@uspolitics Please, please do not dumb down the issue, though.

House members advocate for policy and ideology, and they face the voters every two years.

Supreme Court justices are supposed to be non-political arbiters of the law. They are not advocates, and must not be because they do not face the voters.

So yeah, I disagree with Mike Johnson. Surprise, surprise! But his expressing his views does not offend.

@rbreich Yes.

And this is the issue that could unite far more than half of American voters. Thus it has been disastrous to allow the right to change elections into culture wars over the least unifying details of subgroups' demands.

Trump and social media together simply press blue America's buttons, send everyone screaming about the latest insult. And thus forget the economic justice even much of the MAGA wing believes in.

@uspolitics I have no idea whether he is lying or confused.

However, I would argue that in terms of tactics, we ought to strongly consider referring to stuff like this as signs of old age confusion.

To be blunt, anyone who was going to be convinced to vote against him due to dishonesty abandoned his ship long ago. (And over more serious lies.)

But the widespread claim that it is Biden who is old and confused has gained traction. And ought to be countered at every opportunity.

@dangillmor There is something murky here.

Quite a lot of overlap between those who think it is fine for students and professors to shout down and dis-invite speakers they disagree with (Seinfeld being a recent minor example). Yet find it an outrage that people who have been expressing themselves very clearly are given some limit in how long this can go on.

Seems to me that people of all stripes are pretty inconsistent as to when and to what extent freedom of speech ought to be sacrosanct.

@uspolitics Oh, I so, so wish that they had just ignored Greene.

I guess it's my 35 years of teaching experience, but some people are just looking for attention, any kind of attention, and when you get into it with them, you have rewarded them for their being jerks.

Let's be clear. Some people would approve of Greene's insult. (Although few of them would ever have heard about it.) But several times as many approve of making liberals mad. And it made the news that Greene accomplished this.

@w7voa Trouble is, there was no good answer.

The pandemic was disastrous for so many people, and the far right expertly transferred a whole lot of the resulting negative emotions onto the mainstream, centralized authorities that they loathe.

It worked especially well on the kinds of people who still had to go to work while their kids were home. Highly stressed people are more likely to listen to far right messaging.

(The tone of some social media of some pro-public health posts didn't help.)

@GottaLaff All of this just highlights our problem.

The electorate is splintered between the social media crowd that expects response within minutes. Network TV news crowd that follows a day later. And casuals who may not hear about this for some time.

Millions don't even understand the nuclear warn implications, while millions more are still on Gaza or Swift.

In this environment, Trump's showmanship works really well, no matter how crazy and dangerous the content.

@Wolven @toni Not really sure what you're saying here. Agreeing? Disagreeing? Disagreeing with what?

Hopefully you are not suggesting we fight laissez faire capitalism by pretending it didn't and doesn't happen?

@hosford42 @toni @Wolven Yeah, it would be nice if that's how it had been.

Our problem is that, up to this point, capitalist systems have been the ones that out-competed the others.

I see this as a parallel to the ancient agrarian societies out-competing the hunter-gatherer societies. The latter were generally better for people, but the former almost always dominated and survived.

Near the end of my life, and I've never resolved myself to the tragedy of humanity.

@jonathanpeterson @mekkaokereke I agree with your first sentence (and sentiment) but your facts feel shaky.

It was the lack of national support for Black rights and then SCOTUS's separate but equal. "Democracy" lost only if you redefine "democracy" to mean justice.

The electoral college and senate and slave states? A check of the map does not support this.

And structural racism has gotten awful fuzzy in meaning, but if you ask me, THAT is what remains depressingly widespread.