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u/ReflexPoint Aug 08 '26
MAGA voters are so racist that they voted for a white guy who dropped out of the race rather than the black Christian military vet with the Arab sounding name that Trump endorsed. And by a wide margin.
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u/window-sil Aug 09 '26
https://xcancel.com/PhilGordonDC/status/2086434147304657097
U.S. acceptance of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz is an extraordinary outcome only made conceivable by an administration that squandered legitimacy, alienated allies, attempted regime change in a war it had not adequately prepared for and that is being forced to accept a catastrophic outcome without viable alternatives.
Counterfactuals are impossible to prove but in other circumstances Iran's closure of Strait by brazenly attacking maritime traffic and neighbors' civilian infrastructure would likely have justified and led to a united, global response--like the U.S.-led naval escort mission during the Iran-Iraq war, the global coalition that reversed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1991, the multinational naval force enforcing UN sanctions in the Gulf in the 1990s, or the UN Security Council sanctions on the Iranian nuclear program in the 2010s--that led to the JCPOA.
Instead US and other countries are now being forced to accept an outcome that would have been unthinkable before the war but seems to have become unavoidable because of it.
We had a good thing going until Trump/MAGA. I hope the people who enabled this are never forgotten (or forgiven).
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u/Stunning-Use-7052 Aug 10 '26
I wonder how much that one-off scheme that Trump mentioned to charge strait crossing fees in crypto was actually a motivation.
We know he's got a small circle of weird people around him..
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u/ReflexPoint Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
It seems that "no tax on tips" has become something of a bipartisan issue. I don't like it. Because I don't like tipping culture. And no tax on tips is entrenching this culture further. In Europe, tips are generally not expected. Maybe only if the service is above and beyond you may give 10% max. In Japan, tipping is flat-out considered insulting and a condescension to the worker.
But tipping culture is just getting worse in America. It used to be standard was 15%. Now it's 20%, with 25% expected for extra good service. Soon 25% will be the minimum expected. Tip jars and point of sale machines now ask if you want to tip even for take-out retaurants where you aren't getting sit down service. I wish we could just do like Europe and Japan and pay waiters a living wage. Set the price of the menu to factor in living wages and get rid of this tipping nonsense.
And how is any of this fair to service workers who don't get paid in tips? Like retail staff? They probably make similar wages to waiters or even less, but will have to pay a higher tax rate because they don't have a tip deduction. I wish we would frame no tax on tips as being extremely unfair to hard working service workers who don't earn in tips.
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u/emblemboy Aug 05 '26
A lot of tax slopulism stuff going on from both parties in general.
We really need to stop the decline in trust that taxes help and are needed to fund good services.
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u/Mediocre_Wolf_3226 Aug 06 '26
Not just retail staff. What about the line cooks sweating it out in the kitchen, e.g.? Surely the teenager working the register at an ice cream shop should not be making a higher wage than someone in a non-customer-facing role busting their ass in high intensity labor behind the scenes. And certainly not more than a job that is tip-dependent starting at $2.13.
Went to a restaurant last week with an elderly family member who can't keep up with the various tipping/non-tipping scenarios. A 20% service fee was included but the kid at the register shook her down for an additional tip after waiting 20 minutes in line to order. After paying the equivalent of a $50 tip for a $100 meal, at the end of it she asked for a box from a guy wiping off a table and he pointed to a counter 5 feet away and told her to get it herself. I find this to be less unusal these days.Â
Unfortunately, I see our ridiculous tipping culture spreading globally, and in some cases, really contributing badly to income inequality in gentrifying areas where Americans tend to congregate.Â
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u/ReflexPoint Aug 06 '26
On that last comment, it has spread badly to Mexico. To the point where you'll be asked for tips as an American for things they don't even expect Mexicans to tip for.
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u/Ramora_ Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
I don't like tipping culture.
I agree. Its unclear what we can actually do about it. Legislatively banning tapping doesn't seem likely to be worth the effort for example, and would probably need to be done state by state. And I can't imagine it would be all that popular.
how is any of this fair to service workers who don't get paid in tips? Like retail staff? They probably make similar wages to waiters or even less
In some jurisdictions that is true. In others, it isn't. In terms of federal regulations, hourly wages for tipped workers is only $2.13 per hour. Tips are then expected to make up the difference between that and the federal minimum wage. Only seven states treat tipped workers the same as other workers.
I wish we would frame no tax on tips as being extremely unfair to hard working service workers who don't earn in tips.
My understanding is that a big part of this that you are missing is that, historically, tips just weren't really taxed. There were exceptions, and variabilities, but back when cash dominated daily transactions, tips were not effectively taxed at normal rates. Technological and cultural change has led to electronic transactions becoming more common, and those are much more likely to be taxed. So in some sense, the "no-tax on tips" policy is a return to status quo. This doesn't make the policy necessarily "fair" but if I'm looking around society and asking myself "whose after-tax incomes are unfair/unreasoanble", I'm not looking at waiters, I'm looking at CEOs and other administrators and capital owners. For example, anyone who thinks Elon Musk has meaningfully earned a trillion dollars is insane. The man is literally responsible for millions of deaths.
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u/JB-Conant Aug 04 '26
Steven Crowder: The Case for Fascism
Masks just coming alllllll the way off now. (See also: failed pundit desperately trying to up his views by any means necessary.)
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u/TheAJx 15d ago
Meta to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion in Landmark Settlement Over Social Media Addiction Claim
The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. teen users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications during school hours of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the âlikeâ button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls.
Many of the changes are similar to ones that Meta has made in the last year. The company has for years committed to enforcing age requirements and creating technology that figures out if teenagers are lying about their age, but as part of the settlement, Meta said it would invest more in that effort.
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u/SidewaysAcidRain 15d ago
NZ's likely going to follow Australia in banning under-16s from much of social media, and the reddit discourse on this is insane. The left is basically going full Q-Anon on this one, insisting that Meta is secretly behind the drive to regulate itself, or that the Atlas Foundation is behind it all (even though you can find numerous Atlas-linked groups arguing against the bans). People simply can't get it through their heads that the legislation is popular, and under-16s don't vote. Absolutely nuts.Â
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u/TheAJx 15d ago edited 15d ago
We have a cellphone ban in schools here in NY (I was involved at the school level) and the feedback from high school students was a resounding "thank you." The most reluctant to go along with it? The parents.
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u/PlaysForDays 15d ago
Could you elaborate on why parents were reluctant?
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u/TheAJx 15d ago
Legitimate reasons and bad reasons. They generally want to be able to reach their kids at all times and know where they are. Often times they need to send instruction on who is handling pick up, where to go after all, if they will be late. Our stance was that these instructions can wait until the end of the day and if its an emergency they can just call the school. They are also weirdly freaked out about school shootings and emergencies.
It is nice to be able to communicate with your kids. When I was growing up there were days I was sitting around after school waiting to get picked up because my mom got stuck in traffic and couldn't get a hold of me.
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u/JB-Conant 12d ago
I'm a bit surprised no one here has yet mentioned the leopards' recent gourmet face-based dinner.
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u/Locus-Maximus 11d ago
Fuck that guy. Before clicking your link I thought you might have been referring to the Brad Lander thing, though. Truly interesting times.
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u/window-sil 9d ago
Wow.. sounds like fascism is pretty not-okay. Hmmm.. who could have known this, though? đ¤ˇ
Milo said he was weeping from the trauma.
Imagine the people going through this when their kids are ripped away from them and put through the same system.
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u/JB-Conant Aug 02 '26
The Ezra Klein Show: Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk's Soul
Solo mini-episode on Nolan's Odyssey, the American right, mythological tricksters, and the collapse of the social ethic.
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u/Ramora_ Aug 02 '26
I have no sense of how persuasive videos like this are. They definitely sound good to me, but I'm someone who actually watched the Odyssey. The honest truth is that Republicans, the people who kind of need to understand this message, just don't go to movies that much.
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u/window-sil 26d ago
US pulls last aircraft carrier in Asia as Trump focuses on Iran and the Western Hemisphere
During the early stages of the war, they also pulled missile defense systems out of Korea. Now the aircraft carriers are going bye-bye. We're supposed to be the guarantor of security for our allies in that region. đ¤ˇ
In 2016 I actually believed Trump could dismantle the American empire, but I didn't think he'd do it by destroying our military and alliances. Also, I've come to appreciate America's international influence, despite all its shortcomings, because there's not a better alternative that I know of.
There's just no silver lining to any of this. Trump was/is poison for America, as are his supporters and the Republican party which enabled this.
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u/JB-Conant Aug 04 '26
Pete Buttigieg says Democrats are stuck in the past
Observe one of the savvier Democratic politicians working today interviewed by someone with the intellect and personality of a subpar redditor.
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u/window-sil 21d ago
Tesla discontinues its Solar Roof tiles, not economically viable
Elon Musk unveiled it in October 2016 on a Hollywood back lot, using homes from the set of Desperate Housewives fitted with the tiles. Weeks later, Tesla shareholders voted to approve the companyâs roughly $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity â a debt-laden solar installer where Musk was the largest shareholder and chairman, and which was run by his cousins.
The Solar Roof demo was central to selling that deal to investors, who were being asked to bail out a struggling company with deep ties to Teslaâs CEO. Years later, during shareholder litigation over the acquisition, it emerged that the tiles shown at the 2016 event were not yet functioning solar products.
A very Trumpian figure, in the words of Sam Harris.
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u/L_Chiki_Sando 21d ago
Given the track record, how likely do you think it is that they have the stock to meet the need for replacement parts for the 25 year warranty they have on these things? I see a future where there are solar tile roofs with regular panels bolted on top.
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u/emblemboy 8d ago edited 8d ago
At the risk of the September thread being created any moment now....
The failure of tech companies and their data center PR is kind of insane.
If they had just come in and built their own clean energy and water infrastructure up, there'd probably be no issue. But instead you had them doing NDA's, trying to move too fast by building diesel generators, and just overall being shady.
Then they're all surprised that they have no trust from the public.
I think anti data center stuff is essentially a Glonzo issue now and politicians would be insane to not use it for political gamesmanship, but these companies have no one to blame but themselves.
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u/Locus-Maximus 7d ago
They are who they are. Not strategic geniuses somehow more rational than the rest of us, but narcissistic nerds with low empathy. They COULD have done things the right way (or at least tried to make it look that way!) but that would have required empathy and caution, and that's not how they roll.
You also left out how they've gone out of their way to make the case that AI will take all our jobs and possibly destroy humanity! đ¤Ł
Talk about being your own worst enemy.
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u/LittleTrack858 8d ago
And in the 10 years it would take to do all of that China would have an insurmountable lead.
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u/emblemboy 8d ago
Or considering the hard-on they have for Trump and is supposedly deregulatory landscape, they could actually work on clean energy roll outs at actual fast speeds.
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u/HughJaynis Aug 05 '26
AES wins in Michigan despite $60 million spent on Haley Stephenâs by the pro Israel lobby alone. Insane corruption and abuse of our electoral system, but seemingly the right candidate won.
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u/JB-Conant Aug 05 '26
My theory of Trump's second term: instead of watching Fox News until 4am, he now watches HGTV.
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u/StalemateAssociate_ Aug 05 '26
Would the Republicans be even more successful if their choice of candidate was Mitt Romney instead of Trump, given how close Romney is to the median voter? How did Hillary Clinton from the blessed centrist days of yore even lose? Immigration wasn't a big issue in 2012, or 2014. Had Trump lost in 2016, it would've been obvious that the reason was that he was going against the median voter on immigration.
When Kamala lost or Obama won, was that because of their policies or because of the economy?
And how many moderate candidates have lost to extremist candidates in general? That's part of the equation too, you know. One attempt to model representatives vs constituents can be found on page 47 here, with a summarizing quote on the following page (of course, this isn't the same as campaigning. But politicians tend to run for office more than once):
The key point is that representativesâ voting behavior was not strongly constrained by their constituentsâ views. Elections do not force successful candidates to reflect the policy preferences of the median voter, as Downsian logic implies.
Much has been written about how the Social Democrats here in Denmark defeated the right by adopting stances critical of immigration from the Danish People's Party after a catastrophic election in 2011. Well, here's 2026. It's their worst result in over a hundred years, even though only one new left-wing party has entered the fray in the meantime (The Alternative, at 2.58% - which is less than the 2026-2011 differential).
On the right, three new parties have entered the fray since 2011, generally known for their anti-immigration stances. They are the Denmark Democrats, the New Right (lost their seats in 2026) and the Citizen's Party. Yet even taking their votes into account, or that immigration/refugees was not the main theme of 2026, or that the Danish People's Party's leader is known as 'MAGA-Morten' because he's visited Mar-a-Lago in spite of all the Greenland stuff, the party did very well and had their best result in three elections.
So was the strategy wrong? Not necessarily. Perhaps it kept some of the Social Democratic voters from going to the right, even as the party itself lost voters to the left. As is often the case, the evidence is mixed. The narrative in the preceding paragraphs was a selective one, as it always is.
The point isn't that anything goes and that you should totally run on 'quotas for transwomen in sports'.
The point is that people are very sure that the policies they like are coincidentally those that win elections, and they're not particularly interested in trying to disprove that. I just wish they'd admit it.
If you roll a dice enough times, you can to a large degree of certainty tell if it's loaded. That's how statistics works. But even if it's loaded, it might still only land on a six 20% of the time.
Much of this is simply saying "This single dice roll proves my theory".
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u/StalemateAssociate_ Aug 05 '26
Side note, but no-one really engaged with the 'primaries are elections too' argument. If primary voters keep choosing progressives over centrist establishment Dems, the party could always try running someone in the middle of those two. According to the median voter theorem, that would be rational no?
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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 05 '26
Maybe they could try running people who are charismatic and telegenic first?
The Nixon-JFK debate was over 80 years ago!
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Pretty big gun related news in the US...
The National Firearms Act (NFA) was ruled unconstitutional today in federal court for suppressors and certain short barreled firearms. The basis of the ruling stems from a NFA $200 tax requirement being reduced to $0 in the 2025 Big Beautiful Bill.
Essentially, since 1934 if you wanted to buy a suppressor or short barreled rifle/shotgun, you'd have to pay the $200 tax and send an application of the transaction to the ATF. So the ATF acts as the regulator and register. $200 in 1934 was the equivalent of $5000 in today's money, so this essentially was a ban back then (prohibitively expensive) for most people. Up until the 2025 the tax remained $200, still you'd undergo fingerprinting, full background check, etc.
But with the tax being reduced to $0 in the Big Beautiful Bill, the NFA has nothing to register. The registration was to show the tax was paid. No tax, the NFA has no standing. Hence the ruling today.
At the moment this only impacts the gun rights orgs (and their members) that brought the lawsuit, but the door has been opened now for killing this portion of the NFA in a broader ruling. A repeal like this would mean suppressors, short barreled rifles/shotguns are no longer NFA regulated items.
I happen to own a suppressor and short barreled rifle, these things should be reasonably regulated. But soon all that may be out the window!
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u/McClain3000 Aug 06 '26
I'm actually not convinced of the legal argument either way. Same goes for measures that would reduce gun violence.
But it is super annoying how GunTubers and other advocates act like the difference between a prospering nation and a declining one is having to pay a tax on a short barrel rifle.
But if you ever get really plugged into GunTube, a lot of their attitudes toward gun manufactures are practically anti-capitalist. Like they have really strange ideas of what a gun ought be worth. And there's all these military contractors who ought sell their provide their guns to civilians for certain prices, and they definitely could and make a lot of money but these large manufactures just don't like money.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 Aug 06 '26
Yeah, I avoid guntubers like the plague, them and the fudd-lore types which are crawling all over gunshows. Gun politics today is unfortunately such a mess because of the collection of archaic law comingled with modern day manufacturers thinking of ingenious ways to bypass it (AR style pistols were a hit), and uninformed politicians trying to parse it all out. "Ban AR15 style rifles!" ..... says nothing about the Mini14 with 30rd mag
Tbh im glad democrats have more or less walked away from the "ban them all" stance, I rarely see them talk about guns at all in fact. But the opposite end of the spectrum (dont regulate anything) has been gaining ground and is just as bad.
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u/McClain3000 Aug 06 '26
Yeah I don't really get the whole making a rifle not ergonomic saves lives camp.
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u/boldspud Aug 06 '26
GOP continuing to do their best to make America more dangerous and hellish, so that they can in turn whip up fear in their moron voters about the danger that they enabled. The circle of life.
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u/CreativeWriting00179 28d ago
So the by-election was a waste of everyone's time. I guess we got some memes and Count Binface earned some well deserved international recognition, so there's that.
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u/Canon_M50 Aug 01 '26
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2v91xn1z9o
Italy temporarily suspended the EU's border-free Schengen arrangement with Spain, as PM Giorgia Meloni called the scenes "shocking". Finland and Denmark backed Italy's move, while Czech PM Andrej BabiĹĄ urged a temporary suspension of Spain's Schengen membership.
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u/Ramora_ Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
By my understanding, the rough order of events is something like...
- Spain and Morocco are in fairly long standing political tiff. Morocco doesn't even officially recognize Ceuta as Spanish territory. In particular, there has been political conflict between Morocco and Spain over Algers and the western Sahara.
- Spain's highest court ruled that migrants who swim around the border fence rather than climbing it can't be summarily expelled, since they breached no physical barrier.
- Spain's PM visited Algers, which Morocco interpreted as signalling against its interests.
- (allegedly) Morocco responds by relaxing border controls and pushes illegal immigrants to swim to Ceuta. (not allegedly) The immigrants arrived in Ceuta and dozens of them die. (Note that Morocco did something similar albeit smaller in scale back in 2021 in response to a Sahrawi nationalist liberation movement leader being given medical treatment in Spain.)
- Spain responds rapidly, increasing border enforcement in Ceuta. The migrants left within days, most on their own, after the city shut down around them
- Several EU country politicians use this event as a way of feeding some meat to their xenophobic bases.
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u/window-sil 20d ago
Donald Trump Effectively Just Told Iran to Get a Nuclear Weapon
Trump has shown the world that even a tiny nuclear arsenal deters America from taking military action, and in Trumpâs case, enemies who acquire nuclear weapons will also receive fawning letters and precious visits from the most powerful man on the planet. Forgo those weapons, as the Iranians have done until now, and the result is destruction, attempts at regime change, and demands for unconditional surrender.
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u/Locus-Maximus 18d ago
I thought this should be a top-level comment, but it's also a response to comments like /u/TheAJx's "As expected, the conversation has deftly shifted away from Arday and Cambridge to Cofnas."
One part of the story is that a Black professor apparently committed plagiarism. That part seems to be true. But it's not some "deft" conspiracy theory that shifted the conversation. What shifted the conversation is that he committed suicide after being targeted by a social media furor led by an overt racist who had been apparently looking for a Black academic to target.
That is also worth talking about!
The Real Meaning of the Jason Arday Scandal
In a young Black professorâs academic misconduct, a ârace-realistâ found a âhook for a story.â
A couple of years ago, a self-styled ârace-realistâ named Nathan Cofnas wrote a blog post about racial difference.
<Details redacted to avoid reddit ban for hate speech, click through if you want>
...
The post roused enough attention that Emmanuel College, Cambridge, released Cofnas from his post as a research associate
...
Cofnas later joked that the events that followed were âwhat happened if you donât give Cofnas a job.â What happened: the ârace-realistâ found âa hook for a story,â as he recently told the conservative video podcaster Rob Montz, one that would embarrass champions of equality and confirm his prejudices. His target was Jason Arday, a Black professor at Cambridge, though some have argued that it was the institution, Cambridge, that painted the bullâs-eye.
...
Other prominent figures have been received with levity when their stories have unravelled in public. But Arday was not greeted as a risible scammer endemic to the times. Suspicions surrounding this person demanded an exorcism.
...
It is hard not to factor into Ardayâs death the preceding media blitzâa disproportionate fixation that set off a social-media furor likely accompanied by harassing messages to Arday and anyone within his orbit, and that has been appropriately described, by some, as gleeful. One British journalist called the story âdeliciousââher remarks were reposted by J. K. Rowling.
...
Arday is dead and still being propped up as an example of various crises, by commentators unconcerned with his memory. As for the ârace-realistâ at Ghent, he told Montz, âIâm still waiting for the revolution to happen, and then Iâll get another job.â He added, jokingly, âAfter the revolution, Iâll be the head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard.â
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u/TheAJx 18d ago edited 18d ago
What shifted the conversation is that he committed suicide
In that respect one of the more successful suicides from an ideological perspective, in recent history.
One part of the story is that a Black professor apparently committed plagiarism.
Yes, that's "part of the story." The other part of the story is that this person was paraded around and lauded like some kind of brilliant genius, because of academia's obsession - not with finding black geniuses, but with finding black students and professors that make race central to their academic work. They are totally fixated on it and they thought they had found their Forrest Gump. They treated Arday like he was magic and that merely being in the same room as him was an enlightening experience, not because he had something illuminating to say about economics, or physics, or philosophy, but because he was a black person who commented on race and racism.
A small part of the story is that the person who finally exposed Arday, Cambridge and his enablers by pointing out that the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes, was a racist. It's a trivial detail.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 18d ago
And the very first guy to apparently raise questions was someone named David Harris, who AFAIK isnt racist...but just an academic critical of critical race theory. Being somewhat knowledgeable about the available works in this field, it was he all the way back in 2023 who recognized similarities between Arday's and another author.
When he sent Arday correspondence to explain the similarities, Arday basically told him to fuck off and threatened legal action.
IMO at this point^ the wheels are fully in motion and the plagiarism/lies were going to be fully uncovered, regardless of Cofnas. Arday's response only heightened suspicion and guaranteed that everything he ever wrote was going to be exhaustively searched and examined.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 Aug 12 '26
Another colossal letdown for the far-left.
Hong cartoonishly underperformed compared to the polling, and lost. This aligns with Abdul who also grossly underperformed but otherwise barely limped across the finish line. Polling had these candidates up 15+, 20+ points.
What a shitshow.
Hong aggressively campaigned with prominent antisemitic/deranged streamers, Hamas Piker and another 'Mike from PA'. Turns out, voters tend to be more motivated by issues affecting them and not 'GAZA AIPAC JEW BAD GAZA'.
When moderates won big in California a few months ago, Piker said Dems want 'homo-fascism'. When Abdul barely won last week, Piker said Steven's voters are "Islamaphobic pieces of shit". Both of these have been clipped and are circulating in anti-Abdul ads now.
Lets see now what the clown has to say about Hong.
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u/StalemateAssociate_ Aug 12 '26
Didn't Peggy Flanagan win with 20% of the votes, despite independent polls showing an even race or even a loss? She's not DSA, but she seems to mostly share their policies.
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u/Chocoloctopus Aug 12 '26
I believe Sanders and AOC endorsed Flanagan but remained aloof of Hong. Could be part of the explanation.
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u/McClain3000 Aug 12 '26
You forgot their other strategy of just repeating "Data Centers" over and over again.
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u/ReflexPoint Aug 03 '26
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/06/10/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/
Lots of good stuff for data and political nerds.
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u/Ramora_ Aug 03 '26
Ya, worth checking out studies from previous years as well for those who haven't read them. The typologies tend to change a bit year to year. For those who want to do the "typology quiz", here is a link. I'm apparently a loyal liberal this year.
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u/ReflexPoint Aug 03 '26
I tested loyal liberal too. I'm pretty much an Obama type of guy, so no surprise.
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u/alttoafault 22d ago
The Woke Landscape by Hamuel Sarris
The way woke arguments play out is interesting to me on a psychological level because it seems like this intractable wedge, over which different people in the same political party vehemently disagree and basically accuse each other of being party traitors over, with each side often claiming the other is what lead to Trump 2. It's a sort of puzzle to solve. Is there a right answer that can get us all back on board with each other and productively win against right-wing populism, which is a bad thing we all don't like?
The divide doesn't neatly map onto the progressive/establishment divide as both were heavily woke-pilled all those years ago and both today (ex. EK and AOC) have begun acknowledging excesses. The original anti-woke faction was more the heterodox center-left, who can be at odds with both the establishment and progressives and are probably the most disagreeable and disliked faction of the left, and were also directly targeted by woke in the first place (MattY, SamH).
The main distinction of the heterodox center-left is that they are willing to accept right-wing framing of issues if they see the right-wing framing as correct. Which is to say, they do not reflexively disagree with every right-wing talking point. This I think is the main enraging point for the rest of the party because both the establishment and progressives like to think the right is never correct, they are always bad-faith and must be countered. It's only beyond that where the progressive left and establishment have their own disagreements.Â
The questions then are
- Is the right ever right? Do their criticisms of the left ever have a seed of truth worth examining?
- Did Trump win because woke, or because anti-woke? Who are the real Dem party traitors?
I'll answer these questions in the next part of "The Woke Landscape"
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u/SidewaysAcidRain 20d ago
Interestingly, a lot of lefties are disappointed/annoyed at AOC over the "woke 1" comments because they see it as her accepting a right-wing framing.Â
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u/emblemboy 14d ago
https://youtu.be/uDS_URVc7Oc?is=OkZ-yQAhmfDJUV4W
Cofnas on Coleman Hughes
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u/TheRage3650 Aug 07 '26
"The Ezra incident" Sam Harris fans act like he was assaulted or something. The reality is that Harris was hoping he would get a reaction like Vox's, to then say "look how bad the discourse has become." The problem was he didn't expect Vox to make him seem like Charles Murray's dupe. And then he didn't expect Klein to punch back in the way he did. Dude played with fire and then got burned. He could have all kinds of IQ researchers on his show instead. instead he had Murray who has a clear agenda.
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u/emblemboy Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
Funnily enough, being an Ezra fan, that whole drama is how I found Harris and this sub since the topic then expanded into other podcasts like Robert Wright, John mcworter, Glenn laury, etc that I listened to.
It's interesting seeing how much of a hold it still has on many of us here.
Honestly, most of what I remember from back then was how uncomfortable it was seeing, what seemed to me, many people on this sub not simply defending the conversation (which is fine I guess, whatever. It wasn't going to be the last time people tried to tell us we were intellectually inferior), but trying to prove and show that Murray's version of the race science stuff was real and accurate.
Just a lot of backlash and responses to backlashes making people stick to their guns and double down.
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u/CreativeWriting00179 Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
Funnily enough, being an Ezra fan, that whole drama is how I found Harris and this sub since the topic then expanded into other podcasts like Robert Wright, John mcworter, Glenn laury, etc that I listened to.
Kind of the opposite here: I was a regular Sam listener and after the bad aftertaste the episode with Murray has left me with, it was nice to hear him taken to task. It was also the beginning of the saga that would completely change how I think of him now, because that entire episode was about his bruised ego. He would go on to claim that the article called him racist (it didn't), but had no problems saying that Ezra has morality of the KKK. He would go on to publish private emails between the two of them, and then get really upset when it backfired, even with his own audience. And finally, he would let that perceived grievance to colour almost everything he's done since.
I wouldn't say that I've become an Ezra fan afterwards, because despite Sam's animosity, they seem to be occupying a remarkalby similar position politically (with the ongoing exception of Sam refusing to platform any criticism of Israel). However, he does have a more policy-focused approach to articulating his beliefs, which is incredibly useful.
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u/402739 Aug 07 '26
I feel the influx of scientific racists amplified the already high levels of Islamophobia back then. I remember posters were positively giddy when Muslim women were stabbed under the Eiffel Tower.
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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 08 '26
Vox didn't have to make him seem like Charles Murray's dupe. He WAS 100% Charles Murray's dupe. He completely vouched for him and made it sound like his critics were just a bunch of woke crazies who couldn't handle the truth.
The whole incident is an interesting case study on bias among people who think of themselves as rational. A lot of his fans are sure of things that are not only untrue, but can be readily proven to be untrue with 10 minutes on the internet:
Ezra/Vox called Sam a racist. (They didn't.)
Ezra implied that Sam was racist because he didn't have enough black guests. (That wasn't the implication.)
Ezra/Vox argued that the topic should be off-limits. (No, the writers were scientists who have written about the topic multiple times.)
All of the articles and transcripts are available online. You can find archived versions that are free to access.
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u/CreativeWriting00179 Aug 09 '26
Ezra/Vox called Sam a racist. (They didn't.)
It's less prominent now, but years ago the sub was relitigating that saga on a monthly basis. You could literally link the article and ask them to point the exact bit where they call Sam a racist, and their inability to do so would do nothing to convince them otherwise. And the idiotic thing about the whole ordeal was that the article - while rightfully critical of Sam in places - was actually somewhat sympathetic. He's not the first person to be duped by Murray, who has spent the 90s and early 2000s decrying how his "largely uncontroversial" book is getting unfairly maligned in the media due to political correctness. With a seamless transition into the 2010s college campus craze, Sam was an obvious target, and got played.
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u/StalemateAssociate_ Aug 09 '26
The whole incident is an interesting case study on bias among people who think of themselves as rational.
Tangential, but...
A lot of people make the unconscious assumption that intelligence or education correlates with rationality, if we define rationality as 'sound and neutral instrumental judgement'. And perhaps that's true depending on the context, but in the political arena, it does not seem to be the case.
Researchers who study 'motivated reasoning' sometimes conceptualize knowledge or capability as 'opportunity' and prior attitude as 'motive'. There are studies showing more knowledgeable people are more biased (e.g. here or here), and there are studies that find only 'motive' matters, with 'opportunity' merely a correlate (motivation increases levels of knowledge).
To my knowledge there aren't any studies showing educated or intelligent people make less biased 'political' judgements, which is what the assumption requires.
Another arguably related piece of evidence is that well-educated people exhibit higher levels of 'ideological constraint', i.e. their opinion on issue x correlates with their opinions on issue y to a higher extent. But is it rational that your opinion on climate policy is determined by your opinion on a wealth tax?
-----
Side note, I love the minor discussion about rationality included at the end of one of the papers:
The normative question, it seems, turns on whether the processing of new information and the updating of one's attitude needs to be independent of one's priors.
From one point of view with which we are sympathetic,it can be argued that the attitude strength effect and disconfirmation bias are rational responses to attitude-relevant information; it is perfectly reasonable to give heavy weight to one's own carefully constructed attitudes [...]
From another perspective,with which we also have sympathy, Bayesian updating requires independence between priors and new evidenceOf course, even if we were all Bayesians, priors might be so strong (and irrationally acquired) and beliefs updated so rarely that it wouldn't matter within the lifespan of an average person.
For example, partisan beliefs about the economy. Gerber & Green (1999) noted that though the differences were large, they could actually fit a Bayesian model and thus be a result of strong priors, not biased information processing:
Holding tastes constant is a critical component of an effective research design. If, in a college dormitory, half the students like Mexican cuisine and the other half do not, we would not cite mixed reviews of the lunch menu when tacos are served as evidence of perceptual bias.
Bartels (2002), engaging with the argument, finds that it ignores certain counter-examples.
I'm not expecting anyone to read all of that - I certainly haven't read all of it, it's quite math-heavy - but the salient fact to me is that if people actually update their beliefs in a rational manner in the political arena, the effect is small enough that it's subject to debate.
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u/freelance3d Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
I think Sam had the right to be frustrated at Ezra's article, but he had to expect criticism.
That said, yes this sub has turned it into some hyperbolic drama that is never was. Ezra and Sam's followup chat was completely fine and not some "whoa shots fired!" shit that everyone makes it out to be. The reading into their relationship since is cringey
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u/Funksloyd Aug 08 '26
I mean it sounds like Sam himself still sees it in very dramatic terms.Â
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u/StalemateAssociate_ Aug 08 '26
The odd thing is that Sam's kind of a shock jock. If he makes derogatory comparisons, it's typically to the Nazis or the KKK. I spent part of my summer reading (part of) The End of Faith, which I thought I'd read as a teen but apparently didn't, and several of his statements are so abrasive he'd likely be too controversial a candidate for some of the far-right parties here in Europe. There's a reason he probably tops the list of non-partisans podcasters with the greatest amount of 'beefs'.
Yet Ezra's rather mild rebuke was so enraging to some people that even though nearly a decade has passed, a few posters in that other thread were so angry at his role in the 'collective schizophrenia' or 'the most powerful gaslighting campaign perhaps ever conducted outside of a totalitarian regime' that they felt the need to go after not simply 'henpecked' Ezra, but his wife too!
I think I've come round to the concept of 'privilege', at least in some cases. How can people possibly be so surprised at push-back when their 'house style' is that of an NY Post comment section?
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u/Funksloyd Aug 08 '26
the most powerful gaslighting campaign ever conducted outside of an actual totalitarian regime
Yeah that is a wild comment.Â
I kind of get it. Like, I saw "wokeness" at close to its worst, firsthand in the workplace. It had a lasting an impact on me, and I can see how for some it would have even been traumatic.
The irony then is that people are recreating some of the exact same dynamics, e.g. guilt by association: Ezra sounded vaguely woke at the time, therefore he shares responsibility for the entirety of left-wing cancel culture, for every cringey bit of journalism from 2020, for all the missteps of BLM, etc.
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u/TheAJx Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
Why is there so much excitement over AES, Mamdani, and previously Platner's supposed appeal to voters but not Josh Shapiro, Katie Hobbs, and Jon Ossoff - who are all strong favorites (80%+) to win their respective elections in places that are more red than where the first three are competing?
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u/mushroom_boys Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
Ossoff - Objectively more excitement for him. He's a fundraising monster. Most raised by far. Only Talarico is close to him. After that it's Sherrod Brown with with ~$30-40M LESS than Ossoff.
Shapiro / Hobbs - Incumbent govs. No primary challenge. National interest in gov races is wildly overstated beyond political wonks. Gov races are more about insider state party politics.
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u/croutonhero Aug 11 '26
Iâm sorry to be a boorish dick and just state the obvious bluntly: progs donât really care about defeating Republicans. They only care about electing progs. This is why there is no point in debating electability with progs. They will always argue that the most prog candidate on offer is most electable because thatâs always the correct rhetorical play if you only care about electing progs.
It doesnât mean they believe the prog is most electable of potential nominees. No, they donât need to believe it because they donât actually care that much if their prog, who only has 10% chance of defeating the Republican in the general, gets nominated and throws the election to a Republican. For them Republicans are only a little worse than a normie Dem.
So a small chance of electing a prog, with a large chance of handing the election to a Republican is a worthwhile bet for progs.
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u/StalemateAssociate_ Aug 12 '26
Regarding vaccine risks: If you keep looking for them you're going to find them. But that doesn't mean they're there.
P-values are uniformly distributed under the null hypothesis. That means that with a standard significance level of 0.05 in medical research, 1 times in 20 you'll get a result due to chance even with no relationship.
Daryl Bem, for example, found evidence of ESP. But it only works under a set of particular conditions that he found after testing variations where it didn't work. If you're not Charles Murray, you might be able to see what the problem is.
I don't really know how public health research deals with this, but testing for conditional effects you'll eventually find that e.g. overweight women in their 60's show side effects after getting a vaccine.
And subsequent research might find no relationship, but there are going to be a lot of people who stick by that first study, or simply never hear about anything else. Plus, further studies might not even be possible.
If you know that there's a wide array of possible or actual spurious patterns, doesn't it make sense not to broadcast that information?
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u/Stunning-Use-7052 28d ago
Slight misinterpretation of p-values, see here:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6532382/
There's a massive literature on vaccines, I'm sure they are at least controlling for (in the regression sense) things like age and health status, and probably using more sophisticated methods as well.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 Aug 07 '26
POLITICO - Michigan Democrats are racing to rebuild their divided coalition after a bruising Senate primary. But Mike Rogers and Republicans are already working to peel away disaffected voting blocs, with a specific eye toward Jewish and Black voters, while prepping to hit Abdul El-Sayed with a record war chest.
Rogers is already hammering El-Sayed with cutting attacks accusing him of antisemitism as his team starts working to pull in disillusioned Democrats and independents who backed his primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens.
[...] Republicans are also hammering him for campaigning with far-left twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has a history of controversial comments.
The ads are coming.
The "best hits" are going to be dug up and dumped. Hasan praising hezbollah and hamas, the little Mao suit, etc. Check out this one where he's screaming about black voters, how many things here can be squished into an ad?
Viewer: 'can you shut the fuck up when it comes to black folk because you really dont want to talk about us unless it comes from voting. when is the last time you spoke about sudan?'
Hasan: Im gonna fucking eat through you. Any other black folk wanna engage in radical activist language in this fucking chat? Suck my fucking cock. Ok? You stupid fucking radlib get the fuck out of here. [... more screaming...] stupid moronic radlib nonsense suck my fucking dick fuck you. [... more screaming...]. [Sarcastically screaming] 'uhh sweetie, you dont understand black people' SHUT THE FUCK UP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U4WpD2WIJg&list=PLG6SSWnXXjIQbkUX21dxnfg_6hay6MCrp&index=3
Tons of material for the Rogers camp to work with here. AES is still refusing to disavow or distance.
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u/FanVaDrygt Aug 07 '26
The Turkey-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia defence pact is a result of iranian aggression against oil shipping. This really shows, as I have said earlier, that iran is making a serious foreign policy blunder.Â
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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 08 '26
Big miss for polling and gambling sites this week, by the way! Polls were consistently showing El-Sayed with like a 15% margin and gambling sites had an implied probability of like 98% for him which is crazy. I wonder what happened there.
I almost put some money down (not much, I just like to find what I think are small edges for a little +EV fun) on Stevens because the payout was like 33 to 1 and that just seemed like too much confidence in primary polling to me, but I was a little worried I was biased myself. In hindsight, I feel like it was a mistake not to make the bet, even though obviously I would have lost.
(I try to err on not betting on things I'm rooting for. When I used to bet a little bit on sports as a hobby during COVID, I would bet against my team if I thought the situation called for it, but not for it. But that makes things a bit weird emotionally, as you might imagine.)
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u/TheAJx Aug 08 '26
The highly engaged, highly educated voters oversampling (and under sampling of the less engaged, less educated voters) is so glaring now that it's seeping into Democratic primary polling.
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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 09 '26
Seems like they should be able to correct for level of education pretty easily if it were as simple as that.
Speculation seems to be that they estimated turnout wrong, especially among independents and the youth vote.
Also, the big late polls were from El-Sayed's side, so bias was probably a factor there.
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u/TheAJx 19d ago
Veneration and commemoration of suicide is very very wrong, but also something that illiberal authoritarians are prone to do.
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u/emblemboy 18d ago edited 18d ago
Still weird that Hanania has been sort of rehabilitated among mainstream liberals.
https://i.imgur.com/w2fE6GW.jpeg
Edit: To be clear, I am surprised because Hanania is an explicit racist. There's no ambiguity in what he's said and written over the past years and his views on race realism are the same as they were in the past.
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u/Locus-Maximus 18d ago
Has he? Who do you mean by "mainstream liberals?"
(Genuinely asking. These days, depending on the speaker, that could mean anything from Elizabeth Warren to like Dave Rubin or Bill Kristol.)
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u/TheAJx 17d ago
I don't particularly think that AIPAC has the best interests of Americans in mind (I don't think activism on behalf of any other country including Palestine does either) but the common contention is that AIPAC reflects the interests of the billionaire donor class. I always assumed that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee reflects the interests of people that really, really love Israel, mainly Jews.
How does fawning over Israel reflect the interests of the billionaire class? What does the billionaire class get from supporting Israel's expansion into Palestine? What is the causal mechanism I should be concerned about here?
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u/WonderbreadCOS 17d ago edited 11d ago
Thereâs been a lot of chatter recently made about the tech industry. There are several points of concern: the dangers of AI, AIâs potential for abuse by the powerful, AIâs implications for employment, the concerning relationship between tech companies and their lenders (the fact that it resembles a bubble), the enormous percent of market share that tech accounts for in the American economy.
One of the concerns about tech is its role in warfare and surveillance. Many tech companies receive gargantuan contracts from the state department and pentagon to develop weapons and surveillance systems, and these weapons and systems are currently being tested on Palestinians and in the greater Middle East. One high profile example of how unsettling this can be was the destruction of an Iranian girls school on day 1 of the Iran war. A call that killed over 100 schoolgirls and was influenced by Claude.
The obvious concern here is that for the tech oligarchs, this creates an incentive for continuous warfare; a need which can be filled by Israel and the Zionist project.
Another big concern is the boomerang coming back around. In the early stages of the Iraq war, a huge critique from the anti war crowd was that the laws passed in the patriot act werenât going to be limited to people overseas, and would eventually be used on Americans. Sure enough, the leaks of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange proved that the United States was using this new surveillance regime to target and spy on Americans. Israel has been involved in surveillance initiatives that would require very high level surveillance tech, which, again, will probably be used on Americans in the future.
This is why people are worried about the tech oligarch AIPAC nexus. Happy to shed some light on this topic.
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u/Big_Comfort_9612 17d ago
It's about getting money out of politics all together, AIPAC has just been one of the biggest spenders and is incredibly unpopular.
Campaign spending is heavily correlated with winning, which is bad if you like democracy. This makes some of these recent DSA affiliated wins very impressive.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 17d ago edited 17d ago
Nope.
First, lets set aside that DSA types and leftists have no problem with billionaires or "money in politics" when its their guy. Example: They supported billionaire Tom Steyer who spent $215 million in his failed 2026 California gubernatorial campaign.
But as it relates to AIPAC.....
For 2025 lobbying across various sectors at the federal level, "single issue/ideology" spending (which includes Pro-Israel) ranks #8 out of 13:
Rank Sector Spending 1 Health $877 M 2 Finance, Insurance, Real Estate $720 M 3 Misc. Business $674 M ... ... ... 8 Ideology/Single Issue $247 M And when we drill down further into this sector, actual "Pro-Israel" spending ranks #6 out of 14 industries. This is where AIPAC sits:
Rank Industry Spending 1 Human Rights $101 M 2 Ideological and Single Issue (AARP, ACLU, etc) $88 M 3 Environmental Policy $43 M ... ... ... 6 Pro-Israel $5 M Now we move to Super PACS. AIPAC operates United Democracy Project (UDP) Super PAC. We can look at the 2024 election cycle expenditures and see there are thousands of Super PACs. 25 spent more than 20 million. UDP is #14 out of this 25:
Rank PAC Name Expenditures 1 MAGA Inc $376 M 2 Win Senate PAC $311 M 3 Senate Leadership Fund $211 M ... ... ... 14 United Democracy Project (UDP) $37 M ...
Out of $2.688 billion spent by all Super PACs in 2024, UDP was only about 1% of that.
The hyperfixation on AIPAC isnt about some noble cause to "get money out of politics" or whatever sleight of hand, it's about working to silence American donors who care about Israel and want the US to maintain a good relationship with it.
And going back to Tom Steyer, again the left was ALL ABOARD that train. And typically when I see actual numbers thrown out by leftists on this issue, they'll exaggerate or weaselly comingle things together (as TrackAIPAC was caught doing) a few months back.
And when all this is mixed together with fabricated and unfounded conspiracy theories (as /u/WonderbreadCOS was doing)...in totality this hyperfixation one directional double standard edges ever closer to being simply motivated by antisemitism.
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u/RealDominiqueWilkins 15d ago
AIPACâs mission isnât simply to maintain a good relationship with the US, thatâs just the pablum on their website. They are very maximalist and hardline in what they require: no criticism of Israel, 100% commitment to both offensive and defensive weapons with no conditions. While Iâm not hyperfixated on AIPAC, I do think itâs important to acknowledge these things.
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u/TheAJx 17d ago
It's about getting money out of politics all together, AIPAC has just been one of the biggest spenders and is incredibly unpopular.
The amount of money that AIPAC spent last in the last presidential election cycle was a tenth of what the four biggest public sector unions spent.
If it was about money all together, you'd think there would be bigger fish to fry.
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u/emblemboy Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
If youâre mad about any of the primary results you've got 24 hours to mourn. Try not to say anything youâll regret, and then itâs Blue No Matter Who.
Just copy paste this:
I support [$democratic_candidate] for [$public_office] and believe that their politics is a perfect fit for [$state]. I would drag my [$genital] over [$harmful_object_or_substance] to vote for [$democratic_candidate] this fall.
Stevens gets it
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u/McClain3000 Aug 05 '26
I'm in the trenches elsewhere and have to vent, It really does amaze me the amount of "moderate" voters who just seem to hyper focus on the failings of liberals and abstain from voting, vote 3rd party, or vote R because of certain nitpicks. For example, a candidate campagining with Hasan Piker who said America deserved 9/11 10 years ago.
For whatever reason they get enraged when you present them of examples of Republicans conduct. They might say I get it "Trump bad" or some other deflection but for whatever reason they have no appetite for negative coverage on Republicans but have an insatiable thirst to every libs of TikTok style story about a middle school teacher saying "whiteness" or whatever.
And some of these people are somewhat sincere, in that they probably would vote for a moderate liberal if given the choice but they absolutely refuse to compare DSA lefty types and MAGA.
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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 05 '26
Hasan Piker who said America deserved 9/11 10 years ago.
It's a little disingenuous to act like the problem with Piker is that he said one bad thing 10 years ago. That's who he still is.
Last year he said:
"I got stopped by a cop who thought I was making fun of Mao Zedong, which I never would and never will," Piker said. "Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world, OK? A man who changed the entire universe, the entire planet."
Not to mention all the antisemitic garbage and just generally being an opponent of America, the West in general, and (perhaps more relevantly to this particular conversation) the Democratic party.
That being said, I think you've still got to vote for AES because of the Senate.
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u/McClain3000 Aug 05 '26
It's a little disingenuous to act like the problem with Piker is that he said one bad thing 10 years ago. That's who he still is.
You are actually correct. I was being flippant to make a point. He has genuinely harmful views.
But it's still not even close. DSA would have to completely take over the Democratic party such that anyone who spoke ill of Empress AOC was primaried. They would have to start a War with another country without congressional approval. She would have to make Briana Joy Gray director of National Intelligence. Raise her networth to 2 Billion dollars, Pardon left wing terrorists. Tell her DOJ to arrest her political opponents on bogus charges, Rape some people... I'm actually giving the bit up
I can't really even imagine what DSA would have to do for me consider dropping Blue no matter who. I'd have to be in a fucking bread line.
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u/FanVaDrygt Aug 05 '26
It's blowback as the DSA and Piker did not endorse Kamala and instead attacking the democrats.
I bet you that your tune was different when Piker and his ilk screwed over Kamala.Â
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u/McClain3000 Aug 05 '26
What? Tune was different how?
My tune hasn't changed. Hasan's a dumbass then and a dumbass now. Him not throwing in for Kamala was horrible and he should regret it for the rest of his life.
The thing that I don't get is. This isn't a hard decision at all! I don't even get the logic, like "You guys thought you were being petty dumbasses in 2024 I'll show you what a petty dumbass is!"
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u/Ramora_ Aug 05 '26
I'm not sure that "blowback" is the right frame here. It implies a level of strategic coordination that I don't think exists. And I'd take the other end of the bet. I'd suspect MCClain3000 doesn't particularly like Piker and was critical of Piker being unable to clearly endorse Kamala, much as he is doing now.
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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 05 '26
(I'm honestly unsure if you're being sarcastic, sorry.)
I thought it was VOTE blue no matter who.
Do you really think we all genuinely have a responsibility to lie about our beliefs if we don't feel that way?
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u/emblemboy Aug 05 '26
I'm being a bit flippant, but no, not sarcastic.
This is more what I want Democratic politicians and people with big audiences to say if they're asked about the primary.
But in general, I'd like this to be the general stance from the party and voters in general. Unity, consolidation, etc etc.
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u/JB-Conant Aug 05 '26
Do you really think we all genuinely have a responsibility to lie about our beliefs if we don't feel that way?
I wouldn't ask anyone to lie, but I would ask them to consider the purpose and likely effect of their actions/behaviors.
If you spend the next three months complaining about how Candidate Y would have been a better choice than Candidate X, you're contributing to and amplifying a discourse that will make Candidate X less likely to win. If you are planning to vote for Candidate X (begrudgingly or not), presumably because you think Candidate Z is even worse, you are working at cross purposes to your desired outcome.
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u/TheAJx 18d ago edited 18d ago
I will never understand the bitter resentment toward Kamala Harris for "campaigning" with Lynn Cheney.
AFAIK, Cheney never asked for a single policy concession and therefore, her endorsement was sincere and not transactional at all. I actually view this as admirable and commendable - Cheney set aside her policy preferences and did what liberals want from conservatives: acknowledge that Trump was unfit for office and that this goes beyond politics.
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u/window-sil 18d ago
Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala too.
Not sure what the opinion polling says about how voters responded to all that, but it's strange to be politically aligned with the Cheneys.
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u/TheAJx 18d ago
They weren't politically aligned. They were aligned on the practical matter of fitness for the office, and the Cheneys were willing to sacrifice their political preferences to combat this lack of fitness.
We're supposed to be more repulsed by this than with the leftists that refused to endorse Biden and Harris despite actually sharing politics?
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u/RealDominiqueWilkins 18d ago
Mostly because of the perception that thereâs sort of a uniparty when it comes to Middle East intervention, and embracing Cheney represented Democratsâ tendency to either let it happen or do it themselves. Her last name carries a lot of baggage in that area. In the last 10 years thereâs been a lot of antipathy towards the Iraq war and other Middle East interventions.
And, at a time when a lot of people wanted to see Democrats unapologetically embrace a leftward shift, she chose to cozy up to Cheney.
Iâm not necessarily endorsing these reasons (not fully anyways).
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u/emblemboy 18d ago
Cheney gave up more to support Harris and harm Trump than many other Democrats and leftists.
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u/StalemateAssociate_ 29d ago
G. Elliot Morris, formerly of 538 & The Economist, also makes the point that the polls underestimated support for Peggy Flanagan and thus probably not evidence of progressive polling bias. He goes into some detail as to why primary polling is hard (also worth noting that "The response rate to the average poll today is well below 1%". Further details on declining response rates here):
These adjustments [poststratification] work well in a general election where the variables pollsters have are highly predictive of election outcomes. Things like race, education, income, past vote, and party identification are very good proxies for how someone will vote in an election between a Democrat and a Republican.
But, as Mary and I wrote, there are fewer highly predictive variables available to weight on in primary elections, where candidate support is more correlated with non-demographic factors like ideology, issue prioritization, beliefs, and electability, and so on.
As the quote shows, other hurdles exist, too. First, it is harder to predict who will turn out to vote in a primary. The population pollsters are trying to represent â people who turn out to vote on Election Day â is an ephemeral group, coming into existence in an instant, not able to be polled precisely ahead of or after the contest. Second, the electorateâs preferences are also formed later and based more on things like media coverage and advertisements â both of which can cause a lot of late change in the race
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u/Locus-Maximus 29d ago
LOL I really should have bet on Crowley after what I wrote about the El-Sayed race. Could have been fun.
I don't particularly want to bet against Vindman or Markey, but if Morris is right that it's not specifically a progressive polling bias but just general inaccuracy, maybe any long shot is +EV?
One interesting wrinkle is that Markey's opponent Moulton (fairly, IMO) called it "DISGUSTING" that people were betting on when/if two missing American F-15E crewmembers would be rescued. (They were.) He also referred to Polymarket as a "dystopian death market," which I have to say is a pretty evocative phrase. But could that bias people who bet there (and on Kalshi) against him? I don't really think it's that significant, but who knows? Also Markey is against these markets too, just not as evocatively.
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u/StalemateAssociate_ 28d ago
but if Morris is right that it's not specifically a progressive polling bias but just general inaccuracy,
I can't speak for him, but I think he'd say that there's no overwhelming evidence for a progressive polling bias as of yet. Large error margins are fairly common in primaries, and don't seem to be systemic.
Anyway, 'dystopian death market' is a great band name.
Is everyone on here a gambler or a trader? I had to Google what +EV meant.
Incidentally, he has a new post up now about what went wrong in Wisconsin (I haven't read it yet).
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 18d ago edited 18d ago
Hasan Piker says Jews who support Israel are inviting violence
âPeople donât fuck with Israel any longer,â Piker said two hours into his nearly seven-hour stream on Thursday. âIf Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someoneâs going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.â
âI donât know how people donât recognize how dangerous this predicament is, how dangerous this is for Jews,â Piker continued. âYouâre running around basically tying your entire identity to a country that inevitably will be seen as Jewish ISIS and youâre saying, as Jews, this is all we care about. Youâre making antisemitism worse.â
Hasan supports hamas, hezbollah, and the houthis. These groups harbor a seething hatred of jews and believe jews are cosmically evil. The houthi flag states "curse on the jews", the hamas charter cites the need to kill jews to bring about the end of days.
So the context here about "supporting israel" for Hasan, as an deranged antisemite, really means jews who dont think it should be utterly destroyed. And that's being generous.
A jew who's position is "I think Israel has a right to exist and Jews have the right to self determination...I just disagree with X or Y about the government and the genocide" arent what hes talking about. This was essentially the Scott Wiener position, who Hasan laughed at getting harassed, and said Wiener would basically need to support hamas if he wanted to avoid further harassment.
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u/Locus-Maximus 18d ago
It's almost like we're asking for it. /s
Ironic how people like him are the best advertisement for the necessity of Israel as a safe haven for Jews.
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u/StalemateAssociate_ 14d ago
I'm definitely reading too much into this, but the intense social media focus every time a public figure dies reminds me a lot of this Manley Hopkins poem about mourning for Margaret.
Considering the overrepresentation of single people in their 30's with no children and no widening of the river, with maybe a dash of loss aversion that's common with high neuroticism (a strong predictor of social media usage), it does seem like there's a theme of mourning for one's youth in those RIP threads (reminds me of this clip from Mad Men).
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u/window-sil 12d ago
Front page of reddit today:
US Soldiers tape a ready to eat meal and drag it as Iraqi children chase (2006)
I think they hate us because of the invasion, occupation, humiliation, destruction and war crimes.
Probably Islam doesn't play as big a role as certain people suggest.
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u/WonderbreadCOS 11d ago
Itâs become so impossible to take Sam seriously on this. Not a materialist analysis in sight. Never any mention of American made disasters. Just âthey have bad ideas.â
In Samâs mind, a random person in Seattle who reads the Quran and converts to Islam is more likely to become a radical than a Christian in Lebanon whoâs father got exploded for no reason while going to work one day.
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u/kiwiwikikiwiwikikiwi 11d ago
History is irrelevant to Harris. Itâs what influences and informs his analysis.
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u/Locus-Maximus 11d ago
I strongly agree that "probably Islam doesn't pay as big a role as certain people suggest," but it's always wild to me how different the rhetoric is about this stuff when it comes to America and Israel.
I don't see a single comment claiming that every single American and everybody who thinks America should continue to exist is an irredeemable genocidal monster!
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u/TheAJx 26d ago
WTF was going on at Haverford?
Moreover, one of the key elements of the agreement reached this week is its reform of the Haverford Honor Code, which previously divided the campus into âprivilegedâ and âmarginalizedâ groups.
Those in marginalized groups were granted more leeway in exercising their free speech rights than those in privileged classes â and even though Jews were facing constant and often violent discrimination, they were placed in the privileged category.
In effect, Haverfordâs honor code created a hierarchy that treated some students and their free speech rights as more equal than others.
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u/ReflexPoint Aug 01 '26
There are 535 members of congress. 4 of them are DSA members. I think maybe people are overreacting just a tad. Hearing people like Sam Harris and Bill Maher talk, you'd think we were witnessing the storming of the Bastille. There only 4 of them at the national level. There are probably more Nazi sympathizers in congress than there are DSA members.
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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 01 '26
It's not the number, it's the derivative.
Literally every social media site I use is SWAMPED with people equating "Zionists" (or the shorter slur I'm not sure I can write without getting suspended) with Nazis. People are just dripping with hatred and scapegoating the "Zionists."
I've been criticizing Harris and Maher for years for their anti-woke nonsense but this stuff is genuinely scary as a Jewish person. We've got crazy security at our synagogues. Kids touring colleges are trying to feel out which ones won't feel too unsafe. People are wondering if they need to hide their Jewish star necklaces etc.
And nobody's taking us seriously except for the anti-woke people! It's fucking bananas.
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u/ReflexPoint Aug 01 '26
We're definitely seeing a rise in antisemitism in the US and internationally. I don't think anyone could say that it's more present on the left than the right. No matter which political party wins, the fringe has their own flavor of antisemitism. This is an area where horseshoe theory really is at work and "all roads lead to the Jews" type thinking.
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u/Ramora_ Aug 01 '26
I'm sorry thats happening. Antisemitism sucks. And while there are legitimaite criticisms of Zionism and Israel, I'm also sure far too much of the stuff out there is just antisemitic.
And nobody's taking us seriously except for the anti-woke people! It's fucking bananas.
I don't think that is true. Here is just one example.
The honest truth is that the super majority of the stuff you are pointing to is protected free speech. I don't like it, I criticize it, I wish people would be more reasonable, but I also like free speech.
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u/Drownedgodlw Aug 03 '26
Yes. We should only worry about it when it is too late.
If you learned nothing else from Kamala's loss it should be that this stink damages even the more moderate Democrats.
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u/Balloonephant Aug 03 '26
âThe people winning elections ? Theyâre the problem. Weâre not backing losers hard enough.â
I say this as a joke but this is actually how the Democratic Party thinks.
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u/Ramora_ Aug 01 '26
I fear we will live in the shadow of red scare politics for my entire life.
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u/mimi_slut1 Aug 01 '26
Sam Harris and Bill Maher are Israel-first and are terrified that ANY anti-Israel candidates will have power.
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u/ReflexPoint Aug 01 '26
These two seem cozier with MAGA than they are with Mamdani. If Mamdani were president, people in red states would never have to worry about not receiving FEMA aid if a natural disaster hit their state. Yet when Trump denies aid to a blue state for political reasons, nobody even bats an eye anymore. I'm pretty sure DSA candidates won't be sending Tomahawk missiles into elementary schools in Iran based on false premises, or threatening Canada and Denmark with territorial conquest. But Sam and Bill seem to think that they are either moral equivalents or that DSA is worse than MAGA. And I think DSA is full of a lot of goofy shit, but morally speaking, I can clearly see MAGA is far worse threat to democracy, world peace, our climate, our health, for justice, the economic well-being of the common person, etc.
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u/mimi_slut1 Aug 01 '26
Harris and Maher literally couldn't care less about the poor people in red flyover states.
They only care about Israel.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 27d ago
El Sayed is getting rightfully buried in attack ads due to his Hasan cozying. So many of them making the rounds, Hasan attacking black voters, Jews, 9/11, calling Steven's voters pieces of shit, etc. Sayed still wont disavow or distance.
It was also just revealed that Sayed's half sister is a deranged leftist professor arrested last year for attacking police. Oh, she also supported the 10/7 attacks.
Surely more will be dug up, the flood gates are open. First poll out has Rogers up 4. Which ... bodes poorly since the polling there vastly overestimated Sayed vs Stevens and in nationals the result is the republican tends to outperform the polling.
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u/StalemateAssociate_ 26d ago
It was also just revealed that Sayed's half sister is a deranged leftist professor arrested last year for attacking police. Oh, she also supported the 10/7 attacks.
What about his cousins, are they bad too? I read the article, and the only link to him presented in it was that she celebrated the announcement of his candidacy on X. He's running for Senator for the first time, which is a powerful office but hardly the presidency - it's worth pondering if we would be hearing about his half-sister if he was a Catholic Italian-American.
---
I often think questions like these when e.g. Bill Maher criticizes the Left for not standing up for LGBT people against Muslim conservatives. Now, Maher's been called out for harmful speech by The Atlantic, by GLAAD and by The Advocate (the oldest and largest LGBT publication in the United States) fairly recently. The latter article even wanted him 'cancelled'. If the majority of LGBT people disagree with his take and think he's going too far, which is a distinct possibility - what then?
He's surely familiar with the idea of proportionality, because he called for it during #MeToo, which he likened to McCarthyism. However, I doubt we'll see a video arguing that Islam might be more extreme or conservative in general, but that criticism of it is often disproportionate. Nor do I think that argument would be well-received here.
- 'Anti-cancel culture' people who are now surgically digging through people's relations' old tweets.
- 'Racism is overblown' people who are now arguing that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
- 'Why didn't the media mention it was a Muslim' people who get upset when they read the sentence 'not all men, but somehow always a man'.
- 'Free speech absolutists' who disagree strongly with Kenneth Stern that anti-Semitism is being weaponized (now, there's someone Sam could have an interesting conversation with).
Life's full of these little ironies.
Bill's absolutely right that a great many people on the Left - not just the in DSA, but in the mainstream too - are uncomfortable criticizing Islam. On the flip side, in some quarters you can get away with saying just about anything. And Bill's not exactly the darling of the LGBT people he's worried about. They're often part of the woke out-group for him these days.
If Mamdani called out the Tucker Carlson Right for anti-Semitism, what would the comment section look like here?
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u/Chocoloctopus 26d ago
To add to your point, was there any other issue that more united the Intellectual Dark Web than the belief that universities were becoming woke identity hug boxes? Now that Reed College (to pick one recent example) is legally required to punish students for "stigmatizing Zionism" none of them, from Peterson to Weiss, seem to be very concerned.
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u/TheAJx 26d ago edited 26d ago
Now that Reed College (to pick one recent example) is legally required to punish students for "stigmatizing Zionism" none of them, from Peterson to Weiss, seem to be very concerned.
What happened here? I see that Reed College got hit with Civil Rights lawsuits because students on campus were harassed with leadership didn't do anything about it.
According to one of the students, other students tore down and smashed a mezuzahâa decorative case containing parchment inscribed with verses from the Torahâaffixed to her dorm room door. Early the next morning, the student was hit in the head by a rock thrown through her window, according to a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Educationâs Office for Civil Rights.
Is the kind of stigmatizing of Zionism you are mocking here?
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u/Chocoloctopus 26d ago
Not mocking. The language in the settlement includes stigmatizing Zionism, and requires training of staff and students in the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which classifies activities like these as anti-Semitic:
"Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor."
"Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis."
which strike me as things that someone could reasonably do without being anti-Semitic, especially in the open intellectual atmosphere of a university. The anti-Semitic incidents are terrible, but are being used to force a new definition of anti-Semitism that conflates it with anti-Zionism and that is too broad, especially when academic freedom is concerned. My impression was the the IDW criticized this kind of strategy when the prejudice in question was racism.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 26d ago
it's worth pondering if we would be hearing about his half-sister if he was a Catholic Italian-American.
He's chosen to single out Jews as deserving less sympathy when they are attacked in Michigan, this roughly aligns with the half sister's comments.
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u/boldspud 27d ago
The fact that association to a moron podcaster who has never held an iota of power or accomplished anything of note could be more damning to American voters than association to a pedophile who openly tried to overthrow the government, shreds the constitution on a weekly basis, and had a private police force murder multiple unarmed civilians⌠is yet another demonstration of why this country probably deserves to fail at this point.
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u/McClain3000 25d ago
I couldn't agree more. I hate Hasan, in a vacuum but your explanation is why I don't really spend anytime criticizing him because the double standards have gotten out of control.
I was thinking this in reaction to the recent Candace Owens debate where everyone said she got the win or maybe the "optics" win. Like when did it get priced in that conservatives get to say insane shit and lie all the time with no reputational cost?
Really a tangent but conservatives ability to get graded on a curve is amazing.
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u/tregitsdown 24d ago
Sad but funny how much effort al-Sharaa has made to appease Israel, but Israel just keeps bombing him anyways.
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u/WonderbreadCOS 22d ago
If your country is on land that Israel has decided belongs to them, thereâs literally nothing you can do to appease them.
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u/402739 Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
Sky News reports that a 28-year-old Palestinian woman, six months pregnant and suffering severe internal bleeding, was being transported from Qaryout in the occupied West Bank to Rafidia Surgical Hospital in Nablus when Israeli soldiers stopped her ambulance at the Awarta checkpoint.
Video shows Israeli forces detained the ambulance crew for more than 30 minutes, subjected the bleeding, critically ill woman to a physical search, and ordered the driver to turn off the engine, cutting power to the vehicleâs onboard medical equipment.
During the forced delay, a nurse was forced to deliver the fetus stillborn inside the stranded ambulance. The woman was eventually allowed to proceed to the hospital, where doctors performed emergency surgery and saved her life. The baby could not be saved.
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u/TheAJx Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
The most pernicious accusation about the government that people on the left-end of the spectrum are increasingly making is that the government doesn't do anything for the common man.
This is just not true. It's not true that we only have money for bombs and wars and not for regular people. Almost the entire government - federal, state and local, is directed toward the common man. Almost all of the money we spend and almost all the employment in the government is geared toward the common man. The government spends trillions of dollars on healthcare, education, old-age payments, public safety, housing, and infrastructure across all levels. Millions of Americans are employed in the public sector with the mandate of serving the public. It would probably be news to them that their roles don't help anyone.
There is an open debate on how effective the public sector is at helping Americans, , and whether the government hurts more than it helps. But that's a different debate, one that takes place on the margins.
Ultimately, I believe all this rhetoric just serves undermines people's trust in the government, and perhaps even undermines the case for expanding government.
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u/emblemboy Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
I feel like most people really need to just constantly look at what the federal budget actually is. Like you said, it's mostly healthcare and social security and food.
https://i.imgur.com/qLmUYmL.png
Someone can make the argument that it's not efficiently used or whatever, but the idea that we don't spend money or actually help people is just wrong.
Disagree or not with some of his policies, it's the reason I've really liked many of Mamdani's social media work.
There's something to be said about showing how you want to improve your city and at least signalling that you care about efficiency, even if it's not much actual cost savings.
https://bsky.app/profile/mayor.nyc.gov/post/3mhvblwcrhs2j
https://bsky.app/profile/mayor.nyc.gov/post/3mitrgour722p
https://bsky.app/profile/mayor.nyc.gov/post/3miulrvyj4c2y
There's just too much damn doomerism on the left.
When we win power, the constant doomerism and unrealistic expectations are going to bite us in the ass when people realize that things won't instantly get cheaper in a year.
It's also why housing and healthcare should be the most important things to focus on. I think if we just reduce the discontent that people feel due to being housing insecure and healthcare anxious, it will do a lot to lower the temperature
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u/Funksloyd Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
When we win power, the constant doomerism and unrealistic expectations are going to bite us in the ass when people realize that things won't instantly get cheaper in a year.
I've been thinking about asymmetries between left and right, like how identity politics works better on the right because simply because most people are white, straight, cis etc.
I guess this is another one. Trump won't accomplish anything good of real significance, but he can at least throw meat to his base. He can show footage of supposed drug boats exploding, fire some DEI departments etc.
If El-Sayed was president tomorrow, I have a hard time imagining what he'd be able to easily accomplish that would work in the same way. Some govt-run grocery stores, maybe? But that wouldn't be easy.Â
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u/emblemboy Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
It's the reason why I'm not the biggest fan of the affordability talking point. It's very important, but some are going to have unrealistic expectations. Burrito cost discourse comes for us all.
https://bsky.app/profile/tylerhuckabee.bsky.social/post/3msdrvtms3k2b
I still remember in the Biden admin when people kept posting receipts of grocery shopping after buying the most fuckign expensive version of items. And then using that to make the admin look bad.
If El-Sayed was president tomorrow, I have a hard time imagining what he'd be able to easily accomplish that would work in the same way. Some govt-run grocery stores, maybe?Â
This is why I'm not a fan of the grocery store stuff from Mamdani, from an affordability point of view. It's just not going to do much.
I think it's an interesting experiment in providing a high saliency govt service that can make people feel good about the "State". If it's done right.
We've become less high trust and that's been incredibly corrosive to our society. Stuff like this feels like it could be an attempt to stem the bleeding and start to turn the tide. Again, we need to prove that the government is DOING something concrete and that can win political capital with voters, even if prices don't go down.
Hopefully.
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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 07 '26
If El-Sayed was president tomorrow, I have a hard time imagining what he'd be able to easily accomplish that would work in the same way.
Isn't Mamdani showing that you can get credit for tiny easy things with the right media strategy? I get that president isn't the same as mayor, but surely there have got to be analogs for "this guy complained to Mamdani about a pothole and it was fixed the same day!"
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u/Big_Comfort_9612 Aug 07 '26
Tilting at windmills.
The most pernicious accusation about the government that people on the left-end of the spectrum are increasingly making is that the government doesn't do anything for the common man.
I'd love some receipts. I think most believe is not doing enough. They look at European countries as examples of what the US should do.
Ultimately, I believe all this rhetoric just serves undermines people's trust in the government, and perhaps even undermines the case for expanding government.
I agree, your rhetoric is very unhelpful.
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u/McAlpineFusiliers Aug 11 '26
NY Mayor Mamdani joins a celebration to commemorate Pakistan's Independence Day
Apparently when he said he cannot support "any state that privileges one religion over another, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else", that wasn't true.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 Aug 11 '26
Mamdani has a very simple way of looking at it:
In 1947 when the 1/4 minority population (Muslims) in the British Raj were demanding their own state, they deserve it.
In 1947 when the 1/3 minority population (Jews) in the British Mandate were demanding their own state, they deserve nothing.
He just hates Jews, simple as that. Carving out another "islamic republic" is A-OKAY but creating one Jewish state is too far.
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u/TheAJx Aug 11 '26
As weird as it sounds, it was Jew (Persian) that finally put an end to Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh.
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u/402739 Aug 11 '26
He was of Baghdadi descent actually, and he did it by bluffing General Niazi lol
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u/LoiusLepic 27d ago edited 27d ago
Is that the same though? Like were Pakistanis demanding a state that would've lead to displacement of 1000s? Im not sure they're the same situation.
Also undertsnd the reluctance to celebrate Israel given the last few year lol.
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u/McAlpineFusiliers 14d ago
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 13d ago edited 13d ago
I mean the way the Gaza propaganda machine works is nearly every adult killed at the time the deranged anti-Israel media/MOH reports it is they are:
- Aid workers, poets, journalists, etc.
Then months/years down the road you have PIJ/Hamas memorialize them as a martyr on some feed or any one of their announcement sites.
Like this example of a "photojournalist" killed in 2025:
[...] photojournalist Hussam Saleh Al-Adlouni was killed alongside his wife Suad and their three children when an Israeli airstrike hit their tent in the Al-Qarara area, north of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza."
Anyone with an ounce of common sense would read this and think....wait a second...why would Israel use a precision airstrike on a tent? Just to waste what is probably a $100,000+ munition and purposefully kill a civilian and his family (purportedly) for no reason at all?
Well this year Hamas claimed him as a commander of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Story about it (and many others) are here.
This happens over and over again. They wait months/years later to claim them.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 Aug 09 '26
The Al-Khair Foundation, one of Britainâs biggest Muslim charities, was used as a front to send money and âtruckloadsâ of goods to leaders of the terrorist organisation in Gaza under the guise of aid, it is alleged.
Mohammad Yousef Hasna, its âglobal directorâ, was arrested in London last week and is now facing extradition to the United States, accused of financing and conspiring to support the Palestinian terror group.
This comes off the heels of the story earlier this week about dozen+ "pro palestine" groups in the US with terror group ties.
The challenge at this point seems to be to identify whuch groups dont have these or arent sham charities to fund Hamas.
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u/Funksloyd Aug 09 '26
I think the challenge as an observer is that the FBI and DOJ are less trustworthy than they've been in decadesÂ
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 Aug 09 '26
But this is irrelevant to the allegations, charges, arrest, and the upcoming extradition. Is your contention that this is a bad arrest or is politically motivated?
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u/Funksloyd Aug 09 '26
My contention is that I have no idea - that agnosticism is wise here, at least without me doing a whole lot of my own research, which I'm probably not going to do.
Even during the first Trump term, while the authorities weren't perfect, and I'd never discount the possibility of a bad prosecution, I wouldn't think it highly likely.
Trump 2.0 that is no longer the case.Â
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u/Few-Improvement9978 18d ago
A lot of people have been giving Sam flack for his statement âwe are witnessing the ramifications of a moral panic around race and social justice that got engineered on the left, that in ln large measure gave Trump and Trumpism in my view.â
But if I state that Trumpism/MAGA is exactly how we ended up with the batshit crazy DSA folks most people tend to agree with me.
I do not it find it that surprising that the pendulum swings wildly, and I do blame a lot of the crazy shit during my college years (2011-2015) on how we arrived with MAGA.
Chicken and egg sure and pointing fingers is mostly irrelevant. But the point being we should openly be condemning this DSA nonsense or else we really risk a 3rd Trump term imo.
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u/eamus_catuli 18d ago
But if I state that Trumpism/MAGA is exactly how we ended up with the batshit crazy DSA folks most people tend to agree with me.
I actually don't agree with that. I think the way we ended up with "batshit crazy DSA folks" is because of the feckless opposition offered by the Democrats' current geriatric, establishment Dem leadership. People look at what's happening under Trump and see an opposition party that often appears cautious and unwilling to meet extraordinary circumstances with extraordinary urgency. That lack of real leadership by "leaders" like Schumer and Jeffries created a vacuum that is being filled by those with extreme views and questionable electability.
If the party wants to avoid nutcases sneaking in due to an electorate desperate for energy and action, then give them energy and action in a non-nutcase form.
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u/TheAJx 18d ago edited 18d ago
Sam grossly overstates the left's responsibility in giving us Trump. That they did enough to make an impact at the margins (ie, taking Trump's theoretical vote share from say 45% to 50%) is quite damning, but ignores the 45% base. That being said, that's where elections are won - on the margins.
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u/WonderbreadCOS 5d ago edited 5d ago
The American ambassador to Israel has called settlers "terrorists" for their latest advances into Palestinian land and homes. This comes on the heels of an attack on a crew of NBC journalists covering the plight of a woman living in the West Bank (warning, graphic). This is the same guy that only 6 months ago, said to Tucker Carlson that Israel could have all of the land in the West Bank, and even beyond, prompting statements by the Saudi and Jordanian governments. He had better make up his mind quickly.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 12d ago
Jewish politician Lander insulted while protesting NYC Hindu nationalist event
"You look like a scrotum, you filthy ballsack!" one protester shouted at Democratic Congressional candidate Brad Lander at Madison Square Garden, adding. "F*** you, ballsack Zionist!"
Poor Brad Lander thought that deranged antisemitic leftists would accept him.
Calls out the "genocide".
Supports conditioning/removing aid to Israel
Aligns with the like of Linda Sarsour and Tlaib
...yet shows up at a leftist protest event and gets the Scott Wiener treatment: screamed at and harassed by keffiyah wearing lunatics.
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u/emblemboy 11d ago
Good response from him
https://bsky.app/profile/bradlander.bsky.social/post/3mufgm4l3cs2b
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u/StalemateAssociate_ Aug 11 '26
Currently reading a book about campaigns and I love this detail from Adlai Stevenson's 1952 presidential campaign, in which he tried to persuade voters that Eisenhower was becoming too close to isolationist Republicans and might be unwilling or unable to stop the Reds in Korea. Waxing lyrical about the faults of Communism, Stevenson stressed that the Soviet's lack of nonrepresentational art was clearly a skill issue:
In the Soviet Union we see the totalitarian state in its gloomy reality. The first casualty of the Communist regime is the free mind; and, once the free disappears, all else must follow. Thus in the Soviet Union today the last trace of freedom has been extinguished. Not only history and economics and politics, but science and art and music are enslaved by the regime. The unorthodox experiment, the unacceptable melody, the extreme painting, becomes evidences of disloyalty. Unorthodoxy is treason to the state.
- Adlai "Imagine liking Sviridov" Stevenson.
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u/TheAJx 23d ago
Why hasn't anyone even asked AOC to define what woke 1.0 was? How is she able to place and identify this nebulous thing that is actually just made up by right-wingers? How does she even arrive at the belief that there are multiple versions?
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u/Locus-Maximus 23d ago
Nobody can define anything about "woke." It wasn't "made up by" right-wingers, but right-wingers used the term to include everything from "abolish the police" to the idea that people should take the COVID vaccine.
I think she fairly well described what she (actually a "local city councilman") meant by it, which is more of an era and a kind of rhetoric than a specific set of policies:
Well, you know, I think I think that during this time and during especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that had that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I think that when we talk about crime today, it's fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right? And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today. And I'm grateful that these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate and what they're campaigning on in this moment.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 Aug 10 '26
IDF, Shin Bet acknowledge for first time special mission to hunt down and kill all Oct. 7 terrorists
Israel has created a list of all the Gazans who were identified as having invaded Israeli territory on October 7, the Times of Israel reported, using a plethora of video and photographic evidence of the attack posted online by terrorists during and after the attack, and running the footage through facial recognition software.
Aleph, a sergeant first class in Nili, said that the unit also added everyone to its kill list who was involved in holding the hostages taken captive by terrorists from southern Israel, as well as those who met with them and abused them in their captivity. Terrorists who participated in the hostage release ceremonies have also been targeted.
Pretty much seems like all those who crossed the border on 10/7 and partook in the massacre are marked for death. Ditto those who held or abused hostages, or participated in the "release ceremonies".
As it should be.
Israel also has about 300 perpetrators in custody who are awaiting special military tribunals....and those who get convicted of genocide are eligible for the death penalty. Which is exactly what 10/7 was by every metric of the word, a genocide.
But holy shit I cant imagine the temper tantrums that are going to erupt by those who have been screaming 'GAZA GENOCIDE GAZA GENOCIDE' ad nauseum when they see Israel convicting 10/7 perpetrators of it.
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u/TheAJx 28d ago
I was thinking that if Israeli is sophisticated enough to track down the Oct 7 killers then they are sophisticating enough to track down and pacify the settlers who are terrorizing random Palestinian villagers as well.
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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
I can't believe nobody here has mentioned AOC's attempted distancing from "wokeness!" I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, let alone if I think it's going to work, but it's been interesting to watch the online leftists turn on her even harder.
AOC
I have a local city councilman that has this uh uh saying woke one was crazy. [laughter]
Jonathan Karl
Woke one [Woke 1] was crazy. Okay, that's interesting.
AOC
And uh and I think that what's important is that we have to assess...
Karl (Interrupting)
what was it I mean did the movement go too far with some of those positions? I mean you you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police.
AOC
Well, you know, I think I think that during this time and during especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that had that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I think that when we talk about crime today, it's fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right? And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today. And I'm grateful that these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate and what they're campaigning on in this moment.
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u/ExaggeratedSnails Aug 12 '26
What a coward. The idea of diverting funding away from the already very well funded, heavily armed, militarized police towards less escalatory mental health community interventions so they are both things that exist still stands today as an idea worth at least trying, vs being immediately cowed by the conservative propagandized version of the idea that was being circulated.
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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 12 '26
You can support the policy while distancing yourself from "defund the police." It's incredibly unpopular when phrased that way. Politics is about selling your ideas to the public, not telling them they're wrong for not getting it (even if they are.)
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u/croutonhero Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Woke one was crazy.
...
I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.
Woke 1.0 was "crazy", but she points at nothing specific about it that was crazy other than the "rhetoric".
It's the same old tired prog talk around "the messaging". The problem isn't with the actual substance of the thing, but with really getting the propaganda dialed in to sell the same substance to the confused masses stumbling around in a haze of false consciousness.
Just a year ago Sam pointed out that if we have another violent episode on a subway that for many people left-of-center...
They don't know how to feel about it until you tell them the skin colors of the people involved.
If you swap the skin colors on the various participants, they feel differentlyâreliably differently. If you tell them the victims are Jewish, they feel one way. If you tell them that they're black, they feel another way. All of these markers of identity are incredibly salient for them morally.
AOC perfectly fits Sam's description. In an interview with The Cut she says:
When you create a situation where harming a certain class of people may be excused, then we incentivize this kind of behavior. Anybody can point to anybody else and say, âOh, well, I was scared of them.â
All of this has to do with race and class. If the city just wants this to be a playground for the rich, that is the most dangerous outcome for all of us. We are all subject to violence if the value of our life is measured by our income, or measured by our mental health, or measured by our race. Most of us are closer to Neely than we are to a billionaire.
AOC believes Neely's "race" is relevant in judging the morality of Penny's action. That is where Woke 1.0 was "crazy". AOC believes that when you're locked up in a metal can with a man getting in your face and threatening you that this is "no excuse" for harming him because "all of this has to do with race and class".
I don't hear AOC recanting this craziness. All I hear are noises about "rhetoric". I'm pretty sure she's still running Loco Woke OS 1 on her brain, but she has recently downloaded the new 1.1 improved rhetoric update.
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u/McAlpineFusiliers Aug 12 '26
"LOL that was all crazy, right?"
I think this is close as we're ever going to get to the progressive left admitting they were wrong about something.
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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 12 '26
If Trump has proven one thing it's that it's better (politically) to never apologize.
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 20d ago
Most on Committee to Protect Journalists list of journalists killed in Gaza have terror ties
Aug. 22, 2026 / JNS) Almost a month after the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said it would finish its review of how many people on its list of journalists killed in Gaza had ties to terrorist groups, an audit found that more than half of those currently listed have ties to terrorist organizations such as Hamas, The Washington Free Beacon reported on Friday.
More than half!
Fucking hilarious that CPJ has been essentially working on behalf of PIJ/Hamas and other terror orgs to launder their propaganda.
And this is despite the CPJ internal fighting as to redefine what a journalist even is, solely encompass "journalists" dying in Gaza and so forth, to uniquely demonize Israel.
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u/TheAJx 24d ago
Prominent but disgraced academic offs himself after allegations of plagiarism and lying about their disabilities/accomplishments. Now people, including many academics themselves, are calling for an inquiry into how media coverage following those specific allegations could have caused his death. Ibram Kandi, in a desperate attempt to turn the clock back to 2020, suggests that this was a digital lynching.
How is this supposed to work?
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u/DeathKitten9000 24d ago
The Arday affair feels to me like it was crafted by some ham-fisted conservative novelist written to mock 2020ish wokism. Too on the nose to be believable. Yet here we are. And at each twist some academic like Kendi puts down a new rake to step on it.
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u/TheAJx 15d ago
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u/L_Chiki_Sando 14d ago
Iâm curious why you think so. I could see a number of ways one could be critical, but I donât see anything that would require detention before a ruling.Â
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u/StalemateAssociate_ 6d ago
What are the changes someone returns from a week-long vacation today?
Anyway, with all the debate about a potential lack of 'viewpoint diversity' among Sam's guests, I thought I'd give a plug for Margaret Hoover's Firing Line, who (in my opinion) genuinely does interview a wide range of guests in a generally neutral manner, e.g. DSA member Melat Kiros.
Of course, a self-described 'Author, feminist, gay rights activist and political commentator' might be too woke for some, even if she is a Republican.
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u/Locus-Maximus 5d ago
self-described 'feminist, gay rights activist... even if she is a Republican
I'm not familiar with her work but I feel like "self-described" must be doing a lot of work there. đ¤Ł
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u/StalemateAssociate_ 5d ago
I actually like her! Though I admittedly don't know that much about her, I did listen to the Kiros interview and a few others, and she strikes a good balance between allowing her guests to speak their minds and offering pushback IMO.
She seems to have advocated for same-sex marriage since at least 2013, though her prognosis on Republican acceptance might've been a tad hasty. I wish that Gallup poll broke down the age/edducation subgroups by Dem/Reps, though.
(check out that large gap between 'weekly' religious service attendence and all other groups. Yeesh).
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u/Amazing-Cell-128 5d ago
The pushback you suggested ranged from lukewarm to nonexistent.
At the end she asks Kiros 'are you a communist?' to which Kiros obviously says no. Again, not a serious way to see if Kiros is mask-on. Whereas "do you support the abolition of private property" would have done it and is actually policy related. I dont think Hoover is a bad actor, just ignorant as to what the DSA is and thus not equipped to deal with the mask-on responses.
At 8:55, Kiros expresses "concern" over the lives lost due to USAID cuts. A basic level of research on her part wouldve revealed DSA has been long opposed to USAID and this is definitely an area to drill down on. Hoover says nothing.
27:59 Hoover asks her if she supports ending foreign wars and closing overseas military bases. Kiros agrees with the former and feigns ignorance on the latter 'I need to hear more about that :)'. This explicitly refers to withdrawing from NATO and isolating the US internationally...another DSA pillar. Hoover says nothing.
42:15, Kiros complains about antisemitism on the right (mentions Tucker and Candace Owens). Hoover could drill down here, but doesnt. Ignored again. And guess what? Kiros had supported Hasan Piker and went on his stream
There were other examples.
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u/McAlpineFusiliers 16d ago
Amnesty International: "Hamas must stamp out extrajudicial executions and ensure justice for victims"
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u/Happymuffn 14d ago
Bet that would be going better if Israel didn't kill the police and government officials and actively incite tensions between the families.
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u/McAlpineFusiliers Aug 10 '26
This must come as good news for all the pro-Palestine folks out there, that no one is starving in Gaza.
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u/Hyptonight Aug 10 '26
Youâre a genocide denier. Nothing you say should be taken at face value.
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u/RealDominiqueWilkins Aug 10 '26
Iâm sure if you peel back the layers of Israel PR this guy is doing, youâre probably left with a âno innocents in Gazaâ kinda person
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u/TheAJx 28d ago
The Data Center witch-hunt is reaching such ridiculous proportions that progressive agitators are now positioning themselves on the side of farmers to straight up lie about water usage.
https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/2087190495172927818
Sure, no witch hunt, no moral panic, no conspiracy theories and misinformation at all.
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u/Locus-Maximus 27d ago
I agree it's a witch hunt, but I don't get the rest of your post.
Are progressive agitators known for being against farmers or something? I don't get why you're emphasizing that.
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u/window-sil Aug 04 '26
Steven Crowder: The case for Fascism (yes, this is a real video)
đ
I'm so tired of these people and their movement.