Open Mic for the week of 3/24/25
On this day in 1832, Joseph Smith was tarred and feathered in Hiram, Ohio.
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.
Axios has a fun article talking about the importance of figuring out why Dems lost in 2024.
The article states: Why it matters: It’s hard to win if you don’t know why you lost
One of the problems with 2016 is that this problem was avoided entirely by confidently pointing out that Clinton didn’t lose the election so therefore they don’t need to change anything and this was followed by Trump losing in 2020.
But now, in 2024…
Well, here are the top 10 theories:
1. It’s all Joe Biden’s fault.
2. It’s all Kamala Harris’ fault.
3. Podcasts and social media.
4. “Too woke.”
5. Elitist words.
6. Elitist policies.
7. Testosterone.
8. Inflation, inflation, inflation.
9. The border.
10. Trump is one-of-a-kind.
I’d probably argue that you can pick your favorite three out of there and say “this is why” and just point to those three (any of them!).
But the main thing that worries me are the ones that can easily preface a “therefore, the Democrats don’t need to change”.
It was all Biden’s fault. Therefore the Democrats don’t need to change.
It was Harris. 100%. Therefore the Democrats don’t need to change.
Democrats didn’t embrace podcasts. Therefore the Democrats don’t need to change policies, they just need a Joe Rogan.
Why does this matter?, you may ask. Well, I’d say that it’s hard to win if you don’t know why you lost.Report
I’d say 1,2,8 & 10 were the big problems.
RE: No need to change
Team Blue had an openly unfit leader who no one dared point out wore no clothes. Then they replaced him with a women whose big abilities were her race and her gender, and who over two election cycles got zero delegates to secure the nod.
I’m thinking there’s room for improvement in there somewhere.
1) Don’t pick a VP unless they can head the ticket.
2) If the top guy is unfit, have him actually step down. Harris the President would have been Presidential and wouldn’t have been able to run both against and for Joe.
3) Replace your guy earlier.Report
Team Blue waited until the last second to notice their guy was unable to talk and then replaced him with someone who managed to get zero delegate votes over two election cycles.
They/we shouldn’t be picking a VP based on their group membership but rather on their ability to head the ticket.
If you’re going to replace your guy, do it earlier.
If you’re going to replace your guy, actually replace him. A President Harris would have looked a lot more Presidential and would have removed the conflict of running both for and against Biden. She could have showed herself righting the ship and taking charge.
Of course that assumes she actually had that ability which is unclear.Report
In 2023, I listened to a discussion/interview with a well-known American philosopher and a couple philosophers outside of the U.S., mostly about his most recent book (which has little to do with politics, and nothing to do with American partisan politics), but they ended with talk of movies and then current American politics, and they all, the American philosopher and his non-American interlocutors, agreed that Biden was in serious cognitive decline and the Democrats should be holding a primary to find another candidate.
Point being, it was obvious even to random (admittedly leftist, so not big fans of Biden or the Dems) philosophers in other countries, so it must have been obvious to the people in the White House and the Dem national leadership. In a just world, nobody who worked in that administration or in the national party would ever work in politics again. Alas…Report
In defense of the Democrats in power at the time: it’s 2023 and coming up on the most important election of our lifetimes and they didn’t want to just walk up to Donald Trump and hand him the biggest W they possibly could.Report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_health_concerns_about_Joe_Biden
Shortly after the debate in June, “Biden declined to undergo a cognitive exam”. Presumably he knew he couldn’t pass it.
In Feb 2024, the special counsel said his memory “appeared to have significant limitations”.
My impression is his staff knew, but if he was replaced odds were they would be too. “The Biden administration has also been criticized for allegedly gaslighting or harassing journalists who asked questions about Biden’s health or age”Report
Do I have comments in mod? I’d swear I replied to this.Report
You had two that auto-trashed. I fished them out.Report
I’d go with #10. We’ve had 3 DJT election cycles now, and there’s not an obvious successor. The guy is such an outlier, it’s hard to figure him into regular political science.
I’d probably throw in #8, as well. The 2020s are going to be an odd decade, historically.Report
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/?gift=kPTlqn0J1iP9IBZcsdI5IVJpB2t9BYyxpzU4sooa69M&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Jeffrey Goldberg accidentally included in group chat on bombing YemenReport
Came here to post that I never get invited to the cool group chats. Good for Jeffrey.Report
Do we have any Signal users? How easy is it to add someone to a group chat?Report
I’m a Teams user, myself. I have to go up to the “view and add participants” button, scroll down to “add people”, click on “add people”, type the first part of the guy’s name in the chat, then scroll down and find the guy and add him and *THEN* he’s in the group chat.
I’m wondering if Signal is something around as onerous or if you’ll accidentally do it by typing with all of your fingers one key to the left or right.Report
And then you realized you had two people that names started with Jeff and you added the wrong one….Report
Then you try to quickly hit recall, but someone has already looked at it…Report
Of all the random Jeff’s in the world… they got the Editor in Chief of the Atlantic Jeff.
Talk about bad luck.Report
Michael Waltz.Report
The guy from Inglorious Basterds was in there too?
Man, talk about bad OpSec.
Edit to add: On the plus side, can we all not stand back an appreciate how far we’ve come from an insecure home email server to using state of the art dual encryption?Report
Huh. He’s on Twitter.
Hasn’t tweeted since yesterday.
Probably busy.Report
Heh I believe it is actually Christoph Waltz (Austrians require lots of extra words and t’s) who drinks a glass of milk while the gestapo ransacks your farm house.Report
So a couple of months ago, I was talking about how the January 6th people had incredibly bad opsec, and there is a fundamental difference between the left and the right.
The left has good opsec because the authorities are always after them, attempting to infiltrate them, to incite them to violence so they can crash down, attempting to come up with reasons to arrest them at protests.
Whereas the right is _almost_ always on the side of the authorities, so literally doesn’t bother with the slightest amount of opsec. And that blew up in their face on January 6th when the authorities decided ‘assaulting the police and attempting to kill Congress’ had passed whatever invisible line their protests were normally allowed to get away with.
I…um… Didn’t realize this lack of opsec applied to quite this level.
There is a standard warning that people on the left generally give to people organizing against the administration to ‘always assume that there is a Fed in the chat.’ Blue Sky is having a field day flipping that backwardsReport
Getting opsec about the President’s followers to prevent them from doing the President’s will seems a little risky politically and normally unnecessary.
Law enforcement didn’t realize they were going to have to deal with the President enflaming things as opposed to telling everyone to go home.Report
While amusing I think this is just what happens when you staff your admistration with whatever is worse than backbenchers (nosebleeders?) and media personalities who have never been accountable for anything of significance. Don’t let Fox News fool you, the people on that chat are better understood as JV dilettantes with very low IQs. They aren’t taking cues from the great unwashed involved in 1/6.Report
To be fair to David’s original point, I expect the Tesla firebombers really have their shit together.Report
The talk about not wanting to “bail out Europe again” was a pretty big clue they were dilettantes.Report
Not bad luck, pure stupidity. While I can see it happening (and done it at work one or two times). It is still on that person to find and fix before sending (just like it was on me).
This is even worse because of what it was over.Report
It takes two steps: first, you have to send an invitation to someone, and second, when creating a group, you have to put their name in. If you have people in your contacts with very similar names, it’s probably pretty easy to include the wrong person in both steps if you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing. Which, I mean, it’s been a while since I last created a national security chat, but I’m pretty sure that if I’d be a bit more careful about adding people than they seem to have been.
A fun possibility is that the initial invite to Goldberg was intentional, because dude was using his personal Signal account and he was just adding a lot of media contacts, but then he used his personal Signal account to talk about national security sh*t.Report
Okay, that’s good to know. When I’m in your group chat and you add a third party, is there a ding and a little message at the bottom that says “Joe Schmoe has been added to the chat?”
It does that for Teams.Report
I think it puts a message in the chat, though it’s been a while since I added someone to a chat, something similar to what Teams says when you add someone.
(oops, screwed up my email address I think.)Report
Today’s Senate Intel Committee hearing revealed the Mid East envoy in the chat was in Moscow as it was happening.Report
Happy Nowruz everybody. I was at my second Nowruz celebration with my partner last night. Yesterday was a Zoroastrian Nowruz. It’s pretty interesting comparing and contrasting how one small insular ethnoreligious group deals with things compared to your small ethnoreligious group, especially when they occupy the same socio-economic niche:
1. The Zoroastrian approach to politics and society seems to be keep out and keep your head down. This is the complete opposite of the Jewish approach. Whether we are Ashkenazi or Mizrahi, left or right, Zionist or anti-Zionist, Jews dod not keep out and keep our heads down. Our approach is more like “just because we might be 1% or less of the population, doesn’t give you a right to boss us around. Fish you.”
2. Zoroastrians seem to have no need to update or modernize their religion while the modernizers, traditionalists, and everything in-between was fighting over the religion since the early 19th century.Report
Ahura Mazda seems like a pretty wise guy.
How was the food?Report
Delicious.Report
Luke 20:25 is always sound advice.Report
As the supreme deity of the Zoroastrians, he’s a good bit more than “a pretty wise guy.” If you believe in him at all.Report
A wise lord?Report
There are modernist Zoroastrians, though they are a minority within a very small religious group anyway, so you’re unlikely to meet them. There are also restorationists, who reject “recent” (as in, over the last millennium) changes to the original, pure Zoroastrianism of the Gathas, but they’re also a small(ish) minority within a very small religious group. I think most Zoroastrians are somewhere in between the two, though the only Zoroastrian I’ve ever known personally is a Parsi, which is a group known for their conservatism, though they’re not restorationists.Report
Mike Waltz is married. The woman to whom he is married has a sister. This sister is married to Scott Stapp, lead singer of Creed.
Edit: Never mind. They got divorced last year.Report
Every party has a pooper! 😉Report
A 26 year old leftist influencer/TikTok presenter named Kat Abughazeh is attempting to primary Democratic politician Jan Schakowsky in the 9th District of Illinois. The Illinois 9th District is a very Jewish District, it contains Skokie, and has been represented by a Jew in Congress since 1948 with a brief two year exception in the early 1960s when their representative, Sidney R. Yates, attempted to run for the Senate. Ms. Abughazeh is Palestinian on her fathers side, was part of uncommitted, and has rallied against AIPAC on social media:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4e35adc4d1f152e258c0f8c8d1a8ed40c86b35e9e08f7302659f5de70c5ecb2e.jpg
I have no idea why she considers herself to be a good match for this district. I am getting a lot of Jamal Bowman vibes from her.Report
Her resume includes a lot of work for Media Matters.Report
I’m confused about why you think she’s a poor representative of a district that, while it does have a sizeable Jewish population, is still overwhelmingly non-Jewish, and more than 40% non-white.
Looks like it’s ~10% Jewish, though the statistics I found are a bit outdated.Report
Because her opinions on Israel are very different from the opinions of many of the residents of the district on Israel. Jamal Bowman got into trouble by using the term Zionist in very weird ways, embracing 10/7 conspiracy theories, and saying that Jewish majority neighborhoods are bad in a Jewish majority district. Same thing.Report
Because her opinions on Israel are very different from the opinions of many of the residents of the district on Israel.
It’s a very Democratic district, with a relatively large Jewish population, who still make up a minority of the district (~10%). Assuming that the non-Jewish population of the district looks like the Democratic Party nationally, and that every Jewish person in the district voted Democrat (a ridiculous assumption, but this is just to make sure we’ve got a conservative estimate), then with 68% of the district voting for Harris, take away the 75-80k Jewish voters (obviously, some of them can’t even vote, but again, we’re being conservative), then with Dems nationally sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis at about 3:1, we’d still have a majority of Dem voters sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis. When you throw in Republicans, who sympathize with Israelis at about 8:1, this is still less than 50% of the total electorate, but it’s pretty close. Considering that there are probably at least some Jewish residents who are either anti-Zionist or are pro-Israel but oppose the genocide, I bet it’s probably right about 50:50. I’m not sure it’s at all unreasonable for her to run, but then, that’s why we have elections, right?Report
Jan Schakowsky is 80 years old and has had very few primary challengers in the last quarter century. Besides, no House district belongs to anyone or any group. Kat probably won’t win, but good for her for throwing her hat in the ring.Report
This.Report
Fun fact: one of her primary challengers was none other than current IL guv J.B. Pritzker.Report
I agree with the age thing but there are better primary challengers out there or maybe not. Diane Feinstein’s last primary challenger got caught doing racisms against African-Americans, Jews, and even Armenians in a hot mike moment after Feinstein was elected.Report
If there’s something there, I’m sure Schakowsky’s people can dig it up. Right now all we have is a willingness to run and some online statements indicating a less than enthusiastic support of American aid to Israel.Report