US Presidential Election 2024

[Belligerent Savant]

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[DrEvil]

You guys really need proportional representation. It wouldn't fix things overnight (or at all. Mutual trust takes a long time to build), but it would fracture the established parties into a bunch of smaller ones who would then need to cooperate to gain a majority and nominate a president and divvy up the different government departments among them.

The Hillary party gets to drone some Arabs, but in return the Greens get subsidies for solar panels, the Socialists get better pay for teachers, and the Liberals get some tax cuts for small businesses. Or the Trump party gets to replace the oval office with a gold throne room, but in return the Conservatives get to privatize Medicaid and Medicare, the Christian Democrats get the death penalty for abortions and adultery (the adultery part is quickly overturned after the leopard eats their face) and the Libertarians get weed and copies of Atlas Shrugged in every school library.

[SonicG]

Fuck yeah! for proportional representation parliamentary systems!

Count Binface
@CountBinface
I just beat Britain First.
https://twitter.com/CountBinface/status ... 6431210650

Won on straight votes even!

[Elihu]

I was wondering to myself, in this sci-fi horror fantasy we imbibe as reality, if they can swap the prez with a body double, have clones of him, an actor wearing a mask, deep fakes etc etc etc, why would they choose to make him a senile doddering pervert from a crime family? And it occurs to me, once a person degrades themselves by enlisting in the putative cause or defending him, your party loyalty for the next act is secured! you've got nowhere else to go but the demopublican party! It's a crude trick on the level of the subconscious. The worse they become the more bought-in to the whole charade the slaves become! We're compromised by our own complicity.

[DrEvil]

The fact I'm not even sure which senile doddering pervert from a crime family you're referring to is not a good sign. One is too many.

[JackRiddler]

weed and copies of Atlas Shrugged in every school library.

Pretty sure this is already the case.

[Elihu]

The fact I'm not even sure which senile doddering pervert from a crime family you're referring to is not a good sign. One is too many.

the ambiguity IS the whole point. in this macro environment, to confine oneself to the realms of emotion is to be a slave no matter one's erudition. the great HLmencken remarked that the problem is probably insoluble. he recommended that our illusions be discarded and we adjust our expectations by seeing clearly what politicos really are: parasites.

grow up. be mature. in so doing we reduce their influence to an absolute minimum. for my own part the indignation of being scammed has also got to be discarded. in the confidence game the only one that can save the mark is the mark himself by not playing anymore. this whole thing is in the process of dissolution. a process that can no longer be reversed imo.

some personality ascending to the top to fix everything is the switch on the television set that one should turn off. AJnock remarked "there is no disorder in nature. there never has been. the consequences will be what they will be." spoiler alert: we're all going to be sorely disappointed, "democrats" and "republicans" alike. See? those two things don't really exist. they're figments of the imagination like fairies and unicorns.

[Elihu]

not to denigrate fairies and unicorns. i think they probably do exist. but they're not pertinent and in fact are probably counter productive for present purposes

[BenDhyan]

It is really quite sad, why did his minders do this to him!

[Elihu]

It is really quite sad, why did his minders do this to him!

the thing is done so whatevercrats will be so refreshed and energized in 2028 or 2032, with a fresh new face! and so many new ideas! and so with the whatevercans. they occupy the opposite amplitude of the same wave! the thing is done to maintain engagement, to provide a lifeline of hopes! to keep us wanting to vote till next time! hope that didn't sound too cynical. feelings may have got us into this but they sure are not going to get us out.

[DrEvil]

All hail King Biden, first of his name!

[SonicG]

The Republican Convention seems to be going great. Besides this JD Vance guy (did not know Ron Howard direct the movie of his book), the head of the Teamsters spitting semi-populist rhetoric:

"We need to call the Chamber of Commerce and the business roundtables what they are: They are unions for big business," O’Brien said during his speech.

"And here's another fact against a gigantic multinational corporation: an individual worker has zero power," he continued. "It's only when Americans band together and democratic unions that we win rail improvements on wages, benefits and working conditions … Remember, elites have no party. Elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock price at the expense of the American worker."

This young lady has been brought into the Republican fold to court the young TikTok crowd I guess...


Honestly, the most interesting thing is Thiele trying to Trojan-horse a takeover of the party via Vance is the real chef's kiss.

What we now call “intergenerational fairness” has suffered a lot lately, and it’s not about to be improved by the news that the Baby Boomers are sucking the blood of the young. Although, in fairness, they are only after the plasma.

In Monterey, California, a new startup has emerged, offering transfusions of human plasma: 1.5 litres a time, pumped in across two days, harvested uniquely from young adults.

Ambrosia, the vampiric startup concerned, is run by a 32-year-old doctor called Jesse Karmazin, who bills $8,000 (£6,200) a pop for participation in what he has dubbed a “study”. So far, he has 600 clients, with a median age of 60. The blood is collected from local blood banks, then separated and combined – it takes multiple donors to make one package.
***
That fictionalised account may well be based on the real-life adventures of Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder, who has expressed interest in having transfusions (Gawker even reported that he was spending $40,000 (£31,000) a quarter on regular transfusions from 18-year-olds). He, and various other thinkers who radiate out towards the death-evading “transhumanist” movement, are fascinated by “heterochronic parabiosis” – the sewing together of two animals in order to create a living chimera. Studies going back decades show the regenerative effects of one organism being joined to another. In the 17th century, Robert Boyle – he of Boyle’s Law – suggested “replacing the blood of the old with the blood of the young”.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/sho ... -the-young

Oh those wacky Tech billionaires!

THE DEATH OF PETER THIEL’S “KEPT” ROMANTIC PARTNER IS BEING INVESTIGATED AS A SUICIDE
Miami police plan to interview Thiel as part of probe into the sudden death of Jeff Thomas, a model and social media influencer, sources said.
https://theintercept.com/2023/03/23/pet ... ff-thomas/

And then of course there's Palantir...

[SonicG]

Bonus "In the Inclusive Log Cabin" edition:
https://twitter.com/fernbirg/status/1813305249160900739

BREAKING: An executive of the gay dating app Grindr says the Republican National Convention is “basically Grindr’s Super Bowl.”

[BenDhyan]

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/17/biden-presidential-race-medical-condition.html

Biden says he might quit presidential race if ‘medical condition’ emerged

A little while later....

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/17/biden-tests-positive-for-covid-cancels-las-vegas-campaign-event?traffic_source=rss

Biden tests positive for COVID, cancels Las Vegas campaign event

[SonicG]

C'mon, it's just an image from the US dollar bill...

but Republicans who have fallen down the Aleister Crowley/Jack Parsons/L Ron Hubbard rabbithole be going nutZ

ETA:

Controversial Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) just got served divorce papers by her husband Perry Greene, who said the marriage was “irretrievably broken.”

The congresswoman has also been accused of having multiple affairs that nearly caused the marriage to dissolve in 2012. The filing also claimed that the pair had been functionally separated for years.

The two married in 1995 and have three children together. She reportedly had an affair with an employee of a gym in Alpharetta, Georgia about a decade ago, and one anonymous source told The Daily Mail that the affair “wasn’t a secret” and everyone suspected Perry and Marjorie’s marriage to be collapsing.

There were also reports that one of these gym employees was a “tantric sex guru,” which is not something you would expect to hear along the name Marjorie Taylor Greene.