before they fired him?

to advocate for primarying Democrats so that he could further enrich himself and his organization.

I don't see where President Obama is doing that.

because we expect it of them.

Where is Obama profiting off primarying incumbent Democrats?

It turns out that the long-standing political truths are still out there on a national level. He should learn those so that he really will know it all.

Very few people willingly cede power.

Very few people willing to step up and do the work. Young people don’t appreciate fund raising and meetings. They aren’t interested in compromise. I will happily step down from my county position

...and as Jonathan Capehart observed the other week, we aren't hearing cries for Bernie Sanders to retire.

Government should be intergenerational. It's key to bring multiple perspectives, and institutional knowledge matters. President Biden was effective in ways some other leaders wouldn't have been able to pull off.

And Democratic leadership is not intergenerational at this stage. It is dominated by septuagenarians.

I agree with Obama. The decision-making, worldview, energy and tone of current Dem leadership is not keeping up with the times. It's time for people 70 and older to retire and pass the mantle to people 20 and 30 years younger who aren't sticks in the mud. And don't take umbrage about my use of "sticks in the mud" until you've watched a 20-minute long Chuck Schumer speech in the senate.

The fact that no one's asking Bernie to retire is not evidence that we're wrong about asking for the old generation to pass the torch. Bernie is an outlier. He's a young whipper-snapper in an old man's body.

Republicans have been "greening" for the last several electoral generations. Their SOCTUS picks have been in their 50's, and even 40's, so they can get 30 years of SCOTUS domination. Same with most of their judicial picks. They're supporting younger people for congress. They've been working on this for decades and are backloading the system with horrifically conservative stooges who have lifetime tenure. By stubbornly clinging to power, boomer Dems are hobbling our ability to compete for power.

Ha, so funny. Haven't heard that term in ages.

He was born in 1941, so he is considered a member of the Silent Generation.

But both are elders. I didn't mean to imply boomer was a catchall term for people over a certain age.

Perspective is great but doesn't mean they need to be in control of those decisions.
I mean we have 80+ year olds. I mean on the Republican side they had the chair of the appropriations committee was out of the public eye for 6 weeks before it became publicly known, by way of a newspaper reporter in her home town, that she had been in a memory care facility and her staff and likely others in Congress, like Johnson, had kept it secret.
Grassley says he plans to run again which would keep him in office past 100.

The point is there has to be a balance. The Democratic Caucus needs to stop giving leadership positions based on the age/seniority of the member and be a little more flexible. Like, fine, if the committee chair is older so be it but their deputy should be a younger person or at least not necessarily the next oldest/person with the next most seniority. Especially so if the younger person is studied on the subjects covered by the committee (like a public health person on a committee about public health)

...and at heart, everything we do as Democrats/progressives is about the next generation (the analogy of planting a tree is useful here, with programs and policies meant to prevent problems and address needs—and be adjusted as leaders see how well they work or don't work).

I'm all for balance, and I would also point to one of Heather Cox Richardson's Politics Chats, in which she addressed the different roles within leadership. Here's the video I'm thinking of, and I recommend paying attention to what she says about 34 minutes in, which covers different skill sets.

or control of the House. That being said, running for reelection at 86 would be crazy. If no one else is calling for it, let me be the first.

Democratic House leadership LONG before 2023 - it's like my generation of Democrats had none of the ambitious/aggressive "Young Man in a Hurry" quality in them. If they wind up getting passed over for millennials, it's their own damn fault.

AND rank choice voting asap please!

There might be some boomers that are ok to stick around but I agree with President Obama that the old timers ( and I’m pretty old, too) need to step aside for the younger folks that are rising. This is more their world and future than it is the older folks. The young’s also understand how to fight the modern battles much better than the olds. Gotta meet fire with fire and the young’s bring the necessary fire. I like the idea of ranked voting, too!

That's true democracy, in my opinion. But when you say "open primaries", even the Dems freak out that our power might be threatened. THAT is what Obama is referring to.

Hasn't he heard he’s to be shunned and cast out?

Can’t have new ideas. Or new proposals

I have been saying this since you were elected. Those 80-90 year old congress critters need to move along. They don't have a clue what the next generation can bring us.

These "For Life" benefits in Congress should entice them to resign but noooooo, they will hang on for dear life until they die. It's disgusting how we let this happen.

Always trust a grassroots organizer (who became President twice) to have the pulse of the people!

and then they look at the current crop running the country, most of whom would not qualify as "old" and realize there's no hope at all.

I do agree on the need for a shift from the comfortable entrenched incumbents to representatives more in tune with current issues and perhaps ideas on how to address them, but it is not a panacea

working campaigns and donating money? Don't we need everyone?

The next generation is bringing old fashioned American values? Would that be Pete Hegseth, born in 1980? Or Kristie Noem, age 54? Stephen Miller, born 1985? Elon Musk, also 54? J D Vance, born 1984? Karoline Leavitt, born 1997? I mean, the worst people out there right now with the exception of Trump and RFK are far younger than these "old people." Frankly, as an "old" person, the younger generation currently at the top of politics is looking pretty scary.

OF JOE BIDEN.

Progressives when he was Obama's chief of staff? Very courteous and willing to listen, right?

He's right about that. Every time a reasonable Democrat tries to find common ground or compromise a little bit in order to actually GET a little bit... we hear a chorus of outrage from folks calling them DINO's and demanding that they be primaried and badgered. This is not an "age thing" it's a matter of unrealistic expectations and demands being made on our elected officials and people not understanding how government works... or blaming the party that's NOT in the majority. We need a smarter electorate... that would be a good start.

When the oldsters started their careers, we didn't have Internet-enabled moron mobs and death threats. We could attract better people, because the job was better.

Now you really have to wonder where these "young genius volunteers" are who want to serve us all so badly. We've let the job become so bad that I'm afraid we're getting more and more into a "beggars can't be choosers" market for any form government leadership.

Remarkably, we still get a lot of folks stepping up to the plate, but how long can that last? We need the people to be better followers, imo.

As much as we hear how much the up-and-comers hate "the establishment", it's clear to me that the most vocal opponents do not have a realistic understanding of how government works. In due time some of these outspoken voices occasionally get elected... and lo-and-behold... when their vim-and-vigor and anger fails to produce results, they too become "establishment" and work within the rules, making deals, sharing power, giving-and-getting, finding common ground... exactly as many of the ones before them did.

Rec

Last edited Mon Dec 8, 2025, 03:16 AM - Edit history (4)

And this isn’t about age. I agree with younger progressives way more than my own lame Gen Xers. “Google will change the world!” . Yeah sure it will and did. Why is that a good thing? Look at the world around you. It has changed. Has it changed for the better?

Obama’s politics are to my right. He reminds me of my colleagues at my last work place. I dislike all of them, but they weren’t dishonest or sleazy. It’s not clickbait material. I dislike them because I dislike neoliberalism. I dislike those who justify it and bring it into academia and expect people like me to bend to the will of misogynistic accelerationists. I am not rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Very dull and far from lurid.

Just like Larry Summers was an Obama nominee and part of the neoliberal mess that got us here, they were neoliberals and the last people who should mess around with marketplace solutions for mental health issues they forced.

If I could message them I would tell them “I mean you no harm. Please continue to be lame. You won’t be dragged in. But stay out of my way because when I can, I plan to take action against my last (creepy) host institution and a lot of the stuff since. However, not with MAGA/MAHA and Trumpers piling on”. This isn’t something for the 4th Reich to handle.

These alliances with stopped clocks don’t go anywhere.

If Russel Vought and the creeps learnt from their mistakes during Trump 1.0, thankfully so has the left.

I am going to make my DU posts more coherent from here on out. I am grateful to EarlG/Elad and to my fellow DUers for tolerating me. I have had a very rough 14 years.

I self-deported from the US, when I could not endure the implications of California Ideology.

I am not planning on going back because that would be messy. I don’t want immigration dragged into a case where it is a metaphorical issue more than directly relevant. I feel out of sync with most everyone everywhere (routine stuff aside).

Always did..But I used to plod along like my mom and her dad. We come from a family of lame bureaucrats or scientists and are camera shy and somewhat asocial. The last 14 years have been hell.

A world where activism is viral videos or endless compromises that are beyond the pale is not for me..I already compromise as much as normal humans do however radical my views would seem to those acclimated to a right shifted world, where with every shift we are told that it’s not right-shifting more.

I lost my mom in 2021 and that felt like the end of the world. But somehow I carried on for another 3 years.

With Trump 2.0, I have lost patience with the attitudes of moderates. It’s one thing when it’s just an opinion. It’s another when it keeps going towards real world consequences that are increasingly harsh on the best people in society (I don’t mean me. I am hideous and not bothered by it as long as I am not on display).

I mean people like my family, friends, colleagues, allies, doctors or even anyone who is kind to me. The best people I know and are strained when I am strained. I have been strained because of my horrible rightwing host (Liberal academia! Bullshit..try a hard-right coup of academia dressed up as “Tech will change the world!”) and people of their ilk.

It was one thing when it was only me. I could and did reason “Maybe it’s me. I am mediocre, difficult, entitled, extreme, lazy etc.” Because I am all those things. I can’t be brutal with the worst people in society without being honest about myself. I don’t sugarcoat things for myself. However, I also call out anyone but the billionaire class or reprehensible elites. I am okay with shoving mobs or anyone who attacks me out of the way though.

I mean you probably don’t want to attack me as a general rule when you are outside any scientific or medical community I accept.

And I don’t mean other DUers..within the community you can push it. I will grind my teeth and post a genuinely civil response. If I accept a community or a person I let it go..infighting is tiresome.

That’s what got me here. But I no longer consider my last host part of the scientific community. They are part of the tech creep community.

I don’t want to do the performative and frequently fascistic version of the shit I had to do as if those are obligations honest scientists have. I still police myself, but I have seen enough to conclude that calling out phonies not entitlement or spectacular. Those are people selling out the public sector and academia to these fascists.

I am not dishonest, cowardly or insane and this period really tested my patience as I tried to endure this shit. I just wanted to be sure and I have seen enough.

I was only confused by unfamiliarity with the strain of lunatic conservative BS I was dealing with. I knew the older Cheney version. This latest brand was unfamiliar. Now I am finally caught up.

Anyway, it was one thing when it was just me. When I started seeing it happen to so many people I felt that my gut instincts weren’t off. To see it happening to people who deserve better either because they do their best or because they have real problems. The same cruel and demeaning stuff. Doge and the public servants. And on and on. And that culture is spreading everywhere.

That cannot happen.

I finally am at a real change point. I owe a huge debt to the left: DU, Current Affairs Magazine, Yasha Levine (he has helped me a lot.. he reminds me of some of my favorite colleagues in science, whom I avoid these days for their sake. These are some of the best people I know and I don’t want them associated with me in any way. My onc or my other doctors locally are similar. I don’t want the people who are actually holding this shit society together associated with someone whose politics aren’t palatable to what is currently mainstream. Nor do I want to be the reason they get sucked into frivolous entertainment or gaming or VR rubbish or whatever the fuck those morons in Ai, big data etc shilled or shill next), Nandita Bajaj, Christopher Ketcham, Sam Miller, Nathan Robinson and Current Affairs, Amanda Marcotte, Andrew O’Hehir, Troy Farah and Chauncey DeVega.

I really hope I am anonymous, because I can’t function as a (mediocre) scientist or (mediocre) activist without that. At this point I wouldn’t care except that I find I cannot think that well around people or things unless straightforward or trusted (thanks EarlG/Elad/Skinner).

My thoughts have been a mess. I liked a graphic by DUer CrispyQ which also mentioned Indivisible. As Yasha Levine keeps saying, information without organization is no good. And not organization as in connection via a “panicky” ai agent (that’s a reference to something lame I saw earlier today about an ai agent that panicked and deleted an entire database. Imagine a reality mediated by that thing. It’s the worst idea since the IoT and toilets that go around ordering tp etc).

Nathan Robinson wrote in Current Affairs about how Mangione or the Unabomber needed a movement to organize with. It’s finally bad enough that I can hope to organize with like-minded people instead of some sort of ghastly moderate peddling a Facebook health app.

But even so it’s not easy as all serious activists would tell you and takes as much work as anything else.

But first you have to be clear on who you organize with and I am pretty clear on that head. And now I can let it all hang out.

Locally, a friend who is an animal rights activist and makes vegan sweets has helped me a lot. She is a tough lady. I love her.

My medical MJ company has helped me. That last is not an ad. It’s horrible that such a triviality can be used to make life so hellish for so many people - that too when alcohol -a known carcinogen-is legal.

Like Sam Miller, Ketcham, Levine and similar people, I can’t think like a neoliberal optimist. That’s not depression. That’s being less self-absorbed than someone who sits in Si Valley and thinks a smart diaper will change the world. Maybe one can accomplish stuff. Maybe not. But one has to try one’s best the real way.

My job is easier than that of many since my detestable former host has given me one easy task. They are a source of so much wrong with the world. They must be fought legally and not like people who can be written off as litigious or self-serving. They need to learn to stop being fascists.

There was one scientist I met there who was the least awful of that lot. He wasn’t terrible and I didn’t get why he was hanging out with that lot. It’s unfortunate..If I could have talked to him, I would have asked him to tell the rest of them to stay out of my way. I have no quarrel with them. Beyond general disagreement with every view they hold outside routine science. The occasional stopped clock doesn’t count. I will figure out how to do my part now.

This is in a way a love letter to the left. They have really helped me over the years.
I am already “moderate” in any sane way. I have never resented my colleagues for being successful or insisted that they should all drop out of society and do whatever an immoderate demands.

With the exception of 5 shrinks (2 Reefer Madness shills with my sleazy employer; 2 boors from 2012 and one inane person from 2022 I found via a sleazy little app developed by ex-FB employees) and one creepy defense contractor who sexually harassed me in 2014, I have never met any incompetent or creepy people personally in science or medicine. The shrinks I mentioned weren’t creepy, but they were incompetent. The defense contractor was not incompetent in his field of holography, but he was a grade A creep and the men’s rights type.

These corner cases aside (and I include a collection of douchebags I slammed in the post on a one way trip to Mars whom I do not know but recognise as similar to my lousy former employer), dispassionately speaking, the pis and doctors I have met are some of the most intelligent and hardworking people I know. And they aren’t jerks. But none of that matters when a brutish Elon Musk comes along. Which goes to show that some basic awareness of the world you live in is essential to working in publicly funded science or medicine in a hellscape accelerating towards chaos.

This isn’t just a rant. I plan to follow through as soon as I get one paper in order. That’s the real world not virtual.
What these tech companies peddle is a version of false hope that is antithetical to the real thing. It’s sugary rot. But the preachy narrative that tells you it’s your fault as your life gets worse and worse is monstrous. It is not because you are lazy or stupid that you are struggling in this society for any general you.

I said earlier that I am lazy, entitled etc. Gping forward, if I don’t pull myself together and pushback every way I can from here on out I would be annoyed at myself and think from this point on it would be a letdown to the things I do care about. Anything or anyone i acknowledge as community and have solidarity with as opposed to those turds.

But I don’t think that’s true of you for any general you (except our oligarchs and their sycophants or enablers) that you should pull yourself up by the bootstraps. And least of all when you are struggling and barely managing.

My point is that if the best people in society (I think of Fauci or most decent pis I have met) are embattled when Trump and that cabal take over (fully supported by the technofascists), it isn’t surprising that the rest of us are doing this poorly.

It’s not your fault (or mine) that your life sucks. It’s their fault. They are assholes and they will drain you of all your life force and blame or shill junk tech. Junk tech is mindless. It’s humans who are responsible for junk tech. It doesn’t sprout up on its own.

“Oh it’s just the machine”. “Oh it’s just this person way low down I pass the buck to”.

No it isn’t. It’s the fault of the parasitic ceo class. It is the fault of those fugly douchebags at Google. It’s the fault of bloated economists.
It’s the fault of people who encourage neo nazis or other fascists and misogynists and throw pointless bandaids at the problem.

When you do better, it’s for you to decide (as an adult) if you are doing what you can. Aside from everything else, once you can, anything you can do to outrun these assholes will take you to a place of sanity and peace.

But what we are battling is something really evil and it’s not Skynet or Godzilla. It is far worse. It is this collection of sleazy douchebags who want to to make democracy, civil rights, women’s rights, the public sector, all regulation, environmental protections, any real journalism and basically every worthwhile thing obsolete except for a collection of sleazy little tech companies and a war and baby machine.

I feel as if I am in the bowels of some sort of virtual reality if not game ..some sort of ill conceived hellscape that is everywhere now. It is real and dully stupid and pointless.

I have never had any use for conspiracies or self aggrandizement.

But when you annoy me day in and day out with this worthless junk and then blame me, seriously you picked the wrong person to piss off.

People like me keep getting labeled fringe while these genuinely fringe guys are normalized constantly. That’s not sane.

I wasn’t dogmatic anymore than I was immoderate. Confusing and inconsistent worldviews which muddle abstract concepts and real world action are a nightmare.

I didn’t think for instance that shutting down discussions about the limits to growth or human overpopulation (from the left or moderates) is sane. It is a way to ensure that only people like Nick Fuentes, MTG, Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter (i.e. actual Nazi sympathizers) talk about those things and then they do it in the worst ways possible. And then when El Salvador looms or Roe v Wade is destroyed there is no one left to help. Many narratives are archaic and stuck in WW2. Or crafted by “development economists” of the Cato type. You need new stuff that changes with the challenges of the time.

This has the feel of an ending for me personally because it is the end of the worst period of my life and the Stockholm Syndrome that went with it.

I still have to finish a paper and rebuild my old assertive self. My future looks very uncertain. I am glad I had enough of a cushion that I didn’t need to please anyone, but could follow only what I thought was the right thing. Confusingly and inelegantly, but at least it’s clearer now.

I was better off than many. I chose to be childfree and am an only child. My parents had public sector jobs, pensions, healthcare so I could come back home and refuse to bend the knee to jerks while still doing my part for publicly funded science. I utilized all the things that MAGA and MAHA are destroying - due process, women’s rights, pensions, healthcare, and education. They do this with solid support from the technofascists who really have engineered this whole mess (Google, Facebook, Palantir, Musk’s entire repellant outfit, Andreessen and all the morons skewered by Adam Becker in his latest book. Ad!). These are not people who should have had any influence on medicine or publically funded science. Now all of the latter is being absorbed into defence contracting or billionaire funded (Gates, Chan-Zuckerberg, Wu-Tsai).
This period was truly hellish but I survived.

But these systems and entities must not get away with this. The fact that it became this bad is an indication that they must be held accountable not just Trump and MAGA but the people who helped install them while pretending to be for progress. No more third way.
One has to at least try…I am going to..

I thought I should clean and polish this up a bit since I plan to start a real change from here on out. But decided from the next post on. I have to start working on my real work which has taken a back seat to all this and which cannot be combined with this dreck. But it can work with real activism. Starting Monday I will refocus and this time it will work since it’s in defiance of these foul moderate things not with them.
Left doesn’t mean lazy and entitled. It does mean not going along with horseshit.

I will get there. The sheer mindnumbing heartlessness and exploitation are sickening with these companies and those who enable them passively.

I was pleased to see this earlier this year:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/federal-workers-fight-back-trump-dismantles-work-radicalized-rcna192040

I was never moderate, but I used to instinctively shoot to sound lame (I.e. moderate. No offense to moderates on DU..any outside DU can go and..). Or at least I was trying to come off that way. Not sure I ever succeeded. I think you sound insane rather than moderate when you try to sound like someone you can’t understand.

Now I figure they would call one a “radical far left lunatic feminist” any which way..why bother with an act that never really worked?

A worm that doesn’t turn now and goes back to that moderate swill or tolerates more lame self justification is closer to a real worm rather than a metaphoric one. That’s cruel to other humans. To keep encouraging this is at the expense of women’s rights and real, decent, civilian, publicly funded natural and ecological/earth sciences and medicine. Not everything should be subsumed into an everywhere war-garbage-entertainment machine that rots not just the brain but the soul as well.
Enough is enough.

I am a progressive. I am not calling for The Hague for randoms. I even forgive people from my parasitic former host provided they stay the fuck out of the way going forward. I am not for anything draconian except where it is truly about crimes against humanity.

But you have to stand up for yourself.
This is too serious for more of this swill.
I really have seen enough.

[Edit: Lately, I sometimes wonder if you guys see what I post and vice versa.
It would be just like my former employer to claim I was a malicious bot when virtual just as I was a “psychotic schizophrenic” in flesh.

Blake Lemoine is the kind of crazy they like, it would totally be on brand for them to claim that an Ai or bot came alive and started attacking them as proof that their shitty garbage CS/ tacky agents absorbed their honest self-criticism or some such shit.

I hate those guys.

Or some fucking awful and not mutual social engineering experiment that tries to make me look like an idiot or a crazy (grandiose! paranoid! 🖕

I viciously come up with theories (not delusions but theories on nuisance tech) these morons might build to sell some foul thing no one sane would buy.

An example would be a lousy ambient voice assistant thing driveling away just below the threshold of audibility. If you hear this stupid and pointless thing and repeat it without knowing it, then that’s a magic trick they could shill. I am cursed with sensitive hearing so I sometimes wonder.

That would totally fit those douchebags .

The bottomline is that I worked in the world of good science enough that unless the right kind of scientist or doctor were involved I reject lousy science today as I would ever. I have no use for their own fake curmudgeons and shills.

I prefer the real thing to their own Fanellis and Kent Andersons etc. I don’t buy anyone who talks to that class of people-the technocrats.

Adam Becker is cool. It helps that Christopher Ketcham interviewed him, ie someone whose worldview meshes with mine.

Now I must go and work and sharpen my guillotine. . I have a lot of work to do in my actual field not this bot or not, crazy or not shit. They will be fine but they should go annoy someone else . Crazy sounding post. Too complicated to explain. Again I am grateful to DU for tolerating me.

I will unfortunately have to file some complaints at some point but without these Maha/Maga types piling on. The bottomline is that I don’t want rubbish Ai agents, voice assistants, garbage nudge theory, VR for addiction or schizophrenia or updated Turing tests or whatever the fuck it is.
I am and was an adult human female and whatever it is “No”. If I talked to people who I don’t know it would be people like my old colleagues or people like Ketcham, Miller, Nathan Robinson, Yasha Levine etc. I wish I was in touch with the only scientist in that place who computed as “I don’t know what that is, but no.”
It never works. That middle ground, middle brow bullshit. There are so many, many people who would consider it a privilege rather than the worst fucking thing ever. Instead of taking people hostage for not being impressed.
I tried to be civil because I disapprove of clickbait and viral vids. But civility beyond a point just confuses people. I don’t like The Spectacle. But I have no respect for this stuff. It’s so lightweight and tacky. As is I am struggling to concentrate in routine ways. I don’t want it muddled up with stuff I have no patience with. Pathologizing and projecting. Addiction! Depression! Schizophrenia! OCD! Some new made up illness!
It is simple. I don’t like you and I don’t want to work with you. And I don’t want to be silent and give the impression that I am not filing complaints. But not syncretically with right wing people whom I don’t understand honest or dishonest much. I understand very few people (for anything more than the most superficial stuff). ]