ndawg

What he wanted was power, IMO, and while he accumulated quite a bit of it over his career, that power is no longer his.

Yes, but I bet all of his political victories taste bittersweet in the aftermath of Trump taking over the political party he dedicated his career towards advancing.

Fair, but it also doesn’t seem right to credit McConnell with being such a masterful politician when he got owned by a rank buffoon.

Sure but the fact that Trump is an imbecile and McConnell is intelligent doesn’t change the fact that Trump owns McConnell. Shamelessness, not intelligence, is the characteristic that sorts out the GOP pecking order. Trump has Mitch beat there.

Heard a lot of this over the last four years: "just you watch, McConnell is playing along just until he gets all the judges and deregulation he wants, and once he's had his fill he's going to knife Trump in the back." McConnell -- and the other Republicans in Congress who aren't batshit -- are like a python trying to digest a pig that is Trump/fascism. At this point, the meal has been eaten, and there's nothing they can do at this point except hunker down and wait, hoping the pig doesn't rupture the python's gut before it passes through. Spoiler alert: the python doesn't survive this one.

One of my favorites was in 6th grade when I was supposed to give an oral report about the Houston Astros in front of the class and I coolly explained (with the most professorial delivery that I could muster) that they got the name in 1918 as a shortening of the word "astroturf" -- to highlight the new kind of artificial grass installed at the stadium. The teacher, evidently a baseball fan, was not amused and called me out instantly. I checked my watch and noticed I was two minutes in to a ten minute report. I have no memory of the next eight minutes whatsoever. This guy is on my level of bullshitter.

This isn't a lawyer, it's a guy pretending to be a lawyer at a free comedy improv workshop.

For three generations, we've increasingly subjected Americans from an early age to a constant barrage of 1. superhero fantasies, 2. seeing everyday schlubs "making it" via reality shows or popular youtube channels, and 3. a cultural identity around entrepeneurship and exceptionalism that punishes the weak. It's no wonder adults aren't joining organizations greater than themselves, they're stuck as adolescents in grown up bodies, still indulging the delusion that they are individually great. We've been high on our own supply for about 70 years and poisoned our culture with toxic narcissism.

Most discussions that find themselves in orbit of religion devolve into a dispute about their plausibility, which I think a lot of us probably find kind of dull and reductive at this point. I read an interesting thread on twitter a few weeks ago that argued for religion -- irrespective of its truth -- as an undeniably valuable coordinating technology. When you have something like a shared belief in the ten commandments, you've got a system for elevating the common good above someone's own impulses, particularly during antiquity. Religion goes far beyond a code of laws in this sense, though, as it provides a common narrative for interpreting the human condition. This in turn produces stability, which then begets a degree of prosperity that is far beyond what humans can achieve when we have no communal trust. Religion was therefore a key ingredient to enabling small tribes to band together and form a prospering civilization. When I look at religion in this light, and then consider today's landscape, I immediately notice something of a paradox. Evangelicals are some of the most individualistic and least trusting members of our society. Their religion appears to be leading them towards becoming fundamentally uncivilized, as they don't really seem to hold themselves to any moral code whatsoever. Conversely, on the left, there's an attempt to impose something akin to a secular version of religious law. The latest example I can think of is the high school in San Francisco that is apparently renaming itself from Lincoln High School because, evidently, it's not just confederates whose legacy is being dismantled. If I squint hard enough, I can almost see a kind of religious zealot emerging on the left. It's as if our society as a whole is turning itself upside down trying to figure itself out.

I think the problem is more nuanced. When religiosity was the norm, religions had to adapt to accommodate everyone, including both the fanatics and sensible folk. Every now and then, the fanatics would take control (i.e. Oliver Cromwell), but the sensible folk wouldn't tolerate it for long. Now that sensible folk are largely abandoning religion, we aren't providing a counterbalance to the fanatics. Religion is looking more and more batshit because of an exodus of sensible folk. We see Kenneth Copeland types on TV, but Thomas Aquinas or Kierkegaard types are nowhere to be found. So the solution I see is to respect religious beliefs that stay contained within the realm of metaphysics, and remain disrespectful of the batshit. Otherwise the batshit will inherit the earth.

No, it did. It just shows you your password, since you already know it, but all it shows us are asterisks. Trust me, all we saw was **********.

The internet of 1999 still lives on in message boards, if you know where to look for it. For instance, even surly's message board software can automatically hide your password by replacing each character with an asterisk just in case you accidentally type it out in a post. Try it an see: *******

All 74m of the people you're describing are narcissists who can't make the basic connection that their decision not to solve this problem does, in fact, mean they are perfectly OK with it. They're all so full of shit that they can't see what is obvious to everyone else around them. Do you somehow think that merely deciding to file Jan 6th in the "things that are wrong" drawer in one's brain is enough to put somebody on the right side of history? That is narcissism. Nobody gives a shit how people internally taxonomize world events. Our personal opinions about the world around us are of no consequence to anybody else but ourselves. Other people only care about what you do.

In your version of reality, who is it that gets actually tasked with drafting legislation?

Agreed with all this. If I were magically appointed to be in charge of Dem policy on jobs, I'd definitely look at broadband/infrastructure. Longer term, I'd like to see government sponsor and/or subsidize capital expenditure of CNC milling and 3D printing. In the mass production age, it made sense for a factory to be single-purposed (i.e. pump out steering wheels all day). Now that the internet and computer automation have taken over consumer logistics (i.e. shopping, delivery), and we have technology that can produce whatever components the computer tells it to produce (with no changeover time), there's a real opportunity in front of us. Imagine placing an order for, say, a toaster on Amazon on Monday, a nearby plant worker printing out all the components and assembling them on Tuesday, and the toaster being delivered to the customer's hands on Wednesday. This would be a big win for the consumer, because it would strip the inventory cost from the product's entire lifecycle and eliminate having to sometimes wait for backorders. The worker would frankly enjoy their job a lot more, because there would be a lot more variety (they get to assemble anything that customers purchase), and because they're adding more value, their compensation would rise. Good for the planet, too. Where I suppose the government could help is funding research in developing these fabrication technologies to make them cheaper and more broadly available. There's also a green play, too -- if your shit is assembled at a nearby plant from raw materials, the nearby plant becomes an attractive place to dispose of shit you don't want anymore (by turning it back in to raw materials, we conserve resources while lowering the bottom line even further). Of course, this is just naive, pie-in-the-sky dreaming.. the batshit insane QAnon conspiracy theory will see to it we never get a break..

American manufacturing was always doomed by globalism. American companies tend to solely focus on cost reduction, and since wages are the principal expense, this leads to essentially designing as much skill out of the labor as possible. But we have a minimum wage much higher than what Chinese workers earn, so they'll always be cheaper on paper. I'd like to see the Democrats win over more union workers, but l don't buy that the Democrats policies have actually hurt union workers. They certainly haven't helped, I'll admit, but I don't see how the government can do much to help American manufacturing. Not unless it can somehow pry shareholders away from their fixation on quarterly earnings reports long enough for companies to start realizing the benefits of upskilling their labor force -- the lynch pin to increasing compensation without inadvertently making offshoring more attractive.

Thanks! This board has a fascinating cross section of very intelligent people. Just doing my best to rise to the level of the group.

I don't think an inability to self-govern is actually our root problem. Our political dysfunction is just a manifestation of a cultural one. We simply can't be the America that our education system tells us we used to be. American liberals are largely rejecting the American identity altogether, and while Trumpists cling to it with a desperate but futile zeal, they don't really understand it as anything more than a costume to put on. Very few people are actually stopping to look at the real problem, which is that we've grown up consuming massive amounts of passive entertainment, fast food, and entitlement -- and so none of us really knows how to keep the American machine that we inherited running anymore. I'm an optimist, though. I like to think there's a way through this mess that doesn't lead to our ruin, if we keep looking for it.

Both. Smart people sharing a secret for a nefarious purpose? Smart conspiracy. Dumb people sharing denial of the same aspects of reality? Dumb conspiracy. Same / same.

Este, but also one more thing. When someone zealously believes in utter nonsense, they'll react in a predictable way the closer your dialog threatens to reveal that nonsense. They'll get more violent, specifically -- the subconscious detects when it has to protect some irrational belief. They're not deciding to get angry... their ego is just stepping right in front of their consciousness and making an executive decision to get angry on their behalf. So, if the root cause of their particular worship of Trump is that, for instance, they want to get back to their idea of the "glory days" of America when they can work a union job for $25/hr and a pension... well, the closer you get to showing them how unlikely it is that such a job and retirement will ever return to America, the more angry they'll get. They can't help it. (And actually, the more likely root cause is that they are insecure about their financial future, but anything that touches on the "glory days" motif will be close enough to that root cause to trigger them) All the stupid arguments they engage in are also defense mechanisms. They're designed to keep the conversation about abstract things that don't impact them, so that the conversation never runs the risk of broaching their underlying brokenness. Notice that they'll never, ever willingly talk about anything that matters to them. They lose the moment they admit to caring about anything, because once that happens, the empathy channel opens, and their stupid ego loses agency. I'm not a religious man, but it's possible that Jesus (even the imaginary one) didn't just say "before you take the plank out of your friend's eye, take it out of your own" out of an egalitarian sense of fairness. He might have also been providing a clue for how to disentangle someone else's hypocrisy. If other people first see you model a willingness to self-reflect, they might be nudged slightly towards becoming comfortable to do the same. And if everyone around them models similarly, eventually they might realize it's safe to stop pretending to invulnerable. You just have to not come across as weak in the process (because they still respect "strength," after all). These are people that are extremely afraid of being themselves. That's why they appropriated a shared "tough guy" identity in the first place. They're hurting. It's hard to feel any sympathy for them, given how their reaction to that hurt has led them to be complicit in a whole lot of cruelty, but so long as they're among us in line to vote, our destiny is tied to theirs. Oh fuck, I did it again. 2020 is like the year of suddenly discovering I'm off-gassing on an internet forum. What a tense, shitty year it's been.

America in 2020: "uh, yeah, turns out 'blow up the system' was a bad idea and boring gridlock isn't so bad after all."

Oh damn, thanks for correcting me. Sorry @Dr. Beeper!

Why did you vote for a candidate that you tried to tune out?

The only thing it's missing is the reference to their diverse group of friends, to hide the fact that their social life consists solely of other batshit crazies. An example: "Look, I get it, you're looking out from inside a bubble trying to make sense of a reality you have only recently been proffered. It's hard for anyone to educate oneself when they've been taught how to think by our liberal education system. A lot of my dem friends are going through the same thing right now."

But... but... when we outlaw abortion and gay marriage, then we'll have aligned our laws with what God wants, and God will see to it that our nation prospers!