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

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Originally Posted by icky thump

we’ve asked white people to care about women. They said fuck off.

2

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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

H. L. Mencken: 'Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.'

It may be as simple as this:

1. Telling people "The economy is great and you're dumb if you think otherwise" (based on GDP) while ignoring the way it impacting different populations and areas differently, isn't wise.

2. Telling people they're racists if they don't disagree with you isn't wise.

3. Taking the votes of minority communities for granted isn't wise.

4. Figuring you can scare people into voting for your candidate isn't wise.

5. Figuring you can shame people into voting for your candidate isn't wise.

6. Running on a platform of nothing more than, "I'm not Trump" works during Covid, but perhaps not otherwise.

This is a dark event. But its causes stem from a whole lot of arrogance and incompetence.

Remember this when your first inclination is to blame this all exclusively on racism and sexism. While those are of course partial causes, they are small fractions of a much more significant whole.

And while this Divider in Chief does his dividing, recall, what brought us here in significant part is grievance and identity politics. If both parties continue to practice those strategies, the country is fucked in a manner far worse than what Trump might cause. Right now, the media and political pundits on both sides are talking about the new divide and conquer angle to acquire eyeballs and support - Men vs. Women. Don't let them do it. Don't be the sucker at the table.

Nah, I think you were right the first time. It's backlash to "woke." Which is to say, annoyance at being asked to care about people they didn't want to care about.

Whether that is racism or sexism is a thing we've gone around in circles on, but I do think it is a huge part of what was driving things.

That an how much of our information ecosystem we've let be controlled by the oligarchs who did not want their power challenged in the ways the Biden admin was challenging it.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

1. Telling people "The economy is great and you're dumb if you think otherwise" (based on GDP) while ignoring the way it impacting different populations and areas differently, isn't wise.

That wasn't the message I saw. I saw she will change things up, fix stuff. Like one of the late night talk show hosts asked "aren't you part of the administration already?"

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Adder

Nah, I think you were right the first time. It's backlash to "woke." Which is to say, annoyance at being asked to care about people they didn't want to care about.

Whether that is racism or sexism is a thing we've gone around in circles on, but I do think it is a huge part of what was driving things.

That an how much of our information ecosystem we've let be controlled by the oligarchs who did not want their power challenged in the ways the Biden admin was challenging it.

I think you're both wrong. It's $7.99 for a box of Frosted Flakes.

I personally think Harris played her hand pretty well. With the way she came to be the candidate, she didn't want to split with Biden on anything major and risk a rupture within her party. But, that means being the party of $7.99 Frosted Flakes.

[Did you just call me Coltrane?]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

H. L. Mencken: 'Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.'

It may be as simple as this:

1. Telling people "The economy is great and you're dumb if you think otherwise" (based on GDP) while ignoring the way it impacting different populations and areas differently, isn't wise.

I think a lot of us are in an economic bubble where we can mostly absorb increased prices of groceries, fast food etc. - it's annoying, but it doesn't really change how we live (although I still bitch about the cost of going out to dinner).

I think there are less than us than we think.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Did you just call me Coltrane?

I think a lot of us are in an economic bubble where we can mostly absorb increased prices of groceries, fast food etc. - it's annoying, but it doesn't really change how we live (although I still bitch about the cost of going out to dinner).

I think there are less than us than we think.

So there is only 1% of us 1%ers?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Tom Nichols:

Yes, some voters still stubbornly believe that presidents magically control the price of basic goods. Others have genuine concerns about immigration and gave in to Trump’s booming call of fascism and nativism. And some of them were just never going to vote for a woman, much less a Black woman.

But in the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.

Back in 2021, I wrote a book about the rise of “illiberal populism,” the self-destructive tendency in some nations that leads people to participate in democratic institutions such as voting while being hostile to democracy itself, casting ballots primarily to punish other people and to curtail everyone’s rights—even their own. These movements are sometimes led by fantastically wealthy faux populists who hoodwink gullible voters by promising to solve a litany of problems that always seem to involve money, immigrants, and minorities. The appeals from these charlatans resonate most not among the very poor, but among a bored, relatively well-off middle class, usually those who are deeply uncomfortable with racial and demographic changes in their own countries.

And so it came to pass: Last night, a gaggle of millionaires and billionaires grinned and applauded for Trump. They were part of an alliance with the very people another Trump term would hurt—the young, minorities, and working families among them.

Trump, as he has shown repeatedly over the years, couldn’t care less about any of these groups. He ran for office to seize control of the apparatus of government and to evade judicial accountability for his previous actions as president. Once he is safe, he will embark on the other project he seems to truly care about: the destruction of the rule of law and any other impediments to enlarging his power.

Americans who wish to stop Trump in this assault on the American constitutional order, then, should get it out of their heads that this election could have been won if only a better candidate had made a better pitch to a few thousand people in Pennsylvania. Biden, too old and tired to mount a proper campaign, likely would have lost worse than Harris; more to the point, there was nothing even a more invigorated Biden or a less, you know, female alternative could have offered. Racial grievances, dissatisfaction with life’s travails (including substance addiction and lack of education), and resentment toward the villainous elites in faraway cities cannot be placated by housing policy or interest-rate cuts.

No candidate can reason about facts and policies with voters who have no real interest in such things. They like the promises of social revenge that flow from Trump, the tough-guy rhetoric, the simplistic “I will fix it” solutions. And he’s interesting to them, because he supports and encourages their conspiracist beliefs. (I knew Harris was in trouble when I was in Pennsylvania last week for an event and a fairly well-off business owner, who was an ardent Trump supporter, told me that Michelle Obama had conspired with the Canadians to change the state’s vote tally in 2020. And that wasn’t even the weirdest part of the conversation.)

As Jonathan Last, editor of The Bulwark, put it in a social-media post last night: The election went the way it did “because America wanted Trump. That’s it. People reaching to construct [policy] alibis for the public because they don’t want to grapple with this are whistling past the graveyard.” Last worries that we might now be in a transition to authoritarianism of the kind Russia went through in the 1990s, but I visited Russia often in those days, and much of the Russian democratic implosion was driven by genuinely brutal economic conditions and the rapid collapse of basic public services. Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.

The Atlantic

[Did you just call me Coltrane?]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

So there is only 1% of us 1%ers?

I don't think I'm in the 1%. 1%-ers can send their kids to Swarthmore for $90k/year without blinking. I blink.

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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Tom Nichols:



The Atlantic

I would like people to stop saying "genuine concerns about immigration." They are not genuine. They are, mostly, objectively wrong. Many people believe genuinely, objectively wrong things about immigration.

They do so, in part, because not enough people say they are wrong, instead saying things like "genuine concerns about immigration."

We have a massive problem with an information ecosystem heavily influenced by algorithms controlled by oligarchs. They feed people false claims that traditional media doesn't even try to counter. The Biden administration has begun to try to counter their power, but even those meager attempts are about to end.

Eventually, that power will be innovated away, probably, but we are in a real bad place for the foreseeable future.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

I would like people to stop saying "genuine concerns about immigration." They are not genuine. They are, mostly, objectively wrong. Many people believe genuinely, objectively wrong things about immigration.

They do so, in part, because not enough people say they are wrong, instead saying things like "genuine concerns about immigration."

We have a massive problem with an information ecosystem heavily influenced by algorithms controlled by oligarchs. They feed people false claims that traditional media doesn't even try to counter. The Biden administration has begun to try to counter their power, but even those meager attempts are about to end.

Eventually, that power will be innovated away, probably, but we are in a real bad place for the foreseeable future.

I am very pro-immigration. I think mass deportations is one of the stupidest ideas imaginable.

However, I have also been schooled on this issue by people who are legal immigrants. And people from states like Arizona.

For you and me, immigration isn’t that big of a deal. For people who came here legally, it really pisses them off to see people in here illegally. I’m not going to try to put myself in their heads. But I do have to respect their position.

Not all of the people who consider immigration a big issue are manipulated rubes.

And on a broader point, the hierarchy of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and those of us who are of the “elite,“ have to stop assuming, without basis, that whoever disagrees with us is deluded or stupid.

We are very often just as stupid and deluded as a lot of these people. When you look around this country and see the most grievous policy errors, it almost always comes from technocrats who think they know what is best for everyone.

Humility would win a lot more elections, and a lot more minds. On the other hand, having a pompous and incompetent educated “expert” class repeatedly tell everybody what to do, and fuck it up, degrades the credibility of expertise, and respect for science, logic, and reason.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Did you just call me Coltrane?

I think a lot of us are in an economic bubble where we can mostly absorb increased prices of groceries, fast food etc. - it's annoying, but it doesn't really change how we live (although I still bitch about the cost of going out to dinner).

I think there are less than us than we think.

I agree, 100%.

For the past couple of years, I have been quick to say I don’t see inflation. I also happen to live in a neighborhood where everybody drives a very expensive car, and lives in a big house. My reality is hanging out with people who all have college and graduate degrees, and earn a lot of money.

Back in the early 2000s, I would write, often here, that the little people just have to adjust themselves to globalization, and that they will lose jobs until the price of labor abroad reaches parity with that of domestic labor.

What an outrageously arrogant person I was. And how deluded, as well. I thought these people would just disappear. They would simply take their lumps, and fade away.

Inflation is very real for the average Joe. Things are more expensive, regardless of whether you or I notice.

The biggest lesson of this election is that the upper echelon of the Democratic Party need to stop engaging in a giant circle jerk where they analyze everybody outside their bubble using their own favored metrics. Apparently, navel gazing, and talking back back-and-forth with your affluent and frequently maleducated friends does not give you a clue as to what the rest of the country has in its head.

How shocking.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

https://www.france24.com/en/americas...pen-door-trump

This doesn't explain the Country but if certainly hurt in Michigan. About 5 o'clock last night I was watching TV and some ads that I had never seen came on. "If Trump wins he will drop Israel. Harris supports our ally 100%." They had not played before. It seemed stupid. I cannot imagine too many Jews were on the fence. But plenty of Arabs may have been.

My Lebanese American boss voted for Stein. He had to convince friends to vote, explaining they did not have to vote for President.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally Posted by Adder

Nah, I think you were right the first time. It's backlash to "woke." Which is to say, annoyance at being asked to care about people they didn't want to care about.

Whether that is racism or sexism is a thing we've gone around in circles on, but I do think it is a huge part of what was driving things.

That an how much of our information ecosystem we've let be controlled by the oligarchs who did not want their power challenged in the ways the Biden admin was challenging it.

This comment thread on Reddit is very telling: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZ/commen...o_the_right_a/

The messaging to young men has been absolutely terrible, and I do not know what can be done about it.

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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

For people who came here legally, it really pisses them off to see people in here illegally. I’m not going to try to put myself in their heads. But I do have to respect their position.

Sure, but many who are concerned about immigration seem to believe that a bunch of nonsense about what happens to immigrants (i.e., we hand them piles of cash), their effect on tax collections (i.e., they don't pay any taxes), housing (drive up rents) and jobs (take their jobs). These beliefs are common, frequently stated and wrong.

As far as "came here legally," well, the history of our immigration policy is long and filled with terrible decisions and guess what, people respond to incentives.