Lmao, straight up he’s got no fucking attention span or patience. He’s just going in circles pushing on issues, trying to find one that will budge with just mean words rather than having to spend money or do anything material.

He wants some sort of “win” something concrete he can point to and say “look how much we’re winning” because his poll numbers are in the toilet. He’s surrounded him self with incompetent yes men who keep failing to give him meaningful results, and he’s terrified of losing the house and senate in 11 months.

The voting public didn’t care about her, but she had good connections with relevant instructional actors. That’s why she was relevant. People like trump will keep winning until the Democratic Party, as a political institution, cuts those neoliberal actors out of the coalition. If the party doesn’t, democracy will fail in America, or they will be replaced by some new party, or both.

People complaining about voters not choosing her over trump, or people not being motivated by voting for her, are just feeding in to that dark future. The only way out is standing up and demanding better candidates, refusing to accept the lesser of two evils.

It is true that she didn’t have enough time to put together a viable platform, but if Biden had dropped out early enough for her to develop a viable campaign and platform, that would have meant a primary, and it’s doubtful she would have won that primary.

Even if she had won that primary, it’s still doubtful that she would have assembled a viable platform and campaign. The political cliques she was aligned with were diametrically opposed to the kind of policies that would have made a viable platform.

A break from neoliberal politics was necessary. But basically all of the institutional pressure for Biden to drop out came from neoliberal diehards who were pissed at him for deviating from that line slightly, the age thing was mainly just an acceptable cover story for the insiders. Haris got her chance by appealing to those groups and thus she was never going to challenge those interests.

I mean, I was already basically boycotting them. They ain’t got nothin I really want to watch, nor do I much care for theme parks or cruise lines.

Cuo-mope-ium

Cuomo is basically saying that the republicans will use mamdani as a scare tactic in other elections, like they’ll try and associate any Democratic candidate with him.

Which, he’s not wrong, they will bring him up constantly as a fear monger tactic, but, like, anyone who that works on was already going to vote republican? And the republicans have already been fear mongering about democrats being socialists and muslims regardless? Like, they did that to fucking Obama despite both accusations being categorically and obviously wrong? So like, it doesn’t really change anything.

It’s just copium from Cuomo.

Like, there regularly are people hanging out there, but they never bother anyone, they’re mostly just taking a break from the weather or using the bathroom.

It’s so surreal to see them talking as if they’re doing me some favor. Like fuck off, it wasn’t a problem, and I didn’t need them inflicting cruelty over it .

I think that in a lot of ways, it’s less about the Epstein files, and more about how deeply complicit in the elite culture that he claimed to be in opposition against.

Epstein is just an acceptable outlet among his base to air their uncertainty and unease they’re feeling. Because his ties with Epstein have been well publicized and well known about for a while, but from a right wing populist perspective, that was kind of written off and discredited because it didn’t fit the feeling, the “vibe”, that he was upsetting and visibly angering elites and thus he must be acting against their interests in some meaningful way, now though, it’s very clear he’s cosying up to the tech elite and taking huge obvious bribes from other elite groups and actually gutting social programs they use everyday, rather than that just being a threat made by the “woke” media they don’t trust.

So suddenly the Epstein being associated with him is believable to right wing populists because of how visibly elite aligned he’s being from their perspective.

I think she has a couple of core convictions, and that’s she’s willing to do anything to gain power to enforce them.

Like I don’t say that admiringly. I think she’s a zealot that’s just riding what ever wave it takes.

Generally yes, For me it depends on how significant the discomfort is and how broadly it impacts people, but also, how much doing the thing really matters a lot to someone.

Like, there’s a point at which “ok someone else’s discomfort about this thing is marginal compared to how much it matters to a large number of people” at which point I get annoyed at someone trying to force other people to stop doing something that matters to them, even if I’m not doing the thing.

Lmao, damn, trump seems really scared of this guy.

All the conservatives seem really scared of this guy.

Wonder why republicans might be scared of Democratic candidates left of dead center. Almost like a real alternative not slobbering out neoliberal, Chicago school of economics, nonsense could sweep them in a lot of traditional safe seats.

Or at least be really hard to rally their base against if their base actually hears what the policies are.

It’s so funny to see people who have never lived in a place, and openly do not like visiting a place, bemoaning the choice leadership of the people who actually live in a place, insisting that they should not be able to make that choice. That somehow, someone totally alienated from that community knows better who should run it.

So like, I think it’s less to do with spiciness, and more to do with certain ingredients that people’s bodies aren’t used to, or even might have a negative reaction to.

Might also be that spicyness essentially is lowering the threshold that heat sensing nerves fire at till it’s below ambient body temperature, maybe, if someone not used to hot food it tricks the intestines in to thinking they’ve been burnt and releasing water as a sort of wound response? Maybe? IDK.

Lmao, two idiots fighting. This seemed kind of inevitable, they’re not compatible personality types to work with each other.

Elon definitely thinks he has more influence with trump’s crowd than he actually has, but I also think his position at twitter makes him dangerous to trump by undermining his ability to reach a lot of people who haven’t fully crawled down the maga conspiracy pipeline.

I don’t think he’s going to be able to shift much support to Vance ether. Vance and his ilk are just to weird for most trump supporters.

Would be nice

Money for campaigns is important, but it’s a force multiplier. If there is no force of voters to multiply, it is worthless.

Also those people in the back rooms are going to have a lot less money to throw around now, big donors don’t want to give their money to campaigns that have no chance of winning, what good good is buying influence with a politician if that politician has no influence to sell? I don’t think all that money will flow over to progressives suddenly, but the gap in budget is going to be much smaller now.

Exactly, it’s not the job of the voters to convince a party their interests are worth pursing, it is the job of the party to convince voters that they will pursue their interests.

Donor money alone can not win an election and a failure to engage with voters will sure as hell lose it.

“Of course the Americans introduced the Colorado potato beetle! After all, where is Colorado? America! Check mate liberal”

For real though I hate those little fuckers. Every time I try and grow potatoes in a garden I get an infestation and it’s a pain to deal with in a small plot, can’t imagine how much of a nightmare they are on a proper field.

Propaganda, is a craft, it’s a whole world of tricks and manipulations. Not just censorship and positive stories about the leaders. It can get shockingly sophisticated. We usually only take note of the obvious and obtuse propaganda.

People aren’t dumb for believing it, it’s a whole field of figuring out how to convince people about things. Often if the propaganda doesn’t work on you, that’s because it’s not designed for you, or it has worked but the goal of it wasn’t what you thought it was.

One of the rhetorically effective things about his campaign messaging was how broad and vague it was. Pundits, podcasters, influencers, and those manipulating the algorithms of social media, took that messaging, isolated parts of it and recontextualized those parts for specific audiences.

So while he may have assumed he was being very clear about what he was going to do, the messaging many of his voters got was totally detached from his intentions.

A good example of this is people who thought that the tariffs would somehow be a tax levied on foreign countries, not a sales tax on imported goods. Or those who thought the tariffs would be targeted at specific goods categories to benefit their particular industry, not a blanket tariff that impacts their upstream supply chain.

He told his subordinate on the campaign to get voters to vote for him, he assumed that meant convince them he was right, but that was impossible, the only ones that could get him the numbers he liked were the ones who just twisted what he said till people agreed with it.