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Kamala wanted to run the country. In the end, she couldn't even run her own campaign.
Apparently, the Harris campaign is $20 million in debt despite spending at least $1 billion over the last 3 months. On the other hand, the Trump campaign was frugal - spending only about 1/3 or 1/2 as much as Kamala (quibble about the exact numbers all you want). Staffing in particular seems to have been a major difference with Harris spending perhaps an order of magnitude more than Trump. Harris hired high paid consultants while Trump relied on free labor from passionate supporters.
It gets worse.
The Harris campaign has been accused of paying celebrities for exposure. Surely, already rich celebrities like Beyoncé and Oprah would be happy to support their favored candidate for free. Right? Apparently not. Fox News has reported that the Harris campaign paid Oprah a million dollars to interview her. Lizzo and Cardi B have also been singled out as receiving payments.
Is it any wonder that these celebrity endorsements don't work when they are so fake?
Contra Scott's too much money in dark almonds piece, I think the reason that political campaign donations are relatively low is that it's really hard to buy an election. Bloomberg tried to back in 2020 and his campaign went nowhere. Money does matter, but the candidate matters a lot more. $1 to Trump makes a bigger difference than $3 to Harris. And Trump appearing on Rogan might have been worth $100 million, but he didn't have to pay a cent.
yeah. Hype is overrated, as is money in politics. Look at all the hype over bitcoin over the past 3-4 years yet the price has hardly done anything; meanwhile unsexy SPY/voo crushed it. VC/crypto bros showered $ on Trump for his support; if i had to wager, they will see big fat zero for their efforts. It's hard enough to pull the levers of power by the very people who are are in power...good luck doing it indirectly. Politics in the US is influenced by seniority and connections, which is how such underwhelming choice as Harris got so far anyway. She had paid her dues.
Bitcoin is at $81,000 right now...
Over 3 years (from the last ATH in November '21) it's roughly even with SPY, maybe a little behind. Over 2 years it crushes SPY. Over 4 years (and any further) it crushes SPY.
Comparing it to spy actually handicaps it in favor of bitcoin. A more appropriate comparison controlling for volatility would be something like 2-3x SPY, like UPRO, which beats Bitcoin by a bigger margin. Controlling for volatility, Bitcoin has , as of Today, slightly greater returns and vastly more volatility which makes it worse .
But so far, yes, you're right that Bitcoin as of now is the better performing asset nominally speaking.
UPRO doesn't seem to have performed that well.
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/upro
On 1/1/2020, it was at $36, now it's at $95. Tesla went from $36 to $335. Bitcoin did even better, going from about $7,000 to $88,000 today. Even Apple went from $74 to $224, it did better than UPRO (and pays dividends). Microsoft did similarly well.
It's not like Microsoft or Apple were unheard of back in early 2020, they're basically blue-chips.
ETFs are generally mediocre investments and have management fees, better to just pick out stocks or crypto specifically. If we look at just the 1 year, Bitcoin is up 140%, UPRO is up a measly 100%. UPRO might be a decent investment but it's not a great one.
A decent amount of volatility is good. You want to get in before the institutional investors, not after they've pumped the market up to high heaven. They're already all over ETFs.
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It has done well but it hasn't exactly been 'belly button lint in exchange for untold riches' if you've jumped on board any time since like 2016.
If you jumped onboard 14 hours ago, you'd already have made 7-8% profit, which is what SPY might make in a year. It's at 87K now, rising to 88 as I write this post.
Untold riches for nothing is a very high standard that we've only ever seen with bitcoin and ETH (which was originally distributed to BTC addresses). There used to be BTC faucets where people gave them away, evangelizing to new users.
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Hype can certainly help. Without some positive attention even the best product will sit on the shelf. On the other hand most people will be smart enough to notice when the sales pitch is overselling the actual product.
Kamala had a lot of negatives that were pretty obvious. She’s annoying and has a nervous laugh that’s obnoxious. She can’t give interviews, and when she does, her obvious non-answers are barely comprehensible. She cannot generate enthusiasm for her own ideas. Her rallies needed concerts just to get people to show up. At the end of the day, all the marketing in the world can’t make New Coke taste good.
She is a caricature of everything the right attributes to the left. But we're talking an extremely shallow pool of choices.
It continues to strike me as odd that a party that dominates the Ivy Leagues and Wall Street has had to field back to back candidates that went to Delaware and Howard grads.
And the party that loves the uneducated went with the Ivy League; both Bushes went to Yale and Trump to the University of Pennsylvania.
And Vances is OSU>Yale IIRC. A path generally only for the hyper gifted.
Undoubtedly he’s smart, but hillbilly kid who enlisted and became a military journalist in Iraq is one of those stories Yale admissions would love, not that I’m sure he didn’t also do very well on the LSAT.
You would think so, but actually admissions stats indicate a strong discrimination effect at Ivies against rural kids.
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Really? A straight married middle aged woman who dresses professionally, supports Israel, is seen as moderate by the progressives in her base, is the caricature of everything attributed to the left? I'd have to disagree pretty heavily.
I would have thought that a young LGBTQ Palestine defender who is single or promiscuous, has had multiple abortions, supports UBI, and has blue hair would be the choice of caricature for the right leaning among us. Do I misunderstand what the right attributes to the left? Is being 'annoying' and not generating enthusiasm all it takes to be a leftist caricature?
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It's funny because the day after the election I was overhearing my colleagues talking, and somehow, the impression they had was that Trump winning is the proof that rich people can just buy elections in the US. I don't expect that canadians would know much about american campaign finances, but still.
Just a few days ago I was reading multiple posts on this forum about how the $44 billion Elon spent on Twitter was worth every penny to the Trump campaign and now the Harris campaign spending $1 billion is a sign the big money is on the side of the Democratic Party?
I have no idea how much was spent by whom on each side (and quite possibly no one does), but the war chests of the official campaigns seems like at best a weak proxy for estimating that. (I'm sure there was also quite a bit of money spent on trying to get Harris elected that's not being accounted for in the $1 billion her official campaign touched.)
Going by the numbers on Forbes, Harris spent 1.6 billion, to Trump's 1.1 billion to contest the 2024 election. Musk spent $44 Billion to contest the entire culture; the relevant frame here would be the amounts spent on, say, every other major media and tech company in the nation. So yes, the big money is on the side of the democratic party. Blackrock alone has somewhere north of ten trillion dollars under management, to give one example of a company aligned to Blue Tribe.
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I listened to Pod Save America after the election and they were saying this election shows us that we need to get money out of politics. I immediately thought they were talking nonsense since they are the side that spends the most by far. These are smart, informed, experienced Democratic operatives mindlessly parroting "money in politics" talking points when the exact opposite is clearly true.
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The debt isn't a bad thing: it's common for campaigns to end up with debt. 20M/1000M is 2%. When you're spending those kind of sums over a very short time period in a high stakes situation, with uncertain, variable income streams, it's almost inevitable. It will end up being paid off, and IIRC donation limits are reset after the election (though, if someone was a Kamala donor, I do not envy how much begging they're going to endure for the next couple weeks). Maybe Trump will magnanimously bail her out.
And, although she lost, I'm not sure you can say it was badly spent. As stupid as it is that paying Beyonce to fart in your direction can make voters want to vote for you, if you're flush with cash and you think it'll help, why not? What else would the campaign spend it on? Yet more clueless college grads to run social media accounts and spam Reddit with Kamala memes?
Final point: Kamala did much better in the swing states where the money was being spent than the country at large. A ~2% shift across every state would have resulted in Kamala holding the blue "wall" and winning the electoral college, while still losing the popular vote. Going into the campaign, the expectation was that Kamala would need to be running 2-3 points ahead of Trump nationally to have a shot at those states, but the campaign managed to eliminate this gap. This wasn't done through offering thoughtful policy proposals that addressed their specific regional concerns, or through her personal charismatic connection with white rust belt voters.
Money is good, and it's an edge Democrats will have for the foreseeable future, even if there are diminishing marginal returns to it. They just need a better product to market.
She will do fine. i can see a remunerative career in the cards in the private sector. these people always fail forward
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"The debt isn't a bad thing." Okay, what would you call being personally 20 million dollars in debt if not a bad thing? Because apparently you're unaware they changed the rules so that candidate personally assumes the debt of the campaign
The debt won't exist 6 months from now. The campaign will continue collecting contributions, pay off the debts, and Kamala will walk away with none, rested and ready for her sinecure.
Where do you think she'll land? Unlike Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama she doesn't have her own political machine. So there's not really much to be gained for anyone to ingratiate themselves to her.
And speaking engagements will be thin. No one wants to hear from a loser, especially a midwit who is by all accounts a deeply unpleasant individual.
Clearly, she'll land somewhere. But the fall is going to be steep.
Somehow in my career, I ended up being in a position to be in the room for many private conferences. One of the things that was particularly obvious to me is how human (in the worst sense) the elite "speaker" circuit is.
People imagine those kind of conferences as a meeting of powerful people exchanging important insights, but few of them were more interesting than what you'd hear on a very average TV fluff interview. Maybe one of them was at a level of discussion that would be comparable to what we have going here. In a couple of cases I even realized that I, the IT guy babysitting the tech setup, knew more about the topic than the speaker did, nevermind the attendees. Pretty much always the attendees' questions were shallow. It seemed obvious that the attendees, rich but unknown business leaders, were starstuck and enjoyed being in the same room as someone "famous". It certainly sound glamorous to drop into a conversation an aside about that time you were at a private conference of former prime ministers, VP, etc... I know I enjoy it.
In that context, Harris definitely can do that circuit if she wants. If she was just a failed presidential candidate, maybe the interest would fade fairly quickly. But I guarantee you there are lots of rich people who want to be able to say they were at a private conference of a former US Vice President, even if the presentation is just word salad about unburdening what has been. Having been Vice President, she can probably milk forever if wants.
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If the audience is composed of midwits does it matter, and also, many people really do unironically like her--just not enough to win an election. No one is expecting her to lecture about physics.
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Howard is a solid guess. Throw in a book deal, lucrative speaking engagements with audiences who don't really care what she has to say, maybe some corporate board. She'll be well taken care of. Not for any particular affection anyone has toward her, but to signify to others that they'll be well taken care of.
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Howard University.
They may not like it, but she's probably now like a Top 5 or 3 alumni. Also, Black Women voted for Harris something like 90-10%. Howard University is 70% female. So this lines up well for her to bring in donations.
Probably also some sort of leadership role with The Links. She's literally listed in the opening paragraph of the Wiki page.
TollBooth's Top 5 All Time Howard Univ Alum (in no particular order)
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Chesa Boudin didn't have a machine of his own and they gave him an entire department at UC Berkeley after his disastrous recall loss. A department specifically made for creating propaganda for his policies that the voters rejected.
There's a larger machine at work, much greater than the petty personal ones individual politicians can build. There's a chance she gets nothing, but I expect they'll at least give her a nonprofit doing $10000/plate "rich women's issues" dinners. That was her key demo, and they need to send the signal that they take care of their own.
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This is glossing over the miserable optics of paying (out of touch) celebrities to be your friends. Of course this wasn't known prior to the election results but it's another count amongst many in which the democratic are currently a laughingstock.
That indicates that Democrats are weak when it comes to earned media. That's a massive issue, but it's a separate one from "I have a giant bag of money and need to spend it." The latter is a good problem to have, even if you're chasing after increasingly marginal edges with each additional dollar.
Only if it's not also in direct conflict with your "get billionaire funding out of politics!" messaging.
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If the rumors are true, it was very badly spent indeed. People are saying that she paid Beyonce $10 million, Lizzo $2.5 million, Cardi B $3 million, and Lady Gaga $5 million.
The value of these endorsements is close to zero. In fact, Lizzo and Cardi B may have negative endorsement value given what they represent. Lizzo: "Just imagine, if Kamala wins, the whole country could be like Detroit".
The payments seem so high as to be scarcely believable so I'd hold off on judgment for now. But if true, it seems like she ran her campaign like the Biden administration has run the country, with no regard for frugality and wasting money on useless vanity projects.
lol lizzo . even the marketplace agrees she is overrated
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Maybe I'm delusional regarding the cost of things but it feels like you could do so much more with all this money. Just hire Mr. Beast and give him 100 million. Hell, go to a swing state and spend 20 million on some small scale infrastructure project. Or just hire a different candidate.
but who? it becomes evident, when you look at it, the dems have such poor choices. They put all their eggs in the Hillary/Biden baskets . The GOP can always find populist Trump wannabes of the same sort of mold.
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A man who became famous primarily by creating content appealing to a demographic who are too young to vote?
This is better than lizzo, beyonce,
I don't think mr. beast is a democrat through and would refuse
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Considering the mental maturity of those doing the voting, he's the perfect guy.
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Harris staffers seem to have been running a campaign that appeals to themselves, personally, with the celebrity concerts and so forth. A fun big party for the Dem staffer class. Of course what appeals to the Dem staffer class is not what appeals to the voting public, in many ways opposite to it.
While the sort of corruption where politicians misuse taxpayer money obviously gets more attention, the sort of lower-level corruption where political parties and organizations misuse donations, membership fees, money from ownings etc. for this sort of stuff is probably rather more common.
It's winning by losing. among the biggest recipients of those trump tax cuts will be wealthy liberal elites and woke businesses anyway.
Like Springtime for Hitler?
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A good description for the Democratic Party as a whole.
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The parallels between She Hulk Attorney at law and kamala's campaign are writing themselves. Up to Megan Thee Stallion's ass twerking convincing the public that showrunners have no idea what they are doing. And the end results.
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The purpose of a system is what it does. This is related to the iron law of bureaucracy. The reason campaigns want money isn’t so that they can win elections. The reason campaigns want money is so that they can run the campaign. More money = more stuff for the people running the campaign.
As for why it seems to affect Democrats more than Republicans, guess which party has non-profit employees as a constituency.
Celeb endorsements also are about building a coalition of supporters. Winning is secondary. Even if young people are unreliable voters or cannot vote, they still will grow up and enter society and affect it in many ways.
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