It’s just part of an engineered drumbeat of various reasons not to vote for Biden. He’s the worst president for leftists in a whole generation. Okay actually he’s the opposite of that, but he can’t beat Trump. Okay he could have beat Trump but now he’s too old and can’t beat him anymore, and now we need someone else. I’m just pointing out all these problems because I want to help the Democrats. Now here are 10 different bad things that Biden did (of which it turns out, on examination, that he only did 2 of them and those 2 have asterisks). See, I’m helping the left!

None of it makes any acknowledgement that Trump will be actively destructive to the goals they say they care about, in a way that’s a hundred times worse than even the most outlandish of the false things they said about Biden. And, if the DNC did decide to replace Biden with Andrew Yang or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders, or fucking Che Guevara for that matter, they would instantly pivot to saying it is SUPER PROBLEMATIC that Bernie said this thing about trans people in 1988, and anyway he’s too old to appeal to most Americans, and he screwed up this other thing last week, and anyway bottom line I’m staying home, I could never vote for a fake leftist millionaire who lives up in some rich person’s community up in New England and I’m voting for Cornel West and you should too.

It’s all just a bunch of shit. I mean, in this case they actually have something genuine to load into the cannon (Biden really did do a pretty incredibly poor job at the debate and it’s a real problem). But that’s not why they are firing the cannon this week. They are firing it because it’s Sunday and every day that ends in a Y from now until November is a good day to fire off the cannon.

I have yet to meet IRL a single left-wing politically engaged person who says anything other than that Trump will be such an objectively guaranteed catastrophe for everyone in the world that we should vote for whoever’s running against him, whether that person is Biden or Kamala Harris or a blind dog dressed up in a business suit. All the people who say Biden’s old and so they can’t vote for him are fairly un-politically-aware types who aren’t especially left wing in their personal beliefs.

And yet the internet is full of these super left wing people who feel real aggressive about not voting for Biden, like even more aggressively about that, apparently, than they do about any particular left wing cause, about immigration or going to the Palestine protest or what have you.

It is curious

That part, I won’t say you are wrong about. The American electorate is wrong enough in how they set their priorities that I think Biden’s performance at the debate was a massive problem.

What I am saying here is that it’s weird that the stories are “why Trump’s felonies are not important” and “why Biden’s elderly nature is hugely important,” when the data points the exact opposite way. Honestly, I think maybe people’s understanding of what is important in politics may be quite a few ticks ahead of the media is giving them credit for when they publish stories like this.

1. I’m as surprised as anybody, but the non loaded-to-elicit-a-particular-answer framing of the question showed basically no change after the debate. Polls from the day after the election which asked, who do you want to vote for for president, showed basically no change in the answer (respectively, 45/43 for Trump, and 45/44 for Biden). I will continue to be surprised if that keeps happening but definitely that’s how it actually objectively happened, so far.
2. It is highly notable to me how unanimous in the media is the narrative “Biden’s in trouble because he fucked up the debate” - which, however much of a very real problem it is that he’s old as fuck, isn’t borne out by polling data - whereas they didn’t write too much about “Trump’s in trouble because he caught a bunch of felonies”, even though that was reflected in a few percentage points’ drop in his polling (remember? that was when Biden started ticking higher than Trump in national polls every now and then, which he’s still doing, which he hadn’t been able to do before?). As a good example check out this lapdog bullshit

It seems very clear to me that the media is, as they often do, pretending that they are reporting on trouble for the Democratic candidate, when actually what they are doing is finding a way to frame a legitimate story to do their best to create the trouble that are pretending they are reporting on.

I don’t even think they stand to benefit. I think when he blows up the US their assets will lose value, and depending on how bad it gets they may start having to hang out in some other safer country like a Russian oligarch spending all his time in Western Europe.

I think it is just pure force of habit at this point, like “Biden’s gonna tax the rich fuck him let’s get behind this disaster instead.” I mean, it worked for other disasters like Reagan or W, but I think they haven’t really absorbed how big a disaster Trump 2 would be.

Yeah. It is fairly weird to me that it’s such a common thing to do to take the raw output of the LLM and send that to the user, and to try use fine-tuning to get that raw output to look some way that you want.

To me it is obvious that something like having the LLM emit a little JSON block which includes some field which covers “how sure are you that this is actually true” or something, is more flexible and simpler and cheaper and works better.

But what do I know

The half a trillion dollars worth of student loan forgiveness passed.

A few things about this, It didn’t pass. It never came to a vote. It was an executive order. Centrists didn’t want it.

Wait, hang on. I may have misunderstood you.

If your central thesis is that Democrats in congress are mostly an uninspiring pile of centrist bullshit, and that Biden has to contend with them as well as the GOP in order to get progressive things done that he is trying to accomplish, then I will 100% agree with you. I thought you were including Biden in the centrist fakery.

Your description of getting behind Democrats because you wanted good things to happen, only to see the reality that comes to pass be mostly watered-down corporate-friendly garbage, sounds pretty accurate to me. It sounded like you were blaming that on Obama and Biden, instead of Manchin and the Republicans, is why we are disagreeing. But if you’re saying we need to get rid of the GOP in congress, and replace Manchin and Sinema with actual liberal people, as the solution, I will 100% agree.

Biden, in the only surprise of his presidency so far, listened to progressives on student loans

IRA? NLRB with teeth? Trillions of dollars worth of corporate tax increases? Those were not surprising to you?

And I just got to the paragraph where you call me Goebbels. Conversation’s over. Godwin.

I said that super confidently asserting something which seems to me to be the opposite of true, and relying on the assertion itself to be the explanation of why people should believe it, is a Goebbels tactic.

Like I say, I actually agree with you about the massive gap between what Democratic presidents get done and what they should be getting done. Where it falls apart for me is where to assign the blame for that.

Apparently the only way the candidates will agree to do it is if the format is so stilted that there’s no chance of anyone learning anything or seeing the candidates get challenged on anything. It’s basically just a taking-in-turns version of a campaign commercial.

What, indeed, is the point. Like a lot of American politics, the whole “debate” survives as a pointless vestige of a thing (now long forgotten) that was useful and productive in its original form, but now is mutated to a useless and unrecognizable monstrosity, which you have to pretend is super serious and important if you want to be able to be on TV.

Yeah

1. Biden got a ton of good stuff done, but even if you don’t agree with that, there is no possible way that an adult human being with any level of political awareness can claim that Trump wouldn’t be an objective disaster on an absolutely globe-spanning scale, or that we should do anything in this election than vote for whoever isn’t Trump. It’s like one of those video game puzzles that’s so clear and simple that it seems like there must be more to it. “Do you want to open and find out what’s in the box? Or for me to thrust this running chainsaw into your coccyx?” “What’s in the box?” “It’s a friendly cat, but why do you need to ask?”
2. Biden at the debate looked old as fuck and that’s a problem

It’s sorta boring when you just lay it out, but IDK how anyone could disagree with either of those

Yeah. I mean it’s hard to blame them–

You know what, fuck that, let’s blame them. They have a responsibility. This is like all the German businesses that played along with the Nazis because it was easier and then had to change the subject when their grandkids asked them about the war years. Like yeah grandad ran a, uh, a pots and pans factory. Yeah. Just pots and pans. Now go play outside.

In ordinary times I think it would be fair to say well you know a bunch of them didn’t focus on the bottom line and went out of business and everyone had to get new jobs, so hard to blame the ones still around. But this is kind of all hands on deck time. It’s one thing if you don’t want to write articles about the IRA and all good stuff about Biden. It’s a whole different fuckin story if you want to write stories feeding into getting the guy elected who is going to fuck up your home and city and business and economy and the safety of you and your families, too, and then (I am sure) stand around like “we’re all looking for the guy that did this” if it winds up coming true.

It is fascinating to me that the “Biden is in HUGE trouble in the election because of the debate” narrative is so unanimous in the media

In a way that “Trump is in HUGE trouble in the election because of his felonies” was not in any way

Even though from the tiny amount of polling that has apparently happened, the second one was a bigger deal to the electorate than the first one

Curious

It gave some sound bites for people to hold up as examples of why Biden is old which I’m sure we will be seeing on certain news networks from now until forever going forward

And gave a bunch of “objective” news outlets a good excuse to write a bunch of “DEMS IN PANIC AFTER BIDEN’S UNFORGIVABLE SHIT SHOW” articles they are for some reason eager to write

Other than that significant amount of fodder, I think nothing of value occurred

This is always a part of my prep sheet, is a little list of random names.

Philly is also the city that violently chased the Patriot Front out when they tried to do a march, like literally just set on them whacking them with big sticks sending them packing back into their U-Haul van and driving away shamefully. Like Han Solo unhesitatingly shooting at Vader the instant he sees him sat at the dinner table for his big betrayal speech. Be like Philly.

The presidency is such a weird position. It’s like you’re kind of the boss, but you’re also kind of an employee. There’s a whole staff of people telling you where you have to go and what rules you have to follow, and you’re constantly getting shit on in public for your job performance, and everything bad that happens practically anywhere in the world is at least partially your fault. You can literally call the biggest military power in the world on the phone and tell them who to kill and (subject to certain restrictions), they’ll just go and do it, but you’re not allowed to drive a car.

It’s just bizarre. Like a lot of the American system, I actually really like the way the system is set up, for as weird as it is.

Fascinating. It sounds like your theory is that the Democrats floated the public option and the BBBA, just so they could go through an elaborate ruse following by killing it on purpose after months of work and preparation, only to introduce second weakened iterations of both of them (the ACA and IRA) which still did massive amounts for the country, and they went through all that just so their second version could… look wimpier by comparison to the initial version they shot down on purpose, maybe? IDK.

I’ll say this: If the average when put together, of brand X plus the Republicans actively trying to blow up the Washington Monument or kill all the Guatemalans or whatever the fuck, like a bunch of Batman villains, is a little trickle of sustained significant progress, I would say that the contribution to the average of brand X is probably significant and positive. To me. I wouldn’t look at that as a “well I guess there’s no difference between the two, and the lack of progress is DEFINITELY the Democrats’ fault, citation trust me bro” situation.

By way of example: The half a trillion dollars worth of student loan forgiveness passed. It got done. It was on the books, and then the Supreme Court told them no you can’t do that. Are you saying Biden controls the Supreme Court in secret and he passed it knowing it wouldn’t really happen? I feel like I’m stepping into some kind of Q universe where that’s exactly what you’re going to say, like John Roberts is Hunter Biden in a silicone mask or something.

The shit Democrats passed is nothing in the face of things they ran on and didn’t pursue.

The shit Democrats passed in the last few years is:

• 40% predicted reduction in US greenhouse gas emissions by 2030
• $150 billion worth of student loan forgiveness
• Big increase in working class wages even comfortably exceeding historic inflation
• Huge corporate tax increase to pay for all that

That’s off the top of my head; people have made these massive lists of accomplishments but sometimes it’s hard to tell which ones are substantive. All of those to me are pretty substantial.

I mean, I do commend you on coming up with a framing that makes it pretty easy to say “yeah but what about all the things they DIDN’T do” like the existence of some good thing that would have been theoretically possible somehow invalidates getting some particular good thing done in the real world. And also I commend the framing where you’re asserting SO FIRMLY Goebbels-style that anything they’re failing to accomplish is deliberately on purpose and definitely not the fault of the party that’s in lock step voting down things they are trying to accomplish. Your presentation is such that it’s easy to fall into “well he MUST know what he’s talking about, he is so confident in his presentation that that wouldn’t be clearly just completely made up.”

Both fairly solid arguing techniques. Bravo.

(Oh also recovering from Covid as if it hadn’t happened which basically no other 1st world economy has been able to do)

(Also, did the Democrats float the public option? I remember a bunch of left-wing people at the time talking about single payer, but I don’t ever remember it ever being acceptable to the Democrats and no one really hoping for it, just saying fuck this would be so easy if our country’s government wasn’t so awful but I hope we can get some health insurance of some description at least.)

Dude you gotta try harder than that; you’re just teeing me up to talk about the climate change bill and the ACA and all that other stuff and just go into more depth about everything I already touched on

Just say “but Biden invented bad Israel policy” or “Genocide Joe” or “blue MAGA” and then call it a day after making some kind of flippant comment; anything still in the realm of factual (implying that literally anything I said wasn’t a thing that happened) is gonna be a losing conversation for you

Oh, I know. I am just stating the message for the rest of the people.

The bad faith folks used to have these epic debates with me back and forth but I think they have mostly stopped doing that and I am heartened to think that maybe they decided that trying to say anything I was saying wasn’t true was an obvious losing battle and they were hurting their cause by even making the attempt.

You’re half right

Going forward from Clinton I think it goes, president by president:

• Budget surplus and great GDP (fuck the poor tho)
• ACA, attempts at gun control, the occasional drone strike as a treat
• Unions, working-class wages, climate change

I think as far as the Republican side it’s pretty much always been “more for me and my immediate friends,” yes. The Democrats have pretty reliably attempted to pursue policies which are trying to benefit “the country” though, with increasingly working class aligned definitions over time of who it is that represents “the country”.

At one point I messed around with a lore generator that would chop up sections of “The Dungeon Alphabet” and “Fire on the Velvet Horizon” along with some other stuff, and feed random sections of them into the LLM for inspiration and then ask it to lay out a little map, and it pretty reliably came up with all kind of badass stuff.