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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Yes, Biden had a bad debate – but so did Trump.

    “Bad” is not nearly as descriptive of a word as is necessary here. Biden had very low expectations and somehow fell short of them. Even worse, he fell short in the exact, perfect way to feed into Republican talking points about him having dementia, in by far the worst way he or any other president has ever done, at the most important moment, with literally years to prepare for that moment.

    I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that 2024 Joe Biden is the single worst major party candidate at winning an election in the history of the US. Name someone worse - I know some people have been totally crushed in elections, but you gotta judge those results relative to the competition. Look at all that’s happened with Trump during and since the 2016 election. In 2016, there was no Stormy Daniels, no sexual assault verdict, no fraud verdict, no tragicomic failed attempt to steal the election from the very voters who he’s asking to vote for him again. Forget 1980 Jimmy Carter, I think current, 99-year-old hospice patient Jimmy Carter would have no problem beating Trump. The fact that Biden is behind proves he’s the worst politician in history, and by far.



  • To be honest, I don’t think Trump has the attention span to do any more than hold a bunch of gloating rallies. Ironically his own immunity may end up working against his desire for revenge, as some justice department lawyers will push back until Trump gets distracted by a squirrel or a coloring book or something.

    That being said, I kinda dream of moving to Canada. Fun fact: the median Canadian wealth per capita is higher than in the US, meaning it may have a better claim to “land of opportunity” if we’re talking about ordinary people instead of the richest few. Plus the people really do seem to be nicer. The mosquitoes though…Canadian mosquitoes are no joke.



  • Yeah the thing I really can’t understand is why did the voters pick Biden in 2016? Even on the moderate side of the party there were much better choices. The democratic voters who just seem to pick the name they’re most familiar with - Clinton, Biden - those are the people who made Trump happen.

    I think the majority of Democratic voters just assume the most familiar name is the most electable in the general, but as we’ve seen that’s simply not the case. Ironically, if it feels like Democrats run the worst candidates against Trump, that’s probably not an accident. Trump makes Democratic voters pick the “safest” candidate, who turns out to be the least electable.


  • Anybody but Biden. Kamala seems to be the expected replacement, that works. If not her, pretty much anyone else. Trump is a terrible candidate. While he has experience in show business, he’s way past his prime and pretty much any person should be able to beat him in a debate at this point.

    I was actually recently thinking through people I’ve known and whether they could’ve done a better job debating Trump than Biden did. Generally any adult with a functioning mind would do better. Adults I’ve known with a HS education could’ve crushed Trump in that debate. I’m actually not sure if a homeless guy I once debated on the street regarding the meaning of pi would do better or worse than Biden, he seemed to be at about Trump’s level of sanity and if Trump won this last debate, well yeah even he’d do better than Biden. I can also think of some older teenage jocks I once knew, and while they were dumb as rocks their teenager swagger would’ve been more convincing than Biden’s rambling failed attempts to remember rote speeches.

    If I try to think of who is actually about at Biden’s level, I think of myself at the age of 13, when I had a presentation in front of the class on an issue and for some reason I was struck by that early teenager nervousness, and haltingly tried to give a presentation as the class tried failingly to hide their laughter at how terribly it was going. It was probably the most embarrassing day of my life. That’s Biden’s level right there, because he sounded just like me back then giving that presentation. So any person in their late teens or older with a full grasp on sanity should be a much better candidate than Biden.



  • I think what it all comes down to is most people don’t really want rational debate, and don’t participate in debates in the hope of learning or even to help others learn. Most people participate in debates to feel superior/“own” the other side. The result is debates that are typically lazy, uninformative, and downright mean.

    I think all of us have a little bit of this desire for superiority in us and we need to consciously make an effort to suppress it.



  • I’d argue madness is sticking with a candidate who now has virtually zero chance of winning what should be an easy race with anyone else. Democrats have stuck their head in the sand way too many times. They did it with how unpopular Hillary was in 2016. They did it with RBG not retiring. And now They’re doing it again.

    This is the simple, undeniable truth: Biden is extremely unpopular. One could argue he might win, but that’s the best you can do. A remote, unlikely possibility that he could beat what should be the least electable person in history.





  • At this point it’s starting to feel like Biden’s holding the nation at gunpoint and making us have a second Trump term. He’s always been a terrible politician, running twice for the nomination and failing to get a single delegate, until Obama made him VP. Honestly I suspect part of the reason Obama chose him is because he didn’t wanna play kingmaker and figured Biden was too old to run again.

    Then in 2020 I think the argument was Biden could benefit from Obama’s popularity. I certainly thought that was a terrible pick, but not totally lacking in logic. But in 2024 there was utterly no rational basis for Biden to be running in the first place. Now that he’s been a complete disaster, he’s just fucking us as a nation for his own narcissism.







  • There’s a lot of possibilities.

    My top contender would be a desire to explore, which probably requires consciousness. Given that we have pretty much no idea what leads to consciousness, it can be guessed (dubiously) that if it arose more easily then we’d have an explanation by now. It could be that it’s an extremely rare phenomenon, and there may even be other planets with “intelligent” but mechanistic beings that act entirely for their own survival and don’t build civilizations or explore much.

    Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.

    Third, and the one I most feel is right but it requires pretending I understand quantum physics (which I don’t) and probably offending many that do, is the notion that the concrete universe is not large but small and has no objective existence independent of our respective perceptions, and any part of the universe that’s invisible is a mere wave function that will only have concrete reality upon our perceiving it. I make the further dubious assumption that conscious beings can’t be part of the wave function. So there.