SlowBoy
18d ago
All of my best friends are happy and excited. Meanwhile, anybody I know who I suspect doesn't like Trump has gone quiet. In 2016 there were loud meltdowns and public outbursts; I don't see nearly as much this time. Exemplified by, say, Cenk Uyghur's infamous 2016 tirade, column a, Cenk Uyghur walking off stream in 2024, column b.
SlowBoy
18d ago
Saw somebody comment that the Pelosis and Schumers of the party who pushed Biden out will now have to lose power. I wonder if that's how it will go.
SlowBoy
19d ago
Mechanically, the electors would all still the valid Constitutional lynchpin of the system. If there were a majority of Harris electors, state law might constrain some, but presumably they'd all be free to coordinate around another candidate. There would no no special mechanism for facilitating this, but a few things could happen:
- The Democrats organize behind the scenes and pick another candidate. This person becomes President.
- The Democrats don't organize electors behind the scenes. Come electoral ratification in Congress, nobody has the requisite 270 electoral votes. The president is then picked by a special election of the House (each state has one vote). The mechanics of this option favor Republicans, so it would be in Democrats best interests to go back to (1).
Please note that, if Harris died, Biden is still president in the interim, and he could attempt to nominate someone new as his VP (to force a consensus). There is also the chain of succession that goes underneath the Vice President, and someone from that could be elevated as a compromise candidate.
SlowBoy
19d ago
If the rules are published in advance, it averages out. If you change the rules at the last minute, you're explicitly fishing for a certain outcome.
SlowBoy
20d ago
Its hard for me to see why votes cast in violation of minor provisions of state election code (such as early voting hours) should be voided.
Because the minor violations are ways to get around (what little) safeguards. In Fulton County Atlanta's case, they were trying to count ballots during off-hours, and attempting to refuse GOP poll watchers from being admitted because they weren't allowed to come in during off-hours.
SlowBoy
21d ago
This poll is a complete outlier in the wrong direction. It's not just that it's different from all other polls (which are probably herded to a close split 50-50 so nobody has egg). It's that it's totally divorced from every other fundamental. Republican early turnout is up, voter registration is up, enthusiasm and endorsements are up. Trump is the most popular he's ever been, he's bringing Democrats like Gabbard and RFK onto MAGA, he's got billionaire and tech endorsements, Muslims in Dearborn and Minneapolis are endorsing him, he's filling out rallies in New Mexico and New York. Trump got 40M views on Joe Rogan, Kamala wouldn't even go. If Kamala was winning in Iowa, why isn't she campaigning there? Tim Walz is in the state next door, it would be trivial for him to go. They're campaigning in Pennsylvania. And wouldn't Kamala be more popular? Major newspapers are withholding endorsements, her rallies are tepid at best, shouting broke out at one because attendees didn't get their promised Beyonce concert. It's possible this poll is right and every other indication is wrong -- but then, aren't the crosstabs of this poll awfully convenient? Republicans are apparently shifting further left than Independents, and after 4 years of Biden-Harris, inflation, immigration, and Ukraine, voter's biggest concern is... Abortion? In Iowa?
This is too much, it's not worth taking seriously. Maybe, really really, everything else is wrong and this one poll is right, but it's not very likely. I don't know why this poll gets so much credulity here. It's like listening to a LLM, which has no experience of the world, and has no reference or context. It's possible this one outlier poll is right. But it's exceptionally unlikely. And in the world of crazy outlier predictions, there are lots of other outliers that are just as credible.
SlowBoy
23d ago
Who has access to voting machines? Lots of people, presumably. It's not like we have a full list of all election workers who stand near a ballot. I went and voted early this week, there were two ballot machines, in the hullabaloo it would have been easy for someone to stick a USB in. How would you feel about the scenario, "My biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to my machine AND dozens of people have unsupervised access to my machine, and one of those people could or could not be my worst enemy."
SlowBoy
23d ago
In a secure operation, only a few people would have access to important passwords (like bios). Now, everybody has access to those passwords. The list of people who could be suspected of tampering with a ballot machine goes from documented individuals with a need-to-know to... everybody. And there would be lots of people with legitimate reason to handle a ballot machine who would not have legitimate reason to know those passwords. Lots of people handle ballot machines!
We know how to secure systems in this country, we do it all the time. If these passwords belonged to drones being used in Ukraine, the officer in charge wouldn't say, well, mistakes happen, but five day delays are normal, we shouldn't worry about Russia hacking into our systems, etc. etc.
SlowBoy
23d ago
And the people who install or maintain those machines would have access to all that information. A very small conspiracy could hijack voting machines. Slip in a USB, run a program, and it's done. Machines have to be updated and maintained all the time anyways. And it's totally feasible to write a program that infects other USBs plugged into the device: Infect one machine, and then some third unknowing party who maintains the machines ends up infecting more.
It would be very easy to do! How do we know that this isn't being done? We would need a thorough audit of machine votes and record systems, and that's a right-wing Republican dangerous conspiracy that undermines trust in our sacred democracy.
SlowBoy
25d ago
It was a rally where racial insults and epiphets were thrown around
Name some
SlowBoy
25d ago
I really don't think this matters all that much, except maybe to knock out the last gasp hopes of the Kamala campaign. (The Puerto Rico joke also didn't matter, mattered even less, except that it gave some Kamala operatives final hope for one last great push.)
There have been a thousand stories in the recent past where more and more of the American public is criticized by America's elected officials. What's one more? But somebody's going to lose this game of hot potato eventually, and Democrats are going to have a generational struggle to fix things if they're the last ones holding it.
SlowBoy
28d ago
We have years of Trump being in office and speaking with veterans and their families and they all come away talking about how much love Trump gave them. If you aren't familiar with Trump's well-documented love of the average soldier, you are either misinformed or uninformed.
I just posted a public tweet where Trump complains about Sessions not investigating Hillary, 2 months before Sessions was out. You know, that thing we were talking about that Trump supposedly dropped the investigation out of the kindness of his heart? Any response to that?
Sure, what's the actual wording of Trump's tweet:
“‘Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.’ Jeff, this is GREAT, what everyone wants, so look into all of the corruption on the ‘other side’ including deleted Emails, Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr, FISA abuse, Christopher Steele & his phony and corrupt Dossier, the Clinton Foundation, illegal surveillance of Trump campaign, Russian collusion by Dems – and so much more. Open up the papers & documents without redaction? Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting!”
This is not some blanket call to prosecute Hillary: this is the observation that, far from being a Justice Department that claims to be neutral, they are seriously investigating Trump while not touching amyone else. Hillary ran her own classified email server, Trump did not collude with Russia, which did Jeff Session's FBI investigate? Remember that Sessions was coerced into recusing on the logic that since he participated in Trump's campaign he couldn't be a neutral observer. Thankfully, after that, the FBI was totally politically neutral throughout the Trump presidency.
I listen to a bunch of podcasts. Joe Rogan is probably in the top ten.
If yoh listen to dozens of podcasts but can't listen to Trump talking about the Lincoln bedroom... it sounds like you like slop. I guess that's your perogative.
SlowBoy
29d ago
It's a great interview as a long-form conversation. Rogan and Trump go down many interesting paths, and both talk uninterrupted at length at various times. If you're still living in soundbite culture, I think that reflects worse on you than the interview. People are going to be talking about this for years.
SlowBoy
29d ago
Joe apparently didn't want to do this because he was worried it would end up being fluff or making Trump look good.
Joe said in the interview that he knew he wanted to do the interview as soon as Trump got shot. He goes on to say he wanted to wait for dramatic timing.
SlowBoy
29d ago
I think the Biden admin gets a lot of (bad) credit for the Ukrainian situation, but I will grant that it's a different category from the kinds of conflicts US presidents have gotten involved in until now. (For one, putting American soldiers in forever wars is extremely unpopular, there's some part of the body politic that thinks it's a great deal for us to only have to fight by proxy.)
SlowBoy
29d ago
Biden, to his credit, also didn't start any wars, probably because he is genuinely upset over the pointless loss of his son. That doesn't mean Biden was lucky or had marketing, it means he resisted the strong temptations of the MIC to manufacture new excuses to go to war. Which is Trump's credit! Every prior president going back 40 years started a new war, until Trump. It's not as though we have a sudden shortage of conflicts over which we could have gone to war.
SlowBoy
29d ago
He got attacked for using cemeteries for photo-ops, which is the opposite of respecting the military.
Guy goes to a funeral for families of veterans killed during the current administration. You have to dismiss this as a "photo op" because it's very good evidence that Trump has respect for the military. Oh no, he didn't follow some stupid rules about the correct official procedure for comforting grieving families, he just went to the funeral and spent time with the families, it's just a photo-op.
I'm not referring to your or Trump's general impression of McCain as a person. I'm referring to Trump's comments on McCain's military service. Coming from a guy who couldn't serve due to "heel spurs."
McCain was a horrible person who used his military service as a rhetorical shield to make war anywhere the MIC could make money. Trump rightly points out that McCain's service wasn't even all that honorable, he was a rat. Insulting McCain as a scumbag is no more disrespecting the military than mocking Rosie O'Donnell is hatred of women.
I'm not referring to his business deals, I'm referring to the way he treats his staff. Trump is unusually unable to retain staff.
Name a person you think would not have been fired except for Trump being a manchild. The reason Trump got rid of so many people is that so many of them were horrible. The reason so many of them were horrible is that DC is full of them.
This was Mueller conducting a government investigation and publishing his finding in a report. That comes with penalties for lying.
You are naive.
SlowBoy
29d ago
In addition, Trump was in NYC real estate, which from the nadir in the 1970s has seen valuation growth far exceed equities.
Trump created some of the most valuable property in the world, and the construction of Trump Tower inspired a renaissance in New York City architecture at a time when the city was considered to be dying and gone. Were these broader trends that would have happened without Trump? Maybe, but he's a huge part of it. Judging the success of NY real estate independent of Trump is like saying Coke should have closed up shop and just bought Pepsi.
The fact remains that his business performance is pretty poor
Trump is one of the richest men in the world. There are only something like 3,000 billionaires. If what he did wasn't all that impressive, there should be a lot more out there, an order of magnitude more. Why doesn't every guy with a reasonable fortune invest it all in the S&P 500, they're all underperforming the market.
Yes you can, especially in a relatively liquid market like NYC real estate. Investments are always judged against the broader market, what’s your point?
This is silly. You can't just liquidate tens of millions of dollars and sit on your ass for forty years. You have to live on something, you have to do something, you don't just throw money at the market. It's a full time job, managing money, and then you end up doing deals and making investments anyways. "Instead of spending years lifting weights, you would have performed better if you'd spent that time working out instead." Now imagine saying that to Arnold.
SlowBoy
29d ago
Probably some of the tech visionaries, if Elon comes anywhere close to Mars then his companies, some of the most valuable anywhere in the world, would be currently dramatically undervalued. Trump wants to dramatically expand energy and construction and those are good bets. Tariffs are intended as a policy to increase American manufacturing, which could imply a genre of good investments. If RFK is able to effectuate change at FDA it'd be good to bet on the health of the average person, and maybe against the worst excesses of big pharma.
SlowBoy
29d ago
ontinue being utterly addicted to it, and I also recall them being unconditionally defensive up until the point of the Musk takeover (which they resisted and continue to resist). If they wanted it de
In many cases they do use the same exact phrases in the headlines, converging on the same single words. There absolutely have to be journalist groupchats where some of the more cynical are coordinating.
SlowBoy
29d ago
I think this was a made-up attack line from cynics right when Trump ran, it's very obviously not true, very silly, and reflects badly on the people who believe it. It doesn't work like that, you can't just liquidate your whole net worth and invest in stocks and sit around earning money.
https://fortune.com/2015/08/20/donald-trump-index-funds/
Here's one estimate from 2015. They claim that Trump would have made money if he'd invested everything after 1988 -- yeah no, that's silly, he'd already turned his father's business into a major real-estate empire by then. You can't just play this game by picking any arbitrary year. Now that you've been massively, phenomonally, unbelievably successful, you're really a failure because the stock market beats you after this arbitrary date.
Here's one where Forbes concludes that Trump had beaten the market significantly, up until corona. Which means, at this point, we get to point and laugh at the failure of Donald Trump: haha, you lost valuation while you were president of the United States. You shluld have cashed it all in and bet on black Donald.
SlowBoy
30d ago
You're too jaded to see what's right in front of you. The billionaire rocket space man sees it. A Kennedy sees it. Vivek, JD Vance, Tulsi, etc. The Trump coalition is made up of many of Trump's worst former enemies, because he's a literal anime hero. This is why America is the greatest country on earth, because we believe in the power of friendship, we're going to fix the entire world, it's cringe all the way down. Trump started a movement and this is how the future will remember us: the Trump Era. The Trump Era was when we had Michael Jackson and Muhammed Ali and the internet and Trump. The Trump Era was either the era where Elon Musk brought mankind to Mars, or the last era where people dreamed big enough to believe it was possible. They had coca-cola, and big macs, and monster trucks, and guns. They were the fattest, loudest, dumbest, sickest, most foolish, most gullible, most annoying people on Earth. They did the most important things that have ever been done. They were the greatest people on Earth.
People drank raw milk for thousands of years. Louis Pasteur only invented pastuerization in the 1860s. It wasn't until the early industrial era of contaminated factory dirt that raw milk began causing problems. Which is to say, pasteurization doesn't make milk safe to drink, it makes dirty contaminated milk safe to drink. Which isn't even a problem anymore because our cleanliness is better. Not to mention that the average cow used for raw milk lives in very healthy natural conditions compared to the feedlot pens used for factory farming mass milk cows.
I've been drinking raw milk on and off again for years. It's never made me sick. Raw milk is banned in certain states, but a dozen or so allow it, and more allow some workarounds. It would probably make the Founding Fathers sick to know that milk as they knew it is now illegal to drink in many places. What kind of liberty is that?
Anyways, the last pandemic probably didn't come from viruses in the food supply jumping to humans; it probably came from novel coronavirus funding. Prosecute the people responsible or bankrupt the institutes responsible. I don't know that either of those things will happen, but with Bobby Kennedy in government it's the likeliest chance we'll ever have.
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