tshile

Maybe it was 2004. Memory is quirky. they have these giant retention ditches everywhere because drainage sucks in the Norfolk/Hampton roads/va beach/ Newport News area and I know they are retention ponds now because, well, duh. but. When I was 18. And the entire city was jacked. And we were under mandatory evac orders from the university. And there was immense rainfall. These retention ditches turned into swimming pools for me and all my dumb and fun friends.

Yeah I was in Newport News when whatever it was hit in 2003. Power was out for weeks. Water wasn’t drinkable for large areas for weeks. Because it was that area, there were a lot that didn’t evacuate. And I don’t recall deaths being an issue, but people obviously didn’t realize they’d have to live without drinkable water and power for multiple weeks. Our college parties were by candle light for a week or so.

Yeah. And I think before trump there was this basic understanding of “you can’t get away with that if you wanted to” and now, that’s obviously gone. The real check in the legislature and executive is the voting public. If they signal they’re willing to let you get away with anything…

Try to get a pcr. Rapid has a high false negative rate. I got a pcr in Virginia last week and results were in within 24 hours

New York area has been crushed a few times because they couldn’t handle the smaller storms. Va beach area also has been crushed (not like New Orleans obviously…) but we went weeks w/o power and it was real bad one year. we’re sort of naturally protected. Based on years of watching hurricanes, and no real expertise, it seems like there’s a 99% chance it lands in the Carolinas (or va beach today worst), or it skips by us to the north. seems pretty low chance it would come up the bay and land in dc or the surrounding area. but we can’t handle the rain. It causes problems. Just don’t think storm surge wil ever be an issue…

To me cruz is a victim of timing. He tried the Trump shtick before it was cool. I doubt he can get real traction as far as I can tell Desantis is doing a great job. Most trumpers I know have already vocalized their support for him in 2024 to me, unsolicited btw. really they just have to embrace the art of dealing with a crisis by basically saying “don’t care doing this anyways” trumps ability to manage a crisis the way he did was less about him being savvy and more about his supporters not caring…. I expect them to continue to not care.

Yes, this is what we’re going to see a lot of now. And it’ll be different wording depending on who is being discussed and in what context. But, it’s going to come down to this: as amazing as trump was as a cult of personality figure, he was an incompetent moron in terms of pushing any particular agenda or working the system. he just “bull in a China shop”’d everything. Everything. so now what we have are significantly smarter people, with actual agendas they’re chasing, adopting the persona of trump to grab control of the cult that was created. But they’ll actually use it to push their agenda - cleverly, purposefully, etc. desantis is smart enough to use the trump cult to accomplish his agenda. as opposed to MTG or Boebert who are morons that lucked into finding a seat in Congress cruz, desantis, etc. there’s a couple handfuls of people that, if they accomplish reigning in control of that cult, can do a lot to push the hard right agenda.

🤔

Well, the areas on the rise have higher vaccination rates. So, id think deaths trailing off still makes sense. and December 1st is too early for the thanksgiving rise. I would also think areas where hospitals are not overrun will have less deaths just because exhausted staff, lack of rooms/equipment (I would think) leads to higher deaths. The rising states should be better off. schools are child deaths are the wildcard cause they can’t be vaccinated and are indoors together…

I do not like the words the Biden administration is using. and I’ll preface this with: I think Biden wanted a clean exit, it’s killing him this is happening, and I imagine he’s bouncing between being livid at people running certain things, and being beside himself that this is how it’s playing out. I can only imagine how it feels to get the initial “several service members were killed” briefing. christ. also: not super up to date on every word Biden has said so, if there’s parts out there dealing with this then so be it. I hear phrases like…(paraphrasing) ”no one anticipated” ”unexpected” ”we hoped that the Afghan government…” ”I didn’t know” etc this is a tactical error. first, as a general take, you just gave the gop audio and video of you basically saying “yeah I’m in charge but we don’t know what’s going on” second. There have been multiple leaks about how intelligence basically said this would happen. So, how do you not know? Are you not taking the briefings? Are you not paying attention? Is the cia not showing up? Like how do we square the intelligence community warned you but you didn’t know? (Side note: interesting that the liberal rags the WaPo and nytimes are leaking damaging stories about the Biden administrations handling of the exit. ) third: it’s just a weak position to take. you’re the mother ****ing president of the United States of American. “I didn’t know” isn’t gonna fly. Just own the mistake and dedicate yourself to doing it right going forward.

i guess this may depend entirely on where you get your news from. while I do watch msnbc at times, I haven’t in the last week or two. Ive been sorta limited to npr podcasts and my news reader and they were highly critical. In fact, ive probably listened to every The NPR Politics Podcast for the last 6 years and I’m not sure I’ve heard them say one negative thing about the Biden administration (after spending 4 years grilling Trump… daily) and they were very harsh on the administration. I believe incompetence was the main descriptor used, and the conversation of how he ran on being a competent president was the main “so uh wtf is this mess” piece of it all. Embarrassment was another commonly used descriptor. My news feeds populated by things like the post, times, bbc, Atlantic, and others were pretty harsh. Brian Tyler Cohen (big player in hard left podcast world - I love him despite not being hard left at all, because the man is smart and runs a clean podcast geared around pumping the conversation with facts, and discussing strategy. It’s interesting) ran a podcast titled with the summary “The US pulls out of Afghanistan amid the country’s fall to the Taliban, the media drops the ball in its desperation to cry failure” which can be a accompanied by his tweet (which was posted earlier in thread) that was basically: the media is so desperate to cry foul on the Biden administration in an attempt to appear be fair <to the general public after going after trump constantly>… So… I’m not saying you can’t craft a news feed where you didn’t see criticism of the Biden administration, but I didn’t see that. And i frequent what our conservative friends like to call “liberal rag(s)” for news… I think at best you could say that in this thread the overwhelming initial sentiment was “well that sucks but people will probably forget (in terms of election impact) and at least we’re finally leaving” Which, if you go back and read it, I don’t think “reluctance to be even remotely critical” is fair…

I was like 17 I think. I remember that. All after school activities were cancelled every day. Every white van drew eyes. Getting gas required turning into a lookout. that dude terrorized a large portion of the surrounding dc area for quite a while.

Yeah but trump had a scandal every week. Often multiple a week. There are scandals we forgot about because something else happened 18 hours later theres a “what’s your favorite trump scandal” thread floating around here somewhere. I just… I just hate when the act of criticism is considered equal to other acts when that doesn’t hold past just looking at the act of criticizing. While this is a huge scandal for Biden, it’s one legit one among a bunch of manufactured ones trumps on the other hand… (I know you know that, just adding to the conversation)

I had the single shot and it wiped me out. I think I basically slept for at least 12 hours I also had covid. It also wiped me out.

Also there’s many ways to celebrate something you don’t have to be jumping up and down going “yippee!” you can simply enjoy your opportunity to flex your partisan brain muscles to attack your political foes using baseless claims, hypocrisy with your demands in regards to previous statements I mean, come on. Who here is so stupid that you actually think the number of GOP politicians spouting out about how Biden should have never pulled us out, while they have tweets back in March 2021 where they were demanding Biden leave immediately to meet the terms of the deal Trump negotiated with the taliban… is being driven by a genuinely patriotic concern about what’s best for our country and our service members? is anyone here that stupid? Is there someone here that thinks the rest of us are so stupid you can argue that it’s the case and we won’t be able to figure you out? did the trump team scrub every reference to his taliban deal from his site, something g they used to proudly boast about (ending the war if Afghanistan), because they’re just honest people that genuinely care about what’s right? sorry bud. No one here is that dumb. And if you want to continue on like we are, you’re gonna get wrecked real quick. Cause after 4 years of Trump no one has any patience for that bull**** anymore.

Despite our public school system specifically teaching the topic, I don’t think most people could get more than 30% of the state capitals…

Yeah I think like 10% or less of our population understands this sort of thing. i agree it’s important.

Well the whole thing just sort of happened. It’s not like the intelligence community could have warned us Isis was planning on blowing up areas at the airport as people were trying to evacuate, 3 weeks ago… it’s all sort of moving fast and just happening… but yeah, I’m with you. the equipment thing cracks me up. People are so mad. 20 years of articles about how we’re failing to equip our troops, and all the sudden it’s “we just gave the taliban state of the art equipment” the whole more blackhawks than 85% of other countries thing is trending on Twitter, no one wants to discuss that they have no ability to maintain them. I don’t know how long a Blackhawk can operate with no real, experience-driven maintenance, but I’m guessing not long. Iraq had tons of inoperable aircraft and they were the 4th largest standing army in the world when we invaded. They were a legit government with real global legitimacy. And they couldn’t keep their own **** running. But the taliban is going to run one of the largest black hawk fleets now? Get the **** out of here.

I don’t know. Intelligence communities warned against it. They warned against an isis attack yesterday. My 5 am news rundown yesterday included State telling everyone to get the hell away from the airport. They said Americans not at the airport should not go, and ones at the airport should leave immediately. hours later two bombs go off. So. I really don’t get where the criticism of the intelligence community comes from… originally I was willing to give Biden the benefit of the doubt that maybe they knew but out a good public face on things to try to encourage the best possible outcome. but enough has come out since then that it seems obvious there was an issue here. Either one of competence, or one of lack of prioritizing it. it doesn’t really matter either way. The bottom line is this is a failure of the administration. There’s reports out now we gave the taliban a list of afghans that helped us so they could get through check points… we gave them a kill list…. I think we have to accept that it will be referred to as such. we’re not real good at the whole geography thing.

That no matter who finally did it, exiting Afghanistan was going to be messy. I’m way more happy someone finally got us out than I am mad how the exit has gone.

I think if no Americans died Biden was going to face a campaign style attack that would have just enough truth that it might resonate with some now there are dead US troops. Which btw is worse than “Americans” it doesn’t matter what I personally think. The general public will reject this. (that’s why no one else wanted to do it) He can’t win. The stakes are too high. He won’t run. I don’t think this is something that in 2024 people forget or move on from. (also he probably gifted them the midterms. So. Fun. )

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/26/us-officials-provided-taliban-with-names-of-americans-afghan-allies-to-evacuate-506957 the Biden administration is not doing so hot on the “competent leadership” thing. I get everyone’s desire to write this thing off as something people will forget shortly, but this is just bad news after bad news. and the one thing that couldn’t happen was losing American lives and now that’s happened. and ultimately I mostly agree with the sentiment here - except I’m not so sure the general public is where some of you think it is. My issue is with what I think this all likely means to the general public. Since, my one vote is sort of not all that important.

Earlier. We’re 12 days in now.

DO U GUIZ THINK ITLL B BIDENS BENGHAZI? LOL NO RE-ELECTION 4 U

I agree. but. the world has shown us this is difficult for most.