The Gaming Den

It's been a month since it became clear that, barring any major health changes, 2024 would be another Trump versus Biden rematch. With months to go most polls tell us that voters just aren't tuned in or following things closely - which is totally normal. Since most voters know both candidates from 4 years ago there may be even less reason to tune in that normal.

What has been interesting in the news lately is a combination of younger voters being skeptical of voting for Biden, but an increasing share of older voters appearing to support Biden.

From PoliticoThe polls are suggesting a huge shift in the electorate. Are they right?

It’s a significant reversal from recent history: President Joe Biden is struggling with young voters but performing better than most Democrats with older ones.

NPR has an article that also investigates recent polling: Key voting groups are shifting in the race between Biden and Trump

In the four years since Biden took office, according to the NPR poll, white men with degrees have shifted another 24 points in Biden's favor, and he's gained another 19 with white women with degrees. It's a trend that Miringoff said he is seeing in the surveys Marist has conducted in various states as well.

It could be tough to bring some young voters back on board with so many upset over Gaza. In the survey, 61% of voters 18-29 said they disapprove of the job Biden is doing overall — and he has a lot of work to do to get Latinos even close to the level they supported him at four years ago.

FiveThirtyEight recently launched their Swing-O-Matic that lets you investigate what changes to the electorate by subcategory and turnout. If seniors swung toward Biden by +10 points, but younger voters swung toward Trump by +20 points but nothing else changed, Biden would win (That would be Trump winning seniors by +1 point instead of +11 points, and Biden winning young voters by 9 points instead of 29 points).

I think that appealing to younger voters as the core of your political message is critically important.

The New York Times has an article (free articles limited to non-subscribers, but should be available via incognito mode) How ‘All in the Family’ Explains Biden’s Strength Among Seniors

Warning - This article lists people who will be seniors on or before election day and it may make you feel old.

Yesterday’s hippies have become today’s seniors — and they’re still voting Democratic.

There are a number of articles of various types prognosticating about the election. Also at the New York Times, Simon Rosenberg (Democratic Strategist) shared his upbeat take on the election. Many Democrats Are Worried Trump Will Beat Biden. This One Isn’t.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and consultant, is pushing back against the Democratic doom and gloom.

I would like to be optimistic about a Democratic victory in November. I think the 4 years that Trump was president were the worst years of my entire life. I couldn't go a full day without my outrage meter exploding. And that was when Trump didn't have a plan. I fear what it would be like knowing his plan for organized revenge and an assault on our institutions is fully formed.

You are expected to run a marathon.
Voting Trump means losing your left leg.
Voting Biden means losing your right leg.
They are both unfit for the position, but
you lot do not get to have that choice . .
Pretty sure that in the end they both will
do about 85 to 90% the same things as the
other would, even if for different reasons.

Stahlseele wrote: ↑

Sat Jun 01, 2024 1:00 pm

You are expected to run a marathon.
Voting Trump means losing your left leg.
Voting Biden means losing your right leg.
They are both unfit for the position, but
you lot do not get to have that choice . .
Pretty sure that in the end they both will
do about 85 to 90% the same things as the
other would, even if for different reasons.

Wow. That's a lot of gibberish with an impressively total and utter lack of basis in reality. What a fucked up and stupid false equivalency.

Pick any issue or any governmental action and compare records. They are not remotely similar other than that they are both old white men.
Moving on.

Regarding the post topic, I do think our odds are much better than polling suggests because polling has become utter shit as people don't answer unknown numbers anymore, especially younger people, who tend to be democratic-leaning voters. And media outlets tend to push narratives that are most compelling to drive interest, such as a close race, so given their polling unreliability combined with a monetary motive to be inaccurate, it's hard to take their assessments seriously.

What will be taken seriously is that the Republican party continues to tie themselves to oppressing women and the backlash against their anti-contraceptive anti-women's rights attempts to rule women is going to be felt at the polls up and down ballots. The Republican party also has been pushing ever harder at going full nazi on trans people, which is a smaller demographic than people who care about women, but not to be underestimated in motivating voters to show up against them. I think there will be landslide in favor of democrats country-wide, but I'm still worried because if the improbable happens and Trump and Republicans seize power it will be unthinkably bad. For everyone. Because Biden and Trump victories are not remotely similar outcomes.

erik wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 02, 2024 4:11 am

Pick any issue

I pick Israel and migrants on the Mexican border.

Oops.

Look. Stahlseeles post WAS lazy haiku slush nonsense and almost certainly was made in total ignorance of actual differences between the candidates.

But no. You do NOT anymore get to say "pick ANY issue" it was never a great hill to die on and it keeps on shrinking substantially.

And in fact before I close out this post I will demonstrate by picking another issue.

Creeping fascism and being a threat to democracy. As demonstrated by the total all levels of state and media coordinated and violent fascist suppression of peaceful protesters.

Again. Oops, the fascists are already here and however fascist Trump will certainly be, we (well not me we) ALREADY have brown shirt thugs beating their political opponents with impunity supported by law enforcement, the media, and the supposedly different on fascism and freedom current president.

So... STOP SAYING DIFFERENT ON ANY ISSUE. Even the lesser evil argument is tainted. All you are allowed to have now is to cherry pick the few relatively minor issues on which they still are different. Which is, frankly, not enough for you to any longer comfortably out argue a moron who knows nothing and writes almost exclusively in some sort of broken English haiku format you couldn't parody if you tried.

Fuuuuuuuuuck off. You are wrong, so yes, I do get to say "pick ANY issue" and will continue. Well I would continue but I'm sick of reading this idiocy. So a response-rant and then I sign off again.

Israel.
This has to by hypothetical for Trump since he has no direct influence here. But Trump would like for nothing more than to see Israel go full nazi and create a tremendous distraction for him, based on his total disregard for human life and being an absolute 1000% failure at international politics. He would have put zero pressure on Israel to keep the conflict from expanding. Political figures wishing to curry favor with Trump's fanatics have written shit like "finish it" on artillery shells.
Biden has been pressuring Israel and delaying arms shipments (the stuff that is going through are crap like jets for 2026+, not artillery shells or offensive munitions). Our advisors had been trying to get theirs to listen to not repeat our mistakes we made in Iraq. Biden is in a tough spot where the united states does not want to completely flip on a long time ally, but we cannot support their genocide either. We are going through a lot of effort to set up relief. The groundwork is being laid for independent military peacekeeping and Palestinian state. I cannot imagine Trump doing that.

Mexico border.
Biden worked on and was willing to sign legislation that would help fix a lot of problems with border processing (getting more judges, clearing up backlogs).
Trump torpedoed the legislation by forcing house republicans to vote against their own fucking bill, because solving problems ruins an issue he wants to campaign on.

Fascism.
Trump wants to murder political opponents and for the presidency to be a kingship free from any legal prosecution from crimes. Trump is constantly purity testing his party members. Trump has outright said he admires dictators and hitler. Trump is constantly inciting violence and refusing to respect electoral process.
Biden does not.

How the fuck do you construe them as equivalent? I don't care. You're wrong, you have no chance of ever being convinced because you don't get that wrong without having totally lost the way back, so I don't care.

Biden has not, in fact, put any pressure on Israel to do anything. Biden putting pressure on Israel would look like providing no military aid at all, none, not so much as a sausage until they played ball, not like providing 1% less good gear than Trump might hypothetically do.

Mexican border, the kids in concentration camps didn't stop at any point.

Fascism, Trump can talk the talk, but Biden's walking the fucking walk with his treatment of protesters against the Gaza genocide and his total lack of action to reverse the Dobbs decision (which would, at this point, look like intense interference in SCOTUS to achieve in one week what the Democrats allowed the GOP to do in fourty years).

Fundamentally, you don't get to cry "lesser evil" once you're supporting a genocide, you know, the thing that is meant to be the crime beyond crime that justifies, nay, mandates immediate military intervention from foreign powers to put a stop to it.

The only area where you can really point a serious difference is Ukraine, where for all the worst reasons and all the worst intentions Trump might try to bring a hopeless war to a slightly faster end and accidentally save a few Ukrainian lives. That comparison really doesn't help unless you bang on endlessly about morality and international law - which you can't do, because Genocide Joe is providing military aid to Israel when he should be deploying US troops to fucking invade Israel.

erik wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 02, 2024 6:27 pm

Biden has been pressuring Israel and delaying arms shipments (the stuff that is going through are crap like jets for 2026+, not artillery shells or offensive munitions).

This is absolutely not true. He temporarily delayed literal actual bullets for assault rifles for one division and then immediately backed off and sent them again when Israel leaked the info to their lobbyists who started shit talking him in the press. He has absolutely been supplying them artillery shells and bombs throughout the conflict including now, still.

You can make up whatever hypothetical shit about Trump you want to explain why he will somehow double genocide the Palestinians, but we absolutely do not need people lying about Biden for apologia by pretending he's not sending them bombs.

erik wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 02, 2024 6:27 pm

We are going through a lot of effort to set up relief. The groundwork is being laid for independent military peacekeeping and Palestinian state.

LMAO. Besides the US literally vetoing the Palestinian state resolution, the "lot of effort" was building a pier that broke down instead of using the land border because Biden was pretending the land border didn't exist because Israelis were blocking it.

erik wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 02, 2024 6:27 pm

Mexico border.
Biden worked on and was willing to sign legislation that would help fix a lot of problems with border processing (getting more judges, clearing up backlogs).
Trump torpedoed the legislation by forcing house republicans to vote against their own fucking bill, because solving problems ruins an issue he wants to campaign on.

This is an absolute braindead thing to say about the legislation which did not actually fix any issues, and instead was about giving more money to enforce more draconian border controls with more violence, a thing Biden specifically said he would do when he announced that if the bill passed, he would personally invoke the provision in the bill that let him completely close down the border, 100% to all refugees and asylum seekers in violation of various treaties the US is a party to.

This paragraph is only different from Deaddm's recent "I want all the immigrants deported, natural immigration rates, white birth rates" post recently in that you could just be completely misinformed about what the bill does. Actually supporting that psychotically evil bill which even as proposed in Congress was supposed to be the gift to the GOP to buy their votes for Ukraine funding would be in fact very bad!

erik wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 02, 2024 6:27 pm

I don't care. You're wrong, you have no chance of ever being convinced because you don't get that wrong without having totally lost the way back, so I don't care.

On the topic of losing the way and not caring.

If by some chance you are lying and you do care what people think. My advice is, don't say such stupid shit in person to anyone if you don't want to be reviled and possibly punched in the face.

I for one used to accept the lesser evil position about Biden. Then, things changed because of how terrible he was.

During his term in response to his failures and his actions he has progressed from a barely passable lesser evil to no longer the lesser evil, to a known evil that needs to be stopped right now.

The things Biden is doing right now are actually WORSE than anything Trump actually did. This is GENOCIDE. And at home it is fascists beating college kids to support a genocide.

And when you defend and promote someone doing a genocide and a fascist suppression you had better genuinely not care, because it's going to hurt your personal and family life just as much if not more than coming out as rabbid full believer QAnon.

Kaelik and NPP appear to want the whole system to burn out in revolution, so in that sense electing Trump is more likely to bring it out.

There are major tax cuts that are ending in 2025 that greatly favor the wealthiest Americans. That alone is a reason to have Democrats in office.

The situation as I see it - Republicans use scapegoating to claim that there are simple solutions to all of our problems. Somehow closing the border and making people use a public bathroom based on their gender at birth is supposed to solve all.our problems. Well, problems take more than that. A more just and equitable society with true opportunity is a long boring grinding slog of long-term policies slowly blossoming into real improvements.

The last 4 years where I haven't had to doom-scroll about how we're setting all of our international commitments on fire have been a relief. There have been real meaningful problems where I don't think the government has handled things the way I prefer in every administration, but Biden hasn't been as bad as Trump. More importantly for me, Biden hasn't been as bad as Trump promises to be.

Is there anyone who can claim that they remain uncertain that Trump is actively trying to create a Fascist dictatorship?

Democrats and Republicans are not the same. Pretending they are is foolish and likely counterproductive.

deaddmwalking wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 03, 2024 1:17 am

The last 4 years where I haven't had to doom-scroll about how we're setting all of our international commitments on fire have been a relief.

But setting fire to the ICC the ICP and the UN is invisible to you.

Trump set fire to less and smaller international commitments that the ones Biden has set fire to in SIX FUCKING MONTHS.

Blind, vile, idiot.

In your case I advise you to tell EVERYONE you meet how you support the genocide.

Lmaooooooo at deaddms stupid fucking post.

Trump will be worse then biden in many ways because every time the democrats adopt republican policies it gives license for the gop to move right, but it's very funny for the guy who was praising biden for his promise to close the border 3 months ago to talk about how closing the border is an easy solution offered instead of the complicated ones.

The "progress only happens when you slowly grind out the most incremental improvements possible over time" bullshit is wrong obviously. You can in fact make huge leaping bounds in progress especially when you have avoided doing anything at all to improve things for decades and you are sitting on colossally bad policies.

We don't have to "make things better" on the border by paying millions more dollars to the cbp and deport people more efficiently so we don't keep them in concentration camps. We can just let millions of people into the country, and even stop deliberately making every country South of us into a hellhole for our own personal profits with as much economic pressure as needed and as many coups as we can get away with it.

These are certainly "harder" in a sense then the easy solutions that Joe Biden and trump promised "close the border" but are in many ways also a lot easier, in that they actually make things better instead of worse. But they don't require "slow incremental change of building on what we have" they require "massive fuck off changes immediately that change things drastically."

Anyway, biden has absolutely shredded any international credibility we ever had as hard as trump when he threatened to defund the UN food program if they dared fucking try to recognize palestine.

Jesus fucking christ. The sheer delusion to be like "I stopped paying attention to the news, so I assume everyone in the world loves us now."

I will even point out that biggest international treaty that Trump DID set fire to was the TPP.

And for us, here in Australia, that almost certainly will have on going measurable positive impact on the quality of life of the vast majority of Australians for generations to come.

Now Trump did not know or intend that. But for every pacific nation that was going to be signed up to the TPP that is almost certainly Trumps greatest and most welcome achievement.

And for us out here in the outlying empire, Biden's done dick compared to that.

So maybe try to be more informed about "international commitments" in general before bringing them up in any context.

Kaelik wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 02, 2024 8:24 pm

This is absolutely not true. He temporarily delayed literal actual bullets for assault rifles for one division and then immediately backed off and sent them again when Israel leaked the info to their lobbyists who started shit talking him in the press. He has absolutely been supplying them artillery shells and bombs throughout the conflict including now, still.

More than usual. He didn't just continue the practice of supplying Israel with free stuff to murder people, when Israel increased their murders, he increased the amount of stuff given to them to murder people.

Disclosure, I still hope he beats Trump in the election, I still think he's the lesser evil, but the first word of that was always very small and getting smaller, and the second always very large and getting larger.

Yes biden on multiple occasions simply gave them more bombs when congress didn't approve them and did it quickly because it was an "emergency" because they needed those bombs to do genocide right now.

Trump is not going to be better on any issue, but he's not going to be worse then Biden on Gaza because you can't go up from 100% genocide which is the position Biden has staked out as what he will support with his actions no matter how many times he leaks to the press that he totally asked Netanyahu to stop.

Look you STUPID IDIOTs, we just have to incrementally make things better, over time. Like today we sign an executive order to ban people from claiming asylum, and that will in the long run uhhhhhhh.

See, it turns out that thing Biden promised he would do if only the GOP would pass the law, he decided he can do it without the law now. Almost like his actual goal was just to deport asylum seekers and he's willing to push his power by doing super illegal shit whenever he cares enough about something.


https://www.wsj.com/us-news/biden-to-is ... s-a9a021a5

Minor note as someone who actually knows the law, it is not illegal for an asylum seeker to cross the border to claim asylum under international law including the things the US has signed onto and under current US law.

But you can bet that when Joe Biden signs this order, the automatic deportation without a hearing is going to apply to a bunch of people, then, when they can't claim asylum under the law, that means they weren't asylum seekers, so it retroactively makes their border crossing illegal, justifying not allowing them to file for asylum.

I'm curious as to where Erik gets their news, because they shared a lot of stuff that is outright false.

Biden is certainly better than Trump, but it's mostly that Trump does additional awful stuff and he does it all loudly. Whoever wins this election doesn't change the end result, which is that after the 2024 election the USA will become even more of an insane, fascist empire that bleeds its people (and everyone else on the planet) dry to keep rich people rich and the war machine running. This changes if Cornell West or some other actually good candidate wins, but that will sadly not happen.

Either you think Biden is up to the challenge of making our country and the world better or you don't, and I just don't see any evidence that Biden is trying to improve the country or world. He just keeps making things worse. And I know, you might say "but what about the half-assed infrastructure bill, or insulin? Checkmate, he did anything good at all!" A little win here and there is insufficient. Sure, insulin prices are capped for a bunch of people now, but insulin still costs money and requires insurance and so people are still having to ration that shit. Give us healthcare instead of blowing up every single hospital in Gaza you fucking monster. Replace the remaining lead pipes in Flint (yes, they have not finished doing this) instead of prolonging a war that conservatively kills tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers (not to mention all the civilians) every year. Give out more SNAP benefits instead of playing "I'm not touching you" with China. Drop the sanctions on Cuba. Fucking do something, there is so much to do! Fuck Joe Biden, that guy is a piece of shit.

What amazes me is the total lack of admission that Biden is even a tiny bit wrong on any issue.

Erik did not actually present a lesser evil argument at all because they didn't acknowledge the existence of ANY evil on Biden's part on arguably his three most evil policies!

The fascism thing for instance. Trump said fascist shit and everyone knows he want's to be fascist and I will slightly inflate that by saying he will murder his political enemies day one even though that is NOT what he said and probably not what he actual intends (even though he intends fascist stuff). But Biden's violent fascist crack down? The example thrown in his face we are waiting for him to address? Not even mentioned. As if it never happened. Totally invisible to Erik's position.

It's bizarrely myopic. They really are going with the "your lying eyes" type argument at this point. Those who can disbelieve their own lying eyes when told to are the remaining Biden supporters, simple as that.

First past the post is a bad system, but it is the system. There are only two candidates who can win. One of them is Trump. Despite how idiotic he appears, he seems to know a thing or two about how to install a fascist dictatorship.

I think that the Biden administration could have done a host of things better, especially when Democrats held the house. But my standards are now very low - a barely functioning government is literally enough for me at this moment.

Bonus question - how many countries is the Biden administration currently illegally occupying?

Hundreds.

American empire didn't cease to exist because you stopped paying attention.

But amazing how fast we moved from "I'm so happy we have international credibility" to "uh, so I can't actually defend a single biden policy."

I imagine dead could defend Biden to the exact kind of voter Biden (and the staff that hasn't resigned under his leadership) imagines that they are appealing to. Which are the people who are a few think pieces away from saying for 4 years "Trump border policies are bad" to saying "we can't get them to help us do Trump's border policies". There's no kind of appeal people like dead (who apparently doesn't recognize the suffering of any minority or poor person) that would be convincing to anyone who thinks that real effort should be made to not do bad things. It will never occur to people like this that they've gotten their way in election after election and their methodology has gotten us to the point where, in their mind, the entirety of the American project is on the line in a (read: every) single election. And they are already primed to blame anyone but their team for if (as they would have you believe) tyranny wins out.

Note that his the selling point about preventing a fascist takeover of government doesn't consider that maybe fascism is already here. The flimsy voting system we have is being torn apart as we speak. It's being deliberated about exactly what is the right way to criminalize being homeless. The trial that's supposed to stop the fascist from getting back into power is being tampered with. The judiciary has gone pretty damn wild at the top.

Now I do think that Trump is worse but it's interesting that the reasons I think that he's worse are minor compared to the vast gulf of a difference people like dead seem to see. These people claim to think he's going to end democracy yet what was it that was bothersome for him? Doomscrolling about foreign relations. Not anyone dying, starving, or any of that. Just this imagined value of America's image abroad. That aside I would think that if someone believed that Trump represented an existential danger to democracy that they would not tolerate any limits put on stopping that threat. I don't think he's anymore of a threat to democracy than the rest of the Republican party which is why I don't really feel anxious about his possible reelection. If I was someone who thought he was going to be the worst tyrant ever I would be adamant about Biden taking actions propprtionate to the threat and I'd be loathing every year that went by where nothing was done. Certainly the courts should've been in a position to at least severely limit him but at every turn he's given extensions, no prison time, no seizing of his assets, nothing that your average prosecutor would've done to put a poor marginalized person away.

Biden's legal issues could interfere with his campaign, and it's possible that these complications could affect his chances of winning. If Biden were to go to trial and be convicted, he would have the option to appeal the conviction, possibly, as a law firm, https://federal-lawyer.com/, says, arguing that the jury was biased or that legal errors were made during the trial. This could allow him to avoid prison, at least temporarily, depending on the appeal's success. Given all this, it's hard to predict how these factors will play out in the election.

In my younger more naive days when I thought Obama was good actually and Trump was a threat to US democracy I was openly proclaiming that Obama should do an actual coup to prevent a Republican presidency. Because I guess I truly actually believed all the "democracy is under threat" rhetoric to the point of taking it to its logical conclusions, whereas the people actually saying it appear to use it as a thought terminating cliché.

In my youth, I mistakenly believed Obama was good and Trump threatened democracy. I foolishly suggested Obama stage a coup to prevent a Republican presidency. I took the 'democracy is under threat' rhetoric to heart, while those who used it seemed to treat it as a thought-ending cliché.

morgan13 wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 07, 2024 7:48 pm

In my youth, I mistakenly believed Obama was good and Trump threatened democracy. I foolishly suggested Obama stage a coup to prevent a Republican presidency. I took the 'democracy is under threat' rhetoric to heart, while those who used it seemed to treat it as a thought-ending cliché.

Uhhhhh........

This is a very weird post.

After I saw Morgan13 post in the D&D movie thread I became confident they are an AI. They are probably an LLM masquerading as a person by posting fairly noncontroversial things that fit into various threads at a rate that is so infrequent it's easy to mistake them for a real poster, they do this in all threads they post in. The D&D movie one was just so obviously not on topic and inane that it couldn't have been written by a person. Several of their posts are basically copied from the one preceding it.

Edit on the off chance they are a person: What the fuck is with your weird posts? You usually just respond to people and say something noncontroversial, but sometimes it's absolute nonsense. You post like ChatGPT.