Honestly this was sooner than I expected.
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Giuliani files to represent Trump campaign in Pennsylvania case
Giuliani "had to do this" because Trump's lawyers bailed on him. I think we all know why they bailed.Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday filed an application to formally appear in federal court in Pennsylvania on behalf of the president's campaign in a case seeking to stop the commonwealth from certifying its election results.
Giuliani, who has been recently spearheading Trump’s effort to challenge the results of the presidential election, made the application Tuesday morning just hours before a telephone hearing was scheduled in the case.
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
Nothing. He's just the only person who will still put Rudy Giuliani on TV anymore, and Rudy's like that former Homecoming King varsity quarterback in highschool that threw the game winning touchtown in their local highschool league and is still retelling that story 40 years later as if it's his crowning achievement.
Rudy will do what Trump wants (likely because he's lost his mind along with the lower half of his teeth) and Trump will make sure he can get on TV by being in Trump's orbit. It's a nice "quid pro quo", shall we say.
I really want the readouts of old Ghouly's day in court..
Whether his approval ratings were high or not, he racked up 70 odd million votes, which is still nuts for someone as batshit as him. Obama would've had a hard time against Trump. He'd have won, but Trump is this weird outlier candidate that has created a ridiculously stern coalition of voters. I don't like it anymore than you do. It's just a sign of how polarised the country is right now, moreso than 5 or 10 years ago. It is what it is.
- Christopher HitchensPopulists (and "national socialists") look at the supposedly secret deals that run the world "behind the scenes". Child's play. Except that childishness is sinister in adults.
If you can't, democracy is a dead system and we'd be well-served to abandon it as quickly as possible.
You literally cannot "control the narrative" in these circumstances, it takes orders of magnitude more effort to correct disinformation than it takes to produce. It's a battle that cannot be won, not unless you can get the audience to stop being so gullible and willfully blind.
Obama was a pretty centrist candidate, which of course didn't stop the right from pretending he was a gay Muslim Kenyan communist, or whatever. People don't really vote on policy, though--they vote on things like gut feelings or whichever candidate makes them feel more masculine, etc. Obama is genuinely and preternaturally charismatic, which appeals to otherwise weak-minded right-wing authoritarian voters, which is where you get a lot of Obama->Trump voters, because those same voters are drawn to Trump's faux charisma / faux strength. A couple interesting articles I read today that speak to exactly this--this is an interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat on strongmen: https://the.ink/p/strongmen and this one is about progressives and moderates:
"Left-wing populists often believe that there’s a silent majority who agree with them, if only they can be organized to go to the polls. If that were true, though, an election with record high turnout should have been much better for progressives. Instead, 2020 was a reminder of something most older liberals long ago had to come to terms with: The voters who live in the places that determine political control in this country tend to be more conservative than we are." Which I link because I also believed that until I did a deeper dive on some of the data--conservative Democrats are very, very conservative.
I would also add that Florida's Republican party organizational infrastructure is unparalleled, and I would also *also* add that this election stripped all illusions about "this is not who we are." If 70 million people thought another round of Trump and the end of our democracy was a swell idea, then this is who we are. Democrats can either come to terms with that and get their shit together, being smarter with messaging and targeting (do you ever hear Republicans say, "We don't actually have any policy ideas because we don't give a shit about the masses, we just want to dismantle the social safety net and transfer the nation's wealth to the oligarchs, and instead of legislating, we'll subcontract out policy decisions to our shiny radical right Supreme Court" or, "We're going to disenfranchise voters so we can gerrymander and ensure super majorities so we can stack courts from bottom to top in order to cement our batshit minority rule in perpetuity"? no? then why do Democrats have to blurt out our every thought and mud wrestle with other in public?), or we can welcome our minority party overlords.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. --Frank Wilhoit
- Christopher HitchensPopulists (and "national socialists") look at the supposedly secret deals that run the world "behind the scenes". Child's play. Except that childishness is sinister in adults.
How does the Global Left deal with Right Wing Propaganda in their superior electorates?
Seriously, can our Socialist Betters in Europe and the Anglosphere lend us their awesome Pro Socialist Media machines? Assuming those guys are winning so bigly over there.
They're basically gaslighting folk abt why some swing district Dems lost their seats and lecturing Dems on how they should run.
Seems like a good time to look at how well they do in their own races ...
We also need the translation package. How to explain the awesomeness of Northern European Socialism to immigrants that fled from bad examples of Socialismo.
Government Affiliated Snark
I wouldn't say "propaganda", but they absolutely need to stop hamstringing themselves in the interest of playing "nice". GOP members committed potential crimes? Charge every single fucking one of them for every possible charge, and condemn them utterly through the press in the most venemous manner justifiable by the circumstances. GOP members won't support COVID relief spending for a stimulus for workers, and insist on there being tax breaks for corporations instead, point out that they're proposing to increase human suffering to pad the wallets of the already-fantastically-rich. They don't support police reform? They're white supremacist jackbooted fascist shitbags. Etc.
Don't hold back from this. The reason I wouldn't call any of that "propaganda", is because it's just the simple truth. Phrased rudely, perhaps, but still just the plain truth.
we need to get facebook to be like twitter in censoring disinfo
this is a hated opinion because even lefties are like " yeah im all about free speech bro" but the reaility is there is nothing like this in human history where misinformation is spread and so widely believed. Also in ww2 the us countered pro nazi and pro ussr propaganda.. with biden as pres we could do alot to counter russian disinfo to, alongside getting priv companies to crack down.. and its not even an anti conservative thing, no one is going to get censored for saying " we need a 5% lower tax rate to jumpstart the economy" they are going to get cancelled for shit like " hillary drinks the blood of children for sustenance, which all of trumpers believe, and alot of those socialist counties in europe like germany dont have free speech, nazis get arrested in germany and are forced underground,
Last edited by arandomuser; 2020-11-17 at 05:12 PM.
In Canada, it's pretty simple. When you guys were dealing with the aftermath of McCarthyism, we had Tommy Douglas, an avowed Democratic Socialist. He's known today as the Father of Canadian Healthcare. Voted recently as the most beloved Canadian historical figure. He's basically Mr. Rogers on the political front. That's what Canadians see when they hear "socialist".
The issue in the USA was McCarthyism, and you never got over it because that propaganda remained useful throughout the Cold War, right up till the early '90s. And you've made basically no efforts to counteract it since.
Can we stop using terms like "If Trump loses"? Trump lost. We are at a point where we shouldn't even be entertaining concepts like "If Trump flips Arizona". Trump can't "flip" anything, because the election is over, the votes are counted, and he lost. It is like how the 49ers can't have a comeback win in last years Superbowl, the game is over, all the points are counted, they lost.
Latest popular vote according the AP:
Biden: 79,022,599 (51%)
Trump: 73,308,525 (47.3%)
Yet again demonstrating how impossible and absolutely insane some of these "dem messaging" takes would be if only we elected the president like a real democracy.
- Christopher HitchensPopulists (and "national socialists") look at the supposedly secret deals that run the world "behind the scenes". Child's play. Except that childishness is sinister in adults.