• 11 Posts
  • 931 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle



  • Here’s what I expect:

    For Harris to “win”: She needs to be able to go toe to toe with Trump. Any stuttering, nervousness, or uneasiness will be preyed upon, both immediately by Trump and afterwards in soundbytes and attack ads. She cannot have a “…we finally beat medicaid!” moment. She needs to show that she can stand up to him and give it as good as she can get it in real time. She is definitely at a bigger risk here. Trump will gaffe every 30 seconds and nobody will bat an eye. One gaffe by Harris could cost her the election. Trump will be spouting his firehose of lies while Harris won’t be able to fact-check 1% in real time. Harris needs to be pretty much perfect from start to finish. Any mistakes can and will be exploited.

    For Trump to “win”: Expectations are really low here. He’s not trying to reach new voters. He opely says he doesn’t care about policy. He is doubling down on the racism and misogyny of his base. All he needs to do is control the narrative. Ignore the rules, talk louder, interrupt mid-sentence. It doesn’t matter what gibberish he vomits out of his mouth. None of it will cause him to lose a vote. All he needs to do is dictate the narrative and pace of the debate. He solidifies his position among his base as the mysoginist who will put women back where they belong, and gives undecided voters doubt about whether she will be able to handle the pressure. I think as long as Trump forces everybody to play his games by his rules as he usually does, it’ll be a “victory” for him. Or at the very least a tie. As long as he can portray himself as the strongman going forward, he’s really got nothing to lose.


  • I don’t care how rich or poor you are. Every parent, and I mean every parent has considered every single friend and family member they could possibly squeeze free child care out of.

    Nobody is going to turn down free, reliable child care. Nobody. If a parent isn’t already tapping grandma, siblings, and friends, there’s a reason for that. Could be ranging anywhere from “Mom also has to work” to “Mom can’t keep up with a toddler any more” to “Mom is a fucking psychopath and I cut her out of my life 12 years ago.”

    This is what happens when you try to mix “inbred hillbilly” with “incoherent moron”


  • He knows his base will still see it, even if they don’t hear everything. That is what he cares about. Messaging the base. And his message is going to be to “put her in her place”. He has absolute interest in portraying himself as the alpha male who does his own thing, rules and norms be damned. That’s his whole brand.

    And this is assuming that the moderators have a spine. Do you think they’re going to actively shut his mic off if he goes past time? There’s zero chance of that happening. Trump going off at random on a hot mic = ratings. Trump demanded no fact checking last time and he got it. They continually give in to Trump’s demands because they want to continue having access to him, they don’t want to be labelled as “fake news” in one of his tweets, and they know that his soundbytes generate attention, and therefore ratings, and therefore money.

    There has never been an instance where Trump has been successfully corralled by debate moderators. I have no reason to believe that the next debate will magicallly be the first.


  • Trump has a natrually loud voice and loves to shout. Even if his mic is muted, her mic will still pick up at least some of what he’s saying. And viewers will still see he’s saying something.

    Plus, muted mics don’t change the fact that she’ll be sitting right near him and will be able to hear him. Even if the mics don’t pick it up, he can still throw her off. Try talking to one person while you have another person shouting nonsense at full volume into your ear. That’s what would be happening. Muted mics or no, Harris will try making her talking points and he’ll just keep shouting just to throw her off. If her mics pick it up, he’ll consider it a bonus.


  • Remember, everybody thought the last debate was going to be a cakewalk for Biden. All he had to do was show up and not look like a sundowning dementia patient. And look how that turned out.

    Harris may be able to “handle it” in that he’s not going to get her all worked up where she’ll break down and cry or something. But will she be able to hold her own on the debate floor? She is untested in that realm and her rally speeches show that she’s still not the most confident public speaker, and I could see a situation where Trump just doesn’t allow her to get a word in edgewise. Even if he says nothing but his usual incoherent word salads, if he can essentially bully her into silence by just throwing her off with his usual interruptions, firehoses of lies, and shouting down her responses, it could bolster his strongman persona, play to his mysoginist base by “putting her in her place”, and give some independent voters the impression that she can’t keep up.

    Like I said, Harris hasn’t been tested. Arguing in a courtroom is one thing when there’s a judge who can keep the opposition in check and has the ability to enforce it. It’s different when it’s moderators who are toothless and can’t or won’t do anything about Trump who doesn’t give a shit about the rules at all. And her continuing uneasiness when she gives rally speeches in front of friendly crowds makes me wonder how she’ll handle someone who’s game plan is literally to make her look like she belongs back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.

    Harris’ game plan right from the beginning is that he goes to the debate and just lashes out. That’s why she wanted the open mics. But like I said before, Biden got the debate he wanted on his terms and it ended up ending his campaign. Hopefully Harris isn’t making the same mistake.




  • Given the distribution of birthdays, this should keep total numbers at any one priso… school low enough to make other targets more appealing for the would-be shooter.

    Actually, assuming an even distribution of birthdays, this would mean that populations at any one cam…I mean school, of course…would be roughly evenly distributed. No deterrent for a would-be shooter who can just pick any school and expect similar results. No bueno. I think a better way of doing it would be to separate them by race skin tone ethnicity common background. Yeah, that’s it. Common background. Because there’s no racism or anything. Separating them by <cough> common background will make the groups small enough where even if the shooter does attack, at least the body counts will be kept to a minimum. I mean it’s not like there’s any other reason why a shooter may want to target people with certain common backgrounds, so we’re just really protecting these kids while they’re at these cam…schools. So they can, uh, concentrate. Yeah. Concentration. That’s the word of the day. We may be on to something here godblessamericalandthatIlove…



  • Unless they’re forced to live in the Fortress of Suck for the next 13 years of their lives and never, ever leave, there’s still the bottleneck that will happen every morning and every afternoon as kids come to and from school. They’ll be in a nice little stationary, single file line waiting to get into the building, or waiting for their children so they could leave.

    I mean, the would-be murderer still needs to figure out how to kill large quantities of people standing in a nice single-file line and not moving. It’s not like he’d have some kind of semi-automatic weapons easily available to them that can turn people into various splattermarks on the ground before they even have a chance to react, ri…oh…



  • Yeah, I apologize. That came off as more argumentative than I intended. I wholeheartedly agree with you and was just trying to show the absurdity of the suggestion that turning our schools into fortresses would do a damn thing. Not only is it political theater, it’s a logistical, financial, and educational impossibility and any attempt at doing so could be easily thwarted in seconds in about 10 different ways.

    I mean for the love of God, a shooter could just it in their car across the street and fire into the schoolyard during recess, or when kids are coming to/leaving school. I don’t care if the school is built like ADX-Florence. You ain’t stopping that. There will always be a bottleneck that can be exploited.


  • Pathetic.

    I’m stating it right now. I am officially running for President in the 2024, 2028, 2032, and 2036 elections. Therefore, to avoid the appearance of impropriety and not show political bias, the criminal court system cannot send me to jail until after the 2036 election, regardless of what crimes I commit or am convicted of in the mean time. The crimes I commit between now and then are irrelevant. I mean, you can convict me of those crimes if you’d like. You just can’t punish me for it because I’m a Presidential Candidate under the Trump standard set forth by this judge.

    This act of “not showing bias” goes to show the exact bias that the entire court system continues to give to Trump: giving him special privileges that exactly zero other people in this country would have extended to them in the same situation. And in one fell swoop, Merchan shows that he’s absolutely no better than the rest of them; when push comes to shove, every single one of them will go out of their way to avoid holding Trump accountable for anything, all the while wondering why he keeps doing it.

    He’s doing it because it works. He’s doing it because you let him. He’s doing it because you are unwilling to do anything to stop him.

    And he’s going to keep doing it because you continue to let him win. Fuck this judge and fuck every other judge who continues to rule that Trump gets special treatment as if it’s some kind of fucking birthright.


  • There is more than can be done besides turning schools into fortresses and thoughts and prayers.

    I have almost 20 years of experience working in the public school system. You know those “fortresses”? They’re also for show. Unless you’re literally putting every child through a metal detector individually (which would take way too much time), any student can easily sneak a weapon right in their backpack. Schools simply do not have the time or resources to be checking every individual student every time the metal detector goes off, assuming they have one in the first place. Those bulletproof windows don’t do shit when the shooter is in the building already. And any adult can socially engineer their way to access by simply claiming to be a parent, vendor, substitute teacher, or whatever. I have been to dozens of districts. The number of “fortresses” that could effectively stop a school shooter is exactly zero.

    Give me a public school building anywhere in the country, and I’ll show you ten ways that all of your security measures will do exactly nothing. I will bet large sums of money on it.


  • I know the Trump train is going full steam ahead and Vance is just along for the ride. And I know who’s driving the train. But is there nobody pulling Vance aside and telling him that every once in a while he needs to learn to shut the fuck up?

    It’s one thing for Trump to say it himself. He’s an incoherent moron who can’t put together a coherent thought, and can be written off like a homeless person in the park preaching to the pigeons. But JD Vance is an articulate, educated individual. But IMO, the fact that he’s actually coherent just makes it worse when he says it because that means actual, significant thought has been put into it, which also means coherent thought has been put into implementing it.

    Just think of how much more dangerous Trump would be if he were actually a coherent, functioning person. That’s JD Vance.