The more deliberately twisted shit they can make you believe, the more dependent your entire cognitive architecture is on them.
Not a fan of credits to buyers (just inflates prices further) but I'm a big fan of credits to developers, streamlining permitting, and making some federal land available for development.
Regardless of whether you think these are good policies or an effective platform, it is patently false to say no one would run on such a promise.
You would say "we're going to build more housing."
Now keep that thought in mind... and now acknowledge that that hypothetical government is actually the current one.
Pay close attention to what your mind is doing and let us know if you notice any interesting contortions that somehow draw a line between the obviously fucking insane hypothetical government you were imagining a second ago and the current real one. Report back!
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/02/05/n...
"We may have short-term, a little pain, and people understand that,"
(The _third_ WW2-era bomb design, an impractically long plutonium gun-type. Much like Vance, it was rather pointless and impractical, and was never really heard from again.)
https://chcoc.gov/content/initial-guidance-regarding-preside...
The order is to remove gender ideology, i.e. trans. Switch gender back to sex (binary).
We can talk about the sports issue, the bathroom issue etc. But how many of us have had said issues? How often do these issues occur? Is the resolution in favor of the status quo actually better on the whole if it costs the personal expression of say 10,000 people? 100,000? How many people should be told what to wear and which doctor to see before you are satisfied to have squashed the "idealogy"?
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31120958/questio...
These are a swingy group that could go either way. This podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/will-tariffs-end-trump...
describes polls that make it clear that Americans think that Republicans care about the issues that matter to them and that Democrats don't. "Woke" talk contributes a lot to the latter.
The good news for them though is that now that they see Republicans in power talking crazy like this, Democrats will look more normal to people. But if people on the left muzzled their own fanatics years ago we'd have woken up in a different America.
Biology is hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Back in the 1960s parents got worried that their kids turned into hippies, but hippies managed to supply their own drugs and didn't need to get an Rx from a doc.
I can tell you there’s already been critical guidance from the FDA on clinical trials that have been removed because they have the word “diversity,” as in “a clinical trial’s population should aim to reflect the diversity of the population to which the drug will ultimately be marketed.”
Wintrobe's book [1] has an analysis of a tinpot dictator who wants to steal everything a country has but has to spend some resources on buying people off and some on repression so that he can get away with it. Bill Clinton made a similar maneuver around 'triangulation' that amounts to trying to share as little of the spoils to mass supporters as possible so that he can really give as much as the spoils as he can to donors.
In the case of Bill Clinton he got the full court press from [2] so he could say he was under so much pressure from the right that he didn't have to do anything for the left.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, made a clear show of disdain for the activist faction of the party but they were supposed to vote for her because, hey, she's a woman. She also hoped to win by default against Trump.
Harris didn't show the activist fringe much love, but she didn't show disdain for it either. She was also hoping to win by default, which didn't happen. Because she didn't define herself, she was defined by Fox News. She would have had to have broken visibly with the activist fringe, however, which seems like it could have been a risky move although the dirty secret is that the activist fringe may not actually vote and if it does vote it is concentrated in places where their vote doesn't count.
For now, Trumps's salvos in the culture war are 'cheap talk' that pleases certain people but doesn't consume resources that are coveted by donors. I suspect it will be unpopular too, since people are going to blame you for things once you get in power.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Political-Economy-Dictatorship-Wintro...
You have one party’s “extremism” which takes the form of bluehaired Twitterati saying stupid shit and, I guess, not getting sufficiently disowned by actual political leaders?
On the other hand you have an ongoing ACTUAL ideological purge of our government’s personnel, records, budget, and data, complete with watchwords (like “women”) and loyalty tests.
It seemed to be based on taking your post (“scrub all mentions of the word "women"”) at face value.
You understand now that that isn’t true? That the word “women” is not being scrubbed, and nobody has asked for it to be scrubbed?
I spoke to my uncle about this when he was convalescing in a nursing home. We live in New York, neither of our votes counted. I voted for Harris, he voted for Trump.
He did not see it as a black or white thing, he saw it as a comparison. He didn't see Harris as giving any reason why he should vote for her other than, maybe, she is a woman. The message that you shouldn't vote for Trump didn't resonate. Personally I saw Jan 6 as worse than Sept 11 but actually most people don't. Probably the best explanation I see for this is talked about in this podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/will-tariffs-end-trump...
where Americans were asked "What issues matter to you?" and "What issues matter to X party?" and found that the lists mostly lined up when X=Republican but that people didn't see Democrats talking about the issues that mattered to them.
This is connected to my argument above because the reason why Democrats fall into that trap is the same thing that has ruined center-left parties everywhere in the world: that they make a lot of cheap talk to impress their base while reserving the spoils for their donors.
The good news is that people will be pretty sick of the Republicans in 2 years and if the Democrats were a normal party they would take over the house of representatives pretty definitively then. They've got an amazing way to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory though.
A bunch of people said stupid shit on Tumbler, so I guess the republicans just had to go tear down all our institutions and grift every dime they can?
It's pathetic, but par for the course for the party that insists on "personal responsibility", yet blames Democrats for the deficit despite being empirically responsible for most of it.
"You had extremists" nope, none of those people screaming on tumbler were invited into the Party's cabinet.
Winning the next election is the most realistic plan. Maybe not that hard in 2026 for Congress, we might win earlier than that since there are 3 special elections in the queue already and 6 per year on average. Flip 3 seats and the Republicans no longer control the House. The thinner the margin it is the more some lunatic who is offended by the idea of having a budget can throw sand in the gears.
Winning all the elections from 2025-2028 is the thing to be thinking about, and thinking about the loss in 2024 is key to that.