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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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The way I see the things in my bubble.

Watching the Democrats media machine spinning at full gears is impressive. Trump's assassination attempt is old news. It never happened. The iconic Pulitzer and election winning picture is nowhere to be seen. A lot of dem aligned twitter accounts suddenly are active and on the attack. Felon and rapist are everywhere. Suddenly Trump's age is a problem. Absolutely no accountability demanded from the people that were telling that Biden is ok. No talks if he is fit to be president. Their reality building efforts are smooth and from what I can see effective - no one seems to remember critics of her that they wrote from the ancient time of June 2024, let alone before. All in all makes you believe that Snowcrash's ur-language was not pulled out of Neil Stephenson's imagination.

On my side - Republicans are high on copium, seems to not have been prepared for Kamala, lack message and message discipline, and are on the defensive. JD Vance seems to be bombing. And for it - the election moved from landslide to at best narrow win. I still think that she is the second worst possible candidate after Joe Biden but probably ok enough to win.

The quantity of vitriol on both sides is extremely high, the quality is lacking. But I would say the Democrats are better right now. I feel that it is manufactured enthusiasm, but has the chance to become real one.

All in all bad news for everyone that hopes that mass migration to the west will be curbed before the mid 2030-s (lately I have become single issue on that issue).

Wild take: Right-wingers don't dislike Kamala. At least, not in the way they disliked Hillary. I don't have anything to back this up, just the general vibe from the usual online right crowd on Twitter.

Kamala just seems like she would be more fun to have a beer with than Hillary. She's awkward and weird in a fake politician way, but somehow manages to seem more like a human being than Hillary did. Kamala bullshits in public and is a hypocrite but seems like she might actually be oddly fun to hang out with, which might appeal to right-wingers because that's basically Trump's energy too. Even the allegations that Kamala used sex to jump-start her career, in a way, help feed into this impression because it would be hard to imagine 2016 Hillary having sex at all. And if Kamala did sleep her way into her career, it doesn't even make her look weak because well, at the end of the day she became a Senator and then a Vice President. Her having been a prosecutor also probably appeals to the typical right-wing mind on some level.

Hanging out with a boss as an employee is often very different than hanging out with the boss as just some random person.