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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23239 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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How credible is any of this?

At this point, with lawfare, several unclear assassination attempts, it's IMO pretty credible FEMA would deliberately be a bit slow. Politico thinks Helene could affect elections in the states hit.

Politico has an article.

Hurricane Helene hit especially hard in heavily Republican areas of Georgia and North Carolina — a fact that could work to Donald Trump’s disadvantage in the two swing states.

...

Helene hit some predominantly Democratic communities hard too, adding to the uncertainty. In North Carolina, “Buncombe [County] was affected in really bad ways, and that is a liberal bastion,” said Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. “And Watauga is in really bad shape, also a blue leaning county.”

Overall, Helene could “dramatically change who is in the electorate,” Cooper said.

“In a state like North Carolina where margins matter, then every little tweak to the electorate could be the tweak that makes the difference,” Cooper added. “It’s right on the razor’s edge between red and blue.”

County elections offices in North Carolina — five of which remained closed Thursday — will assess damage to early voting sites and polling stations to determine “which facilities won’t be available,” Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said this week.

"Every little tweak matters" - there you have it.

Perfect motivation for strong partisans to be inefficient with recovery so that voting is depressed in leaning red counties.

How do “several unclear assassination attempts” cause FEMA to sandbag their one job?

If you had a time machine and could go back in time and shoot Hitler in the head to save six million Holocaust victims, would you?

Would you travel back in time and detonate a bomb to kill Hitler, if it meant you also killed 1,000 civilians in the blast?

If you had a time machine and could kill Hitler by not repairing a bridge before he could evacuate before an allied strike, if it meant another 100,000 civilians died in the assault, and another 50,000 starved in the aftermath?

The media and the DNC has been saying Trump is Hitler for close to a decade now. I'm sure you can do the math.

I've played the Red Alert games, so the answer is no

I think the argument is that in a state of such rampant partisanship that the most unhinged will take matters into their own hands, it is realistic to expect normal bureaucrats to look at the political bottom line instead of their nominal duties.

It seems like the very visible screwup which Trump and his supporters are very visibly addressing would make the actual literal neighboring communities of the affected lean more towards Trump, though.

I dunno, maybe that's because I live in Texas, and Dallasites and Houstonians see each other as Texans, where other states don't have that consciousness. But Trump's coalition(I mean Elon has endorsed Trump and does anyone actually believe there's a single democrat in the Cajun Navy?) visibly rescuing people in your backyard seems like it should sway some votes.

It seems like the very visible screwup which Trump and his supporters are very visibly addressing would make the actual literal neighboring communities of the affected lean more towards Trump, though.

Except that the official story is that this is a lie by the vast right wing conspiracy, and the government is actually doing the rescuing. And people here are perfectly willing to steelman FEMAs actions so they can agree that's so.

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