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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Nate Silver wants to share what he wrote in his journal with you - LINK -

He's couching it as a "Reader Q&A" but it's a self-reflective series on him, his substack, the election, polls, and politics in general. If you're already fed up with Mr. Silver, it could be an exasperating read. I am not, however, and do find Nate's straight political takes (without any of the bulllshit "data journalism" or woo-woo risk and gambling stuff) to be better than the average pundit.

Just before the paywall, Silver concludes with a paragraph that reveals the rot at the core of the PMC-liberal elite;

For me, “Trump’s even worse!” worked one last time and I voted for Harris — largely because of January 6 and because Trump, like Biden, is too old. But maybe some of my gut feeling that Trump would win was because I sympathized with voters’ instincts to punish the Democratic Party more than I did in 2016 and 2020. Being willing to take a short-term hit to discourage coercion or punish broken promises is probably a pretty good default, an attitude that’s close enough to rational more often than not.

Dishonesty has a price. The Liberal/Left coalition has been held together by ducktape, glue, and the continued adherence to the idea of a "better tomorrow" as guided by the experts. But they're all inveterate liars and the American people finally called them out on it. Is it a full moon, Nate's turning into a self-awarewolf.

Nate Silver makes a good point. Historically, democrats have done very poorly with progressive ideology as a platform- Clinton won by moving to the center, Obama ran as a technocrat. And crucially they were essentially honest about those things- they may have thrown bones to progressives by going after cultural conservatives a bit, but Obamacare was not the universal single payer system that the left flank wanted and Clinton promoted 'safe, legal and rare', not 'shout your abortion'.

Man, I want to argue with you on the merits, but I can’t get past the smug disdain.

You know better than this. Talk about specific groups. Steelman their positions. Add more commentary than “haha, other team bad!”

Just for avoidance of doubt - my post is considered unacceptable?

I wouldn’t say unacceptable. I’d say it’s not up to your usual standards.

they're all inveterate liars

I'm reading the instructions at the top of the page: "We ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War: ... Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike."

I mean we literally just had a discussion with someone arguing that inveterate lying was perfectly valid, after a campaign season full of the most shameless lying I've ever seen.

There are limits. I think people would appreciate an apology for the lies before extending any more charity. At least for the whole "our internal polls agreed with the prediction markets that trump was winning but we still called them insane cryptobro conspiracy theorists who did their own research (gross! Ick!)". Or "Biden's not senile you're just a rabid maga partisan for noticing." Or "the economy is amazing and Biden solved Trump's crime wave, illegal immigration isn't happening and you're imagining the price of eggs and why do you care anyway, you're weird!" All lies that were used here with no consequences for the liars other than going on some people's mental lists of sociopathic manipulators.

There's a point where you can't just get done with another round of lying and go "hey bro no hard feelings bro I was just using rhetoric to destroy your ability to understand reality and gaslight you into thinking you were insane for questioning our lies, leaving you helplessly adrift in a sea of mass propaganda to serve my own interests. Come on bro we've all done that, I do it to you all the time you can't stay mad at me! What about charity bro?! What about niceness and understanding?!"

It's time to coordinate some meanness against this tactic, because it's antithetical to everything this place tries to do, and it incinerates what little trust anyone has left. I want to come here to read people who will help me understand things I'm unaware of or confused about, not to get force fed this week's edition of "Blob Propaganda Magazine"

There are liars on that side of the aisle. There are also those who believe the lies - the lied-to (and some allies of convenience as well). Call the liars liars; don't call the lied-to liars.

I mean, at a certain point you become complicit in the lies. Like, if you catch me, bloody knife in hand, body at my feet, the body of a person I've had decades of animosity towards and threatened to kill, and I go "He fell", clearly I'm lying. Or at least you'd have significant reason to believe I'm lying. But if you turn around and repeat to everyone "WhiningCoil didn't murder anyone! The poor man just fell and anyone who says otherwise is a nazi!" I'd say you are also a liar.

The entirety of the Democrats and the media lied about Joe Biden's cognitive state for years. In private many of them knew he was thoroughly demented. When the dam finally broke and the rats fled the sinking ship, hoping if they came clean first they could salvage some of their credibility, you heard stories going back to his inauguration. The worst, and the one that condemns the most Democrats, is when he went to Capitol Hill to try to whip votes for the Inflation Reduction Act, he spoke with all the congressional democrats, and he was so obviously demented Nancy Pelosi had to excuse him and "clarify" what he was "trying to say". That was at least two years ago.

There were all the times in public he was obviously demented that got hand waved away. The media knew it was lying then. We all have the same eyes in our head. There were the times the media claimed Joe Biden had a stutter that he's wrestled with for years, despite five decades of public speaking stutter free. They definitely knew that was a lie and repeated it.

The conspiracy to hide Joe Biden's dementia, and the willful lying, or credulous complicity, damned every Democrat and every media mouthpiece that played ball. This isn't in the same class of lying as making and breaking campaign promises, exaggerating your record, denying corruption or moral failings, crass political posturing and the like. It's unlike any act of political dishonesty I've ever even heard of. And they were all in on it, and they didn't even care that it was obvious they were lying to everyone, because we all have the same eyes and ears on our head. If they could have bullied enough people into voting blue no matter who to drag a corpse across the finish line they would have.

If you say "these people are gullible and/or stupid and/or highly-mindkilled; what they say is apparently not significantly correlated with the truth and you should ignore it", that's a solid argument and one I'd actually mostly agree with.

If you say "these people are gullible and/or stupid and/or highly-mindkilled, and we should chop them up into little pieces", well, I don't accept that argument for a variety of reasons, but ultimately that's a matter of opinion; there's logic to that position and it's been taken before.

If you say "these people are all liars", then I'm going to call you out. "Lying" is saying things you believe to be false with the intention that others will believe them to be true. It is highly useful to have a word for that, and I think that's worth protecting against hyperbole like yours. There are definitely some liars among the Democrats, but less than you might think.

If you say "these people are all liars", then I'm going to call you out. "Lying" is saying things you believe to be false with the intention that others will believe them to be true. It is highly useful to have a word for that, and I think that's worth protecting against hyperbole like yours.

I don't think that's the singular definition of lying. Phrases like "lying to oneself" and "lying by omission" are quite common, and I don't think they're being ironic or hyperbolic. Often, lying to oneself is considered a lesser evil than knowingly saying false things with the conscious intent to make others believe them to be true, but I'd also argue that, often, the truth is so obvious and the false thing that someone believes when they "lie to themselves" is so blatantly self-serving that it's at least as much an evil.

How many people do you think would be less than I think? Like I said, I already consider all congressional Democrats liars for this. They all met with a demented Joe Biden trying to whip votes for the Inflation Reduction Act. They lied about his mental state for 2 years. Maybe that does not indict every single congressional staffer, or literally every single person who is a registered Democrat, or every single person who voted D. But it absolutely indicts almost every single person of rank and consequence in the DNC. Now that the beans are spilled, we know they all lied for years, and they knew they were lying.

As I said, call the liars liars. But target discrimination like this is important, damnit. It's the point of that rule, and it divides discourse from rhetoric.

How have I not done that? You keep banging on about how I'm casting too wide a net. Do you think I'm wrong to consider every Democrat of rank and consequence a liar for their conspiracy of silence around Joe Biden's mental state? Do you think it's wrong, if every Democrat of rank and consequence in the DNC is a liar, to claim that the DNC is full of liars? Do you think it's somehow ambiguous who I'm talking about when I say capital D-Democrats are liars? Do you think someone is confused that I'm actually talking about their Nana who heard on the news that Trump is Hitler and voted for the first black female president instead? Here?!

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It's time to coordinate some meanness against this tactic

Why not demonstrate they are wrong or mistaken? Is that mean enough? If there's specific concern trolls you are concerned with, then it'd be good to point them out to Mom--erators. People should be allowed to be wrong here. They should be allowed to make bad, misinformed arguments. They should be allowed to be duped and fall for the latest propaganda and regurgitate it with a fresh coat of polite paint on it here. They should be allowed to be embarrassed, apologize, or quietly slink away and come back with a new humility. You should be encouraged and motivated as you easily dispel provably false things. Easily dispelling provably false things is a major contribution and part of the immune system. Then for things that are not provably false you maybe can take it easy?

I don't make it around all the way through every thread, but I haven't seen an epidemic of DNC concern trolls here.

I mean honestly, I don’t think the press just started doing thing. I’ll be honest, I’ve near zero trust in the mainstream media as a truthful source of actual news. And I don’t think an apology fixes it. The issues are too deep for that, and they won’t change just because they promise to do better. I think at this point, the press need to clean house, top to bottom. Until then, I think it’s just reasonable to ignore the media and look for actual news.

I knew that they were lying about the polls when suddenly the “Keys” history professor showed up everywhere telling people how he’d never been wrong and only he could turn the keys. And if you paid attention, the keys he was talking about were either clearly false or manipulated to become true. Kamala was declared the incumbent, for one, which isn’t true. No major wars (just forget about Ukraine and Israel, both of whom were funding), a good economy (stop noticing the price of things). I felt like I was watching Baghdad Bob declare that there were no tanks in Baghdad while a tank rolls by behind him. More ridiculous than anything, but I felt like this was an insult to my intelligence. They couldn’t possibly think people would fall for this.

Man, this is a bit off the path of this topic, but it's been months since the hurricane fucked up western North Carolina, and I still can't tell fact from fiction. All I see are randos on twitter talking about FEMA kicking people out of shelters, and then taking their kids because they don't have adequate shelter. Some road a bunch of good ol' boys cut through a mountain to Chimney Rock that FEMA closed down, despite there being no other road. Some guy devastated that FEMA stole the building he'd leased for his business, and since his home was washed away, now he has absolutely nothing. There was definitely that one lady who instructed FEMA workers to skip houses with Trump signs, and apparently she went out trying to take everyone down with her, claiming those orders came to her from higher up as well. Was that ever substantiated? I don't know!

It reminds me of the oral tradition from the Great Depression, about FDR stealing gold from lock deposit boxes and slaughtering entire herds of cattle to fight deflation. Visiting local national parks there are exhibits about all the people forced off their land by FDR to establish some of those parks, and how they were totally given a fair market value when they were forced off. I'm pretty sure the worst allegations about FDR stealing people's gold might not have happened exactly the way it's described. But this debunking does not inspire hope as it's full of the usual managerial weasel words I'm used to. FDR didn't steal the gold. He just passed an executive order requiring it be sold to the government at a price they immediately raised after they'd gotten it all. And even when the government did confiscate people's gold, it's because they committed a crime. Like not obeying the executive order to voluntarily sell their gold to the government.

Oh the press has been doing it since before JournoList, that's baked in. What's new is spreading it to places like this through sophisticated distributed propaganda campaigns: delivering talking points to partisans and using them to manipulate people who trust them.

Take the surge in shoplifting for example. It wasn't just MSNBC or Vox lying about it, they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.

What do you even do against a fully distributed and inescapable reality distortion machine like that? Obviously this election showed the limits of convincing people to ignore their lying eyes, but it took an amazing set of circumstances to wake people up.

My mom's told us a story a bunch of times about how, when she was in school as a kid, one day she and her classmates were told to head out to the sports field because some reporters wanted to take a picture. So the reporters had her and her classmates sit on the bleachers, and took a couple pictures, and then they told the kids to start make fists, start yelling and waving their fists in the air, look real angry. The kids did it, and the reporters took a couple more pictures. The next day, one of those last pictures was in the paper for a story claiming that she and her fellow classmates had staged a race riot.

Point being, it's definitely older than Journolist.

they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.

Don't take this the wrong way (I agree with you), I'm not trying to pull a Reddit "source?" move, but I would genuinely love to see links for each of these things.

I'll see if I can still find them. Those particular ones were on the motte reddit I think.

Ah, the old pivot from one persons "They are inveterate liars and it's smart and great, which I can attest to due to my decades of working in politics" to "You can't call them liars, that's against the rules!" I don't know what else to call them after this political cycle. Is there one single truthful thing they actually said?

Who is "they"?

You can call Nate Silver a liar. You can call (specific) Democratic politicians liars. You can call any particular organization or individual a liar (if you can back it up). You can argue that specific statements are lies or that people who claimed to believe something were lying. You cannot just say "Democrats are liars." Unless you think you can actually make a case that every. Single. Democrat. Is a liar. If you really believe that, write your effortpost about how Every. Single. Democrat. Is a liar. Otherwise, yes, culture warring with "Democrats are all liars" will get modded.

Of course if someone came in and said "Republicans are all Nazis," you'd expect that to be modded (and you know it would be). But then you'd continue to be pretend to be confused and indignant when "Democrats are all liars" gets modded.

Who is "they"?

More seriously? The entire apparatus around Joe Biden that hid his dementia. Here is an article from 6 months ago, after the debate. It described how years before that his dementia was obvious to everyone who worked around him. There was an anecdote about how when they were trying to get the Inflation Reduction Act passed, he met with congressional democrats for the last time to try to whip votes. He was so obviously demented, Nancy Pelosi had to excuse him and try to make his comments make some sort of sense.

They all lied All of them. Every single one of them, to a person, lied about Joe Biden's mental state for years. The entire party, the media handlers, every single person who had met with him and saw how demented he was. They are all liars.

There, done. It wasn't even that hard.

LOL. "Liar" is on the same level as "Nazi". I mean I know Nazi has been thrown around so much it's been severely devalued, but I don't know it had fallen all the way to "Liar". Good to know, good to know.

Again, stop pretending to miss the point.

"Nazi" is not the same as "liar," and you know I do not think "Nazi" is the same as "liar," and you are not LOLing.

I took two very common generalizations we actually see, by way of illustrating the point. If I thought you honestly needed something with exact moral equivalence, I'd come up with more closely-matched pairs, like "Nazi/groomer" or "liar/misogynist" or whatever. But (1) this would be pointless, you'd just pedantically argue the equivalence; (2) it's not necessary, you didn't really miss the point.

You got the point.

Don't tell me I'm not LOLing. I just woke up my sick wife with my LOLing, and the dog too. I LOLed in a deep, throaty way, from deep in my gut. It was the LOL of a man deeply satisfied, and you can't take that away from me.

Edit; I mean, seriously. If you are about to mod in so silly and unserious a fashion, so much so you can already anticipate how I'll object (because it's true), but you plow on ahead anyways, and then you get all butthurt for your deserved mockery, just hang up your hat dude. You're cooked.

Edit; I mean, seriously. If you are about to mod in so silly and unserious a fashion, so much so you can already anticipate how I'll object (because it's true), but you plow on ahead anyways, and then you get all butthurt for your deserved mockery, just hang up your hat dude. You're cooked.

I wasn't about to mod you, and as much as you wish it were so, I don't get "butthurt" by your tantrums. That said, unless you are trying to get modded so you can feel more persecuted, editing in personal attacks makes it a lot harder to treat you as having (another) bad day.

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To be fair, I am 1) Not American, 2) Not a Democrat and 3) A Mottezin so how much you can extrapolate from me to the people you are talking about is an entirely different ballgame.

If you want to say SSCReader is an inveterate liar, then certainly yes for much of my career I was. But of course, I also worked for both Right and Left wing parties. So as much as I am an exemplar for Democrats it is also going to implicate Republicans.

"Did prediction markets and other indicators that called the race correctly just get lucky?"

Is beyond the paywall, if anyone happens to have access beyond the paywall and is willing to C+P ....

(semi-relatedly, I would love a substack setup where you could buy say 10 (or whatever number) of general purpose credits and use them across any substack. I would absolutely sign up for something like that. Signing up for 10 different substacks for the sake of reading the 1 or 2 articles a month that interest me .... not so much).

(semi-relatedly, I would love a substack setup where you could buy say 10 (or whatever number) of general purpose credits and use them across any substack.

This is the use case that I'm annoyed Crypto hasn't managed to fill.

Same with newpaper articles. I'm not going to create an account and subscribe to read the couple articles per month I find interesting with every news outlet.

But if I could pay like 15-150 cents to read a particular article on the spot, with just a couple of clicks, I'd be pretty happy to do so.

Why on earth would you need crypto to solve this rather than just a credit card?

Because credit cards are very bad at EXACTLY these kinds of small and inconsequential transactions, especially at scale.

And it's in large part because they have to worry about, e.g. fraud and money laundering protections and massive regulatory burden.

The other part is the infrastructure to handle the bandwidth of that many transactions, which crypto has as well.

Crypto could fill the same niche that used to be filled by carrying around a few spare quarters.

Credit card processing fees are about 25 cents, IIRC. What are they going to do "If you pay the credit card company $0.15, I'll pitch in another $0.10 and let you read the article."?

This was also the idea behind Patreon: a 100 fan to 100 artist transaction would take 10000 payments normally, but Patreon could reduce it to 200 and some internal accounting. (That didn't last too long, though.)

That didn't last too long, though.

What do you mean?

At launch, Patreon was focused on bundles of $1 payments to each creator. Then it focused on bundles of $10 payments. Then individual $10 payments, billed separately. Now it's largely the same as any other content hosting/discovery/payment platform.

To add onto ToaKraka's reply, crypto is literally designed to be transferred in increments that total up to sub-cents. Micropayments were one theorized method of paying for the Internet, but were deemed to be impractical. Brave's BAT was created as a sort of alternative to the modern ad-driven internet we have.

Credit-card processors impose fees that can be major impediments to small transactions. One page describes a fee of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. In that environment, making a 15-cent purchase is not feasible, because the fee would be literally twice that much. (See also all the small businesses that refuse to accept credit cards for any purchase smaller than 15 or 20 dollars.)

Thanks. I thought that the length of the blockchain was making transfer costs go up... has this issue been solved?

I don't know that much about cryptocurrency, but it's important to note that different cryptocurrencies have vastly different transaction fees. According to this graph:

  • Bitcoin itself (BTC) is quite bad for small transactions, because its transaction fees are enormous—at present, 3 to 6 dollars.

  • Monero (XMR) has fees of 0.05 to 0.07 dollar, in addition to offering anonymity.

  • Litecoin (LTC) has fees of 0.007 to 0.008 dollar.

It wouldn't work like that. The aggregator would only bill the card monthly, or when it reaches a certain amount.

Then they're extending credit. Which they certainly do not want to do.

Nah, the dollar amounts are low enough that one month of access wouldn't be a problem. That's the way a lot of court vendors that provide online access work. When the product only costs 50 cents a page or whatever they aren't going to bill each transaction, especially since most of their customers are professionals making a lot of transactions. Instead they just bill monthly, and PACER only charges if you spend more than $30 in a billing period. If this is too risky, then they can always set up a draw-down account where you pay, say, $30 up front and it bills your account until it reaches zero before automatically replenishing.

It's in no ones interest to move to a worse revenue model in a field where almost noone pays anyway

Substack seems to have proven that's a problem with the content, not the audience.

I’m actually surprised enough that there is no newspaper subscription service which comes with, say, 50 free articles/mo from whatever selection of newspapers that I assume it falls afoul of anti-trust law somehow.

Because a large number of subscribers presumably read only a few articles each month and might cancel their subscription in favor of that cheaper model across multiple papers.

There are aggregators like PressReader that include every major news source but cost hundreds of dollars a month for full access (the ‘professional’ plan) and there’s Bloomberg, which also has every major news source but costs tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Silvers main point is if voters punish “their” party (by not voting, or voting third party), even if it means the enemy gets into power. He thinks yes, because that is how he felt:

Turning back to national politics, there are two times when I’ve felt betrayed by the Indigo Blob, my term for the unofficial alliance between the Democratic Party and the progressive expert class. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you can probably identify them because they’re the two huge fights I’ve had with the left in the past several years. One was with COVID stuff. When the pandemic began, I was one of those people who was like “Welp, we ought to just trust the experts here!”. Many of those experts did a great job under impossible circumstances. But I felt betrayed by a minority who were clearly using the pandemic to advance their political agendas: their utter hypocrisy in endorsing the George Floyd protests after having spent weeks telling everyone to stay home, for instance.4 And then they did profound harm with prolonged school closures.

Then there was Biden’s decision to run again. I thought this actually did present an existential risk because of an 86-year-old president’s questionable decision-making abilities in a crisis. At some point, it even became farcical, with Biden referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin” in a press conference meant to reassure the nation about his cognitive fitness. You’d get yelled at by a certain type of Democrat if you didn’t play along and pretend that this was normal.

After the June debate, I was willing to put my foot down; I would have voted third-party5 if Biden had remained on the ballot. Maybe this was intended to “teach the Democratic Party a lesson.” Or maybe it was an emotional reaction more analogous to revenge. But either way, being coerced into voting for a man who clearly wasn’t fit for another four years: sorry, that’s where I was going to tap out.

Other voters may feel betrayed by the Democratic Party for other reasons, particularly too much wokeness, too much immigration, and too much spending. In 2019, Harris ran far to her left. Although many pundits claim that Harris pivoted to the center this year, she was making mostly empty gestures. She backed down from many of her 2019 positions without providing any rationale or proposing much in the way of substantive policies to replace them, or doing anything to offend the various “groups” and nonprofits that dominate the Democratic Party’s policy-making infrastructure. And faced with a decision that did have real consequences — her choice of a running mate — Harris went with what the progressive wing wanted instead of the moderates.

Isn’t Trump also hypocritical and prone toward promising lots of things he can’t deliver? Sure, but his promises are also more tangible: less immigration, less crime, less inflation and most importantly, owning the libs and thumbing his finger in the nose of the establishment through the mere fact of his election.

Then there was Biden’s decision to run again.

I really don't like how commentators act like this was a choice when there was no political reality where he could conceivably not run for reelection. The only way this could conceivably make sense is if there was some obvious candidate who wouldn't draw any opposition and who would be running as a continuation of the present administration. In other words, they would have had to name Kamala Harris as heir apparent and hope nobody credible wanted to challenge her. They weren't going to get that. The administration's shortcomings were manifest enough and Kamala's popularity weak enough that at least one squeaky wheel would emerge who would seriously threaten to derail the whole thing. At that point you're just guaranteeing a repeat of 2016 or any incumbent who faced a serious primary challenge.

On the other hand, you could (probably) keep Harris out and have an open primary with the usual large cast of candidates. But when do you start this process? Most candidates announce in the spring or early summer of the year prior to the election, and the first primary debates are held in the late summer or early fall. But the candidates need time to form exploratory committees and the like and get their campaigns together before they announce, so add an additional month or two of lead time. It's worth noting that Trump's nomination was not a fait accompli at this point, so there was a reasonable concern that the GOP candidate would have an advantage in the general if given more lead time. The latest Biden could have realistically waited to announce that he wasn't running would have been May or June of 2023, but more realistically it would have been made in March or April.

At this point, his presidency effectively ends. any new legislative proposals or foreign policy initiatives are now political hot potatoes that are discussed more in terms of their effect on the primary election than on their own terms. Support from his own party is no longer guaranteed, so better just to ditch anything the least bit controversial. This isn't good for the party, either, since changing candidates doesn't exactly guarantee a Democratic victory. This is put more starkly when you consider that the second half of Biden's presidency went much better than the first. Inflation cooled, the border crisis subsided somewhat, and COVID and Afghanistan were increasingly in the rear view mirror. Any attempts for the party to win back voters or simply do what they feel is right go up in smoke; they've effectively conceded to half a term. And to compound the error, Biden's tenure as president is frozen at that point, and it becomes the record that Democrats are running on, including those who would be willing to question Biden's decision making.

A Biden candidacy wasn't ideal, but he had already beaten Trump once and there weren't any candidates who could step in and make an obvious improvement. If Biden has a normal, boring performance at the first debate then he doesn't drop out and, who knows, maybe he wins. Conversely, if Biden doesn't run and Trump wins anyway then the pundits are writing articles about how the Democrats sacrificed 2 years of power in order to expose intraparty divisions and nominate a candidate who was stuck with Biden's record anyway and had no real chance of winning. So pick your poison.

I really don't like how commentators act like this was a choice when there was no political reality where he could conceivably not run for reelection.

It was a choice, period. Biden is a free man and not some kind of slave, nobody constrained him to choose to run. He would not have been thrown in prison or something. You talk about "political reality", but the man is in his 80s. His life is almost over, let alone his career in politics. Acting like political calculus means he "had to" run is just absurd.

This logic is why democrats lost. Having a mentally competent commander in chief is more important than ensuring everyone sticks to party talking points. Having an open primary is not some optional feature you only do when it's convenient to rev up enthusiasm. Perhaps the party wouldn't have needed to win back so many voters if they didn't betray the nation's trust.

I believe the Democrats also lost because they didn't have a competitive primary in 2020. Or 2016. Actually, the last time the Democratic party had an actual competitive primary where they truly let the party membership decide who they should nominate, the people went against the Clinton machine and picked Obama, who won in a landslide and then won again, despite intense oppositon.

And when the Republicans last had an open primary, they picked Trump, who won in 2016 in a surprise victory and then won the popular vote in 2024.

Open primaries win elections. Machine politics loses them. 2020 was the singular exception, and it was all due to COVID, an unprecedented social disruption.

How was 2020 not an open primary? There were like 700 candidates.

Obama forced a lot of people out of the race through back room dealing.

If Biden has a normal, boring performance at the first debate then he doesn't drop out and, who knows, maybe he wins.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/biden-polling-trump-votes-harris-election-b2644079.html

In that world Trump gets 400 electoral votes.

What map do we think Trump can have 400 electoral votes, even against a dementia patient?

If we assume Trump v Biden, electric boogaloo, flips Virginia, New Mexico, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Maine, that's nowhere near. If we throw in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York, you're still not there.

I see this mentioned a lot and I want to push back a little bit. As the article notes, the claim was made by Jon Favreau on Pod Save America. I happened to be listening to this shortly after it came out, and it's clear from that context that Favreau wasn't sharing this to show, as we say in the law, the truth of the matter asserted. He was trying to make a point about the Biden campaign and their contention that he still represented the candidate most likely to beat Trump. There is no other source for this number; no one has produced the poll or polls in question, and Favreau isn't likely to have seen them himself. The context was consistent with him casually tossing off a bit of Beltway gossip that wasn't intended to be taken literally.

What I think is most likely is that one poll or set of polls showed Biden losing certain states that correlated to Trump getting 400 Electoral Votes. Unless this is the only polling they did, its mere existence doesn't really say much about Biden's chances of winning. Hell, it doesn't even say much about Favreau's original argument. To the extent that such a poll probably exists, it's probably an outlier and was probably treated as such. It seems highly unlikely that internal polling was repeatedly showing a 400 EV Trump win. If that were the case, it would mean that either they or the publicly available polls were off by an order of magnitude heretofore unseen, or that the internal polls were flawed, and common sense would point to the latter. Paying to much attention to this would be like Trump changing his campaign strategy based on the Selzer poll.

The graveyards are filled with indispensable politicians, which is to say there are no indispensable politicians, merely politicians who don't want to let go.

There absolutely are political realities in which Biden didn't run again, starting from untimely death of old age and going to political competence. Biden's choice was a result of ambition, not urgency.

Pick your poison? Between letting supporters of the Democratic party pick a nomination for president and then dealing with the challenges that arise, or predicting the challenges you expect, doing a cost benefit analysis and then deciding to coronate a drunk because you literally have no choice after the cognitive decline of the guy you have been claiming is sharper than ever becomes so apparent that gaslighting no longer works, as a result forcing your supporters to spend the next hundred days claiming things like her inability to give candid interviews/string three unrehearsed sentences together isn't a deal breaker when you already know it is then using every event that occurs to justify your decision because you claim to be data driven as you poison the data with more lies, which means you have actually just been wish casting this entire time?

One of those isn't poison, it's medicine.

I really don't like how commentators act like this was a choice when there was no political reality where he could conceivably not run for reelection. The only way this could conceivably make sense is if there was some obvious candidate who wouldn't draw any opposition and who would be running as a continuation of the present administration. In other words, they would have had to name Kamala Harris as heir apparent and hope nobody credible wanted to challenge her. They weren't going to get that. The administration's shortcomings were manifest enough and Kamala's popularity weak enough that at least one squeaky wheel would emerge who would seriously threaten to derail the whole thing. At that point you're just guaranteeing a repeat of 2016 or any incumbent who faced a serious primary challenge.

Granting all this is true: it's still Biden's fault and he should have stepped down.

I'm sorry, I thought he was the adult in the room? Part of being an adult is being blamed for your decisions, not acting like they're sudden currents that swept you away for no reason.

He, the grownup, chose not only an unqualified but deeply unpopular and incompetent candidate. And he did so for explicitly racial reasons. Whose fault is it? The VP's only essential duties are to break ties in the Senate and to stand as a second for the President.

I also reject the self-serving notion that Bernie is what did in Hillary. She's always been unpopular and Bernie being relevant at all was the public desperately begging Democrats to take their money. Democrats didn't lose in 2008 because someone actually challenged at a primary instead of letting the party grandee be anointed. The party could also have leaned on Kamala to allow an open primary.

A Biden candidacy wasn't ideal, but he had already beaten Trump once and there weren't any candidates who could step in and make an obvious improvement. If Biden has a normal, boring performance at the first debate then he doesn't drop out and, who knows, maybe he wins.

So if Biden wasn't Biden it'd be okay?

Like, this is part of what drove me crazy about the media spin on this. They made it seem as if Biden's mental decline was nothing more than a campaigning issue . So I suppose, in that light, it can look as a bad roll of the dice, bad tactics, a very good but rare counter that knocked Biden out. Some sort of July Surprise? Shit happens, move on.

No, Biden was unfit, physically and mentally. The reason the debate settled the matter is that it was undeniable proof of what people were told wasn't happening (and they had to keep being told because they didn't believe it). Biden hid the extent of this for months upon months not only from the public but from some of his colleagues and the media. This likely affected not just the campaign but his administration (given all of the reporting of stage-managing) Biden then couldn't hold it together under the stress of a full campaigning season, like Democrats like Dean Phillips warned ahead of time. By the time it finally came out, it was too late.

That is still Joseph Biden's fault. Why are we talking about this stuff like it just happened to him? Even if he could have white-knuckled it, he shouldn't have. Because the office of the President is too important to be left to a convalescent. And Biden, as the adult, should know that.

All of this happened against a backdrop of voters making it absolutely clear his age was an issue. Biden pushed through, thinking some combination of his policies (both the ones he claimed and the ones he tried to row back from), Trump's legal cases and general unfavourability would all win him the day - essentially holding the voters hostage, as Silver puts it. He gambled, and lost.

It was not at all practically impossible for an old President to step down and let the party battle it out. I understand that it felt that way psychologically for Biden. But Biden's political judgment doesn't seem to be so self-evidently sound that we can take it as Gospel.

We're hearing now from Democratic insiders like PSA that his polling showed a 400 Electoral College loss and even then he had to be dragged out. What about this implies some sort of judicious weighing of the options? It's just ego. He's way more like Trump than the media hagiography has implied. Worse: Trump actually does seem to be irreplaceable to his base.

There is one main reason it's not especially Joe Biden's fault: he's not in his right mind. One of the things about senility is that it can remove your ability recognize that you are senile.

The blame should be spread far wider. This is the fault of everybody else around him, who absolutely did know the condition he was in, and lied about it anyway. Most centrally, Kamala herself had a responsibility to say something, but she covered it up on the calculation that it was better for her personally. But she's hardly alone. Obama must have known. Pelosi must have known. Surely every senior Democrats in DC who interacted with the president knew, along with staff.

They all covered it up. The only party leaders who can claim they were not involved are governors and minor House members.

No, Biden was unfit, physically and mentally. The reason the debate settled the matter is that it was undeniable proof of what people were told wasn't happening (and they had to keep being told because they didn't believe it). Biden hid the extent of this for months upon months not only from the public but from some of his colleagues and the media.

The question is how many months. Remember, we're not talking about whether or not Biden should have dropped out earlier, but whether he should have run in the first place. He announced he was seeking a second term on April 25, at which point there were only two groups of people arguing that any kind of age or cognitive issues should keep him from running. The first was Republicans, but they had been arguing that Biden had dementia since at least 2019 and thus had no credibility on the issue. The second was people like Dean Phillips and James Carville, along with a bunch of rank and file Democrats, but their arguments were just that he was too old generally and not that he was experiencing any kind of specific decline. If he had instead announced that he wasn't seeking a second term then he would have been a lame duck immediately and all the problems I mentioned above would have come into play. Hell, his cognitive decline wouldn't have even been noticed, for precisely the same reason that no one is looking over his appearances from the past four months to find signs of further decline.

And he did so for explicitly racial reasons.

I don't know what the big deal is about this. It's not exactly a secret that running mates are chosen more due to political considerations than anything else. Hell, Trump's choice of Mike Pence over the more well-known Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie was pretty much a naked ploy to shore up his unsteady support among the Christian Right, yet I never hear criticism that he was chosen for religious reasons. By your criteria, he's an even worse choice than Harris, as his chances of winning a national election as second in line are roughly on par with Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee. Harris, for her part, chose a white guy after only considering white guys and after pretty much every commentator said she should pick a white guy, yet I never heard any criticism of her for choosing Tim Walz for racial reasons.

I also reject the self-serving notion that Bernie is what did in Hillary. She's always been unpopular and Bernie being relevant at all was the public desperately begging Democrats to take their money. Democrats didn't lose in 2008 because someone actually challenged at a primary instead of letting the party grandee be anointed.

I agree with you there; Hillary was a bad candidate, and the Democrats should have seen that in 2008, but you go on to conclude

The party could also have leaned on Kamala to allow an open primary.

First, it wasn't Kamala's decision but that's not my main point. For all the talk I've heard about about having some kind of contested primary, I don't see any scenario in which it wouldn't have made the situation worse. Suppose Biden drops out immediately after that debate; what then? The convention is in less than two months and the election in just over four. The mechanics of scheduling new primaries in all 50 states less than a month after the last ones were completed is a tall order in and of itself, but even assuming the problem could be overcome it only distracts from the real issue. Who is going to jump of the couch to contend for a presidential nomination with that kind of lead time? Remember, nobody other than Biden has any fundraising apparatus or campaign staff at this point. You're asking candidates to start from scratch on short notice. And for the winner, what are the spoils, exactly? The opportunity to run an abbreviated campaign as part of a reclamation project.

Even if they were to dispense with actual elections and simply have a contested primary where candidates would lobby delegates, I doubt the party's best and brightest would be the ones signing up. Do you really think that an up and comer like Josh Sapiro or Gretchen Whitmer is going to waste political capital to take over the presidential bid of an unpopular incumbent? Why not wait a few more years to become more seasoned and make a normal bid where, if nominated, you have the time to run the campaign you want and you're going against a GOP running someone other than Trump for the first time in a dozen years? A contested primary or convention that only attracts b-listers and also-rans only makes the party look even more incompetent, in addition to exposing the internal divisions I spoke of above. Is Deval Patrick or Marianne Williamson a stronger general election candidate than Kamala Harris? Is Kamala a stronger candidate after beating one of those two? Easier to just endorse her and lobby for support rather than open up the clown car.

The question is how many months. Remember, we're not talking about whether or not Biden should have dropped out earlier, but whether he should have run in the first place. He announced he was seeking a second term on April 25, at which point there were only two groups of people arguing that any kind of age or cognitive issues should keep him from running. The first was Republicans, but they had been arguing that Biden had dementia since at least 2019 and thus had no credibility on the issue. The second was people like Dean Phillips and James Carville, along with a bunch of rank and file Democrats, but their arguments were just that he was too old generally and not that he was experiencing any kind of specific decline.

So the Republicans said he'd drop out (which was a "conspiracy theory") then he did but they just got lucky? Okay. Maybe. Maybe they simply have a clearer view into their opponents, unclouded by sympathy, but it's possible.

As for Philips and Carville...even if they said it that way, so what? Ezra Klein, in his little push for Biden to drop out, also said he thought Biden could do the job but couldn't campaign for the job/convince people. This seems like bullshit to me. Campaigning for a second term while juggling other balls has always been the job. People gave Obama a bit of a pass on the first debate due to the "rigors of the Presidency", but after he proved he could win on the next one.

Why frame it this way? Because, if Biden is incompetent-incompetent, the Democrats are guilty of malpractice beyond the electoral kind and that's a discussion no Democrat wants to have because it indicts some of their fellows, people they're on a first name basis with. Questions would need to be asked about how the administration runs. Better to - absurdly - pretend that Biden's condition is a merely electorally damaging one.

Long story short: I think it's absurd to believe that Dean Philips burned his rep taking the extraordinary step of primarying his President with just a generalized fear of age. It's that he's of a particular age and is showing decline enough that the voters are noticing.

I don't know what the big deal is about this.

Because it was a bad choice. Grownup, remember?

Biden trapped himself looking for a unicorn: a connected, nationally palatable black female because he kept stacking identity classes of who he would pander to. First it was a woman, then it was a black woman. He didn't need to lock in a woman, or then insist on a black woman afterwards.

You can pick a base-pleaser. The problem here is that it's a) unclear that Kamala was even a base pleaser. It may be what Jim Clyburn wanted but how much did it shape the general? And b) if you're old you should maybe factor in that this person may have to take your seat.

For all the talk I've heard about about having some kind of contested primary, I don't see any scenario in which it wouldn't have made the situation worse. Suppose Biden drops out immediately after that debate; what then? The convention is in less than two months and the election in just over four.

I don't think it should have come to that. He should have never run for a second term, and he should have announced that earlier. It should never have come to the debate.

Even dropping out on the day he announced (and he should have dropped out earlier) would have been better in terms of letting people dip their toe into a primary.

Remember: I think Biden was clearly declining before he admitted it/the debate utterly discredited any argument against it. He would have had good days and bad days. But he would have seen it creeping up on him. The principled thing to do would have been to drop out before.

Even if they were to dispense with actual elections and simply have a contested primary where candidates would lobby delegates, I doubt the party's best and brightest would be the ones signing up. Do you really think that an up and comer like Josh Sapiro or Gretchen Whitmer is going to waste political capital to take over the presidential bid of an unpopular incumbent?

The incumbency damage cannot be known given that they actually would be a fresh candidate, unlike Kamala. I'm inclined to think a lot more Democrats and Democrat-leaners give them some slack compared to Kamala.

They would also have an independent staff - which Kamala didn't seem to have - which would allow them more leeway in shaping their own image.

I'm picturing a longer time period than you since Biden, in my view, should have dropped out earlier. Even in the shorter view, there is an argument for putting candidates under pressure. Bernie Sanders wasn't seen as any sort of national politician before he resonated with voters. Kamala likely would have been filtered out.

Trump has high unfavorables. It's not outside of the realm of possibility that even on a narrow window ambitious Democrats get involved. It's much more likely if Biden drops out early: as much as he hates the guy, he could coordinate with party grandees like Obama to feel things out.

In many ways the last minute scramble to see someone willing to burn their turn is just another result of Biden's malpractice. Imagine if he came out early and stated he wasn't running. Imagine if he put out signals even before that. You think no one would bite? Everyone was run off because 2028 was there anyway and no one wanted the perception of having kneecapped a stubborn President. He pulls out early and it's a different ball game.

He should have never run for a second term, and he should have announced that earlier.

I thought he actually did at one point.

For having no credibility on the issue, the Republicans seemed to have gotten it right. Maybe you are wrong and they did have credibility but you didn’t listen.

It's a fascinating setup:

R: Biden is senile!

D: How dare you to say such things without any evidence!

R: Here's evidence Biden is senile

D: Bullshit, this is just stutter.

R: Here's more evidence that Biden is senile, also he never had any stutter before

D: Bullshit, he's perfect and anybody can make a mistake. Trump said "covfefe" once!

R: Here's more evidence that Biden is senile beyond anything that anybody who is not senile have experienced

D: Well, maybe he occasionally looks imperfect, but it's just shallow looks, on the substance he's great, the best president ever

R: His every public appearance is a disaster, he can not be effective President.

D: Sure he can, and he will be for the second term too, and anyone who says otherwise is a crazy Qanon!

R: Here's more disasters from Biden

DNC+Obama: Biden, GTFO

Biden: OK, I decided to GTFO

R: Told ya so.

D: You had no credibility on the issue since when you first told us so, we did not agree with you.

Being eventually right isn't the same as being right. My grandmother had dementia in 2014. If I had continually said she had it beginning in 1995, I would've eventually been right, but only after nearly 20 years of being wrong. Additionally, the claims were always beyond anything that's been demonstrated thus far. While he clearly isn't as sharp as he used to be, nothing he's done publicly has shown any indication he has dementia. His debate performance was bad, but the actual answers he gave weren't anything one wouldn't expect from a garden-variety bad debate performance. The criticism was more on his energy and demeanor than anything substantive. From my experience with the disease, this is not what one would expect from someone with that kind of cognitive decline.

While he clearly isn't as sharp as he used to be, nothing he's done publicly has shown any indication he has dementia.

Or, alternatively, Democrats lived in denial for years and dismissed every evidence, until the mountain of evidence got so large it was impossible to ignore anymore, and then they decided this is the moment from which credibility is counted. Very convenient for them, except some people still have memory and can notice that there was plenty of indications and plenty of evidence.

Bigger point is it doesn't matter at which point the medical diagnosis of "dementia" is supported. Maybe he will never be medically diagnosed with it. The point is he was mentally unfit for the rigors of President's job when he was elected, and he only got worse since. And that's exactly what Republicans were saying and Democrats were denying. Pretending like Republicans just got a bit of blind luck because perfectly fit Biden suddenly became unfit in some random freak accident is just bizarre cope by this point. It is absolutely clear Republicans were right from the start and Democrats were lying from the start (those - and there were many - who knew) or were deceived by the former category and willingly accepted the deception despite the evidence in front of their own eyes.

Yes — in your hypo sure. But if you started mentioning grandma is slipping in 2010 you would’ve been correct. That hypo is closer to reality.

The republicans did talk about lack of energy (he did run a basement campaign after all) but pointed out he kept on making weird gaffes (eg confusing his wife with his sister, losing his train of thought). It got worse over his presidency but there was a pretty clear line.

Being willing to take a short-term hit to discourage coercion or punish broken promises is probably a pretty good default, an attitude that’s close enough to rational more often than not.

Ahem.

Yes.

Although the goal should be to restore symmetry, not create a different class of elites who are beyond reproach and punishment.

the goal should be to restore symmetry, not create a different class of elites who are beyond reproach and punishment

Is such a thing even possible?

YES, just put me in charge of everything! /s

I think history has shown long term symmetry is all but impossible, but it sure seems like you can achieve it for short periods of time and a lot can get done during that period.

I think the current challenge is that this used to be the purview of religion. Elites had to behave well insofar as they believed that a higher power could punish them.

We're in an era where not only is belief in a higher power waning, technological wonders are making it seem like you can 'become' a higher power. I don't know how to maintain symmetry between someone with access to a networked drone swarm and someone who can barely use the internet, honestly.