Trump Camp Is Planning to ‘Willie Horton’ Kamala Harris
Thrashy @ Thrashy @lemmy.world Posts 3Comments 406Joined 2 yr. ago
Thrashy @ Thrashy @lemmy.world
Posts
3
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406
Joined
2 yr. ago
An Eisenhower-era deportation program that set up the current dynamic of militarized deportation and border control.
I also grew up in Missouri, though I live in Kansas now, and I know several people who fit that description.
The thing that kills me about Missouri is that it used to be a competitive state for moderate Democrata, but the rural chunks of the state fell victim to right wing populism during the Tea Party wave in 2010 and now there's a whole generation of Missourians whose defining political characteristic is rancorous hate for "liberal" city people. Kansas' politics aren't great, either, but at least the rural voters care about farm issues here... In Missouri, particularly south of I-70 where the only real industry they ever had was lead mining, all that's left is the hate they've been fed from right wing assholes.
Not even that. The 22nd Amendment states that a person can only be elected to the office twice, unless they've served two or more years of somebody's else's term, in which case they can only be elected once. Five months away from the next inauguration, it would change nothing if Harris had to take over the Presidency for some reason.
This psycho was just in the news for attaching her Democratic opponent for "raising a groomer" because one of her grandkids is trans. She makes Marjorie Taylor Green look polite by comparison, and the shame of it is that, given how state-level politics have been trending in Missouri, she's got a decent shot of winning in the general just because of the magic (R).
I think that's giving the media too much credit. The day of the debate I was honestly feeling optimistic -- All Biden really needed to do was talk sense and dunk on the guy who'd just become the first Presidential candidate to also become a convicted felon, and the rules had been set to cut Trump off at the knees by muting his mic when it wasn't his turn to talk. The night should have been a cake walk, but instead Biden came off like a tired and confused old man.
The level of despair I felt the next morning cannot be understated -- I even started to lay the groundwork to emigrate out of the US if necessary. Having Biden step aside and make way for someone more able to fight Trump is a desperately-needed breath of fresh air.
Are there a lot of people who individually hold chaotic, mutually-incompatible political opinions? Sure! I don't think you can boil their ultimate decision-making process down to a box-ticking exercise, where if a candidate represents sufficient number of demographics they hold bigoted views about they automatically vote for Default Old White Guy. For example --
I can’t even tell you how many people had both Bernie and Trump as their top two candidates in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
-- that's very clearly low-information voters dissatisfied with the status quo, who would happily glom onto anybody promising to sufficiently shake things up. Sure, Trump and Bernie had wildly-divergent platforms, but Joe Sixpack -- who probably doesn't feel like he has a dog in the fight on any of the particulars like abortion or finance law and assumes anybody sticking it to the broader political class is a net positive for him -- doesn't see much practical difference, and is so little affected by the bigotry of the right that none of it bothers him, so of course the two candidates presenting themselves as outsiders with a plan to shake up Washington are basically interchangeable.
I just don't think that's a very big demo. Anybody who's suddenly motivated to keep the White House white and estrogen-free is more than likely a foaming-at-the-mouth MAGAt, who was already motivated to put their guy back in office. There will of course be a few people who fit that description, and probably many more diet racists and sexists who will just stay home if their options are Trump or a "left-coast liberal woman," but I don't think they make up a significant-enough proportion of the voting public to outweigh that latter group you mention, who couldn't muster much enthusiasm for Biden but are amped-up to vote for somebody younger, healthier, and more dynamic.
Obama won by healthy margins in '08 and '12, and Hillary -- the least likeable candidate that's made it to the top of the Democratic ticket since Dukakis -- still won the popular vote. I think the people who would vote against a black woman for President were never going to vote for a Democrat in the first place, and given the general aura of relief and enthusiasm I've seen in left wing spaces since the announcement I think Harris is going to be riding a wave of support from the left, even if half of it is just from people who are glad they don't have to hold their noses to support a doddering octogenarian because the alternative is fascism.
I have a friend who had a case before Cannon and told me that she was both one of the stupidest and the meanest judges she's ever dealt with, which is saying something since she practices primarily in Florida. As a representative of the caliber of judges the Federalist Society has to offer, Cannon is pretty damning... and if we get four more years of Trump, the federal bench is going to be stacked with jurists even worse than her.
I've been going back and forth about this all day. On one hand, I think it's obvious that Trump is a symptom of the right wing's systemic slide into open authoritarianism, rather than its architect... but on the other hand, I don't think his cult of personality would have long outlived him (especially if it turned out he was assassinated by a fellow right-winger over his ties to Epstein) and there's not many figures on the right who would be able to reconstitute it quickly. On the other hand, I don't think his cult members would go gentle into the night, and there would be ugly, violent reprisals. On the other hand, I fear there's going to be violence no matter what, and it's probably better for it to happen before the election than after for a host of reasons. But on the other hand, etc., etc...
A combination of resting on their laurels during AMD's lost decade, and failure to retain competitive process technology during the extended gestation and ultimate failure of their non-EUV 10nm node. The arrogance of taking their foot off the gas and assuming nobody would ever catch back up to them backfired hard.
The reverse. OceanGate saw how planes were being built and said, "let's do that for submersibles!" even though in airplanes, composites are subjected to <1 atmosphere of tension loading and <2g aerodynamic loading, whereas their submersible was going to be subjected to >400 atmospheres of compression loading, and a much more corrosive environment.
Composites in aircraft have a fairly long and uncontroversial history, and there's nothing inherently wrong with them in that application. The biggest problem with composites is what happens with them at the end of their service life. Finding ways to recycle them without compromising safety is a good thing, and if it weren't for Boeing having such a damaged reputation at the moment I think nobody would bat an eye.
I lived in co-op housing during college, which was (loosely) administered by the university and separated into different buildings by gender. One year my hall started a rapidly-escalating prank war with a women's hall when some guys testing a water balloon launcher accidentally put a balloon through their back window from like 100 yards away. Things culminated in a massive water balloon fight on the campus quad that both sides referred to as the "Bitches and Bastards Brawl."
The past truly is another country.
Eeeeexactly. My wife is lobbying for it (because she loathes air travel, mostly) but I have no interest in moving to Cold United States just for a marginal and temporary gain in freedom. It'd be a last-ditch option.
EU politics generally seem to be taking a sudden rightward lurch of late, with immigration being a major driver. All that history of African colonialism coming home to roost is making people with a fixed, racially-homogenous sense of their national identity into very unhappy campers. Of the countries not actively sliding into fascism, Putin seems to be ogling with hungry eyes in anticipation of NATO's defanging. Things look pretty dire across the board, to be honest -- between fascism, looming war, and climate change it's all about least-bad options right now.
We're looking in the same direction, since I qualify under the same program. I'm looking at companies to start communicating with about job opportunities now.
The "easiest" would be Israel since my wife qualifies under the Law of Return, but we're both staunchly anti-Zionist, so... ugh. Right now I'm looking closest at Ireland, since my profession is on the Critical Skills Employment Permit list and I work in a niche that is well-matched to the Irish pharma/life sciences sector. In a pinch I'd lobby for a transfer to my company's Canadian branch office, but that's not optimal for a few reasons.
ETA: for permanent emigration, the thing you want to do is find a country where you can speak or at least quickly learn the language, and where you can get employment in a sector that's on their list of critical needs. In most cases you can't get a visa that lets you stay and work long-term without first getting a job offer. In terms of flexibility, someplace in the EU has a lot of appeal, since you can work basically anywhere in the Schengen area after you gain permanent residency. Australia and New Zealand are attractive mainly for being well-isolated from all the regional wars that seem like they're waiting to kick off just as soon as American muscle isn't backing up NATO or Taiwan, but it's a lot harder to get those visas.
Yeah, no, I'm literally making escape plans. Just this week the street between our house and our kid's daycare got shut down in the middle of the day for an unannounced parade, and my wife had a fucking panic attack thinking it might be some sort of Proud Boys or Oathkeepers-type march and they were gonna run amok and we'd be cut off from him. I don't plan to stick around long enough to see that happen for real when Project 2025 kicks off, thank you.
The founders did anticipate direct democracy, the two-party system, and demagoguery. These were much discussed.
...and notably not a part of the constitution they eventually drafted, which was my point. Rather than try to build a democratic system with effective safeguards against demagoguery, they chose to have a system where only "the right sort of person" got a say in the running of government, and assumed that the separations and limitations of power they wrote in to the rest of the document would be sufficient protection against bad actors in that scenario. Now, we have (more or less) representative democracy, but with no additional guardrails to protect against someone like Trump, and SCOTUS is peeling away what we do have day by day.
There's a certain sweet irony in the "token DEI hire" being the overwhelming and enthusiastic consensus pick to take over the campaign. Not that I expect Republican commentators to make the connection, but at least I can enjoy it.