This has not been my only source about how US citizen think, but It’s only place where I currently talk with americans on daily/weekly basis.
But as for regular americans… I think here’s many regular and decent folk around. But, the strange and fascinating part of modern day US is that different social/political stratas seem to lack any common ground. In Finland people do disagree and have different values, but in the heart, most things are universally wanted (economic security, peace, low crime etc.), only the means´to get there are debated. Of course I’m simplifying, but it’s mostly much less polarised here.
It seems that US is falling in to different realities. You can follow one political camp or other and get completely different image what’s even going on. I do believe that there are some really idiotic “woke” people out there, but how mainstream they really are? I dunno. It’s really hard to get to the roots of how regular americans think, most of you guys are probably very uninterested about politics, but I won’t of course see this side when I’m talking about politics in the internet.
Most likely. I’m of course biased as fuck, but I do think Nordic Welfare state makes for more just and safe society than the US model. But I’m not sure this would even work in the US. Different (and much bigger) country and different culture.
Also, it’s not all so rosy, our welfare model is running to the wall fast, and our economy is going to the trashcan. It seems that this was fun as long as it lasted, but there’s too major issues to deal with now.
But yes. I do believe most of us want the same things, which you posted below:
@twojarslave So, after watching the city council video with the gorgeous “Bella Balles”, I just want to ask….how long until he runs for some sort of public office AND gets elected?? I’m dead ass serious, it seems like in Lewiston, anything’s possible these days. That whole exchange with that dude and the city council was ridiculous and a complete waste of time, yet they ALL totally placated him and acted like they were engrossed in the charade. Which, I guess they had to, for if they showed any emotion other than admiration for Mr. Balls, they wouldn’t have been good little marxist/socialists. That exchange would have been over within seconds here in Texas, with the mayor or head of city council instructing the sheriff to escort that weirdo out of there so they could get down to real, actual city business. I just can’t get over that nobody on the council, and especially nobody in the audience, laughed or booed that balls clown or shouted “get the hell out weirdo”. But, I guess Lewiston is just more culturally advanced than us [/s]
Again, I’m sorry you have to live in crazyland, but I do appreciate reading all your updates.
That was in Augusta, not Lewiston, and it was a school board meeting, but I believe the guy has declared himself a candidate for Governor of Maine. I don’t follow him on X but his posts occasionally show up in my feed. He’s the wrong kind of grifter to find grifting success in Maine through politics or solicitation, but he’s certainly doing his best. He moved here to collect benefits just like the woke voters did, and I believe he may have warrants in other states.
Lewiston is actually somewhat sensible compared to Portland, Bangor or Augusta, at least with our surface-level politics and politicians. In other words, we get the same woke policies, but with politicians voting for them who succeeded in convincing the town that they are moderate Democrats.
Our current council president fits that bill perfectly, being a Purdue educated engineer in his 70’s, skilled with using euphemisms to describe the radical policies, while also refusing to recite the pledge of allegiance at council meetings. Even our open DSA member still recites the pledge, probably because he aspires to higher office and Lewiston still has a lot of reasonable, productive people.
One of the more prominent activists who calls himself “Corn Pop” is running for Augusta school committee, formerly friends with the guy who did the Bella Balles stunt and frequent podcast guest. He’s into similar types of performative politics, and recently was arrested but charged with no crime when he showed up to a “No Kings” protest and (supposedly) accidentally flashed a pepper ball gun that’s indistinguishable from an actual gun while holstered, resulting in the protesters freaking out and calling the cops.
It’s extremely sloppy concealed carry practice at best, and I suspect he did it on purpose to provoke the response he got. He may have a good false arrest lawsuit on his hands, but it was still dipshit behavior in my book.
This is why I still read the local progressive hatchet man who is actually a good writer but suffering from a severe case of TDS.
You just explained the entire shift of people like me, Bill Maher, Matt Taibbi, Joe Rogan, and a whole lot of other Gen-X former liberals better than most Americans could.
This is why I currently lean left in America. That vision isn’t perfect, but it’s addressing these things. And decades of data prove those policies are better in most respects.
The current right/project 2025 engame looks like an absolute hellhole, and even more so for my kids. So while I want to agree philosophically, it’s not playing out.
I don’t like your surrender mentality. It’s not the optimistic “Right” view I hope for.
Ahh, yes, trust the experts, at least the ones Democrats tell you to trust. We hear this often in Maine, which used to have the best public schools and the lowest rates of violence, while also being rather affordable compared to other states.
The whole basis of Marxist critique is to compare the present to an unrealized utopian future state, then suggest some redistribution will solve it.
If you compare Maine today to Maine in 2018, it doesn’t validate Democrat policies at all, and no significant Republican policies have even been passed here because they haven’t been in power.
What are the data that support Biden’s border policy? Has someone figured out what the optimal level of diversity is in a small public school system? We’re at 42 languages and 1/3 of the student body as non English speakers. Should we aspire to 2/3’s?
@SepCalla is correct in his observation about Americans having different conceptions of reality. “My truth” and “the truth”. I see it all the time here in Maine, as I explained above.
I’ve understood that the weakening middle class is one of the main reasons US is having these inner turmoils now.
It seems that there are less and less people living well while not being overly rich. Rich people are getting wealthier while amount of people struggling finacially has been on the rise.
This has been a global trend since 2008. And it’s going on everywhere, but it’s much farther in US than in here.
Reasons for this can be discussed, but it’s concerning phenomenom nonetheless.
Here’s an example of leftist rhetoric in action. Chicago public schools currently has entire districts with no children who are functionally literate after a century of Democratic domination in city government.
They want you to believe that their ideas are inadequately funded, not revisit the ideas themselves. It’s the same thing here in Maine, even as spending on public education has doubled compared to the municipal budget, with Lewiston currently being one of the highest spend per student in the country.
It’s the same rhetoric with harm reduction, where they want us to believe that more spending on needles, more spending on other nonprofits, and less incarceration will somehow reverse the dramatic decline they have overseen in public safety.
Speaking of two realities, here is Biden’s head of Border Security for the San Diego sector explaining the dramatic changes in border policy enacted by Biden in 2024. This tracks with what a Maine-based ICE agent has told me, with both men being career federal agents serving under Bush and Obama as well as Trump and Biden.
Maine Democrats want us to believe these men are lying.
Or just trust the people who’ve lived in the various political permutations. I mean, is Trump the guy I should trust to look out for me? Are my kids getting the same level of concern his are? Does he think about their wellbeing, or mine? Is he thinking deeply about your job and the success of Mainers in the new AI economy? Because I seem to recall that historically Maine has been a hardscrabble place; cold and rocky. Without…
Jobs like data entry, scheduling, and customer service are already being overtaken by AI tools like chatbots and robotic process automation.
A 2024 study by the Institute for Public Policy Research found 60% of administrative tasks are automatable. Fink notes that BlackRock is streamlining back-office functions with AI, cutting costs. These roles, requiring repetitive data processing, face near-term obsolescence as AI’s accuracy and scalability improve.
Bookkeeping, financial modeling, and basic data analysis are highly vulnerable. AI platforms like Bloomberg’s Terminal enhancements can already crunch numbers and generate reports faster than humans. Dimon warns that JPMorgan is automating routine banking tasks, with 20% of analytical roles at risk by 2030.
Paralegal work, contract drafting, and legal research are prime targets, as AI tools like Harvey and CoCounsel automate document analysis with 90% accuracy, according to a 2025 Stanford study. Dalio highlights AI’s ability to parse vast datasets, threatening research-heavy roles in academia and consulting.
…I can imagine ME returning to its logging and fishing economy. Sure, tourism will still be there. I guess? If anyone can afford to go. Does this not worry you?
I also wonder, do you dispute the shifts downward in our global standing for things like infant mortality, educational markers, life expectancy, and reported happiness/anxiety? Is this all just fake news? Would you rather have raised your son in a deeply red state like AL or MS? Would you enjoy to retire there?
I live in a smaller, but probably politically similar place to Lewiston (the voting population, that is). There was a big push to bring immigrants in several years ago, which deeply divided the community. A scuffle ensued. Ultimately politicians lost their jobs and there was a shift rightward. The big influx did not occur. The state seems to really value its balance, and moderate conservatives can do well here, though we maintain a leftward tilt. It’s a nice place to live! Albeit not cheap. But living cheaply is not my goal. Living well is. I like being able to look my less-educated and -affluent neighbors in the eye when I stop at Walmart for dishtowels or door mats. I like knowing that their kids can go to the same doctors mine can, and I would like a return to their kids being able to earn a place in college alongside mine. (Currently, despite being in the top 10% of household earnings, college is tough even for my earnings cohort, at least if we want to be able to maintain a reasonable standard of living into retirement.)
I really don’t want a return to peasant classes, which seems to be where we’re going. I don’t think the “experts” of the time - the people experiencing it - found it as satisfying a lifestyle as being a noble would have been. This is where I fear we’re going. You keep making it about immigration and trans issues, but I think very few Americans disagree about the first and very few care deeply about the second. So here we are with the polarization of our voters, so that to be on the right means accepting masked troops in our cities and to be on the left means accepting women with beards competing against our daughters in sports. These are not okay - we should not have to choose between nightmare outcomes.
Good schools for the kids able to learn well, and ideally job prep for kids who struggle academically.
Healthy people, assuming they make healthy choices.
Work that pays enough to live with dignity in one’s community.
Effective law enforcement, with police a valued and protective community asset.
Elimination of harm reduction programs that do not show benefit, replacement with programs (whether jail or whatever) that have worked in the past.
We should stop screaming “but socialism!” about things that are merely things that decent people do. In previous generations the churches covered a lot of the shortfalls for the poor/infirm/stupid/whatever. That’s not the case now. Who replaces the money and devotion (generally non-working female) church members volunteered throughout history? We do. Sadly, that means that the misers and misanthropes are on the line along with the generous and caring, but if we’re going to MAGA, the things the churches did so well will need to come from somewhere else.
Was Biden? Or Harris? I don’t expect POTUS to handle local-level problems, but execute the office of the Presidency, which Trump is doing in a way that’s unlike every swamp politician that came before him. Executing immigration policy and handling national security are right at the top of POTUS responsibilities, and Trump is dramatically outperforming his predecessor who all but urged Putin to invade Ukraine, as long as it was only a “minor incursion”, while overseeing an actual invasion of the USA’s borders with both people and the fentanyl that is currently wreaking havoc on society.
Maine also had a strong manufacturing economy that is showing no signs of picking back up while businesses face higher energy costs, high school graduates who can’t understand a simple engineering print, a workforce that doesn’t always speak good English, along with increasingly higher taxes. One of Lewiston’s largest manufacturers left town a few months ago to consolidate operations in Ohio, not close shop.
Not necessarily, but how can government solve any of that with more woke Democratic Socialism, which seems to be making everything you describe worse?
Local governments are limited in what they can do to control “the influx”, when immigration policy is set by the executive branch of the federal government. The influx ultimately flows to areas that incentivize it the most and where the vast network of NGO’s finds it politically advantageous. That’s how Lewiston’s first wave of asylum seekers decided on Lewiston. It had housing available (with lead contamination issues), social welfare programs available immediately after moving to Maine, and the lowest crime in the country and best public schools in the country, which made it more attractive than Atlanta or Tennessee. They didn’t move here to work, but to take advantage of the government benefits. Not all, just most.
Local government actually stepped up to ask them to stop, because that’s all local government could do since it can’t control the migration of people, even those with Temporary Protected Status like Somalians (which have had that “temporary” status since 1992 after their Marxist government collapsed into civil war). This action by our mayor at the time resulted in national backlash, an award-winning documentary, and a local political backlash that resulted in a progressive mayor who welcomed more, and more started to come when word got out how good the benefits were in Maine.
More nonprofits got stood up, and Maine Democrats decided to fund them with state and local tax dollars, which is one of the things local governments can control, but those nonprofits can get stood up even if the locals don’t want them, in most cases.
The NGO’s then work with government and quasi-government NGO’s, notably the housing authorities, to organize construction of “affordable” housing which then gets packed full of migrants first, locals if there’s anything left.
In short, you don’t have nearly as much control over “the influx” at the local level as you seem to imagine. Nonlocal forces can fund the resettlement whether the locals want it or not, as long as the federal government allows the influx in the first place. These decisions follow market trends as well as being shaped by political priorities, meaning your town wasn’t seen as a juicy target for whatever reason. If you live in Kennebunkport or Cape Elizabeth in Maine, you won’t have to send your kids to a public school that’s 1/3 ELL students speaking dozens of languages. RSU 21 in Kennebunkport has 0 ELL students and so does RSU 12 in Cape Elizabeth. Strange how that works out, don’t you think?
If you don’t accept masked federal “troops” in our cities, you either have to accept Biden’s lack of immigration enforcement, which absolutely will return in a future Democratic administration, or you have to accept that more ICE agents get doxxed and potentially shot while doing their jobs, their families harassed, and fewer good people wanting anything to do with that line of important work.
You actually can control dicks in the locker room at the state and local level now that Title IX is back to what it was always supposed to be at the federal level. Many districts in Maine have recently voted to do this in defiance of the Maine Human Rights Act, which says you have to allow guys to get naked next to you and your daughters at the YMCA or a public school locker room.
I think you’re making the mistake of conflating social programs with socialism. It also does no good to pretend that the very real rise of Democratic Socialism as defined by the Democratic Socialists of America is just a dogwhistle. It’s not. They actually mean it, and it is the driving ideology of today’s democratic party. This means more social programs, but also identity-based tests for those programs as well, and especially for public spending priorities organized around the idea that spending disproportionately on people labeled as “marginalized” in the Democratic Socialist worldview will improve outcomes overall.
It’s the same idea of National Socialism, identity-based social welfare, just with a different set of in and out-groups. Nazis were ethnic German supremacists, who were the “marginalized” group in Hitler’s Germany. Same idea here, just with a different in-group and a lack of total government control.
There are a number of reasons for that, but here in Maine we had a lot of success in public/private partnerships with faith-based charities for most of the 20th century, so it wasn’t ALL done privately. Maine funded sectarian (i.e. Catholic) schools for over 100 years, surviving the KKK’s push to end that program in the 1920’s before Maine Democrats finally did in 2022 on the basis of Catholic schools not adhering to the Maine Human Rights Act’s conception of gender identity. Now St. Dom’s is closing, leaving Lewiston/Auburn without a private option that was still quite affordable to many working families.
They did the same thing with our homeless shelters that have been operating with good track records for decades in partnership with local churches. They were not eligible for any of the recent $2.5 million in funding awarded to Lewiston, which Democrats in Augusta specifically required go to funding “low-barrier” homeless shelters only. Ours just began operation this month, and I don’t expect that attracting more sex offenders, more drug addicts who don’t want to get clean (and don’t have to under the “low barrier” model), will do anything to help the regular people and businesses trying to go about their lives in the vicinity. Every one in Portland becomes a hellscape.
The ideas of Democratic Socialism, aka “woke” are what drives these shifts in public priorities, and a lot of them get voted on by people who campaign as moderate Democrats.
On the plus side, church enrollment is going up, especially among Gen Z, which is the most conservative generation of young men in American history as measured by voting preferences.
I’m also pleased at the backlash within mainstream MAGA to guys like Nick Fuentes, who is not “far right” but a leftist who believes in identity politics and massive state authority while he looks at guys like Hitler and Stalin through rose-colored glasses. Same woke identity politics, different in and out-groups.
The difference is the “woke right” is a fringe movement and not in the policy driver’s seat at the moment, while the woke left is firmly in control of Democrats at most levels of government. In most respects, MAGA is in-line with a 1990’s Democrat on most issues, supportive of public institutions and social welfare programs in general, just not to the same degree that modern woke Democratic Socialists are.
For an example of woke “decarceration” policies in action, Lewiston Police arrested Deshaun Seamster last night for aggravated cocaine trafficking, child endangerment, and for being a fugitive from justice in MA. He’s originally from Oklahoma but something attracted him to Maine and Lewiston in particular.
He’s got a long rap sheet including firing off rounds inside a bar whose owner tried to hire me for security around the same time that shooting happened. I declined the offer to bounce at the ACME Social Club in no small part due to that incident and others like it.
Maybe the latest round of restorative justice is going to result in Seamster being something other than a scourge on Lewiston, and seemingly other cities as well. Locking him inside of a cage would be racist and oppressive, according to decarceration activitists.
Here’s a good explanation of the so-called “woke right”, which I think is as good of a term as anything for what has been shaping up as a largely reactionary movement that presents fertile ground for disaffected young men, especially young white men who’ve grown up under woke left public institutions. The intersectional identity politics sow the field for National Socialism in the same way they do for Democratic Socialism.
A book called “The Cause of Hitler’s Germany” actually goes into how this played out in Weimar Germany, where most people had been conditioned to think in ways that presupposed identity politics of some form (class or race) and altogether ruled out the idea of treating everyone equally and free markets, even among the social democrats. There was no MAGA equivalent in actual policy and philosophical foundation, only different flavors of collectivist, powerful governments.
It affects us to this day, where American Republicans are conflated with German National Socialists by using an 18th century French seating chart to lump them both together as “right wing” due to their mutual rejection of international socialism and Communism.
Interesting article about the Epstein emails and the “dog who didn’t bark".”
There are three emails that are getting a particular amount of attention because of what they suggest about Trump or because of Trump’s involvement in them. The first is this one with Ghislaine Maxwell. It’s a 2011 email from Epstein. It says: “I want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. [Redacted victim] spent hours at my house with him … he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. i’m 75% there.” Maxwell’s response is, “I have been thinking about that.” I think this exchange is being interpreted like this: Trump knew what was going on, in terms of Epstein’s sex trafficking and soliciting prostitution and didn’t say anything, didn’t go public, didn’t go to authorities, didn’t do anything. But he knew. I want to hear what your interpretation is.
I think that that is accurate: Trump knew what was going on at Epstein’s house. He was a witness to it and, at some level, a participant in it. [Trump strongly denies this.] I mean, I’ve discussed the photographs that I’ve seen of Trump around Epstein’s pool with a variety of girls of indeterminate age.
But in addition to that, it was Epstein’s belief that after their falling-out in 2004 over a real estate deal in Palm Beach, with Epstein threatening Trump about money laundering and other things, Trump was the one who went to the Palm Beach Police and, as Epstein would say, “dropped a dime” on the fact that girls were constantly, almost hour by hour, coming in and out of his house. He believed that it was Trump, as an act of revenge or as a threat, who went to the police and started the investigations against him.
I read the whole article, and to believe it somehow paints Trump in a negative light means interpreting Epstein’s messages as truthful and grounded in a commonly-held sense of morality while also taking the reporter who buddied up to Epstein at his word. His “interpretations” are long stretches of reasoning at best, and I am unsurprised to find that a TDS sufferer like yourself finds them to be compelling evidence of anything.
It’s Slate, for Pete’s sake. If you still believe them after decades of spectacular wrongness, you may just be severely handicapped and unable to discern true from false.
Go right ahead. I’m sure there are some fallacies and contradictions in the many words I’ve written here, along with errors in my English.
I also don’t understand why you’d find the words of that Slate author “interesting”, when they aren’t backed up by any facts, but by generous leaps of logic and rather broad styles of “interpretation”.
It seems to me you’re just regurgitating the talking points du jour of people who have a long and notable track record of being wrong.
