I don't think you quite understand how popular she is. The magazines aren't putting her on their covers because they're trying to create hype for her to make her popular. They put her on the cover because they'll sell a lot more magazines due to her already insane levels of popularity.

This isn't hype, this is basic supply and demand, and the demand for Taylor Swift is massive. She is the most popular person in the world right now, and it isn't even close.

Yeah that's how I see it too. Political strategist types can't understand that not everything is a grand strategy. They assume if they can't understand the strategy it must be 5-D chess or whatever. But maybe there is no strategy, and they're just being idiots?

For some reason they simply couldn't fathom an old man giving up power for the good of the country.

It probably only takes a staff on the order of a thousand people to make things go viral on the internet.

If it's your job to just sign up for social media accounts (fill in the the captchas, type in a name, upload a few images) you could easily create at least a hundred per day.Multiply that by a thousand and that's one hundred thousand accounts per day.

Of course you'd have to post some comments occasionally to make it look real. But that would just be re-wording the text from other comments. Of course if someone were to do this, youtube comments would look like, well... exactly like youtube comments are like right now.

So figure a a hundred thousand accounts per week with comments to make it look legit, that's millions of accounts per year. Yeah you'd want to space it out a bit so it wouldn't look suspicious. And you'd need to route the traffic through a botnet so the IPs are from the same country the account claims to be from. But within a year you'd have millions of accounts that all appear legit to any automated system checking them.

So now you've got the accounts and you want something to go viral. Have your thousand people start logging into accounts and running the video or whatever through your botnet, click like, leave a comment, maybe even check out the ad so the social media company makes a bit of money and aren't incentivized to look at it too closely. This probably only takes around 10 seconds per account. You could have anything you want have at least a million likes and engagement within a day. Which is probably way more than is needed for the algorithms to start recommending the content to legitimate users. And then it's all automatic from there.

Sure a few thousand people sounds like a lot. But not for the government of a country that wants to do disinformation.

Republicans are also always on about how the government is bad (even when they're the incumbents) and how deregulating things make everything better. Libertarians are people who drank a full jug of that particular kool-aid. Also like republicans, they tend to only care about gun rights, though they will sometimes pretend to care about other rights to make it feel like an ideological thing.

Same here. It also removes some hassle when changing jobs. All of your personal stuff is on the computer you own and all of the work stuff is on the the computer the company owns. Just turn in your work laptop and you're done with that place and on to the next.

The smaller ones are called "love seats". That makes it consensual, right?

I kept getting frustrated that Harris didn’t say they were cleaning up his mess…in retrospect, I imagine that she wanted to distinguish herself from Trump’s repeated that wasn’t me that was you strategy.

That's exactly it. "You did it", "no you did it!" finger pointing doesn't accomplish anything.

Also it's not entirely truthful. This inflation is a global phenomena. Not everything about the economy is under the President's control. The US has fared better than most countries and the world and Biden has managed the aspects of the economy he could extremely competently. It's damn near impossible to come out of an economic situation like this without a recession, but he pulled it off.

But people when people feel the economy is bad telling that "the economy is good actually" just makes a candidate seem out of touch. Really what's needed is some trust-busting (which is in the works) and raising taxes on the wealthy (also in the works). But there's still a lot of people that believe the trickle down stuff (including the undecideds that Harris needs to get), so that won't do either.

Inflation is always problematic politically. Someone gets a raise that matches inflation, they feel like they gained something they earned. We actually term it a pay raise (when it really shouldn't) and employers most definitely present it as something they're generously giving the employees. So people don't see inflation as being the reason they got a pay raise, it's simply the reason their pay raise was taken away from them. Inflation is difficult to explain because there's multiple reasons for it, and trying to explain concepts around the velocity of money to someone angry about inflation isn't going to go well. People tend to just say "it's because the government is printing money" even when interests rates have been increased which is the opposite of printing money.

So yeah the economy is a complicated subject. So... "we're going after the corporations for price gouging and we're gong to bring down the cost of medicine" are the things Harris is saying because one minute is not enough time to explain the real complexities of the economy to people that believe the "trickle down" nonsense.

Yeah Vietnamese people ate dogs, cats, rats,etc. But not in the US. In Vietnam, during the war. Only because the war caused food scarcity.

An old Vietnamese man explained to me they didn't kill their pets. But if their pet died, they would give it to their neighbours to eat, and their neighbours would do the same if their pet died. Because no matter how hungry they got, they wouldn't want to eat their own dog.

Both sad and strangely heartwarming. I wonder if this is where these stories originated from.

I've never heard of a class action libel suit before, I don't think it's a thing. Seems like libel is saying specific damaging things about a specific individual. But IANAL, I just watch a lot of Legal Eagle.

You wrote a lot of words when you could've just wrote one. Maybe you'd have an answer and if you spent more time educating yourself and less time trying to come off as smarter than everyone else while saying nothing.

Well I meant the goal of the Dems is to get the undecideds as opposed to trying to get the MAGA base.

But it seems to be the goal of the Trump campaign too, but their candidate doesn't have any discipline and can't stop himself from just speaking to the faithful in the dwindling crowds that go to his rallies.

Yeah I just hold shift and ctrl and start mashing function keys until I figure it out LOL.

You're not offering any alternatives.

Or maybe we should just consider every issue individually?

Trump has a serious thing for serial killers. Always gushing over the "late great Hannibal Lector" and he's in love with someone that looks like the Saw Puppet.

The GOP is going to hold locksteady either way. The goal is to get the undecided.

In the debate, Harris played Trump like a fiddle. She made him go on a rant on her cue and he didn't disappoint. He ranted about Haitians eating dogs. Turns out he said this because he was manipulated by a nutjob in his circle, most likely Laura Loomer.

So Trump was goaded into doing a rant by a woman and the most memorable part of the rant was something planted into his head by another woman. Kind chips away at the "Trump is alpha" thing that might be influential to low information undecided male voters.

Also in 2016 it was Trump himself dominating the news cycle, not the nutjobs he surrounded himself with. If Trump can be convinced to rant about the dog thing, what else can the people he surrounds himself convince him to do? If Trump is portrayed as easily manipulated, that puts Project 2025 back on the table. Because no matter what he might say about it now, everyone knows the likes of Laura Loomer can manipulate him into doing it.

Anyway it all fits into the news cycle on the debate. Trump lost, ranted about people eating dogs, and showed everyone he's easily manipulated. Next week Harris will push for another debate, probably landing on "Trump is too scared to have another debate." The media will latch onto that in hopes Harris can succeed in goading Trump into another debate, because the last one had an audience of 67 million. Either there's another debate or Trump looks weak. Which is good for Harris either way.

Yeah so Israel is a democracy. You're saying a democratic country is a Nazi country.

I think a common thing among Nazis is to try to de-legitimize democracies. Trump does it, Putin does it, and you're doing it while claiming they're the Nazis. What does that make you?

Also Hamas came into power by winning a plurality of the votes and refused to hold elections after that. Their goal is to at best ethnically cleanse and at worst commit genocide to remove people of a certain ethnicity from a region. They use extreme violence and a narrative about past injustices to maintain power. They keep people in a perpetual state of angry fervor to control them. That all doesn't seem just a little fashy to you?

How do you know when you're not the one being a Nazi accusing your enemies of being a Nazi? Is it just that you're always not the Nazi and everyone that disagrees with you is a Nazi? How are you different from Trump, Musk, Putin, etc?

What you see and don't see on social media is already decided by nation states. It's just countries like Russia, China, and Iran do it covertly.

They can push the things they want to the top of the algorithms with a relatively small (for a nation state) amount of resources. Sure they usually don't outright ban content (but that can happen too by spamming abuse reports) but they can effectively shadow ban people by simply promoting everything except for the things they don't like and use bot spam to do the social media equivalent of signal jamming.

And of course (as we've seen with Musk) the leadership of social media companies can be influenced (by a combo of same the misinformation they use on everyone else + money) and made into assets for nation states. This allows them to have some influence over who gets officially blocked on social media.

Yes it's not ideal to have nation states influencing speech, the current is to have foreign adversary nation states influencing speech. The choice is between having democracies having a de jure influence on social media or have authoritarian countries have a de facto influence on social media.

We now need a "verify you are a captcha" mechanism to counter this.