I’m not super informed here. Why do you think the new DNC chair will change how the Dem primaries will be operated?

I tried googling around myself, but couldn’t really find anything meaningful. But that’s probably more a reflection of how tired my brain is than anything (work’s been hell).

If you have anything readily available you could share, I’d love to feel some positivity about the Democrat party.

Well, I suppose one way to look at it is that we needed the unified front against Trump, but didn’t get it. So for now, and especially for the midterms, maybe now’s the time to get an alternative party started?

And then they can choose to run a presidential candidate in 2028 or not, depending on the momentum they get?

I dunno. Mostly thinking out loud here.

What would it take to get a primary system up and running for Independents (or more accurately I guess it would have to be a proper party for a primary to make sense)?

I assume it’s some combo of setting up the event hosting ($$$) and somehow coming up with the rules for deciding on how to operate the primary (schedule, thresholds for qualification, voting system, etc). And unfortunately I have no idea how to accomplish either.

Does India particularly differ? I think nods still mean yes and shakes still mean no there. They just also have the “noncommittal head bobble” that tends to confuse people outside India (and, presumably, Pakistan).

I sympathize with Gen Z. It’s pretty natural to see your parents’ generation having done way better than you are doing at the same age and feel like you’ve had something stolen from you. It’s a pretty profound sense of loss, esp. when you do look at history and think, “Jesus Christ, do we have to suffer like the Great Depression to turn this shit around?”

So I don’t know if the WPA itself would be considered socialism. I imagine it depends on your working definition of socialism.

What I can say with a little more confidence is that the WPA and a bunch of other New Deal programs were a direct result of pressure from American Socialists and Communists at the time.

I can’t recall if this is apocryphal or not, but the story goes that FDR told a private gathering of America’s biggest capitalists about his plans for the New Deal and told them they were going to pay for it through taxes. When they protested for a compromise, FDR said “this is the compromise. The alternative is guillotines.” But I can’t find that quote anywhere, so I may have made it up.

I’ll be the first to admit I have no idea what my Chucklefuck in Chief means by trying to get rid of voting booths.

But if I had to guess, I think he means literally the booths. As in, no privacy. Just paper on a desk where anyone can see what you’re doing.

If it isn’t clear, this fucker has no idea what a free and fair election is SUPPOSED to look like. He just wants to make sure whatever system we end up with favors him and him alone. And for some reason, voting booths are catching his ire. Maybe he feels insecure not knowing if Melania actually voted for him.

I’ll have to check those out! Thanks for the rec.

I haven’t used Ground News past the free trial, but a decent feature that I liked was simply that you could look into “a story” and get virtually all of the possible news reports about that one story. Just handy, tbh. If there are other free aggregators doing that sort of linking and grouping, I’d be interested.

The thing about “sources” I can understand, but I think they still have their place. For example, I really like Ars Technica as a tech and science source. One of the things that sold me on them was seeing them make predictions based on their “sources” and those predictions coming true (or close enough). When it comes to politics, the same thing applies. Have they established enough credibility to warrant me believing their “sources”, at least provisionally?

But if you don’t need or want to be on the cutting edge of political conspiring, then waiting for the court filing, full bill, etc. makes complete sense. I just often might need news, anyway, to understand the broader context of a primary source.

I’m extremely happy with the process I’ve had, but I understand it’s very likely not representative of the rest of us here.

By and large, you’re right though. My wife has gone through similar struggles and hasn’t been medicated for over a year because of it.

To be fair, that does limit your ability to decide what is newsworthy to begin with. Ain’t nobody got the time to read every primary source ever, and sometimes the news is literally just “sources say” until an actual court case or whatever drops.

Granted, if you already know what you want to stay updated on, then cutting out the middleman could be workable. You’re just kinda limited in terms of what you’ll ultimately be exposed to.

I just don’t think the average American can (let alone would) read enough primary sources to keep “up to date” in the political sphere. Add science and tech, and that’s just way too much to wade through. Even seasoned beat reporters miss stuff on their beat.

I haven’t gotten back to that yet.

But I’m on meds now. So the next thing I’m gonna try to do is fill my schedule a bit more. If I’m doing more, that’s less time for my brain to fill that time with analysis paralysis and more time doing stuff I enjoy. The byproduct, hopefully, is that my brain will just be happier overall with the added stimulation. Or so the theory goes, at least.

I love poke balls with the super big and legendary ones turned off, more like the Melee and Brawl ones.

I’d like to add some nuance to your observation.

We Americans, most of us anyway, went to public school. And in our history classes, we teach what has been called the “Standard American History Myth” by YouTube channel Knowing Better in their video on American Neo-slavery.

In short, America is founded on many ideals (freedom, liberty, etc), and we generally write our histories as if we have always believed in and acted according to those beliefs (with slavery being a “failure to live up to those ideals”). That’s the simple history we teach our kids here, it’s what we grow up believing, and the only people who ever really learn anything different had nontraditional learning opportunities (e.g. local experts in black history, American Indian history, etc), studied history at a university, or nowadays maybe learned from social media (like the above Knowing Better channel).

Manifest Destiny is a big example. We teach that America believed in their divinely inspired right to the American continent, from sea to shining sea. We do mention the Trail of Tears, but it’s taught as a brute fact at best, and as punishment for standing against America at worst. There’s no emotional processing that we did a bad thing and that we shouldn’t do that thing anymore. Most Americans would do it all again given the opportunity.

And that’s the big thing. We just… simply don’t have any sort of national level conscience. If we did something bad to someone, no we didn’t, and if we did, they deserved it.

I only really came to grips with America’s dark side in grad school by reading, listening, and watching interviews with black people who protested Jim Crowe and Asian Americans who told their experiences living in concentration camps (euphemistically “internment camps”) during WW2.

That, I think, is the biggest problem in the American psyche. Not only have we “never done anything wrong, really” but we’re also pumped up on religious symbolism (we’re a beacon on a hill, a light into the world, etc).

“Divinely inspired” crybully, basically. There’s a reason Trump resonates so strongly here. He’s the embodiment of “I am the best, I never did anything wrong, and fuck you for trying to insinuate otherwise, you ungrateful traitor.”

Hey there. So I’m doing some reading trying to see if I’m just wrong here. I might be?

Just for context about where I learned about Conservatism, its roots, and how it functions in America now, this is really good distillation of what I’ve been learning: The Alt-Right Playbook - Endnote 3: The Origins of Conservatism.

There’s a few bits in there that I find particularly salient for this discussion. First, that early Conservatism was trying to figure out how the aristocracy could maintain its position in society post-monarchy, and they eventually settled on “the market”. Second, that Conservatism has an everpresent undercurrent of “the wealthy deserve what they get, the poors are just freeloaders.” And third, that conservatives in the US say they care about measured steps and slow steady progress, but then all of a sudden they’re about swift, decisive action (usually by invading somewhere).

That final point is a big reason I tend to balk when people say that conservatism is about slow and steady progress vs revolutionary action. That’s something I grew up believing in the US, but it just never seemed accurate to how any conservatives in the US actually behaved. Virtually nothing conservatives say or do here make sense through the lens of “slow and steady” but make a lot more sense if you view it through a lens of preserving hierarchies and ensuring the people at the top stay there and those at the bottom grovel harder.

So I see these throughlines, and I have a hard time imagining that Conservatism (of the old European variety) simply had no strains here in the US. Yet, a lot of what I’m reading suggests that American conservatism is, as you said, a bit different. I haven’t looked deeply enough yet, but my initial thought is because the USA itself was instituted against monarchy, the pro-monarchy bits may not have fit, but the strict traditional hierarchy preservation certainly did.

I dunno. You have any idea how hard it is to unfuck your brain? It’s harder than you think!

This was all interesting, and I’m thankful you’ve shared. On reading, I’m not seeing any connection to the discussion at hand, that of Conservatism and whether or not it has or hasn’t existed in the US.

But to comment anyhow - I find it difficult to understand what the transcribed speech is saying. Mostly because I don’t think I understand what the speaker means by “spiritual”. As a term, I have found “spirit” and its derivatives to be nebulous and unhelpful at best, and pernicious at worst. But my experience with the word is primarily through American Christianity, from which I’m an apostate. So I must decline to ascribe to the speaker there what my own brain interjects. But that leaves the speech largely unintelligible to me. That’s nothing against the speaker, but rather an admission of my own ignorance.

The Dawn of Everything seems interesting though. Seems to have gotten good reception from historians. I’ll add it to the list.

I mean if you want to blame liberals and leftists go on ahead I suppose, thanks for being unhelpful.

I wouldn’t bet on MAGA suddenly waking up to class conflict to the point of guillotines unless Trump points his grubby little finger at them.

What a world that would be.

Rise up against whom though? Their violence is not driven on principle. It’s out of trust and loyalty to a con man who told them to “fight like hell”. What makes you think they’ll turn on him? Other than a tiny handful of folks, when have the leapords eating their faces stopped them from offering their faces up on silver platters at the leopard’s feast?

Will they ever wise up though?

Scoreboard shows these people, the most violent among them, are disconnected from reality and blindly trust Trump and his cronies.

I can’t even get my MAGA mom to believe Musk did a Nazi salute. “Apparently he was throwing his heart to the crowd.” Granted, she’s not politically engaged, she just listens to my dad who stopped watching Fox News because it wasn’t conservative enough. So yeah.