A New Topic: Everyone vote twice.Follow

The old threads get so stale - like my slowly eaten box of cereal. It's still edible, but it tastes and feels like a cardboard cupboard.

We're closing in on the election. Some say it is the most important election of a lifetime. What will be the most detrimental short term fix that trump will try in an attempt to buy votes?

Anyone watching Lovecraft Country? I've been enjoying it.

Why not ask what Biden and team would do as well? You know, if we want a balanced discussion?

I think it's less a matter of "short term fix", but "narrative". As Joph mentioned, Trump pushing a vaccine by late October isn't likely to result in folks saying "OMG! We're saved!". However, the narrative Trumps going for is that he's trying to end lockdowns as quickly as possible via multiple methods, and trying to contrast that by defining Biden as wanting folks to be stuck in their houses forever. How that plays off depends on how many people are so terrified of the virus that they want to stay locked away to "be safe", versus how many are experiencing severe covid fatigue and just want any sign that there's a light at the end of the tunnel sometime soon.

While the whole mail. in ballot thing is a concern among the Right, in terms of actual strategy, the bigger thing is that it looks like Biden is trying to just run out the clock on Covid and Riots, and hope that most people blame Trump for how terrible things are. I suspect that will backfire (is already backfiring IMO), but we won't know for sure until the votes start coming in. The more obvious it becomes that the Dems are actively working to string out the pain for the people, the more they shift to blaming the Dems for that pain.





Yeah. Noticed it when it first came out, but had missed the first episode. Kept meaning to catch up, but for some stupid reason HBO doesn't include it on their on-demand series list (really HBO?). Could be my cable provider that is being a jerk. Anywho, finally found a day when they were marathoning all four of the released episodes, and caught them all (yeah, long binge over this holiday weekend).

I'm enjoying it. I kinda wish it had more of a traditional Lovecraft "cultists trying to do something horrific" feel to it and less of a "white folks with spells doing something that's maybe not really horrific from a Lovecraftian pov". Not sure how many episodes are in the series, but at four in, it's still not really clear what the objectives of the bad guys are, or who the bad guys actually are anyway. I have a concern that this will be like Watchmen, where they feel obligated by having a primarily black cast to make "racism" both the primary motivation and the enemy to be fought. Given that as far as I can tell the primary concern driving the main characters is Spoilerthat the white spell users are trying to collect a full set of a book of names which will give them some unspecified super powers (more than they already have I guess?), and that since they are white, this must be bad for them (cause they're black). Frankly, I'll be disappointed if that turns out to be the case.

So I'm hopeful. But pretty much prepared for this to be yet another one-note story that fails to actually live up to potential out of a need to address current social activism. It's just frustrating that you're literally telling a story that has the potential to show that there really are things much much worse than mere human bigotry, and yet I suspect it'll fail to do that. Be wonderful if they could have the white folks and the black folks both realize this and join together to fight something really horrific and world ending. Was hoping for it in Watchmen and didn't get it. Maybe this time they will?

If there's ever a background to tell that kind of story, it's in a Lovecraft based story. So... fingers crossed.

Probably because one party is a private citizen with no governmental power right now and the other party is the President of the United States? One person can actually direct arms of the government to do short-sighted and detrimental things (like, say, the payroll tax deferral or having the FDA skip important testing for the "win" of a vaccine before election day) and the other can... uhh... say things you don't like?

Edited, Sep 8th 2020 7:26pm by Jophiel

Pretty much this. When I had written this post Trump was busy using his office and our tax money to campaign.

You know, if you guys on the left don't stop burying your heads in the sand and just ignoring/ridiculing anyone from the right who says something you disagree with, you be left wondering in November why Trump just won re-election. Maybe listen to what I'm saying? Because the stuff I just wrote is not some fringe right wing thing. This is how an increasing number of people are viewing the actions of Trump versus those who just want him removed at any cost. Ignoring that isn't a good strategy.

Remember "Basket of Deplorables"? The Dems are doing it again. You can't just dismiss people who don't agree with you. You should, at a bare minimum, attempt to understand both *what* their position is and *why*they hold it. Just assuming those people are stupid, ignorant, bigoted, etc is the wrong approach. You're literally pushing people away from your ever shrinking echo chamber.

I said "Biden and team", and made it very clear that I was talking about policies and actions to force people to stay trapped in their homes, prevent their businesses from opening up, keep riots and looting going as long as possible, etc. Obviously, Biden is not personally doing any of that. But Biden isn't doing a whole lot right now anyway. It's his "team" doing everything to drag him over the finish line. And that "team" is not just his direct campaign folks, but everyone on the Left that desperately wants anyone other than Trump in office.

So yeah, the Dems in congress blocking covid release bills (or putting poison pills into them) are trying to help Biden win. Every Dem governor who has put excessively restrictive closure rules in their states are operating from the same playbook. Every mayor and governor who are sitting on their hands, sidelining their own police and national guards while rioters and looters destroy stuff, are chipping in as well. And the liberal pundits and journalists and late night talk show folks are all participating, by taking all of the harm and pain that those things are causing to the people and blaming Trump for them.

That is the Dem strategy for taking the Whitehouse Joph. They are literally running on Trump mishandling the virus and being wrong on BLM protests, and being wrong on economic recovery. That's the whole strategy. They have nothing else. Seriously. Watch a liberal pundit on any network on any show. They all make the same arguments. And it's all about the things I've been talking about.

Call it "buying votes". Call it "influencing opinion". Whatever. It's all aimed at the same thing. So when your counter to this is "Well, Trump did a bunch of things that people liked, and which helped them, but that's bad because he's just doing it to win the election", it comes out kinda silly to me. So doing things that people like is bad because they might vote for Trump as a result, but doing a mountain of things people dislike and blaming it on Trump and hoping people are too stupid to notice is "good"? I don't get that. But, your denials aside, that is exactly the strategy that the Dems are taking right now.

I think it's stupid, and I think it'll cost them dearly. But you never know. And to be honest, it is kinda their best and only shot to win. So I get it. It's just that to win they have to wreak pain and destruction on the people. Which is kinda sad. I would not want to support a party that cared so much about just winning that they don't care who gets hurt along the way.



I'm not sure how you get from my point about calling people names if they don't agree with you being a bad way to win people over to whatever nonsense you just wrote. The devils in the details, and the problem is that the Left is often lacking on details. They get people active over the same broad stuff you just said. "I'm for equal rights!". Great. I am too. What exactly do you want to do to make us have more equal rights? Oh wait. You want racial quotas for films? You want to penalize companies, not for having unfair hiring practices, but if the employee tallies don't match what we think they should be? Oh. You want to just calculate average wages for whole groups of people based on identity while ignoring the actual job tites and experience and demand some kind of wage adjustments if the tallies don't come out right there either?

Um... No. That's not equal rights. And that's pretty much the problem the Left has. They want to use government power to adjust the results, but not really look into what's causing those results in the first place. And when folks like me want to look at those details, we get called names, or we get ridiculously manipulated stats thrown back at us.

When outcomes are the result of actions and actions are treated equally, you have equal rights. When outcomes are adjusted after the fact to make them equal regardless of the actions taken, or the impact of those actions, you have the opposite of equal rights. But in virtually every single social or economic position the Left takes, they want to do the latter. So yeah, I disagree with them. But that doesn't allow liberals to co-op terms like "equal rights", and "healthcare" or even "environment", and insist that their agenda in those areas is the only way to be "for" those things, and anyone not on board is therefore "against" them.

That's simply not true. But yeah, the more narrow minded you guys are, and the more angrily you sling accusations and labels at anyone who doesn't agree 100% with you, the more people will just walk away. Which is exactly what we saw in 2016, and I suspect we'll see even more of it this time around.

Edited, Sep 14th 2020 2:51pm by gbaji

We keep trying, but you still keep coming back.

Oh, well, a thing isn't worth doing, if it isn't worth doing right: You are a **** eating robot with the AI created in a sophomore high school computer class

I'm not "scrambling". That's exactly what I meant from the start. It's not like I haven't commented on the "all hands on deck" approach the Left uses politically for a couple decades on this forum. Oh wait. I have. There's been a very ugly coordinated methodology between the political side and the media side going back at least 20 years now on the Left. I've certainly posed several times in the last several months about how the actions by Dem mayors and governors with regards to Covid lockdowns, riots, and looting, in conjunction with media skew pointing the resulting damage at Trump, which then gets repeated by the Dem politicians themselves.

Biden has a lot of people carrying his water for him. Cause he certainly can't do it himself. Don't pretend you don't see it.



Which is funny given how accurately I can predict what liberals will do in any given situation and why they do it. It's a predictable pattern Joph.



I think that the Dems are putting too much weight in the gains they got in 2018, and mistakenly believe that the results of that mid term election was some sort of referendum on Trump. They're proceeding as though it is, but a lot of the pickups they got in the house were Dems running on a platform that looked suspiciously aligned with Trump's policies, against old school "never Trumpers" in the GOP. Those house Dems then turned right around and voted lockstep with their party leadership to impeach Trump. Which will likely **** off their voters, who appear to like Trump's policies even if they don't like him personally.

The 2018 election wasn't about the people aligning with the Dems politically, but more of a cleaning house inside the GOP itself. This time around, most of those same Dems are going to be running against new GOP members who are now aligned with Trump's ideas of smaller government, more care taken in spending, better focus on what actually matters, trying to make the government less of a feeding trough and more lean and efficient, etc. That's what the voters want. That's why they like Trump.

I get why the Left tries to make it about the person and not the policies. It's all they have, since their policies suck. But that's kinda my point here. When they go so far as to equate what most people see as "normal" to bigotry and hate, more people will just start walking away. When black people are told they must choose between having no police or being called Uncle Tom's they're going to walk away. When latinos are told that they either support illegal immigration or they're somehow traitors to their heritage, they are going to walk away. When women are told that they either must be fully on board with the most extreme feminist agenda or they aren't women (or maybe there's a special place in hell for them?), they are going to walk away.

Your party is doubling down on what cost them in 2016. I think it's a huge mistake. And no, I don't think that the 2018 mid term is the sign you may think it is.

Ok.