Some [More] News

Thing is, as people over in the OT forum have pointed out, he isn't just "not Trump" - Biden has actual policies, but for some reason some people love to ignore that fact.

That's what really irritates me. Everyone wants to complain about Biden, but no one talks about his policy in detail even when it's clearly available.

If you think Biden is the lesser evil then you still need to explain why his policies are still bad.

And even if you don't like his policies, that's not the problem. You're welcome to criticize his policies all you want. But if you're trying to encourage people to vote for him, calling him "evil" isn't helping. Telling the people you're trying to solicit votes from that voting for Biden is an act of evil is not helping.

It's not about criticizing or not criticizing Biden; it's about word choice. People don't like voting for "the lesser evil". It feels morally wrong to do evil. You, as a jaded leftist pissy about not getting Bernie Sanders as a candidate, might feel better by compromising the sales pitch and saying, "Joe Biden is a garbage candidate, scum of the universe, but you should vote for him anyway," but it's not actually a convincing argument to make.

If you want people to vote, you need to sell them positivity, not negativity. Don't say Joe Biden isn't quite as shitty as Donald Trump. Say that Joe Biden is better than Donald Trump. It's the same fucking thing, but without the self-defeating cynicism that encourages voter apathy.

This is persuasion 101. People will not do the thing you are asking them to do if you, yourself sound like you don't want to do it. Don't talk about Biden like somebody's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to record a message in his favor. Be positive.

Positivity says: Joe Biden is better than Trump. There is still room to improve in Biden's policies. It is good that he is open to listening to more liberal members of the Democratic party, and he is a step in the right direction towards getting those more liberal members in office.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 20th 2020 at 10:34:40 AM

I actually wonder, are there any third-party candidates that managed to make a dent in an American election? Not that it’s likely to happen in this one…

If by "making a dent" you mean "splitting the vote of whatever other candidate they're closest to ideologically and handing the win to the other one", yes.

Third parties aren't ever viable in American elections because a) they don't put in the work down ballot to create any sort of voter base and b) even if they did, Americans seem to regard coalition building as something only the military does.

Realistically, the Democrats should be 3 different parties, and the Republicans about 5, but our political system is too tribal, and our electorate too uneducated, to allow multiple similar parties to coexist like that.

In the 1912 election, the Progessive Party got more votes than the Republicans, but going deeper that election shows the problems with the electoral college.

At the time,there were 531 total electoral college votes.

• The Socialists got 6.0% of the popular vote and 0 electoral college votes.
• The Republicans got 23.2% of the popular vote and 8 electoral college votes.
• The Progressives got 27.4% of the popular vote and 88 electoral college votes.
• The Democrats got 41.8% of the popular vote and 435 electoral college votes.

So that's messed up. Even though the Socialists, Republicans, and Progressives got over half the popular vote between them, they shared less than 1/5 of the electoral college votes.

Supporters of the electoral college claim that it makes individual rural votes count more than urban votes, which means that presidents can't ignore the needs and wishes of rural citizens. However, votes are counted by constituency, so if the goal was simply to boost rural influence, it would simpler and more transparent to just weight rural votes somehow; for example, the total number of votes for each candidate in each rural constituency could be multiplied by 1.2.

Cody did an entire episode on this exact problem last year:

Surprisingly, he immediately dismisses the idea of just abolishing the electoral college, on the grounds that alone will just create new problems. Instead, he argues that the solution is to introduce ranked choice voting. Speaking as somebody who lives in a country with single transferable vote, right next to one that uses first past the post, he definitely has a point.

Edited by VampireBuddha on Oct 20th 2020 at 9:03:38 AM

The 1968 3-way between Wallace, Nixon, and Humphrey ended with Wallace taking a good chunk of southern electoral votes that might have gone to Humphrey on straight ticket votes.

Edited by carbon-mantis on Oct 22nd 2020 at 2:00:27 PM

Many states also have regulations that are hostile to third parties (Or rather, parties not already named in the laws), regarding finances. Any third party, even one with the ground work, starts with an arm tied behind its back.

Cody talks about the fascist backlack by actual fascists to the civil rights movement.

Cody has talked about the Southern Strategy before; his quoting Atwater is one of the video examples on T-Word Euphemism due to repeated use of the N-word.

Some More News: The Movie

This one is two hours and fifteen minutes long. I'm going to save it for the weekend.

Well, that was quite the experience.

First impressions:

• Ever since I was watching Linkara, I've been hesitant on sticking around for the narrative-focused aspects of critique-based YouTubers out of disinterest, which initially repealed me from watching SMH "The Movie". Thankfully, I managed to come around today and thought that the balance between editorial and narrative aspects was handled well to sit through.
• Cody tackling Trumplicas in film and television of years past, ranging from Super Mario Bros and Sesame Street, was extremely relevant and handled well. Some conservative pundits mockingly refer to "Orange Man Bad!" as some new-age hysterical statement, when filmmakers deliberately use Trump-like shady businessmen antagonists as a universal example to show how their behavior would negatively impact the working class and minorities, and why people should care.
• A younger me was introduced to Dinosaurs via a YouTube upload of the steroids episode, but it didn't click to years later how progressive and prophetic its social commentary remains to be. To the point, as Cody quickly shows, the show demonstrating how futile and wasteful a kneejerk "border wall" against the undesirable "Four-Leggers" is.
• That being said, these same movies having striking dystopia looks in the future are occasionally saddled with a complacent feeling of "The old Guard has pretty much soiled the future, but isn't this dystopia kind of cool to fight through?"
• After making a point not to see it, Cody finally watches Tomorrowland. Though not really a hidden gem, the film's optimistic female youth does have a refreshing change of trying to make changes in present, rather than awaiting for the impeding pemessitic future that most older adults might as well make it a self-fulfilling prophecy from reading Brave New World.

With Trump gone, Cody has finally regained his sanity!

…I think.

Rudy Giuliani is Time's Person of the Year. Also farts.

Looks like we were all occupied with Christmas stuff. Here's the SMN Holiday Special

And having spent 55 minutes talking about what's to come for Joe Biden, Cody rings in the Western New Year with a short one about the upcoming Georgian election.

No, don't worry, you haven't travelled in time. Well, maybe you have, I don't know. But I haven't. My point is, Georgian Dream still holds 90 seats in parliament. Cody is talking about a runoff election in the American state which is also called Georgia.

And that BASTARD is trying to hide the OBVIOUS reptilian dominance of Antifa.

This post was thumped by the Shillelagh of Whackingness

i have grown so tired of centrists during the Trump presidency, they're nothing more than stumbling blocks trying to stop progressives from fixing the country

Depends on who you consider centrists, really.

To a lot of conservatives, a centrist is somebody who thinks homosexuality should be officially discouraged but not carry a prison sentence.

I don’t want to see what Cody’s stomach looks like after swigging that bottle of… whatever it was. Ugh.

Edited by Lyendith on Jan 4th 2021 at 3:08:11 PM

I bet his stomach is eggcellent after the 100TH EPISODE!

On our first post-inauguration episode, Cody unfortunately had to scrap coverage of Donald Trump pardoning Joe Exotic which dominoes into Taco Bell's 7 Layer burrito being taken off the menu, but didn't pan out. In its place, he covers why the Republican Party comes with ludicrous tangents about why raising the minimum wage is "actually a bad thing".

The people who complain that increasing people's wages will ruin the economy are the same ones who whine about the precariat killing luxury industries.

Question here: what would Conservatives think of hiring more employees and add more into the workforce? I know it's quality over quantity, but I want to know their thoughts.