It’s not just gerrymandering (though that is indeed pervasive and pernicious. It’s structural. The apportionment between states gives small right-leaning states outsized representation in both the house and senate relative to their proportion of the national population.
> The apportionment between states gives small right-leaning states outsized representation in both the house and senate relative to their proportion of the national population.
That's not a bad thing. The bad thing happened when the Democrats decided to alienate those areas and lost them. You may forget, but a lot of those "small right-leaning states" were solid blue until relatively recently. For instance 100% of North Dakota's congressional delegation was Democratic until ~2010, Iowa was the quintessential purple state, the Senate majority leader was from South Dakota (but unlike today he was a Democrat), and I could go on.
How do you "message" to people who abandoned Fox News for NewsMax when Fox admitted that "The election was stolen" was always a bald faced lie?
Almost all of America makes zero attempt to hear anything a democrat says, opts into being force fed literal republican propaganda on all News channels and now X and Facebook, and then complains that the democrats didn't "message" well.
> The problem isn’t that the candidates are appalling. They’re not. It’s that the left is shit at messaging.
The "the left is shit at messaging" is an excuse to distract from having a bad message (or at least a message with bad parts), so that message doesn't get revised into something better. Basically: "we don't want to change so we can win, so lets hope all we have to do is say stuff better."
Here's something to think about:
> And the stakes of politics are almost always incredibly high. I think they happen to be higher now. And I do think a lot of what is happening in terms of the structure of the system itself is dangerous. I think that the hour is late in many ways. My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.
> Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats.
> And one of my biggest frustrations with many people whose politics I otherwise share is the unwillingness to match the seriousness of your politics to the seriousness of your alarm. I see a Democratic Party that often just wants to do nothing differently, even though it is failing — failing in the most obvious and consequential ways it can possibly fail. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/interesting-times...)
I don't think it really matters what Democratic messaging is when Republicans effectively control all broadcast media. It didn't matter how much Kamala didn't talk about trans issues. It was how much Republicans said she did. No basis in reality like most things they push. But they can push it effectively because the billionaire owners of large media corporations support it. Stephen Colbert can't even interview James Talerico on CBS. Part of the so-called "Liberal Media" owned and controlled by right wing billionaires.
I mean yes, the "impression" you get is bar for bar that of the standard right-wing Trump voter, down to the bad-faith interpretation. People who think the way you do in the US were always going to vote for Trump and were never going to vote for a Democrat, regardless of their platform.
If you're pointing out that the left's message didn't appeal to to the right, that seems tautological.
No they wouldn't, the DNC loves to alienate their base and try to appeal to the center and the right. That's what lost Harris the race. Not (as Trumpist propaganda will tell you) her radical leftist social agenda, but her utter abandonment of anything even resembling leftist principles in an attempt to bring Republicans into the fold.
Tech cycles do occur more rapidly now, but it’s worth noting that it took over 300 years from the invention of the first economically useful steam engine to the obsolescence of the horse (which gained momentum right around WWI and was essentially complete by the end of WWII). About 200 years from the invention of the internal combustion engine — 180 or so from the first economically useful one.
(Btw, steam engines didn’t replace horses pretty much at all. The internal combustion engine did.)
As an aside, horses are still economically useful (although in extremely small numbers) other than for recreational or tourism purposes: they’re still used for logging, for instance, because they can handle rougher terrain than vehicles designed for similar use, and don’t get stuck if they run out of fuel.
One of my least favorite patterns online: sites that decide that I’m a bot because I open a whole bunch of tabs in the space of 15 seconds with the products I want to evaluate or articles I want to read.
Thoroughly unsurprising. Because CICO is correct to a great extent. It’s just that for different people, different approaches to restricting calories in are more effective than others. I thought we’d figured this out by now.
You can look for a job without leaving this one. I don’t know what makes you think staying in this job is any safer than taking a different one — so long as you’re still employed while you look. Better that than looking in this economy _after_ a layoff.
If VC capital dries up, prices can no longer be subsidized and skyrocket. Many participants in a given space go out of business, so there’s less competition and less of a race to the bottom. Those that survive are the ones that price highly enough and can sell enough at that price to at least break even. Yes, there are liquidations, and drops in the cost of shovels, but generally of things that are already in surplus and do not significantly produce value.
Any downward pressure on prices stems from competition for customers’ shrinking discretionary budgets.
reply