It’s absolutely an abdication of responsibility because democracy itself is crucially and fundamentally dependent on the participation of an informed populace. If the people are not informed, or are misinformed, or simply choose not to participate, democracy and our way of life are in peril. Politics and elections are not a sport like basketball or baseball, they’re the mechanism by which we determine and safeguard of our way of life. If I sound contemptuous when I refer to undecided voters in a context like this as low-information morons, it’s because I absolutely am. In fact let me expand that further: “low-information morons who are a threat to our democracy”.
It’s ironic that these morons may go to great lengths to analyze and celebrate or mourn the win or loss of their baseball team as if the world depended on it, yet couldn’t care less about the things that the world actually and literally does depend on.
As reported all over the news, and posted here several times, Trump also called in to Fox News after Harris’ speech and ranted incoherently while (presumably accidentally) pushing the buttons on his phone that created annoying beeping sounds until finally even Fox cut him off.
MacCallum then kicked coverage to a live broadcast of Gutfeld!, where the namesake host began by acknowledging the quick end to the call.
“That wasn’t my fault, Donald Trump!” Gutfeld said. “He’s still talking, by the way,” he joked.
While I do understand your point, you should consider walking that back a bit. I have always been irritated by the fact that the person who gets elected has to win by one vote – which means that, given significantly divergent policy agendas between two major candidates, almost exactly half the voters can end up unrepresented, in the sense that “their side lost”.
It looks a lot like a sport from that perspective – and even if you add in alternative voting schemes, it still works out to “this side ‘won’ and that side ‘lost’.” Lose out enough times and you become disenchanted with a system that just pushes you aside. And if you are not in one of the two major camps, why the fuck even bother if you know your candidate has no prayer of ‘winning’?
Except that who wins the basketball game affects only those who are interested in basketball.
Who wins the election affects the lives of everyone in the country; some of them to the point of life or death. (And that is not true only of this election, though it may be more so of this one than of some others.)
Ignoring whether your neighbor plays basketball because you don’t care about basketball is one thing. Ignoring that somebody’s trying to set your neighbor’s house on fire is something else altogether.
I am reopening this thread at the request of several posters in ATMB.
I wish to make it clear that if the hijacks continue, it will be closed again. Please be considerate of your fellow posters and take off-topic discussions elsewhere. Thanks.
Yes, it was at the conclusion of Ruben Gallego’s speech last night (day 4), and yes, that was Senator Duckworth in the wheelchair. She lost both legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq in 2004.
While she sometimes uses prosthetic legs and walks with the help of a cane (as she did when she spoke at the convention on Tuesday (see clip below), I think that she uses a wheelchair more often.
I thought it was really unfortunate that regular stations didn’t show all the talks. Did anyone really want to hear the commentators blathering together while we could hear the audience applauding talks we couldn’t see? Thankfully posters here linked to YouTube feeds showing all the talks (after I’d missed a lot and had to go hunt them down, like Keenan Thompson). I still don’t know what all I missed.
So as not to start a hijack in this thread, here’s a link to a post in the Schadenfreude thread of a Stephen Colbert clip of (fake) Melania at the DNC.
I admired that VP Harris was willing to smile when discussing social problems. I could aspire to that, to being smooth while still taking action. She seemed poised so I appreciated that.
Inna and I watched Kamala’s speech only, for that was the only thing which mattered to us - how she would handle the biggest speech of her life.
I thought she did fine, a few quivers in her voice, in a speech which may have focused a bit too much on Donald Trump. Inna enjoyed the non-Trump parts, but later said (which I agree) that there was a lot of ‘fluff’, for want of a better word.
I thought she looked great, and the brown backdrop worked well in contrast.
Kamala is in that position that Trump was in 2016 - you can pretty much imagine her to be what you want her to be even if there is no evidence she is who you think she is. That’s an attractive pull for independents, undecideds, and RINO’s.
I thought a lot of what could be described as fluff were the “greatest country on earth” things, the USA, USA, USA stuff, which is great because it works to take back the patriotic narrative from the Party of Assholes. That’s huge!
