Democratic (Party) Direction

Sorry was there a 3 post max? Can we make it a temporary 5, silly season and all that?

― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg)

when's serious season

seriously though i am in favor of you making as many posts in a row as you like, a very serious discussion between three people on the future of the democratic party that drags on long past everybody else has given up and gone over to the enka thread models the future of the democratic party extremely well imo

nobody expresses the spirit of joe biden's america better than misora hibari

I’m pretty much sticking with the the political threads with the least tankies in them these days, thought this one was safe especially since you had just said you usually avoid American political discussions in your previous exchange with me in that other thread. If I want to bicker endlessly with tankies and Putin stans I’ll just make another fake account to get back on instagram.

Guess I’ll have to walk back my shit-talking about the NYT, this quiz has quite a bit of good analysis in terms of likely predictors of party alignment.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/08/opinion/sunday/party-polarization-quiz.html

Sorry also forgot my own personal no shitposting rule I’ve been working on. Guess I need a time out.

I’m pretty much sticking with the the political threads with the least tankies in them these days, thought this one was safe especially since you had just said you usually avoid American political discussions in your previous exchange with me in that other thread. If I want to bicker endlessly with tankies and Putin stans I’ll just make another fake account to get back on instagram.

― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg)

hey no worries, to take personal accountability for my own shit i'm going through a difficult time in my life and that sometimes causes me to fall into some unhealthy bad habits

but my previous engagement with this thread was, i felt like, really healthy and productive and made me feel really good, and two weeks later here you are with the same old Discourse bullshit, it feels like a never-ending battle with the same few people who take up all the fucking oxygen in the room and leave no room for anybody else.

and i admit to harboring a little resentment towards you for that, particularly after my, uh, rather less productive engagement with the human extinction thread. i'm trying not to feel ashamed for it, but it's hard when i make myself super vulnerable and it doesn't seem to have any effect. i worry that i've crossed some unspoken boundary, that i've been inappropriate, that god kate can't you stop being fucking _trans_ for five minutes in your life? not _everything_ is about your being trans you know

i mean it's all i know how to be, all i _want_ to be, if you want to call it a "shtick", i don't think that's a fair assessment but i won't disagree. certainly i don't blame anybody if they get sick of me doing that all the time.

i am really bothered by the way you post and engage with people, the way you feel like it's appropriate to call me a "tankie" and a "putin stan" and act like that's a _rhetorical statement_ rather than an emotional judgement on your part. i don't mind if you have personal animosity towards me, but it bothers me when that personal animosity gets expressed the way you're expressing it now. it's dishonest. conservatives dehumanize me for being trans, and you know what, i can respect that at least, because i _am_ trans, but you have to make up some shit in order to find an excuse to quit treating me like a human being. that's bullshit. conservatives _recognize me for who i am_. liberals don't.

anyway it just super fucking depresses me when i'm just trying to live my life and listen to all the cool enka music dylannn is posting and i click on sna and it's these same three people reminding me how fucked up the world is, how any attempt to change the world is gatekept by people whose _hobby_ is deciding how and we can advocate for our own lives, whether or not it's _strategically or tactically effective_, the oppression, the hopelessness, the despair that comes with it.

if you're being honest about not engaging with this thread anymore you won't see this post, and that's fine, i'm not really writing for your benefit. you might see it anyway. no judgement on you but my feeling is that for liberals _meaning well_ is more important than actually putting their words into practice. and i have no doubt that you mean very, very well.

if you do choose to engage with me in the future i just ask that you try and be a little more respectful of me. i don't really like killfiling. if i killfiled you, it would be like implicitly saying that your behavior towards me is _my_ problem. i'm stuck with the consequences of it, but it's not, fundamentally, _my_ problem. it's yours.

It seems like a historical accident that the centrist position for Democrats in the Senate is occupied by someone from a coal state with strong ties to the industry. There should be better ways to reduce the displacement experienced by current and former coal miners and their families while not providing benefits to fossil fuel industries and helping/forcing them to get out of what they're doing faster.

It seems like a historical accident that the centrist position for Democrats in the Senate is occupied by someone from a coal state with strong ties to the industry.

It's a media construct. If you actually plotted the Senate Democrats' positions on various issues from left to right, you'd wind up with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on one end and Joe Manchin on the other. He is not a "centrist," he is a conservative Democrat. He's not even in the "center" if you allow the spectrum to go from the farthest left Democratic senator to the farthest right Republican senator. He'd be much closer to the Republican side on many issues. There are plenty of other Democratic senators much closer to the mythical "center" than him, but you never hear their names because they just do the work; they line up and vote with the party. The idea that Joe Manchin represents the "center" or "median" of American political thought is bullshit that only someone as stupid as, say, Chuck Todd could ever truly believe.

correction noted: politically but not ideologically the center

He's not even in the "center" if you allow the spectrum to go from the farthest left Democratic senator to the farthest right Republican senator.

I guess I just don't buy this. What's your reason for thinking so? He votes with the Biden administration a lot more than he votes against it. The farthest right Republican senator... I'm not really sure who I think that is but I know they're somebody really, really far right! Like someone who is very different from Joe Manchin! Not somebody who'd be voting to confirm all these liberal judges!

The idea that Joe Manchin represents the "center" or "median" of American political thought is bullshit that only someone as stupid as, say, Chuck Todd could ever truly believe.

Then who does? Joe Biden? Amy Klobuchar? I would love it if I thought the median American political sensibility was like Amy Klobuchar but I look around and I just don't think that's true, I think Americans are, on median, more right-wing than Amy Klobuchar.

see, this is what the democrats, i think, don't understand about politics - what it means to _walk away_.

like, viborg, you've said something which i take to be a pretty offensive personal insult. and, i don't know, under certain versions of european culture the way of handling that would be to "demand satisfaction", to challenge you to a duel. now, don't get me wrong, i am a _big fan_ of dueling. unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, bayard, you are not a lesbian, and since i cannot use the tip of my rapier to push up your chin when i have you at my mercy, dueling is not a possible solution to our problems.

am i _satisfied_ with our little contretremps? no, not really. it bothers me, viborg, it bothers me that you can say something like that without consequence. that's why i'm not on social media, not even instagram. this is the only place i engage on the public internet, the only place where i make myself vulnerable to people like you saying shit like the shit you said. on the public internet, behavior like yours is considered normal and acceptable, and i don't really consider it either.

i've walked away from this board in the past, in large part due to the tenor of the political discussion here, and i may well do so in the future. am i going to do it _now_, because you falsely called me a "tankie" in a political thread? nah, i don't think i am.

if i did, you know, if i did and said so, people would talk about, i suspect that a lot of people would see it as an overreaction on my part, perhaps even some sort of fragility. seen in isolation from the larger context, yeah, probably it is. and democrats have this tendency to see _everything_ in isolation, to separate things out from their larger context. they divide and divide and subdivide, and this is what makes conquest possible.

it's like porpentine talks about - allostatic load. a lot of liberals who are in positions of relative privilege are ignorant of allostatic load, of the different burdens we all carry. i don't know what burdens you carry, viborg, whether they are heavier or lighter than mine. i only know that they are _not_ the same as mine.

and what happens with allostatic load is that maybe the load at some point becomes too great to bear, and i put it down and walk away. that's what i've done with the democratic party. the democratic party is _institutionally hostile_ to me and my values. the culture it encourages is a culture in which there isn't anything _wrong_ with you calling me a "tankie" because my values are not the same as yours, because i will not "ally" myself with you, meaning subsume my interests to your own.

and we walk away, and you don't concern yourselves with us, with where we go, i mean you are sad, but you hope that one day i will learn, that we will come crawling back, and you, in your benficience, will forgive us for our folly. liberals are so convinced, so doggedly convinced, that we _need_ them, and honestly, i'm inclined to agree, why i am a fool who returneth to my folly. i do think we _need_ liberals, but i also am not sure whether i can _trust_ liberals. whether it is _safe_ for me to trust them. because there's no reciprocal sense of need, on reciprocal sense of _obligation_. we owe them everything, and they owe us nothing. and so right now? right now i don't think it _is_ safe for me to trust a lot of liberals. i don't think it's safe for me to trust the national democratic party.

ilx is a moribund institution, and i do not think this is bad or unnatural or wrong. it is a social organization and it is tied to a particular place in time, a particular generational group of people, and over time the number of us who find a home here are fewer and fewer. when i walk away there is no one to take my place. and some people miss me, and a lot of them, i miss them in return. i've lost a lot of people out of my life because there is nowhere for me to talk to them.

and some people i've known, they become alone and isolated and bitter and i am sad for them, everyone needs to have a place where they feel comfortable, everyone needs to have a place where they belong. i've felt that way in the past, alone, isolated, bitter, and i don't now. and if i leave ilx, there are other places for me, there are places i have had to _make_ in order for there to be a place for me and for others, just like people had to _make_ ilx when usenet started dying.

with the democratic party it is different. people treat it like a social club, sometimes, like the liberal protestant churches, they treat their churches like social clubs, but what is left are people who are suffering, people who have needs, and these places, what power they have, they do not use it. they amuse themselves in their dotage.

those of us who walk away from the democratic party, we try and make new places for ourselves. and we don't have the power or the expertise or the _real estate_ but we try anyway, we meet in each others' houses and we fight and the country club democrats sit and laugh at our naivete, laugh while we struggle, and say "if only they did things our way..."

and maybe when their club falls apart completely, some of them will bring what they know and help us, and maybe we will do things that we couldn't do before. or maybe, you know. maybe putin will come in and a boot will stomp on a human face forever, which has _nothing at all_ to do with orwell's late-in-life pastime of ratting out all his old socialist friends to the secret police.

anyway, that went a little longer than i expected, i gotta go, another hard day of packing, moving day is tomorrow, i wish the landlords had given me the key, would've made it a lot easier, but oh well. got some friends coming over in a bit, it'll be good to see them. it's hard times, but yesterday was a good day. it's good to have friends, good to have people who are there for me when i need them.

(glad to hear you found a physical place to live!)

There isn’t a center or median of American political thought.

Yeah, true, if the claim is "Joe Manchin isn't the median of American political thought because there's no such thing because that's a totally wrong model for American political thought" I'm on board

I agree that America is too atomized for the idea of a “center” to even be comprehensible. Manchin’s not even the center of the Senate/the Meet the Press universe, though. Someone like Gary Peters (who? exactly) is.

however Manchin is always MTP and today, apparently, wouldn't answer a dumb question about whether he'd prefer a Dem majority this fall.

There isn’t a center or median of American political thought.

― papal hotwife (milo z)

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

So here's a thing. This week I'm basically taking over this thread by the way until I get bored or enough people tell me to shut up and go away.

One of my friends posted a link to a FiveThirtyEight article analyzing the results of a recent poll on Americans' feelings on LGBTQ rights. I don't really read a lot of 538 - I was kind of a junkie for it in 2016, looked for reassurances that Donald Trump would definitely, totally lose from Nate Silver's reasoned analyses, and I kinda re-evaluated my coping strategies when Trump won.

But a friend posted a link to the article and so I needed to read it to figure out how much I should panic. I'm still reasonably disinclined to panic. I mean, any more than I'm already panicking. There's still a fairly significant chance that I might be systemically exterminated within the next five years, after all.

What fascinates me about this article is that it uses a term I hadn't heard before - "cross-pressured". As far as I can tell, this is used to describe a situation where poll results show that one person holds two mutually incompatible beliefs - that they exist in a state of cognitive dissonance. When it comes to trans rights, an _extraordinarily high_ number of people are "cross-pressured".

In this light it makes perfect sense that the Democrats have no coherent platform. They're trying to appeal to the electorate, and the beliefs and desires of much of the electorate are meaningless and nonsensical.

But there is perhaps sort of a vicious circle happening here, in that the incoherence of the Democratic party _legitimizes_ incoherence in the population. People who call themselves "moderates" turn out to, in practice, model severe cognitive dissonance more closely. In other words, the electorate, as well as the Democratic leaders, are fundamentally incapable of coping with empirical reality.

The funny thing is, as a trans person, I don't really see this as a _new_ way of thinking. I think there was _always_ a certain amount of contradiction and incoherence when it came to normative beliefs about trans people. As long as nobody digs too deep, as long as nobody asks too many difficult questions, everything _seems_ to make sense.

But it doesn't. The principles I was raised from birth to live my life by, they don't make sense. They are, in fact, batshit crazy. And people are coming up with more and more ridiculous euphemisms to disguise this increasingly obvious fact. "Cross-pressured" is apparently one of the more recent. I can't wait to see what the wonks think of next.

“Puppies have a nap, now it’s time for you to have one,” Elizabeth Warren told Feinstein.

(NB: Warren is not speaking harshly, but that doesn't change the context of the exchange)

the joker before blowing up a bus in gotham pic.twitter.com/fx2Gde4yeC

— ༺𝒢𐀔𝒥༻ (@gothjafar) November 10, 2022

every video i see of kamala harris is so fucking funny pic.twitter.com/pmgA2eBESt

— bebonk ⋆˙⟡♡ ⤮ (@beaaprill) November 15, 2022

I actually think she participates quite well in this music and dance sequence.

struttin on her way to put some more people in jail

it's true, she can do that as veep

she’s walking on sunshine courtesy of prison labor

“The thing about Florida Democrats is we keep learning with every passing year that just when you thought you had hit bottom, you discover that there are new abysses to fall deeper and deeper into,” said Fernand Amandi, a veteran Democratic operative in the state. “There is no plan. There’s nothing. It’s just a state of suspended animation and chaos — and, more than anything, it’s the mournful regret and acceptance that Florida has been cast aside for the long, foreseeable future.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/22/florida-democrats-losses/

Good morning!

NEW: a PAC fighting progressive primary challengers is funded by one man who happens to be the richest person in Pennsylvania, a GOP mega donor who has avoided $1 billion in taxes: Jeff Yass. Biden’s former campaign manager is the PAC’s only consultant https://t.co/t0p8eunM1m

— Akela Lacy (@akela_lacy) January 25, 2023

a story of two men who can discern which side their bread is buttered on

Congress must join the AI revolution.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) June 21, 2023

AI President

You can call me Al

AI Qaeda

Weird AI

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AIbraham Lincoln

Dwight AIsenhower

AIke was with us when AImerica needed hAIm

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luv 2 have a pro-union president

"This is not an attempt to ban TikTok. It's an attempt to make TikTok better. Tic-Tac-Toe. A winner. A winner."

-- Rep. Pelosi pic.twitter.com/ExkX6bxz0O

— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) March 13, 2024

pokemon tik-tok-toe to the polls

Sippin Ace of Spades, I do
Got the K Street everywhere I go