Again, the key divide within the Democratic party does not map onto a left/right axis: It is between those who want to fight back forcefully, like Pritzker, and those who can’t/won’t shake the impulse to accommodate, appease, and uphold “normalcy.”
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Again, the key divide within the Democratic party does not map onto a left/right axis: It is between those who want to fight back forcefully, like Pritzker, and those who can’t/won’t shake the impulse to accommodate, appease, and uphold “normalcy.”
In a vacuum, that might sound good and noble. But these self-anointed guardians of bipartisanship and “unity” are radically failing the moment because they can’t or won’t grapple with the fact that “normalcy” politics is simply not an adequate response to an acute democratic emergency.
Oof. The Dems need to stop pretending, based on some imaginary focus group, that there’s some common ground with Trump. The key is to fight everywhere. You should go study Neville Chamberlain’s attempt at “common ground.” It didn’t end well for his historical reputation. Or the world.
This guy gets it. This is the way.
My home city booted Rupert Murdoch out of town, and they can boot this jagoff, too.
That’s the correct lyric, yes. Or as correct as an early Stipe lyric can be.
Thanks! Not surprising. I honestly think narcissism is behind this weird phenomenon of refusing to cite. They think we’re all living inside their heads with them and if not, they can’t be bothered to paste in a link or just write “fucking Axios” or something.
I wonder to what degree all the normalization is just people wishcasting normalcy. I mean, I want normalcy too, bud, but pretending insanity is normal isn't the way to achieve it. It's kind of Trumpian, really. Recall him saying in late March 2021 that Covid would be gone by Easter.
The average middle-class, white schmo loves “bipartisanship” and wants “politicians to work together to get things done,” but doesn’t vote based on that answer they gave to a pollster.
Oh, the audience for it is enormous. But pandering to them just ends up giving us more overcareful, triangulating, milquetoast Democratic candidates, and then the same people accuse them of being timid, equivocating, and ineffectual.
Indeed. Our problem is that tens of millions of Americans think this way, and most alarmingly the people with by far the most influence over the national discourse.
Jimmy Carter, FDR, and LBJ are often cited as the hardest-working presidents in history. But how many long Truths did they write?
"But what about all the times I *wasn't* trying to overthrow the government?"
starmer is doing all the anti-immigrant and anti-trans "popularism" stuff the centrists are demanding US dems do and this is the predictable result:
You could have used this post to demonstrate the accuracy of what you said, if that were possible.
looks like a win for the *checks notes* pro-child-drowning constituency www.npr.org/sections/sho...
yes exactly tho I kinda hate that we've settled on the "high trust vs low trust" terminology since the supposedly "low trust" group is hilariously trusting! they are defined by being gullible, credulous rubes who trust claims by others instead of critically interrogating them
It has? Huh.
Of course not. But the Dems aren’t even really fighting the current guy. I’m not suggesting strategy, I’m just theorizing about what will happen to the GOP if Trump croaks.
exactly! reactionary centrism that defines a lot of elite spaces is also wildly self-loathing but they thing they hate more than themselves is capital-L liberals, its wild
Party of life, yo
This is exactly right! The Right’s core claim is that they represent an authentic, “real" America that is constantly being victimized, made to suffer under the yoke of leftist/liberal overreach, and therefore rightfully aggrieved. And too many Democrats/liberals look at that and go: “I agree.”
We disrupt the pattern-interruption paradigm with robust, scalable, open-source, networked solutions using the AI-powered blockchain.
But where did this appear?
No cite, much less a link, and no alt text.
I was expecting nothing, and it's even more nothing than I expected.
the whining about bluesky (whether Nate Silver or Mark Cuban) is about narrowing the contours of "acceptable" discourse with an eye on protecting center right ideology from criticism but they can't be honest about this so it gets dressed up as some deep, noble intellectualism
the biggest problem with "online discourse" right now is sexist and racist assholes, but notice centrists never spend all afternoon lecturing those voices or the platforms catering to them also, as an aside, the entire political spectrum has annoying people. That's what the block button is for.
bsky.app/profile/rebe...
It's so bizarre to me how many people live entirely within an abstraction of reality that they've created for themselves, when reality is *right there*. Often, it's the above, and it also often includes stuff like "Trump voters are just everyday Americans who are disgusted by corruption."
This is such a weird tic among the reactionary centrists and post-leftists (who at this point are really one, big group). This is where "The Democrats talk too much defunding the police" comes from." They think liberals across the land LOVE Chuck Schumer, because he's always "canceling" people.
There's no countervailing systemic force on Bluesky, it just shows you posts in the order that they're made. But understanding Twitter as a machine that explcitly hides certain opinions and promotes others, and that one of the hobbyhorses of the guy who runs the machine is anti-trans, is important.
Also, don't trust people who say being against fascism is bad for business. Unless you're doing some weird crypto ponzi scheme, or trying to get a government contract to blow up a border tent, dissent great for business! The Onion is living proof. People flock to you! www.wired.com/story/uncann...
All of this is moot because Vance's main problem is that everybody hates him. And anyway. the party is 100 percent Trump now, and nobody at all could replace him. That doesn't mean our problems would be solved, but if Trump croaks, the GOP would begin to crumble.
Ok, "Pop Base." Thanks for the info.
That group is made up mostly of the savvy faux cynics. They been around the block a few times and wasn't born yesterday, you dig? They know the score. The former group are the "civility" fetishists. They think that if we just "learn to work together" we'll be fine. Both are highly problematic.
Really, for a decade.
On the other side of the coin are the people who say Trump is nothing new, because look at Reagan and Bush. They mistake precursors for what the precursors eventually brought us. See also: "The New York Times has always been like this." No! It hasn't!
One problem with this is that many liberals openly pine for Reagan and sometimes even Bush. They don't merely say those guys were way less odious (which is true; even Nixon was). They say they were good men. Remember all the people who posted this picture and said this was how America should be?
Oh, I know what the announcement will be: "The Aristocrats."
At least once a day, I think about the fact that I've lived nearly my entire life hearing (and believing) that Watergate rocked America to its core, so shocked were we that such brazen lawlessness could be perpetrated in the Oval Office. Now we have a full Watergate several times a week
“sliding toward”: “drifting into”
He means seminar-speak progressivism, but doesnt seem to understand that you rarely actually see that on Bluesky.
Trump on the cover of French magazine Le Point. Translation: “Man from Moscow” Le Point is a major French weekly news magazine. It is considered a center-right / conservative-leaning publication.
For myself, I don’t want to drive him out, but this particular thing is pretty putrid and it’s not a total anomaly. I like him ok, but that he is in fact one of the better Dems says more about the party than about him.
Again, not a national political reporter, and thus framed around the plain truth of the matter.
I am amused that Mamdani is seen as a raving communist for suggesting mid-tier FDR type reforms and there's an actual Eugene Debs dude running for Senate in Maine and he's not freaking out anybodyyyy oh yes. Shit. He's white. Sorry, I just got it. Go about your business.
Jesus. You are a broken-down wreck of a human being.
Is it a “policy?” Or is it just something some random people on the Internet said for a while five years ago after being shocked by a cop viciously murdering a a guy? Whose “policy” is it? In what political venue is it being pushed?
I blame the schools.
Whom would you list as the biggest, best-known promoters of “defund the police?” Does even one name spring to mind? Anybody with any power or sway?
Important to remember that during COVID a lot of people primarily experienced the world online and so when you hear them resurrecting their gripes it’s actually just them getting mad again about the things they saw *on social media*
After assuring everyone that he was doing it for journalism, yes.
bsky.app/profile/danm...
I was curious, so I asked Kanye West whether he thought we were close to finding a cure for cancer.
Mamdani on Nadler: Just read that last sentence. Perfect.
So is the real Ryan Lizza!
Your periodic reminder that nobody would ever have heard of Johnson if it hadn’t been for @semaforben.bsky.social’s avid promotion of him. Soon after that, Ben was hired by the New York Times to explain the news media to us.
No. Some broken-down wreck with a fake account. Maybe a spammer of some sort, but my guess is that it’s just some washout.
What are you doing, man? What’s the point of this nonsense, “ryanliza?”
I think a lot of reactionary centrists think we’re appalled by the centrism part. Nope, that’s not the part. At least not for me. I would count tons of people on Bluesky, many of whom I like and follow, as centrists.
Weird, putting tariffs on construction materials and throwing day laborers in concentration camps should have solved the supply problem by now
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filling an IV bag from a murky puddle near Trump National's sixth tee. "The president needs parameciums," he tells the assembled media. "It's the only treatment proven to work in real testing." His golf cart is piled high with dozens of dead birds.
Good news about the cutting-edge AI tools from the $3-trillion-dollar company.
They just keep getting worse.
using a website owned by an overt white supremacist to tutscold a website full of trans activists and scientists
I just think that the proportion of tweets you send about the impending doom of electoral democracy vs how much blue sky and progressives suck is very telling of one’s priorities, and from the outside you gotta wonder about the incentives and incidences that landed one at said ratio
a very high proportion of centrist punditry now just boils down to "progressives yell at me on the internet and i don't like it." you would think that getting paid millions of dollars per year would give you thicker skin
bsky.app/profile/danm...
This is one of the most explicit examples you'll ever see of "the people who annoy me the most, personally, also happen to be the nation's biggest political problem." The quintessential reactionary centrist maneuver.
ditto with The Handbasket. without “blueskyism” i would not have a successful independent journalism outlet. turns out you don’t need to battle nazis to reach people.
Ultimately, it means the cool kids in college who thought they were better than him with their crazy hairstyles and their hipster indie bands and their liberal-arts classes, pretending to like foreign films and art shows. Well, they weren’t. They weren’t better than him.
Jesus.
What pisses me off about Nate Silver and other reactionary centrists is that it is possible to face endless torrents of scorn online without abandoning liberal principles. At a certain point, you have to choose to be an adult. It's either that or curdle into a hateful moron.
This is tailor-made for guys who would love to fully sign on with the lab-leak theory, but still have a shadow of a sense of shame in them.
Not to downplay this *at all*, as it is rife with corruption, but "$6 billion worth of crypto" doesn't actually mean anything. And I guess "real-world valuation" is technically correct, but that valuation is about as solid as graphene aerogel. Lemme know when it becomes actual money.
Surprised they didn't go with "loony bins."
They're trying to convince themselves as much as anybody, I think.
Very generally, on an institutional level it's click-baiting and money-grubbing, while on the level of individual pundits and journalists, it's more attention-seeking. Or really, preening. "Look how rational, reasonable, and above-the-fray I am. I'm no partisan sheeple."
I've actually always thought so, though I didn't hightail it for the Peace Corps. when it was my time.
I do indeed.
Well, not really. Note how both of them lost or abandoned their positions at the two biggest journals of opinion. The dipshits are the de facto “intelligentsia” despite being absolutely unintelligent. They have most of the power over the discourse, by far. But smart people still exist, of course.
"the threat of homelessness is most acute not in the poorest regions of the country, but in the richest, fastest-growing ones. In places like these, a low-wage job is homelessness waiting to happen." There's no housing in Marin for those who earn less than $65K, which is more than most workers earn.
Even many of the non-intelligentsia champions of the workin’ man, like Mike Royko, were better than these oafs. For one thing, Royko never hesitated to speak up when the workin’ man was being an ignorant asshole.
The difference between the intelligentsia of my youth, Gore Vidal and Molly Ivins, and the intelligentsia of today, Jordan Peterson and Matt Yglesias, is stark enough that I believe it's a real thing and not just me being old.
I just saw an online ad for “tactical pants.” They’re work pants. Maybe if we had a draft, many of our problems with men would go away. A few years of being “tactical” might get it out of their systems. Of course it’s easy for an old dude like me to say that, but I think it might be true.
It helped bring us fascism, in fact. Avidly and purposefully.
My immediate reaction:
My brother and I about 35 years ago traded our interpretations of your lyrics via the U.S. mail. One of mine" Up the pine, Katy buys A kitchen-size But not made in Sitting, chopping the big king Wasting time, sitting still Sadly, notes are all lost to time.
Someone please kill me right now.
My FB feed is loaded with this variety of slop. It’s just a picture of Pete Townsend. That’s it. That’s the post. It appeared 16 hours ago and has 2.5k likes, 149 shares, and 145 comments, most of them people expressing the fact that they like Pete Townsend. Some Bengali Typhoon.
I’ll say it again: Mamdani’s grave sin as far as the media is concerned is that he is clearly having a good time. Only right-wing “firebrands” are allowed to have a good time because they’re REBELS against the NAGS and SHREWS in the Democratic party who are like TOTAL BUZZKILLS
There’s a Nazi at my gym.
Through its work in disease prevention, the CDC has saved millions of lives throughout the globe. Some of Trump's partisan critics question his plan to dismantle it.
He died. He died on the toilet but “not the way you think,” a White House spokesperson said in a brief statement before declining follow-up questions.
Look at this shit. How does a person come to say something as inane and tedious as this?
He seems pretty block-happy, that dude.
The United States killed American Indians and drove them from their homes in order to steal their land. Could it work in Gaza?