2024 Presidential Debate 2 Electric Boogaloo

He was the president of the United States. For ****'s sake, of course he was able to find people who would take his calls while he cheeseburgers. That doesn't mean those people were remotely close to being his friends.

Speak? Try he'll be the RNC nominee for President till the day he dies. 2028 for sure, and for 2032 he'll be the betting favorite for Repub presidential nominee.

You're generally right and it seems like a lot of posters here are kinda cultish in devotion to Dems/ can't face how bleak it really is.

However, was thinking the other day, plutocracy, oligarchy... even these terms are kinda optimistic.

It's more like we are ruled by lobbyists/bribes. Outside of culture war issues, policies are determined mainly by how much money is thrown at them.

An actual oligarchy might have some big picture vision. Sure, if the environment collapses they go to their bunkers in NZ. But obviously, it is more fun to ski in Aspen and eat in Paris.

Lots of the policies destroying the middle class create short term profits for one sector, like student loans and banks. But what happens when nobody can afford to buy the goods and services that wall street sells?

What we have is an a la carte serving of policies, and those with the resources get their way on these individual issues. But our policies are hap hazard, crazy and self destructive, even for elites because there is no overall vision, other than just preventing reform and maximizing short term gain.

you didn't read what i wrote

that behavior predated him even running - a made a special note of that because obviously they're going to take that call when he's president - i also made it clear they weren't friends either

agree 100% - having worked for the us gov while abroad i was really shocked by just how inefficient and incompetent they were and it's always been really frustrating seeing a complete lack of any sort of planning or long term goals for anything and of course the one thing the parties always agree upon is to lock out any other party from participation which ensures the continuation of the duopoly

Cool story. I'm sure your experience matches that of the entirety of government. I mean... I'd bet none of us have had those experiences in the private sector. Just the dumb dumb guberment.

A couple of people in my family were the primary planning architects behind the greening of the port of Los Angeles. There was nothing short of over a decade+ of planning, and the execution was pulled off extremely well considering the complexity.

bruh, you're picking on outliers, we don't even have high speed rail - just nothing but copium

Yup... there's a lot of money in politics, that's completely corrupted most sectors. I think most people in here understand all that.

So now what? Complain about what it should be? Whine that you're not getting what you want out of politics?

How about realizing that anything short of a complete utopian society, you'll ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS be voting for the lesser of the evils. Or you can complain that they're all the same and sit out, or vote 3rd party... same thing.

Yeah. Like, I suppose Bill Gates and Mark Cuban believe climate change is real and would prefer to take meaningful action.

If we were really ruled by some type of cabal, even a loose and informal one, they would probably have been building nuclear plants like crazy for 20 years and getting richer off it.

However, when climate policy comes up for auction you have enormous TNCs that might cease to exist. They will spend any amount of money funding both parties as such, every individual candidate, showering them with money when they leave office, funding bogus think tanks and studies and on and on.

On the other side of the issue you basically have nothing. Maybe I can donate $100 to a Dem who I hope will actually take action. (If so, the DNC will go to war against him.) Maybe there are a few environmental ngos and lobbyists. None of them can give a senators 90 iq nephew a 700k job.

Cuban and Gates can't really do much. Set up some foundation to research batteries or whatever.

Again, there is a ton of money to be made in, say nuclear power. But it's mostly potential. ExxonMobil has the bribe ready today. So even though wall street/rich people win either way, we get what is obviously, far and away, the worst option.

Same with HC. I'll be extorted for 100k or so over my life and perhaps die because we intentionally have a horrible system.

Changing the system wouldn't cause a commie revolution. A few useless corporations would die. I would spend my 100k on travel, restaurants and maybe a nice car.

When HC comes up for auction the useless corps will throw everything they have at it. Even though the auto industry might benefit by increasing our disposable incomes, they aren't going to go to war on the other side.

So we wind up with policy that is objectively terrible for everyone but a few corporations that exist just to benefit from intentionally bad policy.

Given the high number of gun owners in this country, I highly doubt that poll was a good representation of a group that included gun owners. People aren't interested in giving up their guns, regardless of the reason why. Punishing people who aren't the cause of the problem isn't the answer. Lack of mental healthcare is more of a problem than guns are, as evidenced by the high number of suicides in this country, and they are counted in gun death numbers as well.

Ya, that's too bad.

How about this reason: Children are getting slaughtered at their schools. Republicans are the pro-life party. They love children, so this should be a slam dunk, no?

Nobody is saying that people should give back all of their guns. Just the ones that make it easy to slaughter large groups of people easily. If you need that for hunting, you're probably not cut out for hunting.

It's a question of degree. Was there corruption in the past? Sure but it was not total. Military spending was reduced in peacetime. The GI bill, NASA, the interstate hwy system, rural electrification, the hoover dam.... nothing like this occurs now. Because, among other things, you can now hand a politician $75k in cash if you call it a speaking fee.

Other countries have better governments and better policies almost across the board. So we know it is possible.

Libs are so weird on climate change and other environmental issues. Are they real or not?

If they are real, should we accept the deliberate creation of a global calamity because the people doing it support gay marriage?

Now, it is a terrible dilemma. If you prefer to vote for horrifically evil people who are less bad than the alternative, I do get it.

If you believe people like Biden and Harris are your pals: good folks who want to make good policies, you are crazier than q anon.

I feel we need to try for something better, though I know it is hoping for a miracle.

Either way, it is a grim choice.

There's a book called the Nazi Doctors. It's a great book about the American political system, because it is about these kinds of decisions.

Is a man who sends thousands to the gas chambers a good man if he also takes steps to save thousands?

Would it be better if he refused to participate at all, and was sent to the front lines, replaced by a guy who killed em all?

It also gets into how when the Nazi Doctors first get to the camps they protest. Some cried and vomited. Some said you can put me in the gas chambers, I'm not doing this. But eventually, almost all became used to it and went along. I imagine this happens to a lot of people in DC. 10,000-20,000 dead for lack of HC each year Just a number to skim over as you have your coffee. It would be nice if we didn't deliberately kill those people, but doing otherwise is just a silly fantasy.

Maybe that seems dramatic. But from what I understand of climate and other issues, a person being born today should dance in the streets with joy if it is only as bad as WWII.

Perhaps it's possible to avoid the whole world turning into a death camp. Maybe it's inevitable. However, if it can be avoided, I think we must stop supporting people who are in favor of it and stop telling yourself that someone who will drop bombs on civilians in exchange for a bribe is a decent person.

yeah we're basically the only developed country in the world to not have basic necessities like universal healthcare and high speed rail

7.5% of all our bridges are structurally deficient - that's an almost 50k bridges in need of repair but we're not repairing them anywhere close to the rate required and the list of bridges to be maintained is forever expanding because repairwork is happening slower than bridges are degrading

of that work, of course it's all done by highly connected contractors and corporations who all engage in massive political "donations"

in fire and fury, the first thing he's told to do when he wants to run for office is to start writing checks for the max 5k to dozens of important republicans because that was the only way he could even get involved, he couldn't just declare that he was running, he had to pay to play

here's a list of all the bridges that have collapsed since 2000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_br...

browse that, what's one country you see repeatedly, that basically accounts for over a third of all bridge collapses in the world?

how is it possible the wealthiest most powerful country in the world is the one that has an extremely disproportionate amount of the world's bridge failures? how are other vast countries with far more bridges and people and way more poverty not dominating that list but instead it's us?

our government is an embarrassment plain and simple

like es2 stated, we no longer build anything

so we're not building rail, is that perhaps a meta decision where we're going in another direction - yes, we indeed went with cars instead but... why is that? because the auto industry bought up public transportation and shut them down to force americans to be reliant on purchasing a personal vehicle

gm was prosecuted for doing this, fined $5,000 and of course the government never brought back that public transport

so then are we planning around that, how each year there's more cars and people on the roads and we're going to build up the infrastructure to handle it?

nope

the last major highway project was 1992 and that was just closing in some gaps in some highways which were not continuous because special interests had prevented their construction

right now we don't build any new highways for 2 reasons

1 it requires long term planning which we don't have
2 there's a million different special interests who thrive under current system of traffic being routed under the current pathways that will donate money to kill any proposals for new development

maine has very little in the way of infrastructure

it only has a single highway running through the state - everything else are windy country roads

there's also very few bridges despite that the state is basically carved out by glaciers so there's long fingers running north/south down the state that on the coast extend into peninsulas but in the mainland are separated by rivers

so it takes an hour to drive to a place that's 15 miles away as the crow flies because you need to drive north for 20 minutes on winding 35 mph roads to where you can traverse east/west for 20 minutes and then drive south for 20 minutes

Portland, which is 40 miles away takes 1.5 hours
Bangor, which is 50 miles away takes 2 hours

just no infrastructure whatsoever, we basically just wanted to connect to canada and then put in zero thought beyond that

if I showed you charlottesville was 99% neo-nazis, are you going to say that Trump was talking about the 1% that weren't? If you're at a rally of 100 people and you're the only one that's not a neo-Nazi, you think people should be charitable and not call you a Nazi?

I read all these arguments in the original back and forth with that guy who has a difficult user name.

Maybe Trump didn't know that. He is, after all, a moron who doesn't read anything. Maybe it was a shrewdly calculated dog whistle with some plausible deniability on the back end. He is, after all, an idiot savant at politics. Who knows?

The content of his statement is the factual part of this discussion. I was mislead about that content and believed it for years. I think it is very, very, very, very easy to make Trump look bad without using misleading content.

How about the time a friendly interviewer asked him to name his favorite bible verse and he was unable to think of one and it went on and on like a cringe comedy bit? This was even a famous joke on the Simpsons about how impossibly stupid Homer was. (To overcome the spider's curse, simply quote a bible verse).

Or back when he was on crossfire as an apolitical celebrity and the fawning interviewers asked the brilliant man what books he'd been reading and he bungled about in a way that made it clear he probably hadn't read a book in 10 years?

There's no reason to pretend he said there are fine people on both sides, inclusive of white power idiots, when he explicitly excluded white power idiots.

Good points. Her parents split when she was 7. I don't think we know how much her parents made in academia in the 1970s or how much child support her father paid her mother, but this does not look like an upper-middle-class residence to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life...

This is from Wikipedia, with multiple sources for all facts:
"Kamala, along with her mother and sister, moved back to California in 1970, while her father remained in the Midwest.[17][18][15] They stayed briefly on Milvia Street in central Berkeley, then at a duplex on Bancroft Way in West Berkeley, an area often called the "flatlands"[19] with a significant Black population.[20] When Harris began kindergarten, she was bused as part of Berkeley's comprehensive desegregation program to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, a public school in a more prosperous neighborhood in northern Berkeley[19] which previously had been 95 percent white, and after the desegregation plan went into effect became 40 percent Black.[20] Harris's parents divorced when she was seven, with her mother maintaining custody.[21]"

In Berkeley and Oakland, the upper-middle-class neighborhoods and the homes where wealthy people live are in the hills. The flatlands closer to the San Francisco Bay are more middle-class and light-industrial neighborhoods.

I used to be where you're at in some ways, but after Trump lost the 2020 election and lied over and over again about actually winning, I lost all my ability for charitability over this guy. The resistance libs were proven right when everyone else said they were wrong. When Trump won the 2016 election but claimed he had won CA by 3 million votes when he clearly lost, that was the canary in the coalmine. We need to be able to evaluate his body of work if we're going to assess charitability.

Anyway one thing I will say is that it's very difficult to assess the exact intention behind someone's words, which makes people like Trump who basically say whatever they want hard to judge. If he says that the world's crime rate is going down at the expense of America because they are sending all their criminals here, what are we supposed to make of that? Is it a lie? Is it him just getting the facts wrong and he really believes it? Is he referencing something that is blatant white supremacist propaganda in a covert way? Who knows. That's where interpreting Trump gets tricky, not so much the media headlines.

I'm all for criticizing the media and think that they focus on the wrong things a lot of the time. But as a politician, why would anyone stop reminding Americans about how Trump constantly used to defend the far right. Now he has moved on to the J6ers, but he always likes to have the extreme people associating with him.

I see no risk in a president who disdains half the citizens of his country, and probably hates many of them.

It's not like such a president and an administration of yes-men might block relief aid to Hurricane-stricken a..., t

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/trump-cant-play-politics-aid-states

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Trump Can’t Play Politics With Aid to States

Obviously the other half of the country can sleep soundly at night knowing that as long as they don't make a fuzz, are sufficiently subservient, don't change their political opinions, don't support other candidates or do not demand any kind of accountability, they will stay off the radar and be ignored. That's what freedom is about.

This is a bit of conjecture, but lack of quality mental healthcare is a bigger problem than access to it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the majority of mental healthcare professionals and institutions are bad at what they do and often make things worse. Not only that, but there are people who could possibly benefit from some sort of therapy, but they won't seek it out, and we can't force them go. And as often as I hear how stigmatized mental illness is, it's not. It's practically celebrated.

Some very fine memes on both sides:

Anyone just want to admit after seeing this debate that Biden is simply living on another planet? Regardless if Kamala wins or not I think the whole world should be glad that he was made to step aside.

It is good that he is stepping down, as he is too old. That said, to me his presidency gets a bad rap it does not deserve. It has been an effective presidency which has managed to drag a lot of necessary policy through a bitterly partisan congress. I'm also a foreigner, so my opinions likely skew very differently from an US citizen.

What is weird to me that is that US progressives seem by and large to long for the Obama presidency, which I find is a far better example of the overly careful and milquetoast ideology they claim to loathe. Granted with a great orator as a focal point and a very tight-lipped administration, so the packaging was great.

Then again, it is MAGA and US "conservatism" which is the driver of political discourse in the US now. It is either their opinion or the debate of their opinion that matters.

Biden saved his presidency by being good (or at least decent) wrt energy, he spent most of his moderate political capital fighting extremists in his party and that has to be acknowledged.

But there is no vision for China (and Taiwan in particular), no solving of trade route problems caused by houthis/pirates, no plan for Ukraine post war (even if he at least does what he can to help them), no coherent plan on immigration, no developing of the relationships with Japan and south Korea and so on.

For geopolitics, and I don't think only about Israel and Ukraine, it was a pretty meh presidency. And that's a core power of POTUS that doesn't require congress approval at every step.

For judges he went very left as expected, unfortunately. He could have kept Garland ready to fill a seat but he didn't, putting him in the DoJ.

The second COVID relief act was an inflationary disaster Biden pushed for, and the inflation reduction act has some good policies in mixed with some absurd ones

Trump is bad as a president mainly because he is a very bad manager of people. He is bad at selecting people close to him, bad at organizing them, bad at directing them, bad at delegating the proper amount of decision making to them.