I’ve been reading a lot of military theory & history lately and one of the themes everyone keeps coming back is the idea of initiative - The initiative is being the actor, not the reactor, and the Dems just treat the gop as a force of nature to react to instead of one you can pummel
100% - this is why the establishment dems need to be strongly urged to resign or not seek additional terms, and to step down from leadership roles.
Like Ukraine being overpowered by sheer number of Russian military forces, it takes time, planning & resources to mount a counter-offensive to regain initiative. Dems don't treat Repubs as force of nature, that'd be completely capitulating like law Firms & Unis, they're defending the best they can.
Yes, the Dems have been far too passive IMO.
It really is time for a complete turnover of the old dem’s, bring in the new talent coach, cut the old, cull the herd for the benefit of the group
Yes!
Great post. Break everything. Impede. Delay. Oppose everything. Hold back money. Sue everyone for everything. I don't give a fuck if it's like free money for poor kids say fuck it we're not doing it whatever it is they want to do just oppose it just kick the shit out of it bust it up fuck it up.
Fair.
Agreed. On the @findoutpodcast.bsky.social they’ve been subtly talking about this very thing where Dems are just reacting to the craziness instead of playing offense.
So true…all defense, no offense. Can’t win that way.
Yep!
I agree!
In life, YOU are either creating stumulus, Or you are responding to one who is. Power favors the one providing stimulus so the opponent has no control.
🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯👍
So basically they need to upgrade their DEX
there's a lot of complicated stuff about how & whether poll quant brain broke Dem pols, but I do think that Random Walk Brain and Initiative Brain are necessarily at odds.
Weak in mind body spirit. Sickened by my own party
Agreed. I’m a goalie but even I know the best defence is a great offence…
Great point!!
📌
for 3 weeks now I been tapping the sign for a neuroscience paper that is a mere 4 weeks old to the point I am INSUFFERABLE to family and friends see Blue on the Left, if can be subdivide into 4 parts such as image 4. The top left box in image 4 is the pleasure of making a decision
and stopping the procrastination cycle “seize the day“ to borrow hellenistic philosophy and American Pragmatism (Charles S. Peirce)
God, yes and it’s so exhausting. Dems need to treat the GOP like a pile of trash that it is and ignore them. Don’t take them into consideration and absolutely forget any bipartisanship.
Thank you. That has been the problem with the Democratic strategy. They react instead of act. Then the CF does something else even more horrifying, and they react instead of acting. People respect leaders who make decisions even though they may be wrong.
They could at least pull a Mao and use the strategic defensive to lull the attacker into over-extending their forces, thus opening themselves up to decisive counterstrokes. But nooo, that would be too cool! 🤣
Dems need more Grants and less McClellans.
They def allow maga to set the playing field. Mainly reactive, at best. Always discussing the maga narrative. In some cases I think they believe things will just cycle back to them being in favor so they just need to wait it out. Nothing really matters. Real leaders have to take a real risk.
Which is astonishing, because the GOP has demonstrated time and time again that when they face any meaningful resistance at all, they fall apart like a Flugtag entry. Newsom's just mocking them really well on social media and you'd think he was Sun Tzu for how mystified everyone is that it works.
Young political upstarts went to the GOP because their supporters are gilullible and their ability to craft a social media narrative outpaces their supporters' ability to discern fact from fiction.
Gotta have a look at my late hubby’s Art of War.
A part of having core beliefs is being able to hate someone intensely and openly. It’s okay to hold a grudge sometimes.
George McClellan-ass party
From the outside this inaction makes the American population look like a bunch of spineless cowards. For years you all talked a big game about being the “leader of the free world” but it now looks like there isn’t a single American who is willing to stand up for actual freedom.
Cali is doing it with @governor.ca.gov Gav. The proposal for vote is we will do it IF, ONLY IF, they do that! Shit or get off the pot Gav let us do it. If they don't then we will be the top turds. You are a politician, you're not running for Spiritual Leader, the Grand Lama of Sacramento REDISTRICT
Whats this from? Where can I find the full text?
www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/m...
Thank you!
Holy shit thats a fucking villain monologue
..and that was the bush neocon era. which is why I look at Liz Cheyney et. al. askance... they're just jealous it wasn't them who got to be dictator
Exactly, people looking back at the Bush era with fondness drive me fucking nuts because IMO we don't have trump without Bush. Bush was just trump 1.0. The first time I moved out of the US it was during George W Bush first term, I came back thinking things were getting better in 2010. I was WROOOONG
They need to watch Patton’s speech at the start of the movie.
Taking the initiative by every available means is one of Trump's most effective strategies, or maybe pathologies. He always presses his advantage, never admits defeat or fallibility, tramples norms and conventions, ignores the law, cajoles and threatens, assumes the win and generally gets his way.
If you act as though you are allowed to do something and nobody bothers to stop you, then you are correct.
Truth
But to have initiative, you have to have a Goal - and I honest to god believe that we don't, really. So as a professional researcher I wrote this paper to determine what actually predicts a good quality of life. The only goal that makes any sense. (Hint: it's not them.) osf.io/preprints/so...
I expect this mortar fire to stop shortly.
I am so sick of the colleagues across the aisle bullshit
We are being led by geriatrics who were traumatized by the loss to Reagan, and haven't ever been able to recover from it.
Dems are still manning the Maginot line and expect everyone to believe they’re conducting an offensive behind enemy lines
Except that in this case the Nazis didn’t have to invade through the low county, this time the people elected them to take over the posts on the Maginot Line. Just let ‘em walk right through the gates. Oh sorry, didn’t mean to put the blame where it actually lies. That’s not what we do on BSky. 🙄
Yes Dem politicians are just poor victims in all of this, they don't deserve any blame.
gotta get inside their OODA loop
Google “learned helplessness.”
They aren’t fighting for us. The DC Dems have been compromised.
Ffs. Doesn’t the civil war or Nazi germany or Armenia come up in all this military history? Anything that might connect to present day that ensures we know the actions of our current perpetrators? Or, no? Just the Dems come to mind?🙄
to borrow from @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social - just keep moving forward, keep hitting them don't stop just keep going. dems totally fail to do this at literally every opportunity, or worse, pause to go "actually maybe the GOP is right, we are out of touch". othermeans.io/p/war-is-a-h...
don't cede ground in a conflict unless you absolutely have to, constantly be attacking, but we somehow forgot to do this in the last 15yrs (it started around the same time Obama won in 2008, whether he's the cause I don't know, doubt). we came close recently with epstein shit but fumbled it
Couple things. A. I'm convinced that a lot of the Democrats think actually learning from pragmatists is gauche. Actually reading Sun Tzu or Machiavelli is something the other guys do. B. Obama was cultivated by Wall Street. Sabotaging the Dems may have been their price / his assignment.
Of course, I'm making it sound like the GOP read here, & lol.
The dumbasses you see on Fox might or might not but the strategists certainly do. Liberals would do well to reflect on Sun Tzu and stop underestimating the opponent that is beating them.
1994-2004: GOP advantage, Newt Gingrich and Fox News 2005-2013: Dem advantage, millennials age into voters as digital media natives (social media, Huffington Post, etc)
2014-2020: Tie, Dem maintain digital native advantage but Boomers finally get online via smartphones and Trump berths/sanctions MAGA alt-right media 2021-: GOP advantage, media goes "anti-woke" and implicitly (or explicitly) anti-Dem, new media publications largely die off, and...
social media switching from feeds based on network/chronology, to just "For You" algorithms, favors GOP mechanically and weakens Dem methods of organizing or otherwise pushing 'virality'. Also emphasis on video over text favors GOP.
Anyway I wrote about this a few days ago, to use the military history analogy, we don't have the fucking "supply lines" to launch sustained attacks.
We've been trying to Obama our way out of a Grant bar fight. We need non-stop jabs at how freakishly weird and corrupt these shitheads are.
Democrats can’t stay on a message- abortion vs the border- who won that? Abortion rights are hardly talked about yet the border is something the Republicans stayed disciplined on. Jan 6th criminals and pardons vs MS-13. Which side won that one with their voters?
Truth is white people. White people brains broke when a black man became president. And no matter how foul 🍊 is, it’s the preservation of “whiteness” that keeps white people voting for a 34 count felon, self proclaimed dictator, accused rapist, virulent racist FRAUD. OWN this shit, so u can change
I agree with most of what you say. I think money has a lot to do with it too.
💯 absolutely!
Kemba I don’t know how old you are but in 2008 when Obama won - he crushed McCain. He won in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and Virginia- a state a Democrat had not won since 1964. But since Obama how have we done in Iowa, FL, OH? These ppl voted for him then didn’t vote Clinton, Biden, and Harris.
I’m 50. Yeah, the white people. Because black women have held the line for Dem candidates. Period. It was a lot of white folks/women who didn’t vote for Hillary in ‘16. And they came back and voted for the monster again in 2024. So, idk how old you are, but surely you can read the data.
52 here. We’ve grown up through all this together. No question black women are the bedrock to fighting right wing politics and we do have a racist pos Prez * who can’t stand the power and strength they bring. The Fed Gov Lisa Cook who is being railroaded is getting less support than John Bolton
It’s notable to me that if Cook was a white woman or man she may still be in jeopardy of her job but the support for her would be stronger.
Tbh I think part of the reason why Epstein has so much staying power is that's it's mostly an inter-right thing where the grifters are worried about the bag and democrats being more active about it would just polarize them back into line tbh
Among Northern Democrats it’s been going on since at least the 80s. There were some Southern state-level Dems who were aggressive as late as 2002, but they quickly fell into extinction between 9/11 and 2010
We’ve sadly been doing this since Reagan tbh.
Yep, he broke the party's collective mind, and Nixon before him didn't help.
i think the problem here is that the left coalition is by its nature a lot fuzzier and transactional than the right coalition, so the risk of defection in an aggressive maneuver is rather high, especially in high-stakes legislative fights as the governing coalition
I appreciated this one a bit earlier about the need to fight. othermeans.io/p/going-down...
"If you're explaining, you're losing." -- Reagan
There’s the meme about left-wing memes being walls of text, but it also applies to the more center-of-left Democrats too. The average American has an attention span of a goldfish. Just say “Orange man bad” or “Trump take egg” or “Release the Epstein files” instead of a 400-character press release!
And if anything, the hostility of the political press to Democrats is an incentive to be even more succinct and direct in messaging.
"Don't siege Stalingrad, use highway-centric warfare to take Yekaterinberg immediately" - Eisenhower Institute of Interstate Conflict memo
Rascal Flatts totally vindicated
Huh, TIL that apparently there was a more-famous cover and I never knew? www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3sM...
Yeah I technically just did a stolen valour but oh well
I do like that both of the dudes who scored hits with this song are just the goofiest looking white dudes ever.
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True!
They're worthless grifters that are just in it for the lifetime paycheck.
They're playing good cop bad cop with us.
The Goop has so little to work with right now that it would be impossible for them to win is dems took hold of the narrative.
Dems are unpracticed in the art of convincing bald-face bullshittery. We need to start lying, about something. Anything really. All that matters is fragmenting the GOP's attention like Trump has ours. We're smarter and we need to act like it. We can't fight with a hand tied behind our back.
What’s the best book or article you’ve read so far?
chernow's grant is really enjoyable actually
I read that! Very much the highway strategy of war.
They were doing well with the “weird” thing and the Epstein pressure
Well said, sir.
A lot of people are mentioning Obama and Biden in this thread. We're talking here about behavioral patterns ingrained at an institutional level. So tell me who had the greatest effect on the behavioral patterns of Congressional Dems between 2008 and 2024? - Obama - Biden - Pelosi
{taps the ‘Murc’s Law’ sign}
They have no power. Sure they can and are fighting through the courts to oppose his unconstitutional orders but besides taking power in 26 there’s little else they can do except call out what they’re doing. Finding candidates and winning in 26 has to be part of the focus. They have all branches
“Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do" —US Grant
Who are you reading? Any standouts
currently getting back into schelling
Arms and Influence is on my reading list currently. Might read some more depending on how I feel about that one
I was but a lowly grunt and the whole reason for rules of engagement is the default is take initiative whenever possible. Anything less than that has to be communicated. It’s been really disappointing seeing some Dems officeholders with military backgrounds not get that.
Card game players (MTG, Netrunner, etc.) call this "tempo." Once you lose it, it's very hard to regain.
All the time. For years they’ve done nothing but react. And this is not the time for that!
TEMPO TEMPO TEMPO
Lmfao
Tempo, tempo, tempo
The best defense is a good offense.
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The Dems act like helpless victims of GOP abuse.
The Biden (and Obama) presidencies feel seen.
We live in censored times. We can't say what we really want on social media because they ban people. I remember when alt-right naz!s were afraid to openly exist in society. Now, they flourish, exploiting protections designed for actual innocent people.
The issue is that dems do need to react to what their supporters think. The GOP has the luxury of turnout regardless of what they say or do. They say "remember how..." and supporters fill in the blanks. Coordinating dems is like herding cats where it takes one slip to scare someone off.
I’m struck by how sharp this observation is and like, sort of drives home the “… the continuation of politics by other means” adage
Have you listened to Toby Buckle's excellent: soundcloud.com/toby-buckle-...
i don't listen to podcasts
how do you clean then ?
the best of hall & oates CD
Fair enough! He says a lot the same in the following article: newrepublic.com/article/1953...
Dems don't do that. Pundits and reporters and people, frankly, like you do that.
Let's be honest, Dems nationally followed Obama/Biden lead of consensus building with MAGA/Republicans. It failed like 1930s Europe in letting Germany take Czech. Now, Dems are reorganizing behind Dem governors who fight back. DNC is as worthless, but doesn't need to unify until 2028.
