rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

Like, sorry, but Julian Schnabel can get bent, so can Carrol Dunham and his daughter, and don't get me started on fuckwads like McCartney. They still make tons of money off their art, and they still make art, but fuck their art. They should be forced to give up their money to people who actually need it.

Dunham and Schnabel sell paintings for amounts that would alter most individuals' lives forever, and probably for the better. Just because they're 'artists' doesn't change the fact that they're also pieces of shit who need to gimme that loot

agreed, table

xxp lol reasonable posts like

Being a businessman provides no positive value, it only takes.

It's completely subjective! And it's not universal inside of the not-businessmen category, nor did I suggest it was. I doubt the Stones are touring for the love of the game at this point but rather because Mick Jagger wants a bigger yacht.

That's why I never said it was about the broader capitalist system or even about wealth per se.

Is the act of accumulating and holding onto excessive wealth monstrous?

yes, by definition

I thought that was the most uncontroversial stance of all on ILX? The one that we all agree on?

Me too. I didn't know there was a "well you might accidentally do it in some jobs where I like the product" clause for some.

No one said there was?

Referring to wealth confiscation:

obv I'm on board with the above but I'm just talking about my view on people in the world as it is - musicians and actors are doing things people do or would do for free but getting paid for it. No verifiably human being on death's door would be engineering a hostile takeover of a century-old retail chain, but someone on death's door might like to get in one last game of pickup basketball.

if Neil Young wants to make music after he hits the arbitrary lifecap of $30 million, tens of thousands of individual people can make discrete decisions about whether to access it

the current system is rigged so that Jeff Bezos makes more than he could spend in 20 lifetimes, every week, by exploiting and limiting the options of tens of thousands of individual people


Paul McCartney should definitely be barred from releasing new albums of songs as Paul McCartney though. Twin Freaks and The Fireman and Liverpool Sound Collage are allowed.

If one cannot grasp how I'm simply making a potential value call between a 50-year old musician with $30mn in the bank continuing to make music as opposed to a 50-year old corporate raider gutting Sears, I really cannot help them.

eg: if Neil Young wants to continue touring, he can blow a load of his $30 million on setting up a network of collectively-run barns with great sound systems and public transport, and hire a dedicated road crew & support bands to travel with him for a year, and work his way back up to the $30 million cap, and then blow a chunk of it again inventing Pono 2.

xp ok, Marc Maron but see tables' posts

If I had $30 million, I'd spend $60 going to see Dead Man with Neil Young doing live score, but I wouldn't buy any of his records.

Yes, there are bad and avaricious artists, too. Think I referred to them way up there and also "maybe" etc.

The difference, again, is that there are no good billionaire businesspeople. Or $50 millionaire businesspeople. Or billionaire heirs and heiresses, obviously, though I suspect they would consider themselves businesspeople. And so on.

man we really ruined the thread for jon v/c today

So millionaires should be allowed to keep their millions if they're good people and make nice art? I'm sorry but this actually doesn't make any sense.

This is the problem with deontological ethical positions-- those who invent them often want exceptions that skew toward their own biases. I understand it and in many ways sympathize, but also just think it's ludicrous for one to say big corporate duder worth 20 million is a shitstain who deserves the axe while Justin Bieber is a-okay because he makes art that people enjoy.

So millionaires should be allowed to keep their millions if they're good people and make nice art?

Redistribute it all above a certain threshold and fuck the value judgments beside that one.

I think the value judgement is pretty important! A mini-Bezos isn't going to be any better of a person or any more valuable to society if we cap his wealth.

I just think the differences between these supposed entities are a lot murkier than you do.

hope you don't cap it before the creation of Bosch

how would we live without Bosch

Are you talking sinks or Hieronymous

Dishwashers, Art Pepper loving murder mystery solvers...i love em all

anheuser-bosch

harry bosch

Oy

A map that overlays the places where mail sorting machines are being removed with places where Clinton had a lead in the 2016 election: pic.twitter.com/wINoJJZXC4

— Xydexx Unicorn 🦄💕 (@XydexxUnicorn) August 14, 2020

This mail thing combined with the fact that most of the US will be a COVID bonanza in November and MAGA people wont be dissuaded from the polls (sans mask) but dem voters might seems like a reasonable concern?

I doubt that dem voters will be dissuaded, and if Trump's machine thought they were, they probably wouldn't be so desperately trying to rig it

Which makes the best case scenario one where lots of people thwart his will to vote in person and a not-insignificant percentage get sick and die.

Great fuckin' world we got here.

I doubt that dem voters will be disproportionately dissuaded

Which makes the best case scenario one where lots of people thwart his will to vote in person and a not-insignificant percentage get sick and die.

From reports I've seen, though no detailed research, heavily-masked shoulder-to-shoulder BLM protests in Seattle (a month thereof), LA, NYC, London, Sydney and Melbourne (one-day marches in these) resulted in no significant transmission spikes. Unmasked parties and influencer gatherings and churches and schools and Trump rallies consistently (seem to) generate spikes. The USA's in-person voting is already designed to drive down turnout, and closing polling places will likely have some effect, BUT assuming anti-Trump or pro-Biden voters are more likely to remain distanced and masked, they're less likely to cop the 'vid and die

Great fuckin' world we got here.

Well, yeah.

Why does he want to be president so bad when he despises America? If i was a 75 year old billionaire with a beautiful wife and young son I’d focus on having a fulfilling retirement.

― treeship., Friday, August 14, 2020 12:13 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

He could golf, take guitar lessons, teach Barron about the real estate business. There is no reason to spend his golden years ruining all of our lives.

― treeship., Friday, August 14, 2020 12:14 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I guess life isn't a box of chocolates, huh.

staying home and running ads that just point out that you're not donald trump is a winning strategy, as 2016 proved. nothing to worry about https://t.co/zfvhLl7fDJ

— Rich Lather (@allahliker) August 17, 2020

Oof thats close. Is that an outlier of has he been closing the gap?

Also, there are 15 battleground states - is that a wider definition than normal?

that CNN poll is definitely an outlier, there is no way there's anything close to a "10 point shift towards Trump"

joe biden needs another schtick besides hiding and being senile.

Yeah the comments said there can't be more than 6 battleground states and people are mostly treating this as outlier xp

i don't trust any "political polls" account that aggregates and doesn't have a blue checkmark. life is too short to trust total randos

Trump has gained a point or two but the average national poll, insofar as national polls matter, shows Biden with a four- to eight-point lead.

A rundown: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/17/biden-trump-polling-democratic-convention-396275

"We are a non-partisan group keeping you informed with trusted political polls, predictions and election night results. We are all you need to be in the know!"

very pedantic take, i know, but how can this account be all i need to be in the know?

also, i can think of one more thing i need to be in the know: a link to the actual poll in the goddamn tweet

*shakes fist at social media, the fucking worst*

why would trump be gaining in the polls at all, though? like who is saying "i was going to vote biden, but then i heard trump making a moronic spectacle of himself on television and changed my mind. he's the guy i want."

important context about the poll that @Ppolling numbers doesn't have enough twitter characters to explain or even link to:

Across 15 battleground states, the survey finds Biden has the backing of 49% of registered voters, while Trump lands at 48%.

The pool of battleground states in this poll includes more that Trump carried in 2016 (10) than were won by Hillary Clinton (5), reflecting the reality that the President's campaign is more on defense than offense across the states. Taken together, though, they represent a more Republican-leaning playing field than the nation as a whole.

xpost Have you ever seen a leaf blowing in the wind only to be caught in a crosswind and blown in the opposite direction? The leaf cannot help it, it has no autonomy.

if CNN is lucky, one of their 4th tier guests will whisper that little piece of context during the 19th segment they run on the poll today. then if the human race is lucky, some 3rd tier celebrity will tweet out the CNN clip where they explain the context so a rando polling aggregator can inform everyone else about how the most exciting little tidbit they could find in a poll description was misleading

god DAMN the replies to that tweet. it's not the fucking cnn poll that's an indicator of the decline of the united states, it's the fucking people replying to it without even pausing to consider about what they're complaining about

I found that poll (and front-page headline on their site) alarming and inexplicable too; the context helps.

(Knowing how much CNN despises Trump, a ridiculous conspiracist idea flashed across my mind; they're trying to bait Trump into letting a legitimate election go forward.)

Before you freak out about any one poll (or some exotic summary function of polls) that a twitter account has cherry picked for you, look at all of them yourself and make up your own mind:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/?ex_cid=irpromo
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/

"battleground states average" is inherently misleading because which states are included as "battleground" is subjective (as I see now that Karl just pointed out)

CNN really is a garbage organization. jake tapper makes a good "you don't know what you're talking about" face to the people he interviews, so maybe keep him for some other gig, but otherwise burn the whole thing down plz