{"id":55978,"date":"2025-01-18T06:03:16","date_gmt":"2025-01-18T14:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=55978"},"modified":"2025-01-17T17:07:13","modified_gmt":"2025-01-18T01:07:13","slug":"open-thread-january-18-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/01\/18\/open-thread-january-18-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread January 18 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, Heather Cox Richardson mentioned, among other things, that after Preident Biden&#8217;s speech this week, Google searched for the term &#8220;oligarchy&#8221; spiked. I guess it&#8217;s good that a lot of people are learning &#8211; and I guess it&#8217;s encouraging that enough people are willing enough to learn to trigger a spike. But I guess I just don&#8217;t live in the same world as people who didn&#8217;t already know the word. I suppose that in 1962 there wewre plenty of people who didn&#8217;t grasp the implications of &#8220;military-industrial complex&#8221; too. (However, I&#8217;ll bet everyone who heard Washington&#8217;s farewell understood the term &#8220;designing men&#8221; &#8211; although it&#8217;s much harder to actually recognize one until he&#8217;s on the way out with your money and possessions in his pocket.)<\/p>\n<p>If Robert Hubbell provides clarity on resisting, <a href=\"https:\/\/robertreich.substack.com\/p\/the-oligarchy-will-decide-what-truth\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Robert Reich<\/a> provides a pep talk to stress the necessity of resisting. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m putting it first today. I for one needed the guidance of Hubbell to help me get out of the emotional swamp Reich built. You may not, but just in case.<\/p>\n<p>Given the holiday, I need to plan ahead some, but I want to get this in before Sunday. <a href=\"https:\/\/roberthubbell.substack.com\/p\/resisting-without-disengaging\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Robert Hubbell<\/a> makes the difference very clear between resisting and disengaging, particularly on social media. I don&#8217;t do any social media myself, and the closest thing I do do to social media is Democratic Underground, and I&#8217;m kind of afraid to go there since <a href=\"https:\/\/www.democraticunderground.com\/100219911472\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I posted this Thursday<\/a> and expect a lot of pushback. The way some members there post, you&#8217;d think Merrick Garland was Roy Cohn or Roger Stone. and that just isn&#8217;t the case.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/62wou0hU_AM?si=inL3dkSGHXtEScUv\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wtLGEp1hDlM?si=XeSTaDH7kg54PhKi\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-55918\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/choice.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"776\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/choice.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/choice-232x300.jpg 232w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/choice-116x150.jpg 116w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, Heather Cox Richardson mentioned, among other things, that after Preident Biden&#8217;s speech this week, Google searched for the term &#8220;oligarchy&#8221; spiked. I guess it&#8217;s good that a lot of people are learning &#8211; and I guess it&#8217;s encouraging that enough people are willing enough to learn to trigger a spike. But I guess I <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/01\/18\/open-thread-january-18-2025\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":55985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[4355,4111,6162,5813,6035,5447,6051],"class_list":["post-55978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-animals","tag-cats","tag-disengaging","tag-executive-orders","tag-gop-hypocrisy","tag-oligarchy","tag-resistance","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}