John Quincy Adams.
Every day, at about 5:30 in the morning, totally naked.
Anne Royall, one of the first female journalists, allegedly forced Adams to do an interview with her by taking his clothes and refusing to give them back to him until he answered all her questions.
Andrew Jackson for his inauguration party invited literally anybody who showed up to attend, and a bunch of people got roaring drunk and wrecked up the White House.
The fuck happened to us man
He also got shot in the chest at the beginning of a speech, calmed everybody down and told the crowd to give the assassin to the police and make sure nobody hurt him, and then spoke for 50 minutes before he left to get medical care.
He said later that because he wasn’t coughing blood, he was confident the bullet hadn’t pierced his lung, so he could go for a while before needing it looked at.
Before the invention of TV stupefied everybody, America was fuckin WILD.
I don’t think anyone was framing Mormons as the good guys
Even by the standards of organized religion, Mormonism is very weird. Cf Ruby Franke. The early history is absolutely wild, and in Utah they still have tons of money and power and everyone acts like it’s just a normal thing.
When people were upset at Substack for hosting Nazis, multiple people told me that Germany’s laws prohibiting hate speech were the right way to do it (often claiming incorrectly that the US had similar laws or regulations).
I told those people that restrictions on speech would inevitably be used against points of view they agreed with that needed to be heard, when those became “hate speech” from the point of view of the powerful.
Every one of these people told me no, that’s not how it works, they’re only going to restrict actually hateful speech, so there’s no problem.
Under Trump's watch Iran attacked US troops directly, injuring over 100 many of whom had to be evacuated to Germany for treatment. The Trump white house treated it mostly as a problem that the events were being reported and making them look bad. They didn't, as far as anyone can tell, have any kind of problem with Iran for having done it.
Trump's presidency was such a clusterfuck, and our news is so bad at reporting seriously about what's going on in the world, that it's easy to overlook or forget things that would have been the end of their presidency for a Democrat.
I know when I think of boomers, I think "probably likes to express opinions in favor of China / North Korea, and that voting for Democrats isn't worthwhile, and a steady flow of memes they find on meme pages, and not much else aside from those three categories of things." You know... boomer stuff.
having an competitor like the Green party start to grow in support would push the Dems to do more about it
Sounds great. I like the idea. How can I help the Greens become a more serious contender in the future?
Also, how does risking Trump winning the general election in November assist in that effort in any way?
voting for Democrats only makes out situation worse
Tell me you're not a pregnant woman who needs obstetric care of any kind or a capitol policeman or trans or Hispanic or a person who's trying to get sick days from their union or a Ukrainian
by consenting to neoliberal capitalism
Yes, everyone knows that simply not consenting to the system suddenly makes it go away. Just ask anyone who's ever been on a traffic stop -- you just have to tell the policeman you do not consent, and all of a sudden, everything changes, and it works out better that you didn't go along with the system.
If only the civil rights movement had been privy to this knowledge, they could have done their decades of work to make the system better much more simply and easily
Clinton was not good on inequality, it was the opposite. He started the trend of abandoning workers with NAFTA
Yes, 100%. This part I agree with; Clinton was very bad.
and it's gotten worse ever since
This part I also agree with.
You spent a long time restating your claim that the Democrats are responsible for all of that and that the trend is accelerating with successive Democrats, neither of which I agree with, and I already laid out some data to say why. Did you have some kind of data or something to back up the argument?
(I saw your chart... it's hard to draw too many conclusions from just 3 data points on the X axis but it looks to me like what it shows is what I said: Inequality got massively worse under Reagan, Clinton, and Bush 1 and 2, and then tapered off although still getting worse under Obama, and nothing is shown after that. I.e. I'm not sold that that chart means that Democrats are the ones doing it.)
Yeah. And the whole thrust of that whole document is, more or less, how can we use violence anywhere in the world to achieve our goals while making sure it won't get out of control or come into a realm where it might come back and impact our happy, well-fed families.
I wasn't saying any of this whole thing as a good thing necessarily; just giving the description: This is how the US tends to behave.
If Israel is trying to ensure its safety and survival while surrounded by enemies, its current course of action is guaranteed to make that impossible for the forseeable future. You couldn't ask for a more perfect recipe for continued terrorism against Israel if you specifically tried to create one.
The irony is that the framework of international law that was created after World War 2, specifically to deal with crimes against the Jews, showed the right way to deal with monstrous acts 10 times worse than October 7th, without creating an endless cycle of violence and humiliation and retribution like the one that led led to the rise of the terrorist state which had tried to exterminate them. Modern Israel has taken that priceless and painful lesson, and left it trampled and forgotten in the mud while they embark on their latest bloodthirsty adventure.
Usually, if you’re running for president, you want to invest money into political or media machines that are going to create true believers for you
If you’re taking the already existing true believers, who think you’re a business genius and all your prosecutions are politically motivated and the election was stolen (like really honestly think all of that is what happened, because they are too deep sunk in propaganda to even see the surface)… and creating an opportunity for them to lose a bunch of their own money by investing in your company, like really be exposed on a personal unavoidable level to how much of a fraud you are and always have been… you’re doing it wrong.
I get it. It’s desperation; you have to siphon money out of them because you need all you can get right now. But it still seems like a tactical error, like there must be another way.