Afghanistan Wars: The Taliban Strikes Back.

I’m genuinely not sure how I locked this thread. It certainly wasn’t intentional. WTF. Apologies.

P.S. I think the posting in this thread has been fantastic, and I’ve learned a lot from all of you.

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I agree with most of your posts, especially given the second one about the obvious diversity of opinion and motivations that still exists there. To me the distinction is precisely the one that captures the colossal American failure and disgusting intervention in Afghanistan. That their government was almost a total fiction of bribery, while the people were largely just trying to look after themselves in a hopelessly corrupted environment. The latter made whatever compromises were done in the last few months, while the former simply melted away.

But I can certainly agree to disagree about that perspective, which is purely one about language used given we agree about the fundamentals behind it (I think). My initial point was just to say I thought making that distinction was where habs was coming from as well.

tx dems aren’t quite dead. the state grew massively, and redistricting only looks backs ten years. yes the voting restrictions are going to hurt, compared to 2020, but midterm will be a low turnout election anyway, and gop gotta pick whether to redistrict optimally for 2022 or 2024.

the maps so far cracked democrats into austin suburbs, but it may make more sense to pack them into a blue leaning seat and gerrymander elp instead. all of this is to say that it may result in fewer moderate dems being elected from texas, but potentially more progressives.

dems best strategy is to immediately sue trying to stay the voting restrictions, see what the maps look like, and run an even more left message with candidates from 2020 who got more name recognition now than they did then. like julie oliver, donna imam. those campaigns were pretty good.

and beto better fucking run against cruz in 2024. but he’s a donk, so it will probably be mj again.

Isn’t veto dead in TX state wide after his dumb were going to take your guns shit? Lot of independent and democrats who like guns in tx

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Texas:

% vote for Trump 2016: 52.23%
% vote for Trump 2020: 52.06%

Texas voting history:

Hey, look at that, that’s a pretty good trend…

…crap.

the ross perot share is messing with the visual.

1976 is carter? yeah that wasn’t a beginning of the trend

The point is that i don’t think there is any trend there. Cutting down the sample size just makes noise look trend-ish.

Texas liberals gonna be forced to pop out some babies and in 20-30 years, Republicans there are going to get wrecked by demographic change.

You may be underestimating the changes in the hispanic vote in Texas.

In what sense?

I’m going with Fly’s half joking comment that hispanics will become the new whites.

That was Dvaut, and he seems to have been correct.

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Yeah, maybe him. Something about whites being a belief statues that stuck with me and thought that trump had good chanxe. Phone fucked.

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There’s a notable division between those who have been here for a generation or more and new immigrants. Some hostility is not unusual. Also, there’s regression to the mean. For groups like the Vietnamese who flee communists and come here and join the party perceived as more anti-communist, that means the later generations are more likely to be Democrats than their parents. A lot of Latin American immigrants come here (sometimes fleeing right-wing governments like Guatemala) and are initially more Democratic leaning and later generations are less so. And some of it is a group getting more established and wealthier and owning businesses and property and other stuff that makes people more conservative generally.

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I would add education to that, the Donnie Dumb Dumb Party loves it’s uneducated people, and that plays out within different demographic subgroups. Donnie Dumb Dumb got something like 40% of low education Hispanic votes and 30% of people with more education (can’t recall how they did that split, but it’s something that pops up among several groups, Donnie Dumb Dumb’s schtick plays well with people on the lower end of the education scale.

I have worked with some not very well educated young Hispanic potential voters (people who were born in the US) and “lol Trump is funny” had them inclined to maybe vote for Trump and I could say I talked them out of it, but they were pretty unlikely to vote at all and I don’t know if they did actually vote for Biden. But, yeah, there’s a draw at least for young not very well educated males (Hispanic or not) where Trump is kind of a troll vote. That will not necessarily transfer to the next Republican candidate if it’s not Trump, and maybe Trump is a little played out.

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I agree, I would also add that young not very well educated males (Hispanic or not) are more likely to line up behind toxic masculine bluster. I think that’s a part of Trump’s appeal to some voters, the “tells it like it is” description really just means “he shoots his mouth off and acts confident and bullies people”. What’s not to like?

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