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Cake day: July 18th, 2024

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  • I think he just has an overall instinct that if the sensible people are for it, he has to be against it. I’m not even joking. I don’t know why, but it seems pretty clear that he operates along those lines, and I honestly can’t think of any other reason to be against wind and solar.

    I know he got mad once because people were going to put up windmills that were visible from his golf course, and he was convinced that somehow it would ruin things for all the golfers, but at this point I think that’s just a minor detail, and the overall principle is just that he hates anything that’s good. I am 0% joking.


  • The background is that he’s saying that the “real negotiations” will take place later, and must include all parties including the EU.

    Of course, nothing means anything under Trump. The whole thing is so disorganized that any statement about the future from any US official might as well come from a magic 8 ball. I just thought it was a little noteworthy that Rubio is making an attempt to be an adult in the room, however doomed that effort might be preordained to be.













  • Yeah, agreed. They changed from:

    “Performatively obediently a bunch of good people, and definitely not a malicious hive of American Psycho lawyers and professional thieves, mining and sanding down and reselling the dreams of children, who would be perfectly happy harvesting organs from prisoners or anything else that would enable them to profit and won’t get them in trouble”

    To:

    “Performatively obedient to a separate bunch of people who would also be happy harvesting organs et cetera, as long as they’ll leave us alone to make our money, and we won’t get in trouble”

    There’s not much of value in the alteration, other than noting one more from the variety of outlets hewing ever more closely to the Nazis if they think it’ll enable them to keep their heads down and be safe. It will not.




  • As with a lot of things, the federal government isn’t a big monolithic robot. Think of it like a vast tribe of weasels. Sometimes, they’ll work together as if by instinct, and they can do great things for either good or evil. Sometimes they just hang around biting on each other. A lot of the time, some of the far-flung parts of it are working on totally different activities than the core wants or is aware of. It is animate, it just kind of does what it wants to do. Most governments are like that to at least some extent, and the American one is far more like that even than the norm.

    I think part of the issue is that fixing American health care involves interfering with some of the boss weasels’ mealtimes, and so of course the whole system is going to get very upset and savage you if you try to do anything to change it. Fixing health care for some refugees in some particular location costs a miniscule amount of money and effort, by comparison, and it doesn’t do anything to un-enrich anybody who’s currently being showered with riches, so it can proceed unimpeded.




  • Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, has said Democrats are “not going to go after every single issue” in the fight against President Donald Trump.

    “We are picking the most important fights and lying down on the train tracks on those fights,” Schumer toldThe New York Times earlier this month.

    “Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are architects of the crisis that allowed Trump’s fascism to arise and succeed,” progressive organizer Aaron Regunberg wrote Tuesday. “They have zero credibility to be leading the fights we face today—not in their record, their competency, or their recent performance. Quite simply, they have to go.”

    “Forcing recorded votes is possible. Frequent quorum calls are possible. A wide variety of dilatory motions are possible. In short, harassing the majority is possible. If they think it’s a bad idea, say so. If they say it’s not possible, they’re lying.”

    Quorum calls?

    Recorded votes?

    Guys: They’re going to try to put you in prison, at a minimum, and then make it illegal for anyone to take your place. They may try to kill you. It’s just a matter of when things go far enough that they think they can get away with it.

    I’m glad the progressives are attempting to spur the geriatric leadership to some sort of lumbering action, of course, but if Chuck Schumer isn’t worried that his is going to be one of the first show trials people should be educating him out of his lack of worry. For his sake, if for no one else’s.










  • Almost everyone I know who was at one point involved in the US military, came out it with a lot of resentment for the US military and bitterness towards the system in general. Maybe there is some self-selection bias there, and maybe my generation going to Iraq and Afghanistan makes a big difference, but that’s what I observed.

    A buddy of mine when he was much younger actually was really thinking about signing up, and he spent half an afternoon or so talking with a recruiter, and the recruiter and his colleague both clearly had massive issues both with the military and with their own lives, and he came out of it with the firm conclusion “Jesus Christ I’m glad I didn’t do that.”





  • the topic of this thread is the genocide in Gaza

    Correct.

    Biden’s complicity in it

    and the response to that from Democratic voters.

    Not really. Or, I mean, I know you brought those things into it, but the main topic of the thread was the “uncommitted” voters and whether or not they made a mistake.

    Then, you brought other arguments into it, including “Democrats have no principles”, abortion, immigration, Lina Khan, and Black Mirror. I responded to the new arguments you brought up and you became unhappy, suddenly, that we weren’t talking about Gaza anymore, and refused to respond to my response to what you said.

    genocide denial isn’t just “I deny that genocide is happening”. it’s more pernicious than that. it can also take the form of aggressively changing the subject.

    I responded directly about Biden and Trump vis-a-vis genocide, when we were talking about genocide. Trump is infinitely worse, vis-a-vis genocide. Someone who cares about genocide and doesn’t want to change the subject should be panicked about the prospect of Trump winning, even if the alternative is a Democrat. That is precisely the topic of this comments thread, before you changed the subject, aggressively, to “Democrats.”

    I do generally agree with your “perniciousness” argument. In particular, something like saying “Trump’s illegal calls for ethnic cleansing are horrific, but” should be a screaming red flag that the sentence needs to stop before the “but” comes in. Or maybe be finished up with “so it would obviously be a crisis if he gained power, so we should stop that.”




  • You said the Democrats have no principles, in terms of how they campaign. I said, more or less, that that’s true. But also, in terms of Biden specifically, he actually does seem to have a lot of principles in terms of what he did in office. With Gaza as one glaring and war-criminal exception.

    I have no idea where you got this idea that I look at “more stuff” and “less stuff” as the two options or why you talked down to me so extensively about the idea that that’s how I look at it. Clearly, hopefully, we both want more good stuff and less bad stuff, and it’s just a matter of talking about what stuff was good and what stuff was bad.

    I think it’s interesting but maybe not surprising that you totally ignored my pretty detailed arguments about income and climate policy, and just kept talking to me as if I hadn’t made them. Feel free to read them, they’re pretty interesting, whether or not you feel like addressing them on any level with me specifically.



  • oh wow, are we at the “bringing up non-sequitur talking points” point of this debate already?

    You claimed that “Democrats have no principles. they’ll campaign on anything they think will get them votes.” My point was that on the two biggest problems of the day, the last Democrat to be in office worked hard on it, and that’s relevant here.

    If you’re talking only about campaigning, saying that regardless of their principled performance in office, their messaging is incoherent dogshit that matches whatever they think people want to hear but doesn’t even do a good job of that, we can agree completely.

    And, actually, on most Democrats we can agree as to that they just don’t do much. I just think Biden was an exception, with Gaza as a notable return to the norm, which was tragic for everybody.

    Democrats’ opposition to climate change isn’t based on principles, it’s based on “say whatever we need to say to get elected”.

    Biden was the first US president who ever took any kind of big action on climate change. We needed to do ten times more, and we needed to do it 20 years ago, but if your metric for “opposition to climate change” is based purely on campaign statements, not on anything that people actually do, then I would request a reframing of the landscape.

    Of course, as far as “normal” Democrats, you’re completely right. Biden was an outlier. Most of them don’t seem to give a shit.

    You listed all the favorite talking points about individual things that Biden did bad on the climate. If you look at the entire picture, it looks like this:

    https://www.statista.com/chart/27935/how-the-inflation-reduction-act-will-affect-us-ghg-emissions/

    Or like this, if you consider infographics suspect:

    https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-were-the-climate-policies-in-the-ira-and-what-will-happen-to-them-after-the-2024-election/#%3A~%3Atext=All+together%2C+the+climate+provisions%2Cto+40%25+below+2005+levels.

    so Biden gets a talking point about how he reduced income inequality…but for actual low-income people, nothing materially improves. again, this underscores the point I was making. Democrats don’t have “help poor people” as a principle, they just want to get votes based on a perception that they help the poor.

    Here’s a summary of what you’re talking about:

    https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/

    Relevant excerpt:

    Between 2019 and 2023, hourly wage growth was strongest at the bottom of the wage distribution. The 10th-percentile real hourly wage grew 13.2% over the four-year period. To be clear, these are real (inflation-adjusted) wage changes. Overall inflation grew nearly 20%, or about 4.5% annually, between 2019 and 2023. Even with this historically fast inflation, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic recession, low-end wages grew substantially faster than price growth. Nominal wages (i.e., not inflation-adjusted) rose by roughly 34% cumulatively since 2019.

    There’s actually a specific reason why high-end wages dropped, during that time: Biden pursued deliberately inflationary policies, during the worst of the Covid recovery, to keep unemployment low. The alternative would have been to let unemployment stay high, depress wages, but make the rich people happy by keeping inflation lower than it would have been. He did the first one. Are you interested in me digging up an article on the details? They’re pretty interesting.

    2022 was the inflation year, when absolutely historic inflation slammed every country in the world, and in the US it was worse (temporarily) because of Biden’s specifically working-person-friendly policies. Again, if you’re genuinely interested in this stuff, let me know and I’ll look up an article, I just don’t want to do it if you’re not planning to engage with it. It’s not surprising to me that if you hit the pause button exactly in 2022, real wages looked the same as 2019, since 10th percentile wages were already steadily rising, but inflation was around 8% that year.

    https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/

    After that, even after Covid, wages at the 10th percentile grew very steeply. High-income earners continued to lose out a little bit, the middle of the scale stayed pretty much even, and low-income earners saw their biggest gains since LBJ. Again, if you’re interested in more than the articles I already sent, let me know, and I’ll dig up some more details.

    This is all by way of response to you saying that Democrats don’t actually do anything, more or less, they just run around making things worse and asking for money and votes. Actually, as far as most Democrats I think that’s pretty accurate (although voting for them so the Republicans don’t get into office and start killing people on purpose still seems sensible to me). But Biden was an exception.


  • I am saying that when you apply the exact thing you just said to the Democrats, I agree with it completely.

    I’m saying that with the Green Party, it apparently becomes important that the media presents the case accurately, which they’re currently not doing, which is terrible journalistic malpractice. That’s the first time I’ve heard that statement from anyone but myself in this conversation. I agree with it of course, for both the Democrats and the Greens, but it sounds like some people here are applying it only to the Green Party, and apparently staying silent on the media’s absolute betrayal of the American people by not making it clear what was at stake in this past election.

    I’m not trying to absolve the Democrats of their complicity (either as regards war crimes in Gaza or as regards an overblown and mostly useless campaign apparatus). I’m just saying, like I keep saying, that blame can be shared. The media shit the bed letting people know how much worse Trump was, and the Democrats being flamingly bad in some areas doesn’t change that, because Trump was objectively worse even than the low standard the Democrats set, by miles and miles. It seems like every time I talk to a certain population of people, it’s entirely the Democrats’ fault that they did bad, not just partially their fault, and I am very interested to observe that the media has now suddenly popped into the equation, now that I framed the question as being about the Greens, instead of the Democrats.