[Lady Bliss]

That report on the document probe on Biden along with his recent references to dead politicians is likely to be the nails in the coffin for Biden’s campaign. The republicans will have a field day using the report’s assertion that Biden is too old and with memory problems to prosecute. When will the Democrats admit that they need to start rallying around a different candidate?

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Lady Bliss, on 08 February 2024 - 11:01 PM, said:

That report on the document probe on Biden along with his recent references to dead politicians is likely to be the nails in the coffin for Biden's campaign. The republicans will have a field day using the report's assertion that Biden is too old and with memory problems to prosecute. When will the Democrats admit that they need to start rallying around a different candidate?

After Trump wins, of course....

Quote

"He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended," [Special Counsel] Hur wrote. "He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died," [...] "At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

Biden's Memory Showed 'Significant Limitations,' Classified Docs Probe Finds (thedailybeast.com)

Turns out Hur

Quote

was appointed by Donald Trump in 2018 as the chief federal law enforcement officer in Maryland [...]

He was also an aide to Christopher Wray at the Justice Department before Wray's appointment to lead the FBI.
Who Is Robert Hur, Special Counsel on Biden Classified Document Probe? (usnews.com)

Before Wray's appointment by Trump to lead the FBI, that is.

Wonder whether Hur is hoping to get anything from Trump....

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 08 February 2024 - 11:35 PM

[Cause]

Lady Bliss, on 08 February 2024 - 11:01 PM, said:

That report on the document probe on Biden along with his recent references to dead politicians is likely to be the nails in the coffin for Biden’s campaign. The republicans will have a field day using the report’s assertion that Biden is too old and with memory problems to prosecute. When will the Democrats admit that they need to start rallying around a different candidate?

I would vote for Biden’s corpse over trump.

Even in the worst case scenario Biden inattention has led to an America with a vibrant economy. Trump is an existential threat to good governance, democracy and peace of mind.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Fwiw I'll do my part and vote for our savior the coffee liquor gelato tycoon... in the primary. Though his prospects don't seem very good right now (unless perhaps Biden drops out... but then hopefully we'd still get a wider field of candidates in time---though wouldn't it be fun if both Biden and Trump win the nominations and then drop dead?... then we can have former VP candidates Kamala Harris vs Marjorie Taylor Greene?... or more likely Stefanik...).

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Statistician and polling expert Nate Silver on ex-Twitter:

Quote

Nate Silver
@NateSilver538

If you wanna say the glass is half-full for Biden, that's fine. Personally, I'm closer to half-empty. Google some random press conferences from 2010 compare them to tonight. [...]

Overwhelming majorities of voters take the half-empty view. Do you know how hard it is to get 75% of Americans to agree on any political question?

The concern has grown linearly with Biden's advancing age.

3.5 years ago, i.e. when Biden was the same age as Trump is now, 51% of voters were concerned about his fitness. It's all pretty rational and consistent. A similar share of voters are concerned about Trump's fitness now.

(13) Nate Silver on X: "If you wanna say the glass is half-full for Biden, that's fine. Personally, I'm closer to half-empty. Google some random press conferences from 2010 compare them to tonight. It's subjective. But elections are subjective. And voters are emphatically half-empty on Biden too." / X (twitter.com)

[Edit: On reflection, most voters almost certainly don't even remember Biden and Trump's exact ages when asked survey questions like these. Since people decline mentally at different rates, and Trump's style of speaking may mask dementia more than Biden's (own gaffe-riddled history) does, it's probably just a coincidence that the % of voters concerned about Trump's age now is similar to the % who were concerned about Biden's age when he was Trump's age. The linear relationship more likely reflects the apparent decline in Biden's mental and physical performance. Though it could also be a consequence of escalating criticism of his age leading up to the election... or both combined. IDK if it's typical for age-related cognitive and physical decline to proceed in a linear fashion for a certain age range---I'd expect there to be some major discontinuities and nonlinearities as most people develop more serious health issues.]

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 09 February 2024 - 02:26 PM

[HoosierDaddy]

There's no doubt Biden should have not run for re-election. He has put his country in a terrible position. I'm not sure if it's an accurate belief that he is the only one who can beat Trump... but it is factual as of right now that he is the only one who has. Thus, I can't fault him for holding that belief, despite how ludicrous it is in reality.

I do fault the people who were unable to convince him that there was another way... because it might cost the country what he's so adamantly outspoken about preventing (the end of the constitutional republic because Trump is an existential threat to it).

It's disheartening that EVERYTHING has become so polarized that each news event, person, act, motivation is viewed from that partisan lens. Frustrating. Maddening.

I don't know how we get out of it at this point other than something that shatters the norm so much that there is a paradigm shift back to a functional normal. And anything that does that is going to create chaos; and through that chaos will come overwhelming pain for the vast majority of people.

Let's be honest: I"m a white, middle-aged, middle class, protestant Christian. I have little to fear personally from Trump's election. But I can think beyond my own immediate selfish interests. Why can't others?

This post has been edited by HoosierDaddy: 09 February 2024 - 03:15 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

HoosierDaddy, on 09 February 2024 - 03:14 PM, said:

There's no doubt Biden should have not run for re-election. He has put his country in a terrible position. I'm not sure if it's an accurate belief that he is the only one who can beat Trump... but it is factual as of right now that he is the only one who has. Thus, I can't fault him for holding that belief, despite how ludicrous it is in reality.

I do fault the people who were unable to convince him that there was another way... because it might cost the country what he's so adamantly outspoken about preventing (the end of the constitutional republic because Trump is an existential threat to it).

Does he really believe that, or is he clinging to power? If he has actually deluded himself into believing it, it may be because he wants to cling to power, or perhaps to delusions of being chosen by Go* to do (to be) His shit on Earth. Or perhaps some of his most influential aides want to maintain power for themselves, and so have twisted his feeble deteriorating brain into doing their power-hungry bidding.

[Gorefest]

It always baffles me how the US seems to vote for a person, not for a party. Surely it is the party programme that one votes for? The president is just the figurehead communicating that programme. There is waaaaaaay too much focus on individuals instead of on policy. That is not politics.

[HoosierDaddy]

Partially this is a result of having two parties who on the grand scale of things are extraordinarily alike on the political spectrum. Minor differences in policies are inherently larger differences than they would be elsewhere. Even more importantly, the person who can SELL their minor differences better is often the winner.

You have people in the Democratic party who are pretty pro-government socialized care, and others who are more conservative than some Republicans. Regional differences make up a large reason for that. A New England Republican is closer in line to a Texas Democrat than a New England Democrat... or at least that used to be the case. The whole thing is becoming more nationalized as time goes on.

It's interesting in that on the macro level, people ARE voting for party blocks when they vote. Split tickets have become much, much more diminished than they used to be. People are loathe to admit that they vote straight ticket (or at least that's my experience). To be honest, I don't ever hit the "Straight Ticket" ballot if only because I like the process of going through all the candidates and seeing where Republicans are running unapposed (very common at state level positions).

[HoosierDaddy]

Azath Vitr (D, on 09 February 2024 - 03:32 PM, said:

HoosierDaddy, on 09 February 2024 - 03:14 PM, said:

There's no doubt Biden should have not run for re-election. He has put his country in a terrible position. I'm not sure if it's an accurate belief that he is the only one who can beat Trump... but it is factual as of right now that he is the only one who has. Thus, I can't fault him for holding that belief, despite how ludicrous it is in reality.

I do fault the people who were unable to convince him that there was another way... because it might cost the country what he's so adamantly outspoken about preventing (the end of the constitutional republic because Trump is an existential threat to it).

Does he really believe that, or is he clinging to power? If he has actually deluded himself into believing it, it may be because he wants to cling to power, or perhaps to delusions of being chosen by Go* to do (to be) His shit on Earth. Or perhaps some of his most influential aides want to maintain power for themselves, and so have twisted his feeble deteriorating brain into doing their power-hungry bidding.

I honestly don't believe he's clinging to power for his own selfish reasons. Maybe I'm reading his motivations wrong, but I don't think that is it.

[Tsundoku]

So, their mental struggles are even making news here. All the time. Just one example:

Americans despair over increasingly frequent mental stumbles from Joe Biden and Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency was once compared to a horse getting loose in a hospital. Somehow the US is now in an even worse place.

https://www.news.com...d695701c760f430

Comment

There’s a famous bit by stand-up comic John Mulaney in which he compares Donald Trump’s presidency to a horse getting loose in a hospital.

“No one knows what the horse is going to do next. Least of all the horse.”

The analogy requires an update. Because instead of a horse, we’re now dealing with a pair of geriatric elephants stamping around clumsily in a surgery theatre.

Their patient, which in this increasingly tortured metaphor is the world, requires a triple bypass to fix Israel-Palestine, Ukraine-Russia and – imagine me waving my arms in a vague way now – all that other stuff.

The elephants cannot do this. They lack the necessary skills, and in any case are far too busy flailing their shrivelled old trunks at each other (I did say the metaphor was tortured). Yet they are the only doctors on offer.

A top-line summary of Joe Biden’s week: he confused the current French President, Emmanuel Macron, with former president Francois Mitterand, who has been dead for nearly three decades. A report from special counsel Robert Hur expressed severe doubts about Mr Biden’s acuity, saying he often struggles “to remember events”.

And in a press conference he called to allay people’s fears about said dodgy memory, Mr Biden described Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico. Cue the end credits music from Veep.

Not to be outdone, Mr Trump promptly managed to confuse Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which is becoming something of a habit for him.

This after repeatedly mixing up former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, and his pantomime rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Nikki Haley. The two women share little beyond their anatomy.

Quite the pickle, isn’t it? A nation of 330 million people, many of them presumably smart and sharp and gifted, must now choose between only two viable candidates for the presidency, one of whom is losing his faculties, while the other appears to have lost touch with reality.

The brief snippets of Mr Biden and Mr Trump that make the nightly news don’t illustrate the full scale of the problem. For that, sit and watch a full speech from either of them – you’ll be entertained and mortified in near equal measure either way.

Mr Biden is plodding and halting, and frequently struggles to recall precise details. These are not the minor stumbles of his earlier career, caused by his lifelong fight against a stutter. Nor are they the gaffes of a man who was once notorious for speaking rashly. They’re worse. We all know it, and we all know the cause.

He’s almost 15 years past America’s retirement age, after all. Mr Biden, 81, is 19 years older than Barack Obama. Heck, he’s older than Bill Clinton, who left office more than two decades ago. You have to go back to John Howard to find an Australian prime minister who is older than Mr Biden, and his career ended in 2007.

Mr Trump, meanwhile, is ranty, aggrieved and often borderline incoherent. The stream of consciousness we get whenever he speaks publicly is a relentless flurry of conspiratorial and paranoid thinking, interrupted only by the occasional bizarre tangent.

A recent quote: “The simplest of problems we can no longer solve. We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”

Right. OK. Sure.

I’d compare them this way: with Mr Biden, the frustration comes from knowing the rough point he’s trying to get across, and watching him struggle to find the words. With Mr Trump it comes from frequently having no idea what he’s even talking about.

Members of their inner circles, hardly neutral analysts, insist Mr Biden and Mr Trump are sharper in private. Hmm, yes, well, I could have told my school maths teacher I was really very good at calculus in private, but it wouldn’t have changed my abysmal test scores.

For years, neither side of US politics has been willing to wrestle honestly with the mental decline and infirmity of its leader. But more importantly, neither man has been willing to wrestle honestly with his own weaknesses. Now it’s too late.

Mr Biden could have decided not to seek re-election, allowing younger Democrats to compete for their party’s nomination. Most people would have respected his self-awareness. Instead his party is left with a President most voters think is too old to do the job and a Vice President, Kamala Harris, whose shaky public performances are a hindrance.

What happens now, if Mr Biden belatedly steps down? The Democrats either flock to Ms Harris and hope she spontaneously transforms into a more competent politician, or they subject themselves to an ugly, rushed contest between candidates who have laid no groundwork whatsoever for the demands of a presidential campaign.

So they’re stuck with him.

And Mr Trump. Well, he could have recognised his succession of electoral rebukes for what they were, and retired to a comfortable life of obscene wealth and golf and nightly adulation from the sycophants at Mar-a-Lago. But his pathological fear of being called a loser would never, ever have allowed such sense.

What happens if Mr Trump drops out? The question is too laughable, too preposterous to even contemplate (though the answer is that his replacement would almost certainly win).

So barring a medical catastrophe, America is trapped, held hostage by these two egos, each long past his prime and incapable of mustering the self-awareness required to realise it. The elephants in the room keep blundering around, while the patient quietly bleeds out.

Twitter: @SamClench

[HoosierDaddy]

I think that article is pretty fair to Biden. It is nowhere NEAR rough enough on Trump. It goes SO lightly on Trump that I'm left to give it zero weight in consideration at all. If incomprehensibility was the only thing wrong with Trump I think there'd be far less concern amongst far more people.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Tsundoku, on 09 February 2024 - 08:31 PM, said:

So, their mental struggles are even making news here. All the time. Just one example:

Americans despair over increasingly frequent mental stumbles from Joe Biden and Donald Trump
Donald Trump's chaotic presidency was once compared to a horse getting loose in a hospital. Somehow the US is now in an even worse place.

https://www.news.com...d695701c760f430

Comment

There's a famous bit by stand-up comic John Mulaney in which he compares Donald Trump's presidency to a horse getting loose in a hospital.

"No one knows what the horse is going to do next. Least of all the horse."

The analogy requires an update. Because instead of a horse, we're now dealing with a pair of geriatric elephants stamping around clumsily in a surgery theatre.

Their patient, which in this increasingly tortured metaphor is the world, requires a triple bypass to fix Israel-Palestine, Ukraine-Russia and – imagine me waving my arms in a vague way now – all that other stuff.

The elephants cannot do this. They lack the necessary skills, and in any case are far too busy flailing their shrivelled old trunks at each other (I did say the metaphor was tortured). Yet they are the only doctors on offer.

A top-line summary of Joe Biden's week: he confused the current French President, Emmanuel Macron, with former president Francois Mitterand, who has been dead for nearly three decades. A report from special counsel Robert Hur expressed severe doubts about Mr Biden's acuity, saying he often struggles "to remember events".

And in a press conference he called to allay people's fears about said dodgy memory, Mr Biden described Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico. Cue the end credits music from Veep.

Not to be outdone, Mr Trump promptly managed to confuse Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which is becoming something of a habit for him.

This after repeatedly mixing up former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, and his pantomime rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Nikki Haley. The two women share little beyond their anatomy.

Quite the pickle, isn't it? A nation of 330 million people, many of them presumably smart and sharp and gifted, must now choose between only two viable candidates for the presidency, one of whom is losing his faculties, while the other appears to have lost touch with reality.

The brief snippets of Mr Biden and Mr Trump that make the nightly news don't illustrate the full scale of the problem. For that, sit and watch a full speech from either of them – you'll be entertained and mortified in near equal measure either way.

Mr Biden is plodding and halting, and frequently struggles to recall precise details. These are not the minor stumbles of his earlier career, caused by his lifelong fight against a stutter. Nor are they the gaffes of a man who was once notorious for speaking rashly. They're worse. We all know it, and we all know the cause.

He's almost 15 years past America's retirement age, after all. Mr Biden, 81, is 19 years older than Barack Obama. Heck, he's older than Bill Clinton, who left office more than two decades ago. You have to go back to John Howard to find an Australian prime minister who is older than Mr Biden, and his career ended in 2007.

Mr Trump, meanwhile, is ranty, aggrieved and often borderline incoherent. The stream of consciousness we get whenever he speaks publicly is a relentless flurry of conspiratorial and paranoid thinking, interrupted only by the occasional bizarre tangent.

A recent quote: "The simplest of problems we can no longer solve. We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on."

Right. OK. Sure.

I'd compare them this way: with Mr Biden, the frustration comes from knowing the rough point he's trying to get across, and watching him struggle to find the words. With Mr Trump it comes from frequently having no idea what he's even talking about.

Members of their inner circles, hardly neutral analysts, insist Mr Biden and Mr Trump are sharper in private. Hmm, yes, well, I could have told my school maths teacher I was really very good at calculus in private, but it wouldn't have changed my abysmal test scores.

For years, neither side of US politics has been willing to wrestle honestly with the mental decline and infirmity of its leader. But more importantly, neither man has been willing to wrestle honestly with his own weaknesses. Now it's too late.

Mr Biden could have decided not to seek re-election, allowing younger Democrats to compete for their party's nomination. Most people would have respected his self-awareness. Instead his party is left with a President most voters think is too old to do the job and a Vice President, Kamala Harris, whose shaky public performances are a hindrance.

What happens now, if Mr Biden belatedly steps down? The Democrats either flock to Ms Harris and hope she spontaneously transforms into a more competent politician, or they subject themselves to an ugly, rushed contest between candidates who have laid no groundwork whatsoever for the demands of a presidential campaign.

So they're stuck with him.

And Mr Trump. Well, he could have recognised his succession of electoral rebukes for what they were, and retired to a comfortable life of obscene wealth and golf and nightly adulation from the sycophants at Mar-a-Lago. But his pathological fear of being called a loser would never, ever have allowed such sense.

What happens if Mr Trump drops out? The question is too laughable, too preposterous to even contemplate (though the answer is that his replacement would almost certainly win).

So barring a medical catastrophe, America is trapped, held hostage by these two egos, each long past his prime and incapable of mustering the self-awareness required to realise it. The elephants in the room keep blundering around, while the patient quietly bleeds out.

Twitter: @SamClench

Counterpoint:

Quote

for the rest of the world one line from Biden's press conference should jump out: "I know what the hell I'm doing… I put this country back on its feet."

In this he has a point: America's economic recovery from the pandemic is the envy of the world. Real-terms GDP growth in the US has been more than three times that of the UK, employment has been robust, and inflation has been addressed faster and more conclusively than in any other advanced economy. [...]

[Biden] may be gaffe-prone, but he is surrounded by a high-performing team. The same cannot be said of [the UK's] own Prime Minister: witness the failure yesterday by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Laura Trott, 39) to grasp that her own government's spending plans will not reduce the country's net debt by the end of the next parliament. The senior Treasury minister in charge of public spending should understand that her own spending plans only imply a fall in debt as a proportion of GDP in the last year of the parliament, but when Evan Davis pointed this out yesterday afternoon, Trott's response was: "I think I need to have the figures. I've got different figures which… I think we just need to… yeah."

Further evidence of the Conservative Party's economic illiteracy arrived this week in the form of a report from the Pensions Regulator, which found that the value of assets held by defined benefit pension funds fell by £425bn (that's four hundred and twenty-five billion) during 2022, primarily as a result of the changing value of gilts (UK government bonds) after the tax cuts [...]

The idea that further tax cuts are affordable is so laughable that even the Confederation of British Industry, not known for its membership of the Woke Blob, has urged Jeremy Hunt to disregard them in favour of green investment.

[...] I would swap our sprightly young PM for an octogenarian who sometimes falls over if it also meant swapping the UK's economic stagnation for GDP that is growing five times faster

The truth about Sleepy Joe Biden - New Statesman

Maybe the UK actually has it backwards: we should elect our King (to be powerless except as a figurehead), and have a meritocracy of capability and virtue reign (preferably constituted by superhuman intelligence... or at least well-informed by it, in a way that effectively remolds the empirical uni(-or-multi-)verse).

OTOH (also in the New Statesman today):

Quote

in this place where freedom is tipping over into its opposite and posing the greatest threat to freedom – in America now, 280 million adults watch helplessly as their fate is being decided by two men who seem, by even the most generous standard, out of their minds.

[...] Americans sat stupefied before their screens, perhaps fearing that their president's sphincter nerve would fail him next [...]

[...] His mental frailty makes him vulnerable to [...] external pressure. After the very hawkish Senator Tom Cotton called Biden a "coward" for not immediately retaliating after three American soldiers were killed [...] Biden retaliated – pointlessly and futilely. The situation is downright Skinnerian. You wonder what other types of negative reinforcement might impel Biden to take heedless action, in perhaps an even more perilous context.

[...] Far from being the embodiment of stable and stabilising American values, Biden is the hologram president – a fabricated mirage of American idealism and strength. He is the perfect emblem of the digital age. [...] In a country where you routinely see people driving at high speeds while looking down at their phones, it makes perfect if depressing sense that a computer-generated simulacrum of a president, rather than a real president, should be wending his way through the world's traffic.

[...] Soon, the veils of idealistic cant about domestic policy and foreign policy will fall away from Biden and he will be seen as the grotesquerie that he is. A dilapidated old man aping the sentiments and values of idealistic youth even as he steps on their dreams and their futures.

Joe Biden, the hologram president - New Statesman

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 09 February 2024 - 10:17 PM

[the broken]

I mean, Biden stumbles over his words sometimes or uses the wrong one. Lots of people do that. Is there any actual indication of cognitive issues beyond that? I mean, is he actually confusing those things, or just reaching for the word and finding the wrong one? Most of this seems like clickbait.

[Tsundoku]

So the Russians are behind a lot of the extremism and social media disinformation regarding "Texit", among other issues in the USA.
Well, colour me surprised!

US ‘Texit’ war threat being stoked by Russia
A US state is being hyped up by Russian interference and is threatening “a war” over a Mexican “invasion”.

https://www.news.com...1a21af8f753c89b

ANALYSIS

Russia’s expert social media manipulation teams are eagerly pouring fuel on a US political fire that has its roots in the Civil War of 1861. And the Kremlin’s state-run media is having a field day.

“Establishing a People’s Republic of Texas is getting more and more real,” deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev. His words spearheaded a barrage of industrial-strength propaganda unleashed on Elon Musk’s “X” (formerly Twitter), hyping the threat of “a bloody civil war which cost thousands upon thousands of lives.”

Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott wants to take control of the border with Mexico.

After the reported drowning death of a woman and two children during an attempt to cross the Rio Grande River, the Governor ordered his National Guard to seal off the scene with razor wire – preventing Federal Agents from investigating.

But, constitutionally, international borders are the responsibility of the Union.

This was recently upheld by the US Supreme Court.

Governor Abbott, however, has since doubled down on what he claims is his right to mobilise his forces to defend his state from “invasion”. Other Republican state Governors have moved to back him, sparking an intense partisan-political spat nationwide.

Not all of the hype is Russian.

US politicians are themselves eager to sow division within their own country.

At the weekend, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem added her voice to threats of civil war.

“If he’s (President Joe Biden) willing to do that and take away my authority as governor as commander-in-chief of those National Guard, boy, we do have a war on our hands,” Noem proclaimed.

Red star rising

Co-ordinated efforts by Russian and US partisan-political groups to push the civil war narrative have produced tangible results.

“There’s a big convoy of truck drivers going down there. So, it can very easily get out of hand. It can genuinely lead to an actual civil war, where the US Army is fighting against US citizens,” a correspondent for Russia’s state-controlled Sputnik online service posted to X.

The “Gods Army” convoy – also dubbed the “Take Our Border Back” convoy – has crossed the United States from Virginia and converged on Texas.

The loose amalgamation of white Christian nationalists, far-right activists, sovereign citizen advocates, QAnon adherents and a wide array of conspiracy theorists share one thing – a deep engagement in social media platforms.

Some “Gods Army” members have themselves called out Russian infiltrators within official social media channels. “They want a civil war/chaos more than anything. What’s bad for America is great for Russia,” one post warned.

Others insist Russia’s merely offering support for their “moral crusade”.

But pro and counter-protesters assemble everywhere the convoy goes – motivated mainly through social media.

“This tactic — amplifying extremes on both sides of a divisive issue — comes straight out of Russia’s disinformation playbook and was used extensively during the 2016 election interference campaign,” adds Orr. “Russia even organised duelling rallies in Texas that were meant to divide the American public, according to evidence uncovered during the investigation into Russian interference.

Heralds of chaos

Kremlin politician Sergey Mironov has offered Texas formal Russian aid: “If necessary, we are ready to help with the independence referendum. And of course, we will recognise the People’s Republic of Texas if there is one,” he wrote on X.

“In the conflict between Texas and the United States, I am on the side of the state. If necessary, we are ready to help with the independence referendum. And, of course, we will recognise the People’s Republic of Texas if there is one. Good luck! We’re with you!”

Such state-generated messaging quickly propagates across social media feeds, seizing on the same talking points and often using the exact same phrasing.

Not much effort is put into subtlety. Or refinement.

It’s more important to generate trending hashtags – the propagandists know few will read content beyond the headlines.

The National Review called out one such obvious fumble.

One online “Texit” (a rebrand of Britain’s infamous “Brexit” movement that led it to abandon the European Union) advocate was arguing the Lone Star State had what it took to go it alone.

“(We have the) 8th largest economy now. 50th by population in the world. A warm water port, oil / natural gas and major tech industries. Our own power grid and military as well?”

This caught the attention of National Review writer Jim Geraghty

“Say, when’s the last time you heard a Texan refer to a warm-water port? This is the United States of America, pal. Other than a couple in Alaska, all our ports are warm-water ports.

“You know who spends a lot of time thinking about warm-water ports, because they have so few of them? Russians.”

But the entire “Free Texas” movement appears suspect.

“This phrase and associated hashtag were used extensively, and nearly exclusively, by Russian accounts associated with the notorious Internet Research Agency,” says Orr, referring to the groundbreaking manipulation factory created by assassinated Putin crony Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Industrial strength propaganda

“In 2016, Americans were influenced by a few fake online individuals; in less than a decade, this threat has transformed into entirely fabricated networks, systems, and organisations,” warns the Brooking Institution Lawfare group.

The upshot is many social media posts advocating a Texas insurrection and civil war are again attracting hundreds – if not thousands – of likes and reposts from Russian troll farms and bot factories to dramatically raise their profile. That’s on top of those generated by their own political sponsors.

Researchers believe that social media algorithms ravenously promote controversial posts in the pursuit of more clicks (and therefore garner extra advertising revenue).

“This is part of Russia’s hybrid warfare strategy, which seeks to undermine and destabilise democratic processes through a variety of means, including and especially information warfare,” says University of Maryland behavioural scientist Caroline Orr.

Social media mechanics are gamed to build up a mass of false narratives and hysteria, blending commentary chatbots, foreign agents and local “influencers” into what – at first glance – appears to be an honest discussion.

This then spills over into other social media threads, where it is often taken at face value.

It’s a tactic pioneered by Russia in the early days of Twitter and Facebook.

It’s long since been adopted by marketing agencies, political parties and profit-driven content creators willing to “sell” any story that generates reader engagement.

“The incessant spread of misinformation corrodes the very foundation of our shared reality, undermining our ability to make informed decisions and to engage in constructive discourse,” warns University of Sydney Professor Uri Gai.

“The challenge is not merely for individual users; it is a societal issue that warrants a collective response similar in scope and urgency to that required by other public policy issues, such as gambling or alcohol use.”

War of the words

“Millions of Americans are up in arms over what they perceive as a lack of security at our physical border with Mexico, yet few people seem concerned about the complete lack of security along our virtual borders,” says Orr.

But many attempts to expose both the deliberate manipulation and vulnerability of social media mechanics have failed.

US Congressional inquiries are being held into university and research groups that have attempted to understand how social media algorithms work – including how children can be led to extremist content within hours of first signing up. They face allegations ranging from “defamation” through to breaching “proprietary intellectual property rights”.

Government bodies established to assess the threat of industrialised lies have themselves been targeted with “censorship” disinformation campaigns, causing them to be shut down.

Social media megacorporations have all but abandoned measures introduced to combat deliberate attempts to deceive their communities after the 2016 US election fiasco. They’ve fired moderators, dismissed risk assessment teams and are once again cashing in on the return of demonstrably false paid political attack advertisements.

And the next round of US Presidential elections are just months away.

Which is why security analysts are paying so much attention to what’s been happening in Texas.

“With the 2024 election just around the corner, these findings are an alarming reminder that Russia never stopped interfering in domestic politics in the US and continues to try to use homegrown protest movements and societal flashpoints as an opportunity to exacerbate social divides and sow discord as part of its asymmetric assault on western democracies,” concludes Orr.

[Mentalist]

Social media literacy, as an offshoot of social influence mechanics, ought to be made mandatory learning in schools.

The problem is, this subject matter requires a certain amount of critical thinking to comprehend, and most kids have already been fully immersed into this social media by the time it happens

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

the broken, on 09 February 2024 - 11:20 PM, said:

I mean, Biden stumbles over his words sometimes or uses the wrong one. Lots of people do that. Is there any actual indication of cognitive issues beyond that? I mean, is he actually confusing those things, or just reaching for the word and finding the wrong one? Most of this seems like clickbait.

Quote

[Biden is] an "elderly man with a poor memory" and "diminished faculties" who "did not remember when he was vice president," the special counsel Robert K. Hur said.

In conversations recorded in 2017, [he] was "often painfully slow" and "struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries." So impaired was Mr. Biden that a jury was unlikely to convict him, [the official report] said.

Memory Loss Requires Careful Diagnosis, Scientists Say - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

And those conversations were from 2017. Meanwhile, as statistician and polling expert Nate Silver pointed out, Biden's apparent age-related deterioration in his televised appearances has grown progressively worse with each passing year. Most of us have probably had the experience of watching an elderly person's physical and mental faculties gradually decline. That's exactly what Biden looks and sounds like; it's not just forgetting things and mixing up names, it's the changes in how he moves, speaks, and responds. It's so bad that his team doesn't want him to do interviews, which is probably the actual reason why he skipped the Superbowl presidential interview for yet another year.

Of course, Biden could help put some of these concerns to rest (at least among many Democrats and independents) by agreeing to a rigorous and thorough cognitive assessment by medical experts, such as those mentioned in the New York Times article. But his team is probably too afraid he'd fail. (And of course the very brief and simple cognitive test Trump took did not mean much---though I'd imagine many voters won't know the difference...)

Quote

SECRET SERVICE: sir they're all on the border. they're saying they want civil war

BIDEN: check out this bridge man i used to eat ice pops with the other school boys there

(14) beer person on X: "SECRET SERVICE: sir they're all on the border. they're saying they want civil war BIDEN: check out this bridge man i used to eat ice pops with the other school boys there" / X (twitter.com)

(unfortunately I actually have to tell you that bit from Twitter is not an actual Biden quote... I think)

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 10 February 2024 - 05:39 PM

[Mezla PigDog]

It seems to me that all of the traditional political parties in the west are in a death spiral. Previously established norms that we took for granted are evaporating. Probably due to the way news is made and distributed and the huge concentration of national wealth at the top end. The old parties are caught between old and new ways of operating and flat out of ideas. It is demoralising in the extreme.

The thought of another 4 years (at least) of Trump makes me want to go and hide in a hole. Prepper lifestyle looks more appealing with each new international event.

[Werthead]

Reagan was significantly younger than Trump or Biden when he started his second term, but relatively early in that second term (won at last partially off the back of him playing the experience card) people noted a cognitive decline had set in, possibly early symptoms of his later Alzheimer's (fiercely denied by his doctors, but witness accounts of moments of confusion during his second term are there). Nevertheless, during his second term he basically oversaw the end of the Cold War (though not fully completed until a couple of years after his second term ended) and steered the US through several major challenges, simply because his team was able to make things work. His cognitive decline really kicked in when he was in his mid-80s and continued to his death in 2004 at the age of 93.

The arguments here are of a similar nature: both Trump and Biden make frequent gaffes and these do seem to be getting more pronounced as they get older. But both have been making these kind of gaffes for years, in Trump's case his rambling, incoherent speeches have been a feature rather than a bug of his speech pattern since the 1970s, whilst Biden was making weird mistakes during Obama's presidency (when they played into his comic image of being a raging party dude with no time for details) and as a Senator a lot earlier. The American public has not shown much interest in alternatives: no leading Democrat candidate at the moment has Biden's profile and all of Trump's opponents are mired in mediocrity, despite trying to appear as tough as he is and even further to the right (DeSantis) or moderate and reasonable whilst strong on national defence (Haley). That I think ties into Trump's appeal despite being incredibly divisive: people know who he is and they like that they know who he is. If there was an alternate Republican candidate who was very famous and had been on TV for years, that might be a different story. If anything, Trump might be getting a boost from people saying, "We survived one Trump presidency, we can survive another, and his tough talk put Kim Jong Un in his place and we didn't have a war in Ukraine when he was around, and none of the really bad things people were saying happened in the first presidency and won't in a second" (none of which is a given, of course).

I do think the "never Trump" vote will turn out in force even for a rambling, incoherent Biden, even if they dislike doing so, but he is at risk of losing the disillusioned young vote who want progressive (at least ish) policies rather than his very lukewarm promises and aren't keen on voting for someone who's made America an accessory to war crimes in the Middle East. The danger is that they don't turn out, Trump gets in, and they start suffering from immediate remorse on not turning out for Biden.

I also think there are very strong indications (but not inevitable) that the next President will have to deal with a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and potentially a renewed Russian push into eastern Europe and a Korean war on their watch, which will be the most contentious foreign policy moments for an American President since the end of the Cold War, potentially since 1962. I don't think you necessarily want either Trump or a far-past-his-best Biden in office for those moments, but someone much more resolute, firm, cool and unflappable. In retrospect we got Obama and Biden in the wrong order, flip them around and I think people might be a bit more confident about the future (although Obama didn't quite live up to billing, he at least had a measured temperament).

Also, Biden could be sharp as a blade, on totally brilliant form, but that might not stop him from simply expiring of old age in the next four years. That puts a huge amount more attention on his VP candidate and concerns over what adversaries might do whilst a transition took place.

This post has been edited by Werthead: 11 February 2024 - 03:11 PM

[the broken]

Quote

I do think the "never Trump" vote will turn out in force even for a rambling, incoherent Biden, even if they dislike doing so, but he is at risk of losing the disillusioned young vote who want progressive (at least ish) policies rather than his very lukewarm promises and aren't keen on voting for someone who's made America an accessory to war crimes in the Middle East.

That ship sailed in, what, the 70s?

As a non-American, my primary interest is in foreign policy, and Biden has done well in difficult circumstances so far, the exception being Afghanistan, which the US electorate doesn't care about because it can't be used against their preferred opponent in the presidential race. I can't think of another name with a comparable record in foreign policy experience at the moment.

Azath's article is paywalled again, so I can't check, but at the moment I still think we've seen nothing but misplaced words. If he actually starts talking about the Falklands war, then maybe impeachment is worthwhile, mixing up names and terms doesn't matter.