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Signifyin(g)Monkey last won the day on September 5 2023
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Beshear maybe, Newsom has a bunch of skeletons in his closet from the lockdown era and the mantle of California doesn’t appeal to swing voters in Middle America the way it did in the age of Reagan. The problem is timing—Biden would have had to step down, and then giving Harris the shaft would probably tank the black vote. Win or lose, we need some new blood after the 2024 elections, though. Provided Trump doesn’t manage to rig all the elections after that, should he get back into office.
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Just occurred to me that I wanted to post this article, not only to illustrate that the de facto suspension of democracy is certainly a distinct possibility even in an ‘advanced’ Western country, but in case anyone ever encounters another poster—here or elsewhere—minimizing the threat of Trump, and needs a good article that outlines an example of someone like him succeeding in their anti-democratic campaigns, in a place not named ‘Russia’. Also an interesting read even if you already know a little bit about Orban. How Viktor Orbán Wins | Journal of Democracy WWW.JOURNALOFDEMOCRACY.ORG The case of Hungary shows how autocrats can rig elections legally, using legislative majorities to change the law and neutralize the opposition at every turn, no matter what...
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Joe Biden might be impeached, lol
Signifyin(g)Monkey replied to b_m_b_m_b_m's topic in The Political Re-Education Camp
If you posit that impeachment has become just another campaign strategy, then it makes perfect sense. Republican voters by and large will not care whether the impeachment succeeds or fails, they will assume Biden's guilt regardless and feel energized; and swing voters are so buffeted by competing sources of information portraying entirely different realities that they won't know what to think, and just go with the prevailing anti-establishment political sentiment and say "Yeah I don't know the details but they're all corrupt so he probably did something naughty." I wouldn't be surprised to see the impeachment process become a recurring staple of campaign season. -
So, in other election news: my advice to anyone who thinks polling isn't a totally broken science and has some knowledge of historical precedents in polling trends is...avert your eyes, unless the prospect of living under Orbanian soft fascism and the hellscape of Project 2025 gives you the warm fuzzies. Because right now many of the most recent post-SOTU polls that are dropping show Biden's approval rating at an all-time low--even as views of the economy are improving--and Trump ahead in Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Yes, there's close to seven months to go; yes, they are a snapshot of public opinion right now, and not communiques from Delphi predicting the future; yes, people might not be paying attention yet. But no incumbent in the poll era has ever come back from deficits like this, and neither Biden nor Trump are unknown quantities, so a major makeover is a taller order than it would be were they fresh faces. So, if you're trying to brew up some copium with polling data, seek other means, because the ingredients at your disposal are pretty terrible. You've got things like "maybe the coming election will break with historical precedent", "maybe polling is a defunct way to measure public opinion", "hey the midterms worked out better than we thought". But "hey Biden's gonna poll well because he's running against a convicted rapist who's also guilty of fraud who also tried to overturn the results of a presidential election and also has a publicly available plan to create a right-wing authoritarian state" is not a viable ingredient at the moment--it's just a reason to feel like an alien in your own country. Because when polled about half of the country says "Hey that rapist doesn't sound so bad, maybe he'll make my groceries less expensive."
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State of the Union - March 7th 9pm EST
Signifyin(g)Monkey replied to Brian's topic in The Political Re-Education Camp
Yeah that's more or less my take, too. I don't think it will stop people from registering concern with his age in polls, but it'll reassure the average voter that he's not senile. It also did a good job of making overtures to all the party factions and voter blocs he's going to need to turn out. There was a little bit for both the centrist and the progressive wings of the party, he leaned into women's issues, and he at least acknowledged the concerns about the conflict in Gaza and backed a two-state solution to bring democrats split on that issue back into the fold. I think the best hope we have is that we'll see more of this from him, and that Trump will engage in his usual lunacy, so that over the course of the final leg of the campaign swing voters will ultimately be convinced that it's a better idea to vote for the boring-but-not-crazy grandpa over the completely insane grandpa. -
Not so much cool with it as resigned to the fact that there’s nothing we can really do about it at this point, except probably make it worse. Regardless, I would argue that you’re perhaps overlooking a key dynamic here, which is that Hamas is an accomplice to the IDF in this genocide. They and Bibi (and various other enabling parties, like the U.S.) are interconnected parts of the same genocidal system. The genocide ends when the system gets reformed, and fundamentally both Hamas and the Israeli political and military establishment must play an equal part in that. I just don’t think blaming one head on the hydra more than another for the hydra’s depredations is the right way to think about the beast’s behavior. But I realize it’s not the most popular take.
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You forgot Hamas. Let's not be coy here--there is no belligerent party in this conflict that is not being shitty. Israel has no self-restraint, the US is enabling them, and Hamas is trying to maximize the casualty count for recruiting purposes. (after having provoked Israel in the first place with their own murderous rampage) I really wish the US would just wash its hands of the whole damn conflict and leave the region to self-fund its fruitless genocidal circular firing squad, but, ya know, geopolitics and the MIC...
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I think the case against the realpolitik "They're gonna do it to us anyway so we might as well do it to them" argument rests less on the idea that 'playing by the rules' will prevent Republicans from trying to pull 'dirty tricks' than on the idea that it will radicalize the party (and thence its 'dirty tricks) a bit less. Or at least a bit slower. (IMO, in the current news environment, it's going to continue to radicalize regardless, the question is how quickly and at what scale) The problem is you're playing a game of escalation against an opponent who has way less scruples than you. Trying to out-escalate them won't work when there are lines they are willing to cross that you aren't. You can't win a shouting match with your crazy schizophrenic uncle--you have to try and just pacify him instead, so that he'll still be insane, but not insane enough to fly into a blind rage and beat you to death. And I just feel like this quickly gets us into batshit crazy territory like every red state passing laws that bar anyone who supports a women's choice to have an abortion from being on their primary ballot, making it functionally impossible for the Dems to win an election, or something along those lines. Stuff that risks pushing us into some kind of Bosnian War-type situation. (To be clear, though, yes, I'd say he's probably guilty of insurrection)
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I know this could go in a sports-related forum, but this is a pretty big deal in terms of some key political issues, including to what extent college athletics should pay its players, whether it can really continue to call itself ‘college’ athletics at all, and the general ethical quandaries of mixing big money sports with academic institutions given Americans’ perceptions about rising college costs. Plus my football team is about to become even more irrelevant and I’m already getting ready to miss ‘the good old days’. Federal judge blocks NCAA from enforcing NIL rules THEATHLETIC.COM The ruling leaves the NCAA's NIL rules in flux until the end of the lawsuit brought against the organization by Tennessee and Virginia.
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This type of thing was going to happen eventually—moral panics targeting marginalized groups always have to rack up body counts before people on the fence realize just how dumb they’re being. The question is how many people will get burned at the stake before Salem —erm, I mean America—wakes the fuck up. Most important lesson in ‘chud solidarity 101’: if you say it, it’s true, as long as it supports chudworld, because what chud is actually going to take the time to figure out you’re lying—or care, for that matter?
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True story, a friend of mine on my son’s travel ball team was talking about how she wished she had more cash every month to put into her portfolio and I jokingly told her, “Just run for president. There’s so much money in it you could retire in two years.” She said she doesn’t know much about politics and couldn’t imagine writing stump speeches, and I assured her that as long as she could find a pissed off group of people to exploit, the former is definitely not a requirement and the latter can be done by ChatGPT.