I think you are the first person I've read that explicitly stated that she actually got around to answering the first question in her response to Trump.
The show I saw had a jerk with attitude hogging the mike and making perfectly cogent (deranged, sure, but his style of speaking keeps the momentum and the tone rolling, and it FEELS like he's onto something). I am guessing at least a few undecideds were goin" "huh...seems reasonable...I mean, sure, the pet feasting is out there, but NOBODY believes that shit, and it's kinda comforting that he's so concerned about our pets..."
On the other hand, there's Catwoman. If the cat ladies are the fearsome force the reps call out to deride (and they would not call them out if they were not concerned about it), those ladies now got a new champion.
I'll buy it. Retail. I'd also suggest that, as Trump continues to deteriorate in public over the next 7 weeks, less-than-ardent MAGAts and Repubs might, when the day comes, decide, "Fuck it," and stay home. Each of those would count as half a win.
OT: You really ought to check out the book "The Superior Person's Book of Words". It has 'rebarbative' and a lot others, like 'nidificate' with hilarious examples.
Not to focus on the polls, but my sense is that they are not able to factor in the explosion of new voter registration that started after Biden withdrew and just spiked again after the Taylor Swift endorsement. So unless I am mistaken, there is a real chance that the election will not actually be close.
This may be correct, but remember: there is only 1 vote that counts, in the Rube Goldberg Memorial Electoral College, so where those new voters are matters a hell of a lot.
Nope, there will be legal challenges. Any armed rebellion will be militia cowboys who cant keep their guns in their pants. A blowout will simply be spun as blatant CHEATING, obvious ballot box stuffing. I expect various types of dustups and ratfucking around polling places and ballot counting to justify claims of irregularities and concerns for "voting integrity".
It would be true, if there were some political sea-change ready to happen, that the polls would miss it. Just as literally the entire intelligence community and whole national security establishment were caught flat-footed by the fall of the Wall and the collapse of the USSR.
Like the man said, if a thing can't go on forever eventually it will stop. The descent of one of two major Parties into barking-mad reality-denying delusion is, you would hope, a thing that can't go on forever.
I’m having trouble interpreting the Google trends post—aside from a surge of interest in abortion, which is not a winning issue for trump, what else do you infer about changing attitudes (and potential voting patterns)?
It's not about change (the two searches were only a couple of weeks apart) so much as attitudes the way they are. The Trump-Biden debate didn't inspire viewers to think about anything in particular as they were watching, but a variety of topics; in the Trump-Harris debate, they got interested hugely in a single issue.
Biden has been a good Democrat on the subject of abortion, if not as passionate as that great Catholic Mario Cuomo (Biden really hates using the word), but voters didn't see a reason in that debate to see candidates as engaged with abortion as an issue; Biden didn't make them think about it. They didn't see an important difference between the candidates. Harris got them to understand that it was dead serious to the politicians, and that's why they started googling it. And learning, hopefully, that their vote will make a difference.
Putting it really simply, Biden didn't convince (young) voters that anything could happen on the subject of abortion; Harris convinced them that there was really something going on and their vote might matter. They started googling because they understood that they were citizens.
I think Biden was abd maybe still is massively conflicted about it, and the fact he came down firmly on the side of bodily autonomy is a big deal – it is one of the things I really admire him for. But I agree his public statements about it were less than inspiring.
Re: the age gap link, I want to register the idea that Harris (born late 64) is Gen X, not Boomer. High school class of 81, college 85, graduated law school and entered the workforce in 89 -- I don't think that aligns her with the Woodstock kids more than it aligns her with my Erasure/Depeche Mode/Pixies era. And officially, the book Generations, by Strauss & Howe, which is the source, as far as I know, of the modern conception of generations, gives the Xer birth years as 61-81.
Ah, I think of 61 and 62 as Boomer years, but 64 certainly not, that was startling. The persuasive part of Munger's piece isn't the use of the generation names, which he acknowledges are weak, but the statement of distances. I wonder if the generation names are even less relevant to the Black community than whites. Her music playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5uDxWcRvjzkUtjakgRUN3V is kind of conservative on the soul side and kind of current on the hip hop side, but almost entirely Black, that goes along with adolescence and college in Oakland and DC, but I don't know how it works in generation terms. I feel like the 80s are almost missing from the list, like she's actually uniting Boomer and Millennial qualities and skipping over Gen X. But she did become a cop, which is a pretty Gen X idea?
Point taken for sure on the gap itself. And you raise a great point about communities. I read Generations in 1993, at a more innocent age and in an era when it was still possible (for me) to swallow without considering "But how much is this analysis dependent on its whiteness?"
As for the playlist -- thanks for the link. Happy to see Janelle Monae, and that her Prince choice is Kiss -- but no surprises. Nothing idiosyncratic. "Conservative" is a good word.
Which does seem to be a Gen X trait -- though I would switch it to "pragmatic." And becoming a cop is a ruthlessly pragmatic choice if you are a politically ambitious woman out of law school in 1989.
I was sorry to see no Marvin Gaye, who's come to seem so central to political consciousness, Boomer but advanced, and also virtually no purely fun dance music, knowing that dancing is a thing for her, and if there was anything good about the 80s, dancing was it. "Pragmatic" is an excellent choice of words, explaining some problems without negativity.
Yeah, the "debate" turned out as good as it possibly could have, with Trump having his equivalent of the Lonesome Rhodes hot mic incident babbling about eating pets. Might move the needle, but not to the naked eye. I was hoping Harris would neg Trump to a meltdown, and she did with skill and grace. Brava.
The Liz 'n Dick endorsement was nice, but its of a piece with the "establishmemt" Republican party's response to Trump's siezure of their party: Somebody Else needs to make this problem go away. A very CEO-like behavior. Too bad no one, and I mean no one, in the Republican party is listening to them. I wondered if, as a corporation, the GOP would do a post-mortem on lessons learned after Somebody Else deals with their turbulent priest, but I remembered they did that after Romney's (IIRC) loss, and promptly threw it away. They have a more fundamental problem, and I see no sign they are even aware of it, let alone have a plan for a policy to address it.
Agreed to all points with one caveat: I was raised by Northeastern Republicans, who are in fact very aware of the problem. But you are right that they are utterly without a plan to fix it. An absolute blowout loss in November might enable some change, better than Romney's close-ish loss could. But who knows. They have not got a lot of room to maneuver. Turns out the formation of a vast rightwing media empire dedicated to keeping their base orgiastic is the single worst thing that has happened to the GOP Establishment since FDR.
I'm talking about the bureaucracy of the Republican party, the functionaries and drones who make the wheels go round, as well,as the leaders like Cheney, McConnell et al. Something really weird happened when Trump took over the Rephblican party. Nobody fought back. The ones who publicly opposed Trump got primaried out. The establishment either did nothing to support them or were powerless to stop it. Either way, its an amazing display of incompetence and impotency. The ruthless and unstoppable machine of Gingrich, Rove, DeLay, Cheney folded like a cheap suit. Just what the hell happened?
They got shook real bad when one of their top fancy dillweeds lost his primary. In Virginia. Real big deal. Cantor? [wikipedia check for details...] Cantor! And oops, he was Majority Leader, how did I forget that. Outspent his Tea Party rival 40 to 1 but that was not enough to overcome the upstart's rightwing radio support. This was 2014 -- sounds about right for triggering panic and collapse, right after the Romney Autopsy Report said it's time to turn Mexicans into white people like we did the Italians, right before they saw salvation coming down the Golden Escalator.
Sad to say, but all I kept thinking was ‘it doesn’t matter what she says. The content doesn’t matter. She needs to own him, and make him look weak.’
That’s where we are now. Maybe it’s always been a wee bit true about leadership roles like the presidency in a country like this, with our culture.
But that’s ALL it is now. That’s the ONLY way to stop someone like Trump. Rational argument, facts, revealing he’s a werewolf who eats little children—this can do nothing.
Being a saint? Jesus or Zeus or the goddess Kali or Elvis descends from the heavens and endorses you, etc.? Also will mean nothing.
I thought she would try but this was a masterful job. It was like Perry Mason cracking a defendant on the stand. It was beautiful, like watching Ali take down Sonny Liston. One, two, and bam.
Perhaps this means I am shallow, and have left politics behind but are we even doing that right now?
The whole rational arguments thing is why the thrilla in...uhmm – where was it again? was emphatically NOT a debate. But everyone knows that except the folks whose job it is to slap labels on things. I think that is why Catwoman relied so heavily on the 'no going back – only going forward' bit, and the Facial Expressions O'Doom.
I think you are the first person I've read that explicitly stated that she actually got around to answering the first question in her response to Trump.
The secret of my success is reading the transcript.
Counterpoint:
The show I saw had a jerk with attitude hogging the mike and making perfectly cogent (deranged, sure, but his style of speaking keeps the momentum and the tone rolling, and it FEELS like he's onto something). I am guessing at least a few undecideds were goin" "huh...seems reasonable...I mean, sure, the pet feasting is out there, but NOBODY believes that shit, and it's kinda comforting that he's so concerned about our pets..."
On the other hand, there's Catwoman. If the cat ladies are the fearsome force the reps call out to deride (and they would not call them out if they were not concerned about it), those ladies now got a new champion.
I'll buy it. Retail. I'd also suggest that, as Trump continues to deteriorate in public over the next 7 weeks, less-than-ardent MAGAts and Repubs might, when the day comes, decide, "Fuck it," and stay home. Each of those would count as half a win.
Good stuff.
Side note: thanks for the new2me word "rebarbative." That's a keeper.
OT: You really ought to check out the book "The Superior Person's Book of Words". It has 'rebarbative' and a lot others, like 'nidificate' with hilarious examples.
Not to focus on the polls, but my sense is that they are not able to factor in the explosion of new voter registration that started after Biden withdrew and just spiked again after the Taylor Swift endorsement. So unless I am mistaken, there is a real chance that the election will not actually be close.
Correct. But, again, even when they do the new registrations won't be included as Likely Voters, because they don't meet the criteria.
This may be correct, but remember: there is only 1 vote that counts, in the Rube Goldberg Memorial Electoral College, so where those new voters are matters a hell of a lot.
That's part of the story: particularly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin
Yeah, but "blowout" means "decided far beyond the margins of ratfucking."
The only resistance left at that point is armed rebellion, and I don't picture the Rs being able to pull that off. Not in the name of TFG.
Nope, there will be legal challenges. Any armed rebellion will be militia cowboys who cant keep their guns in their pants. A blowout will simply be spun as blatant CHEATING, obvious ballot box stuffing. I expect various types of dustups and ratfucking around polling places and ballot counting to justify claims of irregularities and concerns for "voting integrity".
> could be a blowout
There is this from a couple of weeks ago https://crookedtimber.org/2024/08/28/the-electoral-politics-of-age-gaps/
And then this: note the "before" and "after" maps of hotly-searched topics https://googletrends.abovo.co/trends-noreply@google.com/125641
It would be true, if there were some political sea-change ready to happen, that the polls would miss it. Just as literally the entire intelligence community and whole national security establishment were caught flat-footed by the fall of the Wall and the collapse of the USSR.
Like the man said, if a thing can't go on forever eventually it will stop. The descent of one of two major Parties into barking-mad reality-denying delusion is, you would hope, a thing that can't go on forever.
That trends map got a lot of play on TV and it really seems conclusive. The CT post is great.
I’m having trouble interpreting the Google trends post—aside from a surge of interest in abortion, which is not a winning issue for trump, what else do you infer about changing attitudes (and potential voting patterns)?
It's not about change (the two searches were only a couple of weeks apart) so much as attitudes the way they are. The Trump-Biden debate didn't inspire viewers to think about anything in particular as they were watching, but a variety of topics; in the Trump-Harris debate, they got interested hugely in a single issue.
Biden has been a good Democrat on the subject of abortion, if not as passionate as that great Catholic Mario Cuomo (Biden really hates using the word), but voters didn't see a reason in that debate to see candidates as engaged with abortion as an issue; Biden didn't make them think about it. They didn't see an important difference between the candidates. Harris got them to understand that it was dead serious to the politicians, and that's why they started googling it. And learning, hopefully, that their vote will make a difference.
Putting it really simply, Biden didn't convince (young) voters that anything could happen on the subject of abortion; Harris convinced them that there was really something going on and their vote might matter. They started googling because they understood that they were citizens.
That makes a lot of sense—I really hope it augurs well for November!
Here's hoping
I think Biden was abd maybe still is massively conflicted about it, and the fact he came down firmly on the side of bodily autonomy is a big deal – it is one of the things I really admire him for. But I agree his public statements about it were less than inspiring.
Re: the age gap link, I want to register the idea that Harris (born late 64) is Gen X, not Boomer. High school class of 81, college 85, graduated law school and entered the workforce in 89 -- I don't think that aligns her with the Woodstock kids more than it aligns her with my Erasure/Depeche Mode/Pixies era. And officially, the book Generations, by Strauss & Howe, which is the source, as far as I know, of the modern conception of generations, gives the Xer birth years as 61-81.
Ah, I think of 61 and 62 as Boomer years, but 64 certainly not, that was startling. The persuasive part of Munger's piece isn't the use of the generation names, which he acknowledges are weak, but the statement of distances. I wonder if the generation names are even less relevant to the Black community than whites. Her music playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5uDxWcRvjzkUtjakgRUN3V is kind of conservative on the soul side and kind of current on the hip hop side, but almost entirely Black, that goes along with adolescence and college in Oakland and DC, but I don't know how it works in generation terms. I feel like the 80s are almost missing from the list, like she's actually uniting Boomer and Millennial qualities and skipping over Gen X. But she did become a cop, which is a pretty Gen X idea?
Point taken for sure on the gap itself. And you raise a great point about communities. I read Generations in 1993, at a more innocent age and in an era when it was still possible (for me) to swallow without considering "But how much is this analysis dependent on its whiteness?"
As for the playlist -- thanks for the link. Happy to see Janelle Monae, and that her Prince choice is Kiss -- but no surprises. Nothing idiosyncratic. "Conservative" is a good word.
Which does seem to be a Gen X trait -- though I would switch it to "pragmatic." And becoming a cop is a ruthlessly pragmatic choice if you are a politically ambitious woman out of law school in 1989.
I was sorry to see no Marvin Gaye, who's come to seem so central to political consciousness, Boomer but advanced, and also virtually no purely fun dance music, knowing that dancing is a thing for her, and if there was anything good about the 80s, dancing was it. "Pragmatic" is an excellent choice of words, explaining some problems without negativity.
Yeah, the "debate" turned out as good as it possibly could have, with Trump having his equivalent of the Lonesome Rhodes hot mic incident babbling about eating pets. Might move the needle, but not to the naked eye. I was hoping Harris would neg Trump to a meltdown, and she did with skill and grace. Brava.
The Liz 'n Dick endorsement was nice, but its of a piece with the "establishmemt" Republican party's response to Trump's siezure of their party: Somebody Else needs to make this problem go away. A very CEO-like behavior. Too bad no one, and I mean no one, in the Republican party is listening to them. I wondered if, as a corporation, the GOP would do a post-mortem on lessons learned after Somebody Else deals with their turbulent priest, but I remembered they did that after Romney's (IIRC) loss, and promptly threw it away. They have a more fundamental problem, and I see no sign they are even aware of it, let alone have a plan for a policy to address it.
Agreed to all points with one caveat: I was raised by Northeastern Republicans, who are in fact very aware of the problem. But you are right that they are utterly without a plan to fix it. An absolute blowout loss in November might enable some change, better than Romney's close-ish loss could. But who knows. They have not got a lot of room to maneuver. Turns out the formation of a vast rightwing media empire dedicated to keeping their base orgiastic is the single worst thing that has happened to the GOP Establishment since FDR.
I'm talking about the bureaucracy of the Republican party, the functionaries and drones who make the wheels go round, as well,as the leaders like Cheney, McConnell et al. Something really weird happened when Trump took over the Rephblican party. Nobody fought back. The ones who publicly opposed Trump got primaried out. The establishment either did nothing to support them or were powerless to stop it. Either way, its an amazing display of incompetence and impotency. The ruthless and unstoppable machine of Gingrich, Rove, DeLay, Cheney folded like a cheap suit. Just what the hell happened?
They got shook real bad when one of their top fancy dillweeds lost his primary. In Virginia. Real big deal. Cantor? [wikipedia check for details...] Cantor! And oops, he was Majority Leader, how did I forget that. Outspent his Tea Party rival 40 to 1 but that was not enough to overcome the upstart's rightwing radio support. This was 2014 -- sounds about right for triggering panic and collapse, right after the Romney Autopsy Report said it's time to turn Mexicans into white people like we did the Italians, right before they saw salvation coming down the Golden Escalator.
Sad to say, but all I kept thinking was ‘it doesn’t matter what she says. The content doesn’t matter. She needs to own him, and make him look weak.’
That’s where we are now. Maybe it’s always been a wee bit true about leadership roles like the presidency in a country like this, with our culture.
But that’s ALL it is now. That’s the ONLY way to stop someone like Trump. Rational argument, facts, revealing he’s a werewolf who eats little children—this can do nothing.
Being a saint? Jesus or Zeus or the goddess Kali or Elvis descends from the heavens and endorses you, etc.? Also will mean nothing.
I thought she would try but this was a masterful job. It was like Perry Mason cracking a defendant on the stand. It was beautiful, like watching Ali take down Sonny Liston. One, two, and bam.
Perhaps this means I am shallow, and have left politics behind but are we even doing that right now?
The whole rational arguments thing is why the thrilla in...uhmm – where was it again? was emphatically NOT a debate. But everyone knows that except the folks whose job it is to slap labels on things. I think that is why Catwoman relied so heavily on the 'no going back – only going forward' bit, and the Facial Expressions O'Doom.
Too bad it was not 'Nashvilla' The thrilla in Nashvilla sounds really good.
You can't really debate someone like whatshisface.