Wednesday's Most Active Threads

Yesterday's most active threads were again dominated by political topics, even when the topics were not in the political forum. The most active thread yesterday was titled, "Biden weighing whether to drop out", and was posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. The original poster linked to a New York Times article that currently reports that President Joe Biden has told allies that he understands that he must quickly convince voters that he is up to the job if he is to salvage his presidential campaign. This article originally said that Biden had talked to these allies about dropping out. While the current version of the article contains a quote from Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, denying that claim, the claim itself is missing. The article provides no information about why the original claim was removed or even any notice that it has been dropped from the article. After New York Times reporters tweeted out the claim that Biden had discussed dropping out, Biden campaign officials strongly pushed back saying that they had only been given 7 minutes to respond to the report and would have denied it then if they had had time. The upshot is that this thread is based on an allegation that has been removed by the newspaper and rejected by both campaign and White House officials. The discussion in the thread is mostly about who would take Biden's position at the top of the ticket. The most obvious choice is Vice President Kamala Harris. Legally, the campaign money raised by the Biden-Harris campaign can only be used by Biden or Harris. Nevertheless, in this thread, there is strong opposition to Harris. Posters are concerned that she is not popular and that her weaknesses can easily be exploited. Some posters argue that she should be removed as the vice presidential candidate, but that would mean that another campaign would have to start from zero in terms of money. Other posters suggest that she remain as the vice presidential candidate, but someone else be selected to run for the presidency. According to campaign finance experts, that arrangement would legally be a new campaign and could not access the current Biden-Harris money. Realistically, Biden and Harris are the only two candidates. Personally, I don't understand the opposition to Harris. Yes, we can all think of our dream candidates, but none of those are realistic options (unless either Biden or Harris is your dream candidate). Biden and Harris are both currently polling about the same against former president, current cult leader, and convicted felon Donald Trump. I would think that Harris has a much bigger upside. Moreover, Harris's writ as candidate would be fairly simple. She would only need to support reproductive rights, support gun control, demand that corporations lower prices, and attack Trump on a long list of topics. Beating Trump does not require sophistication. It mostly requires demonstrating that you are not Trump and that you still maintain significant cognitive capability. What would be really damaging to Democrats is a long, drawn-out, process to determine whether Biden will stay or go. If he is going to step down, he needs to do it quickly. If he is not going to, all the Democrats calling for him to move aside need to shut up. Democratic infighting at this point is really not needed.

Yesterday's next most active thread was posted in the "Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)" forum. Titled, "Would you date a MAGA?", the thread is very political. The original poster, who is male, says he has MAGA friends who have had liberals break up with them. The original poster says that he has dated Republican women and that they have been able to put their political differences aside and agree on many things. However, he doesn't feel like he could date a MAGA women because of what he believes would be their very specific, and very different from his, viewpoint. He doesn't think they could agree on things that he values such as books and television. There have been several previous threads such as this one which I have locked after they were reported to me due to becoming almost completely political. This thread was not reported to me and, despite it reaching 13 pages, this morning was the first time that I become aware of it. But, true to form, this thread also turned political with posters arguing about everything from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to which party is more out of touch with America. As a result, I locked this thread as well. There is pretty widespread agreement with the original poster. Poster after poster says that while they can generally tolerate people from all along the political spectrum, they could not date a MAGA. One poster who describes herself as a centrist says that she is currently dating a MAGA but is having second thoughts. She is put off by "the manufactured outrage at every little thing, combined with saying things for shock value like a child". The MAGA reaction was also true to form in this thread. Their main tactic was to portray liberals, especially women, negatively. They posted link after link that allegedly documented liberal deficiencies. According to the MAGAs, supported the documented evidence they provided, liberals suffer from mental health issues more frequently, the women are ugly, the men are effeminate, and, regardless of gender, are more likely to die alone. Needless to say, this does little to increase the attractiveness of MAGAs to those participating in the thread. A number of MAGA posters accused posters of living inside the "DC Bubble" which, the MAGAs alleged, distorted their thinking. Apparently, outside the DC Bubble, everyone loves MAGAs. I wrote something similar to this the other day. Almost all of those who refer to the "DC Bubble" misunderstand almost everything about DC. Moreover, they increasingly don't appear to know very much about the rest of the country either. If there is any group that is fully ensconced in its own air-tight bubble, it is exactly the MAGAs. Eventually the thread devolved to little more than the two sides slinging insults at one another.

Next was a thread titled, "Harris for President: new poll shows she's got the most chance at beating Trump" and posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. I saw this thread for the first time just now, but it should have been deleted. The original poster did not follow our forum guidelines that require threads to be started with discussion. In this case, the original poster embedded two graphs from a Washington Post article but did not include any discussion whatsoever. The original poster didn't even link to the source of the graphs. The first graph shows, as the original poster mentioned in the thread's topic, that Vice President Kamala Harris has the best chance of any likely Democratic presidential candidate of beating former President, current cult leader, and convicted felon Donald Trump. A second graph shows how President Joe Biden and Harris would fare among various categories of voters. Harris performs better than Biden in every category but one. In that category, which is White voters, they are virtually tied. This thread has a lot of overlap with the first thread that I discussed above. Posters seem to have very strong feelings about Harris and, for the most part, those feelings are negative. Generally, however, I don't feel those feelings are very well articulated and, despite many of the posters claiming to be liberals, seem to be influenced by conservative talking points. I'll go off on a tangent for a bit that is inspired by some of the responses in this thread. In the very first political science class that I took in college, my professor asked students whether they were Republicans, Democrats, or something else. Student after student, including me (this was long ago, remember) gave an answer along the lines of "I don't align with a party but instead vote for the best candidate". The professor then began listing political issues and asking which party had which position on the issue. Following that, he named political figures and asked us to identify their role in politics. It soon became clear that those of us who "vote for the best candidate" had very little clue about any of this. We didn't know which party had which position and we didn't know even important political figures. The few students who had identified themselves as aligned with a party tended to be far ahead of us. The professor said that this result aligned with research which found that people who are not aligned with parties tend to be less informed about politics than those who do identify with a party. One post in this thread is from a poster who says she is voting for Trump but would vote for Michelle Obama if she were running. This poster also believes that Harris is "awful". Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of politics would know that politically Obama and Harris are nearly identical while a gulf separates them from Trump. So, how could this thinking make sense? The answer is that those like this poster either don't care or don't know about politics (probably both). They are "choosing the best candidate" and a candidate's political positions have almost nothing to do with that choice. The point of this is to say that knowledgable voters, especially those who are politics geeks, have already made their choices. Those who will decide an election are like the poster who would pick Michelle Obama over Trump or Harris. They will not be reached by talking about marginal tax rates or taxing carried interest. They will be reached by a persona that is attractive an inspiring to them. Right now, Harris does not have that. But, $92 million dollars later she might have. That is the upside to Harris that could win the election.

The last thread that I will discuss today was posted in the "Travel Discussion" forum. Titled, "Things you wish people explained to you before you went to (insert vacation destination)", the original poster says that she wishes she had known about some of the challenges of travelling to the Amalfi Coast. What results is what might best be described as 12 pages of random and disconnected travel tips. The posts cover everything from needing a passport to rent a car in Amsterdam to the style of toilets travellers might encounter in Japan. Many of the posts attempt to correct or contradict what was said in earlier posts. I am running way behind schedule today and this type of thread is difficult to summarize. So I will be brief. The usefulness of the information is almost entirely dependent on whether you plan to travel to the country or region for which the tips apply. Some readers might enjoy the quirkiness of some of the posts. For instance, there are multiple posts that mention monkeys and warn that regardless of how cute and friendly they appear, don't get too close. Many of the things people wish they knew involve food or drinks. More than one poster appears to have known to avoid drinking the local water but forgot about the ice in their drinks or didn't keep their mouth closed in the shower. They were fairly quickly made aware of the error of their ways. In the worse cases, these posters also learned the hard way that they should supply their own toilet paper. One particularly strident warning (the poster even used all caps) was to avoid eating reef fish. Apparently these fish feed on reef flora that build up toxins. Then, due to eating what you might think of as nothing more than a dinner of fresh fish, your nervous system is attacked by toxins resulting in years of suffering. There are actually quite a few good tips and some are fun to read.