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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26868 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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Am I misremembering how Presidential campaign losers tend to behave on election night? I think I remember Gore, Kerry, McCain, Romney, and Clinton speaking to their supporters on election night, delivering the bad news but giving some message of unity or thanking everyone for running such a great campaign and such.

Kamala has decided not to speak to all of the people that showed up for her party at Howard University. She's said that she'll speak tomorrow.

It's definitely abnormal, usually they say a few quick words. We haven't seen her personally really lose a race other than 2019, which was handled via a letter to supporters on social media, not a video, and well after the writing was on the wall and her campaign had been full of infighting, so that seems roughly on-brand personally despite not much to go on.

She seems to hate public speaking and only does it when she absolutely has to. I’m not surprised she doesn’t want to do it on the most stressful night of her life, though I think it’s churlish.

Did she not read the job description of a politician? Public speaking is at least 2/3 of the job description.

Well, quite.

Clinton started the trend.

My take: politicians have less connection with their supporters nowadays. If you manufacture support, then you owe nothing to the manufactured supporters. Once there was a reciprocal relationship, but that no longer exists. So why not wait until the last possible moment to concede?

Hillary Clinton didn’t speak to her supporters election night either. She called Trump and conceded at 2:40 a.m.

Yeah but that was her whole life, the culmination of everything and she was sure she’d win. Harris probably never thought she’d be President in any case until a couple of months ago. I’d put it this way, that day in 2016 was unquestionably the worst day in Hillary’s whole life. I don’t think today is the worst day in Harris’ life.

Oh, I’m sure it was completely crushing for Hillary. I have no disagreements there. But I would still think that today is probably the worst day in Harris’ life, even if it isn’t as bad for her as it was for Clinton. Coming so close to the presidency and then losing it (and losing it to Trump, in an explicit rejection of Harris’ and Biden’s last four years) has to be the bitterest pill she’s ever had to swallow.

I will note that it's possible that Harris will still be President, if only for a month or two. All Biden has to do is resign (or die, I suppose).

Agreed. Not to mention, absolutely anyone in her position would get swept up by visions of grandeur, and start to really want it badly. I mean, she probably really thought she had a good chance of going down in the history books as the first female president (the sort of representation I'm sure she cares a great deal about), but now it seems rather that she'll be relegated to being the second woman who failed to become the president.

She's swallowed more bitter things on her path to power.

For the record, semen's not always bitter. Urine is horrifically bitter, but semen can be sweet or salty. I hear it depends on diet, though I'm not exactly going to trial a less-healthy diet to confirm.

Who says Willie Brown wasn't into watersports, among other things?

They both needed their beauty sleep.

Honestly I can't parse this comment as anything but overtly sexist, and plainly adds nothing either. Do better.

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Bro there is absolutely nothing sexist about that post. It's not even mean or derogatory in any way. You're way overreacting to what is, at worst, a not very funny joke.

I thought this comment was a one-liner that was poking fun at the types of humor-policing busybodies that would unironically use a statement like "do better" in response to a harmless one-liner. The sub-thread that followed below indicates that I was mistaken. FWIW, I thought both one-liners were funny and added value to this forum. The sub-thread that followed, less so.

FWIW, when I was a child "beauty sleep" was used when encouraging small children of both sexes (and, presumably, all genders, although we didn't know that at the time) to go to sleep. I have never heard it used with respect to an adult.

You could also parse it as "a joke". Directly above me there's a guy saying Kamala only got where she is by sucking dick, and I'm sexist? Please.

Do better.

This isn't Reddit. Get lost.

Low effort one liners are perhaps not explicitly against the rules, but they are pretty close to it, last time I checked. If you want a joke forum maybe you should consider reddit yourself? Thanks for pointing it out, I've reported both comments. They add nothing to the conversation and only increase hostility and boo-outgroup feelings, again, explicitly against the whole idea. Did you re-read the copy-pasted message at the top of the CW posts recently? I know it might come across as sour grapes, but keeping low-effort punching-down rare is at least in theory a fundamental part of what I perceive to be the goal of the site.

Also, jokes are of course widely subjective and I know that jokes often trade explicitly on being a little transgressive. But to me, it's not even a funny-mean joke, nor particularly inventive; it's just mean.

they are pretty close to it, last time I checked

Check again, they get nominated for AAQCs, and deservedly so (https://www.themotte.org/post/983/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/208068?context=8#context, https://www.themotte.org/post/987/quality-contributions-report-for-april-2024).

If you want a joke forum maybe you should consider reddit yourself?

I don't want a joke forum, but I do want a serious discussion forum in which cracking jokes and good-natured ribbing are permitted and even encouraged. Which is why I'm here.

low-effort punching-down

An anonymous rando cracking a joke about two fabulously wealthy and powerful women who each came within a hair's breadth of becoming the literal leaders of the free world (and one of whom is currently literally next in line to become the leader of the free world) now constitutes "punching down". Lol. But thank you for providing such an illustrative example of a point I made months ago regarding how the "punching up/down" concept is so prone to abuse:

In practice, all you need to do is find one axis on which Alice is considered to be worse off than Bob, and then claim that her position on this axis negates whatever positions she might occupy on any other axes which might be relevant to the debate over who has more power in an interpersonal or political debate. (Hillary Clinton may be white, cis, straight, fabulously wealthy, well-educated and extremely powerful in the literal sense of having held numerous high-ranking government positions in a career spanning decades - but she is a WOMAN, therefore all criticism and jokes directed at her are unacceptable punching down.)

Moving on.

But to me, it's not even a funny-mean joke, nor particularly inventive; it's just mean.

Fair enough. Doesn't mean it's against the rules. I never claimed it was "inventive" (and now the goalposts are moving again: "your joke did not reach @EverythingIsFine's minimum threshold for creativity, three-day ban"): it was just playful teasing, which this thread and forum are full of.

On the most basic level a joke needs to be either funny or insightful or failing either, at least clever to count enough as an "acceptable joke" and not just being mean. We all know, I assume, about the social thing that happens sometimes with jokes where they are either too frequent or not actually funny enough that they are used as a form of bullying, or are opportunities to say what you "really think" but then hide behind "just a joke bro" when challenged. So that's the context I'm coming from: the forum-equivalent of bullying or "just a joke bro" are both forbidden by the rules and for good reason! They both tend to be long-term extremely toxic in a poison-the-well sense for forums, doubly so for those that aim to 'optimize for light not heat'.

By contrast, a joke that is, on the spectrum, more on the side of clever or insightful or all in good fun is fine (or even laudable if an AAQC) in the sense that it probably doesn't contribute to that kind of generalized toxicity. Thus even a short joke can be plausibly seen as at least medium effort in the way the first kind of joke fundamentally is not, and "low effort" is its own rule, however subjective. I hope this explanation helps you understand I'm not actually attempting to move goalposts or anything -- they exist roughly as outlined above, to my mind (not a mod).

While it's obviously difficult to quantify a joke as I noted, since it's highly subjective and even context-dependent (moods of crowds in comedy clubs a well-known confounder of the funniness of a joke itself along with delivery), Scott Adam had a proposal I subscribe to that a joke needs to contain at least one but ideally two or more of the following [to be funny]: Unexpectedness, Exaggeration, Incongruity, Relatability, Absurdity, Reversal. I would probably add in Transgression as its own category, though there's overlap. Since you clearly want to analyze it further, at least to me your joke doesn't contain any of these in any meaningful sense. Nor does it say anything clever. Nor does it contain any special insight. It isn't relatable, it isn't much of a reversal, it isn't absurdist, it just lives in a sour mediocrity and thus is best represented as pure sexism and disdain and dismissal of women. Or, it was just a quick thoughtless one-off that didn't land, I'm not trying to do some actual character assassination or judgement here -- you were totally free to respond in any number of ways other than digging in and claiming it's somehow "good natured ribbing".

Also Scott Adams is certainly an interesting choice of person to use when lecturing someone about how sexist they are and how they need to (unironically) "do better":

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"Yikes sweaty, let's unpack why this isn't a good look. Per these five key criteria, the fact-checkers have determined that this attempt at humour fails to meet the minimum threshold for a legitimate joke; ergo, you are a meany doo-doo head who's punching down at our brave POC kween with several million in the bank and a Secret Service detail." If I didn't know better, I would honestly think you were parodying a certain species of Reddit janny/Snopes editor/woke moderator. I came to the Motte in large part to escape this style of smarmy self-righteous scolding (which is to the modern internet as asbestos is to old buildings), and can't imagine I'm alone in that regard.

In any case, I don't care if you didn't appreciate my joke. Leave me alone.

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