jamesanatesmith.bsky.social
Utah Utes, Chicago Bears, the American West, sometimes a stray Shakespeare take.
606 posts
79 followers
220 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
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It's always telling of just how young MLK was when he passed that he was about the same age as Gene Hackman and died before Hackman even started to become a leading man.
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Isn’t “Big Guy Solves Problems and Beats Up Bad Guys” the bread and butter of the Book of Mormon?
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I don’t know if it’s a comfort, but this was essentially the posture of pre-Gingrich congressional republicans. So things can change pretty quickly.
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Iron law of institutions, too much incumbent leadership, lack of ambition for power.
Could be wrong, could change. In fact, them going national would preferable to the Dems.
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Have heard they suffer from a lot of the internal structural problems that Dems do.
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There’s been this attitude from Democrats that exudes the belief that they’re being graded on a curve: “Trump will be worse of Gaza” , “we did the best we could on inflation”.
We need a results based party. Either you are making the world demonstrably, visibly better or you’ll be in the cycle.
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Tom Ripley does not vote for Trump. He’s an intellectually superior sociopath, so he can’t believe in the messiah complex. Trump would also remind him about the things he resents about himself.
He might “support” Trump if it greases the wheels, but he’s not taking time out of his schedule to vote.
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Every conservative who says kids have it too easy these days spent at least half their childhoods in places where they could get grown ass adults fired.
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“The process” sure seems to run quickly when it’s non-elites in the crosshairs.
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Neither of us said that Clinton would be popular, only that Trump would not have become the perma-nominee without beating Clinton in the first place.
I really recommend responding to what people actually say rather than inventing straw men.
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Who are you arguing with?
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Because the loyalty of the GOP is largely due to him slaying the Clinton dragon. If he lost, he’d be blamed.
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Can this even get covered in mainstream news?
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I look forward to the inevitable Hulu Docuseries about the Rise and Fall of Swig.
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This likely means that Ted Lasso has both Koch brothers as contacts in his phone.
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Or b/c they’re not weird sadistic creeps.
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Did you notice how they don’t do that though?
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If you want me to think of the journalists, you should put them in charge of the journalism
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Top to bottom with the Ivy League Very Clever Boys in media and the Democratic Party.
1. You must support us at all costs
2. There is absolutely nothing we can do.
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Joe Biden is destined to become a tent pole for Mike Duncan’s Great Idiot theory.
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You’d think Cal would be an attractive program for talented kickers.
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Playing his way into starting for the Jets next season.
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Well Alana Haim is playing a character named Alana with a family played by her actual family.
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Mormonism=the declared doctrine of the COJCOLDS + whatever idiosyncratic bullshit your great grandpa thought.
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I feel this on the red line, which I’ve basically stopped taking. At some point it’s just gotta come down to basics: if you don’t give people a place to live, they’re going to find a place.
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It was pre pandemic, but this is basically JK Rowling, Jesse Singal, Matt Taibbi, etc.
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Also…that’s not the thing people remember about Nilli Vanilli.
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I mean, what has he done about it? I think fighting fascism is going to require more than standing around screaming “what do you want me to do? Something hard? That’s too hard.”
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Also, fucking LOL at you acting like electing an 81-year-old president is in the same realm as a female or black president.
The wealthy, white and elderly have been oppressed for too long in this country!
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Uh because the feeble old man has ceded the powers of the presidency to a reactionary Supreme Court, is extremely unpopular and unable to do the campaigning necessary to change that image, is engaging in destabilizing war making, and has shown clear signs of cognitive decline since last elected.
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They genuinely believe that elites should be judged on intent more than effort or effect.
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Tens of millions of Americans who can count and have never seen a President this feeble before. Even in the after events he sounds like shit, he’s just successfully lowered the expectations of the diehards.
There is a reason we have never elected a President in his 80s before.
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Also, he’s the President and he’s doing a really bad job! The Supreme Court just seized control of regulation and okayed executive crimes! We’re at the brink of another regional war breaking out.
Biden’s weakness is causing instability right now.
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And that starts with putting an able candidate at the top of the ticket.
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I do think it’s unproductive to excoriate a Democratic electorate that has lined up behind Barack Obama twice and his preferred candidate twice more.
You are putting words into your nominal allies mouths about downplaying racism to win an argument. I don’t think that’s productive, but ymmv.
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I read OP as criticizing people who want someone that isn’t JB or KH. I suppose I was wrong about that?
You’re lashing out at people who agree with you about KH for the same reasons AS YOU.
Racism is a def factor but pretty far down the list of why Dems aren’t sold on her as a candidate.
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It’s not airtight, but if you refuse to engage in counterfactual as a rule, then you are doomed to never learn from history.
If we had done this, it seems likely that it would have had this result. I can’t know that, but I can still stack up strengths and weaknesses and have a thesis.
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So what’s the point of arguing that an imagined mass of people oppose her for the wrong reasons? The reasons you’ve described are disqualifying in themselves.
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How dare you not accept my straw man argument!
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Yes, but in no small part because the party elite were able to consolidate against them for their preferred candidate.
They should do that again.
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No, but we can look at Hillary’s weaknesses and the reasons she appears to have lost, which are, I will concede, unknowable. She lost in areas damaged by the policies of Bill which the other two opposed. She also had a bad relationship with the press which sorry, was part of the job back then.
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I meant to say desiccated, but auto correct. I know the difference and since the pro-Biden side basically can only make nitpicky arguments, I must stress that I know the difference.
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Also, 2016 Dems at least had some reason to think the emails thing might die out.
Biden’s aging like fucking milk and that’s not going to get turned around by the passing of more time.
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I think this exactly right. It’s a part of the reason that Biden isn’t winning right now. He’s not promising us a better world. He’s promising us one that gets worse at a slower pace.