SlowBoy
2mo ago
Kamala has picked a golden retriever of a VP candidate
Stolen valor.
JD Vance is clearly a terrible VP candidate
Outside the media distortion field he's an extremely capable speaker.
This kind of political analysis basically assumes that the mainstream media frame is the only frame. It isn't. Most voters reject it.
SlowBoy
2mo ago
Once he's gone, many of us want nothing more to do with the Democratic party.
Once he's gone, the Democrats will invent a new threat that requires you vote blue no matter who to save democracy. You have no leverage.
SlowBoy
2mo ago
Last time there was a coordinated attempt to deny them their October surprise, but I don’t know that the 51 intelligence officials trick will work a second time.
I'm sure that this time it will be even worse. Something will escalate. Maybe they'll try throwing Trump in jail after all, or they'll declare a state of emergency before the election.
SlowBoy
2mo ago
he'll keep talking his way out of votes.
Trump wins votes by talking. His entire political career had been made on rallies and tweet.
SlowBoy
2mo ago
I strongly suspect this can't last through the election. Kamala Harris can't actually hide for 3 months without facing: debates, domestic and global affairs, or some level of unscripted campaigning. Putin conquers Kiev -- what does Kamala Harris say? An astronaut dies -- can she really afford to say nothing while Trump goes for the photo op? Everything adds up, not in her favor, and the less she appears in public the more each moment defines who she is.
A year ago Kamala was disliked because she's a bad politician and is extraordinarily dumb. How long can they paper that over?
SlowBoy
2mo ago
I think it's debatable to what level President Harris would even "do" anything. The stabdard now is that she can't speak off-script, so she hides; and Biden is senile, so the departments run themselves. If Trump wins, he imposes change, a little or a lot. If Kamala wins, why wouldn't things go on mostly as they have?
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Name an American politician who qualifies as "serious". Hillary Clinton? Mitt Romney? Bush? Jeb? Obama? We have clown politicians who speak idiotic childlike cliches because they are stupid and silly people.
Trump can't speak in coherent sentences? Trump is the only man alive today whose every utterance is taken seriously. Nobody will remember anything about Kamala Harris two years from now, except that Trump called her Komrad. The man is one of the funniest politicians alive, he is a poet, the way he speaks has literally changed the way we speak the language. Bigly! This is a tired cliche. Please consider how Trump regularly speaks to crowds of tens of thousands of people without teleprompters or notes, and this has made him the most powerful man in the world.
A serious politician is Lee Kuan Yew, who could speak to his nation like adults about controversial issues directly. A serious politician is Theodore Roosevelt, who spoke at something above a third-grade reading level. A serious politician is Vladimir Putin, or Xi Jinping, or Shinzo Abe. Calling Donald Trump an unserious politician -- compared to who? -- Kamala Harris! -- lmao! -- is an isolated demand for rigor. The woman who won't sit down and do any interviews, because when she talks, she explains that democracy, that's when the people, being the people, brcause the people, they have the power, and that's why it's so important -- when this woman speaks, as a rationalist, I listen!
SlowBoy
3mo ago
I think that needs to emphasize crime, the economy, immigration, and the positive aspects of his first term as president.
He talks about these at literally every rally he gives. It's the center of his campaign. I question where you're getting your ideas about the Trump campaign from.
Trump also needs a new emotional, symbolic narrative of some sort to counter the ceaseless waves of the highly energized and quite effectively organized Harris narrative.
He literally just dodged a bullet on stage and stood up and told his supporters to keep fighting. The largest independent candidate since Ross Perot just endorsed him. Kamala Harris has yet to give a press interview. Trump is doing fine.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
What on earth? Trump is not breaking down and is continuing to give rallies and interviews, sometimes at personal risk. Not a single person I know is talking about what you describe (?).
SlowBoy
3mo ago
The line referring to Trump as an “unserious man” is a good line. Trump’s lack of seriousness is obvious to all but his most ardent supporters.
The man got shot in the head and, after standing up, started chanting, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" He gave up a very cushy real-estate and media career to do that. The man is incredibly serious. I reject the implication that people like Joe Biden or Mitt Romney or whoever are serious because they speak calmly. If this is the common verdict across the political spectrum, it's the opinion of a weak electorate that values deeply silly traditions about how politicians are supposed to act.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Detroit's decline is pretty exceptional and represents some deep forces. The amount of industry and wealth lost in Detroit was incredible.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Basically, the technology exists and eventually people will have access to it. Maybe it can be kept locked down for a while, as long as it takes huge feats of engineering to make a good AI. But eventually people will have access to it. Arguments like this make me think, "I am not sure society is ready for everyone to have access to a printing press." Maybe society actually wasn't ready for that. But, well, it's coming.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
It's not thinking, it's braining. Marcotte wants to talk about evil MAGA Republican husbands, and about the virtues of voting. But she's a party-line progressive, and the party line is that mail-in ballots are good and election day is outdated. So the whole middle of the argument is an empty void in which anything can be put, much like ChatGPT. Take the things you believe and permute them through sentences and paragraphs until you have something in the shape of an argument.
This is basically the description of most professional op-ed writers today. The smarter ones apply more complicated levels of augury. I haven't read Peggy Noonan in years now, but maybe she's still talking about the color of Trump's ties.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
As a different post for a different point: Maryland has become one of the most fascinating states, to me. It's probably the most important state that nobody really thinks about: DC is basically a carve-out of Maryland, and even if they're very different places, they're often the same thing. A lot of the old money of Maryland runs through DC, and Maryland is an odd hodge-podge of beautiful small town Americana, blue collar throwbacks, and absolute total shitholes. The history of Maryland is this deeply-repressed and forgotten thing (Catholicism was suppressed until the adoption of the Bill of Rights with the Constitution). And Marylanders often have a pride in their state that rivals Texas or California.
I wonder how much of Baltimore's condition has specifically to do with the nature of DC. In any other state, the largest city would attract some measure of wealth and some corresponding level of niceness, but all the wealth in Maryland is oriented toward the District. Baltimore is a second- or third-tier city relative to Philadelphia or New York, and it doesn't even have the tax haven corporate deference of Trenton New Jersey. In some respect the city has no real economic motive for being, except that it's close enough to DC to beg at the table for scraps, and it has a port. If Baltimore had become the government's capital city (as it could have been), I doubt it would be quite a dilapidated as it is today. If DC had been put somewhere else entirely, I wonder if it would be as bad as it is.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
This, along with another user's posts about Pittsburgh (whose name I've accidentally rudely forgotten) is one of the best posts on the site. This kind of stuff is much more interesting and compelling than yet another post about abstract housing policies or culture war coconuts. I think there's a rich tradition waiting to be written about the characters and places of the country.
Has anything really changed in response to the Key bridge collapsing? I live in the next major city Southwest of you, and was actually driving home the night it collapsed and was supposed to take that route and took a different one to avoid city traffic.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
He's not attacking her identity wantonly, he's attacking the way she uses it.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Please allow me to roll my eyes: the weather changes every day. Hanania is wrong routinely, and taking one twist in the story as vindication is spending too much time on the scroll. The Greeks will never break the Trojan Walls, and the Optimates win again.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
2012 Joe Biden said that Mitt Romney would put black people back in chains. Name-calling and lousy smears aren't a Trump invention.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Comments like this are really the lamest kind of partisanship, and a waste of intelligence.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
All the right-wingers I know are escastic. Walz is a dumb governor who says dumb things on camera. Shapiro was the smart choice who had pundits scared.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
I received 2 red notifications from the bell icon in the upper right, but when I click on them I get no new messages in my inbox or response history. I can't figure out what these notifications are for. Can anyone tell me?
SlowBoy
3mo ago
These kinds of racial tensions are like spontaneous emotions, you can't reason through them. It's not really about racism. Being black in a white society always causes tensions and upsets because that's consequent of being a minority. You can change all the surface dressings, but that doesn't fix the tension itself. So some previous generation made positive (positive?) depictions of black people, but they were made by white people, and that leads to all sorts of invisible frictions. These may be positive (?), but they're depictions of black people as animals, or in a separate category from white people, etc. etc. etc. (There's always a reason ready-at-hand.)
To my way of thinking, I predict that many positive black representations current today will eventually be seen as racist.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Richard Baris talks about this on Twitter: the vast majority of voters are not undecided, and driving turnout among partisans ends up being much more impactful than swaying the mythical moderates. (Besides, the more you activate your own partisans, the more reasonable and mainstream your ideas become, and thus inherently more "moderate".)
"Moderating" is basically an act of persuasion more than actually moving to a political center: if you frame the issue right trans kids becomes the responsible take, while tax cuts for the middle class become an extreme take.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
There is no VP pick Trump could have made that would not have been spun by hostile media forces as a bad choice.
The idea that the VP pick helps win the home state is largely a myth. Vance isn't going to help Trump win Ohio.
Virtually any other VP pick would have been a sign to Trump's base that he was moderating, and would have depressed turnout.
The story would be picked up by every major news organization and not dropped for years, much how they responded when Gabbie Giffords was shot, but not when Steve Scalise was shot.
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