I liken this election to walking into a grocery store and your only choices are a head of cabbage and a week-old, open bag of stale Flaming Hot Cheetos.
The dumb part of your brain says "both of these options suck". And your brain naturally wants to say "at least the Flaming Hot Cheetos have flavor and are interesting".
Maybe you actually want stale Flaming Hot Cheetos. I will not judge you for that. But for everyone else who is despairing that "both choices are bad", I implore you to reconsider. While both choices are unappealing, that does not mean there's not a substantive difference between the two. Your brain is being tricked.
I will not waste your time trying to sell you on how good or exciting a head of cabbage is. You can walk away with the bag of stale Cheetos, telling yourself how much you love it and how anyone who would want to eat a cabbage is stupid. They are stale, they are untrustworthy, they will make you sick and paranoid. Or you can pick up the cabbage, know that you made an adult choice, and walk away with a clean conscious.
What an infantilizing take on the situation. I believe a good portion of voters are thinking more about what kind of policies they prefer and the likelihood of each candidate following through (or not) with the kind of policies they like or dislike.
Most voters do indeed know what they want. In any election, well over 90% are going to vote for the same party they did last time.
But it just so happens that those ~90% are divided both bitterly and evenly. Which means the election is going to be decided by a small percent of people.
The former group is increasingly baffled by the latter, since the differences are so stark. It's hard to imagine what kind of person doesn't have a preference.
I'd say that the OP is encouraging people to realize that the difference is very real and will have a significant effect on their lives. They are not addressing the large majority of people whose minds were made up years ago.
Graham correctly flags the one thing about which there should be no disagreement in any democracy: losing the election and then trying to falsify the results after the fact, in order to remain in power, is completely disqualifying.
We can disagree and quibble about all the rest of it: policy, character, blah blah blah. There are lots of other things I don't like about Trump, or Harris for that matter, but none of them are anywhere close to the magnitude of that.
I've encountered several people in recent days and weeks who no longer quite remember how blatant Trump's efforts to falsify the election results actually were.
I was born in 1974 - no US president (or plausible candidate for president) has ever before done something so manifestly disqualifying. I've never made a comment like the above about any of them.
It's not like he was "demanding signature matching for votes to see if there was in fact any fraud". He threatened the Georgia state attorney general, and demanded he and his colleagues there find a way to falsify the election results.
It's thankfully a simple matter of public record, so if you don't remember the details, you can go and listen to the recordings again[1].
One thing I’m endlessly amazed by is that Trump’s crowd didn’t turn on him after that. Not so much because it was anti-democratic; I don’t think that they were that bothered. But because it was just such pathetic loser-ish behaviour. “I won, really, in my head!” Oh, get a grip, Donald.
His entire appeal rests on them believing that they are entitled to a better life than the one they have, and that the only reason they don't have it is because they are being oppressed by his political opponents.
They don't see his behavior as pathetic. They see it as a noble attempt to fight powers so vast they dwarf even that of the President of the United States.
You and I see that as absurd and can point out numerous contradictions. But they firmly believe that the election was, in fact, stolen.
Which means that no matter what, one party or the other really is trying to steal the election. It has taken us a long time to get here, but we are in deep trouble and I have no idea how to get out of it.
It is my belief that Trump's side is very wrong, and that a loss on Tuesday will force them to reconsider the policy of buying so heavily into a false version of reality. But we shall see.
On immigration: Anybody serious about illegal immigration would clamp down hard on the employers who hire illegal immigrants. Trump had 4 years to prove he was serious, and proved he wasn't.
People seem very eager to take the word of a serial liar and a convicted felon, even when the promises are in conflict with each other. I will never understand the rationale.
Funny that one of his primary donors have admitted the economy will probably crash if Trump wins...How you can do mass deportations without some very bad economic impact is beyond me but what is even more confusing to me is, how do people think Trump will benefit the economy ?
I am surprised and pleased how civil this conversation is on HN. I am voting Kamala, but against my bettter judgement. I do not approve of the genocide in Gaza, and I see it as a failure of leadership. But Trump offers no alternative path. He's not established any credentials as a fiscally conservative bulwark or isolationist. instead he's established no value system at all. If this was a card game I'd return my hand and start again.
The proposal makes no mention of "essential goods during emergencies or times of crisis". It's specifically about giving the FTC and attorney generals the ability to investigate prices and hand out penalties.
While I agree with this, sadly I feel US Elections are considered "Entertainment" or a "Reality" type show these days.
Seems many people want to vote for the "exciting" candidate instead of voting on the issues. So they seem to want the one that mostly one keeps you entertained :(
Sadly we've lost the Greatest Generation. WW2 vet Grandpa would have given us a good smack upside the head to remind us how entertaining and exciting fascists are.
> In 1994 ... members of the Greatest Generation (then ages 67-81) — favored the Democratic Party over the GOP (49% to 42%).
A considerably different Democratic party. In 1994, Bill Clinton signed the largest federal funding bill for police and prisons in history. In 1996, he told the media "I remain opposed to same-sex marriage" and signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned federal recognition of same-sex marriage. That same year, he signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, "the ultimate goal of [which] has been to deter further illegal immigration into the US".[1]
The big issue in that mid-term election was the push for universal healthcare and the Republican sweep of Congress killed it. Every generation except for the Greatest Generation voted Republican.
And when the Democrats finally won a trifecta (in part on that issue) in 2008, they let an insurance lobbyist write the new law and only made the problem worse, proving that they aren't actually on the side of universal government provided healthcare.
This endorsement is the weakest I have seen. Paul Graham wanted to enorse the left no matter what because of his silicon valley connections, and then created an exaplanation afterwards (it would be suprising for me if he ever voted republican in the last 20 years).
In my experience the best way to stop banana republic from happening is to always give power to the party with less power (which was democrat last time, republic this time), as both parties have a danger of trying to accumulate too much power nowdays.
The drumbeat against the 1st Amendment (Hillary, Kerry, news pundits...). They're all talking about how "problematic" and "constraining" the first amendment is, and how it "gets in their way" to govern because they can't control the narrative.
They seem to be missing the irony in their complaints; the constraint is intended upon those doing the governing.
Can you link any examples of democrats saying anything anything like that? This seems wildly unsupported to me. Reps like Ron Wyden are a constant source of intelligence & level headedness & competence around speech & online systems, in my view.
Hes seems to be describing why misinformation is more of a challenge for democratic governments to combat than for non-democratic governments, it’s weird that they edited out the question, hard to understand the context of the answer.
Transcript:
John Kerry: And I think the the dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing and growing. And it's part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It's really hard to govern today. You can't, you know, there's no, the referees we used to have to determine what's a fact and what isn't a fact, the kind of, you know, been eviscerated to a certain degree. And, people go, people self-select where they go for their news or for their information, and then you just get into a vicious cycle. So it's really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in the 45, 50 years I've been involved in this.
And, and, you know, there's a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities, in order to guarantee that you're going to have, you know, some accountability on facts, etc..
But look, if people go to only one source and the source they go to is sick and, you know, has an agenda and they're putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.
So what you need, what we need is to, is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having, you know, winning enough votes that you're free to be able to, to, implement change.
Now, obviously, there are some people in our country who are prepared to implement change in other ways. And . . .
Børge Brende: So you're questioning, really, for [if] democracy can survive unregulated social media?
John Kerry: I think democracies are, are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges that we are facing. And to me, that is part of what this race, this, this election is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?
Sure, right now the democrat policy is letting migrants in so that they vote for democrats.
As a Hungarian I see my own country going down economically because Hungarians outside my country got voting rights and benefits because of Orban without reqirements for taxation, and now we are stuck with a dictator.
Of course US has a much more stable system, but the leftist strategy there seems to me like a parallel to what Orban was doing on the right.
> Sure, right now the democrat policy is letting migrants in so that they vote for democrats.
> As a Hungarian…
Where are you getting your news from in Hungary that is both reporting on US politics but also is so confused about the basics of how voting in the US works?
The dumb part of your brain says "both of these options suck". And your brain naturally wants to say "at least the Flaming Hot Cheetos have flavor and are interesting".
Maybe you actually want stale Flaming Hot Cheetos. I will not judge you for that. But for everyone else who is despairing that "both choices are bad", I implore you to reconsider. While both choices are unappealing, that does not mean there's not a substantive difference between the two. Your brain is being tricked.
I will not waste your time trying to sell you on how good or exciting a head of cabbage is. You can walk away with the bag of stale Cheetos, telling yourself how much you love it and how anyone who would want to eat a cabbage is stupid. They are stale, they are untrustworthy, they will make you sick and paranoid. Or you can pick up the cabbage, know that you made an adult choice, and walk away with a clean conscious.