Open Mic for the week of 11/4/2024
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Stochastic political terrorism continues before election day, enabled by social media companies who are obeying in advance:
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/02/nx-s1-5174151/election-2024-voter-fraud-harassment-influencers-elon-musk-xReport
When you remember that, in addition to any potential political benefits you gain from terrorizing political adversaries and civil servants who stand in the way of your partisan projects, this also draws a ton of clicks and engagement from people who are more stable than the violent maniacs without actually being stable in an absolute sense.
It really is of a piece with FanDuel and gacha games and social media and “mental health” apps, pulling us into obsessive and easily monetized loops, with any other impact being a happy (or not-so-happy) accident.Report
I see you’ve learned your lines. Good job!Report
This man doesn’t deserve to go back – he cares not one witt about the Constitution or Rule of law:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/03/politics/trump-dark-closing-message/index.htmlReport
Anyone know where TFG gets his Enemies from inside rhetoric? John Birch knows . . .
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/03/nx-s1-5176529/john-birch-society-movement-conspiracy-politicsReport
It is getting lost in the run-up to the election but the Epstein tapes reveal some rather monstrous things:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/listen-to-the-jeffrey-epstein-tapes-i-was-donald-trumps-closest-friend/Report
Russia is up to no good:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna178748Report
No one cares it appears.Report
The threats and the doxxing have already started:
https://www.fedmanager.com/news/federal-groups-dhs-respond-after-group-targets-employees-on-watch-listReport
Let’s face it: We knew that Trump would win back in August.Report
We need Kagan and Sotomayor to retire RIGHT FREAKING NOW.Report
They should have as soon as the term ended.Report
Jonathan Pie had a great post-mortem after Clinton lost that I agreed with 80%.
He’s got another entertaining one now that I agree with 30%.
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I like the pox on both your houses message of #2.Report
Those are great.Report
Those are very good. The first one is the best though.Report
If you put this in a movie, people would snort and call it “heavy-handed”.
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There are two squirrels there. One ran across the stage and the other was in that corner at the lower right.Report
In gaming news, Alyssa Mercante is no longer the Senior Editor at Kotaku.Report
She must have known something was coming down the pike. Kotaku is laying off a bunch of people.Report
Huh. Kristallnacht is trending on twitter… welp, let’s see what Donald Trump did now…
Oh, wait. It’s not about Trump? It’s about Jews being attacked in Amsterdam?Report
This is the disgusting world my daughters now live in:
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/emboldened-by-a-trump-win-misogyny-is-exploding-onlineReport
I’m not sure how representative Fuentes is of Trumps supporters.
Guy looks like black propaganda.Report
Gili Cohen reports:
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BREAKING: 64% of Native Americans voted for Trump.
Apparently, they’re not fans of Undocumented Visitors.Report
The Daily Wire reached out to every current, incoming, and outgoing Senate Democrat to see how they felt about eliminating the filibuster and packing the Supreme Court.Report
Huh. Trump picked a chick to be Chief of Staff.Report
Speaking of conspiracy theories:
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Here is something both Nancy and Bernie could say instead of pointing fingers:
“We made a mistake in following conventional wisdom and not challenging an incumbent President in the primary. Our bad.”Report
Well, as I said at the time, the choice was “Biden or What’s-In-The-Box” and Biden was pretty much guaranteed to lose (or so I thought) and, as such, I thought that What’s-In-The-Box was the best play.
Like, I knew that there were downsides!
Anyway, at the time, there were arguments that Biden should be the nominee and only somebody bad would argue otherwise. Dropping Biden at this point would result in the party tearing itself apart!
Well, we had an early debate. Trump vs. Biden.
Remember that Jemelle Bouie thought it was a tie? Hee hee. I still giggle about that. Anyway.
We got rid of Biden. Instead of having an open primary and seeing who could handle Thunderdome (and, perhaps, the general), I was told that swapping out Harris would result in the party tearing itself apart and, besides, all of the warchest money ($80 million!) would be forfeit.
Harris spent about a billion. Which makes 80 million somewhere around 8%.
And here we are.
Personally, I think that the party needs to tear itself apart. This whole “millennial” thing where the only freaking tools at their disposal are moral panics and social disapproval is not working.
Remember in The Dawn Treader where Eustace had to scratch off his dragon scales?
The Democratic Party needs to find Aslan.Report
Having watched Harris campaign for a few months, I find it very hard to believe that she “would have been stronger” if she’d gone through the primary.
Much more likely that she wouldn’t have won.Report
I held this particular story at arm’s length but now DeSantis is talking about it.
The Daily Wire (yes, I know, very partisan media source) reported that “Internal messages obtained by The Daily Wire show a FEMA official ordered relief workers in Florida not to help houses with Trump signs”.
This struck me as very likely to *NOT* be true or, if it was true, a bad, BUT OBVIOUS, joke. You know. “Get on out there and help people, folks. Well, not the ones with Trump signs! LOL!”
Poor taste but, seriously, a funny joke for members of the ingroup.
HOWEVER.
It seems that it was actually serious. From the story:
The story says that Chad Hershey, Washington’s FEMA supervisor, has said that he’s aware of the situation and they’re addressing it.
And now DeSantis is talking about it too.Report
Let me make clear: if true, this is absolutely awful and should not have happened. Like the police, FEMA’s responsibility is to get in there and help anyone who needs help.
However: I suspect that like the police, FEMA didn’t want to get shot. The fact that the “Avoid homes advertising Trump” bullet comes right before “Practice de-escalation and preventative measures” and right after “No one goes anywhere alone” makes me think that whoever wrote this list up suspected, and IMO not without reason, that people with Trump signs on their house were possibly more prone to sitting in the shadows with their shotgun sights trained on any potential approaching “looters”.
AGAIN: to repeat, they shouldn’t have made this assumption; or at least should not have let it guide official policy. Like the police, their job is to go into dangerous chaotic situations and help the people who need help, and that duty will entail some risk to them.
But I suspect the directive was intended to be protective of FEMA employees, rather than punitive to Trump supporters.
My speculation here is intended to potentially explain, but NOT excuse. Again, if true, this is absolutely terrible.Report
That makes sense, I guess. Leaking it now instead of before the election was probably smart. Who knows what might have happened.Report
New York Post is reporting that the lady who did this has been fired.Report
Good.Report
My expectation is it was more “[Trump supporters are] white supremists so f*ck them, we need to help normal people first”.
The social justice warriors want to fight racism and na.zis. Ergo whoever gets in their way is branded that.Report
Interview is priors confirming for me but worth reading from a Democrat defying current trends:
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/a-wa-red-district-conqueror-wants-fellow-democrats-to-look-in-the-mirror/
Money quote:
I was talking to a woman who runs one of the largest labor and delivery wards. She said 40% of the babies there have at least one parent addicted to fentanyl. What is empathetic: to tell them that’s their problem, or to take border security seriously?
People are putting their groceries on their credit card. No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists.Report
Everybody has their own hot takes including myself and they are basically in agreement with this guy. But while Trump won the popular and electoral college vote this time, the Democratic Party did well in Congressional elections and state elections. Liberal ballot messages won. 2024 could simply be nothing more than the general anti-incumbent backlash that happened because of COVID fallout and Trump being popular in many quarters. Somebody like Nikki Haley might have caused greater loses for the Democratic Party because she doesn’t read as much as a hate figure as Trump from the libearl-left spectrum or caused Harris to win because she doesn’t have Trump’s celebrity and ability to mobilize low propensity voters.Report
Yea, I still think there’s a good chance that another Republican would have won even bigger, and maybe had some coat tails. There’s still a chance the Democrats win the house and a significant chance that if they don’t the Republican majority will be even slimmer than the ultra slim majority they have now. A lot of down ballot Democrats outperformed Harris in important races.
However…. I think it’s a real mistake to not take this opportunity for some re-invention. I assume the goal of the party isn’t to trade off the executive on razor’s edge general elections and play for narrow congressional majorities. It’s to actually get governing coalitions big enough to do things, and that can’t happen without appealing to a wider swathe of the electorate.Report
I definitely think that some re-invention for the Democratic Party is needed but this is going to be very hard to pull off, especially in the way that American political parties are structured and somebody who doesn’t have Trump’s cult of personality to remake the party in their image. Latinos had made it very clear that they like the term Latinx and DEI is unpopular but there are more than a few DEI true believers that simply won’t be moved and won’t stop using that term because they are right damn it. Same with the issue of crime. More than a few ideologically committed people believe the way forward is to run every district like it is AOC’s district or Vermont until it becomes more liberal by learning to like it.Report
Brief ideas:
The DNC Chair should resign.
Schumer should step down from Senate Leadership.Report
There needs to be a changing of the guard. Whether it’s an improvement or not depends on the people that come in as replacements.Report
For the Senate, I’d suggest Colorado’s own John Hickenlooper (but I would). Maybe Klobuchar wouldn’t suck.
A Midwesterner or Mountain West kinda person.
As for the DNC Chair, is Howard Dean doing anything?Report
This is the part that got me:
The number one thing that a good congressperson does is represent their district.
If there were more democrats that had local concerns and fewer that had national concerns, they’d not find themselves in this pickle.Report
I don’t think anyone has to be madly in love with Joe Manchin types but its important to underatand that a really, really successful Democratic party would have a lot of those types in it.Report
There was an anti-Semitic riot in Amsterdam that targeted Israeli soccer fans in the city for a match and local Jews:
https://www.reuters.com/world/israels-pm-aware-very-violent-incident-against-israelis-amsterdam-his-office-2024-11-08/
The trigger point was apparently an Israeli being respect to a Palestinian flag or something. I do not understand this. Every time you have a big anti-Jewish riot or something since the Holocaust, the majority response from the world’s Jews is “at least we have Israel and the IDF now” or “this is why we need Israel” but the Pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli side never seems to either get this or they actively believe Jews should be in danger. Like they are making the arguments for Zionism but don’t realize this.Report
It’s been suggested that this was planned and there was no “trigger point”.Report
That is certainly possible as well. The trigger point seems weak but we also have similar weak trigger points causing massive outbursts of violence and anger like the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Trigger point or no trigger point, the argument remains the same. It does nothing to convince Jews that we would be better off without Israel.Report
This article confirms that you are right:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14063329/Amsterdam-rioters-planned-Jew-hunt-Telegram-attacked-Israeli-football-fans.htmlReport
Wanna see a really good ad for a really good Democratic candidate?
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