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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I understand why he felt he needed to do this press conference, but at the same time I can’t believe he did it because he would have literally had to be perfect for it to not just generate new headlines and memes about his decline (which it clearly has).

    It seems like the headlines will never stop and they are being perpetuated by people on both sides, and he’s completely flailing because the fact is, he’s no longer capable of giving a stellar live performance that can put this all to rest.

    Right after the debate, I felt that if Democrats had brushed his performance off, it would have dropped into the background and been totally erased if Biden did reasonably in other appearances and the next debate.

    However, each time there is a new headline about a Democrat’s observation that he is not in good shape, I become more certain that he must end his campaign. Not necessarily because I’m more convinced about his mental decline, but because you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

    So I’ve stopped weighing whether switching out Biden at a late stage was the optimal strategy in a vacuum. He’s been damaged enough by Democrats in liberal spaces that it’s absolutely the optimal strategy now. I’m not judging these Democrats for what they’ve done, I’m just saying it’s a hell of a gamble. So in my view, we might as well accept it that he’s gotta go and hope to hell their gamble pays off. Because there’s no way the guy can stay after all of this.




  • You’re starting out with the wrong assumption in your question. The question should be “why is it that there are only two choices?” And the answer is: because the voting system laid out in the constitution makes it an inevitability.

    It’s not a coincidence that the countries in Europe with many parties have a different type of system. Statistical models demonstrate that their many parties and our two parties are a natural consequence of how our voting system works.

    It’s bad enough being stuck in the situation we are, but wrongly attributing the cause to a vast conspiracy, involving both parties working together, just leads to the wrong conclusions about what to do about it.

    In reality, voting third party instead of the party you most align with just helps the party you least align with. The GOP backs third party candidates that might attract liberal voters for a reason.


  • Correct according to whom? The word has a long history of being used with a singular verb. The dictionary indicates it is usually used with a singular verb. Only a small number of people insist on trying to override this.

    Who cares if it is plural in Latin? Once something moves into a new language, it’s not beholden to the old language. We don’t use a plural verb with “spaghetti”. Germans borrowed the word “party” from English and they pluralize it as “partys” — they don’t need to follow our rules for what is now also their word.

    Don’t give in to these people who claim that “data” is supposed to be plural. They are treating a personal preference as a fact.


  • A linguist looks at an example like “literally” and says, isn’t language amazing? Words change and evolve, are created and die off, and yet everything works, people don’t stop being able to express ideas because the language got screwed up, everything takes care of itself. People were making the same complaints about words being used the wrong way 200 years ago, and a thousand years ago, thinking now we’ve lost a critical piece of the language, but it’s always fine. We have languages like French with an academy that regulates it, and we also have languages that have never been written nor taught in school. And they are all capable of expressing whatever they need to express.