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I cant believe how dysfunctional the us has become.
You actually voted for the biggest asshole and a retard to become president. He was wildly incompetent to the surprise of nobody. The country became a laughing stock. Secrets were leaked, justice compromised (even further), he attempted a literal coup. No, lets vote for him again.
We knew americans were dumb, but holy fuck. You need someone to protect you from yourselves because clearly your government is as caring as it is in russia. The entire population should be institutionalized.
If you think voting for literal idiots is an American thing you really haven't been paying attention.
Boris Johnson, Victor Orban, ...
Milorad Dodik (more like No-dick), even
Trump really beats all those examples.
Rage bait
Def. But the xenophobia and superiority complex on lemmy is outta pocket, tbh.
I see this take often and I see the same kinds of responses, but it's really upsetting to see the main culprit is never mentioned.
Yes, some of us are just hateful, but most of the people voting for Trump are exposed to and consume wayyyyy too much propaganda.
Our media has failed us in sooooo many ways all to chase the Almighty Dollar™. We have literal entertainment networks masquerading as "News" because they're allowed to act however they wish. We have actual "news" corporations acting like entertainment. We have Fox News and Newsmax straight up fabricating a reality for their consumers that is almost exactly the opposite of reality, and then we have CNN, MSNBC, etc, that would rather follow The Days Of Our Trumps T.V drama as opposed to actually doing hard news.
We have 1/3 of our population living in a fantasy reality, 1/3 being made to be enraged about an orange man's dumb tweet instead of learning about potentially good candidates to vote for, and 1/3 that's just apathetic to it all.
We have a gigantic media propaganda problem... We have no real press that the 1st amendment was made to protect, instead we have corporations that are taking advantage of those protections to do whatever they want to make the most money, to hell with what happens to the country...
Edit: all that to say, the people that we see as "OMG how could you possibly vote for him again, are you a monster?" Think "Trump was the best president ever, every news show or podcast or Facebook interaction I have had or watched says as much and proves it."
You should probably be aware that the cheeto never won a majority vote in America. Our democratic system is broken to the core though, and there is basically no way to fix it which is why he still won.
Along with that a good chunk, possibly majority of Americans is already more decent than you because we don't use dehumanizing insults like the R word.
Several states have even proposed banning him from the ballot for his coup attempt, including mine. Unfortunately they are being tossed out, probably by judges that he put in power.
I think you would be surprised at how little power Americans actually have to affect change in our government. Short of dragging our knuckles and starting some uprising like his goons did, change can't happen, and I'm not one to resort to that. I'd sooner head to Canada or Mexico.
It's hilarious for all the "democracy" the US loves to "export", it actually has a pretty terrible democracy. Wildly popular policies have no way to make their way to the government unless a rich person or corporation also lobbies for it.
Change would happen if 74 million Americans would grow a second brain cell and stop voting republican. If democrats were the only party winning elections, people would be more willing to participate in primaries or vote for a third party
Our democratic system is broken to the core though, and there is basically no way to fix it which is why he still won.
The biggest fixable issue is the whole thing where all electoral votes in most states go to one candidate. That is a thing that is fixable. Because that is a matter of state law. The problem being of course that most states don't want to change that, because for most states it would mean less attention from presidential candidates because they'd be playing less of a role in determining who wins (by being worth a smaller, harder to shift margin). Convince every state to switch to the way Maine and Nebraska hand out electoral votes (2 based on statewide popular vote, one for each house districts vote - states get one elector for each member of Congress this assigns electors based on who would vote for that member of Congress) and the problem is mostly fixed (everything except not being able to win the presidency by just winning California and New York by large enough margins and having an average showing elsewhere). Importantly, it's fixed in a way you don't have to get most of the states to agree with all at once to make happen.
Abolishing the electoral college outright would require a constitutional amendment and those are intentionally very hard to do. An interstate compact to functionally eliminate it by getting 270 electoral votes worth of states to agree to assign their electors based on the national popular vote rather than anything at the state level is somewhat more doable but will also be legally challenged under the doctrine that the federal government is supposed to approve any interstate compact.
Several states have even proposed banning him from the ballot for his coup attempt, including mine. Unfortunately they are being tossed out, probably by judges that he put in power.
Any judge that gives a fuck about the law and the Constitution is going to toss those out, as they are premature. He's a fuckwit that's awful in all kinds of ways, but he is still due due process. Arguing 14th Amendment Section 3 applies to Trump requires arguing he has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or given aid or comfort to an enemy. Which he probably did, but "probably" is not generally a standard we punish or restrict people over, nor do we do that without due process and the only process so far in this case is "has been investigated and formally accused".
This is one of the reasons that the Trump legal teams first and highest goal is to delay. If they delay long enough they can argue that the courts are being used as a form of electoral interference and possibly give Trump an election boost, if they delay even longer and he wins they can argue executive immunity. Because that's the path with the best odds for Trump - he's much better at manipulating crowds than at lying to judges.
Once again pointing out that Trump never won the popular vote. Yes, we need to abolish the Electoral College. It favors the right wing unjustly and undermines the will of the people when it does not align with the popular vote.
Lots of people voted for him, yes. I'll make the argument that things will actually get better as the folks whose cognitive abilities are negatively impacted by a century of burning leaded gasoline start to die off.
I believe it's something like >95% of people born between 1945 and 1965 that have enough lead in their bodies to be cause for concern.Can't remember exactly where I read this, but you can do your own Google-Fu.Striking those last couple sentences and just outright saying that over 90% of the entire population born between 1956 and 1976 were exposed to enough lead to raise medical concern in early childhood, according to the table below.
I'm also back to throw in the table/material I'm referencing. If I'm going to make assertions, I should back them up.
And the source: Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood
If you want some idea of how little we cared about lead exposure, just look up the Tar Creek Superfund Site., which turned three nearby populated areas into ghost towns. It's been reported that children would play on the enormous mounds around Picher, Oklahoma, and those things were covered in lead dust.
It was always that bad, it was just better at hiding it in the past. Anyone who grows up poor has always known what's up. There's a reason the crooked rural sheriff meme exists... If it wasn't for massive amounts of racism folks would probably recognize the same patterns in the cities.
It's not new, it's just that the dysfunction got so big that it started impacting the lives of white Liberals. Fuck, go read about native history in the US. They knew what was up from the beginning.
Should... Should we bring democracy to the US by invading them?
Britain did brexit and a bunch of other countries elected right wing nut jobs in response to globalization, not just the us
Fuck off with the "all Americans" garbage you fucking idiot. I don't even care that it's obviously bait, anyone who ever implies I voted for that can just end themselves for all I care. Suffering through this shit then being blamed by brainless retards
Liberals: we need drastic change
Also liberals: how dare someone step out of line
Huh?
Nope. There's nothing special about Americans just like there's nothing special about any nation or large group of people. You have to be deeply ignorant of history to think otherwise. We're all the same species and when things play out in specific ways it's always for a similar set of reasons and circumstances.
As Dan Carlin would say, "it's a human thing." You think this kind of insanity can't happen in your country because it hasn't yet. But you're wrong. It can and has happened, many many times throughout history, in various forms, all over the world.
Again, Americans aren't special and you have to be deeply stupid and/or ignorant to think otherwise.
Wouldn't happen in my country. 🇨🇭
cough SVP cough
They are just farm boomers or paradenplatz bankdad boomers. They will disappear with time, I don't worry to much.
Also : Direct democracy and no président.
Maybe not now, but that's not the point. The point is that we're all human beings and what history shows us again and again is that as a species we are capable of talking ourselves into group-level insanity.
There's nothing about history that should lead anyone to imagine that the capacity for group-insanity is somehow unique to any so-called "race" or national identity.
If you really want to argue that Americans are somehow uniquely subject to such things, you then have to account for the fact that a plurality of Americans are directly descended from European ancestry which in turn means that any difference has to be cultural as opposed to some kind of genetic quality innate to Americans.
The upshot here is not that the US is somehow unique, but is rather that the US is precisely what happens when Europeans take over a brand new continent peopled by civilizations that lack the technology and microbiology to resist.
Again, this idea of yours, that Americans are somehow unique or special, is patently absurd given what we know of history.
I'm surprised Americans don't wear padded helmets all the time, seeing as how much they ram their heads into walls.
Aww, bless your heart.