Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I tried to find the most impactful commercial, but could not. It starts with Harris, not clear in what capacity, talking to a trans woman at something called (I think) Transnation. She assures the person she made it so tax dollars will pay for sex change operation for inmates. It then cuts to two young black men on a talk show talking about how they are not okay with tax dollars being used for sex realignment surgery. AND they don’t want their daughters having to play sports against men. Then it switches to an image that is a man with a beard who must be 40 and probably 6’ 5” in a basketball uniform with what seem to be her junior high girl team mates.

The point was to drive votes, and in particular black male votes to Trump. Or at least to cause them not to vote.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

When Sebby posts about how liberals/lefties see the world I don’t take it as accurate about Ty or RT, but he has you nailed. Do you actually know any people who are in labor jobs? Ever known any? You don’t, no matter what you say.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Then we're all fucked, because figuring out how to bring those billionaires back into the fold is not the path to any kind of political success.

eta: I do think the media environment is a huge thing to solve, and the best thing I've seen about that is this piece by Brian Beutler.

A taste:

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Drivel. Occam’s Razor applies.

Minority voters finally grasped that neither of these parties really cares about them. But under Trump, they’ve got a better chance of making it.

Making it is a term of art here.

People don’t want a handout or a socialized system that helps them. They want a chance. The Democrats continue to think the poor are rational handout junkies. “If we just give them something, as Cass Sunstein says, they’ll be properly nudged.”

Your party’s problem is it thinks the American Dream is about comfort. Ya dumb fucks. If were that, this place would’ve collapsed decades ago.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

In other words, Beutler's #2. Got it.

eta: Your use of "socialized" in this context is, clinically, bullshit. Look it up, if you must.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Almost zero democrats think that.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

You keep telling yourself that.

The Ds' messaging worked. People understood that they were offering more safety nets, a more managed European economy, etc. Nobody missed this. They rejected it. Different thing.

Call them fools for this. See how that works for the Democratic Party. Being scolds has delivered brilliantly for it so far.

Unions, for example, spoke very clearly, and rationally. They preferred to get more projects, more work, that they believe they will receive under Trump, based on Trump's past time in office. This may be a wise or very unwise bet. But it's not a result of "misinformation." They aren't rubes. They just see it differently than, say, the average "intellectual yet idiot" at the top of the Democratic Party hierarchy.

I know, I know... It's all so unfair. The hoi polloi defied their betters. How dare they!

Customer's Always Right. The Ds couldn't close. No coffee for the Ds, and no steak knives. Trump gets the Cadillac, the Ds get fired. Don't like it? Sell something more people want to buy and maybe the results will be different. Or keep telling the people you're trying to sell to that they're fools or deluded if they don't buy what you're offering. People love that approach.

"You won't come home with me? Well, you just don't know how much better I am in bed than anyone else in this bar! Your loss." Works every time.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Agreed. The easiest way to get rid of Musk, for example, will be to continuously ask Trump about what Musk thinks of his policies or if he went through Musk first. Neither likes being number two. Throw Peter Thiel in the mix and we have an entertaining ego-off, if the stakes weren't so damned high.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

A lot to digest here.

eta

Lawrence Weschler:

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I think the American experiment is over. These are not serious people who are going to be running our government.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Obama and Biden seemed to think that if they ran a competent government, voters would notice and reward them, which always seemed naive to me, and the Republicans are going to see if the voters will notice rank incompetence.

Watching him prepare to wreck the DOJ breaks my heart.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Same with HHS. There's very, very good work done by NIH, FDA, ONC, & CDC. And good people. I'm horrified at what's going to happen there.

There were some awesome HIPAA/privacy jobs posted on USAjobs earlier in the year that I would have jumped on to apply for if the possibility of this administration wasn't looming. I'm sure I'm not the only excellent candidate who gave pause to working for the federal government as recently as a year ago. Much fewer now. And these are not political jobs. They're the jobs of keeping the country running.

I don't know what is going to happen, but I do know a lot of good, innocent people are going to be hurt by this change in administration, and if the dust ever settles, it will take a lot to get people to trust that their world isn't going to be upended every four years.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Working at the Government is a choice where you won't make the really big bucks, but mostly secure. This will be fucked up.

Tesla's patents are valued at 3 billion so I am hoping he'll leave that office alone? Although 3 billion maybe isn't too much for him?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I think it's more of an interregnum. Neoliberalism had delivered for a few decades, but did so in a very uneven manner that a lot of the population found unfair. At the same time, the Democratic Party had pivoted toward the center, governing during Clinton's and Obama's administrations in an almost "liberal Republican" manner. The usual counters to globalization and free trade savaging workers, unions, were also marginalized.

Net result: Massive inequality.

This led to populism on the left (Bernie) and right (Trump). But it didn't work, as Trump largely governed as a garden variety Republican, effecting little more than a typical GOP tax cut. Neoliberalism remained the economic policy de jour. In fact, manufacturing jobs left the country during his tenure.

Covid undid some of the inequality, temporarily. People had cash and got a respite from the daily grind, and a lot of them liked it... a lot. Now the free $$$ is over, however, and most of the people long ago exhausted their excess Covid savings. Now many of them, the lower working classes most notably and acutely, feel the pinch from an absence of Covid stimulus and the inflation that stimulus caused. And as this happens, all that excess liquidity caused by the Covid stimulus enriches the already affluent even further.

That's a recipe for really angry middle and working classes.

The pundits like to focus on wokeness as a cause of Trump's win. That's part of it, of course, but not for the reasons pundits assume. I'd surmise people who are upset with out of touch progressives are also upset with out of touch conservatives. Nobody wants to hear progressive culture nonsense because it's not a solution to any of the problems in the country. No one wants to hear from country club Republicans about how free trade is the answer because that's not a solution, either.

Mercantilism and curbs on immigration all but assuredly aren't solutions either, but they're ideas that haven't yet been attempted.

People want ideas that they think will lead to broad prosperity. And neither party, pitching either of their preferred forms of capitalism, is meeting the demand. Because they can't.

AI is going to render a lot of white collar folks obsolete. And at the robotics level, it's going to do the same to blue collar folks. We don't have these conversations because there's no easy solution, and politicians would rather avoid them. But the public isn't entirely stupid. They know that what we're doing is unsustainable.

We will have to modify the current systems, somewhat significantly, going forward. Will we be more socialist? More libertarian? Will the future be rule by strongmen? Who knows. But Trump's stickiness (I figured him a spent force after Jan 6) and broadening appeal speak to a desire, IMO, by much of the public to see the system shaken up and reordered. They don't want more of the same, only run better. They want different.

Trump, of course, is not the answer. He's the hatchet man who precedes what I think will be the next phase of governance. The Chainsaw Al Dunlop of DC for the next four years who'll (probably unwittingly) create the environment in which a subsequent more serious President and Congress start running a country for a 21st century reality, instead of based on policies and assumptions of the mid to late 20th Century.

The past 80 years were an artificially prolonged status quo. The experiment isn't over. It's just starting.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Isn't this part of the problem? Suppose we'd a govt that actually paid for talent? You'd need far fewer people if you focused on keeping the 20% of people who do most of the work in any organization.

The only counter to it that makes some sense to me is the argument that a large % of govt workers are transfer recipients in disguise... people getting middle class pay and benefits they'll spend, with a decent multiplier effect. People who'd otherwise not have jobs and therefore not have multipliers.