The Democratic donor class is much more concerned with picking winners in toss up districts than it is picking policy positions.

Shit, I’ve wanted Barbara Lee to be Speaker ever since she was the only Congressperson to vote against starting the Forever War on Terror.

Third base!

Way back in the Nineties
I was in a very famous TV show
I’m Jacket the Phoneman
Jacket the Phone
Don’t act like you don’t know

This appears to be a reference to this:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/in-an-attempt-to-empower-sex-workers-did-netflix-exploit-them_us_59025a33e4b05c39767d36af

Jesus, it’d be like me saying that I once supported Hugh Hefner even though I’ve always been opposed to pornography. What the fuck else was he ever known for that would have ever justified my support despite my anti-porn beliefs?

No, it doesn’t go like that. These are policies that few or no voters actually support. Nobody who actually works (worked) in a factory thinks it’s a good idea to outsource their job. No voter is out there going “why yes, we should be sending troops to Syria.” That kind of thing. But Republican politicians (and most…

You’re correct that Republicans were also very deeply involved in all of these horrible practices (usually more so than Democrats), for sure. NAFTA (the outsourcing I was specifically talking about) was originally negotiated by the first Bush administration, the war on terror was initiated by the second Bush…

Nobody deserves anything, because the concept of “desert” implies some external God or karma which likely doesn’t exist!

I also kind of think that part of the reason people voted for Trump was, they were fucked over very badly by systems of oppression that Good Coastal Liberals tacitly supported. Clinton supported outsourcing; congressional Democrats mostly voted for the forever war on terror; Obama failed to do much about the opioid…

Politics is an intrinsic part of life in a human society, and this extends to the art made by that society. It’s impossible to excise politics from art, and when people pretend they’re doing so, that’s its own kind of politically valenced statement. (To be clear, I have no idea whether this movie is doing that kind of…

I feel like pirates were actually probably less morally bankrupt than a lot of people back in those days. Sure, they were rapists and murderers, but so were the various colonialists the pirates were stealing from. And the pirates were significantly less shitty in terms of slavery, genocide, and the other stuff that…

1969 wasn’t “pre-feminism” though, it was smack dab in the middle of the second wave of feminism (and as the name implies, the ideology had a first wave which had existed for like a hundred years at that point). And while the word “ableism” may or may not have been around then, the basic concept of “don’t treat people…

Supercop goes on and off streaming pretty regularly, but I will always watch it whenever it comes back on.

I don’t think that’s true. Especially with a sitcom, it takes time for the actors to figure out their characters, or for the writers to figure out what kinds of jokes do and don’t work for their show. (And for the writers and actors to get comfortable with each other and play to each other’s strengths.) I wouldn’t…

I really liked the thread of “Elfo wants to experience the crummy aspects of life which he couldn’t get in magical elf land” - I think that’s an interesting hook for the character, and I wish they would play that up more while downplaying the whole “whiny friend who wants to get with Bean” angle.

My take is that it’s too early to tell - there have only been ten episodes or whatever, so the characters aren’t very developed yet.  So I would say “wait until they’re released more episodes and then ask people again.”

I got sucked down a wiki hole yesterday - did you know that in 1938, the KMT destroyed a dam on the Yellow River, causing a flood which inundated over 20,000 square miles and killed somewhere between 500,000 and a million people? They were being pushed back by the Imperial Japanese army during their invasion, and…

I also think that American national identity was shaped pretty profoundly by manifest destiny, and so even after the frontier was closed we’ve kept trying to recreate those conditions.  That explains all the imperialism (and its frequent association with cowboy imagery, George W. Bush style).  And I think that same…

“Vunce ze rockets go up, who cares vere zey come down? Zat’s not my department,” says Claire Foy.