Hardkill

That's quite a shock. Maybe the district has gotten so blue that it gave Mejia, the anti-israel progressive candidate, enough of an advantage over the more moderate Democratic candidates in the race. What I don't get is why AIPAC didn't go after her with a lot of attack ads on her when she was the main threat to them?

We don't have a recession yet and unfortunately it doesn't look like we will be having one this year. I hope that I am wrong.

It’s not just the donor class that’s contributing to this. It’s really that they are just too afraid to let go of catering to too many different groups of people unlike the Republican Party which has had no problem catering to a much less diverse coalition of interests.

We can’t save the voters who are already too far gone because of the right wing media. However, if we lost too many moderate and Independent voters because of this terrible media environment then we are doomed. A grass movement for this is crucial but I don’t see how that will be enough to save our country. Approval for the Democratic brand is at an all time low.

I haven’t yet, but I want to one day. Maybe I will. Both parties are already greatly disliked and the establishment Democrats are the most unpopular they’ve ever been. Plus, clearly nobody really cares enough about authoritarianism and democracy. Otherwise, Trump never would’ve been president again in 2024. People today care more about affordability and holding the rich, corporations, and the elites accountable. Moreover, Democrats are losing the messaging war and need to figure out a way to spread this cancerous spread of all of these falsehoods and false equivalencies. Otherwise, we could be facing the end of country before we know it.

With the Democratic aligned media environment having become so outgunned by both the right-wing media and the legacy media, the entire Democratic party should do a major war on misinformation. They should constantly call out the mainstream media for their bothsideism and excoriate Fox News and every right-wing media outlet out there for all their lies and devilry. Every Democratic candidate for every election should say that the right-wing media has always been out to get them and everyone who is not as far to the right as they are. They should say that Fox News, Breitbart, the Daily Wire, Turning Point USA, InfoWars, and what have you have been run by Neo-Nazis, secret members of the KKK, and all other kinds of White Supremacists who want to take over the country with their radical right-wing agenda. They should run on suing and cleansing all right-wing outlets non-stop when they gain enough power. The Democratic aligned activists should generate mass protests at every right-wing media company headquarter IRL and have pickets saying that "Truth Not Tyranny!" They all should talk about how the mainstream media and no longer really cares about democracy, no longer really cares about your freedoms, no longer really cares about the welfare of the people. Some of you may think that what I am saying is crazy and goes against freedom speech and democracy. Well, Trump and his party already have been threatening both the legacy media and every Democratic aligned media ecosystem. Democrats gotta stop worrying too much about offending anyone and protecting norms because it's not working and the system is already getting fucked! This is now war. So, Democrats need to fight fire with fire!

Yeah, and a number of successful politicians are introverts too. Barack Obama is fundamentally an introvert even though he presents himself as being highly introverted in public settings, other big events, and interviews.

But it's not about just the complexity of making something that necessarily determines how brilliant something else. In true art, it's about how original or radical a concept or idea is in a forward-thinking manner. Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889 while at Saint-Rémy, using a radically expressive, non-naturalistic handling of paint and color to convey a psychological and spiritual “night” rather than a literal one. The key point isn’t that “everyone back then called it insane” (most people never encountered this specific canvas), but that this kind of heightened, subjective visual language sat outside what mainstream academic taste rewarded—and even beyond what Impressionism aimed for. Impressionism itself had already been a rebellion against official channels since the 1870s; Van Gogh is part of the next wave that pushes further toward modernism. And while Van Gogh did gain recognition in small avant-garde circles late in life, his large-scale canonization was driven after his death through exhibitions and advocacy by those managing his estate and legacy. I agree that shipping a game/film is massively harder logistically. But that’s a different axis than aesthetic invention. “Hard to ship” measures coordination/engineering; “genius” in art often means creating a new visual language that changes what becomes possible afterward. Many games ship and are derivative; many paintings get finished and are mediocre. Execution difficulty doesn’t automatically convert into conceptual brilliance.

It has to be a good mix of capitalism and socialism. That’s why I still support either social democracy or democratic socialism—unless someone comes up with a genuinely new economic system that is proven to work even better than either of those two.

I really disagree with this. I have a bachelor’s degree in Visual Fine Art. My father has a master’s degree in Visual Fine Art, was an assistant professor of art at a top art university, is an architect, has read countless books on art and art history, and has visited many museums and attended many art exhibitions in different parts of the world throughout most of his life. He has always been a very tough critic. We both agree that nearly all commercial art ever made, as well as virtually every video game and computer-generated artwork, has been highly overrated. In fact, we believe that the vast majority of art ever produced—across photography, painting, ceramics, sculpture, drawing, and mixed media—especially in this day and age, has not been good. However, artists such as Van Gogh, Dalí, Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and so on were true artistic geniuses. They did what was genuinely unthinkable and radical for their time. Each of them revolutionized art in their own way. They were the epitome of creativity. Most people were not even capable of understanding their work while they were alive because their works were way too ahead of their time. Their works only gained true widespread recognition and value after their respective deaths.

Yeah.....that's honestly one of my main worries. However, if say Newsom were to become president in 2028, he undoubtedly would be a much stronger communicator for the country than Biden was during his presidency. So, if he governs successfully like Biden did, but is also able to win the messaging war unlike Biden and Harris who failed at that, then he would have a much better shot than either Biden or Harris did in winning the presidency again in 2032. It would be like how Obama won re-election in 2012. Nevertheless, the fact that the Democratic party are still struggling to win the messaging war because of the dominance of the right-wing propaganda and how behind the development of the liberal/progressive media ecosystem, deeply worries me about the future of elections.

I thought you were feeling hopeful before about Republicans losing badly and were starting to like Newsom:

Almost no one wants communism in America. Besides, communism has only worked in the short run, but has never worked in the long run. what we need is either Social Democracy like in the Nordic countries or Democratic Socialism.

Why the hell would you want to help the MAGA community? They have been contributing to the affordability issues we've been having by electing the wrong people to run the country.