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 you’re out of touch.
Fascism isn’t unpopular. It’s very popular when people are feeling desperate.
I keep hearing people say stuff like this: He can’t win! He’s so fascist! He can’t win, Biden did such a good job if you actually look at the facts!
That’s not how elections work. People vote based on what they think will satisfy their interests, and a lot voters don’t see any reason to vote for Biden, and so they’ll stay home. People don’t need to vote for Trump for Trump to win. They just need to give in, and Biden is a “give in” machine. He’s poison to voter hope or enthusiasm, and he’s going to lose if he doesn’t get off the ticket.
If we want to take the threat of Trump seriously, no more hiding our heads in the sand.
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.)
This is why they should’ve had a primary.
We could’ve watched Biden collapse months ago while figuring out who is actually fit to run a good campaign. Now we’re going to have to go through it the hard way, because they tried to hide from the obvious for about the last 8 months.
We don’t have much control over this, frankly. But if we have any, I say we use it.
My personal attitude is that although I will concede that it is possible for Biden to win, if we don’t want to have to hope for a prayer, the only way things get better is if we all pop the bubble that Biden and his supporters are in that they can just ignore reality and hope for the best.
It has to be so clear to the Democratic party that not only are they likely to lose this election (and obviously with it, democracy), but they’re going to lose their jobs. No one who works in the election industrial complex is going to keep getting invited to cocktail parties and get hired on for whatever Potempkin election follows this one if Trump wins. No LARPing that they’re “the resistance!” in their endless fundraising emails while they enjoy being in the minority FOREVER. Rattle the fucking cage. Make it clear we blame them for this nonsense, and will continue to assign them the blame for choosing to run a failing candidate in a time of crisis because no one wanted to be the one to speak up and suggest doing anything else.
People keep getting mad when I criticize Biden, as if doing so is helping Trump win. My take: NOT doing so is helping Trump win. Protest this guy like our lives depend on him dropping out of the race at the convention. (They might).
This is so, so fucked up.
It’s hard to grieve effectively in the face of so many tragedies. Here is another one.
Yeah, and more importantly, Biden needs to learn the public component of diplomacy.
I read his interview in Time, and it’s weird, because it at least gave me some aspect into what he’s thinking.
He’s old as fuck. He has learned decades of procedures and standard practice in diplomacy, and he does NOT understand that a lot of it happens in the open now. Biden thinks he’s playing chess with all the diplomatic messages he sends along backchannels, and he has no idea that this is just an arm wrestling match now. People judge you by what you say and do transparently.
Biden legit thinks he and Bibi are like cousins who grew up together who are having a tough fight, and Bibi is all fucking politics. He’d slit any throat he has to get what he wants, and he will bury Biden in a heartbeat.
Biden should go to Israel, and in a public address announce that the country is turning a corner: it will be safer than ever, and America is going to assist with a long term peace process, which they won’t lead but will provide security guarantees for. And don’t tell Bibi any of this in advance. And when Bibi reacts, say that Bibi has lost his trust and that of the elected public, and they need to hold new elections before getting any new weapons. Get some 'nads, man!
I wouldn’t mind a complete cut-off in weapons, but I also wouldn’t mind if they continue to supply rocket defenses or something if its part of a pressure campaign to send Netanyahu packing. I want Israeli prosecutors and the Hague to argue over who gets to lock his ass up first.
I have good news: It exists! http://retrographer.org/
A lot of them are unrecognizable, but here’s an example of a good one: http://retrographer.org/photos/4215
The bad news is that’s a bit limited. It was the senior project of a CMU student in 2010. It only exists for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you wanted to make one for another city, though, I think you could contact the creator, ask for the code, and then recruit people to get a ton of photos from another city’s historical institutions, and then crowdsource geotagging them (which is what the guy did).
They’re not “just” freedom fighters: they ARE freedom fighters, but they are also conservative religious freedom fighters who utilize indiscriminate violence to advance their cause of by any means necessary.
They are not morally upright heroes. I can’t support what they did. They are, however, also still freedom fighters. And it makes me very, very angry that their tactics have been successful after non-violence failed in 2018. It shouldn’t have come to this.
As Kennedy astutely observed, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.
I cannot endorse the violence Hamas employs, but I also understand in such a context why others do. This was an inevitable outcome of extreme political disenfranchisement, and that makes me equally furious at the joint responsibility I see for the atrocities that have resulted.
I think that any coverage should simply ask organizers to comment.
This is such a propaganda tactic: no one can stop someone from showing up with any flag they want. If the organizers embrace it? Then the criticism is fair game.
But if they say something like ‘out of thousands of protesters who share our demand for peace, several brought inflammatory messages that don’t represent us’, then media has a duty to report that.
This sucks. I was really holding out hope that they might chart a better path forward than most of the alternatives.
Which part? I think this is all subjective opinion.
Yeah, but the training set is nowhere near clean. That’s my point. “Close” is no where near good enough within this context,
I posted a comment impulsively, then saw that you already gave the same answer better.
I’d like to go a bit deeper.
I don’t think people invented socially controlling practices because they found religion, I think they found religion to frame the invention of socially controlling practices.
Masturbation is a gratifying act that relives pressure to settle into a rigid domestic arrangement that serves to make more workers and soldiers, and create dependents that need fed, and whose well-being would be threatened if a parent became defiant and provoked the ire of elites.
Masturbation is good for the individual at the expense of the nation and its rulers. So it’s inevitable that priests would decry it as an affront against god, as that’s historically been their purpose.
Why do you guarantee that? It seems obviously wrong, on a technical level.
The point I’m making is that even if we take it as a given that a shrewd enough AI could correctly distinguish sex at birth – which I think is obviously impossible based on the appearances of many ciswomen and the nature of statistical prediction – you’d still need a training data set.
If the dataset has any erroneous input, that corrupts its ability, and the whole point of this exercise is trying to find passing transwomen. Why would anyone expect that training set of hundreds of thousands of supposed cis women wouldn’t have a few transwomen in it?
This is a great point.
The technology that excludes transwomen from the app is the clear warning that the app is populated exclusively for transphobes. It’s obviously wildly dangerous for a transwoman to be on the app.
The notion that AI is going to clock them is absurd AI hype. There’s no reason to expect AI to be capable of this kind of discernment, and that assumes you even had a training set. Where in the absolute fuck would someone find a training set like that?
Edit: I didn’t read the article. It seems it’s a lesbian dating app. Well, probably less dangerous for transwomen, but still not technically sound.
To add to this: Netanyahu has been on trial for corruption for years, and he’s been using the war as an excuse to avoid holding elections, which he would lose.
When the war ends, Bibi is going to jail. And would you look at that? He’s in a permanent war! What are the odds.
Yeah. And it’s so bad that I feel like the functionality barely goes down.
They should release the following:
‘Out of an abundance of caution, we advise against any user charging this device and attempting to rely on it for communications or regular assistance. Fortunately, we’ve found a workaround and suggest customers looking to continue enjoying the benefits of the Humane pin consider wearing it down in an unpowered state. This will provide infinite battery life and a 100% reduction in unwanted heating while enabling users to continue to receive nearly all the same functionality to which they are accustomed.’
I am here to gently wake you up.
Biden has been losing the whole time, pretty badly. I listened to Pod Save America to get their read, and one of them pointed out that predicted election outcomes can change in one of two ways: a major event can force a big shift, or you can rise or fall slowly over time. Tonight showed that neither is coming for Biden. At his best possible opportunity, he didn’t under perform, he made it far worse. The theory that he could slowly gain ground with media appearances is now popped.
Biden is a nice guy, but he’s experiencing a pretty normal cognitive decline, and voters aren’t going to magically come around to him when they’ve been telling pollsters for months that he’s going to lose.
That isn’t going to change unless the nominee changes. You’re right that this isn’t the end for Biden. But sadly, that’s because it’s actually been over for a long time. It’s time to pick up the pieces and begin the overdue work of fielding a competitive nominee.