Trump still leaning into that whole "loathsome bigot" thing.
I feel like she's lost in the weeds, but it's getting better. Short, simple stuff. Don't get wonky!
He looks extra orange, except tight at his hairline on the upper right side of hi face.
She's doing a great job just answering the question she wants to answer.
She does have a good laughing-at-him face.
I'm really happy they asked about abortion so early.
Trump is sharp in the way that he is sharp. He's a fluid, forceful liar. I think the media was prepared to jump on him if he looked old, but he's doing better tonight than he did against Biden.
I'm still probably going to vote for Harris, though.
She's not damaging herself. He's boring. I'm happy.
I am impressed with whoever came up with the idea that Harris should tell people to go to a Trump rally and that they'd see that people would leave early out of boredom. I have no idea how they will play with voters, but it certainly needles him!
She rattled him by insulting his rallies.
Baited him into bragging about crowd sizes! And gibbering about dogs and cats!
Absolute genius to bring up his rallies.
The moderators are doing a genuinely mediocre job. I'm surprised.
They prepped the battlefield on that one. Well done.
Really? I'm pleasantly surprised by the moderators.
I'm also pleasantly surprised by the moderators. And I also had low expectations.
I think I'm just euphoric that we seem to be avoiding a nightmare.
"Not everyone was handed $400 million and then filed for bankruptcy six times." Ha!
(Trump disputes the amount.)
she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison??
Betcha didn't know she was a surgeon, did you?
The cut him off when he was babbling incoherently about solar.
Surprisingly strong question from the moderators about the peaceful transfer of power and whether Trump regrets anything about what he did on January 6.
The moderator limited his question to Jan. 6. But Trump threatened violence before the election, and has praised the insurrectionists since then. The moderators are, in effect, whitewashing his unambiguous, proud culpability.
But yeah - this is an important improvement over standard operating procedure on this.
Whoops - doing better now with discussion of Trump's lies on the election.
Direct question on whether he thinks he won in 2020.
Best dynamic: she keeps labeling him as tired old same thing, and he keeps generating blather that illustrates it.
OMG. "Donald Trump was fired by 81 million voters." I love this whole answer.
Harris is very strong on the election stuff.
"Donald Trump was fired by 81 million voters...and clearly he's having a very hard time processing that."
Calm, slightly pitying, and rapier-sharp.
I genuinely wonder if this will have any effect on the election. I'm honestly not sure it will.
Baited him with the "world leaders are laughing at Trump" bit. Now he's shouting about how Victor Orban likes him.
45: I don't think it will have any impact either. It was only hers to damage herself, and she's not.
I think it could help at the margins. Whether those margins are in swing states remains to be seen.
50: It has occurred to me that that exact factor might be enough for the 7,000-10,000 votes at the margins that we need in a few swing states.
I'm really impressed with the way she is turning Afghanistan against Trump.
Ooh, Harris is very good here on race.
53 was so golden that even my 9 year old burst out laughing.
Oh right. I just wanted to spout a line.
I'm not watching, so I wasn't sure.
I was a little disappointed that when Trump brought up eating cats and dogs Harris didn't bring up RFK.
He's suntanning. Sunspotting? Sunthing.
Sundowning is terrifying to watch in someone you don't want to be dead.
Did he look like he's wearing a diaper?
Otherwise the diaper would not have functioned properly.
I caught the last 15 minutes or so. I usually hate debates partly because even the Democrats quickly move it to talking points, but I thought she was actually being responsive and pertinent in a way that also hit high points.
I made it through five minutes of the PBS aftershow before I had to turn it off so I didn't start yelling. How, in the Year of Our Lord Twenty-Twenty Four, are those doofuses still talking about undecided voters?
There are statistically *no such people,* and those that self-identify as such are useless in predicting how this race will turn out. This is about turning out a few thousand apathetic nonvoters/occasional voters in a few key states, period, the end. How do supposed professional political journalists get away with pretending not to know that?
I talked to like three of them on Sunday. It was kind of frustrating. But I think the first woman really just needed someone to tell, face to face, that Trump would fuck over Ukraine.
The debate was good enough to get Taylor Swift to formally endorse Harris.
She dogwalked him from start to finish.
Harris campaign has already called for a second debate.
...which will almost certainly never happen.
80 to 77, but really the whole thread.
A wild thing about Trump is his adamant refusal to just say the pro forma thing people demand he say, like, "Jan 6 was bad and I probably should have put out a statement faster" or "Putin is bad and shouldn't have invaded Ukraine." I realize there are deeper things going on in those cases but there are ways to finesse questions like that and he's not interested in even trying.
I was relieved about the whole debate and think she did great. I am sad that it is apparently off-limits to say that 'most immigrants are great, including my own parents'. I will reluctantly believe that professional campaigners told her not to do that, but it makes me sad if they're right.
The media are unanimous in declaring Harris the winner. That kind of press reaction tends to move the polls.
Tho orange one's top lip could not have gotten longer; he ended up looking like some sort of wizened deflated monkey for over an hour. Good work there from Harris and team.
I fell asleep part way through. I was glad that they said there was no state where it was legal o execute children. She did the best on abortion. Her face said "such and such" is a lie. But I kind of wished she had callled him out for lying and then said "here' an honest answer...."
84: Yeah, he refused to answer which party he wanted to have win in Ukraine.
There was one moment at the beginning where Harris meant to say "President Biden and I did X" but she said "President Trump and I". That was a little unnerving.
91: wasn't that the moderators who said that? I noticed it too.
84: if you do what someone else tells you to do, that means you're weak.
94: Except for Putin. Doing what he tells you to do makes you strong.
Did Harris say anything substantive on SCOTUS?
84, 94: I think he got significant juice from just not playing the game back in 2016 but there's a difference between edgy, rebellious etc and just...weird. As you know Bob I also believe 2020 was the year of Peak Wacky, and wackiness is now a negative again.
96: Nothing about future plans to reform it, but she drew a clear line between Trump -> installing 3 rightwing judges -> overthrowing Roe v Wade.
Trump kind of did the same thing on student loans - he meant to say they'd broken their campaign promise, but actually told the story of how they kept their promise and the Supreme Court threw it out.
With one exception, Trump has never won a debate,* and I think it was a smart move by the Harris campaign to seek another debate immediately after this one.
Trump isn't engaged in strategy. His success comes from the fact that he is the embodiment of the American id. This is what Yawnoc describes in 84. He is a dysfunctional debater -- and is seen by his fans as a strong leader -- because he can't/won't adjust. In debates, he's in a forum where the media is obliged to recognize his nutty behavior because the media isn't controlling the agenda, and people can easily compare reality to what is reported.
We know all of Trump's moves, making it easy for Harris to plan. Trump can't change course because his success isn't a function of strategy or planning; it's a product of who he is. (And people respond to that "authenticity.")
*Victory here is defined the same way it is in gymnastics. It's all about how the judges react. The media has never given Trump a win except in this year's Biden debate.
What Harris did amazing well is be pretty fucking explicitly negative about Trump, while coming across as the upbeat positive problem-solving adult in the room.
It's hard to make a new post when I just want to relish this momentary good feeling. Let's just link to the best memes.
87: I noticed this too in the portion I watched. It felt like a bit of a novelty to not have him interrupting his opponent every 2 seconds, although he still got the unscheduled rebuttal time. I wonder if he felt he had to compensate in grabbing the viewer's attention by making his "tough guy" mugshot face.
100: Yeah, I've had a hard time articulating what I liked so much. That's it.
So glad it went well in my absence. electoral relevance TBD, sadly.
I thought the massive ACA repeal whopper would be getting more attention. One of those areas with no grey area; easy to call a stone-cold lie.
I made the unforced error of reading through an NYT "undecided" voters thing. They are tired of democracy, but just not able to quite yet come out and say it.
104: I didn't catch this. What was the lie?
The "concepts of a plan" thing was ridiculous, but it's even more ridiculous because we're talking about one of the top Republican policy goals of the past 14 years. It's worth noting that John McCain's "no" vote on repeal wasn't really about supporting ACA, it was a judgment that the repeal bill was dog shit that hadn't been thought through at all. That was 7 years ago.
106: It was in the lead up to the concepts of a plan thing.
Easy to miss in the ramble admittedly. Emphasis mine.
I had a choice to make when I was president: Do I save it and make it as good as it can be? Never going to be great. Or do I let it rot? And I felt I had an obligation, even though politically it would have been good to just let it rot and let it go away. I decided ― and I told my people, the top people, and they're very good people ― I have a lot of good people in this ― that administration. We read about the bad ones. We had some real bad ones, too. And so do they. They have really bad ones. The difference is they don't get rid of them. But let me just explain. I had a choice to make: Do I save it and make it as good as it can be or let it rot? And I saved it. I did the right thing.
I think that sort of thing from represents a genuine dilemma for journalists. Trump could indeed have arranged for Obamacare to fail through some form of neglect, and he didn't do so.
There's a very strong constituency in the Republican Party that favors the failure of Obamacare, especially if it can't be eliminated outright. There are nuances! Best to stick with stuff that's simple enough that a New York Times reporter can understand it.
I heard that as pure bullshit, since I can't even say what factual claim he's trying to make exactly.
There's so much grist for the mill, though. I'm frankly delighted that he doubled-down on "Democrats execute babies" after my sadness that it got lost in the shuffle at the last debate. This time he really stuck the landing on it.
108.1: Are you implicitly proposing an explanation for why they didn't fact-check that?
In general I think the better explanation for that would be that it wasn't a huge enough whopper to rise to their standards for real-time correction. Trump created some plausible deniability in a more typical GOP candidate style. But it's still a whopper.
The question was "You have long vowed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. You have failed to accomplish that. ...So tonight, nine years after you first started running, do you have a plan and can you tell us what it is?"
Just because the Freedom Caucus might have been happy to repeal and not replace, that doesn't eliminate the promise he made over and over to deliver an adequate replacement. He had every opportunity to, when the rubber hit the road the White House punted policy development to Congress which hurriedly assembled some bad half-baked ideas that failed in 2017.
So the major lie is framing his option as stand-pat or "let it rot".
I was contrasting "I saved it" with the reality of pushing for repeal, having a premature celebration in the Rose Garden when repeal passed the House, and having it come within one vote of passing the Senate. Not something I would expect a moderator fact-check on but still a complete and utter misrepresentation of his Administration's stance.
Looking it up, I had forgotten about some of the nuances of "skinny repeal" etc., but he tried and failed to get rid of it is the bottom line.
I guess another part of the trouble there is they called the AHCA a replacement when in reality it was closer to repeal but with enough caveats and assertions that it was treated like a perhaps-inadequate replacement in the media. But of course if it were a replacement anyone thought was not embarrassing it would have been re-proposed on a platform or somewhere by now.
I started the debate worried that Trump was coherent - not letting his hair down and free associating rally style. But he kept chasing after the sticks Harris threw, even on his (perceived) strongest topics. In the aftermath, even one token republican strategist on the panel was frustrated about his inability to make any coherent points.
I was annoyed by the moderators repeatedly caving and giving Trump time after they tried to move to the next topic. Near the end, Harris finally did the same - and pivoted to the big picture instead of answering the point and stopping. Since she'd been "robbed" of time throughout, I think the moderators let her run/ramble longer than normal post-follow up extensions. (My wife was much more annoyed, guessing that he'd gained 8 extra minutes; it sounds like it wound up netting out to about 5 extra.)
Maybe should be in the gambling thread, but I have been using Trump Media stock value as a proxy for s prediction market. And it dropped precipitously during the debate from 19.50 tp about 16.50.
114: I think the level of incoherence Trump has to reach to *really* move the needle a this point is much, much more gibbering idiot. Think Captain Queeg. (But of course in that case all of the rightwing "influencers" would be all in today on getting to the real answer on the missing strawberries.
I think Trump's support will collapse when a poo escapes his diaper and rolls down his pant leg onto the stage.
Kevin Kruse has a good argument that Harris' strategy was quite coherent. Her theme for the night was "Enough of this Bullshit", aren't we sick of a guy who only cares about himself, the head of the government should care about the people and here's how I will. But into each of those answers she dropped a jab that he always went after because he is of course a narcissist. By ignoring her policy points and defending himself (my rallies are huge! Orban loves me! I made so much money!) he proved her point in real time, all he could talk about was himself when faced with a personal slight. It was kind of funny that he got to the end and had an oh shit moment where he realized he completely forgot to mention his prepared theme of "why didn't she already do these things"
The media of course mostly missed this because of their focus on the horserace (Candidates trade barbs in heated exchanges!) rather than understanding that the barbs were there to let Trump show the truth of what she has just said.
Vance on TV: "I don't think most Americans are going to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and problems of most Americans."
I hope the Harris campaign plays this in an ad over footage of Trump on the golden escalator. Not to get votes, just a minimal play somewhere so it can be correctly described as an ad and get in the media / under his skin.
Yes, it's about Taylor Swift: https://www.threads.net/@kamalahq/post/C_yhKOjM9vG
114: I feel like the extra time hurt more than helped him.
Also, somewhere in the process of texting about the debate, Rory made some reference to false dichotomies, followed by, "That was like your user name on that legal forum you used to follow, right?"
the extra time hurt more than helped him.
Absolutely. After the first 10 minutes or so, almost everything was full-goose bonkers.
123: Legal forum? Is that what you told her?
Hi DK!
120: Good point, JD! Compared to a real billionaire like Taylor, Trump is basically middle-class.
127: I honestly don't remember exactly what i told her. Probably something honest in the direction of "smart people talking about things like law, politics, etc. Honestly, it's probably for the best she didn't have the details exactly right. There are moments of oversharing we're probably all better off that she doesn't stumble upon through curious search engine usage...
I'm sorry, but if I didn't do that, you know Moby was going to.
119 is very good
120 what a lack of self-awareness will do to a dude. Also, wow
Di! And yeah, it's funny having all this out where the kids could read it whenever. Newt (now a 23-year-old with a job as an engineer with a semiconductor design firm) went looking around Unfogged this summer, and happened across my review of Text's book. Told me I was impressively mean.
Having fellow unfogged types come to visit has led to some very vague descriptions for me as well.
"So how do you know [X]?"
"Oh, we were on the same Internet forum years ago."
"What sort of forum?"
I think I said "oh, discussing current affairs, that sort of thing."
"It has all the shortcomings of its genre and is also independently not good" remains one of my favourite review lines ever.
That review has all the strengths of its genre and is also independently good. And the comments are classic old-timey Unfogged.
136: My go-to phrase for how I met people is "arguing about politics on the internet." Boring enough that no one follows up.
||
ISTR someone here mentioned a near future SF novel with people colonizing the Antarctic Peninsula. Anyone remember?
|>
140 sounds like the sort of thing I might have recommended or at least might know the answer to, but it isn't ringing any bells. Or rather it's ringing one very faint one but I can't remember the title. Was there a time travel element?
Kim Stanley Robinson's "Antarctica"?
141: no idea!
142: doesn't sound like it, but thanks!
140: I read a book like this, it may have been me. Global warming-based sea level rise had been so severe that parts of Antarctica were among the largest areas of dry land remaining.
Mine wasn't KSR's Antarctica, reading a blurb. That was the same direction of change but much earlier in the process.
I forget how they made it scientifically plausible. I think if 100% of the icecaps melted, most of the world's dry land would still exist, though not the population.
Found it: Austral, by Paul McAuley. That man spends a lot of time writing.
I might be misremembering how much sea level had risen in that book, but that's definitely the book. It's in my digital orders.
138: that comment thread is wonderful, though I didn't get close to the end. 144-149.
