National television news will always be what it is. The business model is ad sales, from that all else inevitably follows. A news corporation is a corporation first and foremost. That said, there wasn’t anything anomalous about the 2020 election that can’t be claimed of other elections so there’s that.
I would describe the difference as being between broadcast and 24 hour cable news. The latter will always be what it is, the former (although not quite what it used to be) is much less rage baity.
The news has always been, "if it bleeds, it leads" though.
If the left were really the left they wouldn’t be the left though. The NBC left is the problem, the Democracy Now left is not. The left doesn’t want Bernie, Chomsky or Amy Goodman they want The View. Turns out young men don’t want The View, so the left is stuck now much like the American right because there is no ideological coherence, just aesthetic and hatred for the other team however they are imagined (e.g. “tax and spend republicans”).
The path to winning elections is by appealing to voters who can be swayed while keeping the base on board.
The problem with Democrats winning elections (since 2016) has been the ideological purity tests their social-left demands from candidates, rendering them toxic to independents.
It'd be nice if internet SJWs grew up and realized that winning elections with "don't ask don't tell" is better than losing elections with overly socially progressive platforms.
It feels like a large chunk of the party would rather lose an election smugly than win it with compromise.
Republicans since 2014 have been in somewhat of the same mutually exclusive bind, which is why Trump emerged as the primary candidate. Turns out reconciling mutually exclusive promises is possible if you're willing to say things without intending to do them and bank on charisma and a cult of personality.
Tl;dr - Democrats need to cure their case of SJW Tourette's. When someone asks a question about trans rights, say "I support equality for all Americans, because that's what our Constitution promises" and leave it at that.
This is basically a Bill Maher monologue. We live in a country where a pathological liar can turn less than a dozen people in the NCAA into a national issue, but you think the best way to counter that is march a robot out on to the mic to say "I believe we are all equal, vote for me". This is who those "Join the conversation" Pepsi ads that went over so well were designed for.
It's strawmaning the argument to imply that only a robot can choose what to dive into details on.
Democrats should be diving into the details on progressive economic platforms every chance they get, as wholly, messily, and authentically as they can.
But yes, they should refuse to jump on progressive social landmines their opponents lay out.
Depends which way control goes, which depends on the economy in November 2026 + redistricting outcomes.
And I'd say the excesses are equal part tech bro neoreactionaries + nativist Heritage / Project 2025 folks, each of which contributed their own toxic ingredients.
It's rapidly becoming apparent that Trump doesn't actually care about much ideologically and generally blows whichever way the last person in the room asked him to.
Anyone still using the term "SJW", especially as a liberal, deserves to be downvoted. It's 2025, "woke" is the new pejorative for anything remotely progressive.
As much as I agree with your main central paragraph, this
Then yes, there's the SJW issue and the completely unfounded amount of obeisance to it that many democrats and their supporters expressed.
seems misplaced.
For context, I've been watching UK, US, AU, and CA news and politics for decades and my observation is that relatively few on left | liberal | progressive could honestly be described as all in, full on, brain washed followers of SJW issues, trans rights, drag shows, et al. The majority didn't seem to deeply care much past the basic human rights issues of everyone should be able to find a bathroom and most people should be allowed to express themselves.
Almost without exception everything I heard about SJW issues originated from right wing, post Reagan Republican, neo Conservative, Fox | Sky Media type sources.
Without taking a side, just observing the political strategy aspect, this was a strong winning tactic for the US right - hammer endlessly on essentially meaningless issues and raise the perceived threat level to sway the masses, offering a solution to breadcrumbs in the bedding type issues that now rank as empire ending catastrophic confrontations.
I'll have to partly disagree. I don't want to imply that the whole SJW issue was a driving factor, because I don't think it was. The American dems lost the narrative on many practical subjects that too many fence margin voters really cared about, and while the conservatives, MAGA types and republicans overblew aspects of the SJW side of Dem discourse, it was and is a real thing, frequently given obiesance to and in ways that often subtly or not so subtly implied that anyone who didn't immediately do likewise must be some kind of racist, sexist troglodyte.
I'm sorry, but enough of exactly this was visible on the cultural side of support for democrat social politics that it can't just be ignored. It had its impact. Too many sacred cows were encased in too many groupthink bubbles of rigid "permissible" discourse and this was heavily associated specifically with the kind of social circles that democrat politicians are most popular with and pander to very often. For many voters on the margins, this caused a reactionary dislike that led to lost votes.
Take for example the illegial immigration issue. This was something that many voters of all stripes (including many Afican American and even latino American voters) took very seriously for reasons they thought very valid to their contexts. Often, however, stating that you worried about it would be smeared as a part of being a racist in general, and that must have felt bloody insulting, even ridiculous to a hefty number of people who simply viewed it as a baseless character attack.
FWiW I'm in Australia with a similar enough (I'm aware of the yawning chasm of differences) population with pride parades, trans people, social justice calls, etc.
We've been through the political immigration hysteria, "Stop the boats" and "Babies overboard" tipped elections and spawned offshore processing policies that were the envy of Trump v1.0.
That said, hyping fear of trans people following the lead of US podcast warriors pretty much fell flat on it's face here, burned out in disaster, much to the chagrin of aussie neo christians (small c) who tried to fly it up the pole.
At the end of the day the actual demographic volume of those under the tails of the bimodal sex and gender distributions are too small to give Aussies pause but apparently so great they terrify the US conservative into embracing .. umm, whatever this current failing of US democracy will go by in hindsight.
( Franklin, in foresight, referred to it thus:
I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.
)
See also Franklin 'those who would trade a freedom for a very little bit of safety, deserve neither freedom nor safety.' (Granted, he was talking about a Pennsylvanian state finance matter in the quote origination, but it's still a good quip)
But we are not limited by our biology. With tools and technology we can change our limits. From pharmaceutical tools like adderal to neurolink style brain implants to ai assistants to genetic engineering, the limitations in our cognitive capacity are becoming less salient every day. The importance of g in the future asymptotically approaches 0 the farther out you go, at least in terms of economic outcomes. It will always be important for moral reasoning as I’m frequently reminded. But I would guess that openness to experience and/or conscientiousness will eventually displace g as predictors of economic success, if they haven’t already. G is useful when everyone does paperwork in offices, but when everyone is on UBI and/or living in government camps g won’t matter as much, again aside from the capacity for moral reasoning but that can be offset with a stricter and more draconian legal system.
“It [g] will always be important for moral reasoning as I’m frequently reminded.”
Excellent quote! Unfortunately not all high g people engage in moral reasoning, and I fear that they will tend to exploit lower g people, rather than to help them utilize AI to compensate. There is a real opportunity to help individuals with cognitive impairments enhance their abilities with AI. The question is how, and how they collectively feel about it.
Specifically, as well stated by [23] there is no such thing as “race.” The premise of racial group differences is not possible; we can’t have racial differences if race is not real. Sadly, a lot of people very much believe in race, especially the ones that shouldn’t!
Geneticist use the word “ancestry” to refer to summarize the historical geographic origins of genetic variants that we are inherit. Ancestry can be reliably estimated by genome analysis.
Race, like the gender, is now considered a social construct.
The meanings of words are defined by a community of users who find them useful in communicating. Race and ancestry are both useful words.
There’s more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between groups, so race obviously has no genetic justification. That's not semantics. Yes it's real, but for social, not genetic reasons.
> If there's no genetic justification, how would it be possible to trivially determine someone's race just from their DNA ?
Genetic ancestry is determined by correlation with geographic origins and population. In other words, where a set of genetic markers are highly concentrated. It says nothing about race.
There’s more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between groups, so race obviously has no genetic justification. It's real in the way other social constructs are real.
The problem is that Human 'races' are not in fact unique, distinguished and separate from other 'races'. Genetically, two sub Sahara African men could be more genetically distinct than one of those men and a random white man even they should be both 'black'.
The problem you describe only concerns people who don't know anything about the subject, but still have no shame to have strong opinions about it.
Nobody in race sciences (anthropology, etc) claim that there are only unique races that are separate from each other and don't mix. This is a clear strawman.
The fact that there is mixing between races does not mean that races don't exist. You can make an emulsion out of water and oil, but water and oil still are their own things.
And the science has all kinds of specific categorization for human groups that go way beyond the rough separation into 3-4 main races. All the mixing, separation, migration, isolation, etc have been taken into account.
It's a pity this kind of topic/science is basically a taboo in the Western World and for real info and honest discussion have to go to other systems/countries/languages.
My example has nothing to do with race mixing lmao. Two Sub Saharan Africans today are literally descendants of people that never left the continent, there's no amount of 'race mixing' that would causing one of them to be genetically closer to another 'race' than to each other if race was a genetic reality. You're just an idiot with poor reading comprehension.
Between us, you are clearly the one with no clue about what he's talking about.
There’s more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between groups, race mixing or not. Clearly, 'race' has no genetic justification.
You must be one of those clueless people who think that sex is fluid and is a social construct because there is in certain characteristics a bigger difference within each sex than between the medium of each sexes.
You are asking questions that are already were answered if you cared to RTFM/LMGTFY.
Shortly:
- Unique how? Optimally genetically, but this has practical problems that the field of paleogenetics is trying to work on. Until then must use: classical morphological features, odontology, dermatoglyphics, biochemical characteristics.
- How long enough? Depends on the type of group. There are different levels of human group classification, both above the traditionally understood "races" and a lot below that.
I've been told that there's no such thing as a circle because there's no such thing as a perfect circle. The claim that race does not exist seems to be in that category.
You seem to be arguing that talking about races within humans may be useful even if the reality only approximates the definition of race (similarly to the idea of a "circle", which even though it does not apply in all it's precision to any real object it may still be a useful concept as an approximation nonetheless). However, I don't think that comparison is particularly insightful, and it may even be a bit misleading in my opinion because of the important differences in how those two things are defined (circle and race).
After all, the reason why no real object is an actual circle is because the definition of circle is so to say an "ideal" definition that no real object can fit in all it's precision. It's natural to assume that no real object will have all of it's "points" perfectly distributed according to a circle's equation (without even getting philosophical as to how these mathematical definitions relate to the real world, or if they do at all). If one rejects any "approximate", non exact application of the concept, then it will be mostly useless when it comes to describing or understanding the real world (because you won't be able to use it for anything).
On the other hand, the concept of "race" is quite the opposite to ideal: it's not "ideal" as the circle is, in fact it's more of a pragmatic/working definition. It's more like the definition of "chair": many things may or may not be considered a chair, but usually people don't feel that there's "no such thing as a chair" in the real world. On the contrary, it's more common to feel that anything "could" be a chair because it has a malleable definition based on the context, instead of nothing being "precisely" a chair because there are some rigid constraints to the definition that no real object can actually fit.
When the idea of races within the human species is pushed against, it's not because "race" is an ideal concept that no real thing may implement in all it's precision (as would be the case with the circle). I won't present these actual reasons (which could get quite political) here, but I will say that I definitely wouldn't consider those two claims to be in the same category:
- Saying that X real object is not a circle, or that no real object can be (exactly) a circle has to do with the fact that the concept of circle is ideal and by definition nothing "real" will fit it perfectly.
- Saying that (in the human species) there are no races is, however, not based on a quality of the definition of the concept of "race" (specifically, it's not ideal), but on some quantitative judgements about what kind of thing qualifies as a race an what doesn't (pretty much like the concept of "chair", "food", etc. which are not ideal and there's some room for discussion based on context when it comes to whether some specific object fits the category or not).
Ok, so saying race doesn't exist is like saying chairs doesn't exist, since you can't really say what is a chair, what is a shelf and what is a table, correct? Technically you could say that a chair is a table or a shelf, but people still like to call them chairs, you know the difference when you see it.
Races is like that, scientists can't define it but its still a useful concept like a chair. Scientists can't exactly define what a chair is either, but its still a very useful concept and we can discuss chairs and everyone understand what we mean.
Two sub Sahara African men could be more genetically distinct than one of those men and a random white man even they should be both 'black'.
The thing about race is that it has no biological justification. It's still 'real' of course but in the same way money has 'real' value. It's a powerful social construct.
> The thing about race is that it has no biological justification.
> It's a powerful social construct.
This is 100% correct, and yet progressive academics have yet to figure out how to slot this fact into their ideology without creating incorrigible inconsistencies.
For instance - if race is a social construct just like gender, why is transracialism frowned upon, while transgenderism is lauded? Quoting Richard Dawkins, famous debunker of Creationist and religious bullshit [0]:
Why is a white woman vilified and damned if she identifies as black,
but lauded if she identifies as a man? That's topsy-turvy, because
race really is a continuum, whereas sex is one of the few genuine binaries
of biology.
The most coherent (but unsatisfying) answer I have found in the literature is that society has "intersubjectively" agreed to accept transgenderism and not transracialism, where "intersubjectively" ultimately translates to some level of "because we said so and this is society's new fanfiction head canon:" [1]
What matters, then, is that intersubjectively we have all agreed that
ancestry is relevant to the determination of one’s race.
It's worth noting that intersubjectivity is basically a religious concept, as defined in the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. [2]
There is no science or biology on the far LGBTQ+ progressive left. Only pseudoscience and apologetics befitting of a Creationist.
It seems like a lot then I think about how California’s EDD department gave 50 billion to criminals in 2020/2021 and then it feels less ginormous.
My answer because I don’t see it: climate change research. A billion isn’t much but if it can help save the planet that would be worth it to me personally.
It’s not being unaware (naive) but rather a lack of cynicism. I think that’s an important distinction to make. It takes an extra dose of intelligence to avoid cynicism when you are at that level. Cynicism isn’t wisdom, and its absence isn’t naïveté.
The trick is, or was, demographics. The boomers outvoted other groups, because they have larger numbers. Why build housing that diminishes the boomers (ie voters) property values? Also, why limit demand for the hoarded housing by enforcing immigration laws, not undercutting local labor with exploitative practices like h1b abuse, or by creating reasonable legislation like other nations have that protects real estate from foreign speculation oand domestic market manipulation by monopolistic and predatory corporations like blackrock and blackstone? Because the boomers had the numbers and the real estate, and democracy is mostly about winning elections.
There isn't a boomer conspiracy that they are all in on. There isn't a secret Whatsapp chat for boomers to conspire to cheat the next generations out of housing.
It's just bad local policies, because small towns hate density and don't understand second order effects.
99.9% of boomers don't make conscious policy decisions either.
The boomers got old. They were flawed but the heavy anti-authoritarian vibe of the old left was largely carried over from the 60s. Imagine a zoomer lefty burning their covid card the way hippies burned their draft cards. Nope! The thing that shifted was authoritarianism; the terminal end-stage of socialist ideology.
Chris Hitchens used to like to remind people that Clinton was actually a conservative whose political success was due largely to the longevity of the appeal of the “southern democrat” to certain segments of society. His granting of MFN trade status to China is relevant to “his” budget surplus, as is the fact that the internet happened and the unipolar moment began while he was president. Clinton didn’t invent the internet himself; Al Gore did. He didn’t bring down the Berlin Wall either.
Not sure if you’re joking. The parent mentioned Clinton’s surplus so I referenced Clinton’s famous welfare queen reforms.
If I wanted to attack the character of William Jefferson Clinton, I would have plenty of facts to draw from there as well, like sexually assaulting an intern in the Oval Office and lying to us with “it depends on what your definition of is is”[0], which I’d note our non-biased hard-hitting media elites collectively shrugged off. Or I might allude to Jennifer Flowers, or Epstein, or a really long list of other ghoulish Clintonian acts.
[0] One can easily see this as the approximate moment the executive became unaccountable, a trend that’s continued (slippery slopes are real) and which many are now fallatiosly calling factism. It’s not, it’s just unaccountability in the same vein as Clinton’s sexusl assault.
More character attacks to try and counter the cold hard statics truthfully presented.
Unaccountable? Old boy balanced the budget, you know, the topic being discussed (not the Epstein file, who is it not releasing those again?). He came, he took account, he won. How much has Trump, the budget fixer, added to the budget again? And what does that number look like compared to past Presidents?
