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ledenews · 8 days ago

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I’m rather pleased with the results from our most recent general election, on both a statewide level and nationally. Even though the city and county races were decided back in May, we elected good, solid folks for our city government, an amazing crew running our county, and with the statewide offices being decided at the same time as our general election, I believe we did well, at electing capable people who will do what they see as best for us, within the confines of the will of the people. Again, good people who are committed to do the right thing for our state. When it comes to the national elections, which tend to be much more polarized by party line, a clear mandate was delivered with Donald Trump decisively winning both the Electoral and the Popular votes, and Republicans in charge of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Those of us who follow such things refer to this as the “Trifecta.” This most recent election was a referendum on the past four years, which were plagued by inflation, economic policies that left many of trying to figure out what they were attempting to accomplish, and by all of us being reminded bad things happen when our United States projects weakness. I waited to do a “happy dance” until the final ballot counts were returned, and it was crystal clear who the winners were. It required a little more than one week after the close of the polls. While you might have personal issues with some of those who prevailed, they did win. Wishing that any of them fail is akin to hoping the pilot crashes the airliner in which you are a passenger. You might have milliseconds to enjoy your smug superiority, but you’re going to be lining exactly the same hole in the ground. We need to get behind our new elected officials and give their approach a bit of time to take hold. Part of this is going to be undoing things that were broken in the past four years. Our Executive in Chief, one of the few we have who knows exactly how to run an organization as large as the federal government, now has the experience to deal with the built-in insanity that is politics. Trump learned important lessons during his first term, and he has demonstrated that he learns quickly and adapts. It’s not going to stop him from trying new things, though. Which is not safe politically, but exactly what we need. I looked back at the news from the first 100 days of Trumps first term. There were riots. Cities were burning. The left was in shock that their anointed one didn’t become our nation’s first female president. When Biden won in 2020, those of us on the right didn’t light our cities ablaze. We had things to do, and there was some level of curiosity to see if a contrasting approach would work. It didn’t. And now we are headed back to the path that was proven to work for four years starting in 2016 and restarting in about two months. I know better than to expect that the left will greet Trump’s programs and policies with any level of curiosity. They are convinced they know better. The people have spoken, however, because the policies of the past four years failed. We are going back to what worked. It’s not too much to ask the Left to step up and give it a chance, is it? Read the full article

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b8rack · 19 days ago

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We're a long way from a final tally, but my guess is that Trump will be about level with his performance in 2020, while Harris ends up with 10,000,000 or so less votes than Biden earned that year.

I don't think this was a popular swing to the Republicans (at least in the sense of winning over moderates or former Biden voters). This also wasn't a 2000, when third-party voters split Left and Liberal support. What happened was, very simply, 10,000,000 Democratic voters felt less engaged or were effectively disenfranchised this cycle. In other words, perhaps more than any other election in recent history, this wasn't a Republican victory, but purely a deep Democratic loss.

There are probably many reasons for that. We could argue until the end of time about the significance of the proportions, but at some level, I think most of these came into play:

Misogyny + Racism

Failure to excite the traditional Democratic bases

The underscoring of that failure by attempts to court center-right voters

A polarized political landscape that means that traditional swing voters are more likely to be the disaffected rather than the politically divided (which emphasizes the failure of the above two points)

At a time when the world is exceptionally complicated and overwhelming, the failure to create a sense of a "movement," that engages and excites people without demanding a nuanced world view (as much as many mainstream Dems disliked Bernie, I think he actually helped them accomplish this in 2016 and 2020)

Kamala's late entrance to the race, meaning there wasn't time to properly establish her as a candidate (Walz may have taken an even bigger hit because of this; I am convinced, with more time to plan, that they could have played him up more in WI, MI, and PA to great effect)

Exhaustion and burnout from 12 years of Trump-influenced races and a further decade of political division

That a large number of people have always felt that politics are slimy, and that 12 years of Trump have probably convinced them to step even further back. I suspect a lot of people who voted for senators and reps but left their presidential checkboxes blank ultimately fall into this category.

I don't know how much point there even is to laying this down: each election is so different that lessons often don't carry forward, and it's too late, this time around, to learn from whatever mistakes we made. Some of the problems- like exciting the base- are known to the point of triteness, but the solutions are simply elusive.

We'll do what we can to get through this, and still have enough joy in life that it's worth living. Take care of each other; hugs and love to you all.

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infimace-blog · 10 months ago

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So, American here. Not Palestinian but not white either. I'd rather not front my identity like this, but since you're willing to dismiss anybody who isn't a US citizen, I figured I might as well.

You're overexplaining the basic concept of realpolitik, which I think is something that everyone in this conversation can grasp. Sometimes you make compromises to get things that you want, sure. But realpolitik for the West in the Cold War generally meant 'screwing over other, less white countries to keep Russia at bay. Sometimes Kissinger gets involved'. Compromises that sacrifice the marginalized because there's always a bigger threat to be invoked, because there's always something that requires sacrifice and the marginalized are always conveniently sacrificable. I think there might be some parallels towards what happened then and what's going on right now.

Biden was a compromise vote for just about everyone I knew four years ago. Someone you voted for because avoiding four more years of Trump was worth not looking too closely at him. This is nothing new. I knew friends who refused to vote for Biden then; I know friends who will refuse to vote for him now, a lot of them belonging to the same groups you mention as being under threat under a Trump presidency, a lot of them in more vulnerable places than I am. I think it is valuable to look at whoever the Democrats are trying to push for the big chair and assess for yourself whether you're willing to tolerate their worst aspects, their worst policies. Not everyone can or should be voting in the spirit of realpolitik, with no greater end goal than 'prevent the worst scenario at any cost'. Some people are going to draw a line. Some people can't help but look too closely.

And supporting Israel is a Democrat stance at this point, if not because the Democrat establishment are the same sadistic fascists that the Republicans are, then because the US working with Israel is the status quo and they're too callous or wary to change that in the face of genocide. It's an increasingly contentious stance, and in a month or two, when Biden's approval drops enough and the ICJ starts putting its foot down, they might fully renege on it. But votes on things like 'anti-Zionism is anti-semitism' were getting an easy 48% of the Democratic House as late as two months ago - and that was after a concentrated push in the party to vote present instead of voting yes to try and deescalate internal tensions over the issue. Pelosi was trying to write off pro-Palestinian protestors as possible Russian plants last week. A vote for Biden is, by definition, a vote for a softer genocide, and the difference between soft and hard genocide is negligible for those under the bullets. If the Democrats finally break and convince Biden that sacrificing the election might not be worth Israel's support (the election and not the thousands of needless civilian deaths, mind you), it'll be because more and more people are drawing that line, because the talk of boycotting might actually make Democratic leadership switch gears. That scenario you're talking about, with people inside the Democratic party fighting against Biden, that doesn't happen without constituents behind those people going 'this is unacceptable and I don't want to vote for it'. I don't want to vote for it.

And to be clear, I don't want Trump to win, but if we really want to talk about pragmatism in American politics, Biden can lose a lot of votes and still win the election. Unless you live in a swing state, which most of America increasingly doesn't, a protest vote for a third party candidate won't severely hurt Biden's chances. If you're in Minnesota or Nevada, then sure, worry about your vote, but if you live in Oregon or Massachusetts, statistically it won't matter if you sleep in on election day, let alone refuse to vote or write in Claudia de la Cruz or whatever. But it might send a message to the Democratic establishment that the 'no genocide, not even a little one' voter demographic might be worth catering to over the next four years. And if the worst-case scenario occurs and Trump does win, based on what happened in 2017-2018, the Democrat leadership/news outlets/talking heads will sidestep any flaws in the presidential campaign or candidate and blame an insufficiently centrist approach no matter what we do.

If you're really invested in what happens to this country in 2025, you should be pushing for people to do their research and vote for viable downballot non-Zionist candidates that they can believe in, even if they can't stomach Biden specifically. Because, regardless of whether Biden manages to hang onto the throne or Trump steals it again, government on the local, county and state level may still be ripe for change and growth depending on where you live. And if you're lucky, maybe whoever's running for US Senator or Congressperson in your area is actually decent. We should be encouraging people to care about their government and what it does rather than just gritting their teeth as they go through Hobson's choice every two to four years.

I know the US government acts like a corporation but it’s not.

Not voting isn’t the same as a boycott. Because you can’t bankrupt a government by not voting. All you get by not voting is less control over what the money is doing.

The money comes from taxes, not voting. Abstaining from voting does nothing to reduce the governments ability to get money and spend it on shit.

So yes, sometimes you vote to reduce harm because not voting WILL NOT REDUCE HARM.

It’s not a boycot. Abstaining doesn’t take power from the government. It just reduces the number of people they feel answerable to.

#also if we're talking about post-9/11 American imperialism in the Middle East #while that started under Bush neither Obama nor Biden have clean hands there #A lot of foreigners have a lot of reasons to hate both parties here

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stevishabitat · 3 years ago

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CHICAGO — They acknowledged that they could have shown up months ago. Many were satisfied that they were finally doing the right thing. A few grumbled that they had little choice.On a single day this past week, more than half a million people across the United States trickled into high school gymnasiums, pharmacies and buses converted into mobile clinics. Then they pushed up their sleeves and got their coronavirus vaccines.These are the Americans who are being vaccinated at this moment in the pandemic: the reluctant, the anxious, the procrastinating.

In dozens of interviews on Thursday in eight states, at vaccination clinics, drugstores and pop-up mobile sites, Americans who had finally arrived for their shots offered a snapshot of a nation at a crossroads — confronting a new surge of the virus but only slowly embracing the vaccines that could stop it.

Duncan Beauchamp, 17, was vaccinated at Lyman Orchards in Middlefield, Conn. His father had been concerned by how quickly the vaccines were rolled out.Credit...Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Ever Diaz, 42, was vaccinated at the Polk County Health Department in Des Moines. He said it had been hard to get a vaccine because of his job in construction.Credit...Kathryn Gamble for The New York Times

The people being vaccinated now are not members of the eager crowds who rushed to early appointments. But they are not in the group firmly opposed to vaccinations, either.Instead, they occupy a middle ground: For months, they have been unwilling to receive a coronavirus vaccine, until something or someone — a persistent family member, a work requirement, a growing sense that the shot was safe — convinced them otherwise.

How many people ultimately join this group, and how quickly, could determine the course of the coronavirus in the United States.Some of the newly vaccinated said they made the decision abruptly, even casually, after months of inaction.

One woman in Portland, Ore., was waiting for an incentive before she got her shot, and when she heard that a pop-up clinic at a farmers’ market was distributing $150 gift cards, she decided it was time.

A 60-year-old man in Los Angeles spontaneously stopped in for a vaccine because he noticed that for once, there was no line at a clinic. A construction worker said his job schedule had made it difficult to get the shot.

Ronald Gilbert, 60, was vaccinated at a light rail station in Hawthorne, Calif. He said he didn’t really believe in the vaccines, but that with an uptick in cases it was “better to be safe than sorry.”Credit...Rozette Rago for The New York Times

Cliberman Centeno, 36, was vaccinated in Los Angeles. He said he was tired of wearing a mask.Credit...Rozette Rago for The New York Times

Many people said they had arrived for a vaccine after intense pressure from family or friends.“‘You’re going to die. Get the Covid vaccine,’” Grace Carper, 15, recently told her mother, Nikki White, of Urbandale, Iowa, as they debated when they would get their shots. Ms. White, 38, woke up on Thursday and said she would do it. “If you want to go get your vaccine, get up,” Ms. White told her daughter, who was eager for the shot, and the pair went together to a Hy-Vee supermarket.

Others were moved by practical considerations: plans to attend a college that is requiring students to be vaccinated, a desire to spend time socializing with high school classmates, or a job where unvaccinated employees were told to wear masks. Their answers suggest that the mandates or greater restrictions on the unvaccinated that are increasingly a matter of debate by employers and government officials could make a significant difference.

Audrey Sliker, 18, of Southington, Conn., said she got a shot because New York’s governor announced that it was required of all students attending State University of New York schools. She plans to be a freshman at SUNY Cobleskill this fall.“I just don’t like needles, in general,” she said, leaving a white tent that housed a mobile vaccination site in Middlefield, Conn. “So it’s more like, ‘Do I need to get it?’”

Lisa Thomas, 45, was vaccinated at the People’s Market in Portland, Ore. She first wanted to see how the vaccines affected Americans. “I do know people who have gotten it and they haven’t gotten sick, so that’s why,” Ms. Thomas said.Credit...Tojo Andrianarivo for The New York Times

Patricia White, 46, took her son Tariq, 17, right, to be vaccinated at Michele Clark Academic Preparatory Magnet High School in Chicago. Her grandson Diaunta is too young to be vaccinated.Credit...Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

Many people interviewed described their choices in personal, somewhat complicated terms.Willie Pullen, 71, snacked on a bag of popcorn as he left a vaccination site in Chicago, one of the few people who showed up there that day. He was not opposed to the vaccines, exactly. Nearly everyone in his life was already vaccinated, he said, and though he is at greater risk because of his age, he said he believed he was healthy and strong enough to be able to think on it for a while.

What pushed him toward a high school on the West Side of Chicago, where free vaccines were being administered, was the illness of the aging mother of a friend. Mr. Pullen wanted to visit her. He felt it would be irresponsible to do so unvaccinated.“I was holding out,” Mr. Pullen said. “I had reservations about the safety of the vaccine and the government doing it. I just wanted to wait and see.”

The campaign to broadly vaccinate Americans against the coronavirus began in a roaring, highly energetic push early this year, when millions were inoculated each day and coveted vaccine appointments were celebrated with joyful selfies on social media. The effort peaked on April 13, when an average of 3.38 million doses were being administered in the United States. The Biden administration set a goal to have 70 percent of American adults at least partly vaccinated by July 4.

But since mid-April, vaccinations have steadily decreased, and in recent weeks, plateaued. Weeks after the July 4 benchmark has passed, the effort has now dwindled, distributing about 537,000 doses each day on average — about an 84 percent decrease from the peak.

About 68.7 percent of American adults have received at least one shot. Conservative commentators and politicians have questioned the safety of the three vaccines that the Food and Drug Administration has approved for emergency use, and in some parts of the country, opposition to inoculation is tied to politics. An analysis by The New York Times of vaccine records and voter records in every county in the United States found that both willingness to receive a coronavirus vaccine and actual vaccination rates were lower, on average, in counties where a majority of residents voted to re-elect Donald J. Trump.

Barnet Gaston, 14, was vaccinated at Michele Clark Academic Preparatory Magnet High School in Chicago. He wanted to get vaccinated so he could spend more time hanging out with his friends, most of whom were vaccinated.Credit...Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

Anastiacia Rincon, 15, was vaccinated at the Polk County Health Department in Des Moines. She says that she got vaccinated “to protect myself and others, and I have asthma.”Credit...Kathryn Gamble for The New York Times

Despite the lagging vaccination effort, there are signs that alarming headlines about a new surge in coronavirus cases and the highly infectious Delta variant could be pushing more Americans to consider vaccination. On Friday, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said there had been “encouraging data” showing that the five states with the highest case rates — Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri and Nevada — were also seeing higher vaccination numbers.

In Florida, a clinic in Sarasota County was quiet, a brightly lit waiting area full of mostly empty chairs. Several people wandered in, often no more than one or two in an hour. Lately, they are vaccinating fewer than 30 people there a day.

Elysia Emanuele, 42, a paralegal, came for a shot. One factor in her decision had been the rising case numbers in the state, which she had been watching with worry.“If everything had gone smoothly, if we had shut down immediately and did what we needed to do and it was seemingly wiped out,” she said, “I think I would have been less likely to get the vaccine.”

Some people said they had heard snippets that worried them about getting shots on social media or on cable television — misinformation about vaccines has circulated widely — but they said they ultimately dismissed the rumors.In the shade of a freeway underpass in South Los Angeles, volunteers and would-be vaccine patients tried to talk over the roar of passing cars.

Charlene Bradley, 71, was vaccinated at the People’s Market in Portland, Ore. “I was kind of against it, but I promised my son I would do it,” she said. “It just took a while.”Credit...Tojo Andrianarivo for The New York Times

Cindy Adams, 52, was vaccinated at the Polk County Health Department in Des Moines. It was her workplace’s requirement to wear a mask as an unvaccinated person that changed her mind.Credit...Kathryn Gamble for The New York Times

Ronald Gilbert, 60, said he did not really believe in the vaccines and has never been a fan of needles, but with an uptick in cases he reasoned that it was “better to be safe than sorry.”

“I feel better having this now, seriously I do,” he said. “I’m going to be walking like a rooster, chest up, like ‘You got the vaccine? I got the vaccine.’”

News of the Delta variant also changed the mind of Josue Lopez, 33, who had not planned on getting a vaccine after his whole family tested positive for the coronavirus in December.

“I thought I was immune, but with this variant, if it’s more dangerous, maybe it’s not enough,” he said. “Even now, I’m still not sure if it’s safe.”

At a vaccination site at Malcolm X College in Chicago, Sabina Richter, one of the workers there, said it used to be easy to find people to get shots. More recently, they had to offer incentives: passes to an amusement park in the north suburbs and Lollapalooza.

“Some people come in and they’re still hesitant,” she said. “We have to fight for every one of them.”

Otchere Darko, 44, was vaccinated at Westchester Community College in Ossining, N.Y. He waited until he felt the vaccines had proven to be safe.Credit...Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Frederique Moretto, 59, was vaccinated at a Florida Department of Health site in Sarasota, Fla. She got vaccinated to visit her daughter, who is going to a school in Washington in the fall.Credit...Octavio Jones for The New York Times

Cherie Lockhart, an employee at a care facility in Milwaukee for older and disabled people, said she was worried about the vaccines because she did not trust a medical system that she felt had always treated Black people differently.

She was not anti-vaccine, she said, just stalling until something could help her be sure. Her mother ultimately convinced her.

“My mom has never steered me wrong,” Ms. Lockhart, 35, said. “She said, ‘I feel this is right in my heart of hearts.’ So I prayed about it. And, ultimately, I went with my guiding light.”

Many of the people who newly sought shots said they had wanted to see how the vaccines affected Americans who rushed to get them early.

"I do know people who have gotten it and they haven’t gotten sick, so that’s why,” said Lisa Thomas, 45, a home health care worker from Portland, Ore. “I haven’t heard of any cases of anyone hurting from it, and there’s a lot to benefit from it.”

Leslie Vences-Avena, 14, was vaccinated at a Florida Department of Health site in Sarasota, Fla. The F.D.A. approved vaccinations for children age 12 and older in May.Credit...Octavio Jones for The New York Times

Cherie Lockhart, 35, was vaccinated in Shorewood, Wis. Her mother convinced her to get the vaccine.Credit...Marla Bergh for The New York Times

For Cindy Adams, who works for a Des Moines insurance company, it was her job’s requirement to wear a mask as an unvaccinated person that pushed her into the Polk County Health Department drive-up clinic for her first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Ms. Adams, 52, said she had been concerned about possible long-term effects of the vaccines. But now her husband, children and most of her extended family have been vaccinated, as have most of her co-workers.

“I just honestly got sick of wearing the mask,” Ms. Adams said. “We had an event yesterday, and I had to wear it for five hours because I was around a lot of people. And I was sick of it.

“Everyone else is healthy and hasn’t had any side effects, gravely, yet, so I decided I might as well join the crowd.”

Julie Bosman reported from Chicago. Contributing reporting were Matt Craig from Los Angeles, Elizabeth Djinis from Sarasota, Fla., Timmy Facciola from Middlefield, Conn., Ann Hinga Klein from Des Moines, Emily Shetler from Portland, Ore., and Dan Simmons from Milwaukee.

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duhragonball · 4 years ago

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Cult Classic

I had a really exhausting week, so I’m going to try to chill out by writing this thing about cults that’s been bouncing around in my head since... oh, like January 6th? For some reason? But it’s also about my insanely long OC fanfic slash vanity project slash concept album. Join me, won’t you?

Okay, so back in... geez 2018? Has it been that long? Around October 2018 I started working out the details for the big climax of the “1000 years ago” section of my fanfic. From the start I had this idea that the Legendary Super Saiyan would be locked into a death struggle with pretty much the entire Saiyan population, led by a Saiyan King who just can’t handle being upstaged. But I had to figure out a lot of details to make that actually work. What I finally ended up with was the Jindan Cult.

Why a cult? Because I wanted my King character to be the main villain, but also be physically weaker, but also he needed to be powerful enough to challenge the heroine. I came up with all these different ways to beef up his power level without making him a Super Saiyan himself, but ultimately I wanted him to have an army of Siayans at his back. That led me to consider some sort of magic elixir that would make them all stronger, but especially the king, since he’s ultimately in this for himself. At first, I considered having him mind-control all of his goons, but I spent the mind control nickel in earlier arcs, and I’ll have to use it again later, because Towa and Demigra use it. Then I thought of drug addiction, which is sort of like mind control but not literal brainwashing or anything like that. And that led me to the cult concept.

One major inspiration for me was the real-life cult called “NXIVM”, which made the news back in 2018 when their leaders started getting arrested, including “Smallville” star Allison Mack. Every time I read about it, it felt like something from a movie, but it was real. I guess the celebrity angle made it more bizarre to me, because it’s sort of like “Hey, this isn’t just some group of randos; someone you’ve heard of is in this thing.” Not that I ever paid much attention to “Smallville”, but you get the idea. She didn’t just join NXIVM, she eventually became one of the top recruiters. Some of the character arcs in my fic were my own attempt to understand how a person goes from Point A to Point B.

The big plot hole, though, in my mind, was that I came up with this whole master plan for the bad guys, but it involved sending wave after wave of Saiyan cultists to die in pointless, unwinnable battles against Luffa. I couldn’t have them win much, because if they beat her, they’d just kill her, and the story would be over. It struck me as fishy that these Saiyans would sign up for a war where the casualty rate is 100%, but I tried to lampshade it as best I could. “Yeah, all those other chumps couldn’t beat Luffa, but I’ll pull it off because I’m special!” It still seemed a bit unlikely.

But then 2020 happened, and I guess the main thing I learned from that year was that people will accept almost anything in order to believe a comfortable lie. The joke I’ve seen on the internet is that we need to retire the expression “avoid it like the plague”, because it turns out a lot of people don’t actually avoid plagues very well at all. The horrifying thing about COVID-19 is how easily people will accept the climbing death tolls. “Oh, well this person was already in bad health, so they would have died eventually anyway.” I don’t want to get too political here, but I’m pretty sure a lot of the anti-mask, coronavirus-is-a-hoax crowd are the same people who made up tall tales about “death panels” in Obamacare. “They’re gonna euthanize your grandma!” they would say, but now they say your grandma is acceptable losses if it means reopening bars and restaurants.

Actually, I do mean to get political, because holy fuck, Qanon stormed the Capitol Building. Look, if you don’t believe Joe Biden won the election, I don’t know what to tell you, except please get far away from me, right now. If you’re not familiar with Qanon, a few years ago some guy on an image board posted a bunch of cryptic messages and claimed to be an important government figure who would know about important things. People started “deciphering” his “clues” and when he stopped posting new ones they started inventing their own “clues” and interpreting them any way that suited them. This led to an overarching narrative that Donald Trump was actually part of this massive sting operation to arrest hundreds, maybe thousands of left-wing politicians, celebrities, and whoever else. Any day now, he was supposed to have Hilary Clinton arrested, and also JFK Junior would somehow show up and help him, even though he’s been dead for 22 years. Every day, these Qanon guys would add on more bizarre lore to their “theories”, and every day none of their predictions would come true. Then Trump lost the election, which put them in a bind, because their whole mythology is based on the idea of him saving the world as POTUS, and now he wasn’t even going to be POTUS for much longer.

I’m pretty sure this had a lot to do with the lies about election fraud. Trump himself refused to accept defeat, and his supporters didn’t want to accept it either, so they all told each other that it wasn’t real, and they believed each other so much that they dug in their heels. But then they’d take this stuff to court and the judge would be like “Uh, what evidence do you have of mass voter fraud?” and they would just be like “lol nvm!” I mean, if there was proof for any of this, why would they not want a judge to see it? But for Qanon, it was more than just being sore losers. They needed all their whackamaroo predictions to come true, and Trump losing re-election would upset the applecart.

So then they started telling themselves that they could win this thing through the boring certification process. I think it was like, December 14 when all the states had to certify their results. So they held out hope that nothing was over until then. Then they pinned their hopes on the Electoral College, and that there would be enough faithless electors to hand Trump the victory, in spite of the voters. I found this one amusing, since I used to see tumblr suggesting the same thing back in 2016, when they were still trying to come up with ways for Bernie Sanders to win.

Then they decided Mike Pence could fix everything, because on Jan 6, Congress would officially count the Electoral Votes and formally declare the winner, and Mike Pence would step in and overrule the whole thing, because the Vice-President oversees that process. Except he just oversees it, he can’t legally change the outcome, especially on a whim. And then the riot at the Capitol happened, and I’m pretty sure all these Qanon types thought it would mark the beginning of a nationwide uprising, with all seventy-odd million Trump voters going apeshit, but it... didn’t work out that way.

Then they convinced themselves that everything was building to January 20, because the innauguration was actually a clever trap, and once Joe Biden took the oath of office, he could then be arrested for treason, so you see, they had to make it look like Trump lost the election, because it was the only way to fool Joe Biden into incriminating himself... or... something. But Jan 20 came and went, so the latest fallback position I heard was that there’s a double-secret REAL inauguration day, and it’s in March, and the January 20 one isn’t legitimate, even though Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2016, but whatever. That, or the guy we see in the White House now is actually Trump disguised as Joe Biden, or a Joe Biden android or something.

I think I sort of understood that Qanon is a cult, but I didn’t really put the pieces together until the events of January unfolded. Pre-November, it just seemed like a conspiracy theory, without any real timetables or prophecies, like Flat Earth. But once the end of the Trump Administration was in sight, it really started to look like all the doomsday cults I’ve heard about over the years. The predicted events wind up failing to come true, and they invent new predictions to explain away the old ones. It’s not about the veracity of the claims as much as the claims themselves. People want to believe there’s this whole elaborate explanation for everything. They wanted to believe that Trump was this hypercompetent superheroic messiah, because the alternative is to face the uncertain reality: that he had no idea what he was doing, and real people were going to suffer for it.

I think I sort of worked that idea into my fictional cult, but I backed into it. NXIVM was a sex cult, not a doomsday cult, or an elaborate conspiracy theory, so I was mostly fixated on all the depraved things the cult could do to its members. But they all share the same lure: a belief system that promises to make everything fit. I’m not sure what the hook was for NXIVM, but Allison Mack didn’t go in thinking about how much fun sex trafficking would be. That came later, after she was convinced that NXIVM had all the answers, and one of those answers involved sex crimes, apparently. In the same vein, Qanon attempted to explain mass arrests and executions by claiming that Hilary Clinton eats babies or something. “Well, I don’t want babies to get eaten, so I guess breaking into the Capitol building seems like a reasonable course of action.”

Weighed against real life, a bunch of Saiyans accepting a 100% casualty rate doesn’t seem so outrageous. It also helps that sometimes the leaders of these groups can buy into their own hype, and think they’re infallible when they’re really not. This week, I started reading the Darth Plagueis novel again, and I’ve seen the Sith from Star Wars referred to as a cult, but I never gave it a lot of thought until I noticed that Plagueis buys into the whole Dark Side of the Force thing a little too hard. At times, he’ll wax philosophical about how the Jedi are the real bad guys when you think about it, and he’s not just saying that to be manipulative. He honestly believes that the Sith can save the galaxy from decline, which is stupid and hypocritical, because they’re the ones causing all the decline. I always got the impression that Darth Sidious understood that it was all about accumulating power as an end unto itself, and any high-minded talk of necessary evil was just to keep the rubes in line. Rise of Skywalker plays into that idea nicely. He somehow survived Episode VI, but he let the Empire collapse, because if he can’t rule it, he doesn’t want it to exist at all. But he’s still playing himself, because he thinks he can win by following the same failed ideology that got all the previous Sith Lords killed.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about it right now. I need to move on to other topics, because Towa’s not doing a cult thing, so my fic is moving in a different direction. But I feel better for getting this out of my head.

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napoleoninrags · 4 years ago

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MY PLAN FOR HOW TO MAKE SURE WE HAVE AN ELECTION, TRUMP IS REMOVED, AND THE REPUBLICANS ARE GONE FOR GOOD

by Michael Moore

TRUMP HAS DECLARED WAR ON US AND OUR DEMOCRACY.

IT’S TIME FOR US TO PUT OUR LIVES ON THE LINE, IF NECESSARY, AND TO MAKE HIM THE LAST REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT OF OUR UNITED STATES.

Trump, right now, tonight, is up to some very nasty, scary stuff — stuff we can’t even imagine — and of course we can’t imagine it because we don’t think like Trump. Our brains are wired for love, empathy, solidarity, compassion, freedom, person, woman, man, camera, TV.

You know like I know that Trump has a devious, wicked plan to destroy this Election. We need to declare, immediately, that it is he and the Republican Party who have to go, for the sake of this country’s existence, they must be crushed and removed.

Trump actually has an arsenal of plans already in action to ensure he never leaves office. He has them all in high gear — some visible, some not. If you could see them all you’d be so stunned, you’d have to immediately convince yourself that there’s no way he can pull this off.

We are all caught in Trump’s Matrix, a mad web, the work of a psychopath-in-chief with tricks so devious that fascists of old, if alive today, would marvel at what Trump has accomplished.

For the next 11 weeks — and then for the 12 weeks between the Election and the Inauguration — Trump is planning nothing but anarchy, chaos, a call to arms of his angry white male followers and the complete destruction of our democracy. You think I’m kidding? You think I’m overstating the case? Do you want to take the risk that I might not be wrong? Most of you understandably chose not to listen to me four years ago when I warned you Trump was going to win the Presidency by taking Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. May I please ask that you now give me your serious attention for what I am about to say — because if I’m right again this time, there won’t be a next time. There will be nothing left for me to warn you about. There probably won’t be much left of me.

Here’s how Trump plans to end our right to choose the next President and Congress. It will happen fast. I am also laying out here a battle plan for us to defeat this takeover of our democracy. We must act now.

HERE ARE TRUMP’S 5 PLANS ALREADY IN MOTION:

PLAN #1: Create Chaos. Instill Fear. Fire Up the Base with Racist Vigor. Pandemonium Ensues.

CHECK. DONE.

PLAN #2: Suppress the Vote

•Dismantle the Post Office.

•Create 4-Hour-Long Lines by Drastically Reducing Number of Polling Locations.

•Throw Black and Brown Voters Off the Rolls.

•Stop Those Who’ve Served Time from Voting.

•Place 50,000 “Poll Watchers” at Voting Sites Around the Country to Intimidate Voters.

VOTER SUPPRESSION IN ACTION AS WE SPEAK.

PLAN #3: Postpone the Election. Place the blame on a “legitimate” national tragedy or emergency — massive deaths from the pandemic, a terrorist attack, an assassination, a deadly hurricane, a civil war in the streets, one or both Presidential candidates falling ill to Covid-19 — anything that reasonable people, even people who are opposed to Trump, will agree that “we just can’t hold an election right now! We just need to postpone it for a couple days, a couple weeks (a couple months... a couple years...)” Or perhaps he’ll just cancel the Election outright and see if he can get away with it.

TRUMP READY TO PULL THE TRIGGER.

PLAN #4: His September Surprise.

His October Surprise.

His November Surprise.

His January Surprise.

You think you can guess what it will be, but trust me, it’ll be far worse. We need to be ready. Stay on high alert, my friends. Millions of us will need to act on a moment’s notice. It’s the grim reaper of Democracy at our doorstep. We made the mistake of letting Trump get this far — why wouldn’t he now think he can get away with everything??

THE SURPRISE IS UNKNOWN. THAT’S WHY IT’S A SURPRISE.

PLAN #5: He Will Not Leave.

When Trump loses, he will declare the Election invalid, rigged, stolen — and he will refuse to step down.

So, what will we do then?

HERE IS OUR BATTLE PLAN TO REMOVE TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICANS:

1. Do Not Wait — Biden/Harris Should Start Running the Country Now.

We simply don’t have time to wait until January 20, 2021. Nearly 200,000 of us have already died from Trump’s reckless incompetence with the coronavirus. By Election Day it’s possible another 100,000 to 200,000 of us will have needlessly died. A total of 400,000 dead? That’s the equivalent of one hundred and thirty-three 9/11s! Or 532 planes being flown into 532 buildings. If something that horrific ever happened, and the President not only didn’t do anything about it, but tried to pretend it wasn’t all that bad - “it is what it is” - he would be run out of the White House by an angry mob of millions of Americans, lucky not to have his head put on a spike on the Key Bridge over the Potomac.

It doesn’t have to come to that. Biden and Harris should present to America a simple nationwide plan to end the pandemic — and then act on it immediately.

They should call a meeting of all the Governors and ask them what help do they need — and then find a way to get them that help, going around Trump and just making it happen. They should ask industry, in lieu of campaign contributions, to produce hundreds of millions of instant-result tests. They should call their Heads of State friends overseas and ask them to send all the PPE they can spare. They should get 250 million Americans to take the “Face Mask Pledge.” And they should promise the scientists in our top universities all the money and help they need once they’re in office. Ignore Trump. Treat him as if he’s irrelevant and get the job done.

2. The Republican Party Must Be Crushed and Destroyed. Trump Must Become the Last Republican President.

In the Michigan county where I live, the August primary this month set a record turnout for a presidential-year primary. In fact, more people this year voted by mail-in ballot than ALL those who voted in 2016 — by mail-in AND in-person combined. This is a highly encouraging sign for what we now need to do:

• We must create an historic massive turnout between now and November 3rd — a tsunami of voters the likes of which have never been seen, and may never be seen again. In 2016, 66 million Americans voted for Hillary Clinton. This time, though, we have to WALLOP Trump with an electoral concussion, a blow so profound he won’t know what hit him. This must be a defeat so crushing, so humiliating, a whooping of such epic proportions that he will be forced to leave 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with his tail between his legs on January 20th. This mammoth landslide must not only ensure that no president ever behaves this way again, we need to see to it that Trump is the last Republican president. The Election Day Uprising must put an end to this party of Trump enablers and traitors. They had a choice. They chose Trump over Democracy. They chose Putin and Netanyahu over fair elections and freedom for all. They chose the 1% over the 160 million working Americans. They chose the NRA over the massacred children of Sandy Hook. They chose to rig our elections, our textbooks, our economy. Democrats helped them along the way, and we’ll take the stick to them and fix that. The Republicans, though, chose to let hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens perish from Covid-19 because loyalty to Party and to Trump was greater than their duty to the American people. For that alone, the Republican Party must be put out of business for good. Vote out every last one of them. Conservatives will have to form a new party, much like when the Whigs were sent packing in the 1800s. The Republicans must pay for their crimes.

• We must flip the Senate —- and not just by the three seats we need for control. We should shock the pundit class and, as the Republican Party is reduced to ashes, grab a solid 55+ seat majority. Colorado, Arizona, Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, Montana and even Kansas, South Carolina and, yes, Texas (a state that is now 57% non-white) — are all possible Democratic Senate wins. Think about spending a weekend or a week helping out in one of these states. The Republicans will wish they had managed this pandemic better and had everyone busy back at work by now. All this “free time” should make for their undoing.

• Finally, we have to vote the local Republicans out of office, too. State Houses and Senates will be drawing the electoral map for the next ten years. We can’t let the cheating Republicans do this again. Do what you can to elect Dems in your state and local elections. The punishment of the Republican Party — a certified terrorist organization for having helped kill at least 200,000 Americans — is an imperative.

3. Who Would Be Willing To, If Need Be, Put Their Life on the Line To Ensure This Election Is Held and EVERYONE Gets to Vote? I Would. Would You?

These steps must be taken immediately:

• The Secret Service, the FBI, the Capitol Police and the Joint Chiefs of Staff must be called before Congress and swear under oath that they will guarantee that the election will be held, they will enforce the Constitution they swore to uphold, and if he’s defeated but refuses to leave, they will escort the former President of the United States out of the White House.

• Biden and Harris must put Trump on notice that if he does one more thing to interfere with the Election or issues one more threat to suppress the vote, they will turn him and his crime family over to the new Justice Department for prosecution.

• Every single one of us must be strong in our publicly-stated resolve that there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON ON EARTH TO POSTPONE OR CANCEL THE ELECTION. That’s our unmovable and intractable position. No national tragedy, disease, threat or the melting of all of Greenland will cause us not to vote on or before November 3rd. Even if, God forbid, either candidate passes in their sleep between now and Election Day, the Election will continue — and the winner’s VP - or Nancy Pelosi - will become President on Inauguration Day.

• Let’s all pledge that, if Trump tries to cancel the election or if he refuses to accept its results, millions of us will go to DC and encircle the White House, a thousand deep, until he backs down, resigns or is removed.

• And, if you can, quietly make this commitment to yourself: “There are only a very few things I’d be willing to give my life for. This is one of them.” I know. That’s dark. And heavy. And awfully sad because it shouldn’t have come to this. But if we can’t even say that, then what good are we? If we aren’t willing to make that sacrifice, then America is already over and we might as well just fold our tent and see if Canada will take the non-racist, non-homophobic, non war-mongering ones of us who have manners and get satire.

4. Become an Election Defender.

Each of you should form an urgent action group - a rapid response team - in your neighborhood or town and do the following:

• Hold a daily protest at your local post office

• Picket the home of your local Postmaster (he/she may be on your side, so bring them some baked goods)

• Chain yourself to a local blue USPS dropbox if you can find one. Or chain it to something that won’t move.

• Sign up with the city clerk to be a poll worker on Election Day - especially if you’re young. Because of the pandemic, polls will be very short of poll workers. If you’re told they have enough help, then call the local Democratic Party and offer to be a “poll watcher”, the group of people from each party who get to oversee the voting to make sure there are no irregularities.

• Demand your city create more voting locations. Convince owners of arenas, theaters, ball parks, malls - places with large open spaces - to offer their facilities as polling places so that everyone gets a chance to vote.

• Canvas your neighborhoods over the next month to get people to fill out the form you’ll have them sign to get a mail-in ballot — and if they want to vote in person, let them know when the first day is so they can do that. Make a list of who needs a Covid-safe ride. The earlier the better!

5. The Uprising We’re In Is Only Getting Bigger. The People Will Now Call the Shots.

Why wait for the politicians to fix the mess of a country we’re in when they helped orchestrate the mess in the first place? Why don’t we just declare how we want to live — a new way to govern and function as a country — and we will finally fulfill the promise of the American Dream that has never been realized. Life, liberty, true equality, a sharing of the wealth, being good citizens of this world and kind stewards of a fragile Earth.

What have we learned from this pandemic? What we already knew: That employer-based health insurance can evaporate in an instant. Health care is a human right.

That being told “we can’t afford that!” (free college, free child care, free medical care - the things most advanced nations have) is total BS — the government CAN afford anything we decide we need!

We’ve learned that teachers, nurses, the mailwoman, farm workers, mass transit drivers and the minimum wage workers stocking the grocery shelves at 3 in the morning are our most important citizens and they need the respect and income they deserve immediately. 74% of the country now believes a guaranteed annual income is a great idea — fifty percentage points higher than when Andrew Yang proposed it 7 months ago!

We’ve learned to slow down, consume less — and that is what may be the path to saving the planet (when the 4% of its inhabitants [US] is no longer sucking up 25% of its resources and hoarding more than half its wealth).

We’re about to go elect more women than ever before — a time to turn the reins over to the gender that stands a better chance of getting us through the deadly viruses of Covid, Capitalism and Republicans(R.I.P.).

None of this will be launched by politicians. It will only come about through you and me taking action as part of the largest protest movement in our history — still growing, still going strong! — to end the racism, the abuse of the police state, the disgusting income inequality and the hateful misogyny that is going to come to an end in our lifetime.

America, post-pandemic, must become a very different place. Let’s make this happen. Doing the above will be the best cure for the trauma of these past four years.

Commit to being the change.

Organize your friends and family today.

Make your plan to campaign in a swing state Sept. or Oct.

VOTE AS EARLY AS YOU CAN—and take 5 people along with you!

We can do this. Trump - we’re coming for you. I’ll be in the first U-Haul truck that pulls up to your door.

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walks-the-ages · 4 months ago

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and honestly, this might change in the future too, depending on various circumstances! But at this point, Jasmine Sherman has the most Ballot Access out of all the Pro-Palestine candidates I've seen (48) compared to Jill Stein (~23?) and Claudia De La Cruz (3)

-- and that's the thing Vote Blue No Matter Who-ers truly cannot grasp:

"Strategic Voting" does not involve you voting for the same Party you were going to vote for before except now you're rabidly defending the genocide they're committing because you're (somehow, against all lived reality) convinced you can "push them left after they get elected"

-- Strategic Voting is where you actually research all your different options and you pick the candidate who actually best represents your needs, and then sometimes that means picking between two different Parties based on who has the highest chance of winning.

The Green Party is probably one of the most well-known Third Parties out there, but the Unicorn Party, despite the unserious-sounding name, currently has 48 out of 50 states on their Ballet Access!

The only states that do not have them on are (at the time of this post) Georgia and Alaska; even if they're not on Georgia's Ballot officially in time for the election, Georgia allows write-ins and they can be voted for that way, while Alaska does not allow write-ins.

And again, something Vote Blue No Matter Who-ers can't seem to understand: "Splitting the Vote" isn't about trying to force people to vote for the genocidal blue party, it means we, the third party voters, need to organize and rally together as we get closer to the election and ballot access numbers become their final results, and we need to all rally behind the Third Party candidate who is Pro-Palestine (and everything else decent and moral) be they Unicorn, Green, or Socialist.

But, unlike genocidal Vote-Bluers, I know that you do not need to like, swear on your life that you will vote for x candidate at least 3 years in advance of the Election and you cannot possibly change your mind at any point, otherwise you're committing some unspeakably evil sin or whatever.

And a lot can happen in the next four months!

Things change, and you have to adapt to those changes!

Maybe Jill Stein will suddenly sweep and have ballot access in all 50 states and start making national headlines when people see a Doctor and a Diplomat who actually cares about the average working class and poor person on the planet, and rally behind her for her past political experience, while Trump and Harris are left to flounder with their (at the time of this post) 52% Disapproval ratings a piece.

(For context, Biden, who was forced to step down due to low-polling, has a 55% Disapproval rating.)

Maybe Clauda de la Cruz will come out as the underdog and go from 3 states with ballot access to all of them.

But, for now, as I'm making this post on July 28th 2024, right now Jasmine Sherman has 96% Ballot Access, while Jill Stein only has 42%-54%, and Claudia de la Cruz has just 6%.

We'll see how it is as we get closer to the election, and I'll try to post updates here as they happen.

But if you truly believe in positive change, in a Free Palestine, in a Free Sudan, in a Free Congo, in universal healthcare, and no one going hungry or without a home, it is time to stop voting for the candidates who talk the talk, but deliberately step backwards when its time to walk the walk; candidates who do lip-service to policies which would change millions of lives for the better, then abandon them as soon as they're in power.

It is time for the broken two-party system in America to be acknowledged by the masses as broken, and resolve to be repaired. If political parties refuse to represent the people, then they will not be representing anyone, because they will lose their power.

Its not the first time an American political party has dissolved due to lack of support and changing political climate, and it won't be the last;

The original parties were the Federalist vs the Democratic-Republicans, then the Jacksonian Democrats vs the Whigs, then the Anti-Slavery Republicans vs the Jim Crow Democrats, onto modern day Conservative Republicans vs Faux-Progressive Democrats....

Like, if the Party you're voting for is controlling you with fear to get your vote, and you hate having to vote for them and feel sick having to vote for them as they do these horrifying, horrible things...

... that Party is not representing you and you do not have to vote for them, despite what genocide-apologist liberals would have you believe, and that party does not deserve to maintain power at the expense of not only the people they're supposed to represent, but also at the literal lives of people all over the world.

The Democratic party is not only committing genocide as we speak, but they gave 49 seperate standing ovations to Modern Fucking Day Hitler when Benjamin Netanyahu came and gave a speech to a joint session of Congress, literally flying directly to American to avoid having to land in any country that might immediately arrest him as a War Criminal!

If the thought of voting for a Democrat this November makes you sick to your stomach with despair and guilt, but you're terrified of what the Republicans will do, both to you and to Palestinians, there is another way forward.

You do not need to co-sign a genocide to protect yourself and others.

Literal Palestinians have been campaigning since November for people to not vote for the Democrats who are bombing them and their loved ones; if you want to do right by Palestinians (and yourself!) you will listen, and you will not vote to keep people who are committing genocide in power.

If all they can do is speak pretty words and make pretty promises while they continue to send bombs to kill innocents with, you do not need to vote for them.

Voting for a candidate is something you should take pride in, not horror.

If you are terrified and horrified of what is happening in this country and around the world right now, just know its not a choice only between two evils.

You have more options, and they are here, and they are more amazing and hope-inspiring than you could dare to imagine after years of Democrats making false promises to gain support from their constituents* and then not only going back on them but going in the complete opposite direction on purpose:

youtube

*The Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) also launched a 'get out the vote' effort under #WhatMatters2020. Black voters proved instrumental in Biden’s victory in November.

Democrats have shown time and time again they will talk whatever talk they need to in order to get into office, but as soon as they're in power they drop those promises and renege on deals and go above Congress' head to secretly continue sending weapons to genocidal apartheid states without public oversight, or claim to boycott Netanyahu's speech only to have a direct, private meeting with him immediately afterwards.

You are under no obligation to vote for these genocidal monsters.

Change is coming. Change is here.

You have other options.

If you want to make the world a better place, it does indeed take many small steps, but voting for genocidaires in Blue Hats is not in any way shape or form the path towards justice.

Make sure you are registered to vote:

Then, take a look at your current options for Third Party Candidates:

https://jasminesherman.com/policies/

https://www.jillstein2024.com/platform

https://votesocialist2024.com/our-program

and start getting active in the community, in any way you can!

Local Facebook groups are abundant and a great way to get to know the people in your area! See if you've been missing out on great community opportunities, and see if you can start arranging your own!

Start or join a community garden.

Even if you don't have a lawn, if you can get a bucket with some holes in the bottom filled with dirt from the dollar store, you can grow your own food, as easily as keeping that core of seeds next time you chop up colored bell peppers or tomatoes or eggplant for dinner.

Volunteer at the local library or food bank.

Organize block parties.

Start a book club, and build some Free Little Libraries if you're handy with tools.

Turn your neighborhood into a community that works together and supports one-another!

[plain text: Turn your neighborhood into a community that works together and supports one-another!]

just to note: if you try to leave replies, tags, or comments on this post trying to argue with me about how we need to vote for people who are currently committing genocide because they're somehow less evil than their opposition? Don't. All you'll do is get blocked. I am tired of humoring your genocide denial with a response. Replies will be deleted and you will be blocked.

If I didn't mention it, I'll be voting for Jasmine Sherman (they/them) in November, Because they already have Ballot Access in 48 states , as opposed to Jill Stein who currently only has ~23 states with Ballot Access.

#long post #very long post #us pol #us politics #third party #Jasmine Sherman #Jill Stein #2024 elections #claudia de la cruz #kamala harris #Joe Biden #Democrats #Youtube

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nikkoliferous · 4 years ago

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Hey I got a question I’m not American so I don’t understand everything but why do you not vote Biden ?I heard that America has a two party system and the way it is built means that it’s almost impossible for a third party to win big elections like presidential .Are you not taking the risk of bein the few percents that end up letting trump win a second time?From where I am we are all pretty terrified for these elections,would Biden really be worse that all that happened in those past 4 years?

Forgive my long-windedness, but there's really no brief way to answer this question without being flippant.

So, there are a few things to understand here. The first is that, because of the way U.S. elections are set up, the results are really decided by only a handful of states. That "every vote counts" nonsense is bullshit when it comes to presidential elections. If you live in what we call "swing states", your vote may have an impact. I'm from a state that has gone to a Democrat literally only four times in its entire history. It is reliably Republican. My not voting for Biden will have absolutely zero impact on this election.

Secondly, more than 40% of the electorate (myself included) are registered as independents, meaning we don't identify with either major party. Many of those who are registered with one of the major parties don't even want to be and are only registered that way so they can vote in a particular party's primary elections. (I am fortunate in that my state holds semi-open primaries, meaning I don't have to be registered as a Democrat in order to vote in their primary. This is not true of every state, however). What I'm saying is that, if every person voted their conscience instead of voting out of fear of one major party or the other, it wouldn't be impossible for a third party to win. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Third parties can't win because the electorate believes they can't win and votes accordingly. Sadly, this logic even extends to the primary. Exit polling showed overwhelming support for Bernie Sanders' policies among Democratic primary voters, including among those who voted for Joe Biden. So why didn't they vote for Bernie? Because they were constantly being told by a disingenuous media that he "couldn't win", and the top priority for Democratic voters is ousting Trump. (This is, of course, to say nothing of the widespread election fraud that was reported throughout the primary, as was the case in 2016. Apparently, cheating is only bad when Republicans do it).

Thirdly, would Biden really be worse than all that's happened the last four years? The short answer, IMO, is yes. This is a controversial position to take because Trump is so awful, but I'm going to say it anyway: Joe Biden is not the lesser evil. Fortunately, I do not believe in lesser evil voting. I will not be held hostage by my own government. But even if I did believe in voting for so-called "harm reduction", I still would not vote for Joe Biden. Joe Biden has done more damage to this country in his career than Donald Trump ever has. That's not an endorsement of Trump; it's an indictment of Biden and the Democrats. Joe Biden is the reason America is the world's largest penal colony. Joe Biden has repeatedly taken credit for effectively writing the PATRIOT Act, which decimated Americans' basic rights to privacy. Joe Biden not only voted for the Iraq War but was one of its most enthusiastic proponents. Joe Biden helped strip bankruptcy protections from millions of Americans, including making it impossible for people to discharge their student loan debt. Joe Biden, as part of the Obama administration, built those cages at the border that everyone is so upset about. Joe Biden, as part of the Obama administration, kicked millions of Americans out of their homes. Joe Biden, as part of the Obama administration, waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers. Joe Biden, as part of the Obama administration, allowed police to crack the skulls of peaceful protesters during Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson and DAPL. Joe Biden, as part of the Obama administration, brought open slave markets to Libya. Joe Biden, as part of the Obama administration, carried out extrajudicial killings overseas. Joe Biden, as part of the Obama administration, failed to prosecute war criminals. Now Gina Haspel, who was directly involved in Bush's torture program, is Director of the CIA. (Relatedly, Kamala Harris, Biden's VP, was encouraged to prosecute Steve Mnunchin after his bank illegally foreclosed on California homeowners. She declined to do so, and now he's Secretary of Treasury). Here is an article about how the Obama administration handed Donald Trump what is effectively a dictator's toolkit. Democrats in Congress have continued this legacy, even while screaming at the top of their lungs that Trump is an existential threat and a puppet of Vladimir Putin. People need to disabuse themselves of the idea that America is a two-party system. It's not. It's a one-party system. The Democrats and Republicans are nothing more than controlled opposition. It's a sideshow. Our true rulers are Wall Street and the military industrial complex, and they don't hold elections.

Finally, comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore has frequently noted that, historically, Democrats are able to quietly pass horrible legislation that Republicans could only dream of getting away with. This is because when a Democrat is in the White House, the majority of the country breathes a sigh of relief and heads out to lunch. Joe Biden's legislative history of corruption, racism and imperialism makes this fact particularly concerning, because

Unlike Trump for the most part, Biden has a political core. I would rather pressure Trump, who at least occasionally stumbles on the right position by accident (as in the case of North Korea), than Joe Biden, who has a very set ideology which he largely refuses to be moved from. (Even in the midst of a pandemic that has resulted in mass unemployment, he's STILL arguing that employer-based healthcare is good, actually). Trump is more malleable, IMO, than Biden is.

Because Trump is so hated by the political establishment, the media, and quite frankly, a good chunk of the public, there's at least been a heavy degree of scrutiny surrounding him. True, a good portion of it is superficial (focusing on made-up nonsense like Russiagate instead of the actual horrible things he's doing). But people are paying far more attention to what their government does (or doesn't do) than they would have under a Hillary Clinton presidency. Most people still view Barack Obama as a good president because the mainstream media's failure to hold him accountable has convinced them that the most scandalous thing he ever did was wear a tan suit. If Biden becomes President, the vast majority of Americans will tune right back out while their government continues to screw them. And then, four to eight years from now, we'll be having this same conversation, only instead of Donald Trump, it will be Tom Cotton or Tucker Carlson who's the greatest threat our country has ever faced. Every single election in my lifetime, we've been told "now isn't the time" to fix what's wrong with our political system. The stakes are too high. The Republicans are an existential threat. You have to vote for the lesser evil. And guess what? The stakes have only gotten higher; the Republicans have only gotten more threatening; the country's politics have only shifted further and further to the right. What's that saying about the definition of insanity, again?

Lawrence O'Donnell, a media personality who used to work as a Democratic strategist, once said, "If you want to pull the major party that's closest to the way you're thinking to what you're thinking, you must show them you're capable of not voting for them. If you don't show them you're capable of not voting for them, they don't have to listen to you, I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn't listen or have to listen to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party, because the left had nowhere to go."

I understand that you all fear what Trump is capable of. I sympathise with that; I fear it too. But what I fear more is what the next Trump is capable of. I fear what happens in four to eight years when we still haven't solved any of the problems that led to his election in the first place and the next Trump isn't an incompetent buffoon who announces every bad decision he makes via tweet. Kamala Harris is out here tweeting about how awesome things were under Obama and how Trump bungled it all. Joe Biden has already told his wealthy donors that nothing will fundamentally change for them if he becomes President. So my fear of a Biden/Harris administration is two-fold: one, I fear what they'll actually do while they're in office and two, I fear the inevitable backlash that will follow after they've done jackshit to improve people's lives. In other words, I believe dismantling the two-party system that put us in this position in the first place is more important than defeating Trump.

#send me asks #us politics #joe biden #2020 us election

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theliberaltony · 4 years ago

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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.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

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fanwolfgirl · 5 months ago

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I would like to say, I agree with everything you are saying. You are clearly coming from a broader worldview and I do respect that. My (meaner) notes on your mindset notwithstanding, I do agree that Trump is the worst option. I agree he has done irreparable damage to this country in the 4 years he was in office, and will probably do more if he gets another term. I despise that man and to be frank, the best outcome of this election is for both of those men drop dead before November (of old age of course...)

The sticking point for me is not the argument that biden is the better candidate, but how early that argument was rolled out in the election process. We were hearing these talking points in August. of Last. Year. This election was never a fair fight to begin with, no one else stood a chance. The media wasn't even bothering to promote the other candidates, and the dnc had no intention of backing any one else BUT biden. I almost feel like at some point the hags in the dnc need to realize that they don't hold us hostage.

To your point about the government being overthrown if trump wins. I am of the opinion that no matter the outcome of this election, the current political and social climate is leading us to a revolution regardless. I can go talking point by talking point:

Biden has made no moves to stop the Supreme Court from rolling back civil rights, and Trump isn't going to either. The cost of living is too high, niether biden nor Trump have any interest in changing that. We are still committing a genocide, and Trump is not going to stop that either no matter what nonsense he says. More people have been deported under biden than the last two presidents combined, and if Trump gets his way he'll triple that number. Even though Trump is comically evil, Biden mascarading as a senile old man does not change that they are doing the same evil shit. Trump is incompetent, but biden is also.

Project 2025 is the only reason I would consider voting blue. And here is the final thing that gets me about the "Utiliarian" point of view. It's just as naive and worthless as the right theory in the current form of democracy we operate in. The fact of the matter is this: we might get another 2016. Hillary won the popular vote. We did our job. We voted the bad guy out. We did what we were supposed to do. And he. still. Won.

My main argument is not that fighting for the greater good and choosing the lesser evil isn't a solid strategy in general; its just not a solid strategy for us because niether the Right not the Utiliarian strategy is going to fix how broken this country is. Our democracy has been broken since Obama got elected. We can pontificate all we want about hypotheitcals and the amount of "harm reduction" we are doing by voting biden in and holding off a revolution, but the record has shown that everything keeps getting progressively worse no matter who we have in office. When you look at the grand scheme of things, the downward spiral America has gone through is paralyzing. There is no other word for it. So while yes, voting blue and having a Utiliarian mindset is good in theory, I don't think we should put people in the "moral purity" naive box because they are trying one last ditch effort to change the tides.

It's the principle of the thing; I think it's misleading to try and convince people that they are wrong for one method when the other one is just as useless in the end.

Okay fine. I teach an ethics course and I just keep seeing all of this discourse on whether or not to vote in the upcoming US presidential election and I just wanted to lay a few things out here.

People who are saying they will abstain from voting because they see voting for anyone as supporting/endorsing genocide are operating from a Rights Theory perspective.

Basically, Rights Theory posits that you should never take any action that could violate someone else’s rights. EVER. The balance of benefits and harms does not matter. There is NOTHING that can justify taking away the right to, for example, life.

And I think that’s where these anti-voting folks are predominantly coming from. They see voting as endorsing/enabling genocide, full stop, and therefore it is morally indefensible EVEN IF IT WILL RESULT IN LESS OVERALL HARM.

People who are arguing that you SHOULD vote, and vote for Biden specifically, are operating from a Utilitarian Theory perspective.

Utilitarianism is all about balancing benefits and harms, and essentially prioritizing overall harm reduction. They recognize the harm the system is creating, but are willing to participate in the system because through doing so they can ensure that various harms are minimized--certainly not eliminated, but reduced, and, importantly, made easier to eliminate eventually.

Through utilitarianism, we can actually make people's fundamental rights EASIER to defend! But a lot of people are so caught up in the idea of moral purity, and Rights Theory, that they're willing to let their inaction erode people's rights because at least they aren't actively participating in the system. (they are still passively participating, however, and we can argue about inaction being a form of action, but I digress)

Point being, VOTE. Because of Utilitarianism, but also because, if you believe in the inalienability of people's fundamental rights? Voting will make it much easier to protect those in the long term, and that's frankly more important than you getting to feel exempt from an exploitative system you are nonetheless inherently a part of and complicit in.

#you do sound like a very genuine person #I do appreciate that and I do think we have the same goals here

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theotherjourney7 · 4 years ago

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“If you don't quite understand what horror the Trump administration inflicted today on transgender and non-binary people seeking medical care and why we're scared, let me tell you a quick story.

[TW: transphobia, trans death]

On the morning of August 7, 1995, 24 year-old Tyra Hunter was on her way to work as a passenger in a friend's car when it collided at an intersection in D.C. -- she and her friend were pulled from the wreckage, and paramedics were called.

Tyra Hunter was nearly incapacitated on the ground when paramedics arrived and began treating the injured. A male fireman cut open her pants consistent with protocol and upon discovering she had a penis, stopped treating her and began ruthlessly mocking and misgendering her.

The firefighter, Adrian Williams, joked with other department personnel while Tyra Hunter continued to struggle for breath. All refused to treat her. Bystanders pleaded with them, one saying (and misgendering): "It don't make any difference, he's a person, he's a human being."

The firefighters--who were also EMS personnel--continued to joke, one reportedly saying: "Look, it's a cock and balls". Her treatment was delayed as none would approach begin to triage, watching her die and laughing. Finally, a supervisor arrived and administered first aid.

Tyra Hunter's battered body was taken to D.C. General Hospital, where she was bizarrely--and mysteriously--neglected. Blood was ordered but not taken. Tests were supposedly taken w/ results strangely lost.

She was admitted as: "combative transgendered 'John Doe' with breasts and male genitalia, makeup and female clothes". Later analysis showed obvious symptoms of being in hypovolemic shock, and yet, what should have been a direct treatment seemed to be intentionally obfuscated.

Her pulse and blood pressure fell as she lay on a gurney, ignored by the attending physician and other medical staff. She was paralyzed by a muscle relaxant and an expert physician would later testify in court that she would have experienced "sheer terror" in that state.

She had arrived at the E.R. at 4:10pm and died at 5:20pm, virtually alone in a busy room, suffocating from a lack of oxygen in her blood. Post-death CPR and heart massage were administered, by that point seeming like boxes to be checked for paperwork. This was preventable.

At trial, medical experts testified that Tyra Hunter would have had an 86% chance of survival with appropriate medical treatment. A jury awarded her mother $2.9 million in damages for D.C. fire personnel violating the D.C. Human Rights Law and medical malpractice by D.C. General.

This is arguably the most infamous case of anti-transgender discrimination by medical providers. It led to a revolution in transgender rights in the D.C. metropolitan area and became a rallying cry for LGBTQ patients in general.

Because here's the thing: discrimination of this kind is not rare. We don't know how many LGBTQ people have died for being refused treatment on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, but we know discrimination that can potentially enable death is common.

A study by Lambda Legal found 56% of LGB and 70% of transgender patients have experienced discrimination from health care providers, commonly being turned away or refused medically-necessary care because of the medical provider's personal or religious beliefs.

This is already a scary environment for LGBTQ patients, so imagine how it felt last year when Trump and Pence announced through the Dept. of Health and Human Services proposed this regulation stripping out protections for transgender people in the Affordable Care Act.

And not just trans people. All LGBTQ people, folks who are pregnant, and other marginalized communities can be denied ALL forms of medical care by providers if the provider feels treating that patient would go against their personal or religious beliefs. This is all real.

The regulation put into effect today by Trump and Pence is meant to pander to religious extremists who feel doctors, nurses--even hospital receptionists--should be able to refuse recognizing transgender patients, even for life-saving care. Heart attacks, cancer, anything.

The rule essentially guts Sec. 1557 of the Affordable Care Act -- the part that says discrimination on the basis of "sex" should include gender identity and sex stereotyping. What is "sex stereotyping"? It's discrimination because you don't "look the right way" for your gender.

A woman who wears more masculine clothing or man who is even a little effeminate. A child who paints his nails or a girl that has a really short haircut. All these people, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity, violate conformity society expects for gender.

In theory, ANYONE is vulnerable under this rule, even if they're not transgender, even if they're heterosexual. But folks who are transgender? We will suffer because of this. That's not theoretical. That's not a guess. That's reality, a reality that's now government-sanctioned.

That this is done during a pandemic--during Pride--cannot help but feel intentionally cruel. It is a signal by Trump and Pence that they seek to wipe out trans people from the public square. If they can convince the public we don't deserve medical care, all else is on the table.

They want to allow doctors and nurses and other medical personnel to look a trans patient and say: "Treating this person goes against my beliefs, and I will not."

This rule attempts to make that legal.

Trump and Pence will not stop with health care. This is just the start. Other protections are being stripped away. They are coming after trans people with everything they've got. And when they've convinced the public this is all fine, they'll come for others, too. Guaranteed.

This election in November is not theoretical on any level for transgender and non-binary people. Our future--every bit of it--is on the ballot. We have to defeat Trump, and we have to take back the Senate.

So, you're a cis person asking what you can do? The following:

1. Register to vote. Now. Don't wait.

2. Support pro-equality candidates who believe health care should be available to all people. Vote for Biden. Vote for Democrats. Don't play around with this.

3. Support trans advocacy orgs, esp. for Black trans folks.

I am scared. Trans and non-binary people are scared today. LGBTQ folks are generally scared today. We need you to step up and realize that lives are literally on the line in this election. They want you to be distracted and forget and become complacent. Don't. /“-Charlotte Clymer

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evilelitest2 · 5 years ago

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as someone who is a big fan of bernie and hates biden with a burning passion it pains me to have to be his wingman to all my dumbass leftwing friends who don't want to vote now but you gotta do what you gotta do. But in all seriousness, I find it easier to come at them from a practical standpoint and empathize with how much I too hate the centrists. Do you have any other ideas on how to convince people? Some acquaintances of mine are being stubborn.

Convincing leftist to vote for Biden even though he sucks? Well here are a few tracts you can take

1) The first and more important one in my mind is this. If Biden wins in 2020, we will have an election in 2024. If Trump wins, that is not necessarily true. You can point to the examples of Hungary, Poland, and India in terms of how difficult it can be to remove authoritarian inclined leaders if they want to stay in power. Even if Biden sucks (and he does) the fact is that we need to ensure that there is a democracy moving forward

2) Biden is likely only going to serve one term, so we can try again with a progressive in 2024 (warren?) The fact is, despite our ideas being popular, we lost, and we need too do more to infiltrate the party. I”m seeing Sanders as like the leftist Berry Goldwater, and we need our reagan (who can you know...read).

3) Biden again sucks, but there are a few things he does take seriously which leftists should really like. Specifically voting reform, in part because of his African American base, one thing Biden does seem to take seriously is pushing back against Republican voter suppression, which should make things easier for the left going forward. I mean to just use one example, if the democrats are in power when the 2020 census is conducted, that will make everybody’s lives a lot easier. We don’t want a repeat of 2010 in terms of the census. If Republicans can rig it again, we might not ever be able to win an election. for another 10 years, despite having more people

4) Scotus. No leftist platform can ever come to being if the Supreme Court is dominated by republicans. The rightward tilt of the Democratic party started in large part when the Supreme Court became solidly republican. IF Trump wins in 2020, we might have 7 republicans on the court, or even 8, which makes any leftist policies impossible. And with 4 more years, Trump will have an almost thoroughly republican court. We need to clear the courts already, Trump makes it so much worse

5) If Biden wins, and especially if we get the Senate, there is a real chance the Republican party might entirely collapse, which allows the left so many more options.

6) Biden sucks but he is still better. Biden wouldn’t have left the paris accord, he wouldn’t have passed the tax cut, he wouldn’t attempt to appeal Obamacare, and he would try to pass some things we like, like for example a $15 dollar minimum wage, which is something the Democrats take seriously. He also wouldn’t have children in cages, he wouldn’t have fucked up the response to the pandemic as badly, he wouldn’t give the go ahead to the Alt Right, and he wouldn’t have risked a war with Iran. There is a reason why Sanders is going to campaign for Biden.

7) Finally....when has not voting ever made the parties less right wing? If the left doesn’t vote, then the centrists are going to basically assume “we can’t rely on these people, it isn’t worth our time” If we vote and Biden wins, they know they need us. This is how the african American southern population were able to get the democratic party to listen to them, by always voting.

#ask EvilElitest #Joe Biden #2020 primary #Bernie Sanders #Donald trump #elizabeth warren

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kcrabb88 · 5 years ago

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I am feeling some kind of way about politics today, and it is not a feeling I want to have nor one I plan to give into but I sure am Feeling It.

Sometimes I get...really angry when I all I see people do is use the word “destroy” in reference to politics. Destroy the DNC. Destroy this. Destroy that. And it leaves me wondering if people don’t understand that if you break something you then need to understand how to build, or you will be left with nothing in the ruins of what shattered. Do I love the DNC? Fucking no, I don’t. Did I, at the same time, listen to the political director there, who is a woman of color, talk about all the work they’ve been doing to train young people, to get voter protections on the ground NOW, and not later, to reinforce tech, to try to try to try. To be fair, the media doesn’t talk about this stuff. They don’t talk about the women and the people of color and the queer grassroots activists who have worked tirelessly these past three years to BUILD an infrastructure to take back statehouses and get people elected to congress and finally, maybe get Trump out. It’s not in the news but I promise you it’s happening. Good people are out there, fighting. They might not always agree on things--when I attended the summit for Sister District there were Warren, Bernie, and Biden people there--but they are out there Doing Things. Not everything is a conspiracy theory.

Big structural change isn’t just about breaking the old system. It’s about building coalitions. It’s about knowing not just what we want to put in the old system’s place but HOW. And convincing people of why we need to! Like, listen, Warren was my girl and has been since long before she ever ran. Bernie is my second choice. But damn I will vote for Biden if he’s it because I have to. It may not be him! We don’t know yet, nothing’s over! But whatever happens there truly ARE amazing progressive candidates running for office all over and they need help, too. I think so often about my first election in Virginia and how we were supporting a Peruvian immigrant and a Democratic socialist and a trans woman and so many people said it was impossible for them to win and they ALL WON. Then they all won AGAIN because people talked about what we could build, and not just what we should destroy. The presidency is vital and we need to take it back, but there is so much in politics. Places to put our hearts if the nominee is not who we wish it was.

Rage is an important part of activism and politics, I’m angry all the time, but this is also about connection with each other and a belief in building something ELSE, and I’m tired of the toxicity I’m seeing. This is not pointed at anyone at all it’s just a thing we’re all experiencing right now. But you know what? Democratic turnout SURGED yesterday, and that, I can’t help but think, is a sign that all the work done over the past three years has led to this moment. That the gains made in 2017, 2018, 2019, MEANT something.

So I encourage you, please, make a call, donate 5 bucks, knock on a door, write a postcard, every tiny, single thing matters.

#KCrabb talks politics #US politics #Sorry y'all but I'm tired today #Current events

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anthonybialy · 4 years ago

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The Fake Fight of His Life

This round of pretend combat impresses fans the most. Punching the air while promising knockouts is why octagon-based grappling is so popular. The same fuming zealots who think unsubstantiated bluster is the core of fighting applaud what may be the final chance to see their pugilistic hero pummel his shadow. A close election unfortunately let Donald Trump engage in his specialties.

People don't change, which is less reassuring than you'd think. Take the example set by the head of state, who's been so exhausting in kvetching that he can't even convince people to take his side when he could have a case. It's tough to care if he's right. Karma finally noted his obsession with domination regardless of whether there’s enough fraud to make him a victim. Being undignified to the end is how to show Mitt Romney who's boss.

Please give more undeserved powers to governments unable to perform basic jobs. Your mistake was expecting those in charge to be prepared to count just because there was an election. It's tricky to figure out amounts. Twenty-four beers sounds like more than 12, but I'll count empty bottles in the morning to make sure.

You're telling me people who can't complete the simplest of pie charts were unprepared to fight a virus? Harassing the healthy as the sick croaked is as ghastly as it is unsurprising. Entities that are still haven’t taken inventory for certain want to commandeer your health care.

Follow your beloved president's example and carp about the useless media doing something irrelevant. Calling races that are still racing is indeed the sort of scummy self-important move journalists adore. Failed English majors are compelled to make themselves seem important while overcompensating for insecurity caused by irrelevance. Speaking of which, their calls have no effect, or at least shouldn't unless CNN decides how the future will go. John King thinks you should have Pizza Rolls for dinner.

The channel changed the vote, then? Freaking about Fox News claiming someone won Arizona who may have not is like me at home shrieking at quarterbacks for not reading defenses properly like I did from the couch. It's presently trendy to worry arithmetic will be affected by networks who can't accumulate many viewers. Anyone who doesn't race to the polls to vote after dinner because they believe a cable news projection shows precisely why we have an Electoral College.

You should be far more ticked at a president undermining establishments than at channels he berates for noticing. Reaping what’s sown is unappealing to the guy who couldn't make money spinning roulette wheels. An unconvincing case despite a possible point reflects a lifetime of ingratitude despite being handed everything, or because of it.

Look at this crazy outsider ranting against the system from the Oval Office. Decorum would presently be useful, like when the freaking president could say he remains confident about prevailing while doing everything to ensure Americans have a president who humbly accepts the responsibility of winning fairly. Then he'll admit his critics are correct that he's had some management lapses. Ranting about numbers he's invented doesn't count as respectable.

Trump-era America didn't need another example of the lunkheaded folly of binary thinking. It's entirely possible that there's both shady tallying and that the potential victim is a petulant child highlighting irregularities that don't technically exist.

Two other things can be simultaneously true, like Joe Biden being a smug dolt who's spent an endless political career being wrong about everything and Trump being the worst possible defender of the opposite values. Don't tell Laura Ingraham that one thing doesn't make something unrelated true unless you want smoke to billow out her ears.

We don't need unfairness to test character but have it constantly, anyway. This world sucks, as anyone residing on it for more than five minutes has noticed. Take who got to the final voting round and tell me justice prevails. But responding to crummy scenarios is a good portion of our lifetimes. Certain presidents use the chance to project irritability.

Calculating every vote is apparently trickier than a healthy relationship. A counting machine is too futuristic in this primitive era of glowing pocket screens powered by space beams. The determination of who got more support when everyone participating registers an opinion is the last thing in this stupid-ass reality that should be plagued with trickiness. A Sesame Street lesson is the last thing that should be political.

Republicans wish they had a guy who doesn't fight to finish the bout. Establishment insider George W. Bush possessed the nerve to stand up to election shenanigans, and dooming Al Gore to star in the most undeserved Oscar imaginable is even more impressive compared to the incumbent flailing without effect.

Nobody serious takes Trump seriously, even when he has a serious gripe. I blame the fake news media for reporting he didn't win when he said he did. The Rocky V of presidents will finally learn his lesson, by which I mean he'll wail like a toddler who had a 5-hour Energy if he loses or wins. The judges are all biased.

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anexplanationofunfortunateevents · 5 years ago

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Spooky Stories at Camp Quarantine: The Tale of the Swift Boat

Campfire story (n): a ritual where we all sit under the vast darkness of a midnight sky and tell ourselves a story about the big, scary monster that isn’t lurking just out of sight. You know. Probably.

2004 was a dark and stormy year.

The world pulsed with the still-raw trauma of the September 11 attacks. It was an anxious year of denial and bargaining, a desperate search for the loophole after Sirius Black fell through the veil. The twentieth century was dying and the third millennium was struggling to be born. It was the time of the Swift Boat.

The Usurper Bush the Lesser was in a tough place. If you were paying attention, you could see the signs that his stolen presidency was going to end in disaster and disgrace. And it was an election year, so people were about to start paying attention. So he took a lesson from his dear old Dad: he would unleash the hired help to unload a relentless fusillade of lies against his opponent.

Lying was an important part of the strategy because he was up against a strong challenger. John Kerry of Massachusetts was one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate; he was also a tall, fit, well-educated, impeccably diplomatic, Irish Catholic patrician who didn’t challenge anyone’s idea of what a president looked like. He talked like Barack Obama and looked like Mitt Romney. He was allowed to get pneumonia without anyone losing their goddamn minds, that’s how white and manly he was.

Most critically, though, he seemed to have almost unique standing to campaign against the Bush administration’s spectacular failure in Iraq. At the time, Republicans had – cynically, but effectively – made themselves synonymous with The Troops. Anyone who questioned their lies or challenged their reckless foreign policy was axiomatically discredited as “hating the troops.” Kerry, however, was A Troop, with a track record of telling the hard truth about an unjustified war. He had earned five medals in Vietnam and then used that moral authority to call for an end to the bloodshed. His service gave him a way to connect to a massive group of voters for whom the war had been a generational trauma – and it was a strong contrast to Bush, who had used his wealth and family connections to dodge the draft.

Enter the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. This was a group of Vietnam veterans who, in mid-2004, collectively realized that Kerry had lied about his heroism, hoodwinked the military into giving him an award, not once but five times, and successfully covered up his perfidy for thirty-odd years, despite having been scrutinized by Massachusetts voters and press in half a dozen statewide elections. This fantastical tale was largely spun by Jerome Corsi, now known for spreading birtherism (the racist conspiracy theory that former President Obama was not an American citizen), narrowly escaping prosecution by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, and, most recently, hawking Trump’s favorite quack coronavirus cure. They were, naturally, bankrolled by obscenely wealthy Bush supporters.

Maybe these Swift boat veterans were purposefully lying; maybe they were sad old men whose trauma was manipulated by right-wing propagandists. But they did what they were supposed to do. Kerry’s campaign lost its footing and never quite got it back. Instead of being able to challenge Bush’s lies about about the war in Iraq that was happening at the time, he was stuck on the defensive against Bush’s lies about the Vietnam war, which had ended decades before. In one retrospectively critical moment of priming the conservative base for Donald “I like the people who weren’t captured” Trump, delegates at the Republican convention wore silly purple heart bandaids to mock the wounds Kerry received in combat.

We know how that ended. Bush won the popular vote by around 2%, which back in the day actually used to be enough to win the election. Thus, ISIS rose and New Orleans drowned.

The thing is, the bad guys don’t actually forget the past as easily as they hope you do. When a play works, they run it again. When a play almost works, they run it again but better. When a play doesn’t immediately work, it still rallies the right-wing base and softens up the general public for their authoritarian politics of lies and abuse, so they keep it in their back pocket. So we should probably try to understand the specific elements that made the Swift boat propaganda campaign particularly effective.

Imagine you’re an amoral Republican candidate and I’m your mercenary sociopath of a campaign manager. I’ve just said, “look, you’re getting your ass kicked, we’re going to have to swiftboat your opponent” and you’re like “what’s a swiftboat? Write me a memo!” So, here it is. (You may be thinking “but you don’t know anything about me, and I’d never be a Republican candidate for anything!” Lesson the first: it doesn’t matter, because your swiftboat attack has nothing to do with you.)

A swiftboat attack is bullshit. We like to think the truth is the most effective political weapon, but what if there really aren’t any disqualifying skeletons in your opponent’s closet? If you’re going to sabotage them anyway, that’s kind of liberating. After all, true stories depend on facts, which can be too boring to stick with people, and don’t have made-to-spec story arcs that conveniently fit with your campaign’s themes. Plus, if you’re relying on some actual truth that exists in the universe, you’re running the risk that there’s some mitigating factor out there, some witness who can give different context or a wronged party who can say they’ve buried the hatchet. Worse, your opponent already knows about stuff they actually did. Campaigns do a ton of background research into their own candidates, specifically so that they’re prepared for a predictable attack. They can’t prepare themselves for literally anything your army of political strategists can imagine, so you will always have the element of surprise.

Swiftboating isn’t an attack on your opponent’s policy. It’s an accusation that they’ve violated some taboo. There’s some sticky detail that people won’t quite be able to forget, even if they are exposed to the eventual debunking. The story, whatever it is, should be most upsetting to a large, important block of voters who are inclined to support your opponent.

The allegations don’t come from you, your campaign, or even a sympathetic journalist. They’re laundered through apparent private citizens who are part of a group of people that the general public tends to find sympathetic. This makes your story seem more credible to at first glance, wrong-foots anyone who wants to defend your opponent against the allegations, and lets you get credit for insincerely denouncing the attack while continuing to benefit from it.

This is a dick-swinging exercise, so be shameless. You’re not just putting your opponent in their place by showing you can get away with lying about them, and maddeningly rejecting responsibility for your lies. You’re showing off an authoritarian contempt for truth itself.

You need a relentless multimedia assault, impossible for people to miss. You might have to bully legitimate media into teaching the controversy, but they’re wimps. You’re not trying to convince most people that this specific story is true, you’re just trying to plant some seeds of doubt, and to sap time and enthusiasm from your opponent and their supporters. Make the election as miserable as possible and voters will reward you for it.

The most important thing is that you want your swiftboat attack to be on some area where you have a real liability and your opponent has a real strength. You want them to have to defend themselves on something they should get to use as a selling point. Even better, you neutralize a totally fair criticism of yourself – no matter how accurate they are or how ridiculous you sound, the press will dismiss it as “both sides point fingers.”

Kerry’s campaign gets used as some kind of object lesson about the futility of primary voters trying to pick a candidate they think will win: “Kerry was supposed to be electable and Kerry lost, so there.” (You’ve probably heard the even stupider cover version, “if Hillary was so electable, why’d she let herself get targeted by all those criminal conspiracies, HMMMM?��) This is 20/20 hindsight spiked with the just world fallacy. John Kerry seemed like a good candidate because he was, in fact, a good candidate, which is why he did significantly better expected, and he came pretty close to beating the odds. If there’s a lesson here, maybe it’s that swiftboating can keep a clearly electable candidate from being elected.

That’s a real buzzkill because it means we can’t treat the primaries like a round of playoffs where we root for the most exciting player and then kick back to watch the finals. But what it lacks in self-gratification, it makes up for with agency. If a swiftboat attack is supposed to affect how people respond to a candidate, then people get to choose whether or not we play along.

Trump, a textbook narcissist who instinctively projects his infinite failings onto others, is almost a swiftboating savant. His campaign is being handled by the professional Republican operatives behind the original Swift Boat campaign. (Literally, some of the same guys.) So as we move into the general election, know that this is in their bag of tricks. If you start to hear alarming stories about presumptive Democratic nominee former Vice President Biden or any other prominent Democrats on the ballot …. give it the smell test, is all I’m saying.

#disinformation #2004 election #2020 election #swiftboating #john kerry #george w bush

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