Arnie is actually fairly intelligent, and also surrounded himself with competent people

This is really the key factor. His acting chops probably just helped him convince people to vote for him; it wasn’t all there was to him.

Honestly, I’d say don’t put any stock in it. If he did cheat, it was at the extreme margins where it doesn’t make a difference. The fact of the matter is that Americans are just stupid and/or hateful. As much as I’d love it to be true if only to restore my faith in Americans, I very much doubt there was any significant cheating.

Before Trump won the popular vote, I’d say that would trigger a mass uprising or ignition of a civil war. Now, maybe a few protests and a riot here and there? Honestly, probably not much.

I’ve never been less sanguine about the United States as a nation than I am right now.

As much power as they have, they can’t do that fortunately. So, they’ll need to get creative. Something along the lines of “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice” really means twice consecutively, so a third term is good to go. As flippant as I sound about it, it is actually a possibility if Trump survives that long and wants to run again.

Sure, that law isn’t airtight. Really, though, what’s a law but a piece of paper when there’s a SCOTUS decision effectively making POTUS king and Congress unwilling to stop him. At this point, are even so-called airtight laws safe from transgression? I think it’s doubtful.

This is a great analogy

If Kamala would have spent half the time she spent talking about Trump, talking about corporate price gouging instead and how she would go after corporations like a bulldog, voters would have had a place to look for blame other than the Democrats.

I agree. It was really frustrating that she wasn’t hammering this home. BUT I still don’t think that it would have really moved the needle that much. Same with Palestine. Same with Biden dropping out earlier. Same with being a bit fuzzy on details. So on and so forth.

In the end, the American people wanted Trump the person. He has no economic messaging besides a nebulous idea of “fixing” the economy through tariffs, which is laughable. People who use the economic anxiety argument are either trying to deflect blame from themselves for voting for him (“I don’t like him as a person, but he has good policies.”) or because they want to believe in the fundamental goodness of their fellow Americans so that their choices can be rationally explained. The former is deluding themselves since Trump has no cogent economic policy. As for the latter, I get why they want to believe that, but the truth is a lot uglier. The majority of Americans either affirmatively approve of or tacitly tolerate Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and/or are simply too uneducated (or just plainly stupid) or (if I’m being extremely charitable) woefully misinformed or uninformed to understand the gravity of his election.

I’m tempted to blame the Democratic party and nitpick, but at the end of the day, Harris ran a good campaign. It wasn’t perfect, but even if it were, we’d still more or less be here. The core problem, I think, lies in our culture and our educational system. Trump was a uniquely awful candidate, and Harris was a competent, “standard” politician. By all measures, she should have won. Even still, the American public repudiated her, which is simply irrational. In the end, it comes down Trump being the symptom not the problem. The problem lies in our culture and society.

tl;dr: Even if Harris did message better, she still would have lost. American culture and society is flawed and ultimately at fault.

This is what’s getting me. If he won via electoral college or couping, I’d be angry and ready to do the work to pull the country out of this mess and end Trumpism once and for all. But instead, he won the popular vote. People in the United States saw a wannabe-autocrat who was specifically called a fascist by his own officers who admitted to being a dictator “on day one” among so many other things. After seeing that, a majority of people either affirmatively supported the fascist candidate by voting for him, or they are tolerant enough of it to sit at home and not vote or vote for a third party knowing the outcome. And that really just makes me lose faith in my country and the people, and so I’m just sad knowing that this country actively chose this outcome.

What’s worse is that I really don’t feel a strong desire to try to change anything since it’ll just fall on deaf ears at best. More to the point, I don’t even want to hear “their side” or “their reasons” for why they voted the way they did because no matter the rationale they give, it will come down to them being comfortable with oppression of minorities and autocracy. I always want to believe the best of people, but after today, I really can’t anymore.

Young men may be drawn to Trump because he pushes against societal pressure that men need to be apologetic for being themselves.

“Not being apologetic for being [myself]” is why I’m voting for Harris. I swear that conservatives want everyone to fit into confining, pre-defined boxes for everything. I found that among conservatives, I’ve always had to “apologize” for not being hyper-masculine and interested in “softer” and “feminine” things.

If someone is very masculine, that’s cool, too. No one is saying that you can’t be hyper-masculine if that’s what you’re into. BUT if you constantly are apologizing for “being yourself,” maybe you’re just an asshole trying to hide behind masculinity.

Yes! “AI” defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.

See, this is part of his long con. Clarence knows his wife is crazy, so instead of divorcing her, he’s just going to make their marriage illegal. /s

Or class

I tend to agree and give a ton of leeway to stupid, offensive stuff from years past that people have evolved from. We all said and did stupid stuff that we regret. However, this isn’t offensive, and that’s to highlight that Vance either A. regressed in his values from being normal to being weirdly pro-hyper-traditional gender roles or B. has no true beliefs and is just saying what he says because he thinks it wins him votes.

Yeah, they’ll probably have to check everything. Though, I wonder if even just checking that everything is good to go would save time from manually re-writing it all. While it may not be a smashing success, it could still prove useful.

I dunno, I’m interested to see how this plays out.

I think this is an interesting idea. If they’re able to pull it off, I think it will cement the usefulness of LLMs. I have my doubts, but it’s worth trying. I’d imagine that the LLM is specially tuned to be more adept at this task. Your bog-standard GPT-4 or Claude will probably be unreliable.

I can see the allure for places wanting to keep certain trouble-makers out as a precaution, but this gets so close to a privatized social credit score that it’s beyond uncomfortable.

I’m 100% in favor of me being a dictator for life

This right here. Even as a kid studying history, I never understood why someone would support a dictator. When I was like 9 or 10, we were learning about WW2 or something, and I said, “Wait, Mrs. <History Teacher>, you’re saying people wanted Hitler to be a dictator and voted for him? Why would someone give up the possibility of being leader themselves?!” I couldn’t comprehend how someone wouldn’t want to at least have the possibility of having supreme executive authority.

Like, if it were me in charge, then I’m all for it, but some other person? HELLLLLLLL NO! It could be Gary down the block, and he’s an asshole.

Depends on your skills. Documentation is always useful. If you have language skills, translation of documentation or helping create language packs/translations.

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure if I thought about it, I could come up with more.

I noticed that, too, but I just chalk that up to people freezing (fight, flight, freeze).

I think what they’re getting at is that we’re uncertain the extent age will affect his duties. Will his cabinet and other advisors be really “in control,” or will Biden insist on his way forcing others to kowtow. It is certain that the dude is old as hell and if it were he alone, he would be incapable of the job. Since there’s a staff and a ton of advisors, the degree of control they have is, well, uncertain.