People who ignore what you actually say in favor of stuff they make up to pretend you say aren't worth the bother of pointing out the truth. They already know the truth and have shown that they don't care about it.
There are so many issues, from the kid glove treatment of Trump and blatantly corrupt Supreme Court judges, to timid efforts to help renters and Unions, to a Border policy that is only marginally better than Trump's, to shoveling more money at Cops when they kill people instead of working to actually reform them...
It's been a fact for decades that Democrats do better in general elections from the left and their tendency to go right makes them more likely to lose (while they excuse it as supposedly the only way to win). But illustrating that fact has normally been a matter of comparing separate campaigns or whole groups of simultaneous campaigns (election years) that were lefter & righter than each other.
This time, we've gotten to watch this principle prove itself again in almost-real time, just with a slight delay for polls, with the changes in one single campaign:
- She started out by talking about things like price gouging, housing costs, drug prices, and expansion of Medicare, and at least not really saying anything about Israel so it was possible to imagine her being an improvement there, and selecting Walz as her VP.
- She kept rising in the polls and would've easily won the election if it had been held then.
- Since then she's shifted to silence about prices & the economy & medical care, kneeling & swearing fealty to Israel, talking like a Republican about making sure our military services stay totally awesome and keep getting even totallier awesomer, praising & campaigning with Republicans, having nothing to say about any differences from Biden other than that she'll promote & hang around with even more Republicans than him, and stifling Walz.
- And now she's been sinking in the polls.
Wow, who could've seen that result coming ahead of time from those inputs‽ It's almost like this stuff still works the same way it has for decades! But how could
that be‽
And the last few new proposals from Trump have been lowering the interest on vehicle loans to make car-buying more affordable and a couple of other low-level economic things like that. He doesn't emphasize them much because he doesn't mean them, but still, the fact that he's thought of saying stuff like that at all, which he'd call Kommusocialeftist if a Democrat were saying them, shows one of the side effects of Democrats shifting right: sometimes instead of just a void, what you leave behind is a target for somebody like Trump to maneuver to the left of you.
2. The article seems to be saying that a biological level humans recoil from (others') body odor out of fear of disease, and that somehow this is related to their right-wing beliefs. But if it is biological, isn't that more instinctive, and unrelated to one's politics?
No. They interact with each other. (And they're both on spectrums, not all-or-nothing.) The physiological trait can be a contributing factor to your beliefs while other factors also continue to contribute to them, or the physiological trait can be affected by your beliefs while other factors including genetics also contribute to it.
It's the same with previous studies that have found not only that righties experience more anxiety/threat-response and less compassion/empathy than lefties but even have differences in the associated parts of the brain. Having larger & smaller brain parts associated with those feelings can be a contributing factor to your political ideas, but also, having certain political ideas, and being exposed to the stimuli that tend to point people in that direction politically, can (over time) affect the development of the associated brain parts.
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At the moment, they're sort of the biggest threat. Long term, I tend to rank China a bit higher, but not necessarily by a whole lot. If you're looking at what's happening in the world right now, Harris isn't exactly wrong about that.
