Oh, this is WAY worse than 2016.
Before, people said that Biden was fine. Now, they’re saying, “There’s just no way to change, so we have to accept it.”
Bullshit. This is supposed to be a democracy, and every volunteer and staffer and voter and activist and voter needs to rattle the bars of the cage that the Democratic party is trying to put us in. Do. Not. Let. Biden. Do this to us.
I think you’re out of touch.
Fascism isn’t unpopular. It’s very popular when people are feeling desperate.
I keep hearing people say stuff like this: He can’t win! He’s so fascist! He can’t win, Biden did such a good job if you actually look at the facts!
That’s not how elections work. People vote based on what they think will satisfy their interests, and a lot voters don’t see any reason to vote for Biden, and so they’ll stay home. People don’t need to vote for Trump for Trump to win. They just need to give in, and Biden is a “give in” machine. He’s poison to voter hope or enthusiasm, and he’s going to lose if he doesn’t get off the ticket.
If we want to take the threat of Trump seriously, no more hiding our heads in the sand.
Unfortunately, this is not in touch with the reality of our situation.
I find people, when trying to cope with the hard truth that Biden is going to lose, revert to talking about how much he SHOULD win.
He should. He’s been a pretty good president (a genocide not withstanding).
That’s not really relevant. Because if he loses, we are likely to lose our democracy. And currently, he’s going to lose.
He is losing in the polls. He has been losing in the polls and the swing states for the entire election. At some point, this needs to change, or we’re going to watch Trump get reelected. And last night made clear that as long as he is the candidate, this isn’t going to change. When he applied all his effort to proving he could win the election he failed spectacularly.
I don’t just mean flubbing lines. I mean he lost complete control of the narrative. He demonstrated that when trying his absolute hardest, he cannot reliably explain to voters why the vote for him. That isn’t a debate problem. That’s a fundamental candidate problem that doesn’t appear fixable (except with a new candidate).
If he were winning, at least by a little, we could pretend that maybe that’s not a big deal. But he’s not. He is losing. He has been losing the entire campaign, and if he doesn’t step aside, the election result will be the same as every time pollsters have asked in the last year:
President Donald Trump.
No more “it’s not that bad”. This debate is a clear synopsis of the campaign until now, and the outcome in November. If this debate “isn’t that bad”, you might as well say losing is not that bad. (It is. It really is.)
This is why they should’ve had a primary.
We could’ve watched Biden collapse months ago while figuring out who is actually fit to run a good campaign. Now we’re going to have to go through it the hard way, because they tried to hide from the obvious for about the last 8 months.
That’s true, but I don’t think they can do that with Biden at the top of the ticket. He’s spoiled goods.
I’m not a Democrat. I left and joined the Green Party. I’m that crazy lefty. But even I can readily concede that I’d like democrats to win, and I think they could with someone like Elizabeth Warren. Or Cory Booker.
I’m not demanding Bernie or AOC or that Ro Khana be the nominee. But don’t act like there aren’t a few Democrats who have credibly taken a stand once or twice in their career for the greater good. They aren’t the majority, but they’re not so rare as you couldn’t find one.
We don’t have much control over this, frankly. But if we have any, I say we use it.
My personal attitude is that although I will concede that it is possible for Biden to win, if we don’t want to have to hope for a prayer, the only way things get better is if we all pop the bubble that Biden and his supporters are in that they can just ignore reality and hope for the best.
It has to be so clear to the Democratic party that not only are they likely to lose this election (and obviously with it, democracy), but they’re going to lose their jobs. No one who works in the election industrial complex is going to keep getting invited to cocktail parties and get hired on for whatever Potempkin election follows this one if Trump wins. No LARPing that they’re “the resistance!” in their endless fundraising emails while they enjoy being in the minority FOREVER. Rattle the fucking cage. Make it clear we blame them for this nonsense, and will continue to assign them the blame for choosing to run a failing candidate in a time of crisis because no one wanted to be the one to speak up and suggest doing anything else.
People keep getting mad when I criticize Biden, as if doing so is helping Trump win. My take: NOT doing so is helping Trump win. Protest this guy like our lives depend on him dropping out of the race at the convention. (They might).
I shouldn’t bother responding to this, but I have to point out that this weird assumption that scholars of Christianity are all Christian partisans seems pretty similar to people who say that climatologists are all biased in favor of a global warming hoax.
You don’t think anyone goes into studying a field to challenge the orthodoxy? That’s the fastest way to get famous. Even if the rest of your field hates you, you can make an incredibly lucrative career out of being “the outsider”. I literally linked to a collection of experts who agree with you.
If you don’t believe the experts, I guess it’s fine. But it’s weird when people use expertise on a subject as proof of bias to discredit expertise. It’s just such a silly thing to do.
I didn’t say which side I come down on. I just said that there is lots of information with plenty of high quality citations.
I’m really happy that everyone is a winner.
It’s weird how many people in this thread are vaguely debating the validity of the historical research into this question when one person has posted a link to a well cited article on this very very heavily studied subject.
There’s even a link to a well cited article examining the skepticism of the historicity of Jesus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory
I don’t feel compelled to argue an interpretation. The facts are well documented and their interpretations by experts available. What anyone chooses to do with these are of no real concern to me.
I think maybe execs and investors might feel it’s all the same, but if you’re a project manager for cloud infrastructure for enterprise services or you’ve been working for years on releasing a new component of Bing search that you think is a real gamechanger and some muckity-muck at the top says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that anymore: a property manager that’s owned by a private equity partner of one of our big investors wants the chatbot that schedules apartment viewings in Huntsville to be more flirty, so go massage the prompts to make it convincingly laugh at bad jokes,’ some of those folks are liable to start grumbling that this isn’t the role that they were pitched when they took this job.
This is very sensible. Especially when people think of pollution as a local problem that harms their kids’ health.
Thanks. I hope you get some use from it!
Ultimately, I really hope this just clicks with some people. I feel like there is a huge well of potential here, and if some better game developer took this idea and ran with it, I’d be thrilled just to have these ideas seeing larger audiences. I really think this is a fantastically fun setting to play in.
The game’s core manual is on Itch (https://fully-automated-rpg.itch.io/fully-automated-solarpunk-rpg). I haven’t uploaded the playable adventures yet, though they’re available on our website, where you can download them for free without an account.
I’ll add them to itch eventually.
Also, we just released the third adventure of the four-part starter campaign: https://slrpnk.net/post/10660226
I’ll cross post it here, but I need to wait until Wednesday to keep it under 1 per week.
Oh, I see. Thank you for the clarification.
I think you could argue this before the passage of the Nation State Law of 2018. But now it’s enshrined in law that the state exists to privilege Jews specifically and selectively. That’s really putting it all in black and white.
Also I get asked about why I didn’t criticize China or Russia or Iran etc, and the reasons are simple:
Hold on a sec: self determination is always within the context of recognizing the right of self determination of other groups and the basic human rights of everyone involved.
Also, Israel already has millions of Palestinian citizens. And all of these people deserve a say in what the resulting arrangement looks like.
A two state solution is one possibility, but there is no strict requirement that it is the only or best way to serve the needs of those involved.
This meme is bad.
if you look closely, you’ll notice that there’s no real joke. Israel and Nazi Germany should date. That’s a shit tier joke. It’s relying on edginess too hope paper over that there’s no real humor.
from a political commentary perspective, it’s awful. We have a colonial state founded by people who have experienced a collective tragedy that they then allowed to justify displacement of an indigenous population, followed by decades of alliance with Western imperialism and a slide to the hard right, with lots of delusion and gas lightning. And we have an aggrieved former great power looking to expand over neighbors while killing of undesirable immigrants. Yeah, two genocides. But they’re materially different in terms of approach, and the groups pictured hate each other. It’s like you know there’s atrocities, and you know Jews are involved, and that’s kind of the end of your insight but you really wanted to make a meme anyway.
Find something interesting to say.
Also, free Gaza, release the hostages, lock up Netanyahu and all the rest, etc etc
I have good news: It exists! http://retrographer.org/
A lot of them are unrecognizable, but here’s an example of a good one: http://retrographer.org/photos/4215
The bad news is that’s a bit limited. It was the senior project of a CMU student in 2010. It only exists for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you wanted to make one for another city, though, I think you could contact the creator, ask for the code, and then recruit people to get a ton of photos from another city’s historical institutions, and then crowdsource geotagging them (which is what the guy did).
I am here to gently wake you up.
Biden has been losing the whole time, pretty badly. I listened to Pod Save America to get their read, and one of them pointed out that predicted election outcomes can change in one of two ways: a major event can force a big shift, or you can rise or fall slowly over time. Tonight showed that neither is coming for Biden. At his best possible opportunity, he didn’t under perform, he made it far worse. The theory that he could slowly gain ground with media appearances is now popped.
Biden is a nice guy, but he’s experiencing a pretty normal cognitive decline, and voters aren’t going to magically come around to him when they’ve been telling pollsters for months that he’s going to lose.
That isn’t going to change unless the nominee changes. You’re right that this isn’t the end for Biden. But sadly, that’s because it’s actually been over for a long time. It’s time to pick up the pieces and begin the overdue work of fielding a competitive nominee.