millie @ millie @beehaw.org

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10

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1,010

Joined

2 yr. ago

This is just circular reporting. A bunch of outlets start pushing an opinion, so the opinion gets louder. Now the loudness of the opinion is the story.

Hey did you hear that Obama's talking about that shit that every news outlet has been shoving down our throats multiple times per day for the past several months? Obama!

Want Trump to lose? Quit sharing this shit every five minutes and instead find an article about how much organizing voters can shake up an election.

If Warner Bros is looking for a consultant, writer, or hell, director.. Reach out! xD

Let me write for Harley Quinn for a season. If you like it, we make a goofy hallucination Batman movie. What could go wrong?

This is a pretty telling question to be asking in the first place. Given the ostensibly center-left corporate media's literal barrage of 'Biden old' and 'replace Biden' narrative over the past month or two, it's hardly surprising that a number of Democrats think this is a good strategy. Note that they did not ask who these Democrats intend to vote for, the same way many of these stories focus on nebulous 'approval ratings' rather than pointed questions that might tease out who Democrats actually intend to vote for as well as whether they're enthusiastic or simply settling.

What should be telling, however, is that Republicans want to see Biden replaced. Why?

If Biden is an old pushover with bad approval ratings.. what's the danger in letting him run? Republicans are more supportive of Biden throwing the towel in than Democrats. That doesn't suggest to me that they're terribly confident about Trump beating Biden.

I know why Democrats think someone else should replace Trump: because he's absolutely terrifying. A Trump presidency with this current Supreme Court would be an absolute disaster for the fabric of every useful part of government and a gigantic win for corporate interests.

But Republicans? Why? Biden isn't a stand-out among Democrats on his policies, he's the mainstream. Most other Democrats would be doing the same things.

I think it's because Biden is actually extremely likely to win.

Why start pushing stories about replacing an incumbent president after the primaries? Why not before? Because it's too late to do it. All these stories can do now is discourage Democrats and pull Independents who are on the fence. They can't help even if they were intended to, because it's too late.

Ignore all this crap. Go vote in November. Get as many people as you can to vote for Biden. The rest is a distraction by the people who have the money to manufacture as many distractions as they could ever want.

Don't get distracted.

I think COVID was a wake-up call for humanity in a much wider sense. I've never encountered as much genuine anti-corporate and increasingly anti-capitalist sentiment as in the past two years or so. People seem to have noticed the power grab that COVID was used as an excuse to justify, while also having taken the time to step outside of their usual routines and recognize what life can be and what economics have been pushing us all to waste it on.

We won't get out of this with idle pity or by highlighting national boundaries, pushing the issue away from ourselves. We need to get over this shit and work together. Sooner than later.

Smallish sample size aside, cold calling is a terrible way to conduct political polling. I worked in a call center and was a refusal converter, calling people who already told us to go away and getting them to complete the study anyway. The study I spent the most time with was the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Study, which I've administered I think four versions of? I also worked on the Sonya Slifka Longitudinal Multiple Sclerosis Study, a tobacco use study for the University of Colorado, and a number of other studies for smaller periods of time on everything from politics to experiences of abuse.

The people who will actually talk to a cold caller tend to fall into one of three categories, by my estimation. They're either lonely, particularly cooperative, or particularly opinionated. These aren't such big confounding factors for a health study, but they're absolutely massive when it comes to politics.

Reporters don't recognize this at all. They see numbers and cited source and just run with it. As someone who helped collect those numbers, I would not be taking them at face value. Social biases may not have much of an effect on how many carrots you eat in a month, but on your vote? I would struggle to come up with a better way to make your sample less representative.

Gotham's so-called 'villains' are actually just projections of Bruce's madness onto the city's activists, anarchists, and freedom fighters. They spend their days trying to fix the severe systemic issues caused by the excessive wealth and myopia of the self-righteous Wayne family, who have gobbled up nearly every other sizeable company in the city while funneling resources into personal skyscrapers, excavation, and bat-themed military equipment.

The Rogue's Gallery, meanwhile, goes to extreme lengths to redistribute wealth, disrupt Waynecorp galas, rescue and deprogram Robin and Batgirl, and keep Bruce busy with insane shenanigans so that he can't focus more of his attention on grinding Gotham's poor into the dirt. The costumes and gimmicks are just Bruce's mind refusing to see the truth of his own villainy and distorting the world to compensate.

The only ones who on occasion get through to him are his ex-girlfriend, a former Arkham therapist who spent enough time with the Rogues not to buy Bruce's propaganda, and a completely innocent local botanist that he's developed a strange obsession with literally just because she grows plants and he's not sure how that works (his own plants all die in the batcave due to lack of light).

According to political polling, which is bullshit.

I'd honestly like to see what KG can do without being glued to Jack Black.

For real. Who are people folding their fitted sheets for? Learn an instrument!

It's a joke? Did it make you laugh? Why is it funny?

Because I just see AI spam.

Okay, but part of it is phones. Not in like, a 'kids are always staring at their phones' sense, but in terms of the ease of communication changing the social landscape.

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, if you wanted to go hang out with someone, you'd go downtown. You might run into the person you were looking for, you might run into someone completely different and have some crazy unexpected adventure, but it mostly happened in the same place. Even with old flip-phones, they facilitated communication but they didn't derail or substitute it.

Want to see what someone's doing now? You can immediately message them and either know they're free or busy or that they're not responding. And yeah, you could call somebody's phone, but it was different. There was little incentive to keep a phone charged once you were off with your friends, and those early batteries did not last! I remember my mom giving me shit about never having a charge in my phone when she'd try to call me.

Every day was an unexpected adventure. Very little of it was planned beyond 'go hang out in town', but every day was something different. Once all my friends were on social media and carrying smart phones, it changed dramatically. I didn't have to either go find someone or talk on the phone if I wanted to check in, I just have to message them. There's no need to go have an adventure to just say 'hey, what's up?'. There's no built-in incentive to team up and go find something to do the way there was when I had to physically get to someone to hang out.

And yeah, we can still make plans, but that's different. 'Plans' were always there, just as something special and organized, but the default was just hanging around. I don't feel that anymore in the same way. It's still there, to some extent, because I see some younger folks hanging around, but not in the numbers we had. Plans require planning and come with some pressure that just seeing people around town never did.

I think that need to go out and run into random people in order to have a social experience gave us something that we're missing now.

Also, like, we know a lot more now. We can see how screwed up humanity is. We know that a lot of our food is the direct result of dystopian sci-fi level torture of entire species. We know that the richest people are happy to light the world on fire to make a buck and that our measures for stopping them have so far not been as effective as we kind of need them to be. We know a lot of the horrible shit people have been doing to one another behind closed doors, and even out in the light of day.

We know a lot more about everything, but we haven't really had the time to heal from it as a society or even really fully process it all, let alone change it. Given the limits of youthful autonomy until adulthood, it's hardly surprising that it's kinda distressing being stuck in the back seat of a car that's careening toward a cliff while the previous generation's driver mindlessly stares at a Facebook meme about kids be on their phones.

The whole thing is a mess, and younger people are right to be distressed about it. But technology and our struggle to adapt to it is part of that mess.

Yes! Make the situation goofy so Trump has a harder time with his strong man shit! We need something like this for the fist picture!

Yeah! How are we expected to compete with AI beauty? Break our fingers and glue six extra ones onto our hands?

Common usage the the norm are literally the same thing.

Prescriptivists act like 'the norm' is some ordained perfection and everything in their own lifetime is an aberration, but that's just temporal exceptionalism. Do you really think you just happened to be born at a time when the people writing style guides pointed at the be all the all of the English language and all advances are just corruption?

Y'all are just pushing this narrative daily aren't you? It's really transparent

Are we meant to believe that this is a real criticism?

Right. The one where this magical replacement for Biden that doesn't have a name or a face could have jumped on a primary ticket if they had wanted to.

Do you really think that's not a possibility? Did you forget 2016 already? Sanders certainly wasn't wanted by the DNC establishment, and they even found ways to put their foot on the scale, but he was still on the ballot in a high-profile democratic primary.

If someone had wanted to replace Biden, as in like, actually thought they had a good chance of winning and wanted to do the job, there was plenty of time for that before the Russian propaganda machine started wiggling its way into center-left media outlets.

Failing to run the incumbent was the bad strategic move. Also giving her control of the DNC, but Biden would have been an easy win at the time.

Like, I would have loved to see Sanders, personally. Strategically, though? If you're just thinking about getting a Democrat in the office? Biden was the play.

Hit on 16 in blackjack, run your incumbent in elections. The odds do, in fact, matter. The actual odds, not the figures arrived at by making a few hundred thousand cold calls and finding the people who actually want to talk about politics, as if that weren't a biasing factor in political position.

If he's unopposed, who exactly is this great new candidate who is going to magically appear?