Yes. Spitting distance. They were both close elections. What rock have you been living under?

Unlikable to you. Not to his voters. And Trump also beat ten times as many men as he did women. So logically we can’t ever run a male candidate ever again. The voters clearly don’t like male Democratic candidates. Biden only won due to covid.

Why, in the name of all that is good and holy, should we require someone whose dream it is to be a carpenter, to take calculus to graduate high school? In what universe will that requirement be doing any good in their life? What will it serve other than a potential completely arbitrary barrier to simply graduating from high school? And a carpenter is actually far more mathematically inclined than most career paths people pursue.

Yes, learning calculus can be a revelation in mathematical beauty. But the same is true for a thousand potential fields of study. In terms of practical use to most people, they would all be equally frivolous. A case could be made that a thousand fields of study are something that people simply must be exposed to. I’m more in favor of letting people choose their own path. We shouldn’t be piling on arbitrary barriers on to a diploma that is only meant to signify basic competence.

You know, it may sound barbaric, but I’m beginning to reconsider the merits of public crucifixions as a form of state punishment…

Maybe instead of getting rid of the penny, we should simply redenominate the currency. You simply issue new versions of every denomination of currency and declare that their legal value is 100x the value of the old counterpart. So the new penny is legally worth an old dollar. Think of it as “US dollar v. 2.0.”

People get antsy when you suggest this sort of thing, as often it’s seen in countries experiencing hyperinflation. But it need not be. Countries with perfectly healthy economies could benefit to redenominate their currency every century or so. Even modest rates of inflation add up over time. If you want your currency’s value to remain reasonable, (ex: to avoid having to pay a million dollars for a cheeseburger some day.), eventually you do have to redonominate your currency.

Rationally, there’s really no reason not to do it. I wonder if it’s pride more than anything else that prevents us from doing it more often. It would be quite a mental adjustment to go from having a salary of $100k per year in the old system to $1,000 a year in the new one. Maybe that can’t help but make people feel smaller in some way? Even if rationally you can know that you haven’t lost anything, would you still feel poorer if you used to make $100k, but now only make 1k?

Surely no man who could be elected German Chancellor could turn out to be evil! /s

In this survey, a larger percentage of women under 50 said they (or someone they knew) wouldn’t vote for a woman as president, compared to men who responded.

Women tend to have larger active social circles than men. That alone explains this.

Eh. She already meets the requirements. She’s old enough. That’s it. And she is eminently more qualified than the current president. She’ll be 39 in 2028. The youngest president, Teddy Roosevelt, was 42.

This gets really ugly when Democrats start rejecting candidates for their minority status. Kamala explicitly rejected Pete Buttigieg as a running mate because he was gay. Kamala rejected him using the logic of a thousand other bigots, “I have no problem with it, but others won’t understand and will judge me for it.” This is the exact same logic that employers across the country use to deny hiring queer people, trans people, etc. Employers will claim to not be bigoted themselves, but that their customers wouldn’t get it, so they simply can’t hire the queer candidate.

Hogwash. Women have come within spitting distance of winning the presidency. Twice. Kamala and Hillary were both very unlikable candidates running no the same neoliberal platform that voters have rejected in the last three elections.

The real problem was that voting for Trump was voting for Mussolini today. Voting for Kamala was voting for Hitler in 2028. If she had managed to win, someone even worse than Trump would win the election in 2028. That’s the only possible result from a hypothetical Kamala admin, if she had managed to win the election.

Why did you vote for someone even worse than Trump? If Kamala had won, someone even worse than Trump would have got the Republican nomination in 2028. And they would have easily beat Kamala then. She wouldn’t have done anything to alter the conditions that lead to Trump. And now at least Republicans are likely to lose in 2028 (dooming about the end to elections aside.) And more critically, we actually have a shot at getting in Democrats that might actually be able to do something about fighting fascism.

You didn’t vote to fight fascism. You just voted for even worse fascism four years down the line.

So even worse, he manipulated and deceived the entire electorate from the get-go.

Did Biden explicitly promise to be a one term candidate? No. But he personally implied it on many occasions, and he had his underlings spread the messaging of him as a one-term president in the press. His minions were out there in the media basing their entire pitch for his candidacy on the idea of him as a one-term caretaker president, running to restore normalcy.

He deliberately put the idea in the public consciousness that he would only run for a single term but without ever explicitly promising to do so. This way the bastard could get woo voters on the prospect of him making a graceful exit, but while still leaving his future options open. It was a Machiavellian move, and it ultimately blew up in his face and gave Trump a second term.

If she had had more time, she would have lost even worse. The peak of her popularity was when people knew nothing about her. She just kept getting more unpopular as the election wore on.

The only scenario that Kamala could have won is if Biden had somehow dropped out just weeks before the election. Her only shot was to get elected before people really got to know her. She’s a deeply unlikable candidate.

She was left only from July to November to figure out her platform, determine a potential running mate, and come up with ideas.

She didn’t have too little time. She had too much time. She could have won if Biden had died a week before the election, and she had to take over last minute. The peak of her popularity was right when she got the candidacy. And it was all downhill from there. The more voters got to know her, the less they liked her. If she had had more time, it would have been much worse.

She was a deeply unlikable candidate that ran dead last in the primary she ran in. She was chosen by Biden as VP precisely because she was seen as unelectable and thus not a serious rival for Biden’s position.

support trans rights

Why do you surrender so easily to right-wing framing? What ads did she run supporting trans rights? What did she possibly do to make it an issue of her campaign?

There were two sides on trans rights. On one side, we had literal Nazis. On the other, silence. You conclude that the side that stayed silent made their whole campaign about trans rights, which is completely delusional.

Read the article. Kamala made her opinion of LGBT rights abundantly clear. She explicitly rejected Pete Buttigieg using the same logic a thousand other passive bigots I’ve met use. “I have no problem with queer people, but I can’t be near queer people because of what people might think of me.”

Take six mg estradiol enanthate injections weekly for two years. Follow up with domperidone-based lactation induction. Supplementing a testosterone blocker would also be useful.

Warning, this is essentially going on the full hormone therapy trans women go on. You can induce lactation, but it requires being hormonally female for an extended period of time. Look up the effects of mtf hormone therapy, as you would be getting all of them. Also the breast growth is permanent. You have been warned.

I think a simpler way of pointing this out is that the median US household income is $80k. A $100k household income is only 25% higher than average. It’s a pretty normal income. We just have “a six figure salary” as part of our cultural memory as some huge amount.

Let them die. If you want to hang out naked with strangers, that’s fine. I have no objections to people building naked beaches, communes, bike rides, etc. But has anyone except perverts ever actually liked using locker rooms without privacy for changing and showering? To me, it’s always been a communal hazing ritual for teenagers in school gyms than a wise policy. Why should anyone have to expose themselves to strangers just to get some exercise? If you want to do that, fine. But it really shouldn’t be the default.

These people are unhinged militant centrists.

It may seem paradoxical, but it is actually possible to be an extreme centrist. The hard truth of American politics is that there are no actual centrist voters. You won’t find any significant number of people whose views largely lie right between the platforms of the two parties. What you have instead are voters whose views simply don’t align well with the existing party coalitions. Their views may still be extremely strong. Think someone that is extremely pro-choice while also owning a dozen AR-15s. Maybe they have a home in the Libertarian Party, but they have no real home in either major party. They believe passionately on both subjects, they are anything but moderate for both their support of abortion choice and guns. But because their views don’t map cleanly to one side or the other’s arbitrary grab bag of chosen issues, this voter is called a centrist. But they’re not really a centrist. They just have weak partisan alignment.

But people like these? They are actual militant centrists. In many way these politicians are the only true centrists in America. They have formed a worldview that concludes that the right answer to any single issue must lie right in the middle between the two sides. One side wants to raise taxes on the rich while the other wants to cut them? The obviously correct answer must be to keep the taxes steady. Trump wants to turn millions of legal immigrants into illegal immigrants and then deport them, while progressives want to deport no law-abiding person? The correct answer must be to brutalize merely a few thousand innocent people. Progressives want to protect trans rights while Republicans want to liquidate trans people in ovens? The obvious answer must be some roll back of trans civil rights.

People like Schumer, Fetterman, etc. are militant centrists. They will obsessively tack to the very middle of any issue. And this is fundamentally a purely ideological position, the same as any extremist. A militant racist is so committed to theories of racial superiority that they’ll want to see racist policies enacted, even if they hurt the country, even if they hurt the racist themselves, regardless of even if white people are hurt. A militant socialist might demand state ownership of every type of business and enterprise, even if there’s no market failure and private companies can run those things just fine. You would have to be a pretty extreme socialist to think that the government should be running bars for example.

This is the defining feature of extremism and militancy - a willingness to put one’s own ideology above everything else. All that matters is the ideology. It is correct with a capital C. It is truth with a capital T. Any evidence against the ideology is dismissed or explained away.

These people are not moderate. They are militant centrists. Pick an issue, no matter the context or the evidence clear for all to see. They will always tack right in the middle between the two sides. They believe, in their heart of hearts, that the middle path is always the correct one. And they don’t care how many people have to die to keep their cherished view of centrism preserved. They are as extreme and militant as any far-right militia member. They just follow the ideology of centrism rather than conservatism.