Trump has always been rambling and nearly incoherent. He has always been sensitive to slights, particularly about his rallies/businesses/resorts and prone to distracted ranting defending them. The Washington Post picked Hillary as the clear winner of every debate in 2016. Trump simply does not come across well to educated people in a debate format, and that includes Motte users, even those of us that support him. Despite some users here predicting that Trump had a nontrivial chance of openly calling Kamala a racial slur on national television, that didn't happen. This debate won't change anything and Trump is a known entity.
Visually, Trump looked flustered and irritated the whole night. Importantly, he barely even looked at Harris, just started straight ahead for almost the whole night.
Meanwhile Harris had dominant nonverbals. From walking straight up to him on his side of the stage and catching him off guard, to staring at him while he spoke.
On content, Trump got baited several times and also made some unprovoked errors. Harris stuck to the points she wanted to make, seemed to effectively get across the message she intended to get out, and landed a few memorable lines. I don’t recall anything that could be considered a mistake from her.
She wins the debate and comes out of it seeming more competent than I think a lot of people had penned her.
one is Conspiracy Theory made by the left and the other is a proven lie that she parroted in the first what? 10-20 minutes of the debate where the ratings are the highest. Doesn't that sound like a mistake to you?
Do you have any evidence of Trump endorsing 2025?.
As for the fine people, we have the recording of his remarks about it so I don't know what you are talking about.
that would be part of a deliberate strategy, not a mistake.
the strategy of giving your opponent easy rebuttals I suppose, but at that point your judgement on what constitutes a mistake and what is a Strategy is useless for normal conversation.
To be fair Trump's own leaflets I got through my door, have a whole section attempting to distance Trump from Project 2025. That indicates they do have some worries that it is getting traction and sticking and feel they have to actually work to counter it. That in itself means they are having to spend time and effort on defence.
So tying them together on live TV, is probably smart. Plenty of people believe it whether it is true or not. I think you overestimate how easy it is to rebut, and how many people will seek out or see that rebuttal at all in the first place or believe it if they see it.
I think it’s that project 2025 may be basically standard Republican fare, but it’s a scarily long detailed document. You can make up whatever the hell you want about it and no one will double check- they’ll believe you or not on the basis of how plausible it seems.
I think you overestimate how easy it is to rebut, and how many people will seek out or see that rebuttal at all in the first place or believe it if they see it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
Pynewacket 6d ago
Do you have any evidence of Trump endorsing 2025?.
That's not what @aeqno is saying. The argument is that Harris is baldly lying because she thinks she can get away with it (i.e. because she thinks Reliable Sources will back her lie over the truth).
I think they know they can get away with fine people on both sides for the rest of Trump’s life. Trump rebutted it both at this and at the last debate, it doesn’t matter.
My attention while watching the debate was focused on how Trump would talk about Springfield, Ohio. He mixed up his words and messed up badly. It was his worst gaffe of the debate. It was a mistake to mention Springfield at all, though it could have been done better. I was focused on Springfield because it went viral on X only a couple days ago. Trump didn't learn about the viral story out of Springfield until less than a day before the debate. This was not enough time, obviously, for him to process the information and formulate a plan to exploit it. I was curious to see if Kamala knew about the Springfield "cat hoax", but she never had to respond because the moderator gave a thorough rebuttal to Donald Trump in her stead.
Why? He's not trying to get a good grade in debate class. He's trying to frame the election in advantageous terms. The more people talk about this, the better for Trump.
It hits on a visceral level: a town being destroyed by Biden's policies. The cat is just the hook to get the media to report it. "Rust Belt town goes to shit" will never get airtime. "People hunting cats" is irresistible. The media won't be able to help themselves.
is a factually incorrect statement, but there are multiple factually correct permutations which can made by swapping out the nouns. A nimble orator can insinuate that Haitians in Springfield eat cats—without saying it directly—by stringing together all the factually correct permutations. Donald Trump is a talented orator, and I think he could have figured out the right way to present the argument given enough time. I think he faceplanted because he only learned about the story literally the day of the debate and didn't have time to process it.
Sufficiently debunked? In what way? The debunkings have seemingly confirmed that Haitians are poaching waterfowl and have killed at least one person's cat and were in the process of butchering it when police intervened. Whether or not that was for food is unconfirmed, but no one should take official sources seriously regarding that.
Here's one alleged debunking. When I look at the evidence they present I believe the citizen accounts over the "authorities" because the latter are far more incentivized to lie. So IDK. If you are inclined to believe the city manager, then I suppose it is dubunked. I think that if you ask a guy if he's doing a bad job, hes unlikely to say yes.
I haven't seen any citizen accounts of a Haitian having killed a person's cat, though, just an account of an account of an account. A screenshot of a private Facebook post about a report from a neighbor about what a daughter's friend saw ... is technically evidence, but it's approximately the same quality of evidence as a typical urban legend, the sort of "Fw: Fw: Re: Fw: Watch Out!" material that used to spread virally back when the only way we had to spread things virally was email. Today you can read a hundred of them en masse if you prefer.
Recorded evidence would be nice, too, now that we live in a country where 90+% of the population habitually carry video cameras in our pockets. How does someone see something shocking, something ongoing (like a hanging cat corpse) rather than instant, and not be on the ball enough to get photo and video evidence? Even if you're just going to call the police, and you don't anticipate the need to get independent evidence in case the conspiracy goes all the way to the top, wouldn't it be a good idea to get evidence to give to the police in case the criminals mess with the crime scene while you're waiting for a cop to arrive?
Obviously nobody will care about this at all since it's happening in Shelbyville Dayton instead of Springfield, and appears to be a Congolese guy rather than a Haitian!
I mean, sure, we haven't seen them eating cats. We have photos of them carrying waterfowl and at least one police recording reporting 4 poached waterfowl. We have some citizen reports of missing cats. We know cat is a Hatian dish.
There is a reason there is a full court press in the media to try to discredit the accusation. Its shocking. Its highly plausible, 20k poor people who are seemingly not being policed by local authorities (who seem both partisan and overwhelmed, the latter seemingly intentionally by higher levels of government) are going to get up to messed up shit.
This is also happening with the migrants in big cities, including the one in which I work. There are huge sex crimes issues in the shelters, and mostly the people running them are overwhelmed, and there is no reports coming from the migrants. So nearly every prosecution is stemming from a 12-16 year old girl getting an abortion or giving birth.
it'll be interesting to see if this story sticks around and gets more attention, leading to more investigation, or if the media can just quietly sweep it away. Trump might have accidentally stumbled upon a winning move in that debate by bringing it up, even as clumsily as he did.
It's honestly a classic Trump move. He starts off by making a ridiculous claim "they're in here eating cats!" but then when you try to debunk that claim, it ends up looking almost as bad. "OK, they do eat cats in Haiti, but not here." "Oh, they're just eating waterfowl." "All 20k of them are peaceful, lawabiding folks who have perfectly adapted to American culture." "Yeah btw we dumped 20k migrants in this one random town in the midwest, but it'll be fine."
At least with most 90's hearsay there wasn't any obvious reason beyond shock value for someone to make it up to spread, yet it got made up and spread anyway. With the Springfield, OH hearsay it's quite likely that people like "Nate Higgers" (videoed at an earlier town meeting) are inventing more than just awful aliases, in which case we need higher epistemic standards than a game of telephone.
I tuned out. I literally couldn't take it anymore. Trump wasn't doing fantastic, but the petty and nitpicky way the moderators constantly interrupted or interjected to "fact check" him, while letting Harris get away with both widely debunked hoaxes (Fine people hoax, suckers and losers hoax, bloodbath hoax), or wild fantastical bold faced lies (Like Trump arming China's military with chips). And then watching all the people come away with the impression that Harris was in command of the debate with a better grasp of the "facts". Or the fence sitting "just calling balls and strikes" people saying "If you have to complain about the moderation that means you lost". All it did was make me plan a trip to my local friendly gun store.
I've been skeptical of these claims that Biden's own side sent him out to die during the first debate. I guess I forgot how much the moderators can put their finger on the scale when they really want to. They absolutely could have rescued Biden back then. +1 for that having been a palace coup.
I've been skeptical of these claims that Biden's own side sent him out to die during the first debate. I guess I forgot how much the moderators can put their finger on the scale when they really want to. They absolutely could have rescued Biden back then. +1 for that having been a palace coup.
I have not watched either of these debates, but did the moderators for Biden's debate with Trump not also try to give him some easy lay-ups?
I think it's an effective attack, she's asking people to vote for a party more than a character and it frames her as an incumbent, which given things are not going very well, is what Trump wants.
He should have hammered her with that throughout instead of bringing old news Biden into it, to be sure.
Why are there multiple SSC culture war spin-offs? If even SSC readers can’t avoid political polarization to this extent, I don’t see any hope for the rest of the population
I've got a summary of some of the history here, if you're interested. That post skipped over DataSecretLox, but it formed in Summer 2020, mostly from the SlateStarCodex open thread and subreddit readers (w/ a bit of tumblrsphere).
Most of these splits weren't on the matters of politics, at least directly. The tumblrsphere was leftish by ratsphere and SSC standards, but mostly bifurcated to allow more informal and scattershot discussion in a more person-oriented view. TheMotte subreddit split from the SSC subreddit because people were harassing Scott enough that he had a nervous breakdown, and the compromise was that any political discussion needed to be several steps away from his identity.
The CultureWarRoundup, as much as it favored righter-wing viewpoints, was more about different takes on what engagement styles people were going after. Probably still political, but not as much as it seems in retrospect. I think there was one or two explicitly right-wing one-person schisms, but I can't even find them now. TheSchism was meant as an explicit political schism in the aftermath of the Rittenhouse stuff, and a naive experiment, so I guess that makes two relevant ones?
So I guess, yes, that is a lot of bad signs for the general population, but more for how the explicit efforts went than by their existence.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
mdurak 6d ago
"Why" is that Data Secrets Lox was founded in the time between SSC's closure and ACX's opening, and not everybody suddenly evicted from SSC's comments wanted to move to the subreddits (this was before theMotte left Reddit). I was a member on DSL before I was a Motte member, for instance, because I didn't have (and didn't want to get) a Reddit account. It's not a "Motte for different politics".
It's also not specifically for culture war, although it allows it.
I’m not convinced Trump knows how to run the ball.
Arguably, that’s his strongest suit. The 2016 field was unprepared for air raid offense. No huddles, no depth of roster, just a series of passing plays. Trump zeroed in on a weak defender.
Hmm. I wonder if he ran similar strategies in his earlier bids. It was a different time.
It was a waste, but we couldn't be certain of that going into it. The previous debate showed how a bad performance could have consequences. But as it turned out, neither were that bad.
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
7d ago
Trump got off the "I'm talking now" line first. You know he was waiting for that, but he couldn't resist overplaying it.
So far, I am not seeing anything in this debate that moves the needle. Harris is being Harris, and Trump is being Trump. No big gaffes, no notable zingers, no impressive new declarations.
Yeah he fucked up that line. Looked canned and smug and insincere. By contrast his hits on Biden in the first debate looked like brutal honesty and really landed.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
Amadan 7d ago
No big gaffes, no notable zingers, no impressive new declarations
The Haitians eating dogs thing was a gaffe, I haven't heard anyone even propose that dogs were being eaten. He didn't have to bring that up, it's so up in the air. There's plenty he could say about immigration without basing it off strange rumors.
I'd wait until the end of the debate before looking at it either way, I doubt the markets are efficient enough to price the rethoric as fast as they do it for J. Powell.
It's a Keynesian beauty contest, all the bettors are trying to guess how a "normie" would react. Do you think the kinds of people who bet on polymarket are good at getting their fingers on the pulse of how voters react in real time?
I think the aggregate gives them an advantage and they'll probably guess right, but it takes time to collect all that information, I just don't think volatile events can get decent prices instantaneously.
The post debate polls will surely influence people quite a lot.
Wasn't the point the "after 9 months/full term?" I don't recall but that was how I was following it. Very possibly I'm wrong. I agree what you're saying here is relevant and is exactly what he should have been prepared with.
It almost feels like he has trouble recalling things that aren’t a narrative.
He could recall Northam’s keep them comfortable quote, even if at first he thought he was the former governor of West Virginia.
But if it’s nerd shit like Walz changing the wording of their born alive law to require that care be rendered, but not life saving care, well he’s just not going to remember that.
I have the opposite problem, my autobiographical memory is shit but I’m great on technical details of complex systems.
The VP candidates in particular seem to be breaking some of the seven words you can't say on television barriers. Vance and Walz are constantly saying politicians don't give a shit about the Midwest, or that people should mind their own damn business.
I’m going to have to go to sleep soon (watching from the UK) but I think Kamala is doing pretty well so far. She sounds relaxed, well-informed, and hasn’t tripped over herself or gone into major word salads. Trump is doing a solid Trump and has got in some good jabs but some of his talking points have been a bit wacky. The Haitian “people eating pets” story may be true or may be false, but I think it would have been better played as, eg, “people are saying this, now I don’t know if it’s true, or if it’s rumours, but it doesn’t matter, there have been some people killed by illegal Haitian drivers, and the people of Springfield are in a panic, they feel abandoned by a government that doesn’t care about them.” Only 40 minutes in though so all to play for…
Edit: lol, “if she becomes president I predict Israel won’t exist 2 years from now”. On top of that line about how “He [Biden] hates her” it really feels like Trump is losing his rag.
Edit2: Harris much better than Trump on foreign policy imho. Maybe it’s because I’m a geopolitics nerd but so many of Trump’s talking points sound like they’re aimed at <85 IQ people who don’t know crap about the world.
Edit3: Trump definitely deteriorating imho. Losing coherence and dropping talking points in a scattershot fashion. Moderators are obviously biased in Kamala’s favour, but I don’t think it significantly changes the vibes. Trump could have been calling them out on that in a smart way but he’s just not doing a good job.
Edit4: goddamn you America, I have to work in a few hours
Trump’s talking points sound like they’re aimed at <85 IQ people who don’t know crap about the world
Make it <105 IQ and we’re just talking about the electorate.
A very small number of people actually know what goes on in international affairs. If we’re lucky we might get a book a decade after the thing happens, written by someone who has an interest in making themselves look good. Or a declassified documents dump, but those seem out of fashion lately.
I’m curious exactly what Kamala’s role was in speaking to Zelenskyy prior to the invasion. My guess is that Trump was right, they weren’t interested in negotiating to avoid a war, Kamala was there to tell Zelenskyy to not give an inch, America had his back, and if Russia invades he’ll secure his legacy as the Ukrainian president that defeated Russia.
My guess is that Trump was right, they weren’t interested in negotiating to avoid a war, Kamala was there to tell Zelenskyy to not give an inch, America had his back, and if Russia invades he’ll secure his legacy as the Ukrainian president that defeated Russia.
The US government certainly did not believe that Ukraine could viably hold back a Russian invasion, that’s why they closed the embassy and pulled out all personnel, and why they resisted sending large amounts of additional weaponry until after they’d repulsed the siege of Kiev.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t lie to Zelensky, but I honestly question if even he thought they’d be able to defend against an invasion; he disappeared for a few days early on (speaking from unidentified locations etc) and before that seemed to doubt whether the Russians would actually invade.
As President will you use your executive authority to ensure that transgender and non- binary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care? If yes, how will you do so?
It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition. That’s why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates. I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained. Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.
It’s interesting that of Trump’s three nuttiest sounding accusations- babies are allowed to be left to die after birth under the Harris abortion plan, Harris wants to pay for transgender surgeries for illegals, and Haitians are abducting people’s pets to eat them- 2/3 are true and the third one probably isn’t but is at least an urban legend among the local population.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
8d ago
It looks like the current state of the art is to avoid answering questions, and instead treat them as an opportunity for impromptu rambling on a vaguely related topic, or a canned sound-bite on a vaguely related topic. Why not, there are no negative consequences.
The dominant strategy is to come up with a couple of well-rehearsed answers and pattern match questions to them. Even someone really sharp and articulate can at best match that performance. When there's around 5 minutes per topic (all of which are obvious beforehand), there's no reason not to.
Best case is to put some traps in the mini speeches to goad your opponent into going off script; a disciplined opponent knows to ignore them.
You can do better than that in a live debate - obviously competitive debaters do. "Ignore the question and just say your piece" is Media Interviews 101 though, and politicians do a lot more interviews than debates so it is the approach they are most comfortable with.
When I was a student politician, I did the Party training course on media interviews 101, and the line was that (unless you are important enough to insist on a live interview) broadcast media will record 3-4x as much material as needed and only broadcast the gaffes, so ignoring the questions and repeating your soundbite is a necessary defensive technique against deceptive editing. "When is it safe to answer the question?" is 201-level stuff.
Looking at the incentives facing the journo, broadcast media interviews are all about inducing the gaffe (except for the hard-to-get big ticket interview like a US President or an A-lister where it is all about giving a softball interview so other big interviewees will agree to be interviewed by you). My mother has a horror story about how a BBC interviewer started interviewing her in French (which she speaks, but not well enough to do an unprepared media interview), stopped after about 1 minute and said it was actually a sound check, and then started the real interview while she was still in "desperately trying to code-switch" mode.
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
fishtwanger 8d ago
Both candidates launching into a scripted spiel regardless of what question was asked is something I have seen in basically every presidential debate in recent history.
It's a great dig, but I wonder if it actually sways anyone. I have a hard time imagining that people are so foolish as to think that politicians are not in it for themselves by and large.
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Notes -
Trump has always been rambling and nearly incoherent. He has always been sensitive to slights, particularly about his rallies/businesses/resorts and prone to distracted ranting defending them. The Washington Post picked Hillary as the clear winner of every debate in 2016. Trump simply does not come across well to educated people in a debate format, and that includes Motte users, even those of us that support him. Despite some users here predicting that Trump had a nontrivial chance of openly calling Kamala a racial slur on national television, that didn't happen. This debate won't change anything and Trump is a known entity.
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Visually, Trump looked flustered and irritated the whole night. Importantly, he barely even looked at Harris, just started straight ahead for almost the whole night.
Meanwhile Harris had dominant nonverbals. From walking straight up to him on his side of the stage and catching him off guard, to staring at him while he spoke.
On content, Trump got baited several times and also made some unprovoked errors. Harris stuck to the points she wanted to make, seemed to effectively get across the message she intended to get out, and landed a few memorable lines. I don’t recall anything that could be considered a mistake from her.
She wins the debate and comes out of it seeming more competent than I think a lot of people had penned her.
she laughably refers several times to project 2025 in connection to Trump and repeats the debunked "fine people on both sides" story.
How is that a mistake?
one is Conspiracy Theory made by the left and the other is a proven lie that she parroted in the first what? 10-20 minutes of the debate where the ratings are the highest. Doesn't that sound like a mistake to you?
Even if what you say is true (it's not), that would be part of a deliberate strategy, not a mistake.
A mistake is Trump getting completely derailed by Harris' constant trolling.
Do you have any evidence of Trump endorsing 2025?.
As for the fine people, we have the recording of his remarks about it so I don't know what you are talking about.
the strategy of giving your opponent easy rebuttals I suppose, but at that point your judgement on what constitutes a mistake and what is a Strategy is useless for normal conversation.
To be fair Trump's own leaflets I got through my door, have a whole section attempting to distance Trump from Project 2025. That indicates they do have some worries that it is getting traction and sticking and feel they have to actually work to counter it. That in itself means they are having to spend time and effort on defence.
So tying them together on live TV, is probably smart. Plenty of people believe it whether it is true or not. I think you overestimate how easy it is to rebut, and how many people will seek out or see that rebuttal at all in the first place or believe it if they see it.
I think it’s that project 2025 may be basically standard Republican fare, but it’s a scarily long detailed document. You can make up whatever the hell you want about it and no one will double check- they’ll believe you or not on the basis of how plausible it seems.
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yeah, sometimes I overestimate the average voter.
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That's not what @aeqno is saying. The argument is that Harris is baldly lying because she thinks she can get away with it (i.e. because she thinks Reliable Sources will back her lie over the truth).
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I think they know they can get away with fine people on both sides for the rest of Trump’s life. Trump rebutted it both at this and at the last debate, it doesn’t matter.
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And she lied about "bloodbath". She said that Trump would ban abortion nationwide. Etc.. etc..
Both candidates lied pretty much continuously throughout the entire debate. But I think this was a calculated strategy from Harris, not a "mistake".
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My attention while watching the debate was focused on how Trump would talk about Springfield, Ohio. He mixed up his words and messed up badly. It was his worst gaffe of the debate. It was a mistake to mention Springfield at all, though it could have been done better. I was focused on Springfield because it went viral on X only a couple days ago. Trump didn't learn about the viral story out of Springfield until less than a day before the debate. This was not enough time, obviously, for him to process the information and formulate a plan to exploit it. I was curious to see if Kamala knew about the Springfield "cat hoax", but she never had to respond because the moderator gave a thorough rebuttal to Donald Trump in her stead.
Why? He's not trying to get a good grade in debate class. He's trying to frame the election in advantageous terms. The more people talk about this, the better for Trump.
It hits on a visceral level: a town being destroyed by Biden's policies. The cat is just the hook to get the media to report it. "Rust Belt town goes to shit" will never get airtime. "People hunting cats" is irresistible. The media won't be able to help themselves.
"HAITIANS in SPRINGFIELD were caught eating CATS"
is a factually incorrect statement, but there are multiple factually correct permutations which can made by swapping out the nouns. A nimble orator can insinuate that Haitians in Springfield eat cats—without saying it directly—by stringing together all the factually correct permutations. Donald Trump is a talented orator, and I think he could have figured out the right way to present the argument given enough time. I think he faceplanted because he only learned about the story literally the day of the debate and didn't have time to process it.
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Reports of people eating pets were sufficiently debunked, and him rambling on about an obviously fake story made him look uninformed and weak.
We’ve investigated ourselves and found out we did everything perfect isn’t really debunking.
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Sufficiently debunked? In what way? The debunkings have seemingly confirmed that Haitians are poaching waterfowl and have killed at least one person's cat and were in the process of butchering it when police intervened. Whether or not that was for food is unconfirmed, but no one should take official sources seriously regarding that.
Links?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/sep/09/social-media/authorities-rebut-claims-that-haitian-immigrants-a/
Here's one alleged debunking. When I look at the evidence they present I believe the citizen accounts over the "authorities" because the latter are far more incentivized to lie. So IDK. If you are inclined to believe the city manager, then I suppose it is dubunked. I think that if you ask a guy if he's doing a bad job, hes unlikely to say yes.
I haven't seen any citizen accounts of a Haitian having killed a person's cat, though, just an account of an account of an account. A screenshot of a private Facebook post about a report from a neighbor about what a daughter's friend saw ... is technically evidence, but it's approximately the same quality of evidence as a typical urban legend, the sort of "Fw: Fw: Re: Fw: Watch Out!" material that used to spread virally back when the only way we had to spread things virally was email. Today you can read a hundred of them en masse if you prefer.
I wouldn't consider this debunked, but we're going to need to trace the gossip chain back a few more links before I'd consider it confirmed either.
Recorded evidence would be nice, too, now that we live in a country where 90+% of the population habitually carry video cameras in our pockets. How does someone see something shocking, something ongoing (like a hanging cat corpse) rather than instant, and not be on the ball enough to get photo and video evidence? Even if you're just going to call the police, and you don't anticipate the need to get independent evidence in case the conspiracy goes all the way to the top, wouldn't it be a good idea to get evidence to give to the police in case the criminals mess with the crime scene while you're waiting for a cop to arrive?
Looks like Rufo has found a pretty well validated case of cats on the grill:
https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1834926318883852543
Obviously nobody will care about this at all since it's happening in
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I mean, sure, we haven't seen them eating cats. We have photos of them carrying waterfowl and at least one police recording reporting 4 poached waterfowl. We have some citizen reports of missing cats. We know cat is a Hatian dish.
There is a reason there is a full court press in the media to try to discredit the accusation. Its shocking. Its highly plausible, 20k poor people who are seemingly not being policed by local authorities (who seem both partisan and overwhelmed, the latter seemingly intentionally by higher levels of government) are going to get up to messed up shit.
This is also happening with the migrants in big cities, including the one in which I work. There are huge sex crimes issues in the shelters, and mostly the people running them are overwhelmed, and there is no reports coming from the migrants. So nearly every prosecution is stemming from a 12-16 year old girl getting an abortion or giving birth.
it'll be interesting to see if this story sticks around and gets more attention, leading to more investigation, or if the media can just quietly sweep it away. Trump might have accidentally stumbled upon a winning move in that debate by bringing it up, even as clumsily as he did.
It's honestly a classic Trump move. He starts off by making a ridiculous claim "they're in here eating cats!" but then when you try to debunk that claim, it ends up looking almost as bad. "OK, they do eat cats in Haiti, but not here." "Oh, they're just eating waterfowl." "All 20k of them are peaceful, lawabiding folks who have perfectly adapted to American culture." "Yeah btw we dumped 20k migrants in this one random town in the midwest, but it'll be fine."
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At least with most 90's hearsay there wasn't any obvious reason beyond shock value for someone to make it up to spread, yet it got made up and spread anyway. With the Springfield, OH hearsay it's quite likely that people like "Nate Higgers" (videoed at an earlier town meeting) are inventing more than just awful aliases, in which case we need higher epistemic standards than a game of telephone.
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We also need to consider that white suburban liberals absolutely love cats and dogs in general.
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Clearly a planned move to end with "why hasn't she done it" in the closing statements, but I'm not sure how many people will have tuned out by then.
I tuned out. I literally couldn't take it anymore. Trump wasn't doing fantastic, but the petty and nitpicky way the moderators constantly interrupted or interjected to "fact check" him, while letting Harris get away with both widely debunked hoaxes (Fine people hoax, suckers and losers hoax, bloodbath hoax), or wild fantastical bold faced lies (Like Trump arming China's military with chips). And then watching all the people come away with the impression that Harris was in command of the debate with a better grasp of the "facts". Or the fence sitting "just calling balls and strikes" people saying "If you have to complain about the moderation that means you lost". All it did was make me plan a trip to my local friendly gun store.
I've been skeptical of these claims that Biden's own side sent him out to die during the first debate. I guess I forgot how much the moderators can put their finger on the scale when they really want to. They absolutely could have rescued Biden back then. +1 for that having been a palace coup.
I have not watched either of these debates, but did the moderators for Biden's debate with Trump not also try to give him some easy lay-ups?
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It also doesn’t make a ton of sense, especially given Trump’s line about how Biden hates her.
I think it's an effective attack, she's asking people to vote for a party more than a character and it frames her as an incumbent, which given things are not going very well, is what Trump wants.
He should have hammered her with that throughout instead of bringing old news Biden into it, to be sure.
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Looks like a draw thus far(I'm correcting from my bias towards a Trump victory). Moderators definitely look biased.
Edit: this debate is a waste of time.
I only watched a few minutes, I'm more interested in the reactions than the actual debate.
If the NYT says Trump did ok Trump won.
If Pod Save America gets conspicuously upset about fact checking, Trump is winning the election.
If certain mottizens get conspicuously upset about debate formatting and moderation, Trump lost.
If certain DSL folks say Kamala won, she filleted Trump live on camera.
I'm better at judging other people's reactions than I am at actually reading the debate myself.
What's DSL?
Data Secrets Lox, another SSC spinoff forum (which also leans right, although perhaps less heavily than theMotte).
Why are there multiple SSC culture war spin-offs? If even SSC readers can’t avoid political polarization to this extent, I don’t see any hope for the rest of the population
I've got a summary of some of the history here, if you're interested. That post skipped over DataSecretLox, but it formed in Summer 2020, mostly from the SlateStarCodex open thread and subreddit readers (w/ a bit of tumblrsphere).
Most of these splits weren't on the matters of politics, at least directly. The tumblrsphere was leftish by ratsphere and SSC standards, but mostly bifurcated to allow more informal and scattershot discussion in a more person-oriented view. TheMotte subreddit split from the SSC subreddit because people were harassing Scott enough that he had a nervous breakdown, and the compromise was that any political discussion needed to be several steps away from his identity.
The CultureWarRoundup, as much as it favored righter-wing viewpoints, was more about different takes on what engagement styles people were going after. Probably still political, but not as much as it seems in retrospect. I think there was one or two explicitly right-wing one-person schisms, but I can't even find them now. TheSchism was meant as an explicit political schism in the aftermath of the Rittenhouse stuff, and a naive experiment, so I guess that makes two relevant ones?
So I guess, yes, that is a lot of bad signs for the general population, but more for how the explicit efforts went than by their existence.
Thanks for the context, I really enjoyed the summary!
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"Why" is that Data Secrets Lox was founded in the time between SSC's closure and ACX's opening, and not everybody suddenly evicted from SSC's comments wanted to move to the subreddits (this was before theMotte left Reddit). I was a member on DSL before I was a Motte member, for instance, because I didn't have (and didn't want to get) a Reddit account. It's not a "Motte for different politics".
It's also not specifically for culture war, although it allows it.
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NYT thinks it was a narrow victory for Harris, which points to roughly a draw.
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Well, there you have it.
Dunno which DSL commenters you have in mind, but I don’t see much evidence of filleting. Moderation complaints, on the other hand…
We should have made debate bingo.
Yeah I'm reading narrow Trump loss.
What surprised me is reliance by Trump on high variance plays. I'd think he'd be trying to run the ball and make Kamala beat him.
I’m not convinced Trump knows how to run the ball.
Arguably, that’s his strongest suit. The 2016 field was unprepared for air raid offense. No huddles, no depth of roster, just a series of passing plays. Trump zeroed in on a weak defender.
Hmm. I wonder if he ran similar strategies in his earlier bids. It was a different time.
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It was a waste, but we couldn't be certain of that going into it. The previous debate showed how a bad performance could have consequences. But as it turned out, neither were that bad.
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..."that she said" may have been better than "that she put out."
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Trump got off the "I'm talking now" line first. You know he was waiting for that, but he couldn't resist overplaying it.
So far, I am not seeing anything in this debate that moves the needle. Harris is being Harris, and Trump is being Trump. No big gaffes, no notable zingers, no impressive new declarations.
Trump couldn't resist going on a five-minute, wide-reaching rant after taking Harris' bait about his rally crowd sizes.
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Yeah he fucked up that line. Looked canned and smug and insincere. By contrast his hits on Biden in the first debate looked like brutal honesty and really landed.
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The Haitians eating dogs thing was a gaffe, I haven't heard anyone even propose that dogs were being eaten. He didn't have to bring that up, it's so up in the air. There's plenty he could say about immigration without basing it off strange rumors.
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"....a dictator who would eat you for lunch."
I can hear Harris fans high-fiving each other. Who did he just say "quiet please" to? Was that Harris? Or a moderator?
Pretty sure Harris -- if the mics were hot it would have been a total mess.
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Polymarket not impressed with Trump's performance so far:
https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024/will-donald-trump-win-the-2024-us-presidential-election
I'd wait until the end of the debate before looking at it either way, I doubt the markets are efficient enough to price the rethoric as fast as they do it for J. Powell.
It's a Keynesian beauty contest, all the bettors are trying to guess how a "normie" would react. Do you think the kinds of people who bet on polymarket are good at getting their fingers on the pulse of how voters react in real time?
I think the aggregate gives them an advantage and they'll probably guess right, but it takes time to collect all that information, I just don't think volatile events can get decent prices instantaneously.
The post debate polls will surely influence people quite a lot.
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I hate blaming the refs, but it is extremely annoying that the moderators want to """fact check""" Trump but not Kamala.
Back in 2016, Trump faced the same moderator hostility and still managed a better performance.
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That "moderator" comment after Trump's abortion comments seemed out-of-place, I agree.
Note: Is it normal for candidates to say "Hell" in their debates? Maybe it always has been.
It’s also just a straight up lie- not every state requires a baby’s life to be saved when born alive after an abortion.
Wasn't the point the "after 9 months/full term?" I don't recall but that was how I was following it. Very possibly I'm wrong. I agree what you're saying here is relevant and is exactly what he should have been prepared with.
It almost feels like he has trouble recalling things that aren’t a narrative.
He could recall Northam’s keep them comfortable quote, even if at first he thought he was the former governor of West Virginia.
But if it’s nerd shit like Walz changing the wording of their born alive law to require that care be rendered, but not life saving care, well he’s just not going to remember that.
I have the opposite problem, my autobiographical memory is shit but I’m great on technical details of complex systems.
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Recently "hell" and "damn" have become a way for politicians to signal anger. It's really annoying.
The VP candidates in particular seem to be breaking some of the seven words you can't say on television barriers. Vance and Walz are constantly saying politicians don't give a shit about the Midwest, or that people should mind their own damn business.
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They were straight up providing their own arguments. Which they are not supposed to do. I'm getting Trump-Hillary vibes from this so far.
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I’m going to have to go to sleep soon (watching from the UK) but I think Kamala is doing pretty well so far. She sounds relaxed, well-informed, and hasn’t tripped over herself or gone into major word salads. Trump is doing a solid Trump and has got in some good jabs but some of his talking points have been a bit wacky. The Haitian “people eating pets” story may be true or may be false, but I think it would have been better played as, eg, “people are saying this, now I don’t know if it’s true, or if it’s rumours, but it doesn’t matter, there have been some people killed by illegal Haitian drivers, and the people of Springfield are in a panic, they feel abandoned by a government that doesn’t care about them.” Only 40 minutes in though so all to play for…
Edit: lol, “if she becomes president I predict Israel won’t exist 2 years from now”. On top of that line about how “He [Biden] hates her” it really feels like Trump is losing his rag.
Edit2: Harris much better than Trump on foreign policy imho. Maybe it’s because I’m a geopolitics nerd but so many of Trump’s talking points sound like they’re aimed at <85 IQ people who don’t know crap about the world.
Edit3: Trump definitely deteriorating imho. Losing coherence and dropping talking points in a scattershot fashion. Moderators are obviously biased in Kamala’s favour, but I don’t think it significantly changes the vibes. Trump could have been calling them out on that in a smart way but he’s just not doing a good job.
Edit4: goddamn you America, I have to work in a few hours
Make it <105 IQ and we’re just talking about the electorate.
A very small number of people actually know what goes on in international affairs. If we’re lucky we might get a book a decade after the thing happens, written by someone who has an interest in making themselves look good. Or a declassified documents dump, but those seem out of fashion lately.
I’m curious exactly what Kamala’s role was in speaking to Zelenskyy prior to the invasion. My guess is that Trump was right, they weren’t interested in negotiating to avoid a war, Kamala was there to tell Zelenskyy to not give an inch, America had his back, and if Russia invades he’ll secure his legacy as the Ukrainian president that defeated Russia.
The US government certainly did not believe that Ukraine could viably hold back a Russian invasion, that’s why they closed the embassy and pulled out all personnel, and why they resisted sending large amounts of additional weaponry until after they’d repulsed the siege of Kiev.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t lie to Zelensky, but I honestly question if even he thought they’d be able to defend against an invasion; he disappeared for a few days early on (speaking from unidentified locations etc) and before that seemed to doubt whether the Russians would actually invade.
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Transgender surgeries on illegal migrants in prison.
Can't say I'm too impressed by Harris, but she's hitting her points much better than Trump.
It turns out that one appears to be true:
It’s interesting that of Trump’s three nuttiest sounding accusations- babies are allowed to be left to die after birth under the Harris abortion plan, Harris wants to pay for transgender surgeries for illegals, and Haitians are abducting people’s pets to eat them- 2/3 are true and the third one probably isn’t but is at least an urban legend among the local population.
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It looks like the current state of the art is to avoid answering questions, and instead treat them as an opportunity for impromptu rambling on a vaguely related topic, or a canned sound-bite on a vaguely related topic. Why not, there are no negative consequences.
The dominant strategy is to come up with a couple of well-rehearsed answers and pattern match questions to them. Even someone really sharp and articulate can at best match that performance. When there's around 5 minutes per topic (all of which are obvious beforehand), there's no reason not to.
Best case is to put some traps in the mini speeches to goad your opponent into going off script; a disciplined opponent knows to ignore them.
You can do better than that in a live debate - obviously competitive debaters do. "Ignore the question and just say your piece" is Media Interviews 101 though, and politicians do a lot more interviews than debates so it is the approach they are most comfortable with.
When I was a student politician, I did the Party training course on media interviews 101, and the line was that (unless you are important enough to insist on a live interview) broadcast media will record 3-4x as much material as needed and only broadcast the gaffes, so ignoring the questions and repeating your soundbite is a necessary defensive technique against deceptive editing. "When is it safe to answer the question?" is 201-level stuff.
Looking at the incentives facing the journo, broadcast media interviews are all about inducing the gaffe (except for the hard-to-get big ticket interview like a US President or an A-lister where it is all about giving a softball interview so other big interviewees will agree to be interviewed by you). My mother has a horror story about how a BBC interviewer started interviewing her in French (which she speaks, but not well enough to do an unprepared media interview), stopped after about 1 minute and said it was actually a sound check, and then started the real interview while she was still in "desperately trying to code-switch" mode.
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The debates have been that way as far back as at least Clinton V. Trump, maybe father.
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Both candidates launching into a scripted spiel regardless of what question was asked is something I have seen in basically every presidential debate in recent history.
A well-respected technique!
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It seems worse, somehow. But maybe I've just forgotten.
Harris got a question, explicitly said she'd answer all the points, and then all she did was elaborate on "my values haven't changed".
I wonder if it’s more obvious since there’s no crowd to play to.
That might be it. No crowd, muted microphones, and a known time limit if one happens to be into that whole "preparation" thing.
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Its hardly state of the art. We just regularly forget it happens virtually every time.
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Watching this, the US just feels doomed.
nah this is just a standard political debate in US politics these days.
The Biden v Trump one made me feel a lot more "doomed."
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I'm NOT watching the debate and it still feels that way. Just seems like its in the air now.
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Trump really got concerned that she said people'd leave his rallies early. "We have the biggest rallies in the history of politics"
Illuminates Kamala's point that Trump is only in it for himself.
It's a great dig, but I wonder if it actually sways anyone. I have a hard time imagining that people are so foolish as to think that politicians are not in it for themselves by and large.
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Yeah, that one was well planned. I knew when she said that that he was going to take the bait.
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