..same shit.

I was only about 13 back then, but yeah..the 60's and all that engendered.

But this is a new version of weirdness.....Or maybe just the old weirdness in a new guise.

This happens a lot when the powers that be want a certain outcome. It is a mad mad mad world and common sense is considered crazy because the conversation has been co opted by the barbarians. What's worse, they have so much $ that they can spend to bombard the public with manipulations. The marketing guys have you from womb to tomb and they control using fear and seduction.

Trust yourself because you know in your heart what is truth. Thanks for sharing because you speak for many of us who see the cognitive dissonance.

I feel your pain. One symptom of this distorted "funhouse mirror" picture is the ceaseless, endless citing of this poll or that poll that shows my candidate is better than your candidate because the voters will never elect a person who wore red sneakers in third grade. Or whatever.

being defended that the Dem Party, or at least many of its elected officials have veered far away from.

Polls are constantly posted to support the status quo candidates, to show that there is 'no way to defeat them' except that now the polls are moving towards a candidate who seems to be standing for what people expect the Dem Party to stand for.

One bright spot is that right is still wrong.

...a rat hole or a sewer pipe, some days.

over forty-years ago, so the rabbit hole has been my gestalt since then.

I am still trying to figure out how the matrix makes things taste like we think they do and why so much tastes like chicken.

On the other hand, it becomes clear that Disneyland is the only real place in America and the rest is merely a simulation that regurgitates nostalgia and history in its own image while forging a hyper-reality that is more real than real and so, habit forming.

Well, that's old hat in the rabbit hole. Meanwhile, here come the machines!

Some of us are issues purists and vote by issue standards only. Some of us want a big D democrat in the office regardless and turn a blind eye to Democrats espousing Republican economic policies.

But dang if I can find it these days

1. Survival of the human species and as many other species as possible, with genetic mapping of any species that's endangered or likely to go extinct, so that they can hopefully be brought back at some point in the future when our tech gets good enough.

(Climate change mitigation)

2. Gaining control of the political process for the entire populace, as opposed to the rich and powerful.

(This informs every other goal. We need a RIGHT to vote, non-partisan district drawing, corporate money out of politics, and an end to dark money.)

3. Equal rights for all humans, once born.

(No ifs or buts. Anyone can be hired for any job they are capable of performing, anyone can get any housing they can afford to buy or rent, any public accommodation has to serve any person, etc, etc, etc)

4. Public control over law enforcement.

(Communities need to be able to ban the use of various weapons by police on crowds or individuals, to have full ability to see and hear what police see and hear during interactions with the public, and to automatically have independent reviews of EVERY use of a firearm by an agent of the state, and an automatic trial any time an agent of the state kills anyone.)

5. Enhanced worker rights and protections, including automatic profit sharing and living wages.

6. Single payer healthcare, such that the only paperwork any patient has to fill out is to verify their identity, and to sign off on a list of procedures done to them.

I believe our nation's founders would approve of it.

since education is the only non-violent way to curb population growth and save us from ourselves.

Also, we need a return of the Fairness Doctrine. Fox "news" and hate radio caused many of the problems that we are forced to deal with today. We can't accomplish much as a Nation without responsible journalism and an informed electorate.

views are now described as "far left".
Yeah, I know what you mean...

At one point I might be arguing in favor of moderation and working within the system, etc.

Then in another context I feel like I'm channeling Che Guevara.

But Bernie, and the hungry-for-truth crowds he attracts, is beginning to bring it back to normal.

I don't really have a "horse" in the race, so so speak. The problems we face are systemic, and federal level politics are too incredibly corrupt to expend a great deal of energy on. As Bernard Chazelle wrote, "America has lefties but no left." Until that changes, and it has to start at the most local of levels and move outward, the US will remain a corrupt corporatocracy. Most people don't follow politics all that closely, and many who do underestimate just how corrupt the system is:

-Revolving door between regulatory agencies and those who need regulating

-Revolving door between public office and Big Banks/Pharma/Ag/weapons manufacturers/et al.

-candidates getting huge "donations" from the likes of Goldman Sachs only to see a Goldman Sachs employee become Treasury Secretary

-the US's history of supporting ruthless dictators who are anti-democratic in the name of "stability"

-for profit prisons, for profit health "care"

-military spending that eats up 54% of discretionary spending

And so on and so forth. It's state-sanctioned insanity.

and prophetic documentary on life in the United States in the 21st century.

I realize it was supposed to be satire, but damn! It took me this long to finally see it because I didn't think I'd be able to handle it.

Everyone should watch it (again if necessary) and then think about who is going to be the best foreign policy CIC in the White House. No more war for oil and dominance. This is no joke, no satire. We need someone who is not going to keep feeding our military complex.

I saw Republicans break with conventional wisdom in order to tear Clinton down. When Republicans were no longer to be counted on to conserve the most trusted, traditional American protocols, I knew we had fallen down the rabbit hole.

gets attacked and it just about requires a response. The attacks on your candidate become more and more dumb and slanted, so you respond in kind.

Bernie supporters started it early and once the cycle starts its difficult to stop.

I'd be interested to know what your values are, stevenleser, when you find time to post them.

If it were simply a matter of DU deciding who is progressive enough and that person then automatically gets sworn in this would be a simple exercise.

But it's not that simple. Enough of the rest of the country also has to want to vote for that person instead of whoever the Republicans nominate.

Values do matter. Politics is only a means to an end ultimately.

The end being the values individuals want to see expressed as the leaders of government. Politics is the process of collectively determining what a majority feels are important values and social goals, and who best represents them (both in reality and in terms of marketing or "electabilty&quot .

DU is just one tiny part of the "hashing out" process that goes on everywhere about this in diners, living rooms, barbershops, political meetings etc.

Ultimately if it were only about which candidate is most appealing it'd be a contest between folks like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Sandra Bullock, etc.

Pretending it is will not help us.

The problem is that most people don't know what
they want to change and in which direction the
nation should go.

Yes, it reminds me of the late sixties. My worry
is that people might want to look for a strong
leader to get them out of the mess, and that
may get us into very dangerous territory, imo.

(if any) grown ups in charge. Idiocracy is no longer a comedy, it's just shy of a documentary. The wheels have come off the train and none of us really know where we're headed. It's surreal.

I used to think there were "adults" around who (whether I always agreed with them or not) at least had a certain gravitas and sense of responsibility and seriousness of purpose.

Now I feel like there's a definite void of adulthood around.

But I can't figure out if that's a normal syndrome as one advances through middle age, or if we really are devolving in maturity as a society.....Or both.

The pursuit of profit and personal power has led us to the place it usually does.

It's not that there aren't any adults...it's that they aren't seeing the bigger picture.

chaos reigns supreme!

Sincerely yours,
Kurt Godel

Maybe this is the phase where global systems too complex to maintain start to break down, and the parts and pieces are reorganized to become something else entirely. Goodbye nation/states! Adios, corporate hierarchies! Sayonara secret cabals of concentrated wealth!

The end of the Oil Age (i.e the "Kali-Yuga&quot , and the beginning of the Quantum Age. Or some such epoch, beyond our current imaginings.

One may hope, anyway!

In any sufficiently powerful mathematical system there are propositions whose truth cannot be determined. In other words such systems must necessarily be incomplete. (Of course, it is more complex than that. For details, I suggest Gödel, Escher, Bach)

I don't know that Gödel ever went into chaos theory. But what do I know?

A kick merely for mentioning Gödel.

politicians, it's become who can out-weird the next person the most. Watching the last republican debate, nonsensical nonsense was discussed, mostly it was weirdness, and then the inane polls. And Trump Trump Trump. It's contagious. I have my life preserver on!

"It's never been this bad before. How much worse can it possibly get?"

And each time, we seem to find new ways to lower the bar even further.

Now, the bar is so low we're in Limbo Rock territory.

in Limbo Rock territory. What bothers me greatly is youth of today will perhaps think the garbage we have now has always been standard fare. I often wonder just how far down we are going, and when I think it might bottom out, it sinks lower.

Boiled down it says if you (a society) don't know that a value once existed, or didn't experience something lost, you therefore don't appreciate its absence or loss.

Life preservers for Bernie. Maybe little key chain, necklace, bracelet, or pin life preservers.

if y'all will allow: The cartoon character "Zippy the Pinhead" articulated (in 1979), for me, the root of the malaise to which you describe: "All life is a blur of Republicans and meat."

We've had so many nefarious Republicans, for so very long, and their numbers are morbidly increasing. The new crop is obviously sociopathic in a way that most of the predecessors were not (at least publicly).

Which is to say (and hardly an original observation) that due to this, the Democrats have had to skew to the right.
So, yet again, the right drives the entire process with a lot of assistance from Wall Street, especially now that they have so many presidential "candidates."

Trump is the ultimate and logical incarnation of the Republican mentality.

It may take 4 years of preznit Donnie to finally wake up the consistent tens of millions who vote for his party.

Kids have always thought their parents are stupid but watching their parents get suckered into a war and then freak out over a black president and gay people getting married and then seeing them praise Trump has made this generation of kids feel like geniuses.

Thanks for the thread, Armstead.

I am often left wondering whether the dishonesty is deliberate or whether the individual in question is deluding themselves because they so strongly want to believe something. I suspect that in primary season at DU, emotions run higher and so people do tend to delude themselves a lot. I, of course, am a paradigm of reason--not!

except for me, of course.

Ask for single-payer health care and people call you an Obama hater

Ask for a more progressive government and people call you an extremist

Ask for facts regarding a certain position a candidate holds and people call you a conservative

That's not to say that there aren't sane people here. Its just like the sites I've posted on before: you have good and well intentioned people and then you have the fanatics. I guess that's the new normal here at DU.

They know how to bait the debate.

But it's also funny how people seem to think the problem is with certain "others" and not how they may have contributed to the weirdness themselves.

I find these kind of threads facinating.

acknowledged by own biases but tried to include the whole sphere.

All I know is that sometimes I feel like at some points I'm forced into arguing for modernization and working "within the system" and later being put in the position where I feel like I'm channeling Che Guevara.

It's all topsy turvey.

Eight years later and now the establishment seems to be channeling Rahm Emmanuel, and wants to put us in a corner while the adults wrap things up. Lacking the financial backing of those who devastated the economy seems to look like a serious liability to them, and to many rank and file Democrats as well.

Through the looking glass indeed.

that guy there in your avatar was a hero to us, and it's a no brainer where he would stand if he were here today. and that would put him at odds with many on this site.

where did that DU go?