The Democratic Party's Slide Into Irrelevance

Easily.

But emissions is just one form of pollution. Plastics, PFAS. All sorts of unnecessary toxins have to go.

If it's possible, no inherent objection.

But let's be clear, the average human has about a 1/4 oz of micro and nano plastic in our brains from degraded plastics and the figure is growing.

I'm not an expert on how realistic plastic recycling is.

I've always been a recycler, and will continue to be until further information, but started seeing stuff in my feed yesterday or the day before that plastic recycling is actually a net negative. Made me curious. Haven't gone further down that rabbit hole.

Most plastics simply can't be recycled. It's not like aluminum where it can just be melted down and reused.

The people who came up with the recycling numbers (Resin Identification Codes) in the 80s, have admitted that it was basically a PR scheme to make people believe all plastics are recyclable so that businesses could keep using plastic for everything. The usage of the recycling symbol itself further reinforced this idea. In reality, something like only 5% of plastic is actually repurposed-- the rest goes into landfills or the ocean.

Unfortunately, plastic is cheap to produce and profit is king. Capitalism is a helluva drug.

Yeah I am the same all my bottles go to a rescue group and our town has the blue bins and realistically the only thing that is recyclable is cardboard .

It always shocks me when I am in Vegas they throw all the bottles and cans in the garbage

We have a pretty robust plastic recycling for PET bottles but specifically for PET bottles. We are at the point where PET bottles could be an almost entirely closed loop.

That’s if not for the idiots and *******s buying up recycled plastic pallets (most of which from PET) to turn the into something we can’t recycle (“up”cycled garments for example)

no seriously, what's the difference between the dems and maga? fakest opposition party of all time. gee, i wonder why they're so irrelevant...

wow totally unexpected

"Dem party picks CIA agent for Trump SOTU response for 2nd straight year"

well it's official, they're the cia party now

Democrats were destined to lose votes because of I/P. It's a wedge issue in the current Democratic coalition. It was just a question of from where they were going to lose the votes. I honestly don't know exactly what spot on the I/P political spectrum would have been politically optimal if political optimization had been the only consideration.

Exactly. No matter which way they cut, they'd lose a bunch. It's a question of who and how many are more captured and less likely to defect.

you think they would have lost votes by stopping the genocide and forcing a POW transfer? I guess its possible. maybe I underestimate the influence of Zionists and their desire to slaughter. wouldnt be the first time I was wrong about that group.

You seem to believe that a majority of Americans wanted to see as many Palestinians killed as possible. Logically, I would expect you to argue that Democrats lost the election because they showed too much concern for Palestinians.

lol wut

But you could say this about every issue; it's true in an abstract sense that every issue is a "wedge" that will cost some votes. More concretely, it's becoming clear that continued support of the Israeli genocide cost the Dems far more than they gained. The Boomers are dying off, more and more young Americans are coming to see Arabs as human beings with basic human rights. The constituency of left-leaning potential Dem voters who also support an unlimited slaughter of Palestinians is vanishingly small and the Dems shot themselves in the foot catering to them.

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/22/dnc-202...

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/dnc-gaza-ken-martin-democrats/

The Nation

Democrats Have a Gaza Problem. They Don’t Seem to Want to Fix It.

Yes, but not every issue is a wedge issue within the party to nearly the same degree as I/P. I wasn't arguing that the Biden's administration policy was politically optimal. You may be correct that a policy that was more critical of Israel would have been politically optimal. But I do not agree that the number of Democratic voters who supported the Biden administration's policy toward Israel (or who wanted an even more pro-Israeli policy) was "vanishingly small."

In the current environment, any open I/P conflict was destined to be very bad political news for Democrats. There was no way to satisfy everyone in the coalition, and the best you could hope for politically was to minimize the damage.

(Again, I am talking only about political optimization. I fully endorse the idea that politicians should be taking moral considerations into account in these sorts of situations regardless of the political consequences.)

You view boths political parties as pure genocide machines. You view anyone who voted for either major party candidate as a full throated supporter of genocide. Do the math.

The fact that you can't satisfy everyone doesn't imply that the conflict was destined to be bad for Dems. They could have chosen a position that was more popular, picked up more voters and gotten more enthusiasm from the base. This whole "well, what can ya do, it was destiny" feels like an effort to remove accountability from the Dems. They made bad political decisions and lost votes because of it; there was nothing destined about it. Their own internal research says as much.

true for the parties but not necessarily all of the voters

We just disagree about whether the I/P conflict was a political problem or a political opportunity for Democrats. Internal research doesn't go to the point I am making. I also think that you are overlaying current opinion onto 2023/2024. In the last 12-18 months, reported support for the Israeli government has gone down among Democratic voters.

Okay Harris lost votes because of it. That doesn't mean she lost the election because of it. I don't think anyone is arguing that.

We can call any political decision a problem or an opportunity. At the end of the day, they chose poorly because they misread where the public was at or they just wanted donor money. They made poor choices and lost votes because of it, none of it was inevitable.

You seem to be conflating two different arguments.

A--Losing votes on a net basis because of I/P was politically unavoidable.

B--The actual number of votes lost on a net basis because of I/P was unavoidable.

I am arguing only A. I feel like you are implying that, by arguing A, I must be arguing B as well, which doesn't make any sense. A doesn't remotely imply B.

My hunch is national security made a lot of those choices behind doors. I'm thinking the decision to get rid of the Iranian regime is behind a lot of this. There's division with Reps on this too. Same goes for other countries and not just from the West.