What about Joe Biden made him sufficiently left while Kamala Harris wasn’t?

-Joe Biden wasn’t campaigning to finish building Trump’s wall. Or saying that actually it was a good idea to build the wall and the only problems were just that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for it and that he didn’t finish the job.

-Joe Biden wasn’t campaigning on being pro-fracking. And bragging about how he was the tie breaking vote for the IRA, which leased new land for fracking. (I understand there was more to this act, but Harris points to it as a way to show she supports fracking)

-At the time the genocide in Gaza hadn’t ramped up and gotten as much publicity as has now, so we didn’t get to hear Joe Biden’s stance on it.

-Joe Biden wasn’t calling to ensure America has the “strongest most lethal fighting force in the world”.

-Joe Biden didn’t align himself with the Cheneys.

You see that 10 million more Democrats voted for Biden, but stayed home for Harris and you believe the problem is with the people and not the candidate? Now granted, racism and sexism played a role in this for sure. But to attribute that much of a difference just to that? Most of the people that are deeply racist and sexist are already voting for Trump because he supports those ideas. And from what I’ve seen, the Republican voters stayed pretty consistent from last election. It was mainly a dip in Democratic voters. If the problem is with the voters and not just that Harris was an incredibly weak candidate, then why do you believe that many more people voted last election?

I watched this video when it came out and I disagree with the findings in it, because to me it seems less to indicate that people reject logic because of political affiliations, and more people are critical of studies that contradict prior knowledge.

People interpreting results on the skin cream have absolutely no frame of reference. There isn’t a brand name associated with the skin cream that might have some kind of recognition for people to have prior knowledge. The study that they are presented with is the first time they are seeing anything about this skin cream.

People weighing in on gun control, have a lot of prior knowledge on the topic. Now whether all this knowledge is based on facts or data is obviously questionable. But regardless they have prior experience with the topic. So naturally you are going to be critical of a study showing you results that directly contradict your prior knowledge. Also from the video it doesn’t seem clear that they are asking them to specifically treat it like math problem and make judgements based on the study alone. They are asked whether they think gun control is effective. And while obviously they have the infographic right in front of them, most people are not going to base their judgements solely on that data alone.

To put it another way, what if the study was based on something non-political, like say whether smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day improves or worsened lung capacity over the course of a decade? I think most people would be heavily critical of the study that shows smoking improved lung capacity even if the data they are presented reflects that. And I don’t think it would be because they are simply rejecting logic and numeracy based on affiliations. It’s because they have prior information and knowledge that directly contradicts the singular study that is presented to them.

And this is ignoring the fact that while the statistic they use to measure the effectiveness for the cream is very tangible and direct. Either the rash improves or it worsens. And you can make direct comparisons with the control groups. In the gun control study you are comparing different sets of cities, ones that have gun control laws and ones that don’t. You aren’t comparing the same set of cities before and after gun control. So already this is a poor study. Then to make matters worse the statistic they use to measure the effectiveness is “crime worsened” and “crime improved”. Not crime committed with firearms. Or even just violent crimes. Just crimes. And in cities where gun control laws have been implemented, crime is naturally going to go up because there is a new law for people to break. Anybody who isn’t following the gun control laws in that city are committing a crime whereas people in the cities without those laws are doing the exact same thing, but it’s just not counted towards “crime” because it hasn’t been outlawed.

That’s exactly the reason that people didn’t vote.

There’s no civilization in sight.

Your options are

1. drink the pond water and get dysentery. Struggle to find help while you are slowed down by your illness and shit yourself to death.

2. drink the bucket of shit. Same problem just much quicker

3. drink the camel piss. It’s sterile, (edit: I stand corrected) and provides some hydration

4. just fucking give up because all these choices are dire and no matter what you’re probably going to die because there is no sign of civilization or rescue, or another clean source of water, or things getting remotely better for you.

And you’re yelling at people for not happily slurping up the pond water and subjecting themselves to dysentery. Some people are going to have the fortitude to do whatever it takes for survival. And some people in that situation just give up.

People didn’t vote because of apathy, and no hope that things will get better in the future. Yes Harris is better than Trump. But she’s still a step in the wrong direction. Just because it wasn’t a running long jump towards doom doesn’t mean it’s not making progress in the same direction. You want people to vote for you? Inspire your fucking voter base. Give them something to rally behind. Make them excited. Give them hope. Give them a reason to stand in line for hours to vote after working an 8 hour day. Have strong policies that inspire confidence in your capabilities. Don’t make a large part of your campaign ‘at least I’m better than the other person’. That’s your selling point? Not how good you are. Just how less bad you are.

Let’s preface with the fact I voted for Harris, and understand where you’re coming from with lesser evil voting.

But the other half of your argument is that with the way that Harris was tacking to the right to try to gain moderate voters, the choice was between voting between fascism now and fascism later down the line.

But if we vote for fascism later then we have time to distance ourselves from fascism.

By sitting at home happy that you did your job and ‘defeated’ fascism, until the next election where your choice is again fascism now and fascism a little less later down the line?

As the Dems keep drifting further and further right. At what point do you put your foot down and demand actual progressive policies? And how do you get those demands to actually be listened to when the party knows you’ll vote for them because “at least we’re not as bad as the other guys. What choice do you have?” Supporting her is a message to the Democratic party that their strategy of slowly becoming more conservative wins elections. And this is the reason that I was very conflicted about voting for her, but just held my nose and did it for the greater good.

This really cuts to the core of the issue. Why would they need to listen to what people are saying if they’ve already won the election? To bolster their chances of being re-elected? But then the next election will most likely be a repeat. Vote for me or else the fascists win. Then we elect them, even though they state while they are running that they plan to do [x]. We make a big fuss to tell them we don’t want them to do [x]. They follow through with what they clearly stated while campaigning. And then next election it’s the same thing again. The only bargaining chip we really have as the American people is our vote.

If the situation is really that dire. (And I absolutely believe it is) And American democracy as a whole is at stake, who is really the one to blame? The people holding steadfastly to their beliefs and saying that they don’t feel comfortable/ good voting for someone who is saying they will continue to support genocide? Or the person that sees people saying that and points the finger at them as the problem instead of hearing them out and changing your policy to gain their votes? I understand that also poses the risk of losing votes, but do you really want the votes of people thirsting for genocide?

All of this being said I do completely understand that this is the choice that we’ve been stuck with, and that things will be massively worse if Trump does get elected. I’m voting for Harris, but I can’t say that I really blame people who feel like they can’t in good conscience. And I hate seeing everyone telling them to just shut up, vote Harris and worry about it after.

This is such a nothing argument. If all you’re talking about is a summary of a book, people have been able to get that long before AI. I can go to a wikipedia entry right now of any book and look at a plot summary. The author does not get paid for me looking at the summary on Wikipedia. There are numerous other sites where you can find summaries of books. And if you’re asking an AI for a summary of a specific book by a specific author, what attribution would you like to see? The user already knows the source because they’re specifically asking for a summary of that source.

A bigger concern would be the AI reproducing your works and using them in responses.