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Cake day: August 17th, 2024

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  • One major problem here is the lack of community. It was easier to get in-person events organized when the default was to do things in person. #resistance isn’t just more common because people aren’t willing to be in person, but because it’s not as easy to get involved.

    As far as actual political groups are concerned, a lot of them have very little online presence, or their information is only available through something like Facebook where you need an account to view it. Those that are more available frequently only hold their meetings online, and many make it difficult to find how to get involved because you have to navigate through all their requests for donations to find there’s very little else available.

    But that’s just my experience over the last few years. I imagine it’ll get a lot worse when these groups aren’t legally allowed to exist.







  • God, this article is awful.

    There’s stuff like this:

    A majority of voters nationally said Trump was a strong leader; slightly fewer than half said the same about Harris.

    …which implies there’s some significant difference here without giving you the specific numbers. Is this 51% to 49%? They go into the Latino specifics, but only for Trump, but even break it down further to say what percent of Latinos think Trump is strong versus the percentage of Latinas that think Trump is strong.

    The AP is always held up as this infallibly unbiased source, but even if we agree that being unabashedly both-sides centrist is unbiased, that’s not even close to what’s happening here. To even remotely both-sides this you’d have to show all the people that think asking the question of Trump’s strength is an absolute joke and it’s bizarre we’re even discussing it because the only people that believe in strongman leadership are literal fascists.

    With respect to the actual headline and meat of the article, it also doesn’t challenge the assumption that Trump would be better for the economy. If you’re going to include people who were brainwashed into believing that, you have to juxtapose them with the endless historical precedents and current studies that show his policies will absolutely be detrimental to the economy. Even corporations are going to tank in the long term, because you can’t steal from the working class forever.

    By continuing Trump’s campaign propaganda without serious challenge, this is a right-wing article in support of his administration. A more centrist article would say something closer to “Trump tricks public into believing he’ll be better for the economy” because that’s the reality of what happened.


  • Like for a reasonable, ethical individual, that should 100% be enough.

    Conservatives have never been reasonable, ethical individuals. Slavery, Jim Crow, against women’s suffrage, against the equal rights amendment, against social security, against gay and trans rights, the list goes on forever. The country’s fight isn’t to change a conservative’s mind, it’s to get enough of the non-conservatives to engage, protest, and vote such that they overwhelm the small but galvanized conservative base.

    When you win on those issues, those conservatives don’t change their mind. They continue to support slavery, or voter suppression, or the issues of their time, but eventually they die off. Then you have new fights with the new conservatives.







  • Plain ignorance is part of it, but I really don’t think it’s the driving factor. You don’t vote for Trump because you lack some key knowledge, no matter how trivial that knowledge is. You vote for him because you’ve been inundated with conservative media for decades, and you have no grasp on reality anymore. You really believe Harris is going to hold you at gunpoint and replace your gas heaters with electric. You really believe she’s going to sell the United States to China for a hundred bucks. You might even believe there’s a war on men, a war on your religion, a war on everything that brings you meaning to your life. If I truly believed the things that conservative media was saying, I’d vote for him too.

    It’s not just ignorance. It’s brainwashing.



  • And I very much recall at least two instances where he said this is the last election you’ll have to vote in. Is he going to find/create a way to suspend the 2028 election and stay in power? Who’s going to stop him?

    That’s why I said it’s possible, I just don’t think it’s probable. People are loyal to Trump until they’re not. Nobody’s loyal to him because they like him or they think he’s a good guy, or because they think he’ll bring the country prosperity. They’re loyal because they think they can get something out of it. Most people aren’t in a position where they’re willing to give up literally everything to help this particular asshole become a dictator. Those that are are typically incompetent - see anything and everything related to stealing the 2020 election. They tried a LOT of things, but nothing came even close to working.

    So they’ll try again, and I don’t think anybody’s doubting that. And I don’t think our institutions are particularly strong, but they’re probably strong enough to stop that kind of incompetence from leading to a dictatorship.


  • Let me be clear here. If we have a global nuclear war, that’s not recoverable, because every human on earth will be dead. If we enter a fascist dictatorship with today’s technology, that may not be recoverable, because we may see the permanent end of anything resembling a democracy.

    I’m not saying there weren’t horrific atrocities committed during Trump’s reign. What I’m saying is that so far, there’s a chance future generations can live better lives.



  • The truth is it’s unlikely anything historically big is going to happen in the US. We saw what Trump did last time he was in office, and it was really bad, but it was recoverable. The fear isn’t that it’s likely, but that it’s far from a non-zero chance, and there’s very little we can do about it. That uncertainty is scary when we’ve had a relatively good time in recent decades.

    Will we see a sudden shift toward a state where you can get jailed or murdered for being a dissident? Maybe, but probably not.

    Will we see an escalation of the wars involving Israel, such that we see a WWIII and/or the first nuclear strike since WWII? Maybe, but probably not.

    Will we see economic collapse causing widespread hunger and homelessness that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression? Maybe, but probably not.

    The only thing that’s really a guarantee is that we’re another four years away from dealing with climate change, and while that’s massive for humanity down the line, individuals currently living in the US are probably going to be mostly fine. Not to say nobody will be affected - hurricanes, floods, fires, and so on - but it won’t cause catastrophic failure of society in the near future.


  • They should have given people on the left some reason to be motivated to vote though, not just fear.

    This is the massive key that I really don’t think the Democratic party understands. When people are scared, they vote conservative. There are literal studies that show fear is the driving force behind conservative voters. Democrats need to make them feel safe. That’s one of the reasons Obama was so successful - he ran on change and hope. Fear works for Republicans. It doesn’t work for Democrats. But they see fear working for Republicans, so they copy it.