anti_dan
26d ago
How much can I dislike Trump without it being TDS?
Say you are open borders or some other core policy disagreement with him. Then just leave it at that.
anti_dan
26d ago
Russia invading Ukraine is post Trump and also post the initial increased funding pledges.
Russia invaded, almost certainly, because Biden was perceived as weak.
anti_dan
26d ago
MAGA cultists
This sort of sentiment is the issue with establishment GOP and now the never-Trumper ex-Republicans. Conservatives weren't conserving things, They were bojangling for dollars, courting their internationalist reformers, rolling back hard won wins like Newt Gingritch's welfare reforms, derangedly thinking the federal government could enable no child to be left behind, etc. They needed to be kicked in the teeth.
Trump is that kick. If he didn't exist, some other politician would have eventually discovered Pat Buchanan's writings kicked the tires on it and taken the lane. Both major parties essentially disdaining working white men was never going to be a stable equilibrium in a country that depends on that demographic for almost all of its productivity.
So what needs to happen? Adaptation. Trump wont be around forever, but JD Vance has realized what the coalition is. He knows the other party is the party of the fringes.
anti_dan
27d ago
Where did you get this specific detail from? I’d like to read up on the source.
I know him as "party worker from the 39th ward, 44th precinct"
Likewise, source on this? Because it seems the 2020 election certainly was scrutinized plenty. Why would Republicans and even Trump’s own advisers be okay with conceding the election if there was actually such widespread fraud?
2020 was scrutinized by people without investigative power. Particularly preventative investigative power, which is basically only the FBI.
The last time I am aware of a state level organization investigating fraud in a preventative measure stance is NY, where they obtained ballots under false pretenses in all but 2 out of 63 attempts. This would have been 1/63 because they tried voting using the name of a felon who's father was working the polls.
anti_dan
27d ago
I doubt he has done anything truly bad, but he does strike me as the kind of teacher that decides to break out a bunch of booze on the trip to China so everyone thinks he is cool.
anti_dan
28d ago
I am still waiting for one more Tim Walz thing to drop. It probably wont be anything, but he has to be the least vetted major party candidate of my lifetime. He's just a walking mediocrity who has convinced himself via self delusion that everything hes ever done is slightly more impressive than it actually was, or something along those lines. So I expect one more really dumb thing about Walz to come out. Like that he actually quit the track team in high school, but insists he lettered.
anti_dan
28d ago
"Let" is not a thing. Reagan won IL in 1980, a year we know the Chicago machine was still in operation, because the very next cycle it was caught (solely due to a single whistleblower over almost a half century+ of operation). So he overcame what we know to be approximately 100k fraudulent votes. Sometimes you simply win too hard for the fraudsters to steal.
There is minimal fraud in red counties because of historical and on the ground differences. Machines were, largely, only ever erected in urban areas, and thats where they persist. It largely was, and still is unprofitable when it comes to individual/familial wealth and power to erect machines in a town of 5000 people. Those areas that have machines are currently blue, and have been for most of their existence. The other differences currently is that the bluest areas are far bluer than the reddest areas are red. This gives you an effect of near total lack of oversight. In addition, urban areas see clustering of ethnic groups which deter whistleblowing, snitches get stitches works best in these ethnic areas. Lastly, until very recently red areas were mostly all high conscientiousness suburbs whos politics were dominated by people's whos lives can easily be ruined by police, and who have overstaffed, underworked, police itching to find a jaywalker, let alone a fraudster.
anti_dan
28d ago
The conditions of 2020 made additional fraud easier, as seen by, for example, the extremely low rejection rates of noncompliant signatures on mail in ballots.
But yes, most elections won by a particular party who's base is urban have been historically stolen.
anti_dan
28d ago
Personally, I think that we should treat gender dysphoria as a medical condition and leave the treatment options (from getting over it to full transition) up to the medical establishment. Kids should learn that the condition exists, just like other psychiatric conditions such as depression, but we should not bestow special status on trans kids. No 'she is so courageous for coming out', more 'I am sorry that she is suffering from GD'.
Doesnt work. Politics + Medicine = Politics. The medical establishment has demonstrated it cannot be trusted on politically fraught issues multiple times in the last decade.
anti_dan
28d ago
It looks far more like blackmail to me. Consider what one must do to become a politician in DC, its probable that the CIA has dirt on almost everyone. In this model of the world, the House, Senate, and Presidency are just kabuki executing the intelligence community's whims. This also somewhat fits with them desperately hating Trump, because his dirt was public pre-2015, making him largely more difficult to blackmail.
anti_dan
29d ago
Straight from the wiki
There were "62 indictments and 58 convictions, many involving precinct captains and election officials. The grand jury concluded that 100,000 fraudulent votes had been cast in the city ... Authorities found massive fraud involving vote buying and ballots cast by others in the names of registered voters. In one case, a ballot punched for the Democratic slate had been tabulated 198 times."[6] The case was prosecuted in November 1982 by US Attorney Dan K. Webb.[7][8][9]
That system had been ongoing from the New Deal era. It was only found out because they jobbed a single co-conspirator who blew the whistle.
This is despite there being significant investigations by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Now those people wouldnt investigate fraud if it punched them in the face. Feds consider such allegations low class. Much better to prosecute a guy who prayed too close to an abortion clinic.
anti_dan
29d ago
Of course, IL in 1960 was a battle of voter fraud wherein the DNC machine in Cook outworked the RNC machine in southern IL.
Most states now acknowledge the existence of ancient (aka 60 year old) voter fraud machines that would routinely manufacture 100k or so votes (see IL in 1982, the sole one contemporaneously caught). But no one has any explanation as to why this magically stopped when procedures in those areas remain the same. Few of the grand jury recommendations from the 1982 case are currently in effect in Illinois, for example.
Almost all of those recommendations are fully opposed by a major American political party for reasons that seem obvious to the curious.
anti_dan
29d ago
Except those reforms you are talking about haven't actually been implemented, or were reversed. And no one tests the systems for rigor. When they do the FBI prosecutes them not the people letting fraud happen. The FBI has not conducted a vote fraud sting in my lifetime.
If you live in a large city I encourage you to try this: Go to vote, and intentionally screw up your signature horrifically. Make it incomprehensible. See if they ask you for ID. The city in which I reside is currently 0/4. The one I went to college in was 0/2.
anti_dan
29d ago
Well, sure. My priors is we have known about machine fraud for centuries and nothing has changed so why would it stop?
anti_dan
29d ago
To be fair, the only thing I get is the coffee and the dollar menu hamburger (which is now $1.50). These are still good deals.
anti_dan
29d ago
But why wouldn't there have been fraud in 2020? There is significant fraud every year and it was made even easier in 2020 in most of the swing states that went for Biden. OTOH, states like Florida which implemented election security measures saw a highjinx-free election where Democrats (now deprived of their Miami fraud machine) tanked.
anti_dan
29d ago
Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.
Not really. None of the issues in PA and WI happened in Florida. Florida is another state that used to have large Democrat machines that were routinely accused of fraud, but you could never quite prove it. Then Desantis came in, cleaned up the dirty voter rolls, streamlined the counting process, tightened up the vote by mail process (particularly post date rules and signature rules), got rid of insecure drop box, and then actually enforced all of that.
And magically no shenanigans. No more Miami-Dade reporting after the rest of the state had been done for hours. No more pallets of ballots magically being found at 3am. Etc etc. It turns out there is great evidence for fraud happening, because why you engage in active election security, all these suspicious activities disappear.
anti_dan
30d ago
To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.
They have both. Democrats dominate the people without income, people with extremely low income, and people with high income derived from sinecures.
They lose most of the rest.
anti_dan
30d ago
Like is strong. They certainly have to pretend to like it because 25%+ of their voters love it and of those 25% it is one of the only jobs they can hold down.
anti_dan
30d ago
Mcdonalds is not trashy, its also not classy, it just is. It is food that is scientifically engineered to taste good, so denying it does taste good just makes you a liar. Is it also bad for you? Actually controversial. Compared to something like an impossible burger, a mcdouble comes out ahead. Sure the fries are very calorie dense, but that is the potato for you. You can do worse, such as buying wonder or other store stable breads.
The currency exchange is trashy. Lloyds of London is classy. A lot of things exist on the spectrum between them, and Mcdonalds is probably almost exactly in the middle. Maybe trashy people eat there more than classy people, but basically everyone does eat there from time to time because it provides consistency. I rarely get coffee before work, but when I do, Mcdonalds is the most convenient close option. And reasonably priced.
This doesn't work. The permanent staff in the executive branch like her agenda, so they will implement it. As seen with Biden's ability to massively increase immigration admittance with a few EOs. For your alleged preference, you want the opposite, Trump in the White House (stymied at every turn by his employees he cant fire) and a Democrat congress (further frustrating his purposes). A Democrat executive can enact almost everything they want solo except for increased welfare policies.
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