Chat

I don't really think one debate decides who people vote for. Plus you have the electoral college. So you were fucked since forever, you just never noticed. But please vote against Trump because you probably don't get to vote again if he wins, that has a big influence on the world too

I largely share your thoughts. I honestly expected Biden to at least be prepared enough to counter the usual Trump tactics of making things up and using strong words to impress his base while deflecting blame or critical questions.

He can't because he's 2637361873 years old and can't think fast enough to have actual replies. The rules of the debate were no notes and no communication with staff so Biden had to rely on what little working brain cells he has left to form responses and recall history. I also wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to learn both him and Trump have been using stimulants, but only Biden stopped talking them for the debate since there was so much talking about that beforehand.

It was an absolute travesty that there was no fact checking from the completely useless moderators.

Oh, this is WAY worse than 2016.

Before, people said that Biden was fine. Now, they're saying, "There's just no way to change, so we have to accept it."

Bullshit. This is supposed to be a democracy, and every volunteer and staffer and voter and activist and voter needs to rattle the bars of the cage that the Democratic party is trying to put us in. Do. Not. Let. Biden. Do this to us.

I think if you're in a Blue state, you'll be safe. It's the folks in Blue enclaves in Red states, like Austin, El Paso, Atlanta, that I'm really worried for.

We're cleaning up our living room as crash space again for folks leaving red states.

Unfortunately for a lot of us there isn't an exit strategy. No country worth moving to wants an almost 40 year old, single, uneducated, factory schmuck :/

Generally speaking, if the oligarchs don't think you'll be useful to them, you don't make it far enough up in the food chain to be considered a candidate. They don't play the game of "Maybe this person will do what I tell them once they're in office," they play of the game of "Only people I know will do what I say will get onto the ballot."

It has gotten worse. The steady decline of decency in political discourse took a precipitous dive with Trump. Canada is always out of sync with the US political pendulum, PP is our inevitable swing and it's fucking depressing to watch ignorance and bigotry be celebrated so confidently.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but it's easy to choose the better of two choices here. Debate or not, how is it even a question who to vote for when one guy is openly a fascist?

I have been saying this since Obama.

In 2020, people believed they were voting for healthcare, defunding the police, emptying the migrant concentration camps, protecting Roe v Wade, etc.

When you fail to do the things that brought people to the polls, and do the things the opposition wants instead, the opposition's voters still won't vote for you and your own voters just don't vote.

Trying to appeal to moderate republicans just lowers your own voter turnout. The republicans will always vote for fascism over diet-fascism.

But no, pointing out these very obvious mechanisms just gets me labeled as an evil conservative Chinese Putin-bot trying to disrupt the election.

dropping out of the race at the convention

The face of the party is infinitely less important than the impact the policies have on people's lives. It doesn't matter if it's Biden or Pete Buttigeig at the front, the dems only shot in hell is to use every power at their disposal short of drone striking Trump and the SCOTUS (maybe) to demonstrate to voters that 1. They want the same thing the voters want (eg, not genocide) and 2. They will actually do those things (no blaming the parliamentarian or norms or some rules you set or fear the SCOTUS might ask you to stop).

Keep it up! In fact, if you get criticized, you can point out that you'd rather have a leader you CAN criticize than one that gets treated like a God-ling. Point out that one of the differences in the generic liberal versus conservative thought is the idea that a leader might be flawed but generally good at leading versus the idea that everyone needs to support the leader (or the cause) no matter what -- until their transgressions become too extreme and gets them ostracized. Please. Let's criticize early and be ready to replace them sooner rather than later.

To be entirely fair, John Wayne was a nazi

I hear you. A few years back I was rooting for Jeremy Corbin to be Prime Minister and could not understand how the populace didn't choose him. More than that, I sympathize with people who dislike illegal immigration into their respective countries because, well, I can see how it FEELS like, "We built this country to be good and prosperous, and these folks want what WE built while they never built anything like it for themselves" -- but that is a false perception for so many reasons (Was their home a colony or otherwise oppressed? Our ancestors built our countries, but we're just born to them. Climate change is driving equatorial people to Northen climes -- to countries complicit in the climate change that has made their homelands dry and cropless, etc.)

So I don't have a solution for immigration (which Trump harped on constantly). Fixing the climate might help for the long term, but for the short term it won't fix that immediate complaint.

I look at U.S. history and I don't see a strong track record for austerity helping. More the reverse. In The Great Depression, one of the things that seemed to work was letting the government take on debt to give a bunch of people 'stupid' jobs so they could put that money into the economy. Of course, that came with stepp progressive tax rates, too. It was much harder to get rich when the highest brackets were up to/over 90% of income. I doubt the current crop of rich people would allow that to happen in the modern world, but I'd vote for it.

Unfortunately, this is not in touch with the reality of our situation.

I find people, when trying to cope with the hard truth that Biden is going to lose, revert to talking about how much he SHOULD win.

He should. He's been a pretty good president (a genocide not withstanding).

That's not really relevant. Because if he loses, we are likely to lose our democracy. And currently, he's going to lose.

He is losing in the polls. He has been losing in the polls and the swing states for the entire election. At some point, this needs to change, or we're going to watch Trump get reelected. And last night made clear that as long as he is the candidate, this isn't going to change. When he applied all his effort to proving he could win the election he failed spectacularly.

I don't just mean flubbing lines. I mean he lost complete control of the narrative. He demonstrated that when trying his absolute hardest, he cannot reliably explain to voters why the vote for him. That isn't a debate problem. That's a fundamental candidate problem that doesn't appear fixable (except with a new candidate).

If he were winning, at least by a little, we could pretend that maybe that's not a big deal. But he's not. He is losing. He has been losing the entire campaign, and if he doesn't step aside, the election result will be the same as every time pollsters have asked in the last year:

President Donald Trump.

No more "it's not that bad". This debate is a clear synopsis of the campaign until now, and the outcome in November. If this debate "isn't that bad", you might as well say losing is not that bad. (It is. It really is.)