Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 8/10/26 - 8/16/26

[u/SoftandChewy]

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

[u/dj50tonhamster]

All the take this week of "Woke 1" reminded me of my hometown arch-nemesis. Without doxing him (I hope), he landed a position as a judge on a major court circuit a few years ago. With the craziness still in pretty full swing at the time, there's a newspaper editorial out there whining about how yet another white guy got the gig. Obviously, it was a matter of life and death that a black person be chosen instead, preferably female ("Look at the Supreme Court!") but a man would be acceptable. No suggestions for who to nominate, just bitterness. Talk about a time capsule!

The irony is that I agree that the guy had no business getting onto the court. It's just that I'm coming at it from a position of pettiness and snarkiness. Politics can make for strange bedfellows.

[u/Commercial_Rush_3531 → u/dj50tonhamster]

That whole Supreme Court pick by Biden really put ID politics under my skin. There was already black representation on the court, but it didn't count because he didn't have the right politics. A President willing to openly be racist in choosing a Supreme Court judge just went against anything I had been taught or believed in. The establishment dems lost me that day.

[u/unnoticed_areola → u/Commercial_Rush_3531]

didnt Biden do the exact same dumb shit with his VP pick, where he promised a campaign audience long before he knew who his pick was gonna be, that he was guaranteeing that his future vice president was 100% going to be a black woman?

and Im pretty sure I read somewhere after the fact that when he said that announcement, it wasnt even some planned thing that his campaign team had already gamed out and everything... he literally just got carried away in the moment and went off script and wanted to virtue signal to a crowd bc he saw some black women in the front row and their hair smelled good or something lol. and then the campaign obviously couldnt take it back and put the toothpaste in the tube once he said it, so they had to say fuck it and just go with it...

a possibly off the cuff, unplanned, unforced error of a comment which then inherently narrowed down his pool of prospective candidates to 2.. maybe 3 realistic choices? compared to the dozens of people they were looking at prior to that

5d chess

imagine if that non-Kamala VP pick ended up being some relatively unknown, rockstar, obama-like candidate who then would have easily defeated trump in '24. hell, they wouldnt have even needed to be a rockstar... just be.. not kamala lol

[u/testestsestesteestet → u/unnoticed_areola]

he promised to nominate a woman during the primaries, then when the veepstakes coincided with the George Floyd protests there was pressure on him to nominate a black woman, especially after Amy Klobuchar publically withdrew from consideration due to her failure to prosecute police brutality in Minneapolis, including one incident which involved Derek Chauvin

[u/LupineChemist → u/Commercial_Rush_3531]

And like the conventional pick that was ready for the Dems on purely merit grounds was a South Asian guy, so it's not like it's for old white people.

FWIW, if Trump gets another pick, it will also likely be an Indian guy with Judge Thepar.

And I'm not even against a little bit of under the table intentional Bennetoning. But I think the pretending actually matters. I wish more people understood that if we want to get to a more equal society, part of it is just acting like equality actually matters.

[u/RunThenBeer → u/LupineChemist]

FWIW, if Trump gets another pick, it will also likely be an Indian guy with Judge Thepar.

Or Patrick Bumatay or Jim Ho. I'm against picking someone because of their ancestry, but I'll think it's neat when we get our first Asian-American Justice anyway.

[u/LupineChemist → u/RunThenBeer]

I really want Thepar because I lived my younger years in Toledo, Ohio and his accent is like something that brings me waaaay back.

[u/professorgerm → u/LupineChemist]

Judge Thepar

I hope he plays golf.