No, I’m relying on polls that actually poll people who voted for Biden but stayed home in 2024. Among those 19 million people, who exit polls would not capture, a full third of them cited Gaza as their reason for staying home.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/harris-gaza
And we’re not talking about a silent majority. We are however talking about a crucial slice of the base that Democrats need if they want any hope of winning a national election.
You’re thinking far too short-term in your economic analysis.
Imagine if everyone tomorrow just started pirating the works of the major video game and film studios. Will high quality movies simply stop being made?
Of course not. There are many ways to structure a film industry. Why are films made by big for-profit companies in the first place? Market conditions have simply allowed for that consolidation. But if we change those market conditions through targeted mass piracy, the current major studio model will disappear in favor of other organizational structures.
Why can’t films be made by collaborations of various worker co-ops? You could have an actor’s co-op, a videographers guild, an employee-owned animation studio, etc. And they could all come together to collaborate on projects for a share of the total profits. Or hell, there’s nothing preventing even a major film studio from being entirely employee-owned.
If everyone stopped buying things from the giants, then the film industry wouldn’t disappear; it would adjust. Companies would become smaller as the “evil megacorp” model became unprofitable. And more space would open up for more distributed production models and for employee-owned businesses.
Your vision and imagination are ultimately simply far too limited.
If the movie is good, you should support it by making a donation to the strike fund of the unions that represent the artists that actually create the movies. You can support artists without supporting the amoral companies that produce these works.
I decided on my moral beliefs on piracy back during the days of Kazaa and Limewire. Back then the RIAA was shaking down teenagers, threatening them with statutory liabilities of a quarter million dollars per song, simply because the law allowed it. They would threaten low-income families with lawsuits in the millions and get them to settle for a still-ridiculous settlement of few thousand dollars. Even the settlements were far in excess of the full retail cost of purchasing these songs.
I decided then that if the law allows this kind of thing, then copyright law as it exists now is fundamentally immoral. And immoral laws are not worthy of respect.
I mostly take a pragmatic approach to copyright. Whether I pay for something is a combination of the quality of the work, the reputation of the company selling it, the customer service provided by the legitimate product, the probability of getting caught for violating copyright law, etc. An indie publisher that treats their people well? I’ll buy it. Mass market schlock made by criminally underpaid artists for rent-seeking megacorps? I’ll pirate that all day, every day.
But morality literally plays no part in it. I learned long ago that copyright law exists outside of the realm of morality. The decision to buy or pirate is an entirely practical one; morality simply isn’t a factor.
Meanwhile, your morality is just the bandwagon effect.
And you don’t see the glaring obvious problem with relying on EXIT POLLS, when the primary cause Kamala lost was because a substantial portion of Biden’s voter base simply stayed home?
Politically supporting Palestine is a terrible move for either party outside the Dearborn area in Michigan. There isn’t a relevant mass of people that actually care
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I honestly wonder if at this point, candidates would be better off pursuing progressive legislation by running a Republicans.
Ideological purity doesn’t matter worth a shit to Republicans. See Republican voters loving the ACA while hating Obamacare. The party that is supposedly pro free market now openly endorses tariffs and regulation on business to advance a host of culture war bugbears. Republicans are not libertarians; the base especially isn’t ideologically opposed to government programs.
I could see a progressive running for the Republican nomination, a latter-day Teddy Roosevelt. And since the Republicans have become the party of the working class, while Democrats are the party of lawyers and big business, the attack lines write themselves. “Democrats are in bed with the insurance industry!” “Democrats want to pick your pocket instead of giving you healthcare!” “Democrats can’t pass a health plan without lining the pockets of their donors!”
The Republican party has proven itself to be much more susceptible to disruption from outside charismatic figures. The Republican base has far more control over the Republican party than the Democratic base does of the Democratic party. In 2016, the establishment Republicans tried to shoot Trump down, but their base overpowered them, and Trump took over the party. Bernie tried the same thing in 2016 and 2020, but the DNC was far more powerful and able to resist this outside takeover.
I really think that now may be the time for a return of progressive Republicans in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt. Promise to fix healthcare and break up big businesses left and right. Throw a bone to the right by promising to exclude illegal immigrants from the healthcare law (which they would never be eligible for anyway.) Hell, you could even write it so it didn’t exclude coverage for abortion and trans healthcare. If someone points that out, just lie and say that your plan does include these exclusions. It’s not like the truth on such things matters anymore. Sell it in simple terms the common man can understand.
I really do wonder if at this point, progressive candidates might gain more traction by running as Republicans. The Republican party is not ideologically libertarian, and it has proven far more receptive to outsiders and new ideas than the Democratic party.
That’s why you only cap rents on buildings that have existed for some time.
Businesses do not plan for 30 years or more in the future. If landlords can’t make an acceptable rate of return within 30 years, they’re not going to build a new house or apartment building.
So you can attach rent control provisions to buildings that are over a few decades old, and it will have zero impact on the financing and construction of new housing. It will only affect buildings after they’ve long since been built and paid for.
You do have to worry about rent controls discouraging landlords from keeping buildings maintained. But that’s why good rent control doesn’t cap rent, but simply limit the rate of increase. If a landlord can afford to keep a building maintained today, they will be able to keep it maintained in the future, even if rent increases are capped to the rate of inflation.
If anything, smart rent controls like this actually encourage the construction of new housing. By limiting rent increases on old buildings, you encourage landlords to knock them down and replace them with bigger and newer buildings that can be rented at any rate. In unregulated markets, landlords can increase profits by colluding to suppress the construction of new housing stock. Why invest the money in new buildings if you can just increase the rents on existing buildings by conspiring to prevent new buildings from being built? Smart rent controls mean that if landlords want to see their profits increase at any rate higher than inflation, then they will need to actually build new housing units.
A few conservative pundits attacked it from the “undeserving” angle. The actual base didn’t give a damn. The actual base thought it was a useless and tone-deaf figleaf of a policy. It was a wonkish policy only a milquetoast centrist could love - a market subsidy that had a long litany of provisos and qualifications. And one that economists stated would just serve to bid house prices up even higher.
The voters didn’t reject progressive wealth redistribution. They rejected half-baked meaningless gestures.
He lost in 2020 because of a coordinated campaign to get all the centrist candidates except Joe Biden to drop out, while Warren stayed in as a progressive candidate against Bernie.
They did this precisely because he was on track to win the popular vote among the Democratic base. No candidate was set to win a majority of the popular vote, but Bernie was looking at a clear plurality.
Bernie WAS winning the popular vote until the DNC deliberately prevented him from doing so.
Read a damn stats book. Jesus Wept! This could literally be a question on a sophomore-level undergrad stats class, and you would fail that question.
Do you even know how to do an ANOVA?
It seems now that the genocide will be entirely on Biden’s head. There’s a cease fire deal that’s been signed. And Trump winning probably did provide a lot of the impetus to get that deal signed.
I despise Trump for other reasons, but when he said, “finish the job,” he clearly meant, “wrap this up.” You can interpret it as a call for total genocide, but that’s your reading of it, not an objective good-faith reading.
The truth is, in practice, Trump would have not been any worse than Biden on Gaza, even if the war had continued. Biden is already giving full US support to Israel. There’s nothing that a president can give Israel that Biden isn’t already giving Israel. I suppose a president could order US troops to directly participate in the fighting, but even Trump’s not that stupid.
The hard truth is that both Trump and Biden are the same on Israel. There is no meaningful difference between their policies. And Harris made clear she was going to have the same stance on Israel that Trump now will - full unconditional support.
But anyway, it’s most likely now that the deaths in Gaza will look something like this:
Under Biden’s watch: 100,000-200,000 killed in a coordinated campaign of extermination
Under Trump’s watch: a few hundred killed in random occasional spurts of violence while under a state of cease-fire.
Historically, this genocide will be entirely on Biden’s head. It’s his genocide. Trump won’t have that stain on his record.
Did you look at your own numbers? Trump did better than he did in 2020, while Harris did substantially worse than Biden.
If Democrats hadn’t made a bunch of unnecessary and unforced errors, then we could blame it on the corpos and the Russians.