Commenter Archive

Ah, I didn't know UCLA was a Columbia campus.

Aha, so people have been saying since 2023 that they don't like a movie that has yet to be released in 2025. Definitely not racist.

I don't think so? When was it?

I was here when a certain former front-pager argued that casting a black actor as Indiana Jones would be bad because if he'd been a kid and Indiana Jones had been black he wouldn't have gone into archaeology. That was also inarguably racist.

What other reasons, that exclude any reference to her race, ethnicity, or skin tone, might there be for opposing her casting on grounds that it is "woke."

I'd love to see some video or accounts that confirm your understanding.

Look, I think there's some wiggle room in anti-wokism that makes it difficult to call everyone who's anti-woke racist/misogynistic/anti-LGBT, but the only reason for being upset about this casting decision is racism.

Seems like it to me. Generally when you have a protest like that, you don't let counterprotesters in. Since most supporters of Israel are not Jewish, it's quite a stretch to call this discrimination against anything but counterprotesters.

That said, if we're going with that, what about universities canceling speakers who support Palestine? Ban Palestinian flags from events (but not other flags)? Ban pro-Palestinian protests specifically? Deny tenure to faculty who support Palestine? Are these forms of discrimination, because if so, man, we have a whole lot of universities that should lose funding.

I think if the legal one includes "protesting a genocide" and "supporting Palestinians" and, in fact, basically just being a Palestinian, then, gasp! It ain't the students/faculty/school doing the discrimination.

What are some examples of this discrimination?

People have talked about this administration producing Constitutional crises, but I suppose here's the first chance for them to produce a genuine one: do they comply with an order of the Supreme Court, or do they simply ignore it? I'm actually betting they'll ignore it. And even if they actually comply, what will the administration's response be? Packing the court? Getting to Congress to say he doesn't have to pay the money? Going after individual justices? Some combination of all three? So many opportunities for real Constitutional crises. These are exciting times.

Yeah, for me at least, the worry isn't that Russia would launch its nukes at us. It's that if things got to the point that Russia was pressing the button, they wouldn't be the only one, and I'd bet most of China's increasingly modernized nukes work.

I think the worry was that Ukraine (and other smaller former Soviet republics) would not protect their nukes as well. Perhaps to a lesser extent, there was a worry they'd sell them, but just thinking back to the post-Cold War discourse around the nukes in the former Soviet Union, it was security that was the big issue. I remember talk of these nukes basically being out in the open for anyone to take.

Whether this was realistic or not, I don't know. I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to the politics of Ukraine in the early-to-mid 90s.

There’s a strange existential *thereness* to his rhetoric… one minute he’s making up stuff that isn’t true, another he’s reading things he has no idea the meaning of, and another he’s just saying things he think might be neat.

I did not watch this, and have no intention of doing so, but after a decade or more of watching Trump be the late political version of Trump (which is different from the Apprentice version of Trump, and very different from the 80s/90s tabloid celebrity version of Trump), I have a pretty good idea of how it must have gone. And I totally get what you mean about the "existential thereness." Though he's a New Yorker through and through, it reminds me a great deal of my redneck southern friends and relatives back home, whose storytelling might be described as meandering by someone who isn't paying close enough attention to see the logic and the through-line. Sure, some of the digressions seem like little more than flights of ideas, but they contribute to the mood of the story in a way that shouldn't be underestimated. And besides, sometimes it's just important to remind people that Bubba really hates Kevin who lives down the street just past the old church that's not there anymore.

Ha... was just responding that I wasn't spending time in right wing world back then, so I may have just missed it. This might be the origin of it in the broader discourse, then. I remember liberals referring to MAGA as a cult during Trump's first term (maybe even the '16 campaign, I can't remember), and was thinking maybe that's where it started.

And I'm not gonna lie, I remember going to an Evangelical church in 2017, where Trump was much discussed in extremely religious terms, and thinking this was disturbingly cult-like behavior.

Interesting. Sadly I can't read it without a subscription. Whatever the articles says, the idea of Obama fans as "cultists" doesn't seem to have taken generally, though I admit I was not hanging around a lot of right wing circles back then, so maybe it took there.

I also found this from 2005, though it seems to be using cult to refer to a specific shadowy group, not all Dubya supporters.

I wonder when people started referring to hyper-partisans or staunch supporters of particular candidates as cultists. I don't remember it being a thing under Bush or Obama, though it's possible I missed it, or just forgot about it because it wasn't a super common thing. But at least since Trump's first term, I've heard people on both sides refer to people on the other as cultists. I get the idea of Trump as a Cult of Personality, but where does the rest of the cult talk come from?

Who's gonna convince him to reverse it? Trump is either a lame duck president or he won't need to be reelected to remain president, and doesn't seem to really care about the impact of what he's doing on voters. Is Congress going to tell him to reverse it? Musk? Someone else he actually listens to?

I assume at some point, Republicans in Congress, and maybe even at the state level, start sweating about reelection if Trump keeps breaking things, but to date, they've shown absolutely no interest in challenging Trump on anything, so a lot of damage can be done before that happens.

Are you German? I can't quite figure out why you're transliterating the name that way. It's probably innocent, but in today's political climate, when people spell certain names in certain ways to make them sound more foreign, I get anxious when I see someone doing something like this.

(By the way, sorry to turn this into a discussion about the healthcare system. I meant only to use it as an example of an actual idea someone who at least caucuses with the Dems has, and has campaigned on, to show that it is at least possible for someone to the left of Mitt Romney to have ideas and campaign on them.)

I agree it would be a mess for the labor market, but that's largely a problem for capital to sort out, not labor, and I believe people would be able to recognize, fairly quickly, the benefits to labor on top of the raise in pay (even if it's ultimately mostly taxed away), one of which you mention: the ability to leave your job, rather to drop out of the workforce (say, to become a stay at home parent, a full time caregiver for an adult relative, or because of your own health/mental health issues), or to find another job, is severely limited by having your healthcare tied to your employer. A universal healthcare system that is not tied to employment would result in one of the biggest increases in labor power in a century, and if I were a politician selling something like Medicare for All, I'd be saying this a hundred times per day.

I should have been clearer: I actually think Trump is this. I mean if they'd ever seen one among the Democrats (actually they have, Bernie, and they like him).

Let me just add: I'm not even a Bernie supporter, though it may seem like that here. I just would prefer that the opposition party model themselves after a popular politician with ideas than, well, whatever they've been doing.

Hell, if we can go back to a very different Democrat who did this, it worked pretty well for Obama. His ideas were more centered around vibes than Bernie's, but at least they were ideas, and he was very good at selling people on them.

I think it's possible to convince people without presenting them with graphs and syllogisms. Trump is living proof of that. I watch on Facebook as people are regularly convinced by him and his minions (and whatever Musk is) that what he's doing is good for the country. The Democrats would have to have ideas in order to want to convince people of them.

Oh for sure. I think someone like Bernie could win this debate in the eyes of voters, given the proper forum (and I think he generally succeeds when he has the forum). I don't know that anyone else with national visibility in the Democratic Party could.

Unrelated, but an interesting thing in considering the centrist perspective is that Bernie himself is not only not particularly aligned with the "woke" wing of the Democratic Party, but in '16 at least, was pretty actively opposed by that wing. So while I get the centrist argument that "wokeness" is harmful, it really feels like they, or at least some of them, wield it as a general attack on the party's left wing even where it doesn't apply.

I think universal healthcare, once real proposals were before the American people, is something people would have to be convinced on, especially the middle class, who likely are pretty happy with their insurance, barring major illness. Unfortunately, I think the U.S. has had precisely two politicians who have been good at convincing people of things in the last 16 years, both of whom Democratic Party insiders hate (Trump and Bernie). To me, this says something both about our political system generally and about the Democratic Party in particular.

I prefer a party with principles than one whose entire political philosophy is avoiding making the other party's ads for them. I suspect the electorate would too, if they ever got to see one.

If your paycheck is smaller after getting rid of your employer-provided coverage, it's probably because your employer pocketed the savings.