Exactly, so is current state basically stable? An atrophied but break even primary news gathering apparatus that survives on financial scraps and on the job of doing it being prestigious for wealthy left wing children of the well to do so they work those jobs for peanuts (and slant the whole thing their way)? It seems... precarious... to me but I have no idea what the alternative is.
I'm not making an argument for norms, actually, I'm making an argument for stone cold calculation. On the scale of effective, popular, damaging and evil activities Trump could do from one to ten, chasing after officials like this would be ineffective (1-3), noisily unpopular (6-8), do very little damage (individually potentially high but on the masses, 1) and would be very evil (8-10). So, frankly, it'd be a waste of rep, effort and attention to head Trump off from doing it. If he wants to chase his tail going after individuals who are well resourced to resist his persecution, would make a lot of noise, would make him look bad and could very well stymie his efforts at going after them? Good.
That's plausible to a degree but what form will it take? The old media revenue streams are slurped up into Google, Facebook et all and they're not coming back. So are we sleepwalking into a world of endless unabashedly partisan podcasts? Ugh. But maybe that's just because I personally cannot stand podcasts (or talk radio for that matter).
I don't agree. Pardoning Hunter is at least sellable and understandable for him as a person. Blanket pardons of large numbers of people? No. That is an implicit suggestion of wrong doing of huge numbers of people. If Trumps going to go after them make him put in the time and energy doing it.
Yup. The main stream media is a fascinating, macabre, thing. It doesn't have a functional business model but the successor models that devoured its old business model need to have something like the MSM around to leech off of so it gets funded to a degree and persists partially on the backs of something like voluntary labor where the participants are partially paid in public prestige, but as an odd kind of zombie industry. Very very strange. I wonder what will actually be the new paradigm?
-Right wing yelps of this being unconscionable are pretty ignorable. Hunter wouldn't be facing any of these charges if he was anyone but a Biden. The tax charges are ones pretty much everyone in his income bracket indulges in and anyone in his tax bracket that gets busted on them typically does what he did which is pay back the missing money with interest and then the IRS moves on. The gun form nonsense is pure opportunistic pap. It also bears noting that everything else Hunter Biden has proven, over both hostile and neutral investigations, to be entirely nothing- especially in terms of Joe Bidens alleged involvement.
-That being said it still isn't a good look for Biden to be pardoning him. Especially not after promising he wouldn't.
-Both those things being said this is obvious a move of despair and angst on Joe Bides part. On some level he knows that Trump will be his legacy just as he was HRC's legacy. That the best case scenario for us all is that Trump coops all the (considerable) good Biden did in his four years of office and claims then as his own has to chap Joe something fierce- it certainly galls me.
-It's a bad choice for the country and the Party. But Joe Biden isn't a Christ figure or he'd have never run for a second term (I do not believe for a second he's so far gone that he couldn't make that choice for himself) and leaving Hunter hanging in the wind for the dubious mercies of a vindictive Trump administration to beat about is a very big sacrificial ask that Biden simply is unwilling to rise to. I'm not a Father but I can very easily imagine saying "no" to that request even though it clearly diminishes Joe Biden.
-As usual Hunter is a quintessential fail-son and diminishes and grimes everything/one he's involved with. Ugh.
-Fundamentally this is a statement by Biden that, No, he does not believe the guard rails of the system will hold under the next Trump administration and it is certainly an ominous prophecy in that.
But yeah I agree with Marchmaine that this isn't a nothingburger, but it's very close to one. A very dreary dismal barelysomethingburger.
Wouldn't work as in, wouldn't work and it certainly isn't working now because there's no mass "nonvoluntary" MAID. For fish's sake, in 2022 MAID deaths in Canada were 13,241. That's out of around 7.6 million older Canadians or so. So not even a fifth of a percentage point. With those kinds of numbers you'd have better luck trying to bring back smoking.
And, of course, if you tried to enact some kind of non-voluntary MAID regime then your populace would rise up in fury.
So monstrous and wouldn't work? Considering that Trump has plenty of elderly supporters I don't think even his clown car of idiots would go for it. It'd be cheaper to just cut off social security (which would also flash fry his party like a toad in a thunderstorm).
Well then MAID is a complete red herring. In Europe* and Canada it's handled by only conventional treatments being available (nothing bleeding edge) and you not necessarily being able to see specialists or doctors or get treatments right away. Rationing by reduction of options and by queueing in essence.
*Though this is a bit of a generalization since Europe's various states has a very broad variety of social healthcare setups.
Heh, it's an insurance company with an army, not an old folks' home. So MAID would barely scratch the surface, especially if it was an ethically enacted MAID.
Not so far. Trump is nemesis to the thesis that is/was the online identarian left. That set have always been about symbols, language and gestures being what's important with the substantive meat space questions relegated to trivial side issues. That's Trump to a T, just inverted. He's all incendiary language, all wild rhetoric, all everything the online identarian left values just inverted but very often (not always) he just sticks to the gabbling. Looking at, for instance, tarrifs the pattern vis a vis Mexico, so far, seems to be Trump threatens tarrifs if the Mexicans don't "cut off immigration and fentanyl" and the Mexicans seem to be saying "sure we'll say we're doing that" while not doing anything substantively and Trump is like "Victory!"
And what's perverse is that's the optimistic take on Trump. Like if that's all he does domestically with what Biden will hand off to him it could actually work out pretty well for him.
But... taxes. There's no way those mother fishers won't do a huge tax cut aimed at the wealthy and that'll bring inflation roaring back unless they actually cut spending which would be a whole ton of real life meatspace stuff. And there's nothing to stop them from slashing taxes so, well, the best case scenario seems unlikely.
Yeah I think we're going to have to give it a whirl again with a leader who isn't that elderly and so has the vigor both to actively prosecute the messaging and politicking part of the agenda and also push back on the everything bagel nonsense more. The intersectional, "every element of the coalition needs to get something out of every policy" posture just doesn't strike me as working- especially since even when everything bagel stuff is put in some coalition constituencies are dissatisfied regardless.
Had a laid back Thanksgiving with ham (we don't fancy turkey). Thanksgiving is the one holiday I'll unabashedly admit that Americans do better than other nations.
I have no critiques to offer. Poor poor Joe, it's entirely merited but so so sad. And so infuriating that, in our brightest timeline, the best we can hope for is that Trump and his minions blatantly keep, and take credit for, everything Bidens' admin substantively did and ride it to further victories. How utterly galling.
We have to keep in mind that it looks like Trump won by a percentage point and change in the popular vote. That falls entirely within the margin of error in these polling aggregations and polls you're looking at here. Basically either Trump or Kamala winning by those margins is entirely compatible with the polling data we see in these charts.
Sure! Your questions are :"inflation was tamed", various opinion makers said "it's not a problem anymore" and prices for some specific goods (Gas) are back to pre-inflation levels.
The answers I'd offer are:
-Inflation being tamed or tamped back down to normal levels doesn't make the prices, in general, go back to the levels the masses remember, it just means the prices stop rising. But the masses remember those old prices and that rankles them. Yes, absolutely, their wages are also higher but humans, being humans, tend to think of wage gains as being earned by them while price increases are blamed on others.
-Yes, various opinion makers and economists said inflation was dealt with and, as a literal matter, it was because it reverted to historical trends. In economic terms that resolved the problem but as a political problem the masses would only have viewed it as being fixed if prices had gone back to a lower level which would have required an economic calamity or some kind of incredible explosion of productivity, the former which would be highly undesirable and the latter which is magic pixie dust.
-And, yeah, a few things went back down in price. Gas chief among them. But apparently Trump and the rights messaging on that was able to drown that fact out. There's a really asymmetrical difference between the left and right about the way their respective partisans view the economy. Both sides view the economy more negatively when the opposing side is in the White House but the effect is about three times more severe on the right than the left.
Yes, and the fact that some went back means that more could have gone back -if they'd wanted to- but they didn't want to go back to Martha's Vineyard so they didn't. It wasn't some ethnic cleansing.
I have a sneaking suspicion you mean "driven out in cars or other vehicles" which, har har, but you know that I meant forced/compelled against their will or interests to leave.
The inflation theory is pretty solid considering that incumbent administrations, left, right, center and purple have been turfed out by their electorates globally in the last couple years. The only common theme connecting these turfings has been recent inflation.
Some charity is advised, many of these kinds of writers we host would be auditioning for the pages of National Review a decade or two ago. Now they're here with us.
I didn't say Trump was Hitler, I said he has exhibited Hitlerian behavior which is, again, pretty uncontroversial. But Trump isn't Hitler, so far, and the US is not Weimar Germany. Just the same as how the people who got conned into being shipped to Marthas' Vineyard were not driven out but instead quite happily left and went to the places they actually wanted to go.
I remember it well and Uncle Bernie did quite well in the states running up to South Carolina. But that was a race with Biden in it. Would Bernie have simply waltzed to victory in a race with no Biden ever in it or would the support he tied up have gone to a younger moderate lane candidate? Or would other moderates have run. Of course counterfactuals are almost impossible to noodle out.
Yeah it was truly shocking to watch how the conservatives on the SCOTUS, completely insulated from anything Trump could do to them, decided the way they did.
I mean is being involved a failed putsch Hitlerian? Objectively yes. Is running on Blood and Soil nationalism Hitlerian? Objectively yes. Is talking about an ethnic group poisoning the nations blood Hitlerian? Objectively yes. It's not particularly contested that Trump did all of those things so the people calling him Hitler have at least one leg to stand on.
That the left lost to him and now is obeying the laws and proceeding with a legal transition is also not hypocritical. Trying to overthrow the will of the voters is Hitlerian and the left isn't Hitlerian. Jaybird of not long ago would wearily sigh and comment on the game being iterated.
Meanwhile the rights constant and decades old tradition of Stalinist and Hitlerian name calling of Dems remains generally baseless. So you seem to be saying everything is Hitlerian which just seems to be a sophisticated BSDI but, no, both sides don't do it.
On “Joe Biden Pardons Local Man”
Exactly, so is current state basically stable? An atrophied but break even primary news gathering apparatus that survives on financial scraps and on the job of doing it being prestigious for wealthy left wing children of the well to do so they work those jobs for peanuts (and slant the whole thing their way)? It seems... precarious... to me but I have no idea what the alternative is.
"
I'm not making an argument for norms, actually, I'm making an argument for stone cold calculation. On the scale of effective, popular, damaging and evil activities Trump could do from one to ten, chasing after officials like this would be ineffective (1-3), noisily unpopular (6-8), do very little damage (individually potentially high but on the masses, 1) and would be very evil (8-10). So, frankly, it'd be a waste of rep, effort and attention to head Trump off from doing it. If he wants to chase his tail going after individuals who are well resourced to resist his persecution, would make a lot of noise, would make him look bad and could very well stymie his efforts at going after them? Good.
"
What Philip asked.
"
That's plausible to a degree but what form will it take? The old media revenue streams are slurped up into Google, Facebook et all and they're not coming back. So are we sleepwalking into a world of endless unabashedly partisan podcasts? Ugh. But maybe that's just because I personally cannot stand podcasts (or talk radio for that matter).
"
I don't agree. Pardoning Hunter is at least sellable and understandable for him as a person. Blanket pardons of large numbers of people? No. That is an implicit suggestion of wrong doing of huge numbers of people. If Trumps going to go after them make him put in the time and energy doing it.
"
Yup. The main stream media is a fascinating, macabre, thing. It doesn't have a functional business model but the successor models that devoured its old business model need to have something like the MSM around to leech off of so it gets funded to a degree and persists partially on the backs of something like voluntary labor where the participants are partially paid in public prestige, but as an odd kind of zombie industry. Very very strange. I wonder what will actually be the new paradigm?
"
Ugh, Hunter again. A few disjointed thoughts.
-Right wing yelps of this being unconscionable are pretty ignorable. Hunter wouldn't be facing any of these charges if he was anyone but a Biden. The tax charges are ones pretty much everyone in his income bracket indulges in and anyone in his tax bracket that gets busted on them typically does what he did which is pay back the missing money with interest and then the IRS moves on. The gun form nonsense is pure opportunistic pap. It also bears noting that everything else Hunter Biden has proven, over both hostile and neutral investigations, to be entirely nothing- especially in terms of Joe Bidens alleged involvement.
-That being said it still isn't a good look for Biden to be pardoning him. Especially not after promising he wouldn't.
-Both those things being said this is obvious a move of despair and angst on Joe Bides part. On some level he knows that Trump will be his legacy just as he was HRC's legacy. That the best case scenario for us all is that Trump coops all the (considerable) good Biden did in his four years of office and claims then as his own has to chap Joe something fierce- it certainly galls me.
-It's a bad choice for the country and the Party. But Joe Biden isn't a Christ figure or he'd have never run for a second term (I do not believe for a second he's so far gone that he couldn't make that choice for himself) and leaving Hunter hanging in the wind for the dubious mercies of a vindictive Trump administration to beat about is a very big sacrificial ask that Biden simply is unwilling to rise to. I'm not a Father but I can very easily imagine saying "no" to that request even though it clearly diminishes Joe Biden.
-As usual Hunter is a quintessential fail-son and diminishes and grimes everything/one he's involved with. Ugh.
-Fundamentally this is a statement by Biden that, No, he does not believe the guard rails of the system will hold under the next Trump administration and it is certainly an ominous prophecy in that.
But yeah I agree with Marchmaine that this isn't a nothingburger, but it's very close to one. A very dreary dismal barelysomethingburger.
On “Turkeys and Drumsticks 2024”
Wouldn't work as in, wouldn't work and it certainly isn't working now because there's no mass "nonvoluntary" MAID. For fish's sake, in 2022 MAID deaths in Canada were 13,241. That's out of around 7.6 million older Canadians or so. So not even a fifth of a percentage point. With those kinds of numbers you'd have better luck trying to bring back smoking.
And, of course, if you tried to enact some kind of non-voluntary MAID regime then your populace would rise up in fury.
"
So monstrous and wouldn't work? Considering that Trump has plenty of elderly supporters I don't think even his clown car of idiots would go for it. It'd be cheaper to just cut off social security (which would also flash fry his party like a toad in a thunderstorm).
"
Well then MAID is a complete red herring. In Europe* and Canada it's handled by only conventional treatments being available (nothing bleeding edge) and you not necessarily being able to see specialists or doctors or get treatments right away. Rationing by reduction of options and by queueing in essence.
*Though this is a bit of a generalization since Europe's various states has a very broad variety of social healthcare setups.
"
Heh, it's an insurance company with an army, not an old folks' home. So MAID would barely scratch the surface, especially if it was an ethically enacted MAID.
"
Not so far. Trump is nemesis to the thesis that is/was the online identarian left. That set have always been about symbols, language and gestures being what's important with the substantive meat space questions relegated to trivial side issues. That's Trump to a T, just inverted. He's all incendiary language, all wild rhetoric, all everything the online identarian left values just inverted but very often (not always) he just sticks to the gabbling. Looking at, for instance, tarrifs the pattern vis a vis Mexico, so far, seems to be Trump threatens tarrifs if the Mexicans don't "cut off immigration and fentanyl" and the Mexicans seem to be saying "sure we'll say we're doing that" while not doing anything substantively and Trump is like "Victory!"
And what's perverse is that's the optimistic take on Trump. Like if that's all he does domestically with what Biden will hand off to him it could actually work out pretty well for him.
But... taxes. There's no way those mother fishers won't do a huge tax cut aimed at the wealthy and that'll bring inflation roaring back unless they actually cut spending which would be a whole ton of real life meatspace stuff. And there's nothing to stop them from slashing taxes so, well, the best case scenario seems unlikely.
"
Yeah I think we're going to have to give it a whirl again with a leader who isn't that elderly and so has the vigor both to actively prosecute the messaging and politicking part of the agenda and also push back on the everything bagel nonsense more. The intersectional, "every element of the coalition needs to get something out of every policy" posture just doesn't strike me as working- especially since even when everything bagel stuff is put in some coalition constituencies are dissatisfied regardless.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Thanksgiving in Iceland”
Had a laid back Thanksgiving with ham (we don't fancy turkey). Thanksgiving is the one holiday I'll unabashedly admit that Americans do better than other nations.
On “Turkeys and Drumsticks 2024”
I have no critiques to offer. Poor poor Joe, it's entirely merited but so so sad. And so infuriating that, in our brightest timeline, the best we can hope for is that Trump and his minions blatantly keep, and take credit for, everything Bidens' admin substantively did and ride it to further victories. How utterly galling.
On “Huffpo reports that Harris internals *NEVER* had her ahead.”
We have to keep in mind that it looks like Trump won by a percentage point and change in the popular vote. That falls entirely within the margin of error in these polling aggregations and polls you're looking at here. Basically either Trump or Kamala winning by those margins is entirely compatible with the polling data we see in these charts.
"
Sure! Your questions are :"inflation was tamed", various opinion makers said "it's not a problem anymore" and prices for some specific goods (Gas) are back to pre-inflation levels.
The answers I'd offer are:
-Inflation being tamed or tamped back down to normal levels doesn't make the prices, in general, go back to the levels the masses remember, it just means the prices stop rising. But the masses remember those old prices and that rankles them. Yes, absolutely, their wages are also higher but humans, being humans, tend to think of wage gains as being earned by them while price increases are blamed on others.
-Yes, various opinion makers and economists said inflation was dealt with and, as a literal matter, it was because it reverted to historical trends. In economic terms that resolved the problem but as a political problem the masses would only have viewed it as being fixed if prices had gone back to a lower level which would have required an economic calamity or some kind of incredible explosion of productivity, the former which would be highly undesirable and the latter which is magic pixie dust.
-And, yeah, a few things went back down in price. Gas chief among them. But apparently Trump and the rights messaging on that was able to drown that fact out. There's a really asymmetrical difference between the left and right about the way their respective partisans view the economy. Both sides view the economy more negatively when the opposing side is in the White House but the effect is about three times more severe on the right than the left.
On “I Told You So”
Yes, and the fact that some went back means that more could have gone back -if they'd wanted to- but they didn't want to go back to Martha's Vineyard so they didn't. It wasn't some ethnic cleansing.
"
I have a sneaking suspicion you mean "driven out in cars or other vehicles" which, har har, but you know that I meant forced/compelled against their will or interests to leave.
On “Huffpo reports that Harris internals *NEVER* had her ahead.”
The inflation theory is pretty solid considering that incumbent administrations, left, right, center and purple have been turfed out by their electorates globally in the last couple years. The only common theme connecting these turfings has been recent inflation.
On “I Told You So”
Some charity is advised, many of these kinds of writers we host would be auditioning for the pages of National Review a decade or two ago. Now they're here with us.
"
I didn't say Trump was Hitler, I said he has exhibited Hitlerian behavior which is, again, pretty uncontroversial. But Trump isn't Hitler, so far, and the US is not Weimar Germany. Just the same as how the people who got conned into being shipped to Marthas' Vineyard were not driven out but instead quite happily left and went to the places they actually wanted to go.
"
I remember it well and Uncle Bernie did quite well in the states running up to South Carolina. But that was a race with Biden in it. Would Bernie have simply waltzed to victory in a race with no Biden ever in it or would the support he tied up have gone to a younger moderate lane candidate? Or would other moderates have run. Of course counterfactuals are almost impossible to noodle out.
"
Yeah it was truly shocking to watch how the conservatives on the SCOTUS, completely insulated from anything Trump could do to them, decided the way they did.
"
I mean is being involved a failed putsch Hitlerian? Objectively yes. Is running on Blood and Soil nationalism Hitlerian? Objectively yes. Is talking about an ethnic group poisoning the nations blood Hitlerian? Objectively yes. It's not particularly contested that Trump did all of those things so the people calling him Hitler have at least one leg to stand on.
That the left lost to him and now is obeying the laws and proceeding with a legal transition is also not hypocritical. Trying to overthrow the will of the voters is Hitlerian and the left isn't Hitlerian. Jaybird of not long ago would wearily sigh and comment on the game being iterated.
Meanwhile the rights constant and decades old tradition of Stalinist and Hitlerian name calling of Dems remains generally baseless. So you seem to be saying everything is Hitlerian which just seems to be a sophisticated BSDI but, no, both sides don't do it.