Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Sunday, August 10, 2025 08:35
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 47602
PAGE 58 of 58

Saturday, August 9, 2025 11:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How did American slavery end? By killing slave-owners and burning their plantations.

How did Nazism end? By killing Nazis and burning their cities.

How did Japanese Imperialism end? By killing Emperor worshipers and burning their cities.
Stop talking already and bring it, bitch.

Otherwise, sit down and shut the fuck up. You worthless, yapping mutt.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The Nazis and slave-owners and Imperial Japanese were puffed up with pride, convinced of their racial superiority and invincibility. And then they were burned,

They were also Democrats or further left. Every single time.

Shut the fuck up and strike me down already, tough guy.

We're all through listening to you cry like a bitch all day every day. Leave that shit back in 2024 where it belongs, you perpetually impotent, soy-filled cunt.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, August 9, 2025 11:51 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How did American slavery end? By killing slave-owners and burning their plantations.

How did Nazism end? By killing Nazis and burning their cities.

How did Japanese Imperialism end? By killing Emperor worshipers and burning their cities.

How will Ukrainian Nazism end?

How will American imperialism end?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, August 10, 2025 6:36 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How did American slavery end? By killing slave-owners and burning their plantations.

How did Nazism end? By killing Nazis and burning their cities.

How did Japanese Imperialism end? By killing Emperor worshipers and burning their cities.

How will Ukrainian Nazism end?

How will American imperialism end?

1) For one fact, Ukrainians are not Nazis, but that is the Russian propaganda talking point.

Quote:
Mr Putin has repeatedly made baseless claims about a "neo-Nazi regime" in Ukraine as a justification for Russia's invasion of the country.

https://www.bbc.com/news/64718139

2) For another fact, Trump is threatening to invade Canada and Greenland. He also throws around the idea of bombing Mexico. Trump is the emperor, and his American Empire falls with his death.

Quote:
Trump has been in a strikingly imperial mood since his election victory. He has floated acquiring Greenland, reclaiming the Panama Canal, annexing Canada, and potentially invading Mexico — to the intense consternation of their leaders.

https://www.axios.com/2024/12/24/trump-buy-greenland-claim-panama-cana
l

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 | TOP | HOME

Sunday, August 10, 2025 6:43 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

They were also Democrats or further left. Every single time.

Shut the fuck up and strike me down already, tough guy.

We're all through listening to you cry like a bitch all day every day. Leave that shit back in 2024 where it belongs, you perpetually impotent, soy-filled cunt.

6ix, you don't realize that Trump is following a path that is thousands of years old. In history, this path ends with the death of the Trump-like leader and his followers. In modern history, this time won't be different than ancient times.

The Philosophy of Tyranny

What a formative period in Plato’s life tells us about US politics today

By Nick Hilden | August 8, 2025

https://nautil.us/the-philosophy-of-tyranny-1229763/

Few figures loom larger over Western culture than Plato, whose The Republic has profoundly shaped Western thinking for centuries and is among the most assigned texts at English-speaking universities. In it, Plato describes his vision for a perfect society ruled over by what would later be described as a “Philosopher King”—an autocrat trained to wield total control with wisdom. For some 2,000 years, Plato’s notions were accepted by his acolytes with little pushback. But over the past century, his ideas have met growing criticism due to the totalitarian framework in which he situated his idealized Republic.

In his new book Plato and the Tyrant, Classicist James Romm explores a period in Plato’s life that many historians assert was influential to his conception of power. In his early 40s, before he wrote The Republic, Plato began visiting the Hellenic city-state of Syracuse in an effort to compel the first of two generations of authoritarian leaders toward just rule. By the time Plato arrived in Syracuse, Dionysius the Elder had already maintained decades of dictatorship, writes Romm, “not by turning weapons against his people but by exploiting their fears, their anger and their mistrust of traditional leaders, persuading them to vote away their own freedom.” Plato’s attempts to convince the elder to rule justly so angered him that he sold Plato into slavery, though friends later ransomed his freedom. When the Elder’s son Dionysius the Younger ascended to power, Plato tried again to influence a despot to rule with wisdom and temperance, but failed yet again. This time, his fraught relationship with the younger ruler nearly killed him. Romm argues that an intimate look at this period of Plato’s life can help us understand the man and his ideas in a more sober light, and offers insight into the ways autocracies and autocratic ideas take hold, even today.

Download a free copy of Plato and the Tyrant [2025] by James Romm from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=James+Romm+Plato

As Romm notes in his foreword, Sophocles once wrote that tyrants become wise through the company of the wise, but Plato’s story suggests the opposite: that, “The wise can become more tyrannical by the company of tyrants.” Nautilus spoke to Romm about Plato’s dangerous flirtations with tyranny, the process of revealing history once obscured, and the alarming relevance of a millennia-old monocracy.

In the foreword for Plato and the Tyrant you discuss how you were more enamored with Plato earlier in your life, until a new generation of students began questioning his vision. How did your view of Plato change?

The Republic is about an ideal society—ideal from Plato’s perspective—and I bought into the characterization that in some ways this society was the best that could be achieved. But my students were horrified, and I started to look at it more skeptically and recognize elements of it that really look nightmarish from our point of view.

It was really about the social structures of the Republic and whether to call it a utopia or a dystopia. The life of the military class—the guardians, as Plato calls them, who are “good”—are raised from a young age without access to most literature and art, have to be fed a strict mathematical and theoretical education, and are not permitted to have the kind of personal freedoms that we take for granted in a democratic society. Their sexual lives are strictly regulated as are their material lives—they’re not allowed to own much material wealth—and they’re raised essentially as automatons to serve the state. If you look at it from my students’ perspective, it’s a kind of brainwashing—the education that Plato prescribes.

What does the story you tell about Plato’s years in Syracuse have to teach us about power and regime change?

Well, I’m hoping we’re not in an era of regime change in this country. We may be, but that remains to be seen. But we are in an era of increasing authoritarianism and the desire of a huge cadre of people to shuck the norms of democracy and move to some other model—some authoritarian model. Plato was also convinced that democracy had failed and was not a viable system, and he wanted to try something new. He described the role of the authoritarian in The Republic as being that of a philosopher king. So he distinguished very clearly ordinary strongmen, whom he called tyrants, from true kings who rule with the benefit of philosophic enlightenment. And when he went to Syracuse, he was hoping that the strongman there—first the father, then the son—could be turned in a philosophic direction. Not necessarily made into philosophers, but at least their authoritarian impulses could be tempered. They could be made just rulers rather than despots. This turned out to be an illusion—a delusion—that he quickly realized was not only hopeless, but that his intervention actually made matters much worse by provoking a factional split in the court and sending the city into a civil war.

I don’t know if I can draw any specific lessons other than: It’s very dangerous to decide that your system has failed and you need something new. What you get may be very much worse than what you had. With all of its problems, the fantasy that you can just wipe away democratic traditions and get something in its place that will solve the problems of democracy is a very dangerous one that Plato fell victim to, and that caused terrible chaos in Syracuse as a result.

What do Plato’s maneuverings in Syracuse tell us about his legacy?

Plato is deeply revered in modern academia. He’s thought of as a kind of a godlike figure. And I think a close look at his interventions in Syracuse, his relations with Dionysius, his Thirteenth letter, his love affair with Dion—if that’s what their relationship was—it humanizes him. It makes him a more approachable figure, a more flawed figure, and also a more human figure.

In the 1940s, Karl Popper wrote a book called The Spell of Plato, and I discuss it in my introduction. Popper thought it was deeply dangerous and delusional for Western societies—Western democracies—to idealize Plato and not take a hard look at these more disturbing flaws and failings in his career. He wrote at the time of World War II, when fascism was very much threatening to take over the world, and he felt that if we can’t come to a reckoning with who Plato really was—where these ideas about autocracy really came from—then we risk going down the wrong path. I think he was right about that.

As you note in the book, modern technology has played a vital role helping us uncover previously obscured aspects of history. What role did it play in Plato and the Tyrant?

One of the documents that I rely on is a scroll by a man named Philodemus, who wrote a history of the Platonic Academy starting from Plato’s time, and that work is lost except for a scroll that was recovered from a house in Herculaneum that was destroyed in the volcanic eruption that also buried Pompeii. The library of that house was charred such that the scrolls looked like lumps of ash. They don’t look like anything you could read, but you can read them if you can unroll them—or at least this was always the case, that you needed to unroll them, which required just painstaking care, because otherwise they just fall to pieces. In the 18th century, a technique was developed to unroll a scroll very slowly and carefully, and this was used on the Philodemus scroll. It did damage the scroll, but enough of it was preserved that we could recover substantial amounts of text about Plato’s own life and the founding of the Academy.

In this century, a technique has evolved where, by using essentially a CAT scan coupled with AI software, you can get the text from the scrolls without unrolling them. So far, it’s a very slow and expensive process, and very little has been recovered, but it keeps advancing by leaps and bounds, and probably within my lifetime there will be whole texts recovered from these Herculaneum scrolls. There’s over 1,000 of them—or I think almost 1,000 of them preserved—that we don’t have any idea what the contents are. Perhaps there are many lost works in there—works of Sophocles, works of Euripides. There could be treasure troves of classical literature that can be recovered using these new techniques. So that’s very exciting.

Your book deals with themes of freedom versus authoritarianism, justice versus injustice, and the like, which are very much in the news these days. Do you think you were drawn toward these topics by our present day circumstances or did it happen incidentally?

It was incidental at first, because I began this book years ago, before the second Trump term was even a possibility. But as it became clear that we were under the threat of an authoritarian regime, I saw that this story really had a lot of relevance—not just because of Plato, but because of the way that the Dionysius regime got started in Syracuse. I devote a lot of my first chapter to exploring the ways in which a tyranny gets founded out of what was a functioning democracy.

Syracuse was quite a vital democracy in the late fifth century and had instituted various safeguards to preserve the democracy and keep strongmen from taking power. And yet, when a strongman came along—a charismatic demagogue who was able to breed mistrust among the populace, tell them that the rich and the elites were screwing them, were doing them dirty and colluding with their enemies, the Carthaginians—they bought it hook, line, and sinker. And then the tyrant Dionysius was able to build up his power base, install his loyalists, his troops, his security forces, and make himself impregnable. The financial angle—the fact that Dionysius was able to convince his countrymen to accept bronze coins at the value of silver, and those kinds of shenanigans, the use of cons and lies to build up power—it’s a fascinating process that has all too much resonance with what is happening around us today.

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 | TOP | HOME

Sunday, August 10, 2025 7:10 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

New York Times columnist David Brooks alleged DOGE's USAID cuts of leading to the deaths of 300,000 people.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6373749173112

Trump global aid cuts risk 14 million deaths in five years, report says
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o

“It’s Unacceptable”: BU Mathematician Tracks How Many Deaths May Result from USAID, Medicaid Cuts
The impact trackers update in real time based on the loss of international aid programs combating HIV and tuberculosis
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/mathematician-tracks-deaths-from-usai
d-medicaid-cuts/

USAID deaths caused by Trump
https://www.google.com/search?q=USAID+deaths+caused+by+Trump

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 | TOP | HOME

Sunday, August 10, 2025 8:23 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Revenge of the Vibecession

Last year, Donald Trump exploited the perception that the economy was bad, even though many indicators were good. Is it possible to do the opposite? (If the economy enters an actual recession, or slows down, the vibes are all but guaranteed to be bad for Trump.)

By Jon Allsop | August 8, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/revenge-of-the-vibecession

During the Great Depression, William N. Doak, President Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of Labor, told reporters that employment was going up across the country. The reporters, however, had been “fooled before by such cheery statements from politically-minded Secretaries,” Time magazine reported. They sought a second opinion, from Ethelbert Stewart, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and this “white-crowned, white-whiskered old man telephoned Secretary Doak that the statistics given him warranted no such declaration.” Not long afterward, Hoover signed a law requiring the federal government to, among other things, part with workers who had reached retirement age. Stewart was in his mid-seventies; Doak could have recommended him for a Presidential exemption, but he did not, and so Stewart was out. According to Time, many observers in Washington smelled a rat. “Retired?” Stewart was quoted as saying. “Don’t put it that way. I’ve had a tin can tied to the end of my coat tail.”

As the media critic Jack Shafer recently observed, the question of job statistics has been a political football ever since a Bureau of Labor was created, in 1884, under the Presidency of Chester A. Arthur. According to an in-house history, the bureau “was the culmination of almost two decades of advocacy by labor organizations that wanted government help in publicizing and improving the status of the growing industrial labor force.” Samuel Gompers, the famed union leader, suggested that lawmakers wouldn’t be able to justify ignoring workers if they had access to hard data about them. Allegations of Presidential meddling have a history, too. Howard Goldstein, an assistant B.L.S. commissioner under Richard Nixon, was suspected of having undermined a reported drop in the unemployment rate in remarks to the press; Nixon privately raged against Goldstein, demanding that he be fired, and, as my colleague Fergus McIntosh noted earlier this week, subsequently set in motion a “Jew count” at the agency. When the B.L.S. reported a dip in unemployment ahead of the 2012 Presidential election, some Republicans suggested that the department had cooked the books to help President Barack Obama’s reëlection chances. These critics included Donald Trump, who, as McIntosh reported, would cast further doubt on official jobs numbers during the launch event for his Presidential candidacy, in 2015. (“Our real unemployment is anywhere from eighteen to twenty per cent,” he said, shortly after descending the golden escalator at Trump Tower.) Last year, after the B.L.S. revised jobs numbers downward, he claimed that the Biden-Harris Administration had previously covered up the true figures for political gain. If so, they did a pretty inept job, since the new numbers came out in August—two and a half months before the election.

This behavior culminated, last week, in Trump’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the current B.L.S. commissioner, after the agency released a jobs report that showed pretty anemic growth for July, and sharply lower figures for May and June than the agency had initially reported. Trump’s advisers did their best to put a rational gloss on an irrational decision, but Trump himself, as he always does, roared the quiet bit out loud, suggesting that McEntarfer was a Democratic partisan who had rigged the numbers to make him look bad. McIntosh described the firing as “the next step in Trump’s project of making the federal bureaucracy, and the information it produces, into a tool of his own authority.” Other observers agreed, stressing the increasingly authoritarian nature of this authority, and the feeling that McEntarfer’s ouster had compounded a dark moment for those who value the truth. On ABC, Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, described it as “way beyond” anything Nixon ever did. “Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. This is really scary stuff.”

All true enough. (Well, in the absence of a “Jew count,” I think one could make a case that what Nixon did actually was worse.) But McEntarfer’s dismissal also struck me as by far the most self-defeating of Trump’s recent authoritarian maneuvers. Even if the jobs report doesn’t turn into Pravda overnight—the process of putting it together, experts suggest, is hard to blatantly rig—the perception that it has been altered to massage Trump’s ego, or feasibly could be, might undermine confidence in the economy, making bond markets jittery, for example, or lowering U.S. leverage in international trade negotiations. (Already, Trump’s conduct has led to the publication of this incredible sentence, in the Wall Street Journal: “Efforts to estimate economic data in China, which publishes famously unreliable government statistics, could provide a road map for U.S. firms if the integrity of domestic data comes into question.”) All this risk to mask the supposed embarrassment of a jobs report that, while not great, was hardly catastrophic.

The firing is harmful for other reasons, too: as one observer put it to the Times, “Democracy can’t realistically exist without reliable epistemic infrastructure.” In a less lofty sense, it also strikes me as a politically pointless act from the President’s perspective. Often, when Trump has undermined confidence in America’s shared epistemology, doing so has rebounded to his advantage. Now that he’s back in office, however, he’s finding that this isn’t always the case. (Exhibit A: the somehow still ongoing Epstein imbroglio.) Casting doubt on official macroeconomic data doesn’t seem likely to work for him either; as Trump should know better than anyone, having ridden this wave back to office, how people feel about the economy matters most. Trump, with his absolutist approach to Presidential power and majorities in Congress, owns the economy now. Increasingly, it looks like the tin can tied to his coattails.

In 2022, Kyla Scanlon, an economic commentator, coined the term “vibecession,” which she would later define as the “idea that economic data is telling us one story and consumer sentiment is telling us another.” The concept quickly took off in media coverage as evocative shorthand for a puzzling phenomenon: by many traditional metrics, the economy of the Biden years was strong, especially by the second half of his tenure, when high rates of inflation started to slow. And yet many people were unenthusiastic about the economy as a whole.

There have been different interpretations of this apparent discrepancy. A popular one held that the media was overemphasizing negative data points (inflation, mostly) and unrepresentative anecdotes (a CNN segment about a family of eleven that went through twelve gallons of milk a week, for example), and failing to communicate the bigger picture. White House officials were among those pushing this idea, including Biden himself, who suggested, in increasingly tetchy terms, that the press wasn’t covering the economy in “the right way.” Others blamed the Administration for not doing enough to sell its economic accomplishments. (Biden would later express regret that he didn’t put his name on newly finished infrastructure projects or pandemic-era stimulus checks.) Either way, surveys consistently showed that even people who felt pretty good about their financial situation, or that of their state or local area, thought the national economy was going in the wrong direction. Last year, in the spring, a majority of respondents to one poll said that the U.S. was in a recession. It definitively was not.

A different school of thought held that voters were not misinformed about the economy, and that it was patronizing to suggest they were. According to this view, the high inflation of the Biden years had left both psychological scars and a lasting imprint on prices, even after the rate of increase tailed off. And the top-line numbers reported by entities like the B.L.S. failed to communicate the struggles of lower-income families, particularly after early Biden-era programs, such as an enhanced child tax credit and a moratorium on evictions, were struck down or weren’t extended. Even those who said in polls that their personal financial circumstances were fine might have had very legitimate grounds to look around and see an economy that appeared to be skewed, broken—rigged, even. In a country with such a ragged safety net, you didn’t have to be a diehard Biden skeptic to think so.

There are aspects of truth in both of these views. But, however legitimate the bad vibes were, Trump clearly benefitted from them; he won the election, in no small part, based on oversimplified promises not only to end inflation but to bring prices back down. Trump has often proved adept at harnessing vibes, as I explored in a recent column, certainly much more so than Biden and many other top Democrats. (Toward the end of his first term in office, for instance, Trump did put his name on stimulus checks.) And he has managed to remain the tribune of many who think the economy is stacked against people like them, if not necessarily against them personally—part of a broader anti-establishment appeal built on doing things like, say, firing technocrats who run government statistical agencies. Last year, on the campaign trail, he seemed also to tap into a latent nostalgia for the strong pre-COVID economy that he oversaw. After he won the election, optimism about the economy soared, at least among his voters. The vibecession was declared over.

Now that Trump is back in office, however, his economy needs to perform to keep the good vibes going, and while its over-all health is, for now, uncertain, he has done a lot to maximize that uncertainty, not least through the whiplash execution of his tariff policies, which, as Kyle Chayka wrote in this magazine, in April, has turned “recession indicators” into a widespread meme. The tariffs have been widely expected to drive an increase in consumer prices, and there are early indications that this might be happening, along with some warning signs in recent growth and jobs data. Wherever we go from here, Trump yelling about macroeconomic data—made-up or real—doesn’t seem likely to change how most people feel. Ironically, he seems to be repeating the mistake that Biden made, even if Trump’s version of urging the press to report data “the right way” is brazenly firing an official for doing just that.

If last year’s election suggested that voters’ subjective impressions far outweigh high-level economic statistics, it’s tempting to see this as yet another step into a post-truth age. Trump—a man who has said that his “feelings” affect how he assesses his own net worth, and who said that it was his “opinion” that the recent B.L.S. data was B.S.—is a compelling avatar for the idea that vibes are increasingly winning out over facts. But most people do tend, still, to be tethered to their daily realities—and if the bottom falls out of Trump’s labor market, or inflation bites again, those facts will be keenly felt. The logic of the vibecession surely cannot work in reverse. If the economy enters an actual recession, or just slows down, the vibes are all but guaranteed to be bad for Trump.

B.L.S. jobs reports have never been gospel truth. As McIntosh noted, the methodological decisions that inform data collection reflect political priorities; in recent years, that collection has been hampered by declining response rates in the surveys that the B.L.S. sends out to businesses, in addition to budgetary constraints. To acknowledge this isn’t to lapse into some postmodern view that the numbers are all fake anyway, and that Trump’s attacks thus don’t matter. But it is to say that the reality they reflect is a complicated one. If, in the Great Depression, a time traveller had told Ethelbert Stewart about the “vibecession,” he’d surely have thought they were from Mars. But he’d have understood the basic idea. “The only things that make human life human do not lend themselves readily to the statistical method,” he once said. For decades, he added, he had struggled “to put some flesh upon the bony skeleton of mere tabulations—it’s about human lives.”

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 | TOP | HOME

Sunday, August 10, 2025 8:35 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Economics of Smoot Hawley 2.0, Part II

This trade war is really a class war

By Paul Krugman | Aug 10, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-smoot-hawley-20-cf
7

There is a special court, the Court of International Trade, which has jurisdiction over tariff issues, and it ruled the tariffs illegal on May 28. However, the ruling was stayed while the administration appealed the decision to the Federal Circuit Court. Those following the deliberations mostly believe that this court will uphold the trade court’s ruling. But then the case will go to the Supreme Court, and almost everyone expects the Supremes to rule (6 to 3) that Trump can do whatever he wants.

https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2025/trump-tariffs-and-c
ourts-round-2

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 | TOP | HOME

YOUR OPTIONS

SHARE THREAD

NEW POSTS SINCE LAST READ

USER	POST DATE
second	08.10 08:23
second	08.10 08:35