externalities, and loss of resilience when redundancy and slack are treated as inefficiencies.
Rounding evolution to false
Evolution illustrates mechanism replacement. Darwin’s insight was about differential reproduction: organisms with traits that enhance reproductive success leave more descendants, causing those traits to become more common.4 This mechanistic process — no purpose, no direction, just differential survival and reproduction — rounds to “evolution improves organisms.” This rounded version replaces mechanism with teleology, suggesting that evolution has goals or makes things “better.”
These transformations share a structure: the machinery that makes something true gets replaced with a simplified story that makes it false. To simplify a complex causal structure (while still capturing something true), it helps to distinguish three distinct modes of epistemic failure.
Much More at https://aiprospects.substack.com/p/when-ideas-round-to-false
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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An estimated 26 million workers are paid less than $17 per hour, roughly 18% of the US workforce, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
In fact, the minimum wage is $7.25 in 20 states, including Alabama, Iowa, Texas, and Wyoming.
That lines up with the minimum federal wage. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal wage floor has been $7.25 an hour since 2009.
Learn more: This map compares the cost of living in every state
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/millions-of-workers-will-get-a-raise-so
on-as-new-minimum-wage-laws-kick-in-110041798.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:
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.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:An absolute truth would be 6ixStringJack is on hiatus.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your party is dead.
A possible falsehood is 6ix is dead.
Okay.
But your party is still dead.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:I guess you misunderstood, since you cut it from my message. The minimum wage is low because the Republican Party wants it to be low. The other part of the message is the one about Trumptards being genetically incapable of adapting, which is the real reason they struggle, rather than prosper, in America.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:An absolute truth would be 6ixStringJack is on hiatus.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your party is dead.
A possible falsehood is 6ix is dead.
Okay.
But your party is still dead.
Journey to the Origin of Ideological Fanaticism: "Stress is the determining factor in our radical thinking"
By Silvia Lorenzo | 09/24/2025 - 04:15 ET
https://www.mundoamerica.com/entertainment/2025/09/24/68d3a8af21efa0f3
5c8b458f.html
Psychologist Leor Zmigrod analyzes in 'The Ideological Brain' the hidden mechanisms that shape our political, social, and religious beliefs. "We live in a society that considers flexibility as a trait of weakness," she laments
Free download from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Leor+Zmigrod
There is a high probability that Donald Trump shares genes with Tyler Robinson, the killer of influencer and conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Hold on a minute before shouting "fake news!". We know that Robinson, 22, grew up in a staunchly Republican family, with principles as immovable and conservative as those propagated by Kirk himself. And that, after taking out his target with a shot on September 10, he sent the following message: "Why did I do it? I couldn't take his hatred anymore, there are things that cannot be negotiated."
Do not miss and retain this idea. A week later, Trump himself suggested something similar - that there are things that cannot be negotiated - during Kirk's funeral: "Charlie did not hate his opponents and wanted the best for them, that's where I disagree with him: I do hate my opponents and I do not want the best for them!".
Here is the key. Robinson's savage attack and Trump's subsequent outburst trying to censor voices against him have a common factor: their disproportionate way of reacting to stress, which activates mechanisms marked by their genetic basis. "The extreme left and the extreme right share psychological traits: factors that explain not what they believe but how they believe it," explains neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod via video call, a professor at the University of Cambridge and a pioneer in a new branch of her discipline, called neuropolitics.
This 30-year-old psychologist - yes, only 30 - publishes today in Spain The Ideological Brain (Ediciones Paidós), a highly acclaimed essay translated into twenty languages that reveals the hidden mechanisms that shape our political, social, and religious beliefs. After conducting a wide range of neurological and biological experiments in her laboratory, the author reaches the following conclusion: "All humans exist along a spectrum where some are more prone to rigid and ideological thinking and others to more flexible and ambiguous thinking. But what really influences our radical thinking and drives us towards extremes is a determining factor: stress."
In other words, there are heritable factors, whether it is the configuration of genes that distribute dopamine in the brain or how we respond to the perception of a threat, that determine whether we are obstinate and dogmatic thinkers or, on the contrary, independent and flexible. And then, on this genetic basis, various environmental factors such as the perception of threats to our survival or individual well-being alter the functioning of our brain to the point of pushing the ideologies we believe in to extremes.
"Most brains, even the most rational and intelligent ones, seek clarity, coherence, and certainty," explains Zmigrod. "They are predictive organs and constantly try to explain how we should
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I guess you misunderstood, since you cut it from my message. The minimum wage is low because the Republican Party wants it to be low. The other part of the message is the one about Trumptards being genetically incapable of adapting, which is the real reason they struggle, rather than prosper, in America.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:An absolute truth would be 6ixStringJack is on hiatus.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your party is dead.
A possible falsehood is 6ix is dead.
Okay.
But your party is still dead.
Okay.
But your party is still dead.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:The Democrats are very alive. But they need to overcome the sickly foolish compulsion to endlessly talk to Trumptards. Trumptards are NOT adaptable, and they should absolutely never again be treated as if they can change for the better. They should be treated like the beasts they are. See Trump for what a talking animal looks like. Trump kills hundreds of thousands of children by withdrawing food and medicine distributed by USAID, but the animals who are Trumptards respond that it didn't happen. It did happen, and you are an animal, not a human, 6ixStringJoker.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Okay.
But your party is still dead.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Trump+kills+hundreds+of+thousands+of+c
hildren+by+withdrawing+food+and+medicine+distributed+by+USAID
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:Quote:The Democrats are very alive. But they need to overcome the sickly foolish compulsion to endlessly talk to Trumptards. Trumptards are NOT adaptable, and they should absolutely never again be treated as if they can change for the better. They should be treated like the beasts they are. See Trump for what a talking animal looks like. Trump kills hundreds of thousands of children by withdrawing food and medicine distributed by USAID, but the animals who are Trumptards respond that it didn't happen. It did happen, and you are an animal, not a human, 6ixStringJoker.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Okay.
But your party is still dead.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Okay.
But your party is still dead.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Republicans set to pay the price for playing hardball
By Thom Hartmann | January 03, 2026 | 06:49AM ET
https://www.alternet.org/gop-2026-defeat/
Earlier this week, I published an article about how Republicans have spent millions funding the Green Party since 2016 to bleed votes away from Democrats, and how useful idiots on the left have enthusiastically participated because they don’t understand the difference between a first-past-the-post versus a parliamentary electoral system.
The responses have been enlightening: there are still progressives who think the solution is to complain about the Democratic National Committee, trash people who point out these simple political realities, and promote Green and Working Families Party candidates even more aggressively to “scare” Democrats.
As if any of that would work.
The simple reality is that progressives shouldn’t just be fighting the hard right that’s captured the GOP: we should be learning from them. They had this come-to-Jesus moment back in 2008 when, to their shock and horror, America elected our first Black president.
Instead of just complaining, they got active and in just one short decade “conservative” activists completely took over the RNC, purged it of its “moderates,” and now are transforming America into something entirely new based on the models of Russia and Hungary.
I’m not suggesting that we should be learning from the GOP’s bizarro economics; we shouldn't be discovering their selfish morality, misogyny, or racism; or selling ourselves out to the world’s richest men and women.
But there is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party in the wake of that 2008 election and forced the entire conservative establishment to lurch so far to the right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.
If progressives hope to have any shot at transforming today’s Democratic Party, kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party successfully did a decade and a half ago to take power within the GOP and then nationally.
And it starts in our own backyards.
Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, in 2009, was in charge of the Tea Party taking over the GOP.
The Concord Project expanded their get-out-the-vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and hard right conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”
Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of their Obama-era YouTube training videos:
“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”
So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?
“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties; if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”
As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: political power flows up from the bottom.
It starts with local Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power. (Typically they’re voluntary, but in some states or cities they even carry a small salary.)
It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees who then go on to hold elected office, and who draft a party's platform.
They’re also generally the first people elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And
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That article was great, Second.
Thanks for starting my day off with a huge laugh at your expense.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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