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The Lord of Hats posted:I’d love to hear the full train of thought spelled out. Like, I can kind of get how she imagined the presidency thing working out, because “I’m going to be the independent maverick that gets in because I just talk so much sense and am so obviously right, and people will like that I’m not beholden to either party” isn’t exactly an uncommon delusion. But where did she see “loudly renege in my campaign promises and espoused principles” being something that worked for her prior supporters. It's not like she woke up in 2020 and said "I'm going to be a conservative now" all of a sudden. She's been trending rightward ever since she decided to run for the House back in 2012. It was apparently not that surprising to Arizona politics watchers at the time, who generally seemed to regard the seat she was running for as a competitive purple district with plenty of conservative-leaning voters. She joined the Blue Dog Coalition and all the other ultra-moderate Dem groups by 2014, and she's been known as a conservative Dem ever since, winning reelection multiple times and then winning election to the Senate despite that increasingly conservative record. So it's not like it's some super huge shock to the voters that she was in Congress as a centrist. She didn't get burned for being too politically moderate, she got burned for openly defying the president and the party. And she likely did that because she thought it would raise her profile for a future presidential race. You don't get to be nationally known as a "maverick" just for being a conservative who votes with the other party a lot - you have to be actively obstructionist, preferably on something of high national prominence. That led to stuff like her not having a coherent list of demands, because she was blocking things simply to get headlines rather than because she objected to anything in the bills themselves. But she badly misjudged the moment and the political atmosphere, and was too obviously faking it for clout.
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Jan 31, 2024 18:40
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Staluigi posted:My own magical sinema journey was pretty much the same process. Everyone knows she started out super left, but what doesn't get so much attention is that every time she encountered a political obstacle or wanted to move up a rung on the political ladder, "moving to the right" was the strategy that consistently helped her overcome those challenges. Moderate compromise worked pretty well to bring her success in Arizona state politics, but she failed to understand its limitations and she failed to understand how national politics were changing under Trump. Kchama posted:The fact that Sinema was so happy pissing off her base by deliberately betraying them by working against everything she promised to work towards as a candidate is why I think she's just dumb as bricks and doesn't get that this is not going to help her. Eh, her voters had a decent idea of what they were getting with her. All her old leftist rhetoric was long gone by the time she set her sights on Congress. By 2018, she was pretty much openly campaigning on her willingness to defy Democratic leadership and show how independent and unconcerned with partisan politics she was.
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Feb 1, 2024 03:07
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L. Ron DeSantis posted:OK but I did read that they had actually implanted the first one into a human, and given how badly they hosed up the animal trials resulting in a bunch of monkeys and pigs getting brain damage and having to be euthanized because they couldn't be bothered to check if the implant was the right size maybe there should be a LOT of scrutiny here. Especially when other companies are using much less dangerous methods of implantation. There was a lot of scrutiny. Musk has been trying to get Neuralink approved for human trials for literally years - the same leaks that told us about the maimed monkeys also told us that the FDA had denied them approval in 2022 and cited dozens of issues they would need to fix before they could get approval for human trials. The fact that they have approval now means that they've convinced the FDA that they've fixed all of those issues and brought their operations in line with the FDA's expectations. Additionally, they only have approval for limited safety testing, subject to the constraints of an independent review board.
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Feb 2, 2024 02:59
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It's not even the real statue. The actual statue is in the US Capitol Rotunda. New York just got the plaster model that was used as the model for the final statue. In any case, while it rarely catches the attention of the press or politicians, there's another reason for moving the statue - its location in a heavily-used room made it prone to damage, which was noted when it underwent restoration in 2010. Plaster statues are relatively vulnerable to physical damage, compared to the real bronze statue. Sending it to the New York Historical Society would allow it to be protected and conserved properly. Eric Cantonese posted:Yeah. I'm not quite sure why it started going viral again recently, but I have seen various tweets like the one shared in this thread about it all this week. It's an election year, Trump's court cases are going very poorly, and New Hampshire suggests Trump's lead is a lot weaker than expected. The chudosphere has any number of reasons to want to get the base worked up about something relatively unimportant.
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Feb 2, 2024 19:37
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socialsecurity posted:Maybe one day we can get a legit secure online voting system and just do em all the same day or have a random generated sequence. That would require both funding and laws passed so instead we will watch most of the voting power go towards empty acreage, honestly probably as at least some of the founding father wanted. Having all the primaries on the same day isn't necessarily desirable. It gives a massive advantage to the candidates who start the primary cycle with the most fame and money, since campaigning across the entire country all at once is incredibly resource-intensive. While fame and money are still important no matter how you do things, starting off with a few smaller states massively lowers the barrier to entry in order to be seen as a serious contender. Somebody who doesn't have the money or staff to campaign nationally might still be able to do well in a few states by focusing their limited resources on those states. Moreover, it gives a chance for people and donors to see which candidates are overperforming or underperforming expectations. Overperformers can raise their profile and attract more donors and staffers, while underperformers will lose support and eventually drop out, freeing up their donors and staffers to work for the candidates who've demonstrated themselves to be stronger. That's probably better for the state of the race overall, and the states that go later aren't really going to shed any tears that they never got the chance to vote against Bloomberg.
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Feb 5, 2024 07:20
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Low-wage work fundamentally sucks to begin with. Not only is the pay poor, but the working conditions are often terrible. People generally work them because they don't have a better choice. So we don't really need a fancy explanation for why people don't want to work low-wage jobs - we need to explain why they're able to avoid working low-wage jobs. For the most part, the workers aren't missing. They didn't die off or stop working. While the low-wage labor shortage is still hotly debated, the general cause seems to be that the social and economic changes caused by COVID opened up new opportunities for low-wage workers, giving many of them chances to move up to better-paying jobs. In particular, two factors come up a lot. First, many older workers saw the disruptions of the pandemic as a reason to retire, accelerating the impact of the aging workforce and creating many vacancies in higher-level jobs those senior employees were vacating. Second, expanded federal benefits gave workers the resources to pursue better options and even risk losing their current job to pursue those options, and those who were furloughed during the lockdowns had plenty of time as well. All this allowed a significant chunk of low-wage workers to find better jobs, leaving a smaller labor pool for low-wage employers.
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Feb 5, 2024 08:49
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Gnumonic posted:I think Biden is making a huge mistake based on past data that shows that foreign policy/national security doesn't drive votes either way. Open support for blatant genocide forces us to confront the question of who we are in a very direct way that other foreign policy issues don't. If genocide (as we're all taught in elementary school) is the most heinous and repugnant crime there is, and we are openly supporting genocide, what does that say about us as a country? Some people aren't going to be able to stomach the blatant contradiction that arises when the "lesser of two evils" guy is actively supporting the most evil crime that can be committed. At any rate, it's definitely not likely to increase turnout, and I'm extremely skeptical that there are a sufficient number of "median democrats" willing to overlook this to push Biden over the finish line. Current data, right now, shows that foreign policy doesn't drive votes right now in the 2024 election. There are definitely times where foreign policy is an important factor in the election, but every available bit of data shows that the primary issues for most people in 2024 are "the economy/inflation", "immigration", and If "open support for blatant genocide" was as politically impactful as you say, then was US support for the Saudi genocide in Yemen a deciding factor in your vote? As brutal as the current Israeli campaign in Gaza has been, the bodycount there is only about a tenth of what's been inflicted against Yemen. Had you even heard about it today? Clearly the US population doesn't care that much about the US supporting its allies as they slaughter hundreds of thousands of people in brutal, near-indiscriminate military campaigns conducted in the name of destroying hostile terrorist factions. Apparently, the word "genocide" isn't enough by itself to dominate American politics, and people are able to stomach (or ignore) genocides just fine. The even-bloodier Syrian civil war has been pretty much forgotten too.
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Feb 7, 2024 01:07
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Eric Cantonese posted:What does the House GOP have against Andy Milonakis again? Homeland Security runs CBP and the Border Patrol. They're mainly just trying to make him a human sacrifice to their base's anger about immigration, so they can look like they're doing something but don't have to go through the trouble of coming up with actual policies themselves. The right-wing media has portrayed him as a fanatical open-borders ideologue who hates the very idea of border enforcement and is deliberately sabotaging the border agencies by abusing humanitarian exceptions and refusing to support the troops.
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Feb 7, 2024 02:04
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Nosre posted:I had an acquaintance bring up "crazy down there, there's 10 thousand people arriving every day!" in passing. I didn't engage, because when people say stuff like that I assume it's like how Caravans!!! suddenly spike in news reports like clockwork before every election. There really has been a large spike in arrivals at the border under Biden, to the point that the immigration bureaucracy (which was already pretty backlogged) and related systems and services have been largely overwhelmed. While views on what exactly the problem is and how to solve it tend to vary based on political perspective, the problem is real - it's not made up like the caravan stuff was.
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Feb 7, 2024 14:56
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:One thing that I wish we could follow up on is why 18-29 year olds and black voters who identify as moderate are turned off by Biden, but left-wing 18-29 year olds and black voters are much less so. It is always kind of assumed that the dissatisfaction was coming from the more left-wing populations of those groups. Inflation, inflation, inflation. As they say, "it's the economy, stupid". In my experience, only left-wing people that hate Biden assume that the dissatisfaction is primarily coming from the left. Actual polling has pretty consistently demonstrated that Biden's bigger problem is with people who don't give a gently caress about culture war issues either way but are real mad about how much grocery prices have risen.
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Feb 7, 2024 17:01
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Eric Cantonese posted:Has anyone done any studies/polls on whether inflation has hit certain racial groups harder than others? Given the socioeconomic differences that are tied to race, I wouldn't be surprised if inflation is hitting Biden's approval harder with respect to Hispanic and Black voters. Generally it's been hitting non-white groups less bad, mainly because the largest wage increases were in the lowest-wage industries. While the professional class saw significant decreases in real income, a lot of low-wage workers saw much smaller drops (though, of course, they can also afford to lose a lot less). Personally, I think the issue is just that someone who still self-identifies as a moderate these days just doesn't have a ton of strong stances on political issues - leaving them free to switch back and forth based on vibes and economic perception without getting tripped up by things like "caring what the candidates' actual issue positions are".
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Feb 7, 2024 17:48
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Doesn't grocery prices come down to the issue that the food industry raised prices because COVID and then realized they don't have to lower them back down Not particularly. There's been a bunch of supply shocks in the food industry in recent years. Not only did the pandemic completely upend food supply chains more than once, but one of the world's biggest grain exporters got invaded, bird flu swept through chicken populations, and high energy costs have affected food supply chains as well. And that's just the stuff that I, a layman not involved in food industries, know off the top of my head. It's certainly true that those increased prices have been a bit sticky, but the global economy in general still hasn't really completely stabilized from all that stuff either, so it's only natural that companies wouldn't be in any hurry to cut prices.
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Feb 7, 2024 18:55
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Sephyr posted:The fact that O'Keefe was caught red-handed trying to wiretap a sitting Congressperson and the official response was "lol, that scamp, I mean who hasn't, rite?" is just one of those distopia markers that would seem heavy-handed in a comic book. The local US Attorney was friends with the dad of one of O'Keefe's accomplices. Said attorney recused himself from the case, but didn't recuse his office from the case, so his assistant prosecuted the case for him. Although O'Keefe got off pretty easy with a generous plea deal that allowed him to avoid jail, he never forgave that attorney and continued to harass him for years afterward.
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Feb 7, 2024 20:50
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Professor Beetus posted:There are obviously parallels to real world issues and there are attempts to address it but it's also very clearly a comic book universe in which there are just really bad people that need to be stopped by superheroes. It's an absurd reading of the comics to hold Bruce Wayne/Batman to the same moral calculus as if the comic book universe he resides in is exactly the same as our own. It's silly. That's not really right. After all, the comic book universe was crafted the way it is specifically to justify Batman cavorting around in bat pajamas. Supervillains exist in large part to avoid having to tackle those awkward social questions. After all, if superheroes were running rampant in society, combining their superpowers with their selflessness and their willingness to defy the system to do what's right, then they would have a chance at actually changing society and the world in some meaningful sense. But superhero comics don't want to get change too much of the real-world status quo, and for the most part they don't really want to spend their time confronting social and economic issues. As such, it didn't take long for comics writers to realize that they needed something to separate the superheroes from the world and give them excuses to avoid spending too much time dealing with real-world questions. It's not that superheroes exist to stop supervillains, it's that supervillains exist to stop superheroes. The hero always wins in the end, but the supervillain so completely occupies the hero's attentions and energies that the hero has a decent excuse for not dealing with anything else. Here's what Superman did in his very first adventure, Action Comics #1, before he had any supervillains to fight:
And that's just the first issue! In other very early Superman stories, he does things like confront a mine owner over unsafe working conditions in his mines, trying to pressure the government into rebuilding crappy decaying slums, exposing horrible conditions in prisons, and investigating banks that are tricking people into pouring their life's savings into worthless investments. Originally, "Clark Kent" wasn't just something Superman did when he wasn't Supermanning - Clark would use his journalistic resources and connections to get tips about lovely or scandalous things happening, and then go fix them as Superman. Later on, they started introducing supervillains instead, and before long Superman was a guy who fought cartoon villains and natural disasters, rather than a guy who fought against real social and economic injustice. Yeah, it's true that superhero comics probably couldn't exist in their current form as century-long multimedia brands with a shared universe passed around between countless writers if they didn't work that way. But that just makes it an excellent example of how the demands of capitalism and other entrenched social forces will naturally push fiction away from being able to really challenge the system we live in now.
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Feb 8, 2024 20:31
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Tatsuta Age posted:At this point he knows he's in the clear and just flaunting it Nah, the tweeter is cutting off part of what he said. What he actually said is that it wasn't an insurrection, but if it was an insurrection then it was caused by Nancy Pelosi, because he said only peaceful and patriotic and nice things, and nobody brought any guns except for the Capitol Police who shot the peaceful protesters, and if any violence happened it was entirely the fault of all those violent and vicious Democrats who riled up the crowds with their mob boss behavior, and so on and on and on and on. I was originally going to get snippy about reporters cutting poo poo out of context for soundbites, but the context is huge because he was basically just rambling aimlessly. Not bringing his best game, that's for sure.
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Feb 9, 2024 00:07
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Nobody is going to remember this specific press conference in a few weeks, no. Assuming it's an isolated event, anyway. If this kind of thing is going to be a trend, we're in trouble: polling suggests voters are fairly concerned about Biden's age and his fitness to serve, and if this kind of thing becomes a regular feature of the campaign trail then he's probably not going to come off great.
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Feb 9, 2024 07:47
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Sounds like they got the same reporting that was immediately posted here and repeated it because people love catastrophising about Trump People weren't telling pollsters that their number one concern about Obama was his age. Biden's opponents have been slinging senility accusations against him for years, and not just from the right either. Between that and his considerable age, he's far more vulnerable to these sorts of attacks. That doesn't necessarily mean they'll sink him, of course. I still fondly remember how many Bernie supporters dismissed Joe Biden leading the polls, because they were convinced he was a senile sundowning mess who would totally lose all support the moment a camera caught sight of him after sunset. But on the other hand, it's not good to be outright dismissive of the possibility. The most important lesson of the last eight years is that Americans - including us right here on SA - are terrible at predicting the outcomes of elections, and that very unlikely-seeming outcomes can in fact happen. Bellmaker posted:Dobbs is far worse for Republicans than COVID ever was, and this has been reflected in every election since 2022. You'd think so, but polls surprisingly haven't really been showing that. According to the pollsters, people's top three most important political issues in the election are inflation, immigration, and protecting democracy. In spite of Dobbs, abortion apparently ranks fairly low on people's political priorities. Scags McDouglas posted:I know it's a fool's errand to gaze into the abyssal mind of the average Trump voter but I'm failing to imagine him growing his voter base further. Granted, he did so from '16 to '20 but I see that as a high watermark that he could, at best achieve a second time. Among the people who somehow don't have a strong preference for either Trump or Biden after the last eight years, indications are that the "Biden is old" and "the Democrats are engaging in politically-motivated prosecutions of Trump" stuff is actually landing to some extent.
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Feb 9, 2024 16:41
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Anno posted:For me it's hard to form much of an opinion at all when on one hand you have polling that frequently has crosstabs suggesting, like, generational voter realignment in traditionally D-voting groups towards R, but then special elections happen and D candidates often outperform and don't really show any of that. Like I get November will be it's own thing but so far it's difficult to match all this up with the actual hard results we've had in recent months/years. Midterms and special elections often have different voting patterns from presidential elections. First, the presidential election is much bigger news and draws out a lot of less-engaged voters who wouldn't have turned out for the midterms, let alone the special elections. Second, people's personal opinions of the presidential candidates themselves tends to have more of an impact on the overall national result, Also, people are worried because everyone thought there was no way Trump was going to win in 2016, and polling largely suggested Trump was going to lose in 2016, and then look what happened. Personally, I'm of the opinion that politics in the US have gotten to be such an unprecedented chaotic mess that no one is capable of predicting them reliably, and anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves. Predicting the outcome of one election based on the outcome of past elections is rather foolhardy in our rapidly-changing political conditions. The polls probably aren't anywhere close to accurate either, but the fact that they're not showing a massive voter rejection of Trump suggests that we can't simply write Trump off. Is Trump doomed in 2024? Is Biden doomed in 2024? The honest answer is that we really don't know. Both candidates have all sorts of bad poo poo about them that voters seem to think might be important, but there's really no telling how that'll all shake out.
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Feb 10, 2024 05:13
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FizFashizzle posted:Well gently caress me id never seen that. It's because nobody really cared about his stutter until the "Biden is too old" stuff started to rear his head. When he was younger, it was all about "gaffe machine Biden", no one really gave a poo poo about the stutter specifically. However, most voters don't know enough about him to know he has a stutter, nor do they know enough about stutters to know that stuttering can cause things like that. It doesn't really matter what he said at this press conference, it's not going to hurt him. It's February, nobody's paying attention. But if he does a Mexico/Egypt mixup on camera in October, that's gonna be big trouble.
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Feb 10, 2024 16:25
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If you click through and look at what she actually says, the only takeaway from this article is that she still hasn't learned to talk to reporters without providing them stuff they can clip out of context to stir people up with misleading soundbites. quote:Clinton, the former first lady and secretary of state told Wagner that she’s spoken to people in the White House and “they know it’s an issue.”
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Feb 11, 2024 02:05
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Cimber posted:When was the last time the election _wasn't_ the Most Important Election in the History of Democracy (tm, all rights reserved) National elections are, by nature, always going to be important. There's never going to be a year where no one will be hurt by the worse guy becoming president. Senate Cum Dump posted:Number of drone strikes is hardly the only or most important metric for judging a president's foreign policy. I would point instead towards Biden's saber-rattling toward China and Russia--quite a bit more than saber rattling you could argue, but ratcheting up tensions in general. Also, y'know, the genocide in Gaza. There's no guarantee that Trump would be all that much better but given his interest in making "deals" I think he might be more open to sending Jared Kushner to work with the Saudis and pressure Netanyahu into a ceasefire. He sent Kushner to go work with the Saudis to come up with an Israel/Palestine deal back during his first term, and the results were laughable. It was the worst deal offered to Palestinians in the last few decades. Instead of pressing for the Israelis to make concessions in return for Palestinian concessions, he basically just tried to straight-up bribe the Palestinians into accepting Israel's demands in return for basically jack poo poo. Turns out Mr. Art Of The Deal sucks at dealmaking! You're making a very important mistake here: Trump is not an isolationist! He loves hawkish policies and war, he just wants to target different countries than the rest of the US political class does. He engaged in a bunch of brinksmanship and threats against China, and he loved bombing Middle Eastern terrorists. His Israel/Palestine peace plan demanded the removal of Hamas from political power, as well as their complete disarmament. He didn't want to fight against Russia, but that doesn't mean he's an isolationist.
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Feb 11, 2024 06:46
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Gyges posted:Why does he hate China so much anyway? I thought they gave Team Trump a shitload of trademarks and poo poo which should have made them A+ good people for giving him stuff for free. He's big on trade war, and the US imports a bunch of stuff from China. He wanted to renegotiate all US trade agreements to make them more favorable to the US, but he doesn't actually understand the concept of negotiation, so he'd just blindly demand better conditions for nothing in return, and then if that didn't work he'd start spouting threats and engaging in brinksmanship.
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Feb 11, 2024 07:15
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theCalamity posted:I wouldn't call someone who supports Israel as they are running what could be considered a genocidal campaign in Gaza to be somewhat reasonable. Every US president and major-party presidential candidate in the past fifty years has supported a genocidal campaign in Palestine. If anyone had given a poo poo about that in 2022, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2014, 2012, 2010, 2008, 2006, 2004, 2002, 2000, or 1998 (the failure of Oslo is a fair place to start drawing the line to today's events), both America's relationship with Israel and Israel's relationship with Palestine would be very different today. Honestly, the most frustrating thing for me, as someone who didn't just suddenly start caring about Gaza five months ago, is how many people seem absolutely convinced that getting a ceasefire would put an end to the genocide. Bullshit! The genocide was ongoing long before Israel started assaulting Gaza, and it'll keep going long after Israel puts their assault on pause...which, by the way, will almost certainly happen before November regardless of what Biden does. It'll be difficult for Israel to sustain a mobilization of this size for an entire year, as between conscription and displacements, a substantial chunk of their workforce has been rendered unavailable. Before you bring up Arab-Americans again, I don't really care what they do. People can make their own decisions about what they care about. If the events in Gaza have someone pissed off enough that they're not going to vote against a guy who's probably going to put out shoot-on-sight orders at the southern border and make it illegal to be openly trans, well, that just goes to show who they care about and who they don't. I hope they'll be able to live with themselves. They don't need to justify those decisions in this thread...unless they post those decisions in this thread, in which case they should expect to be argued with! I'm tired of seeing the "I won't vote for Biden", "You should vote for Biden", "Are you telling those poor Arab-Americans in Michigan to vote for Biden, you cruel monster????" sequence endlessly repeat itself. If an Arab-American who lost family in Gaza posts in this thread that they don't want to vote for Biden, we can debate whether they're morally obligated to do so then. Until then, I'm getting a real bad taste in my mouth seeing them being constantly thrown around in this thread like debate props. Kith posted:it would be nice if biden did anything to earn my vote outside of "not being trump" He actually did a bunch of historically unprecedented progressive poo poo, the kind of stuff people would have thought was a pipe dream back in 2008. But none of that stuff goes viral on Twitter, so no one knows about it.
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Feb 11, 2024 09:26
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Of course, this applies to you, too: By voting for Biden, you are showing you you care about and who you don't - and they are a price you are willing to pay. Which is fine, but it's silly how people get offended at Muslims when that same standard is being used against us! Not really, no, because Trump is going to do absolutely nothing to stop the genocide in Palestine. I don't particularly care to throw every single minority group in America under the bus for a meaningless protest vote that will also do nothing to help Palestinians. Giving in to self-delusion isn't going to save lives! I'm not saying "Only Arabs or Muslims who directly lost relatives can have a beef about this". I'm saying "defend your own voting choices yourself, stop trying to hide behind Arab-Americans in Michigan". If someone says "Arab-Americans in Michigan should vote for Biden", we can talk about the things that might be impacting their voting decision. When someone says "you, poster in this thread, should vote for Biden", hearing them respond with "are you telling Arab-Americans in Michigan to vote for Biden?" is very tiresome. If Arab-Americans in Michigan don't want to vote for Biden because their families have been endangered, that's their choice - not our choice. I also like how you've completely ignored the fact that the genocide didn't start in October 2023 and won't end when a ceasefire happens. Agitating for a ceasefire for humanitarian reasons is one thing, but don't pretend it'll end the genocide in Gaza. Trump and Obama both supported the genocide in Gaza, along with almost every member of Congress in the last few decades, and all of a sudden it's becoming a dealbreaker in only this one particular election? I'm deeply worried that people on the left are going to use Gaza as an excuse to help get Trump back into office, and then go back to not caring about Gaza at all, secure in the knowledge that they managed to find themselves an excuse to not vote for Biden despite the fact that he's responded to most of their domestic policy demands. It's nice that supporting genocides has suddenly become a dealbreaker among people who've happily voted for pro-genocide presidents and members of Congress in the past, but I can't help but notice how often it's coming from people who've hated Biden since 2019 and have consistently taken every excuse they can find to advocate opposing him. It's not exactly persuasive when someone with a NoJoe 2020 tag suggests that an event that happened in 2023 is the reason they can't possibly justify voting for Biden. I'm rather concerned that all the leftists who suddenly discovered a deep concern about Gaza a few months ago are going to express that concern solely through leaving the "President" slot on their ballot blank, pat themselves on the back for doing their part to stop genocide, and then forget all about Palestine and go back to ranting about student loans or railroad unions or something. Overturning the overwhelming American political consensus in favor of Israel is a large undertaking that'll probably take several Congressional election cycles (because the true root of it is in Congress, not in the presidency!). JoylessJester posted:Could of just posted this and saved yourself a lot of time. Every presidential election in your entire life is going to involve voting for the lesser of two evils, unless we end first-past-the-post voting. Condensing the entirety of politics down into two candidates means that most people will never be able to vote for a general-election candidate whose positions completely match all of their own on every single issue. You're just going to have to suck it up and vote for the person who agrees with you on more issues than the other guy does. If you're not happy with that, then either push for the end of FPTP voting (good luck with that), or start persuading large chunks of America to share your views (the more people strongly agree with you on any given issue, the more likely it is that you'll get at least one presidential candidate who shares that view). Till then, if you actually give even the slightest actual poo poo about the evils that would result, go out and vote for the lesser evi. Uncle Boogeyman posted:If you vote for Joe Biden, that is also a pro-genocide vote. Neither of those two candidates are anti-genocide. Like, vote for him if you want but let’s be real here. I can't think of the last time the US had an anti-genocide president. Trump certainly wasn't one, and Obama did plenty to soak his hands in blood directly and indirectly too. The Clinton administration's long been panned for its insistence that "acts of genocide" happening in Rwanda didn't mean that a "genocide" was happening there. HW Bush was the former head of the CIA. Reagan heavily backed the Guatemalan genocide, and probably others as well. And so on. If you've ever voted in a US presidential election, you've voted for genocide. Bit late to start pretending you can have clean hands now, ain't it? Digamma-F-Wau posted:I feel like one core thing on why these arguments go in circles is that both sides are viewing the opposite viewpoint as an existential threat The reason why they go in circles forever is that they're basically the trolley problem, a well-known ethical thought experiment that famously does not have a clear solution. The trolley named America is barreling down a track toward hurting a fuckton of people. Will you pull the lever to vote for Biden and redirect the trolley to another track which will hurt a lot fewer people, or do you think that this would make you morally culpable for those deaths in a way that refusing to pull the lever wouldn't? Of course, the difference is that this isn't a thought experiment, it's real life. Those people on the metaphorical tracks aren't imaginary numbers for the purpose of a meaningless thought experiment on utilitarianism. That trolley is barreling full speed toward a homophobic, patriarchical white supremacist dictatorship, and the only thing that can save us is enough people deciding they dislike that enough to pull that lever directing us away from it (and in the long term, to keep pulling that lever every two years, and to work to convince other people to go pull that lever too). I personally don't have much patience for people who want to sit at home and jerk off about how they've maintained their moral purity by refusing to touch that lever - especially if they were happy to come out and pull that lever every four years before 2016, but want to pretend they've suddenly discovered deep moral qualms about it now that there's a lot more bodies on the straight-ahead track. Another difference is that the two tracks are represented by individual human beings here, and in this case they're both rather uncharismatic and have a lot of people who have deep personal dislikes for them. So in addition to all the moral and philosophical arguments for pulling or not pulling that lever, there's also a fair number of people who make their decision based on their personal feelings for the people representing those two tracks, and then lie about why they did it because they're embarrassed to admit the moral considerations didn't really play a large role for them.
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Feb 11, 2024 18:50
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Shrecknet posted:this is a good-faith question from a concerned anti-genocide but still Biden voter: It's far more likely that the losing party will adopt positions from the winning party, which would be twice as effective (since they'd only need to pull away 10k votes to change that result, not 20k) and has more potential benefit (they could potentially pull more than just 21k voters from the winning party). Yeah, sure, trying to take votes from the winning party may not be effective and risks losing other votes, but the same is also true of trying to take votes from the third-party, whose extreme positions are clearly unpopular and whose voters are clearly disinclined to support the Democrats. Besides, you're massively understating the size of the gap here. Here's what the actual results in 2020 looked like: Democrats: 81,283,501 Republicans: 74,223,975 Libertarians: 1,865,535 Green Party: 407,068 So the Dems got 200 times as many votes as the Greens, not just the 100 times in your example. And by your own logic, the Dems should be seeking to adopt positions from the Libertarian Party, not the Greens. After all, the last time the Green Party outperformed the Libertarian Party in an election was in 2000, when the Libertarian candidate refused federal matching funds. Considering that the Greens have lost to the party that wants to abolish welfare and end Social Security in the last five straight presidential elections, it's hard to imagine that anyone sees adopting their policies as a way to attract significant political support. Ultimately, the whole thing is nonsense, because major political shifts do not start at the presidency. They start in Congress. Partly because whether a president has support from Congress makes a big difference in how much the president can accomplish, of course. But also because there are a lot more Congressional elections than there are presidential elections, and therefore a lot more opportunities for people to make their political preferences known through voting. Moreover, the smaller scope of the races means more room for outsider candidates with unusual policies or stances to take a shot at getting themselves in front of the electorate and seeing what the voters think of their positions. For example, while Trump's often treated as a political game-changer, he was preceded by several cycles of increasingly insane Republicans getting into the Congress and ousting longtime incumbents. By the time 2015 rolled around, it was already quite clear that the GOP base was desperately hungry for someone like Trump. Majorian posted:Which voting bloc(s) is Biden winning through his hardline Zionist and anti-immigration stances that will make up for the voters he's losing through those same stances, exactly? Not Evangelical Zionists, certainly. Jewish hardline pro-Israel voters? I think their minds are already made up. Immigration hawks? Not likely. So what's the electoral strategy here? Trying to win Florida again? I'm getting tired so I'm just going to google some polls and post a few charts for you.    Looks like there's still a fair amount of people out there who might find "support for Israel" and "reducing how utterly overwhelmed the southern border is" to be appealing. I know it's a lot of fun to pretend that our views are the majority views and that only tiny fringe groups disagree with us, but unfortunately the reality is exactly the opposite. Hell, even among groups that think that Israel is committing genocide, the campaign in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed is still a more popular outcome for Gaza than immediate ceasefire, and maintaining or increasing aid to Israel is more popular than decreasing it.
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Feb 11, 2024 19:59
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Kagrenak posted:I agree with the rest of your post but I don't see those cross tabs in the document? The percentages under the 'describes self as very liberal" basically work out such that there are at least some people who hold those two views but don't imply that is the majority view. 60% of liberals think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, but only 27% think there should be an immediate ceasefire, while 42% think the war has to end with the destruction of Hamas in some form or fashion. There's got to be a fair chunk of people who think it's a genocide but that there shouldn't be a ceasefire. Though rather than self-identified liberals, I was personally looking at Dem/Biden voters and 18-29 groups, both of which are admittedly slightly less sure that it's a genocide. As for how people can put those positions together, I think I can get an idea of it even if they don't agree: they believe that Hamas has to be destroyed, and that Israel has the fundamental right to invade Gaza and destroy Hamas in retaliation for Oct 7th. They wish that Israel wouldn't be quite so blatantly going out of their way to cause needless civilian casualties, but their desired result isn't "stop the war", it's "convince Israel to stop shooting quite so many civilians and focus entirely on Hamas".
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Feb 11, 2024 20:21
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Majorian posted:I'm asking what specifically you think he will do to make the situation in Gaza worse, not whether or not his rhetoric is pro-Israel, pro-Zionism, anti-Palestinian, etc. I'm not trolling; I'd like an answer to my question. Rather than asking us what we personally think, why not ask Israel's leading anti-Palestinian genocide advocate, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the guy who wants to arm extremist groups in the West Bank and used to have a portrait of a mass murderer hanging in his living room? https://www.timesofisrael.com/attacking-biden-ben-gvir-says-trump-would-have-been-more-supportive-of-israel/ quote:Attacking Biden, Ben Gvir says Trump would have been more supportive of Israel As for what Trump would do differently, Ben-Gvir gives plenty of examples. He thinks Trump would stop criticizing the Israeli government and stop pressuring it to back away from right-wing stances. He thinks Trump would stop giving humanitarian aid to Palestinians. He thinks Trump would put an end to Biden's practice of threatening to withhold weapons to Israel if Israel did certain things. And worst of all, he thinks Trump would be more supportive of his calls to And while Trump has largely avoided getting specific about what he'd do about Gaza on the campaign trail, he has said a few things we can refer to. For example, he promised to bar people who don't support Zionism from entering the US, and promised that any non-citizens attending pro-Palestine protests would have their visas revoked and be deported. He also proclaimed that Israel should be avenged for the crimes of Oct 7th, and stated that "there is no hatred like the Palestinian hatred of Israel and Jewish people".
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Feb 11, 2024 22:21
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MonsieurChoc posted:HOW!? It's not even close to the worst it can possibly be. Trump was going to let Israel start officially annexing chunks of the West Bank whether the Palestinians agreed to it or not. The only reason he backed down was that Israeli domestic politics poo poo themselves and delayed the annexation bill long enough for Kushner to get spooked by the blowback, decide he didn't want to be personally associated with it, and convince Trump to cancel the blank check he'd offered Israel. And that's just on the US side of things. On the Israel side of things, Ben-Gvir wants to expel all Palestinians from Gaza and annex it to Israel, and then he wants to do the same things in the West Bank that Israel has been doing in Gaza. He's also been fighting to arm settler death squads in the West Bank to roam around doing pogroms on their own initiative, and just about the only reason that hasn't happened yet is that Biden is conditioning small arms supplies to Israel on that not happening. If you think that this is the worst a genocide can possibly be, I don't even know what to say. It's so obviously wrong that I have a hard time taking it seriously at all. Majorian posted:I can make and understand inferences perfectly well. I'm sorry I don't find your argument convincing, but right now, if Trump's rhetoric reminds me of anything, it's John Kerry's position on the Iraq War during the '04 election, ie: "We're going to keep doing the war, but we'll do it better than Bush and win it faster." Biden's been delaying (some specific kinds of) aid to Israel for a little while now, attaching conditions to it and implying strongly that he'll withhold the aid altogether if Israel doesn't convince him it's going to meet those conditions. He's also issued some sanctions against West Bank people and organizations, and has been threatening that Israel itself could be hit by sanctions if they don't rein in the right-wing brutality there. He's not doing that in regards to Israel's conduct in Gaza, true, but he's taken a strong interest in Israeli policy in the West Bank lately and has been putting some unprecedented levels of pressure on Israel to cut down on its aggressive policies there (particularly when it comes reining in the settlers who go engage in terrorism and brutality with the implicit support of the IDF). Putting aside the question of whether that's enough, it's certainly a whole lot more than Trump would do. Majorian posted:Thank you, I appreciate it. Those are vague threats, though - they remind me of Trump promising to kill all of ISIS' families, something that he didn't follow through on. It's a bloodthirsty and insane post, but it's also in-keeping with his long pattern of offering tough talk on foreign policy and then not following through. None of us have crystal balls to look into the future and tell us with full certainty exactly what he will do in the future. All we can do is look at his past words and his past actions. His past words promise "starting wars" to shed "gallons [of blood]", and his past actions demonstrate unprecedented levels of support for Israel and unprecedented levels of "gently caress you" for Palestinians. You're going to have to be satisfied with the predictions we can make from that, and those predictions don't promise good news for Gazans. Majorian posted:I appreciate this. To be clear, I'm not challenging anyone to establish that one of the evils is in fact evil - we're all on the same page that Trump is evil. It's just a question of, "Is he more evil than Biden on this very fraught, life-or-death-for-millions-of-people issue, and if so, by how much, in material terms?" I get that that may come off as asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but again, it's a life-or-death issue for millions of people, and folks here and elsewhere are doing a lot of important soul-searching to decide how they're going to vote in November (I have the luxury of not having to do that, because again, deep blue state and all that). So I think it's a valid thing to discuss, but I'm sorry if anything I posted came off as points-scoring, because that's not at all what I intended. Yes, he is. He's also much more evil than Biden on a number of other very fraught, life-or-death-for-millions-of-people issues, in ways that are a lot worse in material terms. For example, Ukraine!
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Feb 12, 2024 01:05
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MonsieurChoc posted:None of this is remotely true, btw. You're just bald-faced lying to protect, I repeat, a rapist racist genocidaire. Biden has UPPED the aid to Israel, attached ZERO conditions and has supported all the way, including declaring illegal war on the only parties trying to stop the genocide. I'm talking about something specific, because in the real world there's nuances where people can do some bad things (sometimes a lot of bad things) while also doing some good things. For example, a president can send some kinds of aid to a country while blocking other kinds of aid. In this case, I'm talking about how the Biden administration has blocked sales of small arms to Israel. The administration demanded substantial assurances that those guns wouldn't make their way into the hands of settlers, and when they weren't satisfied with those assurances, they buried the request in paperwork and reviews. As far as I can tell, those gun sales have been on hold for two months with no progress, as the administration gets increasingly annoyed with Israeli conduct in the West Bank. https://www.axios.com/2023/12/13/us-israel-rifle-sale-delay-west-bank-violence quote:Scoop: U.S. delaying sale of M16 rifles to Israel over settler violence Yes, the administration is doing this even as it continues to send other weaponry to Israel. But there's no way Trump would block these sales. He doesn't give a poo poo about Palestinian civilians, and many members of his circles have strong ties to the settlers. So lifting this block is one way in which things could very well get worse for Palestinians under Trump.
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Feb 12, 2024 01:21
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:I didn't watch anything yesterday, why was the ad bad enough it needed to be apologized for? This seems to be the ad in question: https://twitter.com/AmValues2024/status/1756847553595760906 Given that the entire rest of the Kennedy clan seems to hate him and everything he stands for, it's no wonder they were particularly pissed about this ad.
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Feb 12, 2024 16:25
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:The fact that college sports and universities are now partnering and promoting sports gambling to their fans is also pretty wild. Online gambling is about as close to guaranteed easy money (for the house, that is) as you can get. The only thing keeping it down was the legal restrictions.
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Feb 12, 2024 16:57
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Xiahou Dun posted:You're just saying that the math is unintuitive but with more words, again. No poo poo, people without sufficient mathematical education don't have enough knowledge of math : you're repackaging a tautology and pretending it's a point. The problem isn't that people are uneducated, the problem is that people aren't applying that education to gambling, or are choosing to do it in spite of the mathematical realities. The core problem behind gambling isn't that people don't realize they're probably going to end up with a net loss, it's that people enjoy the wins enough that they're willing to go through with it even if it means losing money. Hell, just look at how much money some people dump into gambling in mobile games that have literally no cash reward at all. They're guaranteed to lose every dollar they put into it, but they still dump cash in for the sake of getting some JPEGs they could easily look up online. Because what they're in it for isn't really the reward itself, but the dopamine hit of getting rewarded.
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Feb 12, 2024 18:22
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Senate Cum Dump posted:It doesn't really matter if it's a false equivalence and Trump isn't getting covered the same way. That doesn't address the root concern which is that Biden is feeble and is perceived as such. Deflecting the issue is not going to change any voters' minds. The thing you're responding to isn't the Democrats going "but what about when Trump forgets things??", it's a media outlet going "but what about when Trump forgets things??". Which is important, because these perceptions are heavily shaped by the media. Most of our exposure to these candidates comes via media, after all, and that media exposure usually has a narrative attached. Tnega posted:Content creators live and die by the algorithms, assuming there is no physiological reason specific types/genres of content can be created, we are left to assume that what is granted exposure by the algorithms, (and by extension encouraged to be created) is a, if not the primary determination of what content is created by sex. There may be excellent non-sexualized gaming adjacent content created by women, but it isn't being promoted. Hopefully that cleared things up. The reason there's a bunch of sexualized content on Twitch is because it has two dedicated sections for softcore near-porn, and the reason that this sexualized content skews heavily female is because the site's userbase skews heavily male and isn't exactly a LGBT haven. "The algorithm" has become a convenient boogeyman, but I think people have become far too quick to pin blame on it, because the algorithm is very rarely the actual root problem. Social media algorithms tend to amplify and exaggerate problems that already exist, but it's very rare for them to actually be directly responsible for creating the problem. B B posted:With the exception of Truman, Biden is polling worse than all of them at the same point in their respective presidencies. He's also trending downward both in terms of his overall approval rating and net approval rating. I think he just needs a little more time to become the GOAT of unpopular presidents. Sure, but why pin it to a particular point in their presidencies? It's not like presidential approval ratings are primarily time-based or follow consistent patterns over the course of an administration. They're heavily influenced by real-world events and conditions. If you were talking just about the election, then yeah, comparing Biden's approval rating before the election to other presidents' approval ratings before their reelection attempt might be informative (though I think we're still a little too early for that to be useful). But when you're talking about popularity in general, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to compare across the same point in each president's term.
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Feb 13, 2024 18:15
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Discendo Vox posted:I think amplifying and exaggerating existing problems is a causal mechanism of sufficient significance to be worthy of direct blame. It can sometimes share part of the blame, yes. But I think there's an increasing tendency these days to use "the algorithm" as a thought-terminating cliche, where people simply blame things on "the algorithm" and don't bother to investigate the root cause of the problem or the ways in which the algorithm impacts it. I think it stands out really well in this particular case. Twitch is a major camming site with a mostly-male userbase and a dedicated swimsuits section. It's not surprising at all that there might be a lot more sexualized women! Yet someone's immediate response to this was to blindly blame "the algorithm", without even the slightest effort to explore other potential causes.
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Feb 13, 2024 19:21
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Discendo Vox posted:To the degree that the creation of the swimsuit section is the product of deliberate decisions reflecting pursuit of the outcome measures selected for by the design of the site, that response seems valid. Well, no, because the creation of the swimsuit section has nothing to do with algorithms. It's like asking why SA has a forum where people post about drugs a lot, and then answering it with "because of the algorithms". It's a conscious decision directly and intentionally made by human beings who are directly making decisions about what their site will allow, endorse, and have dedicated spaces for. Jumping straight to blaming algorithms is just absolving the actual human decision-makers of their accountability and responsibility (which, ironically, is exactly a thing people often fear that algorithms will be used for).
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Feb 13, 2024 21:29
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mobby_6kl posted:I'm sure some would. Enough to make a difference? While it varies from state to state and even from local government to local government, property taxes in the US typically aren't excessively high, and there's a lot of potential exemptions. Typically, when property taxes in an area are high, it's because the government in question charges little to no income tax, and thus has to crank up other taxes to fund government services. But the main thing that doesn't sound right to me is that homeowners in the US love increased property values, because the home is their property and thus the value of their property is going up. If the price of their home rises enough that property taxes become a concern, they can sell their house for a massive profit, or do things like take out equity loans or rent out part of the property. There's lots of ways to make a profit off rising property values in America, it's just a lot more profitable if you don't have to pay taxes on those profits. The people who get hosed the hardest by increasing property values are renters, who don't own the homes they live in and therefore see zero benefit from increases in the home's value. Instead of taxes, they pay rents - and landlords will invariably respond to rising property values by substantially increasing rents. While the landlords will typically point to property taxes as an excuse for these rent increases, it's a rather unconvincing excuse. Typically, the real motive is simply that the rich yuppies are willing to pay higher rents than the current renters are, and for the landlords that's an opportunity to make more money in exchange for zero extra work.
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Feb 13, 2024 22:39
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mobby_6kl posted:I remember looking at NJ since that's where my cousin lived and it was like 2.4% which means about $12k a year in taxes on a $500k home. Dunno if that's "excessive" but it seems like quite a lot to just be able to live in property you already own, and might be an issue for someone who bought it when the whole house was like $50k. NJ has the highest property taxes in the nation - the national average is less than 1%. The reason NJ's property taxes are so high is because the school system is funded by local property taxes, and NJ spends a lot on education. Remember, property taxes aren't like rent - you're not stuffing someone's pockets for the privilege of living there, you're paying for local public services. This also means that unlike landlords, the government doesn't have a strong incentive to simply pocket the profits from home valuations going up. While landlords will try to maximize profit, the government has no trouble creating exemptions or lowering rates or capping increases as long as it's "Yeah sucks for renters too" doesn't cut it. Because renters - who are typically poorer than people who've got sufficient financial means to buy and own their own house - get hosed first and worst by rising home valuations. If you think that paying $12k a year to live in the median-priced NJ home is excessive, then what does that say about the renters currently paying median rents of $35k a year? And when they get forced out by rising prices they don't get to cash out the profits from that increased valuation either. The victims of gentrification are primarily renters, not homeowners.
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Feb 14, 2024 00:57
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:If that guy supports Ben-Gvir's policies and sends him money and weapons, how are they different? Does he support Ben-Gvir's policies? Does he want to send Ben-Gvir money and weapons? To be clear, I'm not just trying to pull some pedantic poo poo here. I'm asking because Ben-Gvir's desired policies are quite a bit worse than what Israel is actually doing right now, and it would legit be big news if non-Republican members of Congress were openly endorsing his stances. Even Biden is going out of his way to prevent Ben-Gvir from receiving money and weapons.
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Feb 14, 2024 18:06
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mawarannahr posted:I think that is a bit tongue in cheek and is actually meant to make fun of Trump. Sorry, but unfortunately it's 100% serious: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/10/us/politics/biden-trump-aging.html quote:Why the Age Issue Is Hurting Biden So Much More Than Trump
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Feb 15, 2024 20:14
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mawarannahr posted:It sounds like the article is attributing the physical difference to cosmetics. I don't know why you didn't bold this part, too: The article is neither laudatory nor tongue-in-cheek. It's claiming that Trump looks physically strong and energetic while using makeup and dye to hide signs of age, but still makes mistakes mentally. This is because the article is neither a sloppy blowjob nor a hit piece - it's trying to explore why he might not be perceived as having the same age problems as Biden despite the fact that he probably does.
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Feb 15, 2024 21:19
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