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REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS
A thread for Democrats Only
Saturday, December 9, 2023 7:54 PM
6IXSTRINGJACK
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: Even Michael Rappaport said he's going to vote for Trump. And that dude is a Lefty psychopath.
Monday, December 11, 2023 8:03 AM
SECOND
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Monday, December 11, 2023 1:18 PM
Quote:Originally posted by second: For example, Trump and his supporters like to present the so-called Make America Great Again movement as an unstoppable force. This spin elides some inconvenient facts. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes; he lost the 2020 popular vote by more than double that number.
Sunday, December 17, 2023 10:51 AM
Sunday, December 17, 2023 11:07 AM
Sunday, December 17, 2023 12:14 PM
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: I guess women are going to have to stop swiping left on guys under 5' 10" if they want a hookup in the future.
Sunday, December 17, 2023 1:40 PM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: I guess women are going to have to stop swiping left on guys under 5' 10" if they want a hookup in the future.You're short, unemployed, toothless, and a diabetic with an insulin pump. I can see your dating future will be worse than now, especially if Trump loses, and that causes you to buy a gun to kill Democrats. Women tend to avoid lazy, poor, and angry white trash men with guns, especially the ones with strong opinions opposing abortion and women's rights.
Saturday, December 30, 2023 7:39 AM
Monday, January 15, 2024 8:17 AM
JAYNEZTOWN
Monday, January 15, 2024 11:30 AM
Quote:Originally posted by second: What became of politics in the Long 2010s. By Mark Dunbar | Dec 20, 2023 https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/presentation-and-power Reviewed Here If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution By Vincent Bevins New York: PublicAffairs, 2023. The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession By Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger New York: Verso Books, 2023. Download the books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Vincent+Bevins https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Borriello+Jager I “joined” the Occupy movement in my junior year of college. It was my first taste of political activism. Since turning eighteen and having my first real job (security guard), I'd been vaguely socialist. Before then I’d been vaguely right-wing. I was nervous during the first meeting. I didn’t look the part — six-four, athletic-ish, Nike shorts and Under Armour hoodie — and, worse, I knew I didn’t. I didn’t know the lingo. I didn’t know the etiquette. I didn’t know anything. I just knew I didn't like following orders from people who weren’t accountable to me. The meeting was packed. It was conducted (we wouldn’t want to say “led,” would we?) by a guy who looked the part — short, skinny, long hair. The first red flag was when we were advised (not told, of course) to use spirit fingers rather than clap. The second red flag was when we voted to divide between town and campus groups — the town group would focus on housing, the campus group on student debt. In the campus group, all the ideas for what we should do were theatrical — hold up a banner during a football game, project student debt numbers on the side of a bank. That didn’t interest me. I was there for power, not presentation. But I stuck around for numerical strength, until, one night, after police removed us from occupying the political science building, a fellow Occupier accused me of being an undercover cop. In her defense, I did look that part. This was during the Long 2010s (2009-2022), a decade during which there occurred more mass protests than any decade in history. The protests were against the usual suspects: capitalism, racism, imperialism, greed, corruption. Two new books, Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution and The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, are about these protests and why they seemed to summon more of what they protested against — more greed, more racism, more corruption. They take different approaches. The Populist Moment is an academic investigation into the electoral failures of left-wing candidates in Europe and the United States (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Greece’s Syriza party), while If We Burn is a journalistic account of street protests in the Third World (Brazil, Indonesia, Chile) as well as Turkey and Ukraine. While the electoral and protest approaches are different, they yielded the same result. The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies. Protestors couldn’t make demands because they shunned the formal structures of decision-making that could have led to change; protest candidates couldn’t advance concrete policies because they had no confidence those policies would be electorally sustainable. In other words, where there was a will there was no way, and where there was a way there was no will. Still, the shell of failure can contain kernels of success. Bernie Sanders, for example, didn’t become president — he wasn't the Democratic nominee — but he was a viable candidate. And the skill and knowledge acquired during that time (campaign discipline, policy formation, ideological communication) did not disappear overnight. We see these qualities now in the ambition and vibrancy of the labor movement, which has recently won big victories in the film and auto industries, among other places. Of course, failure can be character-defining. And political failure can define one’s political character, leading to despair or conversion — in many cases, either to establishment hack or useful idiot for fascism. A lot of dixie-whistling has been done about the latter conversion path (proof of the so-called “horseshoe” theory of politics), but such conversions say less about political ideologies than individual personalities. A politics of hope will attract the hopeless, but hope defeated can push the hopeless into despair. And there will be plenty of despair merchants down there waiting for them. Likewise, those who want to wave a banner that the angry can rally around (and it was Augustine who said anger was the beautiful child of hope) will wave whatever banner is most attractive to the angry — whether it leads to better wages or to the burning of books. Finally, there are the careerists. Of course, some ideologies are more likely to attract careerists, just as others are more likely to attract sadists. But those who, after the failure of the Long 2010s, drifted into nihilistic cynicism or started playing footsie with fascism (or, more likely, both) didn’t undergo a political conversion; they succumbed to cowardice. Courage being Augustine’s second beautiful child of hope. Both If We Burn and The Populist Moment blame similar culprits. Borriello and Jäger blame the general atomization of society (the decline of participation in civic organizations, labor unions, and political parties). Jäger has written elsewhere about how we live in an age in which everything is political but there are few genuine political outlets, a strange set of circumstances that explains how, without genuine political outlets, our politics has become vague, and the vaguer the politics the greater the fear of those politics being transgressed. (Without firm political foundations or boundaries, every compromise can feel like a capitulation, every encroachment an invasion.) Bevins blames the ideological plague of “horizontalism” and “spontaneity” — the anarchic impulse for a structureless, leaderless movement. But, as Bevin points out, the decline of formal structures or formal leadership doesn’t entail an absence of structure and leadership. It creates conditions for informal structure and informal leadership. In my own Occupy experience, even though we were technically structureless and leaderless, it was always the same people conducting the meetings, and they were also the first to oppose formalizing anything. I doubt this was done cynically. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t. I think they just wanted to attract as many people as possible and, to their minds, they felt a movement that required no obligations and made no particular demands on one’s conscience was the best way of doing that. All that was asked of participants was their presence and a vague desire for change. That should have been a third red flag because a vague desire for change invites quite a bit of nonsense. I remember one night walking from the general meeting to a more selective meeting for those of us willing to engage in direct action (in this case, preventing a Goldman Sachs banker from speaking on campus), when one of the other participants started talking to me about the evils of the Federal Reserve (the libertarian boogeyman) and how it was devaluing the dollar (not a bad thing for us debtors). What’s the old Marxist joke? The only thing worse than being exploited by capital is not being exploited by capital? If easy credit replacing wage growth was bad, wait until there was no wage growth and no easy credit. Bevins sees the structureless, leaderless ethos as a product of the Sixties and the New Left. Authoritarian structures, so that generation tended to believe, couldn’t bring about democratic changes. A false dichotomy, to be sure. Never mind that “authoritarian structures” have, can, and hopefully will continue to bring about democratic changes. It doesn’t escape Bevins that this anarchic impulse was probably just a coping mechanism for the general atomization Barriello and Jäger write about. The structures were destroyed, good riddance anyway. Nor does the fact that this impulse mirrors the very society it was ostensibly protesting against. “At the end of the day,” retrospectively concluded one protestor Bevins interviewed, “horizontalism is a reflection of individualism.” Both If We Burn and The Populist Moment are “This Is What’s Wrong” books rather than “This Is How To Fix It” books and, therefore, ironically, suffer a bit from the vague desire for change that they chagrin. Bevins, to his credit, ends his book lambasting the unseriousness of long-decade protestors — particularly white, Western ones — who, after failing, didn’t suffer the same fate as their Third World compatriots. (“There's no more agreeable position,” said Evelyn Waugh, “than that of dissident from a stable society.”) Western protestors found refuge in academia and the nonprofit world, while their compatriots were thrown in prison or murdered. And Bevins seems aware that that’s his situation as well. What print media outlet nowadays isn’t sustained by some largesse in one form or another? Nonetheless, the general thesis of both If We Burn and The Populist Moment is correct. What’s needed is courage and competency. Less obscure knowledge of French cinematic history, more concrete knowledge of QuickBooks and how a warehouse functions; fewer heads in the clouds, more feet on the ground. Otherwise one should admit not an interest in power but in presentation — that one’s vague desire for change is more a homely rebelliousness than a radical conviction. The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Tuesday, January 23, 2024 11:32 AM
Saturday, January 27, 2024 5:29 PM
THG
Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: Kamala Harris is an idiot. Everybody knows that she is an idiot. Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election. -------------------------------------------------- Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face. Having a niwit VP is a President's term insurance. Can you imagine how fast Biden* would have been out of office if Camel-like Harris was even halfway competent? SIGNYM
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: Kamala Harris is an idiot. Everybody knows that she is an idiot. Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election. -------------------------------------------------- Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
Saturday, January 27, 2024 5:48 PM
Quote:Originally posted by THG: Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM: Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: Kamala Harris is an idiot. Everybody knows that she is an idiot. Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election. -------------------------------------------------- Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face. Having a niwit VP is a President's term insurance. Can you imagine how fast Biden* would have been out of office if Camel-like Harris was even halfway competent? SIGNYM
Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:27 AM
Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:43 AM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators
Tuesday, March 12, 2024 12:28 PM
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: Quote:Originally posted by second: Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators Oh... get fucked dude. Hitler was a Democrat. He was one of yours. Joe Biden* and his administration are currently doing every single thing you're suggesting that Trump is going to do when re-elected, which are also things Trump didn't do when he was President the first time. The terminally braindead among us vote Democrat because they're so easy to manipulate by leftist shit rags like New York Magazine.
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: #Rootin4Putin
Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:38 PM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: Quote:Originally posted by second: Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators Oh... get fucked dude. Hitler was a Democrat. He was one of yours. Joe Biden* and his administration are currently doing every single thing you're suggesting that Trump is going to do when re-elected, which are also things Trump didn't do when he was President the first time. The terminally braindead among us vote Democrat because they're so easy to manipulate by leftist shit rags like New York Magazine. This was from yesterday, 6ix: Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: #Rootin4Putin http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=64887&mid=1189451#1189451
Quote:6ix, it was only a few weeks ago I told you about Joe Duncan
Quote:, a pilot for Eastern Airlines back in 1962. He made the same kind of arguments you do. Predictably, he dropped dead early in life, in 1965 from choking on a chicken bone. Joe was a fat, greedy, loudmouth asshole, the same as Trump or the average angry poor white trash Trumptard.
Wednesday, March 13, 2024 6:11 AM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators How the American Right Fell in Love With Dictators, Over and Over Again Trump and Putin are nothing new. By Casey Michel | March 10, 2024 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/not-just-putin-why-the-right-falls-in-love-with-dictators.html
Wednesday, March 13, 2024 6:44 AM
Wednesday, March 13, 2024 8:08 AM
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: That post is a self own. You're an idiot. -------------------------------------------------- Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 7:19 AM
Quote:A decent proxy for how much we value youth labor is minimum wage, and we've kept it purposely pretty low. If it had just kept pace with productivity, it'd be at about 23 bucks a share. But we've decided to purposely keep it low. Out of reach. Median home price has skyrocketed relative to median household income. As a result, pre-pandemic, the average mortgage payment was 1,100 dollars, it's now 2,300 dollars because of an acceleration in interest rates and the fact that the average home has gone from 290,000 to 420. The third rail. I'm going to talk about Social Security. It would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit. But that gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill. But the additional 135 billion dollars a year to Social Security, that flies right through Congress. And every year we transfer 1.4 trillion dollars from a cohort that is increasingly doing less well to the cohort that is the wealthiest cohort in the history of this planet. I'm not against Social Security, but the criteria should be if you need it, not whether you have a catheter. What can we do? Nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed with what's right with it. We got the hard stuff figured out. There are programs to address all of these issues, they cost a lot of money, that's the hard part. And we have figured this out. In just five minutes post an earnings call, we can add a quarter of a trillion dollars to the economy. We've got the hard part figured out, the resources. We have the money, but we decide not to do it. This is per-capita spending on child care in the United States relative to other nations. This is housing permits. Things are doable. We increase minimum wage at 25 bucks an hour, it goes into the economy. The wonderful things about low- and middle-income households is they spend all their money. We have to have or restore or a progressive tax structure with alternative minimum tax on corporations and wealthy individuals. We need to refund the IRS. We need to reform Social Security. It should be based on whether you need the money, not on how old you are. We need a negative income tax. My friend Andrew Yang screwed up a great idea, but he branded it incorrectly. Instead of calling it UBI, he should’ve got Republicans on board by calling it a negative income tax.
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 7:46 AM
Quote:Originally posted by second: How the US is destroying young people's future In a scorching talk, marketing professor and podcaster Scott Galloway dissects the data showing that, by many measures, young people in the US are worse off financially than ever before. He unpacks the root causes and effects of this "great intergenerational theft," asking why we let it continue and showing how we could make it end. Read The Transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destroying_young_people_s_future/transcript
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 7:51 AM
Quote:Originally posted by THG: Quote:Originally posted by second: How the US is destroying young people's future In a scorching talk, marketing professor and podcaster Scott Galloway dissects the data showing that, by many measures, young people in the US are worse off financially than ever before. He unpacks the root causes and effects of this "great intergenerational theft," asking why we let it continue and showing how we could make it end. Read The Transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destroying_young_people_s_future/transcript America is set to take off when it comes to very good paying blue color jobs, from one end of the country to the other. We are in the best shape of any country on the planet. T The Greatest Reindustrialization Process in US History
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 11:53 AM
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 12:13 PM
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 12:52 PM
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: *yawn*
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 1:08 PM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: *yawn*Our parents' generation tried hard to give us a better life than they had. So why can’t this young generation do the same for us? https://www.gocomics.com/fminus/2024/05/08 The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 2:51 PM
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: Quote:Originally posted by second: Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: *yawn*Our parents' generation tried hard to give us a better life than they had. So why can’t this young generation do the same for us? https://www.gocomics.com/fminus/2024/05/08 The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two This has nothing at all to do with Trump, but I agree. Boomers are the last generation that is going to have a good share of the wealth and a cushy retirement. Gen X will get a few residual bread crumbs. Any Millennials old enough and smart enough to have bought a house between the housing market crash and the end of Trump's 1st term should probably be alright. Everybody else is fucked, and their only hopes of ever owning a home is if they're left one in a will. That's what eventually happens when everything from social programs to car insurance is built on a pyramid scheme. The only way to save the future is for everybody to fuck and have 5 kids each, but unless they all have 5 kids each it's just going to be an even bigger problem for them when they're of age. And good luck raising all those kids in this economy. And that would just be kicking two cans further down the road because your children are by far your largest carbon footprint and overpopulation is a problem that nobody is willing to talk about now. -------------------------------------------------- Trump will be fine. He will also be your next President.
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 6:14 PM
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 8:49 PM
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: -------------------------------------------------- Trump will be fine. He will also be your next President.
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 11:50 PM
Thursday, May 9, 2024 12:25 AM
Thursday, May 9, 2024 12:37 AM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: -------------------------------------------------- Trump will be fine. He will also be your next President.Let me check if the following fact still freaks you out, 6ix: Only Grover Cleveland was elected to non-consecutive terms as president. Six Presidents were shot. 6ix, are you still insisting that it is a death threat to mention the heuristic that Trump is six times more likely to be shot than be elected to non-consecutive terms? Since every Trumptard I know is certifiably insane, and has the difficult lives that follow from being crazy, I expect 6ix will freak out, once again. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123426/us-president-assassinations-attempts/ The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Thursday, May 9, 2024 7:21 AM
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: I've never freaked out about it. You're a little soy filled pussy. I've archived every death threat you've made though. Just to make your own life difficult if anything were to happen. But you go right on fantasizing about all the ways the world is going to save you from Trump. You need to get creative now because almost all of those things the Media told you were going to save you have failed and you've only got a few more left, which are going to fail. Tick Tock -------------------------------------------------- Trump will be fine. He will also be your next President.
Thursday, May 9, 2024 10:43 AM
Quote:Originally posted by second: Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: I've never freaked out about it. You're a little soy filled pussy. I've archived every death threat you've made though. Just to make your own life difficult if anything were to happen. But you go right on fantasizing about all the ways the world is going to save you from Trump. You need to get creative now because almost all of those things the Media told you were going to save you have failed and you've only got a few more left, which are going to fail. Tick Tock -------------------------------------------------- Trump will be fine. He will also be your next President. 6ix, everything you do points to you being crazy, but you don't see it. Same with Trump. That guy is out of his mind, but you don't see it. Your futures together are going to be filled with trouble because of the way you act. But you can't see that it is your fault. You have to shift the blame to Democrats for persecuting you or claim you are not in trouble. Trumptards are drunks who insist their highs, their intoxication with Trump, isn't interfering with their life. The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Wednesday, May 22, 2024 7:25 PM
Thursday, May 23, 2024 12:08 PM
Thursday, May 23, 2024 10:26 PM
Quote:Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN: old Joe and Kamala, have they destroyed the party?
Thursday, May 23, 2024 10:32 PM
Thursday, May 23, 2024 10:43 PM
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: Quote:Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN: old Joe and Kamala, have they destroyed the party? No. They were already destroying themselves long before Biden* was sworn in. They are the reason that states like Washington and New Hampshire are now in play for Trump though. I'm sure the 2 huge spikes in gas prices this week aren't helping matters any, when 60% of Americans are cutting back or quitting fast food because places like McDonalds have become unaffordable for anybody who isn't making over $100k per year. Tick Tock -------------------------------------------------- Trump will be fine. He will also be your next President.
Thursday, May 23, 2024 10:49 PM
Quote:Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: . . . when 60% of Americans are cutting back or quitting fast food because places like McDonalds have become unaffordable for anybody who isn't making over $100k per year.
Monday, May 27, 2024 7:18 AM
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