US US Politics General - Discussion of President Biden and other politicians

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In regards to how orange Biden has become— this is why you have to be VERY careful when you choose your embalming fluid for your cadavers ESPECIALLY when they’re very pale and/or transparent.

If you go too rosy with your fluid, the cadaver will come out unnatural appearing and it can actually frighten the loved ones of the deceased or the entire country the deceased is currently leading.
 
Here's a comparison of Google Search trend data from the past month.

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Now, what can we learn from this? We can see the debate spike in search traffic on June 27th for Trump and Biden is actually miniscule compared to more recent trends. The Trump assassination attempt was, and continues to be a dominant story, more than doubling the story of Biden dropping out and having massive legs. There are currently more searches for trump than Biden. With Harris, we don't see a spike, but a large slope that settles above the June27th debate peaks. She's currently getting massive amounts of search traffic. She's had the media in a frenzy about her since Biden dropped out and she secured enough delegates, and she's been running and ad blitz, so these are probably people trying to find more about her or are hoping to donate. "brat" Kamala.
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Like an etiolated plant that’s about to fall over.
Found the biologist.
Maybe I’m a bot, you never know
Now I'm imagining an evil robot version of you named Botterly. Like the villainous robot doppelgangers in Bill and Ted or how they built Mechagodzilla.

Yes. Definitely. But, I have had some really great female colleagues and currently have a female boss who is fab. I do find the general ‘tone’ of male environments better, but I must say that the female individual contributor types I work with just now have been superior at this company. The men tend to get promoted fast even if they’re useless, which is a bit hard to see, leaving the women at my level a mixed bag of useless and amazing, but generally mid career and competent. Open office all mixed in with HR stuff was the worst thing. Some shocking behaviour. Small mixed groups are fine, large ones less so.
This returns me to one of my recurrent themes which is how what works on the small scale becomes a problem in larger groups or at the level of mass society. This is probably getting off-topic now so I'll put it in a spoiler, but I wrote something on the farms a while back I'll quote below. It was on the topic of movie heroines and how obnoxious they often are in media today contrasted with Ripley from Alien/Aliens. She ticks every box for "strong independent whamen" heroine and yet she is not obnoxious. And there's a reason for that.

Ripley: Strong, independent, smarter than most of the men around her, physically capable. Superficially the modern girlboss character in every regard and yet... not obnoxious. Why?

Recall if you can the scene in Aliens where the marines are preparing for their descent to the planet, loading equipment, etc. Ripley walks up to Hicks and Apone and says "I feel like kind of a third wheel around here. Is there anything I can do?" to which Apone responds immediately "I don't know. Is there anything you can do." Ripley pauses for a second or two processing this and then says: "Well, I can drive that loader". They give her a chance to do it, she shows she can and ends with a "where you want it?" as she holds a missile. They laugh, tell her "Bay 12, please".

What just happened in that scene? Ripley wasn't bossy or presuming that she had some right to do something or be part of what was going on. And when she presented herself they did what they would do to any man who presented himself - they challenged her to prove herself. And they are happy when she does.

In short, she becomes part of the group by showing she can play their game. And is welcomed thereafter. Same as a man would be.

A modern action film with a female lead would present their lack of immediate acceptance and challenging her as sexist. And when she met the challenge she would not do so successfully and gain acceptance, she would do so better than them and they would be humiliated.

Ripley is liked because she is a woman who is capable and doesn't demand that men around her act in a non-men way. Guys like to challenge each other to make sure that people in the group are strong. Female majority groups like to stamp down on overt jostling and testing - which is an important part of male bonding. Denied it, we're stuck in a state of ambiguity as to who is in charge, how to coordinate actions quickly, how to interact with each other. Things that get in the way of the desire to Get Things Done.

Most modern action heroines are disliked because they humiliate the men around them and punish them for acting in standard male interaction patterns. It's not women being strong or capable that tends to put people off. It's the imposition of working in a way that men instinctively don't want to. And in mixed groups in a work environment in real life, this is often imposed as well. It's when men feel they can't bond and organise in a way that is natural to them that typically leads to frustration.

In the UK, the Labour Party has never had a female leader. The Conservative party has had three. Women who reach the top in politics are overwhelmingly Right Wing. Thatcher, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, Ana Brnabic... Hell, the last two are lesbians as well - they're supporters on the Right overwhelmingly don't care because women on the Right tend to be meritocratic, individualistic - and therefore are happy enough to work in a mode that feels natural to the men around them. Because their modes are the men's modes. They expect to be treated based on their merits, get pissed off if they're not and they don't have a problem being in charge if they think they're the best person to be so.

Meanwhile women on the Left tend to be consensus driven and can even be averse to being in charge.

There is Hilary Clinton of course but the Clinton-era Democrats are not exactly Left Wing and in any case, vampires don't count.

I wonder how hillary is doing.

She must be fuming to witness kamala running for president.

"IT SHOULDVE BEEN MEEEEE"
I imagine it like the scene in Ace Ventura; Pet Detective where he finds the room dedicated to that guy who messed up his life. "Laces out!" The room of a crazy person. Just pictures of Donald scribbled over everywhere.
 
Blah blah blah, Moralize instead of not giving a fuck and see how far that gets you nowa days.

Complain about sex in the streets of SF and I'm sure they will all flip red. Pain and Pleasure are the reasons people start and stop behaviors, and degenerate lifestyles cause a lot of pain.

And if you want to get all preachy do what they used to do and find the most broken and pained and manipulate them.

Unfortunately unlike jaded and aloof individuals like yourself, I do not have the luxury of shrugging my shoulders, rolling a joint, and singing Que Sera, Sera while the world burns. I have a meaningful stake in it.

And like all postural cynics and nihilists, I think you'd sing a different song if we were talking about something that affected you.

Marriage is a sacrament of the church, I think you're confusing marriage and civil unions. There is no such thing as a secular marriage, that's like saying secular communion.

I think you're confusing contemporary novelties and Roman Catholic doctrine with a correct understanding of marriage.

Marriage as a sacrament was an exegetical mistake by the medieval theologian Peter Lombard. The Bible sets out marriage as a creation ordinance (Gen 2, Matt 19), not a covenantal one. The Bible sets out duties and rights for believers in marriage, and parallels marriage to union in Christ, but nowhere draws a substantial distinction between the two "marriages" such that unbelievers are considered unmarried. Marriage is simply what the passages I referenced says it is.

The Roman Catholic Church for its part basically treated a Catholic marriage as something superadded to a regular marriage, not a different thing.

Civil marriages have always been a thing, unlike church marriages. Marriages in this country are controlled by secular law, not Roman Catholic canon law, so far as the government is concerned.

Civil unions were invented by fags as a Trojan horse to claim the legal benefits of marriage without using the name. Everyone knew the ultimate goal was fag marriage in name, which inevitably has occurred. That your pope supports fag marriage without calling it so shows that he is a wolf in shepherd's clothing.

So in that sense, the government can allow you to enter a civil union with your car, but that doesn't make it a marriage no matter how many times they try to label and redefine it that way.

I agree that the government cannot legitimate marriages with cars. I would also be strenuously opposed to any attempt to legitimate man-automobile sexual relationships regardless of the language used.

Also, there is no "right" to marriage, that's ridiculous. Can it be taken away? Yeah? Then it's not a right, rather a socially agreed upon set of rules.

Where do you get the idea that marriage is an alienable right? Have you ever heard of someone losing their right to marry?
 
They do MLMs, sew, worry, and / or shag around. If this was a military wife thing you’d see it evenly spread wherever there are military wives, not concentrated in specific IPs.
Somewhere was going to have the highest per-capita average Reddit screentime. I haven’t seen any evidence linking this place with suspicious posts or even posting frequency.

Okay, maybe I’m willing to entertain the idea that some of the covid posts were bots. I think it’s more likely that Pfizer paid for those bots.

What I’m not willing to entertain is the idea that the NSA, headquartered in DC, runs all their bots through the same proxy in a Floridian Air Force base.

I think my explanation that that particular base has a particularly large Reddit club makes more sense. I disagree with your position that per-capita average screen time needs to be spread evenly across every military base. Might as well argue that Glasgow can’t possibly have the highest per-capita Reddit screentime because it should be “evenly spread everywhere.”

I could just as easily argue the bots are a British conspiracy, pushed by their NHS, because Glasgow is the city with the highest per capita usage.
 
Financial Times reveals that Sillicon Valley now bows to Trump
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Has Silicon Valley gone Maga?​

Some of America’s wealthiest tech investors have come out for Trump. But most Big Tech leaders are staying silent, for now​

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Donald Trump, centre, has won the backing of tech investors including Peter Thiel, Ben Horowitz, Chamath Palihapitiya and Elon Musk © FT montage/Getty Images


Tabby Kinder, George Hammond and Hannah Murphy in San Francisco, and Alex Rogers in Milwaukee
JULY 19 2024


In Silicon Valley, the heartland of US innovation that has long been considered a bastion of liberal beliefs, Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election provoked despair.

“This feels like the worst thing to happen in my life,” wrote Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, on X. “The horror, the horror”, said venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, an Uber investor who made a call for California to secede from the US.

Eight years on, the mood has changed. An influential segment of Silicon Valley’s wealth and power is now lining up behind Trump to win the White House in November alongside his vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, a former venture capitalist who lived in San Francisco for almost two years.

Over the past few weeks, an unfolding cast of prominent technologists have declared their newfound support for Trump, with momentum growing even faster since the attempt on his life on July 13.

“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Elon Musk wrote on X, the platform he owns, just 30 minutes after the shooting. Two days later, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, early internet pioneers whose venture capital firm controls $35bn, threw their backing behind the Trump-Vance ticket. And Keith Rabois, an early executive at PayPal and LinkedIn, who in 2016 called Trump a “sociopath”, pledged $1mn to his campaign. “Biden is the worst president of my lifetime,” the Khosla Ventures managing director now tells the Financial Times.

They joined a slew of Silicon Valley investors like Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, hosts of the “All-In” tech podcast, and Sequoia Capital partners Doug Leone and Shaun Maguire, who had publicly backed Trump weeks earlier. All of them have made, or are planning to make, large donations to a new pro-Trump political action committee led by Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of software giant Palantir Technologies and venture firm, 8VC.

Pishevar, far from hoping California would leave the union, has instead moved himself and his business to Miami, Florida and become a Trump supporter. “The Democratic party I knew under Obama doesn’t exist anymore,” he says, in an interview at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “The shift in Silicon Valley is indicative of the recognition that the Republican party has become much more open to grand ideas to really rebuild America and embrace tech and innovation.”

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Yet the shift is far from universal in a sector, and location, that is still overwhelmingly a Democratic stronghold. Around 80 per cent of donations from internet companies have gone to Democrats so far in this election cycle, according to Open Secrets (though that has dropped from 90 per cent in 2020), and Big Tech veterans like Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman are still backing President Joe Biden, and have urged peers to do the same. In San Francisco, only 9 per cent of people voted for Trump in 2016, rising to 13 per cent in 2020.

Some of San Francisco’s life-long Democrats believe the trend is being overplayed, the work of a small number of influential figures with big megaphones. “It’s a handful of west coast financiers doing what Wall Street bankers have long done — feathering their nests,” says Michael Moritz, the billionaire former leader of Sequoia Capital. “They represent Silicon Valley about as much as the traditional Wall Street types represent the Bronx.”

What happens in this wealthy enclave of the United States is hardly representative of the rest of the country. But the divide here reflects political rifts being felt nationally, as friends and co-workers disagree over whether a second Trump term represents a threat or an opportunity.

Moritz’s views are at fierce odds with his colleagues, Leone and Maguire. Hoffman was part of the founding team of PayPal — alongside Musk and Sacks and longtime Trump donor, Peter Thiel. Lonsdale and Thiel’s Palantir co-founder and chief executive, Alex Karp, is a major Biden donor.

At the same time, the willingness of some of Silicon Valley’s best-known wealth creators to back Trump exposes how parts of the technology industry feel the Democrats have failed to help them thrive.

“People who innovate are fleeing. It is an intellectual mistake that the progressive wing doesn’t engage,” says Karp. “I personally am not thrilled by the direction [of the Democratic Party], but how far can they go before I reconsider? I am voting against Trump.”



The reasons for the shift are as commercial as they are ideological.

Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters are betting the former president will lower their tax burden and boost their business profits. Many of them are desperate to avoid Biden’s plan to tax unrealised capital gains at 25 per cent for individuals whose wealth is over $100mn. The tax would “absolutely kill both start-ups and the venture capital industry that funds them,” Andreessen Horowitz posted on its website last week.

Competition regulators have clamped down on tech companies in recent years, forcing Big Tech into years of paralysis on mergers and acquisitions, and starving venture-backed start-up companies of lucrative exit deals. Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney-general for antitrust at the Department of Justice, have targeted tech monopolies, going after Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple and others in the courts.

Rapid developments in artificial intelligence in the past 18 months have made this a particularly pressing problem for tech companies. “We are on the edge of an AI surge that will make the dotcom boom look like spring break,” says Boris Feldman, co-head of Freshfields’ global tech practice, who advises multiple “magnificent seven” tech companies. “Tech CEOs are concerned that, because of Khan’s obsessive hostility towards major tech companies, [the FTC] will be willing to impede developments in AI, placing us at a competitive disadvantage to non-western countries.”

Trump is unlikely to go soft on tech monopolies, and indeed his running mate Vance has been vocal on his desire to rein in Big Tech. But the sense in tech circles is that a Republican administration will not be nearly as anti-merger as the current government. On top of that, both Trump and Vance, who invested in dozens of fledgling AI companies at his firm Narya Capital, have positioned themselves as strong sceptics of regulating AI.

Looser regulation would be a particular boon for the founders and backers of AI start-ups. “American technological pre-eminence lives or dies on the fate of whether start-ups can succeed,” said Andreessen last week, explaining that his venture firm’s “little-tech” agenda was at the root of his decision to support Trump.

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Andreessen Horowitz has another major financial interest in championing Trump: cryptocurrency. Trump has pitched himself to tech executives as “the crypto president” and he plans to make a speech, in person, at a major Bitcoin conference in Nashville later this month. The price of Bitcoin surged immediately following the assassination attempt on Trump, with crypto investors increasing their bets he will win.

Andreessen Horowitz has an $8bn bet on crypto, making it one of the largest crypto investors in the world. But it has had to fight to influence US politicians as the crypto industry faces heightened scrutiny from regulators after the collapse of crypto exchange FTX and the conviction of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, for embezzling customer funds. Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has been an “existential threat” for crypto investors, Feldman says. “They must get him out. They will spend whatever it takes to accomplish that.”

There are ideological reasons behind the shift, too. Silicon Valley’s culture over the last two decades became defined by progressive attitudes that aimed to root out social injustice, with tech giants adopting mottos such as Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”, Meta encouraging employees to challenge its management on company issues, and tech workers forcing their employers to veto government defence contracts on moral grounds.

Over time, that has changed. Google ditched its motto in 2018 and Meta started restricting political speech by staff in 2020. Growing geopolitical tensions between the US and China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have pulled tech giants such as Google back into government work on defence programmes — and employees are told to leave if they don’t like it.

One of the most obvious divides with tech industry culture used to be Trump’s stance on immigration. Half of start-ups valued at $1bn or more were started by immigrants. Any proposal to “choke off” immigration “makes me sick to my stomach”, said Andreessen in 2016 in a direct response to Trump. But an immigration crisis at the US-Mexico border has fuelled some of the tech swing to Trump since then, particularly from Musk, according to people close to him.

“I think it’s totally cultural,” says Jacob Helberg, a Palantir adviser and former major Biden donor now supporting Trump with his husband Rabois. “Most people are willing to absorb high taxes. I think part of what we’re seeing is the perspective of time has led a lot of people to conclude that President Trump’s policies were actually more right than wrong.”

Provocateurs like Musk have railed against “wokeness” for years, and that sentiment has become an increasingly mainstream opinion in some tech circles, with companies reining in their rhetoric and, in some cases, their action on diversity and sustainability.

Last week, Musk not only endorsed Trump but also announced he would move both X and SpaceX from California to Texas in protest at a new state gender identity law for schoolchildren.

Even some Democrats in Silicon Valley admit that parts of the liberal agenda swung the pendulum too far one way and alienated supporters. “Political correctness in the party is a huge problem, the Democrats can’t yet understand the cost of it,” says Palantir chief Karp.

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There is an even more simple explanation for the sudden outpouring of support, however: Silicon Valley’s power brokers now think Trump will win, after the events of the last month, and they want to have credibility with, and access to, the new administration.

Big Tech’s top executives are staying silent for now, but there are signs of a wider movement happening. On July 12, Meta finally lifted all of the restrictions it had placed on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts after the January 6 2021 attack on the US capitol.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Meta, on Friday said Trump’s immediate reaction to the shooting was “badass” — though added he was not planning to be involved in the election in any way.

Now that the public support for Trump that was once taboo in Silicon Valley is broadly acceptable, more might follow.

This would be vindication for PayPal co-founder Thiel, who was disavowed by parts of Silicon Valley for his donations to Trump eight years ago, and moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles in protest at the tech hub becoming a “one-party state.” He has not donated to Trump this campaign so far, but has been the biggest source of funds behind both the venture capital and political career of Vance.

But Silicon Valley’s newer generation of Trump boosters may find it harder than expected to gain the access they hope for. “They’re all calling and they all want to support me,” Trump said of Fortune 100 chief executives in an interview with Bloomberg this week. “And if you knew about politics, whoever’s leading gets all the support they want. I could have the personality of a shrimp, and everybody would come.”
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Seems to me they're promising Brave New World and delivering 1984.
I'm getting the feeling you've never actually read Brave New World and have a mental image of being blissed out on drugs doing nothing. As opposed to the abuse of infants to eliminate their curiosity, the eugenics to engineer less intelligent working class, the early precocious sexualisation to divorce it intercourse from emotional attachment...

In many ways, Brave New World was worse than 1984.
 
I completely agree with you. A large amount of the female population care a lot about "fitting in." That's how it has always been, and fellow women know exactly what you are talking about but a lot of them don't want to admit it.
This is a feature of women, not a bug. This is a survival tactic that is genetically coded into women via evolutionary process. They can't compete physically with men, so they decided to use consensus building to create larger and stronger groups. Women have traditionally been the moral keepers of society due to this, and it's usually to the benefit of society when used wisely.

The problem is that these tactics have been twisted to push the most insane, self-suicidal ideologies in history.

Edit: ninja'd by @Otterly
 
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