I have 2 pro-Trump coworkers who went on a blathering rant today. I'll chirp them from time to time about the orange clown and how they've been duped by a carny scam artist, so I did bait them, but it's an immediate turn to bashing Harris and getting very animated with insults about "liberals".
You can't even have a back and forth, they start repeating nonsense tinged with conspiracy theories. It would be a full time job debunking all of the untrue crap they repeat but they don't want to listen anyways. It was like a comedy skit, I couldn't believe they were serious.
Yeah, I got a real glimpse at how uninformed and dug in these types of people can be and it's quite depressing.
So you chirp about the orange clown, and they respond by chirping liberals? And this surprises you some how?
Yeah, these nutjobs live in their own wacky world and need to be reminded once in a while, I don't mind. The only surprise was how dopey they sounded getting worked up spitting out inaccurate foolishness.
The silver lining to a Trump win is how poorly he will do...he doesnt have 8 years of Obama policy to keep him afloat. It will be hilarious to see these people try to expalin why their lives still suck.
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Or, disinformation, misinformation and conspiracies that used to toil on the fringes of society has been algorithmically pushed so hard, so fast, and for so many years now, many people are simply living in an alternate reality dominated by propaganda. We are seeing it growing and normalizing in the US, Canada, Europe, developing countries, and even strengthening its grip on places like Russia and North Korea.
People today are consumed by confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and demonstrate horrific inabilities to resist low fidelity information. The Dunning-Kruger effect is on stunning display.
The fact that people are gravitating to extreme ideologies and fascist rhetoric is history repeating itself and people willingly letting their own rights and freedoms slip is abysmal to witness.
Goebbels and Stalin would be impressed with what the world looks like now and how easy it is to dupe the masses.
It is definitely fascinating. The Dunning – Kruger effect, especially.
The silver lining to a Trump win is how poorly he will do...he doesnt have 8 years of Obama policy to keep him afloat. It will be hilarious to see these people try to expalin why their lives still suck.
There will be no silver lining of trump wins
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The average American doesn’t understand their political system. I get the rage against incumbents due to inflation that is a feature of all contemporary democracies but Trump was only in power 4 years ago and his party controls congress and the courts. Both the Dems and the GOP are the incumbents.
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The masses of humanity have always had to surf.
Or, disinformation, misinformation and conspiracies that used to toil on the fringes of society has been algorithmically pushed so hard, so fast, and for so many years now, many people are simply living in an alternate reality dominated by propaganda. We are seeing it growing and normalizing in the US, Canada, Europe, developing countries, and even strengthening its grip on places like Russia and North Korea.
People today are consumed by confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and demonstrate horrific inabilities to resist low fidelity information. The Dunning-Kruger effect is on stunning display.
The fact that people are gravitating to extreme ideologies and fascist rhetoric is history repeating itself and people willingly letting their own rights and freedoms slip is abysmal to witness.
Goebbels and Stalin would be impressed with what the world looks like now and how easy it is to dupe the masses.
My theory is that this has everything to do with the world just being too complicated for almost everyone in most ways.
The vast, vast majority of people have no idea what politics are, how they work, what affects the decisions that are made and how those decisions affect the world. Even many politicians clearly just have no clue what they're doing anymore. Even the ones that suck and actively want to do things that I think are terrible often try to achieve terrible things in really stupid ways, pointing to the fact that they don't understand what they're doing.
I think this is one of the major reasons why topics like abortion and trans rights have become key issues: they're (on the) surface simple and you can just have a vibes based opinion on them.
(Of course both are actually quite complicated issues, no one should have vibes based opinions on them, and the things discussed about them in public are mostly nonsense of one sort or the other.)
The solutions to this fundamental problem aren't easy. I've studied politics and social and economic history for decades, and I often feel barely qualified to have opinions because I haven't been personally active in politics.
I think the confused times we live in are in part a failure of our educational systems, which have overemphasized technical learning and have simplified key topics in history into fairytales, to the point where I think a lot of history as it's taught has a negative effect on people's ability to understand their own times. That is however just a small part of the problem.
Biggest problem is IMHO that we are in desperate need of new, better ideologies. Our current belief system of unshackled capitalism is increasingly obviously a hindrance when it comes to solving problems that have resulted from the rapid economic and technological development born out of capitalism. Ambitious individualism and collective greed just give us nothing to work with when it comes to solving for example the ecological crisis we have created, and it clearly doesn't guide people to sensible voting decisions in a democracy.
It doesn't even find us good economic leaders anymore. Elon Musk is one of the most powerful men in the world, especially when it comes to driving and guiding our economy. If that doesn't tell you that our society is fundamentally broken in terms of who it gives power to...
Without good general ideological guidelines, societies just struggle to function. People need good ideologies to create a sense of who they are in relation to everyone else, and what their purpose in the world.
Socialism has a lot to offer when it comes to alleviating problems of today, but it also struggles hard when it comes to sustainable collective decisionmaking. Etc.
We basically, IMO, Need a new Marx, or Adam Smith, or Jesus/Mohammed.
Someone who can offer new explanations to new times, who boil down the problems and solutions to them in a way that's simple enough and functional enough.
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The silver lining to a Trump win is how poorly he will do...he doesnt have 8 years of Obama policy to keep him afloat. It will be hilarious to see these people try to expalin why their lives still suck.
Unfortunately not. He will ride through his term on massive tax cuts and wholesale gutting of the civil service by his new friend Elon. Like 80% reduction or whatever and it will be heralded as economic genius. It’s the next president who will have to deal with a failed state.
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Apparently Trump's mic wasn't working at his Detroit Rally tonight, and he just wandered aimlessly around the stage for 18 minutes. Dude is not well.
Also, where are his handlers? Couldn't they have just gotten him off stage until the audio issue was fixed? So weird.
It's almost like his campaign wants him to fail and look like a dementia patient in front of the entire world. Similar to the bizarre incident the other day where he just swayed to music for 30+ minutes without saying a word. If Biden or Kamala had done this, it would no doubt be front page news everywhere and the media would be talking about his/her mental decline non-stop. But when it comes to Trump's behaviour, it's crickets from the major news outlets.
Even if Harris wins this (which I still think she might, but it's gonna be razor thin), my faith in humanity is pretty much gone at this point. The fact that this race is still basically a coin toss is beyond embarrassing and incredibly depressing, not just for the U.S., but for Canada and the rest of the world as well.
That roughly 50% of the electorate are perfectly cool with destroying their democracy just blows my mind. Way to spit on the graves of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who fought and died to defeat fascism and keep it at bay. Unreal. What a time to be alive.
We're not much better as a country. Our next PM is either a fascist or one who cosplays as one.
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Apparently Trump's mic wasn't working at his Detroit Rally tonight, and he just wandered aimlessly around the stage for 18 minutes. Dude is not well.
Also, where are his handlers? Couldn't they have just gotten him off stage until the audio issue was fixed? So weird.
It's almost like his campaign wants him to fail and look like a dementia patient in front of the entire world. Similar to the bizarre incident the other day where he just swayed to music for 30+ minutes without saying a word. If Biden or Kamala had done this, it would no doubt be front page news everywhere and the media would be talking about his/her mental decline non-stop. But when it comes to Trump's behaviour, it's crickets from the major news outlets.
Vance needs stuff like this out there so he can invoke the 25th Amendment, in probably the first 100 days, if trump wins...
Bit of a long read, but explains how the Silicon Valley VC's and Musk have backed Trump, where thy came from, and how they are connected. Also, stuff like this:
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As the internet blossomed, Thiel began to encourage a new set of even more provocative thinkers. At their center was an ex-programmer named Curtis Yarvin, who blogged under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug, sketching out the framework for a nascent reactionary movement — later called the new right — aimed at deposing the cabal of liberal elites running the country. Yarvin saw democracy as a “destructive” form of government, instead proposing a techno-monarchy run by a national chief executive. Americans, he said, had to “get over their dictator phobia.” He and Thiel grew close; Yarvin stayed in Thiel’s homes, and they watched the 2016 election returns together.
Apparently Trump's mic wasn't working at his Detroit Rally tonight, and he just wandered aimlessly around the stage for 18 minutes. Dude is not well.
Also, where are his handlers? Couldn't they have just gotten him off stage until the audio issue was fixed? So weird.
It's almost like his campaign wants him to fail and look like a dementia patient in front of the entire world. Similar to the bizarre incident the other day where he just swayed to music for 30+ minutes without saying a word. If Biden or Kamala had done this, it would no doubt be front page news everywhere and the media would be talking about his/her mental decline non-stop. But when it comes to Trump's behaviour, it's crickets from the major news outlets.
This is really not true. They've all covered it ad nauseam with multiple hosts and segment guests discussing his bizarre behaviour. The problem is he's always been bizarre. His very first announcement as a candidate in 2016 was bizarre. And so hearing it over and over from the same talking heads isn't permeating, and the people who need to pay attention don't even watch real news so they get what FOX says.
Hopefully enough people watching him start to decide for themselves that this man is deranged. But the point is, if you haven't seen it by now, you're just not going to see it.
It also won’t be just 8 years. First off it’s a 4 year term (unless he’s talking about before too?) and secondly he isn’t leaving office if he wins until he dies.
It also won’t be just 8 years. First off it’s a 4 year term (unless he’s talking about before too?) and secondly he isn’t leaving office if he wins until he dies.
That’s just not going to happen. I would bet millions of dollars that Donald Trump won’t have a 3rd term.
That’s not saying there aren’t scenarios where he transitions power in a less than fair election but he won’t be able to extend his term beyond the next 4 years. It’s foolish to think that democracy will break that fasts. The appearance of democracy will be upheld. Even Putin followed term limit rules initially.
It's just seems insane how many Americans still support Trump after everything unpresidential he's done since 2016 (as well as just being a maggot of a human being which apparently is now endearing to people), how many of them are being grifted and they don't even know it, how many of them believe conspiracy crap and misinformative info, and how many of them refuse to, or aren't able to, critically think... while at the same time, there are entities in the American political and financial backgrounds that are actively working to destroy American democracy as we know it and further rule the American way of life with an iron fist. Fascism is about to land on the runway, and it seems like, as Ozy said, people have not learned from the lessons of our world's fascist past. The rise of the far right is incredibly troubling.
If anything, this is a sad indictment on the American education system, as well as unchecked capitalism and corruption in a system that is now showing major rifts and cracks in its social structure.
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Many Republicans don’t support Trump. They’ll be going to the polls to vote against the Democrats, not for Trump.
Partisan media pumps out stories about the very worst things the extremists on the other side do, 24/7. Fear and hatred of the other team is what motivates people, not love for the leader of their team. Negative polarization is the name of the game in American politics today.
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If this day gets you riled up, you obviously aren't numb to the disappointment yet to be a real fan.
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Many Republicans don’t support Trump. They’ll be going to the polls to vote against the Democrats, not for Trump.
...any many Republican voters DO support Trump because of his cult of personality, even though it's an obvious facade / grift. And voting against the Democrats, even in spite of Trump, still gets a dangerous, deranged, unhinged man into the Oval Office that can do damage to both sides. The 'party before country' thing will be a dangerous game for that country to play.
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