Six years ago I watched a certain movie and had some opinions about it. I, as I am occasionally known to do, put those opinions on the interwebs for other humans to see. That post is still the number one Google result if you search for the words “Snowpiercer stupid,” and is, somehow, still my highest-traffic regular post on a day-to-day basis:
You may be aware that they have decided to make a television program out of this very silly movie, and that that television program is currently airing, which is responsible for the current surge in pageviews– the post never died; there has been one day since 2015 where it didn’t get any views at all– but I’m not used to it being back up to having three-figure days again.
So here’s the question: do I watch the show? I’m not actually interested in watching the show, but I’m willing to do it for science, if the Internet wants me to.
So, uh, let me know?
3:54 PM, Wednesday May 20: 1,539,633 confirmed cases and 92,712 American deaths.
So here’s the thing: it is impossible– completely, flatly impossible– to get the Democratic nomination without substantial support from the African-American community, and in particular without support from black women. Go ahead, if you like, and look through my posts about the 2016 primary: you will discover, as I quickly did, that one of the reasons Hillary Clinton’s nomination was damn near inevitable after a while was that Bernie reliably lost any state that had fewer than (if I remember right) 60% or so white voters. The only exception to this rule was Hawai’i, which is heavily nonwhite but is heavily Asian and Pacific Islander and not so much as black and Latino as the rest of the country.
It’s no secret that Buttigieg’s base is well-off white liberals. This is not, in and of itself, bad– that was actually Obama’s base when he started his presidential run too, and look how that turned out. But while Obama definitely had to convince black voters of his viability, he was never literally polling at zero percent with them. Pete is, at least in South Carolina, and I suspect in a whole lot of Super Tuesday states as well.
(Don’t bother arguing with me about this. No body cam means the cop is guilty. If I end up sitting on the jury you can talk to me about bias. Until then, fuck this guy. Cops lie, and I am going to be 100% on the side of the dead people for the foreseeable future until America’s police forces clean house.)
So Pete’s done. It’s all over but the shouting at this point. Much like Sanders, his path to the nomination is basically closed without black support and statistically speaking he doesn’t have any. I do not, at this point, see that changing. He hasn’t put in the work and he keeps shooting himself in the foot.
What about Biden?
Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabadoo is currently commanding the lion’s share of the black vote, much like he’s commanding the lion’s share of the polling in general. I went on a tear trying to find a Biden supporter yesterday and eventually managed to find one person who admitted after two tweets that he was her #1 choice but she couldn’t name anyone else running as a Dem.
I’m not actually criticizing this person. There’s a long goddamn time until any voting starts, and frankly it’s probably smarter to tune all of the nonsense out right now. No grief from me about this. But it really makes me wonder how soft Biden’s support actually is. And he spent yesterday saying all sorts of nice things about segregationists and how they never called him “boy.”
This is what I meant, yesterday, when I said that Biden has done his level best since deciding to run trying to erase any goodwill I ever felt for him. We can’t just Kumbaya our way to governance, no, we have to choose some of the worst possible examples we possibly can of literally evil Senators who he got along with just fine. The man has the instincts of a headless turkey and given that he’s run for office several times before on his own and never gotten close to the nomination I have to feel like he’s going to continue fucking up and voters are going to start looking elsewhere. And if you want to fuck up your numbers with the black community, there are probably a few ways more effective than telling everybody how well you got along with people who praised Emmitt Till’s murderers but you’re gonna have to work at it a bit.
The interesting question: assuming the voters do flee, where do they end up? Obviously I’d hope they end up with Harris or Warren, but anything can happen. There’s always the electability argument, which I think is mostly bullshit (Biden is polling best against the Current Occupant for the same reason he’s on top of the primary polls: everyone knows who he is) but has the advantage of being simple and truthy.
Only seventeen more months of this shit to go, y’all!
Trump will be graded on the curviest curve that ever curved at the debates. Absolutely no matter what happens at the first debate, he will be named the winner if he does not shit himself. It will be declared a tie if he actually does shit himself. They will lose interest by the second (and third, if it happens) and the debates will widen Clinton’s lead again.
Tim Kaine will humiliate the fuck out of Mike Pence at the VP debate. Sadly, it will not matter.
Pay little or no attention to the Stein and Johnson campaigns, particularly the Stein campaign, as Jill Stein is an Internet troll and not even a credible candidate by third-party standards. They will not matter. I don’t care how they’re performing on the ballot right now. The election is still a month and a half away and their numbers will drop.
There has not been a single second so far where Donald Trump was in the lead. Not one.
When in doubt, consult this image, and remember 2008 and 2012, and remember that those folks are going to show up again.
(NOTE: If you’re one of the “visits the site directly” people, this is pinned for a couple of days. Scroll down for new stuff.)
If you’re a regular reader (I’ll leave the definition of “regular” up to you; if you think you’re regular, you are) I’d really, really appreciate an answer here:
So, I was just talking with Tobias Buckell about mailing lists over on Twitter, as one does, because Twitter is a very strange place and sometimes you just have conversations with people whose books you own like it’s a perfectly normal thing. Here’s the thing: This sale is on day three and I am already powerfully tired of talking about it. I was thinking earlier today about Warren Ellis’ email mailing list, and about how lots of authors I know (by “know,” read “am aware of”) have such things, primarily because they control them and there’s no way for, say, Twitter to decide that I have to start paying them a nickel every time I want a Tweet to be potentially visible by all 5000 (!!!) of my followers.
The other thing is that, despite my apparent enthusiasm for it, I actually don’t really enjoy turning my blog into a promotion machine for my books. I feel like it’s necessary, which isn’t the same thing, but I don’t like it. This is my blog. It is for swearing. Not marketing. I’m not threatening to pull all book-related stuff from here, because that would be crazy, but I figure if I could somehow get several hundred people signed up for a mailing list, an email or two to those people might be a bit more effective than spreading promotion all over my blog, and it would certainly be easier.
So I’ve done two things tonight. I’m actually pretty happy with what the sale has done for my numbers already, so I’m gonna cut way back on promotion here and on Twitter– because I’ve sent Amazon some money to promote it themselves. I have a number of reservations about their new ads system, and I’ve seen some indications that writers don’t think it works very well, but to hell with it; it’s worth a try. I’ve targeted other books specifically: stuff by Andy Weir, John Scalzi, and Douglas Adams, mostly, with a few other geek favorites thrown in. It’ll run concurrently with the sale until the sale is over or my budget runs out, whichever comes first. We’ll see if anything changes.
Here’s the second thing. My first poll!
To be clear: The mailing list’s primary reason for existence would be promotion, and its use would be– I cannot stress this enough– minimal. I mean, it’ll ramp up around when the new book comes out, or when there are sales, but I can’t imagine more than a couple of mailings a month at the most.
The election was always going to tighten. It’s in between the conventions and the debates. The natural impulse is to revert to the mean.
