2024 Presidential Election thread

[1984Echoes]

16 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

He doesn't even need to campaign.  His fans adore him unconditionally.    

Blind adherence to a fascist wannabe dictator and the willingness to use violence is called...

Fascism.

Mussolini and Hitler perfected that. Trump is too incompetent to do the same but...

We are now (and have been since 2020) a nation that consists of ~35% violent fascists willing to **** all over the Constitution of the United States and our Democracy.

[chasfh]

30 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

May be true but my point stands. If everyone just assumes Trump will lose because of the polls, they may not get out and vote. We should never forget 2016....a national embarrassment.

That means the Democrats will need to target their efforts at states that will make the difference.

BTW: you know how Republicans are always against getting rid of the electoral college because they say only big coastal cities would make any difference in elections? My response to that is, how is that any different than a system in which only two or three states make the difference?

[oblong]

20 minutes ago, chasfh said:

That means the Democrats will need to target their efforts at states that will make the difference.

BTW: you know how Republicans are always against getting rid of the electoral college because they say only big coastal cities would make any difference in elections? My response to that is, how is that any different than a system in which only two or three states make the difference?

Because as we know those are “real” states made up of patriots. Not some lib labs from california and New York. 

[Sports_Freak]

5 hours ago, chasfh said:

That means the Democrats will need to target their efforts at states that will make the difference.

BTW: you know how Republicans are always against getting rid of the electoral college because they say only big coastal cities would make any difference in elections? My response to that is, how is that any different than a system in which only two or three states make the difference?

I've heard complaining about the electoral college but I didn't know it was only the GOP doing the complaining.

[Tiger337]

56 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

I've heard complaining about the electoral college but I didn't know it was only the GOP doing the complaining.

The GOP definitely are not the ones complaining abot the electoral college.  They love it!

[chasfh]

3 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

The GOP definitely are not the ones complaining abot the electoral college.  They love it!

Of course they do—that’s why they care against getting rid of it! 

[Crazy Cat Gentleman]

haha. dork.

[oblong]

 

[romad1]

21 minutes ago, oblong said:

 

Yeah, he makes the case well. 

[jz68]

All I want for Christmas is Trump being arrogant enough to get on the debate stage with Christie.   

[Tiger337]

1 hour ago, jz68 said:

All I want for Christmas is Trump being arrogant enough to get on the debate stage with Christie.   

It would be pointless.  Trump would just do the same thing he does in every debate - insult people, throw out ignorant one liners and make goofy faces.  Then his followers will talk about how he owned the debate.  

[chasfh]

11 hours ago, Crazy Cat Gentleman said:

haha. dork.

His base probably isn't very bright, and also, perhaps didn't bother looking at anything beyond her face and the logo.

[gehringer_2]

13 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

It would be pointless.  Trump would just do the same thing he does in every debate - insult people, throw out ignorant one liners and make goofy faces.  Then his followers will talk about how he owned the debate.  

Right. Trump has learned that the key is to simply never leave the cocoon of your own alternate reality bubble. Debate depends on the debaters at least agreeing that they exist in the same universe, but Trump does not. You can't pierce his confidence by showing that what he says is contradicted by objective reality because he never admits objective reality as a premise. So it's basically like talking to a person suffering paranoid delusion, what is true in your world doesn't matter as they are not in it. 

What's bizarre here is not so much that Trump is able to act out this approach with skill, it's that it works for him. And it can only do that because of the rise of a deep enough alternate reality media system that large numbers of people who are immersed in it can also accept his reality as the one that is objectively true. In this sense it matches the essential properties of a cult in every way, but a cult supercharged by having a mass market media support structure.

Now in practice, we haven't see mass marketed cults in the US other than in the religious domain. And it was hard to get alternate reality cults off the ground in the US because the US was a nation already steeped in post enlightenment Protestantism. The US has been a highly religious country, but the religions it practiced, regardless of how they saw their spiritual side,  were still all in the post Enlightement philosophical fold of science and philosophic empiricism. Even Catholic intelletualism was largely pulled into empiricism after the Enlightenment.

But in recent decades 'mainstream' Protestantism in the US on the decline and we've had the rise of Biblical literalist Christian fundamentalism. Biblical literalism is at its very heart a rejection of the system of post Enlightment empiricism, so this is one deep subtext to the successful rise of unreality based altermate media and politics. 

The other sociological trend that is probably just as significant but is not as widely recognized is the loss of 'community' connectedness throughout US society, but particularly in the non-college educated classes. People are getting more of their intellectual inputs from media, which is profit driven and always has its own agendas (with truth often not being on that agenda), as opposed to person to person interaction - especially cross generational interactions as families have atomized across the country. Cross generational family (and in the day in church congregations) interaction tends to keep people grounded in a broader set of perceptions of the 'real world' and that is something we continue to lose rapidly.

The non-college educated classes get a double dose here as they are both the most socially disconnected, and many of those are do have social connection find it largely in those non-empiricist fundamentalist churches.
 

[ben9753]

3 hours ago, jz68 said:

All I want for Christmas is Trump being arrogant enough to get on the debate stage with Christie.   

He won’t, because, as a prolific poster of this forum likes to say, he’s a little bish

[digitalpigsmuggler]

[romad1]

This is a bit too cute but still, appreciate the effort

obviously, Putin will extra-judiciously murder his political opponent because he is a KGB-trained dictator.  Trump just wishes he could because he's a little bish who f's 13-year olds on Epstein's island when he's not paying them out or paying them to be his whore wife.

[chasfh]

What a concept ...

 

[chasfh]

13 hours ago, digitalpigsmuggler said:

What, is it April 2022 already?

I need to go back in time and get good and mad.

[chasfh]

FYI, this is the chart from last month's year-over-year inflation report:

The bottom line number came in at 4%, and as we can see, almost a third of that is tied up in last June alone, which is now 12 months ago.

Once that month falls off the year-over-year period with next month's report, there's a good chance the overall number is going to come in at two-point-something, which is gonna make everyone throw their hats up into the air and shout "huzzah!" Well, at least those of us over sixty. 😁

I might increase my positions in some stock indexes before then.

 

Edited June 30, 2023 by chasfh

[Tiger337]

3 hours ago, chasfh said:

FYI, this is the chart from last month's year-over-year inflation report:

The bottom line number came in at 4%, and as we can see, almost a third of that is tied up in last June alone, which is now 12 months ago.

Once that month falls off the year-over-year period with next month's report, there's a good chance the overall number is going to come in at two-point-something, which is gonna make everyone throw their hats up into the air and shout "huzzah!" Well, at least those of us over sixty. 😁

I might increase my positions in some stock indexes before then.

 

I might do that too, but I think the pros already beat us to it.  The market has performed very well in the first half of the year.  

[chasfh]

23 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

I might do that too, but I think the pros already beat us to it.  The market has performed very well in the first half of the year.  

I was thinking that, too, that the market might have already priced in sub-3% inflation, but an actual announcement to that effect might draw in the last of the retail holdouts and bring the market up to a new support level.

[pfife]

always be buying....

[Tiger337]

1 hour ago, pfife said:

always be buying....

Except when you get old, you need to be careful about how big of a percentage you have invested in stocks.  You don't want to be taking out money in the middle of stock market crash which sets you investments back several years.  I have my money in buckets where the longest term bucket is in stocks but money that I might need in 5-10 years is invested more conservatively.  The relatively high interest rates on CDs are good for that.  

[Jim Cowan]

51 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Except when you get old, you need to be careful about how big of a percentage you have invested in stocks.  You don't want to be taking out money in the middle of stock market crash which sets you investments back several years.  I have my money in buckets where the longest term bucket is in stocks but money that I might need in 5-10 years is invested more conservatively.  The relatively high interest rates on CDs are good for that.  

Agree 100%...except that I'm 71 and have 100% in stocks (index funds).  This isn't by design, it's just that fixed income returns are so crappy that I can't be bothered with them.

[Tiger337]

13 minutes ago, Jim Cowan said:

Agree 100%...except that I'm 71 and have 100% in stocks (index funds).  This isn't by design, it's just that fixed income returns are so crappy that I can't be bothered with them.

CDs are pretty good now.  You can get more than 5% short term and more than 4.5% for five years.  That won't beat the expetecd average of a stock index fund but it gives you are reasonable return on money that you'll be needing soon.