Election 2024 Part III: Out with the old!

[Lexicus]

One part of how we know this is true is that there is a photo that has been circulating of a black man carrying two dead geese, supposedly one of these geese-eating Haitians. It's not from Springfield. It's actually someone cleaning up road kill. And the guy is not a Haitian.

Also, even if this had been true as presented, we all know white people in Ohio never engage in illegal hunting! That is something that has never happened in all the history of Ohio!


Once again,

Ohio Haitian immigrants say they are afraid to leave home after recent backlash

Living in constant fear, Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, tell ABC News they’re afraid to leave their homes.

abcnews.go.com

 

[Sommerswerd]

Perhaps in a metaphysical sense this is true, however the Haitian thing is absolutely racist, so obviously that I have to agree with the idea I saw on twitter that they are basically just using "Haitian" to mean the n word at this point.

But more broadly, anti-immigrant politics in America in 2024 are definitely all motivated by racism, increasingly openly so. Failure to recognize this is....sus

Another perspective to add to this... the Springfield, Ohio Haitian immigrants are not "illegal"/undocumented. They have Temporary Protected Status (TPS), because of the natural disasters and other human rights crisis in Haiti, so they are legal, documented immigrants, with every legal right to be here under US immigration laws. So there's no argument against them based on "respect for our laws" and/or being "fine with legal immigration, just not illegal immigration", which are two of the most common anti-immigrant arguments we hear.

So when the "illegal" argument is inapplicable, the next anti-immigration argument used is the "don't share our culture/values" argument, but people are starting to realize that just comes of as blatantly racist/bigoted. So then the next go-to is going to be based on "drain on/lack of resources". So the general line is "we would be fine with these immigrants coming in, but we don't have the resources". But thinking about it... the question becomes... So what? Isn't that what taxes and state/federal aid and municipal budgets are for? These immigrants have every right to be here... why do folks feel like they can complain about them using resources? Everyone in a community uses the resources.

Talking about perspectives... thought exercise... If the issue is just too many new people expending resources... how would folks respond to a public service announcement campaign encouraging people to delay having children, including abortion and contraceptive measures... to reduce expenditure of resources?

 

[JollyRoger]

If immigrants are so bad, why do Trump and Vance keep marrying them?

 

[Gori the Grey]

So the general line is "we would be fine with these immigrants coming in, but we don't have the resources".

One of the early responses to the flap was from an employer in Springfield who wished he could add 30 more Haitians to his workforce, such good workers he finds them

"I wish I had 30 more [he currently employs 30 Haitian workers," CEO Jamie McGregor of Springfield-based McGregor Metal, explained it this way during his PBS News Hour interview. "Our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don't have a drug problem. They'll stay at their machine; they'll achieve their numbers. They're here to work. And so, in general, that's a stark difference from what we're used to in our community."

They're not using up resources; they're creating them!

Every aspect of the Trump-led response is wrong, and its wrongness again and again proves that it is nothing but racism.

Why did we ever let flourish the idea the human beings are a net drag? Human beings are our greatest resource!

 

[sophie]

The closest the Democrats have come to defending immigrants is to say "well without them who would we exploit for cheap labor?"

I kind of hate it here

One of the early responses to the flap was from an employer in Springfield who wished he could add 30 more Haitians to his workforce, such good workers he finds them


They're not using up resources; they're creating them!

Every aspect of the Trump-led response is wrong, and its wrongness again and again proves that it is nothing but racism.

Why did we ever let flourish the idea the human beings are a net drag? Human beings are our greatest resource!

lmao. it’s honestly such a nauseating sentiment

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Reading comprehension is a lost art

 

[EvaDK]

According to our news tonight, Harris has narrowed the gap to Trump in red states Florida and Iowa to 2-4 points since the debate, making them potential battleground/swing states. Especially Iowa has experienced a surge of women registering to vote, compared to the 2020 election.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I'm giving Iowa to Harris-Walz, whenever it comes time for us to make our predictions, in large part because of Walz.

 

[Voidwalkin]

The nuance is that the Harris campaign is guessing/believing/hoping that the voters they are currently targeting... the self-described moderates, independents, etc.,... the people you know and encounter everyday that describe themselves as "in the middle", and "I watch all the networks" and BSAB'ing their way through this election... are not racist... at least enough so, that if the campaign doesn't accuse them of being racist, that they won't be triggered into voting for Trump out of spite for being offended.

I sometimes wonder if the term racism fails to capture or describe degree, and that this failing of the English language doesn't create a sensitivity to the term itself.

If someone roots for someone of their skin color to win Olympic gold, it can be pretty easily argued that that is preference for one race over another and therefore racism. If that person is called a racist, though, they are immediately grouped in with hardcore hateful people, and they may not(probably aren't) actually hardcore hateful people themselves. That social peril is instinctively understood, and so the emotions ratchet sky-high in many instances. A better language would have different words for different degrees by consensus. Those words in English appear to be fascist or Nazi, terms which once described specific ideologies but now seem to be used to not only describe subscribers to those ideologies but also hardcore racists generally; dual meanings with wishy washy contemporary consensuses behind them are unideal too.

Hopefully that'll eventually get sorted.

The Harris campaign is dealing with that sensitivity, and even though Trump's fabrication is pretty obviously pandering to the hardcore hateful, it might be politically optimal to allow an organic consensus to form against the fabrication from the ground up(and I think this actually began happening almost immediately). I agree with your description of each campaigns wagers; Harris made the better one imo.

 

[Samson]

Depends who you ask, I guess. If someone believes all anti-immigration positions are motivated by racism, sure, you could call it that. I don't think all anti-immigration positions are motivated by racism, though.

All anti-immigration positions require discrimination based on some othering. It may be race, it may be religion, it may be culture, but the similarities are greater than the differences between those stances.

It's hard for me to see it that way. My lived experience is different.

General aversion to anything new is probably more motivating than actual racism. The oldsters who hate self-checkout I suspect don't like immigration for the same reason. It's new.

Migration is not new, migration is one of the big things that has made us human. The new thing is criminalisation of migration.

I may be an oldsters who hates self-checkout, but that is because the ones I have used are really bad tools for the job

I sometimes wonder if the term racism fails to capture or describe degree, and that this failing of the English language doesn't create a sensitivity to the term itself.

If someone roots for someone of their skin color to win Olympic gold, it can be pretty easily argued that that is preference for one race over another and therefore racism. If that person is called a racist, though, they are immediately grouped in with hardcore hateful people, and they may not(probably aren't) actually hardcore hateful people themselves. That social peril is instinctively understood, and so the emotions ratchet sky-high in many instances. A better language would have different words for different degrees by consensus. Those words in English appear to be fascist or Nazi, terms which once described specific ideologies but now seem to be used to not only describe subscribers to those ideologies but also hardcore racists generally; dual meanings with wishy washy contemporary consensuses behind them are unideal too.

Hopefully that'll eventually get sorted.

I agree that the term racism can apply to a wide range of things, from the KKK to innate ingroup bias and Palestinian activism. That is the way English works, and I think a response is to use a more specific word if you want a most specific meaning.

More relevant to the actual thread:

Putin really wants Trump back in the White House

Russia really wants Donald Trump to be the next US President, judging by reports from American government agencies and now Microsoft's threat intelligence team.

Based on Redmond's latest research on foreign trolls' election interference efforts, the Kremlin has shifted its focus to fake news aimed at discrediting Vice President Kamala Harris and her run for the presidency now that incumbent Joe Biden has bowed out of the race.

In late August and September, two Moscow-aligned groups began pumping out phony video content "designed to discredit Harris and stoke controversy around her campaign," according to Microsoft's September 17 report [PDF].

Storm-1516, a Putin-backed online troll farm known for its "outlandish fake videos and scandalous claims," produced said video content, with two pieces reaching a vast audience.

One purports to show alleged Harris supporters attacking a Trump rally attendee. "Storm-1516 intended this video, which received millions of views, to inflame political divides by stirring racial and political tensions," the threat intel unit reported.

The second video uses an actor to amplify false claims that Harris paralyzed a girl in a hit-and-run accident. This one was distributed through a fake website purporting to be a legit local San Francisco news outlet.

Spoiler Whole article :

Meanwhile, Storm-1679, another Kremlin-linked crew, after focusing on the Paris Olympics for months, changed course to spread disinformation about Harris. Two of its videos spread conspiracy theories and false claims about her policies.
One of these that received more than 100,000 views on X just four hours after being posted on Telegram showed a phony New York City billboard promoting made-up policies.
"MTAC has observed, in three consecutive US presidential elections, synchronized shifts by all Russian influence actors to focus on denigrating the Democratic candidate in the final 90 days before election day," Redmond asserts. "MTAC assesses this synchronization on themes and messages results from top-down direction from the top of the Kremlin."
Additionally, a Russian group led by a Federal Security Service (FSB) officer that Microsoft tracks as Ruza Flood — the US government calls this disinformation effort Doppelgänger, and earlier this month seized 32 internet domains owned by this crew — doesn't show any signs of slowing down its cyber-influence operations.
"In the days following the US government's seizures of Ruza Flood's web domains, we observed this actor moving media outlets from seized domains to new ones, where content can again be readily accessed," Microsoft wrote.
This gang uses typosquatted domains – sites with names that are close to legitimate ones — such as washingtonpost.pm rather than the real washingtonpost.com – to trick viewers into believing they are reading and watching content produced by reputable journos.
One of Doppelgänger's schemes to get Trump back in the White House, as detailed in a 277-page affidavit [PDF] used to obtain a warrant to seize the 32 websites, is called the Good Old USA Project [PDF].
"It makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort to ensure that the US Political Party A point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of Candidate A supporters) wins over the US public opinion," according to this project.
While the candidates' names and political parties have been redacted, the rest of the document makes it clear that Party A is the Republican Party and Candidate A is Trump.
The American tycoon's support for autocratic Russian leader Vladimir Putin – going so far as to describe the invasion of Ukraine as "genius" and "pretty savvy" – is well known.
No wonder the Kremlin's goal, as outlined in the court doc, is "to secure victory of a US Political Party A candidate (Candidate A or one of his current internal party opponents) at the US Presidential elections to be held in November of 2024."

 

[EvaDK]

Average polling puts Harris ahead Trump by around 1,8% in Pennsylvania.

https://www.270towin.com/2024-presidential-election-polls/pennsylvania

The analysts seem to agree that if Trump doesn't win Pennsylvania (19 votes), his chances of finding a path that gets him to 270, are almost zero.

 

[Angst]

for the discussion on racism, it seems to fall on the question of "well aren't a lot of things racist then? don't we need to delineate more fairly?", and i don't really think it's necessary. humans are oftenly just pretty racist. the question is the expression of it as an instance (current iteration of the tendency has a lot of baggage for obcious reasons) and how we deal with it. on an individual level, most people that are aware of racism and are aggressively against it have biases, which they then actively try to become aware of and counteract (and this is the ideal behavior btw); on a societal level, the ideal change in attitude is pretty obvious; can we like stop endangering random minorities for cookie points?

most activists etc in this matter are not of the belief that predisposition can be removed from the equation; they actually don't quite mind it in itself in individual actions depending on their nature, i note that coming from a country with a centuries long bloodfeud with its neighbour that has resulted in a lot of modern brotherly teasing; activists rather understand that there's a lot of structural baggage ingrained in things. there's then little sympathy for the walmart grandma yearning for the simplicity of pre-segregation life, or who votes to get her cashier kicked out of the country, or who likes brown people because they can exploit their labour easier. all of this is awful, regardless of motivation

 

[Farm Boy]

Perhaps in a metaphysical sense this is true, however the Haitian thing is absolutely racist, so obviously that I have to agree with the idea I saw on twitter that they are basically just using "Haitian" to mean the n word at this point.

But more broadly, anti-immigrant politics in America in 2024 are definitely all motivated by racism, increasingly openly so. Failure to recognize this is....sus

It's always something.

Eventually you realize what the something is was never the point.

Because you're dealing with liars.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Donald Trump's Debate Crowd Comment Sparks Confusion: 'They Went Crazy'​

Donald Trump has said that when he got fact-checked by moderators during his presidential debate with Kamala Harris, the audience "went crazy." But there was no audience at the debate hosted by ABC.
Appearing on the Fox News show Gutfeld! on Wednesday, the Republican presidential nominee said the "audience" reacted to his unfair treatment during the debate against the vice president.

"They didn't correct her [Harris] once and they corrected me," Trump said. "Everything I said, practically, I think 9 times or 11 times. And the audience was absolutely, they went crazy."

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-praises-nonexistent-debate-crowd-they-went-crazy-1956251

More signs of cognitive decline, senility, detachment from reality and just a general disregard for accuracy in any statement he makes. He's getting crazier by the day and he is almost on autopilot with his lies... he just says whatever crazy think pops into his mind, with no regard whatsoever to whether its true or not. He's just rambling stream of consciousness nonsense.

Like I've said before, this is how Trump's aging, cognitive decline manifests... its his way of coping. With some seniors, they manifest it by freezing, zoning out, stammering, etc., but with Trump, it manifests as insane rambling, word salads and nonsensical claims, like this latest one about having an audience when there was none.

 

[Akka]

I sometimes wonder if the term racism fails to capture or describe degree, and that this failing of the English language doesn't create a sensitivity to the term itself.

Amalgaming a wide array of nuances under the most emotionnally-charged denomination in order to attempt to coerce behaviour is not a bug, it's a feature. No point to wonder if the language is at fault when the manipulation is deliberate.

 

[danjuno]

I'm giving Iowa to Harris-Walz, whenever it comes time for us to make our predictions, in large part because of Walz.

Maybe if things go very well on election night, but anything that's not Nevada and the Blue Wall should be considered a "stretch goal". Those four get priority over everything else.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Donald Trump's Debate Crowd Comment Sparks Confusion: 'They Went Crazy'​

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-praises-nonexistent-debate-crowd-they-went-crazy-1956251

More signs of cognitive decline, senility, detachment from reality and just a general disregard for accuracy in any statement he makes. He's getting crazier by the day and he is almost on autopilot with his lies... he just says whatever crazy think pops into his mind, with no regard whatsoever to whether its true or not. He's just rambling stream of consciousness nonsense.

Like I've said before, this is how Trump's aging, cognitive decline manifests... its his way of coping. With some seniors, they manifest it by freezing, zoning out, stammering, etc., but with Trump, it manifests as insane rambling, word salads and nonsensical claims, like this latest one about having an audience when there was none.

I read a piece that said that dementia as often represents in the form of Trump-like bluster as in the form of Biden-like tentativeness.

On the bolded point, Lawrence O'Donnell will occasionally do a bit on a moment in one of the early primary debates in 2016 where Trump claimed that he lost "hundreds of friends" in the 9/11 attacks. Since about 3000 people died, for this to be true, Trump would have had to be friends with roughly 10% of the people who happened to be in the World Trade Towers on that day. There was follow-up and he failed to name a single friend he lost on that day. All that was "true" about the comment was the self-righteous anger in which it was spoken: "how dare you say anything to me about 9/11 since I'm a New Yorker and therefore was more immediately impacted?" (I think it was directed to Cruz). The remark didn't lose him any support because his supporters react only at the emotional level. You can slot in any information, and it doesn't matter one way or the other.

 

[Lexicus]

I read a piece that said that dementia as often represents in the form of Trump-like bluster as in the form of Biden-like tentativeness.

On the bolded point, Lawrence O'Donnell will occasionally do a bit on a moment in one of the early primary debates in 2016 where Trump claimed that he lost "hundreds of friends" in the 9/11 attacks. Since about 3000 people died, for this to be true, Trump would have had to be friends with roughly 10% of the people who happened to be in the World Trade Towers on that day. There was follow-up and he failed to name a single friend he lost on that day. All that was "true" about the comment was the self-righteous anger in which it was spoken: "how dare you say anything to me about 9/11 since I'm a New Yorker and therefore was more immediately impacted?" (I think it was directed to Cruz). The remark didn't lose him any support because his supporters react only at the emotional level. You can slot in any information, and it doesn't matter one way or the other.

Trump has never had a single friend his entire life. He uses people, he doesn't form friendships with them.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Well yes, of course, there's that as well.

Returning to the possibility of dementia. Since Trump's comments have always been detached from the truth, making up on the spot whatever reality would be preferable or more advantageous to him, it will be harder to document a given claim of this sort as a sign of dementia. But his dad suffered from Alzheimers.

In any case, the Harris campaign should be ready with a line to the effect that "Well, he's always lied freely, of course, but now one is starting to wonder whether he even knows what the truth is in the first place." That was one of his lines for casting Biden as impaired.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Kamala Harris was not able to pick up the coveted Teamsters union endorsement.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/18/teamsters-no-endorsement-2024-election-00179900

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters declined to issue a presidential endorsement on Wednesday, according to a statement from the union.

The powerful labor union is deeply connected to working class voters in battleground states who could be crucial to the outcome of November’s election. It cited a lack of consensus among its million-plus members, and the non-endorsement is a sizable blow for Vice President Kamala Harris given the Biden administration’s unabashed union loyalty during his term.

Pennsylvania started up early voting 3 days ago on the 16th of September.

We are already in voting season!

Teamsters a bit tardy.

*Edit*

Kamala got the postal workers endorsement last week.

NALC endorses Harris-Walz

The nation’s 290,000 active and retired city letter carriers represented by the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) are proud to announce our endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz.

www.nalc.org

Trump got the cops big lobby org. earlier.

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2024-09-06/donald-trump-returns-to-north-carolina-to-speak-at-fraternal-order-of-police-meeting