It’s that time of week again: f**king Mondays, and your quick hit guide to the upcoming week: What happened to The Huff Post? I started The Daily Banter many years ago with the lofty ambition of becoming the next Huffington Post. I managed to get two of the best columnists on the site (Bob Cesca and Chez Pazienza) to come work with me and we set about creating a snarkier, ballsier version of Arianna Huffington’s groundbreaking website. We didn’t quite make it (although at our peak we had a reporter at the White House and routinely generated millions of page views a month).
These polls about young people turning away from Biden because he is not doing enough, or because they have some misconception that the economy is not as good as it actually is, or for any number of concocted reasons, makes me wonder if these folks under 35 are paying attention to anything outside of whatever youthful bubble they may be inhabiting. Biden is working hard and consistently on things in a methodical way, incrementally, and accomplishing quite a bit under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. This demographic that pollsters keep finding and reporting on either doesn’t actually exist, or they are living in some kind of alternate reality where they expect Biden to wave a magic wand and make everything exactly the way they want it. This is not real life, so they better snap out of it; otherwise, they may see their futures destroyed by an autocratic madman who is sliding into dementia and thinks Turkey is Hungary and a terrorist group is a Middle Eastern dip made with garbanzo beans.
Remember the first midterms after Obama was elected? All those "brilliant" young voters who had been SO damn excited to turn out and vote for him were now outraged that after a WHOLE TWO YEARS as President Obama hadn't waved his Magic Presidential Wand and and instantly turned America into an Ethereal Leftist Utopia where they were given free magically-powered unicorns as upgrades to their Tesla.
I've been forced to accept that most "politically active" young people who think they are helping the cause of the Left are actually deluded rich kids with a shaky grasp of reality and absolutely no understanding of what actual poor people living in the real world have to deal with, who live inside ever-increasingly isolated social media bubbles that distort their already shallow understanding of the real world even further (I wish I could destroy all social media and salt the Earth upon which the servers stood so that nothing more could ever grow their.) They've developed a bizarre and harmful belief that political candidates need to be "exciting" to motivate them to get them to get up off their asses and vote. And they've developed another bizarre, even more disturbing, and even more DANGEROUS belief that inflexible, uncompromising, condescending scolds like Bernie Sanders are actually the admirable standard of what a politician should be like, because they apparently can't comprehend that the entire POINT of politics is about compromise and if you refuse to compromise than politics doesn't work and the whole system breaks down. And the more I read about the history of Leftist student political activists in the US and Europe from the '60s up to now, from France in '68, Germany in the '70s, and here now, the more I realize that most of these young Leftist activists have had their heads buried so deep up inside their own asses it's no wonder that the world looked so shitty to them, because they were viewing it through the lens of their own colon.
And the newsmedia is once again gearing up to do everything it can to promote a Neck-and-Neck Horse Race narrative, because that is what they ALWAYS do, election after election. Even after all the series of self-flagellating articles from just a handful of years ago where so many of them morosely self-analyzed their own roles in promoting the kind of thinking that basically helped get Trump elected... here they are again, all EAGERLY jumping up to do the exact same thing without a single moment of self-reflection or question of whether they should be more careful of what they do this time around.
Sorry I haven't been around to post much lately, Christopher; about three weeks ago my VERY EXPENSIVE laptop I had saved up for two years to afford just suddenly up and died after 2.5 years. Fortunately I found an even better replacement, a factory refurbished model, which will be getting here Thursday. Right now I'm using a tablet but these things just drive me nuts trying to post comments.
Aaron, always good to see your comments. Sorry to hear about the tech issues, but glad you found a fairly inexpensive replacement.
As for “the youth vote” I find it expectations for it seem to range from
- young people are more engaged than older voters and realistic about issues of climate/abortion/gun control/etc which motivate them the skew Democratic
to
- young people are naive and not really engaged beyond surface level so are unrealistic and tend to skew to whatever shiny object far left “politician” appeals to their interest of the moment.
So they are either a good voting block for the Democratic Party, or spoilers who will split the Democratic voting in effect actually help get someone very much the exact opposite of what they claim they want (i.e., a Republican) elected.
“Whether it’s due to faltering confidence in institutions like the government and the media...”
Gee, I wonder if the faltering confidence in the media could have anything to do with the fact of the media is absolutely pathetic at doing their job?
Maybe, just maybe, if the media didn’t intentionally distort the news by blaming Democrats for Republican incompetence or pushing endless “Biden is too old” headlines while ignoring Trump’s obvious growing dementia, people just might have more respect for it.
As I've stated here before, while the polls themselves have no actual value -- they're a snapshot of people who agreed to take a poll, not a snapshot of all Americans -- the way the media presents them "XX% of all Americans say..." helps wag the dog in the direction of the flawed and orchestrated poll results. Last week, the Daily Show provided a chilling look at how that once reliable platform could be weaponized by the GOP. Black right wing champion Charlamagne tha God was the host, and he gave Nikki Haley and Nancy Mace unbridled platforms to spew unchecked and uncontested lies. His monologue jokes could have easily been written by FOX News "humorists", and his final monologue gave a bone chilling reason why both he (a wealthy black person), many black people across the financial spectrum, are gravitating to Trump. "Game respects game" he says, basically tying the noose around his own neck and handing the rope to Jason Aldean. He loves the swagger, machismo, and f-all attitude Trump has. He views Biden as meek and weak. Never once did Char mention Biden's accomplishments on policy -- it was all about charisma and celebrity. That black people love the gangster appeal of a politician whose gangster policies are actively seeking to destroy the black community is beyond my ability to grasp. But that's where humanity seems to be -- under informed and over opinionated. Democracy is only as strong as its weakest link, and its mission accomplished for 100 years of the billionaire class working diligently to weaken the base through religion and media.
HuffPost has become incredibly disappointing. I had my phone set to receive alert notifications from HP and often did. Only they were basically commercials. "This gizmo is the new trend for influencers and celebrities you've never heard of and it's only $15 on Amazon" or "What you're getting wrong about this thing that you've been right all these years". It's a damn shame that this is what is now. HP used to be a pretty high standard for editorials and journalism. Honestly, it's how I stumbled across Bob oh so many many years ago.
I do hope Christie is right. It seems impossible for a multi-criminal like Trump to actually hold the office of the President of the United States, but Trump has shown us time and again a lot of first and seemingly impossibilities can happen when he’s involved. That bastard POS!!!
YOUNG PEOPLE ARE STUPID! YOUNG PEOPLE DID THIS SHIT AND GOT GW BUSH ELECTED IN 2000!!! EVERY NEW GENERATION WANTS THE VIETNAM WAR PROTEST AND SINCE TBEY CANT HAVE THAT ANY WAR WILL DO AND THEY BLAME WHOEVER IS IN THE OVAL OFFICE AT THE TIME. OF IT LASTED LONG ENOUGH THEY’D MOVE ON WITH THEIR LIVES JUST AS THEY DID WITH THE IRAQ INVASION. NOT MUCH PROTEST THEIR WHERE IT SHOULD’VE BEEN BUT I GUESS IT WASN’T FASHIONABLE ENOUGH FOR THEM.
HEY YOUNG PEOPLE, I KNOW ITS FUN AND IT MAKES YOU FEEL NOBLE TO PROTEST BUT YOU’RE PLANNING TO CAST YOUR VOTE NOT BASED ON THE LASTING ISSUES, BUT IN YOUR PASSION OF THE MOMENT.
These polls about young people turning away from Biden because he is not doing enough, or because they have some misconception that the economy is not as good as it actually is, or for any number of concocted reasons, makes me wonder if these folks under 35 are paying attention to anything outside of whatever youthful bubble they may be inhabiting. Biden is working hard and consistently on things in a methodical way, incrementally, and accomplishing quite a bit under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. This demographic that pollsters keep finding and reporting on either doesn’t actually exist, or they are living in some kind of alternate reality where they expect Biden to wave a magic wand and make everything exactly the way they want it. This is not real life, so they better snap out of it; otherwise, they may see their futures destroyed by an autocratic madman who is sliding into dementia and thinks Turkey is Hungary and a terrorist group is a Middle Eastern dip made with garbanzo beans.
“Whether it’s due to faltering confidence in institutions like the government and the media...”
Lemme FTFY: In yet another alarmist headline the media wonders why people think the media is alarmist.
Remember the first midterms after Obama was elected? All those "brilliant" young voters who had been SO damn excited to turn out and vote for him were now outraged that after a WHOLE TWO YEARS as President Obama hadn't waved his Magic Presidential Wand and and instantly turned America into an Ethereal Leftist Utopia where they were given free magically-powered unicorns as upgrades to their Tesla.
I've been forced to accept that most "politically active" young people who think they are helping the cause of the Left are actually deluded rich kids with a shaky grasp of reality and absolutely no understanding of what actual poor people living in the real world have to deal with, who live inside ever-increasingly isolated social media bubbles that distort their already shallow understanding of the real world even further (I wish I could destroy all social media and salt the Earth upon which the servers stood so that nothing more could ever grow their.) They've developed a bizarre and harmful belief that political candidates need to be "exciting" to motivate them to get them to get up off their asses and vote. And they've developed another bizarre, even more disturbing, and even more DANGEROUS belief that inflexible, uncompromising, condescending scolds like Bernie Sanders are actually the admirable standard of what a politician should be like, because they apparently can't comprehend that the entire POINT of politics is about compromise and if you refuse to compromise than politics doesn't work and the whole system breaks down. And the more I read about the history of Leftist student political activists in the US and Europe from the '60s up to now, from France in '68, Germany in the '70s, and here now, the more I realize that most of these young Leftist activists have had their heads buried so deep up inside their own asses it's no wonder that the world looked so shitty to them, because they were viewing it through the lens of their own colon.
And the newsmedia is once again gearing up to do everything it can to promote a Neck-and-Neck Horse Race narrative, because that is what they ALWAYS do, election after election. Even after all the series of self-flagellating articles from just a handful of years ago where so many of them morosely self-analyzed their own roles in promoting the kind of thinking that basically helped get Trump elected... here they are again, all EAGERLY jumping up to do the exact same thing without a single moment of self-reflection or question of whether they should be more careful of what they do this time around.
Sorry I haven't been around to post much lately, Christopher; about three weeks ago my VERY EXPENSIVE laptop I had saved up for two years to afford just suddenly up and died after 2.5 years. Fortunately I found an even better replacement, a factory refurbished model, which will be getting here Thursday. Right now I'm using a tablet but these things just drive me nuts trying to post comments.
Aaron, always good to see your comments. Sorry to hear about the tech issues, but glad you found a fairly inexpensive replacement.
As for “the youth vote” I find it expectations for it seem to range from
- young people are more engaged than older voters and realistic about issues of climate/abortion/gun control/etc which motivate them the skew Democratic
to
- young people are naive and not really engaged beyond surface level so are unrealistic and tend to skew to whatever shiny object far left “politician” appeals to their interest of the moment.
So they are either a good voting block for the Democratic Party, or spoilers who will split the Democratic voting in effect actually help get someone very much the exact opposite of what they claim they want (i.e., a Republican) elected.
“Whether it’s due to faltering confidence in institutions like the government and the media...”
Gee, I wonder if the faltering confidence in the media could have anything to do with the fact of the media is absolutely pathetic at doing their job?
Maybe, just maybe, if the media didn’t intentionally distort the news by blaming Democrats for Republican incompetence or pushing endless “Biden is too old” headlines while ignoring Trump’s obvious growing dementia, people just might have more respect for it.
As I've stated here before, while the polls themselves have no actual value -- they're a snapshot of people who agreed to take a poll, not a snapshot of all Americans -- the way the media presents them "XX% of all Americans say..." helps wag the dog in the direction of the flawed and orchestrated poll results. Last week, the Daily Show provided a chilling look at how that once reliable platform could be weaponized by the GOP. Black right wing champion Charlamagne tha God was the host, and he gave Nikki Haley and Nancy Mace unbridled platforms to spew unchecked and uncontested lies. His monologue jokes could have easily been written by FOX News "humorists", and his final monologue gave a bone chilling reason why both he (a wealthy black person), many black people across the financial spectrum, are gravitating to Trump. "Game respects game" he says, basically tying the noose around his own neck and handing the rope to Jason Aldean. He loves the swagger, machismo, and f-all attitude Trump has. He views Biden as meek and weak. Never once did Char mention Biden's accomplishments on policy -- it was all about charisma and celebrity. That black people love the gangster appeal of a politician whose gangster policies are actively seeking to destroy the black community is beyond my ability to grasp. But that's where humanity seems to be -- under informed and over opinionated. Democracy is only as strong as its weakest link, and its mission accomplished for 100 years of the billionaire class working diligently to weaken the base through religion and media.
HuffPost has become incredibly disappointing. I had my phone set to receive alert notifications from HP and often did. Only they were basically commercials. "This gizmo is the new trend for influencers and celebrities you've never heard of and it's only $15 on Amazon" or "What you're getting wrong about this thing that you've been right all these years". It's a damn shame that this is what is now. HP used to be a pretty high standard for editorials and journalism. Honestly, it's how I stumbled across Bob oh so many many years ago.
I do hope Christie is right. It seems impossible for a multi-criminal like Trump to actually hold the office of the President of the United States, but Trump has shown us time and again a lot of first and seemingly impossibilities can happen when he’s involved. That bastard POS!!!
YOUNG PEOPLE ARE STUPID! YOUNG PEOPLE DID THIS SHIT AND GOT GW BUSH ELECTED IN 2000!!! EVERY NEW GENERATION WANTS THE VIETNAM WAR PROTEST AND SINCE TBEY CANT HAVE THAT ANY WAR WILL DO AND THEY BLAME WHOEVER IS IN THE OVAL OFFICE AT THE TIME. OF IT LASTED LONG ENOUGH THEY’D MOVE ON WITH THEIR LIVES JUST AS THEY DID WITH THE IRAQ INVASION. NOT MUCH PROTEST THEIR WHERE IT SHOULD’VE BEEN BUT I GUESS IT WASN’T FASHIONABLE ENOUGH FOR THEM.
HEY YOUNG PEOPLE, I KNOW ITS FUN AND IT MAKES YOU FEEL NOBLE TO PROTEST BUT YOU’RE PLANNING TO CAST YOUR VOTE NOT BASED ON THE LASTING ISSUES, BUT IN YOUR PASSION OF THE MOMENT.
STOP IT! LOOK, LISTEN, SEE, HEAR!
FOR ONCE VOTE ON REAL ISSUES,
FOR ONCE USE YOUR HEADS!!!
RFK is super pro Israel.
RFK is super pro seeing his name in the paper.
RFK still lives in Csmelot and thinks the Kennedy name alone means something in 2023. Plus he is nuts.
And yet, he’s been accused of antisemitic tropes.
Lol, that’s a false dichotomy. I know many on the right that are extremely pro-Israel but openly spew out antisemitic nonsense
Well, then there is something wrong with the way their brains work. And there is definitely something wrong with RFK Jr.