2024

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Jack Bauer
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boognish_bear
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4th and Inches
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boognish_bear said:


you mean the same Fox News called Arizona before the polls closed in 2020?
Adopt-a-Bear 2024

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Redbrickbear
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historian
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EatMoreSalmon
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Jack Bauer said:


By the time the word salad ends in Michigan there won't be time to go anywhere else... except maybe to take another staged picture on the airplane.
boognish_bear
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Realitybites
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How Kamala Gave California to the Cartels, & the Psychopaths Ruling the Democrat Party

Chris Moritz, on the current state of California (worse than you can possibly imagine).

Even if you aren't from the Fool's Gold State, it's worth watching. Tuesday we either unleash this on the rest of America by letting the Democrats remain in power or turn the tide.
historian
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historian
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historian
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About the usual amount of cringe for Kam, but this time with her doppelgnger:

https://rumble.com/v5lm98i-harris-tries-to-win-over-voters-by-talking-to-herself-in-snl-skit-just-two-.html
Redbrickbear
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[For me, this is not a vote between two (highly flawed) candidates, but between two ways of governing. I have an essay coming out in The European Conservative later today about this, so I don't want to give too much away here. The core of my argument, though, can be found in this must-read essay by Nathan Pinkoski, in First Things.

In it, Pinkoski argues that classical liberalism in America is a thing of the past, and we are actually living between versions of postliberalism. What does he mean by that? Excerpt:

Quote:

Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction. The state-society distinction reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, when the triumph and challenges of the postwar moment clarified the importance of defending social freedom from state power, while ensuring that the public realm was not taken over by private interests. Over the last few decades, this distinction has been eroded and finally abandoned altogether. Like it or not, the West is now postliberal.

This is not the same "postliberalism" that we are accustomed to hearing about. Postliberal thinkers from Patrick Deneen to Adrian Pabst have exposed the conceptual problems inherent in liberal theory. Liberals justify the separation of the public realm from the private sphere by appealing to value neutrality. This notion of separation involves a certain moral and metaphysical thinness. The commitment to neutrality is thought to prevent states' coercing belief through law and force. It protects the private sphere, so that individuals and associations can live out their creeds. Yet by promoting civic neutrality, liberalism socializes us to moderate our ambitions for public life. Against this view, postliberal thinkers argue that the liberal state's rejection of a substantive vision of the good hollows out politics and civil society. Liberalism produces a state bent on driving tradition and religion out of public life, an atomistic society in which money is the only universally acknowledged good. Postliberal intellectuals contend that if our ruling classes relinquished their liberal commitment to neutral institutions in favor of a substantive vision of the good, we could renew our civilization.

The Brexit referendum and Trump's election in 2016 revealed the extent of the West's malaise. Eight years ago, the postliberal critique seemed exciting and relevant, even as liberal intellectuals mounted impressive counterattacks. But these disputations have little to do with how we are actually governed. Governments long ago breached the barrier separating the public and private realms. Nor is the state the only danger, for the supposedly liberal institutions of civil society have given up on neutrality. Cancel culture is corporate and academic culture. The financial and tech giants pry into the private lives of citizens and punish them for their words and deeds. For quite some time, a substantive vision of the good has already been ruling over both state and society.

He goes on to argue that after 1989, in the West, the state expanded its power through ideological capture of the ruling class, which acts more or less in unison, within private institutions to achieve its goals. This is not only something that came about through Democratic administrations. The George W. Bush administration expanded the reach of the state after 9/11. The United States, under successive governments, has weaponized liberal institutions of international governance to make them serve American goals. Covid exacerbated and clarified this, as did the George Floyd aftermath, as has the transgender issue, with the state and its ideological allies in business and private institutions using civil rights laws and concepts to force illiberal concepts of race and sex on unwilling populations, who were not given a say in the matter.

The British commentator Ed West expands on this in his latest Substack essay. (I'm not sure if this is paywalled or not, but oh boy, you should subscribe to Ed's consistently excellent Substack, which focuses mostly on history and the way it impacts us today). Excerpt:

Quote:

The number one reason that people give for voting Kamala Harris is 'the future of democracy'. Yet Republicans have reason to fear the other side, too, that progressive rule will further embed a system where decisions are taken away from elected politicians and steered by a network of NGOs, activist judges and bureaucrats schooled in monocultural left-leaning institutions, where freedom of speech is crushed and a demoralised, impoverished population is led by a ruling class who despises them and their history. A bit like Britain, in other words.

There is also the issue of immigration, which on a large scale makes democracy more fragile. The experience of the United States is different to Europe, since the former has indeed always been a 'nation of immigrants'. Yet until 1965, the US was in essence still a European country with a small, partially disenfranchised African-descended minority in its poorer, less populous south. Even Americans of southern and eastern European descent were under immense social pressure to conform to an Anglo norm.

Columbus Day, now a symbolic source of division, was once designed to celebrate, and integrate, Italians in America, the largest groups of Ellis Island immigrants who joined a country that until then had been dominated by north-west European Protestants. That they did successfully integrate was in part due to the fact that large-scale immigration was paused from 1924 to 1965, a political impossibility in today's America.

America is now something different, what Barack Obama called a country founded on an idea - but might also be described as a 'progressive caliphate', a country defined not by ancestry but belief. This is a fine ideal, but it is a novelty for a democracy, and where this kind of society has existed in the past it has always been ruled by autocrats who enforced the state religion with an iron fist.

Democracy and diversity make unusual bedfellows. Across the world, where a previously secure majority group has begun to lose its numerical advantage, it has led to conflict, most notably in Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Fiji. Multi-ethnic democracies are fraught, because elections are a tribal headcount, and made less legitimate when one side appears to be recruiting more of its followers. The issue of Voter ID is related to how conservatives feel that the Left is cheating the system by importing voters, with some justification.

In these quasi-democracies, political representatives use the system to hand out rewards to their side, Kamala Harris's recent proposal of $20,000 loans for black men being typical of countries where politicians use the levers of power to take from unpopular market-dominant groups. Unlike in the United States of the 1960s, there is no need to frame these arguments through a sense of shared Christian pity - it's a far older and less revolutionary instinct.

Diversity is only one cause of polarisation, and not a precondition: Poland is one of the most polarised countries in Europe and one of its least diverse, while homogenous South Korea is the most divided of all by sex, more than anything.

Neither are these uniquely American trends, with many of the same patterns also found in Europe: the 'great realignment' is now a British phenomenon, too, and indeed was the core story of Brexit. That referendum saw British politics grow far more polarised, with Leave and Remain identities becoming far stronger than party affiliations. While that issue has subsided, for now, voters have instead become polarised over immigration.

Whether we follow a similar path to the United States will depend on many things, including whether trust in institutions continues to fall and immigration levels remain high. The extent to which any politician can change the nature of voting coalitions is also limited: when a country has a populace so divided over core issues, parties will simply come to represent those interests, although individuals can set the tone.

Pinkoski and West are elaborating on the basic point I made in Live Not By Lies: that we are living in a kind of "soft totalitarianism." To restate the point: hard totalitarianism is the Soviet model (or the Chinese model), in which all power resides in the state, which enforces its ideology through violence, or the threat of it. Soft totalitarianism, by contrast, is when a single ideology rules a society without significant state coercion, because the class that rules institutions of private life (the professions, the universities, the media, and so forth) presses its ideology onto the body politic. A second quality of soft totalitarianism is that it does so often for "therapeutic" reasons, e.g., to protect those it conceives as victims from the depredations of the deplorable masses, even to the point of shielding the "oppressed" from having their feelings hurt.

When one is not permitted to say that a person who is a biological male is a man, without facing serious penalties say, the law student who faces expulsion for "aggressive pointing" at a transgender advocate you can say we live under soft totalitarianism. Or at least, under left-wing illiberalism.
The Left doesn't see this, of course. They think they are "defending democracy." Last week, The New York Times, a leading institution of left-wing illiberalism, published an essay by two government professors at Harvard, another such institution, arguing that in the event of a Trump victory at the polls, the ruling class should institute a color revolution to deny Trump the opportunity to govern. Thus, they argue that we must destroy democracy to save it.

Whatever this is, it's not liberalism. In fact, as a Times subscriber, I'm struck by how propagandistic the newspaper has been in this campaign. If you only got your news and information from the Times, you would have no real idea about the country you live in. The paper has been so hysterically anti-Trump that unless you read Ross Douthat a conservative who is deeply skeptical of Trump, but who at least makes a serious effort to understand and explain why so many Americans support him (great piece here, ungated) you would think that half the country was in the grips of authoritarian madness. In the pages of the Times, as in all of the legacy media, there has been virtually no attempt to understand the failures of the Left, and why so many Americans have no trust in them, or more broadly in American institutions.

The fact that the Democrats, having despised Dick Cheney and his warmongering for over two decades, have allied with him and his equally hawkish daughter Liz, tells you everything you need to know about why Pinkoski is right, and we are facing a choice between regimes and that the line between them does not run strictly between Democrats and Republicans...] -Rod Dreher
Realitybites
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Quote:

half the country was in the grips of authoritarian madness

Half the country is in the grip of authoritarian madness - the left half. Most recently characterized by Jen Rubin's tweet that "Peanut the squirrel needed to die."
boognish_bear
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whiterock
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boognish_bear
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whiterock
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Early vote data analysis

Jacques Strap
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Harris declines an opportunity to support increased criminal penalties for shoplifters and drug traffickers in CA.

whiterock
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Trump closing ad

Jacques Strap
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whiterock said:

Early vote data analysis


historian
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Kamala's closing argument is more gibberish:

boognish_bear
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ScottS
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Jacques Strap said:

whiterock said:

Early vote data analysis




A comment to this in X...

boognish_bear
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whiterock
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Jacques Strap said:

whiterock said:

Early vote data analysis



Key Question - how does a ground game that has underperformed so badly on early/mail voting turn around and win it with turnout on election day?
whitetrash
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whiterock said:

Jacques Strap said:

whiterock said:

Early vote data analysis



Key Question - how does a ground game that has underperformed so badly on early/mail voting turn around and win it with turnout on election day?

Get a copy of Maduro's playbook and follow it closely.
4th and Inches
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whiterock said:

Jacques Strap said:

whiterock said:

Early vote data analysis



Key Question - how does a ground game that has underperformed so badly on early/mail voting turn around and win it with turnout on election day?

with all the hub bub abput mail in voting after the last one, people may be shy about doing it. GOP tending vote early due to running out of ballots and broken machines in 20 and 22.

Tomorrow is a gamble for the prognosticators on both sides..
Adopt-a-Bear 2024

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#50 KAIAN ROBERTS-DAY ( DL )
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KaiBear
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4th and Inches said:

whiterock said:

Jacques Strap said:

whiterock said:

Early vote data analysis



Key Question - how does a ground game that has underperformed so badly on early/mail voting turn around and win it with turnout on election day?



Tomorrow is a gamble for the prognosticators on both sides..


Tomorrow is the biggest gamble for the United States since the 1860 election.
4th and Inches
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KaiBear said:

4th and Inches said:

whiterock said:

Jacques Strap said:

whiterock said:

Early vote data analysis



Key Question - how does a ground game that has underperformed so badly on early/mail voting turn around and win it with turnout on election day?



Tomorrow is a gamble for the prognosticators on both sides..


Tomorrow is the biggest gamble for the United States since the 1860 election.
its a turn out game..

The big urbans are way down so if they dont come out tomorrow, its over for Harris.

On the other side, Trump voters have to turn out in similar fashion to normal election day voting or she can win.

Early voting enthusiasm favors GOP and voter registration changes favor GOP.

The final national poll being even favors a Trump electorate win but who knows as polling has gotten so wild lately
Adopt-a-Bear 2024

#90 COOPER LANZ ( DL )
CLASS Junior
HT/WT 6' 3", 288 lbs


#50 KAIAN ROBERTS-DAY ( DL )
CLASS Sophomore
HT/WT 6' 3", 273 lbs
KaiBear
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4th and Inches said:

KaiBear said:

4th and Inches said:

whiterock said:

Jacques Strap said:

whiterock said:

Early vote data analysis



Key Question - how does a ground game that has underperformed so badly on early/mail voting turn around and win it with turnout on election day?



Tomorrow is a gamble for the prognosticators on both sides..


Tomorrow is the biggest gamble for the United States since the 1860 election.
its a turn out game..

The big urbans are way down so if they dont come out tomorrow, its over for Harris.

On the other side, Trump voters have to turn out in similar fashion to normal election day voting or she can win.

Early voting enthusiasm favors GOP and voter registration changes favor GOP.

The final national poll being even favors a Trump electorate win but who knows as polling has gotten so wild lately



With all the disastrous policies of the last four years it is almost inconceivable to me that Harris could possibly be elected.

However years of unrelenting anti Trump propaganda has a significant part of our electorate terrified of the man.

That and the incredible desire to murder babies ( even though abortion is available in most states and the abortion pill is available in ALL states ) will give Harris the election.


I feel so sorry for our country , the poor and middle class the most. As they don't have the means to get out of the way of the juggernaut.
whiterock
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4th and Inches said:

whiterock said:

Jacques Strap said:

whiterock said:

Early vote data analysis



Key Question - how does a ground game that has underperformed so badly on early/mail voting turn around and win it with turnout on election day?

with all the hub bub abput mail in voting after the last one, people may be shy about doing it. GOP tending vote early due to running out of ballots and broken machines in 20 and 22.

Tomorrow is a gamble for the prognosticators on both sides..
agreed. ALL the pollsters are herding.

which brings us back to the Key Question: How can the Democrats drastically improve their election day performance when they have so badly underperformed on early/mail voting?

boognish_bear
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whiterock
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4th and Inches said:

KaiBear said:

4th and Inches said:

whiterock said:

Jacques Strap said:

whiterock said:

Early vote data analysis



Key Question - how does a ground game that has underperformed so badly on early/mail voting turn around and win it with turnout on election day?



Tomorrow is a gamble for the prognosticators on both sides..


Tomorrow is the biggest gamble for the United States since the 1860 election.
its a turn out game..

The big urbans are way down so if they dont come out tomorrow, its over for Harris.

On the other side, Trump voters have to turn out in similar fashion to normal election day voting or she can win.

Early voting enthusiasm favors GOP and voter registration changes favor GOP.

The final national poll being even favors a Trump electorate win but who knows as polling has gotten so wild lately
No question GOP has to some degree robbed election day votes to improve early/mail votes. Which brings us to the 0s & 1s...the low-propensity voters. If they show up, it will be a big win for Team Red. If not, it'll bre a nail-biter.
boognish_bear
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Jacques Strap
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