It’s for the best. The man is not in his best form and he has repeatedly shown that he isn’t. He attempted to rectify the situation since the debate but even those attempts fell short.
There’s a process for removing him if enough people in congress believed that it was an issue, but there’s no reason to do so at this point in the presidency. Even the Republicans aren’t likely to try that.
It does follow. The reason is if the president is cognitively incapable of leading the country. There's a good argument that Biden isn't competent enough to drive a car or work at home Depot. He makes gaffes every time he speaks and is rude and demeaning to people around him according to reports. It's pretty likely that he is effectively not the president right now, that his trusted senior advisers are actually running the country.
I'm not saying all of this is certain or that Biden should be removed, but it is certainly plausible, if not likely.
Trump just had a 90 minute off the cuff acceptance speech at their convention. I can show you the disagreements I would have I can’t show you any major gaffes.
If you want to split hairs and say that the verbal diarrhea that comes out of his mouth every time he opens it is not in itself one giant "gaffe," I guess I'll just concede the point and move on. He's still a giant asshole, always, to everyone, so my original point still stands.
And why was his acceptance speech so "off the cuff" if it was at an official function where he had months to prepare?
> you don’t ever consider that you are the one who was intentionally kept in the dark
There you go again, asserting that you know what's in my head. Please stop.
I've seen mentions of that catchphrase floating around. Based on the wording you used, I thought you were referring to her saying the word "broke" in some context, and I wasn't sure what you were talking about.
Perhaps you should work on your communication skills some more before acting so haughty?
As we age we do have a decline in mental and physical function, but it is generally not uniform. From the reports I've heard his speaking ability is down, but his analytical abilities are still fine.
| there’s no reason to do so at this point in the presidency
The man is still the Commander-in-Chief. Anyone of limited mental faculties (which clearly describes President Biden), irrespective of their politics, should not be in the chair if they are not of sound mind. Consequently, I believe the responsible act would be for President Biden to resign the Presidency and allow his Vice President to take the mantle.
| Even the Republicans aren’t likely to try that.
I actually don't think it's in the Republicans best interest to do so. Tactically, the Democrats would be wise to let Kamala Harris sit in the Oval Office and make her the nominee. It would legitimize her as both a nominee and a candidate. Given that isn't happening, the cynic in me believes that suggests the Democrats don't want her as their candidate.
Regardless, the political machinations are irrelevant. It is irresponsible for Joe Biden to continue as President given he is obviously unfit to continue as the nominee.
The thing is, there needs to be a Vice President to declare the winner of a Presidential election, as we all learned on Jan 6, 2021.
If Biden resigns and Harris becomes President, a new VP would need to be confirmed by the Senate, and the (GOP controlled) House.
What if the House refuses to take up the vote, similar to how McConnell refused to bring up Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court confirmation? In theory that kicks the election to the states, and each state counts as one vote, winner takes all.
I don’t think that’s a gamble the Democrats are willing to take, being that a majority of states (not a majority of the population) are GOP controlled.
The President pro tempore of the United States Senate (currently Patty Murray, D-WA) acts in place of the VP.
“The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.” Article 1, Section 3
A submarine launched nuclear missile takes about six minutes to hit its target. Presidents probably shouldn't even be permitted to drink alcohol during their time in office as responding to nuclear attacks is one of the major duties of office, even if one we hope they never have to perform.
I think you interpreted the parent as saying the president might be drunk & order an unprompted nuclear attack.
The parent was really saying that the president might need to respond to a nuclear attack at any time, therefore they should always be sober and ready to respond. Essentially, the president is oncall 24/7 for reacting to nuclear threats.
There are some protections though where the presidents orders can be disobeyed, which are mentioned in that Wikipedia article you linked.
> "What if [the president's] mind is deranged, disordered, even damagingly intoxicated? ... Can he launch despite displaying symptoms of imbalance? Is there anything to stop him?" Rosenbaum says that the answer is that launch would indeed be possible: to this day, the nuclear fail-safe protocols for executing commands are entirely concerned with the president's identity, not his sanity. The president alone authorizes a nuclear launch and the two-man rule does not apply to him.
Even if they didn't mean that, drunk or not, the US president has the sole authority, both legal and practical, to launch a nuclear strike.
Respectfully, you might want to read something more current on the subject. The excellent book Command and Control [1] is a good place to start.
The "protections" you appear to be alluding to presumably mean the "NCA"'s role in this. That's a term that has no official meaning since 2002 (and before that the president also had the sole authority to order nuclear strikes).
Not in his best form doesn't mean unfit for president.
But yeah, it might be better if he steps down, especially if the candidate will be Kamala Harris
He's still competent enough to be president. He just doesn't have the chops to skewer a lunatic in a live TV debate, which is unfortunately very important, because if he can't, the lunatic might be the next president.
He is not able to hold his own in a debate. Yet you believe he's strong enough to lead the nation and decide when to go to war or not?
Being president should take a high degree of intelligence, integrity, and awareness. At all times.
If Biden's age has been causing mental issues, fine. That'll happen to everybody. But if it's bad enough to stop him from running, it should be bad enough to keep him out of office.
> Being president should take a high degree of intelligence, integrity, and awareness. At all times.
You're basically saying a superhuman is the only thing that should be president. There doesn't exist a person that can navigate politics while having a high degree of intelligence, integrity, and awareness at all times.
> He is not able to hold his own in a debate. Yet you believe he's strong enough to lead the nation and decide when to go to war or not?
Because when he has to decide when to go to war or not, he's surrounded by a group of trusted advisors.
Damn, where are all the HN regulars who chant "How the fuck is a one hour pressure-cooker leetcode session relevant to someone's capability as a software engineer? We're measuring the wrong thing!" ...
* Also, are we just ignoring the context that Biden is stepping down because otherwise Trump might get elected? I know this forum is not a place to call for Trump's resignation, but I can practically taste the double standard today ...
And he also has to be able to make a decision at a moments notice.
When the alarm bells are flashing red in the nuclear bunker, do you want a half senile man deciding to press the button or not?
Isn't Biden pretty good at getting out of the way and letting experts make the decisions? That seems like a pretty valuable trait in a leader assuming the advisors are high quality and that you're not in a time of crisis and need a strong leader (e.g. war).
Yes, his decision making is sound, and comes with a huge weight of experience and understanding of how the world works. His ability to communicate effectively has diminished, but not his ability to assess facts and make effective determinations.
He is clearly not competent enough to be president. He is, arguably, barely competent enough to be a ventriloquist's dummy at this point, which is effectively what he is. We just don't know who the ventriloquist is.
Does anyone believe that he should have his finger on "the button" controlling thousands of nuclear weapons? If you were in charge of a boomer or a Minuteman III silos and you got a launch order purportedly from Biden, would you execute that order? If so, really? If not, what deterrent is currently in place?
If that's the situation, then he's not the president and should either step down or be replaced via mechanisms of the 25th Amendment.
Disagree. The debate showed that his communication abilities are nearly gone, but his mind behind them is intact, just slower than it was.
Which is a really unfortunate position for him to be in. It can't be pleasant. He's not suitable to lead the country for another four years for sure. The country needs a leader who inspires people, and no one on that debate stage was that.
Don't forget, Saint Ronald I. was (allegedly) basically a potato in the latter year(s) of his presidency. So there's precedence, with such a situation.
Seems totally reasonable: I am confident in my ability to do this job now, but I'm less sure I'll be able to do it three or four years from now, so I will be seeing out this contract and won't sign a new one with you. A perfectly normal thing most working people do in their 60s.
He's unsuited to be President for another four years. That doesn't mean he needs to step down right now. It just means he shouldn't run for re-election.
He’s clearly incapable of making any serious decisions. He refers to his defense secretary when he can’t remember his name as “the black man”. He thought a different woman was his wife a few days ago and tried to kiss her. He’s delusional about the current state of the race. He can’t even descend two steps unassisted.
He should have stepped down months ago, and the Democrat party is responsible for hiding this from the public. They really thought they could just shield him till after the election.
Why say "the Democrat Party"? The party's name is the Democratic Party. It feels like an attempted slight, but I don't get it, except that I know Donald Trump occasionally says this as well. Which I also don't get as an insult.
He purposefully said "Democrat Party" to publicly identify himself as a right wing Trump supporter. It's a childish right wing shibboleth. He wants you to know he's a Trump supporter who listens to and parrots Fox News and right-wing media and politicians word for word: that's exactly why he and Trump and other MAGA supporters say that, to "virtue signal" their support of Trump. It's just like wearing a bandage on your ear. Look at all the other words he wrote: he's just being a parrot, as a way of announcing his political bias. He's just a concern troll, not serious about what he says, pointedly making that mistake on purpose.
>Remember “Democrat party” is the key right wing shibboleth when describing the Democratic Party. You gave yourself away. There is no such party as the “Democrat” Party in America.
>A shibboleth (/ˈʃɪbəlɛθ, -ɪθ/ ⓘ;[1][2] Biblical Hebrew: שִׁבֹּלֶת, romanized: šībbōleṯ) is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another.[3][4][5] Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwords, simple ways of self-identification, signaling loyalty and affinity, maintaining traditional segregation, or protecting from real or perceived threats.
It's telling that there's no attempt to refute the argument or examples that Biden is incapable of continuing to act as President or that the people around him have been lying to the public about it for months, if not longer.
Reminds me of the classic adage: If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table.
You loudly and clearly signaled to everyone that you are not arguing in good faith, so you certainly don't deserve a serious response. All you're doing is parroting ignorant uninformed right wing talking points and childish schoolyard bully epitaphs, and it's a complete waste of time taking you seriously, since you have absolutely nothing useful or interesting to contribute, you don't even believe you own words, and you know very well that it's called the "Democratic Party" yet you went out of your way to make that "mistake" on purpose, and you just parrot what you heard without any thought or evidence, so you've forfeit all rights to expecting a response or being taken seriously.
It's supremely ironic that a Trump supporter like you would get his panties in a twist about somebody other than Trump lying in public.
It’s completely possible that he’s fit for office now but realizing that he won’t be able to convince voters that he will remain fit for the next 4 years.
Republicans would have to confirm a VP replacement, which they won't do. So even if he had to resign, he would be held hostage by Republicans because they would rather he lead the country badly than let someone else take over.
There was never any risk of me voting for Trump, but when I watched the debate it became abundantly clear that Biden could not win an election. He came off as an extremely frail old man and I had my doubts that he would survive the entire debate, let alone another four years in office.
I'm a pretty left-leaning person and I find Trump to be an overwhelmingly unappealing idiot in general, but even I had to admit that Trump "won" the debate. He was still the moronic walking Markov Chain that he always is, but he at least looked alive.
It’s hard for me to say it because it’s not like Trump was actually “coherent”, he just didn’t seem like he was on death’s door.
Also, wouldn’t me saying I hate him a lot but still acknowledge he won lend more legitimacy to it? Like it’s actively working against my biases and I still acknowledge he won.
> your biases shouldn't have any impact on whether you thought someone performed better or worse than their opponent
That's arguably the definition of bias isnt it? Especially because political debates don't have objective winners or losers, declaring your bias before picking a winner in something that's only subjectively winnable does seem relevant.
This isn't a case of watching a soccer match and concluding "Gosh, I'm German, but I gotta admit Brazil won the 2014 world cup"
I do try and avoid my biases influencing my opinions on things, but almost by definition “bias” implies that I might not be fully aware of the thoughts that might be influencing.
Again, and I do not mean to repeat myself, the fact that I did concede he won the debate despite my distaste for him indicates that I am able to put them aside, at least a bit.
I find this recent kind of artificial “nuance” by simply pretending that having an opinion is somehow “tribalism” to be supremely annoying. It’s not clever, it just comes off people pleasing with the opposite effect.
Yes. Because Trump "winning" what was potentially the worst debate in US history isn't even worth a consolation prize.
This isn't even a RvD thing. I'd take back Romney, McCain or go as far back as Bob Dole. Hell, Sarah Palin was at least a pleasant form of stupid instead of malevolent. I remember when the R's at least has some minimal sense of class, but even that's out the window. This is just an embarrassment to my country at this point.
I don’t think all (or even most) republicans are stupid, but I think that Trumpism (and demagoguery in general) is a natural consequence of the Republican party’s unwillingness to outright condemn the conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones.
They’ve flirted with that kind of thinking my entire life (with the Satanic Panic and acting like Harry Potter was out to brainwash children), but it feels like the conspiratorial stuff really picked up in around 2013; that’s at least when my grandmother stopped sending me unsolicited Fox News articles and started sending me unsolicited InfoWars articles, and when she started really going off the deep end.
I agree. Their reasons pre-2016 may have been selfish at best or fundamentally misguided at worst. But I felt the worst the potential Romney era would do is slow (but not halt) gay marriage. If you don't subscribe for the conspiracies, W Bush wasn't an awful president (outside of completely throwing education under the bus... But 8 years of Obama didn't fix too much and Biden tried but got huge resistance to some starts).
There's definitely a much more explicitly hateful undercurrent in the trumpism era. I never would have expected a Charlottesville to happen so brazenly in the 21st century. Let alone the insurrection.
And on the other hand, Kamala' complexion is part of why Im worried about the D vote. Because despite much progress there are undeniably some older D's who hold prejudiced thoughts (external or internal).It undoubtedly was a partial factor leading to Hilary's loss. I really hope I'm just overreacting though.
I agree with most of what you said except for this:
> If you don't subscribe for the conspiracies, W Bush wasn't an awful president
I think he was still pretty awful; his administration basically banned stem cell research from happening in the US, he withdrew funding for anything involving climate change research, and he shares blame with Clinton for the 2008 housing crash. [1]
He wasn't quite as stupid as Trump, he didn't try and bribe a foreign official to investigate his opponents, and he didn't try and overthrow democracy with a violent mob, so I guess if that's our bar then he's pretty ok, but I think my standards are still higher than that.
[1] I'm aware that it was Clinton who signed the subprime mortgage stuff that caused it, so he definitely deserves a large share of the blame. However, the Bush administration sat on it and were happy to take credit for the short-term benefits until 2008, meaning that they weren't thinking about the long term consequences either, so I think they deserve a share of that blame too.
Love Joe, but 2 minutes into the debate it was clear he couldn't win an election. He was behind, and he needed to come out strong, and somehow he made it worse. Whether or not Kamala can remains to be seen, but at least there's still _potential_ there.
>He was still the moronic walking Markov Chain that he always is, but he at least looked alive.
Off topic but I find this insult(?) a bit funny. Is it supposed to be an insult as in his action / speech are as predictable/determined by current state only, as is Markov chain?
Maybe, but he always sort of talked like that, even well before he got into politics. Just a rambling incorrect ding-dong that speaks with a far-too-high confidence-to-understanding ratio.
It's an interesting case study in that people's perception of "who won" determines "who won".
However, if you change the criteria to "who had the most favorable impact on undecided voters" then apparently he lost? The news was Trump lost undecided voters from that debate..
So Trump won because everyone thinks he won(including me haha). But what did he win?
I don't have polling data so this is just "personal vibes", but I get the impression that left-leaning people like me thought that the last debate was going to be more or less like the 2020 debates, where Trump ends up looking like a blabbering idiot and Biden comes off as reasonably snappy and charming, and that the election might be another shoe-in for Biden.
I think the statement of "Trump won the debate" largely boils down to the fact that nearly every left leaning person who watched it turned it off feeling like "holy fuck looks like we're getting another four years of Trump".
Having watched it, it's not like Trump got "better" in any regard, he's still a blabbering idiot (maybe even more than in 2020), but he didn't "disappoint" me like Biden did this last time.
not a fan of his totality, but he is an epic troll and memester in a way that has broad resonance.
It doesn't seem sophisticated, but it is perfectly engages one audience, and perfectly enrages a second target audience.
Examples that come to mind is mocking Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" or rebuking the question of him as a dictator with "No, no, no, (other than day one)."
There is no message his campaign could give other than "Biden is running" and have Biden still run - any other message would damage him.
Saying you are considering dropping out would be immediately pounced on, and effectively mean you'd have to drop out. So I don't think there is any signal in the messaging there except that he was probably still seriously considering running.
That’s just how you do it. It would have been far, far more damaging for him to spend a few weeks going “ah, well, maybe I won’t run”. It always looks a bit silly in retrospect, but total confidence right up until you change direction is just how you have to do politics, in general.
It seems to me the pressure built up and he could no longer fight it, which means he had no choice. The party did not allow it, just like they didn't allow Bernie in 2016.
Except in this case "the party" is actually "people that vote for Democrats". It's insane and infuriating to try to blame this on "the elites" when a significant majority of Democratic voters wanted Biden to step aside. If anything, it was "the elites" who tried to hide Biden's true condition and then tried to gaslight us all by pretending his debate performance was just some kind of bad one-off.
> If anything, it was "the elites" who tried to hide Biden's true condition and then tried to gaslight us all by pretending his debate performance was just some kind of bad one-off.
Yes, and it worked, and it's working again. I'm just saying it's not what people would have voted for if there was truly a choice. The presidential election is just a show for the managerial class to select their new spoke person.
I mean, you could read it that way, and without inside knowledge it would be impossible to prove or disprove, but realistically, even if this was fully amicable, even if this had been _instigated by Biden_, it would still have played out in public exactly the same way. There’s no world in which an incumbent national leader will say “hey, thinking of resigning, more info in a few weeks”; it’s just not how it works.
The rules allow the DNC to have an open convention. They just haven’t had one for more than half a century. the interesting thing is apparently if they do that its available to all candidates. So it’s possible that somebody that is well liked by the public, but not by the DNC becomes the leader ie Bernie sanders.
The tough thing though is that money donated to Biden doesn’t transfer to other candidates.
The daily wire did an Extensive breakdown of each scenario a few days ago:
The challenge is transferring to someone not named Kamala. [0] You need some campaign finance oversight with accounts, etc., and refunding and transferring to a "new" candidate would take time and jeopardize tying up ~$100 million in funds.
That's the way it should be? Donations to a candidate's reelection committee are for the benefit of that candidate and severely limited by law ($3300 per donor per candidate per election). Treating inter-committee transfers as something other than donations would allow trivial circumvention of the 'per candidate' restriction - just run a bunch of nobodies, fill their coffers, and then have them drop and transfer to a single candidate
I'll admit this is a bit silly in light of PAC/SuperPAC spending now, but we did have election spending rules at one point and this was one of them.
is there something specific about this extensive breakdown of the laws around a candidate stepping down that you find incorrect? Is there any news source you have found that isn’t biased in someway?
I'm guessing the person actually just meant that Ben Shapiro is extremely annoying. That's why I avoided clicking at least. I've found people use negative modifiers more or less randomly to signal disgust as opposed to thinking through what each word means
To their detriment? I'm not sure. They just had the Republican convention. At that convention, they took a lot of shots at Biden. Now the Democrats say "Wrong target, suckers!"
They take over the news cycle from the Republican convention, and they neutralize a huge amount of the talking points from the convention. That could be pretty brilliant.
(I mean, it would have been better for Biden to clearly not be running last year at this time, and let the primary process do its thing. But dropping out right now might be pretty decent timing.)
This is actually huge. The Dems now get several cycles of genuine organic interest... Kamala as nominee, then "who will she pick as VP" and the convention will get a lot of natural attention, all getting earned screentime (while pundits and pollsters have a field day of pageviews and engagement).
The media class now has months of things to talk about wrt the Dems. The less screentime Trump gets the better, and his convention is already over and spent zero time attacking the actual candidate.
Yeah, it certainly /can/ work. For example in New Zealand in 2017: The labor party (our big centre-left party) had an unpopular/uninspiring leader and was polling terribly. The existing leader stepped down and Jacinda Ardern took over just seven weeks before the election, and rolled to a win.
YMMV, we have very different political systems and cultures, etc. etc.
Nate Silver was already a Cassandra months ago about this issue and was proven right, better than the entire Democrat establishment. The internet is quite the dichotomy. There are easily available sources to the common man that are more right than the most powerful people in the world (Ivy League SAT removal fiasco, Alperovitch on Russian invasion, etc.). But, most people don't listen to them and instead regurgitate brainrot.
Dannnnnng. I think it's definitely for the best (probably never should've come to this, reminds me of RBG). And that said I really, really liked his presidency, but, he is undeniably really old.
The problem isn't just his age, it's his decrepitude, both physical and mental. I know people in their 90s who are able to speak clearly at any hour of the day...
Someone in Trump's own party attempted to assassinate him last week, and failed. For most people, having someone in your own party try to kill you would be a huge negative, but the person I was responding to attempted to spin it as a positive.
The “who” that pulled the trigger is much less relevant than the reaction of Trump right after it happened. Rising up, the flag waving behind him, with a fist in the air yelling “Fight!”. Followed by a crowd cheering, “USA! USA!”.
That was incredibly iconic and that picture will be in the historic books, and IMHO, alongside a biography of him as our 47th POTUS.
I did hear about Teddy being nearly assassinated and then continuing his speech right then and there. Helped with his image as being this stubborn bull who never backs down and comes in swinging.
looking it up, we haven't had a near assassination since Reagan (how... well, poetic isn't the word I want to use). Probably a bit too recent for history books to record at my time. The other presidents who had near assassinations did eventually become assassinated.
You seriously think Trump is more physically fit? I'd give you mentally, but avoiding having your head blown off because you gesture so wildly it's hard to get a clear shot does NOT make the man physically fit. He looks like a trash bag full of gelatin when he wears his golf clothes, and golf was Trump's only/best example of a (barely) "physical" challenge he thought he'd beat Biden at....
Sad.
> You seriously think Trump is more physically fit?
Absolutely he’s more physically fit. I don’t think Biden would have survived being tackled by the Secret Service agents. That alone would have broken all kinds of bones.
And as far as stamina goes, Trump regularly gives hour plus standing speeches. Do you really think Biden could stand in the hot sun for an hour?
I think he's experiencing a rapid decline in his health, possibly due to COVID. He had been recorded riding his bike this June [0].
This is anecdotal, but it reminds me of my grandfather before he died. He had always been able to run on a treadmill and lift weights; then, he got cancer, and his health deteriorated to the point that he began to need a walker to get around, until he became bedridden and died.
"Unfit for office" (Esper) "The greatest threat to democracy that we've ever seen." (Cobb) "he failed at being the president when we needed him to be the president" (mulvaney) "doesn't like to read, doesnt read briefing reports." (Tillerson) "absense of leadership, really anti-leadership" (McMaster) "wannabe dictator" (Kelly) "he shouldn't be near the oval office" (Barr) "a person who admires autocrats & murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, the Constitution, and rule of law" (Kelly) "God help us [if we's reelected]." (Kelly)
And simply, "he's an effing moron" (Tillerson).
Biden has always been a little weird with his vocal stutter, but he makes good points. He knows what's going on. He can talk to issues and hold a point. Trump's logic as he gets up on the podium & drunk uncle rambles is terrifying, both mean and vindictive when coherent but often just totally space case weirdo verbal diaherria. He's never been sharp. He's never been interested in the world, has always lived in his own head & it's only gotten worse & less & less intelligible. He's an effing moron and a mean nasty one at that. Biden is aging yes but he's a put together intelligent engaged listening person who reads his damned briefings & is engaged & interested & has ongoingly shown ability to go on talk shows & rallys & be strong, to talk intelligently to issues, to handle deep conversations well, & make sharp cases.
You don't see anything like this insult against character & intelligence against Biden. I think Biden is sharp, but even if you disagree, at least he started with a full deck of cards and some decency & respect for democracy. The other guy?
I think Bob Woodward really sums it up: "the president has the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader."
What a person thinks and what a person externally expresses can be two entirely separate things. I'm pretty sure Biden can think entirely well enough to be president.
Speaking clearly has nothing to do with mental fortitude. Tons of things can affect the fluency of speech. We really need to move past the days where we judge people's intelligence and competence based on how well the connections of their brain are able to influence the movement of the vocal cords and the tongue the lips and the jaw.
You've got to be kidding, I must as a non-partisan say. The observations entertain the republican world, but they're there nonetheless for everyone, or this wouldn't have been forced by the democrats.
That said, it's infuriating when you have an opponent that can literally say whatever he wants however unintelligible it may be and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said. The double standard is astonishing.
But yeah obviously there certainly are better candidates than Biden to run for president. Why he or she hasn't been found in 2020 eludes me.
> That said, it's infuriating when you have an opponent that can literally say whatever he wants however unintelligible it may be and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said.
Yeah, just three days ago, praising Hannibal Lecter, or remember "covfefe" from a few years back? Or the QAnon bunch where some people managed to assemble millions of people [1] by essentially doing "tea leaves predictions" on Trump speeches?
There is no equivalent to that level of derangedness on the Democrat side, not even close.
Is this satire? A typo on twitter and something that wasn't Trump?
Meanwhile, early this month, Biden called himself the first black woman to serve with a black president, as well as referred to "vice president Trump" when apparently talking about Harris.
> A typo on twitter and something that wasn't Trump?
That one was a response to "and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said", because that is precisely what QAnon was/is: a bunch of people poring over Trump speeches and every tiny utterance of anyone in his circle to find "hidden meanings" like alleged raids on "pedos".
> Meanwhile, early this month, Biden called himself the first black woman to serve with a black president, as well as referred to "vice president Trump" when apparently talking about Harris.
He misspeaks and needs to correct himself. Yes. That's completely undeniable.
But hell, listen to a Trump speech and to a Biden speech. Trump is just a plain stream-of-consciousness braindump all the time, Biden at least generally manages to stick to the prompt.
Unfortunately, Trump has what I call the "entertainer instinct": he knows exactly and most especially instinctively how to entertain masses, how to make pictures and quotes. The best example is him getting shot - 99.999% of people would have fled, he raises his fist and yells "fight".
And in a political climate where it's not facts but pure and utter showmanship that wins an election, that's a problem.
> Why he or she hasn't been found in 2020 eludes me
Well we had the 2020 primaries. Bernie and Warren were too left to win a general election. Pete Buttigieg won Iowa, got 2nd in New Hampshire, but only cancelled the campaign after South Carolina, once it dawned that the South has too much of a quiet problem of Buttigieg being gay and preferring Biden simply because he was Obama VP. Without those sad facts, we could've had Buttigieg winning 2020 and 2024.
Yes, but enough prominent Democrats and donors didn't want to support someone with Biden's faltering condition. Thus the pressure for him to step down. It doesn't matter what the Republicans are willing to support. Democrats are trying to win an election and put someone competent in power.
It's not that he's incompetent (I certainly consider him dramatically more competent to do literally anything
(or when the situation calls for it, nothing) than his opponent), it's that he's perceived by some voters to be incompetent, and that may cost the election, and I'd really rather not be dragged along into that universe because his vanity doesn't let him move over.
It is a requirement for the job of being a national politician.
You have to be able to win elections at that level, and there's no participation trophies for feel-good runs by someone with a handicap, you just lose.
That is what parent is challenging. You can of course disagree. I think it's an interesting point. How much damage do we do to ourselves by societally selecting charismatic people who speak eloquently as leaders (importantly: over other qualities)?
One has to be practical. Some handicaps are seen by the majority as a negative for the job. You can’t tell them they are wrong for making it a requirement (after all, they hire the candidate).
We evolved a natural tendency to like charismatic and funny people, because (I'm speculating) you need a high minimum level of broad cognitive competence to pull that off.
Things like empathy, quick thinking, emotional intelligence, a fresh perspective, broad knowledge of the world, a large vocabulary, and the self-confidence to go with your judgement calls are all involved in telling a single good joke to a crowd.
These are all fantastic things to see in a leader.
On an evolutionary scale, it's probably a little simpler than correlation with cognitive competence.
A group united towards a stupid purpose can be more effective than individuals acting towards more reasonable purposes. If this is true, you can select for both following (susceptibility) and leading (charisma).
I feel like the only characteristic needed to be a popular speaker is self-confidence. Have you seen most of the word salad coming out of Trump's mouth?
It’s word salad, but for his demographic, it’s a salad of carefully selected words they love, delivered with great warmth, charm, or aggression, as appropriate.
All of his 'success' is purely derived from charisma as far as I can tell. He isn't particularly adept at his prior career of real estate business given that he has under-performed in the markets he has participated in, and he had to commit felony fraud to do it. His biggest success is making people believe that he is more successful than he is.
What intellectually rigorous activity would you say he has an aptitude in?
Looking at the wildly hostile media coverage of him post-2015, you’d come away thinking he’s a major charlatan.
Looking at the glowing media coverage of him pre-2015, he seems like a unique business genius.
The truth is probably in between.
Business and marketing aren’t rigorous intellectual activities like math, but they are bloody hard in a different way - even with an inheritance (how many born-rich kids die 100x richer? Almost none). The problems are very fuzzy and open-ended, and frequently don’t even look like a problem.
You can’t consistently solve these problems profitably over many years without some skill.
I disagree. I know quite a few people who are incredibly charismatic, but exceptionally narrow in their cognitive competence. In fact, one of the problems that I would highlight about charisma is that it allows you to be get away with a lot more stupid shit than you would if you had to get by on other talents.
I agree with your point, but I think your examples are charming one-on-onenor in small groups only.
To be considered charming to a large group of people, like half the USA, you need to be conversant in things that are relevant to all of them. A narrow person can never have a wide appeal.
To me, the role seems to be like 95% charisma as it's largely a figurehead position. Foreign relations, domestic relations, commander in chief of the armed forces are all mostly charismatic functions.
The smart but uncharismatic folks seem better suited to institutional roles where they can guide policy in the right direction without being the public face of the policy. It's not all that different from the distinction between sales and the folks that design/make the product; the groups are complementary but divergent.
Winning elections is only a part of why the US President must be an effective communicator. Even with the greatest staff supporting them, poor communication will hamper their ability to do the job, especially in a crisis situation.
I agree that mental fortitude is not necessarily correlated with fine grained muscle control, but speaking clearly is a pretty freaking basic requirement for A PRESIDENT
Biden wasn't running for chief scientist somewhere, he was running for President of the United States, and a huge part (probably the primary part) of that job is being able to communicate effectively. If "your brain isn't able to adequately influence the movement of the vocal cords and the tongue the lips and the jaw" then you shouldn't be applying for a job where verbal communication is paramount.
it honestly astounds me that people did not recognize Biden’s cognitive decline in the 2020 debates. it was obvious then, and it was obvious a month ago when all the news outlets were boldly proclaiming that Biden was fully fit for duty.
> it was obvious a month ago when all the news outlets were boldly proclaiming that Biden was fully fit for duty.
Dude, you just completely made that up. Certainly every news outlet I recall, from NY Times, WaPo and CNN to Fox News and the WSJ were all running a ton of articles questioning Biden's fitness for another term. None of them were "boldly proclaiming" anything.
No, it is a sign that both terms occupy close relationships in the brain. I consistently fumble the name of my elder sister with the name of my eldest daughter and I know many people who have similar mixups.
Biden is showing signs of decline, but the name-swapping thing was never (and still isn't) that. It's mental klutzery, nothing more. As the other person pointed out, it is /very/ common when two names are mentally-adjacent, to reach for the wrong one. My parents would call me by my brothers' names all the time, and I just did that with my own kids this morning.
Anyone who thinks that Biden got confused and thought he was in a press conference with Vladimir Putin (!!) is just spouting nonsense.
I've been mixing up names for as long as I can remember. I'm not even 40. Of all the things to judge him on this rates pretty low on my list, especially since Biden has a bit of a history of "gaffes" like this.
That said, it's pretty obvious a lot of energy and fire that Biden previously had is no longer present. Or at least very inconsistently present.
the thing is. i dont remember a single fumbling of words by biden until he appeared back into the public recently. like he was great at speaking and decently quick witted.
the extreme change is worrisome. i mean is this him now? will it keep deteriorating? why would anyone think it wont. how much of a medical concern will be 1 year later. 2 3? this is what people are concerned with
Those were just the top two results in Google for "biden vice president gaffe", limiting the date to before 2016.
I mean, it's probably gotten worse, although I can't really judge that. But it's certainly not a new thing. I'm not saying he's not too old and tired, I'm just saying that merely the mixing up of a name alone really isn't a sign of incompetence.
Competency is not a requirement for being a politician. Winning the most votes is. And being elocuent and aggressive helps much more than being coherent
I was using "speak clearly" as a shibboleth for general mental and physical ability.
There is clearly something wrong with him that was not in evidence in 2020. Whether it's Parkinson's, senility, 12-day-old jet lag, I don't know. But it's clear that it's hard for him to carry on a conversation, and that is basically the job of a politician.
His recent debate performance was poor. But he's had trouble speaking for a long time. Go back and watch older debates or speeches and see. It's all classic speech impedement stuff; he's clearly had lots of training and experience, but sometimes he can't use the words he wants and switches to different words.
I'm honestly not sure what we're looking for in a debate, but most presidential debates since I've been a voter are contests to see who can look like they're listening the best while getting back to a rehearsed talking point the fastest. [1] When you combine that with trouble with words, and maybe some over training, it doesn't look good.
Does it mean he has trouble carrying on a conversation in a real setting? I don't know, it's a totally different setting with different expectations. We don't really get a window into that.
[1] Well except that MTV town hall. Pretty sure Bill had no talking points appropriate there.
There are also different kinds of difficulty speaking. When he was younger, Biden would trip over words or say something not quite right, or make gaffes (supporting same sex marriage before it was the admin policy).
But now his difficulty seems to come from difficulty understanding what is happening around him. He seemed confused by his surroundings multiple times during that awful debate.
I've seen a lot of Biden supporters pointing to his stutter and speaking difficulties, but his troubles have qualitatively and quantitatively changed, and definitely for the worse.
But in the last couple of months, it's like his tongue is not moving right. I literally can't understand some of his sentences now, the syllables are so slurred and garbled.
The reason there was no coming back from his debate performance is because it wasn't just some verbal slip up or "classic speech impediment" stuff. Anyone who's taken care of an elderly parent or grandparent recognized the clear signs of age-related mental decline. And it obviously wasn't that single debate, e.g. the news about Clooney's fundraiser where pretty much everyone in attendance thought he had markedly declined, or this recent BET interview where Biden got seriously confused and lost his train of thought: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/17/politics/video/biden-youtube-.... To your question "Does it mean he has trouble carrying on a conversation in a real setting?”, that BET interview was just a taped, 2-person, no-audience interview with a friendly interviewer. I just don't understand how anyone who's been paying attention can state that Biden's mental capacity hasn't declined significantly, and more importantly, how anyone could suggest with a straight face that Biden would have the requisite mental capacity in 4 years hence.
Biden apparently had a speech impediment (basically stutter), for much of his early life, and had to train extremely hard to overcome it. So in general I've always brushed aside criticism of his speaking as it's evident to me that he's generally very articulate and well spoken if you overlook the occassional word salad.
Over the last few months I've generally defending his gaffs to friends even though I don't like Biden as a politician, because I think that kind of discourse is counterproductive politically and stigmatising socially, which I still feel.
However, I have to say, the recent downward spike in his ability to string a sentence together becomes concerning to me, not so much because I think it primary reflects any cognitive decline per se, but it seems to me like a sign that the pressure of the presidency and the campaign are affecting him in _some_ way that is causing his speech impediment to surface at its worst and most frequent yet. So I would still push back on a lot of what you are saying, but yes, at this point, something is clearly off there to a concerning degree.
This comment triggers Poe's Law for me. Given this comment by itself, I would have guessed this was satire. Unfortunately, from a fuller picture, I guess this is actually fundamentalism.
Being ugly is a disqualifying trait for getting a job as a supermodel.
Being unfit is a disqualifying trait for being an Olympic athlete.
Being unable to stay awake and say coherent sentences is a disqualifying trait for being the president of the most powerful nation on earth.
Being black or latino is a disqualifying trait for playing a Roman emperor in a movie — which is why Netlix will surely try, because they’re unable to comprehend what the problem even is, and why their “equality” is groan-inducing.
PS: If I was a US citizen, I would vote for AOC not because of her sex or race but because neither of those influence my decision. Do they influence yours?
If going for visual realism, then obviously a black man would not look the part, since all roman emperors were caucasian (except possibly Septimius Severus).
If historical authenticity is semi-expected then having Samuel L Jackson as Nero isn’t going to fly. If race swap is part of the gimmick like in Hamilton then I don’t think it would matter.
Being born in Roman Hispania isn't the same as being "of Spanish origin" or "latinx". Being born in Africa doesn't make you black. Elon Musk is the richest African in the world.
If Shaq had been born in China, would he be a good candidate to portray first sovereign Emperor of China?
A black bear born in the arctic isn't a polar bear.
The truth we cannot change is that people simply want to follow charismatic leaders. We can sit and lament on how stupid that is, but we aren't magically fixing that anytime soon.
Yes, we shouldn’t confuse verbal fluency with intelligence, or the lack of one with the lack of the other. Perhaps you should go back in time to 2000 and step up to defend George W. Bush.
However, when someone was previously verbally fluent and then the whole world can see that that person’s fluency has deteriorated, it’s completely reasonable to believe that deterioration of other mental functions is happening as well, as seems to be the case with Biden.
I occasionally call my kids by each others' names. My parents would call me by my brothers' names. This is a running joke in large families. I occasionally in large meetings swap the names of two products we're talking about and have to be corrected. It's just a very low-grade "verbal dyslexia" that means nothing except that the brain isn't a perfectly-wired machine.
I don’t beleive he’s actually confusing them, but it’s not a good look for a guy who’s supposed to be a leader in uncertain times. One should never be question if the president meant what they just said.
Verbal fluency is a job requirement for a president. It doesn't matter if the president is the most intelligent person, it matters that they can communicate effectively, particularly with world leaders in life-or-death situations when a miscommunication can result in a great catastrophe. Personally I would rank intelligence as less important than several other attributes.
And it's such a double standard. Trump never pretended to speak clearly and now people can in good faith point out that trump has not shown signs of regression because there was nothing he was curating about his persona in the first place and thus nothing to regress.
Whatever Trump says can be construed as some sort of 4d chess hidden message because of a cult of personality that has developed around him. He can hint that asylum seekers escaped from mental asylums but his base will not suspect that he may be the one confusing the two words and instead they will just cheer at the grotesque image because that's the kind of politically incorrect thing they want somebody to say (regardless of whether Trump did that on purpose or not).
I have the feeling that whatever Trump will say and will do will never ever be scrutinized by his side in a way that even remotely resembles the scrutiny to switch Biden has to be subjected to.
And that double standard speaks a lot on the troubled times we're living through.
I don't know the quote you're referring to, but sexual assault by siblings is at least 19x more common (2.3%+ of children) than by adult family members (0.12%+ of children), according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Tangential fact to Biden being able to coherently communicate such a fact or not though.
I agree for the average person, but at the same time the front man for one of the strongest economies in the world should be able to speak at least on an average level. Unfortunately I would define his speech at this point as poor - please correct me if I'm wrong. This factor seems like a running joke not only in the US, but the entire world.
I say this as someone that agrees that Biden should have stepped down earlier (for the 2nd election I mean).
But please, people, do not compare the average person in their 80's to what this man has to do daily.
Just alone entering a war room and giving an order to bomb a place, or watching the raw videos of war (which we luckily don't get access to) is something you don't come back from. This is not an average person, and he was doing OK after all.
However, he objectively got older. That's it. No coming back from that either...
many people that age have been in actual wars. not saying which is more intense or which causes more stress on your body it definitely matters context of what you went through. although id say most vets that went through vietnam or korea probably been through a lot.
at least i know my korean gpa has. man is crippled and vocal cords basically non existent due to his job there. but man is so sharp and smart mentally its actually shocking.
but bidens has had serious brain surgeries. that alone should have disqualified him from even running imo regardless of how his term went
The point is not that Biden has been through an extraordinarily stressful experience at one point in his life but that Biden has been going through an extraordinarily stressful experience for the past four years while already being very old. With the greatest respect to your grandfather, I think it would take a similar toll on him.
And 8 years with Obama as VP in 2009-2017 (in his late 60's and early 70's). Obama got visibly older in 8 years, and he was way younger than Biden was at the time. And yet, Biden challenged Trump that had previously won against Clinton, not the new guy in the neighborhood. And he won.
Seriously, the stress he went through in the last 15-20 years, that's some s*. He even lost his son in 2015.
This guy has crazy good genes. And it sucks that people make fun of him. He should not go as a "joke". People should have some respect and understanding for him.
> The problem isn't just his age, it's his decrepitude, both physical and mental.
"When Biden stumbles over words, we question his state of mind; when Trump acts like a deranged street preacher, it’s … well, Tuesday. If Biden had suggested setting up migrants in a fight club,[1] he’d be out of the race already; Trump does it, and the country (as well as many in the media) shrugs. "
> “Did anyone ever hear of Dana White?” Trump asked during his speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference in Washington. “… I said, ‘Dana, I have an idea. Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league — these are the greatest fighters in the world — fight the champion of the migrants.’ I think the migrant guy might win; that’s how tough they are. He didn’t like that idea too much.”
Fucking Hell. I need to stop thinking these things are exaggerations or hyperbole. In the past few days, I thought "MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW" and (now) "immigrant fight club" were the stuff of political cartoonists juicing the zeitgeist.
This is the other problem with this election cycle: Trump is saying truly deranged things, but they’re so far outside of what people think would be reasonable for a person to say that he’s not getting the kind of blowback for them he should be because nobody believes he’s actually saying them.
(A contributing factor is that he actually Has been misrepresented a few times by the media - the “bloodbath” comment was very clearly about the auto industry in context, so the right feels rightly aggrieved and the left & media lose credibility.)
Nothing new, sadly. Comedians during Trump's presidency were saying how they can't top the absurdness that was Trump's reality. Welcome to a slice of the madness they needed to parody somehow.
On the one hand, abandoning an incumbent President with the all of the strengths that entails just months from the election because you let the other side control the narrative with their "crippling dementia" meme seems like political suicide, and you can usually trust the American left to do the wrong thing for the right reasons.
On the other hand, American politics is so fickle and vain that even a minor gaffe on camera can doom a political career (see the "Dean Scream.") Although this standard only seems to apply to Democrats, it's still a factor. What really killed Hillary Clinton's chances wasn't systemic misogyny, or the email leaks, but her expression. She had a memeable crazy face, and that became her entire identity for many Americans. Now "Sleepy Joe" is the identity of Joe Biden.
The only question now is, what will be the meme that they deploy against Kamala Harris? I don't think the tried and true "probably a pedophile" or "crippling dementia" options are going to work, and "blood drinking satanic priestess" has probably worn out its welcome. They'll probably go "crypto-muslim" like they did with Obama.
edit: looks like they're going with "all of this is an attempted coup." A bold strategy by the insurrectionist party, going back to the "stolen election" well, but it seems to be a perennial favorite. Let's see if it works for them.
if decrepitude had anything to do with voter confidence, we would have booted both candidates out after that charade that we called the "presidential debate"
Compare him from his time as the vice president vs now. It is not even close. He has deteriorated so much in his speech. People can't even understand him which was never a problem back then.
Biden was never the quickest guy (or tongue) in the room. During Obama's term, he was legendary for putting rooms to sleep with plodding, off-topic monologues where he set up irrelevant straw-men and then knocked them down. Obama was, by far, the quicker of the two. Time has probably not improved matters, but it's going a bit far to say Biden's declining sharply. Even in his prime, Biden might have stuttered and stumbled through a debate with somebody as consistently unpredictable and utterly unhinged as Trump.
Is a younger leader better? Possibly. Speaking as a non-American, I have to note that, when Americans vote for a President, they're not just voting for one guy. They're voting for a guy who will select the entire white house staff. Biden surrounded himself with highly competent people with good ideas and they're why he's been an effective President. Obama could have easily done worse if he'd been less lucky with his staff selection. An old president who selects good staff can be effective.
Trump did worse during his previous term and would be objectively worse in his next precisely because he'll surround himself with family and yes-men. When staffing, a good leader tries to make himself the dumbest person in the room. Biden did that. Trump never will.
Case in point: The VP. In a Biden vs Trump contest, it was a very real possibility that either of their VP's would have to take over during their terms. Biden had Harris as his VP, and she's clearly ready to do the job. Trump chose a rookie senator yes-man with a profound lack of principles for his VP. The thought of Vance becoming President in 2026 or 2027 should terrify people.
VP's are frequently ghosts - we only really remember Mike Pence as the guy who called his wife Mother and who Trump and his supporters wanted to hang when they were cosplaying insurrection.
Harris has at least been a formidable prosecuter and brings bone fide proven legal talent to the role, not to mention the $8,000 US plus Trump and his family have donated towards her election since 2011.
It’s weird that an incoherent Trump never gets called out for his ramblings that run on and on in circles. Yet Biden’s gaffes are blown out of proportion. I wish someone just called out Trump directly and told him to stop the ramblings. But nobody in his circle could do it when he was president, nobody could get him off twitter and so on.
Trumps been called out for his ramblings for 8 years now. Its not news anymore. Hes mastered the post truth tactic of overwhelming people with bullshit so much that they dont care about it anymore.
Am I wrong to think that whoever is appointed to Presidency is just a figurehead of the actual administration, and that it really doesn't matter how functional he actually is? I'm not defending or endorsing Biden, but from my eyes we vote for the administration, not for the person.
One could argue the chaos and uncertainty from upending his currently functional administration is not worth the upsides, while allowing for a natural transition via the standard election and end of term process is worth it.
The important consideration is that he’s unfit to serve for four and a half more years, and also that he’s unfit to win the election. In contrast, he’s probably not considerably more unfit for the next six months than for the past six.
He’s mildly unfit to serve now but there’s reasonable doubt he’ll be at all fit in a few years. That would be what the more rational people should be thinking. It’s not about day one it’s about year two, etc.
Ordinarily, yes. But she doesn't poll well with a lot of key demographics due to her tough on crime stance as a DA. Making her president would mean she'd be the presumptive nominee, and I think the party has more optimal choices lined up.
This election will come down to four battleground states. Those are the only states and battles that matter.
I'm more worried about how divisive the race will be if they nominate her (black vs white). It'll allow the media machine to paint numerous "oh it's because she's black, isn't it" kind of rhetoric as a smear on the Republicans.
Reading this entire thread tbh has been a sad and worrying re-affirmation of my beliefs that we're all collectively "fucked". We literally can't put aside differences (myself included) and argue on facts and details, and instead resorting to tribalism.
The big reason we're resorting to tribalism, I think, is because of a peculiar element of human nature about wanting to "right" past "wrongs". So if me looking in from the outside, see the other side winning unfairly last time round, I'll support my side's wrongs despite them being objectively wrong (or what I don't even want) because I want to right the wrong of the past. That topped with the fact that the stakes are a whole lot higher each time means that neither side wants to "take one for the team" - because they know that if they did, the other side will just use the opportunity to the detriment of their opponents.
That's certainly a factor but not the only factor. She bears a lot of the same baggage as Biden for failing to prosecute abusive cops and enforcing so-called "tough on crime" drug policies.
Polls indicate Harris is holding her own, and it's clear that voters seeking an alternative to Trump have already found it in the Biden-Harris ticket. By selecting Harris as his running mate, Biden has given them a viable choice. Now, it's essential for Biden to see this through and commit to the path he's chosen. Ultimately, he should resign at a time of Harris' choosing, ensuring a seamless transition and maintaining the momentum they've built together.
> and it's clear that voters seeking an alternative to Trump have already found it in the Biden-Harris ticket
Do you have anything to back up that claim?
There are scores of voters planning to vote third party or sit out the election due to the lack of good, viable candidates. If the DNC nominated someone who honestly spoke to the ways our country is messed up and the things we'll need to do to change them they could easily see a considerable increase in their votership.
It's evident that someone in this thread is employing stylometry to profile users, likely to uncover user identities, all the while concealing their true identity. The comments' content, which tackles recent events and complex political strategies, is clearly written by individuals with a deep understanding of the subject matter.
Doxing, or attempting to dox, is a toxic behavior that should be strictly against HN rules. It's essential we maintain a safe and respectful environment for open discussion. Instead of indulging in digital detective work, let's focus on the topic at hand and avoid perpetuating a culture of surveillance.
I'd argue that voters seeking an alternative to Trump have already coalesced around the Biden-Harris ticket. You question this claim, citing the presence of third-party voters and disillusioned citizens. However, I've examined the data from various angles, including voter behavior, incumbent advantages, legal challenges [link], and polls (hundreds of them, in fact). The reality is clear: for Democrats, there's one obvious path forward, and denying this is, in my opinion, a self-destructive stance.
Link: This video discusses the legal implications and potential consequences of Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential election, including the role of delegates, party rules, and state laws.
Then the senate would refuse to approve a VP replacement. Remember that leading up to counting the electoral votes loose-lipped GOP senators were saying that Pence (the VP) wouldn’t be counting the days electoral votes? How do you think that would proceed?
The problem is that the Republican controlled house would have to confirm the appointed VP. The senate might take a minute, but it would likely get it done.
Yeah, I meant the house: it would be much in the majority's interest* to leave the position vacant through the election.
* I mean the way they seem to operate these days, where keeping the system running properly isn't considered important, and to a hardcore group is considered something to firmly oppose.
The VP's confirmation would be beneficial, solidifying their position for re-election. However, if the confirmation fails, it could reflect negatively on those responsible, particularly if the candidate wins the general election, as it would highlight their inability to secure a key appointment. Regardless, the process would attract extensive media attention, offering free publicity, which is a win.
Note that by the 25th Amendment both houses would have to confirm. The (bare) Democratic majority Senate would be a challenge. The GOP majority House an even stronger hurdle. Though confirmation is a simple majority, not a supermajority (2/3 vote):
Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
There's also the fact that in ascending to the Presidency, Harris would no longer be President of the Senate, which would lose her tie-breaking vote, AFAIU.
Yes, it would be beneficial for Biden to step down, as this would make Kamala Harris the presumptive nominee and simultaneously break the glass ceiling of a female US President. This would also demonstrate her presidential capabilities to the general public, who may not fully comprehend the responsibilities of the office. Furthermore, if Congress were unable to confirm a VP, it would reflect poorly on them and dominate news cycles, shifting the focus away from Republicans. As President, Harris would be able to address the nation with authority, rather than just as a VP campaigning for the top office. Additionally, it's been apparent for some time that Biden has been facing mental and physical health challenges; it's surprising that this isn't more widely acknowledged.
Note: As an independent observer, I'm offering this perspective as a political strategist or from the perspective of Americans seeking to overcome the historical gender bias in US presidential politics.
Harris already earned it by being elected, so it's not about letting her earn it. The choice is Biden's alone to make, and it's obvious that it would politically amplify his endorsement and significantly reduce the likelihood of further drama within the Democratic Party so close to the election. Moreover, it would likely mitigate any legal challenges related to Biden's transition to Harris.
This argument seems to be missing the point. The discussion is about what Biden should do, not about Harris's qualifications or the primary process. Stepping down would give her a significant advantage and make her presidency more likely, which is presumably what Biden wants. It's a logical step to support her candidacy.
That's not how flagging works. If enough users flag a story, it's automatically killed, not killed by moderators. The active moderation tends to be suppressing the flagging on some amount of controversial stuff.
You've now had multiple people respond to you about your post, all trying (in vain, it seems) to help you understand where the initial confusion occurred, and you continue to either willfully misunderstand, or maybe it's some ESL thing? Or maybe you're just a bored troll? I don't know. Either way, not going to continue responding.
Are you being daft? You arrogantly told someone to “read the policy”, presuming they haven’t. And you stated that general politics are not allowed under the submissions policy. I’m pointing out that this is far from general. I think I’ve been quite clear.
>And you stated that general politics are not allowed under the submissions policy.
It's what the policy says. There's on-topic and off-topic with exceptions. Blanket statements about what "good hackers find interesting" is a partial representation of the policy.
> I’m pointing out that this is far from general.
Going back to you NOT answering my question, I'm not saying this is "general" either.
Generally discussion works best around here when each participant only has to explain their own points. If people have to explain your own points to you it makes discussion kind of hard.
And making points for someone else that they didn't make is also not productive for "discussion work[ing] best."
Explaining that the HN Guidelines has off-topic railings (with exceptions) too isn't saying that a tweet about POTUS resigning isn't a valid exception.
I guess people are on tilt because of the announcement.
I actually do think that whoever becomes the next president has huge implications for all tech companies in the US and even abroad. E.g. the whole issue of AI regulation, UBI in case we get to AGI / SI soon, all sorts of tax issues etc. depend on it, not to mention that the president appoints a lot of judges...
I'm glad to have read it here, it's newsworthy to me, but I don't think the discussion would be worthy. Maybe it'd be nice to have those two be disconnected.
US politics is intimately connected to technology.
1. This election will play a big part in what regulation is imposed on AI. The Democrats are more in favor of ethical and privacy limits on AI. The Republicans see AI as a crucial technology for the US to maintain military superiority and want to see a pretty much anything goes approach to get there.
2. There are similar large differences in how the parties approach privacy in general.
3. One of the common areas of technology discussed on HN is EVs. One party wants to encourage adoption of EVs. The other wants to discourage that--their VP candidate says EVs are a scam wants to cancel EV tax credits and give a $7500 tax credit for purchasing ICE vehicles.
4. They are also very far apart on areas of business law that massively affect technology companies, such as antitrust.
In the mean time, there are new posts about this same subject appearing on HN which are not flagged, linking to CNN, NYT etc.
But the very first post, linking to the primary source, was flagged. Seems unfair to me.
It was probably the right decision on Biden's part.
My main right now is who are they going to position in opposition to Trump? This is too little, too late. Four months until the Election... and I don't feel like the Democrat party has a strong candidacy showing at this point.
This is wild. It seems super late in the game but okay. I'm super interested to see what will become of his chips act etc. The push he has tried to do to remove dependencies on TSMC is very forward thinking. Hopefully the next candidate takes up the momentum.
Why does the US in specific have such drawn-out campaigns? Earlier this week, I saw a pundit commenting that 4 months before the election is too short notice to pick a new candidate. But there's countries in Europe that announce elections, pick candidates, do the campaigns, go to the pools, do the counts, and have the electees take office, all in less than 4 months (see e.g. Great Britain recently).
Because elections here aren't "announced". They're on a fixed 4-year schedule. Everyone knows they're coming, and if they start just a little sooner than the other guy this time, that may give them an advantage. Over time, it creeps earlier and earlier. Like retail stores putting out Christmas stuff in mid-october.
Obviously, in great Britain's recent election, nobody knew there was going to be an election until it was announced, so there was no way to jump the gun.
I think the way we do ballot access also contributes to it. We give candidates backed by established political organizations preferential treatment (vs separating out qualifying for the ballot and support from the organization).
Tbh, I never understood why "support from the party" plays into it at all. If we truly want separation of powers shouldn't we encourage the leader of the executive to have no ties to any of the factions of the legislative. Instead it seems to be the opposite
Plenty of countries have elections on a fixed cycle and an election date known years in advance, and they don't have these extremely long drawn-out campaigns. Also, in most countries candidates also don't spend a fucktillion dollars on campaigning – another thing that has gotten rather out of hand in the US.
And the mid-terms make it even worse. De-facto the US runs on a two-year election cycle. I suspect this is part of the reason why things are so screwed in the first place.
Most countries put legal limits on either campaign spending or campaign duration, or both. That prevents campaign lengths from spiraling out of control and forces campaigns to be a lot more focused (hopefully focused on substance).
The US is one of the earlier modern democracies and as a consequence there are lots of little implementation flaws. And any change is seen as blasphemy against the will of the founding fathers. Many other democracies either had more hindsight available when they wrote their constitution, or were more open to change
> Also gives the people in power control and the ability to block out new messages. No sure it's fair or democratic.
With limited campaigns you usually run with people who are already known and have a long track record that's decently well known. The equivalent of running a Hillary Clinton or a Bernie Sanders. There shouldn't be much new stuff to drag up except their specific policies.
> Some countries give tax payer money based on how you did previously which greatly benefits the status quo
On the other hand if the state doesn't give parties money then the parties are just going to do whatever brings them the biggest donations, leading to a country run by the rich and the corporations. And you can't hand out money regardless of past performance since anyone can form a party at any time.
There is no winning solution here, but giving tax money to parties can be the smaller evil
This isn't an implementation flaw, this is (arguably) by design. You can't regulate campaign spending or duration without regulating political speech, which is a huge no-no under the 1st Amendment.
I don't actually agree with that argument, of course. SCOTUS has been perfectly willing to go along with "time and manner" regulations on political speech in the past and I don't see why "nobody can spend more than $X or campaign longer than Y days" is forbidden when "nobody can protest the G7 summit" is. The US's free speech extremism has, in practice, turned into a delegated right to censorship. And under current SCOTUS interpretations of the Constitution, the government is equally powerless to stop both speech and private censorship.
The true answer, of course, is that Trump and the donor class have coopted SCOTUS into an instrument of centralized power. SCOTUS is the scorpion[0] that stung the Progressive frog. They make this shit up as they go - free speech for me, censorship for thee. Fortunately, SCOTUS's legitimacy is in the toilet, and that power base can be broken; but it requires Congress and the President act to defang SCOTUS in a way that does not merely shift power. It needs to be distributed again.
From your lips to God's ears. As a non-American very much staring at tea leaves, I do worry stuffing the supreme court, or removing some of its power is the kind of act that could provoke a complete breakdown in the political system. Republican refusal to participate in the legislature, outright political violence that sort of thing. It's essential to save the democratic process at this point - but perhaps it's naïve to think that ship hasn't sailed. Kind of astonishing to see recent supreme court decisions like Chevron and presumptive immunity, happening with only nominal opposition - rather than say riots in the streets. Seems there's little mandate for radical change, and a democratic victory may simply delay the inevitable.
FYI most americans don't care about any of this. I suspect you're getting your info from chronically online people and the articles they read.
That aside, if you're interested in US politics you might wanna look at the details of those decisions. Eg, read this section about the case that brought down Chevron deference. You'll see that pretty much any judge or jury would have sided with the plaintiffs: https://loperbrightcase.com/#:~:text=livelihoods%20at%20risk...
I've read Trump vs US, including the dissent. It's frankly terrifying.
Americans not caring about these issues seems indicative of the media not being fit for purpose - rather than the issues not being existential. I'd argue that the less democratic things get, the more disengaged people tend to become about the details of political and legal decisions. Since they have less influence on them and are already suffering lacks lower down the pyramid of needs.
From Sotomayor's dissent
"Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as
bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the
President is now a king above the law. "
Yeah that's an unfortunate decision and that Sotomayor guy is a good writer, but the decision doesn't significantly affect people who live here and the dissent is not an accurate prediction of the impact. At the end of the day, congress has the power to impeach and elected law makers keep the president in check.
What do you think of the case that brought down Chevron deference? That should be a lot easier for you to analyze. Ie. "NOAA fucked around and found out"
And again you ignore the substance of my post. I don't know or care about the gender of the judges. I'll go ahead and leave this conversation. It's like talking to GPT-2
So, let me put it in terms people can understand: what is there to stop Biden from having the Secret Service black-bag Trump if Harris loses in November? Or stop Trump from black-bagging whoever beats the Republican that succeeds him in 2028? Or hell, what stops Biden from droning the SCOTUS justices that wrote the majority opinion right now?
According to the Supreme Court, the only appropriate venue for that question is a Congressional impeachment. The only time when it looked like a President was going to be impeached and convicted was Nixon. That's why he resigned. But I doubt that would happen today. In fact, you can blame Democrats for this: they didn't convict Clinton when he was trading sexual favors, even though that was absolutely something they should have[0]. And Republicans refused to convict Trump[1] for holding up Ukraine aid for political advantage or for inciting a riot in the Capitol building. It's like if you couldn't be convicted for beating and robbing someone because you refused to sign the guilty plea.
As for Chevron deference, let us keep in mind that the alternative to Chevron is legislating from the bench. SCOTUS consistently picks the interpretation of the Constitution that assigns the most power to the judicial branch, which they have absolute control over. The ostensible check on this power is Congress writing a new law, but Congress has been hung for over a decade, which means SCOTUS gets to cowboy-code whatever they want.
[0] During the Me Too era of sexual harassment revelations Democrats started realizing "oh wait, we did WHAT back then?!" and recanting
I'll answer the first part with a question: If Biden black-bags Trump, do you think he will be unpunished? If so, how much do you wanna bet? Same for those other hypotheticals.
> the alternative to Chevron is legislating from the bench
Only when a law is unclear. Interpreting thaw is kinda why these courts exist
Also, notably, the US Supreme Court has ruled against virtually all attempts at campaign finance reform, with several notable recent cases, e.g., Citizens United.
> And any change is seen as blasphemy against the will of the founding fathers.
Anyone who uses this reasoning (I understand you’re not doing so) should immediately be shut up by quoting the inscription on the southeast interior wall of the Jefferson Memorial:
> I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
That’s as clear as can be: to honour the founding fathers’ intention, laws must not remain static.
I'd say exactly your argument is why it's hard to make changes.
The US has this pretty weird civil religion where the constitution is the holy text and the people that wrote the constitution are prophets.
Most other countries don't have that. A lot of democracies don't even have constitutions (UK, for example). The US constitution is an interesting historical document, but it's just a collection of laws. There are a lot of things democracies have figured out since it was written. Amendments are basically impossible at this point because the canon is closed and American politics have evolved to make it structurally impossible.
It should be possible to argue that laws should be fluid without appealing to the prophets of the civil religion. You could, you know, just talk about why it's a good idea. Shouldn't that be more powerful than trying to guess what someone who lived multiple centuries ago would have thought about it?
Your comment is confusing. It seemed like you were going to offer a rebuttal but then didn’t say anything that disagrees with my point.
I’m not saying laws should evolve because a founding father said so. I’m saying that people who invoke the founding fathers’ will as a reason to not change laws should be corrected that a founding father specifically said that laws should be fluid.
Yes, invoking the founding fathers is a stupid argument. And in addition to being stupid it’s also wrong. Meaning there’s zero reason to ever use that argument and people who do can be contradicted by their own logic.
Thank you for clarifying. In that case, I’ll address what I think is the relevant section.
> It should be possible to argue that laws should be fluid without appealing to the prophets of the civil religion. You could, you know, just talk about why it's a good idea. Shouldn't that be more powerful than trying to guess what someone who lived multiple centuries ago would have thought about it?
Yes, you are absolutely right that it should be possible to argue in that way and discussing the merit of the idea should be more powerful than invoking a bunch of dead guys. But unfortunately it’s not. The people who shout about the founding fathers are not the ones you can convince with reason alone. You’re lucky if they pay attention to your whole argument. Invoking the founding fathers is an emotional argument disguising itself as a rational one.
Which is precisely why I’m interested in seeing what would be the reply to “but the founding fathers which you are invoking disagree with the point you’re making”. Though I have no illusions that would fix the issue, people are able contort to into extra planes of existence to not cede their point. Watch Jordan Klepper’s “Fingers the Pulse” segments for examples.
> Plenty of countries[..] don't have these extremely long drawn-out campaigns. Also, in most countries candidates also don't spend a fucktillion dollars on campaigning – another thing that has gotten rather out of hand in the US.
Presumably you mean in Europe, but most countries around the world are parliamentary. They have no system of checks and balances due to legislative capture; the Executive really has no power and can be trivially forced to resign. There's no real point in running a huge campaign for a figurehead that doesn't have any real independence.
Plus, it would go without mentioning that the USA is the world's largest economy, so it's not surprising a lot of money would be diverted to elections with economic consequences.
As a counterpoint, Sweden has elections on a fixed schedule as well, and electioneering is still essentially contained to a month before the election proper.
> electioneering is still essentially contained to a month before the election proper.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the one-month limit is by law. Candidates are not allowed to campaign for longer than that. Just a little context I wanted to add for those that are unfamiliar.
You are wrong, there is no such law in Sweden. But the person you’re replying to isn’t really correct either. Electioneering ramps up slowly over the calendar year but since the election always is on the second Sunday in September there is a lull in July during vacations and then way more activity in August.
I forget which country but there is one that limits campaigning to a single month. It has been proposed as a way to remove money from influencing politics but hasn't really gotten much traction elsewhere.
Frankly the US just has a much larger area to campaign in than sweden. Candidates have to at least visit every state once and spend tons of time in 5-10
There's another significant difference in Sweden: the focus isn't on a single candidate but on the party, so different representatives can do the talking and there's no need for a single candidate to be everywhere.
> The fixed schedule is the case for most EU countries, in Belgium every 4 year we go out and vote.
I think you mean 5, not 4.
> The only possible way to vote earlier is when a government falls and they write out new elections but that is extremely rare.
It's not rare in many other EU countries - and even when there are no "snap" elections the there may be some flexibility about the timeline of the "standard" ones. I'm not sure that "fixed schedule is the case for most EU countries" is a good description, compared to the US where the exact date is known.
The UK has a number of policies and traditions that reduce this tendency, in addition to snap elections.
Obviously in a sense politicians are always campaigning, in the sense that they're always looking to deliver on their election promises, raise their personal profile, announce popular policies, kiss babies and so on. But that's a constant background effort, rather than an election-specific effort.
Perhaps the most important factor is the campaign spending limit; a campaign might have £50,000 to spend in a constituency with 70,000 voters and when the money runs out, they can't legally spend any more. So any money you spend early is money you can't spend later.
Also a great deal of campaigning involves the candidate physically being in their constituency, not in Westminster. So to start campaigning early would involve a burdensome amount of travel, and much less free time to spend with family.
During the short campaign period, parliament is dissolved and public servants enter 'Purdah' [1] where no important policies can be announced. Candidates can spend all their time in their constituencies campaigning - but the government is basically in stasis.
For practical purposes, in parliamentary democracies, the approximate date of the election is almost always known. Occasionally, they’ll go notably early, as with the recent UK one (they could have gone up to December) but it’s not really the norm (or certainly the out-of-the-blue nature of wasn’t), and it was still only five months.
Great Britain's election season is shorter compared to the US in part because they don't need to spend so much time choosing the candidates. Various prospective parliamentary candidates were already selected months before, and Keir Starmer was the Labour Party's "PM candidate" since all the way back in 2020! But since in the US the parties are so much larger and multidimensional (and internally democratic in terms of choosing the candidates), that takes up most of the time that we think of in a Presidential election.
That and the election for the President is functionally independent of the House and Senate elections because they’re serving terms and controlling Congress does not mean controlling the Presidency and vice versa. In the UK, y’all put the leader of the majority party (or the leader of the senior partner in a coalition) in Parliament as your Head of Government which is essentially a selection process which is an internal party affair; and your Head of State is of course the King. I think for most Parliamentary systems (with or without a Monarchy), the Prime Minister or equivalent thereof is chosen similarly.
The way primaries are explicitly drawn out across every state is a big factor. The earlier a given state runs its primary, the more influence that state has by setting the momentum.
It's because America has three elections for President:
1. Republican primaries
2. Democratic primaries
3. General election
The drawn-out part is the primaries, part of which are parties trying to get their candidates in the news for a while. Once the parties officially pick a candidate — July this year for the Republicans, August for Democrats — the election proceeds on a pretty quick timetable.
The UK doesn't do primary elections to the same extent, nor do most parliamentary democracies. So they're faster, since there's just a general election.
The concern about Kamala's "short" time to make a case for electing her to the presidency is that she didn't get to make use of the ~year+ news cycles of the primaries, and will only have the general election to convince voters. (There's also a specter of it being "undemocratic" since party nominees are typically elected by the party's voters, rather than chosen by officials, but since she was Biden's VP in 2020, and he won the election, IMO this is overblown: the entire point of a VP is to take over if the president is unable to function, which is what happened in this case. Her claim to democratic election is that voters chose the Biden/Harris ticket in a general election, which is pretty reasonable.)
Great Britain has a parliamentary system. In the US, the presidential election is drawn out but the campaigns for congress only heat up in the last months.
The UK always has a Leader of the Opposition ready to make the case that they could be the next Prime Minister.
Technically we only vote for the representative in our local constituency, but who is going to end up PM is a big factor. We know what the options are before the election is announced: the current PM and the Leader of the Opposition (although in theory the leader of one of the smaller parties is also possible). Therefore no need for a primary process.
Trump has really turned our system on its head. He's basically been campaigning since 2015 and never stopped. It's exhausting for everyone except, apparently, him.
That's because everyone including Europeans spend plenty of their time watching the US election dramas so obviously it starts as early as possible because there's strong demand for it. It's a big business for everyone: the politicians, media, tech companies, the long line of hangers on, etc.
In Canada we know who the next 2 primary candidates were a year ago and elections not until next yr. That's almost always how it works, whether it's formalized or not.
Most other countries have much shorter election periods. I for one would love if ours was shorter. Our politicians spend more time campaigning and raising money than they do governing
He tried a to push a lot of things in the positive direction. Democrats usually do. In addition to the chips act, there's infrastructure - saw a HN comment linking to database of where the infrastructure money went; insulin cost, public transportation, electric vehicles, climate in general, student loans. He tweeted imposing 25% tax on billionaires, which ultimately became his undoing.
> He tweeted imposing 25% tax on billionaires, which ultimately became his undoing.
Unless you’re suggesting the billionaires made him senile that wasn’t his undoing. He was a decent president, and accomplished some nice things, but his undoing is the fact that he can no longer speak in full sentences without folks holding their breath.
“ You know, it's called rain. It rains a lot in certain places. But, now their idea, you know, did you see the other day? They just, I opened it up and they closed it again. I opened it, they close it, washing machines to wash your dishes. There is a problem. They don't want you to have any water. They want no water.”
Edit:
from the same article - This what he seems to be referencing:
In 2021, the Biden administration reversed Trump's rule that previously increased the flow of water in showerheads. The Washington Post reported at the time, "Trump's shower head rule was part of a broader effort within the administration to relax energy efficiency standards and regulations for an array of household appliances, including dishwashers, washing machines and clothes dryers."
It’s weird to me that even after his debate performance people are still ascribing things to him directly. Clearly he’s just been stamping his name on the DNC agenda, though I definitely think the chips act is good in theory. We’ll see how it plays out in practice.
Until the electoral college is eliminated, or we at least get some kind of system like rank choice voting, there is no point in pretending that the votes of any more than a handful of swing states actually matter.
I think it was pretty widely understood that he was going to have to be adamantly in the race until the exact moment he wasn’t in the race. The second he showed any public wavering it would have been over.
I can understand that perspective too, but a problem with that approach is that he might seem arrogant and out-of-touch - and I would have difficulties trusting a party who is so clear in their communication for so long, and then abruptly change direction completely
This is how it works everywhere. Do you go to your boss and say "well, I'm thinking of quitting and taking a different job, but I'm not sure yet and I'm still deciding. I'll let you know when I've decided!"
resignation and successful impeachment rates are pretty low, so basically it's 4 years, and then later basically one can do whatever they want, they instantly have an amazing audience/market.
Then we could have had a better primary process, instead of putting huge amounts of effort into pushing a critically weak candidate.
People have been saying this for many months, and were basically told to stop helping Trump win. Turns out those people were right - so why defend the lies?
Does he write his own tweets? He's no Elon Musk or Donald Trump, I would assume some staffer is tasked with writing those tweets. And they obviously wouldn't tell the staffer to do anything different until the decision to drop out was final.
They hadn't told the people running his Twitter account yet?
There was already an incident [1] where his press secretary tweeted about running for president on her own account, so she or her people are presumably in charge of it.
Even if Biden had personally authored and posted every one his tweets, that would have nothing to do with whether aides were kept in the loop about major campaign announcements.
This thread is discussing an alleged inconsistency (or quick reversal) in his Twitter messaging.
I agree with what you wrote. The people running Biden's campaign were not told the news 10 hours in advance - nor 10 minutes in advance. I doubt those messages were sent by the same people.
I was waiting for the House to censure him for not stepping aside. It was pretty clear that the flood of leadership democrats and donors insisting he step aside was building.
Several factors affect it... high number of upvotes and comments in a short amount of time, users flagging it because of politics, etc. Hopefully it gets manually unflagged.
It's for flagged comments. If you click the timestamp link, it takes you to a view of just the comment where you can 'vouch', which is a statement you think it is unfairly or inappropriately flagged.
Stories too - all the other flagged dupes at the time showed the vouch option while this one didn't. I suspect this thread got auto-moderated as spam and therefore vouch wasn't available since it could be used to circumvent the moderation. Whereas the user-flagged stories were all vouchable.
Not sure, but I think you can only vouch things that are dead, not just flagged.
With a comment, I think that if it's flagged (more than some number of times), then it's dead. (It's also dead if the user is shadowbanned, or if it's downvoted to -4.) If you think that's wrong, you can (and should!) vouch for it.
With a post, it can be flagged but not dead. Such threads can be replied to. Or a thread can be dead, in which case it cannot be replied to, but it can be vouched.
I don't personally think it's relevant... but more importantly the comments are pretty much a dumpster fire. I don't begrudge people their positive opinions of Biden (even if I do disagree), but even fairly tepid pushback on that idea is being flagged into oblivion. That's completely one sided, and not worth much as a discussion.
I actually think this loses Democrats the election. I don't know who the nominee is going to be but if it's Kamala I think they REALLY lose the election. People may be lukewarm on Biden but they despise Kamala for her shady history as a prosecutor.
It sure seems like there are better chances with him gone; but yeah, he might have already given Trump the presidency by waiting so long (and for running for this election in the first place)
As an anti-trump voter (aka a circumstantial democrat) - that’s what I’m worried about too. It feels like we’ve left it til too late without the democrats putting up anyone that people are excited about - while we know how the other side feels about trump.
My question, and I know no one knows the answer, is are we afraid of a ghost? The ghost being a person who was all in on Biden, that now goes: "fuck that, I'm not voting for Harris"
Are there large numbers of people like this? Nobody knows, but the media certainly does a good job of pushing that narrative. Informing you is not their job, getting you scared and angered is.
I'm gonna vote for the non-fascist one. I wish Biden had stepped down much sooner, but it doesn't change the reality that I am scared of the violence that might arise if the right wins. Our country is in a state of corruption, the supreme court needs to be radically reigned-in and I only see one path before November to have a chance at addressing all these issues, and it's voting Democrats as much as we can.
I would really like to see one of the pragmatic, centrist governors be nominated. Someone who can stop feeding the culture war and rebuild a centrist coalition. There are plenty of Trump voters in swing states who loathe Trump and support him only because they are voting against the far left.
The most recent poll this Saturday had Trump up 7 points in Michigan. It's basically impossible for Biden to win in that scenario.
I think they were well on their way to losing and so they hit the panic button with good reason, if anything this will now introduce some uncertainty which improves their chances.
The history as a prosecutor might be a significant advantage in a general election. The anti-police senitment has waned and she can position herself right at the center w.r.t. rule of law.
Most Black folks want safety in their neighborhoods, period, and that is not possible without police and hence most support it. You don't hear "Defund the Police" anymore because we know how well it worked out.
We slashed police funding in Portland and decimated the force available (to the point where the 911 response time to a robbery in my building was ~6 hours, local businesses my friends work at have private security for employees to call instead of 911, I've been on hold for the non-emergency police line for over 3 hours on multiple occasions, etc).
Things are swinging back the other direction now, as seen by people like Rene Gonzalez (who ran on re-funding and utilizing police toward the local homeless problems) beating out the incumbent Jo Ann Hardesty (who refused to work with police in almost any capacity) in 2022, and a few more police re-funding votes passed since then.
In Seattle, many police quit or transferred on grounds that they refuse to serve a populace that sought to defund them. Net-net was that police force size and responsiveness dropped.
After this, our Black mayor ran on a campaign of funding the police and won.
One of the most effective presidents since Johnson or Truman. But he did campaign on a single term.
Let’s hope the Dem’s circular firing squad puts down its guns so they can quickly concentrate on winning the election with someone … probably Harris is the simplest answer.
I liked James Carville's idea of picking maybe eight contenders and having town hall type events to choose the most popular. Game show element to take publicity from Trump and also kind of democratic rather than anointing a connected insider, which of course Trump would then go on about endlessly.
The tension in the US system is between founders who believed in the virtue of the commoner and founders who feared mobocracy. At various levels of the system, the system is designed to be elitist. And the parties are fundamentally private institutions and can be as populist or elitist as they want (worth noting: in practice, the GOP constitution is more populist than the Democrat constitution, which is one of the reasons they nominated Trump; there weren't backstops in the GOP like superdelegates to push him off the ticket).
The Electoral College is often cited as serving a similar purpose... I think recent events show despite paying the consistent premium it extracts in elitist gatekeeping, when it finally mattered it failed to provide the promised protection against unethical demagogues.
Chicago Mayor Daley and his police force made the mistakes with the protestors, much of the media coverage of the police riots falsely made it look like it was happening right outside the convention site.
Well, anointing the VP Humphrey as the new candidate, in a process that alienated a lot of the dem's base was a big mistake in retrospect.
I won't pretend to know the history well enough to know if there was any workable approach then, but the convention process in 1968 definitely didn't work to produce a candidate Dems were excited about at the end of it, the turnout was low and Humphrey lost in a landslide.
Also, I think some of it was happening right outside the convention site - Dan Rather was famously manhandled on national television by security guards while trying to interview someone leaving the convention.
Anything a washed up hack like Carville suggests should be viewed with suspicion. At this point, it has to be Harris. She is also the only person who can use the money from Joe Biden's campaign fund.
It's a very tough thing to objectively measure, but one metric we can point to is his ability to push a surprising amount of bipartisan legislation through an incredibly divided congress in just 4 years.
IRA (re-industrialized a significant portion of Red states in Power Systems, Battery, and Solar PV manufacturing), CHIPS (bringing back mass semiconductor fabrication with 5 mega fabs and re-introducing packaging and OSAT in the US), Infra Bill/IIJA, and Child Tax Credit during COVID.
There's a reason the GOP aren't touching most of the provisions in the first 3 Acts (especially with Vance as Veep). [0][1]
Vance is backed by Horowitz and Andreessen, and both heavily benefited from the IRA and CHIPS various provisions (but got hit by the capital gains tax changes that Biden proposed a couple months ago [2]).
The biggest issue was the Biden admin's inability to promote the impact of all of these. Biden hasn't been campaigning across America as much as his predecessors.
Ford is building a battery plant in Stanton TN based on grants from the IRA and Biden administration, creating thousands of jobs in a county that has been in economic decline for 30 years. But none of the folks working those jobs have any idea where those jobs came from. They just credit Ford:
> MADLAND: Yeah, I talked to a lot of workers on the site, and this is this very large facility in rural Tennessee, a couple hours outside of Memphis. It's going to be a big electric vehicle battery and manufacturing construction in an area that had for 20, 30 years, really tried to spur investment, and nothing had happened. [...] So these big steps forward in their lives that you can see from these projects, which are good union jobs, constructing the big facility. Then when I also spoke to them and said, well, how or why do you think this project came to be? This project received many billions of dollars in loans from the federal government as part of these investments we're talking about. It also received significant state funding. And the workers to unanimously said, Well, I credit Ford, which is the big Ford Motor Company as a joint investment there. And then I would probe and push and they'd say, Well, I also credit my union for helping make this happen. I had to keep asking and asking before ever mention any elected officials that had anything to do with it. But their sentiment was, well, if any, elected official had anything to do with it. So I would like that and support them, but I have no idea about this.
I can safely speak for myself - the fund I was employed at had began rebalancing away from Cybersecurity and Biotech and funding Hardware, Energy Tech, and Defense Tech around 22-23 due to provisions in IRA and CHIPS.
Plenty of peer funds did the same thing.
Even if Trump wins in November, most of the provisions in the acts I mentioned will be retained, especially given that a Thiel and A16Z acolyte is Veep and an early MS alum is cabinet track.
Before 2022 we weren't even entertaining the option of funding an early stage startup in the Hardware, Energy, or Defense space.
This is a MASSIVE change in the VC/PE industry which has concentrated on various flavors of SaaS for the past decade+.
An entire ecosystem of research grants, commercialization grants, and private sector deal flow has now restarted in the sectors above that hasn't been seen in the past decade.
I absolutely sure if there is few T of free money there will be "MASSIVE ecosystem of research grants, commercialization grants, and private sector deal flow".
But I believe in market economy, and to me it looks like VC/PE didn't invest into hardware much because didn't believe in positive ROI in current condition.
> VC/PE didn't invest into hardware much because didn't believe in positive ROI in current condition
Not exactly.
It was because of the upfront cost and lack of deal flow.
Before the various IRA and CHIPS provisions passed, you might get $200k at most from grants to commercialize research in the Energy or Hardware space. The rest would be fronted from the private sector so you're looking at an additional $800k-1M of private money at the pre-seed/seed stage. On top of that, deal flow was weak, so it's harder to fund later series or get good exits during an M&A event.
This is a very high upfront cost so obviously SaaS made sense due to much higher margins.
After IRA and CHIPS, you could expect to see an additional $300-500k in grants, which means my upfront cost in funding is lower.
Furthermore, the government is providing tax credits and grants to private sector players to minimize the amount of upfront money they need to spend (say) building a Battery Recycling plant or a Chip Packaging factory.
This means there is now much more money sloshing in these segments as a significant portion of my upfront risk has been subsidized by the US government. That money can now be deployed in either funding research projects commercializing into startups, re-investing in existing players to help their own M&A strategy, and funding additional research in the spaces above.
Compare Democrat presidents and Republican presidents in general. We routinely see less deficit spending and more economic growth under Democrats than under Republicans.
Seeing as Trump is a Republican, and that his spending and economy were on brand for the Republican party, I see no reason to assume covid was the sole cause. (Is it your opinion is that Trump is a RINO who runs the country like a Democrat, and covid disguised that?)
Given that the US economy has recovered from covid dramatically better than the economies of all other major nations, I am not inclined to assume that the US economy is currently in poor hands. On the contrary, it sure seems to be in the best hands that exist anywhere in the world.
> Compare Democrat presidents and Republican presidents in general.
as I said I don't think checking historical trends is excuse for current policy.
> Seeing as Trump is a Republican, and that his spending and economy were on brand for the Republican party, I see no reason to assume covid was the sole cause
first two years of his presidency deficit was relatively low
> Given that the US economy has recovered from covid dramatically better than the economies of all other major nations, I am not inclined to assume that the US economy is currently in poor hands. On the contrary, it sure seems to be in the best hands that exist anywhere in the world.
this is a loaded question. Recovery was in expense of inflation, rise of debt. One would need to do some quantitative calculation to see if current situation is result of actual policies (and which policies: Trump's or Biden's), or just economy is flexible itself and if result could be better and if spendings were justified(or went to real estate market and stocks).
>as I said I don't think checking historical trends is excuse for current policy.
I wasn't excusing current policy. I was making the case that Trump's economic failures were due in large part to Republican Party policies, not just to covid.
>first two years of his presidency deficit was relatively low
Well, that's a novel use of the term "loaded question". It wasn't even a question at all; it was a simple statement of my opinion.
>One would need to do some quantitative calculation...
Fortunately, the field of economics is dedicated to doing quantitative calculations and making assessments like these.
Economists strongly favor policies that Democrats tend to adopt (especially demand-side economics: think lower taxes for the poor and higher taxes for the rich and for businesses, relief of personal debt, a stronger safety net for the unemployed, cheaper and more accessible healthcare, more spending on public services that aid economic development such infrastructure and education, etc.) and oppose economic policies that Republicans tend to adopt (especially supply-side economics: lower taxes for the rich and for businesses, union busting, a weaker safety net for the unemployed, healthcare that preferences insurance companies, reduced spending or even outright privatization of public services that aid economic development such as the postal service, etc.).
The majority. This is a good place to start to get the general idea of where economists stand on a variety of US policy proposals: https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/
There are other places as well, but this is the most accessible one I know of for people without access to economics publications.
Polling data of economists is not enough for you? The polls even have commentary where many of the economists precisely explain why they answered the surveys as they did.
I formed my understanding of economists' opinions on policy by reading data like this. It's highly educational, very easy to read, and not biased and cherry-picked like articles and opinion pieces are.
If pure data in a highly accessible format not good enough for you, it sounds like nothing would be.
The only thing that's going to solve climate change is technology. It's the same technology we've had since the 50's. Not turning off our lights, setting the AC to 80, drinking through paper straws, or clearing thousands of acres for solar panels.
Solar is faster in the short term (because people think it's somehow "clean") but not sustainable in long term. It requires too much land and upkeep for not great output. It would be better to go all in on nuclear and surrounding technologies and solve energy once and for all.
I disagree. I'm willing to reconsider though. Here's what I think.
Solar is immensely cheap to the point where it's often cheaper than arbitrary other surfaces. Their maintenance is very low, much more so than nuclear. And land is not an issue for the US or China, the two places where decarbonizing energy is most important. Both have massive swaths of desert that is uninhabited, and where the addition of shade will likely net benefit the local ecosystem.
I agree that solar panel creation produces a fair amount of pollution, but then, so does nuclear power generation. In both cases this can and should be dealt with safely.
Current YoY CPI inflation is at 3%, barely over the long term average, down from a peak of 8-9% before the IRA passed.
It's very possible to construct an argument (certainly I'd believe it) that it didn't actually affect inflation per se and that the inflation burst was transient and would have subsided anyway. It's absolutely not correct to say inflation wasn't "addressed".
Inflation can be addressed when my salary goes up the same ratio as perceived inflation lol. And perceived inflation over the last two years is like 50%, and that's being conservative.
> Inflation can be addressed when my salary goes up the same ratio as perceived inflation lol.
Has it not? Mine has. Wages as a whole have. In fact wage growth has been historically robust for the last decade or so. Here's a FRED graph for "median usual weekly real[1] earnings", which correlates well to the kind of working class argument people usually make in this space: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Note how it has been going inexorably upwards since 2014 or so, and in fact the inflation burst turns out to be the correction to a very rapid spike in wages (due to pandemic assistance) that only corrects downward to the upward curve.
I really wish people who wanted to argue about inflation would do it with more numbers and less "lol".
[1] "Real" means "inflation adjusted" in this context
Lol. You have, what, a 12% increase in salary according to that chart (followed by around 5% dropoff lol) compared to more than 50% perceived inflation. I don't think I need to make any more arguments after that.
I called it out specifically to avoid the mistake, but I think you skipped the footnote. You're misreading the chart. The numbers there are already corrected for CPI. An upwards slope represents higher wealth, independent of inflation. Lol, indeed. This is sort of what I was complaining about. Please, please try to get stuff right before arguing about it on the internet. Economic statistics are extremely well-tabluated and easy to find.
Official numbers for inflation vs actual inflation vs perceived inflation are very different numbers lol. Actual inflation and perceived inflation are much closer together and the official numbers are basically cooked up so people don't freak out. A 10% addition to my previous comment doesn't make a big difference to how people feel about the economy and inflation.
What on earth is "perceived inflation"? That's not a thing. You're literally making up a fake statistic because the real one doesn't support your incorrect-but-strongly-held intuition!
It's inflation as perceived by the average person, basically increases in daily expenditure on required goods and services like food, gas, utilities, rent or mortgage. Have you even been reading what I wrote or are you just spouting shit you copy pasted from somewhere else?
> are you just spouting shit you copy pasted from somewhere else?
I'm literally linking to FRED charts trying to have a numerate discussion about this stuff...
Can you cite some research or measurements or anything about this "perceived inflation" metric you're talking about? Like, where are the numbers? I'm pretty sure you just made it up, no?
I'm not linking to numbers lol. I already know how much more I'm paying for groceries. I talked about perceived inflation from the beginning and you are just now talking about it? You haven't responded to anything I wrote. I am pretty sure you just read the word inflation and started some pre-written rant. Either that or you are severely lacking in reading comprehension.
Just linking a bunch of numbers does not make an argument. You have to actually talk and respond to the actual topic being discussed.
So... when you say "perceived inflation", you're really just saying that you, personally, perceive inflation. And therefore I can't disprove that with numbers, because numbers don't change your perception. Well, touche. I can't beat that logic.
But in the real world, you do admit that current inflation as traditionally understood by centuries of economics is a little under 3% right now, right?
Perceived by me and by pretty much everyone except delusional people like you who believe the official numbers. Keep your head in the sand, why would I care.
And absolutely not lol, the numbers are cooked up, as I said before. You are really really bad at reading comprehension.
Since you cite "pretty much everyone" with the same rigor you do your inflation numbers, I think I'm comfortable with my characterization of "perceived inflation" as your own personal perception.
To wit: you're just simply wrong here, and instead of arguing from a rational basis you're hiding behind your philosophical right to be wrong about whatever you want. And that's very distressing to see on a site like HN.
You can be comfortable in your delusion, that’s fine with me. I’m not writing a thesis when it’s so obvious that inflation is much higher than what is officially reported.
Now compare inflation adjusted income with the cost to rent a one bedroom apartment. That’s been trending down since the mid 80s. As in housing is getting more expensive relatively
> Now compare inflation adjusted income with the cost to rent a one bedroom apartment
And now we're doing goalpost motion. This is how this always goes. Indeed, some things are more expensive and some things are less expensive. And that can change across regions and subeconomies, and even demographically to the extent that different groups spend in different ways. And this is interesting and important.
But it's absolutely not about "inflation" or "wages" and if you come back from an incorrectly-stated argument about inflation/affordability/whatever by saying "OK fine but this is actually about housing policy", you just look silly.
The fact that housing is expensive in some markets isn't a refutation that people are making more money, it just isn't.
EDIT:
But in fact FRED is great, so I generated your chart for you showing the ratio of the CPI urban rent metric to nominal (not "real" this time) hourly earnings: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qtNi
And.. you're kinda wrong here too. It's true that the chart is going upwards, but only by about 8-9% since 2006 (the earliest date where we have both data points). And very notably:
1. Most of the growth was from 2011-2018 or so, not a recent phenomenon at all
2. There was a huge dip during the pandemic (because of assistance programs, it's the same effect I mentioned upthread) that we've only just recovered from in the last few months. The recent rapid rise of "rent costs as a fraction of income" is just taking back all the boon people got earlier.
3. It's actually levelled off since 2023.
Again, there's data to this stuff, and it doesn't support your position.
Is that Biden or effective cooperation in the Senate & House of Reps, including across-the-aisle deals? I always wondered about the degree to which WH coordination played into this.
You can cut it any number of ways: the CHIPS act has existed in some form or another since 2019, but it only gained legislative momentum when Biden threw the weight of the executive branch behind it. The IRA was probably going to happen in some form, but the concrete scope and priorities listed in it come directly from Biden's legislative agenda[1].
TL;DR: 100% credit? Of course not. But has Biden's administration been more effective at advancing its policies through the legislative than the previous administration? IMO yes.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the two presidents in modern history who were most effective at passing major legislation (Biden and LBJ) had spent decades in the Senate.
Removed troops from Afghanistan (though Trump gets half credit for that one too, it was his timetable and his plan that Biden executed -- poorly -- though that's likely due to soft revolt on the part of the military leaders)
Surviving four years without starting a new boots on ground war (also Trump gets credit for that)
Calling out china on its bs (also Trump gets credit for that)
In practical terms the big differentiating factor between Biden and Trump terms is that trump is soft-pro-putin and Biden is anti-putin. And trump freed some black prisoners who probably shouldn't be in jail anymore
Moving forward, Biden is likely to be pro-taiwan and trump has been making anti-taiwan rhetoric
I obviously haven't read all the bills that were passed (ha!), but my impression is that many of the bills are just spending money - which is always popular with both parties. I don't get the sense that there was a lot of policy reform going on.
And an issue with just spending money is that we have to wait a year or two to figure out if the spent money was effective (unlikely?).
And continuing the trade war. Then people act surprised when inflation is high. Recently, I think Jay Powell has even called out congress and the president for continuing to spend.
Spending money is a key "lever" in legislative action. You can't legislate something without allocating money for its implementation and enforcement.
In terms of core policy reform beneath all of the money spending: the current administration seems to place much greater emphasis on capital projects (repairing and building new infrastructure, including energy infrastructure) than the previous one did.
Trump has not been in office since January 2021; how could he have tanked that bill?
Using Trump as an excuse for not passing any bills on immigration, LGBT rights, abortion, etc when he didn't hold any political position for 4 years is the very definition of ineffective leadership.
"Senior Senate Republicans are furious that Donald Trump may have killed an emerging bipartisan deal over the southern border, depriving them of a key legislative achievement on a pressing national priority and offering a preview of what’s to come with Trump as their likely presidential nominee.
In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable."
>you're basically just making the argument that Trump is an incredibly effective leader capable of controlling his party's agenda even when he's not in charge of it
to my understanding, he wasn't afraid of splitting the vote and was vocal about it as far back as 2022. And apparently the R's that publicly slammed him did not want to call that bluff.
Are we calling bills endorsed by a single Republican "bipartisan" now?
Also this so-called immigration bill contained billions for Ukraine, Israel, etc. That along with the fact that most of the bill sought only to facilitate getting more migrants through the system more quickly, and of course the bill was DOA. Saying it was Trump who killed it is just conjecture, and reactions from Senate and House Republicans indicates there was zero support for the bill as written.
Interestingly the House passed an immigration bill in 2023 that the Senate never voted on. Along with the removal of all of Trump's border-related executive orders, it indicates that Democrats are not seriously interested in border security.
Of course every bill is going to allocate money. But there's a difference between allocating money accompanied by a policy reform and passing a bill with the sole purpose of flooding an industry/market with government money.
The IRA is trying to address climate change, yes. But there's the problem of relying on government to have any idea of where to inject money to make the most difference, trusting the government to not just inject money wherever it benefits the most politically connected, and avoiding massive fraud (see the SBA loans during COVID). Not to mention the insane irony of something called the "Inflation Reduction Act" being a massive spending bill.
Point being: Number of bills passed and billions of dollars spent will be terrible metrics for how effective a politician is because of all those nuances.
And yet the Congressional leaders who were in the room with Biden say that he was unable to communicate effectively and obviously senile. It's hard to believe that he had anything personally to do with getting legislation through.
> helped those people along by flying them to non-border states
Are you aware this is actually what multiple RNC candidates were doing?
> 'he' did not allow silly things like the supreme court stop him from attempting to buy voters by cancelling their student loan debt
This is moronic. Farmers receive the most subsidies, is the RNC buying their votes by enacting policy? You could call literally anything "buying votes"
Your post is beyond biased, it's contradicting itself.
> Are you aware this is actually what multiple RNC candidates were doing?
Sure, they flew migrants to 'sanctuary cities' - remember the panic on Martha's Vineyard when a few of them showed up and remember how quickly they were shuffled away by the virtuous inhabitants of that island - to demonstrate the magnitude of the problem. They were very vocal about it and did it out in the open, inviting press and publishing widely about their intents. That is not what I referred to. I was referring to the secretive night flights ordered by Biden's government, something along these lines:
a subpoena of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [...] identified over 50 airport locations, including our nation’s capital, used by DHS to help process into the country more than 400,000 inadmissible aliens through the administration’s unlawful Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) mass-parole program. The program was officially launched in January 2023, and the documents obtained by the Committee cover the period from January-August 2023—accounting for roughly 200,000 of these individuals.
> This is moronic. Farmers receive the most subsidies, is the RNC buying their votes by enacting policy?
Apart from the fact that both parties are in on the farm subsidy racket - the main difference being that the 'democrats' specifically target 'farmers of colour' through the 'black farmer relief program' [1] - there is a clear difference in that those programs have been going on for decades while the 'student loan debt forgiveness' scheme popped into existence at just the right time to attract voters for the upcoming elections.
And yes, of course my post is biased, I am after all playing devil's advocate to defend the 'effective' Biden presidency in ways most likely not intended by the parent poster.
> there is a clear difference in that those programs have been going on for decades while the 'student loan debt forgiveness' scheme popped into existence at just the right time to attract voters for the upcoming elections
And? You are aware that promising to do things for voters that aren't being done yet is not exactly a Machiavellian scheme. It's how a policy gets started. Do we just not do anything because that would be new and scary? It's a response to the growing balloon of college costs and lack of opportunities for degree holders. Being $100,000+ in debt for no payoff is a scam, not debt relief.
I know you're pretending to play devils advocate but you are transparently being critical of politicians doing the bare minimum of their job because they have a D next to their name. Devils advocate means you are taking a position you don't agree with for the exercise of it. You are making bad faith statements about a party you visibly hate.
> Apart from the fact that both parties are in on the farm subsidy racket - the main difference being that the 'democrats' specifically target 'farmers of colour' through the 'black farmer relief program'
So you think they're both buying peoples votes unethically, but it's worse for the DNC because they're black. Got it. As if white people aren't the most catered to in politics.
> Let’s hope the Dem’s circular firing squad puts down its guns so they can quickly concentrate on winning the election with someone … probably Harris is the simplest answer.
On the contrary, the processes that anointed Hillary in 2016 and Biden round 2 in 2024 were exactly the kind of "well, it's this person's turn now" decisions that were bad, anti-democratic (lower-case d) choices previously. I'm not looking for a "circular firing squad" but neither do I think some sort of automatic anointment of Harris is what people want either.
Part of it is a numbers game. She would get an incumbent bump over other potential candidates. There is hope, and I believe some data showing, she could energize the POC base. This is especially important now because polling was suggesting Trump was growing that area. Fundamentally though, name recognition ends up being meaningful in elections. I’m not advocating one way or another, just sharing why it seems to be an obvious choice for the party. If it helps, who I prefer isn’t being considered, probably because it’s not “their turn”.
> ...but neither do I think some sort of automatic anointment of Harris is what people want either.
Regardless of what people want (and FWIW I agree that Hilary getting rammed down our throats was highly anti-democratic) at this stage of the game, Harris is the only person who can benefit from Biden's warchest. Barring somebody like Dwayne Johnson deciding to enter politics and stealing the show, Harris is the solitary candidate who is poised to hit the ground running with an adequate campaign today. And with so little time before the election, I think the only choice Democrats have today is to hold their noses and vote.
Nah. She stole it, it was wrong, and if democrats had policed their own after that happened, they might be having an easier time batting down complaints of political persecution today.
Hillary Clinton basically took control over the DNC through financial dealings that Brazile (who took over as head of the DNC after these dealings) characterized as "if not illegal, then at least unethical".
> the processes that anointed [...] Biden round 2 in 2024
You think it's notably corrupt that... an incumbent president gets to run for re-election? You might argue this was a bad idea. You could argue it's counter to the way the campaign was presented in 2020. But it's hardly surprising; it's literally the way we've done things for hundreds of years!
That's quite the stretch. There are reasons we have primaries in the first place and don't just automatically anoint the VP as the the next presidential candidate. And let's stop with the pretense that their were any real choices in the Democratic primaries this year to begin with.
It's true, the party machine continues to churn out party candidates, and the voters are not given much choice. I left that first item blank in the primary.
But we all have this idea that our candidate will win in a perfect situation that the party will never give us, and while it's good to argue for choices, I'm skipping past the inevitable frustration. Harris was nowhere near my first choice, now or in 2020, but she is qualified. Realistically it's going to be her, whether we agree now or in a few weeks.
I agree that it's best if she earns it, but "earn" looks like something different to everyone and to some, nothing will be enough because their preferred candidate didn't win.
They'd rather lose the election than let someone with less seniority; and god forbid let any outsider into the circle. This happened with Hillary and will happen with Harris. It's the worst candidate to pick and a guaranteed loss against Trump.
The Democrats have got it all going for them; both in absolute numbers of votes and also of financial support. Life is interesting...
A single term was a prominent part of the discussion around his electability[1]. I'm not sure whether he campaigned on it per se, but it was certainly something that I (and other people I know) factored into my vote in 2020.
"Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else," Biden said. "There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country."
Biden was a stop-gap measure as Democrats didn't risk to put any new emerging leader against Trump. I think it was a big mistake - basically "coronation" of Biden back then replaced the normal, though painful, democratic process of producing a new Democrats leader. And as a result, it seems to me that Biden like a huge tree in the forest only exacerbated the issue by not letting new leadership to grow in the last 4 years. Of course he didn't do it intentionally, he (and his entourage) just naturally sucked up all the air and nothing grew in his shadow. Now, with the "anointment" of Harris, Democrats are repeating that mistake for the 3rd time - ie. Hillary, Biden, Harris - while on the other side we have a "Viking" leader who bloody slaughtered and ate all the competitors who were in that Republican jar (compare that to "Biden campaign chair to staff: Time to elevate Kamala Harris" - leaders aren't elevated by some bureaucrats, leaders arise and elevate themselves)
(To clarify my political position, i'm pro-Democrat and think Biden wasn't a bad president, though i think he completely dropped the ball on the foreign policy - while Ukraine and Israel are more prominent, they cause multipage flamewars, so instead i'd point to Houthis where i think majority can agree with me that what Houtis do in Red Sea is just plain war crimes (intentional attacks on civilian shipping) and that should have been immediately nipped in the bud by the overwhelming US and allies' force in the region - if anything, protection of civilian shipping is one of the most legitimate major uses of the Navy, and i'd say it is a direct duty of the president to put it to such a use when the need arises)
> basically "coronation" of Biden back then replaced the normal, though painful, democratic process of producing a new Democrats leader
There was a whole primary with like 12 other candidates and Biden won though. Bernie, Warren, Andrew Yang all had their shot, some did pretty well, but ultimately the democratic base voted for Biden
> There was a whole primary with like 12 other candidates and Biden won though.
Does no one remember what actually happened?
All the other candidates except Warren made back room deals and dropped out around Iowa, suddenly and for no reason. Leaving Biden as the obvious selection, and Warren there to siphon off Bernie support to make sure he wouldn’t be a problem.
The base voted for Biden after they had no choice.
If there are people who don't remember these facts clearly, you are among them. Nobody dropped out "around Iowa" except Kremlin stooge Yang and literal Republican Bloomberg. No legitimate candidate dropped out until South Carolina, where Biden trounced the whole field.
They quit because they got their faces ripped off in a fair fight, not because of some backroom party shenanigans.
People are downvoting you, but February 7th Chris Matthews is on MSNBC after Biden and Sanders debate he says that Sanders will lead to executions in Central Park.
Super Tuesday was on March 3 2020. Amy Klobuchar dropped out on March 2 2020 and endorsed Biden. Pete Buttigieg dropped out March 1 2020 and endorsed Biden.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but it seems like democrats have a problem with democracy, at least within their party. In 2016 shenanigans were pulled to bypass Bernie and the DNC won a lawsuit on the claim that they have no obligation to nominate the candidate selected by the people.[0] The 2020 primaries played out in a similar fashion with Biden having a difficult time and every other candidate stepping aside to allow him to have the nomination. Now I’m 2024 an entire nation has been disenfranchised of their primary selection and the foremost candidate being proposed never received any votes by anyone for a nomination to the highest office (she ended her candidacy before any primary in 2020).
Biden keeps saying democracy is at stake but the DNC seems to keep avoid any democratic process to find their candidate.
This is undoubtedly one of the few times the Democrats collectively did the right thing and defended against an outsider from taking over their Party the way Trump took over and undermined the Republican Party.
People like to imagine that the Parties are these kind of quasi-public entities that exist to serve the American people. They’re not. They’re private entities that are vehicles for the acquisition of power across local, State and Federal offices that are in a perpetual term-based competition with each other. We tolerate their campaigns because their battlefield is the ballot box instead of actual fields, but nominee selection still happens at conventions run by the parties themselves.
The Primary system you are familiar with is one that the Republicans and Democrats chose for themselves to inform their overall decisions on who to put forward as the candidate flying under their banner and has only been around since 1972.
If the DNC no longer has use for a public nomination process, they should get rid of it. It wastes a significant amount of taxpayer resources with estimates in the hundreds of millions of public dollars required to run a primary. It looks like the party has regressed to 1968.
I don’t disagree, although I’ll go a little further and say 1) parties should run their own damn primaries if they run them at all and 2) do so without spending a single cent of public money to do so.
Biden was polling over 50% since the start of the race. The idea that Warren supporters owed Bernie their support is ridiculous (bernie and warren supporters hated each other), and the idea that everyone dropped out to save biden is a braindead conspiracy theory
He was the Founder who ended up being President when the US had both the motivation (which had been there for some time) and the naval resources (which had only just been coming online) to do something about it--but I don't think he was the only Founder who had that general view about the Navy.
This takes a particular view of leadership as chaotic, violent, and aggressive, and not as collaborative, and quiet, but still assertive.
Harris being immediately endorsed by basically all of the alternative candidates (Newsom, Whitmer, etc.) shows that her campaign has its shit together, and moving through the nomination process without conflict leaves fewer weaknesses for the opposition to take advantage of.
His campaign HEAVILY implied this, but no, he never said it.
It’s definitely one of those thing that make people like me, who want good faith honesty in politics angry, because “he didn’t actually say it” politics is why gotcha politics exists.
I remember that too, it was never said explicitly but heavily implied like "he'll return things to normal and then pass the torch to the younger generation" and such comments. I remember being slightly surprised by it because the traditional way was to renominate the sitting president, but a lot of things weren't as they used to in 2020.
I never could find a direct quote of Biden himself saying he would be a single term president, but his campaign team said it regularly in public interviews.
In 2020, when they asked him if he'd run for reelection, he said "I view myself as a transitional president," which is a pretty fucking weird answer if he were planning to run again.
Everyone expected him to drop out earlier, but I think the reason he stayed in as long as he did was to take all the bullets for Kamala until he felt confident all the other potential challengers would get behind her.
What he didn't want to do was drop out early, let Kamala get battered and bloodied by her own party nomination process, win the nomination, then lose to Trump just because she'd been dragged through the mud in the media for months.
I'm not quite sold on it having been a plan to protect Harris and give her the spot without a primary. That strategy would take a ton of coordinstion, but more importantly it throws a ridiculous amount of uncertainty intoix that I think any political party would be too afraid of.
The more simple explanation, in my opinion, is that Biden is exactly what some had thought for over a year now - a person getting older and starting to run into cognitive and physical decline. I've watched multiple family members go through this, and the picture of a person in the middle of decline lying to themselves about their new reality and stubbornly refusing to accept it fits perfectly well.
> He also was president to Russia invading Ukraine leading to a Europe wide conflict. Hamas invading Israel.
I put some of the blame on Biden because the botched Afghanistan withdrawal sent the message that the US doesn't want to get involved with regional conflicts, emboldening Russia, Hamas, and Iran.
The agreement was to leave in May. The US left in basically August which is 4 months after the agreed upon time.
That said, if though basically 20 years of "occupation" the US couldn't nation build Afghanistan into being able to defend itself vs the Taliban I don't think you can point at a single president.
It's not obvious how he could have prevented Russia from invading Ukraine, or stopped Hamas from invading Israel. Not everything comes back to the U.S.
The biggest EV manufacturers in the U.S. are Tesla and Ford, as far as I can tell. No Chinese manufacturer I'm aware of has made significant inroads.
If you believe the Kremlin narrative around their motivations for the war, and I think there are a LOT of reasons to be skeptical of that narrative, but even if you believe it, the 2022 invasion plans were likely already well underway in 2020. These things are planned years in advance (Bush was already working on an Iraq invasion plan pre 9/11, for example) and once things are in motion the stakeholders are not easily turned around.
Very much a false equivalence to the point that it sounds like a bad faith argument. There's a massive difference between contingency planning for a hypothetical versus actively planning for something that's is intended to be agenda item #1.
The first clue to differentiating a contingency from an active plan is resource allocation. Russia moved about 80,000 troops to the Ukrainian border a full 13 months before the invasion. That's over 50% of the force that would eventually enter Ukraine in February 2022 and also about 25% to 35% of Russia's entire non-conscript military force.
It’s not just Kremlin narrative, a large wing of the foreign policy establishment also recognized the risk in published articles as far back as the mid 90s.
And Trump has said that he intends to cancel that tariff [1]. Honestly, the narrative that Biden enabled Chinese EV encroachment is very bizarre. It reflects almost the exact opposite of the actions the candidates have actually taken.
I'm not sure you are referencing the correct article. It just mentions Trump threatening to raise the tariffs to 200% and eliminating the EV mandate. I saw nothing about Trump canceling tariffs.
Not his fault per se, but he certainly didn't help the Russia/Ukraine situation by pushing for Ukraine to join NATO. That was one of Russia's hot button issues and he wasn't exactly diplomatic about it.
One take is, Putin is too self-unaware to realize that the reason Eastern European countries want to join NATO is because they're afraid he will invade them sooner or later, just like what he did to Georgia in 2008.
But then again, maybe there's some merit to Putin's paranoia that NATO is "gobbling" up these countries to create a military circle around Russia in preparation for a future invasion. At least in his understanding, that's a logical conclusion.
But he must knows he's running the country like a thug, with oligarchs being forced to tithe to him, and he hates the idea of citizens revolting to topple down other thugs (like they did in Ukraine), because if that idea catches on, that might happen to him too. I wonder if he draws a faulty conclusion that these revolutions are EU/NATO/Western-engineered because they're evil, instead of coming from the citizens themselves who are fed up with being robbed by the elite.
Hah, ironcally enough, Russia runs a propaganda network (or so we've been told) that tricks the population in EU/USA to moan about their rulers and be rightwing populists...
For the non-stupid answer to your opposite-of-that question: these are takes, and for one thing I claimed, I said "he must", i.e. it's a guess, because if he doesn't realize he's a thug, he'd be dumb.
OK I did not signify that the sentence "At least in his understanding, that's a logical conclusion." is a guess of mine. My bad?
Not according to Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz [1], Chamath Palihapitiya & David Sacks [2], possibly Zuckerberg [3], and others. And of course Elon, Thiel. Many such cases.
These videos would fit very nicely into an undergraduate course segment on motivated reasoning. As viewers, it's incumbent upon us to determine whether the Musks and the Thiels of the world have our best interests in mind and, if not, whether their support for any particular candidate might reflect that.
As Trump said in his recent speech in Michigan "We have to make life good for our smart people." These are executives and investors who have created trillions in value with their technology based products and services. Their interests align with mine.
You're entitled to believe that. But you might want to consider whether this is (1) uniformly true for HN's readership demographic, and (2) uniformly true for the American electorate.
Hmm why should they consider those things? They stated their opinion and priorities, which will likely influence their voting decision. The views of HN or the American electorate play no role in the statement of that individual's priorities, no?
I think the simplest answer here is “almost everyone’s revealed preference is for living in a deliberative democracy, not a demagogic one.”
In other words: GP probably wants, in an ordinary setting, to have their views understood (why bother responding at all if not?). In which case they should similarly set aside some space for understanding why others don’t share them.
I'm not sure I follow that logic. Nothing about justinhj's statement implied "we should do this regardless of what anyone else thinks". They just stated something which is a priority to them. They're taking part in a deliberative democracy by engaging in a public discussion of their priorities. Am I misunderstanding something? Are you maybe responding to something another comment insinuated?
Downvoting isn't really a mechanism to censor, flagging is. The intent of downvoting is usually just disagreement. My guess would be you're being downvoted for a few reasons:
- A few of the people you mentioned are somewhat polarising, so folks who dislike them, might downvote
- in a measure of a president's efficacy, mentioning people who think a president is ineffective isn't as convincing as say mentioning actions of the president that were ineffective. You will, for any president, be able to find a large number of people who will passionately argue for/against that president's effectiveness.
- Your sources are very long videos, which discourage verifying if folks want to see what they said about him. Eg "Here's why he's in effective: [3 hours of podcasts]"
- One of your sources is a podcast which features Trump himself, which greatly brings into doubt the objectivism of the video
- the Zuckerberg short is very speculative, further weakening this collection of sources
- The FT article includes the following names: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Shervin Pishevar, Keith Rabois, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, Doug Leone, Shaun Maguire, Joe Lonsdale, Jacob Helberg
Please keep in mind that not too long ago vocal support for Trump could get you fired (and still might). Fighting against censorship is important.
We would disagree on who is promising the deliberative democracy and who is the demagog I expect. However, expressing my opinion does not reduce the space for others to express theirs. In fact downvoting opinions is a form of exclusion.
Ah, yes, just the people I ask for a sensible objective view on the world.
Like “well, this collection of the weirdest Silicon Valley people available took some time out of their busy schedule of hawking bitcoin or metaverses or magic robots or whatever to give a Very Important Opinion” is _not_ the world’s strongest argument.
> A fair number of Dems have seemingly engaged with the prospect of Biden stepping aside as a gateway to their wildest fantasies
Uh, who? Certainly there are people who have their own opinions out there somewhere, but virtually every name brand democrat over the past few hours has either explicitly endorsed Harris or notably avoided boosting a different candidate. And absolutely no one is going even the tiniest bit negative on Harris, at all.
No, it seems like a fait accompli at this point. Add to that her control over the almost $100M campaign warchest, and... yeah. The fight now is over who gets to be VP.
I'm not talking about prominent Democratic politicians/strategists/pundits for that part; it's just a sentiment I've seen a whole lot of as someone whose social media diet is dominated by left-leaning spaces. There's a huge appetite for the perfect candidate who can (in fantasy-land) ensure that Trump is defeated for all time.
I don't know how much name recognition matters when people are SO polarized about the extremely well-known name on the other side.
It seems like this is really going to be a "for Trump" and "against Trump" election at this point. Nobody's going to leap out and knock anybody's socks off this close to the wire. All the dems need to do is present any body people are reasonably sure will still be warm in four years. The results won't differ much.
> One of the most effective presidents since Johnson or Truman.
In what way? I don't live in the US, so what did I miss? I don't remember Biden doing anything of note (good or bad).
> But he did campaign on a single term.
Biden said that he was running for only a single term, and during this entire second election campaign nobody called him out on that, not even outspoken Trump?
Looks like he just signed a bunch of money to people, then said he fought inflation which was both directly and indirectly caused by him signing over money... Can't see anything tangible there that forcibly improved the lives of Americans.
Simplest may not be best here. Is Harris the person who is most likely to get people to the polls and vote Dem? Is she someone who can convert independent/undecided voters? etc. IMO those are not easy "yes, absolutely" answers. Does the Democratic party have anyone in the wings who is more likely to win than Harris?
Maybe? Gretchen Whitmer might be a strong candidate, off the top of my head. But I'm struggling to think of a nationally known candidate with super-strong positives that would be a viable alternative. (That's also true for the GOP IMO if somehow Trump was out.)
I honestly didn't have much faith in that polling. The media was scrambling after the debate to propose a different narrative and many in the party that were turning on Biden were promoting Harris.
The polling seemed too convenient. I don't have a link handy, but the best poll process I saw after the debate did show Harris doing better than Biden, but she was still worse off than a few of the other Democratic potentials.
Harris at least has legitimacy as having received votes as the vp, and extra scrutiny given Biden's age. The optics of pushing her out would be tragic.
Whose optics? Its only relevant to the people that would only vote for her. I'm no political strategist, but they'll have to undo the (untrue) opinion that she was in charge of the border, which is one of the Dem's primary losing issues right now. If the Republican's can pin that vision into swing voters minds, true or not, she stands no chance to win. I am unsure if that is a fair prediction but that is why I generally hope they can find someone else.
She was on the ticket, so the optics would be of pushing out a qualified, experienced, already-in-place vice president and woman of color because...reasons that are definitely not racist wink wink would be the Republican ad.
The fundamental problem is that nobody but Biden won the primary. The time to debate over and vote on an alternate has come and gone, and this (along with his decision to run at the last minute in 2020) are things I don’t know I can ever forgive him for.
At this point the VP has the most legitimacy as a successor and given the situation we’re forced into she’s unambiguously the option. That doesn’t make it good, but it makes it better than all the other terrible options that involve a free-for-all between candidates with no opportunity for voters to weigh in.
The best possible outcome at this point is for the establishment to quickly and unanimously get behind Harris. Again, it’s not necessarily a good outcome. But it’s the best available to us thanks to Biden waiting for the last possible moment (again) to come to this realization.
It's a disgrace that the party that was able to turn Obama from an unknown junior Senior speaking at the 2004 DNC to winning the Presidency 4 years later, now has done zero to promote more candidates over the last 4 years when Biden ran on being a single term President.
Basically, the DNC's options are the people who failed to get through the primaries in 2020 against Biden and maybe Whitmer or Newsom.
I just do not see Harris getting the middle/undecided, and it's 2016 all over again, if not worse, because SCOTUS has the deck stacked if it's even close.
And probably the wrong answer. I don’t see her winning over swing voters. Gretchen Whitmer seems like the best option to me. I’d enjoy watching her debate Trump.
The 2 parties' bases will vote for whoever their candidate is, and their work is just to convince the undecideds. An HN commenter a while ago wrote, they don't get who in the hell can be so stupid/ignorant to still be undecided in this election. I feel like to win them over, the candidates have to rely on the halo effect, ie. sadly even just on looks. The young and fit-looking Whitmer, or Newsom, seem to be the best candidates. It's shallow, but consider the voters.
Obama's charisma and youth surely helped a lot. Trump is tall and he was a good-looking young man, and his swagger has let him get away with being a total POS for 77-78 years.
Believe it or not, there are people in this world that is not immediately swayed by either waving your totem pole or burning the strawman with the opponents face. You witness a raging mob or a 100% sure fool once in your life and the magic of tribalists shouting loud being convincing, might shatter.
Those will still be swayed by emotional or other marketing tactics that appeal to their convictions, but if they managed to stay undecided in such a polar political climate like USA, my guess is that what they see are two fanatic ends of the horseshoe, and they either decides to disengage from it all or take their time to assessment which one is the lesser dummheit[1]
> who in the hell can be so stupid/ignorant to still be undecided in this election
We only know the name of the Republican candidate at this time. You can make your decision how you want, I’ll make mine when I see who I have to decide between.
Or, hell, Elizabeth Warren. She could beat the shit out of Trump in a debate, and has a list as long as you like of actually fighting for the middle class.
you mean the same woman who has campaigned against, fear-mongered the risks of encryption vs. authority, and rallied for full control over software implementation(s) used by the public (and available to law enforcement/government et. al)?
while she has admirable sympathies and even consistent policy, she has clearly demonstrated she's not opposed to pushing an agenda she does not understand.
Whitmer far and away best. But she’s had every opportunity to throw her hat in the ring and unfortunately the window for doing so is all but closed by now. She seems genuinely not to want it / lacks the courage to proactively make it happen.
CHIPS act, IR act (infrastructure, jobs...), student loans effort, better social nets for seniors, millions of jobs, much better handling of inflation than the rest of the world, pushing for democracy and freedom.
We can't go back to misogyny, racism, removing freedoms from women, teachers, different people, giving money only to the rich and connected, non-sense diplomacy...
The second sentence makes me not trust the first sentence btw.
The first sentence is basically just signing normal budget agreements? The chips decision sounds like the best decision that was actually pushed after Covid.
By not stepping down as president, he is totally RBG-ing Harris.
Maybe a resignation will be announced later for maximum impact and tie into some thing ready for Harris to announce presidentially, like some camp david peacing or another 3 states ratifying the ERA.
I laughed out loud when I read this, but maybe if you reword it "effective presidencies" you could be right.
I imagine those around him were doing all the presidenting, and perhaps they're more effective without a functioning president to get in their way.
Some might then point out things like the border were signs of ineffectiveness, but actually, if you reasonably assume it was intentional, then they were exceptionally effective.
Political parties aren’t democratic institutions. They are essentially private organizations who can operate however they want. It’s only been the last 50 years or so that either party has used primaries as anything more than a straw poll
One of the problems with the US being a two party state is exactly this, people conflate political parties with the institutions themselves, which is not great.
The DNC and RNC are legally bound to follow rules established both by state law and by Congress/legislation. Yes they are private institutions but they can not set arbitrary rules.
When it comes to their primaries, the only obligation that they have to is to follow their own rules, and the only people that are allowed to hold them to that obligation are they themselves, and maybe their vendors.
They aren't even obligated to donors who donated under the assumption that there's some promise or legal requirement that their primaries be fair. That case was dismissed, and resulted in the quote from DNC lawyer Bruce Spiva:
"You know, again, if you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I’m gonna take this money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and stole the money, of course that’s different. But here, where you have a party that’s saying, We’re gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we’re gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions."
The rules set by state law and Congress for candidate selection offer a pretty wide berth in terms of methodology for selecting which candidates appear on the ballot. There's no (federal) Constitutional mandate for primaries; procedures for how a state selects its presidential electors are up to the legislators of each state.
But, currently, Republican primaries are largely democratic and Democratic primaries are at best a marketing period in which their membership makes no binding decisions. Compromise with the tea party forced Republican primaries to democratize, which eventually ended with the party being forced to accept Trump as a candidate against every wish of party insiders. Democrats have "superdelegates," and a ton of other ways to fix the primary, and have gone to court to establish legally that they have no obligation to run it fairly or honestly.
The same sort of democratization happened to British Labour under Ed Miliband, which culminated with the election of Corbyn as leader. In order to fix the problem, they had to purge and expel anyone from party membership that had any sort of firm value system.
Democrats don't have that option in the US, because in the US, people aren't members of parties; they're people who have registered to vote in that party's primary, or people known to have supported that party in the past. US corporate parties have employees, not members. Getting a portion of the public to participate in their primary is the closest thing they have to rallying the membership, and the way that both parties have written election law makes it difficult for them to change anything, or to prevent anyone from voting in them.
Political parties should be democratic institutions. Who else should be democratic if not the parties? In many countries candidates are rejected from elections if parties cannot show that they were selected in a fair, transparent and democratic process. The USA has much to learn from the rest of the democratic world.
He ran virtually unopposed in those primaries and many people sat them out, so I don't think anyone takes those victories as a strong signal. It's become clear through recent polls that he lost the support of many of his party's voters.
They literally cancelled the primary in multiple states. There was not a credible, legitimate, nationwide presidential primary for the Democratic party in 2024.
The large majority of voters wanted him to step down after the debate according to every poll. This is not a decision that goes against the spirit of democracy. To the contrary, sacrificing personal power for the good of the country and the preservation of the ideal that the institution matters rather than the figurehead. It's something we've almost forgotten is possible in the modern age of personality cults and wannabe strongmen.
This is democracy in name only. There are much better alternatives in existence. Don't defend the current system, build a new one that is more resilient and fairer.
The problem is that primaries are giving people the illusion of a choice. This country hasn't been a democracy or a republic for many decades yet it's constantly held up as something we are protecting. People decide who the president is as much as an employee of Google or Meta decide who their CEO is.
Primaries are a relatively new aspect in American democracy (became the norm around 60 years ago). Before that, the parties largely decided on the candidates
> in circumventing all the Democrats' vote during primary
It wasn't really a primary, there was no actual opposition. I don't think anyone is somehow offended that they voted in a primary for a person who stepped down due to age as if their choice was taken to them.
Oof. This guy has been the biggest positive surprise of the US presidents in my lifetime. Expectations were low, but he actually turned out to be a good president (from a European perspective). No new wars, no more talk about shifting defense focus to Asia, generally nothing unreasonable. Good support for Ukraine, no doubts about NATO - rather the opposite. Basically, the rich uncle on the other side of the pond has been a good one.
I presume that his attitudes and staff selection carried the day, and maybe could have done so for another term. But his mental capacity was clearly declining, and he is in fact expected to handle some things personally.
> He came to power under questionable circumstances, winning none of the bell weather counties, most votes ever received (even more than Obama), massive dumps of mail in ballots after the close of the election day, etc.
Honestly, I think the rest of your point can be safely ignored after saying something like this
They have been 100% better than the 4 years previously. I make 2.7x more than I did in 2020 and my net worth has 5x'ed. I knew a lot of people in my team at Amazon that got laid off - they all landed better jobs or other jobs at Amazon.
Most importantly, I no longer have to contend with a pandemic due to a world-beating vaccine rollout championed by Joe Biden.
Also - I don't know what kind of soup you're buying, the kind I like hasn't changed price much. It's around $3.60. I'm also aware that a 10% tariff as championed by the last President will raise prices even further on things I rely on - like out of season fruits.
Trump would (has promised to do so on live television) just give Ukraine to Russia. Biden/USA/allies have stood down Russia, which has been seriously damaged both by battlefield losses, by not achieving their strategic goals and instead entering a second Afghanistan, and by the rapid conversion of the EU economy to no longer need Russian energy.
I think you are spot on (and a bit puzzled why you got downvoted). The energy transition in Germany away from Russian gas was a economic achievement I didn't think possible. It costs Europe dearly but has accelerated renewable transition remarkedly.
"in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which started in 2014."
Russo-Ukrainian War: "The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014. Following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea"
Unfortunately his domestic achievements have been somewhat mediocre.
His signature achievements essentially were one time cash payments to people.
I really do think his major failure was not pushing for a lasting achievement like implementing federal parental leave. He had the chance, but opted for a 1 year extension of child tax credits.
And of course the US has an illegal immigration problem. European right on the rise from 1/10th the number of illegal immigrants the US gets.
The US economy is extremely robust right now and the European countries that took a balanced budget austerity approach are in shambles. Look at England. Just carnage over there.
Deficit spending makes sense when the spending invests in the future. Every mortgage holder understands this implicitly. If these deficit levels concern you the obvious first place to start would be on the revenue side, by letting the Trump 2017 tax cuts expire.
> And of course the US has an illegal immigration problem. European right on the rise from 1/10th the number of illegal immigrants the US gets.
Those are also the backbone of a lot of agriculture in the US, either a president tackles it and food inflation rises or you keep the status quo and prices steady.
There's no winning strategy, whomever tackles it will have it backfire someway, the US depends on exploiting cheap labour for its low margin industries.
Trump's strategy of making lots of noise about building walls to stop illegal immigrants while not actually building or stopping them seems to be working reasonably well.
Genuine question: is the European right actually on the rise? It seems somewhat localized to France, where Macron just unexpectedly outmaneuvered both Le Pen's party and the left coalition that formed to counter Le Pen, securing himself a surprise victory in the snap election everyone thought would be a disaster for him. In the EU as a whole, Ursula von der Leyen just won another 5 years as the President of the European Commission, which seems like a continuation of the status quo in the EU rather than a turn toward the right.
This is all from my naive perspective as an American.
Edit: I'd appreciate a reply instead of a downvote. As I said, I'm asking a genuine question.
Biggest party in the Netherlands is radical right (PVV). In France they barely got a parliamentary majority against Le Pen, in a country that's not particularly good at coalitions, so doesn't look like it will last. Hungary has been on the authoritorian track for quite some time. Poland just managed to get off it, but we'll have to see if it will stick. Italy got a neo-fascist.
Generally you see radical right gaining more votes in Europe, even if they don't outright win everywhere. You also see that other parties adopt ideas from the far right. This means that policy is changing in that direction and that the discourse is more around those topics. Meanwhile research shows that this doesn't actually make voters vote less for the radical right parties, so those other parties are not gaining anything from it.
I see, thanks for the info! Interesting that Poland managed to get off the authoritarian track as you said, when they're so geographically close to being embroiled in war again. I'd think that would lead people to lean toward that kind of "follow the strong leader to get us through war" thinking, but obviously I'm glad it doesn't.
The right-wing party in Poland (PiS) still won the latest election (as in - got the most votes), but didn't anyone willing to form the coalition with them that would secure enough votes to form government - other major parties campaigned on being explicitly anti-PiS. So, even though PiS won, they are the opposition now, and the wide anti-PiS coalition is in power.
Also to add, PIS was mired in the passports for sale scandal, which was a significant reason for them losing the election. People didn't vote against anti-immigration and far-right behavior, they voted against PIS hypocrisy.
Makes one wonder whether they just like his fascist leadership style or there are some rather direct incentives involved. Russian secret services like to stir the pot in other countries in order to weaken them.
A few German right-wing dudes seems to have more or less provably received money and favors from Russia.
The far-right parties are on the rise in most EU countries. But in most EU countries they have not managed to make it into government in enough numbers to be relevant, yet.
But the rhetoric of the centrists/moderates has been shifting towards the right as well, on the topic of immigration, and especially with regards to certain ethnic groups.
> securing himself a surprise victory in the snap election everyone thought would be a disaster for him.
This is totally incorrect. Macron's party arrived 3rd in number of seats when previously it had a relative majority. He lost over a hundred seats in parliament and many key roles. Additionally his coalition is weakened because his allies really didn't appreciate his move and are already openly questioning his leadership.
He is in a way worse position now than he was before the snap election, and while you can say nobody won, no one can seriously question the fact that Macron lost hard.
As for the rise of the far right, it's happening in more countries than just France: Germany, Netherland, Italy, etc.
> He is in a way worse position now than he was before the snap election, and while you can say nobody won, no one can seriously question the fact that Macron lost hard.
Good point. I replied to another comment below, I'd been reading political commentary/analysis saying that maybe his goal was to defang Le Pen's party by letting the French people see what they'd do with power before the election in 2027. But as far as I'm aware he never actually said that was his goal, it's just a guess, and from a hard numbers perspective he called a snap election and lost seats.
> maybe his goal was to defang Le Pen's party by letting the French people see what they'd do with power before the election in 2027
That's what he said in private at some point, but that wasn't his initial plan. We have another reported conversation that explain his plan was to benefit from the divided left to reconquer an absolute majority for himself.
It's only after the left managed to make a coalition that he started floating this idea of letting the far right ridicule itself.
But even if that's a stupid plan, he haven't achieved that either, the far right gained over 50 seats, and their electorate are now even more angry because they consider they got robbed of the election.
So no idea what commentary you were reading, but I'd recommend not to trust that source ever again on that topic at least.
He miscalculated super hard regarding LFI. I genuinely think he did not expect Glucksmann and Faure to basically sweep the antisemitism/antisionism under the rug that hard for the elections to get access to Melenchon's militants.
RN, through no skill of their own, is in ideal position right now. The coffers are going to be full, they have 3 years to clean up their candidates and get the messaging correct, and they have absolutely nothing to do with the coming EU budget restrictions. And R! is finally dead after having served their purpose of shifting the discourse.
The UK may have just managed to get a majority, but that's a peculiarity of their electoral system. As a fraction of the votes, their far right gained a larger share than in previous years.
Similar effects can be observed in plenty of countries, among those Sweden, Germany to some extent, Italy, Hungary has been way left for a long time, etc.
Comparing the most recent election in the UK and the one before it the vote for the right (Reform) increased by 2% points (14% overall) versus the vote share for UKIP in 2019
The other right wing parties (Conservatives, DUP) got 25% between them
Where as the more progressive parties got over 50% of the vote - Greens got 6%, LibDems 12%, Labour 34% plus SNP and Plaid Cymru
To say the right did well in the UK election just isn’t true
To be honest, the UK elections might be parliamentary, but they have a very Presidential character to them, just as is the case in India and Canada. People still vote for the PM face. This time, they didn't want to vote in Rishi. Put Boris Johnson on the ticket, and I'm certain the results would have been extremely different.
There's no "EU as a whole". Europe is made of vastly different countries with their own politics and the people care much more about the national politics compared to EU level politics (at least based on what I have seen).
It doesn't help that the EU parliament (elected directly) does not have much power compared to the commission.
Here in France, the media isn't so prompt as to call last election's results a "victory" for Macron's party.
Quite the contrary, his party now finds itself with (considerably) less parliament seats that it had, and when it could get a majority by appealing to the "moderate" right, he now has to compromise with the opposition. His party doesn't even hold a relative majority anymore.
Sadly my country hasn't been the only European one where fascism is creeping up again. The far rights came out on top in the last European Parliament election in Belgium, Italy, Austria, Hungary and France. In the other countries, its scores are steadily, dreadfully, increasing with each passing election.
Personally, I blame the increasing economic inequality and austerity politics lead in Europe since the 80s.
My personal opinion as a non-European who has voted in the UK elections as a Commonwealth citizen: the far-right tends to win broad support in European Parliament elections mostly as a reactionary bulwark against the EU's Open Borders policy (and rightly so). People tend to vote somewhat rationally for national elections.
Honestly, from my perspective, the rise of rampant immigration (and that too contributed by people of my community) is going to damage the entirety of Europe in the long run. Already I've seen firsthand the skewing of the demographic pyramid in the younger generation (0-18 yrs), a lack of worthwhile job prospects for second generation immigrants, and the rising tide of anti-national behaviors from members of migrant communities. As Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed rightly said, the next generation of terrorists will not come from Saudi Arabia or the Middle East, but from Europe. The kind of venom that mosques here in Europe spew is much worse than the extremely highly-monitored mosque sermons in the Middle East, from Egypt to Oman.
From my Muslim perspective, Europe will be a lost cause in a single generation, unless there is a MASSIVE cultural upheaval that stomps and quashes the current migratory trend. Austerity and inequality are just the sparks, but the bigger powder keg is the growing base of increasingly alienated migrants who have to face the austerity and inequality (see Leeds riots very recently). European society was never structured to take in so many incompatible migrants like American society is.
I believe the immigration problem is mostly fear mongering by the far right. In France less than a thousandth of the population could be classified as "immigrants".
I am not saying we shouldn't have a sound immigration policy, but closing/controlling the EU's borders is highly unrealistic. Just look at Italy's far right government: they promised to stop all immigration to the country but since Giorgia Meloni's investiture, the numbers have never been higher.
The solution should reside in providing better integration and opportunities to migrants, who could very well be part of the solution to Europe's demographic crisis. The most diverse European cities are also the most productive.
Austerity and inequality are the direct results of deregulation, financialization and privatization of previously fine public services. Despite the right's endless whining, immigration has very little real impact on the economy, and crime, overall, has gone down in the last decades.
> The solution should reside in providing better integration and opportunities to migrants, who could very well be part of the solution to Europe's demographic crisis.
The issue is that Europe has already taken in far too many migrants than it can possibly integrate. Right now, taking more migrants isn't a feasible situation if they're impossible to integrate.
The solution to Europe's (or any country's) demographic crisis isn't more migrants. It's making a conducive and affordable environment for families and childbearing. Cheaper healthcare, affordable childcare, cheaper education, etc. and that's just scratching the surface.
> Despite the right's endless whining, immigration has very little real impact on the economy, and crime, overall, has gone down in the last decades.
So is that why Sweden, whose population is 10% non-Swedish now, has had to declare publicly that their crime rates have skyrocketed over the past decade? Why Poland, which took very few migrants pre-Ukraine, has had a very low crime rate? Call me right-wing, but while some of their claims might be horseshit, others are more than obvious truisms.
> The most diverse European cities are also the most productive.
The most diverse cities were already major production centers before migrants entered the picture. For a more accurate reference, compare the levels of non-residential investment into these cities pre and post the migrant crisis.
>In France less than a thousandth of the population could be classified as "immigrants".
France is obviously one of the few countries in Europe that could uniquely integrate its migrant population, but your numbers are wildly inaccurate too. Out of a population of 67 million, 8.7 million were foreign born. Sure foreign born could mean a lot of things, but that still isn't "less than a thousandth" of the population. And a significant number concentrate in the major cities, further ghettoizing them.
I don't believe you can convince your population to raise more children, sure you can make it easier for those that want to, but demographic decline is a worldwide phenomena. It's the endgame of the demographic transition.
What happens in Sweden is mostly due to a resurgence of organized crime. I don't think closing down the country's borders (which, again, isn't feasible by any realistic mean) woulf fix the problem. To find a culprit, you should look at poverty rates which is always much more strongly correlated to crime than ethnicity or whatever else. Here's an article from the Guardian that explores this, for what it's worth: https://theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-violence-...
When speaking of immigrants I always think of illegal immigrants from Africa, which is what the right talks about anyway. In that regard, I believe my figure of one one thousandth is more accurate.
And how again did organized crime become resurgent in Sweden? Was it not driven by scores of unemployed immigrant youth finding an outlet for their skills, coupled with a relaxed policing culture that was developed in good times?
We're not talking about closing down borders here. We're talking about strongly monitoring the kind of migrants you bring in. The UAE and Singapore are both heavily migrant driven populations, yet don't see this resurgence of crime that we see only in Europe, because they actually preselect their visitors and residents.
As it stands now, it is tougher for me as an affluent non-European to migrate to Sweden, or any other European country (except Switzerland apparently, where I'm at now) for the long term, than it is for me to settle in the UAE or Singapore. It is tougher for my highly skilled friends in tech who want to move to Europe, so they've chosen to move to Singapore instead. On the other hand, both the UAE and Singapore are making it much harder for low-skilled migrants to get in, while they find it much easier to go and settle in Europe. And they are, in hordes.
> And how again did organized crime become resurgent in Sweden? Was it not driven by scores of unemployed immigrant youth finding an outlet for their skills, coupled with a relaxed policing culture that was developed in good times?
In short: no. Read the article whose link I posted above.
> We're not talking about closing down borders here. We're talking about strongly monitoring the kind of migrants you bring in.
And how could we do that ? We can't put policemen along every 4m of the European border. We are already doing random border controls, I don't think we can do much better without bankrupting ourselves.
> The UAE and Singapore are both heavily migrant driven populations, yet don't see this resurgence of crime that we see only in Europe, because they actually preselect their visitors and residents.
I don't think comparing the EU with the UAE makes much sense here. The situations are very different. Also, the UAE depends on massive numbers of foreign low-skilled workers to run the country. There are usually only allowed to stay for the duration of their work, and are hidden away from the rest of the country. There are many reported cases of worker abuse and inhumane working conditions. Overall, I'd wager there to be much more violence in the UAE than in Europe. In any case, you were speaking of values earlier, I don't think Europe has much to learn from the UAE in that department.
As for Singapore, I don't know what to say. It's a city-state, obviously it functions very differently than a continent-sized loose economic union of several country. Not that their ways have nothing of interest to us...
I'll conclude on our exchange, feel free to disagree:
You seem to believe about everyone can get into Europe, which is far from being the case. Famously in France, Macron's government last immigration law was the last one in a series of about a hundred similar ones since WW2.
I am yet to hear of an immigration policy that isn't just "give them less rights, give more money to the police, etc.", which as we have seen is only effective if our goal is to worsen the situation.
The influx of young abled men and women should be a net positive for Europe, and France, where businesses are always complaining of not being able to find enough low-skilled workers. Instead, we are too busy pushing back and making their lives harder to the point of making integration almost impossible and ostracizing them from society, thereby creating the conditions for crime to flourish.
There ought to be a clear distinction between indigenous Muslims who migrated post WW2 all the way to the 80s and 90s, and the recent migration waves which outnumber the former. The former have been able to acclimatize to European culture while still maintaining their roots (not to mention that it was harder to migrate back then - you needed a job already for starters). The latter bring the same tribalistic beliefs of their homelands over here. And trust me, the former DESPISE the latter, and it's an understatement. Not because they want to pull the ladder up after them, but because the latter import the same foul culture that the former wanted to escape from.
As a Muslim, I don't want to see people praying on the roads and streets of Paris. I didn't want to see people chanting "From the river to the sea" for Gazans (who have a very strong reason for being despised by the rest of the Middle East). I don't want to see Muharram processions in Barcelona either.
Fun fact, the Middle East has one of the most relaxed migration policies across the world, yet a lot of European migrants are actually unable to migrate because they are criminals back home (the first condition to obtaining a residence visa is a police clearance).
Muharram processions are specific to the Shia community. Allowing one and not letting Sunnis or Sufis do some arcane street ritual/procession is recipe for disaster. Best to not allow anything. Let these rituals be relegated to the mosques and Imambaras, not on the streets where they hamper with the daily lives of non-Muslims.
Indigenous Muslims that you had mentioned are my absolute favorite kind of people, that I've eschewed the rest. The rest could actually learn a thing or two from them (but of course they won't).
Ah, my mistake. The political commentary and analysis I'd been reading had been saying that, while Macron's party lost seats, his goal may have been to defang the far-right before they got any "real" power in 2027. I guess the commentary was implying that his goal may have been to let the French people see what the far-right would do with their political power, while not risking the presidency.
It sounds a little bit like 4-D chess now that I type it out, I'm not sure I believe it myself.
> It sounds a little bit like 4-D chess now that I type it out, I'm not sure I believe it myself.
The thing is with Macron, he managed to make the journalist class believe he's a genius (he's not dumb, but still miles away from being as brilliant as presented). So whenever he trips on a stone, you get an army of journalist explaining to you how he planned for it all along.
Can't wait til Jan 2025. I'll be taking full advantage of the home energy rebates to rewire the electric, install modern insulation, and install energy efficient heating/cooling in my 1930's Craftsman. The rebates should cover up-to $14,000 of that cost which will be a great help.
"His signature achievements essentially were one time cash payments to people."
Look at the $300bn climate funding in the Inflation Reduction Act and the impact on bringing chip manufacturing onshore with the Chips Act. All this with a nearly divided congress.
Easily the most effective US president of my lifetime.
The IRA has nothing to do with Joe Biden. It passed because Joe Manchin decided at the last minute that he hated what China is doing with trying to monopolize stuff like solar panels and batteries.
There's a reason people jokingly refer to him as President Manchin.
The CHIPS act has stagnated since its announcement, it comes with onerous DEI requirements on new chipmaker facilities which just compounds the shortage of skilled labor. There has been no progress on construction of announced facilities since the bill's passage.
1/10th the number of illegal immigrants? The US gets less illegal immigrants than Europe per capita. If you look at the charts from the last 10 years of the immigrants as percentage of population you recognize that the US is seeing slower growth while European countries see faster immigration. This is happening while the US has a high immigration rate of desirable skilled workers.
Haha, he says he is European, talks about decions he's noticed from a "world stage" point-of-view, and you respond with your partisan vitrol.
I'm not sure you can claim moral lapses when you've cited propogandized and exaggerated far-right talking points. I think felonies, positively adjudicatied rape accusations, and paying for sex while your wife is pregnant are all the new standards for a POTUS that lacks moral fiber....
>The Trump administration in February 2020 negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government, freed 5,000 imprisoned Taliban soldiers and set a date certain of May 1, 2021, for the final withdrawal.
>And the Trump administration kept to the pact, reducing U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500, even though the Taliban continued to attack Afghan government forces and welcomed al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership.
This is a very partial view. A good number of people, including American democrats were disgusted by his unwavering support to the current genocide in Gaza. Many believe he could have stopped it with a phone call and explicitly refused. I know many who swore they would not vote for him, regardless of the circumstances.
> Many believe he could have stopped it with a phone call and explicitly refused.
This seems to take all of the culpability, motive and free will away from Netanyahu. I'm not saying Biden couldn't make that call, but why do we assume Bibi would have actually stopped if so?
Depends what was in the phone call! If he said "I'm going to drone you and everyone in your cabinet and all of your family" that would probably have done it, coming from the one person on earth who can credibly make that threat.
Biden's aides could probably come up with a more nuanced and more statesmanlike but equally effective threat than that, of course. Any US president would have great leverage to threaten an Israeli PM personally or politically, or threaten changes to US foreign policy that would work badly for Israel.
> Any US president would have great leverage to threaten an Israeli PM personally or politically, or threaten changes to US foreign policy that would work badly for Israel.
US Presidents aren't dictators and there is no way _any_ policy change too bad for Israel wouldn't have led to serious financial issues for any party. AIPAC is damn well connected.
In any case, I don't believe Netanyahu would have caved. No matter the threat - the crimes of Oct 7 were way too serious for any Israeli PM to leave unanswered. It was the equivalent of 9/11 - and just like the US back then, who completely flattened Afghanistan in retaliation, there is no way any other Israeli PM would have had any other realpolitik option than to fight until Hamas is gone off the face of the planet.
> there is no way _any_ policy change too bad for Israel wouldn't have led to serious financial issues for any party. AIPAC is damn well connected.
Well, yeah, it might not have been good for Biden financially or for the US strategic military position in the region. That's exactly why he didn't make the call - it's not that he doesn't care about the slaughter of innocents, but he cares about other things more.
It’s more like 10x worse than 9/11. Israel is a fairly small country of 9m people. So much of the population was connected to those killed. If you scale it to the US it would be as if 41,000 Americans were killed. Our response would be off the charts in such an event.
To a lot of outsiders it honestly looks like to some extent Israel controls US foreign policy. It's not a good look. Why does the US have to tiptoe so much around this issue? Why does Israel have such leverage? What is this leverage?
I always say, imagine if it was France instead of Israel. Then you see how crazy the situation is.
A strong West-allied military in the Middle East is extremely valuable.
If France started a war of aggression, the US would also 100% stand with France, especially if it started with France being hit with a terrorist attack. I’m not sure what you are trying to say.
From my layman's perspective, it's because a lot of people in the US just plain support Israel. I think that's because of religious connotations but again I don't really know. I've even seen an Israel flag being flown in the same yard as a Trump 2024 yard sign, here in my tiny northwest Iowa town.
Because critics always say what they don't want but rarely think through what they do.
The very likely case of Palestine replacing Israel would be a rapidly anti-US, anti-Western, anti-Democratic government and a loss of a very valuable port in the middle east due to the, y'know, rapidly anti-US issue.
Also depopulating Israel of Jews would almost certainly result in another Holocaust. Because Hamas - the most likely-to-govern organization for Palestine - has long enshrined Jew murder in its charter.
> PALM BEACH, Fla. — Former President Donald Trump declared Tuesday that Israel must “finish the problem” in its war against Hamas, his most definitive position on the conflict since the terror group killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages on Oct. 7.
The US public is not as supportive of Israel as it used to be but support is still broad. The opinions you're reflecting are a small minority. I would expect that democrats lost votes on their "both sides" approach here since more centrists would have move to the right then people on the left who at best can not vote in protest. Stronger support for Israel would have not only reduced Palestinian suffering in the war but would have also likely gained support for the democrats.
For example, Israel was pressured to delay its offensive in the beginning of the war after the Oct 7th attack, which likely caused more casualties and prolonged the war and it was pressured in other ways that prolong the war. There was certainly nothing like "unwavering support", e.g. there was intense pressure to avoid an operation in Rafah, e.g. with the US administration saying the population could not be evacuated, but then Israel ignored that, and the population did evacuate.
On the other hand, there is virtually no chance that the US could have forced Israel to stop the war because Israelis view this as an existential threat. No threats or measures the US would take would override that view. This is likely why Biden is not able to stop the war by making a phone call.
I think it's important for people that want the war in Gaza to end and to see less casualties and suffering to understand this calculus. Israel's and Hamas'. What those people seem to be working towards in practice is a prolongation of the war, more suffering by everyone, and possibly the election of Trump in the US.
> On the other hand, there is virtually no chance that the US could have forced Israel to stop the war because Israelis view this as an existential threat. No threats or measures the US would take would override that view. This is likely why Biden is not able to stop the war by making a phone call.
No chance? That's a very unimaginative view. Here's one way to do it that would have caused Israel to immediately stop: "If you keep going against what we are publicly saying, we will no longer veto security council resolutions against you, and UNGA will move forward with sanctions once they realize we're not going to protect you anymore."
Biden tried to threaten and stop Israel and this is one reason for it taking so long. It took like five months to start invading Rafah, which is crazy. And the main reason is Biden administration stalling it. Thank G-d now Dems will be busy with their political infighting and survival and the hot stage of this war will be over soon and Gazans can breathe a bit and start thinking about their future.
Israel is acting towards its declared objectives which it views as existential: The removal of Hamas from power in Gaza and the return of its hostages. Hamas is acting towards its declared long term objectives of destroying Israel at any cost.
It's ok for you to disagree with those objectives, or Israel's assessment of threat, but you can still see how a truce that leaves Hamas in power does not align with Israels' declared objectives. If you can offer a truce to Israel that removes Hamas from Gaza and Israel rejected that then I'd support your argument but that option is not on the table at the moment (partly because it does not align with Hamas' objectives). From Israel's perspective the proposed truce neither guarantees the return of all Israeli hostages nor the removal of Hamas from Gaza.
Israel's current government is also unlikely to work towards the proposed truce because it involves releasing Palestinian prisoners which will be seen as a win for Hamas and also a potential for future violence. This is where Israel is divided internally with many (most?) supporting a truce and parts of the government working against it. But most Israelis would still see the truce as temporary and agree that Hamas' survival in Gaza is not acceptable after Oct 7th. If Hamas was to e.g. leave Gaza (like the PLO left Beirut) then many options open up for ending the war and moving forward (including removal of the current Israeli government).
Again regardless of your opinion/politics you need to see this from Israel's side if you want to be able to achieve a solution. The Ukraine/Russia conflict is similar in that you need to understand what both sides are looking for and what they're willing to concede before you can end that war. Just saying that you think the war should continue until Russia is repelled from the entirety of Ukraine, while potentially a reasonable moral position, may not be a practical one or one that minimizes the number of people getting killed. I say that as someone who is 100% supportive of Ukraine. There's the idealistic outcome and then there's reality.
It's certainly true that if Israel has no other alternatives, and under the assumption it views Hamas' survival in Gaza as an existential threat, then it will continue to use force to achieve that objective, which will certainly lead to more people getting killed. Israelis and Palestinians.
If this is the scenario we're looking at, and we want to minimize Palestinian suffering and casualties, then we should be looking at how this force can be used in the most optimal way to achieve these objectives. For example, a truce that gives Hamas a chance to rebuild its defenses and re-establish control over broader areas of the Gaza strip is almost certainly going to lead to more suffering and casualties.
Israel just passed a law calling a UN agency a terrorist organization, thus making them legitimate (in their own twisted minds) targets in an ongoing genocide. Earlier that same legislator denied any prospects for a 2-state solution making it absolutely clear that they aim to at best keep Palestine in a state of domination, what the ICJ has ruled as apartheid.
I think it is a mistake to claim Israel is acting with anything but genocidal intent. Even their own legislator shows this genocidal intent when it validates obviously invalid targets. Their aim is not the removal of Hamas from power in Gaza, but the elimination of civilian order of Palestinians in Gaza. And it is clearly and obviously moving towards that goal.
Hamas is not an existential threat to Israel. They don’t have the military nor political capabilities for that. At best they are a threat to Israels ongoing policies of apartheid. But in that regard, so is the ICJ.
Biden's wise choice exemplifies true leadership, and ultimately, it's a testament to the enduring influence of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party's revered elder statesman, who remains a powerful force to this day.
> I presume that his attitudes and staff selection carried the day, and maybe could have done so for another term. But his mental capacity was clearly declining, and he is in fact expected to handle some things personally.
Biden's presidency makes me wonder if we really need a head of state these days. Is it really necessary to have such a single powerful figure in the executive branch?
The biggest exception (IMO) would be in times of crisis, where a strong executive is necessary.
I feel two ways in this, you probably need one voice for certain key tactical decisions, but the fact that everyone feels the presidency is this important in America supports the idea that the presidency has gotten way to powerful. Loosely speaking, the person who is president shouldn’t matter as much as who is in congress.
This is how it works in most European democracies.
The balance between the President, the Prime Minister and the Congress or Parliament is different in different countries. In most of Europe, the President is mostly a "figurehead". The President does the diplomatic stuff, wines and dines with foreign leaders, maybe has the ability to veto laws or pardon people, but it's the prime minister who actually runs the government and appoints the cabinet.
I think this varies varies between countries. Sweden indeed has an almost (formally) powerless monarch. I think the UK has a monarch with some real power but that does not put it to use? And how Denmark, Netherlands, Norway etc fare on this scale would be interesting to learn.
> you probably need one voice for certain key tactical decisions
I agree. Having a unified vision is the other key thing a president brings. Unfortunately though we barely see the fruits of a unified vision with how divided the two parties are today.
The problem isn't the head of state but the head of government. The solution to that is reduce the powers of the President.
I have been having thought that the office of President should be split. With separate head of state and head of government that runs the executive branch. Another option would be to have triumvirate with command in chief that commands the military. Maybe the President has power to dismiss the others, or there is system than one person can't take over, like the CnC can never be executive.
You could do that with current structure by giving all the executive power to the Vice President, and then President would be left with head of state role. They would run as slate, with the visible, charismatic President, and the unknown, competent VP. If the President dies, the VP loses all his power.
I've said that the US needs an elected king. The guy you want to have a beer with, to throw out ceremonial first pitches, even to welcome other heads of state is the king. The person who runs the government and balances congress is the president and should be super boring. I'm imagining George W Bush as idea King material while Gore would have been ideal President material.
In parliamentary republics, the President is the powerless head of state, and the Prime Minister is head of government. There are lots of terms for head of government like Chancellor, Chief Executive, and First Minister. "King" has too much baggage of being inherited.
Most limited Presidents have fixed terms, but I don't think there needs to be term limits for the figurehead. I was thinking that the head of state would attract those who want the spotlight.
The two historical examples that immediately come to mind (and explain the Latin term) both didn't end well.
I agree with the rest of the points you make. I think in Europe, the CnC is always a military post and needs to have done officer training and risen through the ranks, whereas the head of government (whether nominal or actual) is strictly a civilian role.
Whether European models would scale up to something the size of the USA is another question.
> Is it really necessary to have such a single powerful figure in the executive branch?
As an ignorant outsider, my impression is that the president is only supposed to 'preside' over things. Delegate and appoint people. Sign bills as a ceremony.
The real decision-making should be happening by the people's representatives in congress, while the Supreme court can guard against decisions which would violate the constitution.
But then parties form, partisanship happens, and congress stops making meaningful changes. Blocking anything that the dems put forward apparently gets votes for senators. You don't even need filibusters to prevent votes; just the suggestion of one.
So without a working congress, the President and the courts end up picking up the slack, and wield more power than they should.
I naively wish that there was some way for congress to actually be a congress, and for each member to vote his/her conscience on every single matter.
This is a weird way to formulate the question of how you could better constitute the US federal government.
(because if you were gonna make a change as fundamental as not having a primary leader of the executive branch, you probably wouldn't try to limit your changes to that)
There are certainly things Biden can be criticized for but your comment is hyperbole that has little bearing on reality -
> most of the major cities here are no longer safe
objectively, nearly every major cities is safer now than at virtually any time in the past 50 or so years.
> massive hordes of illegal immigrants
This uptick trend has been noticeable for the last 30 years so I'm not sure how this is attributable to Biden. Additionally, as a percentage, we are still not yet relative to the percentage of population that is an immigrant as compared to the late 1800s.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
> But yes, I agree, ignoring the reality of all of those things, pretty good!
But yes, I agree, if you ignore reality, you can blame Biden for everything :)
Enough ordnance lying around for them and their army and menfolk to have fought if they wanted to. At some point we have to say enough is enough. Thousands of American lives, trillions of American dollars, and 20 years ought to have been enough. If not, then it's just not a job that is reasonably accomplishable by a foreign state. I wish them all the best in building a free society for themselves over the next decades, but they'll have to do it without American boots on the ground.
Maybe its China's turn to try to conquer the graveyard of empires.
The US was in Afghanistan for twenty years. Everything the US did there collapsed in a few months after twenty years. It seems like after the second Osama was killed everything done there was a waste of time and money for the US. It's a terrible situation, but it's a terrible situation whenever there is a country using religion to justify oppression and war. The people have to be willing to get rid of the oppressors.
There were just 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan before they pulled out, and below 10,000 for years before that. There are more U.S. troops in countries like Germany, Italy, or Spain.
In the end it was a very small commitment for the US, with huge gains not just for Afghan people but also for the US.
I'd argue that zero troops and zero dollars in Afghanistan should be the goal. Afghanistan knows that if they try to raise up another Osama what will happen, so I would argue that what happens there, even if it's terrible, doesn't actually affect things in the US anymore.
We can invade a bunch of countries in South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe and possibly "improve" lives there, impose our will, while sucking money out of America ostensibly forever.
Or we can sanction human rights abusers, offer proper asylum, and if there are any real on the ground changes from within the country then possibly support in a similar way to support in Ukraine.
Once you invade a country you're committing to a certain responsibility to do right by it and the people living there. Either follow the Prime Directive or don't, but you can't just choose whimsically based on whatever is convenient in the moment. Blame the Bush admin if you really want to blame someone.
How does the prime directive apply when you are attacked directly.
I do agree that Bush deserves the blame for turning what should should have been a hunt down and destroy Al Qaeda mission into a sprawling invasion of various countries in the middle east
Afghanistan or the Taliban didn't attack the US – bin Laden did, who had no position in the Afghan government. Taliban refused to extradite Bin Laden to the US, and the US refused any compromise such as extradition to another country. All of that is a rather different thing than "they attacked us".
Regardless, Obama, Trump, and Biden had to deal with the situation as they found it, whether they agreed with the lead-up or not.
US had to learn the age old lesson too it seems - you just can't conquer Afghanistan (well maybe apart form wiping almost its entire population but even russians didn't do that). And its not a place for democracy, its tribal to its core and nobody likes giving up power held over many generations. It doesn't matter much how superior you think your cause is or advanced equipment deployed.
Counterpoint: after World War II we still have troops in both Germany and Japan who are now our allies. Any kind of occupation, and our occupational forces were small, was always going to be a long term commitment. Instead we just straight up abandoned our allies.
This was not a win, and the Biden Administration lying about it at every single stage of the process until the final troop was out was downright cowardly when all we had to do was continue to commit to sit on our asses while Afghani society rebuilt itself.
They reverted months after we left, which means the only way to hold it off would have been to stay forever and make them the 51st state.
Anyone who didn’t want to live under authoritarian Islamist rule should have left during that 20 year period. I find it hard to believe the whole place reverting was a surprise.
The US invasion and attempted puppet government in Afghanistan made life much worse for women in Afghanistan because it drove regular people to support the extremist Taliban, who themselves became more extreme as the war went on.
Just because the US could take control and pretend to make progress doesn't mean it actually changed people's minds. In fact it actively poisoned the concept of women's rights in that region for decades
> He got us out of Afghanistan too... this was a huge win and was very risky. Doesn't get enough credit for this one.
Thats because Trump agreed to get us out of afghaniston. Biden oversaw the absolutely disastrous execution, abandoning untold millions of military equipment in the hands of the taliban.
Trump's plan involved getting out even quicker. How was it going to be less disastrous?
It is always the same story, Dems bad, I would have done it right. He had a 'credible deterrent', and would have completely ended the Ukraine war (that had been going on since 2014). Just like he claims now he will end the war, and bring back all the Americans imprisoned abroad if re-elected. It's one thing to say that sort of stuff and present a plan for doing so. Trump says it, and then pivots to even more bullshit.
Do you really think a different president, with effectively the same military leadership, was going to execute the pull-out in a broadly different way on a shorter deadline, and call it a success?
Owing to the change of administration, the Biden administration was obviously responsible for implementing the terms of the agreement as negotiated by the Trump administration.
I think both parties get an approximately equal share of the credit or blame.
That's not the fault of the US though. We were there for years and years trying to foster democracy, but you can't help a country/culture that doesn't want to help itself.
Failing US infrastructure has been singled out as a major pressing issue by US Engineers (professional societies, etc) for at least 15 years that I'm aware of.
It's been cited before 2016 as a trillion dollar problem.
The point is that this something that one POTUS chose to talk about and frequently hyped "Infrastructure Week" and also something that another POTUS chose to do something about.
^F informs us there are 33 instances of "war" on that page, most in "award", "forward", etc. Two as the actual word "war".
Of course it's a good thing, why on earth would you imagine it not to be?
> You were the one who could not find it not me and then you got confused with award and forward
Please don't be silly. I found all instances of the character sequence "war". Most instances were within full words, two instances were the actual word war.
Then you asked me to help you to search within the text. Most people on HN are capable of finding such things themselves. Why you struggle with this is a mystery.
As others have pointed out, Lyndon B. Johnson declined the nomination for Democratic Presidential candidate in March of 1968, well before both most of the primary contensts and the then-open Democratic Convention in Chicago. Rather famously, that convention didn't go particularly smoothly.
(In an interesting coincidence, this year's Democratic primary is also in Chicago.)
George McGovern's 1972 vice presidential nominee, Thomas Eagleton, stepped down after it was revealed Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy, two weeks after the Democratic Convention. McGovern selected Sargent Shriver as the replacement candidate.
Horace Greeley, Liberal Republican Party and Democratic Party candidate in the 1872 election, running against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant, died on 29 November 1872, after the general election but before the Electoral College met to count its votes. Greeley carried no states and won no Electoral College votes.
This will be a much more relevant story on HN if it turns out that Elon Musk sent this rather than Biden.
(At the time that I write this, the only place this news is sourced from is Twitter. Every news org is quoting Twitter and then adding their own gloss.)
Disagree, I think everyone has more or less the same (accurate) view of trump it's just the things that his supporters like about him are the same things that make you hate him
It seems pretty clear to me that Netanyahu is trying to stir up a wider war in the Middle East. If he's successful that will be terrible for the security of all the surrounding regions, Europe included.
The parties are not as strong as your typical European party - if you win the presidency, in a very real sense your people become the party. Biden's people picking a process that favored Biden is expected here. For better or for worse there is no smokey back room of elders with superdelegate powers driving the show, the closest is probably the donor class who aren't part of the formal party leadership but back horses in the party.
You’ve got it exactly right. The DNC has been a clown show since as long as I can remember. Probably Clinton? Obama was an obvious favorite at his time, the party couldn’t even get Clinton across the line against Trump and Trump was so bad, most people voted anything but. Basically it’s all been accidental success.
The party is run by a weird mix of blue dogs who don’t really reflect progressive values, and left wing extremists who kowtow to the dogmatic sect of the party. The middle class, who they’re _supposed_ to represent are completely forgotten.
Agreed, it's been obvious for the last year to everyone in my bubble (educated liberals mostly in tech) that Biden was demented. The democratic party is now holding every non-conservative american hostage more or less (what are you gonna do? vote trump?) and I would love to see the party collapse or have a serious overhaul. Why can't they put up candidates people like? At least trump has actual fans, I don't know anyone who actually likes Biden they just prefer him to trump
This feels like evidence of interesting new phenomenon, I get why 99% of politics topics should be removed, but if we post one when presidents get elected, it seems like something as impactful as president dropping out should count too.
Here's what @dang posted on the giant thread of Biden winning presidency (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967). I suspect this thread has been auto-killed by some spam algo and there's a good chance dang will resurrect it at some point.
"As many have pointed out, a dozen or so submissions on this topic were flagged by users. That's actually the immune system working as intended, but another component of the system is that moderators rescue the very most historic stories so HN can have a single big thread about them. We did that 4 years ago, also for Brexit, etc.
Since this was the first submission on the topic, it seems fairest to be the one to restore. (It's still on our todo list to have some form of karma sharing for situations like this, to make it be less of a race and/or lottery.)"
I am, admittedly, very glad that Biden stuck to his word in 2020 that he will be a single-term incumbent president for the last 4 years... I just wish the DNC kept their word on bolstering a more compelling candidate within that timeframe as well.
They had 3 1/2 years to bolster the reputation of Kamala, and largely sidelined her after using her as a play for minority vote. Now they're (likely) running her in a remaining timespan of a little over 3 months left before election -- after no one has thought of her since the last election. This isn't good.
It will be an interesting case study but I think there is a chance that the short runway will allow her to maintain some semblance of high energy. Basically, if you thought American elections were too drawn out, here is your opportunity to be proven right.
This is really misunderstanding how that works. The 2020 field at that point was wide open, no one candidate was looking dominant. She absolutely "could" have stayed in with a real shot at winning, which was true for basically all of them. She got out because (1) staying in costs money and fundraising in a wide-open primary is extremely hard and (2) she judged[1] that she'd have a better path to the presidency by positioning herself as an obvious VP candidate via playing kingmaker with her political capital and identity markers. Which is exactly how it played out.
With all their talk of campaign finance reform, it is not clear to me why the DNC does not finance their most valid primary candidates? Why make them jump through hoops and raise money to stay in the race between the primary elections?
No. I want the DNC to provide some basic money all valid candidates (say those who get above certain percent of votes) so that they can spend their time making their case to the primary voters, instead of trying to raise money.
In the end, it is the primary voters who will pick the candidate who will run for presidency.
"Sen. Kamala Harris drops out of 2020 presidential race": [0]
"Following that debate, her polling numbers dropped to the single digits — and never really recovered.
Amid those problems, Harris' campaign reorganized — laying off some staffers in early states to focus its resources and attention on Iowa.
The latest RealClearPolitics average of recent polling showed Harris with just 3.4 percent support nationally, and just 3.3 percent and 2.7 percent backing in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively."
> She absolutely "could" have stayed in with a real shot at winning, which was true for basically all of them.
This was true for three of them: Sanders, Biden and Buttigieg; but if Buttigieg stayed in, it was looking like at the time that he and Biden both would have lost to Sanders. I remember my last act as a registered member of the Democratic Party was going to be to vote for the candidate who had the best shot at beating Sanders in my State specifically thus denying him some delegates, and I was having a difficult time up until nearly the last minute figuring out who that was going to be up until Buttigieg made the decision extremely easy by removing himself from the race.
Harris didn’t even make it to the starting line. Her campaign simply ran out of money in December before the Iowa Caucus.
I wouldn’t say Biden stuck to his word. He fully intended to run, until people (rightfully) objected. I’m glad he ultimately backed down and stepped down. But this whole process would have been easier to nominate a real candidate if he would have stuck to his word from the beginning. He still deserves the blame for that, even if his most recent actions were correct.
I wouldn't frame "he was campaigning and only pulled out when it became clear everyone was against him" as "he stuck to his word that he will be a single term president". Sticking to his word would've been never campaigning to begin with.
No, you're completely right; I still have a bone to pick with Biden for waiting this long and doing almost no favors for his VP's image over the period of his term. But, he still fulfilled an old promise by technicality, and I'm not one to cut corners for giving credit.
The Democrats now need to emphasize that Trump, who is 78, is too old too. They can feature clips of Trump in 2020 saying that Biden at 78 was too old.
Is this the quote you're referring to (from 2019)?
> Trump added, "I would never say anyone is too old, but I know they're all making me look very young, both in terms of age and I think in terms of energy. I think you people know that better than anybody."
(I'm looking for it in old articles and having trouble finding what you're talking about.)
I also found this from an AP article in 2020:
> With Election Day less than four months away, Trump has spent more money on one television ad claiming that Biden lacks “the strength, the stamina and the mental fortitude to lead this country” than any other single ad this year.
I really dislike this idea that someone can be "too old" to be president. The issue isn't age, it's the conditions and diseases that often come with age.
The issue with Biden for me wasn't his age at all, it was that for whatever reason he was struggling to form coherent sentences. Trump on the other hand seems more or less completely fine. I'd actually argue the best thing about Biden was that he was perhaps the most qualified person to president ever given his long history and respected history in politics.
That said, I do think the older the presidential candidate is the more important it becomes to weight their VP pick when casting your vote, but still, I don't think this reason trend of discounted people solely on their age is a healthy trend. I'd even argue that the ideal age for a leader is probably quite old, maybe around 50-60.
> Agreed. But it doesn’t mean people need to have as little character as possible.
One side is a cult of personality that was bullied into thralldom by an angry old man because they lacked a spine, and the other side cloistered around and hid the decline of a frail old man because they lacked a spine.
Character is the last thing to expect from these people. The Democrats grew at least a vertebrae after George Clooney told them off. George Clooney for President.
"Donald Trump is going to win. And I'm OK with that." - Jared Golden, Democratic House Representative of Maine
I really hoped it wouldn't be so, but anyone that's ever seen Kamala speak will find she is about as compelling as Joe Biden on a bad day. I believe this means China and Russia can prevail in the short term, unless he actually boosts Taiwan's defence meaningfully, which I doubt he will after the Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan aid holdup fiasco.
It is what it is. I wish the nominee was Gretchen Whitmer with anyone but Kamala. I wish Biden had not run for reelection. I wish he hadn't endorsed Kamala. I wish the Democrats and Obama had backed Sanders or Biden in 2016 when they were fit to serve. I wish Trump moderated himself after the attempt on his life instead of business as usual a week later.
I hope I'm wrong about everything observably bad about Trump's first term and his decline since, because with another trifecta of loyalists, he's probably getting much more done this time.
What? Presidents from now until forever have that near unlimited legal immunity, regardless of party. That's what the Supreme Court ruled. That question doesn't even make sense to a Democrat supporter, it's not that simple, because that's the same no matter who wins. And I want the non-Trump candidate to win, but the party has sabotaged their chances in a manner as to appear deliberate.
Democrats have shown plenty of steps to rectify the supreme court ruling. If he have both executive and both houses control under Democratic rule, its very likely that they can clean out the Trump cronies from the Supreme Court.
At what point is it no longer my fault for not voting democrat? Is the democratic party responsible at all for putting up an appealing candidate? How many times can they bully us with fearmongering into voting for someone we dislike? What's the end game here? we just keep voting blue no matter who as things get worse and worse forever?
If you are a real human and not paid by Russia, I really shouldn't have to explain this.
You are not voting just for the president. You are voting for things like Supreme Court, that party legislation not being vetoed, as well as people who staff agencies.
At this point and time, the critical issue is the Supreme Court ruling of making a president a dictator. You have 2 parties - one party orchestrated this ruling through staffing cronies into the Supreme Court, with candidate representing extremist right wing views by Project 2025, which wants to use violence to subjugate people without giving a fuck about Constitution. The other party knows that it cannot use unlimited power to not lose trust of the people, and is actively working to negate that ruling.
Without even touching policies (where again, Republicans lose out massively in both effectiveness and results), your vote is not for a person, your vote is for sanity vs insanity.
None of this is up for debate. Everyone who doesn't vote or votes Republican in this election is supporting having US ran by a dictator.
After this election, if we have actual sanity in place with due legal process that both sides respect, then we can talk about who to vote for.
Come on man stop with the russia bot stuff, i'm just a normal guy who votes democrat. I'm sure we vote for the same people, I'm just really frustrated with the democratic party's lack of appeal. I'm really feeling "bullied" for lack of a better term. I'm being told anything I think would be a good policy or person to support isn't relevant or worth talking about because of Trump. Do you really not see any validity to this position? Can you really not imagine I'm just a normal american person?
1,941 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 460 ms ] threadLet’s see who is going to take the mantle now.
/edit: he is endorsing Kamala,
https://nitter.poast.org/JoeBiden/status/1815087772216303933
There’s a process for removing him if enough people in congress believed that it was an issue, but there’s no reason to do so at this point in the presidency. Even the Republicans aren’t likely to try that.
I'm not saying all of this is certain or that Biden should be removed, but it is certainly plausible, if not likely.
If this is the criteria for “people who shouldn’t be president” then perhaps both parties should offer different candidates.
If you want to split hairs and say that the verbal diarrhea that comes out of his mouth every time he opens it is not in itself one giant "gaffe," I guess I'll just concede the point and move on. He's still a giant asshole, always, to everyone, so my original point still stands.
And why was his acceptance speech so "off the cuff" if it was at an official function where he had months to prepare?
You know Joe’s gaffes and Kamala’s broke catchphrase aren’t the same things.
I honestly don’t know what “Kamala’s broke catchphrase” is.
Joe Biden makes gaffes, appears to have problems with his memory on certain occasions, and is probably too old to run for another four years.
None of the above contradicts anything I previously said.
Of course you don’t. Ignorance is celebrated and you don’t ever consider that you are the one who was intentionally kept in the dark.
She is a moron, and it’s been kept from you. Like Joe’s condition was kept from you.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0K3rbIEsZC0
Yet… you have strong opinions you are somehow confident in.
There you go again, asserting that you know what's in my head. Please stop.
I've seen mentions of that catchphrase floating around. Based on the wording you used, I thought you were referring to her saying the word "broke" in some context, and I wasn't sure what you were talking about.
Perhaps you should work on your communication skills some more before acting so haughty?
As we age we do have a decline in mental and physical function, but it is generally not uniform. From the reports I've heard his speaking ability is down, but his analytical abilities are still fine.
The man is still the Commander-in-Chief. Anyone of limited mental faculties (which clearly describes President Biden), irrespective of their politics, should not be in the chair if they are not of sound mind. Consequently, I believe the responsible act would be for President Biden to resign the Presidency and allow his Vice President to take the mantle.
| Even the Republicans aren’t likely to try that.
I actually don't think it's in the Republicans best interest to do so. Tactically, the Democrats would be wise to let Kamala Harris sit in the Oval Office and make her the nominee. It would legitimize her as both a nominee and a candidate. Given that isn't happening, the cynic in me believes that suggests the Democrats don't want her as their candidate.
Regardless, the political machinations are irrelevant. It is irresponsible for Joe Biden to continue as President given he is obviously unfit to continue as the nominee.
If Biden resigns and Harris becomes President, a new VP would need to be confirmed by the Senate, and the (GOP controlled) House.
What if the House refuses to take up the vote, similar to how McConnell refused to bring up Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court confirmation? In theory that kicks the election to the states, and each state counts as one vote, winner takes all.
I don’t think that’s a gamble the Democrats are willing to take, being that a majority of states (not a majority of the population) are GOP controlled.
“The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.” Article 1, Section 3
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_football
The parent was really saying that the president might need to respond to a nuclear attack at any time, therefore they should always be sober and ready to respond. Essentially, the president is oncall 24/7 for reacting to nuclear threats.
There are some protections though where the presidents orders can be disobeyed, which are mentioned in that Wikipedia article you linked.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Hering#Discharge
> "What if [the president's] mind is deranged, disordered, even damagingly intoxicated? ... Can he launch despite displaying symptoms of imbalance? Is there anything to stop him?" Rosenbaum says that the answer is that launch would indeed be possible: to this day, the nuclear fail-safe protocols for executing commands are entirely concerned with the president's identity, not his sanity. The president alone authorizes a nuclear launch and the two-man rule does not apply to him.
Respectfully, you might want to read something more current on the subject. The excellent book Command and Control [1] is a good place to start.
The "protections" you appear to be alluding to presumably mean the "NCA"'s role in this. That's a term that has no official meaning since 2002 (and before that the president also had the sole authority to order nuclear strikes).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book)
He is not able to hold his own in a debate. Yet you believe he's strong enough to lead the nation and decide when to go to war or not?
Being president should take a high degree of intelligence, integrity, and awareness. At all times.
If Biden's age has been causing mental issues, fine. That'll happen to everybody. But if it's bad enough to stop him from running, it should be bad enough to keep him out of office.
You're basically saying a superhuman is the only thing that should be president. There doesn't exist a person that can navigate politics while having a high degree of intelligence, integrity, and awareness at all times.
If it's true, then we genuinely have destroyed most societal incentive structure that makes being governed worthwhile.
(Agreeing with you, just adding to the perspective.)
Because when he has to decide when to go to war or not, he's surrounded by a group of trusted advisors.
Damn, where are all the HN regulars who chant "How the fuck is a one hour pressure-cooker leetcode session relevant to someone's capability as a software engineer? We're measuring the wrong thing!" ...
* Also, are we just ignoring the context that Biden is stepping down because otherwise Trump might get elected? I know this forum is not a place to call for Trump's resignation, but I can practically taste the double standard today ...
I think they discussed this and:
Biden: run the country and try to lay the groundwork to rectify the Supreme Court crazyness
Harris: your turn to beat Trump in November
I'd only hire Biden for the CEO role actually. Guys a great executive that has a hard time leaving. Classic CEO.
Is there literally any company that wouldn't?
Does anyone believe that he should have his finger on "the button" controlling thousands of nuclear weapons? If you were in charge of a boomer or a Minuteman III silos and you got a launch order purportedly from Biden, would you execute that order? If so, really? If not, what deterrent is currently in place?
If that's the situation, then he's not the president and should either step down or be replaced via mechanisms of the 25th Amendment.
Sorry, but this borders on gaslighting.
It's not that he "didn't have the chops" to win the debate, it's that during the debate he clearly demonstrated that his mind is gone.
Which is a really unfortunate position for him to be in. It can't be pleasant. He's not suitable to lead the country for another four years for sure. The country needs a leader who inspires people, and no one on that debate stage was that.
Nixon has a drunk.
Roosevelt was in declining health before beign reelected in 1944. He knew he might have to resign early.
He should have stepped down months ago, and the Democrat party is responsible for hiding this from the public. They really thought they could just shield him till after the election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-conservatives-refer-to-the...
https://x.com/shaun_gains/status/1751513959025222048
>Remember “Democrat party” is the key right wing shibboleth when describing the Democratic Party. You gave yourself away. There is no such party as the “Democrat” Party in America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
>A shibboleth (/ˈʃɪbəlɛθ, -ɪθ/ ⓘ;[1][2] Biblical Hebrew: שִׁבֹּלֶת, romanized: šībbōleṯ) is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another.[3][4][5] Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwords, simple ways of self-identification, signaling loyalty and affinity, maintaining traditional segregation, or protecting from real or perceived threats.
Reminds me of the classic adage: If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table.
It's supremely ironic that a Trump supporter like you would get his panties in a twist about somebody other than Trump lying in public.
Even Manifold politics had him at 20% two weeks ago. And 10% for the past week.
I'm a pretty left-leaning person and I find Trump to be an overwhelmingly unappealing idiot in general, but even I had to admit that Trump "won" the debate. He was still the moronic walking Markov Chain that he always is, but he at least looked alive.
Also, wouldn’t me saying I hate him a lot but still acknowledge he won lend more legitimacy to it? Like it’s actively working against my biases and I still acknowledge he won.
That's arguably the definition of bias isnt it? Especially because political debates don't have objective winners or losers, declaring your bias before picking a winner in something that's only subjectively winnable does seem relevant.
This isn't a case of watching a soccer match and concluding "Gosh, I'm German, but I gotta admit Brazil won the 2014 world cup"
Again, and I do not mean to repeat myself, the fact that I did concede he won the debate despite my distaste for him indicates that I am able to put them aside, at least a bit.
I find this recent kind of artificial “nuance” by simply pretending that having an opinion is somehow “tribalism” to be supremely annoying. It’s not clever, it just comes off people pleasing with the opposite effect.
That's not how humans work. He's acknowledging this and keeping it in mind to try and get closer to an objective point of view.
You on the other hand, sound like a flailing monkey.
This isn't even a RvD thing. I'd take back Romney, McCain or go as far back as Bob Dole. Hell, Sarah Palin was at least a pleasant form of stupid instead of malevolent. I remember when the R's at least has some minimal sense of class, but even that's out the window. This is just an embarrassment to my country at this point.
They’ve flirted with that kind of thinking my entire life (with the Satanic Panic and acting like Harry Potter was out to brainwash children), but it feels like the conspiratorial stuff really picked up in around 2013; that’s at least when my grandmother stopped sending me unsolicited Fox News articles and started sending me unsolicited InfoWars articles, and when she started really going off the deep end.
There's definitely a much more explicitly hateful undercurrent in the trumpism era. I never would have expected a Charlottesville to happen so brazenly in the 21st century. Let alone the insurrection.
And on the other hand, Kamala' complexion is part of why Im worried about the D vote. Because despite much progress there are undeniably some older D's who hold prejudiced thoughts (external or internal).It undoubtedly was a partial factor leading to Hilary's loss. I really hope I'm just overreacting though.
> If you don't subscribe for the conspiracies, W Bush wasn't an awful president
I think he was still pretty awful; his administration basically banned stem cell research from happening in the US, he withdrew funding for anything involving climate change research, and he shares blame with Clinton for the 2008 housing crash. [1]
He wasn't quite as stupid as Trump, he didn't try and bribe a foreign official to investigate his opponents, and he didn't try and overthrow democracy with a violent mob, so I guess if that's our bar then he's pretty ok, but I think my standards are still higher than that.
[1] I'm aware that it was Clinton who signed the subprime mortgage stuff that caused it, so he definitely deserves a large share of the blame. However, the Bush administration sat on it and were happy to take credit for the short-term benefits until 2008, meaning that they weren't thinking about the long term consequences either, so I think they deserve a share of that blame too.
Off topic but I find this insult(?) a bit funny. Is it supposed to be an insult as in his action / speech are as predictable/determined by current state only, as is Markov chain?
However, if you change the criteria to "who had the most favorable impact on undecided voters" then apparently he lost? The news was Trump lost undecided voters from that debate..
So Trump won because everyone thinks he won(including me haha). But what did he win?
I think the statement of "Trump won the debate" largely boils down to the fact that nearly every left leaning person who watched it turned it off feeling like "holy fuck looks like we're getting another four years of Trump".
Having watched it, it's not like Trump got "better" in any regard, he's still a blabbering idiot (maybe even more than in 2020), but he didn't "disappoint" me like Biden did this last time.
It doesn't seem sophisticated, but it is perfectly engages one audience, and perfectly enrages a second target audience.
Examples that come to mind is mocking Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" or rebuking the question of him as a dictator with "No, no, no, (other than day one)."
Saying you are considering dropping out would be immediately pounced on, and effectively mean you'd have to drop out. So I don't think there is any signal in the messaging there except that he was probably still seriously considering running.
Except in this case "the party" is actually "people that vote for Democrats". It's insane and infuriating to try to blame this on "the elites" when a significant majority of Democratic voters wanted Biden to step aside. If anything, it was "the elites" who tried to hide Biden's true condition and then tried to gaslight us all by pretending his debate performance was just some kind of bad one-off.
Yes, and it worked, and it's working again. I'm just saying it's not what people would have voted for if there was truly a choice. The presidential election is just a show for the managerial class to select their new spoke person.
I only want to express my opinion that he (and the Democratic party) took a while to make this decision, to their detriment.
Interesting to see who their new candidate is going to be.
The tough thing though is that money donated to Biden doesn’t transfer to other candidates.
The daily wire did an Extensive breakdown of each scenario a few days ago:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5vmeGPmDP0nopAlOwDZIV6
This particular scenario is covered at 0:30
That's wild and should be fixed.
The challenge is transferring to someone not named Kamala. [0] You need some campaign finance oversight with accounts, etc., and refunding and transferring to a "new" candidate would take time and jeopardize tying up ~$100 million in funds.
[0] https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/nation-world/biden-harris-...
The idea that the DNC has any power to steer the party is a joke. That is a mental model that is at least 20 years dead.
Kamala is not a strong candidate, let's see what happens.
I'll admit this is a bit silly in light of PAC/SuperPAC spending now, but we did have election spending rules at one point and this was one of them.
They take over the news cycle from the Republican convention, and they neutralize a huge amount of the talking points from the convention. That could be pretty brilliant.
(I mean, it would have been better for Biden to clearly not be running last year at this time, and let the primary process do its thing. But dropping out right now might be pretty decent timing.)
The media class now has months of things to talk about wrt the Dems. The less screentime Trump gets the better, and his convention is already over and spent zero time attacking the actual candidate.
YMMV, we have very different political systems and cultures, etc. etc.
At least now we’ll likely not have both major party candidates be too old for office.
Biden literally cannot walk down two steps unassisted.
Meanwhile Trump appears to be bullet proof.
You can disagree on plenty of policy, but no fair minded person could possibly think he’s mentally or physically more fit than Trump.
That’s a weird way to say “Even his own party is shooting at him.”
That was incredibly iconic and that picture will be in the historic books, and IMHO, alongside a biography of him as our 47th POTUS.
Yep, next to all of the other failed assassinations.
looking it up, we haven't had a near assassination since Reagan (how... well, poetic isn't the word I want to use). Probably a bit too recent for history books to record at my time. The other presidents who had near assassinations did eventually become assassinated.
Absolutely he’s more physically fit. I don’t think Biden would have survived being tackled by the Secret Service agents. That alone would have broken all kinds of bones.
And as far as stamina goes, Trump regularly gives hour plus standing speeches. Do you really think Biden could stand in the hot sun for an hour?
Here’s Biden unable to descend two (2!) stairs by himself: https://nypost.com/2024/06/28/us-news/jill-biden-helps-joe-o...
You’re seriously going to tell me that guy is more physically fit than Trump?
This is anecdotal, but it reminds me of my grandfather before he died. He had always been able to run on a treadmill and lift weights; then, he got cancer, and his health deteriorated to the point that he began to need a walker to get around, until he became bedridden and died.
[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-ph/news/other/joe-biden-goes-for-bike...
"Unfit for office" (Esper) "The greatest threat to democracy that we've ever seen." (Cobb) "he failed at being the president when we needed him to be the president" (mulvaney) "doesn't like to read, doesnt read briefing reports." (Tillerson) "absense of leadership, really anti-leadership" (McMaster) "wannabe dictator" (Kelly) "he shouldn't be near the oval office" (Barr) "a person who admires autocrats & murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, the Constitution, and rule of law" (Kelly) "God help us [if we's reelected]." (Kelly)
And simply, "he's an effing moron" (Tillerson).
Biden has always been a little weird with his vocal stutter, but he makes good points. He knows what's going on. He can talk to issues and hold a point. Trump's logic as he gets up on the podium & drunk uncle rambles is terrifying, both mean and vindictive when coherent but often just totally space case weirdo verbal diaherria. He's never been sharp. He's never been interested in the world, has always lived in his own head & it's only gotten worse & less & less intelligible. He's an effing moron and a mean nasty one at that. Biden is aging yes but he's a put together intelligent engaged listening person who reads his damned briefings & is engaged & interested & has ongoingly shown ability to go on talk shows & rallys & be strong, to talk intelligently to issues, to handle deep conversations well, & make sharp cases.
You don't see anything like this insult against character & intelligence against Biden. I think Biden is sharp, but even if you disagree, at least he started with a full deck of cards and some decency & respect for democracy. The other guy?
I think Bob Woodward really sums it up: "the president has the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader."
> I think Biden is sharp
and also delusional.
So do a very notable fraction of the people who worked for him!
I’m not comparing him to Trump btw. Just explaining why I’m perfectly happy that the dems are replacing Biden with someone else.
That comment was posted by 'readthenotes1.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/probability-of-dying-by-a...
Can't really deliver on your campaign promises if you're more likely than not to be dead before the end of your term.
The doublespeak from the Republican side regarding Biden's capabilities has been, frankly, astonishing.
That said, it's infuriating when you have an opponent that can literally say whatever he wants however unintelligible it may be and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said. The double standard is astonishing.
But yeah obviously there certainly are better candidates than Biden to run for president. Why he or she hasn't been found in 2020 eludes me.
Yeah, just three days ago, praising Hannibal Lecter, or remember "covfefe" from a few years back? Or the QAnon bunch where some people managed to assemble millions of people [1] by essentially doing "tea leaves predictions" on Trump speeches?
There is no equivalent to that level of derangedness on the Democrat side, not even close.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/qanon-groups-have-mil...
Meanwhile, early this month, Biden called himself the first black woman to serve with a black president, as well as referred to "vice president Trump" when apparently talking about Harris.
That one was a response to "and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said", because that is precisely what QAnon was/is: a bunch of people poring over Trump speeches and every tiny utterance of anyone in his circle to find "hidden meanings" like alleged raids on "pedos".
> Meanwhile, early this month, Biden called himself the first black woman to serve with a black president, as well as referred to "vice president Trump" when apparently talking about Harris.
He misspeaks and needs to correct himself. Yes. That's completely undeniable.
But hell, listen to a Trump speech and to a Biden speech. Trump is just a plain stream-of-consciousness braindump all the time, Biden at least generally manages to stick to the prompt.
Unfortunately, Trump has what I call the "entertainer instinct": he knows exactly and most especially instinctively how to entertain masses, how to make pictures and quotes. The best example is him getting shot - 99.999% of people would have fled, he raises his fist and yells "fight".
And in a political climate where it's not facts but pure and utter showmanship that wins an election, that's a problem.
Well we had the 2020 primaries. Bernie and Warren were too left to win a general election. Pete Buttigieg won Iowa, got 2nd in New Hampshire, but only cancelled the campaign after South Carolina, once it dawned that the South has too much of a quiet problem of Buttigieg being gay and preferring Biden simply because he was Obama VP. Without those sad facts, we could've had Buttigieg winning 2020 and 2024.
You have to be able to win elections at that level, and there's no participation trophies for feel-good runs by someone with a handicap, you just lose.
Unclear, but certainly not 0.
Things like empathy, quick thinking, emotional intelligence, a fresh perspective, broad knowledge of the world, a large vocabulary, and the self-confidence to go with your judgement calls are all involved in telling a single good joke to a crowd.
These are all fantastic things to see in a leader.
A group united towards a stupid purpose can be more effective than individuals acting towards more reasonable purposes. If this is true, you can select for both following (susceptibility) and leading (charisma).
I think to say that Donald Trump is anything but narrowly good at Charisma and personal marketing is a stretch.
I wouldn’t give him an integral to solve but that’s not what a leader is supposed to do either.
I think a major world leader needs more than charisma but it’s one of the first requirements.
What intellectually rigorous activity would you say he has an aptitude in?
Looking at the glowing media coverage of him pre-2015, he seems like a unique business genius.
The truth is probably in between.
Business and marketing aren’t rigorous intellectual activities like math, but they are bloody hard in a different way - even with an inheritance (how many born-rich kids die 100x richer? Almost none). The problems are very fuzzy and open-ended, and frequently don’t even look like a problem.
You can’t consistently solve these problems profitably over many years without some skill.
To be considered charming to a large group of people, like half the USA, you need to be conversant in things that are relevant to all of them. A narrow person can never have a wide appeal.
You're arguing a different point. This isn't about charisma. It's about a baseline level of communication.
I'm a Joe supporter but in recent interviews (like BET) there were two parts where I could not make out what he said after 10 rewinds.
The smart but uncharismatic folks seem better suited to institutional roles where they can guide policy in the right direction without being the public face of the policy. It's not all that different from the distinction between sales and the folks that design/make the product; the groups are complementary but divergent.
The one we live in, it is a hard disqualification, and there's an election in 3 months.
We won't fix everything that is broken with how people select leaders in the next 3 months.
His vocal cords are fine, it's just that the words don't make much sense, which is a pretty big problem in that position.
Dude, you just completely made that up. Certainly every news outlet I recall, from NY Times, WaPo and CNN to Fox News and the WSJ were all running a ton of articles questioning Biden's fitness for another term. None of them were "boldly proclaiming" anything.
Even the Democratic Party has given up on the far-fetched excuses. It’s time to surrender to the evidence. That example is just one out of dozens.
Anyone who thinks that Biden got confused and thought he was in a press conference with Vladimir Putin (!!) is just spouting nonsense.
That said, it's pretty obvious a lot of energy and fire that Biden previously had is no longer present. Or at least very inconsistently present.
the extreme change is worrisome. i mean is this him now? will it keep deteriorating? why would anyone think it wont. how much of a medical concern will be 1 year later. 2 3? this is what people are concerned with
2010, "Joe Biden, the vice-president who keeps putting his foot in it": https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/28/joe-biden-vice...
Those were just the top two results in Google for "biden vice president gaffe", limiting the date to before 2016.
I mean, it's probably gotten worse, although I can't really judge that. But it's certainly not a new thing. I'm not saying he's not too old and tired, I'm just saying that merely the mixing up of a name alone really isn't a sign of incompetence.
There is clearly something wrong with him that was not in evidence in 2020. Whether it's Parkinson's, senility, 12-day-old jet lag, I don't know. But it's clear that it's hard for him to carry on a conversation, and that is basically the job of a politician.
I'm honestly not sure what we're looking for in a debate, but most presidential debates since I've been a voter are contests to see who can look like they're listening the best while getting back to a rehearsed talking point the fastest. [1] When you combine that with trouble with words, and maybe some over training, it doesn't look good.
Does it mean he has trouble carrying on a conversation in a real setting? I don't know, it's a totally different setting with different expectations. We don't really get a window into that.
[1] Well except that MTV town hall. Pretty sure Bill had no talking points appropriate there.
But now his difficulty seems to come from difficulty understanding what is happening around him. He seemed confused by his surroundings multiple times during that awful debate.
I've seen a lot of Biden supporters pointing to his stutter and speaking difficulties, but his troubles have qualitatively and quantitatively changed, and definitely for the worse.
Maybe 10 years ago it was that.
But in the last couple of months, it's like his tongue is not moving right. I literally can't understand some of his sentences now, the syllables are so slurred and garbled.
could you point out the timestamp where his speech impediment is evident? this was 8 years ago and he appears to be a silver-tongued devil
Over the last few months I've generally defending his gaffs to friends even though I don't like Biden as a politician, because I think that kind of discourse is counterproductive politically and stigmatising socially, which I still feel.
However, I have to say, the recent downward spike in his ability to string a sentence together becomes concerning to me, not so much because I think it primary reflects any cognitive decline per se, but it seems to me like a sign that the pressure of the presidency and the campaign are affecting him in _some_ way that is causing his speech impediment to surface at its worst and most frequent yet. So I would still push back on a lot of what you are saying, but yes, at this point, something is clearly off there to a concerning degree.
Being ugly is a disqualifying trait for getting a job as a supermodel.
Being unfit is a disqualifying trait for being an Olympic athlete.
Being unable to stay awake and say coherent sentences is a disqualifying trait for being the president of the most powerful nation on earth.
Being black or latino is a disqualifying trait for playing a Roman emperor in a movie — which is why Netlix will surely try, because they’re unable to comprehend what the problem even is, and why their “equality” is groan-inducing.
PS: If I was a US citizen, I would vote for AOC not because of her sex or race but because neither of those influence my decision. Do they influence yours?
A latino man could almost certainly fit, though.
Given a person playing a Roman Emperor is acting in a role not laboring as a ruler, consider that:
The emperors Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius -- among Rome's best and wisest rulers -- and the poet Seneca all were of Spanish origin.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/horizon/june9...
The Four African Emperors were Septimius Severus, Clodius Albinus, Marcus Macrinus and Aemilianus.
https://peek-01.livejournal.com/62062.html
Being born in Roman Hispania isn't the same as being "of Spanish origin" or "latinx". Being born in Africa doesn't make you black. Elon Musk is the richest African in the world.
If Shaq had been born in China, would he be a good candidate to portray first sovereign Emperor of China?
A black bear born in the arctic isn't a polar bear.
However, when someone was previously verbally fluent and then the whole world can see that that person’s fluency has deteriorated, it’s completely reasonable to believe that deterioration of other mental functions is happening as well, as seems to be the case with Biden.
I occasionally call my kids by each others' names. My parents would call me by my brothers' names. This is a running joke in large families. I occasionally in large meetings swap the names of two products we're talking about and have to be corrected. It's just a very low-grade "verbal dyslexia" that means nothing except that the brain isn't a perfectly-wired machine.
* Swapping a name as he’s known to do, with the name of the person who is contextually-adjacent and the other main character?
* Thinking the man he just finished discussing our continual support against Russian expansion, was actually Vladimir Putin himself?
I’m only saying that life-long wors-swapping is not dementia, as so many say.
Whatever Trump says can be construed as some sort of 4d chess hidden message because of a cult of personality that has developed around him. He can hint that asylum seekers escaped from mental asylums but his base will not suspect that he may be the one confusing the two words and instead they will just cheer at the grotesque image because that's the kind of politically incorrect thing they want somebody to say (regardless of whether Trump did that on purpose or not).
I have the feeling that whatever Trump will say and will do will never ever be scrutinized by his side in a way that even remotely resembles the scrutiny to switch Biden has to be subjected to.
And that double standard speaks a lot on the troubled times we're living through.
The current generation reaching voting age would much rather send a text than call so.....
Tangential fact to Biden being able to coherently communicate such a fact or not though.
Could you provide us with the percentage of women getting raped by their sisters and in-laws?
But please, people, do not compare the average person in their 80's to what this man has to do daily.
Just alone entering a war room and giving an order to bomb a place, or watching the raw videos of war (which we luckily don't get access to) is something you don't come back from. This is not an average person, and he was doing OK after all.
However, he objectively got older. That's it. No coming back from that either...
at least i know my korean gpa has. man is crippled and vocal cords basically non existent due to his job there. but man is so sharp and smart mentally its actually shocking.
but bidens has had serious brain surgeries. that alone should have disqualified him from even running imo regardless of how his term went
Seriously, the stress he went through in the last 15-20 years, that's some s*. He even lost his son in 2015.
This guy has crazy good genes. And it sucks that people make fun of him. He should not go as a "joke". People should have some respect and understanding for him.
What a word, TIL
"When Biden stumbles over words, we question his state of mind; when Trump acts like a deranged street preacher, it’s … well, Tuesday. If Biden had suggested setting up migrants in a fight club,[1] he’d be out of the race already; Trump does it, and the country (as well as many in the media) shrugs. "
* Tom Nichols, https://archive.ph/XcMbP / https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/07/the-...
> “Did anyone ever hear of Dana White?” Trump asked during his speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference in Washington. “… I said, ‘Dana, I have an idea. Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league — these are the greatest fighters in the world — fight the champion of the migrants.’ I think the migrant guy might win; that’s how tough they are. He didn’t like that idea too much.”
* https://archive.ph/cQ4KA / https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/22/trump-chr...
And it's not like Trump is that much younger than Biden.
(A contributing factor is that he actually Has been misrepresented a few times by the media - the “bloodbath” comment was very clearly about the auto industry in context, so the right feels rightly aggrieved and the left & media lose credibility.)
Warning, explicit language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhkZMxgPxXU
The fact Trump has not changed from acting like a 'deranged street preacher' isn't exactly a point for him…
But looking across the pond, it doesn't look like Americans agree with me. :-/
Fun times, I guess.
On the other hand, American politics is so fickle and vain that even a minor gaffe on camera can doom a political career (see the "Dean Scream.") Although this standard only seems to apply to Democrats, it's still a factor. What really killed Hillary Clinton's chances wasn't systemic misogyny, or the email leaks, but her expression. She had a memeable crazy face, and that became her entire identity for many Americans. Now "Sleepy Joe" is the identity of Joe Biden.
The only question now is, what will be the meme that they deploy against Kamala Harris? I don't think the tried and true "probably a pedophile" or "crippling dementia" options are going to work, and "blood drinking satanic priestess" has probably worn out its welcome. They'll probably go "crypto-muslim" like they did with Obama.
edit: looks like they're going with "all of this is an attempted coup." A bold strategy by the insurrectionist party, going back to the "stolen election" well, but it seems to be a perennial favorite. Let's see if it works for them.
Is a younger leader better? Possibly. Speaking as a non-American, I have to note that, when Americans vote for a President, they're not just voting for one guy. They're voting for a guy who will select the entire white house staff. Biden surrounded himself with highly competent people with good ideas and they're why he's been an effective President. Obama could have easily done worse if he'd been less lucky with his staff selection. An old president who selects good staff can be effective.
Trump did worse during his previous term and would be objectively worse in his next precisely because he'll surround himself with family and yes-men. When staffing, a good leader tries to make himself the dumbest person in the room. Biden did that. Trump never will.
Case in point: The VP. In a Biden vs Trump contest, it was a very real possibility that either of their VP's would have to take over during their terms. Biden had Harris as his VP, and she's clearly ready to do the job. Trump chose a rookie senator yes-man with a profound lack of principles for his VP. The thought of Vance becoming President in 2026 or 2027 should terrify people.
Harris has been a ghost for 4 years, after dismally losing the 2020 primary, and being selected ostensibly because of her group identity.
Harris has at least been a formidable prosecuter and brings bone fide proven legal talent to the role, not to mention the $8,000 US plus Trump and his family have donated towards her election since 2011.
Exactly zero of them have the demanding job of a president.
If he's unfit to serve 6 months from now, then how is he fit to serve now?
He didn't endorse Kamala in his letter. We'll see what comes out of the spin cycle this week.
e: looks like Biden endorsed Kamala according to other publications
This election will come down to four battleground states. Those are the only states and battles that matter.
https://youtu.be/VxaRt-LlpEk?feature=shared
Reading this entire thread tbh has been a sad and worrying re-affirmation of my beliefs that we're all collectively "fucked". We literally can't put aside differences (myself included) and argue on facts and details, and instead resorting to tribalism.
The big reason we're resorting to tribalism, I think, is because of a peculiar element of human nature about wanting to "right" past "wrongs". So if me looking in from the outside, see the other side winning unfairly last time round, I'll support my side's wrongs despite them being objectively wrong (or what I don't even want) because I want to right the wrong of the past. That topped with the fact that the stakes are a whole lot higher each time means that neither side wants to "take one for the team" - because they know that if they did, the other side will just use the opportunity to the detriment of their opponents.
Do you have anything to back up that claim?
There are scores of voters planning to vote third party or sit out the election due to the lack of good, viable candidates. If the DNC nominated someone who honestly spoke to the ways our country is messed up and the things we'll need to do to change them they could easily see a considerable increase in their votership.
It's evident that someone in this thread is employing stylometry to profile users, likely to uncover user identities, all the while concealing their true identity. The comments' content, which tackles recent events and complex political strategies, is clearly written by individuals with a deep understanding of the subject matter.
Doxing, or attempting to dox, is a toxic behavior that should be strictly against HN rules. It's essential we maintain a safe and respectful environment for open discussion. Instead of indulging in digital detective work, let's focus on the topic at hand and avoid perpetuating a culture of surveillance.
I wish there was a filter to flag these AI profiles and just hide them in all threads.
Link: This video discusses the legal implications and potential consequences of Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential election, including the role of delegates, party rules, and state laws.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mPt-4Eqr35I
* I mean the way they seem to operate these days, where keeping the system running properly isn't considered important, and to a hardcore group is considered something to firmly oppose.
Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
<https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxxv>
There's also the fact that in ascending to the Presidency, Harris would no longer be President of the Senate, which would lose her tie-breaking vote, AFAIU.
Dang said as much in the mega thread[0]
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017129
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please re-read this sub-thread.
Note, most. Not all. Big stories such as these are, I'd say, on-topic.
Who's arguing with you?
Your comment doesn't follow at all.
Other commenters replied to the same parent, challenging their claim.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41026902
That nuance was lost on you then. And my nuance about general politics was lost on you, also. Existence of exceptions is implied in my comment.
Emphasis mine. This is not a “general politics” story and almost certainly qualifies as an “interesting new phenomenon”.
Who's arguing that it is?
>And you stated that general politics are not allowed under the submissions policy.
It's what the policy says. There's on-topic and off-topic with exceptions. Blanket statements about what "good hackers find interesting" is a partial representation of the policy.
> I’m pointing out that this is far from general.
Going back to you NOT answering my question, I'm not saying this is "general" either.
Obviously, you didn't read the whole thread.
Generally discussion works best around here when each participant only has to explain their own points. If people have to explain your own points to you it makes discussion kind of hard.
Explaining that the HN Guidelines has off-topic railings (with exceptions) too isn't saying that a tweet about POTUS resigning isn't a valid exception.
I guess people are on tilt because of the announcement.
The moderators can flag, delete or promote posts as they seem fit, without any transparency.
And of course there are some users that have the flag button which is a super-downvote button (more like downvote and remove).
The community has some input, true, but not as much as on reddit, definitely not as much as on 4chan.
1. This election will play a big part in what regulation is imposed on AI. The Democrats are more in favor of ethical and privacy limits on AI. The Republicans see AI as a crucial technology for the US to maintain military superiority and want to see a pretty much anything goes approach to get there.
2. There are similar large differences in how the parties approach privacy in general.
3. One of the common areas of technology discussed on HN is EVs. One party wants to encourage adoption of EVs. The other wants to discourage that--their VP candidate says EVs are a scam wants to cancel EV tax credits and give a $7500 tax credit for purchasing ICE vehicles.
4. They are also very far apart on areas of business law that massively affect technology companies, such as antitrust.
> Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year.
My main right now is who are they going to position in opposition to Trump? This is too little, too late. Four months until the Election... and I don't feel like the Democrat party has a strong candidacy showing at this point.
Edit : Typo in TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
Why does the US in specific have such drawn-out campaigns? Earlier this week, I saw a pundit commenting that 4 months before the election is too short notice to pick a new candidate. But there's countries in Europe that announce elections, pick candidates, do the campaigns, go to the pools, do the counts, and have the electees take office, all in less than 4 months (see e.g. Great Britain recently).
Obviously, in great Britain's recent election, nobody knew there was going to be an election until it was announced, so there was no way to jump the gun.
And the mid-terms make it even worse. De-facto the US runs on a two-year election cycle. I suspect this is part of the reason why things are so screwed in the first place.
The US is one of the earlier modern democracies and as a consequence there are lots of little implementation flaws. And any change is seen as blasphemy against the will of the founding fathers. Many other democracies either had more hindsight available when they wrote their constitution, or were more open to change
Some countries give tax payer money based on how you did previously which greatly benefits the status quo
With limited campaigns you usually run with people who are already known and have a long track record that's decently well known. The equivalent of running a Hillary Clinton or a Bernie Sanders. There shouldn't be much new stuff to drag up except their specific policies.
> Some countries give tax payer money based on how you did previously which greatly benefits the status quo
On the other hand if the state doesn't give parties money then the parties are just going to do whatever brings them the biggest donations, leading to a country run by the rich and the corporations. And you can't hand out money regardless of past performance since anyone can form a party at any time.
There is no winning solution here, but giving tax money to parties can be the smaller evil
I don't actually agree with that argument, of course. SCOTUS has been perfectly willing to go along with "time and manner" regulations on political speech in the past and I don't see why "nobody can spend more than $X or campaign longer than Y days" is forbidden when "nobody can protest the G7 summit" is. The US's free speech extremism has, in practice, turned into a delegated right to censorship. And under current SCOTUS interpretations of the Constitution, the government is equally powerless to stop both speech and private censorship.
The true answer, of course, is that Trump and the donor class have coopted SCOTUS into an instrument of centralized power. SCOTUS is the scorpion[0] that stung the Progressive frog. They make this shit up as they go - free speech for me, censorship for thee. Fortunately, SCOTUS's legitimacy is in the toilet, and that power base can be broken; but it requires Congress and the President act to defang SCOTUS in a way that does not merely shift power. It needs to be distributed again.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
That aside, if you're interested in US politics you might wanna look at the details of those decisions. Eg, read this section about the case that brought down Chevron deference. You'll see that pretty much any judge or jury would have sided with the plaintiffs: https://loperbrightcase.com/#:~:text=livelihoods%20at%20risk...
Americans not caring about these issues seems indicative of the media not being fit for purpose - rather than the issues not being existential. I'd argue that the less democratic things get, the more disengaged people tend to become about the details of political and legal decisions. Since they have less influence on them and are already suffering lacks lower down the pyramid of needs.
From Sotomayor's dissent
"Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law. "
What do you think of the case that brought down Chevron deference? That should be a lot easier for you to analyze. Ie. "NOAA fucked around and found out"
According to the Supreme Court, the only appropriate venue for that question is a Congressional impeachment. The only time when it looked like a President was going to be impeached and convicted was Nixon. That's why he resigned. But I doubt that would happen today. In fact, you can blame Democrats for this: they didn't convict Clinton when he was trading sexual favors, even though that was absolutely something they should have[0]. And Republicans refused to convict Trump[1] for holding up Ukraine aid for political advantage or for inciting a riot in the Capitol building. It's like if you couldn't be convicted for beating and robbing someone because you refused to sign the guilty plea.
As for Chevron deference, let us keep in mind that the alternative to Chevron is legislating from the bench. SCOTUS consistently picks the interpretation of the Constitution that assigns the most power to the judicial branch, which they have absolute control over. The ostensible check on this power is Congress writing a new law, but Congress has been hung for over a decade, which means SCOTUS gets to cowboy-code whatever they want.
[0] During the Me Too era of sexual harassment revelations Democrats started realizing "oh wait, we did WHAT back then?!" and recanting
[1] A president so nice we impeached him twice.
> the alternative to Chevron is legislating from the bench
Only when a law is unclear. Interpreting thaw is kinda why these courts exist
Others, from 1976 -- 2021: "Campaign Finance and the Supreme Court" <https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/campaign-financ...>
Anyone who uses this reasoning (I understand you’re not doing so) should immediately be shut up by quoting the inscription on the southeast interior wall of the Jefferson Memorial:
> I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
That’s as clear as can be: to honour the founding fathers’ intention, laws must not remain static.
The US has this pretty weird civil religion where the constitution is the holy text and the people that wrote the constitution are prophets.
Most other countries don't have that. A lot of democracies don't even have constitutions (UK, for example). The US constitution is an interesting historical document, but it's just a collection of laws. There are a lot of things democracies have figured out since it was written. Amendments are basically impossible at this point because the canon is closed and American politics have evolved to make it structurally impossible.
It should be possible to argue that laws should be fluid without appealing to the prophets of the civil religion. You could, you know, just talk about why it's a good idea. Shouldn't that be more powerful than trying to guess what someone who lived multiple centuries ago would have thought about it?
I’m not saying laws should evolve because a founding father said so. I’m saying that people who invoke the founding fathers’ will as a reason to not change laws should be corrected that a founding father specifically said that laws should be fluid.
Yes, invoking the founding fathers is a stupid argument. And in addition to being stupid it’s also wrong. Meaning there’s zero reason to ever use that argument and people who do can be contradicted by their own logic.
> It should be possible to argue that laws should be fluid without appealing to the prophets of the civil religion. You could, you know, just talk about why it's a good idea. Shouldn't that be more powerful than trying to guess what someone who lived multiple centuries ago would have thought about it?
Yes, you are absolutely right that it should be possible to argue in that way and discussing the merit of the idea should be more powerful than invoking a bunch of dead guys. But unfortunately it’s not. The people who shout about the founding fathers are not the ones you can convince with reason alone. You’re lucky if they pay attention to your whole argument. Invoking the founding fathers is an emotional argument disguising itself as a rational one.
Which is precisely why I’m interested in seeing what would be the reply to “but the founding fathers which you are invoking disagree with the point you’re making”. Though I have no illusions that would fix the issue, people are able contort to into extra planes of existence to not cede their point. Watch Jordan Klepper’s “Fingers the Pulse” segments for examples.
Presumably you mean in Europe, but most countries around the world are parliamentary. They have no system of checks and balances due to legislative capture; the Executive really has no power and can be trivially forced to resign. There's no real point in running a huge campaign for a figurehead that doesn't have any real independence.
Plus, it would go without mentioning that the USA is the world's largest economy, so it's not surprising a lot of money would be diverted to elections with economic consequences.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the one-month limit is by law. Candidates are not allowed to campaign for longer than that. Just a little context I wanted to add for those that are unfamiliar.
:thumbs_up
I forget which country but there is one that limits campaigning to a single month. It has been proposed as a way to remove money from influencing politics but hasn't really gotten much traction elsewhere.
The only possible way to vote earlier is when a government falls and they write out new elections but that is extremely rare.
I think you mean 5, not 4.
> The only possible way to vote earlier is when a government falls and they write out new elections but that is extremely rare.
It's not rare in many other EU countries - and even when there are no "snap" elections the there may be some flexibility about the timeline of the "standard" ones. I'm not sure that "fixed schedule is the case for most EU countries" is a good description, compared to the US where the exact date is known.
Obviously in a sense politicians are always campaigning, in the sense that they're always looking to deliver on their election promises, raise their personal profile, announce popular policies, kiss babies and so on. But that's a constant background effort, rather than an election-specific effort.
Perhaps the most important factor is the campaign spending limit; a campaign might have £50,000 to spend in a constituency with 70,000 voters and when the money runs out, they can't legally spend any more. So any money you spend early is money you can't spend later.
Also a great deal of campaigning involves the candidate physically being in their constituency, not in Westminster. So to start campaigning early would involve a burdensome amount of travel, and much less free time to spend with family.
During the short campaign period, parliament is dissolved and public servants enter 'Purdah' [1] where no important policies can be announced. Candidates can spend all their time in their constituencies campaigning - but the government is basically in stasis.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdah_(pre-election_period)
1. Republican primaries
2. Democratic primaries
3. General election
The drawn-out part is the primaries, part of which are parties trying to get their candidates in the news for a while. Once the parties officially pick a candidate — July this year for the Republicans, August for Democrats — the election proceeds on a pretty quick timetable.
The UK doesn't do primary elections to the same extent, nor do most parliamentary democracies. So they're faster, since there's just a general election.
The concern about Kamala's "short" time to make a case for electing her to the presidency is that she didn't get to make use of the ~year+ news cycles of the primaries, and will only have the general election to convince voters. (There's also a specter of it being "undemocratic" since party nominees are typically elected by the party's voters, rather than chosen by officials, but since she was Biden's VP in 2020, and he won the election, IMO this is overblown: the entire point of a VP is to take over if the president is unable to function, which is what happened in this case. Her claim to democratic election is that voters chose the Biden/Harris ticket in a general election, which is pretty reasonable.)
Technically we only vote for the representative in our local constituency, but who is going to end up PM is a big factor. We know what the options are before the election is announced: the current PM and the Leader of the Opposition (although in theory the leader of one of the smaller parties is also possible). Therefore no need for a primary process.
In Canada we know who the next 2 primary candidates were a year ago and elections not until next yr. That's almost always how it works, whether it's formalized or not.
Most other countries have much shorter election periods. I for one would love if ours was shorter. Our politicians spend more time campaigning and raising money than they do governing
Unless you’re suggesting the billionaires made him senile that wasn’t his undoing. He was a decent president, and accomplished some nice things, but his undoing is the fact that he can no longer speak in full sentences without folks holding their breath.
During the talk people are cheering and laughing along... granted... in pure transcript form this does sounds rather nonesense.
The video is found at the very bottom of this article.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/06/26/trump-water-faucets-r...
In 2021, the Biden administration reversed Trump's rule that previously increased the flow of water in showerheads. The Washington Post reported at the time, "Trump's shower head rule was part of a broader effort within the administration to relax energy efficiency standards and regulations for an array of household appliances, including dishwashers, washing machines and clothes dryers."
Curiously, his tweet from just 18 hours ago seemed like he was still in the race. I wonder what changed.
The latter half of my comment was obviously more salient in regard to national politics. Not sure why you ignored that.
Manchin is a centrist. In a divided America, that's a very good thing.
Remember 90% of politics in public is a mix of Kabuki theater and WWF Wrestling.
The stepping down announcement was probably a layoff notice to his staff. I bet many are/were shocked.
Then we could have had a better primary process, instead of putting huge amounts of effort into pushing a critically weak candidate.
People have been saying this for many months, and were basically told to stop helping Trump win. Turns out those people were right - so why defend the lies?
There was already an incident [1] where his press secretary tweeted about running for president on her own account, so she or her people are presumably in charge of it.
1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Even if Biden had personally authored and posted every one his tweets, that would have nothing to do with whether aides were kept in the loop about major campaign announcements.
This thread is discussing an alleged inconsistency (or quick reversal) in his Twitter messaging.
I agree with what you wrote. The people running Biden's campaign were not told the news 10 hours in advance - nor 10 minutes in advance. I doubt those messages were sent by the same people.
Monday: layoffs
Where is the mythical vouch feature I could never find ? A yes I believe it's not yet dead, so you can't vouch ?
With a comment, I think that if it's flagged (more than some number of times), then it's dead. (It's also dead if the user is shadowbanned, or if it's downvoted to -4.) If you think that's wrong, you can (and should!) vouch for it.
With a post, it can be flagged but not dead. Such threads can be replied to. Or a thread can be dead, in which case it cannot be replied to, but it can be vouched.
That's my understanding, but I could be wrong.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526450>
Are there large numbers of people like this? Nobody knows, but the media certainly does a good job of pushing that narrative. Informing you is not their job, getting you scared and angered is.
I'm gonna vote for the non-fascist one. I wish Biden had stepped down much sooner, but it doesn't change the reality that I am scared of the violence that might arise if the right wins. Our country is in a state of corruption, the supreme court needs to be radically reigned-in and I only see one path before November to have a chance at addressing all these issues, and it's voting Democrats as much as we can.
I think they were well on their way to losing and so they hit the panic button with good reason, if anything this will now introduce some uncertainty which improves their chances.
Things are swinging back the other direction now, as seen by people like Rene Gonzalez (who ran on re-funding and utilizing police toward the local homeless problems) beating out the incumbent Jo Ann Hardesty (who refused to work with police in almost any capacity) in 2022, and a few more police re-funding votes passed since then.
After this, our Black mayor ran on a campaign of funding the police and won.
Let’s hope the Dem’s circular firing squad puts down its guns so they can quickly concentrate on winning the election with someone … probably Harris is the simplest answer.
The tension in the US system is between founders who believed in the virtue of the commoner and founders who feared mobocracy. At various levels of the system, the system is designed to be elitist. And the parties are fundamentally private institutions and can be as populist or elitist as they want (worth noting: in practice, the GOP constitution is more populist than the Democrat constitution, which is one of the reasons they nominated Trump; there weren't backstops in the GOP like superdelegates to push him off the ticket).
The Electoral College is often cited as serving a similar purpose... I think recent events show despite paying the consistent premium it extracts in elitist gatekeeping, when it finally mattered it failed to provide the promised protection against unethical demagogues.
2) republican candidate considered a crook
3) it's in Chicago
Whatever they do, don't do what the DNC did in 1968 again, lets try to at least make new mistakes this time I guess?
Chicago Mayor Daley and his police force made the mistakes with the protestors, much of the media coverage of the police riots falsely made it look like it was happening right outside the convention site.
I won't pretend to know the history well enough to know if there was any workable approach then, but the convention process in 1968 definitely didn't work to produce a candidate Dems were excited about at the end of it, the turnout was low and Humphrey lost in a landslide.
Also, I think some of it was happening right outside the convention site - Dan Rather was famously manhandled on national television by security guards while trying to interview someone leaving the convention.
Also, I just read that Harris has money pouring in. The donors may effectively decide this before anyone else can get traction.
Question out of curiosity, not a challenge. I don't follow US politics that closely.
There's a reason the GOP aren't touching most of the provisions in the first 3 Acts (especially with Vance as Veep). [0][1]
Vance is backed by Horowitz and Andreessen, and both heavily benefited from the IRA and CHIPS various provisions (but got hit by the capital gains tax changes that Biden proposed a couple months ago [2]).
The biggest issue was the Biden admin's inability to promote the impact of all of these. Biden hasn't been campaigning across America as much as his predecessors.
[0] - https://www.eiu.com/n/us-election-its-impact-on-industrial-p...
[1] - https://www.eiu.com/n/us-election-its-impact-on-us-trade-pol...
[2] - https://a16z.com/the-little-tech-agenda/
The issue was Biden was over-managed because of his reputation of "Bidenisms" for which he has been mocked about for decades [0][1]
This meant he kept campaigning to a minimum and was extremely managed.
It kept gaffes to a minimum but also severely decreased his media time.
[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/joe-biden-unspools-a...
[1] - https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/joe-biden-bi...
> MADLAND: Yeah, I talked to a lot of workers on the site, and this is this very large facility in rural Tennessee, a couple hours outside of Memphis. It's going to be a big electric vehicle battery and manufacturing construction in an area that had for 20, 30 years, really tried to spur investment, and nothing had happened. [...] So these big steps forward in their lives that you can see from these projects, which are good union jobs, constructing the big facility. Then when I also spoke to them and said, well, how or why do you think this project came to be? This project received many billions of dollars in loans from the federal government as part of these investments we're talking about. It also received significant state funding. And the workers to unanimously said, Well, I credit Ford, which is the big Ford Motor Company as a joint investment there. And then I would probe and push and they'd say, Well, I also credit my union for helping make this happen. I had to keep asking and asking before ever mention any elected officials that had anything to do with it. But their sentiment was, well, if any, elected official had anything to do with it. So I would like that and support them, but I have no idea about this.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-ford-ev-battery-plan...
https://apnews.com/article/ford-electric-vehicles-battery-te...
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/g-s1-9460
Plenty of peer funds did the same thing.
Even if Trump wins in November, most of the provisions in the acts I mentioned will be retained, especially given that a Thiel and A16Z acolyte is Veep and an early MS alum is cabinet track.
This is a MASSIVE change in the VC/PE industry which has concentrated on various flavors of SaaS for the past decade+.
An entire ecosystem of research grants, commercialization grants, and private sector deal flow has now restarted in the sectors above that hasn't been seen in the past decade.
But I believe in market economy, and to me it looks like VC/PE didn't invest into hardware much because didn't believe in positive ROI in current condition.
Not exactly.
It was because of the upfront cost and lack of deal flow.
Before the various IRA and CHIPS provisions passed, you might get $200k at most from grants to commercialize research in the Energy or Hardware space. The rest would be fronted from the private sector so you're looking at an additional $800k-1M of private money at the pre-seed/seed stage. On top of that, deal flow was weak, so it's harder to fund later series or get good exits during an M&A event.
This is a very high upfront cost so obviously SaaS made sense due to much higher margins.
After IRA and CHIPS, you could expect to see an additional $300-500k in grants, which means my upfront cost in funding is lower.
Furthermore, the government is providing tax credits and grants to private sector players to minimize the amount of upfront money they need to spend (say) building a Battery Recycling plant or a Chip Packaging factory.
This means there is now much more money sloshing in these segments as a significant portion of my upfront risk has been subsidized by the US government. That money can now be deployed in either funding research projects commercializing into startups, re-investing in existing players to help their own M&A strategy, and funding additional research in the spaces above.
Budget deficits have been smaller under Biden though.
But I don't buy the point that current president is good because he is not as bad as previous in spending.
Seeing as Trump is a Republican, and that his spending and economy were on brand for the Republican party, I see no reason to assume covid was the sole cause. (Is it your opinion is that Trump is a RINO who runs the country like a Democrat, and covid disguised that?)
Given that the US economy has recovered from covid dramatically better than the economies of all other major nations, I am not inclined to assume that the US economy is currently in poor hands. On the contrary, it sure seems to be in the best hands that exist anywhere in the world.
as I said I don't think checking historical trends is excuse for current policy.
> Seeing as Trump is a Republican, and that his spending and economy were on brand for the Republican party, I see no reason to assume covid was the sole cause
first two years of his presidency deficit was relatively low
> Given that the US economy has recovered from covid dramatically better than the economies of all other major nations, I am not inclined to assume that the US economy is currently in poor hands. On the contrary, it sure seems to be in the best hands that exist anywhere in the world.
this is a loaded question. Recovery was in expense of inflation, rise of debt. One would need to do some quantitative calculation to see if current situation is result of actual policies (and which policies: Trump's or Biden's), or just economy is flexible itself and if result could be better and if spendings were justified(or went to real estate market and stocks).
I wasn't excusing current policy. I was making the case that Trump's economic failures were due in large part to Republican Party policies, not just to covid.
>first two years of his presidency deficit was relatively low
It took him a while to overcome Obama's economic policies, but he was certainly making headway in damaging the US economy and increasing deficit spending by the time covid hit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Donal...
>this is a loaded question.
Well, that's a novel use of the term "loaded question". It wasn't even a question at all; it was a simple statement of my opinion.
>One would need to do some quantitative calculation...
Fortunately, the field of economics is dedicated to doing quantitative calculations and making assessments like these.
Economists strongly favor policies that Democrats tend to adopt (especially demand-side economics: think lower taxes for the poor and higher taxes for the rich and for businesses, relief of personal debt, a stronger safety net for the unemployed, cheaper and more accessible healthcare, more spending on public services that aid economic development such infrastructure and education, etc.) and oppose economic policies that Republicans tend to adopt (especially supply-side economics: lower taxes for the rich and for businesses, union busting, a weaker safety net for the unemployed, healthcare that preferences insurance companies, reduced spending or even outright privatization of public services that aid economic development such as the postal service, etc.).
could you give citation, who are those economists? Or all of them? Or majority?
You are making very many unobvious statements with chatgpt confidence.
There are other places as well, but this is the most accessible one I know of for people without access to economics publications.
I formed my understanding of economists' opinions on policy by reading data like this. It's highly educational, very easy to read, and not biased and cherry-picked like articles and opinion pieces are.
If pure data in a highly accessible format not good enough for you, it sounds like nothing would be.
Edit: Yea. That’s what I thought.
Solar is immensely cheap to the point where it's often cheaper than arbitrary other surfaces. Their maintenance is very low, much more so than nuclear. And land is not an issue for the US or China, the two places where decarbonizing energy is most important. Both have massive swaths of desert that is uninhabited, and where the addition of shade will likely net benefit the local ecosystem.
I agree that solar panel creation produces a fair amount of pollution, but then, so does nuclear power generation. In both cases this can and should be dealt with safely.
It's very possible to construct an argument (certainly I'd believe it) that it didn't actually affect inflation per se and that the inflation burst was transient and would have subsided anyway. It's absolutely not correct to say inflation wasn't "addressed".
Has it not? Mine has. Wages as a whole have. In fact wage growth has been historically robust for the last decade or so. Here's a FRED graph for "median usual weekly real[1] earnings", which correlates well to the kind of working class argument people usually make in this space: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Note how it has been going inexorably upwards since 2014 or so, and in fact the inflation burst turns out to be the correction to a very rapid spike in wages (due to pandemic assistance) that only corrects downward to the upward curve.
I really wish people who wanted to argue about inflation would do it with more numbers and less "lol".
[1] "Real" means "inflation adjusted" in this context
I'm literally linking to FRED charts trying to have a numerate discussion about this stuff...
Can you cite some research or measurements or anything about this "perceived inflation" metric you're talking about? Like, where are the numbers? I'm pretty sure you just made it up, no?
Just linking a bunch of numbers does not make an argument. You have to actually talk and respond to the actual topic being discussed.
But in the real world, you do admit that current inflation as traditionally understood by centuries of economics is a little under 3% right now, right?
And absolutely not lol, the numbers are cooked up, as I said before. You are really really bad at reading comprehension.
To wit: you're just simply wrong here, and instead of arguing from a rational basis you're hiding behind your philosophical right to be wrong about whatever you want. And that's very distressing to see on a site like HN.
And now we're doing goalpost motion. This is how this always goes. Indeed, some things are more expensive and some things are less expensive. And that can change across regions and subeconomies, and even demographically to the extent that different groups spend in different ways. And this is interesting and important.
But it's absolutely not about "inflation" or "wages" and if you come back from an incorrectly-stated argument about inflation/affordability/whatever by saying "OK fine but this is actually about housing policy", you just look silly.
The fact that housing is expensive in some markets isn't a refutation that people are making more money, it just isn't.
EDIT:
But in fact FRED is great, so I generated your chart for you showing the ratio of the CPI urban rent metric to nominal (not "real" this time) hourly earnings: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qtNi
And.. you're kinda wrong here too. It's true that the chart is going upwards, but only by about 8-9% since 2006 (the earliest date where we have both data points). And very notably:
1. Most of the growth was from 2011-2018 or so, not a recent phenomenon at all
2. There was a huge dip during the pandemic (because of assistance programs, it's the same effect I mentioned upthread) that we've only just recovered from in the last few months. The recent rapid rise of "rent costs as a fraction of income" is just taking back all the boon people got earlier.
3. It's actually levelled off since 2023.
Again, there's data to this stuff, and it doesn't support your position.
TL;DR: 100% credit? Of course not. But has Biden's administration been more effective at advancing its policies through the legislative than the previous administration? IMO yes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Plan
Surviving four years without starting a new boots on ground war (also Trump gets credit for that)
Calling out china on its bs (also Trump gets credit for that)
In practical terms the big differentiating factor between Biden and Trump terms is that trump is soft-pro-putin and Biden is anti-putin. And trump freed some black prisoners who probably shouldn't be in jail anymore
Moving forward, Biden is likely to be pro-taiwan and trump has been making anti-taiwan rhetoric
Modern politics is such a hole - we are praising a politician for not starting a war.
> Calling out china on its bs What does it mean?
Slava Ukraine
And an issue with just spending money is that we have to wait a year or two to figure out if the spent money was effective (unlikely?).
And continuing the trade war. Then people act surprised when inflation is high. Recently, I think Jay Powell has even called out congress and the president for continuing to spend.
In terms of core policy reform beneath all of the money spending: the current administration seems to place much greater emphasis on capital projects (repairing and building new infrastructure, including energy infrastructure) than the previous one did.
Using Trump as an excuse for not passing any bills on immigration, LGBT rights, abortion, etc when he didn't hold any political position for 4 years is the very definition of ineffective leadership.
"Senior Senate Republicans are furious that Donald Trump may have killed an emerging bipartisan deal over the southern border, depriving them of a key legislative achievement on a pressing national priority and offering a preview of what’s to come with Trump as their likely presidential nominee.
In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable."
That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
I'm just curious.. in your mind, what was the objective of storming the beach at Normandy? What do you think Americans were fighting to preserve?
to my understanding, he wasn't afraid of splitting the vote and was vocal about it as far back as 2022. And apparently the R's that publicly slammed him did not want to call that bluff.
So... maybe?
Also this so-called immigration bill contained billions for Ukraine, Israel, etc. That along with the fact that most of the bill sought only to facilitate getting more migrants through the system more quickly, and of course the bill was DOA. Saying it was Trump who killed it is just conjecture, and reactions from Senate and House Republicans indicates there was zero support for the bill as written.
Interestingly the House passed an immigration bill in 2023 that the Senate never voted on. Along with the removal of all of Trump's border-related executive orders, it indicates that Democrats are not seriously interested in border security.
It all played out in public, just like everything with Trump. There is no need to lie shamelessly on HN, it won’t get you anything.
I'd rather listen to the thoughts of the Speaker directly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii0tl8d5G3g
There is no chance Republicans would vote for that bill, they don't need Trump to persuade them.
The IRA is trying to address climate change, yes. But there's the problem of relying on government to have any idea of where to inject money to make the most difference, trusting the government to not just inject money wherever it benefits the most politically connected, and avoiding massive fraud (see the SBA loans during COVID). Not to mention the insane irony of something called the "Inflation Reduction Act" being a massive spending bill.
Point being: Number of bills passed and billions of dollars spent will be terrible metrics for how effective a politician is because of all those nuances.
> And an issue with just spending money is that we have to wait a year or two to figure out if the spent money was effective
That’s an issue with practically all legislation.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/joe-biden-age-conditi...
Are you aware this is actually what multiple RNC candidates were doing?
> 'he' did not allow silly things like the supreme court stop him from attempting to buy voters by cancelling their student loan debt
This is moronic. Farmers receive the most subsidies, is the RNC buying their votes by enacting policy? You could call literally anything "buying votes"
Your post is beyond biased, it's contradicting itself.
Sure, they flew migrants to 'sanctuary cities' - remember the panic on Martha's Vineyard when a few of them showed up and remember how quickly they were shuffled away by the virtuous inhabitants of that island - to demonstrate the magnitude of the problem. They were very vocal about it and did it out in the open, inviting press and publishing widely about their intents. That is not what I referred to. I was referring to the secretive night flights ordered by Biden's government, something along these lines:
https://homeland.house.gov/2024/04/30/new-documents-reveal-a...
a subpoena of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [...] identified over 50 airport locations, including our nation’s capital, used by DHS to help process into the country more than 400,000 inadmissible aliens through the administration’s unlawful Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) mass-parole program. The program was officially launched in January 2023, and the documents obtained by the Committee cover the period from January-August 2023—accounting for roughly 200,000 of these individuals.
> This is moronic. Farmers receive the most subsidies, is the RNC buying their votes by enacting policy?
Apart from the fact that both parties are in on the farm subsidy racket - the main difference being that the 'democrats' specifically target 'farmers of colour' through the 'black farmer relief program' [1] - there is a clear difference in that those programs have been going on for decades while the 'student loan debt forgiveness' scheme popped into existence at just the right time to attract voters for the upcoming elections.
And yes, of course my post is biased, I am after all playing devil's advocate to defend the 'effective' Biden presidency in ways most likely not intended by the parent poster.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/black-farmers.html
And? You are aware that promising to do things for voters that aren't being done yet is not exactly a Machiavellian scheme. It's how a policy gets started. Do we just not do anything because that would be new and scary? It's a response to the growing balloon of college costs and lack of opportunities for degree holders. Being $100,000+ in debt for no payoff is a scam, not debt relief.
I know you're pretending to play devils advocate but you are transparently being critical of politicians doing the bare minimum of their job because they have a D next to their name. Devils advocate means you are taking a position you don't agree with for the exercise of it. You are making bad faith statements about a party you visibly hate.
> Apart from the fact that both parties are in on the farm subsidy racket - the main difference being that the 'democrats' specifically target 'farmers of colour' through the 'black farmer relief program'
So you think they're both buying peoples votes unethically, but it's worse for the DNC because they're black. Got it. As if white people aren't the most catered to in politics.
Blue=good Red=bad
On the contrary, the processes that anointed Hillary in 2016 and Biden round 2 in 2024 were exactly the kind of "well, it's this person's turn now" decisions that were bad, anti-democratic (lower-case d) choices previously. I'm not looking for a "circular firing squad" but neither do I think some sort of automatic anointment of Harris is what people want either.
Regardless of what people want (and FWIW I agree that Hilary getting rammed down our throats was highly anti-democratic) at this stage of the game, Harris is the only person who can benefit from Biden's warchest. Barring somebody like Dwayne Johnson deciding to enter politics and stealing the show, Harris is the solitary candidate who is poised to hit the ground running with an adequate campaign today. And with so little time before the election, I think the only choice Democrats have today is to hold their noses and vote.
Unless they had some tricky campaign finance exception, it had to be Harris.
Hillary Clinton basically took control over the DNC through financial dealings that Brazile (who took over as head of the DNC after these dealings) characterized as "if not illegal, then at least unethical".
You think it's notably corrupt that... an incumbent president gets to run for re-election? You might argue this was a bad idea. You could argue it's counter to the way the campaign was presented in 2020. But it's hardly surprising; it's literally the way we've done things for hundreds of years!
But we all have this idea that our candidate will win in a perfect situation that the party will never give us, and while it's good to argue for choices, I'm skipping past the inevitable frustration. Harris was nowhere near my first choice, now or in 2020, but she is qualified. Realistically it's going to be her, whether we agree now or in a few weeks.
I agree that it's best if she earns it, but "earn" looks like something different to everyone and to some, nothing will be enough because their preferred candidate didn't win.
The Democrats have got it all going for them; both in absolute numbers of votes and also of financial support. Life is interesting...
He did not really do this.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/11/biden-single-term-0...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/09/politics/joe-biden-bridge...
(To clarify my political position, i'm pro-Democrat and think Biden wasn't a bad president, though i think he completely dropped the ball on the foreign policy - while Ukraine and Israel are more prominent, they cause multipage flamewars, so instead i'd point to Houthis where i think majority can agree with me that what Houtis do in Red Sea is just plain war crimes (intentional attacks on civilian shipping) and that should have been immediately nipped in the bud by the overwhelming US and allies' force in the region - if anything, protection of civilian shipping is one of the most legitimate major uses of the Navy, and i'd say it is a direct duty of the president to put it to such a use when the need arises)
There was a whole primary with like 12 other candidates and Biden won though. Bernie, Warren, Andrew Yang all had their shot, some did pretty well, but ultimately the democratic base voted for Biden
Does no one remember what actually happened?
All the other candidates except Warren made back room deals and dropped out around Iowa, suddenly and for no reason. Leaving Biden as the obvious selection, and Warren there to siphon off Bernie support to make sure he wouldn’t be a problem.
The base voted for Biden after they had no choice.
They quit because they got their faces ripped off in a fair fight, not because of some backroom party shenanigans.
https://www.newsweek.com/msnbc-host-chris-matthews-ties-bern...
The associated press wouldn't even call a winner for the Iowa caucus due to how poorly it was run https://apnews.com/article/fc6777e93b8c50b2fd20e0d31fcc43b3
There were definitely some interesting things going on in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Biden keeps saying democracy is at stake but the DNC seems to keep avoid any democratic process to find their candidate.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilding_v._DNC_Services_Corp.
People like to imagine that the Parties are these kind of quasi-public entities that exist to serve the American people. They’re not. They’re private entities that are vehicles for the acquisition of power across local, State and Federal offices that are in a perpetual term-based competition with each other. We tolerate their campaigns because their battlefield is the ballot box instead of actual fields, but nominee selection still happens at conventions run by the parties themselves.
The Primary system you are familiar with is one that the Republicans and Democrats chose for themselves to inform their overall decisions on who to put forward as the candidate flying under their banner and has only been around since 1972.
As I understand it this was the position of the US Founders as well (and it is also mine).
Harris being immediately endorsed by basically all of the alternative candidates (Newsom, Whitmer, etc.) shows that her campaign has its shit together, and moving through the nomination process without conflict leaves fewer weaknesses for the opposition to take advantage of.
It’s definitely one of those thing that make people like me, who want good faith honesty in politics angry, because “he didn’t actually say it” politics is why gotcha politics exists.
Everyone expected him to drop out earlier, but I think the reason he stayed in as long as he did was to take all the bullets for Kamala until he felt confident all the other potential challengers would get behind her.
What he didn't want to do was drop out early, let Kamala get battered and bloodied by her own party nomination process, win the nomination, then lose to Trump just because she'd been dragged through the mud in the media for months.
The more simple explanation, in my opinion, is that Biden is exactly what some had thought for over a year now - a person getting older and starting to run into cognitive and physical decline. I've watched multiple family members go through this, and the picture of a person in the middle of decline lying to themselves about their new reality and stubbornly refusing to accept it fits perfectly well.
I put some of the blame on Biden because the botched Afghanistan withdrawal sent the message that the US doesn't want to get involved with regional conflicts, emboldening Russia, Hamas, and Iran.
The agreement was to leave in May. The US left in basically August which is 4 months after the agreed upon time.
That said, if though basically 20 years of "occupation" the US couldn't nation build Afghanistan into being able to defend itself vs the Taliban I don't think you can point at a single president.
The biggest EV manufacturers in the U.S. are Tesla and Ford, as far as I can tell. No Chinese manufacturer I'm aware of has made significant inroads.
The first clue to differentiating a contingency from an active plan is resource allocation. Russia moved about 80,000 troops to the Ukrainian border a full 13 months before the invasion. That's over 50% of the force that would eventually enter Ukraine in February 2022 and also about 25% to 35% of Russia's entire non-conscript military force.
Putin would have just thought up another "reason" to invade in a year or two.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-19/trump-wel...
That hasn’t been because of Biden. It’s because they make non-US market vehicles specifically.
We can’t make $5000 new vehicles. They can’t pass our regulations and standards while making the profits they like.
I worked with Beijing Jeep awhile back. They have no interest in the US market.
No wait a minute, Putin did invade Georgia! He was going to invade Ukraine no matter what appeasement offerings were presented.
But then again, maybe there's some merit to Putin's paranoia that NATO is "gobbling" up these countries to create a military circle around Russia in preparation for a future invasion. At least in his understanding, that's a logical conclusion.
But he must knows he's running the country like a thug, with oligarchs being forced to tithe to him, and he hates the idea of citizens revolting to topple down other thugs (like they did in Ukraine), because if that idea catches on, that might happen to him too. I wonder if he draws a faulty conclusion that these revolutions are EU/NATO/Western-engineered because they're evil, instead of coming from the citizens themselves who are fed up with being robbed by the elite.
Hah, ironcally enough, Russia runs a propaganda network (or so we've been told) that tricks the population in EU/USA to moan about their rulers and be rightwing populists...
For the non-stupid answer to your opposite-of-that question: these are takes, and for one thing I claimed, I said "he must", i.e. it's a guess, because if he doesn't realize he's a thug, he'd be dumb.
OK I did not signify that the sentence "At least in his understanding, that's a logical conclusion." is a guess of mine. My bad?
Which has been good for the USA. It weakens both russia and europe. And if ukraine doesn't lose, makes them forever in debt to USA.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blqIZGXWUpU
[3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XgWFwVRGcf4
In other words: GP probably wants, in an ordinary setting, to have their views understood (why bother responding at all if not?). In which case they should similarly set aside some space for understanding why others don’t share them.
- A few of the people you mentioned are somewhat polarising, so folks who dislike them, might downvote
- in a measure of a president's efficacy, mentioning people who think a president is ineffective isn't as convincing as say mentioning actions of the president that were ineffective. You will, for any president, be able to find a large number of people who will passionately argue for/against that president's effectiveness.
- Your sources are very long videos, which discourage verifying if folks want to see what they said about him. Eg "Here's why he's in effective: [3 hours of podcasts]"
- One of your sources is a podcast which features Trump himself, which greatly brings into doubt the objectivism of the video
- the Zuckerberg short is very speculative, further weakening this collection of sources
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/17/co-f...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-16/andreesse...
- https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...
Here's a broader article on Silicon Valley support for Trump (potentially paywalled):
- https://www.ft.com/content/e2ffd807-1c18-436c-9f70-2fa7181ac...
- The FT article includes the following names: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Shervin Pishevar, Keith Rabois, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, Doug Leone, Shaun Maguire, Joe Lonsdale, Jacob Helberg
Please keep in mind that not too long ago vocal support for Trump could get you fired (and still might). Fighting against censorship is important.
Like “well, this collection of the weirdest Silicon Valley people available took some time out of their busy schedule of hawking bitcoin or metaverses or magic robots or whatever to give a Very Important Opinion” is _not_ the world’s strongest argument.
Uh, who? Certainly there are people who have their own opinions out there somewhere, but virtually every name brand democrat over the past few hours has either explicitly endorsed Harris or notably avoided boosting a different candidate. And absolutely no one is going even the tiniest bit negative on Harris, at all.
No, it seems like a fait accompli at this point. Add to that her control over the almost $100M campaign warchest, and... yeah. The fight now is over who gets to be VP.
It seems like this is really going to be a "for Trump" and "against Trump" election at this point. Nobody's going to leap out and knock anybody's socks off this close to the wire. All the dems need to do is present any body people are reasonably sure will still be warm in four years. The results won't differ much.
> But he did campaign on a single term.
Biden said that he was running for only a single term, and during this entire second election campaign nobody called him out on that, not even outspoken Trump?
There's more; that's just the first two years.
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/03/what-to-know-about-all-thr...
Maybe? Gretchen Whitmer might be a strong candidate, off the top of my head. But I'm struggling to think of a nationally known candidate with super-strong positives that would be a viable alternative. (That's also true for the GOP IMO if somehow Trump was out.)
The polling seemed too convenient. I don't have a link handy, but the best poll process I saw after the debate did show Harris doing better than Biden, but she was still worse off than a few of the other Democratic potentials.
At this point the VP has the most legitimacy as a successor and given the situation we’re forced into she’s unambiguously the option. That doesn’t make it good, but it makes it better than all the other terrible options that involve a free-for-all between candidates with no opportunity for voters to weigh in.
The best possible outcome at this point is for the establishment to quickly and unanimously get behind Harris. Again, it’s not necessarily a good outcome. But it’s the best available to us thanks to Biden waiting for the last possible moment (again) to come to this realization.
No idea if he’d be interested but Mark Kelly would be a great candidate to try and win independents.
Basically, the DNC's options are the people who failed to get through the primaries in 2020 against Biden and maybe Whitmer or Newsom.
I just do not see Harris getting the middle/undecided, and it's 2016 all over again, if not worse, because SCOTUS has the deck stacked if it's even close.
And probably the wrong answer. I don’t see her winning over swing voters. Gretchen Whitmer seems like the best option to me. I’d enjoy watching her debate Trump.
Obama's charisma and youth surely helped a lot. Trump is tall and he was a good-looking young man, and his swagger has let him get away with being a total POS for 77-78 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
Believe it or not, there are people in this world that is not immediately swayed by either waving your totem pole or burning the strawman with the opponents face. You witness a raging mob or a 100% sure fool once in your life and the magic of tribalists shouting loud being convincing, might shatter.
Those will still be swayed by emotional or other marketing tactics that appeal to their convictions, but if they managed to stay undecided in such a polar political climate like USA, my guess is that what they see are two fanatic ends of the horseshoe, and they either decides to disengage from it all or take their time to assessment which one is the lesser dummheit[1]
[1] https://nsjonline.com/article/2021/12/bonhoeffer-on-stupidit...
We only know the name of the Republican candidate at this time. You can make your decision how you want, I’ll make mine when I see who I have to decide between.
while she has admirable sympathies and even consistent policy, she has clearly demonstrated she's not opposed to pushing an agenda she does not understand.
Seems like America has been going backwards for a long time.
The first sentence is basically just signing normal budget agreements? The chips decision sounds like the best decision that was actually pushed after Covid.
Maybe a resignation will be announced later for maximum impact and tie into some thing ready for Harris to announce presidentially, like some camp david peacing or another 3 states ratifying the ERA.
I imagine those around him were doing all the presidenting, and perhaps they're more effective without a functioning president to get in their way.
Some might then point out things like the border were signs of ineffectiveness, but actually, if you reasonably assume it was intentional, then they were exceptionally effective.
They aren't even obligated to donors who donated under the assumption that there's some promise or legal requirement that their primaries be fair. That case was dismissed, and resulted in the quote from DNC lawyer Bruce Spiva:
"You know, again, if you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I’m gonna take this money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and stole the money, of course that’s different. But here, where you have a party that’s saying, We’re gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we’re gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions."
The same sort of democratization happened to British Labour under Ed Miliband, which culminated with the election of Corbyn as leader. In order to fix the problem, they had to purge and expel anyone from party membership that had any sort of firm value system.
Democrats don't have that option in the US, because in the US, people aren't members of parties; they're people who have registered to vote in that party's primary, or people known to have supported that party in the past. US corporate parties have employees, not members. Getting a portion of the public to participate in their primary is the closest thing they have to rallying the membership, and the way that both parties have written election law makes it difficult for them to change anything, or to prevent anyone from voting in them.
You: I want water
The Duopoly: That’s impossible and un-American
Polls are now substitutes for voting booths?
Being a nominee of a major party is not a requirement to get on the presidential ballot.
It wasn't really a primary, there was no actual opposition. I don't think anyone is somehow offended that they voted in a primary for a person who stepped down due to age as if their choice was taken to them.
The word your looking for here is 'legitimacy.' It's what political power is made of.
Biden lost it, by staying hidden through the primaries and then showing himself to be obviously unfit once he finally showed up for a debate.
I presume that his attitudes and staff selection carried the day, and maybe could have done so for another term. But his mental capacity was clearly declining, and he is in fact expected to handle some things personally.
Honestly, I think the rest of your point can be safely ignored after saying something like this
Most importantly, I no longer have to contend with a pandemic due to a world-beating vaccine rollout championed by Joe Biden.
Also - I don't know what kind of soup you're buying, the kind I like hasn't changed price much. It's around $3.60. I'm also aware that a 10% tariff as championed by the last President will raise prices even further on things I rely on - like out of season fruits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
"in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which started in 2014."
Russo-Ukrainian War: "The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014. Following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea"
His signature achievements essentially were one time cash payments to people.
I really do think his major failure was not pushing for a lasting achievement like implementing federal parental leave. He had the chance, but opted for a 1 year extension of child tax credits.
And of course the US has an illegal immigration problem. European right on the rise from 1/10th the number of illegal immigrants the US gets.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727
Deficit spending makes sense when the spending invests in the future. Every mortgage holder understands this implicitly. If these deficit levels concern you the obvious first place to start would be on the revenue side, by letting the Trump 2017 tax cuts expire.
I was so excited for the infrastructure bill, but unfortunately it got way stripped down.
You can tax me at any percent you'd like if you're using it (efficiently) for public transit.
Those are also the backbone of a lot of agriculture in the US, either a president tackles it and food inflation rises or you keep the status quo and prices steady.
There's no winning strategy, whomever tackles it will have it backfire someway, the US depends on exploiting cheap labour for its low margin industries.
This is all from my naive perspective as an American.
Edit: I'd appreciate a reply instead of a downvote. As I said, I'm asking a genuine question.
Generally you see radical right gaining more votes in Europe, even if they don't outright win everywhere. You also see that other parties adopt ideas from the far right. This means that policy is changing in that direction and that the discourse is more around those topics. Meanwhile research shows that this doesn't actually make voters vote less for the radical right parties, so those other parties are not gaining anything from it.
A few German right-wing dudes seems to have more or less provably received money and favors from Russia.
https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/bystron-r...
There was also that strange Russia-Trump connection for which there was insufficient proof...
But the rhetoric of the centrists/moderates has been shifting towards the right as well, on the topic of immigration, and especially with regards to certain ethnic groups.
This is totally incorrect. Macron's party arrived 3rd in number of seats when previously it had a relative majority. He lost over a hundred seats in parliament and many key roles. Additionally his coalition is weakened because his allies really didn't appreciate his move and are already openly questioning his leadership.
He is in a way worse position now than he was before the snap election, and while you can say nobody won, no one can seriously question the fact that Macron lost hard.
As for the rise of the far right, it's happening in more countries than just France: Germany, Netherland, Italy, etc.
Good point. I replied to another comment below, I'd been reading political commentary/analysis saying that maybe his goal was to defang Le Pen's party by letting the French people see what they'd do with power before the election in 2027. But as far as I'm aware he never actually said that was his goal, it's just a guess, and from a hard numbers perspective he called a snap election and lost seats.
That's what he said in private at some point, but that wasn't his initial plan. We have another reported conversation that explain his plan was to benefit from the divided left to reconquer an absolute majority for himself.
It's only after the left managed to make a coalition that he started floating this idea of letting the far right ridicule itself.
But even if that's a stupid plan, he haven't achieved that either, the far right gained over 50 seats, and their electorate are now even more angry because they consider they got robbed of the election.
So no idea what commentary you were reading, but I'd recommend not to trust that source ever again on that topic at least.
RN, through no skill of their own, is in ideal position right now. The coffers are going to be full, they have 3 years to clean up their candidates and get the messaging correct, and they have absolutely nothing to do with the coming EU budget restrictions. And R! is finally dead after having served their purpose of shifting the discourse.
The UK may have just managed to get a majority, but that's a peculiarity of their electoral system. As a fraction of the votes, their far right gained a larger share than in previous years.
Similar effects can be observed in plenty of countries, among those Sweden, Germany to some extent, Italy, Hungary has been way left for a long time, etc.
The other right wing parties (Conservatives, DUP) got 25% between them
Where as the more progressive parties got over 50% of the vote - Greens got 6%, LibDems 12%, Labour 34% plus SNP and Plaid Cymru
To say the right did well in the UK election just isn’t true
Farage got 12.6% in 2015 and 14.3% in 2024. That’s not a massive increase. Tory vote meanwhile fell from 37% to 19%
On the centre-left side, In 2015 Lib/Lab got 38%, by 2025 that had increased to 46%
On the left side the greens increased from 4% to 6.5%
It doesn't help that the EU parliament (elected directly) does not have much power compared to the commission.
Quite the contrary, his party now finds itself with (considerably) less parliament seats that it had, and when it could get a majority by appealing to the "moderate" right, he now has to compromise with the opposition. His party doesn't even hold a relative majority anymore.
Sadly my country hasn't been the only European one where fascism is creeping up again. The far rights came out on top in the last European Parliament election in Belgium, Italy, Austria, Hungary and France. In the other countries, its scores are steadily, dreadfully, increasing with each passing election.
Personally, I blame the increasing economic inequality and austerity politics lead in Europe since the 80s.
Honestly, from my perspective, the rise of rampant immigration (and that too contributed by people of my community) is going to damage the entirety of Europe in the long run. Already I've seen firsthand the skewing of the demographic pyramid in the younger generation (0-18 yrs), a lack of worthwhile job prospects for second generation immigrants, and the rising tide of anti-national behaviors from members of migrant communities. As Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed rightly said, the next generation of terrorists will not come from Saudi Arabia or the Middle East, but from Europe. The kind of venom that mosques here in Europe spew is much worse than the extremely highly-monitored mosque sermons in the Middle East, from Egypt to Oman.
From my Muslim perspective, Europe will be a lost cause in a single generation, unless there is a MASSIVE cultural upheaval that stomps and quashes the current migratory trend. Austerity and inequality are just the sparks, but the bigger powder keg is the growing base of increasingly alienated migrants who have to face the austerity and inequality (see Leeds riots very recently). European society was never structured to take in so many incompatible migrants like American society is.
I am not saying we shouldn't have a sound immigration policy, but closing/controlling the EU's borders is highly unrealistic. Just look at Italy's far right government: they promised to stop all immigration to the country but since Giorgia Meloni's investiture, the numbers have never been higher.
The solution should reside in providing better integration and opportunities to migrants, who could very well be part of the solution to Europe's demographic crisis. The most diverse European cities are also the most productive.
Austerity and inequality are the direct results of deregulation, financialization and privatization of previously fine public services. Despite the right's endless whining, immigration has very little real impact on the economy, and crime, overall, has gone down in the last decades.
The issue is that Europe has already taken in far too many migrants than it can possibly integrate. Right now, taking more migrants isn't a feasible situation if they're impossible to integrate.
The solution to Europe's (or any country's) demographic crisis isn't more migrants. It's making a conducive and affordable environment for families and childbearing. Cheaper healthcare, affordable childcare, cheaper education, etc. and that's just scratching the surface.
> Despite the right's endless whining, immigration has very little real impact on the economy, and crime, overall, has gone down in the last decades.
So is that why Sweden, whose population is 10% non-Swedish now, has had to declare publicly that their crime rates have skyrocketed over the past decade? Why Poland, which took very few migrants pre-Ukraine, has had a very low crime rate? Call me right-wing, but while some of their claims might be horseshit, others are more than obvious truisms.
> The most diverse European cities are also the most productive.
The most diverse cities were already major production centers before migrants entered the picture. For a more accurate reference, compare the levels of non-residential investment into these cities pre and post the migrant crisis.
>In France less than a thousandth of the population could be classified as "immigrants".
France is obviously one of the few countries in Europe that could uniquely integrate its migrant population, but your numbers are wildly inaccurate too. Out of a population of 67 million, 8.7 million were foreign born. Sure foreign born could mean a lot of things, but that still isn't "less than a thousandth" of the population. And a significant number concentrate in the major cities, further ghettoizing them.
What happens in Sweden is mostly due to a resurgence of organized crime. I don't think closing down the country's borders (which, again, isn't feasible by any realistic mean) woulf fix the problem. To find a culprit, you should look at poverty rates which is always much more strongly correlated to crime than ethnicity or whatever else. Here's an article from the Guardian that explores this, for what it's worth: https://theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-violence-...
When speaking of immigrants I always think of illegal immigrants from Africa, which is what the right talks about anyway. In that regard, I believe my figure of one one thousandth is more accurate.
We're not talking about closing down borders here. We're talking about strongly monitoring the kind of migrants you bring in. The UAE and Singapore are both heavily migrant driven populations, yet don't see this resurgence of crime that we see only in Europe, because they actually preselect their visitors and residents.
As it stands now, it is tougher for me as an affluent non-European to migrate to Sweden, or any other European country (except Switzerland apparently, where I'm at now) for the long term, than it is for me to settle in the UAE or Singapore. It is tougher for my highly skilled friends in tech who want to move to Europe, so they've chosen to move to Singapore instead. On the other hand, both the UAE and Singapore are making it much harder for low-skilled migrants to get in, while they find it much easier to go and settle in Europe. And they are, in hordes.
In short: no. Read the article whose link I posted above.
> We're not talking about closing down borders here. We're talking about strongly monitoring the kind of migrants you bring in.
And how could we do that ? We can't put policemen along every 4m of the European border. We are already doing random border controls, I don't think we can do much better without bankrupting ourselves.
> The UAE and Singapore are both heavily migrant driven populations, yet don't see this resurgence of crime that we see only in Europe, because they actually preselect their visitors and residents.
I don't think comparing the EU with the UAE makes much sense here. The situations are very different. Also, the UAE depends on massive numbers of foreign low-skilled workers to run the country. There are usually only allowed to stay for the duration of their work, and are hidden away from the rest of the country. There are many reported cases of worker abuse and inhumane working conditions. Overall, I'd wager there to be much more violence in the UAE than in Europe. In any case, you were speaking of values earlier, I don't think Europe has much to learn from the UAE in that department.
As for Singapore, I don't know what to say. It's a city-state, obviously it functions very differently than a continent-sized loose economic union of several country. Not that their ways have nothing of interest to us...
I'll conclude on our exchange, feel free to disagree:
You seem to believe about everyone can get into Europe, which is far from being the case. Famously in France, Macron's government last immigration law was the last one in a series of about a hundred similar ones since WW2.
I am yet to hear of an immigration policy that isn't just "give them less rights, give more money to the police, etc.", which as we have seen is only effective if our goal is to worsen the situation.
The influx of young abled men and women should be a net positive for Europe, and France, where businesses are always complaining of not being able to find enough low-skilled workers. Instead, we are too busy pushing back and making their lives harder to the point of making integration almost impossible and ostracizing them from society, thereby creating the conditions for crime to flourish.
As a Muslim, I don't want to see people praying on the roads and streets of Paris. I didn't want to see people chanting "From the river to the sea" for Gazans (who have a very strong reason for being despised by the rest of the Middle East). I don't want to see Muharram processions in Barcelona either.
Fun fact, the Middle East has one of the most relaxed migration policies across the world, yet a lot of European migrants are actually unable to migrate because they are criminals back home (the first condition to obtaining a residence visa is a police clearance).
Indigenous Muslims that you had mentioned are my absolute favorite kind of people, that I've eschewed the rest. The rest could actually learn a thing or two from them (but of course they won't).
It sounds a little bit like 4-D chess now that I type it out, I'm not sure I believe it myself.
The thing is with Macron, he managed to make the journalist class believe he's a genius (he's not dumb, but still miles away from being as brilliant as presented). So whenever he trips on a stone, you get an army of journalist explaining to you how he planned for it all along.
Easily the most effective US president of my lifetime.
There's a reason people jokingly refer to him as President Manchin.
We need permitting reform at this point to tackle climate change in any meaningful way, which unfortunately the left doesn't want to touch.
https://x.com/ChorzempaMartin/status/1796649970335994067
https://www.micron.com/manufacturing-expansion/ny
The airlines would like all of your money next time they cancel your flight.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/migration?tab=chart&tim...
About 3% of the US population is in the US illegally compared to about 1% in the EU.
Overall, about 15.8% of the US population are foreign born, compared to 6.1% of the EU.
Just like in the US, immigrants aren’t evenly distributed though so some countries have far higher percentages - just as some US states do.
Whatever Russia is paying to post dumb shit like this, its not worth it.
>The Trump administration in February 2020 negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government, freed 5,000 imprisoned Taliban soldiers and set a date certain of May 1, 2021, for the final withdrawal.
>And the Trump administration kept to the pact, reducing U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500, even though the Taliban continued to attack Afghan government forces and welcomed al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership.
This seems to take all of the culpability, motive and free will away from Netanyahu. I'm not saying Biden couldn't make that call, but why do we assume Bibi would have actually stopped if so?
Biden's aides could probably come up with a more nuanced and more statesmanlike but equally effective threat than that, of course. Any US president would have great leverage to threaten an Israeli PM personally or politically, or threaten changes to US foreign policy that would work badly for Israel.
US Presidents aren't dictators and there is no way _any_ policy change too bad for Israel wouldn't have led to serious financial issues for any party. AIPAC is damn well connected.
In any case, I don't believe Netanyahu would have caved. No matter the threat - the crimes of Oct 7 were way too serious for any Israeli PM to leave unanswered. It was the equivalent of 9/11 - and just like the US back then, who completely flattened Afghanistan in retaliation, there is no way any other Israeli PM would have had any other realpolitik option than to fight until Hamas is gone off the face of the planet.
Well, yeah, it might not have been good for Biden financially or for the US strategic military position in the region. That's exactly why he didn't make the call - it's not that he doesn't care about the slaughter of innocents, but he cares about other things more.
I always say, imagine if it was France instead of Israel. Then you see how crazy the situation is.
If France started a war of aggression, the US would also 100% stand with France, especially if it started with France being hit with a terrorist attack. I’m not sure what you are trying to say.
The very likely case of Palestine replacing Israel would be a rapidly anti-US, anti-Western, anti-Democratic government and a loss of a very valuable port in the middle east due to the, y'know, rapidly anti-US issue.
Also depopulating Israel of Jews would almost certainly result in another Holocaust. Because Hamas - the most likely-to-govern organization for Palestine - has long enshrined Jew murder in its charter.
What alternative do you have in mind?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-israel-g...
For example, Israel was pressured to delay its offensive in the beginning of the war after the Oct 7th attack, which likely caused more casualties and prolonged the war and it was pressured in other ways that prolong the war. There was certainly nothing like "unwavering support", e.g. there was intense pressure to avoid an operation in Rafah, e.g. with the US administration saying the population could not be evacuated, but then Israel ignored that, and the population did evacuate.
On the other hand, there is virtually no chance that the US could have forced Israel to stop the war because Israelis view this as an existential threat. No threats or measures the US would take would override that view. This is likely why Biden is not able to stop the war by making a phone call.
I think it's important for people that want the war in Gaza to end and to see less casualties and suffering to understand this calculus. Israel's and Hamas'. What those people seem to be working towards in practice is a prolongation of the war, more suffering by everyone, and possibly the election of Trump in the US.
No chance? That's a very unimaginative view. Here's one way to do it that would have caused Israel to immediately stop: "If you keep going against what we are publicly saying, we will no longer veto security council resolutions against you, and UNGA will move forward with sanctions once they realize we're not going to protect you anymore."
If today is not ending, how can there be a tomorrow?
It's ok for you to disagree with those objectives, or Israel's assessment of threat, but you can still see how a truce that leaves Hamas in power does not align with Israels' declared objectives. If you can offer a truce to Israel that removes Hamas from Gaza and Israel rejected that then I'd support your argument but that option is not on the table at the moment (partly because it does not align with Hamas' objectives). From Israel's perspective the proposed truce neither guarantees the return of all Israeli hostages nor the removal of Hamas from Gaza.
Israel's current government is also unlikely to work towards the proposed truce because it involves releasing Palestinian prisoners which will be seen as a win for Hamas and also a potential for future violence. This is where Israel is divided internally with many (most?) supporting a truce and parts of the government working against it. But most Israelis would still see the truce as temporary and agree that Hamas' survival in Gaza is not acceptable after Oct 7th. If Hamas was to e.g. leave Gaza (like the PLO left Beirut) then many options open up for ending the war and moving forward (including removal of the current Israeli government).
Again regardless of your opinion/politics you need to see this from Israel's side if you want to be able to achieve a solution. The Ukraine/Russia conflict is similar in that you need to understand what both sides are looking for and what they're willing to concede before you can end that war. Just saying that you think the war should continue until Russia is repelled from the entirety of Ukraine, while potentially a reasonable moral position, may not be a practical one or one that minimizes the number of people getting killed. I say that as someone who is 100% supportive of Ukraine. There's the idealistic outcome and then there's reality.
It's certainly true that if Israel has no other alternatives, and under the assumption it views Hamas' survival in Gaza as an existential threat, then it will continue to use force to achieve that objective, which will certainly lead to more people getting killed. Israelis and Palestinians.
If this is the scenario we're looking at, and we want to minimize Palestinian suffering and casualties, then we should be looking at how this force can be used in the most optimal way to achieve these objectives. For example, a truce that gives Hamas a chance to rebuild its defenses and re-establish control over broader areas of the Gaza strip is almost certainly going to lead to more suffering and casualties.
I think it is a mistake to claim Israel is acting with anything but genocidal intent. Even their own legislator shows this genocidal intent when it validates obviously invalid targets. Their aim is not the removal of Hamas from power in Gaza, but the elimination of civilian order of Palestinians in Gaza. And it is clearly and obviously moving towards that goal.
Hamas is not an existential threat to Israel. They don’t have the military nor political capabilities for that. At best they are a threat to Israels ongoing policies of apartheid. But in that regard, so is the ICJ.
Biden's presidency makes me wonder if we really need a head of state these days. Is it really necessary to have such a single powerful figure in the executive branch?
The biggest exception (IMO) would be in times of crisis, where a strong executive is necessary.
The balance between the President, the Prime Minister and the Congress or Parliament is different in different countries. In most of Europe, the President is mostly a "figurehead". The President does the diplomatic stuff, wines and dines with foreign leaders, maybe has the ability to veto laws or pardon people, but it's the prime minister who actually runs the government and appoints the cabinet.
I agree. Having a unified vision is the other key thing a president brings. Unfortunately though we barely see the fruits of a unified vision with how divided the two parties are today.
I have been having thought that the office of President should be split. With separate head of state and head of government that runs the executive branch. Another option would be to have triumvirate with command in chief that commands the military. Maybe the President has power to dismiss the others, or there is system than one person can't take over, like the CnC can never be executive.
You could do that with current structure by giving all the executive power to the Vice President, and then President would be left with head of state role. They would run as slate, with the visible, charismatic President, and the unknown, competent VP. If the President dies, the VP loses all his power.
Most limited Presidents have fixed terms, but I don't think there needs to be term limits for the figurehead. I was thinking that the head of state would attract those who want the spotlight.
The two historical examples that immediately come to mind (and explain the Latin term) both didn't end well.
I agree with the rest of the points you make. I think in Europe, the CnC is always a military post and needs to have done officer training and risen through the ranks, whereas the head of government (whether nominal or actual) is strictly a civilian role.
Whether European models would scale up to something the size of the USA is another question.
As an ignorant outsider, my impression is that the president is only supposed to 'preside' over things. Delegate and appoint people. Sign bills as a ceremony.
The real decision-making should be happening by the people's representatives in congress, while the Supreme court can guard against decisions which would violate the constitution.
But then parties form, partisanship happens, and congress stops making meaningful changes. Blocking anything that the dems put forward apparently gets votes for senators. You don't even need filibusters to prevent votes; just the suggestion of one.
So without a working congress, the President and the courts end up picking up the slack, and wield more power than they should.
I naively wish that there was some way for congress to actually be a congress, and for each member to vote his/her conscience on every single matter.
(because if you were gonna make a change as fundamental as not having a primary leader of the executive branch, you probably wouldn't try to limit your changes to that)
> most of the major cities here are no longer safe
objectively, nearly every major cities is safer now than at virtually any time in the past 50 or so years.
> massive hordes of illegal immigrants
This uptick trend has been noticeable for the last 30 years so I'm not sure how this is attributable to Biden. Additionally, as a percentage, we are still not yet relative to the percentage of population that is an immigrant as compared to the late 1800s. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
> But yes, I agree, ignoring the reality of all of those things, pretty good!
But yes, I agree, if you ignore reality, you can blame Biden for everything :)
If the weren't, why blame Biden? And why writing "no longer" instead of "still not".
If they were, you mean they were safer under his predecessor: Trump
This is practically verbatim conservative news propaganda
What would you expect when one needs license for driving but not one for gun.
> nobody is able to afford anything
Since corporations have unlimited power.
Agreed on NATO + Ukraine too but I wish they would allow us to strike Russia directly even with NATO equipment.
Maybe its China's turn to try to conquer the graveyard of empires.
In the end it was a very small commitment for the US, with huge gains not just for Afghan people but also for the US.
We can invade a bunch of countries in South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe and possibly "improve" lives there, impose our will, while sucking money out of America ostensibly forever.
Or we can sanction human rights abusers, offer proper asylum, and if there are any real on the ground changes from within the country then possibly support in a similar way to support in Ukraine.
I do agree that Bush deserves the blame for turning what should should have been a hunt down and destroy Al Qaeda mission into a sprawling invasion of various countries in the middle east
Regardless, Obama, Trump, and Biden had to deal with the situation as they found it, whether they agreed with the lead-up or not.
This was not a win, and the Biden Administration lying about it at every single stage of the process until the final troop was out was downright cowardly when all we had to do was continue to commit to sit on our asses while Afghani society rebuilt itself.
Anyone who didn’t want to live under authoritarian Islamist rule should have left during that 20 year period. I find it hard to believe the whole place reverting was a surprise.
Just because the US could take control and pretend to make progress doesn't mean it actually changed people's minds. In fact it actively poisoned the concept of women's rights in that region for decades
Thats because Trump agreed to get us out of afghaniston. Biden oversaw the absolutely disastrous execution, abandoning untold millions of military equipment in the hands of the taliban.
It is always the same story, Dems bad, I would have done it right. He had a 'credible deterrent', and would have completely ended the Ukraine war (that had been going on since 2014). Just like he claims now he will end the war, and bring back all the Americans imprisoned abroad if re-elected. It's one thing to say that sort of stuff and present a plan for doing so. Trump says it, and then pivots to even more bullshit.
Do you really think a different president, with effectively the same military leadership, was going to execute the pull-out in a broadly different way on a shorter deadline, and call it a success?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Taliba...
Owing to the change of administration, the Biden administration was obviously responsible for implementing the terms of the agreement as negotiated by the Trump administration.
I think both parties get an approximately equal share of the credit or blame.
Yeah, it turns out all we needed to do was run away in the middle of the night and let the country slide back into a illiberal theocratic hell hole.
You do remember what the "Afghan government" partners and soldiers were like right? Mostly child rapists and gang leaders...
It's been cited before 2016 as a trillion dollar problem.
The point is that this something that one POTUS chose to talk about and frequently hyped "Infrastructure Week" and also something that another POTUS chose to do something about.
^F informs us there are 33 instances of "war" on that page, most in "award", "forward", etc. Two as the actual word "war".
So Biden didnt start this war then is that what you are saying?
> ^F informs us there are 33 instances of "war" on that page, most in "award", "forward",
award and forward have nothing do with war, are you getting confused?
> Two as the actual word "war".
Can you link them, or maybe read your link again.
Absolutely not. Action was started by Biden on a problem that existed for years.
> are you getting confused?
Not at all .. why do you need to ask, are you confused?
> Can you link them, or maybe read your link again.
Are you unable to find them? I'm sorry, I'm not your "Remote Browser As A Service".
Isnt that a good thing then?
> Are you unable to find them?
You were the one who could not find it not me and then you got confused with award and forward
> You were the one who could not find it not me and then you got confused with award and forward
Please don't be silly. I found all instances of the character sequence "war". Most instances were within full words, two instances were the actual word war.
Then you asked me to help you to search within the text. Most people on HN are capable of finding such things themselves. Why you struggle with this is a mystery.
You very much look to be the one confused.
Glad you agree with me, not sure why you wasted so much time.
> I found all instances of the character sequence "war".
You did not though. Check again.
>Good support for Ukraine
You're looking through a particular narrow lens.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/03/politics/lbj-biden-what-m...
As others have pointed out, Lyndon B. Johnson declined the nomination for Democratic Presidential candidate in March of 1968, well before both most of the primary contensts and the then-open Democratic Convention in Chicago. Rather famously, that convention didn't go particularly smoothly.
(In an interesting coincidence, this year's Democratic primary is also in Chicago.)
George McGovern's 1972 vice presidential nominee, Thomas Eagleton, stepped down after it was revealed Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy, two weeks after the Democratic Convention. McGovern selected Sargent Shriver as the replacement candidate.
Horace Greeley, Liberal Republican Party and Democratic Party candidate in the 1872 election, running against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant, died on 29 November 1872, after the general election but before the Electoral College met to count its votes. Greeley carried no states and won no Electoral College votes.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_Party_presiden...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Eagleton#Replacement_on...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1872_United_States_presidentia...>
(At the time that I write this, the only place this news is sourced from is Twitter. Every news org is quoting Twitter and then adding their own gloss.)
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-drops-2024-presidentia...
But jeez the Democratic party needs to new leadership. And I don't mean Harris or whoever, but the party leadership itself.
The gaslighting in the past year about Bidens age was insane to watch. Literally asking people to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
I mean, it seems to be a winning strategy for the other party.
Testament to two party system. But you can call it low standard as well.
The election of the next President will have a large effect on the security of Europe with respect to both Russia and Israel
It seems pretty clear to me that Netanyahu is trying to stir up a wider war in the Middle East. If he's successful that will be terrible for the security of all the surrounding regions, Europe included.
The party is run by a weird mix of blue dogs who don’t really reflect progressive values, and left wing extremists who kowtow to the dogmatic sect of the party. The middle class, who they’re _supposed_ to represent are completely forgotten.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So was (I learned today) the one on Trump assassination attempt:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40957564
"As many have pointed out, a dozen or so submissions on this topic were flagged by users. That's actually the immune system working as intended, but another component of the system is that moderators rescue the very most historic stories so HN can have a single big thread about them. We did that 4 years ago, also for Brexit, etc.
Since this was the first submission on the topic, it seems fairest to be the one to restore. (It's still on our todo list to have some form of karma sharing for situations like this, to make it be less of a race and/or lottery.)"
They had 3 1/2 years to bolster the reputation of Kamala, and largely sidelined her after using her as a play for minority vote. Now they're (likely) running her in a remaining timespan of a little over 3 months left before election -- after no one has thought of her since the last election. This isn't good.
[1] Correctly, with near-prescient precision!
In the end, it is the primary voters who will pick the candidate who will run for presidency.
"Following that debate, her polling numbers dropped to the single digits — and never really recovered.
Amid those problems, Harris' campaign reorganized — laying off some staffers in early states to focus its resources and attention on Iowa.
The latest RealClearPolitics average of recent polling showed Harris with just 3.4 percent support nationally, and just 3.3 percent and 2.7 percent backing in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively."
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/sen-kamala-ha...
This was true for three of them: Sanders, Biden and Buttigieg; but if Buttigieg stayed in, it was looking like at the time that he and Biden both would have lost to Sanders. I remember my last act as a registered member of the Democratic Party was going to be to vote for the candidate who had the best shot at beating Sanders in my State specifically thus denying him some delegates, and I was having a difficult time up until nearly the last minute figuring out who that was going to be up until Buttigieg made the decision extremely easy by removing himself from the race.
Harris didn’t even make it to the starting line. Her campaign simply ran out of money in December before the Iowa Caucus.
I found that yesterday while trying to figure out how popular the "crowdstrike" post was, and it is actually the second most commented one.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967
https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIERJU1RJT...
> Trump added, "I would never say anyone is too old, but I know they're all making me look very young, both in terms of age and I think in terms of energy. I think you people know that better than anybody."
(I'm looking for it in old articles and having trouble finding what you're talking about.)
I also found this from an AP article in 2020:
> With Election Day less than four months away, Trump has spent more money on one television ad claiming that Biden lacks “the strength, the stamina and the mental fortitude to lead this country” than any other single ad this year.
The issue with Biden for me wasn't his age at all, it was that for whatever reason he was struggling to form coherent sentences. Trump on the other hand seems more or less completely fine. I'd actually argue the best thing about Biden was that he was perhaps the most qualified person to president ever given his long history and respected history in politics.
That said, I do think the older the presidential candidate is the more important it becomes to weight their VP pick when casting your vote, but still, I don't think this reason trend of discounted people solely on their age is a healthy trend. I'd even argue that the ideal age for a leader is probably quite old, maybe around 50-60.
No, he very clearly does not. He's rambling and incoherent.
Yeah, because politics is where truth famously reigns supreme.
You are what you are when no one is looking. If you would have ever voted for Biden, you don’t get to complain about Trump’s age.
One side is a cult of personality that was bullied into thralldom by an angry old man because they lacked a spine, and the other side cloistered around and hid the decline of a frail old man because they lacked a spine.
Character is the last thing to expect from these people. The Democrats grew at least a vertebrae after George Clooney told them off. George Clooney for President.
I really hoped it wouldn't be so, but anyone that's ever seen Kamala speak will find she is about as compelling as Joe Biden on a bad day. I believe this means China and Russia can prevail in the short term, unless he actually boosts Taiwan's defence meaningfully, which I doubt he will after the Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan aid holdup fiasco.
It is what it is. I wish the nominee was Gretchen Whitmer with anyone but Kamala. I wish Biden had not run for reelection. I wish he hadn't endorsed Kamala. I wish the Democrats and Obama had backed Sanders or Biden in 2016 when they were fit to serve. I wish Trump moderated himself after the attempt on his life instead of business as usual a week later.
I hope I'm wrong about everything observably bad about Trump's first term and his decline since, because with another trifecta of loyalists, he's probably getting much more done this time.
Do you want a dictator with near unlimited legal immunity in charge of the country? Thats what the November vote is for. Everything else is secondary.
If you are a real human and not paid by Russia, I really shouldn't have to explain this.
You are not voting just for the president. You are voting for things like Supreme Court, that party legislation not being vetoed, as well as people who staff agencies.
At this point and time, the critical issue is the Supreme Court ruling of making a president a dictator. You have 2 parties - one party orchestrated this ruling through staffing cronies into the Supreme Court, with candidate representing extremist right wing views by Project 2025, which wants to use violence to subjugate people without giving a fuck about Constitution. The other party knows that it cannot use unlimited power to not lose trust of the people, and is actively working to negate that ruling.
Without even touching policies (where again, Republicans lose out massively in both effectiveness and results), your vote is not for a person, your vote is for sanity vs insanity.
None of this is up for debate. Everyone who doesn't vote or votes Republican in this election is supporting having US ran by a dictator.
After this election, if we have actual sanity in place with due legal process that both sides respect, then we can talk about who to vote for.