In presidential elections, the messages put out by the incumbent party and the challenger are fairly predictable. The incumbent has to make the claim that things are going pretty well and that to change course now would make things worse. The challenger tries to make the case that things are terrible and that it is they that offer change and hope for the future. This was captured in the ‘Hope and Change’ slogan of Barack Obama when he ran in 2008 after eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration.
In this election, as long as it was between Joe Biden and creepy Donald Trump, that script was being largely followed. Biden would point to favorable macroeconomic indicators, such as that the rate of inflation had come down to very low levels, unemployment was also at very low levels, real wages have been increasing, the stock market is at record highs, and the number of people coming across the southern border had been dropping, and claim credit for it, though it is hard to say exactly how much presidential actions influence such things. Creepy Trump understandably ignored all that and argued that the US was a hell hole and getting worse and that it was he who offered voters a chance to rectify things. Since the macroeconomic factors were not in his favor, he instead focused on anecdotes, and as usual lied outrageously when the facts went against him.
In the case of inflation, creepy Trump focused on the price of groceries, something that extremely salient to pretty much everyone. It is almost always the case that after a period of fairly high inflation like we had, prices do not go back to where they were before, even if the rate of inflation drops to zero. For prices to drop significantly, we would have to have a period of deflation caused by a recession. That would lead to massive increases in unemployment and other hardships for pretty much everyone and is thus highly undesirable. So creepy Trump can rightly say that food prices are higher now than what they were before the period of inflation started, though in typical fashion, he makes up ridiculous things, like that the price of bacon is now five times what it was before. He also highlights a few cases of immigrants committing crimes to argue that the country is being overrun with hordes of criminals and insane people coming across the border, even though immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born people. It is hard to combat the emotive power of anecdotes and that was what Biden faced as the incumbent and found hard to overcome
But the sudden ascent of Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee has resulted in a remarkable switch in the narrative. While she is part of the present administration, the fact that she was the vice-president, a position that notoriously carries with it little power and visibility, has enabled her to distance herself from the administration, as least partially, and position herself as someone new and exciting. Her campaign team has crafted the message that it is she who represents the future and that creepy Trump represents the status quo, a masterful reversal of the narrative. She reinforces that message reversal by claiming to be the underdog in the race, even though it is her party that holds the presidency. They have been aided in this by the fact that creepy Trump was the president before, and the Harris-Walz slogan “We are not going back” has had the effect of making him seem like he represents the past. He also, in comparison to Harris who is two decades younger and vigorous, looks old. When Biden was running, creepy Trump looked the more energetic of the two, even if his cognitive decline was becoming increasingly apparent.
As Chauncey DeVega writes:
Democrats, however, are talking about the future differently with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket. Instead of trying to convince people that the economy isn’t that bad, and that inflation is getting better (both are true statements that voters largely reject), Harris is exciting voters with talk about an inclusive future and expanding opportunity. She talks about “not going back” and she is a strong and constant advocate for abortion rights. Voters are still pessimistic about the economy and the direction of the country, but Harris is offering an optimistic vision of the future that is in stark contrast to what voters hear from Trump and the Republicans.
…Comparing our August and March polling, Harris is neutralizing important issues on which Trump enjoyed big advantages over Biden. Harris has drawn even with Trump on “getting prices and inflation under control”, “growing the economy”, and “getting the US out of foreign wars and conflicts.” Trump had double-digit leads over Biden on these issues in March. Harris now trails the former president by just 2 points. Harris is also expanding Biden’s advantages on “dealing with climate change”, “fixing our schools” and “standing up for working people.”
The different moods of the two party conventions shows this switch. The Republican one was full of doom and gloom as they painted a dark picture of where the country is now, while the Democratic one had a celebratory party atmosphere, with hope and joy being the themes they emphasized. This clip comparing the roll call of the states for their respective nominees shows the difference in atmospheres, even allowing for some selective editing.
A tale of two roll calls: RNC vs. DNC pic.twitter.com/2oW1F6Ar0f
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) August 21, 2024
Barack and Michelle Obama in their speeches also helped advance this slight-of-hand in messaging. They spoke mainly of the ‘hope’ that Harris represented and quietly dropped the ‘change’ from their 2008 slogan. That enabled them to straddle the desire to portray Harris-Walz as the future while retaining some continuity with the positive parts of Biden’s accomplishments.
In general, positive messages of hope tend to enthuse people while doom and gloom tends to depress them. Creepy Trump is locked the latter mode, mainly because that is his nature. He seems to not be having any fun and is instead fuming over the fact that the Harris-Walz rollout seems to be generating so much enthusiasm and positive coverage while whatever benefits he might have got from the attempt on his life, his party’s convention, and the choice of weird JD Vance as his running mate, got obliterated by Biden’s sudden announcement of his exit.
So creepy Trump has been reduced to whining about how the media are unfairly claiming that the crowds at the Harris-Walz rallies are larger and more enthusiastic than at his. One thing you can be sure is that, given his absurd obsession with crowd sizes and ratings, he will be closely watching to see if the ratings for Harris’s acceptance speech on Thursday are larger than his. If they are, expect him to go ballistic and claim that it is fake.
Some people watch TV shows that pretend to depict reality. Some people seem to think reality is just a big TV show. So much shallow thinking.
The only “reality TV” shows I have any respect for are “The 1900 House” and “Whale Wars.” I’m sure the latter isn’t on anymore, but I really hope those guys are still whale-warring, on- or off-camera.
To me, the epitome of SSACFT’s inability to admit he is wrong is his continuing insistence that tariffs are taxes paid by other countries. In fact, the importer pays the tax and, whenever they can, they pass it along to their customers down stream. Do the MAGA cultists not know this?
In 2016 he did have a lot of MAGA intermixed in with all the racism .
In 2020 I dont actually remember his campaign (covid fog?) -- but Biden promised stability and I guess Trumps mishandling of Covid might have also played a part more than his campaign -- i dont remember his 2020 campaign was doom and gloom.
Another weird statement by a weird candidate:
“Demented Trump Asks Why We’re Even Having An Election”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=3ycyxM1k8y4
When he says he is at 93% it might refer to the primaries… that were long ago.
@2, Raging Bee; 1900 House and the spin-offs that followed in England (e.g. the one in the London slums) and the USA (e.g. Pioneer House) were really fascinating programming…but an awful lot of work was put into them by experts in their fields to get the technology (cooking, cleaning) and manners and customs and other aspects just right. The people who took part in them and the people watching them all learned something--mostly that life was really hard and things we take for granted now (like hot showers and mostly safe food) weren’t so simple back then…and that there was no safety net. The typical reality show is “throw a bunch of people together and get them to divulge their weaknesses to each other and watch what happens!”
Someone (I forget who) said at the DNC convention that Trump likes to cause chaos and then curate it. Causing chaos is so much easier because he never has to learn anything or think too much about anything. And like any malignant narcissist, he finds sowing discord and pitting people against each other to be easy and fun--for him.
Apparently he is planning to try to grab attention by holding a fundraiser for the various rioters who are in jail. I can see how he is suddenly concerned about the wellbeing of the incarcerated. I hope he can go join them soon.
From Mediate:
Last evening of the DNC, we can expect a bump in the polls coming out soon.
If it was not for the antiquated electoral college I would feel cautiously optimistic.
What happens in USA has a big effect in Europe, so I will have insomnia until your election is over.
(In fact, I would have concerns even if USA politics did not affect Europe, fascism is generally considered a bad thing)
Here is an interesting summary of polls that hints at Harris having a better chance than Trump
The TEC Show:
“2024 Election Map Based on the Latest Poll in ALL 50 States!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=H9jf5PHVZkA
Most so-called “reality” shows appear to be live method-acted remakes of Lord of the Flies and/or the Stanford prison experiment, usually achieved in part by making it a zero-sum winner-take-all competition with high-voltage emotional electric shocks for the losers (i.e., everyone else). So maybe a touch of Milgram in there too.
As if this (deliberate design to bring out the worst in people) wasn’t reason enough to avoid watching them, they do everything in their power to be maximally obnoxious. For one thing, they sound like ads: loud, trying to yank your attention even from another room, often with excessively dramatic music. Picture someone discovering they have a hangnail, accompanied by the sort of music usually found in a Hollywood blockbuster at the point where there’s fourteen seconds left to disarm the bomb and save the world and cutting that last wire had just caused the timer to speed up.
And then, since a lot of people avoid tuning in to such annoying stuff, they play scheduling games to try to force it down everyone’s throats whether they like it or not. Like having it move around or suddenly grow to 2 hours and airing two or even three new episodes a week instead of just one, and preempting everything else to make room for it. So, you go to tune in your favorite sci-fi drama, or dead-body show, or mystery, or medical, or God help me soap, and one night instead of what you wanted you get this unwelcome reality crap blaring into your face. And meanwhile you miss getting an episode of your show this week because you had the temerity to not jump onto the “reality” bandwagon and insisted on preferring other, more expensive to produce, higher quality shows instead.
Indeed, this rot has destroyed network television. There’s almost nothing decent to watch anymore in the way of scripted dramas, let alone bona fide SF, on network, and basic cable is going down the tubes too, eaten by an endless proliferation of “documentaries” that, while lacking the overgrown-game-show structure, otherwise have an awful lot in common with the “reality” kudzu, such as over-dramatic music at every slightest setback or adverse event and that whole “sounds like an ad instead of a show” thing. Very little original scripted drama airing there as well, though it’s where nearly all the remaining sci-fi is to be had, and remains a trove of SF reruns of treasured series like Star Trek. For now.
The problem, as near as I can tell, is that all of these “reality competition” shows and “on the job documentaries” are very cheap to produce: no union labor required, either writers or actors, save perhaps one unionized actor to be “voice-over guy”. That and, apparently, despite the poor quality of the results, they get ratings high enough that with these cheap production costs they are more profitable to air than proper TV shows. It’s partly executives’ greed to blame, but also partly a public that willingly tunes into this crap rather than insisting that the station show them proper, quality fare or else not be tuned into. Advertisers aren’t helping by not insisting, for brand reputation reasons if no other, on only appearing in the breaks of quality fare.
If network Tv makes you despair, watch British TV. Antiques Road Trip is fascinating. The Great Pottery Throw Down is entertaining and everyone is nice rather than fake drama and infighting.
I also enjoy Landscape Artist of the Year and Portrait Artist of the year reality shows, which I can’t even imagine as an American version.
Tethys @ 10
There is something toxic in US network TV culture that kills TV shows that are adapted from a British template.
I think the US copy of “Cracker” was at least halfway decent, but other transplants have failed.
And I cannot imagine any US version of “A Case For Frost” being successfully done.
Did I mention that real actual documentaries are dying too? Crowded off the cable dial by those low-effort “on the job” “documentaries”, natch. The main place to find anything like that now is a handful of PBS shows, mainly Nature and Nova.
Even the channels that aren’t overrun by “reality” dreck are suffering some kind of malaise. The sci fi channel used to have a fair amount of obscure movies and other fare; now it’s all Star Trek reruns, a few other similar things, and “just the hits” from among recent SF movies. Where it hasn’t been overrun by “reality” junk it’s become bland and corporate in some way. Even CSI, when it came back, no longer had the quirky black-humor charm it did in its early days and was just “generic dead body show with a few recognizable CSI characters and the CSI opening theme”. It’s like they stopped accepting anything quirky or original in the way of new shows, and even long running existing ones had their writing teams fired and replaced by corporate drones, or perhaps ChatGPT with instructions to mimic corporate drones. (With CSI, the rot is traceable back to the debut of CSI:NY, which was always noticeably blander than the original or Miami, until the revived original came back and out-blanded it that is.)
There’s also this trend toward plotting season-long arcs. That can be done well (Babylon 5!) but it is almost invariably done poorly. When done poorly, instead of getting 22 one-hour episodes a season you get one 22-hour episode a season and it drags, bogged down in endless filler and padding. The problem isn’t having some shows have season-long arcs. The problem is the apparent corporate demand that everything now must do season-long arcs, when obviously the writing talent simply does not exist to support that and have it done well in every instance. There just aren’t enough JMSes to go around, y’know? And it’s weird — the reason for mostly avoiding that style of plotting in the past is because arc shows do poorly in syndication, so there’s much less of a long tail of revenue from the show. Even B5, which is quite watchable out of order, doesn’t see nearly as much rerun airtime as contemporaneous ST:DS9, though that might be partly down to the latter’s brand recognition. So it used to be hard for a JMS to get a show like that off the ground … until Lost came along. Then came endless attempts to clone its success, all of which flopped miserably, and then the shoehorning of arc plotting into everything else, with the refreshing exception of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which sadly seems to have been cancelled after only three seasons and on a damn cliffhanger, natch. Last time Space aired an episode it was a season finale infiltrating a Gorn-infested world … and that was getting on toward three years ago now. (ST:SNW also did an episode based on Omelas. And an episode that actually included J6 footage and strongly implied that that event was part of the run-up to the in-universe Eugenics Wars and World War III.)
My experience is a bit different -- I find that the problem now isn’t to find the quality content, it’s finding the time to watch it all. If you’d told me even 20 years ago that I’d now be in a position to simply sit down in my own home and watch any episode of Dr. Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Red Dwarf, Babylon 5, Farscape, the Six Million Dollar Man, Thunderbirds (and on and on and on, name your show), RIGHT NOW, I’d have assumed it would cost the earth and take up most of my house with physical media. The fact all that stuff is out there practically for free and online is near-magical.
And that’s just the classics. Again, the problem with new content isn’t that it’s rubbish (although as ever about 80% of it is…), it’s that I need to *find* the 20% that’s good… and find the time to watch it. Youtube helps -- there are any number of videos recommending “20 great sf films of the last five years that you missed”, and I didn’t “miss” them, I’d never even heard of them. And many of them are really pretty good, it’s just the Disney have sucked most of the oxygen of publicity so quality lower-budget stuff doesn’t get a look in. It IS there, though.
As for quirky and original -- have you SEEN “Doom Patrol”? “Umbrella Academy”?
Season long arcs didn’t used to be a thing because in the olden days (1990s and before) shows existed as physical copies distributed to TV stations, and it was important that if the uncaring techie grabbed the wrong tape off the shelf and showed the show out of order that it didn’t matter. Individuals having whole seasons on the physical media at home was limited to a very few nerds. But now EVERYONE has ALL the episodes “at home” all the time, and the tech cues up the next one for you so you don’t even have to bother remembering where you’re up to. Having a through-line even through an otherwise episodic season is just better, I’d argue. The first show I remember doing that was the British show “Between the Lines”. I remember it being praised for balancing an episode-of-the-week about police internal affairs with an ongoing plot about some conspiracy or something (it’s a LONG time ago…).
Hah! Luxury! No, what you get nowadays is one eight to ten hour movie that drags. See most of Disney’s Star Wars output. (Exception for the astonishingly good Andor, which is three riveting three hour movies and a great finale.) The Acolyte apparently cost $180m (not counting marketing), which is a fairly ludicrous budget for a film, let alone a TV show.
It’s been cancelled? And on a cliffhanger? How can you know that, given that season three isn’t airing until next year? Also: https://deadline.com/2024/04/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-renewed-lower-decks-cancelled-1235883271/
So… what are you talking about? Lower Decks has been cancelled after FIVE seasons, yes, which is a big shame.
Ah. You must have some sort of on-demand thing on your provider, then.
Not even in the listings when flipping through those. OK, maybe “Doom Patrol”, once or twice, somewhere. Didn’t tune it in though, because a) I never saw ads for it before it premiered, b) therefore missed the premiere, and c) if I’d tuned in when I did stumble onto it I’d very likely have found myself watching from timestamp 13:00:00 to timestamp 13:59:59 of a single, 22-hour-long episode, and been x) completely at sea and y) spoilered for the preceding 13 hours of the episode. 😛
Oh, I don’t think it’s quite “EVERYONE”. And even those of you with an on-demand service are subject to changing whims of the provider. “ALL the episodes” could suddenly be “only seasons 4 and 5” tomorrow morning, while you were still only halfway through season 2, or similarly.
Sorry, can’t, other than the movies. The sci-fi channel here only ever deigned to air the first season of “The Clone Wars”, then it disappeared. I hear rumor that there were more seasons, and other series, but none of them has aired anywhere in Canada on either OTA or basic cable, at least not and been seen in the program listings by me.
They also quit airing Doctor Who a couple of years ago, and were always very irregular about scheduling the import even before that. Rumor has it that that is actually still going too, but apparently it’s not airing here anymore, so unless you hoist your Jolly Roger and blow a few hundred bucks on external hard drives, you’re SOL.
OK, either you must have slipped through a parallel-universe portal or I have. I have already seen three seasons of it — the background arc of the first was Pike’s visions of future radiation injury, the second’s dealt with Number One being arrested and charged with stuff, and the third’s had the Gorn. And that was a couple of years ago, maybe more.
What two seasons did you see?
@Bekenstein Bound, 14:
I confess, I’m baffled by your response. You appear to be complaining about the quality of TV shows now available… when the sheer quantity of prestige content available is at an all time high.
When I point this out, you refer to:
… as though you’ve never heard of Netflix. Or Disney+. Or Hulu. Or Paramount+. Or Amazon Prime. Or Apple TV+. And yet you’ve evidently got a functioning internet connection, so I call bullshit.
In your next paragraph you’re asking me to believe that you’re too stupid to correctly navigate to the first episode of a series, and blaming someone else if you “accidentally” watch all of a later episode and get spoiled. You seem to be actively trying to do things wrong so that you can get angry about them.
My bad -- that should read “everyone who wants it”. I accept that not everyone wants it.
OK, two things:
1. “see most of Disney’s Star Wars output” was a reference, not an instruction as such -- like “see page 21” doesn’t mean “go there NOW”, it means “that’s where you can see an example of this if/when you can be bothered”.
2. it’s not “can’t” -- you can if you want. If you don’t want to, well, you do you I guess, but it’s there.
You appear to be complaining that TV as it was in the 1990s isn’t very good, to which I’d say yes, you’re right, thank heavens it’s not the 90s any more.
Or you could VPN into iPlayer and access the entire archive on demand. And you only need more than a couple of gigabytes of HDD if you want to *collect*, rather than watch.
There’s a third option -- you’re the sort of person who’s too confused to successfully identify the first episode of something -- that’s YOUR characterisation of yourself, not mine -- and you’ve possibly somehow confused season 2 of Discovery with |season 1 of SNW. Pike’s vision of his injury happened in Discovery, S02E12, “Through the Valley of Shadows”.
I mean, it’s just a shame there’s no way for you to enter the title of the show into some sort of machine that could access information to tell you all about the episodes that have been broadcast, what the plots were, who starred in them, when they were broadcast and so on.
Oh, wait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Strange_New_Worlds
Did you even bother to click the link I put in the last post? Are you going to bother to click that link?
You seem very confused. But GOOD NEWS! SNW has NOT been cancelled! Now all you have to do is wait until season three has been mostly broadcast, watch the last two episodes in the wrong order, than complain that it doesn’t make sense.
I’m subject to a hard limit of three posts per thread. This is my third, and therefore last, in this thread. It is, however, not a response to anything here -- it’s a response to a comment Bekenstein Bound made in another thread. But as I’ve already posted there three times, I’d be banned if I answer there. And since I don’t want to be banned, I won’t be doing that. But since Bekenstein Bound has set the precedent of responding in a different thread, it seems fair for me to conclude my side of the interaction here.
If I had wanted to accuse you of being a terrorist, I’d have picked a more famous terrorist -- Osama bin Laden, the Tora Bora Law Ignorer, for instance. The joke that predictably sailed over your head was a comparison with a specifically maladjusted Luddite, screaming into the void about the evils of modern technology while demonstrably not really understanding it, and having odd fixations like
Nobody has asked you to do that. Just… pay for stuff. It’s not like e.g. a Netflix subscription is expensive. I mean -- you COULD put it on a credit card if you WANT something to complain about, but nobody is forcing you to or even suggesting you should. I don’t.
Again -- you appear unfamiliar with any television manufactured within the last decade. These things don’t need “rigging up” to anything other than the mains power. They can connect to the internet -- and all the service thereon -- wirelessly without any other hardware. And ANY TV from the last twenty five years or so can be made do so with the two more bits of cabling and a gadget so simple my four year old uses it. No computer required.