#Political debate

[deathtokillian]

Shout out to my neighbor who has a big Harris sign in their yard with stolen ripped up trump signs underneath it. I think that is incredibly hot of you.

[my-midlife-crisis]

Too scared to let me comment:

These individuals wrote me and then blocked me so I cannot respond. Thanks for allowing me your profile names.

Immaturity runs rapid in the world of maga

I guess I'll just go to a fake hospital and get a fake vaccine for the fake TDS that I fake suffer from.

[justapotato89]

watch people score higher on psychopathic tests and score more and more left in political compass tests as the baseline average shifts towards people who'd do anything to achieve what they want but are also leftists, with consideration for society. Those two goals are not complimentary, but they are the only two lifelines that they have. Either they are considered as a part of the greater society which deserves equality and they will fight for it through anarchy as a unit, or they will oppose the government with anarchy being concentrated to the individual, the driving force being only survival.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 27, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 28, 2024

Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events. Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness. 

Immediately after the debate, there were calls for Biden to drop out of the race, but aside from the fact that the only time a presidential candidate has ever done that—in 1968—it threw the race into utter confusion and the president’s party lost, Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand. 

In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list. 

Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt. 

Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.

There is no point in going on, because virtually everything he said was a lie. As Jake Lahut of the Daily Beast recorded, he also was all over the map. “On January 6,” Trump said, “we had a great border.” To explain how he would combat opioid addiction, he veered off into talking points about immigration and said his administration “bought the best dog.” He boasted about acing a cognitive test and that he had just recently won two golf club tournaments without mentioning that they were at his own golf courses. “To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way,” he said. “I can do it.” 

As Lahut recorded, Trump said this: “Clean water and air. We had it. We had the H2O best numbers ever, and we were using all forms of energy during my 4 years. Best environmental numbers ever, they gave me the statistic [sic.] before I walked on stage actually.”

Trump also directly accused Biden of his own failings and claimed Biden’s own strengths, saying, for example, that Biden, who has enacted the most sweeping legislation of any president since at least Lyndon Johnson, couldn’t get anything done while he, who accomplished only tax cuts, was more effective. He responded to the calling out of his own criminal convictions by saying that Biden “could be a convicted felon,” and falsely stating: “This man is a criminal.” And, repeatedly, Trump called America a “failing nation” and described it as a hellscape.

It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.

There are ways to combat the Gish gallop—by calling it out for what it is, among other ways—but Biden retreated to trying to give the three pieces of evidence that established his own credentials on the point at hand. His command of those points was notable, but the difference between how he sounded at the debate and how he sounded on stage at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, just an hour afterward suggested that the technique worked on him. 

That’s not ideal, but as Monique Pressley put it, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.” 

A much bigger deal is what it says that the television media and pundits so completely bought into Trump’s performance. They appear to have accepted Trump’s framing of the event—that he is dominant—so fully that the fact Trump unleashed a flood of lies and non-sequiturs simply didn’t register. And, since the format established that the CNN journalists running the debate did not challenge anything either candidate said, and Dale’s fact-checking spot came long after the debate ended, the takeaway of the event was a focus on Biden’s age rather than on Trump’s inability to tell the truth or form a coherent thought. 

At the end of the evening, pundits were calling not for Trump—a man liable for sexual assault and business fraud, convicted of 34 felonies, under three other indictments, who lied pathologically—to step down, but for Biden to step down…because he looked and sounded old. At 81, Biden is indeed old, but that does not distinguish him much from Trump, who is 78 and whose inability to answer a question should raise concerns about his mental acuity. 

About the effect of tonight’s events, former Republican operative Stuart Stevens warned: “Don’t day trade politics. It’s a sucker’s game. A guy from Queens out on bail bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, said in public he didn’t have sex with a porn star, defended tax cuts for billionaires, defended Jan. 6th. and called America the worst country in the world. That guy isn’t going to win this race.”

Trump will clearly have pleased his base tonight, but Stevens is right to urge people to take a longer view. It’s not clear whether Trump or Biden picked up or lost votes; different polls gave the win to each, and it’s far too early to know how that will shake out over time. 

Of far more lasting importance than this one night is the clear evidence that stage performance has trumped substance in political coverage in our era. Nine years after Trump launched his first campaign, the media continues to let him call the shots. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[shayshaybiscuit25]

This is just too unreal.

[trendtracker360writer]

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[nochd]

Leftist arguments that don't work

In Aotearoa we're seeing a bevy of conservative and reactionary bills coming down the parliamentary pipeline. I guess it's better than the last National-led government we had, who pushed bill after bill through under urgency to avoid having to consult the public.

(Actually the latest batch are all passing their submission deadlines this week, so this post is a bit late. My executive functioning strikes again.)

We have to make submissions to make our opinions known on these bills. We have to argue our case against the ideas these bills embody. And frankly, the last decade or two of online leftist discourse has not prepared us for this.

There are good reasons for not engaging the Right in debate on social media. There are excellent reasons for not getting bogged down explaining our ideas to people who aren't listening. And it certainly feels righteous to simply declare that certain principles are "not up for debate".

But submissions to Parliament are not social media. When you're writing a submission to Parliament, you have to debate. The place of te Tiriti o Waitangi in Aotearoa perhaps shouldn't be up for debate, but it is being debated whether it should be or not, and all we accomplish by declaring it "not up for debate" is to remove our own voices from the discussion.

Since the Glorious Revolution of Cathartic Violence doesn't seem to be ready to launch quite just yet, for the time being if we want to get anything done we have to talk to people who are also being talked to by our opponents, and who do not share our starting assumption that we are good and our opponents are bad. In order to convince those people to lean our way, we have to show them that our arguments are right and our opponents' arguments are wrong.

And I'm sorry -- there is no way around this -- that means we need to know what our opponents' beliefs actually are, as distinct from the straw-man versions that we pass around our own online communities for everyone to kick and spit on.

I was going to follow that immediately with some common talking points that won't get us anywhere outside of leftist circles, but explaining why they won't work turns out to be wordier than starting with a very, very short potted summary of capitalist theory. This is not going to be anything like complete, because if I try and do the subject justice this post will run to book length and be finished some time after the next election. I can elaborate on any specific point if someone asks.

Capitalist theory starts with the subjectivity of value. The value of a thing is how much someone is willing to pay for it, or to accept as payment for it. There is no "real" or "intrinsic" value to anything outside of that. Money is valueless on a desert island.

Whenever two people who each have something that the other wants more than they do, give each other the thing they have in exchange for the thing they want, they end up both having something they value more than what they had before. This is where value -- all value -- comes from. If one of them preferred the thing they already had to the thing offered in exchange, no (voluntary) trade would take place, and no value would be created.

Each person knows what their own needs and wants are better than anyone else does. Therefore, the best trades happen and the most value is created when people are acting in their own interests instead of trying to guess other people's.

This doesn't mean people have to be purely selfish. A parent trying to get insulin for their diabetic child is not selfish; but from the point of view of someone who isn't that diabetic child, it doesn't make much material difference whether the parent is acting on their own behalf or the behalf of a person they love. Either way they're going to do whatever they can to get that insulin.

A thing's value is whatever people think it is -- but talk is cheap. People can say they want to put an end to plastic pollution or animal cruelty or global warming, indeed they can say it very loudly; but if they then go on buying plastic-wrapped food and cage eggs and driving everywhere because it's cheap and convenient, then that shows they value the cheap goods and convenience over the environmental aspirations that they merely talk about.

Which isn't to scorn the people as hypocrites, but to conclude that, since people prefer the convenience to the environmental ideal and the only source of value is people's preferences, then the convenience really is better than the environmental ideal in the only sense that anything is ever better than anything else.

The alternative to voluntary trade is violence. A government taking people's money in taxes is intrinsically violent; if you don't pay your taxes you'll be fined, if you don't pay the fine you'll go to prison, if you try to escape from prison you'll be shot.

Again: the above is a tiny potted summary of the basis of capitalist theory, not a full account. I may well have worded some part of it clumsily, but picking holes in my wording is not going to accomplish anything.

Without further ado, here are some common talking points that aren't going to get us anywhere outside of leftist circles:

"Capitalists are greedy and selfish and take more than they need and only care about money." In capitalist theory the distinction between greed and need is an empty one; you don't second-guess why someone wants something, the only question is how much they're willing to pay for it, and the measure of that is money.

"Capitalists believe in objective value." No they don't. Next! Oh, all right. When you have a whole lot of buyers trying to buy cheap and a whole lot of sellers trying to sell dear, eventually they'll land on the price that the maximum possible number of people will accept. This is called its equilibrium price or market price, and it is the closest capitalist theory comes to affording anything an objectively "real" or "correct" value.

"Capitalism is when the owning class subjugates and exploits the working class." In capitalist theory, labour is a service like any other service, which workers sell, like any other seller, to employers, who buy it like any other buyer. Class doesn't exist.

"Employers pay workers far less for the goods they produce than the price those goods sell for. Profit is theft." In capitalist theory all value is generated by the disparity in value between buyer and seller. Without such a disparity, no trade takes place and no value is created.

"But that value rightfully belongs to the worker whose labour created it." They sold that labour. When you sell a thing it's not yours any more.

"Capitalists want us to do without healthcare / education / national parks / clean air and water / etc." No, they want us to buy those things from commercial sellers rather than take them, by government violence, from taxpayers.

Now just to reassure you that not all hope is lost, here are a couple of arguments that I have never seen a capitalist produce an answer to.

Capitalist theory is all based on a bunch of assumptions about human behaviour, where we're all rational agents motivated solely to increase the value we get out of every transaction. It's mathematically elegant and makes beautiful symmetrical graphs, but it doesn't make good predictions about real-world economics, it doesn't match people's actual behaviour, and it doesn't produce good outcomes in terms of wellbeing and happiness. I'm more interested in something that will actually work than something that makes pretty graphs.

People don't in fact act to maximize the value they get in transactions, simply as such; they act to maximize what is called the utility of those transactions. On an individual level this results in the same choices, but utility is about how much difference economic value makes to its recipients -- which is determined by how much they had already. A homeless person benefits vastly more from a gift of $100, in any terms worth wanting, than a billionaire benefits from a gain of $1,000. The goal of economic policy should be to maximize the total utility, rather than the total value, across the population; and that means taking value from the rich and giving it to the poor.

Labour, in the real world, is very different from any other good or service. In capitalist theory the last thing a seller would ever do would be sell more of their goods or services when the price went down, and less when it went up. But workers very often do exactly that -- work longer hours if their wage goes down, and shorter ones if it goes up -- because they are trying to make a minimum amount each day that will allow them to reach their goals. In these conditions, market logic does not work. Market logic assumes that sellers sell more as the price goes up and buyers buy more as it goes down, and at some point they meet in the middle. If instead sellers sell more as the price goes down, what you get is not an equilibrium in the middle but a race to the bottom. This could be remedied by a government-mandated minimum wage, or by a guaranteed livable unemployment benefit that employers would have to compete with, or by a strong union movement to set wages that employers would have to accept, or some combination of the three; but funnily enough, capitalists don't like minimum wages or unemployment benefits or unions.

You may be able to think of others. Once again, this is a very compact potted summary and I am here to answer questions if any of the details don't make sense.

[dabeastme]

First look at Biden - Trump 2024 Presidential Debate

[anxietyfrappuccino]

i won the argument... this has never happened before

[uboat53]

Well, I wasn't going to bother, but it turns out I do have something to say about Oliver Anthony and Rich Men North of Richmond and that is… has everyone's mind been so poisoned with politics that they've stopped being people?

I mean, look, I get it, I read and write a ton about politics. It interests me, what can I say. And, at its most basic sense, yes, this song is about politics in the sense that it's about the overarching question of who deserves to get what.

But it's not about politics, not in the way that our political system works. The song isn't a Republican song or a Democratic song, it's a frustrated song by a guy who doesn't map to either of those things. The fact that people have been so poisoned by politics that they can't see anything without trying to map it onto a forced binary really is emblematic of some of our larger problems as a society.

Look, Anthony is expressing frustration, and he's right to do so. Like most Americans who don't immerse themselves in economics and policy, he doesn't fully understand why this has happened, but he can see it happening all around him. This song is an expression of that anger, confusion, and frustration, not a reasoned political manifesto. He's lashing out and he hits out at a lot of targets, some of whom may not deserve it. That's how anger and frustration work.

The job of those of us who engage in politics is not to make people like Anthony more frustrated by trying to fit his message into our little boxes that don't seem to be doing anything to resolve his issues, our job is to engage with him. We need to acknowledge his frustrations and his anger, we need to let him know that we know why he feels that way.

Maybe after that, once he and others like him believe that we are actually listening to them, we can talk about how it got that way and what we can do to fix it, but people like him justifiably believe that those of us engaged in politics don't care about people like them enough to take the time to understand their struggles. It's justifiable because, honestly, not enough of us do. I'll admit that, as much as I try to do so, even I get caught up enough in the swirl of argumentation that I forget to sit down and do the important part first.

Kudos to Anthony for rejecting the far-right embrace of his song, it would have been very easy for him to just pocket the money, fame, and attention and start to make a living as yet another curiosity on the right-wing outrage circuit, but now is the time for us to step up. It's time to listen to the confused and frustrated Americans who are disconnected from our political debate. Listen, not teach, not explain to, not persuade, and definitely not use as an example as to why we were right all along. Listen.

And I get it, these people ARE disconnected from politics, they're not always easy to find. But if we keep ignoring them we're going to end up with more and more situations where they lash out in their anger and frustration and we can't be surprised then when they do damage.

[morgancgaliano]

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

Sauce: International W.Churchill Society

Now, not than Winnye was a fair man or anything, he had dire responsibilities in WWII, his morals was grey (isn'it true of any statesman? I think yes), but at least he knew one thing or two on politics and governments.

Information must be free and freely accessible, speech must be free and unfiltered, even when hideous and intolerable: te risk is not being able to develop antibodies against totalitarism, dictatorship, monopolization of powers, discourse and markets or, more simply, hypocritical and sanctimonious polarization of culture.

tiktok is such an awful app, it's almost designed to feed you misinformation and expose you to insane discourse. unlike beloved tumblr, the app that feeds me misinformation and exposes me to insane discourse

[firstoccupier]

The Importance of Honesty in Addressing U.S. Border Issues

President Trump’s executive order to close the U.S. border and declare a border emergency signifies a crucial juncture in American political discourse, sparking considerable controversy regarding national security and immigration policies. By instructing the Secretary of Defense to formulate a comprehensive strategy to secure the borders, the order emphasizes a profound commitment to preserving…

[abignewscom]

JFK’s Grandson Sparks Debate with Tweet Comparing Usha Vance and Jackie Kennedy

Jack Schlossberg, grandson of former President John F. Kennedy, found himself at the center of a social media storm after posting an eyebrow-raising tweet. His question comparing Vice President JD Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, to his grandmother, Jackie Kennedy, sparked intense public scrutiny. In the tweet, Schlossberg asked followers, “True or false: Usha Vance is way hotter than Jackie O?” The…

[marvelsmostwanted]

When you see the news about all of the heinous Supreme Court decisions that were just made please remember that every single one is a direct result of the fact that Donald Trump was the president from 2016-2020 and Hillary Clinton was not. And there are two conservative justices who will likely retire as soon as a second Trump term begins so he can appoint younger people and enshrine conservatism on the court for another 50+ years. So. Please vote. It will at least give us a fighting chance to get our rights back sooner

[irnhero]

if i see one more article, post, or news anchor talking about how joe biden is old, i'm putting my fist through a window. i feel like i've gone through the fucking looking glass.

this is project 2025, trump's plan for what he'll do if elected. whatever you think is in there, it's worse. watch a breakdown of the highlights here. this man wants to unravel the fabric of our democracy for good - this all aside from his vitriolic hatred of poc, his determination to start ww3, and the fact that he can't string a sentence together without telling outrageous and easily verifiable lies. his administration will start their crusade to exterminate trans people on day one, and they won't stop there.

do not talk to me about how joe biden is old, as if that could ever matter to me more than my life or the lives of my friends and family. my little sister is 14, she's trans, and i don't know what to tell her when we talk about politics, because one of these people wants her dead and the other one is old and some of you are still acting like those problems are equals.

i can't fucking stand this. i'm not hearing it this time, we are not repeating 2016. refusing to vote is not an act of protest, it is an act of complacency, and our most vulnerable will suffer for your negligence. vote like your life depends on it, because for some of us, it really fucking does.