mozz

Do you know the difference between the types of candidates the media likes, and the types that are good for the American people? What kind of correlation do you think exists there?

(I do know the difference between wealth and income, and I’m even happy to explain some other time why wealth inequality is still going up even in the face of these gains for working people. It’s still weird to me that wages for working people are a metric you are so hostile to, apparently.)

Fascinating. So you’re aware that working class wages are rising, and income inequality falling, in dramatic fashion, but you would rather look at other metrics instead?

I want to ask why, but as I said, I don’t currently have the energy for a spirited back and forth. I’m just interested to learn that you are in the very small minority that know that that even happened, but it’s not important to you and you’re still here asserting that Biden did what the billionaires wanted him to… by taking 2 trillion dollars away from, well, millionaires and billionaires, not exclusively billionaires, to spend on climate change and the working class.

It’s just weird that you still are so vocal against him, and in a carefully constructed manner that allows for the admission that that happened while still saying it doesn’t count.

It’s just a weird combination of having the knowledge and still reaching the wrong conclusion with it.

Two different groups can be fucking things up in depressingly familiar fashion at once

I am pleased to see all the downvotes, and have not the energy for any extensive debunking, but Biden raised corporate taxes in fairly massive fashion, and oversaw the first reduction in income inequality and growth in wages (beating even historic inflation) for the working class in quite some time.

Why don’t you know that? Along with 98% or so of the American electorate?

Why are the media companies which are largely operated by the wealthy, who see all of that as an extremely bad thing, trying so hard now to bend things around to say he’s trash and we need someone else instead?

Are these two things related?

(As Hunter Thompson said, to ask the question is to answer the question.)

Because they are spineless cowards and various GOP operatives who have been doing this shit since Clinton and have become absolutely fuckin experts at it, came up to them in the locker room

“Hey so I pretty much everyone thinks Biden is a loser now,” they said.

“Really?” Said the media.

“Oh my God, do you even have to ask that?” asked the GOP derisively. “Did you see him at the debate?”

“I guess he did look pretty old…” said the media, thinking silently about when Trump said a wave of immigrants was coming in and killing our citizens at a level we’ve never seen.

“Media, he looked like a fucking ZOMBIE. He looked like an old, old man who didn’t know what year it was. I hope they find someone new after this. They’re pretty much going to have to. There’s no way they’re going to stick with that guy. He looks like someone’s great grandfather. He’s finished,” said the GOP forcefully. And then, after a carefully timed pause, they turned. “Wait, you don’t think he did GOOD, do you?”

And so on

And then the GOP operative got paid almost two hundred thousand dollars a year, and the media went out and wrote the story it was goddamned well supposed to write.

This is 100% accurate -- in the previous posting, I actually had a whole little spiel about it. Yes. Things are still fucked. If anyone is reading this thinking the intent is "oh good we can relax" then that is absolutely not the intent. The purpose is:

1. It's extremely notable that the media is so relentlessly pushing the narrative that Biden tanked because of the debate (which was, of course, horrifying.) I'm actually pretty surprised that the American people are capable of determining that the old as fuck feeble guy is a better choice than the explicitly malicious shoot-the-protestors guy. But, I guess it does make some kind of sense. This is important context to keep in mind any time you are reading one of those "Biden's fucked now" stories -- it says more about the news outlet than about the impact the debate had, outside of the media landscape.
2. Courage! As mentioned above the American people are smarter than the media. I kind of hope that something happens within the Democrats to make me feel better about how the election will go. But, apparently, most people aren't as simple minded as to say "Well, forgot about wanting to keep contraception legal and not deporting all the immigrants, that guy's old; now I want the guy who's just death for all, dressed in a spray-tan skin suit."

@jordanlund@lemmy.world Hi. I didn't editorialize the headline -- Mbin fills in the headline based on the HTML title. Open up the link, mouse over the tab, and you'll see the same title I had posted. I just didn't edit it after MBin filled it in, which maybe I should have. Anyway, here it is, reposted with the current headline. If I had to guess, I would say the site changed the headline in the article without also changing the HTML title tag.

It would have been nice to get a heads up, so I could just edit the title and preserve the conversation, but all good in any case. If you want me to do that instead, just let me know and that sounds fine (by which I mean, substantially better) to me as well.

The New York Times is not an unbiased source on this. I would trust almost anything that wasn’t some random person on Twitter, above the NYT’s polling numbers.

The article is basically just a blog post from the polling outfit itself

Are you deliberately constructing this to encourage moderator activity against the post? Describing it as a “blog post” is fairly bizarre.

What is with Lemmy's insistence on pretending that the debate either didn't hurt Biden, or actually helped him?

It's like a lot of people here actually believe that by pretending nothing is wrong, that means nothing is wrong.

Was “pure horrifying shit show” a not direct enough for you? How would you have preferred I described it when explicitly talked about this? I went into more detail about what I think some solutions might be and my feelings on it, elsewhere in the thread, too.

Although, I guess, I do understand that the package deal where you tell the person you’re talking to what their opinion is, and then why the thing you made up is wrong, makes it a lot easier to conduct the conversation. Sure, tell me more about why I am pretending nothing is wrong.

The whole process of polling is a pile of shit.

I analyzed some polls for recent elections, and they were off by an average of 16 percentage points. They only write that “margin of error 3%” thing because if they were honest about it, no one would listen to their poll, and they’d just use the ones from all the other people who still were lying about their MoE.

The “changed their algorithms” thing is just adding random fudge factors to the dogshit methodology until the answers come out right, but it never makes them predictive at all of the next election, because the underlying methodology is still dogshit. Basically, they call people on the phone, 1-2% of them answer, and then they bark a bunch of questions and whoever stays on the line for the whole thing, they assume that’s a good sample for everyone else and won’t be correlated with any other factors. Which, when you start thinking about it, makes it make sense why it might be off by 16 points.

There’s actually an argument to be made that a change in the polling is pretty reflective of a change in sentiment, even if the overall accuracy might be off by 10 or 20 points, is part of why I posted this. But mostly, I posted it to throw into sharp relief the dishonesty of the overall media narrative “Biden is fucked in polling cause debate,” which is created through a mixture of asking cunningly crafted questions to make it not an apples to apples comparison, mindless journalistic groupthink, and lying.

There was 0% hyperbole in anything I said. I was actually careful to draw a distinction between things I think are possible, things I think are likely, and things I think are virtually certain.

I know that in your mind, what I said was some kind of exaggeration to make a point. It wasn’t. That perception and the casual way you’re looking at this election is why you need to WAKE THE FUCK UP.

The polls do not agree with you

That’s one of the reasons they started writing idiot stories about Michelle Obama. They polled a bunch of other Democrats against Trump, and Biden did better than almost all of them, and they can’t write that story. Kamala Harris, though, actually beat Biden by a couple percentage points, and they definitely can’t write that story, because it’s a realistic and sensible pathway forward.

And so, like the bullies at the back of the class, they shouted out “nominate Michelle Obama!”, and the fucking idiots started taking it seriously and talking about it, while the bullies are trying to laugh quietly with each other behind their notebooks, because of how easy it is to play this game.

We have, to a large functional extent. Democracy requires a free enough press that people can determine what’s going on, which they currently can’t.

I fail to see how making every aspect of that problem exponentially worse by letting Trump come to power will fix it. Are you under the impression that Trump will have the military seize the voting machines and run the 2028 election, but that third parties will then become a viable alternative?