I just want to nip this line of thought real quick. Policies and candidates matter, convincing voters about your positions all the time (not just during an election) matters, meeting voters where they are and having conversations matters.

Trump basically proved this.

Harris out raised Trump almost 2 to 1. Harris had an army of volunteers and the biggest ground operation in history. Trump improved his margins over 2020 anyway. Most importantly, Trump did better in states and counties where neither campaign was spending any resources, like New Jersey, or another really good example is Dade County which swung over 40 points in Trump’s favor since 2016, with neither party campaigning there.

A big reason was what Biden and Democrats did, not during the election, but in the three years before the election. They passed some moderate policies and utterly failed to sell those policies to voters as things that will help the average person. The average voter if asked what Biden did for them would give you a blank stare, and that’s on Biden and Democrats failing to 1) act boldly and 2) communicate their policy vision and how it helps people.

Meanwhile Republicans everyday beat on the drum of inflation and immigration and crime, whether or not those issues were real people felt like they were real. And most importantly people saw these messages, because Republicans are able to get in front of regular voters, to get into the national consciousness. Sometimes by going to spaces that aren’t blatantly right wing, but right wing friendly, like Rogan, sometimes just being loud and causing controversy that trickles into other spaces. When moderate spaces ridicule the latest right wing controversy, that also gets their message in front of regular people, who may not agree outright but will at least consider it. The average voter rolled their eyes at Trump saying immigrants are eating pets, but just by seeing the outrage gave some consideration to immigration and whether it’s a problem, including a cultural problem, and considered and thought about the Trump campaigns larger argument. And it cost Trump zero dollars to get a week or more of coverage about what he considers the problems with immigration just by making an outlandish claim.

Money is helpful, but it’s not even close to everything. We need Democrats with real liberal policies, getting in front of voters to explain what they mean to their lives, to talk about money in politics and corporate greed and wage stagnation and the transfer of wealth from the working class to the oligarchs, to talk about what is sure to be new epic levels of government corruption and incompetence that hurts real people. And Democrats need to do that everyday, not just in the months before an election, and need to do that in spaces where people are, not just on cable news.

The “Run Up” podcast had an episode following the Working Families Party while they were out knocking on doors for Harris in a poor projects type neighborhood. The first lady they talk to is hesitant to vote for Harris because she’s a prosecutor who jailed black men for weed. While they are talking and the canvasser is trying to convince her, her neighbor jumps in and he says something to the effect of “Harris is a woman and world leaders won’t respect her and get us in a lot of trouble”.

Is sexism/racism the reason Harris lost? No, I personally at this point think it has more to do with the Democratic party’s inability to offer solutions for working families - Dems are the center right party representing corporate interests and the elite while paying lip service to actual regular people, MAGA is viewed as the party of the common man, as bullshit as that is it’s what voters feel. I personally think the only way forward is an actual progressive platform which addresses fundamental economic unfairness in the system, and candidates who can connect to and explain that platform to regular folk of all races and demographics.

But you can’t deny that sexism/racism didn’t play a significant role in the loss.

I’ll say, we had a guy do the scarecrow thing in a neighborhood I lived in when I was under 5yo back in the late 80s. 30 years later, the only actual memories I have of trick or treating at that age are the scarecrow guy and some shitty old guy who gave out popcorn balls. I can still picture scarecrow guy’s house and everything about the set up. Point being, congratulations on creating some core memories for a lot of kids!

Biden Admin: Israel, you must improve the humanitarian conditions in Gaza in 30 days, or else…

Israel: Designates the main aid organization, a UN organization no less, as a terrorist organization and bans their activities, violating international law in the process.

Biden Admin: …sigh…the US commitment to Israels security is ironclad…

It’s more like the Colbert Report back in the day, an exaggerated right winger who is so obviously wrong it’s funny.

Do pr people not know about the Barbara Streisand effect?! I was going to skip this decoder episode, except the title of the episode was “Intuit asked us to delete part of this episode”. That’s the only reason I listened, and then only just to the portion they wanted deleted. If it wasn’t for the pr genius at Intuit I wouldn’t have cared. Ffs guys.

Just a guess, but it’s probably a combination of two things. First, if we say a self driving car is going to hit an edge case it can’t resolve once in every, say, 100,000 miles, the number of Tesla’s and other self driving cars on the roads now means more miles driven more frequently which means those edge cases are going to occur more frequently. Second, people are becoming over reliant on self driving - they are (incorrectly ) trusting it more and paying less attention, meaning less chance of human intervention when those edge cases occur. So probably the self driving is overall better, but the number of accidents overall is increasing.

Alex Jones “interviewed” ChatGPT on his show. Three separate times.

Just going to drop a plug for the extremely excellent Knowledge Fight podcast.

There is a significant difference between proxies and a direct missile attack launched by a nation-state. Just as there is a significant difference between the US arming a genocidal state, and the US actually dropping bombs directly on civilians. Not to say Iran and the US are not blameless for the actions of their proxies, but there are degrees here that are significant. You kneejerk “Iran bad, Israel good” view of the world is devoid of nuance. Maybe you should get yourself a twitch stream.

Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari just held a televised address.

In it, he said the Israeli military is “fully prepared to defend and retaliate” to the Iranian attack, stressing that it would be in a “timely manner”.

Hmm…

The Washington Post is reporting, citing three anonymous Pentagon officials, that American troops in the Middle East were not targeted during the Iranian missile attack in Israel.

Iraqi group linked to Iran have previously fired rockets at military bases housing US soldiers in Iraq and Syria.

Another sign that Iran is trying to respond, as a deterrent, rather than with an intent to escalate. At least that’s what it seems like so far.

Iran’s IRGC say attack on Israel response to killing of Nasrallah

Iran’s Fars news agency is reporting that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the missile attack under way on Israel is in response to the killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah last week as well as that of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh earlier this year.

“In response to the martyrdom of Ismail Haniyeh, Hassan Nasrallah and (IRGC Guards commander) Nilforoshan, we targeted the heart of the occupied territories,” the IRGC said in a statement.

So seems like Iran intends this to be a one and done response for everything Israel has done the last few months.

Depends on Israels response. When Iran did this in April in retaliation for Israel bombing an Iranean embassy, Iran was like “we have retaliated and are good now”, Israel responded but it was limited, and status quo was restored.

If Israel decides to escalate (which is their default play lately), or if Iranean missiles hit forcing them to retaliate, there could be all out war, including involving the US.

If you want a hint of what’s to come:

The far-right Israeli finance minister (Bezalel Smotrich) writes on social media: “Like Gaza, Hezbollah and the state of Lebanon, Iran will regret the moment.”

As someone else said, eminent domain is a legal process, and thus time consuming. If I remember correctly, CAHs plan or gimmick was they were going to divide up the land into very small pieces, like 1ft sq, and give it to customers. I think it might have been a black Friday sale gimmick. The idea being there would be hundreds of thousands of people with ownership of border wall land, requiring hundreds or thousands of eminent domain lawsuits to be filed. Not a ironclad solution but, in theory, an impressive way to jam up the wall project. I assume the land in question is part of this gimmick.

My guess is that scale and influence have a lot to do with

To break this down a little, first of all “my guess”. You are guessing because the government which is literally enacting a speech restriction hasn’t explained its rational for banning one potential source of disinformation vs actual sources of disinformation. So you are left in the position of guessing. To put a finer point on it, you are in the position of assuming the government is acting with good intentions and doing the labor of searching for a justification that fits with that assumption. Reminds me of the Iraq war when so many conversations I had with people had their default argument be “the government wouldn’t do this if they didn’t have a good reason”. I don’t like to be cynical, and I don’t want to be a “both sides, all politicians are corrupt” kind of guy, but I think it’s pretty clear in this case there is every reason to be cynical. This was just an unfortunate confluence of anti Chinese hate and fear, anti young people hate, and big tech donations that resulted in the government banning a platform used by millions of Americans to disseminate speech. But because Dems helped do it, so many people feel the need to reflexively defend it, even forcing them to “guess” and make up rationales.

As far as influence and reach, obviously that’s not in the bill. Influence is straight out, RT is highly influential in right wing spaces. In terms of numbers of users, that just goes to the profit potential that our good ol American firms are missing out on.

If the US was concerned with propaganda or whatever, they could just regulate the content available on all platforms. They could require all platforms to have transparency around algorithms for recommending content. They could require oversight of how all social media companies operate, much like they do with financial firms or are trying to do with big AI platforms.

But they didn’t. Because they are not attacking a specific problem, they are attacking a specific company.

Also RT has been removed from most broadcasters and App Stores in the US.

Broadcasters voluntarily dropped it after 2016, I think it’s still available on some including dish. As far as app stores, that’s just false, I just checked the Play store and it’s right there ready to download and fill my head with propaganda.

The US owns and regulates the frequencies TV and radio are broadcast on. The Internet is not the same. If the threat of foreign propaganda is the purpose, why can I download the official RT (Russia Today, government run propaganda outlet) app in the Play Store? If the US is worried about a foreign government spreading propaganda, why are they targeting the popular social media app that could theoretically (but no evidence it’s been done yet) be used for propaganda, instead of the actual Russian propaganda app? Hell I can download the south china morning post right from the Play store, straight Chinese propaganda! There are also dozens of Chinese and other foreign adversary run social media platforms, and other apps that could “micro target political messaging campaigns” available. So why did the US Congress single out one single app for punishment?

Money. The problem isn’t propaganda. The problem is money. The problem is tik Tok is or is on the course to be more popular than our American social media platforms. The problem is American firms are being outcompeted in the marketplace, and the government is stepping in to protect the American data mining market. The problem is young people are trading their data for tik toks, instead of giving that data over to be sold to us advertising networks in exchange for YouTube shorts and Instagram stories. If the problem was propaganda, the US would go after propaganda. If the problem is just a Chinese company offers a better product than US companies, then there’s no reason to draft nuanced legislation that goes after all potential foreign influence vectors, you just ban the one app that is hurting the share price of your donors.

That’s generally true, and if I’m going to be stuck with an American government excusing Israels war crimes, it might as well be one that protects abortion, but there is a big stupid “but” to go with that. Trump hates bibi. Not because of any considered foreign policy thing, but because Trump is mad bibi called biden to congratulate him on winning the election. Trump never has forgiven bibi for this, and has been criticizing bibi on the trail because of it. Our politics are fucked, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

My little sister was the special one, deserving of all the praise and the you can do anything attitude. I was the fuckup, who would be lucky to graduate high school. I wasn’t discouraged, just not encouraged. A lost cause I guess, ignored mostly except when I needed the occasional bail or whatnot. My sister wanted to pursue her dream of being an actor, but never made it, worked at a theme park to pay the bills while doing student films (long after she was a student), eventually getting divorced and working some copy editing or marketing type gig for a small company. She is not on speaking terms with the family, something about accusing mom of writing a negative comment on the YouTube video of one of those student films. I meanwhile had bungled through college, but with the help of my then girlfriend and now wife ended up as a fairly successful attorney. I’m not the “the” of anything really, but I’m doing pretty good considering my background and low expectations.

I remember having dinner with my family at one point when I was in college. I had started as a music major, but switched to poli sci before going to law school route. I remember my sister saying it was “sad and depressing” that I gave up my dreams of playing music, while she was pursuing her dream of being an actor. Ten years later I have a good income, a job I generally enjoy, a good family, etc. my sister is divorced, never achieved her dreams, is working a soul sucking dead end job, seems close to broke, and is isolated from her family.

I think about that a lot now that I have a baby of my own. I want to encourage the kid, follow your dreams, you can be anything etc. But at the same time I don’t want my kid to end up like my sister. I don’t know the answer. Maybe it’s a middle ground of “chase your dreams, but be reasonable, and life isn’t just about fake and racking up accomplishments, enjoy normal things, don’t pursue fame and fortune as if it’s the only thing that will bring happiness”.

Probably not, she’s got the charisma of Hillary, and two strikes (race and gender) against her. But Biden is dragging the rest of the party down with him. With Harris we probably get a Trump presidency (we have at least a fighting chance to avoid it). But with Biden we get a Trump presidency, a landslide election giving him a “mandate” and assuredly a Republican House and Senate to go along with it. Sooo worth a shot with the old switcharoo I guess.

Rudy tripped and fell over a pile of folding chairs at the Rnc yesterday. Enioy the mental image and have a great day!