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I predict everything will be fine and usher in a new American golden age. Piss tape
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| # ¿ Dec 9, 2025 17:22 |
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It's horrifying to me that millions of Americans simply do not inhabit a fact-based reality. Their relatives die around them and they trust the carnival barker because he tells confidently them what they want to hear. Even when it comes out unambiguously from his own mouth that he's lying to them. It's not "oh, these folks have different policy preferences that they've arrived at through well-reasoned thought;" it's, "these folks will trust any loud crank who will cynically feed their fears and worst impulses." This feels like like being at a social event and hearing some slovenly wackjob loudly proclaim he fucks his dog, only for half the crowd to start nodding knowingly and clapping him on the back. These fucks just live in a reality that is completely at odds with mine and they're dangerous.
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Lol, just checked my heart rate since I started following reporting five hours ago and it's spiked from my usual average of 45 BPM to 75. Stress is dumb.
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Welp, Trump got up on TV and accused "somebody" of trying to steal the election from him. It is a profoundly dire time for American democracy.
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2020: Biden wins and somehow managed to get Trump to go. GOP wins the Senate. 2021: The Covid recession finally hits. Voters blame Biden. 2022: The GOP takes the House. Biden is stymied at every turn. Any new Supreme Court openings locked shut by the Senate. 2024: Trump is uncontested in the GOP primary. He wins the presidential election with a blowout legislative victory. Supreme Court shifts 7-2. Then 8-1.
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:This kind of thing is legitimately unhealthy to do to yourself and you should stop. While I want to think that a different Dem candidate would have done better, I still think this election is more indicative of how pervasive the rot in the American electorate is. They're on a completely different plane of reality such that we're now stuck hoping that conservative news media and political leaders finally refuse to indulge Trump's incipient authoritarianism. poo poo's hosed.
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If we can get through all the counting without a violent chud attack on ballot counters, I'll be slightly less pessimistic about the future of this country. Slightly.
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I'm glad that the presser was generic inane BS rather than batshit, "we start bombing in 5 minutes", explicit incitement to violence.
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Milo and POTUS posted:These types aren't half as brave as they like to jack themselves raw over
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I'm not going to truly believe we're past the worst of the danger zone until Biden sits in the Oval Office. The GOP is ramping up its "THE DEMONRATS ARE STEALING THE ELECTION" rhetoric and folks are treating it as them just being sore losers that will come to nothing. There's a non-zero chance that the Republicans talk themselves into taking steps that would tear the country apart. They're already telling their voters that Democrats are the ones actively doing so, so rallying their base to the "defense of the republic" is not outside the realm of possibility, unthinkable through it may be.
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PeterCat posted:Not term limits, but age limits. You can't be in the If we can accept that folks under 25 broadly aren't fit to assume a seat in the House, we sure as gently caress can assume that the average person over 70 is on the road to cognitive decline and simply lacks the mental agility to respond to new and changing circumstances required by just about any high pressure job.
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I've been giving the Biden campaign the benefit of the doubt that he's minimally healthy enough to take office for another four years, but this debate is disabusing me of that trust. Trump's also spouting absolute non-sequitur nonsense, but he's doing so with vitality.
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I hope they invent cryosleep soon so I can skip this part of the timeline¹ ¹ which part precisely? *gestures vaguely at the general environs*
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Yeah, there's a distinct difference between a flubbed debate caused by bad prep and misspeaking versus voters taking away that the candidate fundamentally won't be up to the demands of the office for another four years.
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Pine Cone Jones posted:i will take a corpse over trump There's a handful of pundits I follow on Bluesky who are so weirdly pro-Biden it ends up hurting the argument for him. There are a lot of decent, if debatable arguments in favor of staying the course. "Concerns about Biden's performance in the debate are nothing but mass hysteria," though? That's just outright gaslighting and devastating to credibility. The chuds and the NYT absolutely are cynically fueling the fire and that's abhorrent. But we can't just pretend that voters won't be put off by Biden's manifest shortcomings (polls do show a dip in Biden's already poor numbers), nor just whine that they should be voting against authoritarianism anyway. They should! But the argument needs to be that American democracy faces this unprecedented threat and our candidate, whoever that is, is eager and ready to go to bat for America.
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Even given that a president technically needn't be mentally agile or even all there to get by fine in office, what matters for November is what voters think or can be persuaded of. Are too many going to stay home, naively or selfishly uninspired by the need to defeat authoritarianism alone? I don't even solidly come down on the replacement side. It's just direly important not to contribute to a willfully overoptimistic echo chamber that refuses to entertain electoral realities, lest we blunder into another stupid "it's her turn!" loss when the stakes are even higher. None of us are going to be deciding things, but y'all are probably going to be engaging one way or another with undecided dumb-dumbs who need to be persuaded to the ballot box.
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:I'm not sure how someone comes back with younger folks after enthusiastically enforcing drug crimes this century. Harris is a dead end, there are politicians who haven't put thousands of people in prison over pot. Add in that she or another candidate would have the chance to break, even if only marginally, with Biden on other sore spots (Israel's genocide jumps out), there's some chance of regaining ground. All of which needs to be balanced against the cost of changing horses, of course. But better to do so sooner than too late.
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A number of the pundits and regular folks expressing concern are also vocally anti-Trump. While the NYT's takes feel more like a vendetta against Biden, a lot of the talk is from people who want to defeat Trump, but have concerns since the debate that Biden isn't the best one for the task. And we can obviously rightly complain about the broader media's ludicrous weighing of Biden's age as equivalent to (or even more important than) Trump's brokenrained authoritarianism, I just don't know that it's going to achieve much and the complaints then unnecessarily get extended to the group in the first paragraph.
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Eh, I'm inclined toward the "swap in Kamala" camp, but the Putin bit at least looked like an admissible brain fart that he recovered from effectively immediately. https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1811533805829689460
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ded posted:why don't the people calling for biden to drop out instead call for convicted felon & sexual assaulter + treasonous document thief trump to drop out And sure, there's fuckwits in the media who are unduly downplaying Trump's abject unfitness in favor of highlighting Biden's own shortcomings. That's reprehensible! But it's not the whole of the skepticism toward continuing Biden's candidacy.
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ded posted:trump is a convicted felon, convicted sexual assaulter, stole more classified information than that idiot air force kid. any single one of these things would have people calling for biden to drop out, if it was him that did these things Whether Biden is the best candidate to beat him, however, is a completely different debate that isn't in any way refuted by pointing at Trump. The only thing pointing at Trump is good for is reminding everyone that we need to coalesce around the strongest candidate to beat him. That may be Biden! But his performance in the campaign thus far has a lot of people questioning this.
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McNally posted:No, he really shouldn't. I'm not wild about opening that can of worms up. There's a reason why nobody's been prosecuted for treason since the end of World War II. Emotionally? The man directed an attack against Congress and broke the country's tradition of a peaceful transfer of power, with only incompetence and laziness saving the country from a much worse scenario.
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Funniest result would be Trump starting to talk about doing gun control.
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Stultus Maximus posted:Biden wasn't kidding when he talked about "the elite" being against him. They're intentionally sabotaging him because a Trump presidency isn't as bad to these fucks than the donor wallets closing. The reason why this is still in the news is because the centrist Democrats won't let it fade. 1) I don't understand the exact motive you're attributing to the elites/donors for "sabotaging" Biden. 2) Complaining chiefly about it being in the news to reject the idea of swapping out Biden isn't too perspective: whether Biden should drop out is best based on an alternative's hypothetical improved likelihood to beat Trump. While talking about it further in the media does itself further degrade perceptions of Biden, complaining about that exclusively reads like a way to sidestep concerns about electability. Of course, no one has a genuinely good measure for any of the likelihoods involved, so it's become a screaming match.
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Doubleposting because it seems the Trump campaign has kicked Hogan off the speaker schedule over this: https://x.com/bidenswins/status/1814033177855263059?s=46
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Cugel the Clever posted:Doubleposting because it seems the Trump campaign has kicked Hogan off the speaker schedule over this
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Wombot posted:None of the Democrats saying he should resign has even a hint of a plan of what to do afterwards, they're all just freaking each other out. This needs to end in one direction or another ASAP to clear the runway for the campaign.
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Yeah, it baffles me that some people leaned so hard into the concern being a complete fabrication. But whatever. I'm sure they'll back Harris to the hilt since their pushback was, presumably, founded in having the best candidate to beat Trump.
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They're still trying to hit the ground running on the Harris campaign, but they've at least swapped out (one instance of) Biden's name on the donation page: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/social-bfp-july-2024-v2 Still has "$46" as a cutesy donation option. I went ahead with $47. For the first time in months, I'm actually feeling excited to donate and volunteer rather than just desperate and resigned to doing so.
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Kith posted:frankly i'm just happy that there's not going to be any more BIDEN OLD coverage anymore Weirdly, I've seen a couple voices that are upset that Biden is stepping aside concur with this bad line of reasoning.
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Stultus Maximus posted:...WTF Barry? What are you doing? I get we've all been conditioned to assume the worst and get upset about it by a couple decades of social media poisoning, but it doesn't hurt to withhold judgement until there's some actual action taken one way or another.
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I'll add the caveat that I'm perplexed AOC and Bernie haven't come out with endorsements for Harris yet. Wasn't the main thrust of their argument that Democrats must align on the candidate to defeat Trump, just that they thought Biden was best positioned over an alternative? AOC in particular called out party elites as trying to circumvent Harris. Surely the best way she can push back on that possibility now is through an immediate endorsement?
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:It's only been six hours.
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Love to see it!
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Trump is complaining that Biden's COVID announcement on Friday was fake and, for once, I don't think it's entirely conspiratorial to suspect that it was actually just misdirection to give Biden time to firm things up. Trump then complains in the next sentence that this somehow makes Biden a threat to democracy. How a president choosing not to run again does this is left to the readers' imagination.
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Platystemon posted:It would be one thing to say that he was isolating “out of an abundance of caution”, but it’s quite another to have the president’s physician sign multiple letters about his treatment, his condition, and the specific strain of the virus he’s dealing with. ![]() spacetoaster posted:Dude was a liberal democrat most of his life.
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Stultus Maximus posted:Sometimes, and this is one of those times, I feel good about being old and out of touch.
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Nystral posted:The “Harris Honeymoon” effect. Hopefully they settle higher than Joe but I don’t think they’ll remain this high until November. I believe that most voters are still in the imprinting stage of the Harris candidacy, which will end eventually as they get to know her better and where she stands on various issues, and therefore result in shedding some voters as a result.
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| # ¿ Dec 9, 2025 17:22 |
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Apathetic Medic posted:I said this to you before, but he's only delivered on approx. 30% of his promises. Your choice to ignore that. For another, measuring this in percentages is nonsensical, as if one delivered policy is weighted equally to any other. Is the huge win of getting America out of Afghanistan balanced out by the stalled agenda to deliver broadband Internet to rural communities? Depends on your priorities, but anyone with a brain is going to put the former ahead of the latter. Apathetic Medic posted:The idea that America is actually a one-party state is not a new idea. Noam Chomsky, Christopher Hitchens, and Julius Nyerere are all quoted for saying as much.
Cugel the Clever fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Jul 27, 2024 |
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