I have no idea what to say after yesterday. Confronted between the
choice of a bland corporate technocrat who would put in place the sort
of commonsense public health measures that have tamped down a pandemic
disease in places as far apart as Germany and South Korea, and a raging,
thieving, lying dumpster fire of a hominid whose insane incompetence
has helped kill a quarter of a million of their fellow citizens, nearly
half of the U.S. public screamed "FUCK YES!!! I WANT MORE PLAGUE!!!"
I don't care how much you love your guns, or your God, or your tax cuts.
It's the fucking Plague!
Half the goddamn US public can't vote to escape the fucking 14th Century.
Jesus wept.
Actually...I do have this to say; look at this, from last night's Oregonian:
This is "Jo Rae Perkins":
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not sunk ass-deep in the wingnut fever swamp, so you won't recognize the little sticker she's holding.
It's a QAnon thing; "Where we go one, we go all".
Yep. Perkins is a QANut. A drooling, gibbering looney who has no business being let off Monkey Island, much less into the U.S.Senate. And yet...
Oregon is listed by Teh Google as containing about 4.2 million people.
As of this morning a total of 2,125,047 had voted in this race.
That 's about 50.6% of the people in Oregon. Let's assume that about a quarter are underage, or otherwise unable to vote legally. That brings the total up to about two-thirds, 67%. Repectable, but, still...in the most consequential election in our generation a third of the supposed "citizens" couldn't be arsed to request, or complete, a paper ballot.
And of the group that did, about 835,000 voted for this loon. That's roughly 26% of the vote.
And - as we've discussed here before - that's the Crazification Modulus. That was the "approval" percentage Dick Cheney was riding in 2008, after eight years of nonstop lies, bullshit, and fuckery.
That's what this loon got twelve years later.
I don't care how much you love your guns, or your God, or your tax cuts.
This nitwit has no more business in the U.S. Senate that she does being the Dragon Queen of Bhutan. And if you think she does, YOU have no business being allowed to handle firearms, operate a motor vehicle, or vote in a democratic republic.
You're demonstrably completely fucking unfit to associate with actual humans.
And these hominids are a quarter of the U.S. public and half the nutbag of hammers who voted for MOAR PLAGUE!
As we used to say back in the dark days of the Iraq War, back at the old Intel Dump:
We are so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, SO, SO FUCKED!!!
10 comments:
I really don't understand American politics.
I don't think I am alone.
It's easy. Just think "What would I do if I were a lazy, selfish, greedy, proudly ignorant, prejudiced fuckstick?"
Multiply by 50-60% of the public.
Now you know where all those concentration camp guards and cooks and clerical staff came from
These past four years have pretty much put a nail in the idea of America as the beacon of democracy. That idea has been sullied from the start - the Declaration of Independence really only applying to white men, and been further blackened by various actions (race relations, backing dictatorships, etc...). But the US could try to look past that and many countries did as well.
Then ya'll elected a president who'd like to turn the clock back so he could be Mussolini before Mussolini. And then a significant percentage of your population decided that his incompetence, corruption, racism, sexism, narcissism, and incompetence (so incompetent it needs to be mentioned twice) needed to be rewarded with a second term.
The US has pretty much surrendered its high ground to preach about democracy or as a leader of the free world. Whenever an American administration tries to lecture another country about democracy, freedom, racism, casual friday dress policies - the rest of the world will note you elected Trump and then gave a good college try to re-elect him.
My condolences Chief, I imagine it's very hard to be an American with reason and compassion right now.
Looks like the Democrats lost ground to the Rethuglicans because they couldn't keep Hispanics and other minority voters. They simply went after the white suburban college educated class and totally ignored the working class.
35% of Muslim voters, voted for Trump.
Why are the democrats so useless that Trump is still in the ballgame?
Ael: Given the GOP's loathing for them, the willingness of black and Hispanic and Muslim voters to go for Trump is baffling. You don't have to be a mental giant to figure out that the GOP isn't going to Make Them Great, any more than they've made the rest of us great. Even their White Power gangstas - something like 93% of the hardest-hit COVID counties went for Trump.
Biden's platform has great plans to deal with the sort of problems that the "working class" (and that's primarily black and Hispanic now, BTW) are dealing with. There's nothing the Democrats - or anyone else - can do about automation and deindustrialization. Climate change, offshoring, inequity...it's all there. If the "working class" are so useless that they can't figure that out, how the fuck are the Democrats going to change that?
But failing on the Plague should have been enough.
It's really simple; if you can't vote AGAINST the fucking Plague? How fucking stupid are you?
No, there are policies that can deal with automation and de-industrialization. One needs to make labour scarce. And that means industrial policy where you can't easily import goods built by cheap labour and you can't easily import cheap labour. However, the price of T-shirts and and Tomatoes goes up. Is it economically "optimal"? Depends on what you are optimizing.
The only connection I can make about what gains Trump made with Blacks, Hispanics, and yes even Muslims is not them voting for the man, but what the man could make happen for them... in this case, the socially conservative bloc against any and all abortions, for a start.
For years people have been wondering aloud just why the "faith-based community" backs a serial liar, cheat, panderer, etc. and it's abundantly clear it is an alliance of convenience.
He delivers what they want out of government, by and large, and they will let his personal failings slide.
So I don't think they were voting for Trump so much as they were voting for more Amy Coney Barretts.
Ael: That makes no sense. If you make labor scarce (i.e., expensive) you provide MORE motivation for manufacturers to automate rather than pay for expensive labor (or offshore to find cheaper labor). I agree that there ARE ways to make offshoring harder (for one thing, it should be MUCH more difficult for firms to move capital between foreign operations and domestic. Offshoring isn't nearly as profitable if you can't bring the profits back from overseas without paying heavily. Automation? There's no real "solution" to that.
Unfortunately the malefactors of great wealth have largely captured the entire GOP, much of the "center" of the Democratic Party, the bulk of the "news" media, and a hell of a lot of individuals. So any time you are going to try and make the sorts of changes that will result in a bombardment of scaremongering about the price of tomatoes and T-shirts that will be damn deadly difficult to overcome.
Brian: Those "gains" are largely within the range of error of the estimates. All those blocs voted massively against the Idiot.
And, yes, certainly, the Trumpkins were voting for things that are important to them; racism, abortion, guns, theocracy. But the Plague should have made them at least willing to reconsider those things; they are useless to them when they're dead. But, no. So even gross incompetence isn't enough to make them pause.
That's pretty much a cult.
The thing about automation is that it is scale dependent.
Automation involves building machines to build products (typically other machines).
But it only makes sense where you can pay back the initial high investment.
And a *lot* of that initial high investment is highly paid labour.
With industrial policy, you end up limiting the size of the market.
You can't build one factory that supplies every surgical mask in the world.
It is too dependent on supply disruption.
Instead, you build multiple factories so everyone can get a mask in the next pandemic.
The scale of the factory depends on the scale of the market.
In this world, you end up balancing automation with skilled labour. Somethings get automated, others not so much. You can let the capitalists decide how much goes where (as long as you keep them confined to their own sandbox so they don't get too big for their britches).
If labour is scarce then most everyone ends up with decent jobs and if a capitalist has needs employees to do a crappy job, They need to fancy up their offer somehow.
What you don't do is import low paid workers from outside the country.
"If labour is scarce then most everyone ends up with decent jobs and if a capitalist has needs employees to do a crappy job, They need to fancy up their offer somehow.
What you don't do is import low paid workers from outside the country."
Agreed. What we've allowed industries like meatpacking to do is iniquitous. A lot of that is "regulatory capture" of the organizations like the FDA by business, but a lot is also Republican fuckery; they LIKE poor undocumenteds slaving in chicken plants.
What you ALSO have to do is figure out how to get those higher paychecks BEFORE you start walling off the braceros, because otherwise the price of tomatoes and chicken skyrocket and Joe and Mary Lunchpail panic. AND you have to figure out ways to "balance automation" rather than let capital automate everything they can, because if they can they will; you say it's about scale, but it's also about perfusion; if a simple enough automaton invades enough of the market share then you're back to square one.
But the bottom line is that as AI gets better automation is going to spread. It's cheaper for an industry to automate than pay for "decent jobs" (because, remember, those come with US-designed-high-medical-insurance-costs...). It's going to longer in some places than others...but it's going to come. And we need to start thinking about that now rather than when we suddenly have MORE people who can't keep up with the costs of life in the US. The Founders wanted to limit the franchise because they felt that desperate poor people were too easy to suborn, and to a point they were right...
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