#Trump 2.0 Would Be Even Worse

[loudlylovingreview]

Rebecca Gordon: Trump Showed Us Who He Is the First Time Around

Trump 2.0 Would Be Even Worse Recently my partner and I had brunch with some old comrades, folks I first met in the 1996 fight to stop the state of California from outlawing affirmative action. Sadly, we lost that one and, almost three decades later, we continue to lose affirmative action programs thanks to a Supreme Court rearranged or, more accurately, deranged by one Donald J. Trump. It was…

[navree]

genuinely would love for some of the "both parties are the same" people to name me a single election in the entirety of the twenty first century where the outcome for the country wouldn't have been better if a democrat had won

[anamericangirl]

What's telling to me about how sick people can be is that Trump was nearly killed, someone in the crowd WAS killed, multiple other shots went out, the whole thing was a terrifying event that everyone in the world should be able to agree was scary And yet I see the media on the left trying to spin this "Well this is to be expected, he's so radical and so fascist that of course someone tried to kill him" and "#YOUMISSED" is trending on Twitter Mask is fucking off and I'm done hitting Anon when I send asks to you, these people have truly shown they have no empathy, no sympathy, and are bloodthirsty. People get shot up in a school and their first thought is "This is why we need to ban guns" and "This is because of ultra-MAGA"

Some unhinged motherfucker actually attempts to kill the former president and kills someone in the crowd and the left turns it into a fucking hashtag and an opportunity to try to blame it on Trump even though he's the one that got shot at.

The left are fucking deranged, and I know better than most because I used to be ON the left. I shaved half my head, I had blue hair, I lived with liberal pedophiles (literally) in Ohio for 2 years who wore diapers around the house and bitched about Elon Musk and Trump every fucking day. I know these people are psychopaths and now they have finally just outright announced to the world how sick they are.

Even fucking Biden tried to call the hospital Trump was at to ask if he was okay, EVEN DARTH FUCKING BRANDON CARED ABOUT TRUMP and yet these Twitterlibs and liberal media fuckwads are just jumping on the opportunity to go "Aww man #YouMissed, you fired 5 shots how come you couldn't get him, you fucked up, omg"

For fuck sake hate the man all you want but SOMEONE TRIED TO KILL HIM AND AN INNOCENT PERSON'S BRAIN GOT REMOVED FROM THEIR HEAD, FOR FUCK SAKE HAVE AT LEAST A MODICUM OF SYMPATHY FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE YOU FUCKING SAVAGES.

If this doesn't turn people away from the democrat party then nothing will. Trump was not the only victim of this shooting. A couple of people were injured, an innocent person was killed and still the only thing we hear from leftists is annoyance that the shooter missed.

And while we are rightly angry at the spins the msm is putting on this assassination attempt, they have to put that spin on it or eat their words for the last 8 years. They've been characterizing Trump as a fascist tyrannical dictator since 2016. They've spun him to be Hitler 2.0 telling everyone he's a threat to democracy and leading people to believe he's a threat to their very lives. The "trans genocide" and "kids in cages" the "don't say gay" bill all that nonsense is always, always linked back to Trump and if they turn around now and condemn this attempt on his life what would that say about them? Either they will have to expose themselves as the liars and propagandists they are or they will have to be seen as being sympathetic towards literally Hitler. And narrative is more important to them than anything.

Which explains why they were trying to avoid reporting what happened like the plague. The headlines I saw in the aftermath, after we already knew Trump had actually been hit by the bullet were things like "Trump escorted offstage after gun shots were heard." "Loud popping noise heard at Trump rally." And other variations of that headline. And still leftists don't question why after Trump was shot every single mainstream media outlet had the same headline and they all avoided saying Trump had been shot or an assassination attempt had been made.

They can’t come out and say this was wrong because it will mean they will have to admit to something even worse: that they were wrong.

But of course the people currently in office can't come out and condone the shooting. That would look very bad. So yeah, it's good that Biden stood up there and said the right words and made an effort to contact Trump but how convenient that this happened a mere couple of weeks after the democratic party has abandoned and turned on Biden so his words and condemnation will be buried and ignored and mean nothing.

For the last 8 years, though, Joe Biden and every other democrat in office, paired with the media, have been villainizing Trump for his rhetoric. Everything bad thing that happened was directly the fault of Trump because of his "dangerous rhetoric." But the rhetoric they've employed against Trump and all conservatives since that time has been the worst fearmongering and slander I've ever seen so they are directly to blame for this shooting because of their rhetoric. No more "rules for thee but not for me." They have to live in the world they made.

Leftism, as I'm sure you've seen first hand what with your experience of being one and living in that environment, is no longer about what you support, it's just about who you hate. And every sane person still aligned with them is waking up. The mask has been slipping for years and most of us were able to see who they really were way before it fully fell off but there is no mask now. They're not even trying to hide it.

They have the ideas they pretend to support when told to, but all leftists are only united by one thing: hate.

Their heroes are criminals like Michael Brown, George Floyd and Trayvon Martin. And they hate police until they shoot and kill Ashli Babbitt who's only crime was being a Trump supporter at the capitol on January 6.

They still bemoan the killing of a pedophile, wife beater and injury of a career criminal who were shot because they tried to murder a child while villainizing the child they tried to kill because he successfully defended himself against their attack.

To this day they spin their violent riots as "mostly peaceful protests" while the January 6 protest was a "violent insurrection."

The rapes and murder on October 7 were a justified response to "occupation" but anything Israel does is "genocide."

During covid they freaked out about "public health" and wanted everyone vaxxed and masked to "save lives" but when Trump got covid they all immediately wanted it to kill him.

When a white boy shoots up a school it’s an example of how evil white people and right wing gun nuts are but when a trans person shot children at a Christian elementary school the main focus of leftists, all the way up to the White House, was the danger the trans community would allegedly be in from right wing retaliatory violence and how “hateful Christian rhetoric” was responsible for the shooting.

And none of this has anything to do with the values they claim to adhere to. All of their positions on every single issue come down to who it is they hate the most of the people involved. So their "values” change by the second.

So the violence, depravity and dangerous rhetoric is pretty much 100% on their side but watch them try and spin this assassination on Trump as Trump's own fault. And watch leftists just unquestioningly go with it or just try to distract people with more fear mongering about Project 2025 or something else stupid like that.

The only thing that bothers them about this shooting, other than the fact that the shooter "missed', is that this has pretty much guaranteed Trump is going to win the election. And of course they can't stand that after all they've done to try and make sure that doesn't happen.

[girlbossgaslightguillermo]

Americans begging leftists to vote for Biden otherwise they’re horrible people etc should shut the fuck up. Imagine completely unironically asking Palestinians to vote for the man who is responsible for the murders of their families and people because the other guy is worse and then guilting them if they don’t want to. What the fuck is wrong with you? This is the closest Americans have been to wanting to dismantle the two party system and seeing how fucking flawed it is. If you believe that Trump 2.0 will be even worse, you are probably right, but that doesn’t mean you’re superior to the people who are suffering equally under both parties. What Biden has done with Israel these past few months has been absolutely disgusting and actually having the audacity to say “oh Trump would be worse” when 40 fucking thousand people have died…delete your whole blog I’m so serious.

You have absolutely no right to judge anyone for not voting blue after the democrats have encouraged a fucking genocide. Vote blue if you want to but that doesn’t make u revolutionary or better than those who aren’t voting.

[ivygorgon]

📣 Exciting news from Resistbot!

They've launched a new feature called approval polls. Now you can express whether or not you would re-elect each of your federal elected officials.

This is an important step in making our voices heard and holding our elected officials accountable. Let's use this tool to let them know what they need to do to earn our votes! Try it out by texting "approval" to the bot. Your input matters!

Resistbot continues to innovate for civic engagement. I look forward to seeing more developments like this in the future. Share your thoughts and feedback in the general discussion. Let's make a difference together! 🗳️✨

📱Text APPROVAL to 50409 and earn FREE Coins!

I just tried it out and here's my feedback:

For President Biden, I might vote to reelect him because he took steps to repeal discriminatory policies like the Trans Ban (DADT 2.0). While I appreciate this progress, I hope to see a more critical approach to U.S. support and funding for Israel. Even still, Trump would be worse for Palestine. Vote Blue No Matter Who, until we get Ranked Choice Voting.

For Senator Murkowski, I approve of her reelection because I appreciate Senator Murkowski's dedication to child development and her progressive stance on LGBTQ+ rights. However, I wish she would support stronger gun regulation and prioritize green initiatives more consistently. I'm encouraged by her stance against Trump's policies.

For Senator Sullivan, I strongly oppose Senator Sullivan due to his positions against reproductive rights, transgender rights, and affordable healthcare. Additionally, his denial of climate change, support for gerrymandering, and alignment with extremist views surrounding the January 6 insurrection are deeply concerning. He is an un-American Trump Sucker and I need him out of my chair this instant.

For Rep. Peltola, I approve of her because I appreciate Senator Peltola's support for COVID-19 proposals and her progressive stance on marriage, children, LGBTQ+, and transgender rights. However, I believe there is room for improvement in her support for military service members, veterans, and moderate gun regulation.

[phanchester]

Congrats, Biden wins the election. What are you doing next to ensure trump 2.0 doesn't win? Voting harder? The Democratic Party has a responsibility to elect a reasonable candidate that they think can win. If Biden is truly electable, he'll win! He'll adopt policies that will be popular, and people will respond. If he isn't, then people regardless of whatever the fuck is happening with Republicans have a right to voice their discontent. That's how politics works, whether you think that's pragmatic or not.

The primaries literally just ended. It's June. Bodies are actively dropping in Palestine. It's not that leftists think they're better than you, you're just acting wildly unempathetic to try to draw the conversation to Voting when people are DYING!!! Like actively being bombed and having their bodies blown apart while you talk about elections.

And like, it's almost ironic because literal US citizens are dying in Palestine! You realize Palestinian and American are not two seperate paths that can't intersect right? People who could exercise their holy right to vote in Palestine are dying because American bombs are dropping on them.

Anyways this is a long rant to say maybe just don't be an asshole? Cause you and 22,000 thousand people who reblogged that weird post sound like massive fucking assholes. And xenophobic with the annoying ass Russian bot myth. Surprise!!! there's commies in America, how terrifying. Born and bred in the US of A.

look - i'm australian so all the american election content i am consuming is purely from that perspective. however, here's my general understanding of what's happening -

both trump and biden are going to have the same foreign policy. this is not only because of voting but because of lobby groups and international relations. i know this from an australian perspective because our prime minister was once upon a time very pro-palestinian - he even started a "friends of palestine" group - but that all went out the window when he became prime minister simply because of the grip international relations (particularly with you guys, the us) has on us. realistically, no one is going to rise to power and change the general us foreign policy perspective. however - i do think trump will further exacerbate it and not work under the guise of a ceasefire

trump has significantly worse domestic policies. i know biden hasn't done a lot either, but trump will 100% make worse things happen even faster. trump will take steps to make transitioning harder and even illegal for minors, he will only recognise two genders, he will keep trans women out of sports, he will deport non-white citizens based on their 'ideology' or parents, and he will completely surround himself with an echo chamber in the white house. why do i care? america is the hegemony. every government looks at you guys.

i'm not a biden supporter at all - from an australian pov, most people i talk to, even the hardcore liberal party members (liberal party is our right wing party) think the choices you have for this election is ridiculous. honestly i don't completely know what i would do in your position, and i am also not in a position to dictate anything.

but right now everyone i know thinks that trump will win. most people i talk to are certain of it. yes, both are or will be assisting a genocide. america is inherently pro-israel and every candidate the democratic party will choose will be funding a genocide. it's horrific, but realistic.

i think you shouldn't minimise the us election by comparing to the genocide in palestine. us is still the hegemony - china is the only competitor, and it is has nowhere near the amount of pull that the us has. every country has its eyes on the us. when a domestic policy is passed, the world reacts. discussion about the election should be held - not in replacement of, but beside discussion and awareness of the atrocities in palestine.

i don't have the certainty or the position to tell others to vote for biden. because i truly get it - i think people have the right to be upset, and that will be reflected in the elections this year. but only one is an openly white supremacist climate denier convincted felon who has committed sexual assault - and that is why the rest of the world is scared

[tomorrowusa]

A former official in the Department of Homeland Security has a warning about what Trump is going to do if he's elected to a second term next year.

If you prefer reading to watching/listening, Miles Taylor also wrote this piece for TIME which was subsequently published at Yahoo News.

Another Trump Presidency Would Be Even Worse Than You Think

“Trump 2.0” won’t be as bad as many think. It will be worse.

We need to assume Trump will be the nominee, indictments or not, and that he will be a real threat. The time to start taking this threat seriously is right now.

We should assume the probability of a MAGA redux is significant. The GOP’s anti-democratic, populist wing remains firmly in control of the party, and if another Trump-like leader is elected, Congress and the courts will struggle to keep up.

Notice that Mr. Taylor used the words "Trump-like leader". That would cover all the better-polling candidates for the Republican nomination. We're seeing Ron DeSantis running to the right of Trump; DeSantis's latest attempt to attract the fascist fringe is a promise to appoint anti-vaxxing conspiracy nut RFK Jr. as head of the FDA or CDC.

The GOP has devolved into a pitiful anti-democracy subsidiary of Trump-MAGA. It is now a parody of its former self and should no longer be trusted in government.

[nightcoremoon]

in 2024 and on, I am going to incessantly make fun of every single person aged 18-22 who

a) absolutely could have voted

b) did not vote

c) complains about trump if he somehow wins

there were seven million more votes for biden than there were for trump, and it was the highest voter turnout rate in over 100 years of american history. even if the over a million people who died from covid was enough to affect the electoral college, even if there were more elderly deaths than 18-22 year olds, even if all of the people who saw that trump was directly responsible for the ravaging destruction of our nation that trump orchestrated not just with the covid but also with all of the everything else too, even in the absolute worst case scenario I am not too overly concerned since the FBI themselves will do everything in their power to prevent him getting back to power (I don’t trust the FBI at all to do anything other than protect their own self-interest, and stopping trump from stealing more national secrets would benefit the FBI the CIA and all of the alphabet agencies) and it’s highly likely that trump will run but the conservative party won’t take him so he’d have to run as a third party and we’ll have another roosevelt/taft situation (here’s hoping trump’s zealots and the republicans have just enough of a divide to confuse the shit out of all of those mouth-breathing degenerates). maybe that’s not the absolute worst case scenario but if it was any worse than that, someone is absolutely going to go irish car bomb on their ass. I’m not worried at all. no anxiety to be had.

but if miraculously trump somehow does manage to slither his way back in, I am absolutely 100% blaming every single centrist zoomer for all of their own misery and pain they will face under fascist law 2.0. you didn’t vote stupid, you have no place to whine about it. and OBVIOUSLY before anyone tries to get all SJW on my ass, if you are a victim of voter suppression or you’re in hospice care or comatose or dead or absolutely couldn’t take work off or else they would fire you and kill your mom and throw your dog off a cliff or otherwise have a perfectly reasonable excuse for not voting, OBVIOUSLY you get a free pass and I’m not gonna be a dick to you for being a victim of circumstance. but everyone else is capital F fucked. neo didn’t tell morpheus no fuck you I’m not taking either pill because you guys kill innocent people so you’re no better than the machines controlling all of us; nobody has E V E R sympathized with cypher but thought “eh, you know what, he should’ve chosen to be an independent third party” because hey newsflash asshole ITS A BINARY SYSTEM, YOURE EITHER IN OR YOURE OUT, YOURE EITHER PLUGGED IN OR YOURE ACTIVELY FIGHTING, THERE IS NO IN BETWEEN AS COMPUTERS THINK IN 1S AND 0S. and republicans are biological computers; compassionless, programmed for evil by their ancestry and society, seeing every single thing in this world as black or white. two box systems. burning everything that doesn’t fit into that neat little organization. they will burn you. and I will watch the fire. [and again OBVIOUSLY I should say that gender binary isn’t real and the conservatives are incorrect about stuff being in binary but they have the power right now and they have the control so we have to follow the system only long enough to learn best how to destroy it and as long as they control the senate the house the supreme court the white house the pentagon or anything else it is IMfuckingPOSSIBLE for your bloodless neoidealist anarchist revolution to have any results other than you tossed in prison for dissent, and if you are conservative and also nonbinary you can go fuck yourself, traitor].

of course anyone aged 23 and on should fucking know better by now since this will be at the very least their second opportunity to vote, and they’re not off the hook either but honestly if they haven’t learned and they haven’t paid attention then they’re too stupid to be reached and I’m just blocking them because it’s such a disappointment to see grown ass adults being morons. but I actually have hope for the new generation, since I know the worst of tiktok is not accurate representation of everyone younger than me. so if my being a dick can open their eyes and tickle that teenage rebellion soft spot and show them hey actions have consequences and if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice (thanks rush) and you have to actually take part in society in order to improve it somewhat, then I am willing to be called a ‘poopy idiot fartface’ for the trouble (since we on this website have devolved to third grade). and tbh being mean to someone over their shitty choices is way more socially acceptable than any other reason.

I’ve rambled enough. fuck the queen and fuck the tories. americans need to vote because voting is a privilege. check it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The secrets of hospital bills

Today, the New York Times published an analysis of hospital pricing in the US, comparing prices charged to uninsured people, to Medicare, and to different insurers, revealing that these prices can vary up to 900%, often to the detriment of large insurers.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/22/upshot/hospital-prices.html

This represents a marked contrast to the story we are often told about health-care pricing in America — that large insurers use their might to negotiate lower rates from price-gouging hospitals. That might be true sometimes, but often, it’s not.

And as the Times points out, it’s not necessarily the insurers who pay those inflated prices — many insurance plans are actually run by large employers, and only administered by the insurance company. So when Cigna turns down a treatment, it’s actually your boss doing it.

That may be a nice fiction for your boss to maintain in order to deflect your ire the coverage you’re denied — but it also means that when Cigna allows a hospital to gouge it for your care, it’s your boss that pays for it — not Cigna’s shareholders.

Meanwhile, the variations in prices are simply wild. If you get a colonoscopy at University of Mississippi Medical Center, it costs $1463 if you’re with Cigna, $2144 if you’re with Aetna, and $782 if you’re uninsured.

$782!

The percentage differences are even more pronounced with small-dollar items, like a pregnancy test at Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania:

$18 if you’re with Blue Cross PA.

$58 if you’re a Blue Cross NJ HMO customer.

$93 if you’re a Blue Cross NJ PPO customer.

$10 if you’re uninsured.

There’s so much more of this. Hospital and insurance spokespeople told Sarah Kliff, Josh Katz and Rumsey Taylor that all of this was not nearly so bad as it looks, that it was taken out of context, that there’s an innocent explanation — but were unable to provide that explanation.

The reality is that it’s much worse than it looks. The data-set they were reporting on is fragmentary, drawn from the minority of hospitals that deign to comply with a bipartisan order (started under Trump, affirmed by Biden) requiring hospitals to provide this pricing data.

These are the hospitals with the least to hide, the best of the bunch, and they’re so bad. There’s repeated stories of parents being horribly gouged on rabies shots for their children, for example.

All of this puts the lie to the story of health-care as a market. A parent whose child is in need of urgent care following a wild animal attack doesn’t shop around for a deal. There’s no “demand elasticity” in rabies shots for children.

But even if a heart-attack patient in an ambulance was interested in shopping for a bargain on their care, they would be stopped cold. Hospitals and insurers treat their pricing information as trade secrets, and refuse to disclose it, even when legally obliged to do so.

That secrecy extends to your employer, who is unable to see prices even when shopping for an insurer for thousands of your co-workers. In 2018, Larimer County, CO tried to get the insurer who covered its 3,500 employees to disclose its negotiated hospital prices.

They raised the issue up to the insurance company’s CEO, who personally told them to fuck off, pay him, and forget about ever finding out how that money was being spent. They put the contract out for rebid. Of the six insurers who bid, five refused to disclose prices.

A former Blue Cross exec told the Times that they put “gag orders in all our contracts,” ensuring that no one would ever know whether they were getting ripped off.

Six months after the order that legally required hospitals to post prices, the Times contracted the ten highest-grossing noncompliant hospitals. NYU Langone told them to fuck off (“We will not be providing a statement or comment”).

They got bafflegab from Cedars Sinai: “We do not post standard cash rates, which typically will not reflect the price of care for uninsured patients.”

Penn Medicine made a funny: “Penn Medicine is committed to transparency about potential costs.”

This is not a market. Markets have prices and shoppers (not hostages). This is a racket. If you doubt it for an instant, tune into Arm and a Leg, a podcast that reveals health care’s crooked billing practices and explains how to resist them.

https://armandalegshow.com/

When I moved to America, a number of friends counselled me to take out catastrophic injury insurance and skip regular health insurance, and show up at doctors’ offices and hospitals with cash in hand, ready to bargain.

They swore up and down that they were paying less in cash money for treatment than I would pay in deductibles and co-pays for my insured coverage. It looks like they were right in many cases. But this is no way to run a healthcare system.

For one thing, it leaves people with chronic conditions out in the cold. For another, it allows the system to continue to rot, transforming into a financial institution first and a way to treat patients as a distant second.

America doesn’t have market healthcare. It has racket healthcare. The fact that Americans defend this system is frankly bizarre. Unless you’re a shareholder in this rotten system, it has absolutely nothing to redeem it.

It is a crooked enterprise that wastes trillions and delivers precious little care.

Image: Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[tanadrin]

Honest question: how do you expect anyone to build a life that will be just fine irrespective of politics?Everything in my life which I’ve used to try and deal with shit has been destroyed by this pandemic, and the country is about to reelect the demagogue whose policy has been making that worse. This isn’t catastrophizing - the situation is a catastrophe. Is the solution just “move to a different country lol?” Because I imagine you know that’s actually rather hard.

if you’re American, and by “reelect the demagogue whose policy has been making that worse” you mean Trump

(if you’re not, and are referring to some other demagogue-led country, ignore this bit)

then I have to point out that 538 is giving Trump about a 12% chance right now, and he’s behind in both national and swing-state polls, and while 12% is not nothing, it is also only a 12% chance. multiply all pessimism contingent on a Trump victory by 12%, and all potential optimism contingent on a Biden victory by 88%. Remember that even a 2016-sized polling error does not give Trump a greater than 50% probability of winning; a Trump victory would require a Dewey-beats-Truman sized polling error, and while that’s happened before (when Truman beat Dewey, natch), it’s happened once before in the era of modern Presidential election polling. The odds right now of Democrats winning the Presidency, holding the House, and having a slim majority in the Senate are at about 70% (again, per recent 538 reporting), so catastrophism about the outcome of the American election is... well, catastrophism! Because the situation the US is facing is not actually catastrophe.

I know dirtbag left doomerism is popular on Twitter these days, but it’s, pardon my uncharitability, fucking stupid and just as divorced from reality as Fox News-poisoned right-wing conspiracism. On balance the likely outcome of this election is Democratic control of the legislative and executive branches, and--though this would be contingent on a strong Dem majority in the Senate, and popular appetite for it--there’s a nonzero chance of Dems packing SCOTUS and having control of all three branches of government. Small chance, to be sure, but far, far larger than it’s ever been in my lifetime.

(and if you think ACB being confirmed means a 99% chance that SCOTUS will steal the election... that is also stupid. the supreme court is only relevant in a handful of very specific circumstances where the election is nearly a tie, and those are not very likely circumstances! it would be very bad if we got Bush v Gore 2.0, yes; and being concerned about SCOTUS picks to avoid that kind of thing is reasonable; but letting fear of that scenario dominate your predictions for how the election will turn out would be extremely fucking stupid. I would put more money on the Dems packing the court in 2021 than I would on the court deciding the 2020 election. Not a lot, you understand; but I’d much sooner bet 50 euro on the former than the latter.)

(again, if you’re not American, ignore all the above; but AFAIK other likely demagogue led-countries you might be from, like Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Russia, the Philippines, and the UK, do not have upcoming elections.)

You build a life with meaning outside of politics the same way you build a life with meaning in general. Dan Savage (yeah yeah I know) talks about this w/r/t people who are lonely and have no short-term, or even long-term, prospects of a romantic relationship. You read, you have hobbies, you make friends, you refuse to let bitterness and rage consume you--and in this day and age, you get off social media, if that’s where your bitterness and rage is coming from--and you develop yourself as a well-rounded person so that if you do stumble into a scenario where a romantic relationship seems possible, you are an interesting and fun person to be in a relationship with, because you have a full and complete life outside that relationship.

So too with any other sphere of life. If thoughts of politics and anger against politicians is consuming your life, fucking stop consuming news about politics. It’s not doing you any good. By all means, vote in elections, even volunteer for political organizations, but also read, cultivate hobbies, make friends, get out of the house, get in shape, learn to bake--find out who you are in all areas of life besides the one making you miserable, in short. Yeah, coronavirus makes all this harder. It doesn’t make any of it impossible. I know it’s driving us all a little crazy--me included, and I’m a married Extremely Online homebody--but it won’t last forever. And you get to choose what to do with yourself in the meantime. You get to choose how consumed with resentment and frustration at the world you’re gonna be. You get to choose every day whether you’re going to let the fear that nothing is possible for you govern your behavior, or whether you’re going to try to accomplish something (however difficult, however small) despite the circumstances around you.

If you write 300 words a day--a short newspaper column--then in six or seven months you’ll have a novel. If you do 20 minutes of exercise a day, in six months you could be in the best shape of your life. If you spend an hour a day playing with Python, in six months you could be a fairly competent programmer. And so on and so forth. Mutatis mutandis, as far as the things you’re actually interested in, but the underlying point holds: just because the world feels like it’s going to hell in a handbasket doesn’t mean you can’t build up your life in other areas. The ‘rona doesn’t stop you from having an online or socially-distanced book club, or from hanging out with friends outdoors, or from getting drunk on raid night with your WoW guild (A++ can recommend, btw).

And if you really can’t, if the anxiety or the anger or the worry or the sheer overwhelming weight of it all means you can’t even manage modest effort in the things you care about, you should assign a much greater likelihood to the possibility that your brain is broken, that your thoughts are lying to you (they do that sometimes!) and that your life might be greatly improved by some combination of anti-anxiety medication/antidepressants and talk therapy. Because God is dead, depressive realism is horseshit, and we have to make our own meaning in the world; and the human brain is, in fact, usually very good at that when it’s firing on all cylinders.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Does anyone think the United States will exist as it does today in 2026?

That's the semiquincentennial, our 250th anniversary, and I honestly do not know if the country will make it there in one piece. 2024 is going to be a DISASTROUS presidential election, with multiple state governments already promising to interfere with any results they don't like, and I just KNOW the military is gonna tie itself up in some new overseas bullshit we don't belong in because America doesn't "do" the whole peacetime thing. Our economy is built on war, half the population base their entire political identity on war, so the absence of war will leave those nutjobs itching for a fix, like addicts in withdrawal. Things have only gotten worse in the last year, when everyone was expecting it to magically get better once Trump was gone, and no matter how dee we plunge I just don't see rock bottom coming anytime soon.

The judiciary has shown itself to no longer be independent and impartial. We knew this was coming, but the fact that the Republican Party now openly runs on a platform of packing the courts to het favorable rulings is despicable. And they PROJECT, every single horrible thing they do or plan on doing, they project it onto their opponents. They will admonish the Democrats for something they don't plan on doing, then turn around and do exactly that thing; they call all their shots, they're an open book, they have no poker face and yet we're powerless to stop them. It's an ego thing, they get off on being cruel and rubbing our noses in it. I WISH the Democrats were as radical as the Republicans claim they are. If the Democrats did half the things they were accused of, the Republicans would never win another election.

I'm surprised there haven't been more assassination attempts from either side. Tensions are so high, politicians are so divisive, our culture is so polarized, I'm amazed we don't hear of crazed gunmen going after senators and judges every day. It's a powder keg waiting to go off; once one gets taken out, all hell will break loose as both sides race to take out the other before the powers that be can step in to stop it. If someone killed a right wing politician, do you honestly believe there would be no retaliation? I could see a left winger getting shot and no one giving a shit, but a right winger getting shot would lead to all out war, I'm sure of it. Double standard. Establishment Democrats would trust the justice system to work it out through long protracted legal channels, while Republicans would take matters into their own hands and start picking off opponents one at a time. Tit for tat.

I wouldn't doubt it if 2026 saw a rise in right wing extremism. All the nationalists would be empowered by the anniversary, especially if they took back power in 2024 and appointed a couple extra Supreme Court justices (let's be honest; Breyer is gonna end up being Ginsburg 2.0, retiring or dying with a Republican in office. Thomas claims to be in for life, he's got a good 15 or 20 more years left in him, but I have a feeling he'll retire like Kennedy once the Republicans get back in power, replaced by some rising Nazi starlet who is even more conservative and less impartial than he is).

We need judicial term limits. Not mandatory retirement ages, actual set term limits, because if you require justices to retire at age 70, all you're gonna end up doing is incentivize the parties to start nominating younger and younger justices. If they HAVE to retire at 70, why would you ever nominate someone over the age of 60? We'd start seeing justices in their 40s, maybe even their 30s, newly barred lawyers who've never heard a case but promise to vote however the party wants them to for help rest of their lives. No, what we need is to stagger the seats so that one retires every two or three years, ensuring that there's always fresh blood being injected into the justice system, new voices who know they can't just sit pretty forever.

We need Congressional term limits too; maybe 2 or 3 for senators, and like 5 or 6 for the house.

We need a whole slew of new amendments. Hell, at this point I'd say we need a Constitutional Convention to rewrite the whole document from the ground up. Fresh start. The old way isn't working. Other countries change their constitutions all the time, so why do Americans fetishize theirs as though it's somehow special? It's built on the will of the people, and people's wills change over the centuries. 27 updates in 250 years is far too few.

[transrevolutions]

Another Politics Question: Do you believe that Taiwan can trust it's allies to defend it (United States and Japan mainly) in the event that they are attacked by CCP-controlled China? Or is the issue too distant for the disunified US and too much to handle for the demilitarized Japan?

Well, the real answer here is I really don't think China is going to try to take Taiwan, at least not in the near future.

Think of it from their perspective: If they attack Taiwan, they will have to contend with swift and severe backlash from at least the US in some form. For all our divisions, the US is very solidly imperialist and nationalist, especially in our military. Unlike say, Palestine or the Ukraine, the US has put Taiwan on a pedestal. (This might also be because the US wants to have China as the scary guy right now. Are we at war with Eurasia or Eastasia again???)

For better or for worse, China and the US have extremely interconnected economies. If China collapses, the US will suffer economically. If the US collapses, China will suffer economically. China isn't going to risk a full-out war in such a dependent state. Win or lose, they will become extremely crippled in terms of resources.

Instead, from China's perspective, Taiwan is much more useful as a no-man's-land. They could theoretically take Taiwan, and the US knows this. China's government can use this bargaining chip to gain concessions from the US (although even this is a dangerous game, as the US can be pretty... short-fused). The moment they invade Taiwan, they have made an extremely powerful enemy. It's not in China's best interests to have the US as an enemy, and it's not in the US's best interests to have China as an enemy.

Taiwan is a small island. Sure, it has ideological significance, but in the end, is all that death and bloodshed and destruction and economic fallout really worth it just to get a tiny piece of land? Right now, at least, the CCP doesn't seem to think so. It's all a posturing game. "You know we could take Taiwan any time we want..." "You know we could ruin your production lines any time we want..." etc. etc. etc.

If China decided to ignore all logic and good sense and launch some kind of attack on Taiwan, it could go one of a few ways.

Scenario A: The US, for whatever reason, does not involve itself. It's pretty likely that Taiwan will get taken over. There will be human rights violations, probably on a similar scale to what's happening in Palestine. I think this scenario is unlikely, because the US has such a history of rushing into war situations that I don't see how they wouldn't get involved.

Scenario B: The US sends monetary/equipment support to Taiwan, but no actual soldiers. Taiwan could still get taken over, but the cost for China would be a lot greater. Maybe they'd still go through with it. Maybe they'd cut their losses. In the end, it turns into a second, far more dangerous game of cards.

Scenario C: The US sends troops. This is where we get into more dangerous territory, because sending actual troops is a far stronger declaration of alliance than just sending supplies. Sending troops gives a very specific message: we are willing to risk the lives of our people for this. I think this is the one that could lead to an all-out war. Not necessarily a nuclear one, because even if both parties were this stupid, I don't think they'd be that stupid (maybe if we had someone deranged like Trump, it might). Eventually, nobody starts giving a shit about Taiwan anymore. It's become the Korean War 2.0. Heavy losses on all sides and even heavier losses for civilians. A small country caught in a tug-of-war proxy battle. God forbid this happen.

Of course, this doesn't account for Taiwan's other potential allies, China's potential allies, etc. This is just focusing in on the US and China and their responses to each other, and how that could play out.

I have family living in Taiwan. I've been to Taiwan. Some people there want independence, some want reunification. If this is a question of whether I think it's okay to use Taiwan as a puppet on either side, I don't. Both sides have stopped seeing the people of Taiwan, and only see the political value of Taiwan. To both sides, I'd say, put down your pride. Put down your nationalistic values. Put down your desire to conquer, your desire to fight, and your desire to lock horns. Taiwan belongs to the people living there, and it should be their choice what their future looks like.

Remember the Korean war. Remember Vietnam, remember Afghanistan. The bloodshed and civilian casualties of proxy wars isn't worth it. The slaughtering of an entire people is not acceptable damage.

I don't think China will try and take Taiwan any time soon. I hope they never try to take Taiwan. And it's hard to say this, but if they do, I hope the US won't declare a full-out war. I hope that negotiations are possible. Call me naïve, an idealist, but I don't think it's out of the question for all sides to see sense. And in the end, no matter what grudges there are between powerful governments, a citizen of the US has a more similar situation to a citizen of Taiwan has to a citizen of China than not. We are all living under oppressive regimes and systems. The governments' responsibility is to choose civility. Ours is to choose solidarity.

[marblesarelost]

This is not going to be a popular post.

Before I begin, let me state this:  I absolutely think the current resident of the White House is a pompous, narcissistic nincompoop who is possibly suffering from dementia and God only knows what else.  He is not a good president, he is not a leader, and he will only continue to make things worse as time goes on.

That being said, I give you a cautionary tale, for those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

In the 1970s, we dealt with another pompous nincompoop Republican in the White House, a paranoid megalomaniac who honestly thought being President=being King.  His name was Richard Nixon.

Nixon resigned, praise be to God, and we dealt with Ford for however long, fine, whatevs, and then.  And then we elected Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter is a GOOD man.  He’s not a perfect man by any means, but he is a GOOD man at heart.  If Jimmy Carter doesn’t make it to Heaven, nobody can, that’s my honest take on things.  He was a moderate Democrat, he was kind, he was softspoken, and he did his best.  Was he a good President?  Not really, but he did his level best.

In 1980, the Republican Party nominated Ronald Reagan.  The absolute antithesis, in many respects, to Jimmy Carter.  And Reagan won, and so accelerated our national decline in regards to many things; mental health care, the AIDS crisis, the slow dismantling of the unions as well as the incessant whisper campaigns against said unions that that persist to this day, the corporate welfare now rampant throughout the business sector, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

My friends, I pose this to you; Jimmy Carter was the Democratic answer to Richard Nixon and his disregard for the law, as well as his grasp for executive power.  Ronald Reagan was the Republican answer to Jimmy Carter.  And the damage he did has yet to even be scraped at to this day, 40 years later.

I do hope with all my heart that Joe Biden wins the election.  But friends, if he does, we must be vigilant, we must be strong, we must fight for the curbing of executive power and we must take and keep both houses as well as the Oval Office, because I am honestly afraid that the Republican answer to Joe Biden will be smarter, younger, and more cunning than Donald Trump could ever dream of being.

I will give you an example, if you would like a name; Paul Ryan.

Ryan “retired” in 2018.  He is now a member of the board of directors of Fox News, he’s on Fox from time to time as a commentator of sorts, his name is still recognizable by the Republican public.

And he is only 50 years old.  In 2024, he will be 54.  He has tried to run for President once before, in the 2016 Republican primaries, so he knows how it works.  He’s not an idiot.  He’s a consummate Slytherin, actually.  He basically checked out, refused to run in 2018 because he saw the writing on the wall, he knew that if he hung on to his seat -- which I suppose he might have done -- he’d be irrevocably tarred with the same brush as this administration.

And he’s right.  Nobody really thinks about Paul Ryan anymore.  Nobody considers him politically dangerous.  Like the Tick-Tock Croc, he’s biding his time.

He will be seen as the rational Republican.  He will endeavor to be seen as such.  When asked why he didn’t fight back against the current administration, he’ll shake his head, look down at his hands and then back up at the interviewer/camera, and say, “I tried.  I failed.  I’m sorry.”  And the American people love nothing more than an apology and a second chance story.

He would be -- look at his picture, it’s scary -- almost exactly the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

And we cannot have that, my friends.  We may survive getting Trump out of office, please God.  But we cannot survive Reagan 2.0.

There are others; there’s a multitude of them, to be honest, the Republican primary in 2024 is going to be extremely crowded, no matter what happens this November.  But Ryan is definitely someone to watch out for.

[arcticdementor]

On July 16, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a cable to American embassies across the globe with new instructions. In the face of what he described as the growing threat from authoritarian and populist forces emanating from countries around the world, he urged U.S. diplomats to actively “seek ways to exert effective pressure on those countries to uphold democratic norms and respect human rights,” and vowed that “standing up for democracy and human rights everywhere is not in tension with America’s national interests nor with our national security.” This, he specified, must apply even to America’s allies and partners, declaring that “there is no relationship or situation where we will stop raising human rights concerns.”

U.S. President Joe Biden has explicitly characterized his foreign policy as waging “a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” and described the world as at an “inflection point” that will determine for the future “who succeeded, autocracy or democracy, because that is what is at stake.” And while he has named China and Russia as the top threats to democracy, he has stated that, “in so many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault.”

This kind of rhetoric has led many to describe Biden as gearing up to lead a new round of global ideological competition akin to the Cold War, and Blinken’s cable appears to be a step toward operationalizing this conception into everyday U.S. policy.

…

Blinken’s invitation had in fact been a response to a June 26 declaration made by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, which itself followed the completion of a “comprehensive report on systemic racism,” which had unsurprisingly discovered its titular subject ingrained around the world – especially in the “excessive policing of Black bodies and communities” in the United States. In her statement, Bachelet castigated the West for a “piecemeal approach to dismantling systems entrenched in centuries of discrimination and violence,” declared that “the status quo is untenable,” and called instead for an immediate “whole-of-society” “systemic response,” with a “transformative agenda” to uproot systemic racism everywhere and implement the “restorative justice” urgently demanded by “the worldwide mobilization of people calling for racial justice.”

The Biden administration could hardly have responded with anything less than full-throated support for such an idea, given that battling the omnipresent specter of America’s “systemic racism” has become a core feature of the administration’s political identity.

And few administration officials have embraced this battle with as much personal zeal as Blinken, who moved immediately after his confirmation to not only install a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the State Department (in a powerful new position reporting only to himself), but ordered every bureau in the department to also appoint a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Diversity and Inclusion as well – with his stated goal being “to incorporate diversity and inclusion into the [State] Department’s work at every level.”

…

Speaking of that kind of thing, most of those upset about Blinken’s invitation of the UNHRC’s racism inquisitors strangely seem to have missed another development in a related front of the global culture war.

This despite the fact that the State Department is eager for you to know that, “On June 23, the United States led, and 20 countries co-sponsored, its first-ever side event on the human rights of transgender women, highlighting the violence and structural, legal, and intersectional barriers faced by transgender women of color.”

So there’s that. But side event to what? That would be the last session of the UNHRC, where the U.S. worked to address assorted “dire human rights situations” by helping to pioneer the launch of the “Group of Friends of the Mandate of the United Nations Independent Expert on Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity” (GoF IE SOGI).

Besides the United States, the inaugural SOGI Group includes: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Norway, Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Who is this Independent Expert with so many friends? That would be Víctor Madrigal-Borloz, Senior Visiting Researcher at the Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program.

After its formation, the Group’s first act was to consider a report produced for the UNHRC by Mr. Madrigal-Borloz titled “The Law of Inclusion.”

“The Law of Inclusion” states that all evidence necessarily “leads to the conclusion that all human beings live in gendered societies traversed by power hierarchies,” and declares that, as we all seek to “build back better” (here inexplicably adopting Joe Biden’s campaign slogan) the “adoption of gender-based and intersectional analysis” is “a fundamental component of a diligent discharge of [all countries’ human rights] responsibility.”

Crucially, an intersectional approach leads to a “recognition of how race is gendered and gender is raced, as well as the many other factors which affect how one is allocated rights.” Plus, as a bonus, “gender theory is also relevant as a tool to address, analyse and transform systems of violent masculinity.”

…

Ultimately, based on his intersectional analysis, the Independent Expert declares a new “fundamental duty of the State” based on his careful investigation:

To recognize every human being’s freedom to determine the confines of their existence, including their gender identity and expression.

(I don’t think you will find a more flawless one-sentence summation of the End-Stage Liberalism I’ve previously outlined, characterized by its endless quest to liberate us from any and all limits, than this, by the way.)

…

The United States and the rest of the SOGI Group immediately issued a statement fully endorsing the report, noting that they “would like to reaffirm” that: “As clearly demonstrated by the thorough analysis provided by the report, gender is a social construct”; that intersectional analysis has “proven to be fundamental to the design and implementation of inclusive public policies”; that they support “the importance of advancing legal gender recognition based on self-identification”; and that they “oppose any attempt to erase gender from international human rights law instruments and processes.”

I hope you will retain at least one takeaway from my subjection of you to this word salad of intersectional jargon on race and gender: that the distinctive language and doctrinal ideological concepts of the New Faith have extended far past the Harvard Quad, crossed the oceans, and have now, as the report puts it, thoroughly “permeated” themselves through elite-managed global institutions like the UN Human Rights Council.

Conservatives, in particular, are typically dismissive of the UN in general and the UNHRC in particular (President Trump officially pulled the U.S. out of the council in 2018, after which Biden rejoined as an observer), as they see it as a pointless talk-shop that spends a majority of its time criticizing the United States and its allies, though with little practical effect. This is a mistake.

What is happening here is the steady creation and entrenchment of new norms that aim to redefine what is considered the normal and acceptable window of cultural, political, and legal practice by countries the world over. The UNHRC may have no direct political power, but it is precisely the ignorance or flippant disregard for the transformative long-term power of norms that has so far lost conservatives every culture war battle they have fought. Somehow conservatives – and now Liberals – have been consistently blindsided by norms falling out from under them (gradually, and then suddenly) even as they have held positions of political power.

Meanwhile, under the Biden administration, Washington has now embraced this kind of norm-setting mechanism for remaking the world in its new and ideologically improved image.

…

Not every country is completely woke to the need for unlimited gender self-identification or a “whole-of-society transformation” to address its hierarchies of oppression, however.

International Expert Mr. Madrigal-Borloz has also noticed this problem, which is why he and the SOGI Group are producing a follow-up companion report to “The Law of Inclusion,” this time to be titled “Practices of Exclusion.”

…

Probably in most other contexts, when an external power or powers attempt to “deconstruct” and replace the “traditional values” and “cultural and religious” norms of a distinct people against their will, this would be called that what it is: imperialism (or, occasionally, worse).

Nonetheless, “Practices of Exclusion” is set to be published at the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting in New York this September and will undoubtedly be endorsed by the U.S., U.K., and the other progressive members of the SOGI Group at that time – even as many of these same countries are actually still experiencing their own fierce bouts of “resistance” to its core ideas.

What does this all mean? In short, that the ideological battles of Cold War 2.0 are not going to be limited to categories similar to those which at least broadly seemed to characterize Cold War 1.0, or necessarily even uphold the classic conceptions of “liberal-democracy” and “authoritarianism” or “autocracy” with which we are familiar.

Instead, it should be understood that the Biden administration and its like-minded partners are now operating under a rather different ideological calculus about what “democracy” and “human rights” mean, even as, similar to the original Cold War, that calculus directly links domestic and international ideological foes.

In this worldview, in order for a democratic state to be a legitimate “Democracy,” it is not enough for it to have a popularly elected government chosen through free and fair elections – it also has to hold the correct progressive values. That is, it has to be Woke. Otherwise it is not a real Democracy, but something else. Here the term “populism” has become a useful one: even if a state is not yet authoritarian or “autocratic” in a traditional sense, it may be in the grip of “Populism,” an ill-defined concept vague enough to encompass the wide range of reactionary sentiments and tendencies that can characterize “resistance” to progress, as based on “traditional values,” etc. And ultimately, we are told, “Populism” is liable to lead to Autocracy – because if you aren’t progressing forward in sync with Democracy, you are sliding backwards along the binary spectrum toward Autocracy.

Moreover, as in the case of the struggle between Capitalist-Liberalism and Communist-Authoritarianism during the original Cold War, the insidious “forces” of Populism-Autocracy are present not only out in the undecided “Third World,” but even lurking inside Democracies in good standing – constantly threatening to tip them, like dominoes, into the opposite camp. Hence why Biden issues warnings like the one claiming that, “in so many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault.” The fight against the perceived forces of Populism-Autocracy within the United States, or within the European Union, is not in this conception at all separate from the fight against the likes of China and Russia on the world stage; they are the same fight.

…

Exacerbating this sense of fear and division is the fact that a Democracy can’t just hold some of the correct values – it has to hold all of them, in toto. This is after all the prime conclusion of intersectional analysis: all injustice is interlinked, forming interlocking systems of oppression; therefore injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Intersectionality thus demands liberation in totality; there can be no pluralism – no one can simply be left alone or granted the slightest leniency, because no injustice in any place or of any degree can be suffered to exist, lest it pollute and threaten the entire system.

The conclusion is inevitable: the New Faith must be a missionary, evangelical faith. By its own internal logic, for its own survival, it must march abroad to convert the heathens even as it hunts heretics at home.

…

There are still plenty of countries out there – in fact, a vast majority of them – who think intersectional gender theory and other fruits of the New Faith are in essence stark raving mad, and are also rather attached to keeping their own cultures and traditions.

So even if you are a strong supporter of LGBT rights, feminism, or other liberal-progressive ideals (and yes, many countries around the world of course do treat LGBT people, women, and racial minorities terribly), it is still worth considering the practical consequences of Intersectional Imperialism. If the West makes ideological conformity an integral requirement for joining, receiving aid from, or even working with its Democracy bloc (as Blinken has implied), then many of these countries are liable to flee into the arms of China and other genuinely authoritarian but ideologically non-missionary states, despite the security concerns they may have.

…

At this time it was the Soviet bloc, including communist controlled Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, who argued that freedom from discrimination should take precedence over the rights of freedom of expression and assembly.

And it was the Western liberal democracies, together with the Latin American states, that rose to (unsuccessfully) oppose this idea.

The “fundamental right of free speech” was, argued U.K. representative Lady Gaitskell, “the foundation-stone on which many of the other human rights were built,” and it was the U.K.’s position that, despite abhorring racism, “in an advanced democracy the expression of such views was a risk that had to be taken.” Hungary shot back that free speech and tolerance was pointless if “fascists” were tolerated anywhere.

When the U.S. delegation attempted to restrict the scope of speech defined in the law to that “resulting in or likely to cause acts of violence,” the move was blocked by the Soviet group, with Czechoslovakia countering that there could be no democracy if “movements directed towards hatred and discrimination were allowed to exist.”

…

Times have changed. As the European Union prepares to consider writing “hate speech” into the official list of EU crimes, tweeting “gender-critical” thoughts is already an arrestable offense in the United Kingdom, and the United States looks to enlighten the world about the dangers of oppressive microaggressions, one wonders if there is any country remaining, the world over, still willing to genuinely represent liberal values in these terms today.

Instead only the crusaders of the New Faith remain to march into battle against the Autocrats and their Populist allies, and you are either with them or against them. Welcome to the Woke Cold War.

[seance]

random vent post at 2am because i don’t want to dump on my family and friends a new batch of anxiety induced fears since it’s always the same shit since february last year, before everything got really bad here i was already having panic attacks about it so you can imagine the awful mechanism my brain is stuck in considering everything my anxiety told me would happen from then on, actually happened. and now i’m honestly exhausted, i’m completely and utterly exhausted, anxiety was actually what has been fueling me for the past 12 months but now it’s slowly turning into a sense of doom i can’t seem to shake for too long. the fact that we had more deaths during this “second wave” (as most european countries did unfortunately), the fact that it has been going on since september, fucking september and still not stopping. it slowed down sometime around december but these color coded restrictions are a joke, they do nothing but frustrate people even more, weight on the economy and not stopping the virus in the slightest, as soon as a region eases its rules people floods the streets and everything starts again.

we were actually doing good with the vaccine program, we were first or second according to the doses/population ratio but then of course the universe had to fuck us over and literally every single company started violating the terms of their contracts so we had to slow down immensely ‘cause we got no doses left, we didn’t even start vaccinating the elders. we are a sixty millions people country. and like, i’m constantly reading articles and keeping very informed about everything so i know we are all desperately trying to keep this impossible balance over the chaos but sometimes i wish things were just a tiny bit easier.

but no, instead we got seriously scary variants who will inevitably spread everywhere before we can reach any kind of heard immunity, rendering the vaccines less effective, sometimes useless and we’ll keep running after this pandemic instead of taking serious steps to prevent it. like italy keeps opening things up????????? when everyone around us goes into stricter lockdowns cause the third wave is already here and we’re just pretending not to see it until the hospitals are swarmed again. like we don’t have 600 people dying STILL. like long covid is not an incredibly serious, incredibly overlooked issue that is affecting almost everyone who “heals” from this ugly ass disease.

so the economy is still crushed, people are still losing their jobs and their sanity, research is going super slow on the treatment side of things, poorer countries will be used by the virus as wonderful mutation pots since our ugly richer asses can’t find a way to distribute vaccines equally and we are ALL gonna get fucked over by it.

and this is not even the worse thing mother nature could have brought up with all these crazy environment changes. i’m literally incapable of imagining the future, mine or everyone else’s.

OH AND OUR GOVERNMENT THOUGHT IT WAS JUST A ~PERFECT~ TIME TO BREAK A CRISIS OUT, WE’RE CURRENTLY WITHOUT A PRIME MINISTER AND IF SOME RIGHT-WINGS END UP BEING CHOSEN FOR THE ROLE IT’S GONNA BE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION 2.0: ITALIAN VERSION.

tl;dr everyone keeps talking about going back to normal but i wish i could stop feeling scared even for a hot second.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

FiveThirtyEight has issued its final presidential forecast. There hasn’t been a lot of change over the past 24 or 48 hours, as most of the late polling either came in close to our previous polling averages, or came from — frankly — fairly random pollsters that don’t get a lot of weight in our forecast.

Of course, you can click over to the forecast right now if you’d like to see what it says — I’m sure most of you have already done that. But in these accompanying write-ups, I like to provide some context. When I wrote about our final presidential forecast in 2012, for example, I was trying to explain why a race that everyone assumed was close actually reflected a fairly decisive advantage for Barack Obama. When I wrote about our final forecast in 2016, conversely, it was pretty much the opposite. I was trying to explain that, although Hillary Clinton was favored, what most of the media was portraying as a sure thing was a highly competitive contest between her and Donald Trump.

This year … I’m not really sure what I’m trying to convince you of. If you think that polling is irrevocably broken because of 2016 — well, that’s not really correct. On the other hand, if it weren’t for 2016, people might look at Joe Biden’s large lead in national polls — the largest of any candidate on the eve of the election since Bill Clinton in 1996 — and conclude that Trump was certain to be a one-term president. If you do think that, please read my story from earlier this week about how Trump can win and why a 10 percent chance needs to be taken seriously.

Nonetheless, Biden’s standing is considerably stronger than Clinton’s at the end of the 2016 race. His lead is larger than Clinton’s in every battleground state, and more than double her lead nationally. Our model forecasts Biden to win the popular vote by 8 percentage points,5 more than twice Clinton’s projected margin at the end of 2016.

Indeed, some of the dynamics that allowed Trump to prevail in 2016 wouldn’t seem to exist this year. There are considerably fewer undecided voters in this race — just 4.8 percent of voters say they’re undecided or plan to vote for third-party candidates, as compared to 12.5 percent at the end of 2016. And the polls have been considerably more stable this year than they were four years ago. Finally, unlike the “Comey letter” in the closing days of the campaign four years ago — when then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress that new evidence had turned up pertinent to the investigation into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state — there’s been no major development in the final 10 days to further shake up the race.

Now, there are also some sources of error that weren’t as relevant four years ago. The big surge in early and mail voting — around 100 million people have already voted! — could present challenges to pollsters, for instance. Still, even making what we think are fairly conservative assumptions, our final forecast has Biden with an 89 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, as compared to a 10 percent chance for Trump. (The remaining 1 percent reflects rounding error, plus the chance of an Electoral College tie.)

But what’s tricky about this race is that — because of Trump’s Electoral College advantage, which he largely carries over from 2016 — it wouldn’t take that big of a polling error in Trump’s favor to make the election interesting. Importantly, interesting isn’t the same thing as a likely Trump win; instead, the probable result of a 2016-style polling error would be a Biden victory but one that took some time to resolve and which could imperil Democrats’ chances of taking over the Senate. On the flip side, it wouldn’t take much of a polling error in Biden’s favor to turn 2020 into a historic landslide against Trump.

So as we did four years ago, let’s run through a few stress checks here. On average in past elections, the final polls have been off by around 3 percentage points. How would the map change if there were a 3-point error in Trump’s direction? And what about a 3-point error in Biden’s direction? Keeping in mind that some states move more than others in accordance with national trends, here’s what our final forecast shows:

How a 2016-sized polling error would change our forecast

Biden’s projected margin of victory or defeat in the most competitive states

with 3-point national error … State Final 538 Forecast IN BIDEN’S FAVOR IN TRUMP’S FAVOR New Hampshire +10.6 +14.5 +6.7 Minnesota +9.1 +12.1 +6.0 Wisconsin +8.3 +11.6 +5.1 Michigan +8.0 +11.2 +4.9 Nevada +6.1 +9.5 +2.8 Pennsylvania +4.7 +7.7 +1.7 NE-2 +3.2 +6.4 -0.0 Arizona +2.6 +5.8 -0.7 Florida +2.5 +5.7 -0.7 North Carolina +1.8 +4.7 -1.1 ME-2 +1.6 +4.8 -1.6 Georgia +1.0 +3.6 -1.6 Ohio -0.6 +2.5 -3.7 Iowa -1.5 +2.0 -5.0 Texas -1.5 +1.7 -4.7 Montana -6.4 -3.3 -9.5 South Carolina -7.5 -4.8 -10.2 Alaska -8.5 -5.3 -11.7 Missouri -9.4 -6.3 -12.5

First, before we get to the Biden-friendly or Trump-friendly scenarios: Suppose this is one of those happy years when there isn’t any systematic error in the polls — that is, Biden wins by about 8 points nationally. In that case, then Biden’s going to win the Electoral College, even if there might be polling misses in individual states. Biden’s easiest path to victory would be to win back three of the so-called “Blue Wall” states that Hillary Clinton lost: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Coupled with the states that Clinton won in 2016, that would get Biden up to 278 electoral votes, more than the 270 required. Pennsylvania is the most tenuous of the “Blue Wall” group, but even if Biden lost it — unlikely if polls are about right overall — he’d have plenty of other options as he’s also narrowly ahead in our final forecast in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia and only narrowly behind Trump in Ohio, Texas and Iowa.

What if there were a 3-point polling error in Biden’s favor? Then he’d be a favorite in all of the aforementioned states. Coupled with the 2nd Congressional Districts in Maine and Nebraska, where he’s also favored, that would result in his winning 413 electoral votes. Other states that are traditionally extremely red could even come into play for Biden too, with Montana being the most likely possibility, followed by South Carolina, Alaska and Missouri. This scenario would also make for an 11-point popular vote margin for Biden, the biggest by any candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984, and the biggest winning margin against an incumbent since Franklin Delano Roosevelt against Herbert Hoover in 1932.

But with a 3-point error in Trump’s direction — more or less what happened in 2016 — the race would become competitive. Biden would probably hold on, but he’d only be the outright favorite in states (and congressional districts) containing 279 electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, the tipping-point state, he’d be projected to win by 1.7 percentage points — not within the recount margin, but a close race.

Such a scenario would not be the end of the world for Biden. The extra cushion that he has relative to Clinton helps a lot; it means that with a 2016-style polling error, he’d narrowly win some states that she narrowly lost. Biden has polled well recently in Michigan and Wisconsin in particular and has big leads there. Still, this would not be the sort of outcome that Democrats were hoping for. For one thing, because Biden would probably be reliant on Pennsylvania in this scenario — a state that is expected to take some time to count its vote — the election might take longer to call. For another, it could yield a fairly bad map as far as Democrats’ Senate hopes go, as Biden would be a narrow underdog in several states with key Senate races, including Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Iowa. So while Biden isn’t a normal-sized polling error away from losing, he is a normal-sized polling error away from having a messy win that might not come with control of Congress.

Still, as much as we’ve tried to strike a note of caution, Democrats have a right to be pleased about where they wound up. Sure, Biden could be in a meaningly safer position with a larger polling lead in Pennsylvania or Arizona, where his numbers have slipped a bit down the stretch run. Nonetheless, if we’d told our Democratic readers six months ago that Biden would be heading into election morning ahead by 8 points nationally, also ahead by 8 points in Wisconsin and Michigan, by 5 points in Pennsylvania, by 2 or 3 points in Florida and Arizona, and even a little bit ahead in Georgia and with a pretty decent chance to win Texas, we think they’d be fairly pleased.

It’s also worth keeping in mind the background conditions in the country today. Trump only barely won the election four years ago, against a highly unpopular opponent in Clinton. In 2016, 18 percent of voters in the national exit poll disliked both Trump and Clinton, and those voters went for Trump by 17 points. If they’d merely split evenly, Clinton would have (narrowly) won the Electoral College. Many of those voters actually like Biden, though, who has much better favorability ratings than either Clinton or Trump.

Meanwhile, the election comes at a time where a 2:1 majority of voters are dissatisfied with the direction of the country amid a COVID-19 pandemic that his killed 233,000 Americans — and which has gotten worse in recent weeks — along with high (though improving) unemployment, a summer of racial protests, and continuous erosions of democratic norms by Trump and his administration. Trump’s approval rating has been in negative territory through virtually the entirety of his presidency. Trump’s electoral record is hardly unblemished: Democrats won the popular vote for the U.S. House by nearly 9 points in 2018, about the same margin that Trump now trails in national polls, in an election where polls and forecasts were highly accurate.

In other words, given everything going on in the country — and Biden’s popularity relative to Clinton — it simply shouldn’t be that hard to imagine a small number of voters switching from Trump to Biden. Indeed, that’s what polls show: There are more Trump-to-Biden voters than Clinton-to-Trump voters. The lion’s share of people who voted for Gary Johnson or another third party candidate four years ago also say they plan to vote for Biden.

Trump might be able to overcome this with a disproportionately high Republican turnout. But while Republican turnout might be very high, Democratic turnout almost certainly will be too, as evidenced by, among other things: Democrats’ equal or higher enthusiasm level in polls; their very high numbers in early and absentee voting, and their greater fundraising prowess throughout the cycle.

Again, this is not to deny that Trump will turn out his voters, too. Our model projects overall turnout in the race to be a record setting 158 million, with an 80th percentile range between 147 million and 168 million. But if persuadable voters and independents are mostly flipping to the other party, you need your turnout to be high and for the other party’s to be low to have much of a shot, and that latter condition doesn’t appear likely for Trump.

Still, 10 percent chances happen, there’s never been an election quite like this one and this isn’t a moment that anybody should be taking anything for granted. We hope you’ll follow our coverage for as long as it takes to determine who won.