2d ago

Only The Best People

208 comments

It didn't take Trump to make this real for me.
I remember how our country treated Muslims after 9/11. I remember how we treated people with AIDS and HIV when I was little. Right now I'm watching Nazi salutes on national TV and no one's getting punched even though the room is packed with the supposed opposition, and the people who consider themselves progressive are unironically enjoying people's families inability to afford food staples.
- Progressives are becoming more radical as a response to right wing extremism.
  I was raised republican and was completely caught up in their propaganda. During that time I would've let you starve to death while holding food if I was told you were part of the 'bad' group. You need to treat Republicans as the dangerous entity they are, don't bother being empathetic, they won't ever reciprocate.
  
  don’t bother being empathetic, they won’t ever reciprocate.
  If your statement is true, then you are evidence that we need to at least leave the door open to allow people who come to their senses a path to redemption.
  
  You're not wrong but they have to be the ones to take the first step. If they don't want to we can't force them and we don't have time for that nonsense anymore. There should be Redemption paths but if someone's just awful that's their problem and we have to defeat them
  
  Could not agree more.
  
  The 'progressives' who voted Democrat remind me of abusers who punched their SO in the face and then got angry that they broke their hand.
  For four years the vast majority of voters got poorer. Then, they ran Biden knowing his brain wasn't working and when he embarrassed them, they crowned a weak candidate who looked at all of these poorer people and said she'd change absolutely nothing. Even worse, she told them to be joyful about it. Just absolute political stupidity.
  Trump did not broaden his coalition on extremism. He broadened it on Democrats' political priority to give more money to the rich at the expense of the poor. It's just stupid politically to be seen rooting for people's misery, because those votes are ripe for the picking thanks to Trump's unilateral wrecking of the economy.
  The message shouldn't be: "Your vote was stupid and we hate you." It should be: "Hey, there's an election next year, and if you vote for us we'll fucking stop this shit." (Granted, that's hard to believe watching Schumer and co do nothing, but that's still the message they need to run with.
  
  Voting democrat was still the lesser evil. The fault is with those in charge of the Democratic party, not their voters.
  
  Yes, and I'm disgusted by people who threw their vote away or refused to vote blue over genocide despite the fact that things were clearly going to get worse under Trump. We've had this argument before and I'm not going to waste my time on it again.
  
  or refused to vote blue over genocide
  In 2024, 155mn people voted, while 88mn didn't out of the entire 243 mn eligible voting population.
  Of that, 77 mn voted R, 75 mn voted D, and 3 mn voted 3rd party.
  In 2020, 158 mn people voted, while 79 mn didn't out of the entire 238 mn eligible voting population.
  Of that, 81 mn voted D, 74 mn voted R, and 3 mn voted 3rd party.
  Your claim is that the Uncommitted Movement had an impact in 2024 on the outcome of the election.
  Wikipedia says that the movement got 700k votes. If we look to Ballotpedia, the Green Party received ~860k while the PSL received ~165k, meaning we can pretty much say those two parties captured the Uncommitted Movement's voting block. That's a total ~1 mn voters.
  But JFK received ~760k votes in 2024 because he didn't file to leave the election before endorsing Trump. And the Libertarians which I doubt have any affiliation with the Uncommitted Movement received ~650k. That's a total ~1.4 mn voters.
  The 3rd party vote didn't make or break this election. You can see that in how many people voted 3rd party in 2024 compared to 2020 despite the voting population increasing.
  No, I reject your claim. The Democrats lost 6 mn voters in 2024, and failed to capture the eligible voting population. This wasn't the fault of people who give a shit about genocide.
  Keep telling yourself that though while the Do Nothing Democrats roll over at every chance they get to aid and abet our fascist regime.
  
  Your claim is that the Uncommitted Movement had an impact in 2024 on the outcome of the election.
  No, I didn't say that. I said that I'm disgusted by people who sat out.
  
  You just said:
  I said that I'm disgusted by people who sat out.
  Your original post which I commented on said this:
  Yes, and I'm disgusted by people who threw their vote away or refused to vote blue over genocide
  Which is it?
  The Uncommitted Movement was ~700k strong. Even if we assume the entire voting block didn't cast ballots in 2024, meaning I don't count them in the Green Party/PSL group, the impact of that would still only be less than 1 mn, which RFK and Libertarians similarly drew for their causes. It's a rounding error whether or not they contributed to the outcome or not.
  The real problem is why more people either 1) changed parties or 2) didn't vote in 2024 when they did in 2020. Perhaps COVID had an effect in 2020, perhaps tightened voting laws had an effect in 2024, perhaps Democrats have now become Republican-lite, perhaps shit just sucks and there's no time when people need to work.
  It is a politician's job to think about these things and determine a strategy best suited to acquiring power. If politicians don't do that, they lose races.
  
  They are the same thing. Your reading comprehension needs work.
  
  Ok, here we go:
  I'm disgusted by people who threw their vote away
  Throwing their vote away = not voting.
  or refused to vote blue over genocide
  Refusing to vote blue != not voting
  Refusing to vote blue = vote red, green, PSL, RFK, literally anything else
  Are we arriving at the issue at hand finally?
  Your reading comprehension needs work.
  Annnd classic troll move by resorting to insults instead of facts and claims at hand. How big of a waste of time you've been
  Edit:
  Unless you mean that both people that didn't vote nor voted blue are disgusting to you, in which case whatever. Personal sentiments can't fix hard facts. The more liberals like you cope, the more you'll lose elections.
  
  I stated clearly at the beginning that I wasn't interested in arguing over my personal opinion. You're the one wasting your own time.
  
  things were clearly going to get worse under Trump
  It's not reasonable to blame people for voting for change when the Democrats did nothing meaningful about poverty for four years and then blamed poor people for being angry about it. The 2024 election was simple cause-and-effect.
  That's what partisan Democrats don't get. We were already at 'things got worse', and it happened under Biden.
  
  It is incredibly stupid to value "change" on its own as a key metric. Some changes are good, some are bad, and some are mixed.
  It's like saying "I want to go fast" without specifying a direction. You want to get from NYC to Boston and on foot is too slow? Get on this jet, it's a change of speed. Except the jet is going to LA. But it was a change!
  
  In an insanely propagandistic Media environment (both sides: notice the New Tork Times coverage of the Gaza Genocide) you're going to get lots of people who aren't above average educated types with high political awareness trying to gut feel their way into "who are the ones who lie the least" by going for the kind of discourse that sounds the least like the style of propaganda of the last couple of decades, and right now the "not the usual liar politician sounding" was the "populist strongman" because the trafitional media's propaganda has been slick highly-educated technocrat style for years.
  Further you can't really start from your own "predisposed to believe that Democrats are truthful in what they say" point of view when trying to understand people who are not aligned with either "tribe" and for whom neither side is assumed honest so they're trying to figure out which one is less dishonest (or just think "they're all liars" and won't vote).
  (I see the exact same issue with the members of the small leftwing party I'm a member of in my own country - they simply don't get it that most people don't just presume like them that the words of the party leaders are honest and those of other party leaders are dishonest)
  I think the point the OP was making was that the Democrat leadership didn't even try to sound more believable to sway such people - they just kept on saying the usual things in the very same style as the propaganda of the last 2 decades thus sounding the same, whilst the Republican changed their discourse style so even though they lied even more than before, they sounded "not the usual lies" for some of the people trying to "gut feel" their way around politics coming from a non-aligned standpoint.
  The nicest possible interpretation is that the Democrat leadership are guilty of massive incompetence.
  
  This makes a kind of sense. If you assume they're not listening to any of the words, but just the tone, then I guess that might explain things. But I don't want to think so many people are acting like literal dogs.
  
  Picture this:
  Several people are telling you a story, and they're all slightly different versions of supposedly the same story.
  You can't actually interrogate any of them or even talk to them, you can only listen to whatever story they chose to tell you.
  You can either chose one story or no story at all. You cannot chose more than one story.
  Each of them would gain something if you chose their story.
  You don't really know any of them personally, hence have no predisposition for trusting the story of one over that of the others or even know for sure that at least on of the stories is the true (i.e. they could all be lying to you).
  This is the position of a non-aligned voter in present day politics.
  In such a situation, people will either just go "I chose no story" (i.e. "all politicians are liars") or try and figure out who is the most trustworthy of those telling the stories, via indirect things (remember, people can't even directly speak with, much less interrogate the story tellers), so they will try and gauge a storyteller's trustworthiness based on how they talk, their posture and expression, the format of their storytelling, things they know about them outside the storytelling and so on and as part of that they will for example be less likely to trust those who look like or sound like previous story tellers who later turned out to be deceitful or even lying (and the more in the past they've been exposed to a certain type of story teller that turned out to be deceitfull, the least likely they will be to believe that story telling style).
  It's this dynamic in choosing who to trust that modern populists like Trump are exploiting.
  Curiously at other points in Time, after a period when the populists were in power fucking things up, the same dynamic worked to help the serious sounding highly educated style of storytelling gain power from the populists - at a high level and over longer periods (decades), the process is actually an oscillating system.
  
  The first and last points are flawed, though.
  Several people are telling you a story, and they’re all slightly different versions of supposedly the same story.
  Sometimes the issues are like "We should ban books" vs "We shouldn't ban books". They're not slightly different so much as opposites. For something like "income tax should stop at 40% vs 80%" sure, but a lot of what's on the table now is not that nuanced.
  Which leads me to
  You don’t really know any of them personally, hence have no predisposition for trusting the story of one over that of the others or even know for sure that at least on of the stories is the true (i.e. they could all be lying to you).
  This implies that information and truth is unknowable. That you can't open up wikipedia, click through to sources, read a book. You shouldn't have to go solely on "does their body language seem confident?". This is supposed to be the information age!
  But I guess a lot of people cannot read well, and certainly don't know how to determine what's a good source and what's not. I've seen people just go by some youtube video some nobody made and... oh, I see the problem. If you assume everyone and everything is just as credible as anything else, even some pseudonymous youtube video, knowing anything becomes dubious. Maybe this is why you have "Four dozen studies from nineteen universities have shown human activity is contributing to climate change" -> "well, CoolDog420 on their youtube channel said it's just because the sun is having PMS, and I like his videos."
  That assumption that all things are equally credible is really bad. In college I took an intro to journalism course as an elective, and one of our first assignments was to go through a list of sources and determine which ones were good and which were not. Some were partisan think tanks, some were actually satire, some were real. It was a good exercise. Some students got taken in by all of it, and I think benefited from the professor walking them through how to investigate.
  This is probably all downstream from under-investing (or outright sabotaging) public education.
  I don't know how to fix this.
  
  Hitler junior was change so just let Hitler junior rule the country? That's pretty stupid, my friend.
  
  That's how it works when your guy lets the majority of the country become significantly poorer. They care less about where the change comes from.
  It's not stupid. It's cause-and-effect, specifically, what you get when you vote blue no matter who.
  
  It is reasonable, because of what change meant in this scenario.
- Don't forget hundreds of years of ongoing slavery and genocide.
  
  Or as Southerners call it "The Good Old Days".
  When they say "Make America Great Again", they have a very specific time in mind.
- I grew up in these toxic conservative cultures. It became very clear to me at a young age that there was something deeply wrong with them. I've heard exactly what they talk about when they only think that the people in their fucked up tribes are listening.
  These aren't potential allies to reach out to. They are enemies to overcome.
- Yeah, the aftermath of 9/11 was shocking to me as well and, in many cases, deplorable. The use of the terms "sand n-word" and things like "rag-head" were flying around all over (at least in my part of Ohio), Sikhs and others were getting targeted by racists, and the whole thing was such a surreal time.
  The small town I grew up in did have a fair amount of anti-semitism (uncool things were referred to by some as "that's Jewish") and I'm sure I heard slurs around that as well. I didn't expect the big, farther-left cities to descend into that.

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