#they should genuinely start giving these out to voters

[booasaur]

Something really amazing happened in France, and I think it'd help us in the US to learn about it. Forgive the long read, but I think this is genuinely great both because of what happened and how.

So as some of you might have seen, in a decision historians will debate for years (mostly to figure out just WTF he was thinking, even though he is alive right now and can be asked), the French president, Emmanuel Macron, currently in power and THREE YEARS before the scheduled election, seeing the far right rise in popularity decided to dissolve the assembly and hold snap elections.

577 seats were up for grabs. Remember that number. Since half of that is 288.5, 289 seats are needed for a majority.

The first round happened last week and boy, was it bad. The far right made HUGE gains. It won or was in first place in so many races. And Macron's party ended up third!

Overall, this is how things ended up after the first round:

Far right bloc: 33%

Left bloc: 28%

Macron's centrist party: 20%

Conservatives: 7%

The way the French system works is that if a candidate gets over 50% of the vote, they win outright, and some of the far right did manage that. But, many races went to a runoff.

Immediate projections after were that the far right bloc might win anywhere from 240 to 310 seats, a catastrophe.

A shameful swing to the far right leading to the first time they'll be in power since the 1940s? Yes, but maybe not??

This is where things get interesting.

Unusually, a lot of these runoffs are 3-way, instead of a simpler 2-way choice. And in pretty much every case, that helps the far right.

So on June 30th, the night of the first round, this is how things went down:

Immediately, the left parties put out the call: anywhere they were third, they withdrew and their voters would go over to whoever was running against the far right candidate. Their goal: form a "republican front" to block the far right. The far right cannot get 289 seats.

Macron's bloc was not so...motivated. Different people put out different instructions: in some places, if they were third, they should drop out, but only to help the center left, not far left, in other places, see how far you are, only then drop out, that kind of thing.

The conservative party simply said they won't drop out and won't give their voters instruction either way in races they're not involved in.

Late night developments:

More people in Macron's party are now beginning to realize the situation and starting to coalesce around whichever candidate can beat the far right one. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, from Macron's party, says clearly the priority is to block the far right. BUT, some Macron spokespeople on TV say they'll form a coalition only with the center left and conservatives, splitting the left bloc if needed. Some individual Macronists still saying they won't drop out, even if there's no hope of winning.

Lol.

So, now July 1st:

Only half so far. In one race, where the sister of Marine Le Pen (the far right leader and the face of their movement) was leading, the third place Macronist refused to bow out.

Excellent quote from another Macronist:

Perhaps realizing the same thing, that Macronist in the race against the Le Pen sister now drops out.

In some places, third place Macronists are dropping out DESPITE Macron bewilderingly telling them NOT to?

Halfway through the day:

Of the 311 3-way or 4-way runoffs, the number is down to 135 because of these candidates dropping out: 121 Left, 56 Macronists, 1 conservative.

Oh, there was this, in case people had any doubts about how terrible the far right are:

And to show the selflessness of the left:

July 2:

The deadline to decide if they want to stay in a runoff is today.

A dozen new third place Macronists who said they'd stay in have now dropped out. One got a call from both the PM Attal AND Macron to drop out, signalling the dawning understanding of the importance of this moment.

Even some conservative party members are now backing the left candidate who faces the far right.

A Macronist who had 30.55% of the vote in the first round and came in third to the far right's 33.11% and left's 32.73% and who would have been tempted to stay has dropped out.

The deadline to stay in or not has now passed.

Look at these far right shenanigans!

Macron still being a freaking loser:

July 3rd:

In the end, of the 311 3- or 4-way run offs, only 91 left. Some polls come out that have the far right getting between 190 to 220 seats.

July 4th:

New polls say the balance of the voting itself isn't transferring between the left and center and predictions have risen for the far right, now predicted to get between 210 and 250 seats.

July 5th:

New polls again, left voters now predicted to do better transferring vote to the centrists, decreasing the far right projections again.

However, scandalous reporting emerges: while Attal was trying to fend off the far right, Macron was not only NOT taking the far right seriously, he was undermining efforts to defeat them. His team shrugged off the first round results and celebrated a BIRTHDAY as the results were still coming in?

July 6th:

A few runoffs happened yesterday, nothing much unexpected, some left and center wins.

July 7th:

The day of reckoning. At this point, the expectations are that the far right won't come close to that 289 number but could still easily have the most seats.

GUYS.

It's over and the left are in the lead!

A LOT of cases where a leftist or centrist was 2nd in the first round and now won.

Amazing:

SO many lessons to take from this.

First, you have to vote! You have to. You can't do anything without voting. The freaking French, who'll protest for anything, are showing up to vote. If you're trying to achieve any kind of result and it's not going to happen by January 2025, you have to vote now.

But just as importantly, the left and center (and even conservative) parties made very key decisions. They were all lucky that Attal, who Macron chose, saw the big picture, bigger than indeed Macron could. A stupid selfish centrist leader could have still ruined everything if it were up to him.

TL;DR: After a disastrous first round in the national French elections where the far right was on the cusp of taking power, the left and center formed a strong coalition and through the power of voting and unity, overcame the far right AND their selfish centrist president to win.

[autismswagsummit]

Got a post in my reccomended that reminded me of something I need to make clear, that's gone poorly addressed here until now.

Last year, while you may remember it fondly, the toxicity demonstrated by my voters and fanbase regarding who to vote for (especially during the later rounds) was genuinely atrocious. It moved well beyond the point of lighthearted competition and into genuine vile behavior and often ableism that I cannot let slide as we go further into season 2. This extends to (and is primarily relevant to) Donatello fans. I give you guys a lot of credit for the success and fun of this blog, but it is pertinent that you also remember that Donatello fans in particular were credited with the most cruel attitudes in the wake of Mob's victory. I understand being upset because of a loss, but this is ridiculous.

I am not "calling out" or targeting anyone in particular with this. I am well aware that this behavior does not belong to all of you. The majority of yall are darlings and I couldn't be more grateful for your support. But I let you all off way too easy last time.

Let me make it clear: You are voting on your favorite autistic headcanon/canon character. The metric of "autism swag" does not exist, and should never be used to bully or harass other voters. It's a title that was made up and based off of the names of the other poll bloggers at the time, not a real concept. It is not serious, nobody is winning anything besides a PNG that gets put next to their character if they win.

If I catch wind of any genuine death threats, bigotry, or otherwise unnecessary cruelty sent towards any participants during the course of this season, I will start disqualifying characters. If you cannot keep it civil when polls are live, I see no reason why you should be rewarded with your character's victory.

I deeply apologize to anyone who has been by this cruelty. It is my responsibility as this blog's operator to keep behavior civil, and it's something I've been mishandling up until now. This poll has grown well beyond what I originally thought it would be, it has since day one, and I need to prioritize learning how to handle its reach if it's something I want to continue.

The polls will still run as scheduled, this is not an announcement of a delay or cancelation, simply a firm reminder of where I stand on the harassment demonstrated by people in my follower base.

Thank you for your time and understanding. I hope going forward we can all be kinder to eachother, and understand that at the end of the day, we are here to show love towards our favorites, not hatred towards strangers that have done nothing to you.

[mallardducksaysquack]

Aaaaaaaand the multifandom captor poll results are in!!!

Let’s analyse them one by one before we head out to our designated basements ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

(obviously, major spoilers for Slow Damage, Sweet Pool, Togainu no Chi, Boyfriend to Death and Manakashi no Yuri wa Akaku Somaru as well as descriptions of extreme violence)

(if you are a minor and somehow came across this post, please do NOT proceed)

I recalculated the percentages after excluding the “see answers” votes. Enjoy the MS Excel conditional formatting I had learnt for all the jobs I didn’t get.

Here's the sorted ranking with recalculated percentages:

Let’s now go through the ranking from last to first place.

8. Yuuko (Manakashi no Yuri wa Akaku Somaru) - 0% (0 votes)

No one voted for Yuuko. Very good. FUCK YUUKO.

The snuff-to-necrophilia skullfucking scene might as well have been the vilest shit I have ever seen in my life. I literally had to look away from the screen while censoring this screenshot.

6/7. (tie) - Masami Toono (Slow Damage), Manami Kanzaki (Manakashi no Yuri wa Akaku Somaru) - 2.6% (3 votes)

While I didn’t end up voting for Toono, I actually seriously considered choosing him (alongside Madarame and Taku).

To the three people who did vote for him – you got the ugliest waifu. But hey! You now live in a villa! All of your orifices are safe! Congrats!

Barely anyone has played Manakashi, so I'm positively surprised to see that a couple of Manami enjoyers have showed up.

She might seem very sadistic, but in fact she’s just a pure maiden who will do anything and everything in the name of love. And no matter whether you’ll get choked to death or let her amputate all your limbs with an electric saw, you’ll always have the pleasure to marry her in the end, or at least have her start planning your wedding. Long live the bride and bride!

4/5. (tie) - Strade (Boyfriend to Death), Zenya Okinaga (Sweet Pool) - 8.6% (10 votes)

Looks like the Strade voters want the hammer AND the drill.

I couldn’t understand why anyone would vote for him considering such a low chance of survival until I saw @pesikoshka reblog the poll with a tag saying “strade because he would kill me fast lmao”. Seems like the fast imminent death was in fact an effective selling point!

Genuinely trying to figure out whether the ten of you are such hardcore Zenya simps or just haven’t played the other games. Getting fucked and forced to give birth in a basement until the end of my life does not seem very appealing to me, but I mean, you do you, I guess? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

3. Kei Madarame (Slow Damage) - 14.7% (17 votes)

My personal choice – at least at the time of voting. Sure, he’ll beat the shit out of me, but at least he’ll also grant me relative freedom? I swear I did not vote for Madarame just because I’m so horny for him. This is not a waifu contest. I just like the idea of not spending the rest of my life in a basement.

@mahnati I saw your tags

and let me just say… “as it should have been”. But the nation has spoken, and we have to accept the verdict.

2. Shiki (Togainu no Chi) - 19% (20 votes)

Voting for him has never once crossed my mind. I think I must have been blinded by the fact that I don’t like him. I played TnC about 13 years ago, so my memory is very fuzzy, but I guess you were right about him being a relatively safe option?

1. Taku Murase (Slow Damage) - 44% (51 votes)

What a landslide victory! While I did not end up voting for Taku myself, I truly approve of your choice. After all, he is the literal only character on this list who doesn’t want to hurt you. He’s keeping you imprisoned for your own good. It’s just his lil silly way to protect you ;> It’s time for you to become a guinea pig for his drug research. Enjoy spending the rest of your days in Taku's basement, making sweet love while picking at each other's skin, so that the hallucinatory bugs crawling underneath it can emerge as beautiful butterflies.

That's all for today. Assembly dissolved.

Now go to your basement.

See you never ~ヾ(＾∇＾)

(unless you've voted for Madarame or Shiki - in this case we might bump into each other while roaming around some dilapidated squats and maybe pick a fight)

[cherienymphe]

i don’t want you to think i’m coming at you or anything bc this is coming from a place of genuine respect:

even with the third party votes Kamala still wouldn’t be any where near to beating him in the election. 500,000 wouldn’t have pushed her any higher, i’m afraid. non voters exist bc they refuse to participate in a system that has us fighting for the same rights every year only for them to take it away. voting for both just meant genocide was conditional. that u can accept that if it meant peace for urself. dems have a track record of leaning right and Kamala’s campaign proved that. i hate trump as well and am devastated he’s been elected again, but the same thing would’ve happened under Kamala as well. she still supports genocide, said she’ll amplify her efforts of creating borders n supports fracking.

people have been telling those who keep asking questions about “what they should do” for years and no one bothers to listen bc they are comfortable. the only way for any of us to feel safe is to have America as a whole to be demolished. forming communities and helping one another instead of putting the blame on people who wouldn’t have had an impact anyway.

she referred to herself as top cop. the divide is something they want for all of us as a people. the ones to blame the most are trump voters because they’re the reason he’s in office now. ballots in certain states were being set on fire, bomb threats were sent out and georgia purposefully didn’t send out mail in ballots which rendered them disqualified.

you do not have to reply to this n i don’t know if youll even see it, but i genuinely want you to know that this election was rigged from the very start and a lot of the states that have had problems with their ballots are marginalised communities. voter suppression is apart of this. this happens every election year.

I hear all of that and I don't even disagree with all of that, but the point people make against third party voters (or people who don't vote at all) is that one of those two people will be president. That's just the reality and people always want to bring up third party and such 3 months before Election Day. No offense but I never see any of you campaigning and trying to get people to support third parties the entire 3.5 years between. 3 months before D-Day is too late. It would be wonderful to elect someone who is against genocide and prioritizes what you do but that's not the reality and I believe in living in reality.

Fact of the matter is that third party and none voters believe that if others suffer then we all should suffer. That's what it boils down to for a lot of y'all and y'all can't be bothered that many don't agree with that. I'm not going to apologize because I wanted someone in office who would give me my rights back. It is the truth that we would've had a better chance appealing to Kamala over Trump. They are not the same.

Republicans are now in control of the senate and Trump is about to show you exactly why and how they are not the same at all

[funnuraba]

One thing I will not tolerate is seeing posts about the election saying, "You see? These are normal, everyday people expressing rational concerns!" and the video is an interview with liberal voters who flipped to Trump this time. I'm sorry, but these are not rational people! You get their vote back by waving a set of jingling keys that promises to Change Things from How They Are. That's it. I truly feel that understanding genuine MAGA voters is a better investment of your time and energy, the because they, at least, are looking at facts and going, "this guy will give me the evil shit I want." If someone flipped to Trump when they usually vote Dem, then maybe they're thinking about something, but those thoughts are not connected to their behavior. They are cockroaches jumping around on a keyboard.

This isn't a case of people not paying attention to the campaign trail, because he was already president for four years, it was an unmitigated shit show from start to finish, and his approval rate was rock bottom. Dem voters who flipped to him should not be treated as rational actors,; they should not be interviewed and analyzed; they are Republican Thinkers with a different set of things that make them angry. They're out there saying things like, "He reminds me of Hitler, so I voted for him because he might scare people into ending the war against Ukraine." This is almost a direct quote.

The road to the US presidency is: be vaguely attractive, be charismatic, support are troops; if economy = bad, be the other guy saying, "I will change Economy!" and if economy = good, be the incumbent. That's it. The American median doesn't give a shit about human life or who has what rights or anything else. They want cheap gas and food for their family. Whoever screams about that louder gets their vote, and maybe they'll give lip service to some culture war shit if you interview them. If this election doesn't prove how fake the whole voting-logic theater is, nothing will. They voted to re-elect a child rapist who didn't even reach a mediocre standard the first time around. There's no logic or reason here! His voters are evil, or they're idiots. That's it.

[ribbuster]

hi i’m furious and terrified rn so i’m gonna rant 🤗 being educated on politics right now is so incredibly exhausting 💀 i don’t understand how voters have so many red flags against trump, and yet he still gets votes. america doesnt let felons vote, but theyre allowed to be in office? a sexual predator, no less. trump says so much disgusting and pathetic things about women, and he still is seen as a good man. i am a gay transgender man, and im so severely sick to my stomach thinking about what he could do to my future. i genuinely refuse to come out to anyone else before he’s out of office.

if you give a shit about religion, then lets talk about it. he has said TWICE that his power and overall existence is that of christ, along with having a trump bible. isnt that blasphemous? does the religious view of the person holding your rights really matter when so much is on the line here?

as for prices and our economy, do your research. trumps first term was under obamas economy, which is why it succeeded. bidens term was under trumps economy, which is why it failed. i understand immediately going to what the economy was at the time of the presidency, but that really is not how this works. trump tax is very real and very scary. kamala has promised the decrease of tax for the middle and low class and a tax increase for the upper class, while trump believes the opposite. hes wanting the upper class to pay less and the lower classes to pay more. you would know that if the economy was that important to you to the point where you do your research.

worried about immigration under harris? WRONG!!! harris promises an america in which immigrants are allowed in, all while keeping things level and keeping groups like the cartel out. immigration was so messy under trump because there was so many holes in his plans for it. we as americans need to recognize immigrants, all while making their native homes liveable. immigration effects both parties in many ways, so minimizing it to where the natives are happy with their birth place and dont have to come to america as a last resort should be our prime effort.

“what if its her time of the month?” harris is 60 years old, therefore, she does not get periods anymore. menopause usually starts between the ages of 45 and 55. assuming a woman of 60 years of age is still getting periods is just straight ignorance.

the only views against harris ive seen have all been faulty and rooted in racism and sexism. kamala harris is everything donald trump pretends he is: a friend to everyone, an educated leader, and a gentle hand to those who need it. before you decide to vote next time, do your research. you could be voting for the downfall of our home.

[frasermints]

Hey! The vast majority of non voters are people who are in such maligned, marginalized circumstances that voting has never materially benefitted them ever, but you've never given a shit about their circumstances because you're in a position where voting DOES effect you, and THAT is your privilege!

You calling the poorest, most disabled, most violently oppressed people in the US "at fault" for the political crisis for not voting is actually you being a disgusting classist racist! And also politically illiterate in what a normal voter turnout is under democracy. Genuinely hope you learn to extend empathy to people who've never felt any ounce of political power in their life and RIGHTLY so not trust the system to advocate for them, you vile piece of shit 👍

hey, listen. i know you're angry and probably very very young and likely wouldn't be able to sniff out a case of "not for you, rabbit ears" if it were staring you in the face. but voting does actually materially benefit you, always.

i understand recency bias has influenced a good majority of y'all that have just become eligible or just started to pay attention to ampol in a serious way either since oct 7 or since mid 2023 when campaigning started up again. but it shows your lack of attention, insight, and political knowledge to say that voting does not benefit people that are marginalized. especially voting in us elections.

i am one of those people. i grew up on SNAP and WIC and independently still qualify for SNAP. the only reason i am not on SNAP is because i live with my mother and washington state considers me a dependent with combined income. i have been multiply disabled for my entire life and have more medical debt than you can fathom. i am not white. i am visibly transgender. all of these things impact my ability to vote in person. but you didn't consider any of these things before you sent this, did you?

i also should not have to qualify these things when i make the point to stir and promote political engagement. the only point where i politically have a leg up is that i vote absentee, because my state has mail in ballots by default, and it's somewhat easy to register in washington state. that's it. that's the only part of this where i have it easier.

we all benefit from political engagement. voting is the most crucial part of political engagement. protesting is useless when it is illegal. writing to your representatives is useless when your representatives are fascists. sending money overseas is useless when you are legally no longer allowed to have a job or a bank account. making ragebait posts on twitter and resharing infographics on your insta stories does fuckall when you live in a country ruled by an 80 year old nazi. but you, hiding behind those cute anonymous sunglasses enjoying your time on the internet like the nineteen year old jobless nobody like you are, don't understand that. because you're angry, and you're taking that anger out on someone that is also angry instead of directing it somewhere productive. and here i am doing the same because of it. but i'm also gonna give you some fucking information at the same time. because you wasted my morning sending this to me.

project 2025 is going to happen if we do not vote blue across the board and at that point you will literally not be allowed any form of political engagement. life will be worse for you than it already is now.

also, just because "normal" during a midterm means "less than during the primaries and generals", doesn't mean the turnout we have during the primaries and generals is something good or something to strive for. we need to be better than that if we actually want to move past the stale fucking 80 year old center right democrats we currently have speaking for us. we need to aim for 100% voter turnout. i will not settle for less.

there are also plenty of things elected democrats have done that have materially benefited us. plenty of things the Biden Administration has done! but again none of you fucks are paying attention!

inflation reduction act and medicare - access to prescriptions for disabled people, highlighting insulin caps and the ability to negotiate even lower. we are paying significantly less than we were before this legislation was signed.

bipartisan infrastructure law - specific provisions for women and minority owned businesses, public transport, fish and wildlife, indigenous land.

bipartisan safer communities act - gun control legislation, expanding access to telehealth under medicaid and CHIP, expanding the medicaid and CHIP networks, allows NICS to look into potentially disqualifying juvenile records and closes the "boyfriend loophole", provides multiple grants for multiple mental health services.

respect for marriage act - defines marriage as any valid legal union between two people and

DEA rescheduling of cannabis - oct 2022 biden asked the DEA to consider rescheduling cannabis. reschedulings are rarely denied - deschedulings are rarely approved. this will almost guaranteed happen.

electoral count act reform (2) - makes it exceedingly difficult for another january sixth to happen

local democrats also codified abortion access and protections in michigan, ohio, and washington. local republicans have been a nightmare for it in florida and arizona. dook at what julie mccluskie has done for colorado.

and again, with resources like how to vote in every state, the excuse of "i can't" is lazy as hell at this point. people can literally show up at your door and help you fill out an absentee ballot or get to a polling station to vote curbside, people are allowed at the voting booth to help you with a language barrier or processing issue if you need it.

but. like i said. continue to be angry. continue to rage in my inbox, behind your anonymous sunglasses. continue to be disengaged. and then be all fucking shocked pikachu face when trump and the like-minded GOP get voted in, and everyone in southwest asia gets bombed to shit, and every queer USian gets legislated out of existence, and every latino not born here gets deported. continue to make this a me issue, and not a disengaged voter bloc issue. because this is all about me, someone that has voted in every single election since august 2018, and totally not about the youth vote that has notoriously been disengaged and fucking useless in american politics. sure babe.

[rosaleendhu]

Some tips and tricks for working through your ballot

Okay, so voting, especially in presidential years, can be kind of overwhelming. So here's some tricks for planning your votes if you want to hit every issue on your ballot. I'm gonna try to keep this neutral.

Get a sample ballot for your voting area. This might get mailed to you. You might have to check a website or something. Depends on your state. But get a list of everything you get to vote on. All my other suggestions are going to assume you've got a sample ballot to work with.

Go through and mark the stuff you've already made up your mind about. You can still revisit it, but it's going to give you a reference point for the next step. And it's good to know where you might be able to save some time.

Find a voter guide that matches your values reasonably well. Try not to be a single issue voter here, because some races have nothing to do with whatever your issue is. Searching by your political party might be a good way to start. Your preferred news source might also have a list of recommendations. There's nothing wrong with having more than one guide! Some guides will only focus on big issues, or ones that they have strong biases on.

If the voter guide you found claims to match your values, but doesn't match any of your currently planned votes, you've got some thinking to do about your political identity and the trustworthiness of the guide. If it matches about half? Well, look at the reasons provided by the guide for what they are saying.

IF YOU CAN FIND A NEUTRAL VOTER GUIDE, DO IT. California straight up publishes and mails one out. The most valuable thing it's got is a brief NEUTRAL explanation of what the props mean and what they will change. Sometimes legal language can get really lengthy and confusing, when the whole law can be summed up in like three sentences for laypeople.

Generally speaking, if a proposition doesn't pass, nothing changes. So ask what it will change. Ask who it will help. And ask who it will hurt. And if you can't find any explanations, a no vote means you are voting for no changes. If you are abstaining, you are saying you're happy with either result.

Vote411 and Ballotpedia are neutral websites that just compile official information. If you can't find a guide with the right biases, you can hit these up for official websites, and official text. One of these might be how you found your sample ballot info in the first place!

What about those small town races and issues that the big guides ignore?

Between Vote411 and Ballotpedia, you should at least be able to find if a candidate has an official website. You should be able to pick out some kind of political stance from what they say there. And you should be able to find their endorsements, which is really valuable if the rest of the website is too generically "PLZ VOTE 4 ME!!!!"

If you've gone through all of the above tips and you've still got a race or issue that you cannot find any info on, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SKIP IT. Some candidates just don't try for whatever reason. Some issues are so niche that you may genuinely not care. So if you tried to have an opinion and just couldn't? Yeah, that can happen.

As a note, sometimes you will have a guide that does both endorsements and recommendations. Or something to that effect. That's going to mean there are some issues they have strong feelings about. And there are other issues where they are either closer to neutral OR they are reluctantly pointing out which option is least bad. Personally, I'd rather vote for least bad over abstaining, because it at least moves the scale a smidge away from most bad. YMMV.

Anyway, you've now worked out your sample ballot! So now you can apply it to your actual ballot! Yay! Good job! You deserve a treat!

[brothermoth]

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

—My man Sun Tzu, Art of War

--------

I don't think you guys understand how the US government works. I'm not straight up defending anyone here, I just think that folks need to understand how many gears are all working at once.

First of all the president really can't do shit. Very few presidents have maintained enough social and political power to actually pass their own ideas. FDR was a powerhouse of PR. He was popular. He was charismatic and the people loved him and he was president at the right time to actually force his bills through. Kennedy had quite a bit of sway that helped him start Civil Rights bills rolling through, and LBJ was riding off years of civil unrest, and he made a lot of compromises in 1964 to get those bills passed.

If Congress doesn't like you, you're fucked. It's stupid as hell for candidates to make so many promises because so much of that stuff is simply out of their control. They are surrounded by Senators and Representatives and aids and staffers and secretaries, and often their every idea is put to some sort of vote. The Democrats are not do-nothings. Neither are the Republicans. The Democrats are a very diverse party of very diverse people, which makes it so much harder for them to get things done. For every lukewarm liberal there's someone who genuinely cares for the people in this country.

Picture this: you're a Dem senator from a teeny blue state like fucking Maryland or something. You're a speck. You've got the senator from New York (a state with a pretty even red/blue split if you look at the numbers) who has to appease the rural voters and the city voters. These tiny blue states? Those are the ones who say the stuff you like. The problem is, they're outmatched by the huge states who know they can't swing too far left or right because they need those votes. A hard-line red or blue politician would have a super hard time getting in office in a big blue state. Hell, they have trouble in big red states too.

Those are the people making the decisions. A bunch of shitheads arguing and nobody has enough actual power to get their specific issues legislated on. You compromise. You have to compromise because you DO have to make everyone at least somewhat satisfied. The president just puts a stamp on it and a little bow and kisses it goodnight. Sometimes he says "hey guys why don't we—" and nobody can hear because everyone is yelling already. Some presidents shout louder than others. Trump is a facade. The president is the guy you yell at so the actual shitballs can keep typing away behind the scenes. Trump himself had no fucking power. You think they let his ass do anything? Fuck no. That is how every president works. The president is just the guy you look at. Don't fucking forget that.

Joe Biden himself is not rawdogging Lockheed Martin and playing catch with Israel like his son in the backyard. Congress sways red. Congress has always trended toward right of center, and if the president doesn't like that he can't do Jack shit about it. We should absolutely stop sending weapons to little baby Genocider, don't get me wrong, but it's far more complex than you think. We can't do a single thing for Palestinians if we don't play politics. There's no option not to. You protest, you hound your reps, you threaten and you VOTE. Vote for people who are at least willing to be swayed. You want candidates willing to fold under pressure and give the people what they want.

We do not know Kamala Harris. We don't know her own personal beliefs, we don't know her as a person or a voter. We know what she wants us to know, and it is her job to play both sides. One woman tug of war.

She needs the lukewarm liberals. She needs to tow the line as much as she possibly can because she cannot win if she doesn't. It's not what you want to hear and it's upsetting but it's politics. Kamala is as far left as a presidential candidate could possibly outwardly express.

Jimmy Carter ran as a segregationist in Dixie Georgia. If you saw him campaign, you'd never want to vote for him in a million years. You know what he did when he got into office? Goddamn integration, baby. Because he knew how to play the game. You tow the line, get your votes. Don't say anything to crazy and don't make any outlandish promises.

Leftists are not nearly a big enough voter base to cater to. It's unfortunate, but it's true. Kamala likely supports cutting most, if not all ties with Israel (based on released private comments) but she could never say that AND win the election. You know who is more important? Lukewarm blues. Fucking old people, man. They suck but they are the largest voter turnout.

I'm a history student. I've studied so many fucking political trends it would make your head spin. The side that wins is the patient one. You think the Civil Rights act was the result of a few years of boycotts? Fuck no. It was hundreds, thousands of activists over decades whittling away at the barricades to progress. It's so easy to put barricades up but they're a lot harder to take down.

No genocide in history has ever been stopped by government action. Government is woefully inefficient, riddled with bureaucracy and puzzles like an ISpy book. It's really disheartening to hear and I'm sorry. The Rwandan genocide fizzled out after millions were massacred. The Holocaust didn't stop because it was a genocide, it stopped because WW2 was a land dispute and Germany lost. This is not to say that politicians didn't care—many many of them did—but the people who want progress are blocked at every turn.

You know what you do? You help people. Donate! Work with humanitarian orgs, spread awareness, lend an ear to folks who have escaped and are traumatized by what they've been through. You do what you can for the people who you can do something for, and you vote. It's the only say you have over your government and it's frustrating, but revolution fucking sucks. Even if you think it's for a good cause, trust me. The right people never ever get into power after a revolution and the instability makes things so much worse.

The one big rule of airplane safety is put on your mask before you help others. I'm telling you right now, if you don't keep whittling at the fucking American government you are not going to have a voice to shout with.

Understand how your fucking government functions. You're not doing anyone any favors if you don't. Learn what actually works. Learn from the past and the people who have succeeded because others before them whittled at the barricades. Progress is slow and demoralization makes it slower.

Any leftist worth their salt is the sort of person who can take a step back and look at things. You HAVE to understand why things happen, how they happen. Why do you think fascist governments go for education first?

Please please please learn how to learn. It makes you effective and it makes you dangerous. If you don't know your enemy you might as well fight naked.

----------

[iclimbtreestofeelalive]

in reference to your tags; i firmly stand against "both sides bullshit", actually! i don't disagree that we should be supporting politicians who want to make things better for everyone. however.

there has been a trend for decades if not hundreds of years of discounting poor people of all races in america, especially in the south. poor people living in the south are discounted as stupid on a regular basis in the news, in popular culture, and in the cultural consciousness. think "inbred people from alabama", think mater from cars, think southern accents being universally used as a shorthand for "stupid, illiterate hick". because of this, liberal and leftist politicians have repeatedly discounted and ignored the south, despite its history of coal unions, mutual aid, and disenfranchisement.

i never said that all politicians are old money (though most are) and i never said they were out of touch (though most are). "politician" is a career path that lends itself to people with financial stability, to people with free time, and to people who are willing to lie to get power. it's a fault of the lack of accessibility; people with money and time are more likely to win elections because they have more time to campaign, to advertise. that's why you don't see politicians who work retail while campaigning, that's why they're largely older, whiter, maler.

and therein we find the problem. if politics are only accessible to people who *already* have money, and time, and wiggle room to fail, then we have a political system wherein the upper class are the only ones who have any say. poor southerners recognize this, but not everybody is fancy and eloquent, or had the time and energy to spend all day reading political theory jargon; ergo, "all politicians are shady" or "i don't trust that man". they understand the problem, probably better than you do, but people discount them as conspiracy theorists and pessimists.

the issue isn't that democratic politicians are wrong or bad. the issue is that they overlook a vital demographic of voters when they discount the south as a bigoted wasteland. it's classism, and it's why democrats consistently fail to win the south's votes. republicans make their media free, they appeal to the genuine sense of abandonment by a system meant to protect them that poor people experience. if leftists recognized this and finally started to tailor their campaigning accordingly, we would see an unprecedented social shift in america.

but what do i know. i'm just a dumb hick who grew up in the woods and read too many books for his own good, who has a good vocabulary because his dumb hick parent taught him greek and latin roots to give him a leg up in the piss-poor southern education system.

okay i'm gonna say something and you all have to give me a chance. ready?

we need to stop making fun of poor american southerners who distrust the government. it's real easy to call them all conspiracy theorists and dismiss them, but half the time, its built off of a genuine feeling of being abandoned by the infrastructure meant to keep them safe.

in appalachia, a lot of people lost their homes because of coal mining operations. a lot of people worked in those mines, and then when the mines stopped being profitable, they got tossed out with the bathwater. a lot of appalachia is poor, malnourished, and i don't blame them for not trusting rich politicians who dismiss them as stupid and lower class.

if yall actually listened to half the things poor southerners say, you'd realize that a Lot of common leftist complaints are virtually identical to the rural grandma who doesn't hold with electronic money and politicians. it stems from a genuine feeling of abandonment and ostracization by the people who run the country. functionally, someone living paycheck to paycheck in the city in a tiny apartment has infinitely more in common with someone from rural appalachia than a politician. high rent, high taxes, food insecurity, feeling lied to by those in power, a general sense of frustration. it just sounds fancier coming from a city mouth than one with shitty teeth and a southern accent.

tl;dr stop dismissing southern people as stupid. they're absolutely right not to wholeheartedly trust politicians, because they've been fucked over by them time and time again, and honestly, id rather talk to a southern person who openly distrusts their representatives than someone from the city who wholeheartedly believes that Frederick Jamestown OldMoney III genuinely cares what people think and can be convinced to change his ways.

[uboat53]

All right, is it really so much to ask that someone, somewhere publish some genuinely sophisticated political analysis? (Warning, this is mostly a complaining SHORT RANT (TM))

INTRODUCTION

Many of you may be aware that I read a ton of news and I tend to prefer sources that do more long-form and long-term analysis, that's why I read sources like NPR, Slate, and Vox. More and more, though, I find that even those sources aren't stepping up and providing the kind of political analysis that I feel like any sophisticated professional who spends their life enmeshed in politics should be able to provide.

Let me give an example.

EXAMPLE

A couple of days ago, AP-NORC came out with a poll that showed that voters were concerned about Biden mainly for his age and Trump mainly for his character and criminality. This isn't the first such poll and it probably won't be the last and they tend to be fairly consistent in this regard. Several different news sources covered this poll and what did they write? They wrote that voters are concerned that Biden is too old and that Trump is too corrupt to be president.

Seriously, that's it. That's all I've been able to find in the last several weeks that this topic has been widely discussed. That's not sophisticated analysis, that's just regurgitating the poll findings! What would sophisticated political analysis look like? I'm so glad you asked.

COVERAGE

Let's start with examining coverage. At this point we can safely say that news coverage is driving both of those impressions. The constant drumbeat of Trump's indictments and court appearances is certainly driving the impression of his corruption and criminality while many news sources, particularly right-wing news sources, are deeply invested in covering any verbal and physical slip-ups Biden may make and presenting them as age-related.

RESPONSE

But that's just the start. After that, we look at the response by the candidates, their campaigns, and their allies. At this point, the Trump response has generally been to angrily refute all of the charges leveled against him. There has, in fact, been a full court press on the part of Trump, his campaign, and allies in government in the media to present all of the charges against him as a conspiracy to prevent him from running for office.

The Biden camp, meanwhile, has responded to concerns about his age… well, they haven't really responded to them. I mean, sure the White House and his campaign occasionally put out anodyne statements about how he's doing fine and it's all overblown, but I would doubt most people are even aware of this because they don't get much attention.

So wait a second, one camp has furiously responded to the negative perceptions about their candidate and the other one has barely responded at all? Why would that be? Again, glad you asked, it's strategy time.

TRUMP STRATEGY

Let's talk about timing. Trump has to win a contested primary election in the spring and then the general election in the fall. The spring primary will be in the middle of several of his trials which will limit the amount of time he can devote to campaigning in person. His best hope is to use the publicity of the trials to try to boost his profile during the primary and drown out coverage of the in-person campaigning his opponents will be doing.

This is a double-edged strategy for him. On the one hand, Republican primary voters are primed to buy his argument that it's all a witch-hunt, but the rest of the voting public doesn't seem to be buying it at all. There's a risk that, even if Republicans think he's being unfairly targeted, they may vote for someone else regardless in hopes of having a better chance of beating Biden. Still, the field remains divided and, given the rules of a Republican primary, unless those who vote against him coalesce on a single candidate, he's likely to win the majority of delegates as long as he keeps a fervent core of supporters.

All of this does hurt him in the general election, but at this point there doesn't seem to be a way around that. The trials are going to happen no matter what he says and, even if he gets off, lots of unsavory information is probably going to come out. In any case, he needs to win the primary before he even worries about the general election, so his current strategy is probably the best one to take.

BIDEN STRATEGY

But what about Biden? Biden isn't being seriously challenged in the primaries. Sure, some no-name candidate might challenge him and get 20%-30% in a state or two and get some news coverage for a week or so, but there's no realistic chance at this point that he's going to lose the primaries. His only real concern electorally is the general election in the late fall.

If Biden were to knock down the age attack right now, likely by sitting for long discursive interviews and doing athletic type photo-ops, he still has over a year for his enemies to think of another attack against him, one that likely involves his son's legal troubles. Better to let his enemies continue the age attack which he can easily knock down sometime later, probably next summer, than to give them time to find a more effective line of attack.

Is there a risk that the attack solidifies that impression in the minds of some voters? Sure, but no worse than the risk of any other line of attack. At least the age-related one is fairly easy to knock down as long as the candidate is fit enough to do so.

OVERALL STRATEGY

If you paid attention to all of this, I think you'd agree there's a reasonable case to be made that Biden is in a better position than Trump is. Voter's negative perceptions about Trump are based on coverage that is largely out of his control and his best line of response to help him win a crowded primary is one that will continue to damage him in the general election.

Meanwhile, voter's negative perceptions about Biden are largely driven by coverage that he has the capacity to refute but has largely chosen not to. It's also something that he can refute later by, you know, just showing himself being fit and hearty and, in the meantime, the narrative crowds out other, possibly more effective, lines of attack.

CONCLUSION

As you can see, I did this in just a few paragraphs, probably not even a full page of actual text. Am I wrong? Maybe, but it's not obvious that I am, is it? And even if I am wrong, I guarantee that I am at least looking at the right things.

So where's the sophisticated political analysis? Gone, I think. Is anyone reading anything these days that's actually doing stuff like this or it all just a wasteland now?

[morlock-holmes]

I'm sorry, this is a long essay that I can't bring myself to read because it is filled with the absolute double standard you have begun to use in all of your analysis.

Joe Biden said out loud that he does not support defunding the police.

During his tenure as president he did not defund any police departments, and in fact no police departments were defunded.

Oh, some budgets were temporarily reduced by municipal leaders, but you and I both agree that's not what "defund the police means".

So if Biden says, "I am against X" and then in fact X does not happen, it is reasonable for the voters to conclude that Biden is totally on board to do X and it's definitely going to happen.

Meanwhile, Trump says he wants to lock Clinton up, but it doesn't happen.

So, just like with Biden, we should assume that he's secretly building up to it in the...

No? We should assume he's just lying about it and isn't actually going to do it?

That seems... Different. To what you just said was reasonable for the voters to think about Biden.

And if Trump tries to get the election declared for him, which he did, with basically no evidence of fraud except that he lost, we should assume he won't do it again because, uh...

Look, the Claremont Institute recently published an article explaining that I cannot morally be considered a US citizen and that in an ideal world I would be legally stripped of my citizenship because of what I say when I talk to you.

The Proud Boys spent years coming to Portland to give speeches about following my friends and neighbors into bathrooms to beat the shit out of them. Before Tiny Toese was arrested he gave a speech about beating the shit out of some of my best friends a mile from where my mom lives.

So, hey, if I said that I think the congressional Republicans and Trump and his campaign are sympathetic to all that stuff and will secretly start laying the groundwork for it if they remain in power

How the fuck is that any different from what you are saying about Biden?

I'm really starting to get genuinely offended by these dispatches from an alternate universe where the Democrats are all in thrall to their radical base and the Republicans are burning for moderate compromise and the Democrats just won't budge from their crazy positions!

If Donald Trump failing to lock up Hillary means you should ignore him when he says he won't, shouldn't we, by the *exact same goddamn logic* agree that Biden ain't gonna defund the police?

Or, conversely, if we are judging the parties by the actions of their most radical voters, then aren't the Republicans just as fucking bad and dangerous as the Democrats?

You keep explaining that it's so obvious that we have to judge the Democrats by what their craziest voters say they want, while pretendin that the craziest Republicans just... don't exist and certainly shouldn't effect how we think about the party.

As someone who lives in a town where the craziest Republicans repeatly visit during the summer with the express purpose of starting fights and giving speeches about beating the shit out of my friends, I'm beginning to find this genuinely fucking offensive.

This does lend some insight into voting patterns, which is that a lot of people ignore both what the candidates do AND what they say.

You Won't "Beat Trump at His Own Game"

Post for July 8, 2024 5,500 words, 25 mins

[ @morlock-holmes ]

Like, can you guys imagine Donald Trump ever admitting that he lost a debate? Let alone imagine his party *withdrawing him as nominee* because of it? And we're going to beat him at his own game by, uh, doing literally the exact opposite of his game?

[ mitigatedchaos ]

Your plan is to beat Trump by being better at being Trump than Trump is? Damn, son. You got a Texas oil baron lined up or something?

-★-

I watched the first hour of the debate. At one point the moderator asked Trump about abortion. As the Republican candidate, this is a tricky question for him, since evangelical voters would like abortion banned in most cases (and thus presumably every state). Trump then argued that he was leaving it up to the states, and the states would decide. He says that he agrees that the abortion pill should be legal, and agrees with the court ruling in favor of it, and that he supports the exceptions for rape, incest, and health of the mother. Further, he's against third trimester and 'post-birth abortion.'

While banning most first trimester abortion only has 38% support, banning most third trimester abortion has 80% supermajority support. The views of the median voter are in tension: they don't want to force women to have babies they don't want, but they also don't want to kill babies.

Biden stumbles in his delivery of his canned line in response, which appeared to be based on the idea that strict limits on abortion access would de facto nullify the exceptions.

Democrats have repeatedly lied about abortion. Republicans have repeatedly lied about abortion. The whole argument about 'after-birth' abortions appears to be based on political fencing with bills, which Democrats also do. (Something like the classic, "Oh, sure, it's illegal, but will you make it super double illegal? Oh, you won't? That means you support it, then.")

(I should note, at the time, I wrote, "I don't think Americans should trust a single word either of these guys is saying.")

But later, Biden trips over Roe v. Wade and the three trimesters to the point that it's unclear just what the hell he means.

The main CNN video doesn't support comments, but there's a clip that does. The top comment?

we're fucked as a nation

In my opinion, these comments overall agree with my post...

Man, both of these men are so old and tired, though Biden is the older and tireder of the two. ... This guy's like a cat with 6 months to live.

It isn't that Biden "lost" the debate, as in he morally failed to engage in enough preparation. The man is simply too old; no amount of preparation would have worked.

-★-

With the abortion argument, we get a good example of Trump's pattern of exaggeration: "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states. Every legal scholar, all over the world. The most respected."

There was a substantive debate about this, and in fact there were a number of legal scholars that believed that the issue was, on a legal basis, on shaky ground. This was a common argument over the past two decades. There was not a complete, unanimous consensus.

People talk about Trump lying a lot. For a lot of that, I think they have this sort of thing in mind, but I don't take it all that seriously. This is salesman lying. He is trying to sell you a Trump steak.

Each message has a [social] component and a [content] component. Trump is weighting the [content] component lower, making it less accurate, but the [social] component lacks tactical depth.

I think this gets into some sort of personality conflict.

All politicians lie. They put on a nice suit, tell you some flowery speech, and then go bomb some country in the middle east. Obama was a genius at public speaking, like Hollywood President tier, but the drone war continued.

So, to make up an example (that's less controversial), a regular politician will start talking about "the human dignity" of guys that break into cars, or something, and the initial language will be quite empathetic. But rather than going where this is supposed to go, and improving the quality and safety of the prisons, they'll get you to agree to this nice-sounding language as part of a multi-step maneuver, and then they won't fix the prisons, and they won't properly rehabilitate the guys that break into the cars, and they'll just... release them, to break into your car.

So if someone starts talking about "human dignity," I start looking for where they hid the knife. (I also consider their personal record; I'm willing to entertain that they're serious, but I have to see the evidence of pragmatism first.)

Trump comes in and he starts talking about how, "All the legal scholars agree with me, all over the world. The most prestigious." This translates to, "I'm popular. I make great decisions. Vote for me."

It's so crass that it has a tactical depth of like, one. It's not part of some long and complicated chain. There is no sophisticated ideological permission structure being setup. He's not trying to redefine the language. There is no second maneuver.

So to me, this feels safe.

I'm not expecting to be attacked from some high-level social plane or whatever, so I can relax. This man is a salesman. A lot of what he says is bullshit, but he just wants to sell me something.

I know it's bullshit. He knows it's bullshit. He knows I know it's bullshit. But this deception is so unsophisticated that it loops back around to being somewhat honest, or even friendly. (It's like if you had a mandatory prison gang fight, and technically, they have to "fight" you, but they're not really trying.) Obviously it results in a lower rate of information transmission, though. (What will he actually do? It can be hard to say.)

This is not the same as "lock her up," from Trump's 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. That was concerning, and in fact in the 2016 election I voted for Clinton. But then, he didn't follow through on that.

-★-

Thinking from the other direction, why would someone find the general, "we have the best cows," approach to be disconcerting rather than just annoying? (The Wall was kinda also like that. It's just a big, dumb object.)

Well, if you're used to everything having three layers of social misdirection in order to protect everyone's reputations and social position, and using this to demonstrate loyalty to others, maybe the crass rhetoric makes it sound like anything could be up for sale, with enough votes.

So you're supposed to say the stuff that your network socially agree sounds nice, and if you aren't saying the stuff, that might mean you're planning to coordinate to do something bad. (Why aren't you following the network? Do you think you're better than other people? Sounds like you might be planning to subordinate others.)

But the actual content of the messages doesn't get properly evaluated.

To quote some swing voters from the famous Reddit "sanewashing" post:

Only one participant here agrees we should "defund the police." One woman says "That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said." 50% of people here say they think Biden was privately sympathetic to the position. We are explaining the actual policies behind defund the police. One woman interrupts "that is not what defund the police means, I'm sorry. It means they want to defund the police." "I didn't like being lied to about this over and over again" says another woman. "Don't try and tell word don't mean what they say" she continues. Rest of group nodding heads.

During the early part of the 2014-2022 era, when we had the feminist push, there was a term called "mansplaining," intended to mean roughly "a men condescendingly explaining things to a woman."

In discussion with each other, men may try to assess who is the most knowledgeable or sharpest (in order to lead the discussion), so they may throw a piece of information out there like it's a tennis ball, and they expect you to hit it back. So a man might tell a woman about a book that she wrote, and then expect her to respond with some insight about the passage he was discussing.

From what I've seen, among men this is social statusy, but it's not like, hardcore. From some women, we got tweets along the lines of, "How dare he lecture me about my own book! Does he think he knows better than me about the book I wrote myself?!" It's basically mismatched systems of etiquette. (An autistic woman might have powered through and info dumped about the book to the man anyway until he got tired of the topic, and perceived no insult.)

This was a triple failure.

First, the men did not realize that the women (this kind of woman) have different discursive norms from men, and adapt in a way that makes them feel more comfortable in mixed spaces.

Second, the women did not realize that this was not a male plot to subordinate women. Feminists connected this etiquette mismatch to a larger ideological construct ("patriarchy"). Some of them are probably still angry to this day.

Third, the two groups largely did not reach a mutual understanding on this issue, except for a few honest people (and people less prone to viewing the opposite sex adversarially) in small spaces, coming into maturity.

Which is to say, in this clash of norms, the view based on multiple layers of social indirection as a form of politeness may be socially astute within its own culture, but may be socially maladapted outside of that culture.

Because these social norms are social, they are a product of a local social equilibrium rather than a more universalist analysis, which in practice makes them more particular. Compare economic or scientific ideas, which, while they exist in a social context, have a non-social framework for discovery and resolution.

I don't find it that difficult to understand the median voter wanting first trimester abortion to be legal and third trimester abortion to be illegal.

In the same way, to the median voter and not just conservatives, a slogan like "defund the police" means "defund the police." A lot of the more confrontational slogans produced by this process sound positively unhinged to outsiders - in a way that makes Donald Trump seem normal by comparison.

-★-

There are a good number of right-wing grifters who are out there regularly lying. I don't post much about them, because they just aren't that interesting. The field of politics is constantly shifting, anyway.

But I think it's worth considering how Democrats got into this situation.

To pick another Trump example, some readers may have seen this 2018 video of Trump telling Germany they're too dependent on imported Russian natural gas, and the German delegation smiling at him.

I vaguely recall that this was part of a Trump push to sell more liquefied natural gas from the US to the Europeans.

Of course, Russia did expand their war with Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Germany was importing 55% of their natural gas from Russia.

Brookings interviewed some economists about how the results went down. Russia cut down on gas supplies into Europe in 2021, reducing the amount of stored gas in Germany by the expansion of the war in early 2022. They raised and lowered the amount of gas coming in to Germany until the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline in mid 2022.

So it's likely that Putin's Russia were, in fact, trying to gain leverage over Germany. Estimates from industry CEOs predicted a major recession.

The economists predicted that the situation would be expensive, but manageable, and the damage to Germany's economy was less than expected. Why?

First, the demand for gas was not perfectly inelastic. The dire predictions were based on gas as a bottleneck causing a cascade of missing production inputs ("for want of a bolt, the bulldozer is lost; for want of a bulldozer, the factory is lost; for want of a factory..." one might say). It turned out that it was possible to substitute at multiple points in the production process, so more gas-intensive components could be imported if needed. (As the war was in Ukraine, Germany was not blockaded.)

Second, gas was imported from other sources, including Norway... and liquefied natural gas from the US. (A second source claims that 5-6% of the gas is still coming from Russia.)

Third, the disruption was already on the horizon from 2021, so it was easier to coordinate actors.

So was Trump right? Was he wrong?

Germany was getting about 26% of its energy from natural gas in 2021. If 55% of that is from Russia, that makes for about 14% of Germany's energy supply, not including imported Russian oil. As of 2014, Russian troops were already occupying Crimea.

What I want to argue is that, less than right or wrong, "Getting ≥14% of your energy from a powerful geopolitical rival, particularly one currently engaged in a military occupation just two countries away, gives them potential leverage, and this makes it risky," is obvious.

Going, "Haha, look at this ignorant buffoon who thinks that Putin might exploit providing us with 1/8th of our energy for leverage," is just... It's cringe.

Germany had to reactivate their coal power plants to deal with the energy crisis, but they still had coal power plants to reactivate. The long-term storage problem for renewables hasn't been resolved yet. If they had an energy economy that was 60% natural gas, 40% renewables, and 0% nuclear, they'd be in an even worse spot.

(Lately it looks like people are making a stab at sucking CO2 out of the air and converting it to fuel. Will that be online as a replacement in 2030? That's harder to say. It would be fortunate, because combustible fuels don't have the same security concerns as fission power.)

-★-

Anyhow, that was all background.

How did Democrats get into this mess?

Well, obviously Democrats and left-leaning people in the media made a huge deal of Trump as the exception, Trump as the risk, Trump as would-be dictator, Trump as the erosion of norms, and so on. And of course, the Covid-19 pandemic landed on Trump's term and was very abnormal.

The point of running Joe Biden, from the perspective of the median voter, was a "return to normalcy." This is what voters were telling them by picking the pre-Trump Vice President from Obama's term.

After Trump got in and stopped caring about pursuing Hillary Clinton, I found it hard to buy the idea of Trump as an emergency.

Democrats always seemed to use "Trump is an emergency" as an excuse to behave in worse ways. For example, Democrats argued that protests against lockdowns of community centers like churches were too dangerous to be allowed due to the risk of spreading the virus, but then argued that nation-wide race riots needed to be allowed and that this was the position of 'science' as an institution.

Did the race riots accomplish anything of value? No. The opportunity for normal police reform was squandered on braindead slogans like "Defund the Police," which swing voters think are insane. There was a significant increase in homicide, and this is before accounting for significantly-improved trauma surgery since 1990. If LA is any indication, most of the victims of the increase in homicide were black and hispanic.

They complained constantly about Trump eroding institutional norms... and then eroded institutional norms. By 2022, trust in mass media among independents and Republicans collapsed to 27% and 14% respectively.

This is going to be a long-term problem; conspiracy theories are proliferating due to a lack of trust in sense-making institutions, and sense-making institutions have had their reputations shredded by wasteful partisan behavior that barely moved the needle electorally.

One way to assess how much someone values something is to ask what they're willing to give up to get it. Ask any Democrat on Twitter - what concessions are they willing to make to the rest of America to ensure Trump doesn't get back into office? The answer is none.

A "return to normalcy" would mean using the racial identitarians as expendable shock troops and then dropping them after the election, not getting shut down by the courts for doing "race conscious" policy.

The administration would quietly make changes to shore up the practical (not mere messaging) legitimacy of the institutions in order to cover for the spent legitimacy from the Trump era and run a boring administration focused on policies with supermajority support.

So now Democrats are the weird theater kids, and Trump is the normal guy. (And he's already been President, so publishing a magazine cover calling him Hitler just comes off as hysterics.)

-★-

Why did this happen?

First, as the guy that won the election, Joe Biden is the primary guy with the political capital to reshape the Democratic coalition's priorities. In 2020, Joe Biden had the same problem he has in 2024: he's too old.

There is no Democrat strategic command to impose discipline on the coalition members. There are lots of factions all fighting each other to pursue policy that's aligned with their own interests rather than the national interest, and it's resulting in what I call a coalitional interest deadlock. (For a relatively uncontroversial example, Left-NIMBYs and boneheaded environmentalists oppose housing construction, while pro-immigrationists bring in millions of people... who, when they get here, would need housing. One of these two factions needs to lose.)

Nasty identitarian rhetoric requires no immediate material concessions from these factions, nor does it require any discipline, so we get nasty identitarian rhetoric that does not benefit the country in any way, and is not connected to positive programs (that would require actual work and limiting claims to what's realistic, which defeats the point).

Some of you are probably familiar with the idea of a "leveraged buyout." This is when a private equity firm buys a company with debt, and then typically put it on the balance sheet of the company they just bought out. A firm with too much debt is said to be "overleveraged."

The second problem is that Democrats are epistemically overleveraged. They are making too many bets based on incomplete information, and a lot of the assumptions they're making in the process are not accurate.

Some tech-related online right-wingers believed that mass schooling was having almost no effect on learning or performance, and that it was almost entirely just selecting for conscientiousness and intelligence.

Learning losses from online schooling during the pandemic showed that mass schooling was having an effect - by removing it.

However, in researching the literature on education shortly before the pandemic, I found that getting educational results beyond what schools were achieving was very difficult, and that many educational interventions would fade out. Charter schools only produced modestly better results (for about the same price), in a way I couldn't differentiate from selection effects on parents. (I did find that online charters performed horribly. Well, I guess that's one finding verified by a larger-scale experiment.)

It isn't a matter of funding. Baltimore schools are highly funded and get terrible results.

We lack means to convert funding into results.

(Roland Fryer reportedly managed to beat the average for one class, but as a sign of things to come, he got politically sidelined in 2019. Naturally, he's an economist.)

Line voter Democrats are likely to claim that sub-par US school results are due to underfunding. The condition of scientific institutions is not as bad as right-wingers think it is; researchers know that just blindly slapping more funding on to education won't work. However, the guys in between, the 'officers' of the Democratic coalition, are quite happy to leave the line voters in the dark.

They're probably patting themselves on the back, thinking, "I should leave out the most damaging information in order to protect the weak and marginalized," and then not accounting for the possibility that everyone else in their information chain is doing the same thing.

Because of this, we don't get a more serious conversation that would establish a better method to convert funding into results. (This applies to other domains as well. Public transit in the US is ruinously expensive to construct, particularly in CA and NYC. A "car tax" without the ability to practically construct public transit is just a hateful punishment.)

When a Democrat is talking about "beating Trump at his own game," for example, by pretending that Biden did OK at the debate, this is generally of the form, "we should be more aggressive, deceptive, and selfish."

The Democrats are already too deceptive. It's inhibiting their ability to govern effectively. The Democrats are already too aggressive. A number of the online right being read by Chris Rufo and Elon Musk were once self-identified liberals [1] who were driven away and radicalized by the hostile messaging (which was not connected to practical benefits for society, so this isn't "mere selfishness"). Democrats are already selfish enough; forgiving student debt without fixing the system to reduce the origin of that debt polls 30-40 approve-disapprove.

And for the debate itself...

Bro why do we have 70+ year old[s] running for office? Shouldn't we have someone at least young and more modern? This is like watching a retirement home cafeteria fight 😭

Do you think telling someone like that, "Biden didn't lose the debate," sounds, you know, hinged? At the very least, it certainly doesn't inspire trust or confidence.

-★-

A little while ago, collapsedsquid posted:

Seeing a lot of the "This Trump thing is because everyone was so unfair to Romney in 2012 and he lost" out there again and this is fucking abuser logic man, "Why did you make me hit you? If you'd only put away the dishes like I'd asked then this wouldn't have had to happen" shut the fuck up man.

I had been writing a draft response to this.

Basically, seriousness is both a substantive position and a rhetorical stance. The Bush administration undermined the rhetorical stance on the Republican side due to the Iraq War, which was mismanaged, and in which no nuclear weapons were found. (Some old chemical weapons were found, but not an actual development program.)

Throwing the line "binders full of women" at Mitt Romney didn't help, of course, but it's more like that faction of the Republican party failed to regain its footing.

During the Bush administration, there were comparisons of George Bush to Hitler (it showed up on protest signs, for instance).

In practice, the Bush administration were libcons. Looking at Afghanistan, a mountainous, dry, landlocked country that has a GDP per capita of around $500, they were neither 'anti-racist' enough to decide not to invade and respect the local rule of the Taliban (and their local cultural traditions), nor conventionally racist (or culturalist) enough to conclude that national development would be a tremendous challenge requiring a radical reorganization of Afghan society.

Utilitarianism is generally about maximizing "utility," or subjective positive experience, and assumes that this can be summed across individuals. For example, there is a utilitarian thought experiment in which a surgeon has one healthy patient and five sick patients. If he kills the healthy patient, then he can harvest the man's organs in order to save the five sick patients. (Yes, like in Rimworld.)

There are many problems with a naive utilitarian approach.

However, if we rotate the concept of utilitarianism, we get the idea of moral prices, and morality as something that can be traded off against other factors of production, such as land, labor, energy, capital, and so on. Morality is not like these other resources; immorality can incentivize more immorality. However, this provides us with a potential frame with which to view a more violent and exploitative past.

One way to view the situation is that a radical reorganization of Afghanistan would be morally intensive, not just financially draining.

For example, Afghanistan has a high rate of cousin marriage, which is not common in developed countries. Overriding that would mean prioritizing foreign marriage norms as superior, taking on epistemic debt as the relationship between marriage norms and democracy or economy is more correlative than rock-solid causative, and to the degree that Afghan people resist this change, enforcing it at gunpoint.

While Democratic voters of the era would joke about Republican-voting "rednecks" being cousin-married, the appetite for such a program likely did not exist.

Another way to view the situation is that, from the outside, the Bush administration believed that democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation, were simply what happens in the absence of dictatorship. This view legitimized American power and influence as simply the natural order asserting itself, and argued that asserting American influence was morally cheap.

If democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation are non-trivially the product of particular cultural norms and values, then American interventionism is much more morally expensive.

In either case, Trump represents a "correction" in reaction to the failed project of the Bush administration: conflict and oppression are still undesirable; bombs are morally expensive; borders are cheap.

-★-

As we know, the United States lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban. A joke emerged at the time:

"Now the Taliban have to govern Afghanistan."

Discussion in right-wing circles claims that the Taliban won by doing a better job of maintaining basic property rights and resolving disputes than the US-aligned forces did, despite being in a state of war with the US:

The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.

There were, reportedly, complaints from members of the Taliban after their victory, but it would seem that the Taliban were already governing Afghanistan.

Richard Hanania may be a troll, but he went through some Afghan War documents posted by the Washington Post, and I don't think he's making it up. It would seem that while the Taliban were governing Afghanistan, the US forces, well, weren't:

Six months after he was appointed, Bush didn't know who his top general in Afghanistan was, and didn't care. General McNeill had no guidance about what he should be doing in the country.

He has a whole long thread of this sort of thing. It reminds me of reading through the Wikipedia page on the Vietnam War many years after high school history, which made it sound like the US was quite adept with high-technology weapons, but failed to properly identify and manage the political source for the conflict.

Let's return to the student loan debt forgiveness issue.

A typical firm only has a profit margin of about 7-10%. A firm can keep going as long as it's breaking even, so even a low profit margin can still pay wages. However, if a firm is losing money, it will have to sell off assets or lay off employees, reducing its production capacity.

There is investment, in which we spend current production in order to increase or maintain future production, such as by building a factory. If we make a good investment, we'll get the production value back later. There is insurance, which involves moving risk around. For example, you are unlikely to be in a car accident most of the time, but if you have car insurance and you do get in an accident, the insurance company will pay for repair or replacement of your car. [2] This may make you more likely to buy a car in the first place, or more likely to structure your life around the assumption that you will have a car.

Governments can (in theory) spend a great deal on investment or insurance, but they can only spend a more limited amount on consumption spending.

For a college degree that pays for itself, government can loan money at a low interest rate, and the value will be paid back by the person who took the loan later.

For a college degree that doesn't pay for itself, someone has to supply the production that builds the buildings on the campus, fixes the water pipes, reloads the toilet paper in the bathrooms, and so on, and if that's not "the person taking the degree, but in the future," then it has to be someone else.

Someone like collapsedsquid might have the view, "I want the state to subsidize college education. Why should I pre-compromise and reduce my negotiating position?"

To expand on this, "Guarding the state treasury is the work of the right and of capital (business); why should I do their work for them?"

From this perspective, the role of the Democratic presidential candidate is to be the leader of America's left-leaning coalition, the blue team.

But the median voter or swing voter does not necessarily have this perspective. The median or swing voter is choosing between two candidates to lead the American enterprise.

The actual job is President of the United States.

If you win the War in Afghanistan, you have to govern Afghanistan. If you win the US presidential election, you have to govern the United States of America.

That's the prize. If you don't like it, don't run for office.

-★-

Nonetheless, this causes a tension. In order to become President as a Democrat, you first have to win the Democratic primary, which makes you effectively the leader of the Democratic party.

How do you deal with this?

That's "simple": split the issues.

A political coalition has a lot of people and those people have diverse interests. Representing them all at once is too difficult. Talking about them all at once is too difficult. Generalization of coalitional interests into a smaller, more manageable set of principles yields ideology.

Take the issues, and order them by how important they are to the functioning of the country, and how important they are for mainstream voters.

For the issues most important to mainstream voters, aim for a very broad coalition using very general principles. Pass legislation that has supermajority support in the polls, and be loud about it so that voters know what you've done for them lately.

For more niche issues that mainstream voters care less about, aim for a narrower coalition with narrower principles, to reward your base.

The second is the reward for the first. The median voter should be able to trust you on the things that he cares about, and where he doesn't trust you, it's on things he doesn't care about.

Core issues for the functioning of the country will seep into more generic voter dissatisfaction with things like inflation, so it's better to keep on top of those. Whether to be loud about it depends on whether the individual policy that's actually needed has good optics or not.

-★-

If you want to "beat Trump at his own game," you don't do so by talking about how America has the best steaks.

You identify his most important issues, and then you work out how to best steal them from him.

-

[1] "They were elves, once." Extradeadjcb is probably the most prominent example, but it comes up for a number of them. I've written about this before, but ethnic conflict theory by one player creates an equilibrium more favorable to ethnic conflict theory by other players. Lefty Twitter users asked Razib Khan why he attended Extradeadjcb's natalism conference; he replied by asking where the left-wing natalism conference was. That's probably still 20 years out.

[2] It's more complicated than this.

[arcticdementor]

In a democracy, every vote is supposed to be equal. If about half the country supports one side and half the country supports another, you may expect major institutions to either be equally divided, or to try to stay politically neutral.

This is not what we find. If it takes a position on the hot button social issues around which our politics revolve, almost every major institution in America that is not explicitly conservative leans left. In a country where Republicans get around half the votes or something close to that in every election, why should this be the case?

This post started as an investigation into Woke Capital, one of the most important developments in the last decade or so of American politics. Although big business pressuring politicians is not new (the NFL moved the Super Bowl from Arizona over MLK day), the scope of the issues on which corporations feel the need to weigh in is certainly expanding, now including LGBT issues, abortion laws, voting rights, kneeling during the national anthem, and gun control.

…

As I started to research the topic, however, I realized there wasn’t much to explain. Asking why corporations are woke is like asking why Hispanics tend to have two arms, or why the Houston Rockets have increased their number of 3-point shots taken over the last few decades. All humans tend to have two arms, and all NBA teams shoot more 3-pointers than in the past, so focusing on one subset of the population that has the same characteristics as all others in the group misses the point.

I think one reason Woke Capital is getting so much attention is because we expect business to be more right-leaning, and corporations throwing in with the party of more taxes and regulation strikes us as odd. We are used to schools, non-profits, mainline religions, etc. taking liberal positions and feel like business should be different. But business is just being assimilated into a larger trend.

Corporations are woke, meaning left wing on social issues relative to the general population, because institutions are woke. So the question becomes why are institutions woke?

…

Through the lens of ordinal utility, in which people simply rank what they want to happen, we are about equal. I prefer Republicans to Democrats, while you have the opposite preference. But when we think in terms of cardinal utility – in layman’s terms, how bad people want something to happen – it’s no contest. You are going to be much more influential than me. Most people are relatively indifferent to politics and see it as a small part of their lives, yet a small percentage of the population takes it very seriously and makes it part of its identity. Those people will tend to punch above their weight in influence, and institutions will be more responsive to them.

Elections are a measure of ordinal preferences. As long as you care enough to vote, it doesn’t matter how much you care about the election outcome, as everyone’s voice is the same. But for everything else – who speaks up in a board meeting about whether a corporation should take a political position, who protests against a company taking a position one side or the other finds offensive, etc. – cardinal utility maters a lot. Only a small minority of the public ever bothers to try to influence a corporation, school, or non-profit to reflect certain values, whether from the inside or out.

In an evenly divided country, if one side simply cares more, it’s going to exert a disproportionate influence on all institutions, and be more likely to see its preferences enacted in the time between elections when most people aren’t paying much attention.

…

Here are two graphs that have been getting a lot of attention

What jumps out to me in these figures is not only how left leaning large institutions are, but how the same is true for most professions. Whether you are looking by institution or by individuals, there are more donations to Biden than Trump. Yet Republicans get close to half the votes! Where are the Trump supporters? What these graphs reveal is a larger story, in which more people give to liberal causes and candidates than to conservative ones, even if Americans are about equally divided in which party they support (and no, this isn’t the result of liberals being wealthier, the connections between income and ideology or party are pretty weak). Here are some graphs from late October showing Biden having more individual donors than Trump in every battleground state.

…

In the 2012 election, Obama raised $234 million from small individual contributors, compared to $80 million for Romney, while also winning among large contributors.

…

In September 2009, at the height of the Tea Party movement, conservatives held the “Taxpayer March on Washington,” which drew something like 60,000-70,000 people, leading one newspaper to call it “the largest conservative protest ever to storm the Capitol.” Since that time, the annual anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington has drawn massive crowds, with estimates for some years ranging widely from low six figures to mid-to-high six figures. March for Life is not to be confused with “March for Our Lives,” a pro-gun control rally that activists claim saw 800,000 people turn out in 2018. All these events were dwarfed by the Women’s March in opposition to Trump, which drew by one estimate “between 3,267,134 and 5,246,670 people in the United States (our best guess is 4,157,894). That translates into 1 percent to 1.6 percent of the U.S. population of 318,900,000 people (our best guess is 1.3 percent).” Even if the two left-wing academics who did this research are letting their bias infuse their work, there is no question that protesting is generally a left-wing activity, as conservatives themselves realize.

People who engage in protesting care more about politics than people who donate money, and people who donate money care more than people who simply vote. Imagine a pyramid with voters at the bottom and full-time activists on top, and as you move up the pyramid it gets much narrower and more left-wing. Multiple strands of evidence indicate this would basically be an accurate representation of society.

Another line of evidence showing that the left simply cares more about politics comes from Noah Carl, who has put together data showing liberals are in their personal lives more intolerant of conservatives than vice versa across numerous dimensions in the US and the UK. Those on the left are more likely to block someone on social media over their views, be upset if their child marries someone from the other side, and find it hard to be friends with or date someone they disagree with politically. Here are two graphs demonstrating the general point.

…

There’s a great irony here. Conservatives tend to be more skeptical of pure democracy, and believe in individuals coming together and forming civil society organizations away from government. Yet conservatives are extremely bad at gaining or maintaining control of institutions relative to liberals. It’s not because they are poorer or the party of the working class – again, I can’t stress enough how little economics predicts people’s political preferences – but because they are the party of those who simply care less about the future of their country.

Debates over voting rights make the opposite assumption, as conservatives tend to want more restrictions on voting, and liberals fewer, with National Review explicitly arguing against a purer form of democracy. Conservatives may be right that liberals are less likely to care enough to do basic things like bring a photo ID and correctly fill out a ballot. If this is true, Republicans are the party of people who care enough to vote when doing so is made slightly more difficult but not enough to do anything else, while Democrats are the party of both the most active and least active citizens. Yet while being the “care only enough to vote” party might be adequate for winning elections, the future belongs to those at the tail end of the distribution who really want to change the world.

The discussion here makes it hard to suggest reforms for conservatives. Do you want to give government more power over corporations? None of the regulators will be on your side. Leave corporations alone? Then you leave power to Woke Capital, though it must to a certain extent be disciplined and limited by the preferences of consumers. Start your own institutions? Good luck staffing them with competent people for normal NGO or media salaries, and if you’re not careful they’ll be captured by your enemies anyway, hence Conquest’s Second Law. And the media will be there every step of the way to declare any of your attempts at taking power to be pure fascism, and brush aside any resistance to your schemes as righteous anger, up to and including rioting and acts of violence.

…

From this perspective we might want to consider this passage from Scott Alexander, who writes the following in his review of a biography of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The normal course of politics is various coalitions of elites and populace, each drawing from their own power bases. A normal political party, like a normal anything else, has elite leaders, analysts, propagandists, and managers, plus populace foot soldiers. Then there's an election, and sometimes our elites get in, and sometimes your elites get in, but getting a political party that's against the elites is really hard and usually the sort of thing that gets claimed rather than accomplished, because elites naturally rise to the top of everything.

But sometimes political parties can run on an explicitly anti-elite platform. In theory this sounds good - nobody wants to be elitist. In practice, this gets really nasty quickly. Democracy is a pure numbers game, so it's hard for the elites to control - the populace can genuinely seize the reins of a democracy if it really wants. But if that happens, the government will be arrayed against every other institution in the nation. Elites naturally rise to the top of everything - media, academia, culture - so all of those institutions will hate the new government and be hated by it in turn. Since all natural organic processes favor elites, if the government wants to win, it will have to destroy everything natural and organic - for example, shut down the regular media and replace it with a government-controlled media run by its supporters.

When elites use the government to promote elite culture, this usually looks like giving grants to the most promising up-and-coming artists recommended by the art schools themselves, and having the local art critics praise their taste and acumen. When the populace uses the government to promote popular culture against elite culture, this usually looks like some hamfisted attempt to designate some kind of "official" style based on what popular stereotypes think is "real art from back in the day when art was good", which every art school and art critic attacks as clueless Philistinism. Every artist in the country will make groundbreaking exciting new art criticizing the government's poor judgment, while the government desperately looks for a few technicians willing to take their money and make, I don't know, pretty landscape paintings or big neoclassical buildings.

The important point is that elite government can govern with a light touch, because everything naturally tends towards what they want and they just need to shepherd it along. But popular/anti-elite government has a strong tendency toward dictatorship, because it won't get what it wants without crushing every normal organic process. Thus the stereotype of the "right-wing strongman", who gets busy with the crushing.

So the idea of "right-wing populism" might invoke this general concept of somebody who, because they have made themselves the champion of the populace against the elites, will probably end up incentivized to crush all the organic processes of civil society, and yoke culture and academia to the will of government in a heavy-handed manner.

To put it in a different way, to steelman the populist position, democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of an activist class, which is not representative of the general population. Populists, in order to bring institutions more in line with what the majority of the people want, need to rely on a more centralized and heavy-handed government. The strongman is liberation from elites, who aren’t the best citizens, but those with the most desire to control people’s lives, often to enforce their idiosyncratic belief system on the rest of the public, and also a liberation from having to become like elites in order to fight them, so conservatives don’t have to give up on things like hobbies and starting families and devote their lives to activism.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

I never said that voting is the only way to impact politics, I said the exact opposite. The individual act of submitting a ballot is the least impactful way to create political change because the ballot limits your voice to a handful of pre-defined choices. Sure, you have a slot to write in a candidate if you like, but nobody will see what you wrote besides some ballot counter who will just tally it and move on.

Biden and the Dems aren't going to care about whether or not their voters actually like them and want to see them succeed so long as they vote for them, and the same goes for Trump and the Republicans. Strategic voting keeps the other guy out of office, but you still have to contend with the fact that the guy you voted for is going to do things you don't like.

The preferable option is to get people and measures you actually do support on the ballot and to convince other people to vote for them. The preferable option is to make sure that no matter who wins, they will not be enabled in their efforts to do things you don't like. But these are hard to do, and they involve actually going out in public and making cogent arguments in favor of your preferred policies and candidates and working over and over to fight for these things.

It's a lot easier to take the side of a rich and powerful lesser evil and to coast off of their political momentum than it is to fight for something genuinely good that doesn't have the same support. But lesser evils are still evils, and Biden is still a conservative. If we can't get people on board to fight against his bad policies and decisions, how are we going to fare if Trump wins?

Trump did not win the popular vote in 2016. Hillary got a couple million more votes than Trump did. Biden could win more than 70% of the popular vote and still lose the electoral college. That's not going to happen unless we get some wild state flips, but it goes to show that voting isn't everything.

We need to be prepared no matter who wins to take control of our own destinies instead of acting like we're helpless to do anything other than reacting to politics. Trump might win despite the best efforts of his opponents. Biden might win and still go on to do more shitty things. Instead of waiting another four years and hoping that in 2028 the two big parties give us better candidates to choose from, we should work to organize ourselves, build a real working class party and movement that can challenge the status quo as well as support vulnerable people in material ways. We need to control the narrative and put them on the defense, make them react to us for a change. Otherwise we're doomed no matter which candidate wins.

I believe we can do it and that's the kind of thing I'm fighting for every day, but I also think that the momentum for this kind of change isn't going to start in first world developed countries, it's going to start in the developing world as more and more workers fight for and win their rights. That's going to put economic pressure on the first world which has relied on exploiting developing countries for far too long. Once the capitalists realize they won't be able to do that any longer, once all the cheap goods that flow into the global north start to dry up, that in my view is when the turning point will happen, and I think it's going to happen sooner rather than later.

The types of reactionaries and fascists that will burst into the mainstream when that happens are going to make Trump look like a centrist. That's not me being pessimistic, that's just what happens in times of severe economic distress, and I do believe we can stop them, but it will be a lot easier to do that if we get organized ahead of time. The labor movements of the global south are already gaining momentum. Climate change is having its own effects and putting its thumb on the scale. The clock's ticking, and we can't afford to let ourselves be caught off guard when the next big political economic shift happens.

Only one-third of U.S. adults say they approve of President Biden’s job performance — a record low for his presidency and for any president in the last 15 years.

In an ABC News/Ipsos poll, conducted Jan. 4-8, only 33 percent of those surveyed said they approved of Biden, a drop from the previous poll in September 2023, when 37 percent approved of his performance. Biden’s disapproval rating is 58 percent, up from 56 percent in September.

ABC News said it’s the lowest approval rating since former President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2008.

Biden, who is running for reelection, has a lower approval rating than former President Trump, who is the leading GOP nominee for president.

14 Jan 24

[makeste]

BnHA 6th Popularity Poll Reaction Post - Risky Spoiler-Dodging Edition

hey guys, so seeing as the results from the 6th popularity poll were leaked today, I figured I would do a separate reaction + analysis post this year, rather than piling it in as an extra on top of the chapter reaction post tomorrow. I figure this makes more sense anyway, since they’re really two completely different things. also this way I can write as much as I want lol.

also, just fyi, I am still completely unspoiled for chapter 293. and probably the smart thing to do to keep it that way would be to log off tumblr and hold off posting this until tomorrow, but I apparently have no impulse control today so oh well. anyway, so I’m hoping you guys will keep this spoiler-free if you don’t mind! as always, I would prefer to just jump right in completely unaware tomorrow like Troy returning to the study room with the pizza boxes lol.

okay so this first part is just going to be my predictions. fyi I am writing this part on Wednesday night, and then I’ll add on the results part on Thursday or Friday (ETA: Thursday, apparently, since I am impatient.)

okay so first of all, just as a refresher, this poll was open to Japanese voters from Aug 3 to Sep 30. meaning chapters 279 through 285. meanwhile last year’s poll took place around the tail end of the MVA arc. so between then and now we had Heroes Rising, the Endeavor Agency arc, and the War arc up to the part where the 1-A kids took on Gigantomachia in Gunga, and started battling Tomura in Jakku. so technically only a couple of arcs, but a LOT of stuff going down in them. oh and season 4 of the anime as well

so! firstly, I predict that my truculent africanized honeybee son will hold on to his crown at #1, coming off a year in which he did some internship-boosted soul searching, borrowed OFA in movie canon, and finished out the voting period as the my-body-moved-on-its-own character development MVP. like CALL ME CRAZY lol, but I’m pretty sure his title is safe. and then after him will be Deku and Shouto as usual

Aizawa should hopefully also have a strong showing because the dude had a banner fucking year. reunited with his old dead friend, took on Tomura with his hopelessly inept hero pals, and then chopped his fucking leg off. he had better be in the top 10. his fucking leg died for this, idk what else he has to do

Endeavor also stands a decent chance of doing well given the internship arc and the final episode of season 4. which I’m sure will go down just swimmingly if that does happen lmao. especially if he somehow manages to rank higher than...

Dabi, which I don’t think he will btw, but you never know. anyways though, but I’m thinking Dabi’s going to have a stronger showing than in past years (in the last poll he only got 367 votes and was ranked 19th). mostly because of his fight in the Gunga mansion, and his cheekily censored name reveal to...

Hawks, who is also going to rank pretty high here, I think. might be he loses some points for killing off Twice, but his back was basically to the wall there. and he has always been very popular, and I think season 4 will also give him a boost, along with his heavy involvement in the first half of the War arc

Tomura was already in 6th place last year and I think he cracks the top 5 this year. he’s gotten exponentially more popular since the MVA arc, and got a boost in the last poll even though his flashback had only just barely happened, and he hadn’t finished Awakening yet and all that stuff. anyway, so he’s only gotten cooler and more tragic since then so I think he makes a big play here

Kirishima, Momo, Tokoyami, and Mina should also hopefully do well, since the poll opened right in the middle of all that Gigantomachia action, and Toko had just got done being an absolute badass and protecting his birb dad. I don’t think he’ll quite make it to the top ten, but he should

and last but not least, I’m hoping that Mirko will come out and take the polls by storm, although I have no clue how popular she is in Japan lol. she’s clearly Horikoshi’s favorite though. she SHOULD be everyone’s favorite, but I mean, we’ll see how it goes

anyway that’s it as far as predictions! and so now, through the magic of writing stuff at different times, we will fast-forward to the part where we actually find out the results!

OH MY GOD YES, STEAMPUNK KHLKSLLKL. HERE FOR IT. JOLLY GOOD SHOW. 5 STARS

Kacchan looks SO COCKY and SO HAPPY and SO ADORABLE, YES I SAID IT. he is adorable as FUCK. I don’t quite know what it is about this particular Kacchan that just screams “LOOK HOW FUCKING CUTE MY STUPID, LOUD SON IS WITH HIS BIZARRE WINDOWPANE-LOOKING CONVERTIBLE SUNGLASS GOGGLES and his POORLY TIED CRAVAT”, but I think it’s because he looks like if a Digimon character and a FMA character had a baby

anyway, so it looks like most of the people present here are more or less who we expected to see. except that I can’t tell for sure if that’s Dabi or Shindou, and if it’s Shindou I’m going to punch somebody in the face so you will have to excuse me

Iida wearing a TRENCHCOAT and a TOP HAT with ENGINE EXHAUST GOGGLE ACCENTS is my new favorite Iida of all time. take note how there is no possible way he can wear those goggles with them sitting on top of his hat like that. plus he’s already got glasses on. these are just purely for aesthetic and IF THAT AIN’T JUST THE STEAMPUNK WAY

Deku out here speaking softly and carrying a lead pipe. Kacchan you best look out. seems like he’s done watching you take first place year after year while he languishes in the number two spot. your only hope is that he trips while attacking you because his boots are unbuckled

Shouto’s standing over there with the rest of the non-first-and-second-place characters, but what are the odds his results are actually within spitting distance of Deku’s same as always. anyway he doesn’t mind, though. also his outfit is by far the most sensible one here, but if you look closely he’s got some sort of fire extinguisher/jet pack thing strapped to his back that’s got a control switch on his belt. Shouto are you jetpacking or putting out fires

Kirishima out here all “I’m not sure what steampunk is so I’m just going to take off my shirt and pose”

AIZAWA WITH THE EYEPATCH SKLKSDLKFJLSKJLDFKJSLDFFJLDKSJFL:KS. SIR. SIR. also, lowkey furious that Horikoshi refuses to show us the automail leg that he is clearly sporting here but which we just can’t see, SHOUTO MOVE GODDAMMIT

Endeavor has TWO fire extinguisher-slash-jetpacks. THE BETTER TO... WHATEVER. look at you here in the top ten again. you really live for that controversy

HAWKS OUT HERE WITH HIS STEAMPUNK BEATS BY DRE AND HIS WEARING A RING ON EVERY FINGER. nice to see you’ve still got your wings there, kiddo. then again Deku still has both of his arms too so who even knows what is going on

BUT SERIOUSLY THOUGH, IS THIS DABI OR SHINDOU. as if I don’t know the truth deep down in my heart. y’all I am gonna flip lmao. it’s not that I dislike Shindou, strictly speaking. but just... I can’t explain what it is, but if you put him and AFO next to each other and told me “you can only punch one”, I would be having a serious crisis. just, THIS FUCKING GUY, idek. STOP SMILING

Tomura looks like he just wandered onto the set here by mistake and has no idea where he is or what is going on. it’s because you’re wearing a bigass severed hand that’s blocking your entire view, Tomura. just take the hand off your face my sweet murder dumpling

anyway! so I managed to also find a link to the full poll results while somehow managing to avoid spoilers, and then I wanted to compare the results to last year’s poll, and so I made... this

hopefully you can all see this. if you’re on desktop you might be screwed, but on mobile you should be able to click and enlarge it. I mean, assuming you actually give a fuck about boring poll analysis spreadsheets lmao

anyway, so there were actually 13k fewer votes cast this year which is a bit of a surprise. is the series not still growing in popularity? do people apparently have better things to do during their quarantine lol

anyways but despite this, and despite getting 8k fewer votes overall, Kacchan still managed almost twice as many as his closest competitor. well fought, Deku. please put down that pipe

I somehow always underestimate the power of ship popularity to influence these things. but for example, it looks like Present Mic got that Vigilantes Trio bump. ride that wave for all it’s worth my man! hell, you got me on board

Iida fucking Tenya somehow got some sort of POWER BOOST out of NOWHERE which I can’t explain at all lmao, but I’m here for it. NOT BAD FOR AN OLD MAN

Sero managed to get the exact same number of votes in both 2019 and 2020. clearly the most loyal fans in the business

Mirko being all the way down at #20 is, of course, a travesty, and I hereby nominate her to be the one to punch Shindou in the face

ngl though, the lack of a single female character in the top ten hurts just a bit. it’s not overly surprising, but still. the worst part of it is that even if you kicked Shindou to the curb and moved everyone else up one slot, it would still be all dudes since Mic beat out Momo by a margin of a little more than a hundred votes. hard to stay mad at Mic for too long, though. ah well

Tomura actually lost a bunch of votes which is a genuine surprise to me. I know the villain standom isn’t as dominant in Japan as it is in Western fandom, but still. you can go ahead and punch Shindou too I guess

Tokoyami lowkey doubled his vote count over the past year while hiding down there at #18. he is slowly becoming more powerful. biding his time

anyway so I think that’s it! I mean not really, but I’m getting kind of tired lol. so just, you know, insert the usual gripes at Overhaul’s ranking here, although we can be happy about Magne making her way onto the list (r.i.p.), and Mineta and AFO taking a very satisfying slide down (all the way out, in AFO’s case; good riddance you bum). Hadou also got a huge boost which is awesome. Mustard’s persistent ownership of the #36 spot will forever remain a mystery to me, but oh well

anyways, this was fun. and I really do feel like everyone is looking away on purpose so that when Deku brains Kacchan with that pipe in about two seconds from now, there will be no witnesses, oh my fucking god

[thiscitychickk]

Heyy sis this ya fav from AO3 😂🤣! Okay, I feel like this a safe space so I don't feel bad in saying you opened up a can of worms with this latest chapter lmfao. This chapter was great, including the content all considering and the conversations/discussions that happened after the reading. That said, why did you actually include this topic in the story? Also, is there a way I can type without a limit lmfao cause I have more to say and I am not about type 3-4 asks 😂 I cannot.

**SPOILER ALERT: Ch19 Come Let Us Adore Him**

Hey sis🙂 I won’t shy away from any criticism, especially when it’s valid frustration and triggering content for people. 

Why did I include this plotline in the story? I think it goes back to what I’ve said all along. I want this story to be an accurate depiction of American politics as well as what it’s like to work in them. More than the inaccurate fanfics I’ve read, ther are also  tons of stories and books that feature star crossed Republican Democrat love stories that gloss over any bit of ideological differences and go from point A to deep in love without actually hitting on difficulties.

That said, slavery is part and parcel of our nation’s history. It’s awful. It is poorly taught in schools. Ramifications of slavery are very much being felt by our neighbors today - and also being denied by many people in power in Washington, DC and across the nation.

Republicans count on voters to not understand how it has created so many injustices, social and economic, and capitalize on it in the way they create their platforms, message, and campaign. In order for Lucius to be this right-wingy presidential candidate, that’s who he is.

Are there other avenues that I could’ve taken for their wealth? Sure, but the pervasive inequality caused by slavery, then sharecropping and convict leasing and Jim Crow, the New Deal, on and on. It all stems from slavery, and this is not the last that we will see of the fallout from the article as well as the general awfulness of some of what Lucius believes.

I also would ask that people remember that this is a Harry Potter AU - the premise of the Death Eaters, one could say, is blood supremacy. The equivalent of which is racism in the United States. I warred within myself over whether this was too tough of a topic to take on in fiction, but isn’t that the point? To grapple with the difficulty in our world and try and make sense of it? 

Unfortunately, with this fic, the sense that is made of this topic is that there is none. Especially for ‘white liberal allies.’ Hot take? Allyship is usually just performative. White people are hard-pressed to give up their stake in success, money, status, prestige without a fight, even if they say they will.

And Hermione? She’s 22. People have posted comments that are very angry with her - and some with me, saying that I write like a white liberal.

Which... I am. But I am also writing Hermione like any just out of college liberal who comes to Washington. She’s idealistic. She thinks she can change the world. She thinks she’s going to be doing good.

Nothing really happens in Washington - legislation that overhauls the systems as we know it - be it incarceration, health care, infrastructure, paid parental leave, child care, education... Those things hardly EVER get dealt with outside of a piecemeal approach.

Draco has had a lifetime to realize that, and he’s dating someone who is young enough to still be rocked by every wave in Washington. He knows that she’ll eventually find herself in the same place of subdued shoulder shrugging that he is in. 

***** This is the BIG thing that I want to get through with this story, especially with this chapter *****

Extreme partisan politics do not get legislation passed - her job is not to be an activist, her job is to support a member of congress’ legislative agenda. It took me about a year to realize that. It’s well known in Washington that almost everyone moves to the center of the political spectrum once they have worked on the Hill long enough. Liberals become more pragmatic and conservatives become more centrist. It’s just the way of the world when it comes to getting legislation passed.

I know that people are going to be mad at me for making this a central piece of the story - but I have promised to keep it realistic, and this is how it is in my experience working on the Hill.

Draco isn’t going to have a liberal revolution - Hermione isn’t going to become a Lucius fan girl and vote for him in the primary or  maybe even the general, if he becomes the GOP candidate (spoiler alert?). They’re two imperfect people who avert their eyes from shitty things because it’s easier not to fight or get upset sometimes.

But personally, should Hermione dump Draco over the fact that his father is unwilling to condemn slavery unequivocally? Maybe. She hasn’t yet, clearly.

This is a 22-year-old who has comfort and love and attention for the first time in years. She’s still figuring out what it means to care about politics and work in them and see no progressive bills make it to the president’s desk for signing. It’s rough to go through.

Could she do more? Yeah, but yelling at Draco is just going to have him say ‘this isn’t going to work.’ And that’s not what she wants at this point.

I guess the point that I come to with people’s anger over how she acts is what do you want out of this story? And I wish you could hear me ask, because it’s genuine curiosity, not annoyance or anger that people don’t like where I’ve taken things or where they believe it’ll go.

Do you want Draco to switch his party affiliation?

Do you want Hermione to dump him?

Do you want Draco to quit politics and move somewhere remote with Hermione and be miserable?

There are only a few ways this story could end up, with the two columns being ‘together’ and ‘not together.’ I totally totally get that people are annoyed, but that’s what comes from a realistic story of two very different people coming together. Everyone carries a different load in every relationship they’re in, and clearly Hermione has the heavier one in many aspects here.

Hopefully this clears a little up and can at least make you feel better about what you’re reading. Like I said, I get that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. 

Some people are continuing to say that their relationship is predatory, and that’s the only thing I find fault with. Hermione has continually consented throughout this story. Is there a power imbalance in their jobs? Certainly, but she doesn’t work for Draco. Draco doesn’t pay her salary, they don’t have anything to worry about ethically at this point in the professional realm. Personally? There is so much consent here. So much slow-walking to start their relationship up. She can leave at any time. She’s not being gaslit, hell, it would be easier for Draco and his whole family if she left him. She’s not being forced to do anything.

If you made it this far, you’re awesome. Thank you for your honesty, my friend, and I hope you have a great day!