State of the Discussion

Since this is a music thread:
Is someone here able to transcribe the lyrics of this song for me?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJgDp5zF4s0
I only get disconnected fragments and the auto captions produce mostly rubbish.

Remember: It is perfidy to quote GOPsters verbatim and a felony to provide audio or video proof when the quotes get challenged. That includes public speeches made to an audience of millions.

Pro Bono's quote reminds me that the inner circle of George Bush was dubbed the 'Mayberry Machiavellis' (and Gemini tells me it was not by a democrat, but by a former White House staffer under Bush)

Io spero, e lo sperar cresce ‘l tormento:
io piango, e il pianger ciba il lasso core:
io rido, e el rider mio non passa drento:
io ardo, e l’arsion non par di fore.

wj - (Especially those who didn’t see it coming, and so failedto plant something else this year. Too late now to do anything but plow the crop under as fertalizer for next year.)

Right about now those farmers are also starting to realize that there is no way to plan for what to plant next year, because there is no telling what The Ancient Orange One is going to decide to add to the tariff pile as his next tantrum negotiating tactic.

You can't plan a year out when the yahoo in charge keeps blowing stuff up to keep his enemies - the farmers' customers - off-balance.

They could plow it all under and try to grow carbon, but TAOO has blown up climate subsidies as well.

Screwed.

I notice that Trump is now demanding that the Chinese resume buying soybeans from the US. One suspects that he discovered that Midwestern farmers are seriously upset to have a major market snatched out from under them. (Especially those who didn't see it coming, and so failedto plant something else this year. Too late now to do anything but plow the crop under as fertalizer for next year.)

He seems oblivious to the fact that the Chinese have found alternative suppliers. Which is to say, they don't need to buy from us. As opposed to, say, refined rare earths, for which we (and, for that matter the rest of the world) have no alternative sources of supply.

We could develop them, of course -- "rare earths" aren't particularly rare; just challenging to separate from each other. It would just take 5-10 years, even assuming zero regulatory constraints (i.e. no environmental impact reports, no planning permissions, etc.). Can't expect Trump to grasp that, of course.

I could easily see the Chinese playing hardball on this. If only to show the wannabe his place. Hey, it keeps working for Putin, so why not?

My main criticism of the (D)’s over the last, say, 40 years is that they’ve neglected the areas that aren’t what they see as their places of strength. Rural areas, much of the south, much of the mountain west, to some degree the industrial midwest.

The two big political geography stories of the last 35 years are the huge swing from blue to red in the Midwest, and the corresponding swing from red to blue in the West. The 8-state Mountain West now has one more blue US Senator than the 13-state Midwest. The entire 13-state West has nine more than the Midwest. 35 years ago -- 1990 -- Republicans in California were competitive: legislative seats at the state and national level were close to equally divided, and that year Feinstein lost the election for governor.

Personal charisma is great, recognizing that nobody watches TV anymore so stop spending all your money there is great, understanding how to leverage social media is great.

Recruit the charismatic people, do all those things.

However.

My main criticism of the (D)'s over the last, say, 40 years is that they've neglected the areas that aren't what they see as their places of strength. Rural areas, much of the south, much of the mountain west, to some degree the industrial midwest.

When I say that, people often reply "how can you say that, their policies are much better for those folks". And in general I think that's true. But I'm not talking about *policy*. I'm talking about physical presence and local identity.

There are 50 states, 435 Congressional districts, and something north of 3,000 counties or county equivalents in the US. I don't know how many cities and towns, but a lot of those, too.

There should be a (D) candidate for every public office, in every one of those political units, in every cycle. There is not. My scientific wild-ass guess is that they're lucky if they field candidates in half of them.

There should be some kind of (D) field office in each of those political units, and the DNC and similar (D)-aligned organizations should be supporting all of them with money and people. They should *not* be telling them how to run their local organization, because the people who live in an area almost certainly know the area better than anybody in the DNC. But they should be supported with money, assistance in recruiting local candidates and volunteers, and with boots on the ground (as they say) during election cycles.

Way back when, Howard Dean developed a 50 state strategy to basically do the above. It worked well. Obama continued it at least for his first run, but since then it's kind of been abandoned.

There *is* interest in all of those places. Bernie Sanders and AOC have been holding town halls in very red places and thousands of people show up. So at least a basic level of interest is there.

My sense, or belief, is that the (D)'s as an institution have focused on the stuff they sort of know how to do - basically the easy stuff. Solicit big money from rich people in large cities, focus-group their messages to try to polish them up into something that will resonate with "regular people", lean heavily on the most reliable demographics that they are (more or less) sure to win.

It's a very top-down, center-of-power-centric approach.

They need to stop spending billions of dollars on consultants and start spending billions of dollars to establish and support *local (D) organizations* in every freaking political unit in the country. And let those organizations take the lead in identifying and understanding the issues that are significant to the people *in those places* and in explaining to those people how they benifit more from (D) policies than from (R) ones. Which, in general, they do. And also let those local folks take the lead in understanding how (D) policies do NOT benefit folks there, so they can evolve policy to address those needs.

Folks in all the places I'm talking about don't really care all that much what Chuck Schumer says. They might not even care all that much what Trump says other than to find it somewhere between annoying and entertaining.

But they will have a much harder time tuning out what their neighbor says.

The 50 state strategy, but really make it a 50 state, 435 district, 3,000 plus county, every town and city strategy. Support (D) candidates for mayor, town clerk, school board, county sheriff, tax assessor, dog catcher. State senate and house.

And, of course, federal House and Senate. But work from the bottom up.

Do that for 3 or 4 or 5 election cycles. They'll lose a lot, and spend a lot of money on doing so. And they'll win some. And over time, they'll win more.

Patience, persistence, and quit relying on the easy wins.

<i>Why not a model focused on re-imagined Revolutionary War heritage and New England?</i>

Not necessarily New England, but this was more of a thing when I was a kid in the NJ suburbs of Philadelphia. My grandmother's house was decorated with plates depicting scenes from the Rev War and other such memorabilia. She had pistols and powder flasks, some of which were obvious replicas and others that may have been genuine. Her house was not at all rare in that regard.

People would display the old "Betsy Ross" flag year round, but it was everywhere around the 4th of July.

I know a few people who currently participate in Rev War reenactments, but they're NJ Loyalists (i.e. Red Coats). They tend MAGA-ish. It's kind of odd considering that they aren't on the side of the rebels. That would give them a sort of commonality with the rebels of the Confederacy. Maybe it's the authoritarianism they like (not "No Kings" but "Yes Kings").

I visited Gettysburg a few summers ago. Seeing the American flag there seemed to signal something completely different from what it does when I see it flapping around from the back of pickup truck where I live - pride in the Union that defeated the Confederacy rather than obnoxious faux-patriotic MAGAism.

/stream of consciousness

This may be the oddest picture I've ever taken: it's the Spourne Parclose, containing the tomb of John Ponder, in St Peter and St Paul's Church, Lavenham.

How do you get coverage, online or otherwise, for the other side of that story? 

Good question. My feeling is that much of the media is being played by the savviest manipulators of the news cycle. Trump gets way too much air time for what amounts to disinformation, so do Netanyahu and the IDF, Farage and previously Johnson.

I don't know why they run the trucks-in-the-mountains ads in the rest of the country. In the 11-state contiguous western states, the vast majority of the population lives in urban/suburban areas but can drive to the mountains in less than an hour.

I've long said that the proper picture to represent the modern West should look like this. In this case San Francisco, and the snow is rarer in Las Vegas and Phoenix, but it still happens occasionally even there. Now that the Census Bureau has admitted it's the 21st century and we can do density based on actual built area rather than county area, the western region is very narrowly denser than the Northeast, and both are much denser than the Midwest and South.

There is a mystique about the West that's every bit as bullshit ad the mystique about the South and similar in some ways. There's the erasing of historical crimes against humanity, the faux claims to independence, and the strange definition of masculinity which includes 'strength" but not brains. The Southern version has more faux morality. Both have BS about being victimized by outside elites. The West version has A LOT of pity party about not being represented when in fact they are over-represented in government.

I guess my question is: Why is that kind of bullshit the model? Why not a model focused on re-imagined Revolutionary War heritage and New England?

>why is it Southern rural culture which is the model?

is that actually true, though?

if you look at truck commercials, there's a lot more "driving around in the mountains" than there is "driving around the giant flatness of MS" or "hauling groceries in the valleys of WV". and cowboys are more west than deep south. here in NC, people in the country are growing soybeans and cotton, raising pigs and chickens, not riding around on horses roping cattle.

a mythical south (which includes TX and parts of the midwest) might be the model. but the actual south isn't the same thing.

I was thinking the other day about that weird time when all of a sudden a subset of the national culture was into CB radio, complete with radios, handles, etc. Making excuses to contact each other just so they could say, “Ten four, good buddy!”

I had a most serious crush on Kris Kristofferson, long before Convoy, (and put up with unacceptable behaviour from one of my tutors at law school - e.g. looking at my chest rather than my face while talking to me - because of his resemblance to KK) but I do wonder if that film also did something to make the whole scene attractive to women, and to men because it was attractive to women. Of course, it was presumably a big thing already for the movie to get made...

it seems natural that rural culture should be similarly homgeneous

The question would seem to be: why is it Southern rural culture which is the model? Why not the Midwest? Or the Mountain West? They all have significant rural populations, too.

One piece of economics related to the Civil War, and being from Illinois Lincoln was very much aware of it, was shipping on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. By 1860, farmers from Ohio through the eastern parts of Iowa produced large amounts of excess grain. The bulk of the excess went down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to the ports around New Orleans, and by ship from there. Those farmers were very much afraid a separate Confederacy would impose large transit fees and ruin their business.

During the debates in Parliament on whether Britain should enter the American Civil War -- and on which side -- much was made of exactly how dependent Britain was on grain imported from those states, and that there were no alternate sources.

Animism is also at the heart of circumpolar shamanism. As a Dark Green Religion, biocentric type, I lean that direction, at least as a narrative for living ethically in the world. It's the story I allow myself to live by whenever and wherever physics starts to slide towards metaphysics.

I think it's healthy to treat everything as a fellow creature wherever possible. It maximizes empathy and guards against hubris.