Unpopular opinion: Kamala was a solid candidate.

Biden was headed to a humiliating defeat. Another couple debates, and maybe he loses NY and CA and we have a Dukakis- or Mondale-level annhilation. Kamala stepped in and ran a solid campaign on very short notice. Trump didn’t even have time to come up with a good nickname for her! She kicked his ass in their only debate, and he was literally too scared to do it again.

In the end, she lost by a couple hundred thousand votes in 3 states. She was wrong about Gaza and the economy, but PA, MI, and WI are credibly winnable in future elections. Kamala was not a garbage candidate.

banned me from the store “for life”

Awesome! I hope you refused to honor it unless he put a poster on the front door with a picture of you and a ghostbusters-style “no” sign around it.

Hmmm… “A Passage to India” takes place during the Raj (which is when the Crown took over from the East India Company) but a lot of the attitudes and issues are the same

• IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087892/
• the novel on Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/61221

Similarly, “Conduct Unbecoming” takes place right after the Crown takeover. But hey, it’s free on youtube:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gzE8HkRrz0
• description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conduct_Unbecoming_(1975_film)

Finally, you could look here:

• https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?keywords=east-india-company

It’s like calling tech support and having them say “works for me! try reading up on the problem” and hanging up.

Unpopular opinion: blaming the voters is counterproductive. It’s important to understand why they voted (or abstained) the way they did.

Yes, some percentage of voters are indeed racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. But hypothetically, another percentage are people who were unhappy because of economic reasons and felt they were presented with two bad options:

• an unreliable candidate who acknowledged they were unhappy
• an unknown candidate who said they were wrong and should just be happy

Is this hypothesis correct? I don’t know, but just assuming the voters are ignorant, or just saying that leopards will eat their faces, isn’t productive.

Hmm… I’ve dealt with elderly relatives, and it can be hard to tell when someone’s no longer capable of doing something… so I have a bit of sympathy for him there. It’s possible that a year ago Biden was up to the job and really was the best chance at defeating Trump. And he gets credit for stepping down when he did. However I’m a little more skeptical of his sticking VP Harris with the job of solving the border crisis, which is a notoriously unsolvable problem.

I suspect that given 3 months to jump-start a campaign, NOBODY could have won this election against Trump. Biden was headed towards Dukakis and Mondale levels of defeat, and Harris at least brought it to a couple hundred thousand in 3 states. (I wish I could post my argument to “unpopular opinion”, but apparently they prohibit political posts.)

I mean this respectfully. The character Everett True is known as someone who tells the truth even when it’s not popular.

FTA:

…for at least 20 million U.S. households, there is good cause for disillusionment. The method the federal government uses to calculate real incomes tends to capture the economic realities of higher-income people better than those of working-class and middle-class Americans.

To be fair, she had little more than a weekend to come up with her campaign messaging. She was made candidate like 3 months before election day.

All cognition has an emotional component, so you have to be more specific. Once you get more specific, then you’ll see that music and art communities are different.

Words to live by! /sincere

OK, fair enough.

Hi, not comment-op, but… Here’s one of the first set of exit polls to look over: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls

Though it’s a little too early for real analysis, since ballots are still being counted. Really the most interesting questions are things like: in tipping-point states (like PA, MI, WI, maybe GA or NC) how did the vote/turnout shift? That sort of analysis takes a bit longer, though, so we’re stuck with clickbait articles like the one posted above.

a hard communication problem

I think it’s a lot like tech support. End users don’t care about the details. They just want to hear: I see your problem, and here’s how quickly I’m going to fix it.

Most Latinos do not work in the fields. Many of us have been here for several generations. There are many types of Latinos. (Disclaimer: I voted, phonebanked, and canvassed for Kamala.)

I was just extending the bait, didn’t realize people would take it seriously. I’ve added an “/s”.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LaundromatLiaisons

In reality, the Amazon driver’s pay has been cut, so they ask for a tip. You don’t tip enough so they beat you up. If you could afford to order from Amazon, why didn’t you tip enough? Obviously you’re not supporting essential workers in these trying times. They’re just working hard, feeding you, keeping you clothed, protecting you. But they have families of their own to take care of too. You’re not even ordering enough so they can afford to take a bathroom break.

Note: this was meant to be: /s

The more I think of it, I wonder if anyone could have won that election given only 3 months. If Obama had been VP, and suddenly made the candidate, could he have done it? Could Hillary have won it? John Kerry? Maybe, but it would have been a miracle.

Kamala did a solid job. Note how people are debating how she could have fine-tuned her messaging or policy proposals; they’re not talking about gaffes or complete incompetence. She lost with a deficit of 30K in WI, 80K in MI, and 150K in PA. A definite loss, but not comparable to the landslide losses of 1988 or 1984. Biden was headed for that sort of landslide loss, but Kamala turned it into a much closer contest.

Harris’s campaign, conducted over a short three months, deserves to be credited for skillful execution under extraordinary circumstances. Once tapped for the job, she had little time to lose to mount an eleventh-hour rescue mission for the Democrats. It was a classic case of a woman leader being thrust into a glass cliff” situation, a term first coined to address how most women came to be appointed CEO. Faced with a company/party/country in freefall, a highly qualified woman is tapped to rescue a situation that might well be unsalvageable.