dasfoo
7mo ago
Except that this was obvious. How can you credibly sell your ability to win elections when you can’t predict something that obvious.
The people they are selling themselves to share the same self-delusion, so it's to their benefit to affirm the delusion to get more work. This assumes that they are self-aware enough to know that their delusion is false, but most delusions persist because the deluded will not challenge them.
dasfoo
4mo ago
I don't think Russia can be a true ally in its current political configuration, so any potential realignment in that direction is likely temporary if it is even real.
"The West" -- U.S., Canada, Europe -- as the enduring post-WWII alignment has been called, is only successful because all nations have a long-term survival incentive to cooperate with each other, based on their common-enough values and the accepted dynamic of U.S.' larger status. Any country who wants to compete with U.S.' status and has different non-cooperative values is never likely to make a long-term ally.
I know there are Russia-stans who have an alien-to-me notion of Putin as a benevolent victim of Western aggression who would love to nestle into an accepting U.S. bosom (once it's purged of its Euro-centric WEF neoliberals), but that seems like a fantasy that is bound to end like the Hitler-Stalin pact.
dasfoo
5mo ago
I think ideally the democrat media would have been more measured and patient, and the temperature on everything could have stayed more reasonable while the professionals did there work
This is really the issue to me. The institution that has positioned itself as the arbiter of partisan agreements no longer does their job with any commitment to the truth.
The reason there are so many unanswered questions about seemingly suspicious behaviors on election night 2020, is that there was never a good-faith effort to investigate those questions. If election skeptics thought something fishy happened at a vote counting center after observers were sent away, the reporting on such a claim amounted to "The people counting the votes said 'No, nothing fishy happened.' Therefore, it was the fairest and most secure election in history." Narrative buy-in won over actual investigating, which was never going to convince the skeptics and only pander to those who wanted the skeptics to be wrong regardless of the truth.
dasfoo
11mo ago
There's now a counter-attack to the couch meme forming on X with a false rumor that Waltz has admitted to drinking horse semen. This kind of low-blow falsehood becoming a tit-for-tat escalation is both not good and easily foreseeable.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Claiming that the false entry was in furtherance of another crime ... without actually including that crime in the indictment and without that crime ever being adjudicated in court
This is the part that bugs me the most. How can a crime be asserted as a predicate fact in court when that crime has never been charged, tried or convicted?
If the argument is that the crime exists because Michael Cohen pled to it as part of a bargain, isn't that irrelevant with regard to Trump? AIUI, one person cannot be convicted by proxy of another person's trial; Trump would be entitled to his own defense.
Further, the insinuation that it is electoral fraud for a political candidate to mislead the public opens unlimited potential for lawfare fuckery. Does this mean it's possible to charge Joe Biden with Electoral Fraud for saying that his son's laptop was fake during a Presidential Debate? Or any other outright lie or even half-truth told in the course of any campaign?
I admit, seeing most active politicians from the past few decades jailed for dishonesty might be a nice corrective, but selective prosecution is not the way to go about it. It seems like this case is going to come back at the Democrats in severely unpleasant ways.
dasfoo
11mo ago
Any minnesotans got any cool stories about him?
Some of the stuff coming out about him includes:
- Claims that he quit his National Guard post when they were called up to Iraq but has continued to play it up in his bio, including citing a retroactively invalidated rank
- Was once arrested for DUI going nearly 100mph in a 55 zone
- While he allowed Minneapolis to burn in 2020 his wife found romance in the smell of the fiery destruction
- Presided over the redesign of the MN state flag to resemble the Somali flag
- "Tampon Tim"
Can't vouch for the truthiness of any of these. Interesting how #1 & #2 strongly echo attacks on Geroge W Bush in 2000 and 2004.
dasfoo
9mo ago
Temporary Protected Status and Asylum are different legal protections, with different criteria and processes. More generally, what does the term "illegal immigrant" refer to? I am under the impression it refers to people in the United States without a legal status that permits them to remain. That very literally does not include people with TPS (like the Haitians in Springfield have). if "illegal immigrant" includes even people who have legal permission to be here, what precisely are the boundaries? Are there green card holders who are "illegal immigrants?"
Isn't the distinction Vance was making that the immigrants entered the U.S. illegally and then TPS retroactively changed that status, temporarily, to legal?
It's also kind of funny to hear Vance complain about the CBP One app since it was launched in... October 2020 by the Trump administration!
But if you read the article, it says that the app's functions have been expanded under Biden to do things like grant parole to illegal immigrants! https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cbp-one-overview
On October 28, 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) launched a mobile device application called CBP One so that travelers could access certain agency functions on mobile devices. Over the last two years, the agency has expanded CBP One’s uses. The app has become the only way that migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum at a port of entry can preschedule appointments for processing and maintain guaranteed asylum eligibility. CBP One also became the only way that Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans seeking to secure travel authorization to obtain parole through special programs for those nationalities can submit their biometric information to CBP.
CBP One’s original uses included 1) providing travelers with access to Form I-94 information, 2) scheduling inspection appointments for perishable cargo, and 3) assisting international organizations who sought to help individuals enter the United States.
The app’s latest functions, like the use of CBP One to pre-process asylum seekers, has raised concerns both about gaining access to a legal right through a smartphone app and about the privacy implications of the app.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I agree that people here discount the possibility of her winning if she becomes the nominee. It’s not above or even close to 50%, but she probably has a 20-30% chance of winning. A lot of people dislike Trump and will be willing to come out to vote against him, just like last time.
Yeah, while I don't think she would be ideal, people forget that Biden in 2020 had only two arguments in his favor:
- He wasn't Trump
- He was "safe"
Now that he's apparently mentally unfit, and therefore unsafe, the only argument for him is one he shares with literally every other Democrat, including Harris.
There's little Democrats love more than a historic DEI accomplishment and if Harris becomes the nominee we won't hear the end of all of the exciting potential "firsts" she represents and the enthusiasm for smashing that glass ceiling will become deafening.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Most Democrats want him gone. They voted for him in the primaries but now he's a liability.
Did they? He ran (virtually) unopposed and only got something like 15 million primary votes. They didn't need to vote for him, and they mostly didn't.
Will the long-buried Biden hair-sniffing stories finally see the light of day? Or will the media come back to Biden's corner now that he's fighting back?
It's interesting how my Reddit in the last week has been overrun with "Trump's Best Buddy Jeffrey Epstein" and "Trump accused of raping a 13-year-old" posts across a variety of subs. The anti-Trump bots are out in force and aiming low. If "Biden's Top 10 Underage Gropes" doesn't get equal roll-out, someone is shirking their solemn responsibility.
dasfoo
5mo ago
Anecdotally, in the last day I've seen Reddit threads, Facebook posts, and have heard directly from acquaintances who work in government that they worry about their work being impacted. Don't discount the social media effect wherein everyone wants the positive attention that comes with signalling victimization at the hands of the bad man, even before they know if it's actually happening.
The argument previously formulated by these same groups -- "No, it's not happening, but if it is happening it's good" -- is probably a safe fallback response. We can empathetically help anyone who loses their important government job move into the private sector, where their important skills will surely remain valuable.
dasfoo
1yr ago
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history.
I see comments like this a lot, and it goes with the general sentiment that men don't respect women and only think of them as sex objects. The truth is that men do value women greatly for certain things that are unique to their womanhood and less for other things that are not unique to women. It's contemporary women who have devalued the qualities they have which men do value.
It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.
I know this is controversial to say these days, but the bodies of men who act like women cannot do the things the real women can do with their bodies and, generally, women are highly valuable because of what their bodies are built to do: nurture life. If I owned a goat who just wanted sit in my chicken coop all day, he wouldn't be very valuable to me because he can't lay eggs.
I'm not saying that all people should be strictly limited to traditional gender roles -- there are outliers that just can't perform those roles. However, society is currently obsessed with making outliers the new normal, which is wreaking havoc on both the healthy operation of human interactions and the self-worth of those who have been yaslit into devaluing their natural gifts.
dasfoo
9mo ago
Even keeping it to the 2020 election, why was no one who claimed that 2020 was "the most secure election in history" asked for the data on which that statement was based? By what metrics, and how do those metrics compare to past elections? Or was that claim based on partisan wish fulfillment and yet accepted as fact because we don't like the people claiming otherwise?
dasfoo
5mo ago
Anyway, this is not the thing to be confused about.
It is, though, if you then question why USAID is upset about the SoS/DoGE having access to these supposedly insignificant and/or perfectly normal classified materials. Whether they are up to no good or just reacting politically to the change in admin, it looks like bad faith on their part and completely legitimate for the Trump admin to audit the fuck out of them.
dasfoo
11mo ago
The comms failure is, to use a popular parlance, "weird." If the Secret Service is in charge of security for an event, and commonly enlists local LEO as support for their mission, it's baffling to me that it's common practice to silo local LEO's ability to communicate with the SS. If it's not common practice, then it's doubly "weird" that it happened to coincide with here with so many other seemingly obvious breeches in protocol.
In security, in the event of a breach, speed of communication between different layers of the responding force is crucial, and this system seems to have been designed to prevent responder communication from the bottom to the top.
It does call to mind the comical depiction of the FBI in the movie Die Hard, which suggests a derisive elitist attitude from the Feds toward the locals, but it's shocking to see it play out in real life like this.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I see no new downside (electorally) to the Democrats replacing Biden with a younger, charismatic and relatively unknown center-left politician with no current national profile, someone like Obama in 2004. There will be wall-to-wall fawning media coverage and probably a short enough period for the honeymoon to stretch through the election before any real negatives can stick to them. It will bring back Democrats who were weary of Biden, Independents who were put off by age concerns or the stench of this re-run election between two guys with high negatives. If they pick well and find someone who isn't mired in dumb scandals, a family of grafters, or crazy fringe politics, that's even better. It's a hail mary, but like most sports fans, I would rather see my team try a hail mary when they're chasing the game in the fourth quarter than do nothing at all.
The other thing they could try, which might have a better chance of working, is to draft in a feel-good barely-political celebrity, like Tom Hanks, Oprah or The Rock, with a brief campaign as a "non-partisan" national healer. Like Trump did in 2016, this generates excitement and brings in new voters who are there for the star-fucking and don't care about issues.
In both scenarios, selection is key. The wrong person can go down in flames disastrously (like Sarah Palin, who brought in a burst of energy but faced a hostile press and was not prepared for it), but then they'd back where they are now, so no real loss.
dasfoo
1yr ago
That's not demonstrating "zero respect for the target as a thinking human being" - it's being pragmatic about how to achieve some limited version of their goals and build a coalition in a representative liberal democracy.
It's A pretending to share a value that is important to B to convince B to help toward's A's policy goals, whereas A actually holds both the B and the value in contempt. One of the cleanest examples of this, historically, is the western Communist's appeal for human rights including freedom of speech, but only as it applies to their treatment by western governments. If the Communist were to take power, those rights would disappear instantly and any attempt to appeal to them on the basis of that shared value would reveal that it was never shared in the first place. There's not really a true coalition, unless you consider the conman and his mark in a coalition to steal the mark's money.
This is less clear on issues of bodily autonomy and meat production, but probably not hard to see less charitable angles if you zoom out a few levels and look at a bigger picture than just those issues.
dasfoo
9mo ago
The shift in (publicly expressed) conservative views on female sexuality in the face of wokeness has been fascinating. Conservatives are now openly much more sex-positive when it comes to traditional sexuality, as a bulwark against alternate sexualities, whereas in the past they were more focused on opposing sexual permissiveness by promoting modesty. Look at the conservative embrace of Sidney Sweeney or all the rightoid influencers on X who prominently display cleavage while opining on whatever issue: the new conservative messaging is "It's good for men to want to fuck real women," because too many other, weirder avenues have opened up in pop culture.
Now, surely, this has always been the conservative ideal, but it was more prudent in the past to let it bubble in the background, lest your daughter forsake the first half of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The balance is what's important, and if nature if pulling heavily on the whore-half, socially we need to over-promote the madonna-half. Now the framing window has changed from, "Don't be a whore" to "Don't be some weird whore who is outside the bounds set back when your grandma was a respectable hetero whore for grandpa behind closed doors."
If conservatives fear that teachers/librarians are in a conspiracy to groom their kids into blue-haired gender-queer kink-mongers, you'd better believe there will be some counter-grooming. Who doesn't want their son to love tits, or their daughters to have happy marriages by doing things we don't want to know about to please their husbands? Now that the left is so far down the sex-as-anything-but-breeding path, we can be more honest about the merits of good old-fashioned fucking.
dasfoo
1yr ago
a guy who goes stargazing on a blanket and accidentally falls asleep
The cop would probably nudge him awake and say, "You can't sleep here," and the guy would go home. If the guy instead pulls out a tent and crawls inside to sleep there, he'll probably get told again to leave and, if he doesn't, arrested. This applies whether the guy is homeless or homed, there's no class distinction other than one of obstinate and probably repeat offending.
Sleeping in a park where sleeping is disallowed because you have nowhere else to sleep is no different than stealing fruit from a fruit stand because you have no other food. It's a crime, whether you're scruffy or clean-cut.
Luckily there are beds and food in jail, so the system works when we let it.
dasfoo
1yr ago
But last night all I felt was pity as the CNN analysts tore into him. He's still with it enough to know that this was an epic disaster. His legacy is now in ruins, no matter what happens. Once he got home and it was just him and Jill, did he break down and cry? I don't know. Maybe politicians at this level don't have those feelings. But the non-thinking part of my brain felt a lot sympathy for him personally.
One of the points pressed by the CNN panel was, "How did the DNC/Biden's campaign let him get this far without intervening?"
I would be shocked if half of that panel wasn't already aware he was this bad. David Axelrod (who was oddly half-covered in water droplets for the first segment, like someone had thrown a cup of water at him right before cameras), Obama admin heavyweight, didn't know? Van Jones didn't know? It's their job to know. It's hard to buy the feigned shock from a bunch of high-level DC journos and politicos who surely never gossip.
As for Dr. Jill, if anyone knows, it's her, so it would be rich to assume that last night was some dam-breaking revelation for her. If she's let him get this far, it's either out of cynicism or a sense of entitlement, and I would guess neither of those states at this stage are penetrable by actual self-reflection or honest emotion.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I don’t think it’s difficult to see how and why poking fun at old conservative fogeys this way is rather dishonest.
The old conservative fogey model is the song Wouldn't It Be Nice by the Beach Boys: Young people should want to have sex and not do it, which encourages marriage. A world in which teenagers can have sex and don't want to is as gross a perversion of nature as supposedly switching genders, removing the focused drive that has inspired art and other achievements for millenia.
dasfoo
1yr ago
At the end of the day in politics, the rules are more like guidelines, unless there's an army enforcing them.
In 2002 the NJ Senate race had passed the nomination deadline, when incumbent Senator Torricelli was headed for a certain loss following corruption charges. The Democrats asked the New Jersey Supreme Court if they could pretty please have an exception made and the court declared an "emergency resignation exception." The Democrats replaced Torricelli on the ballot with the recently retired Senator Frank Lautenberg, who won by almost 10%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lautenberg#2002_election
dasfoo
1yr ago
As far as Marvel goes, it's a potentially relevant side conversation that so much pop culture that is ostensibly aimed at younger kids -- superheroes, cartoons, YA fiction -- has become mainstream entertainment for adults. It's not just a de-sexing of society that is reflected in that kind of material, but a de-thinking or a de-maturing, which has troubled me. There should, IMO, be a transition in one's teen years from reading YA lit to A lit, because the ideas will be more complex and the conflicts more reflective of the choices and moral considerations that adults face in their lives. They can teach us how to think about complex subjects. I was reading a Reddit thread about Poor Things yesterday, and it's shocking how many people are so media-illiterate that they can't delineate between text and subtext. I partially blame the glut of YA media that has no subtext.
When I was 15/16, as an avid movie-watcher, I was expanding from Star Wars and Superman to stuff like The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Akira Kurosawa. I can't imagine how stunted I would be now if I stuck to content that was created with a juvenile audience in mind. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of junk, but I try to keep it balanced. Even though the dumb horror movies I love push some easy pleasure buttons, they aren't what elevates me.
dasfoo
2yr ago
Its either a serious case of ideological blindness or serious levels of intellectual dishonesty to actually claim trans child == dead child.
It's stealing a base, but it's as apt a metaphor for the parents as it is for the trans people who use it to describe themselves.
I have a nephew who has claimed to be a girl for the last few years. He recently told his parents that he was encouraged to do this by his therapist as a way to mitigate suicidal feelings. He's still suicidal and worse now that he went through this insanity and it didn't help. In a way, his transition was a kind of failed metaphorical suicide attempt. I have no idea how parents react to a child who tried and failed to kill themselves, except from movies like Ordinary People, but it's like a kind of death. There's grieving for sure. It turns death from a remote specter to an omnipresent reality in every future interaction with that child. Parents tend to irrationally fear the worst, anyway; although you compartmentalize such fears as irrational. After a suicide attempt, however, they have pictured their kid dead as reality and now will fear suicide every time the phone rings and probably for most minutes in between those phone calls. If it's not death it must be an excruciating and unrelenting tease of death.
It's not a huge leap for me to assume that the parental reaction to a serious suicide attempt would be similar to a reaction to a supposed gender transition.
There's also a kind of an "undead" quality to their presence after transition, like in a horror movie where a loved one has returned as a vampire or zombie. There's this uncanny valley between the person you used to think you knew and this disturbing thing that has replaced them that signifies something no one wants to address or think about. While is does not threaten harm, it casts a pall of unease over every interaction. If it's not the death of a person, it is like the death of normalcy. Maybe normalcy was a fantasy, but it was a mutually agreed fantasy that has been destroyed by this thing that lives between the lines of order and now stares everyone in the face in broad daylight, and you know that both you are shamed by how you react to its presence as it is shamed by the disruption of its unspeakable presence in its current form. It's a death that has half-happened and stands in the room as a reminder of its possibility and yet can't be spoken about. Is that worse than death? With death there is peace. Maybe there's not a word for it yet, and death is the closest we can come up with so far.
The picture on the right, however, is not the endpoint of Communism, but a waypoint. In the endpoint, most of the people in the picture on the right are dead or in prison, because it was never going to turn out the way they thought it would and it's always worst for the non-conformists. Honestly, the endpoints of Fascism and Communism look pretty much the same: A corrupt political hierarchy eating each other for power while stealing from the people and murdering as many witnesses as possible.
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