“I think she’s beautiful — very beautiful! I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually — unusually beautiful!"
I don’t think it’s with her popularity that the creepy old serial sex abuser is preoccupied…
I’m regularly struck by the literal insanity of politics, but this whole deal with Israel is a particularly notable example.
The fact of the matter is that we have no idea what Harris’s actual opinion of the situation is. Regardless of what it might actually be, she has to support Israel, which at this point means supporting a government of literal murderous psychopaths who are simultaneously carrying out a genocide in Gaza and a violent incremental illegal land grab in the West Bank while also brazenly trying to provoke, and drag the US into, a war with Lebanon or Syria or Yemen or Iran. And why does she have to support all of that patent evil? Because if she doesn’t, AIPAC will spend millions and millions of dollars trying to destroy her, like they already destroyed Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, for daring to have principles.
And what’s the likely net result of that? To elect a Republican, which is to say, a member of the party of actual antisemites.
They accuse Democrats of being antisemites merely for calling genocide genocide, and meanwhile, the actual antisemites - the people who comtinue to hold to the notion of Jews as evil, money-grubbing vermin who are conspiring to take over the world, are Republicans, even including Republicans in high office, like “Jewish space lasers” Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Think about how insane that is - a politician has to publicly support a genocidal regime or face being called an antisemite and having an Israeli advocacy group spend millions and millions of dollars to destroy her and instead elect the candidate from the party of actual Jew-hating antisemites.
And as if that isn’t enough, we have Jill Stein in the middle of it all, who, with zero chance of actually winning, is free to take the position that any rational person should take, and the position that the majority of the Democratic base takes - that genocide is genocide and is rightly condemned. And that then introduces the risk that she’ll draw off enough Democratic voters, merely by taking the position held by the majority, so the position that the Democratic candidate should take, that it will hand the election to the Republican - the candidate of the party of actual antisemites.
The whole thing is bludgeoningly insane. I don’t think anyone could’ve created such a grotesquely dysfunctional and actuslly counter-productive system if they’d deliberately set out to do it.
And yet that’s the world we live in - the world we’re forced to live in - a world warped by the literal insanity of a wealthy and powerful few.
It boggles my mind.
I’m having another of those “Damn - I’m still not cynical enough” moments at the thought that anyone would actually believe that Trump could do a better job than anyone else at anything having anything at all to do with the economy.
It’d make sense if the measure of an effective president was their skill at lying, filing false financial reports, dodging creditors and filing bankruptcy - then Trump would clearly be unequalled. But since it’s not…?
Only “near” historic low?
Since we already have at least two overtly corrupt justices whose entire defense consists essentially of “nobody has the authority to do anything about it so fuck you,” and the highlights of their last session include ruling that bribery is entirely legal just so long as the check is postdated and that presidents are completely and totally immune from even being investigated over anything that is in any way connected to anything that might by any stretch of the most fevered imagination be considered an "official act " I have to wonder what it will take to actually hit rock bottom.
I have no doubt that, since they have no integrity, no ethics and no regard for either law or the well-being of the country, we’ll see.
No - probably not.
Religion, just in and of itself, isn’t really the problem. It’s just the most notable example of the underlying problem, which is probably best summed up as aggressive tribalism.
People have a compulsive desire for self-affirmation - for assurance that they embody whatever qualities they consider the indicators of “good” people. And by far the easiest way for people to assure themselves of that is to associate those qualities with a label and self-apply that label. That gives them a fellowship of label-wearers who are invested in the same belief, which establishes a feedback loop in which they all assure each other of how [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] they are, and a ready-made set of outsiders they can individually and collectively condemn. And that last is the real problem - since few if any people truly embody the qualities they wish to believe they do, the easiest and most effective way to assure themselves they do is to focus on some designated set of others and on the assertion that they fail to possess those qualities. That allows people to assure themselves that they are at least more [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] than these other people over there.
That’s clearly a toxic and antagonistic dynamic that really just serves to divide people up into warring factions, and since it’s at least somewhat irrational yet crucial to people’s self-affirming self-images, it’s a thing that easily gets entrenched and, whenever possible, codified, so that it can be forcibly imposed.
Again, religion is certainly the most common and historically destructive vehicle for that, but it’s far from the only one. Most notably, it’s also the dynamic underlying virtually all ideology and a great deal of philosophy, not to mention a great many less significant distinctions, ranging from sexual preference to diet to sports fandom.
Now - in the first place, I would say that it would not have been possible to have a world without religion, since the practical purpose of religion is to provide answers to questions for which there’s insufficient evidence or knowledge to support nominally legitimate answers, and that lack of evidence and knowledge was an unavoidable part of our history. From the moment that somebody wondered what that big bright thing up in the sky was and somebody else made up an answer for them, religion was inevitable.
Beyond that though - if we were to imagine a world in which religion somehow never came to be, we’d just have had a world in which people would’ve focused that much more on the other ways in which they divide themselves against themselves, since that desire for self-affirmation exists anyway.
And truth be told, I actually think that’s part of the problem with our current world - that a great many people have just shifted from what would in the past been a self-affirming faith in a religion to a self-affirming faith in an ideology or philosophy or political affiliation or some other tribal distinction - that much of what we’re seeing today is the same toxicity just based on more secular divisions.
Not that religion has become less of a problem - what it’s lost in overall market share, it’s undeniably gained in the fervor and aggression of its remaining adherents, but it’s also been joined by a wide range of other divisions, each destructive in the same general ways, even if not necessarily to the same degree.
True.
I need to think of a concise way to frame that, because he’s not like any five-year-old - he’s like Donald Trump as a five-year-old.
Yes - most five-year-olds are the way you describe. But there’s that one who not only refuses to share, but yanks toys he doesn’t even want away from the other kids just so they can’t have them, who throws tantrums over pretty much anything and everything, who can’t be trusted with anything delicate or complicated because he’ll get mad and break it when he can’t figure out how to work it, who kicks the backs of airline seats and throws screaming fits in the middle of stores, who steals anything he can get his hands on and lies brazenly when he gets caught…
That’s the five-year-old Trump was, and still is.
As always, all one needs to do is pretend that Trump is an unusually tall and bald five-year-old, and what he says and does makes perfect sense.
This is the key, and it really is just that simple.
Their hateful and ignorant ideals simply don’t have enough support to win with any significant voter turnout.
They therefore have exactly two options - to modify their positions to appeal to more people, or to hold to their positions and try to manipulate and corrupt the system so that they can win in spite of the fact that a clear majority rightly find them to be noxious. And they’ve blatantly chosen the latter.
You’re arguing with a figment of your imagination.
If you have any interest in actually discussing/debating with me rather than the caricature in your mind, let me know.
the obvious conservative-media thirst for the idea of him dropping out
I see no reason to believe that the conservatives want him to drop out, and many reasons to believe they want him to stay in.
There’s absolutely no question that they’re outnumbered. With a fully engaged voting public, they can’t possibly win. Their only hope is to prevent as many people as possible from voting, and discourage as many more as possible.
Additionally, they’ve spent the last four years flogging the “Biden crime family” narrative, so all they have to do against Biden is stay the course. A new candidate would need an entirely new set of oppositional propaganda, and they wouldn’t have much time in which to get it to take root.
I would think that pretty much the last thing in the world they’d want would be for the Democrats to make an 11th hour switch to an entirely different candidate, and quite possibly a candidate who will inspire the sort of enthusiasm Biden’s candidacy is sorely lacking.
and hope that the DNC can come through in a clutch and come up with an alternate plan from scratch without tripping over their dicks and falling down as they are wont to often do.
Now that I agree with pretty much entirely, with only the proviso that, Hanlon’s Razor notwithstanding, I tend to ascribe their failures more to malice than incompetence (though it could be argued that since it appears to boil down to stultifyingly shallow self-interest, it could qualify as just a different sort of incompetence).
Also, if you are a Democratic politician or donor and you want to replace Biden with someone else, surely talking to the press about how he should drop out without anyone in particular in mind that you’re talking to them about as a replacement, and a strategy to get that person into place, should be an absolute last, last, last resort for a way to get that done. And probably not even then.
I wholeheartedly disagree.
I think that the winning strategy, rather obviously, is to throw the nomination entirely open and let it work itself out. The exact thing that’s going to inspire the sort of enthusiasm that will steamroll Trump is a very public process by which a nominee is legitimately chosen.
Coming into it with some prepared scheme by which to hopefully force the nomination of a particular candidate is just duplicating the mistakes the DNC made in 2016 and 2020, and it’s all too likely to just end us up right back where we were before the debate - with a disappointed and frustrated base that has to be guilt-tripped into voting for a candidate in whom they don’t believe solely on the strength of them being not-Trump.
They know very well what they are doing. It’s just that their wealth isolates them from the consequences of it. They don’t care about healthcare, climate change, education, unemployment, because that’s for the 95% to worry about. They are rich enough to don’t give a fuck, and they feel safe doing so.
And that rather obviously describes someone who’s rather obviously mentally ill.
Specifically, they lack empathy and have little to no conscience, so have little to no concern for the harm their decisions might cause to others. Those are the hallmarks of both antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy.
Mm… sort of.
The US had the enormous advantage of starting its life with material resources of which most can only dream, so it couldn’t help but achieve some fairly significant success, and as long as things were relatively easy, it generally did. But it never quite managed to pull its head out of its ass. Its material advantages made it so that it generally managed to get by in spite of the fact that it’s head was firmly lodged up its own ass, but that also meant that it never learned anything. So it just stayed in a diminishing circle of bad decisions until it reached a point at which smart decisions were necessary, and it revealed itself to be mostly incapable of making them.
And at the moment, it’s actually subject to a mass movement that lauds the days of the bad decisions as the good old days, since the people still have their heads too far up their asses and can’t recognize the reality that they were always bad decisions, that the prosperity that accompanied them was simply due to the US’s enormous material advantages and in spite of, rather than because of, the bad decisions, and that a return to those bad decisions in an era in which those material advantages have been squandered is just going to make things even worse.
Which, granted, is still sort of a “good run” - much smarter people have still failed to do even close to as well, since they were stuck starting out with pretty much nothing but disadvantages.
But one can’t help but wonder what could’ve been had we not had our heads so firmly lodged up our asses…
It’s really very, very simple.
Regulation of things like pollution serves the interests of the people broadly, but undermines the interests of a handful of obscenely wealthy sociopaths.
And much of the current Supreme Court explicitly works NOT to serve the interests of the people broadly, but to serve the interests of the obscenely wealthy sociopaths.
And that’s it, right there. Just as has happened in numerous past civilizations, the power structure in the US has become so warped and corrupted - so entirely in the control of sociopaths - that it not only no longer even pretends to serve the interests of the people, but tends to explicitly work against their interests.
And the hell of it is that the ruling class is so far gone in corruption and shallow self-interest - so sincerely deeply mentally ill - that they don’t recognize that ultimately they’re working against their own interests - that serving the interests of the people maintains the health of the society from which they benefit, and that working against the interests of the people undermines that health. Like any other mindless parasite, they’re going to destroy their host, and in so doing, ultimately destroy themselves.
And the US will just be added to the ever-growing list of societies destroyed through the machinations of a relative few profoundly mentally ill people granted undue wealth and power.
I pessimistically expected that.
If he bowed out and the Dems nominated a halfway decent candidate (which they likely wouldn’t do, but that’s a different subject), they’d demolish Trump. He’d lose so badly he couldn’t even pretend it was fraudulent (though of course he’d claim that anyway, since he has the emotional maturity of a spoiled five-year-old). The race would instantly go from a terrifying risk to a complete rout.
But between Biden’s ego and the DNC’s determination to stick with a wholly-owned establishment neoliberal hack at all costs - even if it means losing - I expected that they wouldn’t take this golden opportunity.
Transparent astroturfing.
The staff is laying a foundation so that when Trump - an arrogant, oblivious nitwit with the attention span of a five-year-old - inevitably comes out of it the obvious loser - they will already have the base primed to believe that that somehow reflects poorly on… Biden.
I don’t see any possible way it couldn’t. Every official is going to expect a “gratuity” in exchange for approving a contract, and every contractor who expects to succeed is going to go into every deal with the understanding that they’re going to be expected to pay a “gratuity” after the deal is finalized.
The upshot of it all can only be wholly institutionalized pay-to-play, with only the ultimately entirely meaningless requirement that the payment has to be deferred instead of up front.
Yes - it’s pretty much a given, cynically, that a corrupt court is going to rule that corruption is legal.
As I often do, I wonder if this is going to be one of the things that future historians will point to as a notable event in the days leading up to the collapse of the US.
There actually is a statistical correlation between conservative, anti-trans political affiliation and a preference for transgender porn, and Texas leads the nation in searches for transgender porn.
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