InArticuloMortis
2024-02-01: The political situation ATM — The best outcome I didn think would did with the Biden-Trump rerun being a subject of widespread disbelief that it will actually transpire.
Trump has completely destroyed the old GOP transforming it into the US version of global reactionary populism which got a boost from the western liberal orders reaction to the pandemic and other social issues.
The reversal of what was considered right and left a half century ago is fairly complete if you take the modern corporate left as a legitimate one.
Minor but brutal wars in regions where it is endemic mask the fact that great power conflict hasn happened since technology mooted total war. The US and China are very unlikely antagonists although the standard jingoism is in full force, that's something unchanged although now China is the preeminent challenge to American hegemony, of which it appears the American people may be about to call time.
The second AI hype cycle is still in full swing with no apparent pushback on the use of the term for pretty much anything that isn clearest data processing. A sense that its peaking tho.
There's a sense of unreality as revolutionary changes are being effected but not consciously as in the past by revolutionary actors. The old order postures as its own replacement, more or less successfully in the absence of anything authentic except backwardness which is ofc utterly incapable of articulating anything other than a distorted notion of the past.
Trump is still the presumptive GOP nominee after two primaries and SCOTUS hasn ruled on whether or not states can exclude him from ballot. My guess is they will so rule since this power is pretty explicit in the constitution but we'll see if they even squarely address the issue. With Trump out of the picture Haley would be the presumptive nominee and she has been polling as beating Biden by a wide margin for a time.
2024-07-03: Trump has cleared the field and ATM he himself is the only thing standing between him and a second term. He has shown something not seen before, namely restraint in letting the opposing party implode without detracting from the attention it is rightly getting. I'm calling pivot. Biden's best timing on the other hand would be to announce retirement for the good of the country tomorrow but it's clear he has no intention of doing so although this seems to be just due to someone who wasn that bright in the first place. He appears to be intent on a campaign to demonstrate in unscripted public performance the not-so MCI he evinced isn frank, pervasive.
Unless he can carry thru on that, he should have exited by the convention tho and it will then be seen if that party can recover from the changes it instituted due to the events 56 ya this Sept in Chicago, which I remember vividly, although I was 14. If Biden is in fact fairly gone in clinical MCI, or even is able to perform but the country just rejects him and his party covering up his condition for 3 years but not taking action then the reckoning of both parties will be complete. Watching his shambolic performance in the debate, can see why there are numerous calls to invoke the 25th amendment. But zero chance he'll get out on his own apparently and very little time for his party to act, hours or days to make the resolve and 7 weeks until the convention.
2024-07-18: Biden still insists he'll be the nominee and nobody else has announced since Harris is becoming presumptive. The post assassination attempt Trump Vance ticket presided over an RNC generally considered a success and contrast to the '16 one. Dems were gonna rush thru Biden's nomination per a long process he started for that by moving the SC primary up but it was delayed by Schumer and Jeffries. A wide range of judicial actions moved in Trump's direction, no point in detailing them here, but more or less erased the prior situation on that.
Biden certainly fits the 3 diagnostic criteria in the enwiki article, making egregious memory errors almost at every appearance but he resists action that could confirm or reject MCI. Also hard to tell from what Jeet Heer described as "honest to god stupidity" which was always there. In any case he does in fact look like a broken down pile of crap which is how a hot mike captured Trump calling him and how virtually no one is going to be able to miss as they follow up on putting him out there to be seen as much as possible in contrition for the prior opposite policy.
Being stupid, he just doesn get because he was able to do what some consider a good job, that doesn means he's going to be when the aging he has been so unsuccessful in dealing with has continued its apparent acceleration. If he declines as much in the next four years as the last 4 he'll be truly like M. Valdemar awakened, per the page title. Also doesn seem to get that 98% of the country is younger than him and now that they are getting a load of him regularly ... .
2024-07-21: Biden apparently had sufficient judgment left to make a gracious exit. Harris has all but been coronated and will do the same job although not so thoroughly and being younger and maybe brighter could grow with the opportunity.
By this action the dems confirm what I have long believed that suicide is not ever an inevitable action, particularly for historical formations. I think if Biden had not done what was expected of him, he would have been ejected somehow, just don't see a whole layer of careerists falling on their swords for one old pol.
