OBJECTION!

He’s 7 points down in Pennsylvania according to this poll, what a headline to run with.

It’s much more likely that they’re ordinary people acting according to well known psychological patterns of tribalism. People can hold different beliefs or values without being paid actors.

Incredibly based. Just having someone with a voice in that chamber would be huge.

This is about the most incorrect analysis I can imagine.

Democrats right now would vote for Biden if he was in a coma

You would. But this core contingent of “vote blue no matter who” people is not large enough to win in the general.

Biden, unlike other potential democratic candidates is more likely to have some non trump Republicans voting for him.

Biden represents the same thing the Democrats have been offering for decades. Anyone who’s a Republican has already seen people like Biden and said, “No thanks, not interested.” Yeah he’s a centrist, but he doesn’t cut across party lines because he doesn’t bring anything new or different to the table.

The fact that media is only talking about Biden without urging trump to step down shows me the whole thing is astroturfed.

This is an absurd conspiracy theory. There have been plenty of high level Democrats calling for him to resign, as well as a significant number of Democratic voters. His debate performance raised concerns about his mental competency that everyone who isn’t self-deluding can see.

It’s completely meaningless to call for your enemy to step down. Why on earth would Trump listen to Democrats and liberal media outlets telling him to step down? What you’re suggesting is stupid and pointless, it accomplishes nothing and serves only to justify your conspiracy theory.

And? Does that contradict what I said in some way?

TIL 32% of Democrats are pushing conservative propaganda to discourage people from voting Democrat.

The “everyone who disagrees with me is a bad actor” conspiracy theories keep getting less and less plausible.

This is random and nitpicky, but can we talk about that ad’s soundtrack?

Maybe things have changed and I’m out of touch, but I thought the thing was to put suspenseful horror movie music over attack ads, you know, like the classic Michael Myers theme. The music they used is like, kind of dark, but it’s more like an action movie, like the way the bass drops at 0:33 is the part of a trailer where they’d so some really cool stunt, and around 0:50 the pace is picking up to where it’s like, trying to hype you up to see the movie. Like, it’s not that far off from the soundtrack in the trailer for Inception, where it’s like, yeah there are some dark aspects to it, but it’s still supposed to be fun and entertaining. I know I’m not the target audience, but this just left me wondering when the Kamala movie dropped, and not like, worried about some sinister plot.

The whole thing feels kinda disjointed tbh. At first the message is, “Biden is senile, Kamala is really running thing, and she’s gonna let the immigrants in, be afraid,” but then by the end the message is, “Haha, Kamala is saying all this incoherent stuff, she’s a joke!” It’s like they got distracted and lost the plot halfway through a one minute ad. I guess they’re just throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks, but it’s very unfocused and low effort.

“And the Trump administration kept to the pact, reducing U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500, even though the Taliban continued to attack Afghan government forces and welcomed al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership.”

So should the withdrawal have been stopped at that point? Exactly how much longer do you think we should’ve stayed in Afghanistan?

And that criticism was always bullshit. There’s no “right” way to retreat, it was always going to play out the way it did. Journalists criticized it in bad faith, because it generated clicks and because they never actually opposed the war, because again, war is great for clicks. In reality, what happened when the US pulled out was the culmination of 20 years spent doing nothing to stabilize the country and only making the Taliban stronger.

But go ahead then, armchair strategist, and describe to me what specifically could’ve been done differently about the withdrawal that would not have resulted in things playing out the way they did.

Opposing the withdrawal is the same as supporting the war. The withdrawal was one of the only good things Biden did in his whole career and liberals will never forgive him for it. Worse yet, you want to allow Trump to claim credit for it when Biden’s the one who actually saw it through and had to deal with the flak from it.

Liberals will criticize ending a pointless 20 year war and somehow still not realize that they’re jingos.

I didn’t say the relations were good, but they were certainly a lot better 5 years ago.

Amazing. So because the NRA met with Russian weapon manufacturers to try to get rich, it means every one of the 5.5 million NRA members has been swayed by Russian propaganda. Absolutely zero of them were legitimately just gun nuts who were always going to vote Republican because they oppose gun control, 100% of the members were swayed by Russia the moment someone on the board met with a Russian arms dealer.

I guess it becomes very easy to show that a large number of Americans have been influenced by Russia if you’re allowed to play like 6 degrees of separation like that. Why don’t we count anyone who ever used Facebook too, while we’re at it? What percentage of Americans bought a coke in 2020, while Coca-Cola was doing business in Russia? This goes way deeper than I ever imagined.

I’m glad that the US has suddenly started caring about labor rights and the well-being of Muslims, and I’m sure that it’s just pure coincidence that it happens to be aligned with criticizing and fear-mongering it’s largest competitor.

There are plenty of poor countries with worse conditions than China. Major multinational corporations set up shell corporations to run their sweatshops and if they get exposed they say, “We had no idea,” maybe pay a tiny fine, then set up another company to do the exact same thing. Many of these countries are in the US’s sphere of influence, and many have to sign away control of their own domestic policies as a condition for entry into the global marketplace, while their resources, stolen by force by colonizers, remain in foreign hands.

Why isn’t the US concerned about their labor conditions? I’ll tell you why: because one of those cases means giving more money to rich corporations in the form of defense contracts, and the other means restricting the ability of rich corporations to exploit the poor. All the bombs the US is building will do nothing to improve the conditions of anyone living in China, while there are plenty of people who the US could be lifting out of poverty if it cared to.

The sudden decline in relations was not because the whole US just woke up one day and decided to start caring about the conditions of laborers in China, which used to be much worse than today. Don’t feed me that nonsense.

My question specifically included the words “actively swayed.”

Not a dude, and the US got along much better with China, until around 2019 when the wars in the Middle East were winding down and the US needed a new justification for defense contracts, and when it needed to shift blame for botching COVID. That’s when all of a sudden everyone started hating China for no other reason than the news said to.

What constitutes “a significant portion?” 5%? 20%? 60%?

That’s wild. Like, to think all it takes is a handful of Twitter bots to instantly sway like half the population of a country.

Say, why doesn’t anyone else try this? Just set up some bot accounts to spread misinformation in favor of Biden, and it should be just as effective right? I mean, it can’t be that people have different beliefs and different material interests or anything like that. Everyone who disagrees with you is simply so stupid that they just instantly believe anything they see. Shouldn’t you be able to use that to your advantage?

Ok then, what percentage is believing, repeating, and being actively swayed by Russian propaganda?

Just curious, what percentage of Americans do you think are under the influence of Russian bots? Because roughly a third voted for Trump and roughly a third didn’t vote, add in third party voters and I’m pretty sure that would mean a supermajority of Americans are Russian assets, which is a fascinating perspective.

The US chose to saber-rattle with China before the war in Ukraine, which destroyed any possibility of this that might have existed. China was never going to agree to diplomatically isolating Russia when it would so obviously be next.