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  • Paul Cantrellinthehands@hachyderm.io
    Nov 6, 2026, 12:23 AM

    Paul’s Inexpert Tactical Political Advice of the Day™:

    In the fight over who’ll be the next Congressional leadership, focus on Schumer. He’s both more harmful and more likely to go down right now than Jeffries.

    Don’t get me wrong, Jeffries regularly pisses me off. This is not a Jeffries endorsement. I just think Schumer is the fight that’s both more important to win •and• is more winnable. Light a fire under Jeffries, now and continuously, but frigging take Schumer •down•.

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Replies

  • Carsten Frankecarstenfranke@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 2:05 AM

    @inthehands do we email Peggy Flanagan's campaign to make our opinion about Schumer known? Still bug Klobuchar about it, even though she will resign?

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  • Vmiss_rodent@girlcock.club
    Nov 6, 2026, 2:50 AM

    @inthehands I would prefer to see both of them out, but, yeah, if you have to pick one to focus on, focus Schumer. He's been a problem since Jeffries was still a corporate lawyer.

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 3:27 AM

    @inthehands @glyph

    So let me just check and see here…

    Last time he was Majority Leader, Schumer ran rings around the Republican opposition and got a bunch of impactful legislation passed despite having a literal 50/50 Senate, including the biggest climate action bill in world history.

    As Minority Leader the last couple years he wielded the tools of obstruction so well that Republicans literally worked to change the Senate rules and ran to the Wall Street Journal to write whiny op-eds claiming it just wasn’t fair to have to face an opponent as tough as Chuck Schumer.

    And in the election cycle just concluded he helped lead the biggest wave for Democrats in the Senate in I don’t know how long, including correctly identifying pickups like Mississippi that everyone else had written off, and deploying nearly $70 million of emergency funding to drag that underperforming asshole in Michigan over the finish line.

    Meanwhile, the internal caucus that hate his guts and want to replace him is led by the folks whose Plan A for their coup was to endorse and elect a Nazi-tattooed rapist Blackwater mercenary in Maine.

    Make it make sense.

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  • Ian Bickingianbicking@hachyderm.io
    Nov 6, 2026, 3:53 AM

    @ubernostrum I've seen people specifically acknowledge Mitch McConnell for his willingness to be the bad guy, for everyone to hate him and absorb negative public opinion on behalf of other senators. I don't know exactly what a McConnell looks like as a Democrat, but arguably Schumer is that.

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  • 0xDECAFBADslyborg@ohai.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 3:59 AM

    @ubernostrum @inthehands @glyph Ah yes, the Michigan race in which Schumer's preferred candidate eventually endorsed the *Republican*.

    He's been around too long and is too invested in norms that no longer exist because they have been lucrative for him and his family. He will do his best to squash what the midterms just showed to be broadly popular things like cracking down on Wall Street because it will offend donors. If he is left in charge, the pendulum will swing right back in 2 years.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:06 AM

    @ubernostrum @inthehands I am open to hearing arguments about Schumer's achievements or skills I'm not aware of but this seems to be a wildly rhetorically incoherent argument. He gets credit for his shrewd savvy in "dragging" AES over the line with clever deployment of just the right amount of funding (i.e. 2/3 of what the opposition was spending), but we are supposed to forget that his openly-preferred (if not officially endorsed) primary candidate ginned up islamophobia in the primary?

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:08 AM

    @ubernostrum @inthehands And we're supposed to respect his shrewd vetting of candidates because he absolutely knew that Platner was an abusive nazi, endorsing a visibly-exhausted gerontocrat as the only bulwark against his bigotry, but equally skillfully *withheld* this devastating oppo dump vetting until months after his candidate *lost* that primary?

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:11 AM

    @ubernostrum @inthehands like you cannot heap praise on his masterful behind-the-scenes manipulations when things happen to work out but then ignore his repeated absolute faceplants in public. Florida: a regrettably unpredictable overperformance that he could not possibly have forseen. Mississippi: analytical genius spotting a rare opportunity. Like how is he directing *some* of these decisions but only when they turn out to have been correct?

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:14 AM

    @ubernostrum @inthehands Why is it that AES might have been at such a funding disadvantage that the party needed to parachute in such a desperate endgame bailout, I wonder? Could it be that "The quiet message from Mr. Schumer appears to have been heard loud and clear by Democratic donors. In recent weeks, supporters of Ms. Stevens have begun at least four outside efforts to give her a sizable advantage in advertising spending." nytimes.com/2026/06/05/us/poli

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:24 AM

    @ubernostrum @inthehands Part of the job of the leader is coalition management, so the fact _itself_ that half the caucus hates his guts is kind of disqualifying in its own right. Another part of the job is communications, which he is just … viscerally, visibly, laughably bad at. The man has no rizz, which, if he were an analyst or a staffer, fine. But rizz is a big part of the job; he has to be the face of the party for the next 18 months until we get a presidential contender.

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:47 AM

    @glyph @inthehands

    So, to be clear, your objection is that in a primary for an open seat (so siting Senators had no compulsion to just endorse the incumbent) Schumer preferred one of the candidates, supported that candidate, and then—along with the entire rest of the Democratic “establishment”—lined up behind the winner of the primary even though the winner of the primary wasn’t his preferred candidate?

    How villainous of him! How awful! I can see why you’d want him gone, especially after the many sterling examples the progressive wing of the party has given us this past decade of letting bygones be bygones and rallying behind the nominee even after a contentious primary and… I’m sorry, I just can’t keep writing that without laughing out loud.

    Meanwhile, I see you’re upset about a “gerontocrat”. I prefer to call her the accomplished and popular two-term governor of Maine, and I think in that light it’s not such a stretch to recruit her to run. But if you’re concerned about gerontocracy, know that some of Graham Platner’s biggest supporters among existing Senators were

    Bernie Sanders, age 85, has filed to run for another six-year term
    Ed Markey, age 80, ran for another six-year term this year
    Elizabeth Warren, age 77, ran for another six-year term in 2024

    All of whom are older than Chuck Schumer. And Chuck Schumer didn’t rush to give an early endorsement to the guy whose Nazi tattoo and Blackwater mercenary past were out in the open from almost the very beginning.

    And if we’re going to hold endorsements and affiliations against people, let’s talk about former progressive darling John Fetterman, who keeps hinting he’ll switch parties to Republican because he gets along with Trump so well. Or former progressive darling Tulsi Gabbard, who went from being a progressive member of Congress and a Fellow of the Sanders Institute to literally serving in Donald Trump’s cabinet.

    Meanwhile, it’s absolutely true that Schumer was the mover behind Colom in Mississippi. And the one who recruited Sherrod Brown to run again in Ohio. And that he directed resources to win key races. It’s absolutely true that he passed a shocking amount of ambitious legislation in a Senate where he technically never had a majority. It’s absolutely true that he so frustrated John Thune and the Republicans these past two years that they did in fact work on rule changes and write whiny op-eds in right-wing media.

    Anyway. We could still be basking in the glow of a big win, but some people seem determined to wreck it and to try to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by whatever means it takes.

    I suggest you look around at the folks you’re making alliance and common cause with and consider whether that should be a warning sign. Some of them are right here in this thread already, spouting the kinds of tropes that ought to make anyone stop and think “wait, are we the baddies”?

    app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/0

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 5:32 AM

    @ubernostrum @inthehands While I find your position somewhat irritating and that clearly seeped into my tone, what I was trying to do was to illustrate that there are numerous clear problems with Schumer’s leadership. If you want to convince *me* about his viability, you’d need to take those into account and address them as part of a holistic argument. I am not making a blanket defense of every decision in the entire progressive faction.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 5:32 AM

    Let me try to re-focus on the substance here. My issue is not that Schumer has no right to endorse candidates he likes. The issue is that the picked a deranged racist lunatic loser who ultimately endorsed a Republican, which speaks to poor character judgement. If your only argument is that he is a better judge of character than *Bernie “Claude is my new friend” Sanders*, then, sure, good luck with that I guess.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 5:32 AM

    I also think he should not have newly recruited someone *older than he is* to run against Collins; that speaks to poor organization-building, which is like, the main thing for a leader. If he had a deeper bench, surely he could find someone under 70. Your counter-argument here appears to be that… other people… are also old? Yes, most senators are way too old. They should be retired. It is tragic that they have not recruited younger and more energetic people so they can do that.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 5:32 AM

    I am just going to gloss over the whole paragraph of Tu Quoque stuff about bad progressive candidates because that seems to be totally irrelevant and I’m not sure why you brought it up. I’m not endorsing a specific other leader. There are 50 states worth of senators and surely someone more dynamic, moderate, and younger than Markey or Warren could step in.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 5:32 AM

    I assume you just agree with the “shit communicator” point since you just glided right past that one without addressing it, even by saying how bad Fetterman is at talking or something.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 5:32 AM

    The stuff about Colom & Brown is maybe interesting and could be some good counter-evidence. But like, what did Schumer *do*, that somebody else wouldn’t have, when he passed all that legislation? Was it him, or Biden? Frustrating Thune seems … relatively easy, when the house was such a smoldering ruin. Do you think Schumer had some unique skills in that role? You don’t need to keep repeating it, I get it, it’s not like the man has zero accomplishments, they just don’t stack up that high for me.

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 6:18 AM

    @glyph @inthehands

    To be blunt: I find your position more than “somewhat irritating”, and the only reason we’re having a back-and-forth is because it’s you. Anyone else would have been blocked and cut off instantly after the first post.

    I laid out how Schumer was effective as a Majority Leader, effective as a Minority Leader, and effective at picking up Senate seats in this election cycle. Your response is… well, I’m not even sure. You seem to think that can all just be discarded in favor of some sort of hypothetical thought experiment that someone else might perhaps have done better.

    But we have a successful known quantity, and while there are people who would relish getting to write “Democrats in Disarray” stories about a divided caucus fighting itself, I think those people can get fucked and we should unite behind someone who’s already demonstrated sufficient qualifications and effectiveness.

    You seem to think it’s OK to hold Schumer responsible for a primary endorsement that didn’t work out even though he (and the rest of “the establishment”) fell in line behind the nominee, but *not* to hold his biggest enemies in the Senate responsible for their failed endorsements or to use those as a critique of their general judgment. I find this incoherent at best.

    You seem to think Schumer is a “shit communicator” and that this is self-evident. I think evidence is needed, and I also think the fact that people value “but they do Good Tweets” over “but they do good work” is pretty terrible.

    You don’t seem to think it’s a red flag that the group that wants him gone felt they could literally stomach a Nazi rapist in a Senate seat on the Democratic ticket if that was what it took to get them power. I think if that’s what they’re willing to do for power, then they should be kept as far from it as possible (also, apparently they’ve now named themselves “Fight Club”, which is at best one step away from joining the right-wing meme-o-sphere). I also think we should display no charity whatsoever toward their motivations.

    And to be honest, the open bigotry against both Schumer and Jeffries is so obvious at this point that I’m skeptical of attempts to explain it away or not see it.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 6:30 AM

    @ubernostrum Look, the guy you’re replying to is in Minneapolis. Schumer fucked up the shutdown and gave ICE the budget to build their own fleet of aircraft carriers, and then they started murdering his neighbors as a direct consequence of that failure. While he watched, at close range. Maybe you have some defense of that procedural fuckup, but conveying it with grace and patience would have been a much better move.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 6:35 AM

    @ubernostrum I was trying to nudge this in a direction where it might be a learning opportunity, where you could relay some specific demonstration of Schumer’s skills, maybe explain some things I don’t know about his record, address some specific complaints I have. Instead you’re just yelling, repeating yourself nonspecifically, and attempting to, I guess, bully me out of support for the progressive senate faction? A thing which I don’t particularly care about?

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 6:38 AM

    @ubernostrum I don’t think you have particularly well evidenced _why_ he was good at either being minority or majority leader, and you can tell me not to believe my lying eyes about his communication skills but the numbers here are _stark_. He is very bad at getting people to like him. Maybe he truly rides the line at the edge of what’s procedurally possible, I’m not an expert at senate parliamentary procedure, but it sure doesn’t look like it from where I’m sitting.

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 6:48 AM

    @glyph Eight Senate Democrats defected to end the shutdown. By all means, go be angry at them! But none of them were named Chuck Schumer. He held the line and made clear he wouldn’t vote to end the shutdown without concessions from Republicans.

    And the shutdown situation sucked. It was a trolley problem where no matter how it wound up, some significant group of people would be badly hurt. But you’ve presented no evidence that a different Minority Leader would have somehow been able to produce any better outcome.

    And really that’s the thing I need you to understand: you’re not angry at Chuck Schumer. You’re angry at the 70-odd-million people who voted to elect Republicans in 2024, and the hundred-million-odd more who just shrugged and let it happen by either not voting or “protest” voting, and who therefore put all of us *in* a trolley problem. And now that a lot of those voters flipped this week and elected a bunch of Democrats and there’s a chance to start making progress, you and others are actively taking sledgehammers to what is honestly a really fragile and disparate coalition, before it even has a chance to be sworn in. And I can’t and won’t abide that.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 6:53 AM

    @ubernostrum Sometimes one can commit no errors and still lose. But he *did lose*. And I, personally, think that he could have been whipping defectors much harder. Maybe the ideas that I have for how he should have wielded that power are wrong, and primary challenges or other similarly extreme things would have broken the coalition more badly than I would appreciate. He had to convince those dems, and he couldn’t. Mabye nobody could, but *he couldn’t*, and people died.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 6:55 AM

    @ubernostrum And yes! Ultimately we are in a fight with Republicans. I am mad at him for being a bad leader *in that fight*. The kind of ire one has for a bad general is very different than the ire one has for the enemy. And by framing things like this, you’re talking down to me, assuming I cannot do this kind of very basic utilitarian analysis on my own.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 6:57 AM

    @ubernostrum Right now, if you’re correct, then it is morally incumbent upon *you* to be convincing. Presumably that is why you felt it necessary to burn social capital by replying to this thread in the first place, when you could have said nothing. You are doing a very bad job, despite a receptive and sympathetic audience. Look inward, and perhaps consider why the strategy you are supporting and the strategy you are employing might be aligned in ways that make them both fail.

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 7:15 AM

    @glyph You don’t get to start off as *you* did in this thread and then switch to this approach, Glyph.

    And to answer your other comments:

    It wasn’t *any* elected official’s job to have a Green Lantern ring and magically will away all our problems. We are not passive bystanders who just vote every couple years and then abdicate all responsibility for the consequences. You know that, and you know better than to act otherwise.

    And you want to complain about communication? You know who else is a spokesperson for Democratic politics? You are. I am. We all are. So: what did *you*, with a following of thousands on social media, do to communicate the direness of the situation and help people understand what was going on?

    The saying goes: “look for the helpers”. If I go look back through what you’ve said, will I see a helper?

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 7:32 AM

    @ubernostrum The very first thing I said in this thread was “I am open to hearing arguments about Schumer’s achievements”. I proceeded to critique *your argument*, not Schumer’s record; I was highlighting a double standard. I admittedly could have been more polite, and made the invitation more explicit, but I was pretty annoyed by your opening gambit’s rudeness already. Clearly, I could have done better, given that my attempt failed.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 7:33 AM

    @ubernostrum However, I categorically refuse to pivot from discussing tactics in this conversation to a totalizing personal utilitarian calculus. If you don’t think I’m a helper overall, we don’t have a basis of good faith to build on. For what it’s worth, I know that you are, or (as you said previously) we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 7:36 AM

    @ubernostrum If your defense of Schumer is that some random F-tier washed-up programmer “personality” with sub-10k followers on a backwater irrelevant social network is a less effective advocate for democratic politics and organizing than he is, then, guilty as charged, I guess.

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 8:40 AM

    @glyph We know--not suspect, not speculate, *know*-- that Trump's two wins were significantly aided by apathy and depressed turnout on the Democratic side. If you don't believe me, I can show you numbers.

    That doesn't mean criticism isn't warranted or can't be posted or even that we can't have some fun doing so. But there's a difference between reasonable and constructive criticism, and the relentless firehose of negativity that social media has turned into with respect to the Democratic Party and Democratic politicians, and which plays its role in increasing apathy and lowering turnout. And there's absolutely no need to add to that.

    And again. Schumer was effective as a Majority Leader: he got key legislation passed in a literal 50/50 Senate. He was also effective as a Minority Leader: he obstructed so much that Republicans literally threatened to change Senate rules to get around him. And if you want to hold him responsible for what you see as avoidable mistakes/losses in a midterm cycle, you don't get to do that and also deny him credit for wins. And this was overall the biggest win in a long, long time. There simply is nobody else with that kind of record in the Senate caucus.

    It still is the case that the shutdown was a no-win situation, and the only alternative strategy you've offered is that, in a hostile media ecosystem that actively wanted Trump back in power, Schumer could have somehow gotten a sympathetic message across to ordinary Americans who then would have... not been able to do anything, either, because there wasn't an election coming up, and Republicans believed (and the media was agreeing with them) that they were riding a massive wave of realignment in American politics.

    And all this latest wave of post-victory acrimony is even worse, because it prevents us from being unified to wield those nice big Congressional majorities, and because it's threatening to actually rip the party apart before we even get to January. I certainly see how angrily posting about Schumer and Jeffries is *cathartic* for some people, but I don't see at all how it helps anyone or anything.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 8:55 AM

    @ubernostrum Do you see it as a total impossibility that the party could unify behind a leader other than Schumer?

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 10:06 AM

    @glyph People who know more than I do seem to think there’s zero chance anyone else could get close to enough votes to become Majority Leader. Ditto for anyone getting enough votes to become Speaker over Jeffries.

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 6:57 AM

    @glyph And if the shutdown had continued indefinitely, do you know what would have happend?

    People also would have died. At that point around 1.6 *million* people were furloughed and facing eviction and starvation, and while you’re free to say that’s an acceptable sacrifice in your view, you’r not free to say it’s clear and obvious to everyone that they are the correct ones to throw under the trolley.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 7:06 AM

    @ubernostrum Perhaps if the leaders of the party were really bad communicators and could think to do nothing but extend/not-extend. But a really good leader with really good infrastructure could have been organizing support drives, building resiliency into the system in advance, using it as a bully pulpit. And I could probably write you up 3-4 pages of suggestions if I thought about it for an hour or two, but that’s not supposed to be my job! It was Chuck Schumer’s job.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 7:09 AM

    @ubernostrum Beyond that, if it was really impossible, then it was kinda his job to *explain why* it was impossible, and explain what was going to happen next. Which he also failed at, because as far as I can tell — despite me being top-decile plugged-in in terms of the total population — he just … didn’t do anything else. His explanation worked for you, I guess, so he’s not batting zero. But a lot of other people came away with my impression as well.

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 1:00 PM

    @glyph Also, hold on just a minute, because both Paul and you are repeating untrue claims. It took me a while to dig up all the info, but I knew there was something way off here.

    The 2025 shutdown ended after seven Democrats and one Independent flipped and allowed cloture on a continuing resolution. A CR doesn’t and can’t expand an agency’s budget. It just preserves the status quo and kicks the problem down the road.

    In 2026 there was a short shutdown in January when Schumer and Senate Dems, literally in response to what was going on in Minneapolis, halted the budget. That shutdown ended only when Republicans agreed to remove the DHS funding from the budget.

    Then the second 2026 shutdown, the longest in US history, was February through April when Republicans tried to fund DHS and Schumer and Dems held the line. It ended with a modified bill that funded TSA and FEMA but *not* ICE or CBP.

    Republicans eventually did a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill in June to fund ICE and CBP. Party-line vote as far as I can tell.

    Currently the government is once again on a continuing resolution, which expires on December 11, and seems to have been timed specifically to prevent the lame-duck Republican majorities from being able to confirm judges or pass other nastiness since they have to do another budget fight or face a Christmas shutdown.

    So Schumer NEVER caved on funding ICE, and certainly didn’t give them “the budget to build their own fleet of aircraft carriers” or anything like it. Every instance of expanded funding to ICE since Trump took office was through reconciliation bills that bypass the filibuster.

    Even the dedicated haters, at the time, had to grudgingly give him credit for playing that as well as anyone could have (see link). Yet for pointing out the truth about this while a lie is running around the world, I’m the one “burning social capital”?

    prospect.org/2026/04/03/chuck-

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 6:45 PM

    @ubernostrum My own high-level gloss here was definitely out-of-sequence. I am quite sure that Paul, who was (obviously) paying closer attention to this specific issue at the relevant time, could fill in better details, but you kicked this off in such a way that we have now burned that bridge and I'm not going to loop him back in. The burning of social capital is obviously not providing this correction (which you're only doing now! not at the start!) but the bombastic derision you opened with.

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 9:03 PM

    @glyph I'm going to quote Paul here:

    "Then, at the end of Jan, just weeks/days after they murdered Alex Pretti, when support for ICE+CBP was at its lowest, when the Democrats’ hand was the strongest to stop this effort to upgrade ICE from secret police to private army, Schumer just…caved. He extracted essentially no meaningful concessions, nothing but a few procedural hurdles the Republicans easily jumped through (as everyone predicted they would). The shutdown ended, having bought us essentially nothing. The funding passed.

    Schumer had even managed to get the DHS funding isolated from the rest of the budget — an incredible negotiating position to be in! — and he just flushed that advantage down the toilet at the moment of greatest leverage."

    This is not the kind of claim that just needs to "fill in better details". It's objectively and verifiably false. And not even a difficult or complex kind of false, either. This can be debunked by just skimming Wikipedia's coverage!

    The first 2026 shutdown ended with Dems helping to pass a funding bill that explicitly excluded DHS. The second, longer 2026 shutdown ended with another funding bill that did TSA and FEMA but still excluded ICE and CBP. At no point did Schumer or the Democrats "cave" or "throw in the towel" or any of the other things Paul has claimed repeatedly in his angry posts. They didn't vote to give ICE expanded funding that could "build a fleet of aircraft carriers", as you so bombastically claimed. The big Democratic "cave" was on a continuing resolution in 2025 that just kicked the budget down the road, and after the events of Minneapolis over that winter, in the early 2026 shutdowns Schumer and the Democrats held the line to the maximum possible extent. Again, I even cited someone who hates Schumer (but who actually paid attention to what he did) writing up a grudging acknowledgment of this.

    If I said something as completely wrong as what this thread has offered, especially if I said it in service of wrecking a fragile coalition that's our only hope for trying to take our country back, I *hope* people would jump in to correct me. And the fact that you're still trying to hand-wave it away as a matter of just needing "better details" or more conciliatory tone is really concerning.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 10:45 PM

    @ubernostrum Yes. That is why *Paul* doesn't like Schumer. There are a couple of ways I could interpret "caved" based on the facts in evidence, and I'm not quite sure what he meant by that. Too bad you blew your chance to persuade him by opening by attempting to reductively relitigate Platner/Mills and AES/Haley instead of getting into the substance!

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 10:47 PM

    @ubernostrum My own "aircraft carrier" comment was based more on the events of 2025 and I doubt we'd see eye to eye about what tools Schumer had available to him at that time, and I just don't think that we are capable of having this particular discussion productively.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 10:49 PM

    @ubernostrum For me, the issue is this: the Democratic brand is badly underwater. As great as Tuesday's wins were, they were the result of *negative polarization* more than any funding strategy, recruiting drive, or whatever. People are pissed, for obvious reasons. But people _do not like the democrats_ realclearpolling.com/polls/fav and in 2028 we are going to get absolutely pummeled into irrelevance (if not the minority) by thermostatic opinion again.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 11:10 PM

    @ubernostrum Now, if the choice were Schumer's leadership or a *destroyed coalition* then sure. But this isn't a "blue no matter who" moment, it's not like the choice is Schumer or Thune. It's "Schumer, somebody else, or maybe a couple of embarrassing failed rounds of protest voting which makes it clear to Schumer that he's on thin ice and then Schumer anyway". It's not like the Senate shuts down if someone else puts themselves forward. It's a secret ballot *inside* the conference.

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 11:32 PM

    @glyph In a heavily polarized environment, yes, most everybody ends up “badly underwater”. For example: basically all Republicans will say they hate Democrats, and at least a few percentage points’ worth of Democrats will be angry with the party at any given time because it’s a coalition and you can’t please everyone all the time, and that’s all it takes to get you to a net unfavorable.

    And you know that. I know you know that.

    In 2025 Republicans passed the OBBBA through reconciliation, which avoids the filibuster. For the later budget resolutions that year Schumer expressed doubts about whether a shutdown was the right choice, and those doubts were perfectly reasonable in the moment, but once it came to a shutdown he did the difficult thing and stood by the ongoing shutdown even when literally millions of people were suffering under furloughs and benefit cuts.

    And you know that. I know you know that.

    You also know or should know that I’ve tended to avoid (certain types of) “politics” on Mastodon. I’ve done so for my own reasons, and doing so has frequently required me to try to hold my tongue and overlook everything from terrible hot takes to flat-out lies coming from people who absolutely ought to have known better. And I think I did mostly manage it, because it’s been a rough couple years for us all, and because I still valued professional acquaintances from the Before Times.

    But this week we won. We won big. I unclenched my jaw for the first time in two years and breathed a little sigh because finally there was some hope. And what did I see when I came on here? I saw people actively trying to wreck it, not even 48 hours in.

    And the fact that you’re still resorting to smug aggressive “too bad you blew your chance to persuade” type comments, and deflecting and dodging with quibbles like redefining “caved” to mean something it plainly does not, reinforces what I was already afraid of.

    So I’m just going to be blunt: you were one of those people with whom I frequently felt I needed to just grit my teeth and try not to call out the smug wrecker stuff you loved to post. Over the past couple years I’ve blocked and muted a bunch of the people you like to boost, to try to keep the stuff out of my timeline and make it easier to stay on at least professional acquaintance terms with you.

    But what you’ve been doing the past day or so, I can’t ignore and I can’t fix by blocking or muting someone else. I’m going to mute this thread, and you, and take the weekend to think about where to go from here, but right now I’m not optimistic.

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  • James Bennettubernostrum@infosec.exchange
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:52 AM

    @dogiedog64 @inthehands@hachyderm.io @glyph The immediate deployment of dual-loyalty tropes says you’re two, *maybe* three posts away from just full mask-off slurs and Nazi memes.

    I bet the people who hate Chuck Schumer sure are glad so many of their allies look like you!

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 5:56 AM

    @ubernostrum @dogiedog64 I am also sensitive to unwarranted “dual loyalty” stuff but I am reading this as a reference to Schumer’s much more specific “my job is to keep the left pro-Israel” comment last year in his NYT interview, or “one of my jobs is to fight for all the aid that israel needs” at a JCRC-NY event in February. perhaps I am being overgenerous, I do not know this person, but I don’t see obvious fascist stuff on a quick scroll through their profile

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  • The Lack Thereof :v_bi:lackthereof@beige.party
    Nov 6, 2026, 7:05 PM

    @inthehands

    Much bigger deal is that it's actually *possible* to take Schumer down, as it requires only a vote of the majority of Democrats to pick Senate majority leader.

    For speaker of the House, on the other hand, the vote is of the full body, all the Republicans get to vote, too. So we need a pretty massive supermajority of Democrats to replace Jefferies, since we can assume every Republican in the house will be voting as a bloc for Jim Jordan or some other monster.

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