Generally true politically. But these are questions that need to be asked.

Yes, it’s tempting to say, “a human life is priceless, no price to save a life is too high.” But there are an infinite number of ways dollars can be spent to save lives. And by making cars more expensive, that puts less money in people’s pockets to pay for healthcare, quality nutrition, etc.

What if someone invented a miraculous but expensive safety device? Imagine if someone invented a device that decreased traffic deaths by 95%, but at the cost of $250k per vehicle. We would make vehicles incredibly safe, but at the cost of completely shutting working people out from vehicle ownership. Would it still be worth it? There will always be some point where safety just isn’t worth the cost. Not because we don’t care about human life, but simply because there are many potential ways for us to spend money to enhance human safety and well-being.

I played a whole Curse of Strahd campaign as “Merrtyle.” She was a bard, didn’t play an instrument. Painted instead. She was a fanatic of Ilmater, and I had her follow a bonkers over the top sect. She went everywhere in a hair shirt, self-flagellated herself with a cat-and-nine-tails, and generally lived the most miserable austere existence possible. Her physical stats were garbage. Once when the party had to scurry up a rope to an upper floor, she couldn’t make it, and the other party members had to pull her up by a rope around her waste. And a common saying of hers was, “hold your horses, in coming…” as the party waited for her to catch up.

She was a blast to play.

Look what thinking cautiously has got us. Look what thinking audaciously has got them. What rational rational Republican voter would have thought that Trump was a good potential candidate in 2016? Rational opinion was that Trump was a candidate doomed from the start. Yet the Republicans through caution to the wind and went for the inspiring candidate. And look what it got them.

Every election we choose the path of least resistance. Every election we talk ourselves out of the truly inspiring candidate, all in the name of electability. How many Democrats have voted against the progressive primary candidate, the one who could inspire, the one who could rally…all in the name of electability? Hillary was the candidate in 2016 because she was more electable than Bernie. Biden was the candidate in 2020 because he was more electable than Bernie. Biden was nearly the candidate in 2024 because sticking with the incumbent was simply the rational and cautious move.

Maybe it’s time we have faith for once. Maybe it’s time we believe in ourselves and our message for a change. Maybe it’s time to stop talking ourselves out of running our strongest potential candidates. As a great poet said, you have to believe in impossible things, or else they can never come to be.

Yes. Spitting distance. They were both close elections. What rock have you been living under?

Unlikable to you. Not to his voters. And Trump also beat ten times as many men as he did women. So logically we can’t ever run a male candidate ever again. The voters clearly don’t like male Democratic candidates. Biden only won due to covid.

Surely no man who could be elected German Chancellor could turn out to be evil! /s

In this survey, a larger percentage of women under 50 said they (or someone they knew) wouldn’t vote for a woman as president, compared to men who responded.

Women tend to have larger active social circles than men. That alone explains this.

Eh. She already meets the requirements. She’s old enough. That’s it. And she is eminently more qualified than the current president. She’ll be 39 in 2028. The youngest president, Teddy Roosevelt, was 42.

This gets really ugly when Democrats start rejecting candidates for their minority status. Kamala explicitly rejected Pete Buttigieg as a running mate because he was gay. Kamala rejected him using the logic of a thousand other bigots, “I have no problem with it, but others won’t understand and will judge me for it.” This is the exact same logic that employers across the country use to deny hiring queer people, trans people, etc. Employers will claim to not be bigoted themselves, but that their customers wouldn’t get it, so they simply can’t hire the queer candidate.

Hogwash. Women have come within spitting distance of winning the presidency. Twice. Kamala and Hillary were both very unlikable candidates running no the same neoliberal platform that voters have rejected in the last three elections.

The real problem was that voting for Trump was voting for Mussolini today. Voting for Kamala was voting for Hitler in 2028. If she had managed to win, someone even worse than Trump would win the election in 2028. That’s the only possible result from a hypothetical Kamala admin, if she had managed to win the election.

Why did you vote for someone even worse than Trump? If Kamala had won, someone even worse than Trump would have got the Republican nomination in 2028. And they would have easily beat Kamala then. She wouldn’t have done anything to alter the conditions that lead to Trump. And now at least Republicans are likely to lose in 2028 (dooming about the end to elections aside.) And more critically, we actually have a shot at getting in Democrats that might actually be able to do something about fighting fascism.

You didn’t vote to fight fascism. You just voted for even worse fascism four years down the line.

So even worse, he manipulated and deceived the entire electorate from the get-go.

Did Biden explicitly promise to be a one term candidate? No. But he personally implied it on many occasions, and he had his underlings spread the messaging of him as a one-term president in the press. His minions were out there in the media basing their entire pitch for his candidacy on the idea of him as a one-term caretaker president, running to restore normalcy.

He deliberately put the idea in the public consciousness that he would only run for a single term but without ever explicitly promising to do so. This way the bastard could get woo voters on the prospect of him making a graceful exit, but while still leaving his future options open. It was a Machiavellian move, and it ultimately blew up in his face and gave Trump a second term.

If she had had more time, she would have lost even worse. The peak of her popularity was when people knew nothing about her. She just kept getting more unpopular as the election wore on.

The only scenario that Kamala could have won is if Biden had somehow dropped out just weeks before the election. Her only shot was to get elected before people really got to know her. She’s a deeply unlikable candidate.

She was left only from July to November to figure out her platform, determine a potential running mate, and come up with ideas.

She didn’t have too little time. She had too much time. She could have won if Biden had died a week before the election, and she had to take over last minute. The peak of her popularity was right when she got the candidacy. And it was all downhill from there. The more voters got to know her, the less they liked her. If she had had more time, it would have been much worse.

She was a deeply unlikable candidate that ran dead last in the primary she ran in. She was chosen by Biden as VP precisely because she was seen as unelectable and thus not a serious rival for Biden’s position.

support trans rights

Why do you surrender so easily to right-wing framing? What ads did she run supporting trans rights? What did she possibly do to make it an issue of her campaign?

There were two sides on trans rights. On one side, we had literal Nazis. On the other, silence. You conclude that the side that stayed silent made their whole campaign about trans rights, which is completely delusional.

Read the article. Kamala made her opinion of LGBT rights abundantly clear. She explicitly rejected Pete Buttigieg using the same logic a thousand other passive bigots I’ve met use. “I have no problem with queer people, but I can’t be near queer people because of what people might think of me.”

These people are unhinged militant centrists.

It may seem paradoxical, but it is actually possible to be an extreme centrist. The hard truth of American politics is that there are no actual centrist voters. You won’t find any significant number of people whose views largely lie right between the platforms of the two parties. What you have instead are voters whose views simply don’t align well with the existing party coalitions. Their views may still be extremely strong. Think someone that is extremely pro-choice while also owning a dozen AR-15s. Maybe they have a home in the Libertarian Party, but they have no real home in either major party. They believe passionately on both subjects, they are anything but moderate for both their support of abortion choice and guns. But because their views don’t map cleanly to one side or the other’s arbitrary grab bag of chosen issues, this voter is called a centrist. But they’re not really a centrist. They just have weak partisan alignment.

But people like these? They are actual militant centrists. In many way these politicians are the only true centrists in America. They have formed a worldview that concludes that the right answer to any single issue must lie right in the middle between the two sides. One side wants to raise taxes on the rich while the other wants to cut them? The obviously correct answer must be to keep the taxes steady. Trump wants to turn millions of legal immigrants into illegal immigrants and then deport them, while progressives want to deport no law-abiding person? The correct answer must be to brutalize merely a few thousand innocent people. Progressives want to protect trans rights while Republicans want to liquidate trans people in ovens? The obvious answer must be some roll back of trans civil rights.

People like Schumer, Fetterman, etc. are militant centrists. They will obsessively tack to the very middle of any issue. And this is fundamentally a purely ideological position, the same as any extremist. A militant racist is so committed to theories of racial superiority that they’ll want to see racist policies enacted, even if they hurt the country, even if they hurt the racist themselves, regardless of even if white people are hurt. A militant socialist might demand state ownership of every type of business and enterprise, even if there’s no market failure and private companies can run those things just fine. You would have to be a pretty extreme socialist to think that the government should be running bars for example.

This is the defining feature of extremism and militancy - a willingness to put one’s own ideology above everything else. All that matters is the ideology. It is correct with a capital C. It is truth with a capital T. Any evidence against the ideology is dismissed or explained away.

These people are not moderate. They are militant centrists. Pick an issue, no matter the context or the evidence clear for all to see. They will always tack right in the middle between the two sides. They believe, in their heart of hearts, that the middle path is always the correct one. And they don’t care how many people have to die to keep their cherished view of centrism preserved. They are as extreme and militant as any far-right militia member. They just follow the ideology of centrism rather than conservatism.

We lost in 2024 because of delusional thinking that we can bully people into voting for us. Convincing people to vote for your side starts with not being a rude pompous ass. It starts with not announcing that you know voter’s wishes and beliefs better than they do. If voters get a whiff that you feel that you are entitled to their vote, they will punish your side out of spite. You can whine about this fact of human nature, but your whining won’t help you win any elections. Elections have never been some dispassionate utilitarian balancing of policy platforms, and voters get annoyed when you pretend that they are.

Democrats lose when they forget that they’re supposed to represent voters first and foremost. This is why white progressives usually fail when they go into minority communities looking for their votes. They’ll try to brow beat racial minority communities. They’ll say, “surely, our policies of government programs and redistribution are in the best interests of your community!” while at the same time not really trying to represent the issues those folks actually care about. Maybe UBI would be a great boon for members of a racial minority group. But that doesn’t mean members of that group will vote for you, or that they have to. They may simply have other political priorities and would prefer politicians that will push for those priorities first. This is the difference between ruling and representing.

I have no doubt that attitudes like yours cost Democrats far more votes than the few progressives that actually stayed home. Your message is meant to browbeat people who are honestly almost always going to vote for your side anyway. But people who are more moderate see your message, see that you feel entitled to people’s votes, and vote against Democrats as a consequence.

The number one complaint people have about liberals is “liberal arrogance.” And this is a great example of the arrogance that causes Democrats to lose elections. You believe you’ve diagnosed all of society’s problems. You believe you know the solutions to them. You believe you have all the answers. When other people tell you that their priorities are different from yours, and so your balance of issues are different from there’s, you insult them, bully them, and try to shame them to vote for the Democratic candidate.

You are why Democrats lose elections. Your hubris dooms us all. It’s condescending. It infantilizes voters who have a different ethical system than you do. And ultimately it shows that you want to rule people, not represent them. Liberal arrogance in its purest form.

Trump never held office before being elected president. What he had was fame. Guess what AOC has in spades?

Someone like Mamdani will be poised to win. But then the DNC will suddenly start pushing their candidate hard. They’ll decide that they need a candidate that can at last truly appeal to Republican voters, someone who has bipartisan political experience!

Say hello to 2028 Democratic presidential nominee David Duke!