No video released yet but the right wing blog-sphere is already claiming it’s AI. Put on your seat-belts and keep your hands inside the car at all times.
No video released yet but the right wing blog-sphere is already claiming it’s AI. Put on your seat-belts and keep your hands inside the car at all times.
Same with “Trump speaks slowly and closes his eyes for a couple seconds” being paraded around as him being ‘exhausted’ or even ‘sundowning’.
None of it could possibly sway voters, it’s just to make the voting base feel good about their choice of support.
“Closes his eyes for a couple seconds”? Yeah, Trump spending a half hour of his rally walking the stage aimlessly to music was probably just his whimsical side, not a sign that his mind is anything less than razor-sharp. Libs these days will exaggerate ANYTHING!
Even if he was dead on his feet, how does that change anything? The only people who care about the optics of it are libs who already find him gross and disturbed… It makes dems feel better about their candidate’s chances (“look, he’s tired and on the ropes, give him the haymaker!”). If anything, him being a tired sleepy old man undercuts their message that he’s a vindictive and dangerous fascist who’s losing touch with reality. It wouldn’t surprise me if his change in demeanor is an intentional choice to make him look more chill and reasonable.
You hear how republicans reacted to that town hall? They fucking loved it, they talk about it like it was a birthright trip or something.
Yes I agree it won’t change anything. Everybody is pretty much decided at this point, and the whole neck-and-neck race thing is basically clickbait for ads.
It was neck-and-neck according to the polling in 2020 too and as unenthused as most of us were about Biden, he fucking smoked him even in the EC
People might not have been enthused about Biden in 2020, but there was at least some hope for him after the extremely progressive primary campaign.
There’s none of that hope or excitement for this year - there was no primary to push Harris to run on progressive issues. If there’s any election that bears a resemblance to this year, it’s 2016, not 2020
Yea, I kinda hate that attitude, too, honestly. True enough that polls are already like trying to read tea-leaves, and there’s ample motivation to play games with the results to skew a particular way. But people tend to apply that analysis selectively so that they don’t have to confront the possibility their candidate/political calculations aren’t popular. When our media circles are being blasted with petty reporting about one candidate or the other taking a dookey on stage or whatever-the-fuck, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep expectations reasonably close to reality because you’re ignoring about half the signs and granting too much weight to the signs you actually do see.
The race is neck-and-neck, by just about any reasonable projection. But the margin of error is something like ±3/4%, and that’s assuming a healthy sample and is just a snapshot that is still weeks away from election day. A poll on the day of the election that has Harris -1 in Michigan could end up being Trump +3 or vice-versa, and that’s completely within the margin for that poll.
But if you’re not even hearing what’s being said on the opposite end of the spectrum, let alone actually trying to understand what’s being said, then you’re gonna be completely taken for a ride come nov 6. For 6 months after the election, analysts and most Americans will be scratching their heads trying to understand what happened (win or lose) because people just have no idea what the other half of the country is actually feeling. And when people are sure they had it right, and then have those expectations flipped on the day, that’s when you get people storming the capital or spending years prosecuting foreign interference that was completely out in the open the whole time.
I appreciate and agree with most of your post, but I disagree that we are all so disconnected from each other’s feelings. Perhaps it’s a regional thing, but many of us have relatives, if not friends, who deeply disagree with our politics. We not only get exposed to the others’ views through social interactions, but we also absorb any political media they have on in the background on holidays and other get-togethers. Some of us also want to understand what the other end of the spectrum is exposed to and seek out some content from these sources for a variety of different reasons.
I don’t understand the mindset and thinking of people in my life that are so far on the other side when it comes to these issues, but I don’t write them off or feel disgusted by them as people unless and until they start promoting hate speech in most cases.
I’m also not experiencing any delusions about inevitable outcomes on election day. I’m preparing for either reality, but I’m more actively preparing myself for the opposite outcome of what I’m hoping for. Lemmy does a great job of reminding me how possible this is in comment sections every day.
I’m doing what I can by helping and encouraging friends, coworkers, and my partner to vote. He even requested an absentee ballot after months of telling me he wasn’t going to vote. I didn’t push, and I don’t consume most news media when we’re together. He has just had a harder time ignoring the evidence of his eyes and ears lately.
Nothing is decided. If we care at all about not feeling the gut punch that was November 9th of 2016, if not worse, then we should do what we can to prevent that from happening again.
Maybe it is regional… But my experience has been that it is just one “side” that are the type to play cable news in the background of holidays and family get togethers.
We don’t experience the same media onslaught as they do. We might hear their perspective from talking to them, but we don’t understand the extent of the warped reality they experience, and we don’t understand how the same news events get communicated to them very differently.
Just looking through the reporting shared here, you get the distinct feeling that Trump is on the decline and he’s in big trouble. But any other media environment paints an extremely different picture - and any alarm or skepticism raised here in the comments is not very well received. The polls that show trump extending leads in swing states are suddenly not at all unbelievable once you anonymize your internet browsing and see what’s being presented to the median american.
I’m just commenting on what I see. The vibe here feels very similar to 2016, and I’m bracing myself for the media collapse that happens the day after.
Being a tried sleepy old man doesn’t prevent one from being a dangerous fascist. Source prior dangerous fascists who continued to be so long after they got old.
Of course not, but people don’t think of tired sleepy old men as dangerous fascists.
The optics are mutually exclusive, even if the qualities themselves aren’t.
I agree with you, but you seem to be confusing optics bullshit for the base with anything remotely resembling rationale
Bro he can’t hold a plastic water bottle with one hand, he’s definitely sundowning even if the claims about those clips are (pardon the pun) trumped-up
That’s the point though, those clips just make it seem like we’re exaggerating all of his behavior.
Not the same. Stop.
The more you amplify ordinary behavior as somehow exceptional, the less people will actually listen to the exceptional behavior.
There’s an endless stream of videos hyper-analyzing footage of Harris or Biden doing ordinary things, making them seem like egregious examples of derangement or ill-health. It’s what the conservative base is exceedingly good at.
It’s far more effective to make fun of them as obsessive weirdos than engage in the same petty psychoanalytic rhetoric as they do. The latter isn’t going to move any voters and is only going to excite the weirdos on the other side.