I just wanted to confirm from our meeting just now, did you want me to (some crazy shit that could cause problems)?
There was 0% hyperbole in anything I said. I was actually careful to draw a distinction between things I think are possible, things I think are likely, and things I think are virtually certain.
I know that in your mind, what I said was some kind of exaggeration to make a point. It wasn’t. That perception and the casual way you’re looking at this election is why you need to WAKE THE FUCK UP.
The polls do not agree with you
That’s one of the reasons they started writing idiot stories about Michelle Obama. They polled a bunch of other Democrats against Trump, and Biden did better than almost all of them, and they can’t write that story. Kamala Harris, though, actually beat Biden by a couple percentage points, and they definitely can’t write that story, because it’s a realistic and sensible pathway forward.
And so, like the bullies at the back of the class, they shouted out “nominate Michelle Obama!”, and the fucking idiots started taking it seriously and talking about it, while the bullies are trying to laugh quietly with each other behind their notebooks, because of how easy it is to play this game.
We have, to a large functional extent. Democracy requires a free enough press that people can determine what’s going on, which they currently can’t.
I fail to see how making every aspect of that problem exponentially worse by letting Trump come to power will fix it. Are you under the impression that Trump will have the military seize the voting machines and run the 2028 election, but that third parties will then become a viable alternative?
Have fun in the death camp
Maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll “only” be illegalization of abortion and maybe birth control and porn, a ratcheting up by quite a lot of all the undemocratic shit that goes on at a state level to prevent fair elections, the functional end of fairly important things like the Department of Education or the EPA, and definitely not least of all, the end of any attempt at action on climate change, even the pitiful attempts at mitigation that are currently trying to prevent some of the most apocalyptic of outcomes.
Of course, that’s only the first four years. I think it’s fairly unlikely that four years of corruption of the judiciary would leave anything in place in terms of fair enough media and elections that we could get rid of the Republicans at any point going forward, until it gets so bad that there is a for real blood in the streets revolution and ensuing civil war.
But, you know, you didn’t have to vote for the old guy. I do understand how that could be upsetting.
Therrrrre it is
I kinda had a feeling that was where this was going.
Yes. He’s not demented, but even if he was, yes. Vote for Biden, or Kamala Harris, or fuckin Daffy Duck if that’s who’s on the ballot on the other side of Trump.
Reforming the Democrats so they are not so shit also sounds like a great idea, just unlikely to me to happen in the next few months. But in the meantime, yes. If a bucket of ranch dressing was running as the nominee in November, I would plan to vote for the bucket, because it doesn’t plan to do any mass deportations or have the military seize the voting machines to prevent any improvement of the system in the future that you just claimed is your hope to achieve with all of this.
Okay, so significantly less likely than Jon Stewart. Got it. Well, if that’s all you’ve got on offer, I plan to shrug my shoulders and vote for the guy who doesn’t want to kill or deport me, and I would recommend that others do and advocate the same.
This part doesn’t seem totally crazy to me. Actually, Ralph Nader, who has quite a history of getting good outcomes to pop out of the pig’s ear (to put it pretty fuckin charitably) that is Washington, expressed his anger and frustration with people who were seeing injustices like Gaza and not doing anything to threaten the Democrats into better behavior about it. Like I say, not totally crazy.
I feel like the needed additional part for that, though, is some concrete action to induce the change you are aiming for from the Democrats. That’s the part that the civil rights movements had. If you’re just saying “not good enough yet” as a general thing, and encouraging others to do the same, then I think that ramps up the unlikeliness of it producing any good policies, and also ramps up significantly the likeliness of it producing death camps instead.
Not saying you’re doing that; I haven’t gone back and taken any kind of deep dive. But I’ve been conversing with you and I haven’t happened to run across anything that stuck out that looked like “I don’t want to vote for the Democrats unless X Y Z and you shouldn’t either.”
If you have a credible plan for how to achieve a third result, let’s fuckin have it.
I am completely serious. I want to replace Biden with Jon Stewart, because that is the most confidence inducing thing I can come up with and seems at least as likely as all kinds of crazy unrealistic shit I am hearing and at least carries the advantage that if it did happen, I feel like I could relax quite a bit about what the election is going to result in. But if you have something more realistic, which wouldn’t be hard, let’s have it.
I think the debate was a horrifying disaster. I think the Democrats should be having a hard conversation about what they want to do, and this mindlessly stubborn “fuck you it’s Biden” attitude is just as harmful as is the constant hand-wringing about how we can’t possibly go forward with it being Biden.
Surely, the right move is for Biden to go up on stage and say, look, I want the best for the Democrats. I’m fine with an open convention. No one in the Democratic party is the enemy. Trump is the enemy. Let’s have an open convention, and figure out what we want to do, if everyone can commit to getting the fuck behind it and winning the election once that is done. I hope it’s me, but if it’s not I’ll support the nominee, but let’s figure it the fuck out without getting in slap fights with each other while there’s a crocodile approaching the children.
Just as surely as that, doing the whole ABC interview was just compounding mistake upon mistake. The first rule of getting bullied is, you don’t stand up in front of the class afterwards and make a big speech about how you’re not actually a big poopie head, and show everybody your head so they can see there’s no poop on it, and it was totally unfair for everyone to say those mean things about you because they’re not true.
The part that pisses me off, and the reason I wanted to post this, is the absolutely relentless drumbeat of shitting on Biden and panicking that about a third of the Democratic party is for some reason leaning way the fuck into now. It’s just stupid. They talked you into the idea that all the American voters suddenly forgot that Trump might execute them, because of the debate. Surprisingly enough, they didn’t. The New York Times sure did. They ran 8 out of 8 of their front page stories yesterday about how Biden is bad. Someone needs to show them the data before they keep milking this thing and make it come true.
Guys: Trump is gonna fuckin execute you. Wake the fuck up. If you think Biden’s too old, let’s have a fuckin solution, because Trump might be going to execute me too, or at least put me in prison, and I’m really fuckin sick of you pretending the polls show this objective disaster for Biden (when they don’t), and creating the exact “he’s gonna lose the election” situation that you claim is your greatest fear, the whole time while you’re doing everything in your power to create it.
Oh right. My mistake.
So you know that Trump has plans to start shooting protestors on purpose with live ammunition, but you also think that whether you vote or not isn’t important? Not just “accidentally” crush some eyes or testicles or skulls from time to time, but just outright gun people down en masse, and you’re okay with not doing anything to stop that escalation until the Democrats clear your bar for goodness?
(Actually, more accurately, he has plans to remove the things that stopped the order from getting carried out, when last time he said he wanted them to shoot protestors with live ammunition.)
I’m not trying to be rude about it or harp on this one thing when we seem like we should be allies, but your viewpoint on that sounds shockingly naive. You also didn’t answer my question. If you (or I) are one of the people getting shot, a year from now, because you want to organize for a better world, will you in your words deserve to face those consequences?
Why is this not sedition?
That too, yes. But my main point is that Trump is such a disorganized moron that I think it’s possible that having him at the helm will undo a lot of the potential effectiveness of Project 2025. Having almost anyone else in charge of its implementation will amp up the terrifyingness level by quite a bit, and it already wasn’t small.
Whether you vote or not isn’t important to me as long as whoever gets elected, you continue to fight for a better world via direct action.
If Trump gets elected, you may start getting shot for fighting for a better world via direct action. Or for many other things.
The Democrats created this situation,
100% true
and they deserve to face consequences for it.
Along with millions or potentially billions of others, who didn’t do anything wrong?
They didn’t say Biden had any part in the genocide, they said:
There is a very real chance that Biden’s unquestioning support of Israel will lead to WW3.
Bibi knows whatever happens, Biden will always have his back. He can’t get that loyalty from any other US president
Those are two dubious statements followed by a third that is explicitly and laughably objectively false. Every US president has had Israel’s back. The idea that Biden is somehow exceptional is the part that is Republican propaganda, not the idea that he has any part. He clearly has quite a large part in it, I think. I would stop short of saying he’s “responsible” for it at this point, although I guess that one is debatable by people of good faith.
But saying he’s a departure from the norm for US presidents because of his nearly-total support for Israel is explicitly false, and is being used quite effectively as propaganda against him in this election, yes. When was there a US president who didn’t support Israel?
Also, I want to get clear on this, too: Are you saying people should be unable to say that this is Republican propaganda? Like not allowed to say that, something is wrong with the forum if they’re allowed to make that claim about you? Or no?
This is exactly why Trump is the best case scenario for all this ugly shit coming to its battle. Think about if they went to all this trouble of laying the groundwork and rigging the media coverage so everyone spends the whole time talking about how Biden’s old and jerrymandering and overriding vote totals with the state legislature and killing the post office and intimidating voters and running multi billion dollar explicitly seditionist media networks and whatever else and what the hell, it works, and he gets a second term.
And then he says, fuck that, we hate Project 2025 now, if I do that then people won’t like me
It’s the same reason some spy agencies put a kibosh on the idea of killing Hitler… like actually, we looked at it, and this guy’s a seriously mentally ill stimulant-addicted megalomaniac in addition to a stone cold moron who refuses to listen to anyone smarter than him, I think we actually want him to be the one in charge of the whole operation.
I think the pure length of it introduces enough delay before encountering the really terrifying parts and might interfere with the punch of the message. I might try to do a modified version with some bold text and larger sections so some of the strong full impact comes across right away, without trying to reduce the detail or the scope
Also, I think it is relevant to repeat the founders’ feeling on it. The “government” doesn’t “let” you do anything. Everyone’s just born into the earth into this wild and semiorganized place, as weird social beings that are half monkeys and half made up of something a lot more inspirational. And from time to time, they want to set up a system they all agree on so they can have clean water and roadways and courts and someone centrally in charge of the economy, things like that. But, sometimes like a few thousand people put temporarily in charge of all that start to look around at all the guns and money in their command and get confused and think they have the right to tell 400 million other people “hey check it out you have to do what I say, I DGAF what you think or of it’s right, that’s just what’s up.” And then when that happens it is the job of the 400 million to re educate them on what’s up.
And you could say that if they don’t, they deserve what happens. But honestly it’s not even a statement of deserves or not, or right and wrong. It is simply a statement of the reality of what happens. Most of things like the bill of rights is understood today as like, what the government is “allowed” to restrict and not, but the founders’ view of it was a lot more akin to, these are some examples of what people will do as inherent parts of their nature and God help you if you try to tell them they can’t, and they become alert and organized.
The whole process of polling is a pile of shit.
I analyzed some polls for recent elections, and they were off by an average of 16 percentage points. They only write that “margin of error 3%” thing because if they were honest about it, no one would listen to their poll, and they’d just use the ones from all the other people who still were lying about their MoE.
The “changed their algorithms” thing is just adding random fudge factors to the dogshit methodology until the answers come out right, but it never makes them predictive at all of the next election, because the underlying methodology is still dogshit. Basically, they call people on the phone, 1-2% of them answer, and then they bark a bunch of questions and whoever stays on the line for the whole thing, they assume that’s a good sample for everyone else and won’t be correlated with any other factors. Which, when you start thinking about it, makes it make sense why it might be off by 16 points.
There’s actually an argument to be made that a change in the polling is pretty reflective of a change in sentiment, even if the overall accuracy might be off by 10 or 20 points, is part of why I posted this. But mostly, I posted it to throw into sharp relief the dishonesty of the overall media narrative “Biden is fucked in polling cause debate,” which is created through a mixture of asking cunningly crafted questions to make it not an apples to apples comparison, mindless journalistic groupthink, and lying.