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[RedKing]

Yeah, I was about to say, HuffPo is no place to predict the future.

[EnigmaticHat]

Or, you educate the lolnoobs on why gridlock is preferable to the rubberstamp that Trump previously had.
Cast it as Thermopylae if you have to -- we didn't beat back the Persian army, but by Zeus, we held the line. And 2020 can be the Dems' Plataea, because whomever controls state houses controls redistricting.

Over the last two years every day was supposed to be the big push to finish off the toupee boy. Every day I read news that said that it was going to be the last straw, that Americans would have enough, that Democrats would mobilize and restore order to the world, that the Republicans would have enough and remove Trump to replace him with someone less orange. Every scandal was to be the last, each controversy would break the mould, and yet each day brought no change whatsoever. The status quo remained. The midterms were to be the blue wave that would have been the knock out blow to end Trump's reign of terror forever to usher in a new era of peace and equality. The victory of the midterms was not to be a heroic defeat, but a triumph. It was to be Salamis.

This was however not to be.

The hard fought battle was lost from the get go. The strategic goal was to reach a stalemate, a gridlock with which to continue the fight to another day. The greatest victory was to simply stave off defeat and pray for more time to fight on and on and on. It was not Salamis. It was not Thermophylae. Everything for nothing, utter dedication sacrificed for another go at starving the enemy.

But you are not the Greeks. The time is not on your side. There will be no wunderwaffe in this war. The battle drags on as it has for two years and you are no closer to victory. Sun Tzu said that "invincibility lies in the defence; the possibility of victory in the attack."

When all that remains is defence, no matter how determined, there can be no victory, only heroism in defeat. You managed to stop the enemy by throwing everything you could at him, a victory hollow and devoid of joy.

You may call this Thermophylae, but this was no Thermophylae.

This was Asculum.

If this is victory, I hope for the Democrats' sake they do not win anymore.

Neat, I'll just be over here with my subpeona power, million+ enfranchised voters in Florida, and changing voting demographics.  You keep complaining about American politics being American politics.  Rome wasn't built in a day.

Edit: Also, you know, control of the house.  Even if we took the senate there were literally not enough contested seats up for grabs for us to be able to overcome the presidential veto, and this wasn't a presidential election.  Now Trump's legislative agenda is dead and we can do things like pass legislation that would be popular among Republicans up to the senate just to watch them squirm and fracture.

[Madman198237]

Important to note is that the Greeks really didn't intend Thermopylae to be a suicide mission, they really thought that they could just hold the line and defeat the Persian army. Then they got there and realized that the Persian army was half the size of the entire Greek population and that they were about to have several very, very bad days.

But the Spartans, it turns out, are excellent propaganda wizards, and so when Leonidas *did* make the final decision to stay and fight (with anyone who wished to remain behind, which amounted to ~1000 other Greeks) to give the other Greek forces time to retreat back to their own city-states, they immediately turned it into this massive propaganda thing about how the Spartans were super-soldiers who had spat in the collective eye of three hundred thousand Persians.

Also, just realized we're on page 1775, at least according to those reasonable people with defeat default^{go away i'm not an English major} posts per page. If I'm using the default, which I'm pretty sure that I am.

[SaberToothTiger]

defeat posts per page

Simple spelling error or shrewd political commentary? You decide.

And back to lurking I go.

[RedKing]

This is probably the longest-lived AmeriPol thread since 2016. *tennis clap*

Also, page 1776 is obvious the correct point to declare a revolution, you filthy Royalist pigdog scum.

[Dunamisdeos]

I missed like a lot of pages but I am on the side that fights against Pigdog Scum. That sounds like pork I can't eat and I am unilaterally against that.

[RedKing]

I missed like a lot of pages but I am on the side that fights against Pigdog Scum. That sounds like pork I can't eat and I am unilaterally against that.

Welcome, brother! Take up arms against our oppressors and their questionable genetic engineering!



In other news

1. Laura Ingraham is losing her shit that there are four young, progressive, non-white new Congresswomen, dubbing them the "four horsewomen of the Apocalypse". (C'mon Laura...the correct term is "horseperson").

2. Mitch McConnell wrote an op-ed calling for bipartisanship and at the same time slamming the incoming House Democrats for being partisan before they've even been sworn in. Twitter has a field day with Mitch "One Term President" McConnell accusing anyone of partisanship.

3. InfoWars gets infected with malware snatching credit card info from its remaining followers. Alex Jones claims it's a conspiracy. Which is to say, a bear shit in the woods and the Pope is still Catholic.

Infowars did not immediately respond to our request for comment but Jones sent ZDNet a lengthy rant that boils down to something like, I haven’t been pwned! It reads in part:

    The corporate press is claiming that a Magento plugin to the shopping cart was the point of entry, but that is not true. Infowarsstore.com has never installed that plugin. We use some of the top internet security companies in the nation and they have reported to us that this is a zero-day hack probably carried out by leftist stay behind networks hiding inside US intelligence agencies [...]

    The hack took place less than 24 hours ago; it is undoubtedly the hacker or hacker group that then reported this to the establishment corporate press in an attempt to scare business away from Infowarstore.com.

Jones went on to accuse “big tech, the communist Chinese, and the Democratic party” of being behind a sweeping effort to de-platform Infowars. We’ve reached out to Magento to confirm Jones’s claims that the point of entry did not involve one of the e-commerce company’s plugins and that he’s working closely with its “top security people.”

[MetalSlimeHunt]

mhuh mhuh MSH you're just a scaremonger, everything is fine and can be reformed to be perfect, hey what's that coming over the hill

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Consider this sentence.

"Sex and procreation among the American population drastically declined from the 90s to the 20s, which contemporary accounts recognized but did not assign a clear cause for, which in later years resulted in ________________."

Is there a good thing in that blank?

[Dunamisdeos]

"Scaremongering, because overall population growth rate never went negative and has experienced worse decreases in the past before bouncing back"

[Starver]

"the rise of our glorious Robot Overlords. All Hail!"

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The birth rate is not my concern, I'm not a crypto-fascist. The concern is one of an unstoppable social wind in favor of isolation and dysfunctional misery, of which the lack of sexual relationships is only the most glaring gem in a large crown of alienation which has come to define American society.

There are possibilities.

[misko27]

Personally, I was waiting on January and the new Congress to come before declaring the old thread defunct and inaugurating my new, improved Freedom Thread (plus I haven't had time to write up my Star Wars intro-style first post). It's traditional to wait until the new Congress sits, yes? Besides, it's only 1776; we should stop at 2018 if anything.

Going off of this research (page 6), it seems that the "behavioral sink" isn't cities. It's the Internet.

Despite all of our rage, we are just mice in a cage.

[Doomblade187]

I also see this resolving in time. As we get better access to mental health services, and nonconsensual relationships are increasingly pushed down, so long as quality of life continues to improve.

Personally, I was waiting on January and the new Congress to come before declaring the old thread defunct and inaugurating my new, improved Freedom Thread (plus I haven't had time to write up my Star Wars intro-style first post). It's traditional to wait until the new Congress sits, yes? Besides, it's only 1776; we should stop at 2018 if anything.

Going off of this research (page 6), it seems that the "behavioral sink" isn't cities. It's the Internet.

Despite all of our rage, we are just mice in a cage.

Lololol

[MrRoboto75]

And, since access to social media is voluntary, people can... y'know, leave. It's not like it's our literal habitation, after all- there are other means of communication.

I still get affected by Tinder fostering dating cultures even if I never download it in the first place.