Yes, Jaybird, organized persecution of trans people has progressed far enough that they can merely associate her mentioning a normal thing the government provides (medical care to prisoners, a thing the government has a legal, constitutional, and _moral_ requirement to provide) but involving icky trans people, and that fact causes a negative impact.
I repeat what I said: This is _exactly why_, when some Democrats say ‘We should have taken positions that we wouldn’t get attacked on’, others ask the very questions you think is unacceptable ‘Whose human rights do you think we should have trampled?’
The right, or at least Trumpism, has moved into actual, literal, fascism. And I will defend that statement at this point, I'm being not hyperbolic. One of the targets, one of the outgroups that fascism requires, have been decided to be trans people, and queer people in general, and a good chunk of people here will be forever damned that they keep 'asking questions' about trans issues, or demanding compromise.
There is no compromise, because you cannot compromise with fascists trying to eradicate people they don't like. They will never accept anything sort of totality, and they will just _lie_ about whatever position their opposition holds.
--
And the people who say things like 'Maybe trans people should stop asking for health care' (Like healthcare isn't a perfectly normal thing people need.) or 'Maybe trans people should stay out of sports' (Like sports are even vaguely the business of the government or important at all)...you're the Germans in 1934 who are saying 'Look, I don't agree with the Na.zis, and I don't agree with any violence, but there are a lot of Jews in the government, and a communist did burn down the Reichstag, and I'm just asking questions. Maybe a few restrictions on people are in order...not what the Na.zi want, but, like, _reasonable_ restrictions."
And maybe some of you need to f*cking stop and think about what you're doing. The results you are helping accomplish by being 'reasonable'. Because you are talking about things under a system that you know damn well will not be 'reasonable'.
He accidently admitted they were correct during the campaign when talking into a mic he didn’t realize was on.
Yeah.
I've talked about this before. At a certain point, someone's personality becomes clear. And no one here has mentioned this:
The part of the book that caused the most controversy concerns Trump’s divorce from his first wife, Ivana. Hurt obtained a copy of her sworn divorce deposition, from 1990, in which she stated that, the previous year, her husband had raped her in a fit of rage. In Hurt’s account, Trump was furious that a “scalp reduction” operation he’d undergone to eliminate a bald spot had been unexpectedly painful. Ivana had recommended the plastic surgeon. In retaliation, Hurt wrote, Trump yanked out a handful of his wife’s hair, and then forced himself on her sexually. Afterward, according to the book, she spent the night locked in a bedroom, crying; in the morning, Trump asked her, “with menacing casualness, ‘Does it hurt?’ ” Trump has denied both the rape allegation and the suggestion that he had a scalp-reduction procedure. Hurt said that the incident, which is detailed in Ivana’s deposition, was confirmed by two of her friends.
Now, Ivana since has said she didn't mean it was rape in a ' literal or criminal sense', which...firstly, it actually _does_ sound like that, but secondly...she not disputing the actual events, just asserting it is not legally rape. And I don't know if it is or not, it sounds like it legally is to _me_, but fundamentally, it doesn't matter.
What matters is that is how he treats women. He has an incredibly obvious pattern of treating women as prizes, at objects, as mere tokens. He's cheated on three wives, and, yes, that's not illegal and shouldn't be, but still. (And it's not the sort of cheating that might be understandable or sympathetic, like falling in love with someone else, a huge chunk of it is literally just prostitutes.)
Honestly, and people need to internalize this more: A huge chunk of the wealthy are functionally sociopaths. They have never experienced any consequences or even societal pushback for anything they've ever done. The only real difference is how much they think that in the open vs. keep it hid.
Oh, and to be clear, the lie was literally just based in bigotry, hoping people would have horrified reaction to the idea of trans people existing. It wasn't crouched in 'This is government spending out of control', or at least not just that.
It was 'Harris is for they/them', aka, explicitly anti-trans. It was part of the Trump campaign general attack that 'Harris does not loathe trans people', which is not, in fact, a policy complaint, but just outright fascism.
But again, none of this is actually 'changing positions' whatsoever. This is not some sort of new policy position where the Democrats have gone too far. Providing medical care to trans people is...like, a normal thing. A thing that has been around for decades. And when the government controls all medical care, like when someone is detained, the government provides that.
Trump did not attack actual policy positions that Democrats hold, he attacked the mere concept of 'not being bigotted against trans people'.This is _exactly why_, when some Democrats say 'We should have taken positions that we wouldn't get attacked on', others ask the very questions you think is unacceptable 'Whose human rights do you think we should have trampled?'
Because you're there saying 'Maybe the Democrats should have demanded trans people aren't allowed to have healthcare, that would make the Republicans like them.'
Fun fact: It wouldn't. They'd just make up something else to attack. 'Harris supports laws allowing trans people to drive cars to schools to kidnap your children!" because she didn't oppose a law allowing them to change sex markers on their driver's license.
So what is your theory, there, Jaybird? That prisoners should not get medical care?
This has been policy for healthcare while in Federal detention since 2016. Trump didn't do a single thing to alter it. It was the policy his entire administration.
This is exactly an example of what I'm talking about. Harris did not actually do _anything_. Gender-affirming care was added to various healthcare provided in prison in 2016, and that was it. She just said she wasn't changing it.
Meanwhile, John Ratcliffe, who I assume is the Pocahontas villain until proven otherwise, not only seems to believe in q-anon, but is a very ardent 'UFO-declassification' guy, is being appointed CIA director.
It sure is weird how we keep getting these UFO guys in the government, but it turns out they never release anything. Seriously, all we keep learning is that 'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena', as the military calls them, get observed all the fricking time, and that is, apparently, it. We literally had a hearing yesterday:
The conclusion always seems to be 'Yeah, we keep observing stuff flying in complete violation of know aircraft engineering or even the laws of physics, damned if we know, but we're pretty sure people aren't just hallucinating, and we're also pretty sure it's not aliens'. (If anyone wants my opinion, it's going to turn out there is some natural phenomenon that we literally do not know exists. For the longest time, we disbelieved in ball lighting too, and we still have no good explanation of what it is. It's going to be something like that.)
Anyway, John Ratcliffe, who in actual history was nowhere near as evil as Disney made him out to be in Pocahontas, was opposed by Democrats back in 2020 when he was nominated as Director of National Intelligence. Not cause of the UFO stuff, but because he had little experience in intelligence and was extremely partisan as a politician.
Congratulations q-anon, you managed to get a person under investigating for trafficking a minor across state lines made attorney general. That was your goal, right?
Note the actual question under the law is whether or not he actually _paid_ for her to cross state lines, which would be the crime. It does not appear disputed that he was 'dating' a 17-year-old. In 2019. At the age of 37. While he was in Congress, and married. Nor does it seem under dispute the sheer amount of prostitutes he's hired.
Maybe he'll finally get that pardon he keeps asking for.
Incidentally, everyone keeps talking about how the House Committee lost jurisdiction. Yeah, well...everyone knows that report is going to leak, right?
In case anyone is wondering how that happened, The Onion had a slightly lower bid, but it was literally the only bidder who would promise to dismantle the thing.
Everyone else trying to buy it was not only trying to continue to 'media outlet', but would have almost certainly hired Alex Jones, which was exactly what the Sandy Hook parents were trying to avoid.
Someone probably will still hire him to spew his gibberish, but at least the platform and brand is gone.
There are a lot of ways that the response can be worded… “Oh, who do you think we should have abandoned? Who do you think we should have denied were human? Whose human rights do you think we should have trampled?” is a light paraphrase of one I’ve seen in the wild.
It’s not really a question, is it? It’s pretty much an attack that attempts to get the person trying to figure out, specifically, *WHICH* mistakes were made/avoidable to shut the hell up and get back in line.
No, it's making people explicitly state what they are merely trying to imply. It sure weird how you think the discussion the Democrats are having should not involve people actually being honest about what they want changed.
And this is everyone's reminder that Democrats will never, ever, ever, stop being attacked on LGBTQ issues, which we know because Republicans literally just make things up about those issues. Republicans attacks are not based in the real world.
Because the major attack _I_ heard was 'The VP candidate required tampons in boy's bathrooms in school', which, it should be pointed out, is a lie.
Jaybird, why don't _you_ explain what bad positions drove away voters that changing positions on could be described as 'abandoning someone' that the Democrats took this time? Not 'What bad things exist in some abstract sense', but literally anything Harris or Walz said or did? It doesn't have to be limited to LGBTQ, although the demographics most suggested to be thrown under the bus.
Jaybird, something like 50% of stuff that was 'on the radar' about Democrats was utterly made up, and 50% of the stuff that was 'on the radar' about how Republicans would solve problems was made up, also.
The actual failure of this election is, oddly, the entity that the media is not talking about: The media.
The media normalized literally everything. And, yes, I'm aware that a huge segment of the population has warned off into insane media sources, but there is a certain point where the media should just have refused, bluntly, to repeat anything Trump was saying.
The problem is that Republicans understood how to work the media, so keep feeding stories that were often utter nonsense, and Democrats just...didn't. But the problem isn't Democrats, it is the media.
At a certain point it just has to become 'This man is utterly unacceptable as president' as sorta the lead to literally any story about him.
If you’re trying to claim that large numbers of people want to have their genitals surgically changed/removed then please post your sources.
When I say people want to exit their categories, I am not saying people wish to do anything about the physical attributes that other use to classify them. I mean they wish that people would not classify them that way.
There is a difference between 'physical characteristics that are observable', and 'entire structures of classifying people based on those characteristics'.
It really is astonishing how white cishet men people cannot grasp the ideas that we invented those categories, and a lot of those invented categories are used to harm people
Let me guess. Your blood type is B, isn't? I can tell, it's the sort of general selfish personality they have. Probably born in the year of the ox, too.
Gender is “arbitrary”? So if I decide I’m female I’ll lose my 6′ 8″ size and wouldn’t be a monster in women’s sports? How does that work exactly?
Are you asserting that females cannot be 6'8'? Weird hill to die on.
You do realize that all professional sports teams set their own rules, right, and the actual _lawmaking_ is almost entire about kids sports?
High school sports 'fairness' is not only completely random based on when kids hit puberty, but a good chunk of the trans kids are on blockers and hormones of their respective genders. Or, worse for athletic ability, _only_ blockers. And, and this feels really really important: Trans kids playing sports are a microscopic group of kids, often literally one or two kids. In an entire state.
You get told it's about adults, and meanwhile one trans 16-year old girl who has been taking blockers and just started taking estrogen and going through female puberty is trying to play girls volleyball in high school, and the state Republicans are essentially trying to pass genitalia inspections to stop it.
In 2020 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the anti-employment discrimination laws applied to trans
In 2023, Florida banned trans healthcare for several months. To be clear, I mean for adults.
I don't give a damn what happened in 2020. If anything, that makes it clear how hard and fast Republicans have gone after trans people.
The vast bulk of people have zero desire to “exit their category”.
Says the white straight cis man.
The vast majority of people have zero desire to _be_ any categories, because one of their categories is used to oppress them.
And, to be clear: There are not categories. All ways we have invented of dividing people up are both completely arbitrary and have been redefined or even invented from thin air over the lifetime of humanity, some of them startlingly late.
It seems reasonable to think trans-women shouldn’t be in female sports. Trying to claim that this is “fascist” is an effort to avoid having reasonable conversations.
It is amazing how many people here are still repeating things that were Republican talking points four years ago while the Republicans moved on denying health care to all trans people and started taking away their kids.
Wow, the very very first step of fascism, the first attack to dehumanize, sounded slightly reasonable to people who are not knowledgeable about the topic! Why are people complaining about Jewish art being taken out of museum, that has no impact on anything (Which even they admit!) and shouldn't we honor Germans more? And I am sure that is where it stops!
You should know better. Hell, the ads that are _currently_ being run against trans people go way past 'trans women in sports', we're at the point where the anti-trans campaigners do not even have to explain why trans people are bad, there is literally an ad out there merely associating 'they/them' with Harris.
Hint: When a political party has have already managed to create a negative implication against a class of people, and people who just _associate_ with those people, to the point they do not even have explain it, THEY ARE DOING A FASCISM.
The only slight consolation was that they seem somewhat early on these ads and the American people do not actually have this association and don't think trans issues are important, but that was only a consolation when they were not in power. Now, it's not, because they can both actually do harm to trans people and because they can create a media feedback loop that causes more and more anger at them.
As a left-leaning folk who disapproves of cozing up the Cheneys, that actually isn't the problem.
The problem is that things have been getting worse and worse for the average American, at first slowly. Then, thanks to covid, somewhat faster. Although no where near as fast as the media is pretending. This is the end result of decades of problems, not some sudden magical thing that happened under Biden. And a chunk of the problem is the wealthy realized they could screw people over more and blame it on Covid.
This is due almost entirely to the entire economy reorienting itself to operate solely for the benefit of the wealthy. Which, ultimately, is the fault of Republicans and Ronald Reagan, who set up a system where the wealthy are allowed to collect more and more money until they have all the money, although the wealthy didn't really amass enough money to start hijacking politics and screwing everyone over until sometime in the 90s.
Now, I know that was long and involved, but the point is, the American people are looking for a way out.
Democrats do not and have not offered a way out. The last useful thing they did that made thing better for the average person was Obamacare, and the only reason they did that is that both the health insurance and health care industry wanted it. They campaigned explicitly was about how they don't want to change anything, how Trump was a threat to the system, and how they were super-duper centrist and look, here's a bunch of Republicans who also didn't change anything. Vote for us, your life will continue to suck and we will do nothing about the root causes, in fact, we won't even _talk about_ the root causes because those people are our major donors.
The problem isn't that Democrats are too conservative in some abstract policy reason, it is because they are literally CONSERVATIVE in that they wish to conserve a system that is more and more broken for more and more Americans, because that is what they are paid large amounts of money to do.
Republicans meanwhile offered a way out, because fascism is _always_ a way out, and will always fix your problems, and if it doesn't, it at least tells you the problems are now known to be a specific group of people and you can two-minute hate on them once a day for causing all your problems.
Because if a person can live as their authentic self, then hierarchies can not be enforced.
Yup. It's extremely hard to enforce oppression against women if people are allowed to exit that category. (Not just 'enforce', it shows the entire thing as the nonsense it is.)
Fascists always classify. It's one of the reason Trump fell apart when running into a biracial person.
Here is John Kelly, swearing _under oath_, that Trump discussed having the IRS go after
John F. Kelly, who served as former President Donald J. Trump’s second White House chief of staff, said in a sworn statement that Mr. Trump had discussed having the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies investigate two F.B.I. officials involved in the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia. Mr. Kelly said that his recollection of Mr. Trump’s comments to him was based on notes that he had taken at the time in 2018. Mr. Kelly provided copies of his notes to lawyers for one of the F.B.I. officials, who made the sworn statement public in a court filing.
The Times’ report went on to note, “Mr. Kelly said he made clear to Mr. Trump that there were serious legal and ethical issues with what he wanted.” The then-president “regularly” made the demands anyway, leading Kelly to remind his boss what he wanted “was not just potentially illegal and immoral but also could blow back on him.”
That is a four-star Marine General swearing under oath that Trump will, in fact, go after civil servants, not just by firing but trying to have them investigated...and only being stopped by the adults in the room, who will not be there this time.
It is evidently the case that lying about trump being a Hitleresque mass murderer got donations and acclaim, but did not actually convince enough voters.
But it leaves everyone who bought the lie panicking right now.
Hey, look, it turns out Jaybird has read basically none of the insider accounts of the Trump administration and what the 'adults in the room' had to stop him from doing.
We _already know_ what Trump wants to do. It's not just that he tells us, it's that he literally had to be talked out of them or even _lied to_ as president to stop from doing them.
Here is four star Marine-General John Kelly, Trump's Chief of Staff: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/10/22/2024-elections-live-coverage-updates-analysis/john-kelly-donald-trump-fascist-00184999
Trump is “certainly an authoritarian” and “admires people who are dictators,” and meets the definition of a fascist, the former general said in the interview.
“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” said Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff from July 2017 to January 2019.
Kelly went on to say that Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.”
Here is a bunch of other people talking about that: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/25/never-trump-former-officials-back-kelly-warning-00185435
“We applaud General Kelly for highlighting in stark details the danger of a second Trump term. Like General Kelly, we did not take the decision to come forward lightly. We are all lifelong Republicans who served our country. However, there are moments in history where it becomes necessary to put country over party. This is one of those moments” the letter states. “Everyone should heed General Kelly’s warning.”
...
The letter was signed by Trump administration officials, including Kevin Carroll, former senior counselor to Kelly; former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews; former assistant secretary of homeland security Elizabeth Neumann; former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci; former chief of staff at the Dept. of Homeland Security Miles Taylor; former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham; former press secretary to the vice president Alyssa Farah Griffin; and former national security adviser to vice president Pence, Olivia Troye."
Why do you think all these people, who are mostly Republicans and apparently didn't have any problem working for Trump when hired, have started lying about him?
“If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form. And the question is what does it look like after.”
Some of us noticed this in 2016.
My only consolation is that a few of these media idiots are going to be harassed or even arrested by Trump.
You’re sitting here claiming it’s impossible to pick off voters when Trump/the GOP just picked off a bunch of voters.
...you do understand that there is no indication those are literally the same voters, right?
Moreover, I didn't say no one changed parties...I said they didn't do it based on the party trying to reach out to them, because, and this is important: The very small minority of people who flip parties are like 90% lunatics.
The remaining 10% are 'line in the sand' types that saw a party actually do something they think is complete unacceptable, and left the party, and thus are not going to be convinced to come back via some campaign rhetoric.
The most obvious examples being Never Trumpers, but I repeat what I said: There is no need to convince them of anything. Either they think Trump is so unacceptable in office they will vote for the Democrats anyway, or they just feel personally uncomfortable voting for him (and thus are someone who cares more about their own 'moral integrity' than the actual result) and thus will not be voting for Democrats regardless, which probably _also_ violates their personal morality.
I'm sure there is some very hypothetical, almost imaginary middle ground there that might be convinced with outreach, but it is _absolutely_ not worth any sort of outreach if it even _slightly_ depresses your existing voter turnout, because it risks pissing off millions of voters to get, like, two thousand of them...
Saying “you’re wrong to care about those things” was a bad plan, in my view.
No, it wasn't. Democrats should not be trying to get Trump votes. Such a very small minority of Republicans vote for the Democrat that it is pointless. This is true, and it will always be true.
And most 'undecided' are either people who are lying either because they think their choice makes them look bad, or that claiming it makes them look smart...or complete and utter morons who will decide who to vote on based on a completely random criteria.
Elections are not about convincing people to vote for you, period. That is, at most, maybe a 1% impact. 99% of the impact is convincing the people who will vote for you to show up and do that, and/or convincing the people who would vote against you not to show up. It is, entirely, turnout.
But that poll does explains exactly where Democrats failed. The Harris campaign didn't care about stuff that Democrats care about...except abortion. (Incidentally, every race that had abortion access on the ballot had it do _better_ than Harris, which implies some people are so idiotically informed they that voted to protect abortion access while re-electing the person who appointed the people who removed it.) They didn't often anything about health care (Except abortion access, and who knows how often that was the same issue.) or the economy (Except to point out Trump would be worse.)
This is, as I've pointed out a few times, not a campaign failure...it is a policy failure. The reason they did not focus on health care or the economy is they have nothing they are willing to do to make it better. Because anything that would make it meaningfully better would remove the amount of money that corporate America and billionaires are shoving at them.
Incidentally, in 2020, Joe Biden got approximately 6% of the registered Republican voters.
This year, with actual Republicans on stage, with Harris, her actively promising to put Republicans in the cabinet, making every outreach to peel Republicans away from Trump, and with both the coup attempt and the legal judgements against Trump...
Harris got 6% of registered Republican voters.
And lost 20 million Democratic voters that just wandered off somewhere and didn't bother to vote.
What could we possible make of this, going forward? I know, maybe the Democrats should move even _farther_ to the right and reject the radical left. Appeal to centrist Republicans who reject Trump _even harder_. GOTV for them. Bus them to the polls, if need be. If they try hard enough, go right enough, maybe they can get that number up to 7% by 2040!
What the hell are you talking about? Please explain how Trump's trade policies have helped literally anyone at any point, or how enacting tariffs is free trade?
And the voters are not actually pissed at inflation, despite the media framing it that way. They're pissed that wages have not followed inflation.
Which, of course, is because corporate interests have bought both parties, so they will do absolutely nothing to impede corporate interests shoveling money to the wealthy, as they have been since the '80s.
Nor will the media actually explain this or call it out, so we are left with enough Americans to vaguely think it is default of immigrants or corporate policies about Black people or something that we get fascism. (Which is actually is the exact same reason we got fascism last time.)
Edit: Also, people did not like the Trump economy. Like, at all. By the end it had fallen to pieces, although some of that was due to covid, but it already was not doing well. Unemployment more than tripled. That's why the memes are running around lying and showing covid gas prices, pretending that that means the economy was doing well. If the economy actually was doing well, they'd be showing graphs.
Rereading that, allow me to rephrase "And that is why we ping pong between corporatist interest Democrats who don’t do anything, and an insane criminal lunatic who doesn’t do anything." By appending 'to help people' to both halves.
Donald Trump does plenty of things. He will do plenty more. None of them will help the people in the slightest, and in fact some of them are going to seriously injure people in general, in addition to people in specific that either he or bigots dislike and have chosen to target.
But because he has lied, (because this is how fascism works), he has convinced enough American voters that targeting those specific groups are going to make their lives better.
That's how fascism always wins, because they are willing to lie about a solution to a problem that is real, and everyone else refuses to do anything about. (Sometimes the problem is literally unsolvable, but it wasn't here.)
On “The Four Stages of Post-election Cruelty”
Yes, Jaybird, organized persecution of trans people has progressed far enough that they can merely associate her mentioning a normal thing the government provides (medical care to prisoners, a thing the government has a legal, constitutional, and _moral_ requirement to provide) but involving icky trans people, and that fact causes a negative impact.
I repeat what I said: This is _exactly why_, when some Democrats say ‘We should have taken positions that we wouldn’t get attacked on’, others ask the very questions you think is unacceptable ‘Whose human rights do you think we should have trampled?’
The right, or at least Trumpism, has moved into actual, literal, fascism. And I will defend that statement at this point, I'm being not hyperbolic. One of the targets, one of the outgroups that fascism requires, have been decided to be trans people, and queer people in general, and a good chunk of people here will be forever damned that they keep 'asking questions' about trans issues, or demanding compromise.
There is no compromise, because you cannot compromise with fascists trying to eradicate people they don't like. They will never accept anything sort of totality, and they will just _lie_ about whatever position their opposition holds.
--
And the people who say things like 'Maybe trans people should stop asking for health care' (Like healthcare isn't a perfectly normal thing people need.) or 'Maybe trans people should stay out of sports' (Like sports are even vaguely the business of the government or important at all)...you're the Germans in 1934 who are saying 'Look, I don't agree with the Na.zis, and I don't agree with any violence, but there are a lot of Jews in the government, and a communist did burn down the Reichstag, and I'm just asking questions. Maybe a few restrictions on people are in order...not what the Na.zi want, but, like, _reasonable_ restrictions."
And maybe some of you need to f*cking stop and think about what you're doing. The results you are helping accomplish by being 'reasonable'. Because you are talking about things under a system that you know damn well will not be 'reasonable'.
"
You do indeed assume that. It's not true, but you do assume it.
On “He Got Away With It”
Yeah.
I've talked about this before. At a certain point, someone's personality becomes clear. And no one here has mentioned this:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/24/documenting-trumps-abuse-of-women
Now, Ivana since has said she didn't mean it was rape in a ' literal or criminal sense', which...firstly, it actually _does_ sound like that, but secondly...she not disputing the actual events, just asserting it is not legally rape. And I don't know if it is or not, it sounds like it legally is to _me_, but fundamentally, it doesn't matter.
What matters is that is how he treats women. He has an incredibly obvious pattern of treating women as prizes, at objects, as mere tokens. He's cheated on three wives, and, yes, that's not illegal and shouldn't be, but still. (And it's not the sort of cheating that might be understandable or sympathetic, like falling in love with someone else, a huge chunk of it is literally just prostitutes.)
Honestly, and people need to internalize this more: A huge chunk of the wealthy are functionally sociopaths. They have never experienced any consequences or even societal pushback for anything they've ever done. The only real difference is how much they think that in the open vs. keep it hid.
On “The Four Stages of Post-election Cruelty”
Oh, and to be clear, the lie was literally just based in bigotry, hoping people would have horrified reaction to the idea of trans people existing. It wasn't crouched in 'This is government spending out of control', or at least not just that.
It was 'Harris is for they/them', aka, explicitly anti-trans. It was part of the Trump campaign general attack that 'Harris does not loathe trans people', which is not, in fact, a policy complaint, but just outright fascism.
But again, none of this is actually 'changing positions' whatsoever. This is not some sort of new policy position where the Democrats have gone too far. Providing medical care to trans people is...like, a normal thing. A thing that has been around for decades. And when the government controls all medical care, like when someone is detained, the government provides that.
Trump did not attack actual policy positions that Democrats hold, he attacked the mere concept of 'not being bigotted against trans people'.This is _exactly why_, when some Democrats say 'We should have taken positions that we wouldn't get attacked on', others ask the very questions you think is unacceptable 'Whose human rights do you think we should have trampled?'
Because you're there saying 'Maybe the Democrats should have demanded trans people aren't allowed to have healthcare, that would make the Republicans like them.'
Fun fact: It wouldn't. They'd just make up something else to attack. 'Harris supports laws allowing trans people to drive cars to schools to kidnap your children!" because she didn't oppose a law allowing them to change sex markers on their driver's license.
"
So what is your theory, there, Jaybird? That prisoners should not get medical care?
This has been policy for healthcare while in Federal detention since 2016. Trump didn't do a single thing to alter it. It was the policy his entire administration.
This is exactly an example of what I'm talking about. Harris did not actually do _anything_. Gender-affirming care was added to various healthcare provided in prison in 2016, and that was it. She just said she wasn't changing it.
The right just _lied_ about what was going on.
On “Subject to Change: The Trump Cabinet So Far”
Meanwhile, John Ratcliffe, who I assume is the Pocahontas villain until proven otherwise, not only seems to believe in q-anon, but is a very ardent 'UFO-declassification' guy, is being appointed CIA director.
It sure is weird how we keep getting these UFO guys in the government, but it turns out they never release anything. Seriously, all we keep learning is that 'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena', as the military calls them, get observed all the fricking time, and that is, apparently, it. We literally had a hearing yesterday:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/amandakooser/2024/11/14/congressional-ufo-hearing-features-eye-opening-uap-claims/
The conclusion always seems to be 'Yeah, we keep observing stuff flying in complete violation of know aircraft engineering or even the laws of physics, damned if we know, but we're pretty sure people aren't just hallucinating, and we're also pretty sure it's not aliens'. (If anyone wants my opinion, it's going to turn out there is some natural phenomenon that we literally do not know exists. For the longest time, we disbelieved in ball lighting too, and we still have no good explanation of what it is. It's going to be something like that.)
Anyway, John Ratcliffe, who in actual history was nowhere near as evil as Disney made him out to be in Pocahontas, was opposed by Democrats back in 2020 when he was nominated as Director of National Intelligence. Not cause of the UFO stuff, but because he had little experience in intelligence and was extremely partisan as a politician.
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Congratulations q-anon, you managed to get a person under investigating for trafficking a minor across state lines made attorney general. That was your goal, right?
Note the actual question under the law is whether or not he actually _paid_ for her to cross state lines, which would be the crime. It does not appear disputed that he was 'dating' a 17-year-old. In 2019. At the age of 37. While he was in Congress, and married. Nor does it seem under dispute the sheer amount of prostitutes he's hired.
Maybe he'll finally get that pardon he keeps asking for.
Incidentally, everyone keeps talking about how the House Committee lost jurisdiction. Yeah, well...everyone knows that report is going to leak, right?
On “Not Satire: The Onion Buys Infowars with Help from Sandy Hook Families”
In case anyone is wondering how that happened, The Onion had a slightly lower bid, but it was literally the only bidder who would promise to dismantle the thing.
Everyone else trying to buy it was not only trying to continue to 'media outlet', but would have almost certainly hired Alex Jones, which was exactly what the Sandy Hook parents were trying to avoid.
Someone probably will still hire him to spew his gibberish, but at least the platform and brand is gone.
On “The Four Stages of Post-election Cruelty”
No, it's making people explicitly state what they are merely trying to imply. It sure weird how you think the discussion the Democrats are having should not involve people actually being honest about what they want changed.
And this is everyone's reminder that Democrats will never, ever, ever, stop being attacked on LGBTQ issues, which we know because Republicans literally just make things up about those issues. Republicans attacks are not based in the real world.
Because the major attack _I_ heard was 'The VP candidate required tampons in boy's bathrooms in school', which, it should be pointed out, is a lie.
Jaybird, why don't _you_ explain what bad positions drove away voters that changing positions on could be described as 'abandoning someone' that the Democrats took this time? Not 'What bad things exist in some abstract sense', but literally anything Harris or Walz said or did? It doesn't have to be limited to LGBTQ, although the demographics most suggested to be thrown under the bus.
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Jaybird, something like 50% of stuff that was 'on the radar' about Democrats was utterly made up, and 50% of the stuff that was 'on the radar' about how Republicans would solve problems was made up, also.
The actual failure of this election is, oddly, the entity that the media is not talking about: The media.
The media normalized literally everything. And, yes, I'm aware that a huge segment of the population has warned off into insane media sources, but there is a certain point where the media should just have refused, bluntly, to repeat anything Trump was saying.
The problem is that Republicans understood how to work the media, so keep feeding stories that were often utter nonsense, and Democrats just...didn't. But the problem isn't Democrats, it is the media.
At a certain point it just has to become 'This man is utterly unacceptable as president' as sorta the lead to literally any story about him.
On “Trumped”
When I say people want to exit their categories, I am not saying people wish to do anything about the physical attributes that other use to classify them. I mean they wish that people would not classify them that way.
There is a difference between 'physical characteristics that are observable', and 'entire structures of classifying people based on those characteristics'.
It really is astonishing how white cishet men people cannot grasp the ideas that we invented those categories, and a lot of those invented categories are used to harm people
Let me guess. Your blood type is B, isn't? I can tell, it's the sort of general selfish personality they have. Probably born in the year of the ox, too.
Are you asserting that females cannot be 6'8'? Weird hill to die on.
You do realize that all professional sports teams set their own rules, right, and the actual _lawmaking_ is almost entire about kids sports?
High school sports 'fairness' is not only completely random based on when kids hit puberty, but a good chunk of the trans kids are on blockers and hormones of their respective genders. Or, worse for athletic ability, _only_ blockers. And, and this feels really really important: Trans kids playing sports are a microscopic group of kids, often literally one or two kids. In an entire state.
You get told it's about adults, and meanwhile one trans 16-year old girl who has been taking blockers and just started taking estrogen and going through female puberty is trying to play girls volleyball in high school, and the state Republicans are essentially trying to pass genitalia inspections to stop it.
In 2023, Florida banned trans healthcare for several months. To be clear, I mean for adults.
I don't give a damn what happened in 2020. If anything, that makes it clear how hard and fast Republicans have gone after trans people.
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It's 'cishet'. One word.
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Says the white straight cis man.
The vast majority of people have zero desire to _be_ any categories, because one of their categories is used to oppress them.
And, to be clear: There are not categories. All ways we have invented of dividing people up are both completely arbitrary and have been redefined or even invented from thin air over the lifetime of humanity, some of them startlingly late.
It is amazing how many people here are still repeating things that were Republican talking points four years ago while the Republicans moved on denying health care to all trans people and started taking away their kids.
Wow, the very very first step of fascism, the first attack to dehumanize, sounded slightly reasonable to people who are not knowledgeable about the topic! Why are people complaining about Jewish art being taken out of museum, that has no impact on anything (Which even they admit!) and shouldn't we honor Germans more? And I am sure that is where it stops!
You should know better. Hell, the ads that are _currently_ being run against trans people go way past 'trans women in sports', we're at the point where the anti-trans campaigners do not even have to explain why trans people are bad, there is literally an ad out there merely associating 'they/them' with Harris.
Hint: When a political party has have already managed to create a negative implication against a class of people, and people who just _associate_ with those people, to the point they do not even have explain it, THEY ARE DOING A FASCISM.
The only slight consolation was that they seem somewhat early on these ads and the American people do not actually have this association and don't think trans issues are important, but that was only a consolation when they were not in power. Now, it's not, because they can both actually do harm to trans people and because they can create a media feedback loop that causes more and more anger at them.
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As a left-leaning folk who disapproves of cozing up the Cheneys, that actually isn't the problem.
The problem is that things have been getting worse and worse for the average American, at first slowly. Then, thanks to covid, somewhat faster. Although no where near as fast as the media is pretending. This is the end result of decades of problems, not some sudden magical thing that happened under Biden. And a chunk of the problem is the wealthy realized they could screw people over more and blame it on Covid.
This is due almost entirely to the entire economy reorienting itself to operate solely for the benefit of the wealthy. Which, ultimately, is the fault of Republicans and Ronald Reagan, who set up a system where the wealthy are allowed to collect more and more money until they have all the money, although the wealthy didn't really amass enough money to start hijacking politics and screwing everyone over until sometime in the 90s.
Now, I know that was long and involved, but the point is, the American people are looking for a way out.
Democrats do not and have not offered a way out. The last useful thing they did that made thing better for the average person was Obamacare, and the only reason they did that is that both the health insurance and health care industry wanted it. They campaigned explicitly was about how they don't want to change anything, how Trump was a threat to the system, and how they were super-duper centrist and look, here's a bunch of Republicans who also didn't change anything. Vote for us, your life will continue to suck and we will do nothing about the root causes, in fact, we won't even _talk about_ the root causes because those people are our major donors.
The problem isn't that Democrats are too conservative in some abstract policy reason, it is because they are literally CONSERVATIVE in that they wish to conserve a system that is more and more broken for more and more Americans, because that is what they are paid large amounts of money to do.
Republicans meanwhile offered a way out, because fascism is _always_ a way out, and will always fix your problems, and if it doesn't, it at least tells you the problems are now known to be a specific group of people and you can two-minute hate on them once a day for causing all your problems.
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Yup. It's extremely hard to enforce oppression against women if people are allowed to exit that category. (Not just 'enforce', it shows the entire thing as the nonsense it is.)
Fascists always classify. It's one of the reason Trump fell apart when running into a biracial person.
On “The Shepherds have a Credibility Problem”
Here is John Kelly, swearing _under oath_, that Trump discussed having the IRS go after
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/oath-john-kelly-raises-serious-allegations-trump-rcna93367
(Link to Maddow instead of the paywalled NYT.)
That is a four-star Marine General swearing under oath that Trump will, in fact, go after civil servants, not just by firing but trying to have them investigated...and only being stopped by the adults in the room, who will not be there this time.
On “History Was Made in 2024 Election, Now What?”
You would be.
Hey, question: Did you vote for Harris?
If so, why do you think you are the person the Democrats need to convince?
On “The Shepherds have a Credibility Problem”
Hey, look, it turns out Jaybird has read basically none of the insider accounts of the Trump administration and what the 'adults in the room' had to stop him from doing.
We _already know_ what Trump wants to do. It's not just that he tells us, it's that he literally had to be talked out of them or even _lied to_ as president to stop from doing them.
Here is four star Marine-General John Kelly, Trump's Chief of Staff: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/10/22/2024-elections-live-coverage-updates-analysis/john-kelly-donald-trump-fascist-00184999
Here is a bunch of other people talking about that: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/25/never-trump-former-officials-back-kelly-warning-00185435
Why do you think all these people, who are mostly Republicans and apparently didn't have any problem working for Trump when hired, have started lying about him?
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Some of us noticed this in 2016.
My only consolation is that a few of these media idiots are going to be harassed or even arrested by Trump.
On “History Was Made in 2024 Election, Now What?”
...you do understand that there is no indication those are literally the same voters, right?
Moreover, I didn't say no one changed parties...I said they didn't do it based on the party trying to reach out to them, because, and this is important: The very small minority of people who flip parties are like 90% lunatics.
The remaining 10% are 'line in the sand' types that saw a party actually do something they think is complete unacceptable, and left the party, and thus are not going to be convinced to come back via some campaign rhetoric.
The most obvious examples being Never Trumpers, but I repeat what I said: There is no need to convince them of anything. Either they think Trump is so unacceptable in office they will vote for the Democrats anyway, or they just feel personally uncomfortable voting for him (and thus are someone who cares more about their own 'moral integrity' than the actual result) and thus will not be voting for Democrats regardless, which probably _also_ violates their personal morality.
I'm sure there is some very hypothetical, almost imaginary middle ground there that might be convinced with outreach, but it is _absolutely_ not worth any sort of outreach if it even _slightly_ depresses your existing voter turnout, because it risks pissing off millions of voters to get, like, two thousand of them...
...which is part of what happened here.
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No, it wasn't. Democrats should not be trying to get Trump votes. Such a very small minority of Republicans vote for the Democrat that it is pointless. This is true, and it will always be true.
And most 'undecided' are either people who are lying either because they think their choice makes them look bad, or that claiming it makes them look smart...or complete and utter morons who will decide who to vote on based on a completely random criteria.
Elections are not about convincing people to vote for you, period. That is, at most, maybe a 1% impact. 99% of the impact is convincing the people who will vote for you to show up and do that, and/or convincing the people who would vote against you not to show up. It is, entirely, turnout.
But that poll does explains exactly where Democrats failed. The Harris campaign didn't care about stuff that Democrats care about...except abortion. (Incidentally, every race that had abortion access on the ballot had it do _better_ than Harris, which implies some people are so idiotically informed they that voted to protect abortion access while re-electing the person who appointed the people who removed it.) They didn't often anything about health care (Except abortion access, and who knows how often that was the same issue.) or the economy (Except to point out Trump would be worse.)
This is, as I've pointed out a few times, not a campaign failure...it is a policy failure. The reason they did not focus on health care or the economy is they have nothing they are willing to do to make it better. Because anything that would make it meaningfully better would remove the amount of money that corporate America and billionaires are shoving at them.
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Incidentally, in 2020, Joe Biden got approximately 6% of the registered Republican voters.
This year, with actual Republicans on stage, with Harris, her actively promising to put Republicans in the cabinet, making every outreach to peel Republicans away from Trump, and with both the coup attempt and the legal judgements against Trump...
Harris got 6% of registered Republican voters.
And lost 20 million Democratic voters that just wandered off somewhere and didn't bother to vote.
What could we possible make of this, going forward? I know, maybe the Democrats should move even _farther_ to the right and reject the radical left. Appeal to centrist Republicans who reject Trump _even harder_. GOTV for them. Bus them to the polls, if need be. If they try hard enough, go right enough, maybe they can get that number up to 7% by 2040!
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...new free trade deals? Bureaucracy reform?
What the hell are you talking about? Please explain how Trump's trade policies have helped literally anyone at any point, or how enacting tariffs is free trade?
And the voters are not actually pissed at inflation, despite the media framing it that way. They're pissed that wages have not followed inflation.
Which, of course, is because corporate interests have bought both parties, so they will do absolutely nothing to impede corporate interests shoveling money to the wealthy, as they have been since the '80s.
Nor will the media actually explain this or call it out, so we are left with enough Americans to vaguely think it is default of immigrants or corporate policies about Black people or something that we get fascism. (Which is actually is the exact same reason we got fascism last time.)
Edit: Also, people did not like the Trump economy. Like, at all. By the end it had fallen to pieces, although some of that was due to covid, but it already was not doing well. Unemployment more than tripled. That's why the memes are running around lying and showing covid gas prices, pretending that that means the economy was doing well. If the economy actually was doing well, they'd be showing graphs.
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Rereading that, allow me to rephrase "And that is why we ping pong between corporatist interest Democrats who don’t do anything, and an insane criminal lunatic who doesn’t do anything." By appending 'to help people' to both halves.
Donald Trump does plenty of things. He will do plenty more. None of them will help the people in the slightest, and in fact some of them are going to seriously injure people in general, in addition to people in specific that either he or bigots dislike and have chosen to target.
But because he has lied, (because this is how fascism works), he has convinced enough American voters that targeting those specific groups are going to make their lives better.
That's how fascism always wins, because they are willing to lie about a solution to a problem that is real, and everyone else refuses to do anything about. (Sometimes the problem is literally unsolvable, but it wasn't here.)
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Dude, he's literally already been convicted of dozens of state felonies. That doesn't magically go away cuz you win election.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.