ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
2d ago
The ad is decent, but the issue is message discipline. If Republicans can stick to the ads' line, they're in a much better spot.
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Reduce opportunities for Biden's state to be revealed to the public. If you truly believe that Biden is entirely senile and demented only getting by on copious doses of Adderall, then wait until the Democrats are more entrenched on supporting him. They may still have had the ability to do a swap even post-nomination, but it makes that even more damaging and chaotic.
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Have a playbook on Kamala. Messaging and messaging discipline. The RNC was effective at making Trump cute and cuddly; don't throw that away with off-key messaging.
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Lay the groundwork well in advance for whatever attacks you are going to push. There's a balancing act here: too much attention on Kamala means less on Biden. But Biden's negatives at the end were much higher than Kamala's: the goal should have been getting them around equal negatives, so a swap doesn't help too much. Or, if you're absolutely certain Biden will drop out or die, then focus all fire on Kamala.
ThenElection
2d ago
The lack of preparation for Kamala is one of the clearest cases of political malpractice I've ever seen. It's not some black swan event: people have anticipated this for months if not years. Even the Trump campaign itself was suggesting it would happen! And yet Republicans are caught entirely flat-footed.
In retrospect, the Trump campaign should have anticipated the likelihood of Biden having a candidacy-ending disaster at a debate, and made sure every debate happened after the nomination.
ThenElection
4d ago
I remember Obama saying Buttigieg was unelectable. Not for being gay, but too short at 5'8".
When looking at the height pay gap (tall people get paid more than short people), it exists in both women and men, but is much larger in men.
ThenElection
5d ago
I have a hard time imagining how someone could honestly conclude that, but then again I've thought Biden was obviously mentally incapable since long before the debate.
(And the same for Trump! To a much lesser extent: he roughly seems at the point Biden was in the mid to late 2010s.)
ThenElection
5d ago
An aside: interestingly, the first time the Edith Wilson page URL was saved on the Internet Archive was January 20, 2021.
ThenElection
5d ago
Is the old man next to her her father?
ThenElection
5d ago
She is non-senile and capable of staying on message and repeating a talking point without mangling it. Biden runs well behind Generic Democrat on Senate and House polls, and if she can successfully approximate Generic Democrat, she wins.
ThenElection
5d ago
Nit: he was separated when they dated, not divorced.
ThenElection
5d ago
The guys who care about that are already voting Trump. The vulnerability is more with female voters (ironically, likely more those who are of a racial minority).
ThenElection
5d ago
How much energy did Kamala bring to the Democratic Party in the 2020 primary, exactly?
Her benefit is the extent to which she imperfectly represents the "generic non-senile Democrat," not any energy she brings. And that's a very real benefit, but no one is excited about Harris. No value over replacement.
ThenElection
5d ago
Another issue is that Willie Brown is still alive, cogent (more so than Biden), self-interested, and most of all has a really big mouth. He's not the type to let himself get thrown under the bus without a fight.
ThenElection
5d ago
I don't know if it's Schrodinger's dementia; there's a consistent position that looks something like "there's a baseline for mental competence; Biden is above it now, and two months ago we believed he would be above throughout his second term; the debate added new evidence to indicate he will not be above the baseline two years from now, but that he's still above it and would be throughout the remainder of his first term; so the change in candidate while Biden remains in office is perfectly reasonable."
This is pretty tenuous, to say the least, but it doesn't require holding mutually inconsistent positions. The issues in that argument are a willful misreading of evidence (both the debate and everything that preceded it) and a decision to choose a baseline in a very narrow, convenient interval.
Political considerations are, of course, what is driving this, not logical ones, but I don't think that's a surprise to anyone.
ThenElection
5d ago
Would either American party preemptively defenestrate a President because of mental competence concerns? The Reagan experience in his second term suggests not, though I suppose one could argue Republicans have shifted to caring more about mental competence since then.
Probably more effective for Republicans to call out the corruption around her appointment to various California agencies at the behest of Brown than explicit casting couch references. The former can gain traction, the latter is written off by the Vox set as sexism. And when voters ask "Why would Brown work to get some appointed with no real qualifications to well-paying part time gigs she barely performed anyway?" they naturally quickly find out "oh he was 30 years her senior while they were dating."
ETA: Hmm, or maybe not. I guess no one has really tested the latter line against her. Media will of course denounce it, but maybe that doesn't matter (or is even a pro).
ThenElection
7d ago
Apparently, the corrupted file was just filled with nulls:
https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1814364640127922499
I'm trying to image what might cause that; truncating the file and then failing to write it? My filesystem-fu isn't really up to par.
ThenElection
7d ago
The best solution is to make it very easy to declare bankruptcy to discharge loans, maybe as simple as standing up and yelling "I declare bankruptcy." It would, of course, destroy the credit card and student (any unsecured, really) loan markets as they exist now, but it shifts the risk to people who actually have the capacity to evaluate it. Keeping people in perpetual debt who don't have the intellectual capacity to understand interest is kind of obscene.
ThenElection
8d ago
She is also a candidate able to campaign without stepping on her own feet (too much). If she's asked about abortion, she knows and is able to segue into Trump wanting raped 12 year olds to die giving birth. And, furthermore, she knows not to divert the question to the scourge of illegal immigrants rapists, which is... Not a topic Democrats should be focusing on.
ThenElection
8d ago
Identifying potential victims fits more easily into progressive ideology than identifying (inconvenient) perpetrators. The people victimized by crime are not, primarily, white people or the well-to-do. It's poor people and black people. If you can more effectively frame policing reform as "we need policies to protect vulnerable population from victimization from criminals," it's both harder to argue against and true. People may be willing to overlook a black man murdering an elderly Asian woman for ideological reasons, but it's much harder to take the position "we need to allow criminals to murder black people with impunity in order to protect black people."
ThenElection
9d ago
Claude 3.5 changed its tokenization scheme (R2L integers, so 1234 is tokenized as [234, 1]), which accounts for its models' (even Haiku!) superior performance over competitors.
I am torn about how to read into this. It's very stupid that a change like that can skyrocket performance and shows that existing systems have some pretty serious flaws. On the other hand, it indicates that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit to improve things, even if there isn't a serious improvement in fundamental architecture coming in the short-term.
ThenElection
9d ago
Can't wait for the AI-waifu advertising agreements with LVMH.
ThenElection
10d ago
My attempt at steelmanning the "assassinations are actually good" position: democracy is good, and an assassination attempt is a sign that a democracy is on the brink. Being successful or not does nothing to the health of the democracy: the fact that it occured at all is the symptom of the underlying malady. Given that, if someone is actively harming democracy, then it's better that an assassination attempt on them succeeds than fails.
(I'd disagree basically on every stated assumption in that, but I think it's how the logic goes.)
ThenElection
10d ago
There were shenanigans around the primaries, but Bernie fundamentally wasn't sunk because of them. He lost because he was a rando with extremely out-there political views from a tiny lily-white state, who didn't resonate with the Democratic Party as a whole. (It bears pointing out that the online activist/college student crowd, although having outsized influence on media, are not at all representative of the Democratic base.)
If elite and donor contempt was enough to sink a candidate in a primary, Trump would never have been able to win his.
Aks predates ask; it's the form preferred by Chaucer and the author of Beowulf. Ask is a modern degeneration enforced by London statists in their government building exercise. An unsavory task (or, more appropriately, tax).
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