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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.
As a former Democrat, perhaps I was never able to summon a burning dislike for Ms Clinton, although I was never her fan. I didn't vote in the matchup between her and Trump. My opinions of her only turned more negative further down the line.
By comparison, I find Kamala to be odious on nearly every dimension. I might have given Hillary a lot of shit, but I never doubted her intelligence or general political savvy. Kamala is a bobble-head, and while I could have tolerated her existence as a fashion accessory for the Biden campaign, watching her get escalated to her current position without having to jump through a quarter of the hundreds of fire rings Trump had to circus through is now insulting.
I think she will ultimately do herself in. But I admit that every couple of hours I have a mini-freakout about her being this close to POTUS. I relax when I remind myself that she never had any momentum and has been entirely reliant on elder statesmen's protection and hiding her from view. Now she has nobody else's wing to hide under and there's no more safe spots to bail to.
Victoria Nuland and her type are also 'intelligent' on the same level and look where their brilliant group think has gotten America. Into the enviable position of supporting a meatgrinder that has, so far, killed something like half a million people.
Ask yourself how you'd feel about the intelligence of Chinese politicians if they staged a coup in Canada, replaced the Canadian government with a pro-Chinese ones and then were surprised by US invading the place.
Wow, that's an awkward interjection of a tired conspiracy theory for a pet topic. Really couldn't hold it in, could you?
For your parallel to hold, you'd have to change some things- like that instead of a Chinese politicians staging a coup in Canada to get a pro-Chinese government, it was the American president bribing, sanctioning, and then successfully pressuring the Canadian Prime Minister to start shooting supporters of his own government in the street, only to find that the Toronto Mayor wasn't willing to go along with a lethal party purge and then the Canadian PM fleeing the country for the United States before he could be impeached.
And then the United States conducting an invasion of one province, and then astroturfing an insurgency in another in an effort to start a civil war, and then having to intervene to sustain the insurgents when they start to fail, and then maintaining a frozen conflict for half a decade while attempting to coerce the Canadians into changing their constitution in a way to give the American proxies veto-authority over Canadian foreign policy but empowered them to have their own foreign policy with the US.
And then giving up, calling them all Nazis and not a real country anyway but actually American and outright invading with pre-made plans for all the pro-Canadian and anti-US advocates to go to the torture sites and mass graves.
'Tired conspiracy theory'
Are you seriously suggesting you'd not be blaming Russia for January 6th had one of their foreign policy officials gone there and was photographed being nice and chummy with the insurgents ?
Sure. Not least because January 6th didn't have insurgents.
If you have to invent alternate history comparisons- twice- to validate your conspiracy theory parallel, that in and of itself is indicative of the quality of the original metaphor.
High ranking foreign policy officials greeting and handing out cookies to actual insurgents - people in armed militias engaged in violence against the state, not just 'pretend' insurgents who are there to create a spectacle..
Yes, perfectly normal, in no way was it a message to the militias that they had official support of the White House because no diplomat or foreign policy official would ever meet publicly, on camera, with armed resistance without an official blessing. Unless he wanted to get shitcanned spectacularly and probably charged with something the next day.
You know, you're not a weird person. You seem more like an NPC.
And here we are appealing to more alternate history caricatures, for a third time. That bored with this timeline, huh?
Feel free to keep on. I promise to go 'Uh-huh' for any more efforts.
Uh-huh.
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