Uncategorized

Posts that I forgot to assign to a category.

Stipulated:

  • Biden is too old. He was too old last time.
  • Trump is too old. He was too old last time. (And will be as old as Biden is now before the end of a second term, which somehow never comes up in the age discussions.)
  • Trump is obviously in worse mental shape than Biden, and no one with the power to drive the conversation wants to talk about that.
  • If Biden’s weakness was apparent before the primaries, he should have not run. If its been rapid onset since the primaries, he shouldn’t be fighting to stay in. If it really was just a bad day they should be doing a lot more to show that.

So what do we do? Replace Biden? Stay the course?

Obviously, Biden’s pushing a very large rock up a very steep hill at this point. Can he do it? Can the people around him make it look like he’s doing it? Fuck if I know. And unless there’s some time travelers who can also see down alternate reality paths to check the results of different decisions, no one else knows either.

If Biden’s going to be replaced, how do you deal with the mechanics of it? The party is already having to do slight of hand because the Ohio legislature wasn’t being helpful. (To be fair, that’s not a surprise. Come on guys, check state filing deadlines when trying to schedule the convention. Yet another unforced error.) UPDATE: Apparently Ohio Republicans did stop playing petty games and moved the deadline. Still a stupid move on the party’s part.

If you’re able to do it, who do you pick? Harris is the obvious choice. If you pick someone else, you justifiably piss off a couple key constituencies in the party. The elephant in the room is that there are people who will vote against her because of her race and gender. Some of those people might be staying home because they can’t quite stomach one of Trump’s flaws, but they’ll be back in a second when a black woman is running. No way to tell how many of those people aren’t already voting for Trump, but obviously the margins are already razor thin. And ignoring that sort of response is why we have Trump around in the first place.

(Hillary Clinton was a fatally flawed candidate. When she was running for President she had spent roughly 25 years as the personification of and target for all of the right wing’s hate and conspiracy theories. It doesn’t matter that it was manufactured and exaggerated and played for effect. The baggage was immense and it outweighed everything else. Any other Democrat could have beaten Trump. Probably any other Republican would have beaten Clinton. Harris isn’t weighed down as badly, but we’re in a scenario where every bit of margin is going to count.)

And if you don’t go with Harris, who do you pick? Lets say you engineer a situation where Harris refuses the nomination “in solidarity” with Biden, in an attempt to blunt the backlash to her being passed over? The old guard of the party is just that, old. Even most of the middle ranks are the cautious sort that believe it’s a good idea to pretend politics is still reasonable people making compromises. Who do we have who can unite the party and meet the moment?

Yeah, I can’t think of anyone either.

Personally, I don’t have an opinion on what should happen. Not only do I recognize that I don’t have enough information about the scenario to have a meaningful opinion (though I think Josh Marshal at TPM has an interesting view), I would vote for a desiccated corpse over anyone who’s made a meaningful attempt at the Republican nomination for President since Ronald Reagan.

Ultimately, that’s the most frustrating part of this. Donald Trump is an utter narcissist. His sole motivations are his ego and his personal gain, in that order. I can’t even say he’s evil; evil people have principles, even if others find them offensive. Trump is completely amoral. Defeating him should be trivial. He should do it himself.

But the American Right Wing, which has largely shifted from an improbable coalition of Ayn Rand fanboys and fundamentalist churches into a Christian Nationalist organization, has found him to be a perfect vehicle. They latched on to his ego, they feed him adoring crowds that are all but ready to anoint him as the second coming, and they pour money into his bank accounts (and are probably shoveling it out the other side just as fast.) And so he becomes their useful idiot. I honestly believe him when he says he doesn’t know what Project 2025 is, and that he doesn’t agree with some of what he’s heard. I also believe he’ll put those people in power if he gets a second term, without a first thought, let alone a second one.

But instead of attacking Trump, the institutional Democratic Party is doing what it does best. Walking on to stage, getting everyone’s attention, and then shooting itself in the head while trying to shoot itself in the foot.

Why, am I still on Twitter?

Am I still on Twitter? Why?

Still, why am I on Twitter?

Why, I am still on Twitter!

Twitter (I won’t call it that other thing) is obviously getting to be more and more of a cesspool. There are people openly and proudly advocating for Nazism, racism, and sex/gender/orientation violence. Every day there’s another new low. The fact that it comes through as a screenshot with a well crafted debunking and/or dunk is getting less and less helpful.

I’ve tried fighting the good fight but it feels like the last remnants of people who might have been persuadable have all either picked a side or left. The sane political voices that used to provide good news, or a good argument to refute the assholes, are at best fighting a holding action at this point. Most of the creative people I followed have left, and the most that are still there are only posting marketing materials and not seriously interacting. (Not that I blame them.) Of the people I actually know, the vast majority haven’t posted in months, and in some cases, years.

But there’s a handful of people that I don’t communicate with anywhere else, that I don’t want to lose all track of. Despite there finally being hints of an end to the long dark tunnel of my wife’s health issues, that’s still a ways off at best, so almost all of my social contact that isn’t with coworkers or store employees is through Twitter. There’s a handful of news sources that still occasionally provide legitimately useful and hopeful news.

But it’s rare. So now I scroll farther and more often searching for a bit of positive reinforcement, when there’s less and less to be found.

But what are the alternatives? I’m on Mastodon, but that didn’t seem to get a critical mass. With Jack leaving BlueSky, there’s less worries about that turning into “Twitter, but Crypto”, but do I really want to start this addiction over? Reddit has some interesting stuff, but it’s speed running the enshitification cycle even if it is keeping the assholes slightly better contained so far.

I think for now, I’m going to remove the app from my phone and tablet, to cut down on the doom scrolling. I’ll keep it on the desktop for a bit, and see what it does if I just hit it less often. And I’ll try (again) to write more here. Not that I’ve had much luck with that the last five times, but hey, you never know.

I miss Usenet so bad.