Lol fair. The media will find some way to say it’s a neck and neck race, but I take your point that actual polls may show a lost battle long before the election.
“Any President can do anything they want but I won’t, Jack!” is not going to make me give you $20, Joe.
2 Likes
The AstralStarCodex guy (who’s a psychiatrist) weighs in.
Many people on Twitter are asking “how could anyone possibly have been stupid enough to not realize that Biden was senile?”
I was that stupid. I didn’t say it openly, because I’m at least smart enough to have a high threshold for giving my opinion on political things I don’t know much about. But I thought it in my heart. So in case the people asking “how could anyone have been that stupid?” actually want an explanation, here’s my former reasoning.
Republicans have been accusing Biden of being senile (and the Democrats of hiding it) for at least five years now. Before the 2020 debates, they were excited that this was when they could finally prove once and for all that Biden was senile. Then Biden did fine, and they retreated to “well he’s senile but they have some secret drug they’re giving him, just during debates, that makes him look fine”.
I think a lot about experimental cognitive enhancement drugs, and I can say with confidence that nothing like that exists. Stimulants can help people with mild dementia be more active and motivated, but they don’t really improve cognition directly, and they can’t make a demented person temporarily lucid.
Still, for the past four years, every time Biden was going to do something - a press conference, a State of the Union, whatever - the Republicans would say “ha, this time is going to be the proof that he’s senile!” And then he would always do fine, and they would retreat back to “I guess he used the secret drug this time too”. The satire site Babylon Bee had some funny articles about this:
Meanwhile, the Democrats were spreading the alternate narrative that Trump was senile. This one has gotten less press, because I don’t know how many people really believed it. But it came up occasionally, along with out-of-context video snippets where Trump said or did something dumb or meandering. Of course, anybody with a presidential candidate’s level of public exposure will have a few gaffes. Even if they don’t, you can always deceptively crop something so it looks like they did.
So with the constant attempts to prove that both candidates were senile, the constant demonstration by both candidates that they weren’t, and the constant retreat into conspiracy theories of “I guess he used the magic drug again but we’ll get him next time!”, I just tuned out this entire category of thing. And I guess I kept it tuned out longer than I should have, whoops.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Even if liars are saying something for their usual liar reasons, it can still be true. For twenty years, people spread false rumors that Castro was on his deathbed, but this didn’t make Castro immortal. In the same way, I should have figured out that even if I couldn’t trust any particular claim that Biden was senile, the prior for an 81 year old becoming senile was still high.
But I guess I assumed that if he was becoming senile, some Democratic elites would have secret knowledge about it, and they couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to deny it while also scheduling him for a debate where it would inevitably come out. So I figured the Democratic elites who were closest to him thought he was doing well, and I trusted them more than the people who had been wrong every time for the past five years.
I’m still confused what those elites were thinking. Reading the news coverage for the past few days (including some video clips from a post-debate rally where he seemed noticeably better) it seems like some combination of:
- He has good days and bad days, and they were hoping this would be a good day.
- He’s better in the daytime than at night (this is a classic dementia symptom called “sundowning”), his aides mostly only saw him during the day, but this debate was at night (9 - 11 PM in his time zone).
- He’s still good at simple tasks like reading from a teleprompter, and they hoped this would extend to harder tasks like a debate.
I think the most likely story is that his aides noticed he had good days and bad days, thought that most days were good, and figured they’d roll the dice, schedule him for two debates, and hopefully they’d be good days and this would defuse questions about his health. But their luck ran out, they got a bad day, and also they were caught unprepared for how bad he was during the evening.
4 Likes
If anything can turn the election, this can.
9 Likes
https://x.com/heidireports/status/1808103029557653676?s=46&t=XGja5BtSraUljl_WWUrIUg
“The fact is, there wasn’t an open dialogue about whether he should run except for the people who would benefit from him running,” said a Democratic operative close to the campaign. They described the inner circle, Donilon especially, as convinced “that this was going to be about Trump, not about Biden, and at the end of the day, people just wouldn’t vote for Trump. But here we are, we’re sitting in July, and the race is about Biden, and it’s about a trait you can’t fix.”
4 Likes
It’s also cool how Brazil is running circles around us in dealing with racist right wing insanity. Truly never want to ever hear anything about American exceptionalism ever again. We were gifted boardwalk and park place in monopoly.
8 Likes
Minor edit
4 Likes
South Korea has also been jailing former PMs at a respectable rate.
1 Like
https://x.com/michaeldweiss/status/1808133313976004675?t=o2EyoNcfxXPcx2-Vv0-CDQ&s=19
https://x.com/mattcorridoni/status/1808087327920496912?t=P4OhrQGuHbFWvADfiIwABg&s=19
I don’t know why they don’t just let her run, she is as charismatic as Hillary and she beat the hell out of Trump (I assume, can’t be bothered to look it up).
5 Likes
Fwiw Boardwalk and Park Place are two of the worst properties to invest in. They cost a lot and have little return because of how rarely people land on them. The best properties (you’ll literally win every time) are the red and orange combos. Buy houses and then refuse to upgrade. No one can build hotels if there are no more houses to start with.
1 Like
These two things seem in conflict. But maybe you mean “at least as charismatic”
Would Kamala pulling a Brutus be considered an official act of the Vice Presidency? Just kidding of course, FBI agents.
1 Like
Fwiw, I read it as being a heavily sarcastic post.
1 Like
Yes, sorry. I am trying to lol so as not to cry about all the horrible news this week.
3 Likes
It’s purple and orange (that row between jail and free parking), right? Problem is you still need to land on that shit to buy it which is hit or miss, and if you don’t get the whole set you have to make good trades…but if everyone knows they’re the best bang for the buck, no one will let you have it.
I can only imagine the sheer hell of playing a serious game of Monopoly with other competent players who refuse to give up an edge, nobody gets a full color set of anything, and all everybody does is just go back and forth paying each other shitty $10-$30 rents. Maybe over the course of days one guy would finally grind the others down becuase he owns 3 of the 4 RRs or both utilities or something like that.
2 Likes
