Conservative Americans are legitimately braindead
Excerpt from this Substack post: https://nickrafter.substack.com/p/the-rent-may-always-be-too-damn-high
Syndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
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166 replies
Everyone loves socialism, except for the word itself.
Yeah, for most people politics is like the winter Olympics. They genuinely have no idea what's going on unless it's repeated ad nauseam over and over again or it gets slipped into some other media they're consuming.
They're also terrible at spotting what's fake or untrue.
It was fine when during their evening tv watch they got commercial promos for the top evening news stories each ad break, but those days are gone.
Goebbels, in essence: “If you want to make it in propaganda, you have to repeat the same trite phrases over and over again, no matter whether intellectuals contradict you and refute you. You convince scholars with clever arguments, and the masses with simple ones.”
It's not a small feat when it does feel like every fucking person on TV is lying to you constantly.
From NPR to the Houston Chronicle to BBC News One to the Joe Rogan Podcast, it's just mountains of bullshit and lies and jingoism and native advertising.
Go back 30 years, and you still had this shit. It was just pitched to the Median Voter rather than some rarified hot house of partisans.
You still had John Stossel with his crypto-libertarian bullshit and Tucker Carlson screaming at James Carville on Crossfire, but always over something totally incidental. People like Rush Limbaugh and Rachael Maddow hadn't quite gone mainstream yet. Jon Stewart was confined to the back corners of a cable news comedy channel. FOX (the whole damned network, not just the news channel) was just getting off the ground.
Everyone agreed gay people shouldn't get married, but women should be allowed to hold a credit card.
Everyone agreed Iraq had WMDs and Cuba is being run into the ground by Nazi Communist Fidel Castro and China is a backwards hellhole where Tianamen Square happens twice a day.
Now you've got Controversy as the focus of news rather than Consensus. So if CNN says the sun rises in the East, Newsmax will bring on Laura Loomer to tell people the CNN anchor rapes puppies, so don't believe them. And if the WSJ says the economy is booming, sixteen podcasters will release episodes about how we're a decade into the New Great Depression You Just Don't Know About.
People believe crazy shit because there is no consensus reality anymore.
Because lying gets more attention than the truth and we live in an attention based economy. Human attention is now the commodity that every tech overlord is fighting over and they amplify the influencers that get the most eyeballs and earballs hoping their platform will be at the top. That means the most unscrupulous and bombastic liars are shoved in our faces because those are the ones that rally engagement from both fans and haters. You can farm more engagement by being a piece of shit than by being a smart, interesting, or good person. Also, the media is totally complicit in this and will happily prop up these schmuck podcasters by tirelessly writing articles criticizing them. They cannot help but participate in the meaningless twitter feuds and gotcha online culture because that's what most people consume.
Not just American.
Have you seen the news of the Italian 4 year old girl who died from diphtheiria, a disease for which there has long been a vaccine (mandatory in Italy, even) and which hadn't been seen in that country for more than 3 decades due to vaccination, but her parents thought that vaccine gave autism to that kid's cousin so didn't got her vaccinated.
Curiously, the mentioned vaccinated cousin also got infected and survived.
A young child literally died because her parents were gullible braindead morons who (doubtless via Social Media) got fed the same shit that's fed to American braindead morons and actually believed that even though it originates from a country which is a postcard for Idiocracy.
Well, guess they did indeed made sure their child won't ever have autism ...
(All this shit makes me so fucking furious!)
This vaccines giving autism shit all because of facebook.
It is impressive how people don't question their own assumptions and beliefs.
They just believe that socialist support making things more expensive. They don't even know what that statement means. It's just a = b and that's it.
So the way to make them vote for socialists is to talk about costs. Looks like an easy win.
That, and just say what you're going to do, rather than labelling yourself.
I always think of taking the angle of "people can call me whatever they like but I stand for these principles -" is always the right approach. Labels are much easier to subvert in people's minds than actual plans of action.
Well, it seems like the propaganda and defunding schools worked as intended. These are the vote-cattle the right are working towards.
Don't take this badly, but in my experience, formal Education doesn't teach people Skepticism (the real deal, not the Denialism that morons have whilst thinking they're being "skeptics"). It also doesn't at all train people to be self-aware and spot when it's an emotion (fear, wanting to belong, even hope) making them want to believe something rather than cold hard logic.
My formal Education is in Science and Engineering, and whilst education in those areas does push you more towards a more analytical kind of thinking and an as objective as possible measuring of things, most higher education out there is in soft "sciences" at best, or even just the kind of domains were the main required expertise is in convincing people, so the very opposite of being as Objective and Logical as possible.
From my observations even some people with higher education in a Sciences or Engineering domain are gullible cattle when it comes to politics, mainly because they don't engage it with logic and the way of thinking they use in their professional life, but rather with tribalism (which is emotional) or just straight raw emotion (like anger or fear) and thus are stupidly simple to control and pretty much self-convince that whatever the propagandists want them to believe is true even when the most basic analysis of it immediatelly shows inconsistencies.
TL;DR Whilst better and more Education somewhat improves people's resilience to propaganda, even the highest levels of Education in highly objective and analytical domains won't make people immune to this shit, since people are controlled via emotional subconscious cognitive pathways, not logic, and even highly intellectual people who WANT to believe something will find some kind of seemingly "logic" explanation to conclude that which they want to believe is indeed so.
The secret hidden in this article is that talking about the cost of living, cost of groceries, cost of gas resonates across party lines stronger than any culture war distractions. The way to bring down fascism is to simply talk about how expensive things are and why there is no help.
Also to not use ANY of the conservative buzzwords they have conditioned them to hear and associate with certain things. Also don't say anything related to all their Thought Terminating Cliches.
Don't say: Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Immigrants, anything LGBTQ, anything economy, anything equality, anything related to DEI, anything they fixate on.
Instead, use actual basic terms and explanations without using the shortcut words that they have been conditioned/brainwashed with. It's a minefield, but can be done. Don't say the economy is bad, say the cost of food is very high and I wish we had better pay or cheaper prices. Don't say you want democratic socialism, say it would be great if medical costs were fair and we had more help with everyday things we all want and need.
For all of Trump's bullshit I credit his grade 3 level speaking with most of his success.
The man speaks like an adult talking to a 5 year old (intentionally or not) and the American electorate responds to that.
The man speaks like
an adult talking toa [foul-mouthed] 5 year old [in need of a nap]This has been my biggest takeaway of the past ten years. The electorate wants more social democratic policies, but they are afraid of the name. Fox News has made the mention of "social" anything or "liberal" anything toxic to a not-insignificant portion of the US population, and calling these policies by their generally agreed upon designations (be it from political science, philosophy, or academia), that group will just shut it down because those words just trip something in their brains.
Anecdotal as it may be, I got my MAGA mother to agree that a single payer healthcare system was better explaining in small words what "a common sense, good system" would look like. She was totally on board. Will she vote for "Medicare for All," now? No, because "that's socialism!!!!!1!1!!1," but an identical program that got explained was "just common sense."
In the end, I've found that MAGA people fall into three camps: bigots, idiots, and the selfish. Bigots will never be reasoned with; they're there to hurt people. The selfish are too rich to benefit from any good policies. Idiots, though, can be reasoned with, but you have to reason with them in the language of a 10 year old. It sounds condescending (and to a degree it is), but it's the only way to get through to them.
It seems insane from an outsider's perspective, but I think that we could get some European-esque policies passed in the US if instead of using "normal" terms, we use super mega-deluxe 'Murican cowboy names and just play into the quirks of American culture.
Oh man, spot on.
Bigots and selfish really are both lost causes, good news is those 2 groups are a tiny fraction of the overall US population. Maybe 5-10% each. The 3rd group you named I 100% agree are idiots, but it isn't like they are idiots in all aspects. They are just politically and maybe empathetically / emotionally idiots. They fell for an absolute moron's very obvious lies and grifts. They fell for the most basic political cons. They fell for the same lies and grifts he has been doing for DECADES where he uses people and throws them under the bus at the end of their usefulness. He makes deals and doesn't pay. He gets support and doesn't hold up his end. He sells things with a promise that never comes true. Not to mention he is in the Epstein Files more than Jesus is in the Bible. Not to mention the 34 felonies. Not to mention all the bankruptcies. Not to mention all the laws he violates. Not to mention the insurrection and treason. Not to mention his corrupt ties to foreign governments and powers. Not to mention the pile of red flags with his character and behavior. AND THEY FUCKING SAW ALL THAT AND VOTED FOR HIM ANYWAY!
Yeah, in their daily lives they may be a smart farmer and know how to grow crops well, they may be a smart business person and know sales and management well, they may be a smart person and know a dozen difficult skills and be smart in many other ways.
But with politics and empathy, they are absolute bottom of the barrel, blind as a deaf bat morons and it is embarrassing to see just how gullible and dumb they are and it would be absolutely hilarious if it weren't for the fact that we have to be in the same boat as them.
Can we coin new words to mean the same things, or would fox news ruin them too fast?
Fundamentally, I think trying to shortcut and use terms to consolidate and represent a complex idea is broken.
If you have never encountered the concept or had it explained, then it's some black box. What does "I support DEI policies" mean at face value. How do you parse that sentence if you've never heard the acronym?
"It means diversity, equity, and inclusion" doesn't clarify anything. Diversity of what, specifically? Who is being included in what? How do we measure equity?
Especially for people who have been conditioned to think that you don't qualify for diversity if you're white.
The lesson isn't that we need new terms to rotate through to stay ahead of media. The lesson is we need to speak to the actual fucking meat of the matter.
Yes and no. Yes, we should explain actual policy stances without saying "this is single-payer healthcare" or "wealth redistribution" or whatever phrase causes conservatives to shutdown. However, there still needs to be a name for shorthand purposes. It's like a pronoun in language. It gets tiring fast to keep using a person's name rather than saying "she/he/they/etc." and that causes its own issues.
Ultimately, the outline of a solution I can see is to advocate for "common sense" reforms and explain them (first at a high level so anyone can get an idea and then at finer detail later on). Call the policy something 'Murica-esque that any truck driving, gun totin', farmer from Texas would get behind. Then stay as far away from what the rest of the universe calls the policy and deny that it's what the policy is. Those who know, will know and not care or roll their eyes, and the disengaged will go for it. For example, "This isn't socialized medicine! It's my own idea! The American Patriots Help Each Other Be Healthy policy!"
Repackage social democracy as "the cowboy mentality"
"Fluffy Kitty Cat calls themselves a Zorbloxianist, but that's just because they're too ashamed to say what they really are: a socialist."
Even in cases where people aren't just trying to come up with another word for socialist policies, they still get accused of being socialists. There's a whole narrative of environmentalists secretly being socialists, using the environment as a cover, there's people calling Joe Biden a socialist, etc. The Democrats have been doing everything they possibly can to avoid the label for at least the past 40 years and it just doesn't work, it's how we got into this mess in the first place.
Imo there's no shortcuts. Embrace the label, and say, "Well yes I am a socialist, and what's so bad about that? Here's what we socialists believe and why." And when they try to say socialism means this or that you can push back on it and have some credibility in terms of what socialism means because you've accepted the label. That's what Mamdani actually did, and it worked.
If you deny being a socialist, then you'll be expected to denounce it, and then the other side is free to say, "Socialism is when you eat babies" and if you try to say "That's not what socialism means" it will be met with, "Well if you're 'not a socialist' then why are you defending socialism?" And if you agree, then you're validating and strengthening the boogeyman, and if socialism is the most horrible thing ever, then it's just a question of who can look less like a socialist, which will always be the right.
I think Lewis Black said it best: "We have a party of bad ideas and a party of no ideas."
It’s the economy, stupid.
It's because of them immigrants taking our jobs, right? Like those idiots voted for Trump because he talked about lowering prices. He did the opposite, but of course they are gonna vote for him again. Can't vote for those dang socialists!
I fear people are just too dumb to ever not fall for it.
🤌Zohran Mamdani 🤌
It's crazy how the emoji made me read that with an Italian accent.
but, specifically, Brad Pitt's Italian accent from Inglourious Basterds
“Zoo ran ma’am danny”
Nailed it.
Mamdani
3rd most eyetallyan
bappa di boopy?
Mamda Nia!
I've also heard of such a "conservative" calling for the nationalisation of Google in order to save it from socialism.
...wh...what? What are the inner workings of that person's brain...
If you look at it very superficially, the "logic" is not actually that hard to follow:
As long as you're unburdened by the slightest inkling of what socialism actually is, this line of "logic" makes some sort of sense.
Because they legitimately don't know what they're saying. They're just saying "them big college-soundin' words" without any clue to their meaning.
You're giving them too much credit already
I think there was a movie called Red Zone Cuba where the moral was everyone had to give their money and businesses to the US Government in order to stop communism.
Never heard of it, but i see it has a whopping 1.6/10 on IMDB. Must be a gem.
But yes, that sounds like exactly the same sort of logic.
Ah, common clay of the new west
These are people of the land
You know... morons.
I don't know why there had to be some weird background but here's a still from the actual scene
So far west they've ended up on the East Coast again.
This is why both politicians and those who have a strong interest in politics need to chill with the jargon and labels.
People voted for Mamdani because they liked his ideas, his approach to things, not because he was a "socialist". Hell, most people, including me, aren't sure exactly what that means.
"People don't know what Socialism means" is the worst case of intentional ignorance about things that are completely understandable by people who refuse to look something up since "People in the middle east have been fighting for centuries and nobody understands why."
It also doesn't help that it seems to mean something different to everyone.
It's just someone who isn't capitalist. Or right wing. Or just doesn't agree that trans people should have rights.
groups that self label aren't exactly helpful for understanding what the label means (see german socialist party)
Pro-good anti-bad party is the future we are heading ig. Because some dude cant bother to open giant source of infornation right in his pocket.
They're all pro-good and anti-bad in their own words.
Personally as soon as somebody reduces anything to "good ones" vs "bad ones" I'm immediatelly suspicious that they're either activelly trying to swindle everybody else or they're usefully idiots parroting the shit put out by those activelly trying to swindle everybody else - almost nothing involving humans can be reduced to 2 and only 2 sides, which aren't even ranges but actual absolutes.
But realistically we can agree that reality leans left.
but the orphan crushing party is offering free bones if they win
Jargon and labels are part of the way people are controlled - simplify complex concepts down to repeatable simple words and now you can both control the meaning of such soft definintion terms (notice how the meaning of "terrorist" has been moved over time to become "against those in power") plus constant repetition breeds familiarity, thus the very same cognitive paths that transform brand-familiarity into "comfort with brand" and hence favoring it over less familiar brand, are exercised to get people to accept provided political "explanations" & "solutions" using those slogans.
That said, in my experience if you try and explain complex things to people with enough complexity and completeness for them to understand the subtleties of the subject, they switch off half way (like, I bet, plenty of people reading this post that didn't pass the first half of the first paragraph), so you have to somehow find at least simple metaphors, so not quite down reducing it to slogans but not all that far.
New political spectrum just dropped.
The political ouroboros.
I wonder how many thought they voted for this guy:
This movie was actually how I was introduced to the Israel/Palestine conflict.
And thats what Trump and fascists hate art, it's a median where story tellers convey deep nuances about dumb shit happening in the world
You're right but Zohan is a bad example because it's more Israeli propaganda than art
I think I understand the bizarre train of thought, something like:
I know rationally that running on material interests can cut through culture war bullshit, but it's funny to see how it gets rationalized when it does.
Don't forget " oh he's Italian, so he is white" was probably a decent amount of their piggish thinking
Cuomo is also white/Italian though.
Cuomo is actually an italian surname
Actually Cuomo ends with an 'o', silly Billy.
Funny thing is, there are at least a couple Middle-Eastern comedians on r/StandupComedy who made jokes about how the audience must be confused when the ‘Italian’ man on the stage starts talking about his Lebanese, Palestinian or Iranian background.
I'm sorry but if I think Italian I immediately think slightly dark skin in my mind...idk not that it matters just what I visualize
What matters is that it's the correct side of Mediterranean
It's insane that it works because these people are so dumb
I'm not going to argue they're not dumb. But I think writing people off as dumb is a dead end. Trying to educate people in mass will never work, and honestly is scary. Re-education should chill everyone's blood.
To me, it's that they don't have time to investigate further. They've adopted the R is good, and these talking points mean R mental model.
And that's a problem that has scalable solutions. Four day work weeks. National holiday for voting. Increased paid time off for vacation and sick leave. Medicare for all.
These all give people their time back. Time to think about things other than how they're feeding their kids this week.
I mean it's exactly to Republican plan as those areas controlled by the party of Idiot America, tore apart education and the ability to have any critical thinking skills. You now have generations of people who will believe anything they hear without thinking for a single beat.
It's anecdotal evidence. It's braindead to take this as a representation of conservatives.
Yeah
Most of the stupid cunts are even more hateful and even less intelligent
How do these white trash bootlickers even manage to breathe propely with th3ir "heroes" toying them around like puppets?
decades of demonizing education, attacking and undermining education by making sure it doesnt teach essential skills like critical thinking and punishing anything but blind acceptance and obedience, the abolition of the fairness doctrine to begin the locking of people into isolated information bubbles, social media and facebook that uses algorithms to maximize profits by serving inflammatory content to vulnerable people to further expand the the right wing information bubbles online with the happy little bonus of it bringing in billions of dollars and thus being a capitalistically selected for behavior of feeding innocent people into the hate machine because right wingers post more, see more ads, and click more ads, because of their constant engagement due to their constant manufactured outrage.
and, i mean, thats just the tip of the iceberg thats created these people, but I'm not gonna spend an hour highlighting every single thread in this blanket.
Republicans voting for Democrats because they don't watch Fox News and thought he was a super Republican? I hope I never runs into these weirdos.
Got the math wrong but the answer right.
This is why you gotta show your work.
Verifiable facts are a liberal conspiracy and they'll have no part of it.
Clearly the education system is getting too much funding. Somebody cut this waste.
We're already spending this much and they're still like this? Clearly it's ineffective and needs to be gotten rid of entirely.
We still have crime too, better defund the police
Exactly! I agree with you!
They're ignorant and easily duped. Trump loves the uneducated.
I could more or less say the exact same thing about the left though.
Captain Both Sides strikes again!
These people would wholeheartedly believe 2+2=5 if the Party says it.
Left and right shouldn't matter. Policy is what matters. Simple as
Well there are left wing and right wing policies. The difference is there are no good right wing policies.
There are great right wing policies for the right wing.
So only for people with shit for brains.
I don't think so. I think they are opportunists. It's not that they're dumb, it's that they're selfish.
If they were only selfish, but smart, they wouldn't be voting for politicians whose demonstrated aim is to reduce their constituents' wealth and funnel it into a class of people which their constituents have zero chance of ever joining.
No, they're dumb. They're certainly also selfish, but that's because they're dumb and can't comprehend the value of helping someone else, because the feedback loop on that mechanism has more than one step before they receive value back, and because the value received is most often in intangibles.
Let's agree that they are a) Selfish, b) Dumb.
A candidate might have hundreds of policies. Often they claim to support certain policies because they know those policies are popular, but don't have any real belief or intention to follow up on those policies.
Political parties are effectively a "brand" so that people who don't have the time or energy to read hundreds of policies and to ensure that the candidate claiming them is trustworthy and believes what they're claiming. Parties often kick out members who no longer align with their views. A voter can vote for a certain party's representative and know that what they're getting aligns with that party's general stance.
Left and right is a useful way to represent where various parties fall on a specific spectrum of beliefs. In reality there are multiple axes that can represent economic freedom, alignment with Christian religious beliefs, the strength of a social safety net, isolationist vs. interventionist foreign policy, etc.
But, "left" and "right" came from where groups of politicians stood in the early days of the French republic. They tended to group up with other like-minded people so even if they disagreed completely on certain things, they had generally the same world view. So, "left" and "right" is a good way to simplify things to know if in general a politician shares a certain set of beliefs.
Right and far right. Fixed that for you.
Also everyone knows both candidates are full of shit and won't do anything that they promised.
left and right dictate the direction of policy. given that though the republicans in the us abandoned all conservative philosophy and embraced just facism.
It must be very limiting to only have two directions
most people don't want to move in the other directions. they are either for facism or democracy and don't move much. More flip.
In a local election that's true. When it comes to seats in a larger body, you've gotta take the bad with the good to get anything done. If we added a dozen anti-abortion democrats in the Senate, Trump would be impeached. And abortion would be stuck. A shitty trade off, but one that would move closer to removing abortion bans in the longer term.
(ignoring the house just for the example)
That's a great way to get stabbed in the back.
Look at what happened with Joe Lieberman. Dems backed him up even after he lost his primary in a bright blue state, and he repeatedly threw them under the bus.
Same with Jim Justice in W. Virginia.
That just means you made it to the front in the first place.
Indeed, but let me dream
I'm surprised this misconception isn't more common. Conservatives constantly run on reducing the cost of living (despite doing the opposite), so someone actually vowing to do it with a plan in mind seems perfect for this lot
Yup, instead we all get strung up on not welcoming "racists" in our tent. Economic issues should be the main focus of the left!
The reason race is divisive is because Democrats, as a national party, refuse to run on economic issues that would endanger their corporate donors. In the absence of economic policies that would improve their lives, white people will vote for racial grievance every time.
Yup, corporations have truly become the enemy of the people. Just look at the obscene payouts from the tariff debacle. With my conspiracy hat on, I think that was the goal all along. A lot of these companies will have record profits this quarter because they get money from the taxpayer to cover the tariffs that regular consumers already paid. Insanity
I mean.... Ill take all of this type of brain-dead I can get
I know these individuals are on our side for these issues. Are they racist? Maybe, but welcome to America! Half this country still believes in the southern lost cause.
This isnt surprising one bit. Those people are probably above the average Intelligence of Americans actually.
The idiots really do ruin the world dont they.
Think of how stupid the average conservative is, then remember, half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin.
Reality is far worse than Idiocracy. The average is so much dumber than the people in that movie.
I'm smarter than they are and I had to look up how to spell "aneurysm" to say that reading this post gave me an aneurysm
Just goes to show you what’s important to people and the efficacy of echo chambers and propaganda of the right.
People often want the same thing. But the right is so effective at repetition and corralling their followers that they aren’t able to separate the rhetoric from the politics and assume anyone saying the “magic words” is automatically on “their team” until told otherwise.
This comes down to a lot of purposeful obsfucation of politics and terminology as well as subpar education in that matter.
Example, those people saying "The left" mean left of their view points and understand. But without clear definitions of their intent and meaning it becomes a pointless mire for discussion. You spend more time educating and getting clarification that you're not likely to ever make it to the discussion at hand.
A lot of what I and many USA citizens will have to do is just understand what different positions are, what certain terms mean. When they say "liberal" they mean a vague definition of "the left." Where as when I say it, I mean neo-liberals in particular which is a conservative ideology that still believes in Laissez-faire capitalism.
Political philosophy has never been taught in schools and a two party system means that there's little coherance in party positions besides "big tent, urban" or "big tent, rural"
Every time I read one of these I lose a little faith in humanity and that meme quote from that nutty Indian cultist plays in my head
At the same time this increases my faith in humanity. When people aren't propagandized, they listen to the politician and vote in their interests. At the end of the day, they agreed with what Mamadani was saying and that's why they voted for him.
It doesn't have to be elaborate and sophisticated, what matters is getting the right result.
The "everything is fucked, so don't give a fuck" guy?
Oh no, I meant this guy.
He was trying to advocate some sort of meritocracy/technocracy by saying that any form of government is effectively the sum of it's leaders, but the... rather blunt wording made him a meme.
It's the economy stupid. Trump won on the economy. Mamdani won on the economy.
Yup, The problem I'm seeing is there is a strong faction that controls prices but also leans right? This war with Iran should cause fuel prices to skyrocket but because the rich vote right they are able to control them to help Trump.
Yep, it isn’t that socialists and dems run on making things expensive, it’s that conservative ultra wealthy raise prices of goods and services in their very large businesses when dems are in control because they know people will blame dems and not the wealthy who actually set the prices.
Talk about living in peak dystopia. It's all a big game and the working class are just pawns to be played with
Cannon fodder, cogs in the orphan crushing machine, bricks in the wall.. it’s just rich people getting whatever they want at the expense of others.
I legitimately believe that a winning strategy for the left is reverse psychology.
Loudly announce being "socialist" and just promote bad, or even just existing ideas claiming "we can't let the Conservatives prevent us from x".
The run your real candidates on "anti socialist" platforms
No, actually what you should do is run a good socialist platform. Mamdani and his great governance has done more to fix the perception of socialism in the US than any reverse psychology tricks would ever do.
Mind fucking, rhetorical tricks, and newspeak are a considerable part of what got us into this mess. Socialism as a political and economic philosophy is a great starting point for undoing the damage wrought by hierarchical domination, we ought to be up front and honest about what it means. Let the socialists define it on their terms, and then put their money where their mouth is when the time comes
Go MAGA, go broke!
Gas prices are up! VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET
It's not reverse psychology, it's being for the People. Democrat leadership works for their corporate owners, a lot of the same one that equally fund Republicans. That's the difference between them and Mamdani.
fleecing the dumb. just happy for the attention.
They sure found an interesting way to square Fox News propaganda with Mamdani's campaign promises.
This is cherry picked as fuck. They'd rather call their voters stupid (they do it regularly) then admit they are losing them. Obviously conservatives voted wrong because they were tricked by their feeble dumb brains not because Mayor Mamdani had a better platform.
always have been
🔫
everyone is braindead. it's by design.
if you're even reading this, you're in the top 10% of american minds, and you probably skim the post for sensationalist and/or opinion affirming details.
Bro if you know what the fediverse is youre probably in the top 2% of intelligence in the US
Alright that's bordering the circle-jerk territory. Let's end it on a humble quote.
Thats a good one haha.
I think part of it is that we do know that we are idiots compared to genius scientists and hell a lot of 14 year olds now are way smarter than me. I really dont have any specific skills anyone else can't do (people doing 3d cad and printing and shit just in their free time, thats a genius right there to me, or any coding). I think when we find those people who are actually unintelligent but think they are super smart becuase they watched a Facebook video on politics that our brain kind of implodes at the lack of self awareness.
Any text based platform is not going to be representative. Many people don't read well, and don't have the ability to communicate well in writing.
That extra sucks becuase i love shit like the smolweb and gemini protocol but people will never understand it because its not shiny and flashy.
That is disappointing for me. I suck at talking, and often forget the finer details of a verbal discussion.
I hope you remember this post at some point and cringe at the fact that you hit submit.
Ok
I mean, its not dumb. From their information sphere, this would make a lot of sense.
Its literally what Trump railed about, what they were bombarded with, which he said because it was popular. Of course theyre gonna vote for someone who says the same things.
Many have noted that Trump's rhetoric basically burned down US conservative ethos, and this is the fallout in action. Not that he cares; Trump couldnt care less about the Republican party beyond the benefit to him, which he is quite explicit about.
Conservatives believed a lot.of thugs that were just racism in disguise. Trump threw out the disguise and they loved him for it, they gave them what they wanted directly and not Indirectly. But cost of living is too high to go back to the old ways
Racists are certainly in Trump's tent and love him, but I think it's a mistake to overgeneralize all Trumpsters as primarily motivated by racism.
I think most of it is just personalized information bubbles. Which this article supports. People get fed what they want in their feed, see politics through a sycophantic lens; Trump is just the current lighting rod for all that attention.
Voters are dumb, welcome to democracy. But this should mean it will not be hard to win over their votes.
Seems like a lot of reddit rage baiting has moved to lemmy.
Yeah. I mean we're all sort of refugees here. It's like the Big Digg Exodus, the exodus that started the chain reaction of shit that killed Reddit and made us come here, and now we're the enshittifiers. It's like poetry, it rhymes.
We are the traffic.
I don't know man, lemmy/fed is picking up steam and posts are getting in the thousands of votes now. That used to be reddit circa 2008-9.
Since they started enforcing mandatory login to access old.reddit I just decided that sometimes you need to put your dog to sleep and be happy for the good times and stay pissed forever about all the times it decided to eat its own puke.
Sorry for rambling. Get off my lawn (I use UNIX btw)
Kind of like a post apocalyptic band of refugees. Moving from place to place as civilization crumbles.
Where no one place is ever safe for to long, because so many refugees show up that they bring the plague with them, and you have to move again.
So yes, get off my lawn you damn kids. I started my career with an HP 1000 A-Series minicomputers running RTE-A. But don’t ask me to remember anything more than the name. That knowledges is lost to the brain fog.
Oh my god are we just playing text based Kenshi?
We are part of the swarm. Or the hive, if you will. We cannot escape it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWUQ40XT0jI
Ah. You speak the old tongue. I hark!
Yes, i am one of the old ones. Tasked with keeping the old ways alive. But time has taken its toll. I am but a shadow of what I once was.
Once we were great being who reached for the stars. But then the fall came. Now we live like animals in the ruins of what once was greatness.
Do people just read stuff like this and assume this actually happened?
They are pedo supporting Nazis and they are the worst of us.
I think both parties are dumb in their own way. The USA is commiting a genocide in gaza under both leadershits. Fuck this dog and pony show. We need to yeet this goverment.
If you've been following the news, several democratic nominees are "AIPAC Free" and are outright against israel. If you're American, for the love of god, vote.
Republicans and establishment dems are all bought by AIPAC but at least the dems are waking up to that and voting out establishment candidates. Republicans are never going to "wake up" and start fighting against the money because conservatism is inherently beholden to status and power.
wow, boring. nobody needed tazed