Discussion
I wrote a kinda wonky thread on "Blue Sky" about the (kind of discouraging) things we can predict about the 2027-2028 Congress by looking at the 2007-2008 Congress, which was in a very similar situation.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2aebn3xk5t63net43eeepire/post/3mzlojmmklc2l
Blue Sky is bad at threads, but I generally try to keep US politics talk over there instead of here because you are of course all European and it is not so useful to you.
@gaditb It seemed to me at the time there was very little crossover between federal and state-level politics. State-level democratic politics were sleepy at the time and I think California had a libertarian-wing Republican governor.
Man Bluesky is such a weird site. Every post now has a "X/Y" counter marking where it is in a thread, which is nice, but they also can't display more than ~10 posts in a thread at a time, and when they display the thing to click for more posts it always says "Read 1 more reply" regardless of how many more replies there are. "11/15, 1 more reply". Maybe they really mean "replies by 1 more person"?
It just feels like every individual feature was implemented in isolation and never touched again
@mcc i guess technically that post in particular only has one reply, and then that reply has one reply... it could be expensive to count all nested posts, and adding the remaining number of thread posts as a special case makes the number harder to interpret... -the devil's advocate
@8sumint Yes, that would make sense, except that later on they *wound up counting the nested posts*, and they didn't think to go back and edit the "1 more reply" text.
@mcc yeah i guess since when you click it it does unroll all your posts as if they're top level, it would make sense to include them in the count along with the rest of that level's replies
There are times I suspect the whole site is vibe coded
@ralfmaximus I think there is a lot of evidence for that idea, at least all changes to the site in the last year+
I don't like BS much.
Have blocked bsky.brid.gy, and filtering all toots with "bsky.app" or "bsky.social" in them.
Helps a lot 😉
If you spend enough time, again and again, year after year, where every time the Democrats hold a vote that's important to you, it fails 49/51 with two Democrats voting Republican— or the Republicans hold a vote it's to you it fails, it passes 51/49 with two Democrats voting Republican— you kind of start to lose faith pretty hard in the Democrats. Possibly lose faith in democracy itself. It gets hard to convince yourself elections mean anything when this is what results.
@mcc I think especially when some ostensibly progressive legislator votes either against the good thing or for the bad thing. and it's like oh, they're doing that to cover for someone whose seat is in danger (because they were asked to by leadership). in RPG terms, they are tanking my anger.
okay sure, I understand this as a tactic. but when it's constantly the move, when it never seems like it's your faction's turn to win, when you don't even feel you have a real target for your ire (because again, the votes traded obscure all this)... it's not unfair IMO to pin all of that on leadership and the party itself
@mcc I keep on wanting to believe that this isn't true, but that never seems to work out
@mcc Have you read The Republic of Thieves, the third in Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards series?
I end up thinking about that a lot when the Democrats are "in power".
@mcc Reading a whole thread-- or, worse, following a multi-threaded conversation-- over there is this little puzzle game every time, I guess to keep your mind sharp?
(Though it doesn't have the "did several other people already make the reply I'm making and I just can't see it for federation reasons" problem we have over here, which I suppose counts for something?)
@mcc the observation about how likely intraparty obstructionism creating huge problems for 2028 is one of the things i'm most worried about-- we've seen over and over again that democrats retreat at the worst possible times, and i think it's genuinely a way bigger source of frustration than any of them realize
@mcc America is the only place with anti-trans people, of course. /s
@emma Transphobia in the UK expresses a little different from the US (even if UK transphobia is kinda rooted in things that happened in the US). Canadian transphobia and US transphobia are closely related. But *this* thread is mostly about parliamentary procedure and situations that structurally cannot happen in Canada
@mcc understood, I was trying to make sport of the tendency of Germans on fedi pretending nothing is politically wrong about their country except for the cops trying to evict them from their squat.
@emma i was trying to figure out a way when i wrote the op to imply a joke about Canadians being European but I couldn't think of anything.
@mcc What did the state-level politics look like?
That's the sort of thing I was thinking could be a "here's actual policy" done when (a) federally things will but MUCH bigger of a fight (b) it's not going to get overruled by federal action superseding state. (And when (c) a lot (I think?) of the major messaging is being driven by smaller-scale voices like e.g. the mayor of New York.)