Yes. And for the context of this conversation, the people in the USA are what matters. It's not like this regime is going to give up just because other countries dislike them. Their core fan base think it's going gangbusters.

Yes, that's what "in the country" means..

It is also exactly these same people of the USA whose thinking is going to matter for determining what happens next, not anyone else. It is immaterial what "everyone else outside the borders of the USA" thinks in the context of the country.

The USA is so overwhelmingly powerful, the phrase is apt: "When it sneezes, the world gets a cold."

The nation that owns the majority of nukes is run by an actual idiot with dementia, and his corrupt picks.

The nation with the majority of aircraft carriers and submarines...

The nation with the largest GDP...

The nation that makes the tech most of the world runs on...

It is terrifying, the international implications that a collapse of my country would cause, but even that pales to the malicious damage it can cause.

>Are we as small savers just idiots feeding this idiot machine?

Yes. 401k should never have been the main retirement plan.

Most can't. I would say Warren Buffet was level headed, has empathy, and understood he was a steward of resources.

Earlier I said "all billionaires", and that wasn't fair.

To be clear, there are some who turn Capitalism into a religion (objectivists, and the like), and to them it can be moral. They at least seek to serve a moral good, even if I disagree about the means I can appreciate that their goal is still to make the world a better place.

Trump is not one though. He is utterly devoid of morality and seeks only to fill an endless black need for external validation.

Had COVID not happened, Trump might not have gone batshit crazy with a vendetta against the entire concept of independent federal agencies. Actively rejecting the advice coming from Fauci et al would seem to be a large part of what sensitized him to the larger pattern rather than just writing each instance off as an interpersonal issue.

(by "Trump" and "him" I mean the person himself plus his symbiotic ecosystem of enablers and followers)

> Women candidates

What I meant was Biden and then Harris.

I'm not a politico, but IMHO Harris didn't have enough time to clarify her positions, and to address the points raised by her opposition.

Also, I wonder if the way she was chosen by the Democratic Party rubbed some people the wrong way enough for them to abstain from voting as a form of protest.

I interpreted the clause “two poor alternatives in a row” as Biden + Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and not Clinton + Harris, since Clinton was the 2016 nominee and Harris was the 2024 nominee after Biden dropped out, but the 2020 nominee was Biden, who did successfully defeat Trump that year.

In my opinion, Clinton’s and Harris’ losses had less to do with their gender and more to do with the candidates themselves:

1. Clinton was facing strong anti-establishment headwinds, and Clinton is a very establishment politician. Many people in 2016 were piping mad at establishment politicians. Trump was able to win the GOP nomination on a platform of “draining the swamp” and pursuing an aggressively right-wing agenda compared to more moderate Republicans, and Sanders, who also had an anti-establishment platform, proved to be a formidable opponent to Clinton. Despite Clinton’s loss, she was still able to win the popular vote. Perhaps had there been less anti-establishment sentiment, it would have been a Clinton vs Jeb Bush election, and I believe Clinton would have won that race.

2. Harris never won a presidential primary election. The only reason she ended up becoming the nominee is because Biden dropped out of the race after his disastrous debate performance against Trump, which occurred after the primaries. Since it was too late to have the voters decide on a replacement for Biden, the Democratic Party selected a replacement: Harris. She only had a few months to campaign, whereas Trump had virtually campaigned his entire time out of office.

3. Let’s not forget the Trump factor in 2024. During Biden’s entire presidency, Trump was able to consolidate his hold on the GOP and his voting base, and in some ways he even expanded his base. The conservative media was filled with defenses of January 6, and Trump was able to convince enough Americans that he and his supporters were persecuted in the aftermath of the 2020 election and January 6.

Look, after lurking through that submission about the Olympics a few days ago I get HN is divided on sex/gender identity, but I'm pretty sure that Joseph Biden is absolutely a man. "Cisgender", if you must.

Or are you misreading the actual argument?

And no one voted for Nixon. (I'm old enough to remember that.)

Don't worry, the governor of phillidilly told me that Trump's mental acuity scores are top notch.

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His approval rating is at a historical low for any president at this point in their term, I think. People don't like ICE, pedophiles, or wars in the Middle East.

"inanimate carbon rod"

I like that—wherever it came from. (And inanimate strangely sells it even harder.)

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