personally, this cycle the best thing i have under my belt is karma.
I hope republicans/conservatives have to learn their lesson the hard way around.
Narrator: unfortunately, they won’t as they are unable to correlate their struggles and hardships with their choices
You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl’s Jr.
So next time we gotta call everyone up, knock on every door and ask ‘‘hay what are you, your kids, your family’’ them tell them ‘‘heres exactly what’s going to happen to all of you when this goes down’’
I know it’s a cliche at this point, and I hate that it’s true, but there’s plenty of doubt about whether “next time” will be a thing.
If it weren’t so sad, it would be almost funny.
So many people are waking up to the fact that… Most people are functionally illiterate children with no understanding of the world they live in.
The easiest way I have to explain it:
You use your phone every day. You know how to use it, menus in and out, all the different programs and their uses. But if I were to pop open the cover and take one single piece out, you would never know, and you would never be able to use it again. Without someone else, you have absolutely no clue how to go about fixing it. You can push it’s buttons all day, but when it comes down to how it functions at the basic levels, you are clueless.
So am I, by the way. I don’t have any reason to know how to build or program a phone. Or computer. I can push their buttons all day though! Even hidden buttons. But if everyone else on the planet disappeared tonight, I would effectively be living in the 1500s, as that’s about where my technical understanding of things ends. (scavenging for replacement electronics notwithstanding, once something electronic breaks, it’s gone since I can’t exactly run a semiconductor factory by myself, or the mines to get the materials)
My point is, most people only know how to “push the buttons” of the world. They have very surface-level understandingsof it. But when it comes down to it, they don’t understand how the internals actually function.
Sorry if this rambled a bit, I hit the bowl as soon as I got home from work.
This is a funny take I haven’t heard. Maybe it’s a bit true.
People I talk to seem to have little understanding of Trump policies. Like it’s mostly projection.
One person I spoke to with a Trump pin said these two statements: “I don’t like where the country is heading everything is expensive. The government spends too much money”… “yeah we got to support Ukraine, Russia would not have invaded if Trump was president. Russia needs to loose and go home so we can end the war”
… like okay? And Trump will help any of this how, as a lap dog to Putin who blew up the budget and raised taxes on those making less than $500k?
These people vote for people who tell them what they want to hear and project the rest… you know morons.
I mean I know enough which candidates are the “lesser evil”, but I’d never fully understand how the global economy works.
Most people aren’t gonna understand everything, and that’s fine. But it shouldn’t take much to know who to not vote into office. But unfortunately… it does seem like making a simple choice is a huge hurdle in many peoples minds.
That’s absolutely true, but I can’t get how people didn’t watch or listen to the Toupee for even a couple seconds and not instantly realize he’s full of more shit than an outhouse.
Because they’re stupid too and he speaks at a third grade level way they understand.
As a single person you’d be pretty good for the rest of your (still probably short) life. But honestly, I think ascribing button pushing to some of these people is a stretch. They know the particular buttons to open their social media, or maybe even access their banking, but any mention of settings and you get a blank look. I see that with every generation now, working in IT. It used to just be the boomers, but tech knowledge seems to have degraded over the years.
I felt something die inside me when I realized “display settings” was going way too far into technical territory for most people.
All I was trying to do is tell someone why their screen shuts off “so quickly” after two minutes.
I had to send them step by step pictures with big red circles.
And this was someone I had thought to be intelligent enough to figure something out, and tech-minded enough to know what I was talking about. Turns out they just like buying whatever fancy new gadgets they see in commercials.
Read DOE as department of energy and was confused.
At lunch yesterday, I overheard two women talking about how they should totally be hired for the new department of government efficiency, and how they have a lot of great ideas to offer from their years of experience in federal jobs.
“You should cut my job.”
Granted.
And MY fucking loved ones. And lots of other people’s fucking loved ones.
My anger grows each and every day. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through what’s coming either from a mental health perspective or from a keeping my family safe perspective.
YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! AH, DAMN YOU! GOD! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
Oh believe me, I agree. But they weren’t even motivated by their own best self-interests. It’s voting for the leopard face eating party on a scale I didn’t think was even possible.
These are the people who vote on vibes and emotions, it’s important candidates and politics don’t discount them because they’re the main voter block.
They’ve been reacting to the perceived moralist shaming of WOKE since 2014, and the right have kept that perception around whilst mocking it, being unPC, and joking around to show they’re “cool guys”.
So when Kamala makes a face when Trump says something about eating cats, the left think he’s an idiot whilst emotional voters think he’s play a game, joking and she’s being rude/shaming.
Or when he dresses like a garbage man, and the left calls them stupid for enjoying it, that pushes emotional voters towards voting for him, and away from voting for her/them.
Dems lost sight of the emotional game/narrative being played. So he played the fun guy, they played the shaming upright moralists who can’t take jokes and want to be serious or angry all the time (often bejng baited into this role).
Made for an easy choice for emotional voters. It was not rational (hence the regret). But it’s what got the Republicans into office.
Ye gods, no wonder it’s so easy to grift people. They’ve got the savvy of a toddler.
It’s so easy to shit on voters for not being informed.
Dems had $1B to reach this lady with a message about how they were going to improve her material conditions and they couldn’t or wouldn’t. At least they got that sweet sweet Cheney fan vote.
When people have to work constantly or their kids will starve and it just keeps getting worse wtf is anyone supposed to do?
“You didn’t do your homework, so you deserve to have your life destroyed lol”
The system is fucked. Well and truly.
I can see why they might woo current Republicans… In the case the lose by a thin margin, it would give them greater leverage to block Trump’s administration.
Maybe if they just googled? Takes about 15 sec. They’d see something like this: https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/kamala-harris-2024-campaign-promises-here-are-her/ It’s hard to imagine it could have been any easier for people who weren’t aware of Harris’ policies.
Democracy isn’t government on cruise control. Democracy is a responsibility. Blaming politicians isn’t going to change the fact that it is not institutions that uphold democracy. It’s the people.
So yeah, ultimately the people failed themselves. Some people just need to learn the hard way. If that is the only way these people will learn, why try to stop them from getting their lessons?
Americans are basically spoiled children. Never experienced government hardship. Why expect them to understand the value of what they have that prevents the hardship?
When people have to work constantly or their kids will starve and it just keeps getting worse wtf is anyone supposed to do?
I agree with you when it comes to a lot of things in terms of civic engagement, but in this case, there are lots of websites out there with information that won’t even take you more than 20 minutes to read in terms learning of who the candidates are and what they stand for.
You can literally do that on a break (or more than one break since you’ll get them every day) at work. And if you’re not getting breaks at work, your boss is violating the labor laws which should be posted where all employees can see them. Not that they ever read them. Employees are entitled by federal law to a 5-20 minute paid break. I realize 5-20 minutes is shit, but most full time jobs at least give you longer unpaid breaks than that, if for no other reason than they don’t want their employees passing out from hunger.
there are lots of websites out there … You can literally do that on a break
Correct. Now your task, should you choose to accept it, is to show someone how to do that. Teach them to do their research. Easy? Now come up with a way to communicate the same message to maybe 150 million people. And make sure they don’t ignore it.
This is why strategies like advertising, canvassing, and media interviews are effective. Unlike expecting voters to “just do the research,” these methods meet people where they already are—at home, watching TV, listening to the radio, scrolling through social media, or catching up on the news. They reach voters directly, without assuming any prior knowledge or effort on their part.
I guess. I was told in high school before I was even old enough to vote that the League of Women Voters always gives out election info. They used to do it in a free pamphlet and now they do it on their website. Are people really not told that in school anymore or do they just not pay attention?
I personally wasn’t told that in high school. Also in high school I was told that consuming weed was a moral failing and that blood is blue when it’s inside the body so
I remember being taught all kinds of lies about weed for sure. I also remember “Officer Friendly” coming to my elementary school and telling us not to pick up any pieces of paper with cartoon characters on it, by which I think he meant a whole blotter paper’s worth of acid?
And now that I am able to monitor my own child’s schooling because she’s going to an online school, but it’s a public school and it’s run by evil Pearson, the company that makes all the public school textbooks, I can see that they’re still going with all kinds of bullshit lies like “marijuana is a gateway drug” and they don’t even bring up the fact that there are pharmaceutical options when it comes to alcohol and tobacco.
But they sure did push that AA crap.
You’re not wrong about having the physical and temporal capacity to inform yourself regardless, but you’ve also got to have the mental and emotional capacity as well.
I’m sure you’re aware of how exhausting it is to live here, even just having nominal exposure to all the campaign ads and the outrage bait “news.” That’s before all the regular stress of living here with a family, all of your material conditions. Is my car gonna break down? If it does will I get fired? How can I afford my kids soccer cleats? Will the babysitter cancel on me for my extra shift?
If the only exposure you got for the election that you paid attention to because it was “entertainment” was a “funny” Joe Rogan clip your buddy sent you of the Trump interview it’d be real easy to be like “well, we made it through the first one, and at least he acknowledges that things are more expensive…”
Obviously if you’re tuned in, you know that’s a bullshit front. But if you don’t have the capacity to be tuned in because fucking everything is designed to stress you out and extract what little money you have… Well, here we are.
If the only exposure you got for the election that you paid attention to because it was “entertainment” was a “funny” Joe Rogan clip your buddy sent you of the Trump interview…
This right here is hitting on the real problem. People are fed bullshit from firehoses coming in all direction, so they feel like they are informed because of what they have passively taken in. It takes some real effort to step back and think “What if the things I’ve been hearing are not the full story?”, and even more effort to take the next step and actively seek out information that might challenge what you have already heard and internalized. We are ALL guilty of this to some degree.
But if you don’t have the capacity to be tuned in because fucking everything is designed to stress you out and extract what little money you have…
Precisely–it is 100% the point. If you are stressed out working 2 jobs and raising a kid, you are going to have a lot less energy to keep your bullshit detector running and the simple solutions to complex problems naturally sound more appealing.
I guess you’re right. It’s just so damn important to them and their families… I have been there, super exhausted from all that, but I knew the risk of not being informed about who I’m voting for. I guess it was enough for me to make sure I knew, but not for others.
I’m definitely not saying you should blame yourself for not phone banking or door knocking enough or something.
The system that we live in is just perfect for making us feel like this. And the people in charge are not incentivized to change it for us.
The only way we fix it is by trying to make things better locally, from the bottom up.
