I feel pretty aggressive about Biden aiding and abetting genocide, supplying Israel with enough bombs to turn Gaza into a death camp.

Agreed

I feel pretty aggressive about Biden just coming out against gender affirmation surgery for minors for no fucking reason.

Sure

I’m also still feeling pretty fucking aggressive that he broke the railroad strike, but that was years ago so you probably forgot about it.

He strengthened the NLRB for the first time since any president that I can remember to the point where it’s backstopping all this historic union progress at Starbucks, UAW, Amazon, all this shit that union people are fighting for finally has some legal backing behind it which is a pretty key force multiplier which in my book is a win.

He did break the rail strike, because it would have fucked up the economy for everyone in ways that led to inflation that actually was sort of his fault, and given how incredibly aggressive everyone is about blaming him for inflation that wasn’t his fault, I don’t think that’s trivial. And, his labor dept. kept working the issue afterwards and got the workers the sick days they were striking for anyway, when there was nothing for him in it.

I realize that the rail strike is a pretty good talking point, because I actually sort of agree with you that in a perfect world he should have let the strike happen and fuck up the rail companies and if the price of bread goes up then oh well treat your workers better America. But trying to extrapolate from that to that he’s a bad labor president when on every non economy ruining strike he’s been 100% on the side of the workers which is incredibly rare for a US president, I think is unfair.

But at least it’s something I can shove in your fucking face so maybe you’ll pressure the Democratic Party to replace their nominee.

Who would you want them to replace him with? If you don’t want Trump, then I think it’s fair to ask what is the course you would want to chart instead of Biden?

I actually have an answer in mind that I like, far more realistic than some that I’ve heard, but I’m curious what your solution would be.

Biden and his blue MAGA cult.

Fascinating

I didn’t even know about this

I watched one of his speeches at random just to see what the guy was about and TL;DR I wasn’t impressed and I would not be at all surprised to learn that the Republicans are trying to trick leftists into getting behind him. But I hadn’t heard that he also dislikes NATO. That seems like a weirdly specific and incongruous stance for him to take, given how extraordinarily nonspecific was a lot of the stuff he was saying when I watched him.

Yeah. Those guys I’m fine with. I was around in the 90s, man; you don’t have to tell me that the Democrats don’t have my back.

My point is that that subset doesn’t spend all their time on political forums picking on the DNC. Their time on the internet in my experience is spent in anarchist / activist forums or just on other, non political things; their not caring about electoral politics is a lot more universal and they don’t get all amped up talking about it or want to spend all their time on it (and specifically spend all their time on criticisms of only one of the parties, a lot of which are sort of made up and weird if you look at them closely.)

Stop climate change, stop killing Palestinians, economic justice for working people

There are various strategies you could use for any of the three, with various levels of timeframe involved and chance of success and all, but “let Trump come to power” is not a real good solution to any of them, to me. “Stop supporting the Democrats until they suddenly decide to start supporting them” also seems weird to me and unlikely to succeed. People have been not caring about politics (with every righteous reason) for quite a while now, and it doesn’t seem to have made the politics or the level of leftism progress in the equation any higher, to me.

What, you mean those guys that looked at Bernie Sanders and Gavin Newsom and Cory Booker, and said naw we want the guy with the crazy hair who is absolutely guaranteed to be unacceptable to the American electorate, to be the spokesman of the Left and specifically in this presidential election and we want people to take the world’s most bizarre strategy on his behalf which will NOT cause him to win or advance any leftist cause but MIGHT get Trump elected and destroy any large number of leftist causes

And, also, are totally uninterested in any leftist causes more strategic or logical than this weird and counterproductive single quixotic stand in this general election

You mean those guys WEREN’T trying to win the election for leftist causes, like they said they were?

That’s nuts man

I have yet to meet IRL a single left-wing politically engaged person who says anything other than that Trump will be such an objectively guaranteed catastrophe for everyone in the world that we should vote for whoever’s running against him, whether that person is Biden or Kamala Harris or a blind dog dressed up in a business suit. All the people who say Biden’s old and so they can’t vote for him are fairly un-politically-aware types who aren’t especially left wing in their personal beliefs.

And yet the internet is full of these super left wing people who feel real aggressive about not voting for Biden, like even more aggressively about that, apparently, than they do about any particular left wing cause, about immigration or going to the Palestine protest or what have you.

It is curious

That part, I won’t say you are wrong about. The American electorate is wrong enough in how they set their priorities that I think Biden’s performance at the debate was a massive problem.

What I am saying here is that it’s weird that the stories are “why Trump’s felonies are not important” and “why Biden’s elderly nature is hugely important,” when the data points the exact opposite way. Honestly, I think maybe people’s understanding of what is important in politics may be quite a few ticks ahead of the media is giving them credit for when they publish stories like this.

1. I’m as surprised as anybody, but the non loaded-to-elicit-a-particular-answer framing of the question showed basically no change after the debate. Polls from the day after the election which asked, who do you want to vote for for president, showed basically no change in the answer (respectively, 45/43 for Trump, and 45/44 for Biden). I will continue to be surprised if that keeps happening but definitely that’s how it actually objectively happened, so far.
2. It is highly notable to me how unanimous in the media is the narrative “Biden’s in trouble because he fucked up the debate” - which, however much of a very real problem it is that he’s old as fuck, isn’t borne out by polling data - whereas they didn’t write too much about “Trump’s in trouble because he caught a bunch of felonies”, even though that was reflected in a few percentage points’ drop in his polling (remember? that was when Biden started ticking higher than Trump in national polls every now and then, which he’s still doing, which he hadn’t been able to do before?). As a good example check out this lapdog bullshit

It seems very clear to me that the media is, as they often do, pretending that they are reporting on trouble for the Democratic candidate, when actually what they are doing is finding a way to frame a legitimate story to do their best to create the trouble that are pretending they are reporting on.

I don’t even think they stand to benefit. I think when he blows up the US their assets will lose value, and depending on how bad it gets they may start having to hang out in some other safer country like a Russian oligarch spending all his time in Western Europe.

I think it is just pure force of habit at this point, like “Biden’s gonna tax the rich fuck him let’s get behind this disaster instead.” I mean, it worked for other disasters like Reagan or W, but I think they haven’t really absorbed how big a disaster Trump 2 would be.

Yeah. It is fairly weird to me that it’s such a common thing to do to take the raw output of the LLM and send that to the user, and to try use fine-tuning to get that raw output to look some way that you want.

To me it is obvious that something like having the LLM emit a little JSON block which includes some field which covers “how sure are you that this is actually true” or something, is more flexible and simpler and cheaper and works better.

But what do I know

The half a trillion dollars worth of student loan forgiveness passed.

A few things about this, It didn’t pass. It never came to a vote. It was an executive order. Centrists didn’t want it.

Wait, hang on. I may have misunderstood you.

If your central thesis is that Democrats in congress are mostly an uninspiring pile of centrist bullshit, and that Biden has to contend with them as well as the GOP in order to get progressive things done that he is trying to accomplish, then I will 100% agree with you. I thought you were including Biden in the centrist fakery.

Your description of getting behind Democrats because you wanted good things to happen, only to see the reality that comes to pass be mostly watered-down corporate-friendly garbage, sounds pretty accurate to me. It sounded like you were blaming that on Obama and Biden, instead of Manchin and the Republicans, is why we are disagreeing. But if you’re saying we need to get rid of the GOP in congress, and replace Manchin and Sinema with actual liberal people, as the solution, I will 100% agree.

Biden, in the only surprise of his presidency so far, listened to progressives on student loans

IRA? NLRB with teeth? Trillions of dollars worth of corporate tax increases? Those were not surprising to you?

And I just got to the paragraph where you call me Goebbels. Conversation’s over. Godwin.

I said that super confidently asserting something which seems to me to be the opposite of true, and relying on the assertion itself to be the explanation of why people should believe it, is a Goebbels tactic.

Like I say, I actually agree with you about the massive gap between what Democratic presidents get done and what they should be getting done. Where it falls apart for me is where to assign the blame for that.

Apparently the only way the candidates will agree to do it is if the format is so stilted that there’s no chance of anyone learning anything or seeing the candidates get challenged on anything. It’s basically just a taking-in-turns version of a campaign commercial.

What, indeed, is the point. Like a lot of American politics, the whole “debate” survives as a pointless vestige of a thing (now long forgotten) that was useful and productive in its original form, but now is mutated to a useless and unrecognizable monstrosity, which you have to pretend is super serious and important if you want to be able to be on TV.

Yeah

1. Biden got a ton of good stuff done, but even if you don’t agree with that, there is no possible way that an adult human being with any level of political awareness can claim that Trump wouldn’t be an objective disaster on an absolutely globe-spanning scale, or that we should do anything in this election than vote for whoever isn’t Trump. It’s like one of those video game puzzles that’s so clear and simple that it seems like there must be more to it. “Do you want to open and find out what’s in the box? Or for me to thrust this running chainsaw into your coccyx?” “What’s in the box?” “It’s a friendly cat, but why do you need to ask?”
2. Biden at the debate looked old as fuck and that’s a problem

It’s sorta boring when you just lay it out, but IDK how anyone could disagree with either of those

Yeah. I mean it’s hard to blame them–

You know what, fuck that, let’s blame them. They have a responsibility. This is like all the German businesses that played along with the Nazis because it was easier and then had to change the subject when their grandkids asked them about the war years. Like yeah grandad ran a, uh, a pots and pans factory. Yeah. Just pots and pans. Now go play outside.

In ordinary times I think it would be fair to say well you know a bunch of them didn’t focus on the bottom line and went out of business and everyone had to get new jobs, so hard to blame the ones still around. But this is kind of all hands on deck time. It’s one thing if you don’t want to write articles about the IRA and all good stuff about Biden. It’s a whole different fuckin story if you want to write stories feeding into getting the guy elected who is going to fuck up your home and city and business and economy and the safety of you and your families, too, and then (I am sure) stand around like “we’re all looking for the guy that did this” if it winds up coming true.

It is fascinating to me that the “Biden is in HUGE trouble in the election because of the debate” narrative is so unanimous in the media

In a way that “Trump is in HUGE trouble in the election because of his felonies” was not in any way

Even though from the tiny amount of polling that has apparently happened, the second one was a bigger deal to the electorate than the first one

Curious

It gave some sound bites for people to hold up as examples of why Biden is old which I’m sure we will be seeing on certain news networks from now until forever going forward

And gave a bunch of “objective” news outlets a good excuse to write a bunch of “DEMS IN PANIC AFTER BIDEN’S UNFORGIVABLE SHIT SHOW” articles they are for some reason eager to write

Other than that significant amount of fodder, I think nothing of value occurred

Philly is also the city that violently chased the Patriot Front out when they tried to do a march, like literally just set on them whacking them with big sticks sending them packing back into their U-Haul van and driving away shamefully. Like Han Solo unhesitatingly shooting at Vader the instant he sees him sat at the dinner table for his big betrayal speech. Be like Philly.

The presidency is such a weird position. It’s like you’re kind of the boss, but you’re also kind of an employee. There’s a whole staff of people telling you where you have to go and what rules you have to follow, and you’re constantly getting shit on in public for your job performance, and everything bad that happens practically anywhere in the world is at least partially your fault. You can literally call the biggest military power in the world on the phone and tell them who to kill and (subject to certain restrictions), they’ll just go and do it, but you’re not allowed to drive a car.

It’s just bizarre. Like a lot of the American system, I actually really like the way the system is set up, for as weird as it is.

Fascinating. It sounds like your theory is that the Democrats floated the public option and the BBBA, just so they could go through an elaborate ruse following by killing it on purpose after months of work and preparation, only to introduce second weakened iterations of both of them (the ACA and IRA) which still did massive amounts for the country, and they went through all that just so their second version could… look wimpier by comparison to the initial version they shot down on purpose, maybe? IDK.

I’ll say this: If the average when put together, of brand X plus the Republicans actively trying to blow up the Washington Monument or kill all the Guatemalans or whatever the fuck, like a bunch of Batman villains, is a little trickle of sustained significant progress, I would say that the contribution to the average of brand X is probably significant and positive. To me. I wouldn’t look at that as a “well I guess there’s no difference between the two, and the lack of progress is DEFINITELY the Democrats’ fault, citation trust me bro” situation.

By way of example: The half a trillion dollars worth of student loan forgiveness passed. It got done. It was on the books, and then the Supreme Court told them no you can’t do that. Are you saying Biden controls the Supreme Court in secret and he passed it knowing it wouldn’t really happen? I feel like I’m stepping into some kind of Q universe where that’s exactly what you’re going to say, like John Roberts is Hunter Biden in a silicone mask or something.

The shit Democrats passed is nothing in the face of things they ran on and didn’t pursue.

The shit Democrats passed in the last few years is:

• 40% predicted reduction in US greenhouse gas emissions by 2030
• $150 billion worth of student loan forgiveness
• Big increase in working class wages even comfortably exceeding historic inflation
• Huge corporate tax increase to pay for all that

That’s off the top of my head; people have made these massive lists of accomplishments but sometimes it’s hard to tell which ones are substantive. All of those to me are pretty substantial.

I mean, I do commend you on coming up with a framing that makes it pretty easy to say “yeah but what about all the things they DIDN’T do” like the existence of some good thing that would have been theoretically possible somehow invalidates getting some particular good thing done in the real world. And also I commend the framing where you’re asserting SO FIRMLY Goebbels-style that anything they’re failing to accomplish is deliberately on purpose and definitely not the fault of the party that’s in lock step voting down things they are trying to accomplish. Your presentation is such that it’s easy to fall into “well he MUST know what he’s talking about, he is so confident in his presentation that that wouldn’t be clearly just completely made up.”

Both fairly solid arguing techniques. Bravo.

(Oh also recovering from Covid as if it hadn’t happened which basically no other 1st world economy has been able to do)

(Also, did the Democrats float the public option? I remember a bunch of left-wing people at the time talking about single payer, but I don’t ever remember it ever being acceptable to the Democrats and no one really hoping for it, just saying fuck this would be so easy if our country’s government wasn’t so awful but I hope we can get some health insurance of some description at least.)