On Sinema at the Sinema: October 2021 US Politics thread

-out-

it's disappointing but politics is compromise which was exactly why sanders was shooting so high. the unfortunate thing is that compromises never make everyone happy. but if they weren't shooting high, imagine what we would have gotten.

But we still haven't gotten much of anything! The delays are making it harder to see any future success and making it feel more likely that this administration will be seen as a failure. At this point, they should just pass something

Pretty sure "something" will pass.

good morning!

Two problems:

(1) Several legislators and Biden don't understand the moment of crisis.

(2) Because Dems are now a true coalition party in that they represent everyone NOT a fascist, the structural deficiencies imposed by the Constitution empower the most reactionary factions.

One's personal expectations of Biden (a senescent crook) don't make the outcomes any less poor. "One trillion" doesn't mean much when most of it can (and will) be undone by the 2023-24 GOP House and it fails to make structural changes in the face of inequality and climate catastrophe. This was their one chance to switch the tracks on the trolley line and they've blown it.

We're going to make it through half of Biden's meaningful Presidency and he won't even have bothered to reschedule weed.

At least he's not Bush/at least he's not Dubya/at least he's not Trump-ing our way into the apocalypse.

Almost six whole quarters of our next military budget!

your response is that he is a senescent crook, ok

this is a country dominated by republicans, even with a democratic majority, and is sliding into autocracy.

I think that the presidential election in 2024 will show us that democracy in the US is basically over

your response is that he is a senescent crook, ok

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/biden-delaware-way-graft/

I'm not thrilled, either, but I'm honestly not sure what Biden personally is supposed to have done to pass a better bill. There's this fantasy that he could've been strong-arming Joe Manchin behind closed doors; I just don't know what that would actually look like in order to be effective, or whether a president temperamentally different from Biden could make it work in the face of Manchin's incentives.

Putting aside the Beltway press hyperventilation about Sinema-Manchin as a Trojan horse for other reluctant members, it's really this minority against a majority of the House-Senate… it's the majority of House-Senate members against this preening minority.

Get here if you can!

honestly as long as it's somewhat good on climate I'll consider it a big win

xp wasn’t part of Biden’s message that he would be singularly able to convince moderates and Republicans to get on board and do what was best for the country? Obviously that was bullshit and you would have to be a moron/not have paid attention to the last 20 years of politics to believe it for a second but he did make that argument.

Look they’re tackling the important stuff, the minimum wage will have to wait.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee is marking up a bill this week to sanction whoever “directed or carried out” Havana syndrome attacks lol

— aída chávez (@aidachavez) October 19, 2021

Pretty sure "something" will pass.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, October 19, 2021 8:47 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

me, after a few pints

"The Democrats struggling and fighting for a full year to pass a bill that mostly makes ineffective pre-existing programs more complicated and harder to access" is one of those outcomes that's obviously funny but also very difficult to laugh at. https://t.co/xOMIIY6tV6

— David Roth (@david_j_roth) October 19, 2021

Interesting

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/new-public-defenders-joe-biden-quietly-makes-history-courts-n1281787?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=news_tab&utm_content=algorithm&fbclid=IwAR1Bs0_Jed-qN4YOQJFf0p0E0NFAp00tcvEdhQjaY9GLOw5ZlIbl3rglAwY

Sorry, sic

So I’m finally listening to the Revolutions podcast about the French revolution and it is very interesting to hear about about how desperately pre-Revolutionary France needed reform but the system was structurally incapable of making any effective change.

Makes ya think, donit?

Let them eat NFTs

yeah, but out of that difficult situation came modern day France!! it was all worth it, right?

right

as i understand it, after napoleon was finally defeated, he continued to lead france until the middle of WW2, when he was sacked and replaced with de Gaulle. also some colonialism in there

I'd take current France over current US easy.

i've never been to europe :(

that's why i don't know the history :(

i hear in europe that they have these really nice breakfast nooks tho

If you've been to Epcot, you've been to Europe.

epcot was one of my very first memories (grew up in jacksonville til i was 3)

is this epcot, is this europe, or neither?

https://i.imgur.com/mhjPiN3.jpg

https://www.reddit.com/r/WaltDisneyWorld/comments/gqx2pz/saw_this_and_thought_spaceship_earth_had_caught/ - neither. 1976 fire in Montreal.

hmm. ok, in that case. i think the answer is europe

i mean france

Tu me brises le coeur, Karl.

Just to echo some of what has already been said here, it is hard to imagine leaders being more out of touch with the populace they ostensibly serve and the crisis conditions so many are living in.

But I also want to propose that a large part of this is because of Protestant cultures and hierarchies of work that are deeply ingrained in this country. In essence, the crisis is with the entire way that our society is structured, and because these absolute assholes have mostly unjustly benefited from these structures, they just don't care how they've failed the rest of us.

Blah blah this country is doomed, still glad I didn't vote for this sentient raisinfucker

Le plus difficile, c'est que je dois me fier à google translate, parce que... vous ne le croiriez pas, mais mon français est horrible, juste le pire.

My French has deteriorated. Fortunately, my kissing hasn't.

but one thing i know is i don't remember ever voting on whether we were switching from freedom fries back to french fries, and i support american freedom

I don’t buy the Protestant explanation, many of the most egalitarian nations in the world are deeply Protestant.

Sometimes the absolute assholes are just that, absolute assholes.

You're wrong.

Perhaps you've missed the enormous number of articles about people quitting their jobs recently, but there's a serious problem with the way that we view work in the US, and part of it stems from a deeply Protestant ethic of labor.

I mean, Max Weber wrote a book on it more than 100 years ago ffs.

i believe it's the white evangelicals that are the problem, not the protestants. there is a certain puritanical pulse that runs through our culture that can be seen as deriving from protestant influence, but the ugly stuff is white evangelical. there is something very wrong with them, and they benefit enormously from being a religion, because that's seen as above criticism by so many people, rather as a really fucked up giant organization that controls the social policies of a fascist political party

hey guys

many Catholics suck too

But evangelicalism stems directly from Calvinism, a strain of Protestant thinking.

Marilynne Robinson has written a couple fascinating essays rescuing Calvin and Calvinism from themselves.

(Neither here nor there though)

evangelicalism is a branch of protestantism, yes. but the white evangelical problem is a special and unique one in the united states. i don't see this same theocratic political poison spewing from evangelical movements elsewhere, at least not a scale comparable to our own.

see, like marilynne robinson, bill mckibben. these are cool protestants. where are the cool white evangelicals?