2020 US Election (Part Two)

[EgonSpengler]

Anybody going to watch the 'town halls' tonight? Personally, I think I'd rather hit myself with a hammer.

 

[Ajidica]

There has been a bit of a blow up with the New York Post expose'.
https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/emails-reveal-how-hunter-biden-tried-to-cash-in-big-with-chinese-firm/

October Surprise™ timing written all over it.

If the abandoned laptop story is true , there is a crack cocaine sex tape + Hunter got paid huge $$$ for introductions to his father + the Biden family members had to kick back 50% of what they "earned" to daddy Joe Biden.

Pffft, no way is this a story.
They'd have to arrest 50% of Washington DC if they went after the Bidens for this activity.


Twitter went crazy banning the story!
https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...iden-story-conservative-bias-paranoia/616726/

Lots of people who shared it also had their account locked like the White House Press Secretary and the Trump Campaign I think.

Does anybody actually care about this story? It is a clear smear job that the NY Post was immediately criticized for due to its appallingly shoddy verification and sources.
As far as why there was that weird Twitter ban, I genuinely have no idea but if the Biden campaign had secret pull with Twitter to get them to ban articles, I doubt they would waste it on this POS.

 

[Lexicus]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-biden-airplane-worker-positive-covid-19-coronavirus-test/

greatttttttttttt

 

[amadeus]

Does anybody actually care about this story?

Me, but I don’t think it is Joe Biden’s fault. Hunter Biden is Billy Carter under a veneer of Michael Douglas’ character in Wall Street.

 

[Ajidica]

Me, but I don’t think it is Joe Biden’s fault. Hunter Biden is Billy Carter under a veneer of Michael Douglas’ character in Wall Street.

Let's not forget Bush's cousin (or was it brother?) who got caught up in a Chinese money laundering ring.
Though nothing will ever beat Billy Beer.

 

[Berzerker]

Me, but I don’t think it is Joe Biden’s fault. Hunter Biden is Billy Carter under a veneer of Michael Douglas’ character in Wall Street.

He took him to China to receive a bribe or payment on behalf of the Biden family

 

[Arwon]

Hey I forget where the thread was and who was defending this as "oh he must have resisted" or "he must have shot first", but anyway, Trump bragging again about ordering an extrajudicial hit on that left wing Portland shooter. It's always fun when you try and defend your man from an allegation and he just blurts it out that it happened.

“We sent in the U.S. Marshals. It took 15 minutes it was over. Fifteen minutes, it was over. We got him," Trump said to applause in Greenville, North Carolina. "They knew who he was. They didn’t want to arrest him. Fifteen minutes, that ended.”

(after earlier describing it as appropriate and necessary retribution a month ago)

 

[Takhisis]

Anybody going to watch the 'town halls' tonight? Personally, I think I'd rather hit myself with a hammer.

The Rookie is on.

 

[RobAnybody]

Does anybody actually care about this story?

No. From what I'm seeing online (anecdotal, I know) it's only even being discussed in forums like this, & specifically threads like this, which are dedicated to political news stories of the day. No one "in the real world" is even aware of it, much less has an opinion on it.

 

[Ajidica]

Well, this is interesting:

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, castigated President Trump in a telephone town hall with constituents on Wednesday, accusing the president of bungling the response to the coronavirus pandemic, cozying up to dictators and white supremacists, and offending voters so broadly that he might cause a “Republican blood bath” in the Senate.

In a dire, nine-minute indictment of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy and what Mr. Sasse called his “deficient” values, the senator said the president had mistreated women and alienated important allies around the globe, been a profligate spender, ignored human rights and treated the pandemic like a “P.R. crisis.” He predicted that a loss by Mr. Trump on Election Day, less than three weeks away, “looks likely,” and said that Republicans would face steep repercussions for having backed him so staunchly over four tumultuous years.

“The debate is not going to be, ‘Ben Sasse, why were you so mean to Donald Trump?’” Mr. Sasse said, according to audio obtained by The Washington Examiner and authenticated by The New York Times. “It’s going to be, ‘What the heck were any of us thinking, that selling a TV-obsessed, narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea?’”
...
He added that he did not think Mr. Trump’s leadership through the crisis had been “reasonable or responsible, or right.”

The “deficiencies” added up from there.

“The way he kisses dictators’ butts,” Mr. Sasse said, listing his reservations about Mr. Trump. “I mean, the way he ignores that the Uighurs are in literal concentration camps in Xinjiang right now. He hasn’t lifted a finger on behalf of the Hong Kongers.”

He continued: “The United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership, the way he treats women, spends like a drunken sailor.”

Mr. Trump “mocks evangelicals behind closed doors,” he added. “His family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity. He’s flirted with white supremacists.”

Though before anyone thinks Sasse had a flash of conciousness:

Mr. Sasse also hinted at more drastic consequences: a “Venezuela style” Supreme Court with dozens of justices installed by ascendant Democrats; an empowered China ruling the Pacific because of Mr. Trump’s “weak” policies; and American allies doubting whether they can “trust in U.S. strength and U.S. will.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/...=footer&req_id=875847971&surface=most-popular

 

[KaibaCorp]

A lifetime career politician who has barely ever held a real job is making tons of money through nefarious means? Surprise surprise, what a crook.

 

[amadeus]

A lifetime career politician who has barely ever held a real job is making tons of money through nefarious means? Surprise surprise, what a crook.

You’re going to have to be more specific than that.

 

[Ajidica]

You’re going to have to be more specific than that.

 

[KaibaCorp]

No. From what I'm seeing online (anecdotal, I know) it's only even being discussed in forums like this, & specifically threads like this, which are dedicated to political news stories of the day. No one "in the real world" is even aware of it, much less has an opinion on it.

You’d think the sensationalist 24 hour news cycle would be all over it, but they’re not. News is partisan, water is wet.

 

[Phrossack]

Eh idk, I think how we define leftism probably renders it incapable of being considered as winning anything. But in Europe, DemSoc policy has been relatively standard orthodoxy in various regards for decades now. It's easy to forget there used to be a time when tons of children would just spend their lives working all day long in a factory hoping that a fire didn't kill them, while their grandparents basically just became poor and died like all old people. And also one of their grandparents couldn't vote.

Now, has the left failed to make much of a dent against capitalism? Yeah sure. But it's also the global orthodoxy in terms of economic policy. It ain't gonna change over night.

You must have slept through the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Equal Rights Act, the women's movement, the Vietnam War protests, Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting, the New Deal, school desegregation, Obamacare, Title IX, Medicare, etc.

I see what you're getting at, but poverty-stricken towns in Appalachia with more drugs than jobs and farmers who have to cull livestock because they can't afford to feed them aren't the powerful, unless you broaden the definition of powerful to include "those who used to be doing okay, but aren't anymore." The right-wing message appeals to people who look around and say, "Gee, our lives used to be pretty good and now everything sucks. wtf happened?" I think it was similar in 1920s Germany. The National Socialists started out as the German Workers Party (or something like that, I forget the exact name) and part of Hitler's early pitch was that the German working class had been screwed by the ruling class. How do you say "Drain the Swamp" in German? It's then that they bring out the scape-goating and the bending of the truth.

To make that even worse
Left is also seen as the party for losers. This social Darwinism view is eroding the traditional more social cohesive conviction that the strong shoulders should care for the weak.
And many people who struggled upward in socio-economic terms during their life want to give expression to their feeling that they are a winner by not voting on a losers party.
And many people still and likely forever in a weak position cherish the feeling to belong to the winners by voting on them and talking like one of them.

The Left also seldom inspires ordinary people to gain succes in their personal life. The Left is mainly occupied with non-personal systemic and theorethical discussions ordinary people have no time for to follow or understand.
And the language used by The Left is not really the common language of Joe Average, it's too academic and has too many difficult words with many syllables in long sentences.
Language and Culture are very strong connected.
The language of The Left is an almost immediate disconnect with Joe Average.

The Left is fundamentally in limbo because they are supported by the more social well educated and want to care for the traditional weak who are not well educated.

I disagree with this premise completely. The left has won almost every struggle it's ever been in for the last hundred fifty years. That is why the conservatives needed to engineer a counterrevolution.

Unfortunately, the struggle doesn't end once any of those milestones were reached. Today we're seeing erosions to the gains made during those moments in history.

Right-wing ideology appeals to those you're describing but ultimately serves the powerful. That's the idea.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx was already writing. A century ago, Eugene V. Debs was campaigning. Socialists have been fighting for workers' rights for generations now. People in the US have been fighting for the rights of those who aren't white for ages. And what does the left have to show for it?

Spoiler :

The left has fought and fought and fought for over a century to achieve a world in which people can support themselves and their families through safe, honest, reasonable work and not be held hostage by threats of homelessness and hunger, or be denied rights based on race, or be serfs to an invincible caste of hyper-rich capitalists, or struggle to survive a lifeless, apocalyptic hellscape, and look where we are now. Income inequality through the roof. People being declared "essential workers" too important to be allowed to be safe, but not important enough to pay fairly. Wage-slaves toil at the invincible, all-powerful empire of Amazon. Prices have gone up but wages have stagnated. America is constantly getting poorer and poorer while the ruling class gets richer and richer. In terms of race, Black Americans were promptly re-enslaved under sharecropping and chain gangs after "emancipation," and lost their voting rights to a successful terrorist campaign. Segregation ended - officially - but unofficially, cities remain largely segregated, and most people who aren't white remain disproportionately worse off, and are routinely executed by the tax-funded gangs and lynch squads we call police. In terms of equality, we've made huge strides backwards, with the unions destroyed, taxes on the elite lowered to literally nothing in many cases, more handouts for the rich, and more corporate power in general. Ecologically, none of the warnings of the past four decades have been heeded. Mass extinction is actually accelerating. The goal of keeping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius below previous levels, while still devastating, has proven hopelessly optimistic and is now impossible. The world's capitalists and right-wing nihilists are fighting an overwhelmingly successful delaying action aimed at trapping us in the sinking ship's lower holds while they seize the lifeboats, and nothing meaningful is improving. We're going to have ten billion people all demanding to live like the upper-middle class of a dangerously consumerist society on a world that cannot pay that bill.

The left wanted peace, and it got the world wars, Vietnam, Iraq, and more. The left wanted workers' rights and now we have corporations so huge and powerful that they can stop any threat to their wealth and power, and it won't even matter before long because automation will lead to colossal unemployment. The left wanted racial equality and got shameless, defiant neo-Confederate white supremacy and unyielding racial inequality. The left wanted a healthy, beautiful world and has now been guaranteed a hellish wasteland unsuitable for human habitation within a few decades, if not sooner. The left wanted real change, and is now faced with a centrist versus an actual fascist. All over the world, countries have fallen to right-wing extremism - Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, India, Brazil, Israel, and more. Germany is fighting a losing battle against the same cultists and fascists who have consumed America. Britain has gone haywire. There is virtually no country where the left can be even close to satisfied with the government, and this is worsening by the year. Far-right Internet conspiracy cultism has proven to be an incurable infection that can infect the entire world.

Nothing has worked. Any battles the left "wins" are soon reversed by a ferocious regressive, capitalist backlash. We ran out of time to save ourselves from the threats of climate doom, automation-induced unemployment, and more, and are now bleeding out from fatal wounds.

And frankly I don't think any other result was ever possible.

If you ally with the weak and fight the strong, you'll pretty much always lose if you yourself are also weak. The billionaires can and do easily network and coordinate with each other; they're a small club with strongly shared interests, meet and talk often, and can always hire agents to assist them. The masses of the world are divided by race, religion, and political beliefs, are overwhelmed with work and family and all manner of other demands, and anyway it was never going to be possible to effectively coordinate that many people. The billionaires are thus in the position of a heavy person sitting on the scrawny lower classes, who can never get off the ground unless the billionaires let them. And a huge number of the middle and lower classes actually like being dominated, so long as the natural hierarchy is preserved an the people they hate are kept down.

As far as I'm concerned, all we can do is go down resisting as best we can. That's why I vote, even though it doesn't count in my state or arguably my country. But don't labor under any misapprehensions that the left will ever overcome this rigged game.

 

[Lexicus]

I can't stop you from dooming if that's what you want to do - it's a free country - but it simply isn't true that things now are as bad as they were in 1850 or 1900 or 1950. Take it from me, I'm TAing a labor history class this semester that runs from 1865 to roughly 1950.

 

[Drakle]

Right, capitalism has worked so well! The only problems it's brought us are...let me just see...multiple genocides, colonialism and imperialism, a dozen or so depressions, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, two world wars, fascism, Nazism, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, an ecological crisis that threatens to collapse human civilization...I could go on...

Yes, Capitalism has led to some very bad outcomes. But you haven't given a single positive example of a socialist/communist economy that works. It is like saying democracy is bad, and listing the same stuff. Well, what is the alternative? Autocracy of some stripe? Which is even worse, and fails to deliver any of the positive attributes.

Even if socialism was a viable alternative, the system forces are too strong to allow it to take hold. Look how much had to be dumped on Russia for their revolution to take hold, and other nations in Europe which were similarily stretched to the breaking point, managed to contain the revolutions. And that was in the day of rifles, not drones.

But the system forces are not a monolith and many actors with power, do want to see a more equitable society and one that does tackle real problems. Many billionaires and multi-millionaires spend big on progressive causes. The choice is backing socialism (which hasn't proved itself a viable alternative) and being a permanent minority. Or backing a Progressive Capitalism, which has a track record of working and has a real shot at a real electoral majority. The choice seems very clear to me.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Anybody going to watch the 'town halls' tonight? Personally, I think I'd rather hit myself with a hammer.

I watched the season finale of Utopia... if I'm gonna watch conspiracy theories I want it to at least be entertaining.

 

[Sommerswerd]

I'm glad you mention fracking, because it gives me a springboard to make the following point that you and Gori seem to have forgotten: however unyielding you think Manchin is, I can assure you that THERMODYNAMICS is even less willing to compromise.

If the herd can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo, but lava is chasing the herd and moving faster than the slowest buffalo, then the whole herd is gonna get incinerated if it's unwilling to leave the slower buffalo behind. That's physics. Inevitable as the sunrise.

I'll do you one better. Eventually, humanity is going to have to get off this planet and become a spacefaring civilization, along with as many forms of life as we can bring with us, because even if we can manage to reverse the environmental damage (we can't... without... well... maybe dying en masse) and avoid a nuclear holocaust (eh... maybe?) and avoid an external extinction level event (we can't... Armageddon and Deep Impact notwithstanding)... eventually the star will explode, implode, or otherwise die, taking the whole solar system with it.

So yes in the "short" cosmically speaking, term... we do need to get off fossil fuels for the love of god and everything that is sacred... in the long term, we also need to be establishing a long term, global initiative to start colonizing/terraforming other planets in this solar system with an ultimate goal of launching multi-generational expeditions to reach other solar systems.

But... to bring this tirade back down to Earth... both figuratively and literally... we need to get a majority of our government, particularly, the leadership, in a consistent position that fossil fuel use is bad for the planet and needs to be reduced. We aren't there yet... but maybe(?) we are close.

As an aside... I've tried the "Impossible Whopper" at Burger King. I think "impossible" is apropos, because as I understand it... the sodium content basically neutralizes any potential health benefits of it being vegan. But I think that the fact that "impossible meat" even exists is a non-negligible sign that we are making progress, are capable of progress... and that 10,000 years from now, our descendants may yet be arriving at distant stars, learning about the primitive days when humans were so stupid that they elected leaders because they were TV show personalities.

I hope...

 

[Drakle]

Fracking is a chaotic industry that is being rocked by constant bankruptcies. Costing yourself votes by going after it publically is silly. It is already killing itself, you really don't need to waste effort on it rhetorically when there are so many other issues. Once in government Biden and Harris should do something about it, to an extent. But not an outright ban.

But also while fracking is bad for the environment, it is still better than coal. The reason the coal industry has fallen so hard isn't a war on coal, but the availability of cheaper natural gas, from fracking. This has actually driven a decrease in emissions. You have to consider alternatives. Like how in Germany, there getting rid of nuclear, prolonged their coal plants.

The way to kill fracking is to invest heavily in renewables and nuclear. Not ban it, without a plan.