Leaderboard

I get what youre saying and electing Trump for the first term wasn't really that surprising and hence allot of people got on board as a middle finger to the rest of politics etc. But after seeing 4 years of him and the fallout of him losing, the lawsuits, the impeachments, the criminal charges etc etc people voting him in again are fucking dumb. That being said its nearly entirely the Dem's fault. Absolute theatre.

The problem with this analysis is that people who come out with it are invariably people who lean further to the left than the nominal "left" option. The Labour Party tried an offer to people who needed it most under Jeremy Corbyn and suffered their worst defeat in decades. There has to be some realism here. People haven't voted for Trump over Harris because Harris and the Democrats weren't socialist enough. Personally, I'd love the UK to have a genuine socially democratic left-leaning offer to vote for but the evidence says that the electorate at large, in the UK and in the US, just don't have the appetite for it. Sometimes we have to step back and just admit that there's a large number of people in the US who actually like the inflammatory, faux strong-man character with undertones of white male supremacy and despotic fascism that Donald Trump plays, and that there's a bunch of low-information swing voters who see nothing beyond "my groceries are more expensive than they were 4 years ago and I'm mad about it so I'm voting for the other guy again" and a "not nice" way of describing this is calling them stupid or idiots when uninformed would be more accurate. It seems unthinkable to us very online people who find Trump's antics shocking that these people exist but go and look on Twitter to see how many Americans searched "who is Donald Trump" and "did Joe Biden drop out" and "who is Kamala Harris" on search engines over the last 48 hours to see that they exist. The Democrats have clearly made a litany of errors. Joe Biden should have dropped out much earlier and they should have had a genuine contest to determine who should have run instead, but there's no way that someone like Bernie Sanders or AOC running on a socialist agenda and promising to be the saviour of the Palestinians would have ended any better for them. Any time Labour in the UK or Democrats in the US dare to go any further to the left than they currently are, they get labelled as communist traitors by 90% of the media and the fight is over before they've begun.

America is an unfair battleground democratically, due to their policy on voter freedom. Republicans in general, but Trumps republicans especially, tend to vote based on feeling. Not any policy or real issue. So they always turn out. A larger proportion of dems need to be stimulated by policy, and won't get up to vote if what they want isn't on the table. Funnily enough, the flag waving god fearing church on sunday types that infest the red states vote like it's their god given duty. I agree with the sentiment here that the first Trump victory was kiiiiiiiiiiind of acceptable, in that he platformed on being radically different to the established order and that he was going to change everything, and was crazy enough to do it. I didn't buy it, but people are dumb, so can be excused for the 1st mishap. But none of it happened. He didn't drain the swamp, he filled it with his own invasive creatures, then regularly had to fire them. It was 4 years of riots, garbage economics that crippled the US export industry, then a call to a fascist takeover at the 11th hour of the term, which every right wing talking head (Shapiro ect) now says 'no it wasn't a fascist takeover, because the takeover never happened!'. Like the police intervening and stopping the event somehow makes it a freebie and politically inconsequential.

Do you think so? I don't. There were a lot of Democrats that were upset that they didn't have a say in who their nominee was. I think Biden should've pulled out sooner so they could've done a proper primary.

Reminder @Tommy @Azeem @Viva la FCB @nawoo @Coma @Pyfish @6666

@nudge, @Bluewolf, @Michael, @Stan, @Viva la FCB, @Tommy, @Coma, @nawoo Your weekly reminder!

I like John McDonell but this is exactly what I'm talking about. This guy was part of a Labour Party that put forward a genuine centre-left agenda that was emphatically rejected in the UK, and the US is largely more right-wing than the UK. You don't have the answers here buddy. We can all eulogise about the world we want to live in but you have to be realistic about what you can actually convince people to vote for. It's a crying shame actually that his section of the Labour Party weren't in charge in the UK for the last election because the deep unpopularity of our Conservative government is the sort of exceptional circumstance you need to get a proper centre-left party into power in countries like ours, and it's probably one of the only elections in our lifetimes that they could have won and shown people what actual progressive policies can do for them. He's right about people feeling the improvement in quality of life but again, the idea that Biden/Harris being more left-wing helping them electorally is a nonsense.

Labelling people idiots or stupid for voting that way doesn't help at all. It's what happens when the alternative doesn't do anything to help those who need it most. I think Spike in a previous post covered the reasons better than I could. Those are the reasons why you end up with people like Trump in power and the likes of Farage/Reform winning seats in the UK and probably will gain more after 5 years of Starmer's Labour here in the UK

I know America isn't great, and for a proper leftie or anyone who thinks Israel has crossed the line by about 200 million miles, etc. (okay any normal person), Harris and the Democrats aren't perfect or even particularly good, but I really don't like the "they're all shit" narrative. Harris is nowhere near as bad as Trump for the USA or the rest of the Western world at the end of the day. If you don't like her then fine, but come on, if someone offered me the choice of stubbing my toe or having my feet chopped off then my response wouldn't be "well they're both just horrible!"

@Viva la FCB, @Stan, @Michael, @Tommy, @6666, @nawoo, @nudge, @Bluewolf, @Coma Your weekly reminder!

Crazy that this clown is back in but it's the Democrats' fault for thinking they don't need to try.

I hope for an alien invasion, as in the movies they always seem to invade the US solely, that would be an upgrade

My comment was just about how you're coming back from the dead a bit in this league. I've not updated the table yet but I think you're off the bottom. Just occurred I haven't picked anything myself this weekend.

Round of 16 will be drawn this ebening at 19.15 CET. Going to update the matches. Bremen Darmstadt Regensburg - Stuttgart Bielefeld - Freiburg Leipzig - Frankfurt Köln - Hertha BSC Bayern - Leverkusen Karlsruhe - Augsburg Wolfsburg - Hoffenheim