Political Roundtable Part XXXIV

[Wizardspride]

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[Wizardspride]

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[dobrojim]

My 29 yo daughter has a stronger case than
previously with her idea that there should be
age maximum for POTUS.

[The Consiglieri]

Msnbc is not enough. There's a whole, financially self sustaining right wing propaganda ecosystem.

People really, really want to believe right wing lies. It makes people feel good, while the grifters use it to rob from the poor and give to the rich.

There will never be a liberal equivalent to the right wing media. Conservative are much more likely to believe lies. There's been a lot written about this, along with studies. E.g.,
https://slate.com/technology/2017/11/why-conservatives-are-more-susceptible-to-believing-in-lies.html

There's a huge market for right wing news. People on the right never seem to get enough. On the left another story. I remember about 30 years ago, a liberal radio network started up, to go against Limbaugh, and all the rest. It couldn't stay in business.
Same with TV. MSNBC is just hanging on. Liberals want more nuance and analysis in their news. I can't watch some of the MSNBC hosts, because I want both sides of the story, and some just give a very slanted view.

Part of the problem too is simply that people don't really watch the news anymore, it's become a very diffuse media environment. There are the dying newspapers and magazines, dying local and national news, podcasts, blogs, substack, facebook and FoxNews itself, isn't really a news channel, and never has been, it's Pravda for 1990's era Limbaugh fans, and their descendents. While liberals like they're silos too, liberals tend to be a very heterogeneous group who will fill in a wide variety of silos instead: national news, old print media, dying blogs, podcasts, etc.

We don't have a set up we can really make to compete with Fox News because we are not a homogenous group in the same way as the bulk of fox news/limbaugh and now tucker carlson hell scape. The only good news in this area, is there is some splintering into different silos on that side of the political aisle, but it's not enough to really matter, it's more enough to create even crazier, and stupider news feeds for those swallowing the bull----.

As for the lies thing, I don't know, I think both groups can be lead down the plank towards utter bull----, see Biden being just fine, as a talking point that a large minority of hardcore dem's believed when it was obvious he was over the bend etc. I think the big difference isn't that we're less brain washed, it's that we're so heterogeneous, that any portion of us that swallows a bull---- narrative, will just always be a small sliver of the entire dem pie. There are a multitude of interests among dems, especially since some center-right never trumpers switched to our side adding yet another group. Pew's political typology quiz classified us as the progressive left/Establishment Liberals, Democratic Mainstays, outsider left, and stressed sideliners (centrists) a few years ago in their quiz, while conservatives were classified as ambivalent right, populist right, committed conservatives, and faith and flag conservatives, which they viewed as 10% of the party, along with 11% fitting the populist right grouping.

I think now it's clear that conservatives are actually a hodge podge of about 35-40% pure maga, and 60-65% detest liberals enough to swallow the stink of idiocy of pure maga, and vote for it despite their misgivings. I think there's basically those two groups, and evengelicals are of course 85% maga and probably 15% detest liberals.

I think Liberals are a mix of both far left, democratic mainstays, and stressed sideliners, and you can add in that we are also religiously diverse, ethnically diverse, and economically diverse.

I think what makes lies less penetrative for us than with them is because we are simply too diffuse, and so lies only get absorbed from smaller subsets, while the rest get annoyed. When conservatives are made up of fiscal conservatives of the old Bush I type (these guys at National Review in the 80s/90's thought this group was 75-80% of the party when it was really 15-20%), far right/Racist+Evangelical's likely make up at least another 35-45% (these are the ones that swallow the lies whole), and then another 35-50% who simply hate the far left, and tag the whole of dem's with that label, and so hold their nose, and vote for what they regard as the least crazy change possible. I think the percent that was this group and the Bush I's turned out to be much smaller than traditional Republicans like the Bulwark Guys and the Dispatch guys thought. I'm sure most of them thought that Bush I's, and just "keep it simple, stupid" conservatives were to their mind, 80% of conservatives, and instead it turned out, at most they are 50-60%, and more likely 40-50% at best after a decade of Trump.

What has shocked me is how many Republicans hate democrats and liberals enough, to hold their nose and still vote republican after a decade of piled up proof of how incompetent, corrupt, nefarious, and obviously deluded and idiotic, and flat out evil, this regime is. They still regard what really are center left to pure centrist Dem's like Biden and Obama and Hilary to be even worse, which is delusional insanity, but also proof that the message machine on the far right managed to actually penetrate the brains of a huge portion of the smartest, and most thoughtful conservatives (I was and am surprised at how liberal this message board is, few posts in disagreement if any, but I'd underline that while a liberal myself, I don't view conservativism as evil or wrong, I view it as the peanut butter to liberal chocolate, the yin/yang, the other ingredient that makes society function best: conservatives keep the car on the road when liberal steering is about to send it into a fool hardy ditch, while liberals are the ones that remind conservatives that change, that heart, and soul, and genuinely caring about people is what allows government and cultures to thrive, not simply the invisible hand, and the government that does least does best: it is the liberals, after all, that gave a heart and soul to Rome, its the liberals that started every movement that expanded the rights of women, of minorities, of the disabled, of gay men and women and on and on: we need each other because conservatives keep our boat afloat, are car on the road, and liberals help to bring direction, purpose, and value to the existence we all share, period). I've never viewed conservativism as wrong, it's just different than my own politics, period, because of my culture, rather than anything else.

We went astray when we tarred one another's political culture as evil and different, and yes, I'd 1000% agree that the vast bulk of these problems started with the Moral Majority in the 80's, Rush and Newt and the internet in the 90s and talk radio and fox news....and decades later, we've ended up here, forgetting who one another are, and growing to hate one another so much that I tend to doubt this country will remain whole when my son is my age (I'm 50, he turns 9 this week).

[The Consiglieri]

I'd also note that Center Right political and historical thinker Robert Kagan disagrees with me, and views these problems as tracing all the way back to the founding and the recalcitrant slave holding aristocracy, so maybe I'm wrong about when this started, I just think it was made infinitely worse when Reagan absorbed the Moral Majority/Evangelicals, Newt Embraced Hate the other side don't just disagree political marketing, rush being born and then fox news and internet siloing etc.

[dobrojim]

^ long and I didn't read as much of it as I eventually hope to
however

We went astray when we tarred one another's political culture as evil and different, and yes, I'd 1000% agree that the vast bulk of these problems started with the Moral Majority in the 80's, Rush and Newt and the internet in the 90s and talk radio and fox news....and decades later, we've ended up here, forgetting who one another are, and growing to hate one another so much that I tend to doubt this country will remain whole when my son is my age (I'm 50, he turns 9 this week).

A major contributor from where I sit is that there is ample opportunity to find what seem to the reader like authoritative
sources to back up virtually any policy point of view.

I see little empathy or attempt to understand the complexities of many of the problems we face.
They are complex and require some work to understand, including the willingness to learn that maybe you're
only partly right about the issue you are trying to position yourself on. Or maybe right to feel a certain way like
frustrated or angry and resentful about something because you believe in zero sum thinking in which
you hear or read about someone getting something you are not getting.

We've grown incapable of celebrating the success of people who are not part of our tribe unless
we see our own tribe members, especially the ones close to us, getting their own.

[Zonkerbl]

I don't see any daylight between "pure maga" and "irrationally hates liberals" and there is not a single Republican in existence right now who is not 100% delighted in the evil being wrought in their name.

[The Consiglieri]

^ long and I didn't read as much of it as I eventually hope to
however

We went astray when we tarred one another's political culture as evil and different, and yes, I'd 1000% agree that the vast bulk of these problems started with the Moral Majority in the 80's, Rush and Newt and the internet in the 90s and talk radio and fox news....and decades later, we've ended up here, forgetting who one another are, and growing to hate one another so much that I tend to doubt this country will remain whole when my son is my age (I'm 50, he turns 9 this week).

A major contributor from where I sit is that there is ample opportunity to find what seem to the reader like authoritative
sources to back up virtually any policy point of view.

I see little empathy or attempt to understand the complexities of many of the problems we face.
They are complex and require some work to understand, including the willingness to learn that maybe you're
only partly right about the issue you are trying to position yourself on. Or maybe right to feel a certain way like
frustrated or angry and resentful about something because you believe in zero sum thinking in which
you hear or read about someone getting something you are not getting.

We've grown incapable of celebrating the success of people who are not part of our tribe unless
we see our own tribe members, especially the ones close to us, getting their own.

Haidt's the Righteous Mind does such a beautiful job of illustrating how our minds function in terms of why we are attracted to whatever partisan side we might be attracted to. Its beyond frustrating that instead of improving relations, and collaboration by the two contrasting world views, things have only gotten much much worse since he put together Moral Foundations Theory.

[The Consiglieri]

I don't see any daylight between "pure maga" and "irrationally hates liberals" and there is not a single Republican in existence right now who is not 100% delighted in the evil being wrought in their name.

This is the difference.

A good chunk of liberals either rationally, or impulsively flat our reject conservative anything, in terms of candidates and ideas. The same is true of conservative.

In some cases we think these things through and arrive at these perspectives, in other cases it is pure impulsivity. I've never voted for a Republican, and I probably never will. At the national level the last Republican I probably would have voted for Eisenhauer. Even the Reagan worship which bled into moderate and liberal circles the past few decades never bled through for me and my circle because my childhood was spent in a bay area that was in equal parts whipsawed by an Aids epidemic which was an unacknowledged holocaust for more than half a decade before he could mention it, while elementary school kids like me saw adult figures disappear, not because they were simply transferring to another school, but because they themselves fell to this disease (something we as children were never told, and were utterly confused by), and on the other side was the slow break down and destruction of entire neighborhoods ravaged by hopeless and drugs, and gang warfare: East Palo Alto, my friend and class mate drive bye shot dead, before his 16th birthday, Richmond and Oakland, Hunter's Point and San Jose.....

I just can't vote Republican, because on every issue I cared about, with only rare exceptions, for me, that side was just wrong: Sex, Art, Religion, Aids, Gay and Women's Rights, the rights of minorities, the environment and on and on and on, the only times I tended to tilt right at all tended to be foreign policy, in which case I tended to view the far left as largely ignorant of history, and of our nature as angry, violent primates.

Anyway, for me MAGA is not a process of thinking through takes and who has the better ideas, it's more the rubber stamping of thoughtlessness I see from the far right and far left alike.

The problem to me, is that while Democrats have kept generally the stupidest and most impulsive elements of the party, away from the controls, Republicans have gifted parts of control to the idiots of their party since the Moral Majority at the very least (and Dixiecrats joined) and especially since the 1990s, accelerating to a pinnacle since Trump. There's daylight to me, because MAGA is an unthinking sort, and Republican isn't the same. What bothers me and I imagine you, is that Republicans who aren't maga, still, prefer this insanity, to the centrist-Center/Left approach that was Biden/Clinton/Obama. Biden, Clinton, and Obama aren't and were never Bernie, were never Ilhan Omar, were never the far anything, nor was Kamala (I don't think there was anything I ever found stupider than the claims that she was a far left commie and always had been: How no Dem was ever able to suggest in an interview: "Any far left anything circa the 1980's and 1990's was not, and would NEVER join the prosecutors office after getting their law degree, they were an army of public defenders, the far left, sure as hell not prosecutors in that era").

Anyway, my coworker agrees with you, viewing anyone who is still pushing a lever for Republicans as MAGA no matter what, in my view, a lot of these people are simply politically lazy, and don't want to switch their party no matter what evil thing their party is doing based on their cultural background (there are many regions that are the polar opposite of my Berkeley, CA, where Republican to Dem ratios are 90-10 or 95-5, culturally, period) and/or base, fiscal arguments (which are in themselves, equally stupid since Bush I, Bush II and Trump have all presided over economic disasters that were left to Clinton, Obama, and Biden, to clean up afterwards, tax breaks simply don't make up for crap like the Great Recession, of the apocalyptically incompetent running of Covid Prep after we learned of the problem in December '19 and did --- all for the next four months, and then pretended it wasn't bad until tens of thousands started dying.

[dobrojim]

I can't think of many (any ?) republicans who
can use the word left(ist) to describe a Dem
without using an adjective like far, extreme, or
radical to create something worthy of fear and
unworthy of consideration for what they actually
want to do.

[doclinkin]

I can't think of many (any ?) republicans who
can use the word left(ist) to describe a Dem
without using an adjective like far, extreme, or
radical to create something worthy of fear and
unworthy of consideration for what they actually
want to do.

Why I like the term progressive. Who is against progress? Let’s f’n get better and grow a bit. Nobody is so damn good they can’t be better. Liberal sounds too much like you’re free with everybody else’s money. But progressive implies we’re headed somewhere. Aspirational.

[dobrojim]

Agreed. But is left(ist) something Dems use to self
describe or are others the ones deliberately using
it to be derogatory ?

Just like Pubs consistently use the term democrat
(rhymes with rat) Party as opposed to Democratic
party.

[Zonkerbl]

Evil, despicable Republicans celebrate their chosen representative committing vile, racist ambush on South African president, committing themselves to flat out lies to justify their horrifying evil

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/22/africa/ramaphosa-trump-meet-analysis-int

I was offered an 11 month gig, conditional on the consulting firm winning the bid, and I'm helping another company write a bid for a small project. Annoying thing is I have to put my job search on hold while I wait to see what happens with the 11 month gig since I'm committed now. Consulting kinda sucks! But I'll take what I can get. Republicans, I really hope hell exists so you will be held accountable for your crimes.

[AFM]

Glad to hear you landed on your feet.

[Zonkerbl]

Glad to hear you landed on your feet.

Don't jinx it! Haven't landed anything yet!

[closg00]

Evil, despicable Republicans celebrate their chosen representative committing vile, racist ambush on South African president, committing themselves to flat out lies to justify their horrifying evil

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/22/africa/ramaphosa-trump-meet-analysis-int

I was offered an 11 month gig, conditional on the consulting firm winning the bid, and I'm helping another company write a bid for a small project. Annoying thing is I have to put my job search on hold while I wait to see what happens with the 11 month gig since I'm committed now. Consulting kinda sucks! But I'll take what I can get. Republicans, I really hope hell exists so you will be held accountable for your crimes.

This was SO predictable that this was going to happen.

Best wishes with the bid

[Wizardspride]

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The Trump administration is enlisting national park visitors into the Republican president’s fight to rewrite American history, with a new directive that forces all park units to display signs that encourage guests to report any information that is critical of American history.

On May 20, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directed all park units to display the signs to comply with President Donald Trump’s earlier executive order, which claims that U.S. history has been distorted by ideology and seeks to counter what it describes as revisionist narratives that portray the country’s past in a negative light.

Burgum’s order directs federal agencies and cultural institutions to remove content that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living,” and to instead highlight the nation’s progress and achievements. It also calls for the removal of what it terms “improper ideology” from museums, monuments and public exhibits under federal control.

[dobrojim]

Those who fail to learn from history...

[dobrojim]

It's become glaringly obvious that Golfy is not
well. Recent speech at West Point being one
example among many. So the obvious question
is who or what will initiate his removal?

25th amendment? President JD?

The GOP? That seems extremely unlikely.

5 months into a 48 month term. Horrifying to
consider where this could end.

Watch on YouTube

[Zonkerbl]

Straight out of 1984. Horrifyingly evil.