The French Lieutenant's Win
Added 2024-11-08 10:22:16 +0000 UTCThis was not an episode that were happy to record, in the sense that—gallows humour aside—this sucks! It's bad. But, for this immediate post-mortem bonus episode, Riley, Milo, and November discuss the US election... as well as the Labour party's cosying up to Trump, the future trends you can predict in British politics, and the fact that the UK now has at least four Pod Save America equivalents.
MILO ALERT Check out Milo’s UK Tour here:
https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows
TRASHFUTURE LIVE SHOW ALERT We will be live in London at Between the Bridges on Sunday, November 24! Get tickets here.
Comments
Why did this election happen this way? I think most of your analysis is correct, especially among the people who actually voted and the couple of times you mention the like vote share. And also: - extremely low voter turnout - voter suppression. Not the conspiratorial shit that is all over the place, but the run of the mill shit that has been being reported on as a deliberately strategy with a specially fervent tenor for 4 years (& longer in a less direct way); shit like signature matching and purges to voter rolls. And you’re also right about the solutions being to move to the left and the fact that the democrats desperately need a good candidate, but they kind of can’t structurally make one. There is no way that such a candidate can survive to get prominence without taking hits that make them unelectable to this country, which is as mean and vicious as this election result would imply for massive swaths. (Which is also the result of a republican strategy which has been bearing a lot of fruit lately and involves several different directions, like destroying the news ecosystem and disrupting education as much as possible while creating their own parallel institutions to do the same work and spread propaganda. Add the hyper capitalist consolation of the internet into social media platforms whose design shoehorns people into this set of behaviors, which in turn took the kill shot at legacy media (all of whom were already cannot abide any level of progressivism). https://open.substack.com/pub/taylorlorenz/p/the-majority-of-news-influencers
AnIconic Dog
2024-11-18 16:59:04 +0000 UTCwe got RFK jr in charge of HHS, so get ready for Pandemic 2: Mpox Boogaloo
MI
2024-11-15 14:13:50 +0000 UTCWell that's exactly the point, which is why it's paycheck vs hamburger, ie, the paycheck in relation to the price of things you want to spend it on.
Pilfering Kibble
2024-11-14 19:25:01 +0000 UTCProblem is the paycheck doesn't actually matter. People get a raise, think Yay I deserve more stuff now! But they can't actually buy more stuff
Tom Capon
2024-11-14 17:49:09 +0000 UTCif you’re on the patreon app, you can hit the icon at the top right of the episode that looks like (•••) > download
MI
2024-11-14 13:24:12 +0000 UTCI came back from today's episode for context on the gay finance acronyms
Kevin
2024-11-13 12:18:33 +0000 UTCYou don't need to feel personally responsible for this. It's hard, but focus on what you can do in your community
John McElroy
2024-11-12 17:09:22 +0000 UTC(to OP) fuck off, vatnik
Rebecca Richards
2024-11-12 09:24:38 +0000 UTCThere’s a bunch of stuff named after a Dr. Gay Hitler in Pickaway County, OH
Mark Patsy
2024-11-11 20:24:38 +0000 UTCThis is what I keep coming back to, but without finding any answers. Maybe we're wrong and it's not 1933 it's actually 1928 and we're going to do tariffs again, but were is the new FDR coming from and who will back them? Last time there were groups on the ground to affect change, principally unions, but also civic clubs, churches who were concerned with increasing literacy, and millions of farmers (American farmers have always been market orientated but also have tried to focus more on their own independence than on profits) probably best exemplified in the Grange organization. And this go around that seems pretty thin on the ground. Talking of pointless Ws turning to Ls, a local Sierra Club spent 2 years rounding up city council votes to ban single use plastics on city property (a tiny meaningless victory but something) only to have the whole thing sunk by state government interference.
jamin
2024-11-11 16:58:52 +0000 UTCAs funny as it was to tell a British person to vote in a US election, not voting gave us fuck all and helped lead us here. I voted uncommitted a week before the election and it was the worst mistake of my whole life
Ineloquent Reverie
2024-11-11 16:00:45 +0000 UTCThe people yelling at Devon to vote blue no matter who on X The Everything App are..........still kinda funny ngl
Harry
2024-11-11 14:37:40 +0000 UTCTruly, it's a story about dems losing the ability to hold their nose and vote moreso than Trump triumph
Tristan Ryan
2024-11-11 00:10:32 +0000 UTCthat's the same rationale given to every other disastrous hot war of my generation including the Israel expeditions into gaza and lebanon 2) those all massively exacerbated the "there are out of control extremists in here" problem but go off I guess
etienne
2024-11-10 21:58:05 +0000 UTCI found out Trump won watching BBC coverage in the Edinburgh Airport Hampton Hilton. Nothing so surreal as watching the sign language interpreter with a poppy on his lapel translate drinking a brew dog IPA in an empty hotel at 1:30 in the afternoon.
Man, I Got Nothing
2024-11-10 18:06:27 +0000 UTCyes, so funny, where are your crying-laughing emojis liberal? "basic international law"? Hasn't israel proven that it's only tool for western hegemony? "anticolonial"? who is colonizing? the banderite government refused to stop killing ethnic russians in the Donbas despite the 2 Minsk agreements, but, oh, I guess this isn't "basic international law", so russia should have let them continue low grade ethnic cleansing for 75 years like in Palestine
mexicanhalloween .
2024-11-10 17:19:57 +0000 UTCThe Bariopticon
Ferrosol
2024-11-10 15:21:40 +0000 UTCso funny to genuinely have this opinion lol like just sweeping aside all basic international law and antiwar anticolonial instinct and just going "no actually Iraq and Afghanistan had it coming"
etienne
2024-11-10 08:52:27 +0000 UTCPerhaps it's hairsplitting, but saying "xyz lead to people voting for trump" doesn't really hit for me when Trump got less votes in 2024 than 2020.
Dave Clarke
2024-11-10 04:59:48 +0000 UTCWe might be ok
Man2quilla
2024-11-10 03:47:36 +0000 UTCWhy would you care about the ukraine? Their nazis took over in 2014, provoked this conflict, and I hope they all die
mexicanhalloween .
2024-11-10 00:03:19 +0000 UTCElon is looking for the woke temple like Heinrich Schliemann looked for troy.
Elek Tolman
2024-11-09 23:36:57 +0000 UTCbooooring
William Deverell
2024-11-09 23:16:14 +0000 UTCidk that this means anything and a propos de rien but the late teen/v early 20s white male cashier at my local quik trip just clocked that i was listening to the pod and said "oh trashfuture they're great" and anyways it warmed my heart
Laura
2024-11-09 15:39:57 +0000 UTCBTW in Spain, Sánchez and the PSOE are ersatz Blairites who were the second most popular party in last year's elections. The proposed right/far right coalition was just short, so instead Sánchez cobbled together a rickety coalition with the far left (who are riven with infighting) and all the various nationalist groupings, including the hated Catalán independentistas, insodoing mortgaging the PSOEs future and sacrificing his poll rating. Barring weird shit, the government seems likely to collapse prematurely and a PP/Vox coalition will get in.
Alan Johnson
2024-11-09 10:54:39 +0000 UTCI heard the quote: "Harris is not a 360 girl, she is a 224". My first connection was: 224F, a good temperature to smoke food. Think me going more and more offline is a healthy thing
Jonas Schwammberger
2024-11-09 09:28:35 +0000 UTCSame here while editing. I recently embarrassed myself in public because I was listening back to check sound quality while walking home and I heard Hussein say "Rachel Reeves recently dyed her hair ginger, which indicates at least a passing interest in Wahhabism." Do you know how to make Swiss people think you're fully insane? Try losing your mind laughing out of nowhere while walking down the street
Trashfuture
2024-11-09 09:00:22 +0000 UTCProbably can't get away with this for a variety of reasons but I can probably design something as a graphic when I have the time lol
Trashfuture
2024-11-09 08:57:32 +0000 UTCPlease make a Kissing Penises of Men Gay shirt with the KPMG logo
lunchpin
2024-11-09 07:00:07 +0000 UTCThe end of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
Man2quilla
2024-11-09 04:02:36 +0000 UTCDuring the Iron Joe interregnum I made it a habit to tell my liberal friends that they sounded like my Marcyite friends when they'd say something to the effect of, "Don't these fucking idiots know the economy is great?"
Andrew Davis
2024-11-09 02:23:04 +0000 UTCWell I hope y'all are happy -- you've convinced me to stop for burgers instead of cooking at home
Henry Read
2024-11-09 01:39:46 +0000 UTCcan’t wait until they turn on the nuclear powered AI Deportation Machine in Partnership with Palantir that they just like fed all our data into
Jeremy Cohn
2024-11-09 01:10:02 +0000 UTCIts more and more obvious that a supposed left needs or needed to build from the ground actual institutions of its own power, which currently will be extremely difficult and possibly not enough to actually affect much.
Josephine
2024-11-09 00:28:32 +0000 UTCI think the last time we felt any happiness in here is when Corbyn won the Labour leadership and when the Squad first got elected, which is like about a trillion years ago
etienne
2024-11-09 00:19:59 +0000 UTCI've been listening to the Left Wing Andrew Tate (i.e. Chapo Trap House) for about 8 years now and the one thing that's becoming really embarassing these days is how EVERY ONE OF THEIR POLITICAL PROJECT fails. If you listen to any left-wing podcast or follow any liberal project all you got was ruthlessly bullied by the entity you were trying to do entryism into; failed in your standalone elections, the entity you were trying to entry also failed, just a constant string of Ls with a few incredibly bitter pyrric Ws that just make you sick and turn to ash in your mouth. At some point I can almost understand why some aughts kid would turn into a nazi just to save themselves the embarassement of constantly being told to fuck off and then FUCKING LOSE, again and again
etienne
2024-11-09 00:17:43 +0000 UTCI just can't believe we have to do this again
Man2quilla
2024-11-08 23:27:44 +0000 UTCrip me kissing men's penises (gay) died me
Tristan Ryan
2024-11-08 23:23:33 +0000 UTCNovember puts the gal in gallows humor
Diva Facliffe
2024-11-08 22:37:51 +0000 UTCHappy Fuck November Kelly Week to all who don't celibate.
Diva Facliffe
2024-11-08 22:37:36 +0000 UTCThem Iowegian witches'll chuck a hex on ya toot sweet
The Project Project
2024-11-08 22:10:28 +0000 UTCUnfortunately not the first hex code associated with failure https://knowyourmeme.com/news/elizabeth-warren-staffers-get-what-look-like-holocaust-tattoos
Ian Munro
2024-11-08 22:04:17 +0000 UTCnot to be all jokes right now, but I saw your 🪰 username and read that as “do you know about downloading flies” and I completely accepted that as you doing the world’s most obscure bit. anything that makes me crack a smile right now is worth it I guess, so, thank you?
ellie
2024-11-08 21:54:23 +0000 UTCNo it's not the only answer for sure, you're 100% correct. But it was a factor. There is no way it's not. And saying "just play a white dude next time" would not be the takeaway I'd hope. But we know dems love that shit.
Jordan Y Clementi
2024-11-08 21:18:24 +0000 UTCThey Hillary'd themselves. They Hillary'd themselves AGAIN.
Ariane Signalis is the Elster Signalis Fan Club and challenges you to play SIGNALIS without pointing at any of the characters an
2024-11-08 20:40:53 +0000 UTCif anyone from the pod reads this don't get mad at me. getting mad at me is carcerality
🪰
2024-11-08 20:09:17 +0000 UTCdo you know about downloading files
🪰
2024-11-08 20:08:30 +0000 UTCIf that's your plan, better stock up on ammo. If a revolution is succesful there will still be hundreds of thousands of counter revolutionaries, who currently spend their time gathering guns and prepping for the boogaloo.
Minna Ihalainen
2024-11-08 19:54:58 +0000 UTCJust a small note re: Spain. The Valencian community is governed by the right wing, led by Carlos Mazón, and he refused to activate the emergency level 3 for the DANA, which was necessary for the central government to intervene in the management of the crisis. So it’s a little unfair to blame Sánchez for the deaths there, it’s another right wing failing
James
2024-11-08 19:53:56 +0000 UTCThe first step in a revolutionary strategy is not Pokemon-Go-to-the-Barricade, it's to build communities that will fight for one another and save themselves, regardless of what the politicians or courts say is possible in a given moment. The LA Tenant Union's new book has a chapter that sketches one of these fights exactly. 28 unit apartment building in historically marginalized community is bought by a speculative investor. 10 units receive 60% rent increases, new landlord is doing open investor pitches about how he plans to raise all rates eventually and court new tenants. All of this is legal under current tenant law, there's no procedural way to prevent these evictions. Each of these 10 could go to the legal aide society, have their case analyzed, and be told 'sorry-nothing-we-can-do', then move. What a good organizer does in this case is outline all their options and try to convince people to fight. What this complex did instead is knock on all their neighbors doors, hold collective meetings, and decide a course forward. They decided collectively to hire representation that would fight the eviction case in the court. The 10 units receiving the huge increase decided to withhold their rent, because they couldn't pay anyway. After that first month, more units started joining the union and also withholding their rent payments in solidarity. Individual units wrote physical checks to the landlord and gave them directly to the Union instead. They pressured the property management company for meetings and were refused. They highlighted their fight in the local media. They did big rallies to get more media and Council attention, who also told them nothing could be done. They built a mass of 100 people to go protest in front of the new landlord's house, 14 miles away. All the while they made collective decisions: don't take individual deals, don't get individual representation, if you are wavering you discuss it with the group first. And they won! Their building won a Collective Bargaining Agreement (literally the first of it's kind in LA). Rent went up by 10% and year-over-year increases were capped. And the tenants reserved the right to negotiate and strike. Does all of this sound like a lot of work? Yeah, it is. It's also about the same amount of commitment (1 year), time (weekly meetings), and guts it takes to run any local council campaign. But it also more directly empowers people, meets them where they are, and is a cornerstone of literal communist organizing. It's time to get to work.
JVD
2024-11-08 19:32:46 +0000 UTCand i voted so hard
MI
2024-11-08 19:22:15 +0000 UTCinshallah
Penis Charles
2024-11-08 19:10:11 +0000 UTCCan we talk about how funny it would be if Trump just completely dumped Elon from day one and never let him have any power? Like 'you served your purpose, little bald boy. Bye.'
Noblesse Oblahaj
2024-11-08 19:03:45 +0000 UTCNova's "we can't win over young white men from the patriarchy without addressing another material concern" is crucially on point. The thing about the patriarchy is it creates a world that's shit but gives some men a slightly-less-shit deal. The end of patriarchy therefore doesn't seem like "everyone will benefit" to those men. It seems like "I will lose out". Because in the short term that's the correct analysis.
Jacob Barlow
2024-11-08 18:51:21 +0000 UTCI'm digging a hole while listening to this.
Alistair SM J
2024-11-08 18:44:00 +0000 UTCI'm inclined to believe that it's true, but I'd like to know where I can find the "Discretionary spending at an all time low" data. I don't know where to find a dataset where I can exclude the top 5% and it's warping effects from having such a wild gap in wealth.
Charles Comfort
2024-11-08 18:29:28 +0000 UTCMesoamerica bits are the best
Peter Larkin
2024-11-08 18:18:17 +0000 UTClmao
🪰
2024-11-08 17:38:31 +0000 UTCnothing works for me because my family isn't getting bombed overseas by the US and I don't want things to get worse here the place where I live, but I respect if that isn't the case for someone else. Also how hard would it have been for Harris to just say weapons embargo until Israel conducts it's operations in accord with international law or some shit? Sure it's maybe not the moral stance but it gets something done, heads off escalation with Iran and it plays into the law and order thing the Democrats keep trying to do.
jamin
2024-11-08 16:51:38 +0000 UTCI worry that if the take away is it's just racism and misogyny then that leads to well we'll just do more neo-liberal capitalism with a boring old white guy again ya'll like that right? (which did kinda work for a less old Biden to be fair) But it's definitely an issue especially in my Midwest circle of employed mostly white people half of whom own homes. Like come on guys why are WE burning the system down here? The moderate democrats do a decent job of supporting our interests. But for every lifetime Republican family member who I can convince to SAY they're not voting for Trump, 2 more who've never cared about politics before jump on the train.
jamin
2024-11-08 16:29:16 +0000 UTCUS elections are obnoxiously simple: conservatives WILL show up and vote red down the ticket regardless of candidate, policies, etc. People will only show up to vote for Dems if they like the candidate. Being 4 years out from Trump's last days in office were enough for folks to start forgetting about what he did so they don't care enough to vote against him again. That's how we end up with Trump's popular vote total basically never changing with people massively staying home to not vote for Kamala. I personally have accepted that I'm stuck with nothing or get worse, so I vote for nothing, but I get why other people don't.
kiwi
2024-11-08 16:15:20 +0000 UTCThere's a somewhat easier metric for getting a rough idea of people's sharing of the GDP. Yes, overall it would require a bunch of research but for a "shit I need to get an idea in 10 seconds" you can take GDP per capita less heatlchare per capita divided by the GINI index for the country. (Ideally you'd also include GDP spent on all necessities here and then calculate gini coefficient after expenditures but healthcare is giant and we have 10 seconds). So we're looking at (for USA and numbers I pulled from google machine, not perfect because I have to focus on household not individual, but GDP is per capita) (81695.19 - 14133.27) / 0.49 = $137,881.47 Lets take the UK for comparison (48866.60 - 5326.46) / .35 = $124,400.40 Sweden: (56,305.25 - 6193.58) / .33 = $151,853.55 Even if you knock out expenditures and just take GPD per capita divided by gini index USA: $166,724.88 UK: $139,618.86 Sweden: $170,621.97 China: $26,838.43 Interpretation of this is difficult but you can see some obvious things like turns out Sweden's mean dickhead is better off than the USA and UK's mean dickhead and, well, the UK is just shit, but not as shit as China.
Nicholas J Skradski
2024-11-08 15:56:30 +0000 UTC“Vote with your mouth” will be rattling in my head for a bit
Kevin M Lardi
2024-11-08 15:45:08 +0000 UTCYeah it's that people didn't walk tuah the polls We should, still, acknowledge that on top of how poor the campaign was run, Biden, the ideological argument, etc. racism and misogyny were also massive factors.
Jordan Y Clementi
2024-11-08 15:44:20 +0000 UTCRiding to the camps in a Robovan, remembering how good Milo’s Andrew Tate impression was
Isaac Taylor
2024-11-08 15:35:18 +0000 UTCThe lesson is we didn't court the moderate republican votes hard enough! Better swing to the right more!
jamin
2024-11-08 15:02:32 +0000 UTCI wasn't here in 2019, so I suppose one upside is now I get my post-election-horror Trashfuture episode contemporaneously
THEonlyMAILMAN
2024-11-08 14:51:54 +0000 UTCa neoliberal runs on neoliberalism and loses and so the left has to run to the swamps and start a protracted people's war - very logical
Drew Flanagan
2024-11-08 14:35:43 +0000 UTC3 million less people voted for Trump this election than last... Just so happens 14 million less people voted for Kamala this time as opposed to the last election hmmm any lessons to be learned. Probably not
Eric Murphy
2024-11-08 14:35:15 +0000 UTCif nobody is willing to vote for reforms (I don't think that's true but it seems like what you're implying) why on earth would they roll the dice on the idea of a socialist revolution?
Drew Flanagan
2024-11-08 14:34:56 +0000 UTCOne of my friends thinks it's gonna be Vivek Ramaswamy. I personally think it might be Jim Jordan.
Marjorie Zeager
2024-11-08 14:08:00 +0000 UTCWonder who Ohio's gov will appoint 1st? Dewine is a moderate, but i'm sure it will still be someone terrible.
Mark Schwagner
2024-11-08 13:56:41 +0000 UTCAlso my sheriff is Bruce Zuchowski if you want to look up the meme.
Marjorie Zeager
2024-11-08 13:50:13 +0000 UTCIf anyone from the pod reads these comments: I would love to send this episode around to friends and family to evangelize for TF. Would you consider unlocking?
Pete Hollitscher
2024-11-08 13:36:48 +0000 UTCI've been having similar repeated realizations to Nova. My most recent one was, fuck, Ohio has to have a special election to replace JD Vance as our senator
Marjorie Zeager
2024-11-08 12:37:41 +0000 UTCIn a red wedding solution you'd also need to take out enough of the Republican House members that the Democrats can control the Speakership. In Minecraft.
Ben Schwabe
2024-11-08 12:36:38 +0000 UTCI'd gotten used to not waking up every morning and checking to see if the world had ended. Time to do it all again. Too many loved ones living in the States that are now in danger for me to be optimistic right now.
Peter Larkin
2024-11-08 12:24:10 +0000 UTCi think identifying the trump win as a crisis of not only democracy but the entire economics dogma for the past 40 years is spot on. govts have effectively gotten amazing at number going up and then turn around and wonder why nobody is clapping for them.
Insom
2024-11-08 12:15:23 +0000 UTCHamburger vs pay check is so on point
Pilfering Kibble
2024-11-08 12:00:03 +0000 UTCthis mf really just said "too too bullet"
Aaron
2024-11-08 11:34:04 +0000 UTCThere is no electoral hope for the left. At the very least not in the US. Embrace a revolutionary strategy, not SocDem reformism
Julian Gricksch
2024-11-08 11:23:29 +0000 UTCPlease step away from the Lathe of Heaven. And leave that Monkey Paw on the shelve.
Josep C.
2024-11-08 10:52:45 +0000 UTCPlease keep doing Mesoamerican bits
Richard McKinley
2024-11-08 10:44:39 +0000 UTCfinally an emergency podcast, i was threatened with hundreds of these and in their absence i've been going insane alone
CAE
2024-11-08 10:25:52 +0000 UTCThe trashfuture adherent strikes again. Вы промахнулись. Приготовьтесь к тысячелетию тьмы.
Сейдж
2024-11-08 10:24:53 +0000 UTC
