laxam
1yr ago
The Youngkin nomination provides the path forward here. The Partisan primary is a worthless, broken system for choosing the candidates of a political party. It promotes selecting extremist candidates who underperform in general elections and isn't even particularly democratic.
Party conventions with majoritarian nomination requirements are what I want. The whole move away from powerful conventions was a stupid, mid-century feel-good move in the first place and it has been busily sabotaging our ability to govern ourselves ever since.
laxam
1yr ago
Trump was given a curated list to pull names from.
Mitch held a seat and Trump did what he was told. The one, huge, unequivocally great thing he did wasn't him, because you have to be delusional at this point to think Trump is good at doing anything but trolling the hell out of the libs.
laxam
1yr ago
Almost any other Republican would have won. Most other Republicans would also have won the popular vote, instead of squeaking through by the skin of their teeth.
laxam
1yr ago
So you think McCormick would have done better with which part of the electorate?
McCormick would have cleaned up in the suburbs and with independents, both groups Oz somehow managed to lose against a socialist loser with heart problems. McCormick codes as a business conservative in places that used to only elect business conservatives like the Philly collar counties. He would especially have had an easy time riding to victory over the brain dead if Lou Barletta were at the top of the ticket instead of Mastriano, who acted like an anchor, dragging the entire state party down with him.
McCormick may well still end up a Pennsylvania Senator. There's a lot of interest in having him run for Bob Casey's seat, although Casey is a tougher nut to crack than Fetterman was.
laxam
1yr ago
Your claim is McCormick would do better than Oz in suburbs and independents except Oz polled ahead of him with those groups and did better with one them in the GOP primary. McCormick's demo was foxnews boomers who did vote for Oz in the general. Oz got killed not because of indep or suburbs, but because no working class people showed up to vote for him. This is why I think McCormick would have done even worse.
1.3 million people voted in the Republican primary, 5.3 million people voted in the general. Primary results don't mean much for the general, otherwise Mastriano wouldn't have gotten blown out everywhere.
it's convenient for the people who have been failing in PA
What's convenient is that, every time a horrid, worthless candidate gets pushed over the primary top by the Orangenfuhrer, their loss is always excusable by something. Even if those losses are totally discordant with how other elections in the state went, like Oz and Mastriano running hundreds of thousands of votes behind the GOP House candidates in PA, or how the AZ GOP Treasurer obliterated their Democratic opponent. There's always some excuse.
Also, Trump's 2016 'get out the vote program' in PA...received fewer votes in PA than Obama, both times.
laxam
1yr ago
I actively do not trust real name accounts, and avoid real name forums, for that reason: if you’re making money I don’t trust you, if you’re not making money I suspect you’d like to that you’re just lurking on that pawn hoping for a promotion
I would say there's an exception for old people who have been on the internet for a very long time. Back in the 80's and 90's, it used to be a LOT more common for people to use their real names, just because there was no great perceived need for pseudo-anonymity.
laxam
1yr ago
What is it WaPo declares that Democracy dies in Darkness?
The common joke is that that is not a warning, but a mission statement.
laxam
1yr ago
This isn't burning the system down, this is getting the Democrats elected in 2024.
laxam
1yr ago
Personally, I think the organized efforts of the media, big tech, and the federal security apparatus to both conceal truths harmful to democrats and propagate lies harmful to Republicans is probably what, if anything, is going to get the Democrats elected in 2024.
It's kind of weird how that didn't get enough Democrats elected in 2022.
Or 2016.
Or 2014.
Or 2010.
laxam
1yr ago
I'm going to take a wild guess and say you probably think it's fine for the federal security services to collude with Twitter, facebook, google, and most major media corporations to manipulate the information available to voters.
Not particularly. I just don't think it's enough to win elections all on its own. A bit better distribution of votes and the GOP picks up 10 more House seats (the 10th closest seat last year was NC-13. The Dem won by a tad less than 9,000 votes out of 250,000 cast. Vote distribution across distributions based on turnout differentials and last minute independent swings and the like are a bitch. The Democrats complain about them constantly). Some saner Gubernatorial and Senatorial candidate choices and the GOP probably picks up a few governor's mansions (or refrains from losing them) and a Senate seat or two.
As an example, the AZGOP received more total votes in House elections than the AZDEMS by more than 300,000. While the AZGOP ran two more candidates than the AZDEMS, it was still a larger gross than Katie Hobbs got in the gubernatorial election and just an inch more than Mark Kelly in the Senate election. The AZGOP also swept the vote totals in the state house and senate, (58-42 and 55-45, respectively, although again the AZGOP ran more candidates in both, 8 more -- two of which were independents who got less than 2,000 votes total -- in the state house, and 1 more in the state senate). Same story in PA: the vote gross was heavily weighted toward the PAGOP in both the state and Federal House elections (by 400,000 in the state house and a bit under 300,000 in Federal House elections). While the gross here doesn't total to more than Shapiro or Fetterman got, there was the obvious anchor of Mastriano that wasn't present in AZ (Lake had her problems, but she was a very talented television presence and knows what she's doing when speaking to the public. Mastriano had no media presence at all and didn't speak to any audiences that weren't entirely in the bunker for him), borne out by the fact the PAGOP US House candidates totaled almost 500,000 more votes than Mastriano got.
Same thing in GA, where both the state and Federal House gross vote totals would have won outright, without the need for a runoff. Same in Nevada, even.
People can and do vote for the GOP, they just need good candidates (and some luck with voter distribution, and Dem gerrymandering doesn't help -- while I'm more skeptical of the jump to gerrymandering accusations than most, some places, like NV, are egregious) and they can do well. People just need a reason to think voting GOP is a good idea. Depending on how this all shakes out, this may be turn out to be that idea. If deal that was worked out successfully instills budget discipline without people experiencing major damage to their lives and livelihood, it certainly counts as a reason to me.
laxam
1yr ago
They weren’t even allowed to continue to practice their religion privately; the state knew that in order to secure long-term the power and legitimacy of its new ideology, it had to stamp out any displays of the old worldview, no matter how comparatively feeble.
You're attributing a huge amount of capacity to early Medieval states that didn't really exist. It's generally accepted that pagan practices with a Christian gloss persisted for a long, long time after formal conversion. I've seen some historians claim that the countryside in most of Europe wasn't really converted in anything but name until AFTER the Middle Ages, more or less just in time for the Protestant Reformation.
Medieval Catholic Christianity was able to maintain such religious unity over a large area by essentially being hands off once the temples were torn down and the churches put up. Just morph your old cults into veneration of some newly discovered local Saint and you're good to carry on more or less unchanged (for example: It's entirely possible that the Irish Saint Brigid is more or less literally a religio-translation of the pre-Christian Irish goddess Brigid). All the same practices and festivals can be held in all the same places, just with a different name in the middle.
laxam
1yr ago
Isn't the "Global South" project a rebranding of Third Worldism, which had obvious ties to the Communist International and Maoist Movement?
It probably has more to do with the non-aligned movement, in terms of family resemblance. This is the Indian prime minister, after all.
laxam
1yr ago
My wife and I work around this by completely banning having a cookie by yourself in the house. If you want one, you have to get one for the other, too. This means you have both the impulse control of each person as well as making it relatively rare for both people to be craving cookies at the same time, so it's very rare for us to have more than one or two each. I can't think of the last time we've done anything even close to having a whole box in one sitting.
It also helps we don't keep particularly delectable cookies like flavored Oreos in the house at all, anymore.
The republicans have a weird mix of strip mall baptist church combined with oligarch wealth vibe to them. Someone who lives in a major city, is educated and well travled probably feels out of place at a Trump rally. Even in the UK but even more so in other European countries there is a brand of pearl necklace wearing urban right wing that likes neoclassical apartments in major European cities and enjoy high culture. The Republicans seem too focused on rural boomers who are opposed to change and want a culture that is fairly alien to the PMC.
This is a new phenomenon. It used to be that the US equivalent of what you're talking about was the suburban conservative, a breed that dominated the Republican party up until 2016 (although it had been on a downslope since the financial crisis). A combination of cultural change (the suburban US of the early 2000's may as well be a foreign country to what it is these days -- the country was still majority Protestant and overwhelmingly Christian, the Mainline churches were, if not vibrant, at least healthy enough to be analogized to middle aged rather than on life support as they are now -- and this was a process of change that was well advanced by 2016) and reactionary disgust at Trump and everything he represented meant that a district like Virginia's 7th could go from electing a Republican like Eric Cantor by 40+ point margins, cycle after cycle, to reliably picking Abigail Spanberger out of disgust at the populist who picked off Cantor in a primary.
It's not really ideological: most of the Republicans the suburbs used to favor were as reliably conservative as anyone in the new party. It's about, as you highlight, cultural factors. Respectability politics was a positive thing in the suburbs and the kind of conformism that allows for it is in bad odor right now. Combined with the actual cultural change that has happened in suburbs (especially in the North and West; suburban Georgia is still much more up for grabs than, say, suburban Pennsylvania), there just isn't this the old kind of bourgeoisie conservative constituency like there used to be.
The US also used to have the kind of urbanite conservative you speak of, but it's been on the way out for even longer. The Republican Party stopped being theirs/they cultural died in the 60's and 70's. Now, urban conservatives are working class white ethnics, 'Reagan Democrats' and their descendants.
laxam
1yr ago
Even CRT/school closures as an issue, is kind of sketchy - people point to 2021 and Virginia, but if you really look into things, voting patterns show the standard drop in voting for everybody as is standard for off-year VA Governor elections, except for 70+ voters, which tells me the CRT thing was a bugaboo to older conservative voters, and that's about it.
The 2021 VA Gubernatorial election was decidedly high turnout for a Virginia off-year election.
'Whose turnout drops less' is honestly something that makes perfect sense to be driven, at least in part, by what are live issues. After all, the 2021 Virginia Democratic candidate actually got over 100,000 more votes than the 2017 Virginia Democratic candidate. It's just that the Republican increased his vote total even more.
This whole line of reasoning reads like cope. DeSantis got 500,000+ more votes in 2022 than he did in 2018. You're free to believe what you want, but you're not really bringing evidence for it. It's probably a strategic mistake
laxam
1yr ago
Wasn't there a Senator recently who spoke about having to use a SCIF in the basement of the Capitol to interact with classified documents?
I think it's entirely possible this is a problem limited to the upper-reaches of the Executive branch. I don't think Congress gets to be flippant with its handled of classified material (except to the extent the Speech and Debate clause allows them to verbally release it from the floor of their chambers).
laxam
1yr ago
Yeah, and I've seen commentary that that is significantly worse precisely because it's more difficult for Senators to just take stuff home.
laxam
1yr ago
If we can’t actually protect Ukraine despite billions in sanctions and giving the most powerful weapons we have, what sane country is going to trust us to be their defense or to protect their trade or solve their disputes?
Ukraine isn't getting the most powerful stuff NATO has. Ukraine got a bunch of old Soviet equipment from the ex-WARPAC NATO members and it's gotten some stuff a generation or two out of date from the US. They're also only getting some of the wider environment of military organization NATO militaries operate with. They don't have the training, the military traditions, the economy...
Ukraine is NATO supporting a country it has no formal commitments to because NATO countries think it's either the right thing to do, a good realist move, or some mixture thereof. If it doesn't work out, that's humiliating, in a way, but not incredibly moreso than the Afghanistan pullout or the mess in Iraq. Countries with whom NATO or the US have actual treaty obligations will know they have nothing to worry about. They saw what happened with the HIMARs. They know how far ahead of everyone else NATO is. If things don't work out for Ukraine on a strategic level, that's ultimately because the West didn't care enough to do more than throw some pocket change and old equipment at them.
Japan and Korea may develop a niggling fear in the back of their mind about just how far the willingness of the US and NATO to commit to a war in their defense may go, but they also know the situation is sufficiently different that they can re-assure themselves and move on with their day.
laxam
1yr ago
They're giving UA everything good it can possibly use.
Yeah, and all the really good stuff is dependent on a level of infrastructural support and training the Ukrainians can't replicate. Instead, they get the stuff that can be deployed independently, which is usually old or relatively less effective.
Also, if Wagner were near-peer, they'd be wiping the floor with the Ukrainians.
laxam
1yr ago
Somehow, the US didn't learn its lesson re: sactions 215 years ago, with the Embargo Act.
laxam
1yr ago
This guy goes up in the lift with her and propositions her. I do understand why she'd feel at risk in a confined space with a possibly drunk guy where she has no idea how he'll react (and her being possibly drunk and tired as well didn't help with how she reacted or felt).
If this is a big enough worry for someone, it may be worth following a reverse-Pence rule and actively avoiding getting into confined spaces with young men.
laxam
1yr ago
Then, I think, it's time for a risk assessment and an exploration of mitigation strategies. Have any of the women you've known ever carried a self defense weapon like mace or a taser?
It's a little weird to me how you go in so hard on calling Swedenborgians a cult and part of Oz's inauthenticity when, in actuality, they're an ancient sect (admittedly kind of weirdo, but no moreso than modern sects like the Charismatics) with deep roots in the Mid-Atlantic region that date back to the Revolution. His affiliations with them is probably one of the most Pennsylvania parts of him.
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