Ackman is also a part owner of X, and that platform will also definitely be a big part of an effort to defeat Mamdani.

Edit: a family member just asked me what I think of Mamdani wanting to put a tax on all hiring, saying he proposed a 35% tax on the salary of all new hires. I googled this, and the only results are on X. The fix is in.

Fair enough, but this is the opposite of going for the eyes and throat. This is attacking Trump where he’s least vulnerable. It’s an uphill frontal assault on Trump Castle, armed with a nerf gun. The best you can hope for is a valiant effort.

Better option would be they should stop pretending they have power, and go out there in the media and into communities and yell about how Republicans have too much power, and need it taken away.

I’m sorry I know this impeachment is important to all your emotional needs after feeling bullied and all, but it would be extremely helpful to Trump.

Bear with me please. Here’s how impeachment actually works:

1. Trump does something terrible that is extremely unpopular.
2. Outrage forces Democrats to impeach him.
3. Because impeachment requires a 2/3 majority, which is literally unobtainable for Democrats even after the midterms, there’s absolutely no chance whatsoever he gets convicted, so he wins at the Senate.
4. Trump declares victory, says the whole thing was a hoax.
5. (This is the key) Low information voters regard the issue as now settled in Trump’s favor.
6. No one talks about the illegal war, leading the Jan 6 riot, or trying to corruptly shake down Zelensky again, because these are all now worthless as attacks against Trump.

See the last two impeachments. There’s no way this works well. American democracy sucks, but realize it’s a game. You can’t win at poker by playing every hand, no matter how much you deserve to win. Impeachment is a 2-7 off suit. Fold it on sight.

A certain percentage of all people are bloodthirsty monsters, especially when it comes to people unlike themselves.

And anyone who thinks this problem is caused by no one trying to use a bomb, gun, or flamethrower to solve it is the biggest idiot in planet earth.

To be fair, that grey tree trunk looked a lot like a road

If he yells “free Palestine” while doing it, that means he’s associating himself with others who support a free Palestine. And that means other people won’t want to associate themselves with them.

I feel like this is very obvious but people seem unwilling to acknowledge it. Because they view this guy as on their side. But he’s on the side of narcissists, not people who are effective at saving Palestinian lives. He didn’t think at all about whether this will save or cost Palestinian lives.

I feel like the free Palestine movement in particular needs to understand this: if you want to save Palestinian lives, you need to convince people. And you don’t convince people by shooting at them, or by justifying people who shoot at them. Think about it: do you see Coke murdering Pepsi supporters as part of a marketing campaign? No. Because the people they hire for marketing are paid a lot of money to actually succeed. Instead they associate coke with positive things, by bringing in celebrities, and generally portraying coke drinkers as cool people.

You should try being more like coke. Sorry if this sounds belittling, but I feel like it needs to be said because free Palestine people seem to think the best strategy is to piss off the people you’re trying to convince. And that has never worked once in the history of mankind.

Killing is only justified if it saves lives. Anyone can see this act will cost lives on both sides. And 1000x as many on the Palestinian side.

Let’s be real, this guy wanted to be a badass and get praise and attention. And he doesn’t care how many die because of that.

It’s not that no one cares, it’s that people who do care don’t want to be associated with others who care like this guy.

Just as the tide of public opinion was turning against Israel. That guy probably got a few hundred thousand Palestinians killed.

It wouldn’t be a Trump administration without reality TV drama. That harms millions of people.

The left is shockingly asleep about how bad this is. X still is the single most important platform for driving narratives about the news and politics. And it’s still important in part because Democrats and the left as a whole have been lethargic in leaving it. The fact that it’s blatantly being used to tilt the national political discussion in whatever direction Elon wants was probably one of many keys to getting Trump elected in 2024, and should be regarded as an ongoing emergency for Democrats and the left.

On the contrary it’s right, perhaps even acute

Assuming you actually believe I misunderstood their argument, perhaps it would be more useful to explain their actual argument that I’m not grasping?

So this version of the argument basically amounts to: people who have harmed society should contribute to social welfare that bolsters the economy and society collectively. Which while a solid effort and earning my upvote, 1) the_petty_auntie’s reply doesn’t show signs of making this particular argument and 2) in this particular case, it fails because society as a whole wasn’t harmed by her son’s actions - rather a particular victim was. And as the victim was a teen at the time of the incident, it’s unlikely that the victim would be able to take advantage of student loan forgiveness unless it happened many years ago.

The question asks why the audience’s student loans should be repaid now when hers were not. The response is that the reason is the same as paying for her son’s prison sentence for raping a minor, which is “betterment of society”. Let’s count the number of ways this fails:

• “For the betterment of society” is a justification that could be used for pretty much any defensible policy decision. It really doesn’t further the argument at all unless there is something specified about how paying student loans makes society better.
• RAPING A MINOR is in caps both to indicate shoutiness and to emphasize this aspect of the crime, which again, is hard to tie back to an argument about student loans
• The main failure - the fact that it’s a blatant ad hominem directed at the poster for having a son who raped a minor, which is an evidently successful attempt to hide the weakness of the purported argument by casting the OP as someone whom one would not want to be associated with by virtue of being a parent to a rapist. This implied argument, which is the real argument, is invalid in the absence of evidence that rapist-parents cannot have valid opinions.
• It’s also a particularly egregious example of an ad hominem because it relies on guilt/worthiness by blood relation, the same concept behind ideas like racism and even worse, inheritance.

Better answers might include:

• Education costs have risen to a degree that the fairness calculation is now different
• Student loan debt is a threat to the whole economy and just as bailing out banks sometimes makes sense, bailing out student loan holders might as well
• Financial inequality is out of control and we should dispense with antiquated notions of “fairness” to the wealthy when circumstances have been more fair to them overall than at any time in the past

But these answers would not get reposted on social media as much because they don’t play into tribalism and social drama.

All three people here are terrible

Charlize is cool.

They weren’t, but they were a hell of a lot stronger than Trump. And Biden for that matter.

The reality is there’s clearly a double standard in how Americans - both male and female - view women as candidates. Look at how they attacked Kamala for having a monogamous relationship with Willie Brown while Trump cheated on 3 spouses and sexually assaulted somewhere between 1 and 25 people.

Does anyone think there’s a chance that a woman who was caught cheating on her spouse could get elected? And it’s not just sex stuff, the way opinions and mannerisms are scrutinized is different too. There’s 100x as many ways for a woman to be cringe as a man.

The country was in decline for at least a decade before Trump took office.

Well 4 years of that decade was Trump being in office, and 4 other years was the result of people being willing to vote in literally anyone who wasn’t him. So really 8 years of that decade was Trump’s fault. And the other two years? Not bad.

As for the rest, Trump is cutting funding for research like crazy. That won’t just affect things today, that’s going to make stuff shitty for decades. And that’s exactly the kind of harm that the emotion-laden American news and social media simply won’t cover. So I don’t think there will be a backlash, rather the opposite - politicians will realize bullying scientists, government agencies, immigrants, and other voiceless Trump targets is just good politics, and keep doing it.

Of course future prediction is hard, so who knows what will happen. But I’m not seeing the path for this to turn around anytime soon. The same media that created MAGA, and made it even more popular 4 years after it proved itself to be a horrific disaster is the same media we have today. Democrats will probably win the next two elections because people can see what Trump is doing in real time, but after that I have no hope for America. If I have to predict the future, I’d guess the EU becomes the new global leader, driven by relatively high democracy and pro-science policies compared to the rest of the world. This could even occur in a relatively short time frame, like 5 years.

I’m plenty open to questioning every part of copyright (has the idea ever actually been proven to be worth the enormous costs? It’s like an infinity-percent tariff on anything information related.) but the same copyright should apply to everbody. It sounds like this proposal gives a specific pass to corporations developing AI - anything these corporations can access should be accessible to the general public as well. If you can use a song to train an AI for free, a human artist should also be allowed to use it directly and turn it into a new work.