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chainsaw

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Everything posted by chainsaw

  1. They should rename the thread to "NFL Legends who kill people in their spare time"
  2. "When we fight, we win" is true. The trick is to actually fight instead of only talking the talk. The national party is led by weak people such as Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and dozens of people behind the scenes that are equally committed to the fantasy that this nightmare will end if we just hit snooze a few more times. Committed mostly because their careers depend on politics as usual remaining politics as usual. "When we fight, we win" means recruiting strategists and candidates who are untainted by the facile "popularist" school of thought championed by Matty Yglesias. As we've begun to see with the pendulum swing on immigration, the vast majority of voters and poll respondents are fish naturally drawn to shiny objects. They follow us, not the other way around, so any political compass that's based on the fallacy of the fish attracting the shiny objects is guaranteed to fail. The political faction with the shinier objects, the side with the more compelling and more viral narrative, is the faction who decides where the center mass of the public sentiment will be. Be the metronome, not the hapless musician trying to keep up. Since at least the Obama administration, the Democrats conspicuously negotiated against themselves on immigration. At first, when the opponents were John McCain and Mitt Romney (by today's standards, way to the left of the GOP on immigration) the debate was never about the humanity of noncitizens or their entitlement to the basics of due process. The problem was defined in terms of whether to grant amnesty and how best to streamline legal immigration. On DREAMers, Romney said they should have a path to become legal permanent residents. He distanced himself from Arizona's "papers please" laws. Obama of course supported granting DREAMers a pathway to citizenship but since the bad faith GOP didn't want to give him another accomplishment on top of the ACA, the DREAM Act never would happen. Dems' hands have since allocated to all of their fingers the task of checking where the wind is blowing, while at the same time the GOP's hands dexterously operated the industrial-grade propaganda machinery responsible for controlling the weather. Before long nobody was thinking of illegal immigration in terms of streamlining the legal process or passing the DREAM Act, instead it was wall to wall 24/7 coverage of a made-up "border crisis." No lie too outlandish, ranging from apartment complexes under siege to dogs being abducted and eaten. Where was the counternarrative? In Chicago, where one would expect to have heard it, we instead were regaled with the tragic tale of Jim Lankford's border bill getting blocked for......... *gasp*............ optics? Partisan strategy? Look at how far we've fallen, the delta between the DREAM Act that was blocked as a means toward cynical partisan ends during the Obama administration and the Lankford Border Bill that was blocked as a means toward cynical partisan ends during the Biden administration. If the Lankford Bill counted as a "win" then we'd already lost before the game even started. What a difference eight years can make, sure, but the rightward shift on this issue is as unmistakable as it was avoidable. Worse yet, this is one of many issues where the Democrats' idiotic silence followed by flatfooted "popularism" has led to a catastrophic betrayal of a previously reliable voter bloc. The failure to lead is how we got here. I have a faint sliver of hope from these local races that at least at the state level (now that there's a new party chair) we will see fewer of these hopeless, wasted efforts to win over conservatives by parroting whatever the latest opinion poll says is popular. Leftists have better ideas than Liberals, and Liberals have better ideas than Conservatives. The left may not have as many propaganda outlets and social media platforms as the right, but you can be the richest man on the planet aligned with the biggest social media and legacy cable "news" outlets in the world and still fail to win a Wisconsin supreme court seat--even if you make promises of a chance to win a million bucks! Book bans should be unpopular. We never should have allowed the debate to regress to a point where even the suggestion of a book ban would allow its proponent to continue being taken seriously. That it was possible for a candidate who run on, win, and use their position to ban books in school districts is unforgivable. The failure to prevent the zeitgeist from getting to that point, the failure to fill the silence with an effective counternarrative, can't even be called political malpractice. It's something worse than malpractice, somewhere between murder and what Jeffrey Epstein did with his island. Looking ahead I'm thinking about how to maintain these specific seats because if Joe Biden taught us anything it's that stability and prosperity are boring and it has a way of shining a spotlight on losers when they're the only ones losing. They become more vocal, and the propaganda machine cranks it to 11 looking for fake problems to pretend are real. How can we make good ideas and prosperity less boring? That's the big problem that the next generation of leaders has to solve. If you're boring, you're less of a shiny object, and if you're less shiny, you lose elections. We need to be able to tell compelling counternarratives even when we're in power. One thing that the left has done very effectively in Mexico is maintain direct communication with its base. Sheinbaum won by even bigger margins than AMLO. There needs to be a competent, coordinated message when Dems are in charge that look at all I'm doing for you and we are delivering good things for you regularly. A daily message, if possible. Control the message. Always. I think this would even work for local and school district candidates. Once a week, explain what you did and how it helps people. Don't be boring, and make sure your ideas don't suck. Perhaps most importantly of all, if there's some asshole making your job harder, you can use your bully pulpit to get them to fuck off. Especially the book banning homophobes. Remember: when we fight, we win.
  3. He was always Zionist and probably also racist, but at least had enough impulse control to avoid saying the things that would have gotten him creamed by Conor Lamb
  4. goin the wrong way, buddy
  5. All that was missing was the band on the field
  6. this might hit too close to home for Surlyites
  7. Also running a fentanyl black market
  8. I think it was an accelerant. It just has to be, and I've known people who had similar very abrupt personality changes after similar medical episodes. Hell even Charles Whitman went mad after some serious head trauma.
  9. Wemby would not have been celebrating the way he did when he saw the Spurs won the lotto if Mitch had been the HC. This is a huge, possibly franchise-defining mistake.
  10. Stephen Miller is the poster child for low intellect guys who got groomed by the right power broker.
  11. Each underthrown into triple coverage?
  12. The right to stand your ground and the right to carry a knife with a blade of up to 5.5 inches. These are clear rules and beyond debate. Who started the fight? This is not known yet. How long was the blade? This is not known yet to the public. Release the video.
  13. I've started transitioning to locally hosted LLMs
  14. https://www.404media.co/researchers-secretly-ran-a-massive-unauthorized-ai-persuasion-experiment-on-reddit-users/ Make no mistake, if this is what researchers are willing to publicly admit to doing, just imagine with Big Tech oligarchs and nation state-backed intelligence are capable of doing.
  15. Getting thrown to the wolves too early can permanently destroy a QB'S confidence. It's a far fetched scenario but imagine if you will a 5-star freshman QB having to play meaningful snaps against an elite defense coached by Nick Saban in his prime. Chances are he'd never be the same afterwards and would be lucky to find a starting position at some garbage G5 program.
  16. He's better than a Fox News personality but it's one thing to run a successful YouTube channel and it's another thing to have the awesome responsibility of the NOAA and NWS. He's a great multitasker, I'll give him that. Plus he knows how to delegate to actual experts which can't be said for most of the Trump cabinet.
  17. Sark has his flaws but knowing who to start at QB isn't one of them.
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