U.S. Politics, November 2024: GARBAGE DAY!!

Xp keyes — i posted that link in the California politics thread way earlier today, but hey kip

Eh, if there’s any place to virtue signal it’s the VP pick. More salient with Trump and Biden because lol old but otherwise it’s a non-job.

Cold marketing driven pandering, where decisions are guided by focus groups studying what "resonates" with their target demographics. I think people are better at spotting that shit than they're given credit for

She would have never got those things anyways.

I was just thinking about something that stuck with me in the debate.

DONALD TRUMP: You know what it reminds me of? When they said they're going to get student loans terminated and it ended up being a total catastrophe. The student loans -- and then her I think probably her boss, if you call him a boss, he spends all his time on the beach, but look, her boss went out and said we'll do it again, we'll do it a different way. He went out, got rejected again by the supreme court. So all these students got taunted with this whole thing about -- this whole idea. And how unfair that would have been. Part of the reason they lost. To the millions and millions of people that had to pay off their student loans. They didn't get it for free. But they were saying -- it's the same way that they talked about that, that they talk about abortion.

They couldn't get -- they didn't even come close to getting student loans. They didn't even come close to getting student loans. They taunted young people and a lot of other people that had loans.

Biden giving her bullshit titles like Immigration Czar helped torpedo this campaign. The VP should be encased in carbonite and only thawed if the President dies or a Senate vote needs tie-breaking.

watching libs pushing the "15 million missing votes" conspiracy theory to the point where several news outlets had to publish a factcheck for it today, while not realizing that MAGA people are the ones egging this on because it helps them sew further doubt in the 2020 results and elections in general, is fairly annoying.

one friend I know started up w/ similar shit yesterday ("something stinks about these numbers, I don't buy it!"), but thankfully that's it.

California's at 55% counted, and 7 others are anywhere between 68%-79%

I mean look, I'm suspicious too, it doesn't square at all with what we were hearing earlier in the day, it sure did feel plausible that there could be record turnout due to how insane and unpleasant Trump had gotten...but like, results are results. It's the same reaction I've had every time I've looked at the Milwaukee Bucks score this year.

Biden did not name Harris “border czar” fwiw. He tasked her with outreach to countries in Central and South America where a lot of migrants were coming from. It didn’t include a title at all, that came from Greg Abbott and right-wing media.

Not that it matters at this point, obviously.

It is both funny and predictable that people on both the left and right are pushing the “missing 15 million votes“ thing. People on the left think that it means votes somehow disappeared this year, people on the right think that it means those votes were all fake in 2020. When in reality it’s not going to be 15 million, And what it mostly means is some significant number of people just stayed home.

I guess that's Trump's superpower. nobody takes him seriously, even though it's abundantly clear that we should. it makes it really hard to communicate the threat he poses. like the comment he made about Liz Cheney having guns pointed in her face - I didn't really think that was a direct threat, nor was the "shoot through the reporters to get to me" thing, that's just the way he talks, the argument is a guy running for President *shouldn't* talk that way, especially when it's a guy who wanted to send the National Guard to rough up citizens and directed a mob into the US Capitol. but people don't see it that way, because our politics have been devalued so much. it's all a fucking reality show now. I blame the media.

look we can talk about the Dems' failings all we want but at the end of the day 73 million people decided they wanted more Donald Trump in their lives, something I cannot process at all given that he embodies every single negative trait that a man could possibly have...the only conclusion is people like him because he makes folks like me upset. and that's sort of difficult to process right now. what did I ever do to you, asshole?

A bunch of straight cis white dudes complaining about “virtue signaling” is awkward for me tbh.

In terms of the policy stuff targeted at black voters, she was kinda at a disadvantage having already played up the tough on crime messaging (which I guess was easier than walking back the Kamala is a Cop thing by seriously promoting criminal justice reform and/or withdrawing support for Israel and the genocide).

Only one person has complained about virtue signaling?

h/t tipsy

"The net worth of the world’s 10 richest people grew by about $64 billion the day after the US election thanks to their companies’ surging shares, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index: It was the largest daily increase since the index began in 2012."

https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/11/07/2024/semafor-flagship-awkward-timing-uncomfortable-silence

This is maybe the most pertinent thing I've read today:

Donald Trump’s victory has been a boon for the mega-rich. The net worth of the world’s 10 richest people grew by about $64 billion the day after the US election thanks to their companies’ surging shares, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index: It was the largest daily increase since the index began in 2012. The two leaders of Trump’s transition team are billionaires, and several of his most loyal donors, including Elon Musk, are now “poised to have the biggest sway as his administration takes shape,” with posts ranging from cabinet positions to unofficial advisory roles, Bloomberg wrote. Among the leading candidates for Trump’s Treasury secretary is a billionaire hedge fund manager who made a fortune betting against the Japanese yen with George Soros in 2013.

https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/11/07/2024/semafor-flagship-awkward-timing-uncomfortable-silence

lol oops. xpost to sleeve

lol jinx, and thank you

You target policies like that to all voters. It’s deeply cringe/cliché to link drugs to black Americans and Kamala knows that damn well.

Fuck focus groups! I ran a lot of qual research projects at one time and the client wants certain outcomes so they can proceed. The people running them arrive with their own agenda and the respondents are hand picked to deliver that back to the client. One time I recruited a focus group of outer London Cosmo readers and the editor (who’d thought her readers were more like inner London it girls working in media) wailed ‘those aren’t my readers’ because they weren’t particularly stylish or, um, svelte. But they were definitely her readers!

I thought the 'crypto for black men' thing was amazingly bizarre and off base patronizing myself but I was told elsewhere that it's a big deal for them because they are disenfranchised by traditional financial institutions. but that doesn't mean it's a good solution.

"hey we know banks aren't good to you maybe try some fraud instead"

Nate Silver screaming 1 IN A TRILLION into a pillow

There's a sequel to that song, even after Axl had it removed from all reissues of "Lies"?

one benefit of being old: i remember being a child and seeing the profoundly dangerous idiot cowboy actor turn the whole map red. wiped out the new deal democratic party as then constructed. that eventually got these guys their 30 years of clintonism they're mourning today

— jeff computers (@allahliker) November 7, 2024

right wing spooks sabotaging Carter's hostage rescue helicopters helped as well, ftr

The biggest arseholes.

Xp xyzzz — that’s not that old! I remember that as a kid as well and I don’t consider myself old.

The writer of that (pretty good) thread considers himself old.

You are only as old as you feel :-)

Yeah I was nine

i was 18 in 88 when Dukakis was the nominee and didnt vote in my first election after 8 years of Raygun he was such a LAMO

I was 19 in '88 and Dukakis came to my campus on the campaign trail. I went to him, the energy in the room was not palpable. But I voted for him anyway.

In a way it was good because it gave me a low bar of expectations for presidential candidates.

Went to see him

Biden giving her bullshit titles like Immigration Czar helped torpedo this campaign.

Cmon man, this was not at all a title Biden gave her, disappointed to see a right wing talking point thrown around here as if it’s true. Yes he tasked her with dealing with the border, yes a stupid move, but that “Immigration Czar” and “Border Czar” was shit right wingers were calling her.

thought this was interesting about how that all came about:

ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: Immigration, I think, is a pretty fascinating illustration of this whole theme in general. It’s telling, right, that you immediately say immigration and don’t specify the so-called root causes issue. What does that mean? That means your portfolio is ostensibly trying to grapple with things like impoverished conditions and crime from Central American countries that are actually causing these migrants to flee north to begin with.

The way that that assignment came about — and this speaks to, I think, just the lack of a broader strategy that the West Wing had when it came to her — as Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s former chief of staff, told me, they were in a meeting, talking about this very issue. And Kamala Harris, as Klain told me, spoke rather forcefully and rather well about her ideas for alleviating some of these root cause elements.

And Joe Biden was impressed with her ideas. And he essentially said, why don’t you take that issue? Why don’t you take it on? And she’s kind of silent for a moment. And after the meeting, she approaches Klain and says, I’m really happy to be engaged on this, but I was sort of throwing those things out there in the hopes that someone else could take them on and not me, because it is just a completely no-win issue. I mean, to the extent that you can, as a governing leader, help alleviate those root causes, I mean, that’s a 10, 15-year at minimum metric.

EZRA KLEIN: Kamala Harris, as vice president, is going to fix El Salvador?

ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: Yes. Word is out on whether that has happened yet. ... But anyway, Ron Klain says, look, I get it. But — and here’s the important part — when Joe Biden was vice president, this was the issue he took on for Barack Obama. So he didn’t even see it as, oh, I’m saddling her with the thing that I don’t want to do, or sort of the scraps. He saw it as a great sign of respect that he would take the issue that he had worked on for Barack Obama and feel enough confidence in her that he would want to give it to her as well.

So completely divorced from questions like, can she make any meaningful, just optically, a sense of a win on an issue like this? And what does that mean for her profile as a vice president? Things like that were just not coming into the equation at all.

If you prefer “gave her unpopular and impossible jobs” cool - the actual title doesn’t matter, he weighed her down with the border even more than simply being Biden’s VP.

Sure, but you said "bullshit titles."

He also didn't weigh her down with the border, he basically gave her a diplomatic portfolio — talk to these countries, work on solutions. Totally reasonable job for a vice president. The rest of it was invented by Fox et al.

But see, they're good at driving the story!

She's not a diplomat, she's the Vice President! Her job is to wait around in case he dies and cast tie-breaking votes. We have actual diplomats to do shitty, unpopular jobs. If he didn't weigh her down with an unsolvable problem (because it's not actually a problem and because we don't have a time machine to undo the last 90 years of Central American policy) how did they have a story to run with?

From the left she was promising a continuation of Biden's immigration policy (bad!), from the center-right onward she was responsible for 'the border crisis.' Appealing to people who think immigration is not a major crisis and Biden has been great on immigration is a pretty narrow slice of the electorate.

yes we can beat her up for her failures, and kudos to you guys who seem really focused on that! but in the end most people just wanted a celebrity strongman, a total dipshit who falsely promises prosperity and is all in for white supremacy and the degradation of women

torn behind 'blaming the voters' and a poorly executed campaign, but it's probably neither - this is how democracy is supposed to work, voting the bums out (who secured real wins for you) and bringing back the other bum (with his own self-interests at heart)... I'm defeated, deflated, but not angry at the voters who made this choice

(to be fair, I think Harris ran a pretty solid campaign with the time she had, really energized a big portion of the electorate, but alas)

I reprimanded a friend in 2016 who said that we, all of us in this country, deserved the beating we were all about to get, the first time Trump was elected

But now I agree. We as a country deserve all of the pain he is going to deliver.

I know he has his sights on punishing California, but all the undocumented farm workers he aims to deport? That's all solidly red territory, those farmers are all Trump voters... ditto for the Arkansas poultry plant workers... you reap what you sow

The problem with the country feeling pain, deserved or not, is that it always gets felt most by the people who are already struggling.

Can't wait for people to be surprised that he actually meant he was going to try to deport a million people a year.

how dare the leopards eat MY face

We as a country deserve all of the pain he is going to deliver.

I completely disagree with this btw, nobody deserves pain and least of all red state voters. People want something better, the Democrats failed to offer that, it's not rocket science.

I tend not to blame the voters for the same reason I don't hold myself responsible for everything terrible the candidates I vote for do. For a large part of the electorate, voting is just an expression of one or a few priorities and the belief that one candidate is at least marginally better on those priorities. Yes, there are legit white supremacist hardcore trumpers, and I don't forgive them, but there have never been enough of those to win an election. He needed people who just felt like "my rent and bills and groceries are too high, fuck it let's try someone else" to vote for him too in order to win.

I honestly wish some of my friends on the left were able to detach themselves a bit more from the candidate in their voting, we might be better off. No, you are not endorsing everything a candidate stands for by voting for them. It is not a deep personal moral choice, it's just a very minor tactical one.

I reprimanded a friend in 2016 who said that we, all of us in this country, deserved the beating we were all about to get, the first time Trump was elected

But now I agree. We as a country deserve all of the pain he is going to deliver.

― Dan S, Thursday, November 7, 2024 8:35 PM (fifty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean honestly, this strikes me as a pathological way to view elections. This sounds like a your psyche issue, not an America issue.

yeah, not onboard with the 'we deserve this'... an we're probably not going to descend into full-blown fascism with this election. DeSantis could not have pulled this off, Trump is a bit of a unicorn

The outcome was personally shocking, but now that I fully consider it, this is how the nation goes sometimes

Like Clint Eastwood said, deserve's got nothin to do with it.