Peterkin

Yes, that's what I assumed you meant. And, no, it probably isn't. The man is obviously tired most of the time. People have less energy as they age, have to pace themselves in every effort (I speak from experience) and US political campaigns are hectic enough to exhaust anyone, even it they were doing it full time, not in addition to running a country in perilous times with a recalcitrant elected body. I like and respect Mr. Biden, but I don't think he can bounce back from this.

I don't think it matters anymore. With the wildfire spread of Biden-can't-hack-it opinion, confidence in both the party and the candidate have plunged. At this point, the only hope of averting catastrophe is for the Democrats to select a new ticket, very, very quickly, get solidly behind it, and campaign for all they're worth.

I still have a little time left over to speculate on the deluge after me.

What else can we do? The alternative is our collective worst nightmare.

It would work for me, but probably not for a lot of middle-aged and older Americans. Balance would probably look better. Newsome looks about right for the press photos - male, white, solid. I don't know much about him. Optics matter a great deal to poorly-informed people with short attention spans and memories. Maybe they'll even go out an vote, if the choice is between two attractive, smiling, racially diverse candidates and that trainwreck of a human being smirking next to a blank oval.

No, they were desperately trying to keep Trump from turning it into one of his rallies.

Some, probably. There are still fossils who think no mere female can do the job. But the two women have very little else in common. Clinton was hampered by her baggage (Bill; past errors) and her personality came across as cold and hard a lot of the time. She was trying to do a Thatcher, I guess, and it didn't work. I don't think Harris would make the same impression. Besides, time has passed; some of the fossils have died, more millennials have reached voting age.

They think she's unelectable - that America is not ready for a person who represents all that America has pretended to be and wasn't. That's not what's said aloud: she's unpopular. Probably has plenty of opportunity to piss off some people, sure - what effective jurist or legislator hasn't? As with Biden's lapses being diagnosed all over cyberland by people who never met him (my current suspicion is a couple of mini-strokes under the stress of campaigning.), the more an opinion is repeated, the more traction it gets. But I think she'd surprise everyone. People see two old men, each with obvious issues, and they have to wonder about the future, which is going to be rocky, no matter what happens in US politics. The Trump supporters are used to his derangement and don't care. The Biden supporters have always counted on a cool and reasonable leader, so they're panicking. The Trump-averse Republicans don't know what to do. I think there is much to be gained from presenting a complete antithesis to Trump - a young, energetic, good-looking, personable, smart woman. She just might mobilize the disaffected minorities and youth.

I can, yes. And the far too heavy influence they have on American (most influential economy in the world) and Canadian politics. The Americans are slightly worse: they even politicize jurisprudence and make sure that election campaigns for any office depend on sponsorship. As do the news and information media. There is now - too little, too late. There were electric cars in 1900, and wind turbines but nobody with the big bucks chose to develop that technology. So, it languished. Financial institutions and big business are extremely conservative; the majority publicly tout competition and venture, but are actually pro-monopoly and risk-averse. As long as they can keep government in the tried-and-true camp, they don't have to change or chance anything. And since they own the media, most voters can be bribed or scared into agreement most of the time. Who do you suppose is telling them the stories? That one, and the one about the Big Bad Immigrant, and the one about the liberal elite that's already outlawed Christmas, murdered their unborn babes and is coming for their guns, trucks and cattle? Who actually has reason to fear socialists? And who made that happen? By what means? The governments happily went along with paving over the wilderness (progress) and subsidizing oil, undertaking enormous - and later enormously profitable - development projects at taxpayers' expense. Bit by bit, once the loans are paid off, all the public works quietly get 'outsourced', invariably resulting in less service at a rising cost. Odds are, this is what business is waiting for in the clean energy sector, as well as lab-grown meat and urban hydroponics: they have the patents, they've been talking the hype of green investment for years - while also financing anti-climate, anti bicycle and public transit, pro beef, use more-waste more propaganda. A new technology? Let the government make the initial investment, then they'll start a talk campaign on how government mismanages everything, but they're willing to jump in and fix it, as they did with prisons.... In theory. In practice, most of them begrudge government the necessary tax revenue and the power to re-prioritize, so the initiative keeps getting stalled. Nevertheless, a few brave ones do make a little progress, and some profit. Just not big enough or fast enough. For the last 20 years, we've been where only a dramatic, decisive, multi-faceted global strategy could prevent the point of no return. With the melting of the permafrost, we've already crossed it. I'm not complaining. I'm just reporting.

And helpfully saying, "Everything is fine, just needs a little tweaking ... Good, good, baby steps and bandaids until you get accustomed to the idea.... Take your time..." We did all that in the 1970's, 80's, 90's and finally started getting a little louder and more urgent in the last few decades. Now, it's crunch time: with major surgery, the patient [human civilization] may survive, though with much diminished quality of life. Do nothing and he's dead. The only way to get more people on board, without any help from government or much support from mass media, is to keep showing them alternatives. Which is what the Pollyannas have been doing, via blogs, newsletters, co-ops and You Tube videos - with some success. The ideas I showed you are not mine; progressive European countries are way ahead of North America, because of the clout financial interests have here.

The people on board - energetically and enthusiastically on board - have always been self-motivated. They can see the inherent good sense of generating their own electricity, insulating their homes, recycling materials, ect. That's why so much of it has already happened. Some governments are forward-looking, as well. It's impossible to implement sustainable measures in countries that still subsidize fossil fuel and Big Energy. It would be, but the screams of outrage "The Economommeee!!!" "Jabs, Jabs!" and "Nanny State!!" would power a wind farm for a week. Of course, wind farms are wrong, just as factory farming is - all done on the wrong scale, for the wrong purpose, with the wrong results. One place it's being done the right way is in Native communities. Another good example-setter can be a religious institution. If all this had taken place 40 years ago, we'd be home and dry. As things stand, with conservatives in the resource-rich countries still blocking progress, it's too little, too late.

Hey, I think that might work. Let's try it!

The old distribution system - the grid - is wrong. It was always wrong: error-prone, dependent on key nodes, inefficient, wasteful, vulnerable to sabotage and weather, expensive to maintain and repair, dangerous and ugly. But it was profitable. It's not going to stay profitable. We need a better model.

OK Share. What has your latest brainstorm produced?

Change the way we generate energy and the way we use it. But many people can't think in terms of change, diversification, efficiency, refitting, downscaling, localizing or simplifying. They can only think in terms of wanting more, and every want almost immediately turns into a need and the need immediately becomes urgent and crucial. No human person actually needs a skyscraper, a fighter jet or a container megasghip. ....but the economomeeee!.... So, as long as those people are in power in too much of the world, we'll have another crisis and another, each bigger than the last, and then, by one means or another we roast to death by the millions. Just as with a pandemic, If we were to put intelligent people dedicated to solving the problem in charge, more of us would survive.

In Nixon's time, one of those 'wrong' things was the process of desegregation in the long, deep wake of the Civil Rights movement. His strategists - notably Roger Stone, who went on to advise other Republican candidates - knew just which fears to exploit. The fear of losing majority privilege and the fear of crime and drugs (on which he declared war - a terrific excuse to bulk up law enforcement, put a whole lot of young people in jail and off the voters' list, incidentally turning a generation off political participation). Nixon claimed to speak for "the silent majority". In his campaign, that unregarded, long-suffering America was depicted as law-abiding middle class taxpayers, who were burdened with supporting an ungrateful underclass of wastrels and fallen women. He was also very publicly associated with superstar Billy Graham. His successors built on that religious foundation and formed an abiding alliance with Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority - repressive Christian groups seeking political power over their fellow citizens. In that sense, the promise to give back something that had been taken away was true: no more separation of church and state. The NRA came on board in the 70's, as well. Those unholy alliances, coupled with an upsurge in dedicated right-wing broadcasting, and a massive increase in financial support by interest groups with plenty of funds, and a few egregious Supreme Court decisions, the party kept formulating more pro-business, anti-union, militaristic policies, and cut public services, all in the name of individual liberty. They - that is, a few ruthless and influential men in the party - alienated or deliberately pushed out moderate, thoughtful conservatives, and the quality of candidates steadily declined - until the Grand Old Party was left with the sorry spectacle we see today.

It was never a well-defined word. Used in modern politics, it's the will of some of the people - the loudest and most easily swayed by shallow ideas, hollow promises, symbols, slogans, tribalim and shouting. You can still call democracy democracy. And the degradation of democracy is not due to Donald Trump. All he's done is set himself up as the latest loudest shouter. The use of 'populist' tactics was never far from the surface, but it generally had been contained for a long time by the constitution, the supreme Court, reasonably honest election oversight and responsible news reporting. As those eroded, the slide of American politics to where a puny figure like Trump could climb on it. I put the start of the visible slide at the 1972 Nixon campaign; then came Gingrich and Wallace. Etc.

The term seems to be applied mainly to the idea of the common people, or "we the people" as American sloganeers would have it. The idea, all by itself, is pitted against an elitist establishment, which is depicted as a multiform control system, manipulated by overeducated liberals (often of a specific stated or implied ethnicity), imposing its constraints on all the red-blooded, two-fisted, freedom-loving, God-fearing people, and giving all the power to bureaucrats and academics. Resentment against that elite is nurtured with disinformation and public tantrums (or rallies), where a (?) charismatic, or anyway, compelling speaker shouts at the mob about all the wrongs they suffer at the hands of the elite, which is soft on crime, lets dark-skinned immigrants take your jobs, demands that you be civil to groups you despise, and is coming for your guns, pickup trucks and cattle. (Or whatever version is relevant to the country and period.) The gist is that 'we the people' need a Strong Man to give us back a glory and power we never actually had. in return, he gives us permission to commit violence against everyone we resent.

Well, good luck with that!

It can't disappear, because the ruling class needs administrators, organizers, bean-counters, technical support, caregivers, pedagogues, expediters and enforcers.

Nevertheless, vertical organization and top-down control is fundamental to both doctrines. There are very clear chains of command. The harshness of the stratified system is somewhat mitigated by democratic governance, wherein the common people elect representatives to protect their interests. That's why laws are enacted against various kinds of abuse... but those protections can also be eroded by subsequent administrations. Democracy in the west is less than two hundred years old, and it's already crumbling in everywhere. Why which? Why was it set up way? Why does it work? Or why is it not to be questioned? It's set up this way on the pattern of monarchy and aristocracy. The ruling class is clearly defined; it owns everything and controls everyone. The population does what it's told, from paying poll tax and working for whatever wages are offered to serving in the army. It works, because the arrangement makes for a stable, pyramid structure of society, until some major shift in the economy causes internal rearrangement of layers. But the new aristocracy - clerical, military or financial - soon settles everything back to the old arrangement with a change of cast. In the church, it's not to be questioned because it was so ordained by God, and you simply have to take it on faith. Questioning can have dire consequences. In capitalism, money talks; penury shuts up, if it doesn't want a police baton upside its head.

That may be the future of space colonization - assuming** - but it does nothing to relieve the crowding and privation here on Earth. ** - that anyplace within reach can be terraformed; otherwise, why even bother? What's the point in taking 150,000 years to seed a plastic dome? - that we had the resources to spare for such a huge frivolous gesture Unless what you mean is a last gasp effort to save some remnant of humanity from extinction. There's been a lot of talk about that. But it's not what the OP is about.

It's in the doctrine of capitalism, just as monarchy is in the doctrine of Christianity. These things are not to be questioned - ever.

And how many bad ones did they endorse. Brexit springs to mind... Of course, we may have very different definitions of rubbish.

Not necessary to collude. Voters quite often get enthusiastic about rubbish policies. And it doesn't matter which rubbish Republican candidate most loudly bruited which rubbish policy. They would all do something repressive that hurts poor people and benefits their sponsors. There are no only Democrats who want to ease the burden on people who work by taking back a little of the resources seized by people who do not work. Nor are the right-wing Republican who enact repressive religious doctrine adhere to those doctrines; they simply cater to that faction for its political and financial support. Nobody's going to prevent the Russian trolls (all too real, btw - and thirty other countries run them, including China) through legislative measures - it can only be done by the owners of the social media. Which beat the hell out of fascist states to live in.