Sometimes I get frustrated at how this can all be fixed.  But America healed after a true Civil War.  Germany healed after putting the original Nazis in power and then again when it was split in two after World War II.  Countries seemingly come back from this type of stuff a lot.

I still maintain that Trump and his ego are the problem.  I'm not saying there aren't fascists behind Trump ready to take the next step, but I think Trump offers a specific problem because he's so charismatic, he gets so many people who don't normally vote to vote, and he is litigious with the money to back up his lawsuits.  I don't think anyone else is going to have that combination anytime soon.  JD Vance has almost none of that.

So just calmly waiting for _________

The best depiction of neoliberal politics, in my view, is TED: Season 2, Episode 5. https://www.reddit.com/r/Corridor/comme … s_so_good/

(Here's a transcript in case the video becomes unavailable.)

Bill Clinton exudes warmth and charisma. He could not be nicer or sweeter in his ability to connect, open up and bond because in-the-moment empathy costs him nothing, and the sheer sincerity of his behaviour co-exists with his predatory intensity as he then savagely intimidates the working man (a Dunkin Donuts clerk) into handing over goods and services (coffee and donuts) for free and makes him comply with a photo op where the president shakes the hand of a man who once ran his own business but now has a service position at the chain of a corporate conglomerate for minimum wage with no benefits.

This is a hyperaccurate depiction of Third Way politics, in my view, and why Americans see mainstream Democrats as ineffectual and weak. Third Way Democrats who run the party today aren't here to defend the people from a bad system; they're here to smile or apologize as they maintain it, and that's why the mainstream Democratic Party views Democratic Socialists as a threat.

Clinton's combination of performative empathy and ruthless de-industrialization of America is what laid the path to Trump. So long as Democrats continue to compete with Republicans for who gets to exploit workers, their message will be too muddled and contradictory to resonate.

We Canadians would be foolish to think ourselves above it all.

Now, people remember.  Trump has seemingly lost almost all his Hispanic support in two years, and young people are getting more and more disillusioned.  Democrats are winning in a lot of places they lost in 2024, and they're making places that were deep red competitive.  And none of the Republicans can dare to try and split the middle and speak out against what Trump is doing.  So those brainwashed Fox News people are the only ones who will vote for them.

I think if this were any other midterm in my lifetime, it would be a bloodbath.  The Democrats would take the House and the Senate.  They'd win state legislatures and governorships and local races up all over the country.  I think there's a real shift away from Trump and his BS.  But Trump controls law enforcement and the mail and every branch of the government.  I'm still not convinced he won't manufacture something to delay or postpone or cancel the election.  If he can't stop the election, he'll stop certain people from voting.  If he can't do that, he'll try and overturn elections he lost.

Maybe all that will fail.  Trump is slower and I'm not 100% sure he cares about congress.  Maybe he won't bother.  But I just cannot find enough hope to believe that things will look better in three or five months.

Tell your fellow Canadians that we're sorry.  And hopefully sanity can return in 2028 and we can be friends again.

*******

If sanity returns, I'm most excited here on August 24, 2026 to vote for Ossoff in two years.  He has Gavin Newsom's fire without all the other Gavin Newsom traits.

I myself am struggling to find a vision, a leader, a direction and a hero. Maybe there aren't any.

Simon Rosenberg, while admitting he was simply wrong and that his assessments were so flawed as to be broken, has plenty of data on Trump's sinking polls and how Republicans have completely taken over the news cycle and infosphere and boxed out democratic voices from the mainstream... but his view that Republicans flood the news with favourable polls may not be meaningful if those favourable polls reflect what was enough for Kamala to lose.

Generally, my sense is that both sides of the political spectrum are disenchanted with capitalism. The socialist win in New York City with Mayor Zohran Mamdani offers a vision of government that is dedicated to making life more affordable for the working class as opposed to the private equity class. But his wins are on a collision course with the Clinton-era Democrats and their descendants who spent the 90s squeezing the middle and working class for the benefit of the wealthy, using Bill Clinton's charisma to mask the gradual de-industrialization of America, turning it from a nation of builders into a nation of middle management administrators.

James Carville Jr. continues to bleat that Democrats should continue to be Republicans in Democrat branding. That one lunatic insisting that Kamala actually won the election is insane. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are meek politicians in a state of quiet surrender just looking to clock in and collect their salaries and get their pensions. These are the people still leading the Democrats. There's this one person ranting about how deeply threatened he is by people in drag and by the one in 50,000 transgender athletes and saying they're all sex criminals despite this dude being the one who proudly posed for photos with sex trafficker Allison Mack and claimed her crimes were fake news. There was this other guy who ranted about the evils of vaccines, but I have no doubt he was as quick as the average FOX pundit to get vaccinated ASAP.

I know nothing and I understand less. I cannot stress enough that the opinions of ireactions are not the views of the Sliders.tv community.

But even if Talarico gets more votes, I think Texas will try to do something crazy.  And who will stop them?

I'm excited.  I'm nervous.  I don't know what to expect.  But when you see how underwater Trump is with so many groups of people that he dominated with in 2024, I don't see how this isn't a bloodbath under almost any circumstance.  And what if, this time, the polls are undersampling the anger and the disapproval?

I assume people in the AVTF hate vigilantes and that's why they joined, but how can so many of them twist that philosophy into "okay let's kill a boat full of innocent workers we know aren't vigilantes."  Even in the face of *waves wildly all around*, I have to believe that most people are good and most people, no matter how much they might hate certain people, think that killing is wrong.  Even if they're okay with other people killing, they'd be hesitant to do it themselves.

All that is to say I'm hoping to see more defects from the AVTF.  I'm also not 100% sure I agree with recruitment staying high when the AVTF are actively being targeted by someone superpowered.  Do people like legally roughing up poor people enough to risk getting a fork thrown through their eyes?  I would assume once it got out that Bullseye was targeting officers, a bunch of people (especially the type of people ICE seems to be recruiting) would bail.  I would think they'd only be doing it because they feel like there would be no consequences, but Bullseye is dishing out a lot of consequences.  Throw in whatever Frank is doing and whatever Fisk says Daredevil is doing, and I can't imagine they'd be able to replace officers as quickly as Bullseye is dealing with them.  But again naive.

I do think the show is making super obvious parallels to Trump with Fisk, but I still think I'd prefer Fisk to Trump.  Fisk is a bad guy, but he's a bad guy who seems to care about people on some level.  I think Fisk is willing to work toward making things better with the intention of getting rich and powerful as a result.  I think Trump only cares about himself,  and he doesn't care on any level if things get better for people.  I think Trump might even make things intentionally worse sometimes just because he thinks its funny.  I legitimately think Trump is a worse supervillain that Fisk.

*******

So Trump's approval rating continues to plummet, and special elections keep going the Democrats' way.  I'm starting to get a little more optimistic that it could be a good midterms as long as Trump doesn't do anything totally crazy.

I've been a little relieved to see that Democrats aren't completely abandoning races in dark red areas like they have in the past. I'm hoping they're learning that they need to go after every race no matter how conservative or how small the race is, and I'm hoping they have some kind of plan to keep any of these gains they've gotten.  To recover from Trump, the Democratic party needs to be reaching out to disillusioned Trump voters and then they need to deliver for them.  I've said it before, but the Democratic Party needs to be able to transform itself into the party of the working class again, even if it means abandoning some really important stuff.  If there's a madman with a gun running around, you can't be too concerned with the fire code, even if the building is actively on fire.  Handle one issue at a time.  And right now, I think Democrats could do well with going all in on economic populism and saving social issues for a later day.

I don't know how likely it will be that the Democrats won't fumble this, but I'm using up what hope I have left that they can do it.

The second season of DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN is basically Daredevil vs. ICE. Daredevil has had one major fight scene per episode and beaten up about 10 ICE officers in each of the three episodes to date. (The story calls them the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, but they're all violent thugs assaulting and imprisoning people in off-the-books detainment facilities with no due process or oversight.) Daredevil has smashed their officers' faces into walls, hammered his club into their eyes, punched through their jaws and started holding them prisoner.

On one level, this is incredibly cathartic, and I can imagine Informant crying that Daredevil has become a mouthpiece for liberals followed by noting that Informant's white supremacists and misogynists and transphobes of choice have won the real world conflict while the left of center are hiding in fantasy fiction for relief. On another, this is not exactly a constructive fictional depiction.

Daredevil exists in a world where superheroes can administer severe beatings that don't kill anybody. Reality is more like that episode of THE FRESH PRINCE OF BEL-AIR where Will Smith killed a man who was mean to his uncle by yelling at him to drop dead at which point the man collapsed from a heart attack and died. We don't know everyone's medical situation. A punch to the face could be lethal and we don't have Matt Murdock's radar sense to know how hard to hit somebody. BORN AGAIN would be ill-advised to encourage civilians to take up arms against ICE.

As a result, by the third episode, DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN is forced to abruptly assure the audience that beating up ICE agents is not Matt and Karen's attitude going forward, instead clarifying that their goal is surveillance and information gathering with combat being incidental rather than planned. The show doesn't emphasize -- but I would -- that taking down 10 ICE agents a day is pointless: the recruitment numbers will ensure that any deficit via street vigilantism can be instantly filled by a new influx of people keen to terrorize civilians.

Due to actor unavailability, Frank Castle is not in BORN AGAIN and said to be missing from both the AVTF cells and from the narrative entirely. On one level, this is preferable: Frank's strategy would indeed be to simply shoot AVTF agents dead at a rate of 10 - 50 a day. But as BORN AGAIN tacitly points out: the officers are simply the lowest-ranked, most disposable parts of Wilson Fisk's machine. The machine behind them: the extrajudicial maneuvering, the federal and state and municipal bureaucracy enabling their actions; the way elections and the information ecosphere have been manipulated to put unstable people in positions of public service -- none of that would be addressed by Frank Castle gunning for AVTF agents, which is really Frank's only strategy for any problem ever anyway.

BORN AGAIN is at the edge of extremely dangerous political territory and is being extremely careful about it.

https://ew.com/jerry-o-connell-says-reb … s-11927062

Oh cool, so Trump and Ellison got to snatch up Warner Bros.  This will be great for everyone.

Trump mehh, but it's a continued problem that oligarchs like Ellison's family control more and more.  That said, beyond CNN and to some extent HBO, what even IS Warner Discovery anymore?  The studio is a wreck.  Discovery is just reality trash.

Oh cool, so Trump and Ellison got to snatch up Warner Bros.  This will be great for everyone.

Yeah, every time I saw this producer or that actor telling us how bad it would be for Netflix to buy Warners, I just wondered if they'd considered how bad it would be for Paramount to win. One MAGA techbro owning both CBS News and CNN. What's the worst that could happen? And if anyone bought that both studios would crank out more films per year than they currently are...

Will I get a refund from the old ones???

I wouldn't hole my breath.