I actually agree that Biden’s performance was a big problem. Also, the polls are feckin useless, but seeing the relative change that happened because of some event is actually like the one thing they can do pretty well. If you remember the middle school science chart of accuracy vs. precision, they have dogshit accuracy which was off by an average of 16 percentage points when I investigated it for some recent elections, but against all odds they actually are precise.

So, that said: Here’s an overview of recent polling.

• Trump’s polls really did drop by quite a few points after he was convicted. The same outlets freaking the fuck out over Biden’s YouGov polling dropping from 42/42 to now 40/42, didn’t say a goddamned word about Trump’s “debacle” of being convicted of etc etc when his polls dropped by more than that; in fact they wrote the exact opposite story.
• The massive tanking of support which was predicted did not materialize. IDK what’s up with this NYT poll, but what the fuck, just look at the other ones. He dropped a couple percentage points. It’s not real good but it’s actually a lot less than I expected given how bad the debate was.
• All the other Democratic possibilities are worse. The issue actually isn’t Biden. The issue is that the news misrepresents reality so aggressively and mendaciously that people can’t figure out whether it’s a better idea to take home a cat that’s got some health problems, or a rabid dog. That’s the root of the whole “Michelle Obama” story – I think they were looking desperately for some story to write that wasn’t “but Biden is still better than every other alternative except Kamala Harris who he’s 2 points behind, and we can’t write about her being good because she’s a realistic replacement and writing good things about her might actually create good things for the Democrats and I’ll get in trouble with my boss.”

I am beginning to share Trump’s hatred for the media

The quote leaves out the best part.

people have cast doubt over the quality of Telegram’s encryption, given that the company uses its own proprietary encryption algorithm, created by Durov’s brother

That was exactly my point, yes

Sure, keep pretending this is a purely objective and data driven choice you reached purely for reasons of trying to help the Democrats. You can point to whatever polls you want to to help in that endeavor. I will not stop you.

Actual quote:

The Vanity Fair article also features Eliza Cooney, a former part-time babysitter who worked for Kennedy between 1998 and 1999, alleging that he groped her in his kitchen. Kennedy declined to directly acknowledge the sexual assault accusation at first, instead dismissing “the other allegations” as part of a “very, very rambunctious youth.”

“I’ve said this from the beginning. I am not a church boy. I am not running like that. I said … I had a very, very rambunctious youth. I said in my announcement speech that I have … so many skeletons in my closet, that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world,” Kennedy said, adding, “Vanity Fair is recycling 30-year-old stories, and I, you know, am not gonna comment on the details of any of them.”

When asked directly whether he denied sexually assaulting Cooney, Kennedy repeated, “I’m not going to comment on it.”

This comes right after he directly and at length denied the allegations that he ate part of a dog.

Also, this part of his very, very rambunctious youth happened (allegedly) when he was 45 and had several children.

Oh so they have dropped Cornel West and now this is the new thing for unrealistic alternatives to Biden

Dude, fuckin Jon Stewart

If you’re gonna float some weird outsider person as the alternative to Biden, float the guy who would clean up the fuckin election left handed and might well not do too bad a job running the country afterward, either

Good fuckin luck with that

Rail lives in that weird category like rural mail or power service (or, for that matter, highways) – you need to provide it if you want your country to be a civilized place, but it’s real real hard to make it available at a reasonable price and still turn a profit.

Turns out the answer was government, all along…

I’m just saying most left people I know who want to reign in the excesses of US hegemony care about US military adventures in the Middle East, or interventions in Central America, or immigration policy, or neoliberal trade restrictions against weaker economic powers… it’s highly unusual for the second thing on the list to be this particular European military alliance that is highly consensual and pretty productive for everyone who’s a part of it, and which is targeted almost entirely (now that it’s not the late 1990s anymore) at one particular big geopolitical power that they don’t have any particular love for any more than they do for the US. If we were talking about reigning them in back when they were bombing the fuck out of the former Yugoslavia, then yeah I wouldn’t bat an eye at it, but… I’m not saying it’s impossible that someone from the left managed to authentically arrive at the conclusion that out of all the possible awful things the US does on the world stage, NATO’s the urgent problem that needs to be torn down. But I think in comparison to the other obvious explanation, it seems a little implausible, quite honestly.

I learned today that Cornel West thinks the world would be safer without NATO. I won’t say that’s the only geopolitical opinion he felt strongly enough about to issue a press release about, but I had to go six months back to find another one, which makes a total of two that I’m aware of.

“Let’s not support Israel while they kill Palestinians,” of course, is honestly a pretty sensible and congruous number one… “why NATO is bad” and Ukraine, on the other hand, is a very surprising and unusual one to be number 2.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what the right move here is. It’s a shitty situation. “How Democracies Die” talks about it in quite a bit of detail, but basically, in the unfolding collapse of a democracy, there’s a terrible temptation to start eroding democratic norms “in kind” in response to their eroding from the fascist side, but this is a mistake. You have to keep fighting on the tilted table without trying to tilt it back, because eroding the norms of behavior plays right into the fascists’ hands and those democratic standards are horrifyingly hard to get back once you’ve broken the seal.

But, that being said, keeping in mind that this is satire to make a point: I don’t think Biden should have Trump assassinated, or anybody. I do think that it would be a little more directly on the nose if he, as an official act, had Seal Team 6 ambush all the justices that voted for this (as an official act of course), take them with hoods over their heads and in ziptie cuffs to an undisclosed location, and then put up on YouTube the video of someone asking them a few questions in a bare concrete room in that undisclosed location, requesting that they clarify that this is really what they meant. Sort of bring some reality to what is the door they are trying to open, on a personal level, to them. Because I am 100% serious when I say that that is 100% very literally the door they have chosen to open. Sort of a “Let’s close this door back up tight, right brother? Unless you are sure you want to open it? Really, like really for real sure with no backsies?”

Saying that it’s okay if one group of people that someone tried to wipe out, does whatever they want, because of course they’re the victims after all, is exactly how we got to this situation where Israel is creating on Earth a for-real biblical apocalypse and people are trying to defend their right to do so.

Here is his more complete statement on it.

Two things can both be concerning

When one side is being violent and racist against innocent people and then some other people start being violent and racist against innocent people on the “other side” to counterbalance, that’s not a calm or welcoming development for anyone concerned

Judging by the number of people who showed up at the Stormy Daniels trial the army is pretty understrength.

I won’t say they are not dangerous but I think there’s like a couple thousand of them that are actually ready to go to war at this stage, which if it doesn’t grow, is nowhere near enough

I think Godwin’s Law died out around the time the actual Nazis came back. It’s actually sort of difficult to talk about some elements of politics and media in the present day without referring to the historical parallels, and one particular parallel is absolutely significantly more parallel than the others.

But you don’t have to justify to me, man. You can abandon the conversation at any point you feel that that’s what you want to do. All the best.

I didn’t even know about this

I watched one of his speeches at random just to see what the guy was about and TL;DR I wasn’t impressed and I would not be at all surprised to learn that the Republicans are trying to trick leftists into getting behind him. But I hadn’t heard that he also dislikes NATO. That seems like a weirdly specific and incongruous stance for him to take, given how extraordinarily nonspecific was a lot of the stuff he was saying when I watched him.

Yeah. Those guys I’m fine with. I was around in the 90s, man; you don’t have to tell me that the Democrats don’t have my back.

My point is that that subset doesn’t spend all their time on political forums picking on the DNC. Their time on the internet in my experience is spent in anarchist / activist forums or just on other, non political things; their not caring about electoral politics is a lot more universal and they don’t get all amped up talking about it or want to spend all their time on it (and specifically spend all their time on criticisms of only one of the parties, a lot of which are sort of made up and weird if you look at them closely.)

Stop climate change, stop killing Palestinians, economic justice for working people

There are various strategies you could use for any of the three, with various levels of timeframe involved and chance of success and all, but “let Trump come to power” is not a real good solution to any of them, to me. “Stop supporting the Democrats until they suddenly decide to start supporting them” also seems weird to me and unlikely to succeed. People have been not caring about politics (with every righteous reason) for quite a while now, and it doesn’t seem to have made the politics or the level of leftism progress in the equation any higher, to me.

What, you mean those guys that looked at Bernie Sanders and Gavin Newsom and Cory Booker, and said naw we want the guy with the crazy hair who is absolutely guaranteed to be unacceptable to the American electorate, to be the spokesman of the Left and specifically in this presidential election and we want people to take the world’s most bizarre strategy on his behalf which will NOT cause him to win or advance any leftist cause but MIGHT get Trump elected and destroy any large number of leftist causes

And, also, are totally uninterested in any leftist causes more strategic or logical than this weird and counterproductive single quixotic stand in this general election

You mean those guys WEREN’T trying to win the election for leftist causes, like they said they were?

That’s nuts man