I think things will be fine. The story for the last few years, in any D v R election is things are neck and neck up to the last moment at which point Righties get their ass beat by a significant margin. I think the Harris media strategy is brilliant. Paying attention this week to the places that people actually go for the news these days has guaranteed a big win next month.
See, I have plenty of weed and it makes me the eternal optimist. I'm a horticulturist and you know our official motto - " Better Living With Plants !"
About 6 or 7 (which means it's probably 8 or 9) years ago, I was driving back from a band rehearsal at around 10:30, in the San Fernando Valley of L.A. I was the only car on the street, stopped at a red light, when a truck pulled up beside me. Inside were two kids--late teens, tops. And they were writhing around and acting comically distraught. I lowered my window and beeped, and the passenger lowered his. I said, "It's going to be all right."
"WE NEED WEED!" the kid said.
I laffed, and the light turned green, and we drove off.
I went out and got a horticulture degree just to keep from having moments like that.
We eat plants, we wear plants, we live in houses made out of plants, when we are, sick we take medicine made from plants. It makes perfect sense to me that we should explore our inner selves and our place in the grand scheme of cosmic universality using plants.
Agree with all this (except I don't do weed; never been interested). The normal "Horserace Horserace Uber Alles" (as I put it) isn't in play here; the MSM know this, and they're *furious.* All of their coverage has been them trying to drag her to their (fixed) track, Democracy Downs, for their (fixed) horserace.
Meanwhile the Hurricane Commander in Chief manages to dodge much of the incoming, and deflect most of the rest. And Queens Man is probly looking for another pandemic to pin on the commies whilst selling another test kit to Ras-Putin, thereby cementing the victory somehow...
An apocryphal story - At some soiree or awards ceremony, Mrs Richard Rodgers was speaking about how her husband had written "Some Enchanted Evening" and it was considered by many to do the most beautiful Broadway ballad ever. At this point Mrs Hammerstein spoke up and said " My husband wrote " Some Enchanted Evening - Your husband wrote " Da de da da dum da"
O/T, but if we’re going to be retailing potentially apocryphal stories, I came across this one recently, regarding Bill Faulkner’s sojourn writing screenplays in Hollywood:
****
[Howard] Hawks liked to take Faulkner on hunting expeditions, and when Clark Gable heard one day that the director was setting off for the Imperial Valley early the next morning, he asked to go along. Hawks agreed. The three of them were driving through Palm Springs, as Hawks later recalled, when the talk turned to writing. Gable, whose ignorance was almost classic, idly asked Hawks’s gray-haired friend who he thought were good writers. “Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself,” Faulkner said. Gable seemed mildly surprised. “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?” he asked. “Yeah,” Faulkner admitted. “What do you do, Mr. Gable?”
1.) Racism--there are HUGE swathes of Americans for whom the loss of freedom to use racial slurs in public is a genuine crisis, and one that only Trump can remedy.
2.) Misogyny--many men feel completely oppressed that they can no longer hit on the receptionist at work or compliment their secretary's tits with those bastards from HR getting involved. Trump promises to change this.
3.) Owning the libs--even if 1 and 2 are not your thing, the fact that a Trump win would so thoroughly own the libs makes voting for him imperative.
4.) The effects of the massive ocean current of misinformation, ignorance, and projection--the fact that we now have something like 25% of the populace absolutely convinced that Jews are using space laser to create and control hurricanes for political purposes says something really terrible about this country.
1984 was my first presidential election. I was 19. And if you think I was going to vote for Ronald Reagan just because my parents told me I was supposed to, I'll tell you what I didn't have the nerve to tell them: hell to the fucking no 😂 I wanted Geraldine Ferraro in the VP spot. Azroy noted, Reagan took every state except Minnesota, which was Mondale's state, and being reminded of that just now makes me feel a lot better about next month's conflagration. I was just discovering feminism and LGBTQ issues in 1984, and that's the political climate we had? No wonder my early twenties or such a shitshow of anger and defiance 😂 actually, with the overturning of Roe versus Wade, my late '50s aren't a whole hell of a lot different. 😆
It is like living in a nightmare looking at the 538 polls these days. The idea that this contest is such a squeaker, that's so many people plan to actually vote for that tangerine shit bomb, is absolutely surreal, in an orwellian way. I just hope we get through to January 20th without violence.
Fortunately for us, we were born into great privilege and have lived at what is likely to be the apex of human comfort and freedom. Very bad times are coming. The weather doesn't care about our politics, not in the very short term anyway, But for good or ill, in the very short term we'll be dead, so the opportunity for good times in our particularly privileged lives is still there. It's just a matter of physical and mental health. Our control over the physical is limited, but mentally we have quite a bit more choice. Politics for most of us is just a spectator sport like football and we would likely benefit from changing channels and watching nature shows instead. Or better yet, turn off the tv entirely and get out in the world.
Though it's possible to improve mental health in that regard by getting out in the world and attempting to make the politics better. I think writing counts. But with that kind of engagement, the likelihood of experiencing some kind of PTSD is much greater. I think a lot of it has to do with how our mental health is affected by powerlessness. Following politics and doing nothing but talk about it can make us feel powerless. Getting out and doing something can be empowering, but when the efforts have negligible effects, that feeling of powerlessness can set in. Or just being realistic because realistically the great majority of us are effectively powerless, whatever we do makes no more dent in the universe than whatever an individual ant is doing in the ant hill.
Personally, I see power through the prisms of Carlos Castenada's no doubt fictional teachings of Don Juan and the likely equally fictional teachings of the Buddha. The Don Juan character teaches that we can acquire personal power by embracing certain ways of life. The Buddha character teaches that power is an illusion and we should embrace powerlessness. Put them together and there is a path around the traumatic stress that paying attention to politics rightly inflicts.
But whatever selfish contentment we can by either dropping out or engaging isn't going to matter to the weather and the end is always going to be near.
Thanks, Roy. For myself, back at the beginning of July I was hoping that by October Harris would be leading by 5-6 points, not 2-3. Largely for the reason that Trump is, well, Trump and Jim Dave on the campaign trail is a glitchy animatronic Nazi straight out of Disneyworld. Trump’s lead over Biden meant that some low-information and centrist voters simply wanted a fresh choice and not a rematch between two Crypt Keepers.
So one possibility is “they are both too old and I want a change” is just 2024’s version of 2016’s “economic anxiety,” a cover story for people who are just fine with conservative monstrosities as long as they believe they won’t be negatively impacted themselves and the price of eggs will be lower. But my own theory -- which could be very, very wrong -- is that because the pollsters underestimated Trump’s numbers in 2016 AND 2020, they don’t want to be caught flat-footed a third time. So they have weighted their polls accordingly, and are now all herding towards inflating Trump’s real numbers by a couple of points.
At least that’s what I tell myself so I sleep at night. And it doesn't change the fact that it's monstrous that Trump ever got more than 30% of the vote.
Fingers and toes crossed. While I was reading the link you provided, a friend I'd shared my theory with a few days ago sent me another link to Brian Beutler's stack Off Message. Apparently he believes this theory, too. Here's hoping!
Recent history (say since Reagan) shows the American voter likes to alternate leadership between the 2 parties. 12 years Reagan/Bush1, 8 Clinton, 8 Bush2, 8 Obama.
So a Republican was next in line. Plus, they had a billionaire Celebrity! A TV star! Running against the Shelob of Chautauqua, a woman the target of a generation of unprecedented smear campaigning, with the Russians piling on. Even then, it was close (no, the popular vote is an irrelevant data point, as we keep having to relearn). So this time it's down to how many Americans (in the "swing" states) want to hurt the right sort of people. The sheen of Celebrity has faded, and the machine hasn't had decades to build their campaign against this woman. Hunter S. Thompson's question is more relevant than its ever been: "are we a nation of used car salesmen who will kill anyone who threatens to make us uncomfortable?".
And November will go a long way towards answering Thompson's question. As I've said, that a man like Trump could ever receive more than 30% of the vote is a national disgrace for any country that so much as alludes to itself a democracy let alone boasts of it.
Given the bulk of them live in ungovernable tribal areas that's not so bad. Stiching together a nation out of 50 psuedo-autonomous fiefdoms was always a long shot, and it only lasted this long by the iron fist of Washington shoveling money to the hinterlands with an otherwise light touch. Once America became an empire, and had a mass media to rub the rube's noses in that showed a world they were ever-more distant and disconnected from, this all was just a matter of time, and the time is now. Its not The Final,Countdown, but this fight will continue until either the federal government is overhauled to represent humans instead of land, or the Republicans bumble our way into some Armaegeddon they can't lie their way out of.
"The bright side of it, in my view, is that we’re now confronting conflicts in our democracy that have been papered over for many, many years"
Damn, chef -- leave it to you to find the silver lining. And I love your example of the United States and structural racism & white supremacy because what we see from those groups most committed to the defense of those structures is a lot like the rage and violence of a domestic abuser who says "if you hadn't complained about all this in the first place, I wouldn't have had to hit you" or "kill your pet" or whatever other horrible thing might be imagined.
"Hell, most of Western Europe was full fascist in the early 1940s. They bounced back pretty good"
Holland has entered the chat. And Italy. And Poland. And Hungary. And Romania. And Sweden. And England, France, & Germany simply refuse to be left out... It'll be interesting to see how fascism plays out in the structure of the EU more broadly. I'd bet one or two more major economies will be chafing to leave if these parties aren't undeated & discredited in the next five years.
"(And then we have to fight some of the people we’re voting for now to get all the way there, which may turn out to be the tougher battle!)"
Based. Also, luring previously-irredeemable GOPers to the increasingly rightist Democratic party, doesn't bode well for anyone left of.. well, John Galt. But that is the fight for 2028. Probably 2032 more realistically.
Sorry, no jokes today. Where's Bern? Goddammit, this gurl needs to be amused!
About the fash, European-style: Look at the numbers, and the fascists "win" with 28%, which is more than the 26% their nearest competitors got. That's multi-party democracy for you. I've been saying for a while that a solid third of any country is ready for fascism any time, so this actually underperforms my pessimistic and cynical take on human nature.
Anyway, the other thing about multi-party democracy is that governments are built out of coalitions of parties, and the fascists may be stuck in the permanent-minority 28% status if no one else will play with them. Looking at France, one thing the fascists seem to be good at is getting the other parties to set aside their differences just to keep the fascists out.
Except that Macron subverted the will of the voters, refused to build a coalition with Melancthon & turned rightward, building a coalition instead with Le Pen.
And it points at the real danger: The shouty fascists in the street are dangerous enough, but they don't gain real power without an alliance with corporatists who want austerity and the disciplining of labor.
It took a global economic collapse to give fascism a leg up last time. Right now its a horse race between global warming and crypto, but we've got a real shot at another one. Absent that, all they can do is loot the countries dumb enough to give them a shot at power. Like Trump. A global movement needs a global catastrophy.
Global warming, crypto, and hey, let's not shortchange the 2020s equation shaping up already as Misinformation Superhighway + Rise of AI + Russian Interference = Social Cohesion Cratering Epistemological Catastrophe
Criminality as the highest manifestation of independent thought equals antisocial behavior is the ultimate social behavior. That is, selfish is actually prosocial.
By Jove! I think you've got it!
I learned how to mess with MAGA using illogical like, You shouldn't vote because that's how they get you. Stay off their radar. Not voting registers as a protest vote and you still take two hours off work but do something for you.
My actions are the partisan opposite of getting out the vote. I'll let you know if it works. You'll see it in the numbers.
I've been saying this, too (especially in these pages). Dems should field an ad that says, "You don't like Harris? Can't bring yourself to vote for a Democrat/liberal/woman/person of color/decent human being? Fine! But you can't vote for Trump. So just stay home, kick back, we're all good."
I also take some small comfort from the fact that the flop sweat is pouring off Trump; he always looks old and tired now; and he's just coming across like an ancient sad sack. Like you said, Trump's followers can't stand a loser and that's all this inflated fraud has ever been.
I wonder how many of Trump's voters see him at all. I see a lot of him because I live at the end of a pipeline that delivers his every crazy utterance to me for Laffs. But most people? Not gonna go to one of his rallies, don't watch the news (and when they do they see 3 seconds of Trump while the newscaster intones "Former President Trump spoke about health care.") Then you've got the deliberate ignoring of him by loyal Republicans who don't want to know. At this point, everyone thinks they know Trump, I'm betting tens of millions will go to the polls without once downloading the update.
I'm scouting RVs. If he gets back in, I'm selling my house and getting the fuck out of here. Figuring on somewhere near the border in maybe New Mexico, where I can make a quick getaway if things start getting bad. All the rest of the border states are too fascist except California, which I prefer to avoid.
Nice pep talk. FWIW, my spouse, who is a pretty clear-eyed person, thinks the MAGAts are going to get obliterated in November due to the fact that women, of which she is one, are (in the words of the great James Wolcott), "...fed up, cheesed off, and ready to bring the funk." Dare to dream, I say.
Try to avoid it if I can. Did you know Tammy Baldwin wants to FORCE women's domestic-violence shelters to admit BIOLOGICAL MALES?
About her opponent, California banker Eric Hovde, I have never seen a single ad for Hovde, not even the bland "Here I am with my wife and the kids and the dog." Just attack, attack, attack, lie, lie, lie. If he wins, other Republicans will take note and this will be the standard formula, if it isn't already.
I’m so lucky that I’m reading this on the iPad where detailed comments are hard to write.
Suffice to say, I (of course?) agree with post generally, it’s just a shit ton of details with which I disagree big time.
OTOH, any time would be the wrong time to go into details because they’re too pessimistic and I’m sure I’ve touched on them before.
So taking a pass for now.
Thank you!
"it’s very hard on me"
You need weed? You got friends.....
Lemme know!
I think things will be fine. The story for the last few years, in any D v R election is things are neck and neck up to the last moment at which point Righties get their ass beat by a significant margin. I think the Harris media strategy is brilliant. Paying attention this week to the places that people actually go for the news these days has guaranteed a big win next month.
See, I have plenty of weed and it makes me the eternal optimist. I'm a horticulturist and you know our official motto - " Better Living With Plants !"
or deading you will be?
"....things are neck and neck up to the last moment at which point Righties get their ass beat by a significant margin."
This has been the story in Wisconsin the last few years, let's hope it holds up this time.
Oh, good, I get to tell this.
About 6 or 7 (which means it's probably 8 or 9) years ago, I was driving back from a band rehearsal at around 10:30, in the San Fernando Valley of L.A. I was the only car on the street, stopped at a red light, when a truck pulled up beside me. Inside were two kids--late teens, tops. And they were writhing around and acting comically distraught. I lowered my window and beeped, and the passenger lowered his. I said, "It's going to be all right."
"WE NEED WEED!" the kid said.
I laffed, and the light turned green, and we drove off.
I went out and got a horticulture degree just to keep from having moments like that.
We eat plants, we wear plants, we live in houses made out of plants, when we are, sick we take medicine made from plants. It makes perfect sense to me that we should explore our inner selves and our place in the grand scheme of cosmic universality using plants.
Agree with all this (except I don't do weed; never been interested). The normal "Horserace Horserace Uber Alles" (as I put it) isn't in play here; the MSM know this, and they're *furious.* All of their coverage has been them trying to drag her to their (fixed) track, Democracy Downs, for their (fixed) horserace.
1.5 marks for Democracy Downs (woulda been 2 but we await patiently the lineage between Democracy and Hugh).
It's legal here, too. But thanks!
That's Roy – Fair and Balanced.
Meanwhile the Hurricane Commander in Chief manages to dodge much of the incoming, and deflect most of the rest. And Queens Man is probly looking for another pandemic to pin on the commies whilst selling another test kit to Ras-Putin, thereby cementing the victory somehow...
Vlad Vlad Ras-Putin,
Smoothest chest I've ever seen
Wrestle bears & ban the queens
Vlad Vlad Ras-Putin,
Russia's gangster war machine
It was a shame how he carried on
Aww, that's better — thanks, Mr. Bern
2 marks, right out the chute.
Glad to be of service!
Sigh. Yeah, all it took was one glance at the pic atop the post and now I have “Nothing Like a Dame” playing on a loop in my head. Damn you Roy!
You've got to be carefully taught.
"You got to have a dream/If you don't have a dream/How you gonna have a dream come true?" has served me well as a wisecrack comment on many blogs.
We got nothing to put on a clean white suit for
We got nothing to look masculine and cute for -
An apocryphal story - At some soiree or awards ceremony, Mrs Richard Rodgers was speaking about how her husband had written "Some Enchanted Evening" and it was considered by many to do the most beautiful Broadway ballad ever. At this point Mrs Hammerstein spoke up and said " My husband wrote " Some Enchanted Evening - Your husband wrote " Da de da da dum da"
Probably not true, but it should be.
Lots of things that aren't true probably should be… But others should never be
The Thing That Should Not Be
(True)
Ha!
O/T, but if we’re going to be retailing potentially apocryphal stories, I came across this one recently, regarding Bill Faulkner’s sojourn writing screenplays in Hollywood:
****
[Howard] Hawks liked to take Faulkner on hunting expeditions, and when Clark Gable heard one day that the director was setting off for the Imperial Valley early the next morning, he asked to go along. Hawks agreed. The three of them were driving through Palm Springs, as Hawks later recalled, when the talk turned to writing. Gable, whose ignorance was almost classic, idly asked Hawks’s gray-haired friend who he thought were good writers. “Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself,” Faulkner said. Gable seemed mildly surprised. “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?” he asked. “Yeah,” Faulkner admitted. “What do you do, Mr. Gable?”
Reminds me of my favorite knock-knock joke:
"Knockknock!" " Who's there?" Sam and Janet!"
Don't knock 'em!
Thanks, I needed that - some ad from the (sane) past
My thoughts exactly. Who knew you were so smart? ; )
Never underestimate Trump's appeal:
1.) Racism--there are HUGE swathes of Americans for whom the loss of freedom to use racial slurs in public is a genuine crisis, and one that only Trump can remedy.
2.) Misogyny--many men feel completely oppressed that they can no longer hit on the receptionist at work or compliment their secretary's tits with those bastards from HR getting involved. Trump promises to change this.
3.) Owning the libs--even if 1 and 2 are not your thing, the fact that a Trump win would so thoroughly own the libs makes voting for him imperative.
4.) The effects of the massive ocean current of misinformation, ignorance, and projection--the fact that we now have something like 25% of the populace absolutely convinced that Jews are using space laser to create and control hurricanes for political purposes says something really terrible about this country.
They think "owning the libs" this time means they'll have them as *slaves.*
Dust off Nat Turner.
Well, those of us they don't decide to hunt through the woods.
1984 was my first presidential election. I was 19. And if you think I was going to vote for Ronald Reagan just because my parents told me I was supposed to, I'll tell you what I didn't have the nerve to tell them: hell to the fucking no 😂 I wanted Geraldine Ferraro in the VP spot. Azroy noted, Reagan took every state except Minnesota, which was Mondale's state, and being reminded of that just now makes me feel a lot better about next month's conflagration. I was just discovering feminism and LGBTQ issues in 1984, and that's the political climate we had? No wonder my early twenties or such a shitshow of anger and defiance 😂 actually, with the overturning of Roe versus Wade, my late '50s aren't a whole hell of a lot different. 😆
It is like living in a nightmare looking at the 538 polls these days. The idea that this contest is such a squeaker, that's so many people plan to actually vote for that tangerine shit bomb, is absolutely surreal, in an orwellian way. I just hope we get through to January 20th without violence.
Fortunately for us, we were born into great privilege and have lived at what is likely to be the apex of human comfort and freedom. Very bad times are coming. The weather doesn't care about our politics, not in the very short term anyway, But for good or ill, in the very short term we'll be dead, so the opportunity for good times in our particularly privileged lives is still there. It's just a matter of physical and mental health. Our control over the physical is limited, but mentally we have quite a bit more choice. Politics for most of us is just a spectator sport like football and we would likely benefit from changing channels and watching nature shows instead. Or better yet, turn off the tv entirely and get out in the world.
Though it's possible to improve mental health in that regard by getting out in the world and attempting to make the politics better. I think writing counts. But with that kind of engagement, the likelihood of experiencing some kind of PTSD is much greater. I think a lot of it has to do with how our mental health is affected by powerlessness. Following politics and doing nothing but talk about it can make us feel powerless. Getting out and doing something can be empowering, but when the efforts have negligible effects, that feeling of powerlessness can set in. Or just being realistic because realistically the great majority of us are effectively powerless, whatever we do makes no more dent in the universe than whatever an individual ant is doing in the ant hill.
Personally, I see power through the prisms of Carlos Castenada's no doubt fictional teachings of Don Juan and the likely equally fictional teachings of the Buddha. The Don Juan character teaches that we can acquire personal power by embracing certain ways of life. The Buddha character teaches that power is an illusion and we should embrace powerlessness. Put them together and there is a path around the traumatic stress that paying attention to politics rightly inflicts.
But whatever selfish contentment we can by either dropping out or engaging isn't going to matter to the weather and the end is always going to be near.
I think you should run again.
Middle distance, no doubt.
I am a sprinter.
heh
"power is an illusion and we should embrace powerlessness"
Charting the shifting bounds of our powerlessness reveals our true power, however limited.
So much wasted effort going it alone. Beating one's head against a wall, blind to the span of its arch.
Shame on you people!... I am available for questions.
AC or DC?
It swings both ways
Why not both?
Well I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain and the end is always near.
I have it on Good Authority that beer and Fruit Loops is the genuine Breakfast of Champions.
Thanks, Roy. For myself, back at the beginning of July I was hoping that by October Harris would be leading by 5-6 points, not 2-3. Largely for the reason that Trump is, well, Trump and Jim Dave on the campaign trail is a glitchy animatronic Nazi straight out of Disneyworld. Trump’s lead over Biden meant that some low-information and centrist voters simply wanted a fresh choice and not a rematch between two Crypt Keepers.
So one possibility is “they are both too old and I want a change” is just 2024’s version of 2016’s “economic anxiety,” a cover story for people who are just fine with conservative monstrosities as long as they believe they won’t be negatively impacted themselves and the price of eggs will be lower. But my own theory -- which could be very, very wrong -- is that because the pollsters underestimated Trump’s numbers in 2016 AND 2020, they don’t want to be caught flat-footed a third time. So they have weighted their polls accordingly, and are now all herding towards inflating Trump’s real numbers by a couple of points.
At least that’s what I tell myself so I sleep at night. And it doesn't change the fact that it's monstrous that Trump ever got more than 30% of the vote.
There may be something to your suspicions. https://progresspond.com/2024/10/07/most-pollsters-are-adding-pixie-dust-to-boost-trumps-support/
Fingers and toes crossed. While I was reading the link you provided, a friend I'd shared my theory with a few days ago sent me another link to Brian Beutler's stack Off Message. Apparently he believes this theory, too. Here's hoping!
Recent history (say since Reagan) shows the American voter likes to alternate leadership between the 2 parties. 12 years Reagan/Bush1, 8 Clinton, 8 Bush2, 8 Obama.
So a Republican was next in line. Plus, they had a billionaire Celebrity! A TV star! Running against the Shelob of Chautauqua, a woman the target of a generation of unprecedented smear campaigning, with the Russians piling on. Even then, it was close (no, the popular vote is an irrelevant data point, as we keep having to relearn). So this time it's down to how many Americans (in the "swing" states) want to hurt the right sort of people. The sheen of Celebrity has faded, and the machine hasn't had decades to build their campaign against this woman. Hunter S. Thompson's question is more relevant than its ever been: "are we a nation of used car salesmen who will kill anyone who threatens to make us uncomfortable?".
And November will go a long way towards answering Thompson's question. As I've said, that a man like Trump could ever receive more than 30% of the vote is a national disgrace for any country that so much as alludes to itself a democracy let alone boasts of it.
Given the bulk of them live in ungovernable tribal areas that's not so bad. Stiching together a nation out of 50 psuedo-autonomous fiefdoms was always a long shot, and it only lasted this long by the iron fist of Washington shoveling money to the hinterlands with an otherwise light touch. Once America became an empire, and had a mass media to rub the rube's noses in that showed a world they were ever-more distant and disconnected from, this all was just a matter of time, and the time is now. Its not The Final,Countdown, but this fight will continue until either the federal government is overhauled to represent humans instead of land, or the Republicans bumble our way into some Armaegeddon they can't lie their way out of.
The Final Countdown is a great movie, even if it does wuss out in the third act.
I was thinking more of the hit song by Europe, the band. I'll look for the movie in The Long Tail.
"The bright side of it, in my view, is that we’re now confronting conflicts in our democracy that have been papered over for many, many years"
Damn, chef -- leave it to you to find the silver lining. And I love your example of the United States and structural racism & white supremacy because what we see from those groups most committed to the defense of those structures is a lot like the rage and violence of a domestic abuser who says "if you hadn't complained about all this in the first place, I wouldn't have had to hit you" or "kill your pet" or whatever other horrible thing might be imagined.
"Hell, most of Western Europe was full fascist in the early 1940s. They bounced back pretty good"
Holland has entered the chat. And Italy. And Poland. And Hungary. And Romania. And Sweden. And England, France, & Germany simply refuse to be left out... It'll be interesting to see how fascism plays out in the structure of the EU more broadly. I'd bet one or two more major economies will be chafing to leave if these parties aren't undeated & discredited in the next five years.
"(And then we have to fight some of the people we’re voting for now to get all the way there, which may turn out to be the tougher battle!)"
Based. Also, luring previously-irredeemable GOPers to the increasingly rightist Democratic party, doesn't bode well for anyone left of.. well, John Galt. But that is the fight for 2028. Probably 2032 more realistically.
Sorry, no jokes today. Where's Bern? Goddammit, this gurl needs to be amused!
Yeah, I see the fash comeback in Europe. Would be hilarious, in an existential way, if democracy had to be saved by Brussels.
This is sadly the funniest thing I've read today.
"democracy had to be saved by Brussels"
Hope sprouts eternal
I know, right? “Three cheers for the boring!”
Not boring; Brussels is supremely weird (in a good way).
Dead cat bounce, maybe?
About the fash, European-style: Look at the numbers, and the fascists "win" with 28%, which is more than the 26% their nearest competitors got. That's multi-party democracy for you. I've been saying for a while that a solid third of any country is ready for fascism any time, so this actually underperforms my pessimistic and cynical take on human nature.
Anyway, the other thing about multi-party democracy is that governments are built out of coalitions of parties, and the fascists may be stuck in the permanent-minority 28% status if no one else will play with them. Looking at France, one thing the fascists seem to be good at is getting the other parties to set aside their differences just to keep the fascists out.
Except that Macron subverted the will of the voters, refused to build a coalition with Melancthon & turned rightward, building a coalition instead with Le Pen.
IOW, he Netanyahued the election results…
Oh shit, hadn't heard that. Fuck.
When they say Neoliberals are just a few steps away from Fascists, that’s good evidence… :(
And it points at the real danger: The shouty fascists in the street are dangerous enough, but they don't gain real power without an alliance with corporatists who want austerity and the disciplining of labor.
No fash without the cash.
It took a global economic collapse to give fascism a leg up last time. Right now its a horse race between global warming and crypto, but we've got a real shot at another one. Absent that, all they can do is loot the countries dumb enough to give them a shot at power. Like Trump. A global movement needs a global catastrophy.
Global warming, crypto, and hey, let's not shortchange the 2020s equation shaping up already as Misinformation Superhighway + Rise of AI + Russian Interference = Social Cohesion Cratering Epistemological Catastrophe
Criminality as the highest manifestation of independent thought equals antisocial behavior is the ultimate social behavior. That is, selfish is actually prosocial.
By Jove! I think you've got it!
I learned how to mess with MAGA using illogical like, You shouldn't vote because that's how they get you. Stay off their radar. Not voting registers as a protest vote and you still take two hours off work but do something for you.
My actions are the partisan opposite of getting out the vote. I'll let you know if it works. You'll see it in the numbers.
How can it fail?
I've been saying this, too (especially in these pages). Dems should field an ad that says, "You don't like Harris? Can't bring yourself to vote for a Democrat/liberal/woman/person of color/decent human being? Fine! But you can't vote for Trump. So just stay home, kick back, we're all good."
Just show that George Carlin clip! Hasn't aged well, but it may still have its uses (hey, the same could be said of me.)
I also take some small comfort from the fact that the flop sweat is pouring off Trump; he always looks old and tired now; and he's just coming across like an ancient sad sack. Like you said, Trump's followers can't stand a loser and that's all this inflated fraud has ever been.
Yeah, but for them "been loser so long it looks like win"...
I wonder how many of Trump's voters see him at all. I see a lot of him because I live at the end of a pipeline that delivers his every crazy utterance to me for Laffs. But most people? Not gonna go to one of his rallies, don't watch the news (and when they do they see 3 seconds of Trump while the newscaster intones "Former President Trump spoke about health care.") Then you've got the deliberate ignoring of him by loyal Republicans who don't want to know. At this point, everyone thinks they know Trump, I'm betting tens of millions will go to the polls without once downloading the update.
I'm scouting RVs. If he gets back in, I'm selling my house and getting the fuck out of here. Figuring on somewhere near the border in maybe New Mexico, where I can make a quick getaway if things start getting bad. All the rest of the border states are too fascist except California, which I prefer to avoid.
The Fire This Time
Ha, you think they're gonna allow you FIRE? Freeze in the dark, libtard.
[slowly drawing out bangin-together rocks, and rubbing-sticks*]
I'll show 'em!
*For our matchless friends
Was Matchless ever the brand name for a line of cigarette lighters? Seems like it should have been, if Peerless can be a line of water faucets.
Unless they go all "Omega Man" on us and burn everything that reminds them of book learning.
Nice pep talk. FWIW, my spouse, who is a pretty clear-eyed person, thinks the MAGAts are going to get obliterated in November due to the fact that women, of which she is one, are (in the words of the great James Wolcott), "...fed up, cheesed off, and ready to bring the funk." Dare to dream, I say.
I actually feel pretty good re:election...thanks Roy!
Well, whatever happens at least we won't wake up the morning after the election and think, "Oh, shit - forgot to visit Wisconsin!"
I hate to think what it must be like to watch tv there.
Try to avoid it if I can. Did you know Tammy Baldwin wants to FORCE women's domestic-violence shelters to admit BIOLOGICAL MALES?
About her opponent, California banker Eric Hovde, I have never seen a single ad for Hovde, not even the bland "Here I am with my wife and the kids and the dog." Just attack, attack, attack, lie, lie, lie. If he wins, other Republicans will take note and this will be the standard formula, if it isn't already.