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Kamala's word salad causes prediction market meltdown?
https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1843450980291010656
I guess she could be referring to Article 2(4)?
Even with a positively colossal steelman it's hard to understand what she's saying, charters cannot participate in successes. I think she doesn't really mean anything by this statement. It's what Gary Marcus says about LLMs, how they're just spinning word associations around.
She then continues on to repeat fairly standard US rhetoric 'we're not going to do a deal without Ukraine at the table' and dodges the question of NATO membership. None of it is particularly adept politician-speak IMO, she could do with lessons on muddying the issue.
How hard would it have been to say 'we want a free, democratic Ukraine with 1991 borders' or if they want 2014 borders, why not say that? Or if territory is too sensitive to talk about, just say 'we want a free and democratic Ukraine, a Russia that isn't going to be invading any more countries, deterrence for all America's enemies'? It was a pretty easy question!
It's not just that, there's more:
https://x.com/ClayTravis/status/1843449294008836567
She's asked about whether it was a mistake to let illegal immigration rise so dramatically and fails to dodge the question. She could've said 'oh there are enforcement problems since it's a big border' or given a distracting pre-prepared anecdote about one of the challenges they faced. She just says 'oh we have been offering solutions, solutions are at hand and we'll make more solutions on day one, when I'm elected!"
Here's a bigger chunk of the video, each minute I watch there's all this word salad and flailing question-dodging:
https://x.com/ThisIsJnored/status/1843473339085631770
For instance, at about 1:50 there's a question about the extensive US military aid to Israel and whether the Biden Harris administration is capable of putting any pressure on the Netanyahu govt.
She does say something substantive from time to time, carefully implying that the alliance is between the American people and the Israeli people, not with Netanyahu. She uses a proper technique like 'the real question is...' there which makes her look more in control. But it's still a pretty bad performance overall.
Presumably this is why polymarket has gone from parity to 53-46 in Trump's favour): https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024?tid=1728364599343
And then there's the editing! I think whatever portion of the interview they're releasing is the most flattering stuff they could get. How else do you explain this: https://x.com/LangmanVince/status/1842964122553761982
He asks the same question "but it seems Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening" with the exact same head movements (from a slightly different camera angle) and she gives a different answer, even more full of spaghetti:
What's going on here? Am I missing something basic? Kamala's answer isn't coherent either way but it's vaguely related to the question, was it edited from something else? This is why you should just give clear answers that specifically engage the question. Not interchangeable babble with with six clauses to a sentence.
I feel concerned (not only because I've placed bets that Donald Trump will lose the popular vote since I thought it was a dead sure thing) but also because this is the apparent calibre of American leadership. Even if we assume that Elite Human Capital or the Deep State is running the show, why can't these people find a decent media spokesperson? How hard can it be?
Apologies for how much of this post is rhetorical questions, twitter links and transcription, I'm truly confused by the whole thing. I also feel like people should know what I'm linking to, they should be able to scan the link with their own eyes and know to nitter or whatever if they don't have an account.
Edit: https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1843664856446316758 (this shows the editing they did somewhat more clearly)
That US is led by midwits has been evident since 2001 at least. The war on terror was a grotesque miscalculation-the neocon dreams of seven countries in five years delusions, Iraq a fumble, the war was a strategic victory for Al-Qaeda because it led to a decrease in US power and influence, loss of trust in the USG. Then you had the Arab Spring, which succeeded only in ruining things and not increasing US power either. Let's not even speak of Afghanistan. Then we got to Ukraine. Chinese have made no secret they're not going to be color-revolutioned, yet Americans thought driving China and Russia closely together was just the thing.
Putin clearly wanted in, was cooperative post 9/11, asked to be considered for membership and seeing as NATO has at times contained wholly authoritarian regimes like Turkey's various juntas , Portugal (somehow a founding member) etc, there were no obvious reasons why not to admit them. This would've gone some way to containing China.
That China would become extremely powerful was obvious since early 1900, when they were found to be not intellectually deficient, just merely medieval.
Emanuel Todd, the anthropologist famous for calling Soviet decline back when people thought USSR was eternal has an some interesting remarks in an interview about his upcoming book. Translation here.
I concur on a lot of the aforementioned U.S. foreign policy being a failure but think this veers into a Chomyskite type dismissal of anyone’s agency other than the U.S. government’s. The Arab Spring in Egypt and Syria began organically, as corrupt authoritarian states did not yet have a handle on the virality of social media. The U.S. government certainly picked sides, but I think it is unfair to treat this as the type of own-goal attempting the regime change and democratization on of Iraq was.
I think the aftermath is a complete loss. The Arab Spring wasn’t about democracy, it was an Islamist movement based in getting rid of the old guard who were largely secular socialists and nationalists. Our ignorance of the region and what these despots were holding back is obvious now and anyone familiar with the region and the history of could have easily told you that weakening these secular regimes is good optics and terrible policy. And where these despots were weakened or overthrown, we now have either outright Islamist governments or powerful military junta’s threatening jihad at either the secular government or the designated target of the Jews. But then again our midwits are not exactly scholars and were taken in by the optics that happened to coincide with their interpretation of the neo-liberal right side of history narrative that holds that humans all naturally are alike and think exactly like post-modern liberals and want nothing other than to join the Rules Based International Order and drink Starbucks and send their daughters to humanities programs at Evergreen.
To be blunt, my take on politics both domestic and international is Real Politick. You are a fool if you’re trying to govern based on delusions and fantasies about how you wish the world works. And you are a double fool if you’re misunderstanding human nature. We are not fundamentally good people, no one is. And pretending that if we just ignore reality hard enough we can wish ourselves to Utopia is just going to set everything back.
I’ll disagree with you on the point that the Arab Spring itself wasn’t about democracy. But as it was decentralized, it could only create a vacuum, and that then let groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, that had organization and structure, fill that vacuum.
It was about poverty. Higher grain prices meant that for the first time a lot of people didn't had food security.
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