I have zero social media exposure besides whatever gets so much attention that they cover it in a major newspaper ("brat", e.g.), so honestly I have no idea. I guess I'm basically a dodo at this point. My species is not long for this world, and I'll be the first to admit I'm hopelessly out of touch.

I know we're months away still, but one thing I find frustrating is that you just don't see political ads from the democrats that simply show clips of these conferences and interviews. The GOP has been running this ad in Michigan where they show Harris saying "The border is secure" super imposed over images of migrants coming in by the dozens. It's highly effective. The same should be cakewalk for the dems where you can literally just show Trump yelling about "ending voting" or "being a dictator on day 1" or Vance saying that women belong at home (never mind the fact that his very own wife is a successful lawyer--yet more evidence that he actually believes in nothing).

Democrats have a strong history of running the nice campaign under the assumption that people will see through the moron they're running against. But that strategy collapsed in 2000, 2004, and 2016. I don't know why they're so bad at elections, but they need to wake the fuck up and fast.

As an aside I think it's fairly interesting that pro-family policies have been gaining traction among the GOP. If they would wake up and realize there's no going back to 1950, there might be some room for progress and compromise there. Not at all hopeful about that, but it seems like there's some convergence on both side of the aisle that the status quo sucks. Though my personal belief is that the only pro family policy that could ever do anything to actually encourage families is to fix the housing crisis. To me that is the single biggest domestic policy issue out there and it gets virtually no play.

Sad what’s happened here. Same circle jerk as the rest of the internet.

You should avail yourself of some Cold War history. We came close to nuclear war in the 60s, as most people know, but also in the 80s. But for the calm thinking of leaders in the US and USSR, things could have differently. The fact that you prefer to be flip about the president’s primary job, CIC, is troubling to me.

Loooooooool. I’m talking about a gaping hole at the top of the military, for which nuclear war is the direst problem. Constitutionally, the president is the commander in chief. An absent cic is a constitutional crisis in and of itself. I think this place is letting its tds make it dumber by the minute.

No. You misunderstand my argument completely and probably willfully. I’m not arguing for Trump; I’m arguing against Biden. Not sure why I’m even replying, since I assume you’re just trolling me. The sooner Biden steps aside, the better. It’s inevitable at this point, so I can’t imagine what he’s waiting for. The fact that he can’t read the tea leaves makes my argument stronger, not weaker.

There is one and only one existential threat to America and it isn’t Donald Trump. It’s nuclear war. Full stop. I can’t fathom anyone being ok with a senile person being the ultimate cog in the nuclear chain of command. Horse race politics, for me, ends at war and nuclear war especially. Under no circumstances will I vote for a would-be nursing home patient to hold the nuclear codes. That has nothing to do with electability whatsoever. I’m 99% sure I’m not the only person who feels that way. He’s embarrassing himself and the country at this point. That Trump is a piece of garbage who gets darling treatment in the press is a totally separate issue and even if it were corrected overnight, not one that’s going to move the needle on Biden’s feebleness.

The mistake everyone is making is the assumption that the Roberts court is attempting to set precedent.

I'm not as sure as you are about that for two reasons. Firstly, they could have decided the case narrowly to simply say that Trump is immune. They didn't. They said The President is immune for any official act, then went on to define "official" so broadly as to make almost anything official in some conceivable way. And secondly, this dumb fucking "unitary executive" hypothesis has been kicking around for decades. Nixon himself wasn't the one who first opined that when the president does it, it's not illegal.

Largely, however, I agree with you that Roberts has gone out of his way to try to twist himself in knots to sound intellectual while basically holding the party line to the greatest extent possible. I think he'll go down as a great villain of 21 c. America. You expect that out of the other lackeys, but he tries to position himself as above the fray, and he's not fooling many people.

Here's a paradox that I can't get my head around, and I hope that necroptosis can weigh in if he's lurking around somewhere. If it's illegal for a soldier to disobey a legal order, and also illegal for a soldier to obey an illegal order ("I was just obeying orders" is never a legal defense, e.g.), then what happens when the commander-in-chief, who now by definition can't given an illegal order, orders his subordinate to torture a child to get a confession out of the parent, say?

I don't think Roberts thought this one through. It seems like, contrary to all available evidence, he just penciled in the maxim that the president always acts in good faith. Remarkable dense.

That poll actually shows the opposite of what the poster purports it to show. Trump’s highest average is against Biden, and though each of the other candidates is weaker in nominal terms than Biden, the “don’t know” is significantly wider. As the election approaches, those don’t knows will break dem if they’re given a decent candidate, trump’s approval ratings such as they are.

I agreed with you 100% until the day after the debate. The editorial boards of every major newspaper in the country, liberal and conservative, are urging him to step aside. That’s not nothing. I gone it even odds at this point.

He doesn't have dementia. He has age related cognitive decline, which isn't great either. I think he's going to last in the race until the first set of high quality, post-debate opinion polls come out. I think this actually might be a best case scenario for America. The behind-the-scenes fight right now should be Witmer v. Josh Shapiro, with no other serious contenders. Both upper midwest pragmatist governors who are very popular in relatively evenly dem-gop split states. Either would be formidable, assuming it's not too late to mount a serious campaign. I think Trump is more like America's Maduro--stupid and incompetent but with an authoritarian's disposition. But I don't like gambling America's future on a guy who probably isn't fit to be president now, let alone 4 years from now, when the vanquishment of America's Maduro is there for the taking with the right candidate.

Did you watch? I haven't been able to bring myself to watch a Trump debate since the infamous Clinton stalking debacle. And throwing Biden into the mix just doesn't increase my enthusiasm, believe it or not. The analysts this morning are pretty blah on Trump but down right killing Biden.

As in , do I think Whitmer would be a better candidate than Biden? I mean, I think marshmallows taste better than an old shoe. But I also think that an old shoe is what's for dinner, and that beats the shit out of cyanide. Whitmer will be a candidate in 2028, but I think it's engaging in wishful thinking to think there isn't a 98% chance Biden is the candidate, with a 2% chance that Harris is should Biden suffer some sort of medical emergency. I don't have the slightest clue how you'd dump her. Whitmer is great, and has done a very good job as the chief executive of my fair state, but we don't live at the end of the rainbow.

I'm talking about much smaller things than that. For example, overestimating the chances of harm from an MMR vaccine vs. underestimating the harm from texting while driving. Or never letting your kids go to the park by themselves vs. virtually unfettered access to digital devices. There's a whole mixed up world perceived vs. real harms. Maybe KB is correct that we've always been bad at risk assessment, but my sense is that the way in which were bad at his has morphed into something that looks like the tragedy of the commons on steroids.

Certainly in that environment it's a lot easier for bad actors to exploit people's fears for whatever gain they get out of it. But also a lot of leadership in this country has scored some nasty own goals since the pandemic that are inexcusable. There's a good line in a thing I posted this morning about suicides in the army where a soldier says how fucked up it is that the army preaches sacrificing the individual for the collective but then still fails the collective. I'm not into making predictions, but one I'm fairly certain of is that we're going to continue to experience a leadership gap for at least another 4 years and change.

On a more serious note, I think what covid exposed is that many decades of a fat and happy society have made it virtually impossible for the average person to assess risk. In a way, that's a good problem, because it points to the fact that things are safer now than they ever have been in the history of the world. But it has the giant downside of every tiny risk being perceived as existential.

Ha! Got your ass motherfucker. I knew the laser pin story was written just for you. That was a strategic reply.

Here be dragons

Edit: Knowing you as I do, I'm 99% sure that if it were ever proven beyond doubt that Hubski actively harmed children in unfathomable numbers, your reaction wouldn't be "Oh shit, we have to cover this up ASAP!"

Yeah but how many kids' lives did he save by making sure that they didn't end up retarded?

I didn’t say admirable. I said it’s “nice” to read an articulate human trying to mount a defense of policies I fundamentally disagree with. Frankly, the tariff thing, when articulated in this way, makes him sound like a left wing unionist, which is surprising. I truly believe that it’s in all of our best interests to try to understand positions we disagree with, and to me, there just aren’t ideas that are too dangerous to talk about. Trump articulates literally nothing, and neither do the Bannons and Millers of the world, so I thought it was very insightful to finally find an individual trying to make a case.

I found the post to basically be banal self-importance masquerading as profundity.

Yes, I think it's well worth a read. I wouldn't say that he convinced me of anything, but it's nice that someone is trying to make an intellectual case for tariffs and lack of support for Ukraine. Typically the GOP relies solely on id, not logic. Vance, whatever else anyone might think of him or his positions, is a very smart and logical human.

I'm not talking about his halting style and general inability to finish a sentence. I'm talking about his misuse of words, which is quite a bit newer. Like saying "Pelosi" when he means "Haley". Or just a "grahgrahgrah" when he means "Venezuela." This appears to be accelerating, and my guess is that it's due to underlying dementia (because it looks like budding aphasia). Natural age associated cognitive decline doesn't usually come with aphasia. It's also possible I'm merely seeing out of context video clips, and he's usually fine. Idle speculation is sort of the point of the internet, I guess.

That's encouraging to hear. Obviously, you run in circles that the rest of us can only imagine, so I would not pretend to have any insight on how Biden "actually" is. However, I would still go with the numbers and say there is a highly nonzero chance that he can't finish a term. At his age, there's an 8% chance of dying within a year and by the end of the term it increases to a 12% chance. Similarly, even if he's fine now, his chances of developing cognitive impairment accelerate exponentially each passing year. I find it downright hubristic to run for president at age 78 (a la Trump), let alone age 82. In the 70s, we derided the USSR as a gerontocracy, and Brezhnev died at 75!

For real if they want to neutralize the "he's old" attacks, all they have to do is run a series of ads that highlight Trump's obvious early stage dementia. The garbled speech, the replacing of names or objects by unrelated words, the rambling, unconnected thoughts...it's all part and parcel of a man whose gray matter is deteriorating quickly.

In a way, doing that would be an admission of how old and slow Uncle Joe is, but it's not like they're fooling anyone anyway. Just have to lean into the fact that when you're in a race, you're not racing an ideal. You're racing the other guy. So as long as you can say, "I'm shitty but he's worse," you will always have a point.And in many ways it would be a more honest and resonant point than trying to pretend he has any vim and vigor left in him.