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Well, this is the Trump experience. I mean this debate. He started out really strong, was totally defeating Harris for the first ten minutes or so. Then he just couldn't help but start rambling and making unforced errors. Why decide to bring up abortion and ramble about ninth month abortion? That's not one of the Republicans' strengths. Why bring up Marxism? Outside of the highly online left and right, people generally think of Marxism as some boring thing from decades ago, not as an important issue. Why bring up the Springfield pets thing? That's another highly online issue that plays weird to normies.
Why not just focus on your strengths of crime, the economy, and immigration? He's starting to try to pivot more back to those now, but now he's rambling and raising his voice and acting defensive, which looks bad.
This guy has always sucked at debates other than in the 2016 primaries and when he got to go up against Biden a few months ago, but almost anyone could have won that debate against Biden.
Kamala is a competent but relatively weak debater, a strong debater could easily run rings around her. But Trump has learned nothing, it seems, from past debate performances. He keeps making the same kinds of unforced errors and making himself look bad. He can't stop himself from getting defensive and rambling and bringing up stuff that most people don't care about, or even stuff that favors his opponent.
If he could have just stayed calm and focused, he would have this debate in the bag by now. Instead he is fumbling it. How the fuck can a man have nine years of experience at politics and political debating and not learn the simple lesson of staying calm and looking calm and tough when the context makes it the right decision, instead of getting flustered and emotional all the time?
Shower thoughts: I watched some of it and was deeply unimpressed with both. Just constant lying and avoiding answering questions to deliver intelligence insulting propaganda soundbites instead. I hate American presidential debates and continue to do so.
As someone that I would self-categorize as "crazy person," namely I consider myself a socialist and a Marxist but I hate woke and what the modern establishment Democrats have become, I was flirting with the idea of protest voting Donald Trump. I think this debate pretty much sealed me against that.
In particular his two stances refusing to concede and admit he lost the 2020 election, that it was stolen, and supplication to Russia/Putin by refusing to endorse defense of Ukraine were red lines to me.
Unlike a lot of people, I don't have a lot of problem with Jan. 6 and hardly buy into the establishment Democrat narrative that it was some sort of horrific never again atrocity and affront to "democracy" (read: their deep state establishment power) "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure." and so on. I think it's kind of cool the Congress felt some real fear of the people for once, actually. That said, Democracy depends on people accepting they lost and acknowledging the winners as legitimate leaders to work with. A refusal to do this is a dangerous and destructive degradation of western civilization. I don't know if Trump genuinely has a mental problem or if he's just playing to his base that can't accept loss, but either way it's totally unacceptable. Likewise, I don't know where this subservience to Russia comes from, other than again playing to his retard extremely online base, but it's not okay. The USA shouldn't be bowing to anyone. They both bow to Israel though - which would be a red line for me too except.. yeah. It's was sadly expected and there's no apparent escape from the domination.
Apparently Trump also commented on Marxism but I missed that. Well obviously I oppose that as a slur, but that's pretty unique to me I guess. I was already severely backing off from strategic protest hearing that J.D. Vance endorsed some insane Red Scare book that promotes the "Cultural Marxism" myth and argues that democracy is bad and the them are subhumans trying to get you, if you don't get them first. No proof Vance actually read and liked the book for real, but apparently Trump is all in on this shit. It's a reminder that there's no real strategic friendship here. No socially conservative "populist" economics helping born Americans grow strong with brotherhood. In the end they will still sell out America to the elite monied globalists. They will still cut taxes for rich people and pollute the world. They will always pander to & reflect the culture and politics of the lowest IQ band of whites. I hate Democrats, progressives, and wokies. But Conservatives and you people are just plain evil and nothing good can come from this rotten soil. Sad.
Sidebar: looking up that Jefferson quote more interesting things arise from the letter to what I believe is a response to Shays's Rebellion
Truly there is nothing new under the sun.
I hate to break it to you, but the idea that Cultural Marxism is a myth, is a myth. There literally were academics calling themselves Cultural Marxists, and they were promoting exactly the kind of thought that would later become SJWism, and now Wokeness.
No. It's not. I'm a Marxist. If it were real I would have heard of it. The first time I heard of it was from ultra-right wing extremely online types. And they continue to be the only ones that talk about it. This leads to at least one of two conclusions
In the years I have argued Marx and Socialist stuff I have pretty much never encountered an anti-Marxist that really knew much of anything about Marxism. It really is kind of astounding how ignorant anti-Marxists are about the ideology they profess to hate, actually. Up to the most respected professors, it's immense amounts of confused BSing. And we're not talking about something small that's easily missed here.
You mean academic singular. I watched this happen in real time. The extreme right-wing types that desperately wanted to put the cultural marxism myth on to wikipedia were having a hard time with power users and their citation gatekeeping. Eventually someone just went to google scholar and found a book with the title Cultural Marxism from the 80s or 90s from some literal who. Not a single conservative I've seen citing this "proof" has read said book, that I know of. Nor has any serious Marxist. Nor have I. There might be others, I don't know, since culture and marxism are two very popular buzzwords for overproduced academic hacks, but no serious Marxist has ever talked about such things. This might not be obvious to you, but trust me, It's really obvious to me because I am actually somewhat familiar with this ground.
The other works the conspiracists like to cite never call themselves "cultural marxist" e.g. the Frankfurt School. Who are not literal whos. No fan or detractor of them has called them such in Marxist circles. Again, it's all right wingers from without confusedly opining. Fans call their influence "critical theory" and it's no great secret or grand conspiracy.
Again we are talking about a supposed movement that's brought much of the developed world to its knees. Despite the fact economic leftism as a movement is laughably dead and pathetic now. Not some micro book from around the collapse of the USSR.
If wokeness had much to do with serious Marxism maybe I would be Woke. I'm not. I'm opposed to it.
Cultural marxism is effectively Antonio Gramsci. He absolutely wanted to influence culture and was pushing marxism.
The cultural revolution clearly shows that the communists wanted to influence culture.
Especially the early soviet union wanted to greatly impact culture.
This isn't more of a conspiracy theory than that right wingers want to change culture. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy that people with similar political views want the same thing. That christians tend to be pro life isn't a conspiracy. They are not all congregating in a central lodge. Many of them aren't really taking orders from above and those who are such as catholics are entirely open about the church's stance.
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