I worry for our future. As it stands, it is looking to be very, very bleak.
Exactly this. We no longer have a grand total of 3 TV channels; it's a conscious choice to tune to fox news and consume that rage-bate-as-a-distraction.
As long as it's profitable to offer up "bespoke" views of the world to individuals, there's next to no hope of those individuals being able to galvanize under a common and shared set of facts and that's a per-requistie for any sort of mass protest/change.
Didn't see any mention of that in the news.
Most mainstream news covered him blaming DEI and and most mentioned specifically people with disabilities. Many didn't go into the laundry list of specific disabilities Trump mentioned.
No one is defending the NIH or Fauci or the math department at UCLA in a way that makes sense to a majority of Americans... Why these are even under attack in the first place is beyond me.
Bus drivers and airline pilots get mental evaluations, and they are only responsible for two hundred people at a time. Yet person responsible for whole country can have any mental illness.
No, the reason people don’t discuss this is that the next question is “so you have a mandatory evaluateion, what are the consequences, and who selects the evaluator?” And you very quickly realize that any proposal is either:
(a) adding nothing substantive that isn't already covered by existing provisions allowing for removing people for incapacity, or
(b) creating a new and unaccountable seat of power, or
(c) designing a replacement (which may be an improvement!) for the processes discussed in (a) to which the evaluation mandate is a jumping off point that turns out to be superfluous.
Also, you realize that to effect anything with any consequences for the Presidency and some other offices, legislation doesn’t work, you need a Constitutional Amendment.
1. Have actual democratic primaries and get rid of their super delegates.
2. Advocate for the rights of American citizens and not of those streaming illegally across the borders.
3. Protect American industry and labor. This doesn’t just mean propping up unions - it means making an actual effort to bring industry back to the US.
The rest is just theatre. So this autism declaration, or trans baiting is just the sideshow. IMHO - the those are the three main things for me to start considering the democrats again.
Superdelegates exist but have no vote in the first round unless their votes collectively can have no impact on the outcome; this reform was adopted for 2020 and beyond by the DNC in 2018.
The other points are just arguments that Democrats need to adopt MAGA positions on currently salient, highly-divisive issues for which preferences are highly correlates with other MAGA policy preferences, which would remove the reasons many Democratic voters support the party without (because of the correlation of preferences) making the party more palatable to most people who currently disagree with the Democrats on those issues.
I would aggree with you that this "is just theatre" and as long as whoever is in charge is looking into the important stuff on economics and public policy, we could ignore the theatrics. I don't think this guy is doing a good job on the "important" stuff, but that's beyond me and I don't really have a say on tariffs, immigration or whatever else on someone else's country.
However, the "theatre" he does hurts real people in the real world. Trans people get killed or refused care, kids get shot in schools and even his own allies get hurt in the heat of the political theatre he creates. I must say I'm actually kind of glad he switched aim from vaccines to Tylenol: the whole antivax thing was extremely dangerous to the population as a whole, while blaming Tylenol will maybe hurt some pharma sales that's all. I wish he went with this discourse from the start, instead of spreading fear over vaccination during the times the World needed vaccines the most.
With that said, my whole point is that, unfortunatelly, political discourse has power, even if it's just theatrics. I wish you folks had more than two options in the US so you wouldn't need to choose his hateful and harmful discourse over the opposition, but sometimes you have to make do with what you have and it's not going to be good.
I don’t agree with the administration on abortion and trans policies. There is a lot more to trans than just trans men in women’s sport and bathrooms.
Immigration enforcement should have better due process and it should be welcomed by both Democrat and republicans. There is no reason for democratic law makers to claim not to comply with federal law.
Either way - the points I put out is something I hear often in the US. Most people get shutdown in public for even appearing to agree with the current admin on policy even if they don’t agree with the implementation theatrics. It’s a bit of a shit show here when it comes to having an honest conversation.
This basically had no impact because the political ads just said she was going to open the border and use your taxes to pay for transing your kids anyway. The Dems can't reasonably change how they're viewed in the media environment and if they do manage to take out a moderate position on something they'll just be seen as the slightly less effective option - once everyone agrees the border needs to be tougher, why not vote for the party that's louder on immigration anyway?
Germany has a huge manufacturing surplus, and yet its share of employment in industry has been declining for at least 40 years now.[1] "Industry" cannot be "brought back" [2] because what it once was no longer exists. Productivity in manufacturing has gone up through the roof, and manufacturing simply doesn't need many jobs now. Jobs are needed in professions like nursing and education.
> Advocate for the rights of American citizens and not of those streaming illegally across the borders.
That borders on stupidity at the level of climate-change denial or anti-vax. First, people are "streaming illegally across the border" because American citizens want them to help the economy. And if Americans change their minds and are willing to live with fewer immigrants in a weaker economy, at any specific point in time, the rights that need to be advocated are those that are in danger. At this point, however, it seems that the Trump administration is threatening the rights of both immigrants and citizens, which is why you see Democrats sounding the alarm on both.
[1]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.IND.EMPL.ZS?location...
[2]: https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2025/closing-t...
While the manufacturing jobs of old cannot be brought back because they no longer exist - they've been eliminated by automation - there could be non-economic arguments for bringing back more manufacturing (e.g. a national security argument). The Biden administration did actually do that; the Trump administration is actively harming manufacturing with its exceptionally incompetent and stupid tariff policy (a very different tariff policy could hypothetically help manufacturing, but economists will tell you that subsidies - along the lines of what the Biden administration implemented - would be more effective and cause less economic harm).
The bottom line is that, on the economy, as in health, what most characterizes the Trump administration is an almost unbelievable level of stupidity and incompetence, and it will achieve none of the positive economic goals it purported to pursue (and is likely to achieve the opposite). This means that the only intended change this administration is bringing about is the Orban-style consolidation of power and authoritarianism, and a reduction in education and research.
If you want to look at things from a purely cynical point of view, that parties seek to "manufacture" voters, with the current dominant polarization axis, Democrats' clear interest is to have more educated and/or informed Americans, while Republicans' clear interest is to have fewer.
Yes, indeed, if the democrats were only more performatively cruel to illegal immigrants then I am sure they would win more elections. Why even tack that comment at the end? Do you really think democrats are supporting illegal immigrants at the expense of Americans?
> In Silver Bulletin’s polling average, the president is now behind by 4.2 percentage points on his handling of immigration-related topics, where he was once above water by seven percentage points at the beginning of his term. It’s clear why: the images of chaotic and sometimes violent ICE raids across the country have spurred outrage; in a Washington Post/Ipsos poll this week, the raids were the strongest issue motivating disapproval of the president, with 20 percent of voters who said they disapproved of Trump’s overall performance citing “immigration” issues as “the worst thing Trump has done” so far in office.
Although some people were always going to cheer on the cruelty they were promised:
> The reason for the more staggered decline (compared to other issues) was also prominent in the Post’s polling: 55 percent of respondents who said they approved of Trump’s overall job performance cited immigration as the “best thing Trump has done” since taking office. The seemingly disjointed result can be explained thusly: while Trump is gradually seeing his support base shrink on immigration-related issues, those Americans who remain in this camp are strongly supportive of the crackdowns.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
More importantly, the claim that immigration (illegal or otherwise) is at the expense of citizens is at the very least highly debatable, and not what most economists think. E.g. here's Paul Krugman:
> Until the 1990s many economists, myself included, believed that immigrants with limited formal education were substituting for native-born workers. As a consequence, we thought that immigrants would put downward pressure on the wages of less educated native-born workers. Most of us changed our minds in the face of evidence that immigrants were taking very different jobs from native-born workers with similar education. This meant that they were complements, not substitutes, even for low-education native-born workers, and probably raised their wages. For example, more immigrants to pick fruits and vegetables translates into lower food prices and higher real wages for native-born workers.
That is not to say that Americans must accept illegal immigration or even legal immigration, but the claim that it's at their expense is far from established.
Immigration - legal and illegal - high skill and low skill - are net positives to the economy and even our social safety-net programs. American citizens come out way on top in this whole deal by far.
And if you think giving immigrants a few bucks to get started is expensive, it's a pittance next to the costs of mass detention and deportation. They increased ICE's budget by 15x and it's now the most well funded law enforcement agency in the world.
It's true that border crossings surged in the Biden years. The apprehension rate however, was the same as Trump's. The vast majority of illegal border crossings end up in ejection or deportation. Over the whole 4 year term I think we have something around 2.5 million people who were actually released into the country while their cases go through the immigration courts.
And there's some research out there that suggests the immigration surge helped stave off a post-covid recession and softened inflation relative to the rest of the world
Now under Trump, we're projected to have the yearly first decline in population in ages.
The US admits 1million legal immigrants every year. This is in addition to people on a valid work visa and folks who are illegally here.
The Democrats just needed to find a way to extend that instead of lifting it.
Granted the Obama years and years before were an issue as well. But Obama was a lot more efficient at deportation. Tom Homan was obama’s top person for removal.
We thought we live in a world of science, reason and kindness. Sure, not everyone is a scientist, or understands it all, but somehow we have recast the mediaeval human into someone who instinctively believes in experiments and peer reviewed papers, not pagan rites and magic.
But I think this must have actually disappeared a long time ago and we just didn't notice. There was no one combining charisma, credibility and the willingness to build support out of setting science on fire.
I'm not even really picking on the US here, I think the rest of the West is not much better.
I'm not a doomer though. I'm sure we can turn it around, or rather that we will bounce back, sooner or later. I just hope it will be a conscious effort rather than a reaction to being utterly burned, like the changes that came from the two world wars.
The democrats need to change and run a compelling alternative, and I see no evidence that will happen any time soon.
The democrats and the left have, among other issues:
- refused to run legitimate primaries, instead propping up Hillary when she was unpopular, Biden when he was senile, and Kamala when she was also unpopular and a clearly bad candidate
- wasted a lot of goodwill advocating for policies that are unpopular with the center of the country, including trans in woman sports, the border, and crime
- ignored, minimized or outright spoke down to half the country (the “deplorables”)
- spent decades advocating globalization and ignoring the economic effects on half the country
What compelling democratic candidate is there to run in 2028? What is the compelling Democratic vision? The only fresh new charismatic faces I see are AOC and Mamdani; and while I think they are impressive politicians, those types of policies will not win over the center of the country and would lose in any national elections.
And I don’t know what the center of the country looks like, either. If the center favored careful, conservative policies, Trump would not have won.
Politics no longer make sense to me. I say Democrats should just run the candidate with the most charisma and fuck everything else.
“Politics no longer make sense to me. I say Democrats should just run the candidate with the most charisma and fuck everything else.”
Personally, I think they should focus on running candidates that have the best chance of winning. Politics is a competition!
In the official product information sheets, they state that you should consult with a medical professional before using it during pregnancy.
A competent medical professional will tell you that it's OK to use in most cases.
A competent medical professional I’m sure will make their own judgement call which may be that it’s not okay to use while pregnant. We should leave that up to the medical professionals, but I’m glad the recent press conference helps raise awareness for medical professionals to consider.