• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 6th, 2023

help-circle
  • Being recognized as the only sane choice by people across the political spectrum and by nonpartisan organizations that rarely if ever endorse presidential candidates is generally going to be helpful for a campaign.

    While there are plenty of people on Lemmy acting like this is a deal breaker, I highly doubt any of those people were ever going to vote for Harris.

    And even if there is a nonzero number of votes lost to third parties or staying home because of this endorsement, those lost votes are almost certainly less likely to be in battleground states, and are only worth half as much as any independent or republican leaning votes that would otherwise have gone to Trump.





  • Also, I think Trump benefits from the assumptions that low information voters have about Republicans, and their tendency to blame the incumbent party for anything bad that happens, particularly in the economy. Harris laying out specific policies to help families, small businesses etc. is just in one ear and out the other, but Trump being vaguely pro-business in any way reinforces their biases.

    And to make matters worse, most people aren’t all that rational. They aren’t paying close attention to what’s being said and analyzing it coldly and logically. Hell, they may not even be paying attention, and just check in every once in a while. This also benefits Trump because his strategy is to spew lies, false promises and emotionally charged rhetoric which is most effective on the uninformed and unthinking members of the audience.

    That said, there’s just always going to be 20% of the people who would say Trump was better in every way no matter what happened. Some of that is because they are treating every question as a proxy for Trump vs Harris/Democrats/Commies/Whatever, and part of this is because they are so far gone that they can only interpret the debate through a right wing lens that will uncritically accept whatever Trump says, and which rejects any good point Harris makes.




  • The first Mission Impossible movie is a fun time capsule in many ways. It has some fun stuff with early 90s depictions of computers, hacking, the internet and email, back before anyone knew what any of that actually looked like.

    But it’s also a great example of the 90s naivete that the US had about conflict and global politics. There’s an entire monologue about how intelligence agencies are obsolete because the cold war is over. There was this vague notion in the 90s that world peace had broken out and things were just going to get better and better. And Hollywood sometimes struggled to come up with villains now that they no longer had soviets for that, so you don’t see it reflected as much in films, especially since optimism doesn’t make for good popcorn flicks, but Mission Impossible captures the thinking if not the warm and fuzzy feeling.


    My other suggestion would be Contact. My theory has always been that 2001 A Space Odyssey, Contact, and Interstellar are really the same movie made in different times. As the 90s incarnation, Contact has no international conflict, only internal politics. It’s got that I’m spiritual but not religious" vibe that was everywhere in the 90s. It has a vague message about hope, and belief and trying to understand the universe and what’s out there in order to understand ourselves… it’s hard to put it all in words, it’s just the whole tone and vibe of the thing, it’s all just so sincere and idealistic.

    (For a great big dose of 90s optimism and hope for the future, I highly recommend watching the Adventures of Brisco Country JR. I’d have nominated that, but it isn’t a movie)



  • I buy most of my groceries at a local employee owned chain. It’s amazing how they were able to avoid so much of the massive increase in costs that larger chains were experiencing. It’s like they had a completely different supply chain that wasn’t anywhere near as inflated. Oh sure, certain brands seemed to be going way up in price, but other items from competing brands didn’t. Meanwhile at Walmart, everything went way up in price, and at a much faster pace. Weird how that works.

    I guess the giant monopolies must not have the resources and experience required to run an efficient business. How else can you explain the disparity?