You're not alone, Mary. I'm 83 and feel the same as you do. I belonged to a group of socialists back in the late 60s - early 70s and we fought to change the Democratic Party back then. Jeffries/Schumer need to be replaced by people who represent the people they represent and we need to hold their feet to the fire.
I was so moved by Danielle last week I subscribed! you won't lose my support for speaking the truth. I think Jared is more hopeful for the future due to perspective. Like Danielle said: black women are the most educated demographic & yet they're experiencing the highest lvl of unemployment. I think facts like that make it hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I feel much the same, but I have hope that I'm just beaten down, and Jared's optimism will prove correct
College in California was FREE until Reagan noticed that too many blacks were attending and he put the kaibash on that. And here we are. Higher Ed as a money making scheme for universities and lenders.
there is more to that than racism, but racism is a significant factor. white women are feeling the aftermath of dei elimination. no wonder girls are beginning to be seen as baby machines once again.
when i arrived in the us, a big thing on daytime tv was the mauri show with all the teens pregnancies. then that died. and now we are back on that front. in tn, i think a girl as young as 11 can be placed into marriage.
To Danielle I'll say that this collab oration started 45 years ago under St. Reagan. Trickle dow n was supported by many Dems, firing of Air traffic controllers which caused a depression of union membership last 30 years, loss of women's bodily autonomy, loss of voting rights, inequality, loss of support for minority groups and soooooo much more.
Hey! Jared! I’m sick tooo🤧 Get better Soon-I’d been worried about you! Yay for my 2 favourite sane people on Wednesdays (among other daze). I’ve upgraded with both of you with the💰I am NOT giving to the “Democrats”
This was a fantastic discussion and I want to thank both for these check-ins. Of everything I have time to listen to, these check-ins are consistently the ones which 1) have me walk away either with something to look up/learn/ read or 2) leave me with a focus point.
Some comments:
1. The comment about the immigration slave class stuck a particular cord for me. In particular, the fact that the US trades/traffics/disposes of people as garbage reminds me of Qatar and the abuses of immigrants that they carried out in order to build stadiums for the world cup there. It is devastating that the US is this country now. It is devastating, but it is not surprising. Slavery is not only a founding sin, it is a core value - a core value that has been tacitly kept under the covers, and now is unleashed unconditionally.
2. I associate neoliberalism with the myth that the government works slowly and people cannot stomach fast change. I think that this myth was introduced in order to keep people hoping for low hanging fruit, one at a time, even if rotten by the time they get them. A particular benefit, for the politicians, of this approach is that you have people trapped looking in on direction only, when where could be an entire orchard with fresh apples right behind them. I think neoliberalism succeeded in convincing people that small steps are acceptable and that they should not demand anything big from their government (even though the government keeps demanding higher taxes) i.e. people were acclimated to a zombie state of acceptance and compliance. The unwillingness of the people to rise up, is due to this cultivated state. But, we need to also remember that the fed government is militarized to the teeth and has no problem killing its own citizens. How different is the US from Iran?
3. I have to bring out Jon Ossoff. For a week Danielle, Wajahat and a few others were head over heels with the one sentence Jon Ossoff pronounced. What had Ossoff done to date to show that he is not a Cory Booker grade?! Not only that, but he immediately turned around and showed that he is nothing but a Cory Booker. If I were responding to his one sentence, I would acknowledge who he is and has been in the past, and I would move away from his persona into the context and the content of the message. We need to keep ourselves from the temptation to put someone on a pedestal. These people are public servants. They serve the public. Just because they do their job does not mean they need a pedestal. We are paying them already to do their job. Let's not glorify them. We do not need more cults of personalities. We need public servants. I am glad Jared broght it up, and I am disappointed that Danielle did not admit that elevating Ossoff was a mistake. Mistakes are great if we learn from them; not so great if we don't.
4. I have a college bound daughter. I've taught her math all of her life. We were wrapping statistics and I explained that stats ie never taught well, and that most people who use stats, have no idea what they are doing. She asked me why stats is taught poorly. I can see two reasons. Either the people who teach it don't understand it, and perpetuate the status quo, or it is never meant to be understood because under the hood there is a lot of handwaving, cherry picking, racism, eugenics, etc. I told my kid that we cannot just give in when the textbook, inevitably, goes from rigor to handwaving. This is when it is the rational and responsible person's work to actually start digging and questioning.
What women and African Americans have shown in the last decades, is that they can dig deep when given the opportunity. The questions that white people were afraid to ask, they would not only ask, but also answer. "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents", "The warmth of other suns", "Beloved", "The New Jim Crow" will not have existed otherwise. These are uncomfortable, unsettling truths.
Education is fundamentally liberating. While it can be a ticket to entrapment as was pictured in the movie the Firm, it has the power to remove chains and to help recognize the traps before they snap.
5. Covid is destroying people's immunity. Covid has been present non stop since late 2019. The "wave" is a myth. We lose people to covid every week. We are registering cancers and other conditions at ever younger cohorts. The disability claims are on the rise. The health care system is overwhelmed not only because of the cuts to social and medical programs, and the overworked medical staff, but also because of long covid among medical staff.
The single best thing you can do to avoid catching Covid is to wear a respirator, kn95 or better. If you catch Covid, the single best thing to do to avoid Long Covid is to rest.
The vaccine is not a cure. The damage to internal organs is compounded with every infection. There is no cure/treatments for most of the long covid conditions. There is a lot of gaslighting, though, if you are in the mood once a sufferer.
The vaccine is one part of a layered protection strategy. Protection is resistance, if you need an extra motivation to give it a try.
6. As I said, these check-ins are always appreciate by me in some way. In this one Jared said something along the lines of " it is always impossible, until it is inevitable". I grew up in Eastern Europe. The changes in 1989 were impossible until they were inevitable. I am not happy with the shock therapy and the neoliberalism capture there, but I lived through exactly this, and I see it here. The fear among all establishment is that they can see their end. They have two options - consolidate power and make inner dealings, brute force AI style, or collapse and actually face consequence. Their actions project the fear, and their fear is the aftermath which they see as likely. So, right now it is important to win as many battles as possible and destabilize them. What people need to understand is that the discomfort is a generational battle, not a quick gratification of length one election cycle. Democracy is everyone's responsibility.
To comment on Danielle's belief that the people are not collectively organizing and rising up. I think that this is actually what shocks and terrifies the establishment. There are many small battles fought on many battles. There is no centralized battle. People are rising up locally on data centers, on school boards, on national parks, on ice, on legal decisiosn, etc. Most people are investing their time into something that is local and important. The overall effect is where the "inevitable" that Jared talked about comes in. The fed government does not have the man power to subdue the entire country on so many fronts. This is why there are wins. And the many wins terrify all of the establishment.'
great discussion. Danielle, saying a lot of things that make sense - mulling over things and i think you've explained- nodding my head. Jared, hope you feel better fast
This is going to be a step in and then a huge step back out in order to address some errors in this conversation.
1. Danielle said "nobody is talking about expanding the court" Not true. James Clyborn said he supported expanding the court to 13 justices on one of the Sunday news shows just last Sunday. People ran with it and said this is now the centrist position. Mike Johnson immediately pushed back and Republicans tried to start a constitutional amendment to hold the number of justices at 9. Every Democrat voted against except 1.
2. Jared said Democrats are either incompetent or quizzlings. Not true. Some? YES!!!!! But not all. And Danielle agrees with me - she said she will support the candidates she believes in.
3. "America is filled with people with magical thinking and no imagination." "OK, we're not crazy" "It's all a scheme to steal from you"
True and not true.
Most people are sheep. They will simply go along to get along until it becomes impossible to survive that way. That's why Jared is hopeful- he sees our world becoming less and less survivable for sheep. Danielle and Jared and the ones still listening, are not sheep. And we find it maddening that so many are. And that's what brings Danielle down- how can so many people refuse to see and use their power for good? This is where acceptance has to play a role. It's not just Americans, or this century, it's the truth of our entire species. It's evolutionarily adaptive for most people to be sheep.
I don’t feel that is reason to despair. It is reason to become a good shepherd. Which is what this podcast attempts to do and does well. But it is not for sheep; it is for those of us trying to be good shepherds. We will always be a small minority. That's fine as long as we bring enough sheep with us. Similarly our electeds will always be whores to some extent. It is our job to hold them accountable. The messages we use to get sheep to help us may not be the messages we use with each other.
And what is the best way to do that? Well meaning, fully awake people can disagree. And that's where we are right now. We have more allies than we see and even some among people we think are enemies. Let me go deeper.
With complex trauma we create an inner critic that is overly harsh on ourselves. It protects us from the overly harsh environment we are in by helping us comply in advance. When we are powerless children / prisoners that is adaptive. We survive. When we are powerful adults, it holds us back from reaching our potential. Therapy helps us see and quiet it.
And less talked about, with complex trauma we also create an outer critic that is overly harsh on others. It protects us from the overly harsh environment we are in by helping us distrust those who seem like friends but are really working against us. Again, it's adaptive and we survive. And again when we are discriminating adults, it holds us back from reaching other people who can help us do more. And many of us are in a triggered outer critic state right now. Understandably so. Especially those of us who are dragging generational trauma along with us in our epigenetics. Has the Democratic party been acting as a captured opposition? Yes, in many ways. And does it still have actors within it who are trying their best to turn that ship around? Yes. And do some of them see the way to do that differently than you do? Yes. These past 10 years have been traumatic and many of us are blind to each other. So many already know our system is rigged. So many have been fighting it feeling alone and paranoid. Now is a time to quiet the outer critic and find those people. We will not agree on everything. We will fight and shout at each other. And we are all still looking towards the same hopeful horizon.
There is opportunity everywhere. I am only sharing this one conversation because it shows that others many of you think of as lost or capitulating are not as numb or evil as you might think.
Loved this episode. I am and always have been independent. I have listened to people call independents "low information voters". I would wager that I pay more attention than any republican or democratic voter. The ranks of independents have been increasing exponentially for years, people are catching on.
We are glad you speak out I have been called a socialist for most of my life and I'm 80. I can't stand Jefferies /Schumer
You're not alone, Mary. I'm 83 and feel the same as you do. I belonged to a group of socialists back in the late 60s - early 70s and we fought to change the Democratic Party back then. Jeffries/Schumer need to be replaced by people who represent the people they represent and we need to hold their feet to the fire.
You guys haven't lost me. :)
Feel better, Jared! Glad you're taking care. <3
I was so moved by Danielle last week I subscribed! you won't lose my support for speaking the truth. I think Jared is more hopeful for the future due to perspective. Like Danielle said: black women are the most educated demographic & yet they're experiencing the highest lvl of unemployment. I think facts like that make it hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I feel much the same, but I have hope that I'm just beaten down, and Jared's optimism will prove correct
Danielle’s comment about the mental gymnastics we are having to commit, for so many disasters, was spot on
College in California was FREE until Reagan noticed that too many blacks were attending and he put the kaibash on that. And here we are. Higher Ed as a money making scheme for universities and lenders.
there is more to that than racism, but racism is a significant factor. white women are feeling the aftermath of dei elimination. no wonder girls are beginning to be seen as baby machines once again.
when i arrived in the us, a big thing on daytime tv was the mauri show with all the teens pregnancies. then that died. and now we are back on that front. in tn, i think a girl as young as 11 can be placed into marriage.
To Danielle I'll say that this collab oration started 45 years ago under St. Reagan. Trickle dow n was supported by many Dems, firing of Air traffic controllers which caused a depression of union membership last 30 years, loss of women's bodily autonomy, loss of voting rights, inequality, loss of support for minority groups and soooooo much more.
Still here
Hey! Jared! I’m sick tooo🤧 Get better Soon-I’d been worried about you! Yay for my 2 favourite sane people on Wednesdays (among other daze). I’ve upgraded with both of you with the💰I am NOT giving to the “Democrats”
This was a fantastic discussion and I want to thank both for these check-ins. Of everything I have time to listen to, these check-ins are consistently the ones which 1) have me walk away either with something to look up/learn/ read or 2) leave me with a focus point.
Some comments:
1. The comment about the immigration slave class stuck a particular cord for me. In particular, the fact that the US trades/traffics/disposes of people as garbage reminds me of Qatar and the abuses of immigrants that they carried out in order to build stadiums for the world cup there. It is devastating that the US is this country now. It is devastating, but it is not surprising. Slavery is not only a founding sin, it is a core value - a core value that has been tacitly kept under the covers, and now is unleashed unconditionally.
2. I associate neoliberalism with the myth that the government works slowly and people cannot stomach fast change. I think that this myth was introduced in order to keep people hoping for low hanging fruit, one at a time, even if rotten by the time they get them. A particular benefit, for the politicians, of this approach is that you have people trapped looking in on direction only, when where could be an entire orchard with fresh apples right behind them. I think neoliberalism succeeded in convincing people that small steps are acceptable and that they should not demand anything big from their government (even though the government keeps demanding higher taxes) i.e. people were acclimated to a zombie state of acceptance and compliance. The unwillingness of the people to rise up, is due to this cultivated state. But, we need to also remember that the fed government is militarized to the teeth and has no problem killing its own citizens. How different is the US from Iran?
3. I have to bring out Jon Ossoff. For a week Danielle, Wajahat and a few others were head over heels with the one sentence Jon Ossoff pronounced. What had Ossoff done to date to show that he is not a Cory Booker grade?! Not only that, but he immediately turned around and showed that he is nothing but a Cory Booker. If I were responding to his one sentence, I would acknowledge who he is and has been in the past, and I would move away from his persona into the context and the content of the message. We need to keep ourselves from the temptation to put someone on a pedestal. These people are public servants. They serve the public. Just because they do their job does not mean they need a pedestal. We are paying them already to do their job. Let's not glorify them. We do not need more cults of personalities. We need public servants. I am glad Jared broght it up, and I am disappointed that Danielle did not admit that elevating Ossoff was a mistake. Mistakes are great if we learn from them; not so great if we don't.
4. I have a college bound daughter. I've taught her math all of her life. We were wrapping statistics and I explained that stats ie never taught well, and that most people who use stats, have no idea what they are doing. She asked me why stats is taught poorly. I can see two reasons. Either the people who teach it don't understand it, and perpetuate the status quo, or it is never meant to be understood because under the hood there is a lot of handwaving, cherry picking, racism, eugenics, etc. I told my kid that we cannot just give in when the textbook, inevitably, goes from rigor to handwaving. This is when it is the rational and responsible person's work to actually start digging and questioning.
What women and African Americans have shown in the last decades, is that they can dig deep when given the opportunity. The questions that white people were afraid to ask, they would not only ask, but also answer. "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents", "The warmth of other suns", "Beloved", "The New Jim Crow" will not have existed otherwise. These are uncomfortable, unsettling truths.
Education is fundamentally liberating. While it can be a ticket to entrapment as was pictured in the movie the Firm, it has the power to remove chains and to help recognize the traps before they snap.
5. Covid is destroying people's immunity. Covid has been present non stop since late 2019. The "wave" is a myth. We lose people to covid every week. We are registering cancers and other conditions at ever younger cohorts. The disability claims are on the rise. The health care system is overwhelmed not only because of the cuts to social and medical programs, and the overworked medical staff, but also because of long covid among medical staff.
The single best thing you can do to avoid catching Covid is to wear a respirator, kn95 or better. If you catch Covid, the single best thing to do to avoid Long Covid is to rest.
The vaccine is not a cure. The damage to internal organs is compounded with every infection. There is no cure/treatments for most of the long covid conditions. There is a lot of gaslighting, though, if you are in the mood once a sufferer.
The vaccine is one part of a layered protection strategy. Protection is resistance, if you need an extra motivation to give it a try.
6. As I said, these check-ins are always appreciate by me in some way. In this one Jared said something along the lines of " it is always impossible, until it is inevitable". I grew up in Eastern Europe. The changes in 1989 were impossible until they were inevitable. I am not happy with the shock therapy and the neoliberalism capture there, but I lived through exactly this, and I see it here. The fear among all establishment is that they can see their end. They have two options - consolidate power and make inner dealings, brute force AI style, or collapse and actually face consequence. Their actions project the fear, and their fear is the aftermath which they see as likely. So, right now it is important to win as many battles as possible and destabilize them. What people need to understand is that the discomfort is a generational battle, not a quick gratification of length one election cycle. Democracy is everyone's responsibility.
To comment on Danielle's belief that the people are not collectively organizing and rising up. I think that this is actually what shocks and terrifies the establishment. There are many small battles fought on many battles. There is no centralized battle. People are rising up locally on data centers, on school boards, on national parks, on ice, on legal decisiosn, etc. Most people are investing their time into something that is local and important. The overall effect is where the "inevitable" that Jared talked about comes in. The fed government does not have the man power to subdue the entire country on so many fronts. This is why there are wins. And the many wins terrify all of the establishment.'
Love this.
great discussion. Danielle, saying a lot of things that make sense - mulling over things and i think you've explained- nodding my head. Jared, hope you feel better fast
Generational Trauma
This is going to be a step in and then a huge step back out in order to address some errors in this conversation.
1. Danielle said "nobody is talking about expanding the court" Not true. James Clyborn said he supported expanding the court to 13 justices on one of the Sunday news shows just last Sunday. People ran with it and said this is now the centrist position. Mike Johnson immediately pushed back and Republicans tried to start a constitutional amendment to hold the number of justices at 9. Every Democrat voted against except 1.
2. Jared said Democrats are either incompetent or quizzlings. Not true. Some? YES!!!!! But not all. And Danielle agrees with me - she said she will support the candidates she believes in.
3. "America is filled with people with magical thinking and no imagination." "OK, we're not crazy" "It's all a scheme to steal from you"
True and not true.
Most people are sheep. They will simply go along to get along until it becomes impossible to survive that way. That's why Jared is hopeful- he sees our world becoming less and less survivable for sheep. Danielle and Jared and the ones still listening, are not sheep. And we find it maddening that so many are. And that's what brings Danielle down- how can so many people refuse to see and use their power for good? This is where acceptance has to play a role. It's not just Americans, or this century, it's the truth of our entire species. It's evolutionarily adaptive for most people to be sheep.
I don’t feel that is reason to despair. It is reason to become a good shepherd. Which is what this podcast attempts to do and does well. But it is not for sheep; it is for those of us trying to be good shepherds. We will always be a small minority. That's fine as long as we bring enough sheep with us. Similarly our electeds will always be whores to some extent. It is our job to hold them accountable. The messages we use to get sheep to help us may not be the messages we use with each other.
And what is the best way to do that? Well meaning, fully awake people can disagree. And that's where we are right now. We have more allies than we see and even some among people we think are enemies. Let me go deeper.
With complex trauma we create an inner critic that is overly harsh on ourselves. It protects us from the overly harsh environment we are in by helping us comply in advance. When we are powerless children / prisoners that is adaptive. We survive. When we are powerful adults, it holds us back from reaching our potential. Therapy helps us see and quiet it.
And less talked about, with complex trauma we also create an outer critic that is overly harsh on others. It protects us from the overly harsh environment we are in by helping us distrust those who seem like friends but are really working against us. Again, it's adaptive and we survive. And again when we are discriminating adults, it holds us back from reaching other people who can help us do more. And many of us are in a triggered outer critic state right now. Understandably so. Especially those of us who are dragging generational trauma along with us in our epigenetics. Has the Democratic party been acting as a captured opposition? Yes, in many ways. And does it still have actors within it who are trying their best to turn that ship around? Yes. And do some of them see the way to do that differently than you do? Yes. These past 10 years have been traumatic and many of us are blind to each other. So many already know our system is rigged. So many have been fighting it feeling alone and paranoid. Now is a time to quiet the outer critic and find those people. We will not agree on everything. We will fight and shout at each other. And we are all still looking towards the same hopeful horizon.
There is opportunity everywhere. I am only sharing this one conversation because it shows that others many of you think of as lost or capitulating are not as numb or evil as you might think.
https://substack.com/@timmiller15/note/p-214051005?r=43nrad
Loved this episode. I am and always have been independent. I have listened to people call independents "low information voters". I would wager that I pay more attention than any republican or democratic voter. The ranks of independents have been increasing exponentially for years, people are catching on.