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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
A book that just came out/is about to come out that interviewed various people in Washington over the past few years described Stefanik as being more in the vein of Mc Carthy or Graham as opposed to Greene or Mo Brooks. Based on their interviews, the authors are confident the latter group are genuinely nuts and believe every hateful and stupid thing that comes out of their mouths. The Stefanik group don't, but they are hyper obsessed with obtaining power and will say or do anything to further than end, with Mc Carthy being particularly craven and shameless about it. Which is why they're always the ones bashing Trump on private or in the heat of the moment but worshipping him when the camera is on.
There was a point in the book where Mitch called Biden early on after he won the election and acknowledged his win, but also told Biden that he wouldn't acknowledge it publicly for a while to save face with the Trumpists.
He also privately called various senior defense and intelligence officials to beg them not to resign in case they needed to intervene if Trump set off a constitutional crisis after the election. Before, you know, publicly refusing to impeach Trump for trying to do just that.
Edited by Parable on May 18th 2022 at 2:40:25 AM
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Mitch said thing against trump after the impechment but them trumpist complain and he fall in line.
Mitch line most republican have to balance the need of his party to stay in power with the fan most of voter base are now good damn lunatics.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"Biden invokes Defense Production Act towards infant formula.
Double post: W makes a Freudian Slip gaffe, saying Iraq when talking about Ukraine as an unjustified invasion.
CNN reporter:
House votes 231-192 to approve $28 million to help FDA deal with baby formula shortage. Every Democrat voted for it, while all except twelve Republicans voted against it.
Septimus linked this article on a previous page and I know the conversation has moved on but I just wanted to highlight a particular passage from it:
I think this is something that probably should get more attention. Tying every problem together makes sense from an academic or activist perspective, but to most people it just looks like a big and unsolvable problem.
They should have sent a poet.
I find the inclusion of the second one to be a strange contribution to the argument, though - with the first one, yes, it makes sense why that might seem like a Gordian knot to untangle. But "student debt relief is a racial justice issue" isn't a statement that says one won't fix the other or that there are other means to address that, it's saying that these actions contribute substantially to the enfranchisement of minorities and thus have effects beyond the economic arguments for student debt relief.
The first one is an argument for radical transformative change, the second is an argument that doing one thing begins breaking the link in a lengthy chain.
Edited by math792d on May 19th 2022 at 1:36:21 PM
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.I think the problem with "student debt relief is a racial justice issue" and these kinds of intersectional arguments is several fold. Firstly, it's not obvious that it's true even if we ignore base rate bias. Arguing with baseless or demonstrably untrue arguments tends to fail and usually leads to bad policy. Secondly, you are often implicitly deemphasizing the B when you say "B is A" and people will perceive it as such. Thirdly, the "continuum fallacy" - the probability of someone supporting both student debt relief and racial justice is smaller than of someone supporting either. Joining such issues together can cost you a lot of political support.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanAlso, the argument that solving climate change must necessarily involve throwing away our cars and taking mass transit everywhere turns off a large number of people who would otherwise support things like the transition from gasoline to electric vehicles. It's a subset of the "dismantle capitalism" argument, which again makes enemies of private businesses that are trying to solve climate change.
Edited by Fighteer on May 19th 2022 at 8:47:56 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Not this again.
Hugely expanding public transit is not the same thing as "make people stop using cars always". The idea is to remove as much of the incentive to use cars as possible (by making it cheap and simple to get around without them) so people will naturally stop relying on them so much.
Stop flattening it out into an all one or the other thing, no one with any sense or clout is advocating for just banning all cars.
And yes, reducing our reliance on cars as much as possible is necessary because even things as simple as how we've laid out our cities to benefit cars contributes to climate change entirely passively.
And we do, collectively, really need to reckon with how capitalism is literally the reason we've let climate change get this far. Because the oil companies deliberately buried data they had in the 60s and 70s on climate change because they thought that letting glaciers melt would mean more access to oil. And they knew the consequences and decided to sacrifice the planet for potential profit anyway.
Edited by Zendervai on May 19th 2022 at 8:56:35 AM
I live in Japan, which has an extremely robust public transportation system - and yes, it's a much smaller land mass than the US; that is a concern, but it's not an unsolvable one. Public transit is a necessity and it will only become more so with increasing urbanization/suburbanization. Food deserts are created and exacerbated by everything requiring a car to get to, for instance.
It's been fun.

So moderate she voted to overturn the presidential election results right after the Insurrection.