2025 Irish Presidential Election

If he was in the US when he videoed it whats the problem? You can het weed delivered to the house using an app like a take away in MA

Thats funny…sure blinken repeatedly stated that theyre arming israel without preconditions etc. Maybe joe is working behind blinken’s back?

I don’t believe he is. What I am suggesting is that we rarely fully know in the moment the goings on, negotiations, and discussions regarding delicate matters, especially around politics and war.

Biden is doing a reasonable job domestically by the standards of a normal US President. But these are not normal times, they’re the most consequential times since FDR was in office. Biden’s presidency is pretty much the last chance for the world to avoid Trump bringing the whole house down by getting back in next year and moving the US to being a pro-Russia fascist cesspit of chaos.

There are two wars here, neither of Biden’s making. Only total irredeemable, cretinous simpletons who get their information from la la land on the right wing American INTERNET - and we have a few here, think these wars are of Biden’s making. The same idiots who accuse Biden of starting wars are the same people who if they’d been around in 1941 would have been howling for the US to stay out of World War II and would probably have accused the US of starting the Pacific War.

Biden has not been serious enough about Ukraine winning. The US is afraid of Ukraine winning.
Imagine being afraid to win in 1945. The penny just does not drop of what Russia is. This is existential for Europe for the first time since 1945. There are still idiots there who believe in a Kissinger like doctrine of two stable opposing forces being best for the world, that you need to preserve a permanent enemy. The response has not been enough and if Trump gets back in, the response is over, Ukraine and Europe gets thrown to the wolves.

With the other war, he has caved to Israel. It is not remotely enough to make tepid statements about too many civilian casualties like he is doing. Israel is torching the west by carrying out a genocide. Israel lies that it is “fighting to save western civilisation”. It is doing the very opposite. The west, most especially the US, is just letting them do it. The likelihood is Biden would not have been able to stop it even if he was firm in his language and in his actions, Israel are such monsters they’d go ahead and genocide Gaza anyway. But you cannot stand idly by and be on the wrong side of history and not suffer consequences. At least if stand up to the Israelis, you are setting yourself on the right side of history. If this is Biden’s best, it is not good enough. The consequences are the end of the post World War II western order and Trump sneaking back in on a lower turnout, a total disaster.

Sure Biden is better than Trump, a hell of a lot better, but you have to give people something to vote for, not rely on people voting against the celebrity fascist.

He hasn’t given people enough and he’s toast next year. He’ll probably win the popular vote again but he won’t win the electoral college. He has to win by at least 6-7 million in the popular vote to win that and he won’t because his core vote will shrink due to disillusionment and there are also a host of spoiler candidates lining up for Trump.

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In fairness to @Tierneevin1979 , no-one could have forseen what an absolute diabolical disaster Joe’s presidency would turn into

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I agree with all of that.

I think Biden’s biggest predicament electorally is the very recent alarm bells sounding that a swathe of young Americans will not vote for him unless he stands up for the people of Palestine, and if he puts major pressure on Bibi, it could give the GOP the perfect ammunition to nail him hard enough for Trump to win. It’s very dicey, and terrible timing. I believe Biden will win the electoral college. It’s whether Trump’s bebops and rocksteadys can conjure enough political dark art to swing the vote that could change that. I don’t think Trump’s campaign will attract the calibre of best minds that were available to him in '16, as most would be afraid of the consequences to their reputations and finances, in the aftermath.

The entire Republican party and US right wing eco-system will fall in in lockstep behind Trump and they’re far better at putting on a united front than the uneasy coalition which should be in favour of Biden/the Democrats are.

Israel’s genocide is a wedge issue. Wedge issues only exist on the non-fascist side because principles only exist outside of fascism, fascism has no principles, it’s about power and power only.

Biden was getting slaughtered whatever he did. If he was seen to “not support Israel enough”, he would have been facing the entirety of the morally bankrupt pro-Israel media and trollbot machine in the US and would lose a large swathes of Jewish votes. As it is he’s going to lose younger left-wing voters. He’s counting that there are less of the latter to lose than the former, and he’s probably right, but he’s still on the wrong side of history. You’re far better off being on the right side of history by taking a stand which is moral.

I don’t see him winning Georgia again, the margins are way too tight.

Michigan looks dicey.

Wisconsin looks I think like it might hold but for how long.

He might hold Arizona and Nevada but you don’t know.

Pennsylvania is the real big one and I can see that one going.

So many jews now compared to before are aghast at Netanyahu’s tactics. I was reading submissions recently on the topic in a floridian newspaper which add to my belief in a significant shift, although every submission from jewish readers rallied against Trump. I believe that the bond between Biden and Carter will swing Georgia for him, but just. Those important states will be dicey, and they can’t leave anything to chance. I would guess that the Dems will have a few bombshells about Trump ready to roll out between his election as GOP candidate and the Presidential elections, that will be aimed at the moderates within the GOP and the undecideds. I see RFK Jr has been bestowed by serious financial backing for his run. The 3rd party candidates could decide the future of the world, and every one of them has their agenda. RFK Jr is angry at the Dems making him a point of ridicule, Cheney if she runs is angry at the GOP. Almost too many avenues to watch.

Won’t be a Carter factor in Georgia, it’s 43 years since he was president and American politics is vastly different from then. The Democrats being organised on the ground is the only thing that can possibly save them there.

There are no “bombshells” that can come out about Trump at this stage. I think Kennedy will take more votes from Biden than from Trump and he will definitely act as a surrogate for Trump. Jill Stein (who is 100% a Putin asset) and possibly Joe Manchin will also be spoilers.

Liz Cheney would be as well not to bother, there is no market for her in today’s Republican party or anywhere really and she won’t take any votes from Trump, and might take a few from Biden.

Only a sort of simultaneous dawning on the American public that they don’t want this shit again except worse (maybe a little bit similar to to how there was a sudden “oh no” dawning in Ireland when Fianna Fail hit 32% in pre-2020 General Election poll) can save Biden.

I don’t believe that the structural factors in the information landscape which historically tend to benefit incumbents apply this time. The information landscape is fucking wild now in a way that it wasn’t remotely close to in say, 2012.

Hard to work out if joe is guardrailing the peace or guardrailing the genocide

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I wouldn’t entirely bank on that. He might not have had been viewed to have been an effective president, but his work post presidency probably was the finest of all elected to the post. There’s a great pride amongst Georgians across the divide in Carter, and his recently deceased wife and I feel that too many Georgia republicans and undecideds know that Trump doesn’t represent them, or understand their plight. We’ll see. The hate towards Fani Willis, will mobilise young black voters I believe, who many still have a huge respect for the part the black panthers played in African American history. I think it’ll be tight.

The online infowars is extreme. I would be delighted if Twitter folded and shut it’s doors, as many who were there before it devolved into a racist cesspit are being poisoned by misinformation and disinformation, to the increasing peril of our democracies.

If Trump wins next year, which is entirely possible, it will be a result of Democrats shooting themselves in the foot like 2016. In 2016 it was Hillary’s “deplorables” comment which didn’t sit well in middle America. What a lot of outsiders don’t understand about America is the partisanship on display on TV is mostly an urban coastal thing and in the inland states most people are conservative regardless of which way they vote. Anyone who’s spent time in the midwest would know that the vast vast majority of people wouldn’t regard their neighbors as deplorables whether Democrat, Republican or Independent. If you called someone a Nazi there you would get laid out, could well be by a Democrat.

This rime round Trump is being made into a martyr, the efforts to jail him or at least knock him out of the race are ridiculously transparent. The New York case a prime example, an activist Prosecutor who ran on a campaign of “getting” Trump. Her entire case is that Trump defrauded banks by lying about property values to get loans. Leaving aside that every developer does it and none get prosecuted, the very banks that Trump got loans from have testified that they were fine with Trump and the loans. Now she’s trying to win the case on social media, posting daily about Trump’s guilt (is that appropriate during a trial?), I know it’s New York and heavily liberal but the jury will have a mix of liberals and conservatives so no way imo he gets convicted.

And that will be a huge win for him: “the mad leftists infleunced the DOJ to go after me, but the people rejected them”. Another huge win are the Hunter Biden charges, that ad of Biden lying at the 2020 debate will be played incessantly between now and the election. Makes it harder to sell the Trump is a liar (he is, pathologically) and can’t be trusted (he can’t) line when your own candidate is shown to be the same.

It’ll come down to the economy though as always. Israel will likely not be an issue by Novermber 2024 other than somewhat reducing the younger Democratic vote.

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Isn’t it desperate altogether that Musk allows conservative voices on Twitter to balance liberal voices? Yes there are batshit nutters on both sides, but thats the price of free speech. Racism isn’t just an issue of the far right, I only follow sciencey types of there, but some of the pro Hamas posts I’ve seen pop up are horrendous. The whole notion of Israelis being “white” colonial settlers is such absolute racist ignorance, the racial background and spectrum of Israelis is identical to Palestinians in terms of ethnic and colour range, not to speak of the fact that almost all Jews who migrated to Israel after 1948 were refugees. From an actual holocausts and several genocides.

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Carter was the best president of my lifetime (not that I remember him being in the post) and unquestionably the finest post-president ever. He’s one of the few genuinely decent men elected to the post and a relic of a time when white people in America had the ability to use their Christianity to inform their worldview positively rather than as an excuse to climb down a rabbit hole of paranoia and hate.

Georgia is trending Democratic, and if American democracy still exists in the future it will go like Virginia is and become a fairly reliable Democratic state, but it isn’t there yet, the margins there are still Fermanagh South Tyrone like. Even a tiny of a tenth of a percentage point will swing it swing it back Trump’s way.

To what extent abortion is still an issue in 2024 is key for Democrats. But my feeling is that it will drift away as an issue in all but the states Republicans are guaranteed to win anyway.

Twitter is an absolute cesspit now because Musk bought it to make it an absolute cesspit. But Twitter is also a document of history. Palestinians are documenting the final days of their lives in the same way Ukrainians did. That’s actual real history and if it shuts down, that’s erased. Fascists like the erasure of real history and its replacement with fake history. The age old tactic of right wing elites is to take control of something of public value, run it down, corrupt it, hobble it so that people perceive it to be of less value, and no longer deem it worth preserving. That’s what Musk has done with the full backing of an axis of global kleptocrats. So much the better if they can keep it going as a firehose of far right propaganda and steadily run left wingers and liberals and non-headbangers off it. Inertia is keeping a lot of people on it though, which works for the Republicans too as those people (me included) are keeping it going, losing the propaganda game but stopping a proper competitor from emerging.

I keep saying but people dramatically underestimate the effect the internet has had on shaping public discourse towards the awful. However bad people think it is, it’s way, way worse.

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Anyway, back on topic.

@Cheasty when is the last time someone with a seriously thick working class Dublin accent like KKKOnor held a public role of any importance, ceremonial or otherwise? A POWER RANKINGS of same would be welcome.

Tony Gregory the closest surely?

A fella on here actually said he’d vote for him

Off the top pf my head Lynn Ruane, Gino Kenny, Brid Smith, Louise O Reilly.

Doesn’t happen. It’s part of the reason Stephen Kenny failed. If you have a thick Dublin accent (wha’?) you aren’t taken seriously.

You can get away with an ould’ stock Dublin accent as in a Kevin Heffernan type accent because it sounds respectable. Colm McCarthy the economist has one of these, as well as being a dead ringer for Kevin Heffernan.

The rules for McGregor would be different though because he’d be running as a deplorable.

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Of those only Louise O’Reilly has a position of any sort of importance and her accent is more trade union Dublin than League Of Ireland or Hill 16. There are major nuances which mightn’t be apparent to outsiders which make a massive difference.

The key factor is pronunciation of your Ts at the end of words.

McGregor’s accent isn’t a pure Dublin accent, or it has evolved into not being a pure Dublin accent, it has evolved into being some sort of grotesque mongrel with a hint of fake American rapper and a hint of fake spiv Cockney businessman.