Of course he’s juggling lit matches in an ammunition dump and if he fishes it up he’ll get one heck of a market crash.
He could get one anyway. The markets are not even slightly happy with this level of uncertainty.
Yes, at some point, it might be clear that Trump is not going to do these tariffs, and the marker will stop worrying, but then other countries will stop even pretending to care, and countries that _did_ apparently care previously will, without much fanfare, stop doing whatever they announced they did. (It's worth reminding people that all of this is being done without any actual agreements being signed, as far as I know.)
And there's not any way to square that circle. Either people believe he might do it, in which case the market doesn't like it, or they don't, and people ignore his threats.
This is on top of the situation that is NVidia crash, which for some reason is happening in extreme slow motion and is only like 20% done. Hell, if it's slow enough, it might not actually harm anything else, but honestly this is a little insane...I know stock trader are delusional gambling lunatics, but they usually aren't _this_ bad. Apparently, we're seeing if we can keep a company in the air by techbros just wishing really, really hard. Sounds stupid, but it works for Tesla.
We may need you to write the Tariff post. I know that I don’t know enough about Tariffs to say how bad they’ll be beyond just writing about Smoot-Hawley and repeating the Libertarian talking points that I had memorized back in the 90’s.
The thing about tariffs and protectionism is that even the people who _like_ them(1) admit they can only be used to protect existing industries, and you shouldn't be using them when you don't have the industries to start with, because all you've done is idiotically raised your prices in the vague hope that, years later, that industry will finally exist.
Like, this is obvious when you think about it.
What is less obvious that the world is so interconnected that the amount of 'things that go into making other things' is so large that you often _think_ you have an industry somewhere, but it turns out to be 95% dependent on a thing you import from somewhere else, at which point see the first paragraph I said.
Which is why broad tariffs on entire countries are idiotic to start without any research.
1) I will admit I am not entirely against tariffs, but not for protectionism per se, but labor rights. Slap a _very small_ tariff on China, starting at 0.5% (I have no idea if that's a reasonably starting point.), and let companies that can demonstrate they treat their workers fairly opt out. Slowly ramp that small tariff up, to incentives companies. Point out that China itself could opt out of the entire thing by actually changing their laws and no longer allowing what is functionally slave labor.
But that's not really an attempt at protectionism, at least not in general, although I guess it could be argued it's an attempt at protecting American companies from having to compete with companies that can abuse their workers.
And a key point is you need to do this extremely slowly and at a very low level. You know, like non-dumb people.
I don't disagree with you in theory about some of this, defunding the police and abolishing ICE are probably things to not talk about for now. (And ICE is just going to go full-fascist when let lose, so there will be more ammo later anyway.)
But I think you seriously underestimate just how much young people, even the sort of disaffected young people who have run over to the right, are completely fed up with gun control and the lack of progress there.
We're about to hit 30 years since Columbine, since the reality of school shootings have dominated the life of everyone who passed through school after that, which are *checks note* everyone under 40 at this point.
And the feeling of helplessness, as politicians have been completely unwilling to address the issue, has only gotten worse.
This, honestly, is one of the issues that Democrats should be putting right up there next to abortion. And I think the only reason they have not is the Democratic party, and in fact the entire political establishment, is run by people who are older than dead.
Now, like the Republicans on fighting abortion, you could argue that doing this would activate the other side, like the anti-abortion wins have activated pro-life Dems...except the anti-gun control side has _long_ been activated. Decades ago. There is not really any harm in the Democrats just going full-bore on gun control...the Republican party already lies about their position on that anyway. Might as well actually hold the position they are being condemned for and get the 'youth' vote.
Because reporters never want exclusives with potential Presidents.
Rogan is not a reporter. And I don't say that to diminish or insult him. (Although to be clear I would like to diminish him and insult him as much as possible, and I shall pause here and do so: Rogan is a credulous dumbass who has actively harmed this country by platforming people who should not be platformed and giving weigh to outright conspiracy theories.)
Anyway, back to being polite: Rogan is not a reporter, and has never claimed to be a reporter. He doesn't even claim to be political. He claims to just be some entertainment guy with a podcast.
What non-softball interviews did Harris do instead?
Politics doesn't do hardball interviews anymore. If Trump won't do them (He honestly seems to have backed off even softball interviews!), it seems odd for the Democrats to be expected to.
What we all talked about, while operating off lying sources, was gibberish. There was an entire discussion here (I think more than one) about how Harris _choosing_ not to go on Rogan was her fatal mistake and maybe she could have won, or at least come out better, if she had chosen to.
It turns out, she did not, in fact, choose not to go on Rogan. She tried, and was pretty overtly blocked by him. (And while it might be possibly she could have fought her way past that, it was clear at that point he was actively hostile to her appearance and was pro-Trump, despite pretending otherwise, which means it would be incredibly stupid to go on to a show he controlled.)
Which means the discussion on this site about her 'choice' was utter gibberish.
--
You know, this is the second comment I've written in a row where we're talked about how people on this site have been _very_ wrong about why Harris lost. It wasn't the 'choice' she made not to go on Rogan, which she didn't do, and it wasn't her pushing a pro-trans agenda, which she didn't do.
Weird how everyone keep being wrong about this, and moreover, appear to be wrong in exactly one direction, whereas every wrong conception of her loss asserts she should have moved more towards center. It's almost as if this is calculated misinformation where the center libs once again fail because they have absolutely no solutions for anything or any way they can make anything better...but then blame the actual left for those losses, so they can demand even _further_ movement into Democrats being a Republican Lite party that literally no one wants to vote for.
I didn’t say that they shouldn’t have left themselves open for attack.
So what I'm going to do here is write that sentence down, that you agree that Democrats did not, in fact, do anything to open themselves up to this attack.
And I will be repeated posting that the next time you start talking about why Harris lost due to how actively pro-trans she was, by reminding you agree that Democrats did not actually do anything pro-trans and for them to not been attacked on trans issues would have required them swinging hard anti-trans, to match the other party. (And somehow have done that decades ago.)
And the other party's position on trans issues is *checks notes as of 2/3/2025* holy f_cking sh_t. I'm not even going to try to describe it.
And if you want to make the argument that _both_ parties should turn to minority-bashing and oppression, you're going to have to make it explicitly.
What Trump got impeached over for impeachment 1 was impounding funds, a thing that Congress explicitly made illegal after Nixon did it, and then the impeachment failed, and now that he's in office he's completely decided to do it. In fact, he's assigned Elon Musk to do it.
I feel it was, actually, a bit important.
Part of the problem is they tried to make it about Trump trying to extort Ukraine into investigating Biden, because they thought that sounded better. So Republicans argued it _wasn't_ that and it's legitimate to condition foreign aid on blah blah blah.
No. It doesn't matter. The President is required to spend the funds as stated by law. Period. End of story. It does not matter what he does not spend them on, it doesn't matter why he doesn't do it. That is perhaps an interesting backstory, but it is literally not important.
If the president starts deciding not to spend money allocated funds, he has seized the power to do retroactive line-item vetos. Remember, the line-item veto _itself_ is unconstitutional, even when it granted by a duly-passed law. Impoundment does it retroactively on existing law, and invents that power out of thin air.
Now, yes, there are probably some circumstances where the president feels the conditions have changed so much that to do so would be a violation of other parts of his oaths (Like if he's directed to give money to a country, but that country literally declared war on us before he can.), and he certainly can choose to do that...and he can be impeached for it. In fact, I'd argue that even if everyone understood the situation, it would be good to hold an impeachment hearing and _make him_ defend his actions. In front of Congress, sworn in.
Instead, yes, the Republicans in Congress decided to be extremely impotent about the President stealing their power.
I mean, I certainly can understand the position that 'literally no stock trades she can do can be trusted', and I guess the CIA could have informed her of something, even in China.
But December 31st sounds like someone just wanted out of the incredibly, blaring, extremely obvious bubble that was, and still is, NVidia, and decided they wanted it to happen in calendar year 2024 for tax reasons.
The two issues that seem problematic are what to do about young trans children and what to do about trans athletes.
Really? Those are the only two that seem problematic?
Have you tried pointing that out to the Trump administration, which has currently stopped research about any sort of trans people, calling it 'trans ideology', and has deleted a bunch of existing data like from public access?
Or blocked medical access and threatened to arrest people who provide it for people who are 18? Not under 18...under 19. Sure is sounding like they think _no one_ can consent to transition.
Who have decided to forcible de-transition prisoners? And note I'm not talking about 'not transitioning' or 'what prison people are in', I'm talking about, for example, trans women who have been in prison and fully transitioned for decades, and the Trump administration is not only trying to (It has been blocked for now) sending them to male prisons, demanding they use their old names, trying to cut their hair, but also refusing to provide hormone prescriptions. (Which to be clear, are incredibly cheap, just in case anyone is going to pretend it is about cost.) Many of these are women who cannot produce testosterone anymore, and thus will be left with no sex hormones, which of course poses long term risks.
Because it really looks like you got pretty badly motte-baileyed here, to use the official term of this site, and that what the people pushing these concerns _claim_ have an issue with is not actually limited to that.
In fact, they appear to dislike trans people existing at all.
Maybe at some point we start thinking about these two 'problematic' issues in the context of the very obvious goals of the people who keep talking about those things. (And, as I pointed out below, the government doesn't even _regulate_ sports rules, so that's almost nonsensical to pretend is somehow a political concern.)
Hey, Dark Matter, what if I were to tell you that that obviously stupid policy was changed to actually require checking testosterone levels a few months later _by_ the governing body of the sport?
You know, like the IOC and pretty much all international sports organizations recommend.
You notice the date on that in the URL? September 8, 2023. And the date on that video? The competition was the March 23, 2023.
Five and half months. That feels like 'Literally the next meeting of the national organization' to me. I don't really know they work, but this is an national organization that managed to decide to change their rules, and actually change their rules (Yes, those are often two different things), and get them published, in five and a half months, which honestly feels rather astonishing.
And again, this is not something trans people object to. This is no trans person saying people should self-identify into sports. (Although you will find a lot of them pointing out that essentially no laws care about the rules of sports _except_ somehow when it's about them, and also that sports are literally unimportant recreational activities and should not be involved in policy discussions _at all_, and we certainly shouldn't be basing legal policy on sports being 'better' or whatever.)
This is not some ideological thing this guy found. It's a loophole of an organization that was careless. In fact, under their old rules, he shouldn't have been allowed either, because he was supposed to produce some ID with that gender on it, and he has none.
A loophole that got fixed immediately.
And somehow, this has political meaning. A loophole in an event that happened in a different country, under the control of a sports organization in that country, that was a bit slow on the uptake about the recommended way to do this but fixed it immediately. About an activity that is _entirely_ recreational and has no actual meaning for anything at all.
Weird how that's somehow meaningful to US politics or serves as an example of anything.
Jaybird, the argument being made here by me is not that the trans issue didn't change things.
My argument is that that Democrats didn't 'support' trans people 'too much', but instead were incredibly neutral towards them, saying things like 'the courts says we provide healthcare to prisoners, including gender affirming care' and 'there's already some legal protection for discrimination'.
Incredibly milquetoast statements. And no policy changes at all, as evidenced by the fact you have to dig up the most trivial wording change and pretend it means anything at all.
What happened is a populist demagogue started railing about a minority and running ads about about how the other side wouldn't make that minority cease to exist, but instead kept saying vague platitudes about them.
Those are not the same thing.
Which means that when you say 'The Democrats shouldn't have left themselves open for attack', the only way for them to do that is to do the same thing as the populist demagogue, preemptively. They can't stop doing what they are doing, because they aren't doing anything. All they can do is also do what they other party is doing and attack trans people the same.
Actually...do worse. Because moving to that point would just move the demagogue farther into attacking the group. Or expanding it into gay people. So the Democrats would have to keep following them, presumable straight into, I dunno, where does the story _sound_ like it ends up?
We are not talking about biology. We are talking about your assertions of how we sort humans. You claim the determining factor on how we sort humans is a thing almost no one has measured, for anyone. And certainly aren't doing it while walking around.
It doesn't actually matter how scientific or non-scientific the determining factor is, my assertion is not that isn't (See my other post), it is that we do not use it.
If you to claim that we sort bananas into large or small by the molecular density of their peel, I would also object to that. Even though it is a very specific thing we could measure. But that is not the way we sort bananas, and that is easy to demonstrate because absolutely no one knows what the molecular density of any banana peel is! It doesn't matter that fact could be measured, it is not a fact we use in sorting bananas.
You are an actual human, one assumes. You know, when you look at someone, you do not sort them into male or female using the size of their gametes. That is a flatly insane lie. You are not Dr. Manhattan, you cannot see the size of their gametes!
Anyway if I don’t want to get pregnant should I, a man, start on birth control pills? Would they not do something now, today, but then start doing something, if tomorrow I told people I identified as a woman? How would that work? Is there a way I could become pregnant?
Um...in what universe are we even talking about if people who 'identify as women' can get pregnant? That literally was mentioned by no one. We were talking about people who 'did not identify as women', or, more to the point, 'people who are not legally women', could get pregnant.
Everyone, you can tell the transphobes, and the people who operate in transphobic spaces, because they always somehow make discussions about trans men into trans women, because they mostly forget trans men exist at all, often in the middle of a sentence.
One sex produces lots of small gametes and is incapable of becoming pregnant, the other produces a single larger gamete and is. We all know this.
You know, it's funny how you can tell what circles someone hangs out in because of how they define that. The 'gamete' one is pretty much 'extreme transphobic social political circles'. Notably, it's what transphobes have settled on after having been demonstrated wrong on basically every other definition they came up with.
Now, explain to me: How do you know what size gametes you produce? Did you have them checked?
Or are you just _guessing_, based of other things?
Could it be that you're seeing various clues based off body and presentation, calculating a sex from those, and then _working backward_ to try to guess what sort of gametes someone produces, a thing you cannot possible know on sight, and likely do not even know of _yourself_.
And then claiming _that_ result is what everyone uses to do the calculation to start with.
That seems very dishonest.
You cannot use some sort of magical idealized version of reality where everyone has measured their own 'gamete size production' and pretend it applies to the world, at least not without admitting that means the sexes are currently about 1% male, 0.5% female, (Men are slightly more likely to have their sperm looked at) and 97.5% unknown. (And note I'm guessing really high here. People only tend to get reproductive cells looked at when having problems with infertility. It probably is a percentage of a fraction.)
(In case you're wondering why I am harping on this, it's because you don't actually speak to any trans people on this, who know damn well that neither the Biden administration, nor the Harris campaign, actually did anything for trans people, not even speaking to fight against the massive wave of anti-trans laws. It is laughable to claim elected Democrats were too pro-trans.)
The CDC now refers to “pregnant women” rather than “pregnant people”.
I am bringing this down here to talk about this policy instead of up there, because I do expect the production of a better example up there. But I do want to mention this:
When the CDC changed its wording, there were people who are _legally_ not women who get pregnant. (1) There were people who had their legal gender as male or non-binary who were pregnant.
That is a true statement and not debatable.
What the CDC did was change its terminology to reflect existing reality of the law.
The law acknowledges trans people exist. This is a thing that is true in every state, it is true at the Federal, trans people are just a thing that exists in US law. You can argue they shouldn't, but they do. And this has been true for _decades_.
In fact, I would suggest that people complaining about the CDC's change, which again reflects legal reality, is just people complaining about trans people existing.
And that, in fact, is what the claim that the Democrats are ' fixated on social or cultural issues' is. Just...complaints that Democrats are refusing to say that trans people do not exist.
So we are at the point that the only example of 'pro-trans policy' is a government agency using slightly different phrasing.
Is that your final answer?
I'm not arguing it doesn't technically fit the criteria I laid out, I guess is it a policy that Democrats did, but I don't even have to point out how weaksauce that thing is, you already know how weaksauce that is because you preemptively apologized for it.
But...it doesn't work as an example of _priorities_ anyway. If you go back to the original comment, we are talking about what 'kind of issues' are 'prioritized' by the Democratic party. That was the original claim.
You have managed to track down a single tiny pro-trans thing that 'Democrats did', but it sure as hell was not presented as any sort of priority. The people who brought it up as a talking point were _Republicans_, not the Democrats. The Democrats just...silently did it. Not even them. The administrators that Democrats staffed the government with silently did it. It's not even a law.
Since apparently I need to clarify: Do you have anything pro-trans that the Democrats _presented as a thing they were going to do_? And then did?
Either in an election as a platform, or as some sort of policy statement, or anything like that.
Part of the premise of fascism is that people 'voluntarily' overreact and comply in advance, because the regime is always extremely erratic, lashing out at random, and that is no possible way to actually follow the rules perfectly and be safe. So the only possible thing to is 'virtue signal' that you are trying as best as you can, please, daddy, don't hit me.
No, I'm not making a joke there, fascism, when taken a as a whole, looks very much like how abusive relationships with huge power dynamics(1) work, and people under fascism react in much the same way as people do to abusers with power over them. Often by desperately trying to please them in advance so the abusers target someone else instead of them. Sometimes even offering up targets.
1) Aka, things like parent/child abusive relationships. Relationships where the victim can exit the relationship look a little different and the abuser has slightly less power, has to occasionally cave and pretend to offer care and support. Although of course, the abuser doesn't like that and will always try fix that situation so the victim cannot leave.
Again, you have, very mysteriously, not listed a policy that helped trans people, and instead have chosen to present an example of the thing that prisons are constitutionally required to do (provide healthcare) and that Harris and the Democrats did not do.
In fact, the idea that prisons have to provide gender-affirming care was decided by the courts, in Edmo v. Idaho Department of Correction. And others. The court decision is also correct, the courts have long held that denying medical care to inmates is 'cruel and unusual punishment'.
But none of that is important, because we're not talking about that. We're _trying_ to talk about the thing you assert has been happening, where Democrats do a lot of stuff that is pro-trans and there is 'pushback' to that.
And I am asking you, again, to _literally name a single example_. One that wasn't, in fact, done by the courts. You seem incredibly sure this has been happening, please name one instance.
Jaybird, I would like a single bit of evidence that Democrats made a bigger issues of trans people in 2020 than Republicans did in 2020 or 2024. You just sorta redirected back to 2020 without saying the example.
This because the example you cited last time on this topic was 'prisoners should receive standard medical care', a thing that not only is true in general, but prisons are extremely obviously a place where you can make the population angry for any nonsensical reason.
"Democrats are using OUR TAX MONEY to pay for food for convicted RAPISTS of CHILDREN."
Yeah, that's what happens when you imprison people, you have to pay for their care. That is not a policy choice per se, and more the fact that killing prisoners by withholding necessities from them is, uh, not only unconstitutional but very literally psychopathic.
As a 'policy', this is nonsense.
Do you have an example of a _policy_ that Democrats made, or will your next example be something like 'Democrats continue to enforce laws that make it illegal to murder trans people where they stand!'
Jaybird, we understand you do not understand what is going on, but this discussion is _not_ about whether or not Trump is doing 'well', it is whether or not elected Democrats and the people on this site and the public at large understand he and his administration have explicitly become genocidal against trans people, and that other minorities are next.
We do not actually care he has not accomplished much there. And we don't particularly care, in this context, if the trains run on time.
Marshall who is nobody’s idea of a slouch thinks calm and steady wins the resistance:
To be very clear, I am not panicked. In real life, I am slowly and methodically doing many things, a lot of which I will not say here, but mostly consist of making sure people are safe.
What I am doing _here_ is merely trying to get people to pay attention, because I am trying to figure out the arguments that can cause politically active people to stop being stupid.
Or, was. Instead what I'm getting here is a lot of people inadvertently answering the question: What would you do in Germany in the early 1930s?
A lot, and I mean a _lot_, of people are completely failing this test.
Trump has issued an EO attacking schools that allow students to socially transition in any manner, and threatening to have the AG charge teachers for going along with with it.
This is, to repeat, threatening arrest of teachers who use the names that students wish them to use. It is not about restrooms, it is not about medication, it is not about informing parents. This is threatening the arrest, of teachers, that do not oppose students who, wish to use another name and pronoun. Even if they have the permission of their parents.
To be clear, this is not some weird interpretation of the EO. It literally says that. It is very clear.
Good to see so many people on this actual exact page that propose pre-emptivingly caving on trans issues as some sort of triangulation, a thing that surely makes logical sense.
So, again I ask: When _exactly_ do we actually start recognizing what is going on?
Is it next week, when they going after parents for it?
Is it when they go after gay students?
I am asking people to actually _state the line_ that they are waiting for Trump to cross to call it fascism. Draw it in the sand.
And maybe that will make you all stop being cowards.
raise loud alarm bells to those old enough to remember the phrase “concentration camp,”
Oh, don't worry, all the Very Serious people here think this couldn't possibly be fascism.
Incidentally, our deportation policy was already implemented by a very fascistic agency, ICE, and honestly was pretty horrific. There's a lot of bogus both-siding in politics, but the _amount_ of deportations really is both-sides, as is just how horrific ICE actually behaves.
And as pointed out, Trump is not noticeably doing more than that. Deportations are not really up.
So why would we to turn military bases into detention centers? Or, to ask an even better question, why would be detaining 'the worst of the worst' there, as Trump put it?
Why are we detaining anyone we're deporting _at all_? The only reason we detain anyone is that we need to first put them in front of a immigration judge...why does it matter how 'bad' they are if we're just deporting them anyway, and are we going to be operating immigration courts down there in Cuba?
That seems like a hell of a lot of work, flying people to Cuba, just to...have a immigration hearing and deport them. Doesn't it? Does this even slightly make sense?
Also, again, we normally deport people on commercial flights. Rather obviously, we cannot put people on commercial flights in Cuba. Or into Cuba, for that matter!
None of these makes sense, and the entire purpose of this is fir Trump to _punish_ people here illegal. It isn't going to be 'detaining people until a hearing', it's just going to be detaining people, period, for years, while pretending to gearing up for a hearing that never comes. It's the same reason he's chaining people to seats on military planes.
And, just like the military planes, he will triumphantly explaining to the public that _that_ is what we do to foreign lawbreakers. A boot stamping on a face, etc.
Luckily, we all know this Can't Be Fascism. Otherwise, it would look a _lot_ like it.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
He could get one anyway. The markets are not even slightly happy with this level of uncertainty.
Yes, at some point, it might be clear that Trump is not going to do these tariffs, and the marker will stop worrying, but then other countries will stop even pretending to care, and countries that _did_ apparently care previously will, without much fanfare, stop doing whatever they announced they did. (It's worth reminding people that all of this is being done without any actual agreements being signed, as far as I know.)
And there's not any way to square that circle. Either people believe he might do it, in which case the market doesn't like it, or they don't, and people ignore his threats.
This is on top of the situation that is NVidia crash, which for some reason is happening in extreme slow motion and is only like 20% done. Hell, if it's slow enough, it might not actually harm anything else, but honestly this is a little insane...I know stock trader are delusional gambling lunatics, but they usually aren't _this_ bad. Apparently, we're seeing if we can keep a company in the air by techbros just wishing really, really hard. Sounds stupid, but it works for Tesla.
"
The thing about tariffs and protectionism is that even the people who _like_ them(1) admit they can only be used to protect existing industries, and you shouldn't be using them when you don't have the industries to start with, because all you've done is idiotically raised your prices in the vague hope that, years later, that industry will finally exist.
Like, this is obvious when you think about it.
What is less obvious that the world is so interconnected that the amount of 'things that go into making other things' is so large that you often _think_ you have an industry somewhere, but it turns out to be 95% dependent on a thing you import from somewhere else, at which point see the first paragraph I said.
Which is why broad tariffs on entire countries are idiotic to start without any research.
1) I will admit I am not entirely against tariffs, but not for protectionism per se, but labor rights. Slap a _very small_ tariff on China, starting at 0.5% (I have no idea if that's a reasonably starting point.), and let companies that can demonstrate they treat their workers fairly opt out. Slowly ramp that small tariff up, to incentives companies. Point out that China itself could opt out of the entire thing by actually changing their laws and no longer allowing what is functionally slave labor.
But that's not really an attempt at protectionism, at least not in general, although I guess it could be argued it's an attempt at protecting American companies from having to compete with companies that can abuse their workers.
And a key point is you need to do this extremely slowly and at a very low level. You know, like non-dumb people.
"
I don't disagree with you in theory about some of this, defunding the police and abolishing ICE are probably things to not talk about for now. (And ICE is just going to go full-fascist when let lose, so there will be more ammo later anyway.)
But I think you seriously underestimate just how much young people, even the sort of disaffected young people who have run over to the right, are completely fed up with gun control and the lack of progress there.
We're about to hit 30 years since Columbine, since the reality of school shootings have dominated the life of everyone who passed through school after that, which are *checks note* everyone under 40 at this point.
And the feeling of helplessness, as politicians have been completely unwilling to address the issue, has only gotten worse.
This, honestly, is one of the issues that Democrats should be putting right up there next to abortion. And I think the only reason they have not is the Democratic party, and in fact the entire political establishment, is run by people who are older than dead.
Now, like the Republicans on fighting abortion, you could argue that doing this would activate the other side, like the anti-abortion wins have activated pro-life Dems...except the anti-gun control side has _long_ been activated. Decades ago. There is not really any harm in the Democrats just going full-bore on gun control...the Republican party already lies about their position on that anyway. Might as well actually hold the position they are being condemned for and get the 'youth' vote.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025”
Rogan is not a reporter. And I don't say that to diminish or insult him. (Although to be clear I would like to diminish him and insult him as much as possible, and I shall pause here and do so: Rogan is a credulous dumbass who has actively harmed this country by platforming people who should not be platformed and giving weigh to outright conspiracy theories.)
Anyway, back to being polite: Rogan is not a reporter, and has never claimed to be a reporter. He doesn't even claim to be political. He claims to just be some entertainment guy with a podcast.
Politics doesn't do hardball interviews anymore. If Trump won't do them (He honestly seems to have backed off even softball interviews!), it seems odd for the Democrats to be expected to.
"
No, Jaybird, what she said was not gibberish.
What we all talked about, while operating off lying sources, was gibberish. There was an entire discussion here (I think more than one) about how Harris _choosing_ not to go on Rogan was her fatal mistake and maybe she could have won, or at least come out better, if she had chosen to.
It turns out, she did not, in fact, choose not to go on Rogan. She tried, and was pretty overtly blocked by him. (And while it might be possibly she could have fought her way past that, it was clear at that point he was actively hostile to her appearance and was pro-Trump, despite pretending otherwise, which means it would be incredibly stupid to go on to a show he controlled.)
Which means the discussion on this site about her 'choice' was utter gibberish.
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You know, this is the second comment I've written in a row where we're talked about how people on this site have been _very_ wrong about why Harris lost. It wasn't the 'choice' she made not to go on Rogan, which she didn't do, and it wasn't her pushing a pro-trans agenda, which she didn't do.
Weird how everyone keep being wrong about this, and moreover, appear to be wrong in exactly one direction, whereas every wrong conception of her loss asserts she should have moved more towards center. It's almost as if this is calculated misinformation where the center libs once again fail because they have absolutely no solutions for anything or any way they can make anything better...but then blame the actual left for those losses, so they can demand even _further_ movement into Democrats being a Republican Lite party that literally no one wants to vote for.
Ah, I'm being conspiratorial.
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So what I'm going to do here is write that sentence down, that you agree that Democrats did not, in fact, do anything to open themselves up to this attack.
And I will be repeated posting that the next time you start talking about why Harris lost due to how actively pro-trans she was, by reminding you agree that Democrats did not actually do anything pro-trans and for them to not been attacked on trans issues would have required them swinging hard anti-trans, to match the other party. (And somehow have done that decades ago.)
And the other party's position on trans issues is *checks notes as of 2/3/2025* holy f_cking sh_t. I'm not even going to try to describe it.
And if you want to make the argument that _both_ parties should turn to minority-bashing and oppression, you're going to have to make it explicitly.
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What Trump got impeached over for impeachment 1 was impounding funds, a thing that Congress explicitly made illegal after Nixon did it, and then the impeachment failed, and now that he's in office he's completely decided to do it. In fact, he's assigned Elon Musk to do it.
I feel it was, actually, a bit important.
Part of the problem is they tried to make it about Trump trying to extort Ukraine into investigating Biden, because they thought that sounded better. So Republicans argued it _wasn't_ that and it's legitimate to condition foreign aid on blah blah blah.
No. It doesn't matter. The President is required to spend the funds as stated by law. Period. End of story. It does not matter what he does not spend them on, it doesn't matter why he doesn't do it. That is perhaps an interesting backstory, but it is literally not important.
If the president starts deciding not to spend money allocated funds, he has seized the power to do retroactive line-item vetos. Remember, the line-item veto _itself_ is unconstitutional, even when it granted by a duly-passed law. Impoundment does it retroactively on existing law, and invents that power out of thin air.
Now, yes, there are probably some circumstances where the president feels the conditions have changed so much that to do so would be a violation of other parts of his oaths (Like if he's directed to give money to a country, but that country literally declared war on us before he can.), and he certainly can choose to do that...and he can be impeached for it. In fact, I'd argue that even if everyone understood the situation, it would be good to hold an impeachment hearing and _make him_ defend his actions. In front of Congress, sworn in.
Instead, yes, the Republicans in Congress decided to be extremely impotent about the President stealing their power.
And so he's done it again.
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I mean, I certainly can understand the position that 'literally no stock trades she can do can be trusted', and I guess the CIA could have informed her of something, even in China.
But December 31st sounds like someone just wanted out of the incredibly, blaring, extremely obvious bubble that was, and still is, NVidia, and decided they wanted it to happen in calendar year 2024 for tax reasons.
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Really? Those are the only two that seem problematic?
Have you tried pointing that out to the Trump administration, which has currently stopped research about any sort of trans people, calling it 'trans ideology', and has deleted a bunch of existing data like from public access?
Or blocked medical access and threatened to arrest people who provide it for people who are 18? Not under 18...under 19. Sure is sounding like they think _no one_ can consent to transition.
Who have decided to forcible de-transition prisoners? And note I'm not talking about 'not transitioning' or 'what prison people are in', I'm talking about, for example, trans women who have been in prison and fully transitioned for decades, and the Trump administration is not only trying to (It has been blocked for now) sending them to male prisons, demanding they use their old names, trying to cut their hair, but also refusing to provide hormone prescriptions. (Which to be clear, are incredibly cheap, just in case anyone is going to pretend it is about cost.) Many of these are women who cannot produce testosterone anymore, and thus will be left with no sex hormones, which of course poses long term risks.
Because it really looks like you got pretty badly motte-baileyed here, to use the official term of this site, and that what the people pushing these concerns _claim_ have an issue with is not actually limited to that.
In fact, they appear to dislike trans people existing at all.
Maybe at some point we start thinking about these two 'problematic' issues in the context of the very obvious goals of the people who keep talking about those things. (And, as I pointed out below, the government doesn't even _regulate_ sports rules, so that's almost nonsensical to pretend is somehow a political concern.)
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Hey, Dark Matter, what if I were to tell you that that obviously stupid policy was changed to actually require checking testosterone levels a few months later _by_ the governing body of the sport?
You know, like the IOC and pretty much all international sports organizations recommend.
And...trans people do not complain about this.
https://www.powerlifting.sport/fileadmin/ipf/data/rules/IPF_Trangender_Policy_21.8.2023_v3.pdf
You notice the date on that in the URL? September 8, 2023. And the date on that video? The competition was the March 23, 2023.
Five and half months. That feels like 'Literally the next meeting of the national organization' to me. I don't really know they work, but this is an national organization that managed to decide to change their rules, and actually change their rules (Yes, those are often two different things), and get them published, in five and a half months, which honestly feels rather astonishing.
And again, this is not something trans people object to. This is no trans person saying people should self-identify into sports. (Although you will find a lot of them pointing out that essentially no laws care about the rules of sports _except_ somehow when it's about them, and also that sports are literally unimportant recreational activities and should not be involved in policy discussions _at all_, and we certainly shouldn't be basing legal policy on sports being 'better' or whatever.)
This is not some ideological thing this guy found. It's a loophole of an organization that was careless. In fact, under their old rules, he shouldn't have been allowed either, because he was supposed to produce some ID with that gender on it, and he has none.
A loophole that got fixed immediately.
And somehow, this has political meaning. A loophole in an event that happened in a different country, under the control of a sports organization in that country, that was a bit slow on the uptake about the recommended way to do this but fixed it immediately. About an activity that is _entirely_ recreational and has no actual meaning for anything at all.
Weird how that's somehow meaningful to US politics or serves as an example of anything.
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Jaybird, the argument being made here by me is not that the trans issue didn't change things.
My argument is that that Democrats didn't 'support' trans people 'too much', but instead were incredibly neutral towards them, saying things like 'the courts says we provide healthcare to prisoners, including gender affirming care' and 'there's already some legal protection for discrimination'.
Incredibly milquetoast statements. And no policy changes at all, as evidenced by the fact you have to dig up the most trivial wording change and pretend it means anything at all.
What happened is a populist demagogue started railing about a minority and running ads about about how the other side wouldn't make that minority cease to exist, but instead kept saying vague platitudes about them.
Those are not the same thing.
Which means that when you say 'The Democrats shouldn't have left themselves open for attack', the only way for them to do that is to do the same thing as the populist demagogue, preemptively. They can't stop doing what they are doing, because they aren't doing anything. All they can do is also do what they other party is doing and attack trans people the same.
Actually...do worse. Because moving to that point would just move the demagogue farther into attacking the group. Or expanding it into gay people. So the Democrats would have to keep following them, presumable straight into, I dunno, where does the story _sound_ like it ends up?
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We are not talking about biology. We are talking about your assertions of how we sort humans. You claim the determining factor on how we sort humans is a thing almost no one has measured, for anyone. And certainly aren't doing it while walking around.
It doesn't actually matter how scientific or non-scientific the determining factor is, my assertion is not that isn't (See my other post), it is that we do not use it.
If you to claim that we sort bananas into large or small by the molecular density of their peel, I would also object to that. Even though it is a very specific thing we could measure. But that is not the way we sort bananas, and that is easy to demonstrate because absolutely no one knows what the molecular density of any banana peel is! It doesn't matter that fact could be measured, it is not a fact we use in sorting bananas.
You are an actual human, one assumes. You know, when you look at someone, you do not sort them into male or female using the size of their gametes. That is a flatly insane lie. You are not Dr. Manhattan, you cannot see the size of their gametes!
Um...in what universe are we even talking about if people who 'identify as women' can get pregnant? That literally was mentioned by no one. We were talking about people who 'did not identify as women', or, more to the point, 'people who are not legally women', could get pregnant.
Everyone, you can tell the transphobes, and the people who operate in transphobic spaces, because they always somehow make discussions about trans men into trans women, because they mostly forget trans men exist at all, often in the middle of a sentence.
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You know, it's funny how you can tell what circles someone hangs out in because of how they define that. The 'gamete' one is pretty much 'extreme transphobic social political circles'. Notably, it's what transphobes have settled on after having been demonstrated wrong on basically every other definition they came up with.
Now, explain to me: How do you know what size gametes you produce? Did you have them checked?
Or are you just _guessing_, based of other things?
Could it be that you're seeing various clues based off body and presentation, calculating a sex from those, and then _working backward_ to try to guess what sort of gametes someone produces, a thing you cannot possible know on sight, and likely do not even know of _yourself_.
And then claiming _that_ result is what everyone uses to do the calculation to start with.
That seems very dishonest.
You cannot use some sort of magical idealized version of reality where everyone has measured their own 'gamete size production' and pretend it applies to the world, at least not without admitting that means the sexes are currently about 1% male, 0.5% female, (Men are slightly more likely to have their sperm looked at) and 97.5% unknown. (And note I'm guessing really high here. People only tend to get reproductive cells looked at when having problems with infertility. It probably is a percentage of a fraction.)
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(In case you're wondering why I am harping on this, it's because you don't actually speak to any trans people on this, who know damn well that neither the Biden administration, nor the Harris campaign, actually did anything for trans people, not even speaking to fight against the massive wave of anti-trans laws. It is laughable to claim elected Democrats were too pro-trans.)
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I am bringing this down here to talk about this policy instead of up there, because I do expect the production of a better example up there. But I do want to mention this:
When the CDC changed its wording, there were people who are _legally_ not women who get pregnant. (1) There were people who had their legal gender as male or non-binary who were pregnant.
That is a true statement and not debatable.
What the CDC did was change its terminology to reflect existing reality of the law.
The law acknowledges trans people exist. This is a thing that is true in every state, it is true at the Federal, trans people are just a thing that exists in US law. You can argue they shouldn't, but they do. And this has been true for _decades_.
In fact, I would suggest that people complaining about the CDC's change, which again reflects legal reality, is just people complaining about trans people existing.
And that, in fact, is what the claim that the Democrats are ' fixated on social or cultural issues' is. Just...complaints that Democrats are refusing to say that trans people do not exist.
1) And still are, despite Trump's gibberish EO.
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Hey, so, I guess that renders all the 'Harris should have gone on Rogan and it was a huge mistake not to' discussion into utter gibberish, right?
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So we are at the point that the only example of 'pro-trans policy' is a government agency using slightly different phrasing.
Is that your final answer?
I'm not arguing it doesn't technically fit the criteria I laid out, I guess is it a policy that Democrats did, but I don't even have to point out how weaksauce that thing is, you already know how weaksauce that is because you preemptively apologized for it.
But...it doesn't work as an example of _priorities_ anyway. If you go back to the original comment, we are talking about what 'kind of issues' are 'prioritized' by the Democratic party. That was the original claim.
You have managed to track down a single tiny pro-trans thing that 'Democrats did', but it sure as hell was not presented as any sort of priority. The people who brought it up as a talking point were _Republicans_, not the Democrats. The Democrats just...silently did it. Not even them. The administrators that Democrats staffed the government with silently did it. It's not even a law.
Since apparently I need to clarify: Do you have anything pro-trans that the Democrats _presented as a thing they were going to do_? And then did?
Either in an election as a platform, or as some sort of policy statement, or anything like that.
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Part of the premise of fascism is that people 'voluntarily' overreact and comply in advance, because the regime is always extremely erratic, lashing out at random, and that is no possible way to actually follow the rules perfectly and be safe. So the only possible thing to is 'virtue signal' that you are trying as best as you can, please, daddy, don't hit me.
No, I'm not making a joke there, fascism, when taken a as a whole, looks very much like how abusive relationships with huge power dynamics(1) work, and people under fascism react in much the same way as people do to abusers with power over them. Often by desperately trying to please them in advance so the abusers target someone else instead of them. Sometimes even offering up targets.
1) Aka, things like parent/child abusive relationships. Relationships where the victim can exit the relationship look a little different and the abuser has slightly less power, has to occasionally cave and pretend to offer care and support. Although of course, the abuser doesn't like that and will always try fix that situation so the victim cannot leave.
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Again, you have, very mysteriously, not listed a policy that helped trans people, and instead have chosen to present an example of the thing that prisons are constitutionally required to do (provide healthcare) and that Harris and the Democrats did not do.
In fact, the idea that prisons have to provide gender-affirming care was decided by the courts, in Edmo v. Idaho Department of Correction. And others. The court decision is also correct, the courts have long held that denying medical care to inmates is 'cruel and unusual punishment'.
But none of that is important, because we're not talking about that. We're _trying_ to talk about the thing you assert has been happening, where Democrats do a lot of stuff that is pro-trans and there is 'pushback' to that.
And I am asking you, again, to _literally name a single example_. One that wasn't, in fact, done by the courts. You seem incredibly sure this has been happening, please name one instance.
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Jaybird, I would like a single bit of evidence that Democrats made a bigger issues of trans people in 2020 than Republicans did in 2020 or 2024. You just sorta redirected back to 2020 without saying the example.
This because the example you cited last time on this topic was 'prisoners should receive standard medical care', a thing that not only is true in general, but prisons are extremely obviously a place where you can make the population angry for any nonsensical reason.
"Democrats are using OUR TAX MONEY to pay for food for convicted RAPISTS of CHILDREN."
Yeah, that's what happens when you imprison people, you have to pay for their care. That is not a policy choice per se, and more the fact that killing prisoners by withholding necessities from them is, uh, not only unconstitutional but very literally psychopathic.
As a 'policy', this is nonsense.
Do you have an example of a _policy_ that Democrats made, or will your next example be something like 'Democrats continue to enforce laws that make it illegal to murder trans people where they stand!'
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Jaybird, we understand you do not understand what is going on, but this discussion is _not_ about whether or not Trump is doing 'well', it is whether or not elected Democrats and the people on this site and the public at large understand he and his administration have explicitly become genocidal against trans people, and that other minorities are next.
We do not actually care he has not accomplished much there. And we don't particularly care, in this context, if the trains run on time.
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To be very clear, I am not panicked. In real life, I am slowly and methodically doing many things, a lot of which I will not say here, but mostly consist of making sure people are safe.
What I am doing _here_ is merely trying to get people to pay attention, because I am trying to figure out the arguments that can cause politically active people to stop being stupid.
Or, was. Instead what I'm getting here is a lot of people inadvertently answering the question: What would you do in Germany in the early 1930s?
A lot, and I mean a _lot_, of people are completely failing this test.
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Jaybird, I would like a single bit of evidence that Democrats made a bigger issues of trans people than Republicans did this election.
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Trump has issued an EO attacking schools that allow students to socially transition in any manner, and threatening to have the AG charge teachers for going along with with it.
This is, to repeat, threatening arrest of teachers who use the names that students wish them to use. It is not about restrooms, it is not about medication, it is not about informing parents. This is threatening the arrest, of teachers, that do not oppose students who, wish to use another name and pronoun. Even if they have the permission of their parents.
To be clear, this is not some weird interpretation of the EO. It literally says that. It is very clear.
Good to see so many people on this actual exact page that propose pre-emptivingly caving on trans issues as some sort of triangulation, a thing that surely makes logical sense.
So, again I ask: When _exactly_ do we actually start recognizing what is going on?
Is it next week, when they going after parents for it?
Is it when they go after gay students?
I am asking people to actually _state the line_ that they are waiting for Trump to cross to call it fascism. Draw it in the sand.
And maybe that will make you all stop being cowards.
On “Trump’s Unforced Error”
Oh, don't worry, all the Very Serious people here think this couldn't possibly be fascism.
Incidentally, our deportation policy was already implemented by a very fascistic agency, ICE, and honestly was pretty horrific. There's a lot of bogus both-siding in politics, but the _amount_ of deportations really is both-sides, as is just how horrific ICE actually behaves.
And as pointed out, Trump is not noticeably doing more than that. Deportations are not really up.
So why would we to turn military bases into detention centers? Or, to ask an even better question, why would be detaining 'the worst of the worst' there, as Trump put it?
Why are we detaining anyone we're deporting _at all_? The only reason we detain anyone is that we need to first put them in front of a immigration judge...why does it matter how 'bad' they are if we're just deporting them anyway, and are we going to be operating immigration courts down there in Cuba?
That seems like a hell of a lot of work, flying people to Cuba, just to...have a immigration hearing and deport them. Doesn't it? Does this even slightly make sense?
Also, again, we normally deport people on commercial flights. Rather obviously, we cannot put people on commercial flights in Cuba. Or into Cuba, for that matter!
None of these makes sense, and the entire purpose of this is fir Trump to _punish_ people here illegal. It isn't going to be 'detaining people until a hearing', it's just going to be detaining people, period, for years, while pretending to gearing up for a hearing that never comes. It's the same reason he's chaining people to seats on military planes.
And, just like the military planes, he will triumphantly explaining to the public that _that_ is what we do to foreign lawbreakers. A boot stamping on a face, etc.
Luckily, we all know this Can't Be Fascism. Otherwise, it would look a _lot_ like it.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.