#election postmortem

[tomorrowusa]

« [T]he albatross was not just Joe Biden; it was the longer-term perception that liberals constituted the country’s ruling class. This is something the otherwise inchoate conservative moment has emphasized consistently and effectively in recent years: that the Democrats were now the party of power and the establishment, and that the right was the natural home for anti-establishment resentment of all kinds — of which, it’s now clear to see, there is an awful lot. Most on the left haven’t seen it this way, frustrated by legislative stalemates and judicial setbacks and too-close-for-comfort elections seemingly every cycle, with a feeling all along that liberals were always swimming upstream. But in profound ways that the party’s voters rarely recognize, the Democrats have been the country’s incumbent political force now for a full generation. »

— David Wallace-Wells at the New York Times. (archived)

It was actually more than just an incumbency thing. In the eyes of much of the population, Democtats had become The Establishment. And whipping up popular grievances is always going to hurt The Establishment.

A problem is that Liberals are still not great at messaging – though there have been some minor improvements. Warning about Project 2025 and climate catastrophe had a little effect, though it wasn't that visceral.

Donald Trump's incompetence in the early months of the pandemic led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of additional American deaths and unleashed 2½ years of recession, unemployment, and inflation. Yet we hardly heard anything about this in the campaign.

Joy is nice. But if you really want to win over an unsettled electorate, you need to make them fear in their bones what the other guy would do if elected. Donald Trump personally created a real life dystopia in 2020. Reminding people of that in a visually graphic way would have offset Trump's unsupported claims about migrants on the prowl for your family pets for dinner.

If you are seen as The Establishment then you have to get voters to view the previous Establishment with greater trepidation. For five consecutive presidential elections, starting in 1932, Democrats successfully pinned the blame for the Great Depression on Herbert Hoover. Trump's pandemic disaster should have been good for at least two such cycles.

[npi]

Donald Trump's victory was powered by voters who felt that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris didn't care about them

Many Democratic strategists, activists, and voters thought that the 2024 presidential election would be similar to the 2016 and 2020 elections: the key to beating a deeply unpopular Donald Trump was finding the right candidate. In other words, the Democrats just needed to not blow it. After all, Trump famously won in 2016 because Hillary Clinton was nearly as unpopular as he was. However, this…

[paleolithique]

and listen. i get it. i'm a 25 year old commie burnout looking back with the benefit of hindsight and i don't get paid the big bucks to make the big decisions. i get that the DNC felt like they had to have a woman of color on the ticket in 2020. but did it really not occur to ANYBODY that the former attorney general of california might be especially effective in the attorney general cabinet seat.

i guess at the end of the day it was kind of a shame that pete "wine cave rat" buttigieg ran such a bad campaign that he had to be shuffled off into the department of transportation. bc in another world a biden buttigieg 2020 ticket probably would've got them to 270 all the same.

[qqueenofhades]

I don’t have any words right now for what’s happened. Where in the fuck do we go from here?

I don't know. I really, truly don't know. We can't sugarcoat how bad things are going to get, and we can't pre-emptively give into it anyway. This is going to be an unprecedented time in American history (if, sadly, not world history) and the forces conspiring to make you obey will gain much of their power from you doing so in advance, without a struggle. It seems fair to say that America as it has always been historically constituted is over, and may not return in our lifetimes, but we also do not know that for a fact. If nothing else, the fascists will find it very hard to cancel competitive elections, and we cannot sit back, throw up our hands, conclude that voting is clearly meaningless, and let them do that. There are a lot of other things that we need to do, but that's one.

There are various postmortems to be written and nits to pick, but Harris was thrown into an impossible situation and did the best she could in 100 days. Even her critics agree she ran a pretty much flawless campaign. But this country simply decided that a well-qualified black woman could not be preferred over the most manifestly and flagrantly unfit degenerate to ever occupy the office. They decided this for many reasons, not least because large swathes of the country now live in curated misinformation bubbles that, under Government Czar Musk, will only get much, much worse. They were helped by the cowardice and complicity of the "mainstream media" that could have ended Trump's career exactly like they did to Biden after the first debate, but chose to preserve the profits of their billionaire oligarch owners and did not do so, giving Trump the benefit of the doubt and normalization at every turn. They also hounded Biden relentlessly over the four years of his presidency, never reported on the good things he did, and drove him to the historically bad approval ratings lows for a president who was by any metric, quite successful (and will quite possibly be our last ordinary American president for a very long time). Along with the searingly ingrained racism and misogyny and misinformation, Harris could not overcome that.

Democrats clearly had a messaging problem, but it's also true that the country, quite simply, does not care about "democracy" when the economy is perceived to be at stake. Not to over-egg the Hitler parallels, but yeah. This is how Hitler returned to power in 1933 -- on the backs of widespread economic collapse of the Weimar Republic; voters decided they just didn't care about the overtly fascist stuff, which he then proceeded to you know, do with genocidal vigor. Except the American economy in this case was actually doing well, which makes it even more baffling and indefensible. Enough people simply memory-holed Trump's crimes (aided at every turn by SCOTUS, Mitch McConnell not convicting him after January 6, Merrick Garland being far too slow and timid, the corporate media), liked the racist fascist behavior or felt that it wasn't a dealbreaker, and decided that in this election, he was the "change" candidate. It's insane by any metric, but that's what happened.

The country is deeply sick. We do not know what will happen. It's going to get bad. Barring a miracle, we will not have federalized abortion rights again in my lifetime, and there will be widespread attacks on public health, women's rights, immigrants, transgender people, and other vulnerable people. Even and especially the ones who voted for Trump. Never Thought Leopard Would Eat My Face, etc. Alito and Thomas will swiftly step down and allow their seats to be replaced by 40-year old wingnuts hand-selected from the worst the Federalist Society has to offer. SCOTUS is gone for the next generation at least. There is very little prospect of it being ever fixed in the foreseeable future.

Trump will never face a scintilla of consequences for his previous crimes; all the open federal cases will be closed as soon as he takes office and fires Jack Smith. The best we can hope for is that he dies in office, but then we get Vance and the cadre of alt-right techno billionaires ruled directly from the Kremlin. Putin is celebrating this morning and with good reason; he's gotten everything he wants. Trump will egg on Netanyahu in Gaza and abandon Ukraine. Democracy across the world will remain even more fragile and badly under threat. Authoritarians will be empowered and American withdrawal from international systems will percolate in very dangerous ways that cannot and will not be fixed in the short run. I really hope all the leftists who celebrate this as the "defeat of the genocide candidate" will enjoy all the genocide and suffering that's about to come. And yes, I do think the Israel-Palestine war fucked us in a large way. Jewish voters perceived the Democrats as insufficiently pro-Israel due to the presence of far-left antisemitism, even as the far left attacked the Democrats relentlessly and never targeted the Republicans. Arab voters abandoned them, possibly deservedly. What would have happened without the war? We don't know. You get the historical period that you get. Netanyahu and Trump can now do anything they want. Hope it was worth it.

As I said, I can't sugarcoat it. We are going to be paying for this in some form for the next decade, and probably longer. I'm not as absolutely shattered as I was in 2016, but I am much, much angrier. We all thought, we all hoped, America was better than this. It isn't. That, however, is something that has also happened before. What we decide to do next will shape how the next chapter unfolds.

This would be a great time to stock up on needed medicines, renew your passport online, and anything else you need to do in preparation for next year. Many of us simply do not have the wherewithal, whether financial or otherwise, to leave the country. I don't know what will happen with me. I don't know what will happen to any of us. This was utterly avoidable and yet, America didn't want to avoid it. At some point, there's nothing else you can do. You can point to media cronyism, Russian influence, etc etc., but the fact that two of the most qualified presidential candidates who happened to be women have now lost to Trump twice makes it unavoidable. The virulent rightward shift of young men (of all races) in particular paints a grim picture as to how the reactionary misogyny of the 21st century is going to essentially undo most of the progress for social and gender equality in the 20th. The patriarchy has been a problem for most of human history. Doesn't really seem like it's going to change.

The end result of this, however grim: we're still here. We are still living within our communities. If (and this is a big if) Democrats can retake the House, they can put some checks on the process for the next two years. At this point, we are in full-out buying-time, trying-to-prevent-the worst mode. We could have continued fixing things, but we won't be doing that. We will only be trying to preserve ourselves and our friends and our smaller spheres of influence. It sounds very trite to say that we have to have courage, but we do. There's not much else.

It's going to be an awful winter. We have two and a half months to see this coming and know how bad it's going to be, and... yeah. I don't know how soon the buyer's remorse will inevitably set in, but it will. Tough luck, people. You voted for him. You get the country that you decide to have. But the rest of us are also here, and what Gandalf says is still true. We wish the Ring had never come to us, we wish none of this had happened, but we still have to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.

I don't have a lot more. I'll probably be logging off for a while. I don't need to look at the internet for.... yeah, a long time. (Will I do it anyway? Probably.) I don't know what else to leave you with, aside from again:

Do not obey in advance. Do not act as if everything is foreordained and set in stone. Fascist regimes end. They always do. We are going to have to figure out how, and it will suck shit, but the alternative is worse.

Take care of yourselves. I love you.

[tanadrin]

regarding transphobia: I also think it can't be stressed enough that it was a panic ginned up in 2011 because the right-wing had lost so hard on gay marriage. Even now if they strike down that court case, they won't undo the social acceptance of same-sex marriage (and many states will specifically and explicitly allow it).

while the prospects of a similar event for trans people in the near future in the US are not... good, they actually can't legislate popular opinion, and what little I've seen on postmortems for the election suggest this really was not a victory fueled by hatred of the they/thems

Yeah, in the very long run I'm quite optimistic on trans rights, but in the short-to-medium term there's so much harm that can be done, especially to trans kids, that it's hard to focus on what attitudes will be like in ten or twenty years.

[mariacallous]

The postmortem part of elections always makes me want to die. Everyone so certain in their particular theory of why a candidate lost and *shocker* it's always what happens to line up perfectly with their own personal beliefs -- like the leftists still arguing Harris lost because of Palestine.

[chamerionwrites]

“Democrats have to stop pandering to the left” would be a hysterically funny postmortem election take if it weren’t so old and predictable and tiring. Pandering where. Show me the policies. Remember when Biden slightly airbrushed Trump-era immigration law, and Fox News went right on characterizing him as an unhinged open borders commie regardless? Remember when Harris literally campaigned with Liz Cheney?

[crazy-pages]

A) If this reporting is correct, Harris turned away from economic populism because her brother-in-law, Uber's chief legal officer with a $60,000,000 net worth, told her it was needed to win CEO support.

B) Biden's team things he would have won if he'd stayed in because he would have been more explicitly dismissive of trans people.

We need. To fucking eat. The Democratic establishment.

Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: “You have more to lose than she does.” And now he’s lost it. Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.

In the hours after Harris’s defeat, I called and texted members of Biden’s inner circle to hear their postmortems of the campaign. They sounded as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite. They also had a worry of their own: Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view.

Although the Biden advisers I spoke with were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign, based on the months they’d spent strategizing in anticipation of the election. Embedded in their autopsies was their own unstated faith that they could have done better.

One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump’s oligarchical allegiances. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, “We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends.”

While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.

Another Bidenland critique takes Harris to task for failing to navigate the backlash against identity politics. Not that Harris ran a “woke” campaign. To the contrary, she bathed herself in patriotism. She presented herself as a prosecutor, a friend of law enforcement, and a proud gun owner. But she failed to respond to the ubiquitous ads the Trump campaign ran claiming that Harris supports sex-change operations for prisoners. She allowed Trump to create the impression that she favored the most radical version of transgender rights.

Biden, allies say, never would have let such attacks stand. He would have clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports. Of course, he never staked out that position in his presidency. But it’s true that Harris avoided the issue, rather than rebutting it, despite the millions of dollars poured into those attack ads. And in the end, those ads very likely implanted the notion that Harris wasn’t the cultural centrist she appeared to be.

A sour irony haunts Biden aides. In the coming months, Trump will use executive power and unified control of Washington to wreck many of the administration’s proudest accomplishments. But the ones he doesn’t wreck, he will claim as his own. Biden helped build the foundations for economic growth, with the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the infrastructure bill. Because the investments enabled by all three of those bills will take years to bear fruit, Biden never had the chance to reap the harvest. Despite Trump’s opposition to those pieces of legislation, the benefits of those bills could bolster his presidency. Biden will have passed along his most substantive legacy as a gift to his successor.

[coffinup]

Writing tips for death/funerals/bodies from someone who has worked in the funeral industry for over 3 years

-Bodies actually feel warmer immediately after death due to a condition called postmortem caloricity. This briefly raises the body temperature as bacteria within the gut start moving.

-Rigor mortis has three stages: primary flaccidity, active rigor, and secondary flaccidity. Active rigor starts around 3-6 hours after death. Active rigor will make the body stiff, but not immovable. Secondary flaccidity starts around 30-50 hours after death. This is when decomposition will start to be visibly noticeable. In lower temperatures, active rigor may last longer.

-The first sign of active decomposition is a green tinge in the the lower abdomen

-Funeral Directors NEVER read out a will. This is the duty of a probate lawyer

-Hearses never pick up bodies from their place of death. Hearses are used to ceremonially transport casketed bodies from the place of the funeral to the place of final internment. Funeral homes and mortuaries will use unmarked mini vans or transport vans to pick up bodies from hospitals, nursing facilities, homes, etc.

-a dead person’s eyes shouldn’t be cloudy soon after death unless they already had cataracts. Eyes stay relatively clear until a few days after death. If a body was refrigerated or in cold temps, eyes might become cloudy sooner.

-Perfectly frozen bodies will tend to look essentially the same as they did in life, sometimes including having flushed cheeks and fingers. This flush will turn darker and more gray over long periods of time.

-The body of someone who died from asphyxiation (choking, hanging, suffocating, drowning) may appear blue/gray in color briefly after death.

-The body of someone who died from carbon monoxide poisoning will exhibit cherry read discoloration in their face and extremities, and sometimes their whole body.

-Often times people who were older, who had a liver condition, were obese, or were an alcoholic will be severely jaundiced (yellow) after death

-livor mortis is a postmortem condition that consists of blood settling into areas from gravity. For example, someone laying on their back during death will have a purple/gray/red “staining” in their back, butt, backs of their legs etc, parts of the body that are close to the ground.

-For the love of God, organs are not removed during embalming. This is not part of the embalming process. Autopsies may remove visceral organs for examination. If you search “modern embalming process” on youtube or google you should get a run-down on how modern embalming is done. Embalming in most cases is also NOT permanent. The body will start to decompose after about 2-5 weeks.

-“Clinical Death” is a term used for the cessation of hearbeat function, where life can still be restored through intervention. When writing about someone who briefly died but came back because of hospital intervention, you can say they were “clinically dead”. “Brain death” is when brain function has ceased but organ function is maintained through life support. “Biological death” is cessation of organ and brain activity due to lack of oxygen. This is irreversible. “Legal death” is when a medical professional has declared someone as dead and a death certificate is issued.

-NOT ALL STATES HAVE CORONERS. If you are writing a story in a particular US state, do some quick research to see if they have a coroner or a state medical examiner. Coroners are an elected position and don’t need a medical license, they examine evidence from crime scenes and autopsied. Medical examiners perform autopsies and do need a medical license.

-If someone dies under unknown circumstances, they will be subject to autopsy. This can be as benign as having a heart attack or slipping at home, or as malignant as being murdered.

-this is tangental but Cancer does NOT cause your hair to fall out. CHEMOTHERAPY may cause hair to fall out. Not everyone that has cancer or gets chemo will lose hair. People that have cancer in their upper body (breast, lung, throat etc) are more likely to lose hair than people with cancer in their lower body (genital, rectal, colon, intestinal etc)

If anyone can think of anything else let me know!

[azazelsazaleas]

Worth taking a look at in the midst of the postmortem.

A few interesting takeaways:

- Latino men and white women voted majority Trump.

- Gen X was (roughly speaking) the generation that voted most Republican.

- Lower-middle economic classes ($30k-99k) voted for Trump more than the poor or the upper-middle and wealthy.

- By religion, Christians went overwhelmingly for Trump. Everyone else preferred Harris, with Jewish and non-religious people voting strongly blue.

- Parents and married couples were more likely to vote for Trump.

- Despite what some weirdos on Reddit have been saying, LGBT communities still voted overwhelmingly blue. There’ve been a number of people attempting to claim that a large number of gay, lesbian, and bi voters broke off and supported Trump due to concerns over trans issues; the numbers do not support this.

- Almost 2/3 of first-time voters picked Trump.

- The largest two main issues driving voters where the economy (32% of respondents listed, mainly Trump voters) and the state of Democracy (34% of respondents, mainly Harris voters).

- 82% of Trump supporters said that US support for Israel is not strong enough.

- The majority of Trump voters were voting primarily for their candidate. The majority of Harris voters were primarily voting against Trump.

[whilomm]

hey listen guys I know its hard to hear but you dont have to say Trump Cheated to point out the problems w this election

Yeah theres tons of votes being thrown out, but that doesnt mean the trump campaign was doing shady backroom deals or anything, it means that this country has places where its set up so that its way too easy to throw votes out for tiny reasons, and its been set up like that for a while. this isnt a new issue Caused By Trump Personally this is existing problem. yes, if you voted by mail or anything, make sure your vote went through and cure it if needed cause those could have massive effects downballot, but dont conspiracize about it, its just your average everyday voter suppression in this bitch of a country.

ideally they would give voters more time to cure ballots for legit issues (like signature mismatch, which yeah if u wanna prevent vote theft on mail ins It Is Important) and notify them better (especially in an age where No One Answers Their Phone) but they make the windows tiny because This Country Sucks. the conspiracy is that "wow, america sucks". very surprising, i know.

meanwhile the bomb threats. suspicious as hell, yes. needs to be investigated, yes. but also they could have come from some random ass maga cunt. I don't know how to tell yall this but some right wing fuckers do in fact love doing a terrorism independently on occasion, no conspiracy needed. now, if it comes out the threats can be directly connected to the campaign somehow? yeah, THEN its direct election interference, and we have to have a whole nother conversation, but realize it could just as easily be some random asshole doing it.

also "the dems lost 15 million votes" theyre still counting. they probably lost votes still, yeah, but you have to wait for them to finish counting to see how many. some of the states still counting like california lean heavy dem so like, the gaps gonna lower at least a bit probs. looking now its more like 10 mil gap. dunno how much thatll change, but neither do you yet. shut up with the numbers til you actually Have The Numbers. the full postmortem cant come til you actually have the body all here to dissect.

unfortunately yall i think half of american voters are just fucking stupid ass cunts who are easily swayed by shit like "egg prices" and "gas prices", and the dems massively failed every step of the way on that front (biden didnt do enough to combat price gouging when it happened, biden still decided to run knowing how fucking unpopular he was with everyone from rightwingers to checked the fuck out normies to leftists and despite barely being able to string a sentence together and then waiting until so fucking late in the race to finally drop out, the dems usual noncommital ass messaging and refusal to take strong stances on shit bit them in the ass once again...)

no, chances are from how its looking right now, trump won, no conspiracy needed. Some of its the rabid maga crowd yeah, but also some of its probs the normie ass checked out average levels of misogyny people who dont even realize their "feelings" about how trump just seems like a "stronger leader" are 100% "he is man therefore strong", some of its people who genuinely fucking vote based on shit like name recognition and had to google "did joe biden drop out". the average american is unfortunately oftentimes a fucking idiot who doesnt pay attention to goddamn anything beyond how their personal finances were these past 4 years, and dems didnt do enough to energize the voting base of people who actually do pay some attention to get them over that gap.

They couldnt get the checked out normies, they didnt even bother with the people who pay attention, and they massively goddamn fucked up.

Theres no one single thing to blame here, the whole thing is a massive messy shit stew. a million things that could have been done, including shit that should have been done over a decade ago by the dems when they really had power, but this country fucking sucks so.

[mightyflamethrower]

Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.” – William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” – Often attributed to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand

The Democratic election postmortem immediately descended into public blame-gaming—as expected. When Joe Biden was forced off the ticket in late July, the conspirators issued a party line that he was to be praised as a veritable George Washington—in the spirit of Washington’s farewell address of 1796 about why it was a good thing for the first president not to run for a third term.

So, we were lied to that Joe, the sitting President of the United States, was not forced out by Nancy Pelosi, the Obamas, George Clooney and the celebs, and the billionaire class. We instead were lectured that Biden, magnanimously as the neo-father of our country, selflessly bowed out to ensure Kamala Harris’s elevation as the nominee and, with it, a sure Democratic victory.

But now? After the Democratic train wreck, half the party is suddenly damning George Washington Joe for sticking around too long, even though party grandees cooked up the scheme in the first place of nominating the cognitively challenged Biden in 2020 to shut out his radical (and supposedly unelectable) primary rivals.

Now that his successor Harris has bombed, in the leftist mind, Joe has gone from a Washingtonian Olympian to a veritable selfish Richard Nixon who clung to office far too long and supposedly ensured his party’s defeat.

Yet still, others now blame incumbent Vice President Kamala herself. The once “joyful” candidate, after the coup to remove Biden, was once praised to the skies as a “turn the page”/”move forward”/“change” candidate—only then to be damned as an insipid loser.

So, one postelection narrative was that Harris—we were told to recall—was always known as inept and thus originally picked as Joe Biden’s Spiro Agnew insurance policy, who would prevent his indictment, impeachment, or medical removal.

But never mind blaming either Biden or Harris or both. The left cannot fault either a lack of funds; they raised a billion dollars more than Trump. Leftists also cannot complain about 95 percent favorable media coverage, supposedly worth billions of dollars in free advertising.

They cannot regret that they did not do everything imaginable to destroy the Trump monster—given they had impeached him twice and tried him as a private citizen. They cooked up the Russian collusion and laptop disinformation hoaxes, raided his home with a SWAT team, and unleashed five criminal and civil suits designed to bankrupt, demonize, and jail him. They tried to remove him from at least 16 state ballots and daily smeared him as a fascist, dictator, and Hitler—even as two would-be assassins tried to shoot him.

So, we are witnessing the rich Democrat-media fusion blame and fault everything but themselves. In truth, whether Biden or Harris ran—it never really mattered.

Even an open convention with a “moderate” veneer nominee like a Josh Shapiro would not have saved them. The fault was in themselves: a radical Democratic agenda actualized by Joe Biden, who will leave office with an approval rate under 40 percent, and two-thirds of the country believing the country was headed in the wrong direction under his tenure.

So, what lost the election for the Democrats? Both substance and style.

The proverbial people may have agreed that Trump was sometimes crude, but they knew in his prior four-year tenure that food, gas, rent, power, and insurance were affordable. The border was finally secured. Trump did not welcome in 12 million unaudited illegal aliens. Nor did he oversee a disastrous flight from Afghanistan or watch two theater-wide wars blow up Ukraine and the Middle East as a derelict America became irrelevant.

Boys did not spike volleyballs down upon the heads of girls nor did male boxers pound the brains of women.

Nor did teenage biological males shower with young girls.

Nor did the Trump tenure witness institutionalized anti-Semitism spreading throughout the nation’s elite campuses and onto the streets. Nor did Republican party grandees obsess on race, promote reparations, demand unlimited abortions until the moment of birth, or trash fracking.

So, the message—not just the messengers—was toxic. But that said, the message was also delivered by a bicoastal elite, exuding hubris and superciliousness. This election, the left committed the two cardinal sins of American politics: one, never talk down to the American people as too stupid to appreciate the wisdom of their supposed elite betters; and two, never abandon the upwardly mobile aspirations and real struggles of the middle class.

Instead, during the campaign and after the election slaughter, Democratic grandees screamed against a supposedly racist, sexist, homophobic, nativist electorate—as if these critics were a mummified Hillary Clinton circa 2016 still pontificating about the deplorables and irredeemables or a calcified Obama lecturing on the pathologies of the clingers.

Indeed, the epitome of such hypocrisy was the late entrance of the now-plutocratic Obamas. The pair variously private jetted in from one of their four mansions to “save” Harris from her incompetent self by diagnosing the skeptics of her hard-left message as ignorant, illiberal, and suffering from Marxist false consciousness.

Thus, a week after the election, Democrats are still trapped in La La Land.

Blue-state governors now posture and brag that they will stop the newly elected Trump—but from what exactly? Will they refuse his tainted federal funds? Spit at him when they ask for disaster relief help? Declare blue America “sanctuary states” that will nullify federal law and not pay federal taxes?

What does California governor Gavin Newsom mean by calling to session the California legislature to “resist” Trump? Will he order another Steele dossier pee-pee tape? Another Hillary Clinton 2016 call to join La Résistance?

What does Illinois Governor Pritzker mean by warning Trump he will have to go through the ample governor to get to “his people?”

Coordinate more local and state prosecutors to resume where Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg, and Letitia James left off?

Mimic Madonna and threaten to blow up the White House?

Emulate Kamala Harris and warn weeks of violent protests that won’t and should not stop?

So how exactly is the elected president actually stripping away the rights of their liberal residents—three months before he even sets foot in office? And what might such illiberal or extralegal Trump efforts entail?

Find another Andrew McCabe to weaponize the FBI to go after his enemies?

Discover another Anthony Fauci to stealthily send American cash to a leaky Chinese virology lab run by the People’s Liberation Army?

Draft another Lois Lerner to politicize the IRS to deny left-wing groups nonprofit status?

Rehire James Comey to get the FBI and social media together to censor the news?

Maybe rehire Loretta Lynch or Merrick Garland to sic the Department of Justice on political enemies at school board meetings?

Bring back Confederate-style nullification of federal law and open the border?

Or are Trump’s threats likely to be more existential and cosmic—like packing the court to ensure another six conservative justices?

Or, as the right takes control of the Senate, will the damnable new conservative majority abolish the ancient filibuster?

Perhaps the left is worried that now that a vengeful Trump has handily won the popular vote, he will most likely remove the 237-year-old Electoral College by sidestepping the constitutional amendment process?

Or will a dastardly Trump bifurcate some blue states to ensure their red halves become two new states and with them four conservative senators?

In sum, the left will not recover by blaming the American people and the voters for their loss. Nor will they regain power by caricaturing the supposedly illiberal and unappreciative middle class.

Nor will they reboot by blustering that they are at war with a president before he takes office as if he was not just elected by a clear majority and an overwhelming electoral college vote.

Nor will they find salvation today by blaming the “messaging,” or tomorrow Kamala Harris, or next week Joe Biden—rather than looking in the mirror and acknowledging the fault, Dear Democrats, is “in ourselves.”

[nonbinaro]

So frustrating to me to see a mostly reasonable post about something like, how to deal with election distress or build community or protest, something inclusive and positive and helpful, and then op tacks on a bit of their personal pet bigotry and completely invalidates and alienates Group They Think Is Annoying For Talking About Their Own Oppression. thinking about this a lot wrt the election postmortem and people bending over backwards to victim blame transmascs, but also applies to other groups in other situations (Jews, aspecs, disabled folks, etc)

[killed-by-choice]

“Daphne Roe”, 16 (USA 1988)

The American Journal of Forensic Pathology published a case report from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. The case study detailed the death of a Black teenager from a legal abortion. I have given her the name Daphne Roe here.

Daphne was 16 and pregnant in the second trimester. When she was 21.5 weeks pregnant, she underwent a hypertonic saline abortion.

Up until 26 hours after the saline administered, Daphne seemed to be okay. Then she started having painful cramps and projectile expulsion of amniotic fluid. Daphne started shaking and went into convulsions. She went into shock and died within 2 hours of the start of her symptoms.

Daphne’s autopsy showed the extensive damage throughout the 16-year-old’s body. Her lungs suffered from pulmonary edema with marked vascular congestion, focal areas of atelectasis, and intra-alveolar hemorrhages. The blood vessels in her kidneys, liver, brain, and spleen showed marked congestion. Her postmortem diagnosis included lethal hypernatremia from amniotic fluid embolism.

Amniotic fluid embolism should have been unlikely for Daphne. According to the medical journal, most cases occur in older, multiparous women in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy, labor, delivery, and the immediate postpartum period. A young patient pregnant for the first time would not have been likely to have an amniotic fluid embolism during birth, but thanks to the abortion, Daphne’s bloodstream contained a mixture of amniotic fluid and hypertonic saline.

It’s worth mentioning that saline abortion had already been banned in multiple countries for being too dangerous. A doctor wrote in the July 3, 1972 Journal of the American Medical Association, warning that "Saline amniocentesis abortion has the highest fatality rate of any elective surgical procedure, second only to cardiac transplantation. The ethical, sensible answer to this problem would be to place a moratorium on saline abortions...."

Women — and young girls like Daphne — deserve better than abortion.

(If you think you know who Daphne is and would like to help share her story, please DM me.)

[cool-island-songs]

Anonymous asked:

5 and 12 for ask game :3

hallo :3 (based on this ask game)

5. Has fandom ever ruined a pairing for you?

Nah. If I want to write something badly enough, I'll do it eventually regardless of internet people and their shenanigans. I do like being able to talk to people freely who ship different things to get me thinking about the dynamics I may be interested in myself. The creative mind needs room to breathe and I always want to write things for people who are nice to me. Most people are like this, which is why I think ship war behavior is for short-sighted control freaks, a great way to make your ship toxic by associating it with your bad behavior. This happened to me for a while with Style. But I was shipping it back in 2008, and there are a handful of people I know who might like to see what I'd come up, so you know, in the immortal words of my ma this one time,

12. Is there an unpopular arc that you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?

I genuinely found season 20 to be a fascinating postmortem of the 2016 election, even down to the way they anticipated Hillary would win and that then noticeably messed with the direction it took. I wonder if I would feel differently if I'd seen it as it was airing.

The Elon ball gargling was weird and they did that on Rick and Morty too so I wonder how much he was paying these shows to go soft on him like that. Unless they were like, "Hey, we're Tratt. We'll gargle for free! We have terrible taste!" You know, that's always a possibility. Even so, interesting and weird stuff going on all around imo