Can you please explain to a non-America what is that message is? I hear this refrain all the time and all I get is a vague insinuation that people are not being listened to.
Stop calling working people without a college education stupid and stop alienating men. "Non-educated" people work just as hard or harder than the rest of us. I've been to college and the only thing it "educated" me in is Computer Science, which I majored in. I'm not in any way better as a human being than my friends working in construction. Quite the contrary, their job is far more important to society than mine. If I stopped my niche research tomorrow, no one would really care. If handymen, farmers, or truckers stopped working, there would be riots.
Also, the DNC should really stop forcing unwanted candidates down people's throats. It doesn't work, even when you spam social platforms with your narrative.
> Quite the contrary, their job is far more important to society than mine.
Non-american here, but I feel pretty much the same way. I also do niche research in computer science. People working in the supermarket, people driving trains and busses, medicine workers, construction workers, they all do work that is vastly more important to society than mine. A single educator in my child's kindergarten most likely does work that is orders of magnitude more important to society than mine is. Maybe this attitude comes from the fact that both of my parents never set a foot into higher education, but it is something I feel very strongly, and which is quite humbling.
I remember my father predicting in the early 2000s that the academic elite was increasingly crippling the country by adding more and more non-pragmatic rules in seek of some idealistic utopia, and that they would lose the support of the masses pretty soon. As a young teenager, I did not believe him, and in my arrogance of youth, I also dismissed it as the ramblings of an uneducated worker. But sure enough, most of the things he feared back then turned out to come true.
> I also do niche research in computer science. People working in the supermarket, people driving trains and busses, medicine workers, construction workers, they all do work that is vastly more important to society than mine.
Today, for sure. I think it's far more nuanced in the long term. Most of these jobs would be non-existent without the researchers of yesterday.
Of course, if you disregard today completely for building the tomorrow, a lot of people who don't get access to wealth today will be pissed. Which is very roughly what's happening in the USA. "What we have now is perfect, and can sustain forever, stop with the progressive BS", chant the conservatives.
It's a hard balance. Dems messed it up, Reps will mess it up further, I bet.
> Most of these jobs would be non-existent without the researchers of yesterday
The research of yesterday was on another level than most of what is done today. Not to say that it's worthless, pursuit of knowledge is always worth it.
This is all moot now. We have a far-right supermajority in government. America is fucked for the next few decades at the very least. The DNC is no longer relevant.
Calling republicans far right is the exact rhetoric that alienates and divides people. Take the next four years to try to find some common ground with the right.
Not at all wanting to be confrontational- genuinely curious; if they’re not on the far right then where are they? The Democrats seem fairly centrist, and it’s the more wayward independents (eg Greens) that seem to be on the Left.
My perspective is European & Australian, so I wonder if that skews it.
Because it’s illogical. Far right implies there is an edge to a majority “right”. Calling the entire majority “far right” is just lazy adhominem attacks. Calling the entire the democrat party far left is equally stupid.
> Because it’s illogical. Far right implies there is an edge to a majority “right”.
"far right" and "far left" are terms for contextualizing a political stance, based on the world view and actions. It's doesn't matter where the majority of people stands, they can be all far right or far left or in the center, it wouldn't change the definitions.
In America you generally only see "Far X" used as a slur to basically imply extremism. I'm sure a lot of people will have strong feelings about whether that's accurate or not but my point is mainly that I think it's weird when people in places like Europe go by the academic definition with regard to American politics.
The nazi government of Germany was "far right" even when a majority of the population supported it. The political left-right spectrum is roughly defined with socialism, communism on the far left, social democracy on the left, classical liberalism on the center-right, conservatism on the right, and ultra-nationalism, fascism on the far right.
Calling the democratic party "far left" is stupid for a different reason, viewed from a global perspective, they're probably best positioned as centre-right.
Depends what you care about. Broadly speaking the entire developed world is further left than the US on workplace/business/union policy issues.
The US left (federally, not talking Alabama dems here) is generally more left on immigration, abortion and LGBTQ+ and affirmative action type policies than Europe, broadly speaking. Drug policy is a wash IMO. There's a lot more variation in Europe because the EU doesn't arbitrate social issues the way the US federal government does.
> Broadly speaking the entire developed world is further left than the US on workplace/business/union policy issues
This is what's crippling them. We initially built the social security net to counter this issue. Then we increased employee rights to maximum levels. I think one of either would be beneficial, but not both.
As an Alabama Dem, this is something that is just so disappointing to see when we're assumed to be not "generally more left"
There are so many here supporting and doing good, hard work with things like the Yellowhammer Fund, ¡HICA!, and Magic City Acceptance Center and Academy but we have to fight for any acknowledgement. We had more people vote for Kamala than several states but they amount to nothing in the public eye. It's so deflating and discouraging
I think you have to acknowledge that the democratic politicians that rise to prominence in your state are not exactly the left of the left when it comes to policy in the same way that Christ Christie and Charlier Baker aren't hardline republicans. It's just a reflection of the electorate, not a personal slight.
Doug Jones was our last democratic politician on the national stage and he voted quite liberally. We just don't have many anymore, due to gerrymandering and our electorate. I think Terri Sewell is our only non-Republican
This is not true. Their identity politics stances are widely unpopular across the globe, and you won't find another country where they are represented in political discourse.
Far-right is well defined globally. Few core values: nationalism, authoritarianism, anti-socialism, economic libertarianism, racial and gender hierarchies, anti-establishment sentiments.
If you think a party is ticking many boxes, you may label it as "far-right".
Protectionism also is a value associated with "far-right". It may sound like it conflicts with libertarianism but in my understanding that's applied nationally, while closing borders.
I won't argue on positions of a specific candidate or party.
> This is not a far right position. This is a populist position.
> Protectionism also is a value associated with "far-right".
While it may be associated with the "far right", it is held by others as well. Many unions, in the past, supported protectionism for example.
Regardless, the argument was not about Trump holding protectionist views, but libertarian views which he clearly doesn't hold to.
> It may sound like it conflicts with libertarianism but in my understanding that's applied nationally, while closing borders.
Closing the borders has nothing to do with libertarian economics or protectionism.
If you go back 15 years ago plenty of people on the left supported restricting immigration. Bernie Sanders famously called open borders a Koch Brothers plan to get cheap labor and harm workers in the US.
> Populism also is often associated with far-right.
While most populist politicians, at the moment, are on the right, it is not a right wing position. Bernie Sanders is often referred to as a populist as well.
Regardless, it is not a far right position to be anti-establishment or whatever somebody defines populist as.
Sorry if that was not clear in my messages. It's not binary and exclusive. The values are commonly associated with far-right. That doesn't mean each value is exclusive to far-right. It doesn't mean a far-right party cannot deny part of them or accept any other values.
As with every definition there is a grey area and when a party is labelled as far-right it means that it ticks many boxes that put it in this category. Of course, people can disagree, argue on positions, that's politics.
> Closing the borders has nothing to do with libertarian economics or protectionism.
On that specific point, I was thinking about economical protectionism than physically closing border.
> populist [...] is not a right wing position.
True, it's usually associated with far-right or far-left rather than regular party.
By that reasoning Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy weren't far right, because a very significant portion of their population actually voted for that. Or France now, our "Rassemblement National" used to be far right, but now enough people (about a third) vote for them that they no longer are.
Sorry if that feels like a strawman, but I find the idea of using popularity to determining what counts as "far" stupid and dangerous.
Democrats believe a man who thinks he is a woman is scientifically a woman. They believe in censorship. They believe in supporting and growing the military industrial complex. They believe in a discrimination campaign against whites and Asians, and meanwhile allowing unfettered illegal immigration with the intent of giving amnesty to the millions that entered through the forcibly unguarded border.
They are not centrist by any stretch of the imagination.
> Democrats believe a man who thinks he is a woman is scientifically a woman
It's a bit more complicated than that. Gender is a social construct, mostly determined by genes & genitalia. It's not quite enough to believe you're a woman, other people have to believe it too. Another issue at play is that there are far more "intersex" people (who have some characteristics of the opposite sex, sometimes to the point doctors don't quite know whether to list them as male or female), and from what I've heard trans people often (possibly generally) are "intersex" in a way that wasn't visible at birth. The idea of a female's brain in a male's body isn't that far fetched.
> They believe in censorship.
I believe this one is more popular in the far right (when in power) than in the far left (when in power)
> They believe in supporting and growing the military industrial complex.
Militarism sounds like it's more popular on the right. Though it can be more complicated: military backed imperialism can indeed support stuff like welfare at home.
---
Now the elephant in the room: last time I checked, democrats were firmly capitalists: they believe the means of production should be owned privately. Even if you exclude actual communism from acceptable discourse, they're fairly poor at public services and keeping inequality in check.
I find it curious how people are so willing to uncritically accept this ill-defined "female brain in a male body" idea without thinking it through sufficiently to be able to explain it.
The third person plural is so convenient. You did well, not directly accusing me of uncritically accepting an idea. You did well, not directly saying I didn't think it through enough to explain it. Your caution paid off, you just avoided two mistakes in one sentence.
You're a bit light on justifying the burden of proof, though.
Can you name a policy of today's republican party that is further right than the republican party of 20 years ago? From my perspective they've ceded ground on many social issues. They had a porn star speak at the RNC convention this year. Dick Cheney, one of the people responsible for the "War on Terror", endorsed Kamala Harris. The idea that federal politics in the US has shifted right, not left, is baffling to me.
Nope. When I worked in a factory as a teenager, ICE came in and presumably deported all of the illegals, because they didn't show up the next day. A big reason Trump got elected is because they stopped doing that, and "mass deportation now" is effectively enforcement of the same policy as it was back then.
> That some people are born better than others and they deserve more in life.
Isn't that simply factual human nature? If someone is tall, attractive, physically fit, hardworking, and intelligent, isn't it meritocratic for that person to accrue overall greater benefits/utility to their societal contributions compared to someone who is ugly, unfit, lazy, and stupid?
I wouldn't categorize that position as "far right" at all. I think the position you are trying to express is that the ugly/unfit/lazy/stupid should not be punished or abused by the government/laws/society just for existing. I would be surprised if you walked into an average MAGA rally and found a plurality of people who disagree with that.
Because they’re trolling, knowingly or unknowingly. There’s a presumption here that HN commenters can operate a search engine and read pages of text, and are therefore capable of basic research.
If they’re asking for a definition, it’s likely because they already know it and just want you to fall into a “gotcha” they can then divert discussion toward in their favor. It’s cheap theatrics.
You can miss me with that last part, because I have to assume malice on the part of those who try to steer discourse around vocabulary or policy nuance rather than acknowledge the binary reality of the question.
Vocabulary is what we have for textual discourse lacking other inputs, and clarification on terms is a basic and actual necessity of such. You say you "have to assume malice" and, in line with what I already alluded to, that requires malice.
It's not pedantic to ask that your statements be taken clearly and in the right context.
It's worth noting as well that in the context of inclusion, pointing out pedantry at all is going to exclude a group in the "common" understanding of exclusion.
Most importantly, this person is trying to understand your perspective and instead of trying to sway their opinion, you criticize them. One thing that the "far right" has accomplished recently is an understanding that everyone is a person and worth respect and voice. Which is evidenced by the countless videos displaying such behaviour and the ubiquitous response of blessing attributed to people with such inquisition in comment sections everywhere.
In stark contrast is the term uneducated and it's supposed link to intelligence. Don't they teach logical fallacies in college anymore?
I am actually not. I just don't know of any policies or promises of Trump that I would genuinely categorize as far right. Border control is not far right according to me.
First of all I dislike Trump and for sure have liberal views in lot of aspects. And say even if I have malice intent and I am a hardcore Trump supporter, comments like yours wouldn't have changed my mind. Assuming you want to change people's side, it is not the reply that would change it.
According to Wikipedia, "Far-right politics ... are typically marked by radical conservatism, authoritarianism, ultra-nationalism, and nativism"
Digging into the page for radical conservatism, "Elements of ultraconservatism typically rely on cultural crisis; they frequently support anti-globalism – adopting stances of anti-immigration, nationalism, and sovereignty – use populism and political polarization, with in-group and out-group practices.[3][4][5][6] The primary economic ideology for most ultraconservatives is neoliberalism.[6] The use of conspiracy theories is also common amongst ultraconservatives.".
Trump is well-known for his populist, anti-globalist, anti-immigration, and pro-nationalist rhetoric. He has also promulgated conspiarcy theories such as the Obama birther conspiracy and claims of stolen elections.
As for authoritarian, Trump forms a textbook example of a personality cult. He frequently attacks existing institutions and an independent media, undermining trust in a free democratic process. He frequently issues positive messages about authoritarian dictators in other countries such as Bolsonaro, Orban and Putin.
Ah, yes. That well know impartial source of political facts, wikipedia.
>>Trump is well-known for his populist, anti-globalist, anti-immigration, and pro-nationalist rhetoric. He has also promulgated conspiarcy theories such as the Obama birther conspiracy and claims of stolen elections.
You can be patriotic and anti-immigration without being far right. I think the claims of a stolen election are yet to be properly investigated. I'd welcome a truly impartial look into all the covid postal vote shenanigans last time.
>>As for authoritarian, Trump forms a textbook example of a personality cult. He frequently attacks existing institutions and an independent media, undermining trust in a free democratic process. He frequently issues positive messages about authoritarian dictators in other countries such as Bolsonaro, Orban and Putin.
You can criticise institutions now? And I'm sure he'd be in favour of an indepenndent media if America had one.
Putin is a obviously a dictator. Bolsonaro and Orban not so much (especially Bolsonaro as he was, er, voted out which would seem to automatically disqualify him from being a dictator).
Political ideologies are defined by a cluster of stances that collectively form a narrative. Those stances may individually have some debatable justifications, but it's when they're taken together that it becomes compelling.
It's not just
"there's something wrong in our society"
it's
"there's an insidious dark force at work, it's brought us down from our glorious past, these groups of people are involved, violence against this threat is understandable, only a few men are strong and capable enough to lead us out of this...".
In 1930s Germany and Italy the "groups of people" were marxists, jews, gypsies, homosexuals and a few others. In modern Russia it's LGBT, central Asians, objectors to the war, and various religious groups like Jehovah's Witnesses. For Trump and a lot of Europe's right-wing it's LGBT, immigrants, intellectuals, and liberals (though he calls them communists).
"there's an insidious dark force at work, it's brought us down from our glorious past, these groups of people are involved, violence against this threat is understandable, only a few men are strong and capable enough to lead us out of this...".
For insidious dark forces, he alludes to the "deep state", talks about an "enemy from within", and uses phrases like "poisoning the blood of the nation".
For glorious past, there's the MAGA motto, and his narrative that political correctness and lefty lunatics have destroyed American exceptionalism.
For violence, he's repeatedly threatened violence against protestors to his rallies, defended or refused to condemn violence by his own supporters, and suggested that political opponents deserve to have violence inflicted on them.
For only a few men, his prodigious hyperbole about how he's the best at everything, and he literally describes himself as "I am your retribution" who will usher in a "new golden age". And again, he's generally praising of strongman authoritarians around the world
>> For insidious dark forces, he alludes to the "deep state", talks about an "enemy from within", and uses phrases like "poisoning the blood of the nation".
What about calling your political opponents "garbage" and "deplorables" and "fascists"?
>>For glorious past, there's the MAGA motto, and his narrative that political correctness and lefty lunatics have destroyed American exceptionalism.
Probably objectively correct.
>> For violence, he's repeatedly threatened violence against protestors to his rallies, defended or refused to condemn violence by his own supporters, and suggested that political opponents deserve to have violence inflicted on them.
Thank god the Democrats only have peaceful groups like Antifa and BLM. And it's not like Democrat supporters haven't tried to kill him twice. The Democrats are objectively the more violent party.
> What about calling your political opponents "garbage" and "deplorables" and "fascists"?
I condemn name-calling, but it is not the same as conjuring images of insidious dark forces.
> Thank god the Democrats only have peaceful groups like Antifa and BLM.
I condemn the violence of these groups. As do leading Democrats.
Not sure what you're trying to argue at this point. I've demonstrated a clear fascist narrative from Trump and all you've done is draw poorly conceived similarities.
They are a corporate party, just like the democrats. Supporting secure borders is not far right. Republicans have support of every race, they are not racist despite the media repeating that they are. Trump is very hesitant about getting involved in wars. I see nothing far right about them, maybe they are somewhat nationalistic instead of globalist, but the US is a diverse nation. At the end of the day they are just another corporate party that appealed more to the American people.
Were they conservative? No, they wanted to upend society and create one that is nothing like anything ever seen before. They were also anti-religion. In many ways, they were anti-tradition, and I wouldn't consider their obsession with bringing back dead traditions to be traditional.
Were they hateful, racist, etc.? Yes, up to you if that's considered 'right'.
Were they, like how American political parties are, friends of big business? Not really, they wanted to sponsor monopolies and whatnot but also wanted the businesses to have no influence over the state, rather the other way around, the state can force the big business to do what they want. As far as if it actually worked that way when they were in power, I'm not sure.
They don't believe in climate change, want zero controls on guns, are generally anti-immigrant - even the legal immigrants are lied about e.g. Haitians in Springfield, don't believe women should have certain rights concerning their own healthcare, want to keep cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, etc.
They are impenetrable. Yes they'd claim I'm unwilling to compromise but we're talking about different starting points - I have to get them to accept certain actual real-world events and facts as true before starting a meaningful conversation.
Which is why the entire talking point of the Dems bringing illegals into the country to replace the electorate is a lie to enrage the base through racism. Many, possibly the majority, of immigrants coming into the US are very conservative.
I watched the victory speech. He promised three things (1) only four years of him in the White House, (2) appointing RFK to eliminate vaccines and gut the health care industry (3) end current wars, so basically give his boss
military control of Eastern Europe.
I don’t believe (1). The other two would mean our kids’ life expectancies just halved.
- Eliminating vaccines is a terrible idea, but public school vaccine requirements are state law in my state. RFK won't be touching them.
- Gutting the health care industry? That's not necessarily a bad thing. Wasteful health care administration (passing the buck) was something like 30% of health care costs pre-ACA, and health care is now 17.3% of GDP. Shedding 1/3 of health care costs would bring our health care expenses to the same ratio of GDP as the UK. Of course it would also cause an unemployment crisis...
Pre-ACA it was hard to near impossible to get healthcare with an existing condition. Additionally, most healthcare costs are later in life. My fear is shedding costs is going to equate to only covering people who are young and healthy. But hey, it'll be cheaper.
> Nineteen of those studies were considered to be high quality; of these, 18 reported an inverse association between estimated fluoride exposure and IQ in children. The 18 studies, which include 3 prospective cohort studies and 15 cross-sectional studies, were conducted in 5 different countries. Forty-six of the 53 low-quality studies in children also found evidence of an inverse association between estimated fluoride exposure and IQ in children.
>They don't believe in climate change, want zero controls on guns, are generally anti-immigrant - even the legal immigrants are lied about e.g. Haitians in Springfield, don't believe women should have certain rights concerning their own healthcare, want to keep cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, etc.
I'd be willing to bet that the amount of conservatives that fit your description are not enough to win an election. That description is only a subset of conservatives in my experience of being a conservative myself and living around many of them.
Common ground. The whole democratic apparatus of the United States might get severely hollowed out for the foreseeable future, and you're talking about finding common ground.
Why is everyone else responsible but the people responsible? Not calling out fascism is surely just as problematic.
Do you have any data (except for interpersonal psychology) on whether letting fascism slide or calling it out ultimately makes the situation worse? At what point do you call fascism fascism? When it's too late?
> At what point do you call fascism fascism? When it's too late?
You call it fascism when it is fascism. Once it is openly fascist then it is probably too late to stop, but you don't call it fascism until it is fascism.
Let's hope we never have to find out, but so many people captivated by a conman while simultaneously crying about everyone else's position is a recipe for abuse.
Separating children from parents at the border, reverting hard fought women's right to their own body, that is the stirring of fascist behaviour.
That wasn't his main intention. It was to stop the flow of illegal immigration into the country. And after popular criticism, he reversed that policy and never enacted it again. That doesn't sound authoritarian/fascist to me. It sounds more like bending to the will of the people you govern.
> reverting hard fought women's right to their own body
And a large swath of the country believes abortion is murder. I guess for that, they are fascists in your eyes?
The term really has lost it's meaning and is just used by the Left to demonize the other side.
> The term fascist has been used as a pejorative,[74] regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum. George Orwell noted in 1944 that the term had been used to denigrate diverse positions "in internal politics". Orwell said that while fascism is "a political and economic system" that was inconvenient to define, "as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'",[75] and in 1946 wrote that '"Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable."[76] Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales wrote in 2000 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times".[77]: 1
You could try to answer this yourself by looking up the definition and cross checking it with the rhetoric from the republican party during this campaign.
I fail to see how the Republican party is fascist. I think it's a term the Left uses to demonize their opposition. Ironically, that is kind of fascist-like.
> The term fascist has been used as a pejorative,[74] regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum. George Orwell noted in 1944 that the term had been used to denigrate diverse positions "in internal politics". Orwell said that while fascism is "a political and economic system" that was inconvenient to define, "as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'",[75] and in 1946 wrote that '"Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable."[76] Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales wrote in 2000 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times".[77]: 1
I assume you have good reasons to believe Republicans are fascist. I'm simply asking you and any others who believe this to share your reasons. Is that not reasonable?
Even if I listed all reasons why the rhetoric during the campaign reeked of fascism, you’d simply dismiss them, like all the times before where this has been called out already. This is why people rightly feel people like you act like they’re in a cult. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
Like right now, by editing your comment you're desperately trying to pose there is no accepted definition of fascism. Dismissing definitions only fits the bill.
Ah yes, the "you're too stupid or unreasonable (i.e. deplorable or trash)" to reason with so I won't even try argument.
> you’d simply dismiss them
I'm a random internet stranger. How could you possibility know me so well? Again, it's just a blanket stereotyping and demonization of people who have different beliefs that you do. A mass ad hominem attack. That attitude is a root of many problems in the political arena. I expect that kind of rhetoric on Reddit, but am disappointed to encounter it here.
> Even if I listed all reasons
I'm a busy person and I assume you are too. Why don't you list one and we'll go from there?
You already try to dismiss an accepted definition, so why would I bother reiterating all the easy to find articles, videos and podcasts that literally quote and warn of Trump's rhetoric? Do you think you sound like a person that is trying to understand criticism of his party, especially right after voting for them?
> You already try to dismiss an accepted definition
In this discussion, we've already defined it? where? That's news to me that I can dismiss something that I wasn't aware of.
> Do you think you sound like a person that is welcoming criticism
I am very welcoming of criticism of my party and the one I voted for. Trump can be a bombastic jerk. I voted for him because his policies align more with my values than Harris'. He was the lesser (much lesser) of two evils. I didn't vote for him in the primaries and I wish he wouldn't have won them.
Anyway, you continue to make assumptions about me rather than discuss/debate the issue of why you think Trump is a fascist. It's not much of a discussion and so I'll opt out now. All the best to you.
If you think every debate should first have a discussion on definitions, before you can get to the heart of the argument, you should not be debating.
We don't have to define it. That's the point. It's already been done for us.
It's the same with asking me to list reasons or sources that explain the republican parties fascist tendencies, while that's been done thousands of times through the course of their campaign. If you were truly curious as to why people might feel that way, you could have done so at any point during the last few months.
You did't accept the definition you bothered to look up and you didn't accept the valid concerns people had during the campaign.
The real reason you're walking away from this conversation is because you don't care if I am right.
You're not afraid of fascism, because you think you're in the right group.
I think the other poster was just being polite, trying to have a discussion about the left's misuse of the term fascism, yet failed to account for the degree of intelligence required to understand such nuance. So let me spell it out for you all, you are misusing the term and on the odd occasion that one of you actually checks the definition, you view it through your own biased lens, rather than reading the complex description thoroughly. You cherry-pick some terms and twist others around to suit your own dogma, with the intended goal of using it to villainise the enemy.
If you replace nationalism with partisanship, in very many ways the modern left is far more closely aligned with the vile components of fascism than the republican party, or even Trump supporters. The left have done everything they can do vilify anyone who disagrees with their core beliefs, which they hold are a matter of morale superiority and to which, in their minds, no person of moral substance could ever find disagreeable.
By very definition, conservatives are conservative. When they disagree with someone, they continue to treat them respectfully and move on with their lives, comfortable in the reality that there exists people around them with very different beliefs than their own. The left, on the other hand, do no such thing and yet look in the mirror and convince themselves that they're the better people in all this.
Trump less won this election than the democrats did lose it by arrogantly putting up a candidate with strong ties to the current unpopular administration and whose other policies and attributes did not appeal to the swing voter.
I don’t even have a dog in this fight since I'm from the EU. I can see why the Democrats lost. I can also see why Trump won.
And I'm factually correct when I say that Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous. He has motivated even a reasonable person like you to defend him vehemently. He made you part of his group, and by the looks of it you’re already starting to hate those who are not in it.
You are way too worked up. “Already starting to hate those who are not in it”. There is not a whiff of evidence of that in the comment you are responding to
You couldn't be more wrong about me. In-fact I did not vote for Trump and have always been in the centre, between the republicans and the democrats. Shockingly I'm considered right wing by the left and left wing by the right, albeit moreso by the left. I'm exactly who both parties should be targeting when they want to win an election and while I couldn't bring myself to vote Trump, the democrats certainly didn't sell me on Harris.
I have observed from the sidelines how both sides behave towards one another and while there are some extremists on the right whose behaviour is utterly shameful, I have noticed that a significant number of moderate people on the left have grown utterly intolerant of conservatives over the last decade and they'll vocalise their disgust and even go as far as lodging complaints with employers or writing negative reviews about businesses, outing and harassing people whose views they disagree with. While the extreme right tend towards violence, what those on the left do is equally disgusting, yet they do it with a false sense of righteousness.
> Ah yes, the "you're too stupid or unreasonable (i.e. deplorable or trash)" to reason with so I won't even try argument.
I wouldn't call anyone stupid, but I will say this. I live in the south surrounded by evangelicals, and they talk about Trump like he's a religious figure. I've tried to have rational conversations with family members and it's like arguing about the existence of God. In their eyes Trump can literally do no wrong. Maybe that's not you, but some of your defenses here feel like that.
Because you know exactly what people mean when they talk about fascism. Trumps fascist language and tendencies have also been well documented by scores of people and not just progressives. Instead of deflecting by debating about the meaning of the word, explain how you're ok with all of the fascists things that he says on a regular basis.
As someone else said who responded to you, they could list all the fascist statements Trump has made and you'll find reasons to dismiss them. Just like trying to convince a religious person that god does not exist.
I was watching a streamer who once referred to something as “stupid” before they corrected themselves to use a different word (I don’t remember because it’s not the point). The reason for their correction was that they believe that word to be a lazy way of describing something; lots of things can be considered generally “stupid” but there’s always some underlying reason for that conclusion which will invariably be a more informative descriptor. (It takes effort to discover this reason, hence it’s “lazy” when one does not.)
I do commonly see “fascist” used to describe things in similar ways where the person seems to be expressing a general disdain for something. They do successfully convey some meaning but it’s very non-specific. Just food for thought for readers who want their opinions heard more than they want to hem and haw over the specific meanings of words.
Objectively, the use of force to eject protestors at rallies is of the fascist mindset. Trump endorses it.
The counter-argument is that a culture of violent police suppression is just modern America, and it’s not fair to tar one particular party with that particular brush.
1. Rhetoric of an "enemy within". Trump has already made it clear that he intends to use the US military to "clean out" our country.
2. Supreme consolidation of power. Trump plans to re-enact Schedule F. Tens of thousands of federal workers will be fired, and their replacements will be required to vocalize their devotion to Trump. The bureau meritocracy system, which has been in place since the 1800s, will be removed completely. In its place, a system of political loyalty.
3. Supreme avoidance of the law. Trump is completely immune to any criminal prosecution while president, and he has made it clear he plans to use this newfound power "very aggressively".
4. Desecration of education. Within the first 100 days, the department of education will be dissolved. States will pivot to ahistorical pro-conservative education, if they provide any public education at all.
Why then are the republicans so open to lower gun ownership restrictions by the citizens?
If they were fascist wouldn't they be doing the opposite? I thought a fascist government would not allow or want the average citizens to own firearms.
This is just 1 example that pops into my mind. I can think of other examples too where the republican policies seem to be the direct opposite of what I read that a fascist government would want.
Saying that wannabe dictators would fear an armed populace is an American folklore not supported by real world history. In reality, wannabe dictators usually love a disenfranchised, angry population - all you have to do is to tell them there's an evil outsider responsible for their misery. If they're armed and capable of creating more chaos? Even better. No reason to worry, you can deal with them at your leisure once you have the full state under your control.
(I'm not saying that the republican party is fascist, just that there's nothing in their gun policy that would be inconsistent with a wannabe fascist party.)
Advocating conspiracy theories, undermining trust in democratic process, pro-nationalist, racist, sympathetic to (if not supportive of) white supremacists, ultra-conservative and traditionalist, stoking unfounded fears of communism/marxism, etc...
Okay. Let's take conspiracy theories. Trump has promoted the Obama birther conspiracy, pizza gate, that the Clintons are responsible for the death of Epstein and other political opponents, that there was fraud in the 2012 election and various false claims about the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections, various tropes about Soros etc...
It's a fact that Trump shared and promoted these. It's a fact that they are conspiracy theories.
And the Russian collusion "right under our noses" bullshit floated by the Dems turned out to be just that, bullshit conspiracy theory costing taxpayers over $30 million for the investigation. So that makes Dems fascist too then?
Firstly, conspiracy theories are just one aspect of a complex narrative that characterises fascism.
Secondly, conspiracy theories generally fly in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. But if you look at the Mueller report, it lists numerous links and collusions between the Trump campaign and Russian government. There were actual criminal offenses. There just wasn't quite enough to prove wilful criminality.
Thirdly, unless I'm mistaken, the Dems did not continue to promote claims of a conspiracy between Trump and Russia after the report was accepted.
The positions the Republicans voiced in their campaign cam ony be summarized as far right. So applying the moniker to the party in it's current form is accurate. The party isn't the same as their voters/supporters.
All of the moderate Republicans were primaried out over the last eight years, the senate has a few holding on but the house has been mostly cleared out. The party is very much far right. Did you not see how many Republicans refused to certify the election in 2021? It’s only gotten worse since then.
Common ground with people who voted for someone who campaigned on hate is a pretty steep hill. Funny how Republicans are never asked to "find common ground"
I’m sorry, but OP was right in calling the party - the entire party, and its supporters, and its candidates, and its institutions - far right. Because at the end of the day, many believed this was a nuanced choice about policy differences rather than what it really was: a binary choice between an imperfect Democracy, and strong man totalitarianism.
The voters made their choice clear, and those of us most impacted by GOP authoritarian policies now get to spend the next four years (at least) trying to make sure we survive attacks against us while also maybe still salvaging this grand democratic experiment.
So no, you can take that “find common ground” and shove it. We adhered to decorum for decades, even as the GOP marched ever further right and ignored, plowed through, or destroyed any and every uncrossable line or improper decorum in their path. You don’t get to try and apologize on behalf of an electorate that willfully has chosen violence, nor should we (those affected by said violence) have to tolerate their excuses.
In my country in Europe our most "right-wing" parties would be considered leftist in the US, so hopefully this brings into perspective just how extremely right-wing republicans are.
Republicans stopped existing in 2016 when they found out they either have to bow down to Trump or become third-party behind democrats and trumpists. Last meaningful actions of republicans was suppressing Trump during his 2016 reign, but those people are out now. There are no republicans left in power.
Who's in charge now are not republicans. Now it's just far right believing in genius and ability of their cartoonish leader.
I mean, they call Harris a communist so all bets are off. Even Sanders would barely register on the left side pretty much anywhere in the western world
Actually that statement shows exactly the political and societal problems there is today in the US. If people can’t even talk together and even get insulted it’s going to go even worst.
Ho really? Did not history teach us everything that is happening today and can happen tomorrow ?
It can go worst as in a civil war. To a full split of the country in x countries. Now I don’t think it will happen but saying it can’t go worst is both factually false and not anchored in reality
I just don’t have any interest in having a “dialogue“ with people who want to erase LGBT Americans and burn books. There are some people who can’t be reasoned with or at least won’t be convinced by me. I am not going to waste my time on them, I’m going to continue to engage in dialogue with those who can actually hold a coherent discussion. Agreement isn’t required, but I sure can’t imagine anything productive will come from talking to someone who believes liberals are harvesting “adrenochrome” from children.
I’ve already adopted a stance of not talking politics with people who believe the 2020 election was stolen, and frankly my life has been much better for it. You can’t reason people out of a position they didn’t reason themselves in to. In my experience anyone who believes that millions of “illegals” and deceased voted are incapable of having a real discussion or listening. They will not accept reality.
When RFK Jr. is unleashed on our health system I wonder if people will finally wake up to the fact that conspiracy theorists are not just in the halls of power now, but that their numbers have grown substantially.
If it was true that it’s a waste of time to converse with others when paradings and ideologies are far away or even opposite to ours then if you think about it on a more extreme side diplomacy and ambassadors are then in your view just utterly useless and so much more a waste of time. If you tell me that you can’t do it in your own country and it’s a waste of time imagine the effort they have to do in some exotic culture.
It’s up to you. If you don’t want to do anything that has an impact too.
Surely we can distinguish between the relatively small number of people in diplomatic positions, a selected position with criteria (generally), and the rest of society?
IMO this argument carries very little water but rather “feels” right.
It's just the standard leftist doublethink of the past decade. Any realistic definition that labels 99% of Republicans as far right would label 95% of Democrats far right too. If their ideas were popular they would have started their own party a decade ago instead of being ground up in the DNC.
They claim "harm reduction" but that's not how just not voting works, 95% is still a super majority and anything you "win" is just tokenism at the end of the day.
> Stop calling working people without a college education stupid and stop alienating men.
Nobody is calling anyone stupid just because of the lack of education.
However the lack of education makes people gullible and easy to manipulate. From bleach as a Covid remedy to marginal tax as a grave danger to working people - you don't have to go far for examples. And when someone does believe this sort of blatant bullshit, then, yeah, they don't come across as particularly bright individuals.
But are you arguing that when people believe things that are demonstrably false, like using bleach as a Covid remedy, not because there is any evidence behind them but only because they were uttered by someone they trust wholeheartedly, and this person does not have any hint of medical training, that nobody should say they are stupid, but only quietly believe it in their minds?
So what is the takeaway here? When referring to trump supporters, follow the line of reasoning:
- Trump floated bleach as a covid remedy
- Bleach as a covid remedy is obviously stupid (we should both be agreeing on this one)
- Trump supporters support such statements from trump
- But pointing that out is "calling them stupid" and thus we shouldn't do it?
I'm genuinely curious about this because it makes up so many discussions with trump supporters in a nut shell. I don't want to condescend to them, but I also shouldn't be pointing out things that genuinely are stupid about trump, because doing so would offend them too? What should I do, just pretend all the dumb things Trump does (and that his supporters support him for) don't exist? Just so I can find common ground? (I mean, strictly speaking this is exactly what I do in polite company with trump supporters. I just pretend all the really dumb shit doesn't exist and just talk to them about policy and stuff, and in the end I end up finding that we agree on 90% of stuff and we go on our way. And they continue to support trump for reasons I don't understand.)
> Trump supporters support such statements from trump
Did you ever meet a Trump supporter who used bleach? Did you ever meet a Trump supporter who thinks bleach for covid is a good idea?
If you're being honest with yourself, can you even imagine a middle-aged man drinking bleach to get rid of covid?
almost everyone I know voted for Trump, I know a lot of people, none of them ever drank bleach (as I'm writing this, I remembered I know someone who drank bleach as a little kid and had to go to the hospital, my point stands though)
But my larger point is that his supporters support such statements. Not that they’re stupid enough to inject bleach (although that did happen.) It’s more that, when bringing up that he even said shit like that, trump supporters get offended that you’re condescending to them. Like, how dare you bring up that thing he actually said.
And when I say they support statements like that, it’s because they bend over backwards to find ways to convince themselves that he’s somehow not a lunatic for saying it, trying to find ways of charitably interpreting his drivel. That’s what “support such statements” means.
You believing that people actually drank bleach and weren't pranking poison control is your choice.
> they bend over backwards to find ways to convince themselves that he’s somehow not a lunatic for saying it
look, you've probably never listened to more than 5 unfiltered minutes of him speaking [0]. His supporters know he's not a lunatic, we've heard him talk for almost 10 years. Imagine a friend of yours saying something like what he said, actually imagine a normal friend of yours saying it. You wouldn't all of the sudden think he's a lunatic. Your 1st assumption would be "maybe they discussed something to do with one of the chemicals in one type of disinfectant possibly having another use" if that's a little crazy, maybe he's tired or joking or something.
Point is, in Bayesian terms, it really depends on your priors.
[0] I thought of an interesting exercise: If you commit to listening to his interview on Rogan, I'll listen to an episode of your choice that you think will enlighten me
> look, you've probably never listened to more than 5 unfiltered minutes of him speaking
I have all the god damned time. He was president for 4 years! I had to! (At least as someone who tried to follow the news then, it was unavoidable.) Most recent time I listened to him for an extended period was during the debates, where I watched the whole thing uninterrupted. We can get into the whole eating dogs thing but I'm sure you're tired of it by now.
> Imagine a friend of yours saying something like what he said
I would think they're pretty dumb, but I'd brush it off and still be friends with them.
But here's the thing: my friends aren't president of the united states. I believe we should hold him to a higher standard, especially in the beginning of a pandemic when misinformation was rampant and it was very important we didn't hear nonsense like this from our president. The whole "people say shit like that all the time" trope is the exact problem I have with trump and his supporters. I don't want our president to have the intelligence level of a typical "friend" who thinks putting bleach in your body might be a good way to fight an infection.
> If you commit to listening to his interview on Rogan
This premise isn't even true. Trump did NOT float this idea.
This is something Democrats believe though. Which says a lot more about Democrats than it does about Trump supporters.
As someone replied to you: No Trump supporters actually believe in bleach as a remedy, but tons of Democrats do. What does that tell you about their respective intelligence or education?
> Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you're going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me
So we go back to my point. Am I supposed to just pretend he doesn’t say shit like this, so that I avoid offending trump supporters?
And interestingly the word "bleach" does not show up in the quote.
And when he says "disinfectant" he means that literally as some kind of disinfecting medication. The next sentence mentioning "medical doctors" should have clued you into that.
So, now that you know that, what's wrong with what he said? (Oh, I'm well aware that the media rapidly decided disinfectant meant bleach, and then went on a rampage about that, but that's not what he said, and also not what he meant.)
Which is kind of the point isn't it? You are accusing Trump supporters of lack of knowledge but the shoe is actually on the other foot. The entire outrage was literally an invention of his opponents.
Which is also why Republicans laugh at liberals who complain about this stuff, because unlike the liberals, they heard what he actually said, and not some fictional version.
There’s that bending over backwards I was talking about in a sibling thread. Trump supporters do everything they can to twist his very obvious words to mean something that isn’t as insane. Then they turn it around and say I’m the crazy one for listening to his words.
I’m not accusing trump supporters of being stupid this, I’m accusing them of supporting what he says even though he’s obviously off his rocker.
He’s talking about putting disinfectants inside your body. He’s not using some code word for medicine. He’s talking about how fast disinfectants kill Covid outside the body, and that we should try putting them inside the body.
At this point I’m done with this entire thread, dealing with his apologists is going to give me an aneurysm. I weep for our country.
> to twist his very obvious words to mean something that isn’t
Is English not your first language? Those words aren't that hard to understand.
> He’s talking about how fast disinfectants kill Covid outside the body, and that we should try putting them inside the body.
So you're fine twisting his words to mean something else, and then accusing others of doing it?
Do you really not realize you have just then, taken his words, re-interperted them, then got mad about a fictional interpretation?
How do you not realize that everything you said about other applies FAR FAR more to you?
> dealing with his apologists is going to give me an aneurysm
Understanding spoken English makes me an apologist?
> I weep for our country.
We all do, but for very different reasons. Liberals lost the election because they can't seem to stop demonizing the other side, and people are sick of it. Perhaps take a lesson from that.
Just stop. Please. Please fucking stop. It's fucking exhausting dealing with people like you.
Let's dig up more of the quote, hopefully I won't pass out with rage having to type this shit:
> THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. So I asked Bill a question that probably some of you are thinking of, if you're totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn't been checked, but you're going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that too. It sounds interesting.
> ACTING UNDER SECRETARY BRYAN: We'll get to the right folks who could.
> THE PRESIDENT: Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you're going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.
He was JUST TALKING about how ultraviolet light would be great to get inside your body. If you'd like, we can talk about how FUCKING STUPID THAT IS on the face of it. Let's inject UV light into your veins somehow, sounds great.
Then he talks about "a disinfectant".
Now, your interpretation of "a disinfectant" is that he's using some strange coded word for plain old medication. After he was just talking about ultraviolet light.
So your contention is that RIGHT AFTER talking about ultravilot light being put inside your body to cure covid, he's now using "a disinfectant" to mean "a vaccine we haven't yet discovered" or some codeword for "medicine"??? How would that even make sense in this context?
He's talking about bleach. Nobody uses "disinfectant" to mean fucking anything else than "a thing you put on surfaces to kill microbes", like bleach, peroxide, etc etc etc.
YOU are the one that is twisting words to find a charitable interpretation of "disinfectant" to mean anything other than EXACTLY WHAT HE MEANT, which is some fucking bonkers tirade about how "if we can kill covid cells outside the body with things like ultraviolet light and disinfectants, then we should try doing that inside the body!" He didn't suddenly switch topics to talk about medicine.
> At no point in the media briefing did the then-president recommend that people inject bleach or other disinfectants into their bodies. He merely asked experts whether disinfectants could be injected to tackle COVID-19; a stance he later rowed back on when pressed by a journalist.
Right! He didn't say you should inject bleach, he merely opined that maybe we can inject disinfectants into people to tackle covid.
And you'll also notice that I DIDN'T SAY that he TOLD people to inject bleach. Only that he FLOATED the idea, which is EXACTLY what he did, if you take the common, everybody-in-the-english-speaking-world interpretation of "disinfectant" to mean "products that kill microbes that you absolutely should not ingest", with bleach being a perfect example.
Let's look what wikipedia says about a disinfectant, shall we?
> A disinfectant is a chemical substance or compound used to inactivate or destroy microorganisms on inert surfaces.[1] Disinfection does not necessarily kill all microorganisms, especially resistant bacterial spores; it is less effective than sterilization, which is an extreme physical or chemical process that kills all types of life.[1] Disinfectants are generally distinguished from other antimicrobial agents such as antibiotics, which destroy microorganisms within the body, and antiseptics, which destroy microorganisms on living tissue.
- Disinfectant is something you use on surfaces
- Antibiotics are things you ingest
- Antiseptics are something you use on living tissue
So you'd agree that trump meant "We should try using things we normally use on surfaces, and see what happens if we inject it"? It's just the word "bleach" you're hung up on?
Ok, then fine. Trump didn't float bleach as a covid remedy. He floated "disinfectants you'd normally use on surfaces, but injected into your body" as a covid remedy. I get it now!
> Liberals lost the election because they can't seem to stop demonizing the other side, and people are sick of it. Perhaps take a lesson from that
"You see if you were just nice to the terrorists they wouldn't have blown up the building. Perhaps take a lesson from that. We should be nicer to terrorists so they don't kill us."
Nobody's arguing words. You offered to show "dozens of examples right now, in the press" of Trump voters being called stupid. Apparently there are none.
I've seen research shared here that suggest that more education scales with more radical political beliefs and overconfidence, for both sides of the spectrum, not just left. So you're right. Though of course more people concentrated in cosmopolitan areas with liberal cultures means more educated people lean left.
The entire point of being wealthy (and USA is one of the richest countries on earth) is to be able to afford to sacrifice some extra wealth (e.g. by not working, or giving to charity, or abolishing slavery, or enforcing worker's rights) to accomplish other goals (whatever you deem good, or moral, or just fun / entertainment).
On every objective measure the US has the best economy it has had in...pretty much ever. So they voted for "their own economic interests" by voting in a guy with plans that every economist says will be absolutely disastrous and will not only massively spike unemployment, it will lead to far greater prices for American consumers.
Trump's plan for grocery prices is to put massive tariffs on grocery imports and to deport millions of workers. There is no one with a functioning logic cortex who doesn't see the problem with this plan. But at least they can rest comfortably knowing that the Musks, Sacks and Bezos' of the world will get a killer tax break for their next yacht.
American elections are the guy in the big suburban house complaining that filling up his F350 costs a little more than it did during COVID shutdowns and thinking that somehow the guy floating insane plans is going to fix it. It's bizarre.
Wage growth has far exceeded inflation in the United States. Americans as a whole have never, in history, been wealthier or consumed as much. This is one of those fun "you don't know what you've got until it's gone" things where people bought into a political narrative to such a degree that in their world-leading affluence they truly think they are hard done by and wronged. I sadly feel that a lot of Americans are going to learn that there is a long, long way to fall.
>You mean leftside selected economists with their own agenda.
If you really look at everything like this, that's incredibly sad and self-deluding. Trump's economic plans are scattered spitballing that sound like something the most ignorant person just randomly contrives. There is literally nothing Trump has proposed that would in any way improve the US economy or reduce prices of anything. But they absolutely would do the opposite. No one, ever, has convincingly described how Trump is going to improve the economy. It's just random score-settling and self-enriching nonsense.
>He had the lowest unemployment numbers in decades.
In Trump's first term he was constrained from doing much of anything, and actually accomplished shockingly little policy, just coasting on Obama's policies. In this term he will have zero checks. He can actually do the crazy nonsense he has proposed, and destroy the country.
There are two possible paths ahead for the United States-
-economic calamity with zero upside where people learn that tariffs aren't some magic thing that other countries pay. Where inflation truly starts going wild again, while federal services collapse and the oligarchs reap. Musk, Bezos and crew will never have it better. Many Americans will have it much worse.
-...or..., and what Trump voters repeatedly reveal they are assuming in voting for him, he just lied about everything he says he's going to do to get a vote and actually won't do anything much at all beyond some corruption and self-serving.
People always say this about working-class Republican votes but the exact same thing is true of many educated middle-class Democratic voters. If you work e.g. in big tech you will pay less taxes when Republicans set tax policy. Why aren't we calling tech worker Democrats stupid for voting against their own economic interests and higher taxes?
This is an honest question, I'm not American, I don't live in the US and I genuinely don't know: how has Donald Trump served the interests of "working people without a college education" during the four years of his presidency? I'm also curious to know if the Democrats have done any different.
In the interest of full disclosure I am totally guessing that neither did anything to materially improve the lives and fortunes of working-class Americans and neither Donald Trump will, nor would Kamala Harris. Working people in the US, as in the rest of the world seem to me to be shafted for good, by all sorts of economic forces that they have no control over. I'm speaking in this as a current academic but one-time unskilled, immigrant worker.
It used to be that you could feed yourself and your family with "the sweat of your brow". Not any more. Who is working to change that?
> how has Donald Trump served the interests of "working people without a college education" during the four years of his presidency?
Uneducated working class folks compete with illegal immigrants for jobs and cheap housing. During his presidency illegal immigration was lower and wages rose for the working class and housing costs were relatively stable. He’s also positioned himself as the “law and order” candidate, and crime tends to impact the working class much more than the middle/upper classes.
Mostly folks who voted for him voted on the premise that their experience of the economy was better when he was president rather than on the basis of individual policies.
You actually can, by working the incentives. For the first three years of Biden’s administration one could show up, be apprehended, and be relatively certain that they would be released into the country, where you might be housed and fed.
Under later Trump and Biden’s current policy, you are released into Mexico.
I get and fully understand that many Americans are angry and want change, and they exercised their democratic right and pursued that change. We all need to respect that. Many things are not on the right path, and I have a feeling "DEI" and grievance farming is going to have a rough time ahead. And I get it: As a white male I honestly am tired of government being a tool to suppress white males. I am sick of living in a Western country that endlessly self-flagellates and acts like it needs to host the world in some act of contrition for success.
Having said that, it's hard as an outsider to look at the things Trump is campaigning on and not see that as not just calling "non-educated" people stupid, but he is literally relying upon it. Either his voters are extremely ill-educated, or they simply don't believe a word he says and actually make his lying a feature of his candidacy. Either aren't great.
When just about every economist says that the US economy -- quite literally the best economy on the planet -- is going to implode under the policies Trump has stated (even just the tariff proposal, not even getting into the crackpot "abolish the IRS and write on a piece of paper that crypto wipes out the debt", or Elon magically cutting 2/3rds of the federal budget, etc.), for people to then vote for Trump to "fix" the economy is not educated. Being isolationist in one of the greatest eras of peace in human history will not bring peace to Earth, it's literally guaranteed to bring war that will end up on your doorstep, etc. Nuclear non-proliferation dies with this election, and there are a lot of powers that existed under the US umbrella that are going to fire up a nuclear program, covertly or not.
I fear that many Americans just have no idea how much they have to lose. There is a sense of comfort and complacency to assume that this is the baseline. But it isn't. It can get much, much worse, very quickly.
I find a lot of his voters seem to respond to criticisms with "Oh don't worry, he's not actually going to do those things." I think your point about making his lying a feature of his candidacy is spot on. Here's to hoping that nothing ever happens.
Yes! I hate that. Also, "listen to the science" people are obnoxious. There are regular scandals of people in STEM faking their results for decades and I've seen garbage labelled as research more often than I can count.
I do not trust political sciences or humanities at all. There is little to no valid method to most things they publish. And I'm not alone in that opinion in my circle.
> Quite the contrary, their job is far more important to society than mine.
I doubt it. Think about how connected the world is, you can't even apply for jobs without the internet.
Both jobs are equally important. The main difference is that you can get started doing construction without many pre-qualifications, while a construction worker may take a year or more to get the basics of computer engineering down.
What happened is that the remain side had to fight on the side of a reality that existed and the Brexiteers made up a fantasy future that has failed to materialise.
Worse: many different and mutually incompatible fantasy futures, which they denied ahead of the referendum, and which after the referendum became a source of infighting that made all possible Brexits impossible to get past Westminster until Johnson came along and lied to everyone to get enough support to actually close a deal.
(The only time I can think of when digging a deeper hole got anywhere, even if the where was a… I guess in this metaphor: a disused basement where the stairs were missing?)
Your comment somewhat illustrates the point. It disparages those who voted for Brexit instead of trying to understand them, which is a recipe for eventual failure as we've seen.
Judging by this thread, it's still not possible to have a discussion on this...
> It disparages those who voted for Brexit instead of trying to understand them,
But why? Why is it the job of the people who are on the side of established truth who have to understand the views of the fantasists? I saw more "disparagement" from the pro-Brexit crowd than the Remainers. Why isn't it their responsibility to understand the realist position?
We told them Brexit would be a disaster. We were told we were scaremongering. It went ahead anyway, and it turned out to be awful. It was a stupid decision, and it was terrible judgment.
Why can't we tell people that some proposals are stupid? And why can't we tell people after the fact that they made a stupid decision? How is it our fault that they make bad decisions?
I think — as a Remainer who remained so hard I responded by moving to Berlin — that "why" is "because it was a referendum and that's how those work".
It's not sufficient (or necessary) to be correct to win in a democracy, winning requires being convincing, which may be easier with the truth but is also much harder when insulting half the electorate.
Even when it's very tempting afterwards to say "we told you so".
As for how to be convincing… dunno. I'm much more comfortable with computers where I can google the errors.
> which may be easier with the truth but is also much harder when insulting half the electorate
I'm not sure this is correct. In both the Brexit campaign and the Trump election, the winning side spread insults freely, whilst meanwhile spinning a narrative that the other side were talking down to their supporters.
In both cases, the more aggressive and less truthful campaigns won, and the more "proper" campaigns that tried to reach out actually failed.
Being bolder seems to work better in the current political climate, not pussyfooting around being safe and trying not to insult anyone. I wonder if refusing to apologise and doubling down on the "garbage" comment would have worked better.
People were concerned about loss of sovereignty and high immigration. These are perfectly valid concerns and the Leave campaign perfectly understood that when they picked "Take back control" as slogan.
Immigration is also a big factor in the Conservatives' defeat in the general election. People felt cheated as immigration hit a record high and voted Reform UK, which handed Labour a huge majority despite actually getting fewer votes than at the previous election.
So it's quite extraordinary to see the comments here with zero reflection on why all of this happened. This is the real, dangerous divide between the well-offs in and around London and the rest of the country.
I have read that the two main issues on voters' minds in this American Presidential election were immigration and the economy, so result is not very surprising.
Loss of sovereignty in particular was a fictional concern in regards to the EU, given the structure of the EU and the relatively high power of the UK within it. The degree to which the EU should be made more democratic is precisely the degree to which it remains exactly what leave campaigners said they wanted to replace it with: a traditional boring free trade agreement in the hands of negotiators appointed by the governments of the member states.
"High" migration likewise had nothing much to do with EU membership, as the government demonstrated precisely by following Brexit with, as you say, record high immigration.
One of the other famous big concerns Leave campaigners had was the cost, which famously became the £350 million a week on the side of a bus. This number was even called out as a falsehood at the time, but it was believed by enough to make a difference.
Remainers were unable to convince the majority that the benefits of EU membership was worth the cost, financial or otherwise, regardless.
It is patently false that the loss of sovereignty is fictional. There is a loss of sovereignty by definition when the EU is a political entity with the power to enact laws. The issue is even being raised with a (growing) part of public opinion throughout Europe, and it continues today in the UK with, for instance the ECHR.
It is also patently false that immigration had nothing to do with EU membership. The surge of immigration from Eastern Europe was caused by EU membership (although initially the UK government could have imposed limits) and it also highlighted loss of sovereignty as there was nothing the government could do about it because of EU law.
Now, of course the government still controlled, and controls, immigration from outside the EU and they demonstrated that they were in fact in favour of high immigration despite what they said. This is a major cause of people voting for Reform UK instead of the Conservatives as already mentioned several times. That's why I have been saying that the result of this year's general election is a continuation of the issues at play since the Brexit referendum and even before that.
I am quite shocked by the obtuse reactions in this thread. This is still the very narrow-minded view that "we are correct they are wrong" that led to the Brexit referendum's result. Effectively, "we" are smart and correct and "they" are stupid and racist, without any attempts to try to understand the other side's point of view (which does not mean agreeing with it).
As an ironic side note, this is what "diversity" and "neurodiversity" in the workplace is all about: Bringing diverse points of view and listening to them instead of locking ourselves in our certitudes.
> It is patently false that the loss of sovereignty is fictional.
It is not "patently" false. That is an absolutist view of the type you are complaining about. UK law still had priority: demonstrated by the fact that the UK was able to withdraw from the agreement.
> This is still the very narrow-minded view that "we are correct they are wrong"
You seem outraged by this; why? Why shouldn't we think that we were correct and you were wrong? Presumably you thought you were right and we were wrong.
Anyway, the empirical evidence since suggests that we were correct and you were wrong. Most of the predictions made by Remainers turned out to be correct. Can you accept that?
> Effectively, "we" are smart and correct and "they" are stupid and racist
No one in this thread has claimed this. The official campaign never said this. You are attacking a strawman.
> There is a loss of sovereignty by definition when the EU is a political entity with the power to enact laws
If you claim that a power granted by the member states themselves, who agree to it specifically as a mechanism to enable decision making, is a "loss" of sovereignty, then democracy — all forms of it, direct or representative — also meets this description.
> and it also highlighted loss of sovereignty as there was nothing the government could do about it because of EU law.
Except for all the ways they could.
In addition to "not actively campaign to be allowed to join the treaty in the first place" (which the UK did, FOM was part of the 1957 Treaty of Rome before the UK joined), "not actively campaign for the EU to get bigger" (which the UK did), "change the rules of the EU" (which the UK did), "not join the Schengen area" (the UK did not join Schengen), and "leave EU" (which the UK did), member states also have the power to specify the rules for anything longer than a typical tourist trip in most of the west would otherwise allow anyway.
This would have been a lot easier if the UK hadn't been horrified by the idea of national ID cards that the rest of the continent seems fine with.
What really stopped the UK government from doing anything much about migration — and the reason why they were really "high migration" — is the economic need for all the migrants to do all the work that the UK industries rely on but can't get locals to do for whatever reason.
This is specifically why the UK government did not impose limits to legal immigration routes and instead made empty slogans about stopping boats that didn't even constitute a rounding error compared to everything else.
> This is still the very narrow-minded view that "we are correct they are wrong" that led to the Brexit referendum's result.
I do not group all Leavers into one single category.
Unfortunately, my experience has been that the only thing Leavers have in common is the narrow-minded view that all other Leavers had the same reason for voting Leave as they themselves had. None I've encountered have been willing to engage with the observation that what they want isn't compatible with what other Leavers wanted, and when confronted with unambiguous evidence of this call each other names and denounce that alternative as "not true Brexit".
Some may call this "stupid", but not me. I think it is an unfortunate aspect of the human mind when it comes to politics, a place in which all teams are fallible and none are exempt.
Even at the time of the campaign, I was of the opinion that any who listened to the speeches by Daniel Hannan and was thereby convinced to vote Leave, was neither a fool nor a racist — he has a silver tongue, his words were not those of racism or malice.
On the other hand, those who saw Nigel Farage stand in front of his "Breaking Point" posters and thought "yes, this speaks to me"… well, one way in which I'd agree with UKIP MP Douglas Carswell is that he called the poster "morally indefensible": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Point_(UKIP_poster)
> Effectively, "we" are smart and correct and "they" are stupid and racist, without any attempts to try to understand the other side's point of view (which does not mean agreeing with it).
From my POV, that describes every Leaver I've ever tried to discuss this with, both before and after the referendum. There was one who said "Brexit will be fine because the EU will give us a good deal", and when I said "no", rather than try to engage or find out why I thought that, replied by shouting "that proves we should leave"; on another occasion, someone else present expressed — as a concern — the belief that Brexit would make Cambridge shrink, his reply was to shout "good"; and after the referendum, he didn't understand why I stopped talking to him and moved out of the country even though I'd already been openly talking of this before the referendum — he was a Cambridge graduate who several times boasted of being in the international maths olympiad, logic goes out of the window when politics gets into the human brain.
Those Leavers who continue to discuss Brexit seem unable to understand why, despite winning the referendum, they didn't get what they thought they were voting for — when those of us who voted Remain knew that what we voted against was in the same general space as the vague incoherent mess that actually happened.
I am willing to believe that those who thought they were getting low immigration would be upset when all the other considerations got in their way; just as those who were promised no change to trading conditions were upset to discover that the EU does in fact have an external border after all and despite claims to the contrary.
> This is the real, dangerous divide between the well-offs in and around London and the rest of the country.
Above you said "It disparages those who voted for Brexit instead of trying to understand them". Why are you disparaging those who voted remain instead of trying to understand them?
There was nothing coherent to understand. A rag tag coalition mainly built on delusional positions.
- we can have all the trade benefits without freedom of movement (specifically denied by EU at the time, didn't materialise)
- we will have 'more trade' afterwards (fails to understand how trade works)
- we won't have to follow EU rules (in reality, we can't really diverge that much from how the EU works without incurring penalties)
- we won't have to pay anything to them / we hold all the cards / ... (we did pay for our liabilities and we definitely didn't hold the cards)
- we can become much more left wing if we leave the neoliberal EU (fails to account for the fact our country isn't particularly left wing overall)
- politicians will have to take responsibility/can't blame the EU (brexiteers keep blaming the EU even now, BJ et.al. have faced minimal or no consequences for their actions)
- we can fish again (ignores relative importance of fishing vs the actually productive economy, disregards that EU is a big market for said fish)
Well oversight on financial institutions by EU is gone, yeah you still have regulations for normal business that you have to do with EU. But super rich and corporations can drop their money in UK puppet territories and EU is not going to have pressure points. Google "UK tax havens" and I bet brexiteers were handsomely paid for their efforts by people who want that scheme to continue instead of sharing any of that money with EU.
As in, they were right calling people bigots if they wanted to get out of the eu? That definitely didn't improve uk, I've even heard about people feeling "betrayed" by the now valid tariffs that damaged their UK business
Working class people who, especially, wanted to control immigration were called bigots, uneducated, stupid, racist, etc and were ignored. Result is that they voted for Brexit. No, that didn't change anything because this was ignored by the establishment (both Labour and Conservatives) and that is still festering with the resulting rise of the Reform UK party (of Nigel Farage who's celebrating with Trump in Mar-a-Lago right now).
Here's a better analysis of the Brexit thing which was posted here yesterday. It was mostly decided by the fact that the pro-Brexit people had better marketing campaign.
Your "analysis" is from someone involved in the Brexit campaign. Of course Cummings is going to say he was amazing at marketing.
Another argument would be that Vote Leave broke campaign spending rules. In countries with legally binding referenda, that would justify rerunning the referendum. But in the UK it was "only advisory".
"Better marketing" campaign is another word for saying that they understood people's concerns better and were thus able to use that to their advantage instead of insulting the people they were supposed to convince (as the Remain campaign did). This is what Cummings did to win.
> instead of insulting the people they were supposed to convince (as the Remain campaign did)
Can you point to any examples of this? I don't think the official Remain campaign did anything of the sort. Insulting the people you are trying to convert is a poor strategy, which is why I don't believe they did it.
When you say "were called bigots, uneducated, stupid, racist, etc", what I think happened was that the Leave campaign alleged that that was what the Remainers thinking/saying and it gained traction.
I believe the argument being made is that calling spades spades is bad when spade is an insult and you need to convince the spades to vote for you.
Which is also why Republicans calling Democrats childish names such as "Dummy-crat" or saying "socialist" (or "commie") for all things to the left of their Overton Window doesn't convince any to their left to change their minds rightward.
I think that might be the culprit, but then you have no escape. Some post brexit interviews have been - at least for an European - quite hilarious. I feel sorry for them tho, but it's sort of a leopards ate my face situation
I used to live in Cambridge; I knew only one person who was a long-time UKIP voter in EU elections, who was "delighted" by the result of the referendum.
Even though I'd already been openly discussing moving to Germany ahead of the referendum, and went on an InterRail trip immediately before it to find a place to move to in the event of Leave winning, he did not comprehend that my reaction to the result included cutting him out of my life entirely.
He wanted the Cambridge to shrink, I left. That's his face leopard.
(As for intelligence: he also sometimes boasted of being in the international maths olympiad, this was Cambridge after all).
What lessons haven't been learned? Keir Starmer's Labour won the last UK elections by a landslide and the Tories got the boot. I do think your analysis oversimplifies a complex issue.
I'm not ignoring that Starmer got elected by keeping his mouth shut and his hands behind his back, but the Tories' smash-mouth politics did not win the day anyway. What I can see from where I am is that Brexit was a very special case and it's all gone back to normal now.
There was no landslide. Labour actually got fewer votes than at the previous election when it was by Corbyn!
What happens is that Conservatives voters voted for someone else, mostly Reform UK. And the reasons have been the same as what's been festering since Brexit with the added factor that the Conservatives increased immigration to record level...
Labour won with 411 seats (up 211 from 2019) and 33.3% of the popular vote (9,708,716 votes) vs. 121 seats for the Conservatives (down 251) and 23.7% of the popular vote (6,828,925 ).
YMMV but I call a lead of 290 seats and 2,879,791 votes a landslide.
It was the Lib Dems that seem to have taken most of the Tories' voters: 72 seats (up 64) and 3,519,143 votes. The latter at least checks out. Reform was up 1 seat from 2019 for 5 seats total. Not quite a big splash then.
Labour also won big in Scotland against the SNP for the first time in years (but that was rather the fault of the SNP).
You're completely missing the point and where the votes went.
Labour got 9,708,716 votes in 2024 vs 10,269,051 in 2019. Starmer and Labour did not convince voters adn lost votes to the Greens.
What happened is that people did not vote for the Conservatives and instead voted Lib Dems and, especially, Reform UK, which got a massive 14% (3rd place and more than the Lib Dems). The Reform UK vote is because the Conservatives did not deliver on Brexit and even more importantly did the opposite of what they said on immigration, which reached record level.
The number of seats to Labour is a result of the above (Conservatives dropped so Labour candidate was elected) not because people voted Labour more than before. The surge is Reform UK.
So the same issues that have been at play in the Brexit referendum are still the key issues.
Reform's seats came from the Tories, unsurprisingly, and like you say Reform won more of the popular vote than the Lib Dems (4,117,221 vs. 3,519,143; not a wide margin) but Reform also campaigned in many fewer constituencies where they didn't have to compete directly with the three largest parties (not to mention Lord Buckethead and the Monster Raving Loony party, their nemeses). So maybe they have lots of supporters in certain areas, but only in those certain areas.
Reform is not a serious political force in the UK. They only renamed themselves from The Brexit Party, but they remain a single-issue party that appeals to a tiny minority of voters. The majority of the electorate are much more concerned with real issues like the economy, the NHS, education, law and order, and the environment. Brexit wasn't even a particularly big issue in the last elections. Even the Lib Dems, who had campaigned for a second referendum in 2019, laid it to rest this time and focused on more recent issues like sewage spills in rivers etc.
Might I also hog the mic a little while longer to say that I, personally, am mostly socially conservative, and am absolutely appalled both at the Tories and Reform, who are nothing but right-wing populists and demagogues that do not care a jot about all the things that socially conservative voters care for: jobs, order, stability, lawfulness, the economy, family, etc. And let's not forget that it was Margaret Thatcher's Tories that got the UK into the EU, and did so because it was beneficial to the economy, trade, and the stability of international politics. Exciting the EU was exactly antithetical to conservative ideals: it was a radical act of self-mutilation.
Labour are now the conservative party, the party of business and fiscal responsibility (and sitting on your hands while you kick the can down the road) and that's why they took all the Tories' votes: because the socially conservative constituency got fed up with the Tories' antics and, the Brexit fever having passed, wanted to go back to order and stability.
> Reform is not a serious political force in the UK. They only renamed themselves from The Brexit Party, but they remain a single-issue party that appeals to a tiny minority of voters.
In the 2024 UK general election, they got 14.3% of the vote. I don't think that's a "tiny minority". And if that's a "tiny minority", then the 12.2% of the vote Lib Dems got is an even tinier minority.
The problem that Reform has, is that 14.3% is spread too thin geographically. Reform got 5 MPs from 14.3%, Lib Dems got 72 MPs from 12.2% – because Lib Dem support is more concentrated in particular constituencies, mostly in southern England.
This is a side-effect of first-past-the-post. If the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum had succeeded, then Reform would have likely ended up with more seats in 2024; although even with alternate vote, the seats-per-vote advantage that Lib Dems have over Reform due to their greater geographic concentration would have still existed, albeit somewhat attenuated. A more fully proportional system, such as those used by the devolved legislatures of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, would have attenuated that advantage even further–although those systems are still region-based, so even they may not completely eliminate it.
>> In the 2024 UK general election, they got 14.3% of the vote. I don't think that's a "tiny minority". And if that's a "tiny minority", then the 12.2% of the vote Lib Dems got is an even tinier minority.
I don't disagree. I argued that the Labour win was a landslide, not that the Lib Dems' result was one. Me and the OP were disagreeing about where the Tories' voters went: Reform, or Labour. I argued they mostly went to Labour and my reasoning is that Labour are now the party that best represents socially conservative voters.
I agree that FPTP is skewing results and Reform might have fared better in a more representative system. Then again, the Lib Dems may also have got more votes. There was a lot of discussion in the elections about "voting strategically" to oust the Tories and avoid splitting the "liberal" vote. Maybe with a more representative system that wouldn't be an issue anymore.
FPTP is an embarrassment certainly. I don't vote in the UK, I'm a bloody foreigner, but if the system was more balanced I might even consider becoming a citizen. It's stupid that I've lived in this country for so long and I don't get to say where it goes politically. Although that would require me to swear an oath of allegiance to the king and I'm a republican. It's a tough call.
There is no official definition, but generally (in a UK context) a "landslide" is a party winning a big House of Commons majority – like the Tories in 1983 and 1987, or Labour in 1997. And by that standard, 2024 was a landslide – Labour won almost as many seats as 1997, and beat both of Thatcher's records.
What I think what complicates things: both Thatcher's and Blair's landslides were big majorities backed by a big percentage of the vote (> 40%). And since the two things go together, even though quasi-officially it is about the first not the second, it is understandable how some people take the second to be part of the definition as well. For 1983, 1987, 1997, it doesn't make a difference. But then suddenly in 2024 it does – Starmer won a big number of seats, but only 33.7% of the vote – only slightly more than Corbyn's 32.1% in 2019, and actually in absolute terms over 500,000 fewer votes. This is because turnout dropped significantly in 2024 compared to 2019.
> Me and the OP were disagreeing about where the Tories' voters went: Reform, or Labour.
Given the drop in turnout, I think quite a few Tory voters just decided to stay home.
> I argued they mostly went to Labour and my reasoning is that Labour are now the party that best represents socially conservative voters.
That's not numerically possible – the Tory vote dropped by 19.9 percentage points, while Labour only gained by 1.6 points and Lib Dems by 0.6 points. A small minority of Tory voters switched to Labour, but any more than that and Labour would have got a bigger vote share than they actually did. The Tory voters must have gone somewhere else – and given Reform got 14% of the vote, it is obvious very many of them went to Reform.
That would be true if there was a change with that population. Right now the numbers are that Trump won with slightly less votes than when he lost in the 2020 elections; and Kamala lost with significantly less vote than Biden got in the 2020 elections. There are almost 20 million of voters that didn't show up on this year election that showed for the 2020.
What I don't get is how the bar for the Democrats seems to be so much higher than for Trump. Sure, "the typical man" is more easily validated by Trump than Harris, but at the same time Trump says much worse things about women than Harris about men. I can see how the Harris seems more "elitist" in a way than Trump, but to me that seems like a subtle negative versus Trump's long list of very obvious flaws.
We call that "double standard" and it's top on the list of common fallacies. The lack of education, whether I demonize it or not, definitely has a saying in its spread. And dismantling the department of education won't help getting people more educated in the following elections.
I think the difference is that Harris (less so than Clinton but to some extent) was seen as representing a liberal consensus that men, particularly white, heterosexual men are 'over', that the 'future is female', etc.
Trump is just Trump. A rhetorically violent, deeply unpleasant convicted rapist, but not the vanguard of an explicitly misognist movement. At least not one thats culturally hegemonic. So while American progressives may label Trump voters sexist or racist, the overwhelming majority of them don't see themselves that way. Meanwhile, a highly vocal minority of progressives do actively demean men, while people, straight people etc, and have for a decade. They've enacted DEI practices, and scholarship and funding practices that exclude men from fair participation in the workforce, education and the arts. As efforts to correct historic imbalances in that participation. At the same time, they've ignored how male participation in higher education has dropped off, the epidemics of alienation and underemployment affecting men.
Edit: Just to clarify I'm addressing the question - not advocating Trump, or suggesting that life for men or white people or straight people is in fact materially worse. Just pointing out people strongly dislike being disliked, actively biased against and demeaned and this does in fact affect their voting preferences.
I'm genuinely at a loss as to how that connects to anything I wrote. It's not Harris' gender that was the issue - to the extent that the position I'm taking helped shift the dial. It's the perception that she would continue the policies and forward the ideological perspectives listed above. It doesn't help that she seems extremely disingenuous and politically opportunistic. Trump is of course both these things - but conservatives seem to care less about that, likely because of the redemption narrative built into Christianity. You can be as much of a villain as you like provided you push that button. It's worth noting that Obama and Bill Clinton both pushed their Christianity when campaigning, and that appeal wasn't lost on evangelicals. Progressives, it would be difficult not to admit, are pretty adamantly set against redemption currently.
You may think you mean, or maybe you did not, the accurate description: adjudicated rapist. And that difference right there, between adjudicated and convicted, and all of the other ambient hoaxes, is in big part what the referendum yesterday was about.
Ask yourself how long it was between late 2017 and when you found out the "fine people" hoax was actually a hoax. Or if just now, whether you knew that even Snopes confirmed the hoax that Kamala wantonly repeated (as if it were true) in the debate is indeed a hoax.
Most normal people don't see the difference between adjudicated rapist and convicted rapist as an innocent mistake but as something that those who push such hoaxes -- rather than innocently parrot them out of ignorance -- should be put behind bars for in response to the damage they do this great union of states.
That is a distinction without a difference. It's not a hoax to acknowledge that a man credibly accused and judicially 'adjudicated' of raping multiple women is a rapist.
"I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping.
She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture —
I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look...
I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything...
My impression is that it's not about what Kamala Harris (or most Democrats) said, but the fact that the Republicans were able to create the perception that there are strong movements which hate "whites" and which hate "men" (in various combinations), and that voting Democrats would help those movements. Apparently, they were able to convince enough non-white men and white women that Trump will be better for them.
The simple fact is, Trump is a rorschach/inkblot test.
He is everything people claim and nothing at all. He says so much bullshit constantly that you have to just ignoring or discounting shit he says. So he reflects what you believe.
I dont know about the USA. But I know from personal experience, that COVID politics destroyed my trust in left-leaning parties. I voted left until 2020. I will never give them my vote again, ever.
That's madness. Trump - along with several other right-wing figures in the US and globally - consistently downplayed COVID's danger, went on wild tangents about hydroxychloroquine, ultra-violet light, and injecting disinfectant, and challenged the use of effective measures such as face masks and social distancing.
But most people's anecdotal experiences with COVID amount to "It was just like having the flu, I don't see why they made such a big deal about it and banned Twitter accounts for saying things that line up with my experience"
Yes. To me, it looks like this was intentional, as a form of warfare against the country. I mean, it sure worked, and it's said that RFK Jr., a weird crank, will get put in charge of all healthcare. That basically means all medicine becomes underground, forbidden.
You can't post like this on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We have to ban accounts that do this, and have warned you before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384536). I'm not going to ban you right now because it feels unfair to single out one person, but please fix this so we don't have to in the future.
To be fair, RFK Jr believes that vaccines are linked to autism and wants to ban fluoride in drinking water because it's "linked to cancer". It's very worrying that he could be setting health policy.
I could have put it better, I think. But that's basically what I was driving at. Whether I'm off base calling him a 'weird crank', or have to behave as if he has more legitimacy (which will be difficult, though I could try harder), he's very much on record as wanting to ban and stop many things that in his mind are like terrible crimes against citizens.
I'm not uncomfortable lumping a lot of that together as 'medicine'. For instance, we know vaccination in general raises his ire, but he also seems to object to pasteurization. If he remains in a position to be able to ban that practice, it could be a significant driver of health-related issues. And I do think he's in a position to be able to ban or at least substantially punish the practice of pasteurization, vaccination, flouridation… it's unclear how much influence the man will have, but it could be a great deal.
COVID has mutated to become far less fatal. At the time, social distancing and mask wearing were effective ways to reduce incidence and prevent hospitals from getting even more overwhelmed.
> This systematic review and meta-analysis suggests that several personal protective and social measures, including handwashing, mask wearing, and physical distancing are associated with reductions in the incidence covid-19.
This one I know is a straight up lie, because I remember where it came from: Trump asked an expert if it was possible to use disinfectant inside the body, was immediately shut down with a simple "no", and dropped it. Audio of the conversation was leaked and immediately twisted into "drink bleach", ignoring everything else about the conversation.
Also UV light treatment actually exists, just not for this purpose. It's a completely normal thing to ask once you learn UV kills viruses.
It doesn't. Part of what you're seeing is just straight up cheating. Florida wouldn't allow election observers. It might take a little while to sink in, but American elections are more or less running like Russian elections at this point, and these results are what you get when it's not honest. Sometimes it's like this, and sometimes the leader figure is said to get like 99% of the vote, when he doesn't feel like playing coy about it. It's up to him, not you.
America started when it rebelled against being ruled. I'd say that's not entirely off the table. First it has to become clear that we're getting ruled, not represented.
In essence, yes. I'm saying that Trump's narrative on women is no worse than societies default. Women experience far worse things than macho talk. It takes more to alienate a lot of them.
I'm politically the opposite of the person you're replying to, but these two notions are correct and not contradictory. Average people are ignorant and misogynist, and we should acknowledge this and talk about it, but not to their face. If you're not the direct target of the ignorance or misogyny, you should explain to them why their assumptions are false in a dumbed-down way, not using university-level language. Calling people ignorant directly will get them defensive and emotional. They will think they are being attacked because they are a man.
Of course, for people who are directly targeted by the ignorance and misogyny, it's their right to directly call it out, but they might not call it out at all, because they would be targeted further.
I understand calling people stupid is not a strategy to convince someone.
But it’s not like that is why someone votes for Trump, right? It’s maybe more of a way to disincentivize conversions back.
I… really wish there had been a primary though. Biden deserves to be hated for the rest of his life for this (along with all of his other decision making)
They should have had a primary instead of having a ritualistic anointing of Biden. The reason Biden had to drop out is because he was there when he shouldn't have been.
I can vaguely understand fixing a primary for H. Clinton, but for Biden? One of the things Biden ran on in 2020 was a vague indication that he would leave after one term.
I realized the stupidity argument during covid first, and it all came from the left. So much contempt, a reason why I no longer can identify with liberals. In fact, I am disgusted by what I remember from 2020/21.
Yea Kamala should not have been the candidate. She was tied to Biden who was associated with inflation which I think really decided this. I'm not sure the rest of your comment has that much to do with it
> She was tied to Biden who was associated with inflation which I think really decided this.
What about the rest of the world who've also been experiencing the same?
It's a very shortsighted take, and we've seen the same in the UK where Liz Truss 6 weeks as PM has taken the blame for global inflation in the court of popular opinion
Of course, its not logical, but voters "feel" they were better under trump without realizing inflation was a global phenomenon. This was also a failure of Dem messaging.
This is why we call Trump's voters "stupid", the US is still under Trump's tax plan until 1/2025. So if someone has an issue with taxes, it's not Biden's fault even though he is in office.
Inflation was caused by the Covid stimulus of 2020, and the mountains of free money printed that year (which is why it hit the entire world - every government did the exact same thing). Last I checked, Biden wasn't president at the time...
Given that Trump's economic policies are primarily the cause of inflation in the US, not sure what your point is. He printed and gave away 8 trillion dollars when combined with his tax cuts for the wealthy and people wonder why the cost of everything went up. Corporations across the planet were the beneficiaries of corporate welfare as governments printed money to battle COVID, and then they pocketed the profits and told their employees that they couldn't afford to give them raises.
Flooding the country with millions of undocumented workers to compete with Americans is not a favor to the working class. That is a hand out to corporations.
I can’t find any statistical reporting to back there being millions more undocumented immigrants coming into the country in the last 4 years. Data-backed reporting indicates that we’ve had ~11 million undocumented workers since the 2005 with little change until 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-k...
I take no position on why these jobs are unfilled by Americans. But trying to claim these jobs are stolen or taken by undocumented workers (as implied by the comment to which I originally responded) is just wrong. If I assume you are correct (and it is in fact a quite plausible theory), I would allege the jobs are being stolen from American workers by the employers. Certainly the employers are relatively more profitable as a result of their shenanigans, if you are correct.
It's also a hand out to middle class, who cosume a lot of services provided by illegal imigrants (landscaping, renovation, cooking in restaurants etc.). The Dems kept the price of maintaining a nice lawn low.
The Kamala campaign had one and only one major problem.
COVID stimulus and an economic slowdown from 2020 caused four years of inflation in the entire world, and people see the price of milk going up and punish the incumbent (not even the person who was in charge in 2020.
At which point, it doesn't matter how you campaign, or if the opposing candidate is actual Satan, nobody's going to vote for the incumbent.
It also doesn't help that the press normalized actual insanity that would not have been tolerated from anyone else, and collectively pretended that it's normal and reasonable behavior.
It does matter how you campaign. Very few people live without access to information beyond the price of milk. If you see that global inflation is a thing and that it is a topic of importance for potential voters you could acknowledge that it exists and work on your messaging/make it look like you're trying to do something to fix it.
The working class and young men (all young people really) have been completely left out of the economic recovery. Harris saying she would change nothing about what Biden has been doing was a huge problem. She tried to address it later.
At the end of the day, "it's the economy, stupid".
It was not, but the Trump campaign continuously lied about it. Trump lied and lied and lied about the democratic party being anti-men, anti-cis, anti-Christian, Kamala being low IQ, and whatever other stupid shit he could think about, but somehow it's Harris fault for being "too divisive" (not sure how).
Trump is the incarnation of a thin-skinned bully, he allows himself the worst but will cry as loud as possible on the first sign of a backslash.
If people who voted for him are not stupid, they certainly act like it.
They said, "People who support Trump". They never said, "People who disagree with me". Those are your own words. And there's a great deal of difference between those two clauses.
I understand you want to shield yourself from criticism, by pretending you're merely in the "people who disagree with" camp and not in the "people who support Trump" camp. But trying to do that while putting words in someone's mouth lowers the quality of discourse here. And then to try claiming moral superiority by citing "This is HN, not reddit" is just ... transparently pointless.
Also, you ruin your own argument by proving your parent correct.
> They said, "People who support Trump". They never said, "People who disagree with me". Those are your own words. And there's a great deal of difference between those two clauses.
They are closely related and I don't see as much difference as you do but okay, they are different clauses. I also believe saying someone is stupid for supporting Trump is wrong. You can disagree with a person's vote, try to point out why you think they are wrong, just ignore them but calling someone stupid has no benefit except maybe it makes the insulter feel good about their own superiority.
> lowers the quality of discourse here.
but calling me and over half the country stupid adds to the quality of discourse?
> "This is HN, not reddit" is just ... transparently pointless.
HN has clear guidelines about this [0] and people here generally adhere to them. By saying this is HN, I'm appealing to the higher standard espoused in these guidelines. Do you think those guidelines are pointless?
> I understand you want to shield yourself from criticism, by pretending you're merely in the "people who disagree with" camp
You understand incorrectly. If you look at my recent comment history, it's pretty easy to see I'm Republican and voted for Trump.
> Also, you ruin your own argument by proving your parent correct.
I don't understand your logic here. How did I prove the parent correct? Seems like just another personal insult on your part.
I look forward to your responses to the above.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Be kind."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> They are closely related and I don't see as much difference as you do but okay
They are nowhere close but of course you can't see that so okay.
> I also believe saying someone is stupid for supporting Trump is wrong.
Of course, Trump supporters are known for being poor employers of reason and introspection.
> try to point out why you think they are wrong
This list is so long that it's pointless to point this out in every conversation with a Trumper, but your parent did actually try.
> just ignore them
This is dangerous, to all humanity. At best, it's tolerance of the intolerant.
> but calling someone stupid has no benefit except maybe it makes the insulter feel good about their own superiority.
I strongly doubt your parent felt good about it. There's nothing good about calling a Trumper "stupid", because it does nothing to help the situation. Trumpers don't listen to reason; I'm sure your parent knows this. It's far more likely your parent spoke out of sheer frustration, which I fully understand, having had my own faith in humanity tested by this whole ordeal, and it hasn't even begun its "revenge run".
> but calling me and over half the country stupid adds to the quality of discourse?
1. Spoken by itself, probably not. But your parent didn't just call Trumpers stupid. They first explained their reasoning. Within a greater context where that's precisely the point being discussed: "How Trumpers are stupid."
2. More like "quarter of the country". Half your country didn't even vote.
> By saying this is HN, I'm appealing to the higher standard espoused in these guidelines.
If that's all you were doing, that'd be fine. But to do that while putting words in people's mouths? That's disingenuous, at best, and transparently so.
> Do you think those guidelines are pointless?
And there we go again with the putting words in people's mouths.
> it's pretty easy to see I'm Republican and voted for Trump.
I don't see how this, in any way whatsoever, proves I "understood incorrectly".
> How did I prove the parent correct?
I've already explained in this thread above. Twice. I don't see the point in trying a third time, especially when ... <see above>.
> Seems like just another personal insult on your part.
It wasn't. It was an appeal to do better, since, as you said, "This is HN". Maybe I understand why you feel that way, though. I am, after all, somebody that disagrees with you on sth, so of course I must be out to "get you". Rest assured, I am not out to "get you".
----
> [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Be kind." "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Since you quoted this, let me leave you with one thing to ponder on: Just how spectacularly poorly your candidate (i.e., Trump) does on these guidelines.
You don't see how "People who support Trump" and "People who disagree with me" are closely related? The former is a subset of the latter.
>> I also believe saying someone is stupid for supporting Trump is wrong.
> Of course, Trump supporters are known for being poor employers of reason and introspection.
To clarify, I don't think that anyone should should call anyone else stupid for any reason. It's just ad hominem.
I'll address your characterization of Trumpers as being poor employers of reason and introspection below.
> that's precisely the point being discussed: "How Trumpers are stupid."
Again, I have a problem with the ad hominem. Why not "wrong" or "misguided"? Why take it to the personal insult level? You mention about the reasoning for using "stupid" is sheer frustration. You also mention maintaining the quality of discourse here. "stupid" does not do that. Maybe it helps you vent your frustration, but kicking a dog does that for some people and we can agree that being frustrated doesn't justify that.
It just serves to demonize and dehumanize people on the other side.
>> Do you think those guidelines are pointless?
> And there we go again with the putting words in people's mouths.
I didn't put words in anyone's mouth. I asked a question. And the reason I asked it is you don't seem to have a problem with calling a certain class of people stupid which clearly violates the guidelines. So it's reasonable to question if you value those guidelines.
>> it's pretty easy to see I'm Republican and voted for Trump.
I don't see how this, in any way whatsoever, proves I "understood incorrectly".
This is your understanding: "I understand you want to shield yourself from criticism, by pretending you're merely in the "people who disagree with" camp"
That is incorrect. I do not want to shield myself from criticism by pretending I'm merely in the "people who disagree with" camp. As seen in my past comments, I do not pretend I'm not a Republican/Trump supporter.
>> How did I prove the parent correct?
>I've already explained in this thread above. Twice. I don't see the point in trying a third time, especially when ... <see above>.
I ask for clarification of something you said and this is your response? I proved the parent correct about what? Where have you explained this twice? You don't have to explain it again. Just copy and paste it. Doesn't have to be both times. Just one is fine.
When someone doesn't understand something, it's not always their fault. Communication is a two way street. Sometimes it is the communicator that is unclear in their messaging.
Now to address your comment about Trumpers having poor reasoning and instropective abilities I'll choose a few hot button topics in this election cycle and go through my reasoning on them.
- Immigration and border security
On day one of the Biden/Harris administration, they reversed most of the Trump era border policies. This resulted in an unprecented level of illegal border crossings. Some of these that crossed went on to rape and kill American girls/women , take over whole apartment complexes and some are terrorist bent on US destruction [0]. Furthore, these illegals have cost US taxpayers untold millions to suppor them.
After three and half years, right before the next election cycle Biden finally reinstated Trump era border restrictions and the flow of illegals stemmed. And Harris who years before said building a wall was stupid, in a recent interview suddenly says she is open to bulding the wall.
My questions are why did Biden/Harris reverts Trump border policies in the first place only to reinstate them three and a half years later when Harris was up for election?
To me, it's just unreasonable to open a countries borders like that and basically ignore immigration laws. Why let millions of immigrates into the country illegally like that? It's akin to saying "I don't need walls or doors for my house. It's ok that anyone can come in as they please. That's totally ok for me and my family"
There are legal paths to enter the US and become a resident. Those need to be followed an enforced.
So, am I stupid and lack reasoning skills for believing the above?
- June 6th Capital insurrection.
It was an insurrection against the governemnt. All the protesters who stormed the capitol should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
The question is did Trump lead this insurrection? I don't think he directly lead it. That would require that he told them something to the effect "let's go to the capitol and take over". Did he cause it? I think there are valid arguments on both sides of that debate.
In any case, this was a really bad move by Trump and a huge blight on his record.
Was it enough to keep me from voting for him? Obviously not. To me, Trump is the lesser of two evils. I didn't vote for Trump in the primaries. I really wish he wouldn't have won so I could have a better choice.
But Harris's policies I'm deeply opposed to. In terms of character, I think she is fake and insincere flip flopper with no real convictions and thus can't give straightforward answers to questions and spews word salads instead. Do I like Trump's character? Mostly not. He is deeply flawed. There are some good qualities I see in him (that I know you'll disagree with me on.). He deeply wants to see the US succeed and thus has sincere passion and deep conviction. For example, he's the only candidate that will stand up to and call out China's trade bullshit, their unfair trade practices that have screwed over America for decades. The tariffs he threatens are for the purpose of forcing China to the negotiating table. The past decades of American presidents' hemming and hawing to China have done nothing to change their behavior.
So I choose based mostly on policy rather than character.
Depends on who you ask. Both sides demonize the other, but say they don't. Republicans are just much, much better at it. The ads and rhetoric are all designed to solicited emotional responses from the constituency, putting them in a very easy position to "Other" anyone who disagrees. If you can make your followers feel like they are disenfranchised then it's a simple matter to control them by promising to be the solution for their discontent.
Project 2025 also helped, since Democrats answered it with shock and horror instead of countering with their own improved version. Say what you will about the depravity contained within those pages, but Trump voters hold it up as "at least it's a plan" without having read it, much like their other beloved book, The Bible. Knowing that, it was quite easy for the Trump campaign to whip up support.
As much as I want to end with some pithy comment like "manipulation is a hell of drug," I can't. Half the country just got permission to put their ugly truths on display and they certainly did not disappoint. I have trouble laughing about that anymore.
When one guy is talking about domestic military deployments and shooting his political antagonists, and it’s not clear that the courts will stop him, then I do indeed think the F” word is in order.
The rest of it is self evident, but I’m not going to be the one to say it out loud.
You are correct, but bizarrely working class people still think the GOP is the party that works in their favor. Despite literally increasing taxes for them and giving tax cuts to the rich.
Tonight's election flat out showed that democracy doesn't work with an uneducated population.
Yep. Hence the recent push to kneecap the education in States - be it book bans, forced Bible studies or other eye-popping regressions. Watching this unfold across the pond was a bewildering experience.
I would have thought young people having access to the internet would have allowed them to educate themselves and see through bullshit, but apparently not.
I really do think this is the beginning of the end for the US. At least I have front row tickets to the show.
Who are you calling uneducated? Just because your have an opinion doesn’t make you an authority on what people under other life conditions need to lead a successful life. Speak for yourself.
> Just because your have an opinion doesn’t make you an authority on what people under other life conditions need to lead a successful life.
That has nothing to do with anything. Every single person voting on the economy for Trump, blaming Biden for inflation is an example of a lack of education. Just for one example.
There's a reason college educated people vote so differently to non college educated people on average.
and everybody just pointing out that climate protection cannot be forced onto a population is also framed as a climate change denier. i don't deny climate change. but i don't see why current generations' lifes should be tougher just to help out future generations. there needs to be a healthy balance.
That's what the previous generation said in the 90s. They could afford that choice, because they knew they would likely be dead before climate change started really affecting everyday life. Our generation – those who are not close to retirement – does not have the same luxury. Our future will be tougher anyway, both from the climate change itself and from the efforts to mitigate its effects.
Do you want your children to have a better life than you? They won’t unless we start putting in the work to fix climate change.
As a species we took on some climate debt to improve our standard of living, and we’ve been talking bigger loans every year. Those loans are coming due in the form of larger and more frequent weather-based disasters as well as health problems for millions. If we start paying off the loan more aggressively now, we can help prevent harsher payment plans for the next 50 years.
You don’t pay off a house all at once, but you’ll thank your future self for paying it off earlier rather than later.
i don't have children and i don't care about the future of our species. solution is easy - don't bring children into this world. having said that; life always finds a way and even dire future projections won't be much worse (maybe not even close) to stone ages, dark ages or natives living in a jungle. and they all did well enough and do. that's how it is.
Have you been living under a rock? Our current lives are already tougher because of climate change, and it's only going to get worse. More extreme and more frequent weather events (droughts, floods, heat waves, ...) are already happening.
> I don't see why current generations' lives should be tougher just to help out future generations.
Most people want a good life not only for them but also for their children, and their children's children. I don't have children, but I still want a good life for future generations. Is that not simple basic human decency?
Note that the longer we wait, the more difficult we make it ourselves to change things, and the more tough even our own lives are going to be, even ignoring future generations.
> There needs to be a healthy balance.
Yes. The status quo is not a healthy balance (or arguably any kind of balance).
If republicans take the house and they already have the senate, and he has Scrotus, the first bill banning abortion federally from the House will pass the Senate and end up on his desk. I have no doubt that he will gleefully sign it.
I'm not denying climate change as a whole or in absolute, I just want to point out that there's enough evidence to think that the world as we know it won't actually end in 2012 as some studies indicate.
Climate change is a part of Earth's lifecycle. There have been ice ages, and there have been periods like jura, when it was warmer. It's all natural.
What you probably mean is how humans influence this cycle; whether accelerating or delaying it, in effect disrupting it. For that, there's no evidence; however, there are many politician lobbyists (and yes, also scientists taking advantage of juicy grants to deliver what was ordered) going to capitalize on the fear that it might be.
As someone who believes in Anthropomorphic Climate change, that graphic is just horrendous. Here is another XKCD to explain why: https://xkcd.com/605/
To be less punchy: Most of the data on the graph is on a scale of 500 years and the data is filled in with dashed lines. Starting the late 1800's we suddenly have real data(what is the update frequency?, how does that compare to previous data?)
Here is the note on the graphic: "Limits of this data: Short warming or cooling spikes may be 'smoothed out' by these reconstructions but only if they are small enough or brief enough"
~99.9% of studies agree on human-caused climate change [0].
We know, with absolute certainty for an undeniable fact, that Exxon's own climate scientists skillfully and accurately predicted climate change as a result of increasing fossil fuel use [1].
And we know that Exxon's response to that was to systematically sow doubt for decades, using tobacco-lobby style FUD tactics.
And yet you want us to err on the side of apocalypse. "What if we create a better world, and it was all for nothing".
You've been conned. I know how difficult it is to show someone they've been made a fool of, and I won't try. In fact, I agree with you that in many cases science ought to be questioned - lobotomies, mockery of germ theory, racism presented as science based, Daszak's infamous Lancet paper, etc.
On climate change though, there's very little to respect on the side of deniers. I would argue that, at this point, denying anthropogenic climate change amounts to treason against life.
Again, I find it very small-minded to imply that I'm a denier because I advocate for questioning what we are told. Furthermore, you are putting words on my mouth which make no sense at all.
People should understand there can be healthy middle grounds, which Parent obviously struggles with.
I don't deny anthropogenic climate change, on the contrary, I'm believe it's real and there's evidence for it.
I am, however, sceptical of how it's being presented and used.
An odd choice; to present your points layered in snark and sarcasm, then complain that you weren't fully understood.
> I am, however, sceptical of how it's being presented and used.
Then say that. Poe's law is rampant on this topic. If you want to be understood, then you need to write clearly and plainly.
> People should understand there can be healthy middle grounds
We're so, so far from a healthy middle ground on the discussion around climate change; and comments like yours above push in the wrong direction.
Questioning "what we are told" on climate change without differentiating between what 99.9% of scientists are saying, and what political/industry goons are saying, is guaranteed to receive clapback from any right minded individual.
So, don't act surprised when there's pushback. It's not "small-minded", it's people responding sensibly to the words you wrote.
I concede you're partially right, and I was later regretting my tone, until I re-read a few of the comments and answers. Still, I actually agree with the content of what you're saying, although maybe not the intention or the conclusions.
My tone is, after all, pushback, precisely because we didn't start from a middle ground to begin with (parent's comment). I am pushing in a direction. You might disagree with it, and that's fine.
> differentiating between what 99.9% of scientists are saying, and what political/industry goons are saying
Even if what scientists say can be inaccurate, as has happened throughout history, the point is rather that I question what politicians or the industry says, based on Science, because while the science might be correct, the message is easily corrupted.
... Also, yes, the West is responsible for the vast majority of CO2 release. It's not remotely close [0].
* The United States has emitted more CO2 than any other country to date: at around 400 billion tonnes since 1751, it is responsible for 25% of historical emissions [at 4% of world population].
* This is twice more than China – the world’s second-largest national contributor [18% of world population].
* The 28 countries of the European Union (EU-28) – which are grouped here as they typically negotiate and set targets on a collaborative basis – is also a large historical contributor at 22%.
* Many of the large annual emitters today – such as India and Brazil – are not large contributors in a historical context.
* Africa’s regional contribution – relative to its population size – has been very small. This is the result of very low per capita emissions – both historically and currently.
OK but what does cumulative historic data have to do with anything. It's a dynamic system, it's about of rates of release and removal. Might as well list total contribution by the mammoths.
> why is bacteria life on mars but a clump of cells is not life on earth
That is conflating life (the ability is eat, shit, reproduce, and the potential to late become sentient) with actual sentient life, which is not correct.
Also, no one is planning to ban antibiotics because bacteria is considered life so we can't do anything to save the host by killing it.
We could make it not opinion with ease. Make the test:
“Can the fetus survive without the host body?”
That’s a medical question that will slowly move toward not aborting ever. And it solves the medical issues as well. “This fetus is killing the host” always allows for removal, because we can either keep them alive, or it can’t survive.
Then the folks who want more babies to reach term can focus on improving medical technology instead of getting involved with the mess that is people’s love lives.
The mother is providing care for the unborn child with her body. Seems like needing care vs. being unable to exist on its own is a distinction without a difference.
Huh? Since when is a zygote not alive? It has a cell membrane, contains genetic material, has metabolism, can maintain homeostasis, and can grow. That's pretty much the definition of life.
Do you also think neurons, muscle cells, etc are also not alive?
The abortion debate is not about whether or not the thing that gets removed during abortion is life--I doubt you can find any competent biologist who would say it is not--but rather whether that particular cell or group of cells should be treated different than other cells or groups of cells in your body.
E.g., why should abortion be any different from removing tonsils or from circumcision, both of which also involve the removal and death of living cells from the body?
By that logic, we should also consider banning antibiotics. In a world where we consider a cell or a small grouping of cells to be a life (rather than just alive) antibiotics are essentially a tool for genocide.
That is exactly my point. People are conflating being alive (explicitly in this thread in the sense that a single cell is considered alive) with having a life that should be preserved. Complaining that if we found single celled life on Mars that we'd protect it even to our great inconvenience, but we will end a single cell or small group to save a host body, are making their argument based upon a false equivalence. Any life that might be found on Mars isn't ever posing a risk to a sentient host, and those defending harsh abortion controls because “all life should have a chance even single cells” don't extend “all life” to, well, all life.
Why is this attached to my comment? My comment has nothing whatsoever to do with abortion. (Which I not only do not want to ban, at the very least I'd like it to go back to how it was under Roe v Wade).
My comment was about people misusing the terms life and alive. The correct way to argue that abortion should be legal is not to redefine life and/or alive so that some living cells or collections of living cells do not qualify rather than trying to redefine common terms used by biologists.
The correct way is to argue that we only only protect some cells or collections of cells and not others and then to argue that fetal cells belong in the not protected group. The question then comes down to deciding what it is that makes some groups of living cells protected but not others. Probably the best argument would be something along the lines that before that collection of cells has grown and developed to the point that it has a brain that can think and feel it is not really different from a tumor or other collection of cells that we don't protect.
> We are not willing to agree to abortion free for all where you can just kill a fully formed baby at nine months like you can in Walz's Minnesota.
See? Ignorant, and I say that not as an insult but as an absolute statement of fact.
No woman 9 months pregnant can just go get an abortion at 9 months. The only reason that is allowed is for cases where it is medically necessary, that's it. Even in those cases, the doctor would do everything possible to save both lives wherever possible.
This is the inverse of laws like in Texas where women are dying due to not being able to abort a baby that isn't even viable at 5 months or so. Take some time to read up on these things, PLEASE.
We really have people voting because they think women can just voluntarily terminate a pregnancy a few days before they are due to give birth? What in the hell has happened to the average ability to think critically in this country?
No dang, YOU have destroyed this site. It's already well on its way to becoming the next Reddit. Only the most extreme progressive positions can be posted here, anything else will get flagged out of existence. Hackernews and all the other social media sites with their censorship are destroying the minds of people and furthering this division. Just look at this thread as a perfect example. Ruthmarx and I have a fundamental disagreement about the actual facts, and you call that a flamewar. Now we can't find a resolution. Neither of us can learn anything.
Not voluntarily, only due to medical necessity. As I said.
> It seems to me you like to substitute what you want to be true for reality. That's the opposite of critical thinking.
The irony here.
Not trying to continue a political flamewar as per dang, but correcting blatant misinformation like the above should be everyone's social responsibility.
True. Although the scale for anything from sperm to baby is probably human<->animal<->bacteria life. I liked it because it definitely shows it's a form of "life" in an accessible way. Where on the scale it falls and whether that life should be protected is an entirely different matter.
I remember reading about college professors who shows a 1 day old zygote or whatever and a skin cell which appear pretty indistinguishable from one another.
Does any reasonable person believe that zygote at that stage is truly equivalent to a human life?
Next up no one should be masturbating because each sperm is potentially the next Mozart or Einstein.
I know, right? It's not mine. I don't really care for it either (except for the "kill at 9 months" thing), but it's interesting to see the two groups argue about it. Both seem to think they're undoubtedly 100% right, as a fact, etc.
To declare an arbitrary date when a human being starts to be a human being is so hypocritical, its no longer funny. Actually, I would call that ignorant and evil.
We're using abortion as birth control, in at least 90% of the cases, if not more. Because we dont want to tell the people involved that they have responsibilities in life, and if they dont want children, they are supposed to keep their legs closed or use some other form of birth control. The motivation is clear, its a convenience. But morally, its absolutely evil. I used to see it differently, but that was for my own convenience. Because I secretly hoped that if I ever accidentally knock a women up, I could avoid my responsibility if she is willing to abort. 20 years later, I realize its my responsibility, and I cant make a doctor kill a human being just because I would like to have an easy life.
At what level of development is a human foetus anatomically distinguishable from a cow foetus?
There's no fact-based reason to draw the line in any particular place. We, humanity, don't know what "personhood" really is beyond the laws we write while guessing and the just-so stories we tell each other to justify those laws.
That's why I'm vegetarian, and why I'd become vegan quickly as soon as someone can get milk from GM bacteria. (And sell it in supermarkets).
It's also one of two reasons why I try to be nice to LLMs: just in case. (The other reason takes it as read they have no experience of existence: by being trained on humans, they'll do better and worse exactly when real humans would do better and worse, and that means worse on holiday season and when getting insulted).
I do care about welfare, and the difference between infants and zygotes is sentience.
Most medical professionals and ethicists consider 24 weeks to be the reasonable cutoff for abortion because this is when the fetus starts to develops sentience.
The reason this is relevant is because that is the first stage of development capable of having an identity relationship with the future person that fetus/infant will become.
Animals don't have to be self-ware to suffer. Not introspectively self-aware at least.
Self-awareness itself is poorly defined. So is consciousness, so is sentience, so is intelligence — and by some (but not all) definitions those are four* different things.
No, not really. It has pretty standard definitions in philosophy and science, or it wouldn't have been able to be tested for over several decades. I suggest spending some time reading the wiki, it gives a pretty detailed overview.
The only point you have is about consciousness, and we don't need to understand the entire thing to understand parts of it or observe it, just like gravity.
• The ability to recognise one's own body as distinct from that of others, as demonstrated by plants.
• The ability to pass the mirror test, which some AI pass, but whose relevance is widely debated in animal psychology both on the grounds of sensory chauvinism and because it may cause both false positives and false negatives owing to us not being able to converse with the animals we're testing.
• Introspection, except that now we've got LLMs responding much the same way Turing hoped they would when outlining his eponymous test and suggesting that a "viva voce" interrogation would have us know if the machine was innovative or "learnt it parrot fashion"*.
As humans are also demonstrably great at confabulating reasons for their acts (see: split brain surgery, specifically experimental research on patients' cognitive functioning after surgery), it is unclear whether humans score any differently than LLMs in this test irregardless of if LLMs do or don't count as people in any other sense.
• Qualia: nobody knows.
• Mindfulness, meditation and spirituality: arguably only those who explicitly practice the appropriate mental techniques, e.g. Buddhist monks and similar.
• Public/social awareness of self-standing in community: everyone who is "cringe" fails.
* fun fact: AI critics have been stochastically parroting the stochastic parrot criticism since at least 1949
Like I said, it's actually very well defined because it's been being studied for decades at this point. Just because it can sometimes be an overloaded term in colloquial usage doesn't negate that.
I again suggest you give the wiki page a read. It's quite in-depth and detailed with plenty of good references.
I did in fact read the Wikipedia page, and also have an A-level in philosophy, which means I've written more about this in three homework esseys than the total length of the English Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness
It's absolutely well defined it's just a complex topic. Most of the examples you gave in your last reply are never defined as self-awareness in an academic paper, e.g. qualia is always separate and the mirror test has always just been an indicator not the thing itself.
No, thats not what I said, and you know that. I believe we are using abortion to a very high degree for basic birth control. I am aware that there are exceptions, like those you mentioned. However, while necessary, these exceptions also pose a threat. Because if we have abortion legisation which only allows for abortions in cases of rape, millions of women will, out of desperation, start to claim rapes which never happened. Its a bad situation, no matter what we do.
If one handyman or one farmer or one trucker stopped working, no one would really care. If all CS researchers stopped working, I'd wager people would care, just as they would if handymen/farmers/truckers stopped working.
I thing OP point is that if the trucker stopped working people and businesses will be impacted that day (before he gets replaced, easy with trucker, not with labour). The impact will be more direct and tangible way than, say, a CS researcher not showing up this morning.
Agree 100%. The "am I wrong? no, it's the voters who are wrong!" is a sure sign the next campaign will flop as well.
A large percentage of Americans aren't interested in what the Democratic Party is selling. The party can either stick to their policies and live with these kinds of showing, or take some time to really think about what the American voter is looking for.
I look at the grander picture. It’s not that the democrats aren’t connected, it’s that the American people are culturally bankrupt. The romans became decadent after all, culturally incapable of maintaining their empire and slowly declining in power and influence over Europe. The American idea itself is in decline.
Because of the way Americans handled themselves during this election. On both sides! That January 6th happened. That Biden dropped out so late, denying a primary to his party.
All these show me that American culture is spiralling towards incompetence, just like the Romans.
I don’t believe you are correct. People who vote for a man as debased, self centered, sexually depraved, and criminally inclined as Trump are “wrong”. White men latched onto a horrible person as their savior. If that’s what they want then they deserve what comes. But the people who don’t want that should stick to their principles.
What does it say about Trump that so many of his lawyers and advisors ended up in jail and that so few former cabinet members endorsed him? What does it say about his supporters who cared not that he raped children with his pal Epstein?
Remember when Cruz and Lindsey Graham spoke honestly about Trump just before November 2016? Recall what they said then to what they say now. It’s a cult.
> People who vote for a man as debased, self centered, sexually depraved, and criminally inclined as Trump are “wrong”.
Maybe you're too young to remember Bill Clinton?
He was accused of sexual harassment by a number of women (including a rape). His relationship with Lewinsky (22 years old), is highly exploitive in terms of the power he held over her career. While he might have supported women's right politically, he was certainly exploitive in his personal life.
There were also a number of "questionable business dealings" in his past. Arkansas land deals, Whitewater, almost impeached by Congress for lying.
But I'm sure you'll say "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Republicans". Ok, then don't blame Trump voters when they think "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Democrats".
So while people got worked up, he got re-elected handily.
It's funny to me when people entirely overlooked Clinton's life because they liked him as a President and they liked his policies.
The Clintons earned $120 million in 10 years after he was President. Hilary gave 30 minute speeches at Goldman Sachs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clearly these were payouts for repeal of Glass-Steagal and other policies. He was a predator and not deserving of the adulation he got. She became senator for New York by having it basically handed to her.
It would benefit humanity if people were taught to be consistent in their views. If they understood that extremism is when the cause is more important than the truth.
But I'm sure you'll say "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Republicans". Ok, then don't blame Trump voters when they think "oh, those were just trumped up charges by the Democrats".
You’d be wrong. I don’t have your apparent level of inconsistency.
> The Democratic Party.. lied to the American people about the cognitive health and fitness of the president. It prevented, threatened, litigated and otherwise eliminated the ability of other [Democratic] candidates for the primary to compete, to get on ballots, and to even participate in a debate.
And it turns out the voters don’t seem to actually care about the cognitive health of the President, nor do they seem to care about being lied to about it.
Yes, they do hide Trump's health reports from the public - or rather he never releases any information like other presidents do. Hell, he GOT SHOT and never gave any details of what happened.
I agree that Democrats denying Biden's cognitive decline was a disaster.
The gibberish that routinely comes out of their candidate barely qualifies as speech.
The reality is, nobody who was wringing their hands about Biden's cognitive abilities, or his son's legal problems actually cared about either issue. If they did, they wouldn't have voted for an mentally declining criminal today.
I think the only lesson that Democrats can learn from the past three elections is that women have no chance at presidency. If anything, as an outsider, the campaign Harris led, seemed to reach vastly more people than Biden's.
I am 100% convinced a Republican woman could win. I was in touch with a lot of deep-red middle-of-the-country Republican voters and candidates for state and federal offices when Palin was the VP pick. Shooting-stuff-in-political-ads sorts. It was practically all they talked about. They liked her a ton better than McCain. I think they’d have gladly voted for her at the top of the ticket (granted, they lost that one, but I think an R woman could absolutely be elected President, probably more easily than a Democratic one).
That would be missing the forest for the trees in my view. I could see it having an impact, but when 60% of people say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, putting up a candidate who was in power the last four years just isn’t going to work. Biden would not have won a primary, and neither would she have
As a foreigner, the Democratic party just lives of to crying wolf on the Republican party without offering any meaningful difference. And people have gotten tired of it, judging by the fact that Trump is not getting more voters than in 2020, but they are getting considerably less.
Maybe I'm a bit too optimistic, but rather than "people want Trump" I read all this debacle as "people want something different from the Democrats".
Nah, the problem is that Republicans have openly played a dirty game for almost a decade with ZERO repercussions. They flaunt the laws and conventions of politics and nothing happens.
Democrats still play by the rules for some reason and don't call out the shit done by the other party with simple enough terms.
This. One side sticks to the rules and watches silently while the other side slowly undermines them.
At the same time, the Republicans have perfected the twin strategies of sowing distrust in neutral media reorting and playing the victim card consistently to everything, even their own attacks.
And Donald's first term taught them that when you lie ALL THE TIME, nobody can fact-check you effectively. Just stick to the script and talking points, no matter what the question.
By the time the first ad-libbed bold faced lie is checked and sourced, he has told 42 more. It's not a game you can win by playing by the rules.
It clearly shows how bad the D candidate/policy is, such that people prefered the R candidate with all the flaws you listed. The eye opener should be why people rejected the D candidates.
I'm inclined to agree with you. At the same time, I don't think Kamala should have spent some of the limited time she had cozying up to people who wouldn't vote for her, antagonizing her base, and for the most part sidelining the people she had to convince.
It’s a white nationalist backlash. They cared not about the messenger; only the message. It’s also the product of Russian disinformation. Russia has perfected the art of sowing division and faux outrage. We’ve done it to other countries so we deserve it in some sense. We’ll see a rise of toxic masculinity. Women exercising sexual autonomy and gaining power is not something snowflake men can handle.
Russia and China have been waging a cyber war against the U.S. for a long time now. Russian accounts on social media have been effective at sowing dissent, chaos, conspiracy theories, and false information. Tim Pool and others on Russia’s payroll is clear evidence of this.
The lesson of the day is that the U.S. is far more conservative than I thought. Trump is the President we deserve and we deserve what comes next. White rural voters will not be helped by him and I will not shed any tears at their plight.
It is additionally also possible that a democracy with more or less independent media is much more vulnerable than a dictatorship with state-controlled media. The democracies in the world better wise up quickly and figure out a way to become resilient against this.
In this election, the Democrats were unable to offer the majority of voters the past they fondly remember or the future they can look forward to. It's that simple.
No, as a group the just didn’t turn out to vote. The message being delivered didn’t compensate for bias. And many who did are in bro camp voting for Trump.
Turnout matters. This was a must win and they bet wrong.
The message is the same even for non-America - we need to engage with these folks and stop disparaging them. We need to talk to them, we need to understand where they're coming from, we need to help clear the air between "us and them" so that there won't be an "us and them" and so we can _together_ avoid people that tell us what we want to hear.
I bought that line in 2016 and again in 2020. I'm not saying I'm done with trying to understand, but that level of fks to give is very minimal now.
Obviously, I don't think 50% of the population is stupid, but every time I try to "understand" it's becoming increasingly clear it's about his "charisma" and "our team" and less about hard policies.
People out here voting against their own interests or blaming things on ignorance (inflation, etc.).
That would be the charitable interpretation, the alternate is that they are knowingly misogynistic, deeply racist and have strong fascist leanings to follow a flawed corrupt politician with cult-like devotion.
That's why Kamala lost: they called supporters of the other camp racist and misogynists like you're doing right now instead of discussing and listening to their grievances.
Shitting on your voter base is no way to win sympathy.
The marginal voter doesn't have grievances like that unless the country is seriously in trouble (like it was in 2008 and 2020.) They're not paying close enough attention to have them, nor do they have clear ideas about which piece of government is capable of addressing which problems. They have better things to do.
If you talk to the median voter their thinking will be like "something happened three years ago I was mad about" or "my husband wants us to vote this way because he saw it on TV" or "the Democrats want to legalize incest" or "I like voting for whoever I think is going to win" (and yes these are all real.) They especially do not have coherent opinions on economic policy.
Mainly the problem is the US doesn't have a coherent media ecosystem anymore and Republicans were better aligned with newer media, ie Facebook posts and bro-y podcasts like Rogan. So TV ads and "ground game" don't work.
Simply put, this chunk of the electorate doesn’t have any kind of grasp on the workings of government. As you say, their motivations for voting are simplistic and difficult for campaigns to reason about because they’re so particular to each individual.
Part of the reason why political media has seen such a decline in quality is because of that fundamental lack of understanding by the people. Neutral nuanced analysis doesn’t resonate because that’s some combination of too incomprehensible and not entertaining enough, which has led to the media landscape we have now where it’s turned to the televised version of junk food: hyper-processed with lots of salt and sugar and practically zero nutritional value.
That said, to some degree I don’t place fault on the people for this. A lot of it comes down to inadequacies in the education system when it comes to civics, wherein young people are not well equipped to become highly functional, fully conscious voting adults.
Economic vibes with simplistic immediate effects if truly were a major factor then 2020 Biden would have won with bigger margins than Reagan did .
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Countries with far poorer literacy and school attendance rates and patchy education systems vote quite well informed.
In India for example every candidate (party or independent) must have a simple symbol because many voters cannot read, yet nobody is saying Modi wins because of lack of awareness or good understanding of his Hindu nationalist agenda or extreme right wing policies.
It is the third election for both, voters have had a decade to see the effect of the policies have had first hand no matter what they have been told
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Body electorates aren’t as dumb as we like to explain away.
Education, economics, even disinformation (foreign and local) all play marginal role, but can’t explain the core
At some point we have to accept that this is a deeply racist(who come in all colors) misogynist society with facist Christo white nationalism deeply ingrained.
You have no idea if thats why she lost. Thats why you want to believe she lost but it could be things like inflation, immigration, and not having clear messaging. Also not distinguishing herself from an otherwise unpopular president.
We should hear their grievances on our bodily autonomy and healthcare ?
There are aspects where we can compromise, or empathize and learn to live together on such as economy or immigration, basic human decency and healthcare are not it.
Also bit rich that we have to listen to their grievances, they haven't afforded anyone that courtesy, or respected the process of democracy.
If the results were other way round, we would be hearing conspiracy theories about election interference non stop. You can only compromise with people acting in good faith, it is clear that majority of Americans don't want to do that.
Maybe mankind ain't yet so developed that what you list isn't present in general population in large numbers, even majority.
Echo chambers like HN or typical workplace of typical HN user give skewed image how much rational folks out there generally are. Most people that I ever met are trivially susceptible to smart manipulation via emotions, even to the point of shooting their own foot.
Social engineering is problem for everyone no matter their background HN echo chamber or otherwise
However we don’t get to use manipulation foreign, partisan or otherwise as crutch or excuse, post 2016 was full of that: oh there was Russian influence, he didn’t get popular vote or we didn’t know what MAGA stood for, as am sure there will be blame now on Biden not stepping down, Harris not having a primary, Gaza and inflation and dozen other things, and the platform would shift even more to right chasing the non existent center, instead of resetting to the left. The right has figured it out there is no centre and it is pointless to try to aim for it.
Bottom line is this is who Americans are , maybe the country can change and be better maybe not , but denying reality of is not the place to start.
Misogynistic was my first qualifier, it is not an coincidence that Trump has won only against women twice, and it is not an oversight that in 250 years America is nowhere close to electing a woman president.
Technically Obama was running against one, McCain had Palin on the ticket .I don’t think that made a difference, VPs don’t .
misogyny is hardly the only factor but if there was woman on the top of the ticket than it absolutely seem to be number one factor .
You have to keep in mind it just wasn’t symbolic like in 2016. There are real tangible immediate threats to reproductive healthcare that this election also represented.
I would have thought the data is self evident, here you go.
Women account for 51.1% population .
There are 25(15D:9R) female senators (25%)
There are 126(92D:34R) congresswomen (29%)
There are 2424 (1583D:815R) female state legislators (32.3%).
In addition to be poorly represented they are mostly democrats with 2-3:1 split from republicans.
It is important to note that ratio grows poorer higher the office , beyond senate it is 45:1 for VPs historically and 46:0 for presidency .
Given the higher life expectancy for women and fact that political office comes late in life they should be if anything more than 50% if gender does not play a significant role.
if not misogyny then it is on you to show why either women are specifically unqualified(!) or unwilling or uninterested in public office and why republican women in office are disproportionately missing in what is already low numbers
I've read people say this over and over. And yet, I don't know of any single substantive position that Kamala has taken. She chose a vibes fight and she lost.
look at the comment i’m replying to. if you go to both candidates pages, they’ll have their policy positions laid out. Kamala made none of them a part of her core message. She instead leaned bizarrely into the threat of fascism.
She was weak on messaging, but her proposal for housing was good (improving affordability has appeal, but she failed to capitalize on it). What confounded this in part was that she probably meant to mostly stay in line with Biden's policies, and you can't connect with voters on that. They're concerned about inflation and the border. Biden's administration already fucked that up for her; they fixed the border, but too little too late (so what is there to say?), and while inflation has abated and wage-growth has improved, people still feel poorer than before 2020 (so what is there to say?).
I can't see how anyone else in her position would have done much better. I don't blame Harris much.
The last 20 years of the UK is an interesting rollercoaster.
There was a massive international financial crisis that outed the Labour government and brought in a Tory/Lib Dem coalition government based on promises of government austerity.
There was an independence referendum in Scotland where the main campaign point for staying with England was to ensure they stayed in the EU etc.
Then the Tories managed to pin the blame for the failings of the coalition on the minor partner and drew a line under that for the next election.
Then there's brexit, which was really a vote to put an end to bickering inside the Tory party. But the population, narrowly voted to leave the EU! This was very much a protest vote.
Then there's a utter crazy story of quick rotation of prime ministers and scandal and sleeze and very very poorly-received budgets and things.
So then this year Labour are back, and their main strategy was 'at least we're not the Tories'. They are not popular, but they are not the incumbents.
The funny thing is that Labour is now 100% "like the Tories". It's the Tories who are no longer "like the Tories" and have morphed instead into a rabid populist party without real politics that bank instead on identity politics.
The UK is just developed country facing the same problems associated with an aging population as every other developed country (and also many developing countries—sucks for them...). There's absolutely nothing special about the UK and if the UK is a failed state then so too is Germany (where I live) and the rest of Europe, and the only "successful" countries on the planet are the US, Switzerland and a handful of microstates.
She didnt explain why inflation happened. She didnt explain why dems did not crack down on the border until right wingers made an issue out of it. She didnt distance herself from biden. She didnt explain how she would protect abortion rights. I wanted her to win but she didnt have answers or her messaging was not getting through
Inflation: "inflation has come down over the last two years, a lot of it has been from the healing of the supply side of the economy.
What is that? Supply chains have improved. The labor force has expanded, partly due to increased immigration, and that's helped to take some of the edge off of the supply-and-demand imbalances that we had when inflation was very high two years ago."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/examining-how-economic-pla...
Immigration: "After hitting a record high in December 2023, the numbers of migrants crossing the border has plummeted since then. Harris and the administration have credited their tough anti-asylum measures for stemming the flow, although increased enforcement on the Mexican side has also played a key role."
https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2024/where-trum...
Abortion rights: "At one of her first campaign events, she stated that if Congress “passes a law to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States I will sign it into law.”"
https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive-freedom/how-kamala-ha...
If you don't like what her positions are that's your prerogative but it's just not true that she did not have answers to these questions.
> Inflation: "inflation has come down over the last two years, a lot of it has been from the healing of the supply side of the economy.
I think this is one of the disconnects: inflation has been decreasing. What I think people hear, which is wrong: the prices of things are coming down.
They're not coming down, they're increasing _slower_ than before, and before was bad. Prices for lots of things are much more expensive than before covid.
The reason that "inflation is better now" didn't stick is because half the country was telling the emperor they were clothed, and half the country saw a naked person.
The problem really is that we need to accept that they are "stupid" but in an empathetic way, remembering that we were once stupid and ignorant. We took it for granted that other people wouldn't confuse correlation with causation, blaming Biden's presidency for inflation. But all of us thought correlation was causation at one point until somebody educated us on science. When a topic was confusing and complicated, we leaned on correlation to guide us until we learned better in formal education. It would be immensely difficult to explain to someone why groceries have become unaffordable without extensive exposition, but it's a hard problem that we should try to solve instead of just calling people ignorant in frustration.
Yes and the media needs to stop being so obviously biased because it both undermines their role as the arbiters of truth and it undermines the party they allegedly want to win
I was just thinking the exact opposite, maybe the US needs to split into two nations. I was drawing border lines in my mind around central regions and wondering how things would pan out if they seceded. The lack of geographic continuity would be a problem for the coasts, but perhaps they could join Canada.
Won't this be impossible since you have the urban/rural areas of the same state belonging to these two different nations ? At-least impossible without a gargantuan civil war that makes the 1861 war look like a toddler's quarrel.
True, that was an awkward episode. Now you've got me reading about the motivations for the civil war. I mean obviously slavery, but why go to war rather than let the Confederacy be a separate nation? Seems the fighting was over the political future of yet-to-be Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma (if I've got the right territories there), and whether they would have slavery, once populated.
Blue areas aren’t states. They are cities. Democratic voting counties account for over 70% of the nations gdp. Conservative counties quite literally cannot support themselves.
> Blue areas aren’t states. They are cities. Democratic voting counties account for over 70% of the nations gdp. Conservative counties quite literally cannot support themselves.
Conservative counties produce goods and food that can be produced anywhere.
Democratic counties produce goods that generally require an education and are significantly more valuable. Think big tech, big pharma, engineering, etc.
Democratic counties would be just fine without conservative counties. The inverse is not true.
I think you are ignoring the lag time inherent in radically shifting international food supply chains, even if you have the money to pay almost any price for goods.
If Conservative counties stopped sending food to Democratic counties, the Democratic counties would collapse into chaos LONG before they are able to secure alternative food supplies. It's a Hell of a lot easier to go 90 days without "Big Tech & Big Pharma" than it is to go 90 days without grains and chicken from flyover country.
Blue states have farms as well, it's just not the primary industry. I'm certain blue states would have enough food to last until they could negotiate to trade with other blue states or international partners.
Let's just assume you can secure beef and other foodstuffs, from, say Argentina, on DAY ONE of a Red-County food blockade. A ship from Buenos Ares to Los Angeles takes 20+ days. So even if you acted immediately foodstuffs would arrive in LA two weeks after the supermarkets would be empty.
On this I stand corrected. I was thinking of all the food in the state though, and I mean all food period. Everything in warehouses, everything in every supermarket, etc.
In an emergency situation, all the food in NY state would surely last more than 5 days? Besides, I don't think it would take that long to negotiate food trade for a short term emergency period, maybe from Canada.
If the red states really could hold blue states hostage over food, then, well, that sucks. I guess ideally trade could be stopped gradually in a more civil way instead of blockades where people would suffer, I'm sure a ton of shit red state people buy on Amazon and Walmart has to come from blue states, so there would certainly be something to leverage.
My point was inaccurate, but I think the larger point I was trying to make still stands - eventually, blue states would not need red states if they could move farming to blue states, there is enough land to do so especially looking at the latest map with how few blue states there are. Red states really have little to offer that blue states can't replace in a few months. The inverse is not true.
> In an emergency situation, all the food in NY state would surely last more than 5 days?
I'm having trouble finding detailed sources on food warehousing, but what I've seen so far suggests that because of Just-in-Time logistics, there is actually very little food warehousing away from the "last mile" distribution locations. Keeping large quantities of food stored is expensive (climate control, other methods to avoid contamination) and laborious (government-mandated inspections, etc.), so I'm not surprised if there aren't many places sitting on a 30 or 60-day supply of chicken breasts or something unless some government agency forces them to do it. Businesses see every type of unused inventory as a cost center.
> I guess ideally trade could be stopped gradually in a more civil way instead of blockades where people would suffer,
Well the whole point is to communicate the "nuclear option" of non-gradual blockade that risks immense suffering.
> I'm sure a ton of shit red state people buy on Amazon and Walmart has to come from blue states, so there would certainly be something to leverage.
It has to come through Blue ports, but something like 70% of Amazon products are made in China: ( https://www.statista.com/chart/33376/share-of-items-sold-on-... ) ( https://notochina.org/how-to-tell-if-a-product-is-made-in-ch... ). Sourcing stuff from China is about to become massively more expensive for everyone if Trump goes through with his tariff plan. The other problem for Red States is shifting overall logistics chains away from West Coast container ports (such as Long Beach) to Red Texas and Florida ports. Even if the capacity requirement drops because Red Counties have lower populations than Blue Counties, it's still a logistical headache, and expensive.
> eventually, blue states would not need red states if they could move farming to blue states, there is enough land to do so especially looking at the latest map with how few blue states there are
If it was reasonably profitable for that land to be used for agriculture, you better believe these massive agri-businesses would already be raping, uh, I mean "cultivating" those areas.
> Red states really have little to offer that blue states can't replace in a few months. The inverse is not true.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs would suggest otherwise: people can absolutely live without Apple Vision Pro and Hollywood movies.
Also consider that law & order in cities is already tenuous (partially thanks to Defund the Police and the Summer 2020 riot fallout). Do the cities have the law enforcement manpower or WILLPOWER to suppress even a week's worth of absolute chaos from supply disruptions before they devolve into Haiti-level anarchy? They can barely maintain order even now. ( https://www.foxnews.com/us/fallout-from-weekend-chaos-philly... )
It's much worse in the US though because the gap is so much wider. Even in the UK or Canada or Australia, the right is not opposing climate change or healthcare or anything reasonable to the same extent as in the US.
They absolutely are here in Canada. Especially around climate change because Canada is an oil exporter. And they will be emboldened by what just happened in the US.
Alberta outright banned renewables development for 6 months and then slapped a huge set of restrictions on them after that "moratorium" was lifted. A tax on electric car owners added. The conservative parties nationally are on a constant drum beat about the national carbon tax and it's doomed. Weak emissions caps we have are also doomed. Any little things that have been done for the last 10 years will be undone.
At a recent party convention in Alberta, the ruling party passed a climate denial resolution as official party policy.
Amazingly lots of people on this forum trying to sanitize what these people are about.
Try splitting Georgia, where Harris wins a few populous counties with a 30 to 70 pp margin, and Trump leads the lump of smaller counties with a 30 to 70 pp margin.
They reelected the DA that's prosecuting Trump on one of the populous counties, on the same election where the state swung further towards Trump.
In the past, maybe. Trump won the popular vote last night. He swept almost everything, as painful as that is for me to say. There is no way to divide the country without mass migration which would never happen.
Cross the border from here in Canada into very "blue" New York and you'll drive through a huge swathe of what is actually "red" Trump country in Western New York.
Outside of the urban areas even "blue" states are red, or "purple."
The reality is that America voted for this guy. It's not nearly as regionally divided as liberals in America want to think.
For me, it means not going there anymore. I just won't cross the border for any reason.
Yeah I live rural Ontario. Last municipal election people's lawns were covered with idiotic "Stop Woke" signs. And my parents are in rural Alberta. Oh boy.
Fair enough but you need to deal with the proliferation of troll accounts and pointless political sniping that's propagated on here in the last couple of years.
The person I replied to was not engaging in good faith discussion, which is evident simply by looking at everything else they posted yesterday.
As much as I feel that HN's tone policing is de facto defence of status quoism, guidelines here are that direct personal attacks aren't permitted.
However you may be pleased to know that ideological battle isn't either.
If you can't find a suitably witty or effective response, none is often better. You don't have to attend every argument you're invited to.
You can also email mods at hn@ycombinator.com with issues. I do this frequently on all manner of points, most often title or URL issues, but other guidelines violations as well, and often that results in accounts being banned.
Trust me that this can be sorely aggrevating and crossing the lines tempting, but you'll ultimately be a more persuasive and effective advocate working within the rules here.
The Joye of Ye Taxes is that you cannot choose to stop paying them just because of a disagreement about how they are spent. Elections need to be won first.
Meh, it is clear where they care coming from and they talk quite clearly. What we need to do is to stop like naïve Pollyanna's, stop relying on fact checks, stop pretending "both sides are equal" and engage with dirty fight they do.
What "dirty fight" are you envisioning? Prosecuting Trump in court doesn't appear to work and is disparaged as "lawfare". Biden calling Trump voters trash apparently backfires, but nothing Trump or his campaign says ever backfires.
And "calling him what he is" has so far failed to sway his supporters, I don't see how it will do it now. OTOH, he (probably?) won't stand for election again, so the point is probably moot...
>the US Supreme Court decided more or less exactly that presidents can break the law and get away with it
no, they did not. The court pointed out that the remedy (specified in the Constitution) for a president who breaks the law is impeachment and conviction by the house and senate. After which, that former president could be subject to prosecution.
Democratic party goes out of its way to look center, be accommodating and non confrontial. It just does not work.
I stand by "politician should not mean being lawless". US Supreme Court being pro lawless when it comes to GOP is just politics of US Supreme Court. It does not mean law should not matter or that trying to apply law is fighting dirty.
Trump and his supporters will say anything and accepting their framing again and again should be already seen as proven failure strategy. It just does not work.
It is not dirty fight, full stop. Dirty fight would be to act like Trump and his supporters do or approaching it.
I suggest we stop with the "we need to engage with these folks and stop disparaging them" nonsense designed to create unequal situation where GOP and Trump can be arbitrary dirty, but everyone else needs to treat them with kids gloves and use euphemisms.
I suggest Democratic party to become more aggressive rather then forever trying to paint themselves as "the adult ones" and forever put themselves into center. It just does not work and serves only to allow overtone window to move toward radical conservativism.
I suggest we stop demanding that "both sides" are described in the same terms. I suggest we stop following nonsense:
> We need to talk to them, we need to understand where they're coming from, we need to help clear the air between "us and them" so that there won't be an "us and them" and so we can _together_ avoid people that tell us what we want to hear.
For example, conservative Christians are coming from the point of view of someone who thinks women should be submissive to men, should have less legal rights, abortion and contraception are wrong because they allow for safer sex.
For example, quite a lot of people in GOP are coming to it with idea that being gay is disgrace, being trans deserve severe punishment and that being criminal is cool as long as you are rich white guy.
Actually engage with these rather then euphemism them away.
I for one think the an anti-Trump campaign that just spammed his "grab them by the pussy, you can do anything" comment would've cut his support among religious voters significantly. It was mentioned in D-leaning spaces but never a campaign focus (at least, not in any of the attack ads I have seen - they were all about issues only D's care about, rallying the base rather than actually trying to care what non-base voters think).
The economy might be what swung this vote, but long-term it's hard to understate how much ground the D's have lost among religious voters for "embracing sexual immorality". Believe it or not, bringing up hypocrisy does work on many of them (at least it might make them stay home) and mere apologies won't erase it. Latinos are where this jumps out in statistics, but it's far from limited to them.
Possibly the reason D's didn't do that (much) was because it would have little down-ballot effect, and no effect on future candidates?
(on another angle, we could've seen "we have reined in Trump's inflation so at least it won't get worse", "Trump gave unconditional handouts without the Democrat-recommended constraints", etc.)
You're losing if you write like this, because this is liberal/left wing writing. If the voters prioritize strength and machismo, you should be insulting them even more. They don't mind, they'll just assume it's about someone else.
That's not what the GP means, the popular vote is likely to be for the Democrats, as has happened basically every election. It's only because of the electoral college system that Republicans win the presidency.
Ah interesting, I don't know enough about which states do what. Is it not at the point where the states we knew the results of have been tallied, and the swing states are still unknown?
Yes - they are free to vote, and the electoral college then selects who they put their votes towards to represent the voters, which is in line with the majority voting sentiment.
I think calling this too much government inaccurate. IMO it is government not doing enough what it should do, and putting its hands into private issues too much. So cutting government regulation won't work.
This is a case of a home raid and tossing the house that resulted in the killing of a pet. If you don't think that is too much government power and abuse, I don't understand your world view.
In my ideal world, a govt. rep would reach out or knock, even with a warrant, to do an animal wellness check and remove the animal in case of abuse and to cite the owner and specify the correct forms needed to keep the squirrel.
the message is: we don't want immigrants, we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us). like it or not, this is what people want.
> we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us)
It is not even that since what they basically propose is to dial down the war in Eastern Europe but get more involved in the war in Middle East and possibly soon in East Asia. That stance always seemed very confusing to me as a non-US person.
> That stance always seemed very confusing to me as a non-US person.
Europeans seem to overestimate how close America is to Europe.
If you live in the Western half of the United States, Asia is much closer than Eastern Europe, most US military deployments are in the Pacific, and most foreign trade the US has is with Asia.
Both parties campaigned on leaving the Middle East, but it is difficult to disengage from the region without devolving power to a regional ally (similar to how the US historically let France take the reigns on African relations). Historically, that ally has been Israel and Turkiye, but relations between the US and them have fallen precipitously.
But you aren't getting any with this ticket. There is no political force in the US that would question the trickle-down fairytales, and your broken elections system won't allow one to emerge.
So you vote for change, yet the economics policies stay as unequal as always. But in the process you supported a rapist and a criminal who calls execution of journalists, suppression of women, blatant racism and just death and destruction of non-privileged people everywhere.
accelerationism would be launching yourself into the unknown and not committing to a particular political ideology except the continuous development of capitalism. This is simply working with the concrete situation: a Trump presidency, which clearly opens up more opportunities for radical action then a Harris presidency, since Trump will be too busy completely destroying the economy and the FBI, CIA, and NSA, the judiciary and the legal system more broadly, to be even capable of fighting back against resistance or even stopping the conditions for a popular foment. Or, maybe I'm wrong, who knows. But at least now we'll get to know.
Notably those wars were not started or escalated by Trump's republican party. While >Dick Cheney< got accepted by Dems now just because he is against Trump...
Trump has a responsibility in escalating the tension between Israel and Palestine following the move of the American embassy to Jerusalem.
He also escalated bombings in Syria.
His terrible Afghan deal also made it so that there was no time or guarantees to fly Americans and people that helped America to the US while also leaving a lot of American military gear to the Talibans. This also ridiculed the US on the international stage.
Considering it seems Arab American voters were willing to punish kamala or even outright vote trump on account of the current administrations stance on IvP since then, it seems they are willing to look past the embassy issue for a bigger issue - the current state of affairs.
Considering how the Obama administration handled Iraq and Afghanistan, I doubt they would have acted any differently wrt Syria.
Alas if I recall Trump managed to have ultimate responsibility for that fiasco occur under Biden's watch on account of losing the 2020 election. Whoops.
> Alas if I recall Trump managed to have ultimate responsibility for that fiasco occur under Biden's watch on account of losing the 2020 election. Whoops.
Yes, he was completely out negotiated by terrorists and his successor had to clean up the gigantic pile of poop that leaked from Trumps diaper.
it's actually really interesting, Trump already modified his rhetoric. In the rallies in the last week and in his acceptance speech he has suddenly talked about how they want immigrants to come in legally - even went out of his way to talk about "geninuses" in the acceptance speech. Pretty clear here that people like Musk have been heavily exerting influence to shape his viewpoint towards favouring immigration that allows high skilled workers in.
It's not immigrants. It's illegal immigrants. It was very clear from the beginning that this is what will kill the democrats chances. When you have poor people that have lived in this country since birth not be able to get help from the government because the government services in their community are over ran due to the influx of people. Who do you think they are going to vote for? Why do you think the Republicans had an historic election with minority voters?
All they had to do was actually do anything about the tens of millions of immigrants coming over the board, but they ignored it and Trump used it against them.
The Democrat party is ran by a bunch of idiots. Hopefully this is a wake up call for them to get with the real world on issues.
Calling someone Hitler when they clearly aren't is also not going to help people support you especially AFTER he was president before and they experienced a presidency under him lol.
This has happened and is happening in Europe, too.
Many people are coming in, some of them don't integrate and cause problems, the center says it's not a problem and the left says let's have more of them.
More people are coming in, problems are getting worse (both real and imaginary), people are getting upset, the right realizes they can use that and they build their whole agenda or that and win the elections.
The number of countries this has happened in increases, so non-right parties need to rethink their strategy if they want to stop losing.
Europe is able to change political course much more gradually: the EU is 27 countries, and the EU Parliament is elected with proportional voting systems which leads to coalitions and compromise.
A 10% increase in 'right' votes means roughly 10% more influence for the 'right' opinions.
In the USA, a tiny increase in 'right' votes means 100% more influence.
Europe is currently experiencing a hard shift to the right because progressives keep lying and downplaying bad economy policies and illegal immigration. Yet somehow each party has their own scapegoat.
"Tens of millions" "coming in over the border"? Mexico only even has 120m people in the first place. What, you think that half of their population walked into Texas and bought a house in Dallas?
> From 2014 to 2020, migrants from outside Mexico and Central America — known as “extra-continentals” — accounted for 19 percent of immigration court cases.
> In the last four years, those “extra-continentals” have risen to 53 percent of all court cases. They have arrived from countries such as India, China, Colombia and Mauritania.
Okay. Sure. Mexico only has 120m people. You think that a third of their population walked into Texas and bought a house in Dallas? A quarter? Hell, ten percent?
Fine. I'll bring some of my own statistics. There might be ten million undocumented immigrants living in the United States total. There are fewer than half a million illegal border crossings a year; if the expected lifespan following an illegal border crossing is, I don't know, forty years, then it's obvious that the overwhelming majority of illegal border crossings don't convert to undocumented immigrants. These numbers are easily available on the relevant Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni..., which itself has extensive citations from a wide variety of sources. Saying that there are "tens of millions crossing the border" is clearly and blatantly incorrect.
And, of course, that's not even getting into the real meat of the issue, that's just sarcastically calling out the surface-level lies. No, what I really want to say about illegal immigration is that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than either documented immigrants or outright citizens, that they pay more taxes than they cost in government spending, that they do not affect job access or pay of legal residents, that they prevent offshoring, and that they contribute to GDP via spending and labor. Undocumented immigrants are, as far as I can tell, purely positive contributors to America at every level I look at, for the people working alongside them and going to school with them all the way up to the grandest statistics. If we truly wanted a healthy economy - if we wanted more citizens to have better jobs, if we wanted more money for education and healthcare, if we wanted less crime and less exploitation of labor - we would legalize all of them and invite more in after them.
250k (recorded border patrol contacts) came across in December 2023 (peak), about 55k this last August. It is usually fewer then a million per year but still a significant number of people. Bad policies in 2023 led to an absolute flood. That is competition for American workers.
Still not "tens of millions", don't motte-and-bailey me.
Also, I thought competition was good and that we needed more of it. That's the usual fiscal-conservative line, right?
I'll further note that there are more job postings open right now than there have been at any time since 2000, that unemployment right now is incredibly low considering the pandemic and 2008, that the unemployment that still exists can be fairly easily traced to the previous trump presidency rather than any other cause, and that multiple detailed studies (refer to previous Wikipedia link) fail to find that illegal immigrants have any effect at all on the jobs or pay of American workers. Having more workers in total increases spending which opens up more jobs, for example, standard jevons paradox stuff. Your conclusions are not supported by any kind of evidence, your models do not describe or provide accurate predictions of reality, and your proposals will not work the way you think or claim they will.
Is it really competition? Do American workers get paid in cash from employers who don't ask for their Social Security number? Skilled jobs require documentation. Unskilled jobs require documentation. Working undocumented means being paid in cash by an employer who doesn't tell the IRS about you. Are citizens really lining up to work these jobs that undocumented immigrants perform? Food prices will increase again when all of the migrant farm workers are deported.
Most of the illegal migrants coming into the U.S are not from Mexico. They're from Latin American and Asia. Actual migration from Mexico by Mexican citizens has been on the decline in the past 10 years. Possibly due to Mexico's growing economy.
if Biden will sign a decree to welcome everyone and every migrant would be legal, people still won't like it. people want to reduce immigration, legal or illegal.
>Calling someone Hitler when they clearly aren't is also not going to help people support you especially AFTER he was president before and they experienced a presidency under him lol.
One bigly reason I voted for Trump was because his first term was by far the most peaceful both this country and the world at-large ever was in my lifetime.
For four years we didn't start or join any new wars, we even flat out refused to when the military industrial complex begged to Trump to start one with Iran after they shot down one of our drones. North Korea didn't fire a single missile and China wasn't anywhere as loud with their saber-rattling (I'm Japanese-American, I care deeply about Japanese security). Russia didn't invade Ukraine. Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah/et al. weren't brutally killing each other.
For four god damn years life was actually peaceful, and I want that again.
Russia invaded in 2014 and the conflict stabilized (but didn't stop) in 2015.
In the meantime, the Syrian civil war was raging on.
Similarly, if we ignore all the events in the prelude to WW2, the world was a very peaceful place. According to Hoover, Roosevelt was a threat to world peace, not Hitler.
I'm not implying anything with the analogy, I'm only trying to illustrate that the world was not peaceful between 2016 and 2020, despite the president's efforts.
Perhaps if we had gotten 2 consecutive terms, it might have provided more long term stability.
Warring Middle East nations signed more peace treaties under Trump than in any other time in modern history. Israel signed four peace treaties with Arab Nations under Trump.
If Hitler then used that line to try and justify murdering millions of brussels sprout eaters, then yes. Otherwise you've missed the point by an almost impressive margin.
On the one hand, it's sort of believable that he would not engage with literature of any kind. On the other, he kept saying it after being informed that the phrase came from Hitler.
When any reasonable person says something that might seem close to something Hitler says and is told about it, their reaction is to figure out how to re-express what they said more clearly so that it cannot be mistaken for agreeing with Hitler.
Trump's reaction apparently is to want to make sure you know he didn't steal the idea from Hitler.
> we don't want to help other countries at our short term cost (even if it is a long term gain for us)
More like stop trying so hard to bring us closer to a WWIII. The USA's current foreign policy is the main cause of all the turmoil we're seeing in eastern Europe and the Middle East. Anything that can change it should be welcomed by anyone with a desire to live.
The game theoretic irony is that peace can often only be achieved by building up the military strength to deter potential attackers. There are a few places in the world where US involvement can lead tonkore stability.
Faltering US support for the Ukraine will tempt Russia into more territorial expansion towards or even into NATO.
China will probably ramp up aggression against Taiwan and against the Philippines. It is a minor miracle that no lethal shots have yet been fired in the persistent and aggressive military incursions into Philippines territorial waters. Several navy vessels have already been damaged this year.
I believe that the best way to release tensions in the Middle East would be by improving relations with Iran - but Trump bombed the deal that would have enabled that. The relqtive economic stength of the US could have been a good motivatir. Now Iran is aligning itself with Russia.
>The game theoretic irony is that peace can often only be achieved by building up the military strength to deter potential attackers.
But the utility of military build up is non-linear. There comes a point where further gains for your side are marginal while further losses for your adversary are existential. A neutral Ukraine represented a sufficiently balanced state of power that rendered war negative sum for Russia. We overextended ourselves in trying to peal Ukraine away from Russia's orbit. NATO in Ukraine would have been a strategic noose from which Russia would never escape. The Ukraine war is blowback for American policy towards Russia, i.e. expand NATO up to Russia's border, bait Ukraine and Georgia for NATO membership, foment anti-Russian movements in Ukraine that lead to the expulsion of the Russian-friendly president of Ukraine and install someone western-oriented.
> NATO in Ukraine would have been a strategic noose from which Russia would never escape.
Reminder: Ukraine was (strongly) against NATO membership before Russia invaded in 2014.
NATO threat is a red herring that Russia likes to dangle in front of the western countries to cover up its expansionist agenda. The only reason it's "afraid" of NATO is NATO can make that agenda much harder to pull off.
> The game theoretic irony is that peace can often only be achieved by building up the military strength to deter potential attackers.
Nobody has attacked the USA since Pearl Harbor. Military strength has been used to impose hegemony over other parts of the world, not to protect the nation.
> There are a few places in the world where US involvement can lead tonkore stability.
How can you say that after the countless deaths, pain, and strife caused by the USA in the Middle East, Asia, and South America?
You mean the terrorist attack orchestrated by the same guy (Osama Bin Laden) the USA propped up in the 80s when he was fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan?
The 11 September is the perfect example of the USA bringing instability to the world and giving life to future enemies through their reckless interference in the Middle East.
> Military strength has been used to impose hegemony over other parts of the world, not to protect the nation.
I'm not a scholar of military history. I assumed that no one would dare attack the US because the US military is larger than the next ~dozen militaries combined?
The lesson is that Reddit is not real life, and that calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters turns out to not be a winning strategy.
Whether democrats finally learn that lesson is another thing. I am not optimistic on that.
> calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters
The Democratic campaign did no such thing. Can you point to any examples? As far as I can see they went to great lengths to avoid saying anything like that.
As far as I can tell there was far more venom from the Republicans. Maybe the lesson is that a winning strategy is to be more insulting.
It was a single remark by the outgoing president who wasn't standing for election, and something he quickly rowed back on. It was clearly something he didn't intend to say, but at some point in an election campaign someone is going to misspeak.
Anyway, you're moving the goalposts. The allegation was "calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters".
Meanwhile, Trump: "Crazy do-nothing democrats", "horrendous people", "the Dems are vicious"... and about 10,000 other insults whilst seizing on one offhand comment from Biden.
Biden said, "the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters", in response to one of Trump's supporters saying Puerto Rico is garbage. Then Biden tried to walk it back by saying he meant that supporter, or his rhetoric, or whatever (and even if we deny him that walk-back, "supporters" is not all conservatives, all Republicans, or even everybody who votes Trump). Democrats mostly called this a gaffe.
While unacceptable by presidential standards, it's extremely tame compared to the things Trump regularly says about groups of people (we could even just limit that to the things he says about liberals or Democrats), and the vocal support he receives from his supporters for these statements. The fact that this got so much attention is evidence that "double standard" would be an understatement.
>calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters
They don't (in general). Some of them over-apply those words. Some of them apply them to an over-broad category ("conservatives" or whatever). Some of them apply some of those words to some Trump supporters, which is not even the same thing as Trump voters, Republicans, or conservatives. And of that sub-sub-subset, sometimes the harsh words are even understandable, considering the hideous, immoral things they are being applied in response to.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters are much harsher with their words, and use much broader strokes when applying them.
I.e. it's the opposite. One of the defining characteristic (as opposed to simply a tendency) of the speaking style of Trump supporters is mockery and provocation and insulting and name-calling and threatening. They don't all do it, but it's an undeniable part of their ideology.
Inflation. Record illegal immigration. Identity politics. Inflation. An anointed candidate. Perceived censorship. Inflation. Income inequality. Cover ups. Inflation.
I’m not saying Trump will fix any of this. I’m just saying people feel like PC culture has gone over the top while a 20oz Coke has tripled in price. Harris campaigned on “we’re not going back” but a lot of people would trade Trump’s insanity for housing prices of yore.
Funny thing is we saved ourselves from 2008-style economic collapse with stimulus, which partially caused the inflation here but also caused it in all the other countries. But nevertheless, all their incumbent parties lost over it.
When you get punched in the face, the first thought is not who else got punched. Of course ppl will vote based on their own recent face punching. "I didn't get punched in the face when the other guy was president"
I wouldn't say stupid, I'd say ignorant. A more progressive interpretation: you can't help someone else until you have your own mask on. People are voting based on how they feel their life is compared to 4 years ago and apparently half of america very much recalls life being better then. They don't feel the need to dig any deeper than that; they need to get their own oxygen mask on.
Which is a bit of a weird argument because people did get punched hard in 2020. Things were mostly very bad during Trump’s last year in office. Jobs were lost, millions died; Trump himself spent days in intensive care in October 2020.
Political memories are very short. Trump can get excused for the botched Covid response because it’s ancient history, but Biden can’t get excused for global inflation which followed from the same disaster.
> Inflation was global, and the USA navigated it much better than other Western economies.
This comes across as very out of touch. By "navigated it" you mean brought inflation under control. But it's not like prices came down.
The $1,500 per month grocery bill that was $1,000 in 2019 is still $1,500.
People don't look at the CPI and think "phew, glad the Fed was able to get inflation back to target" they think "I remember when I used to have $1,000 left over each month".
Not only will Trump not fix these things but he’s the cause or at least contributor to all the things you just mentioned. You may be right that those are the reasons people voted for Trump, but if they did they’re naive at best.
Yes. We Americans have the collective memory of a Mayfly and the inability to pay attention to things that drive actual inflation that take a lot of time to resolve, like bad housing policy, logistics logjams, and starving the beastly budget needed for oversight.
I completely agree that Trump printed a ton of money, but Biden also continued to print a ton of money.
In addition, people tend to associate outcomes with the administration in power even if it’s due to a prior administration. Inflation appeared under Biden, not Trump. Inflation decreasing also does not mean prices decreasing.
Obama is the only 2 term President to have gotten a majority of the vote both times since Ronald Reagan. Our system had been broken in a sense (depending on your perspective). We’ve had candidates get a plurality and some a majority of the vote who did not get elected. I think the electoral system needs to be abandoned.
The U.S. is far more right wing than people thought. That Trump got a majority of the vote is a huge win for him. No one can claim his win is because of a backward electoral system and not because he is popular. This is huge. Democrats will be dead for 2 years minimum. Trump will be able to enact whatever legislation he wants to.
He is the President we deserve. The DNC needs to be abolished. Democrats had the opportunity to reform the system. It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
> Democrats had the opportunity to reform the system. It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
When? How? Any change like that in the last few decades would be very hard, and probably before that as well.
I don't disagree with you, I've argued "fixing the system should be #1 priority" for years, but even if the Democratic party wanted to, I don't see how they could have done so.
When Obama was President his first two years Democrats had clear majorities of both houses. But that fool was obsessed with “bipartisanship”. He acted as if the political norms of the 70s had not changed. Also, they haven’t even tried to fight for the things I mentioned.
In Obama's first term, the parties were not nearly as ideologically sorted as they were today. There was a Democratic majority of 257 in the House, yes, but 54 of those were members of the explicitly conservative Blue Dog Coalition. They wouldn't have agreed to vote for sweeping partisan reforms.
I think they would have gone for updating the number of a Representatives. But they didn’t even try to do such things. Obama kept trying the make a deal with Republicans and acted like it was the 1970s. In the end he saw what his efforts were worth when Republicans refused to even vote for his Supreme Court nominee.
Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment and that wouldn’t have passed with enough states.
I don’t think number of representatives matters as it’s mostly representative of population. If the ratios are the same then I don’t think 435 vs 4035 matters.
> Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment
No, the size of the House is determined by Congress; a century ago they decided to cap it at the current number, and never increase it since then, regardless of population increase.
> I don’t think number of representatives matters as it’s mostly representative of population
That's not the case, though. A quick look at constituents per representative across states is all it takes to see how stark that is.
It's extra important because the number of electoral votes each state gets is dependent upon their number of representatives.
Changing number of representatives would require a constitutional amendment…
You are wrong on this. You should look up Reapportionment Acts. The number of Representatives does matter in an electoral system and for other reasons. A Representative from California represents far more people than one from North Dakota. This is a major power imbalance in both electoral matters and in matters of federal legislation.
The number of Representatives hasn’t been updated in a 100 years.
> It’s been over 100 years since the number of Representatives has been updated. They could have imposed election reform. They could have gotten rid of archaic Senate rules like filibuster.
As much as I'd like to think the waning days of the 2022 Congress were wasted, I don't think this would have been feasible.
Manchin and Sinema refused to get rid of the filibuster. And with that in place, nothing else that you mention was possible.
> The U.S. is far more right wing than people thought.
Yup. In 2016 we thought Trump was an aberration, a temporary cultish fad. In 2020 we felt justified because he lost, but we ignored how barely he lost. And now, knowing everything about Trump there is to know, we've elected him again, and we can't even say he lost the popular vote this time. The GOP took the Senate, and may even keep hold of the House for at least the next two years. Thomas and Alito will likely retire from SCOTUS, and Trump will appoint young, carefully-chosen, extreme right-wing justices. The makeup of the court will be hard-right-majority for the rest of my life. I'm sure he'll also appoint more hard-right judges to the federal judiciary in record numbers.
This is who we are, and it's time we start accepting that. Dem leadership needs to internalize that and drastically change their strategy. I'm not sure
Every individual is a rational/irrational actor. I don't know the split of time they're irrational vs rational. Maybe 50/50.
Some people are better than other people at convincing other people to do things in a certain way. Might have a little to do with genetics, probably more to do with education and size of platform, which is mostly a function of whose legs you popped out of and a little bit of whatever magic sauce makes you, you.
Most people that are good at convincing other people to do things a certain way are doing so in a way to personally enrich themselves. Sometimes they have a little more empathy, or perhaps intelligence, and know the personal enrichment can't be too flagrant, but regardless they all share that goal.
Unless one becomes too much of an outcast from the other good-convincers (think e.g. Lenin, Mao, CKS, Washington and his friends) and they convince everyone to go kill the followers of the other good-convincers until an equilibrium can be reached where either only one good-convincer is being enriched or at least both are to an acceptable degree.
This dynamic will play out eternally. Part of the mechanism of good-convincerness being sustainable is that you never disturb that equilibrium too much, so in this case to ground it, hence why the democrats tried to pivot right to fight accusations of being leftists (an ideology very much opposed to this idea of the best convincers being extremely personally enriched). In the end, they didn't really lose. Kamala will continue to likely have a powerful political career, and if not she can at least write some books and die phenomally wealthy like Hillary will. Democrats can switch from having much federal power to being an opposition party. Nothing actually changes, the message simply switches from "give us votes and money to enshrine whatever it is you care about" to "give us votes and money to fight fascism rah rah." Both messages are of course a lie, the real message is "give us votes and money in a way that allows us to continue to collect votes and money."
The message is that in the global zeitgeist, the natural human tendency among everyone, good convincer and not, for liberation, personal agency, and fulfilment, is obviously not being met when no matter where they turn there's someone telling them that if they want these things they have to all support a given good convincer. In the early Soviet Union, communist leaders too advantage of the opposite zeitgeist to achieve the same thing. Right now, the reactionaries have acquired a greater share of the zeitgeist, maybe because their messaging coincides well with several refugee crises and the inevitable climate refugee crisis.
In my personal opinion these tendencies can't be rewarded in this form of top down hierarchy where it's good-convincers pitting their supporters against each other. Imo we can overcome the nurture and saecular aspects of what makes someone a good convincer (education, self determination, material conditions provided for) to make everyone more level in their ability to convince others to do things. Early societies had this more "flat" organization, where the best convincers lived basically on raw rhetorical ability (look up some old Cherokee transcriptions for their interactions with missionaries, they were genuinely hilarious and viciously good at humiliating rhetorical opponents), and even that could only go so far.
During the Spanish civil war I believe the anarchists did a phenomenal job educating and "leveling the playing field" among an astounding number of people - off memory as I'm on my phone, something like 70% of their economy had been syndicalized. Somehow they convinced a shitload of the population to think deeply about their engagement in society and politics and become active, daily, if not hourly, participants in that process.
This fascinates me and I want to try this again. It of course involves sucking it up and talking to Trump supporters which I find very difficult because they say some very silly things, but regardless, if an alternative power structure isn't injected into the mix, the game of good-convincers playing hackey sack with the zeitgeist to maintain power will never end.
This fascinates me and I want to try this again. It of course involves sucking it up and talking to Trump supporters
That’s a good attitude, because nothing is truly solved with a Trump presidency. His victory was always just an expression of the undercurrent. The electorate has just voiced it, for a second time, but that’s all.
I agree that it's a clear message. The messaging the last time Trump won the election was that the electoral college was broken, Trump lost the popular vote, Americans deserve better.
8 years later, after all of this political baggage, prosecution, and media repudiation the Democrats managed to lose in resounding manner – not just the electoral college, but the senate, house, and popular vote.
This is after what is arguably a great Biden presidency, economy-wise. The Democrats have centered their entire identity for the last 8 years about being anti-Trump. There are no bright spots in the results for them, no messaging that they can hang their hat on, and build on going forward. From a base building perspective, this is brutal. The next election is square one for them.
If they'd done something they would've lost more. Voters, who on average are near retirement age, hate it when you do anything because they think it'll affect their retirement.
In this case they were blocked by Manchin/Sinema from anything like filibuster reform, but they did get some big important economic reforms in.
My new unhealthy conspiracy theory is democrats like being perpetually in the minority where they can talk a good game but don’t actually have to follow through on anything. That’s why they always tack right and try to compromise with people who call them enemies and groomers and demons. “We’ll welcome them into our cabinet” never sat well with me in the era of Trump.
Polls show voters think Harris/Walz were too liberal, not the other way round. They mostly haven't gone right either; Biden campaigned as a moderate and ran as the most progressive administration in my life.
(Which was good! But voters hated it because they don't like change and don't like inflation.)
To me it seems like Democrats just failed to listen to their constituents, and being one who wanted Bernie Sanders to have some chance at running in 2016 and 2020, I think this is the reckoning of that more than anything. The Democrats have ignored their own base and this is what happens when they pander to signals from everywhere else.
I don't understand everything you're saying, probably because I am not involved in day to day US political discussion, but a few of your points seem wildly exaggerated or misunderstood.
No one is forcing anyone to turn any sons into daughters, are they? What you're really saying is that you don't want anyone to be allowed to change their gender. That's a quite prohibitive stance for a country that puts so much emphasis on freedom.
What's this "male perverts sharing locker room" stuff about? Who's campaigning for letting random adults into kids locker rooms?
In California for instance if the child wants to transition then you must let it. If you attempt to stop it or guide them out of the decision in any way you’re at risk of having your child taken from you. That’s the force being used, do what we say or we’ll take your child.
I believe Elons kid had this happen to him, hence why he’s so pro trump despite the fact that trump is pro oil industry. The lesser of two evils he said.
Parent got voted down because HN is largely extremist left.
This is harsh: it’s effectively trolling, but it’s not by the original poster but a calculated political campaign designed to smear Democrats. Saying anyone wants “male perverts [to] share showers and locker rooms with their kids” is untrue, but it’s really effective at getting people to pick a side because it sounds terrible and even though this is not a pressing problem in the real world (if we’re talking child size abuse, the risk is family members and trusted adults) it’s perfect for getting strong emotional reactions, as we can see from how heavily used it is.
Governor Youngkin got elected in Virginia riding on a wave of anti-trans sentiment based off of a single reported assault where the accused wasn’t even trans, didn’t identify as such, wasn’t allowed to be in the bathroom where the assault occurred, etc. but that was such a volatile claim that it was all over the news for the end of the campaign even though it was a single assault out of thousands.
I think it’s possible to recognize that a position is not factual and based on emotional impact but we need a better term than trolling to describe it.
agreed; I'm not saying the person is _right_. If the left wanted to get dirty, they should have tossed up all the pedo priest data. At the end of the day, it was absolutely a messaging problem. People very literally believe that their kids could be targeted and become trans. Education and more propaganda are the only options.
I think it should have been focused on the economic issues: there was a little of that but it should have been louder on what people experience like the way grocery costs include corporate profit-taking or how the guys deciding to have layoffs or hiking rents were heavily supporting Trump - there are a lot of abstract or targeted issues but almost everyone thinks about their paycheck and how much of it is going to living expenses.
You believe polls? The right notoriously is undersampled because they simply don’t take them. If you need more evidence, the polls also put her in the lead.
Polls had it as a tossup similar to what we saw. I believe that when voters repeatedly say they care about the economy and immigration, they probably are saying those because they mean it and not because they’re fixated on trans people but shy.
that’s a toss up? no that’s a commanding victory. if republicans take the house and all else is the same they’ll have won popular, electoral, house and senate. that’s not a toss up
It’s still a tossup: you’re conflating the polls being within the margin of error with the electoral college vote count, but all of the major analysts were saying it was even odds that either of them could win with a range of vote totals. 538 had it at 52:48 favoring Trump yesterday, and the EV range went high because so many states were close.
> But it is worth stressing that the polls will not be exactly correct. Polls overestimated Democrats by an average of 3-4 points in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, for example, and overestimated Republicans by an average of 2.5 points in the 2012 presidential election. Our election model expects polls this year to be off by 3.8 points on average, although it could be more or less — and our model thinks this error is equally likely to favor Democrats as Republicans
> And that’s why we’ve been saying the race isn’t necessarily going to be close just because the polls are. Trump and Harris, our model says, are both a normal polling error away from an Electoral College blowout.
come back in two days and explain why you’re wrong. you’ve lost complete. you may get the house, very unlikely at this point, but that’s the only one not confirmed. dems have no recourse here, the attacks didn’t work, the hate speech didn’t work, and now you can’t accept the results.
What are you even talking about? Nobody serious is contesting the outcome. I was simply rejecting the false claim that the polls didn’t allow for this result when the last couple weeks were full of people saying this outcome was very possible.
The Democrats just lost an election because they tried to dismiss poorly-articulated-but-legitimate concerns as trolling/ists/phobes. Could be a teachable moment, if they are willing to learn.
I am interpreting it correctly. Donald Trum is repeated choice of GOP and its voters. He won twice. They are choosing him, because they want exactly what he is, who he chooses to cooperate with, who he picks for supreme Court.
He is not some kind of outlier either. There is whole network of media, influencers, think tanks doing the same to various degree. The same kind of rhetoric was here for years.
The popular vote is not a good indicator. I live in a deep blue state, the fact that my vote doesn't actually influence the electoral college reduces the incentive to go vote, drastically.
Exactly, unless you rerun with a "popular vote wins" election - it's not concrete at all. The campaigns would not have been run in the same way, and the people would not vote in the same way.
I say this every election when democrats play the "but we won the popular vote" card as well - that wasn't the game being played, so it doesn't really mean that much.
It doesn't send me a clear message. Trump got fewer votes this time around than he did in 2020. And overall I read that 20 million fewer voters participated this year. The message I'm getting is apathy.
Every time somebody wins, their supporters say it sends a clear message. You should consider that the message you believe is so clear that you've left it unsaid is demonstrably not clear.
I absolutely sympathize with individual reasons to vote Trump and don't automatically look down on Trump voters (immigration, for example). But, Trump himself and explicit "Trump supporters" (i.e. people who make it clear they support his general identity - negativity and all) 95% of the time don't leave any room for sympathy when I encounter them, online or in person, and they are extremely common. What the average liberal is shown (and I assume you care about the average person in each camp, since lauding the common man is a prominent value) is an unheard-of-in-their-lifetimes amount of verbal encouragement (with varying degrees of explicitness) for hatred of others, violence against others, imprisonment of others, and disrespecting of the law/constitution in the name of those things. It's not comparable with any past Democratic candidate (or Republican, for that matter).
On the personal scale, my wife and I don't express anything close to extremist positions, or any cheerleader-type love for Democrats, or any name-calling of conservatives, and yet we are called every slur that's popular with Trump supporters. And we're white, cis Americans. My wife, because she's so friendly when strangers talk to her, has been stalked by one Trump supporter and had another call her a slut (to another Trump supporter, not to her face). She's terrified of these people now. It's insane that they even state out loud their support for Trump in the short time we encounter them.
You can't expect humans presented with that to think, when that candidate wins, "Wow, I guess political issues X, Y, and Z are really important to those guys. Maybe I was too harsh on them." They're going to think, "Wow, those guys really are leaning in a fascist-y direction and have a big problem with evil people in their ranks. I'm scared for my country, community, and family." I don't think that's an extreme or unnecessarily provocative thing to admit.
It's more likely that there is a small vocal pro-trans lobby, a small vocal anti-trans lobby, and almost everyone else who gives it no thought whatsoever.
I did say "or is just that willing to throw us to the wolves".
You can't pretend that we we haven't been forced into the political eye over past several years. The winning party has been extremely loud and extremely clear about their plans for us. I don't buy the ignorance argument anymore, not after three election cycles of this. If you voted for them, then you're okay with more of us dying in exchange for whatever you think you're getting out of the deal.
(Using the nonspecific "you" here—of course I don't know how the person I'm replying to voted.)
This is a little outside my bubble - what specifically are you worried about?
I have a couple acquaintances that are trans and they seem like normal happy people that aren't overtly oppressed. I'm under the impression that the state of trans rights is more or less equivalent to black rights, is that not the case?
I don't think we should try to draw any conclusions about the mental state or hopes and fears about people who we consider acquaintances. We just don't know them well enough, and they don't know us well enough to open up about the hard stuff.
To be clear, trans people face much more violence than you would think. It doesn't help when the GOP runs ads showing "trans women" as burly grown men who beat up little girls. Yes, that's real.
It's very difficult to not see the right's treatment of trans individuals as a slow genocide. Not only do they offer them no protections, but they also take healthcare rights away. But worst of all, they demonize them as monsters and sic their followers on them. The GOP doesn't actually need to kill trans people, it just needs to convince people to kill trans people. So far, that has been incredibly effective.
republicans spent +$100 m on anti trans ads this cycle. it was a major talking point of the whole campaign. “gender reassignment surgeries happening in school”, etc.
It's not just that they hate you, it's that you're enjoying privileges you don't deserve. They are always angry that someone somewhere is getting something they don't deserve.
Then the trans activists (not the community) should not have been pushing stuff onto the kids side of things. That's a 100% no-go area and I don't know how anyone thought that was a good idea. People, all people, want themselves and their children to be left alone.
Because people like you are often at the forefront of wider social movements. Stuff like healthcare, safety nets, worker empowerment… Your influence goes way beyond gender care or women's rights. Beyond their bigoted sensibilities they have an incentive to shut down many of the wider political views you may defend.
I can't wait for four more years and beyond of hearing these same talking points over and over and over again. I could put up an argument here, but it's been done before and better, and frankly, I'm just so tired today.
As a response to the parent, this is antagonistic and uncharitable. The parent wasn't interested in arguing, and didn't even deny this specific point. I'm not saying they wouldn't, but there's plenty that can be easily denied in the GP (see my other comment), and this is not one of the "easy" ones. If women generally feel uncomfortable with trans-women in their bathrooms, that's not an unreasonable argument to make. The problem is that almost every time the argument is made, it's made unreasonably, using hatred or support for violence.
> The problem is that almost every time the argument is made, it's made unreasonably, using hatred or support for violence.
Not really though. What typically happens is that a perfectly reasonable statement about respecting women's boundaries, or the importance of female-only spaces, or the impossibility of men being women, gets labelled as "hatred" despite no hate being expressed.
>forcing non-trans people to accept a fiction (people can change sex)
This is dishonest.
Obviously, vanishingly few people disagree on basic reality. Undeniable facts include: Whether or not I have a penis; whether or not I have a Y chromosome; whether or not biologically male and female brains/bodies normally differ; whether or not I feel like a man or feel like a woman; whether or not that feeling is permanent (that one would involve predicting the future, but is still ultimately factual).
The things people actually differ on are:
- The semantics of words like man/woman. This is 99% identity politics - "semantic argument" is practically a synonym for "pointless argument". "I'm using this word in a new-ish way."; "No, I disagree with that usage." It's utterly tangential.
- More relevantly: How (un)comfortable they feel about some of those basic realities listed above, and whether or not they express that using pettiness, word-bending, cherry-picking, physical violence, murder, etc.
>influencing vulnerable children into harmful and unnecessary medical procedures
I can't say that a "you are whatever you feel like" influence has literally never resulted in an impressionable mind making a horrible decision for themselves, but it's monumentally overstated by conservatives, which is easy to do because it's so subjective and so dramatic. The line between the obviously correct "be who you are without fear" and the less prudent "wouldn't you like to be who you feel like you are?" can be very blurry.
>Stop doing that and almost everyone will happily leave you alone to dress and behave however you please.
Surely you can read this and see that "almost" does not qualify this into reasonably true territory. This is just not how people are.
You're confusing the electoral college with the Senate. In the electoral college, the states are weighted by population. It's a flawed system, but it's not "each state having an equal say".
But even then the weighting is _very_ uneven. The number of votes per elector can vary wildly by state, by as much as some small whole multiple. So the “weight” of one vote in one state can be say, four times that of another state.
It’s amazing to me that this can stand and efforts to change never seem to get very far.
I'm an outsider; is the US a democratic union of 50 states (plus districts and territories) or is it a democratic union of ~ 335 million individuals?
Is the EU vote in Brussels passed by countries or by individual citizens?
As I recall the current electoral system was set up to weight the votes of states that were members of the union .. if the US has moved to a single unified country of individuals then it might be time to reset the rules (the US founders would be in favour if I read their comments on evolving systems correctly).
Perhaps 'dated' is a better description than 'broken'.
If you mean "state" in the sense of "nation-state", then no, the US is not a democratic union of 50 states. It's a federal republic. While each state does have its own identity, government, and laws, the US federal government has much more power over US states than the EU has over member countries.
> the current electoral system was set up to weight the votes of states that were members of the union
The current electoral system was set up to appease the southern slave-owning states who would have had little representation if the straight popular vote was used.
> Perhaps 'dated' is a better description than 'broken'.
Potato, potahto. Distinction without a difference, in this case.
That's a silly comparison when even the EU is a mix of by-country/by-population (council/parliament—and even the parliament is weighted toward giving smaller countries more representation)
How about some good old-fashioned respect for the office of President?
Trump's legacy already speaks for itself.
As far as Europe and other overseas countries are concerned, Trump's most remarkable accomplishment was quite some time ago when he was President the first time.
He made unprecedented Presidential history already, and for the rest of his life (as well as the lives of millions of other senior citizens) he can bask in the degree of admiration that he brought to such an esteemed executive office.
He clinched it like no other in over 75 years of very strong & respectable leadership, recognized worldwide which really means something to international partners of all kinds.
He made sure that President Barack Obama will go down in history as the final US President to effectively be the "leader of the free world", in a long line of illustrious Republicans & Democrats who may one day regain such a level of respect again.
Only not possible in the lifetimes of millions of people around the world, for whom it's just a little too late now. Biden couldn't recover that mantle in only 4 years unless he was a miracle worker of some kind, that's how elusive it really was.
Completely eluded Trump, and once again the traditional American kind of world-class leadership on an international stage fades further into the past, with no recovery on the horizon any time soon.
Yeah. It's been scary to see how Big Tech and the media presented Trump as a threat to democracy and someone you cannot possibly vote for. It becomes dangerous when one party has that much power and support. It's not a democracy anymore when people are not presented with facts and are not allowed to express their opinions without getting cancelled or labeled a certain way. You can see it even in the comments here: "Far Right", "bigot", "redneck". We should acknowledge that blunt words like this are at a very low level of political discussion. "Far Right" is a particularly nasty label because even a liberal from 2010 would meet the definition as it's used today by liberals.
Look at this [1] - Oprah warning women that if they don't vote they may lose their ability to vote. This is ridiculous. Trump is not a saint and January 6th was a dark moment but they (the Big Tech, the media, the celebrities) blown the negative image of Trump out of proportion and are making stuff up. Whether you like him or not he is the candidate of the other party. There is no democracy without the other party. The reality is that the megaphones have been cornered by a single side and are used in the most unfair way with additions of fake news and negative coloring about Trump and the "Far Right". Elon Musk saved the day by buying Twitter. It's the last social media platform where Republicans and their supporters could have any presence.
There were plenty of reasons to not vote for Kamala. Perhaps the biggest ones are her views that align with communism. [2] And by the way, Merry Christmas! [3]
You're complaining about how Trump was presented as a threat to democracy after he made a speech saying how if he wins you'll never have to vote again? After he lead an insurrection and tried to illegally overthrow the previous election both on paper and in person?
Seen a good few Trumpers complaining about the label "far right". If you don't like the label that's on you, it's like an orange complaining about being called an orange, it's a fact.
Like I said, it was a dark moment. However, Democrats have been in charge for 12 out of the past 16 years and have the support of billionaires owning the biggest content platforms. Recently, they used those platforms to the fullest extent to drive their political agenda with the general message being "Democrats are the only moral choice". He stirred up an insurrection but like I said it's not just about Trump but the 2-party system that makes this a democracy. I would repeat the second paragraph of my previous comment.
What am I supposed to think when I see a campaign ad like this? [1]
The parent pointed out that Trump promised the same thing again - so not a dark moment, but a dark pattern. Very dark. There's not much darker than overturning the rule of law and creating civil unrest.
>"Democrats are the only moral choice"
I agree with you that Democrats are not somehow unusually moral, but I don't think this is the lie you are portraying it as (or exaggeration? It's unclear what your criticism is exactly). Plenty of people have been given plenty of concrete examples indicating that the Trump camp contains a significant portion of people who espouse unusually immoral ideologies. Maybe they're wrong, but they don't have to do mental gymnastics to arrive at that conclusion in an intellectually honest manner. And, as you rightly point out, there are effectively only two parties.
>I would repeat the second paragraph
Regarding that, then:
>if [women] don't vote they may lose their ability to vote. This is ridiculous.
I've heard Trump supporters say they think women shouldn't vote dozens of times - on the social media platforms you claim are (or were at the time) lacking conservative voices. The notion isn't ridiculous. It's unlikely. But when it comes to threats to the most foundational rights, "unlikely" isn't good enough for the voter's mind.
>Whether you like him or not he is the candidate of the other party. There is no democracy without the other party.
Democrats largely don't take this stance beyond petty disrespect like "not my president" and demanding recounts in very close regions. Trump supporters, on the other hand, explicitly do take this stance when the other candidate wins, as you, again, have already admitted.
>Elon Musk saved the day by buying Twitter
Twitter moderation under Musk is at least as right-leaning as it was left-leaning prior. That is to say, somewhat. What Musk did do was declare the word "cis" a slur, broadly. A word I used to describe myself and my wife in another comment, because it was relevant and correct (the usual comparisons are the words "Jew" or "gay").
Republicans haven't been anywhere near absent from social platforms for 15 years. Underrepresented, maybe. However, social platforms bring out the ever-living pettiness of politics on both sides, and the conservative flavor of pettiness is naturally more likely to break even the most politically-neutral moderation rules (or be "shouted down", by whatever definition you want for that) on social media platforms, because it is more anti-social than the liberal flavor of pettiness.
> It's been scary to see how Big Tech and the media presented Trump as a threat to democracy
Please explain how Project 2025 (written by the Heritage Foundation etc etc, not big tech / the media) is not a threat to democracy, specifically its sections on consolidating power in a single person (= autocracy) and dismantling various federal systems of checks and balances in favor of loyalist political appointees.
> It's the last social media platform where Republicans and their supporters could have any presence.
Truth Social was built specifically as a safe space for Republicans and their views. Musk did not make Twitter a bastion of free speech, not when using words that personally offend him get you banned.
> Truth Social was built specifically as a safe space for Republicans and their views
I have never heard of it. A niche social media site built specifically for expressing right-wing political views could never compete with Facebook, Instagram, Reddit.
I would like to skip that rethoric here on HN whenever possible. You cannot possibly reduce 70M voters to that.
I would like to explore the whys and hows of this apparent step backwards in so many things and why Trump was voted like he was and this reductionist view helps no one.
You're right to point out that this kind of rhetoric isn't really in the spirit of HN.
On the other hand, it's a fallacy to assume that there must be merit to an argument just because it's championed by a majority.
I'm aware that it's politically suicidal to say that "most people are stupid", but I'm not a politician (I'm not even American) and I feel like "stupidity" should not a priori be ruled out as an explanation.
Perhaps you could use the word "idiot" and refer to them as "idiots". The term has been used in a medico-legal context in the past to define a person's mental age.
That there is a divide between the two parties and the average intellectual ability of their supporters is a well-known fact. I'd contest that this is less of an issue than their racism.
So you really think more than half of the Americans are mentally impaired? The probability of being mentally impaired is higher for a random poster like you than for half of American people.
Your understanding of statistics is deplorable. Also, your reading ability. I specifically said it's racism, rather than the (verifiable) lack of intelligence.
True, "stupid" is a very imprecise term. But my main point was merely that epistemically, there is no validity to something just because a majority is behind it.
Well, technically, stupidity is relative. If you're defining it as "below 50%", then that's half the people. "Below 90%", even more, etc, so the statement in itself doesn't really make sense.
If you're in the 90th IQ percentile, sure, most people are stupid to you.
You would be a fool to think that an entire population is stupid. Perhaps a proportion sure but the deciding vote comes from a large proportion of the population that are by no means stupid. Democracy in theory is a form of distributed computation and just because you don't agree with the end result does not make every else stupid
I don’t believe we can judge what happened just by looking at the majority opinion and give it merit, but I also can’t dismiss it as simply "stupidity."
Messages from certain leaders can resonate deeply with people. If a message is well-received by so many, it could mean the opposing side didn’t present a strong enough argument—basic politics.
In my persoanl view, the discourse needed to challenge figures like Trump is limited by U.S. politics, which is heavily influenced by corporate funding. This influence likely explains why the Democratic Party often seems unwilling to take bold stances.
Policies like stronger unions, better social protections, higher taxes for the wealthy, and a meaningful minimum wage increase are hard to promise if campaigns depend on corporate backing.
People feeling disenfranchised and reaching for populists is a common issue throughout time.
I believe social media has widened the most extreme opinions and forced polarisation on most people, I can feel it with the UK too, where a very clearly corrupt government, with a revolving door of leadership: one losing the country enough money in 14 days to pay for the NHS for a decade… are being talked about favourably over a meek, awkward, slightly right of centre leader who happens to be wearing a red badge instead of a blue one.
Discourse is so swollen with bitter defence and snide attacks with soundbites of “sides”, I really do believe that its the fault of platforms showing the most divisive voices most often.
The thing that pushes me towards right for example, is seeing people dehumanising men for being men (not behaviours, just clear misandry against the gender) on social media so openly- and to much fanfare. I would otherwise be considered extremely left wing by UK standards.
Is this something you do actually experience in real life though?
Because I'm with you that social media is part of the problem. When I was using Twitter, many years ago, I also saw a lot of these super-woke people that I thought were just crazy.
But in real life, I don't see these caricatures so often (where they do exist, they tend to stick together in close-knit organisations and so are easy to avoid). Most women, gay and trans people, minorities etc. that I met just want to have some basic rights and don't care about culture wars about language use etc.
no, exactly, you can feel the effect on some peoples beliefs and behaviours but they can always be reasoned with in reality. You are completely correct that these behaviours are so much more extreme online with the #KillAllMen Movements, 4B[0] and choose the bear. I still hear whispers of these beliefs, but it’s not nearly as strongly held or widely seen as it is on social media.
More impressionable people might hide stronger beliefs, like my mum, who is a reformer in the UK and parrots all their talking points and soundbites, but only down the pub with her like minded friends, or with me. Never to a labour supporter or in a public forum- so they almost never get challenged; and they become so deep rooted.
When optimising globally, sometimes a backward step is required to escape a local minima. It is possible that progressive politics has made a misstep, and that correcting that is the right thing to do.
I think we can all see that correcting to oligarchy/authoritarianism/fascism never works out well for any nation. I don't see your suggestion of a correction working out here either.
We have a first pass the post voting system which only allows for two parties.
We have this thing called the electoral college that further obfuscates the popular will.
Both of these flawed systems disillusion millions of people every election cycle. People in non-swing states who have a minority opinion feel they have no voice, and often do not vote.
People who have serious issue with the two major parties have no viable method to express their political will.
---
Media:
We have a highly polarized media environment where a large number of people only get their facts from highly biased sources. This can happen on "both sides" but it's particularly evident with conservative media such as Fox News. In this outlet, millions of people see an alternate reality to the one we live in. They don't see Trump's age-addled brain or his most offensive rhetoric.
---
Policy:
Many people seem to think that the Democratic party is responsible for the inflation of the past 4 years. Many people seem to think that Trump stands for lower taxes for the working class, in ways that won't hurt them.
If we take Trump literally, he wants to deport many millions of people who live and work in this country peacefully, but do not have proper documentation. He wants to give Ukraine to Russia. I believe he is at best ambivalent to a national abortion ban. He doesn't show any support for combating climate change.
You mention that the EC obfuscates the popular will, but you ignore that it's a balance that gives a voice to many who would otherwise have none.
Would you find a popular vote system that entirely ignores the votes of dozens of states in favor of just a few somehow carrying less obfuscation of the will of the people?
There is probably no single thing that you could ascribe to 70M voters except that they vote. However, there are plenty of themes that are touted amongst supporters, many (all?) of which are easily shown to be false. Also, his biggest benefactors are people with a lot of money or influence... which are definitely not most of those 70M voters.
The man was convicted by a jury, impeached, and is known to have raped people. He is a known national security risk. ... the "critiques" are endless.
IMHO, to say that there is a useful message to be sent by electing him is naive at best. The fact that nobody can seem to discern that message despite truly trying is also telling.
Is the message, "people just want to watch the world burn?" Is it something else? As far as I can tell, nobody actually knows.
Meanwhile, he has declared victory before the votes are actually finalized. Is the probability high? Yes. Does it undermine the process? Also, yes.
Are there factors such as, "Kamala is a black female" at play? Almost definitely. Does Trump pander to groups that are covertly/overtly racist? Yes. Do all of his supporters understand/admit that? No.
Depends on implementation but in general we already don't have a free market, and if we did the American economy would collapse with the destruction of the entire farming sector and possibly the oil and gas sector, so I don't dismiss price controls on groceries or rent controls out of hand.
Singapore has nationalized housing and is extraordinarily prosperous. Perhaps rent control isn't a good measure and we should simply do that instead.
In interviews with people who are primarily voting on the economy a common response is that they feel things were economically better for them under Trump than they were under Biden. They want to go back to that, and they believe Trump can do it again.
Ok, let's take the nuanced route. Not all are stupid.
They're just more uneducated than ever, more conservative than ever, and idolizing dehumanization and evil totalitarians more than ever.
The root of everything is social insecurity and bad education, caused by the USA actually not being a country for its people but for corporations and billionaires.
I'm sorry but if you want a pathological liar, criminal and an overall horrible human being as a president of the (probably) most powerful and influential country in the world, you're just scum. Keep the downvotes coming.
The inequality in a nation must have a huge effect on the nature of the people in that nation. That a treatise on inequality has won a Nobel prizes for economics would tend to support your thesis [1]. That another Nobel prize winner has also written on inequality should clinch it [2].
> I'm sorry but if you want a pathological liar, criminal and an overall horrible human being as a president of the (probably) most powerful and influential country in the world, you're just scum. Keep the downvotes coming.
This is precisely what I'm talking about. You really think this comment is going to do anything but push even more people to vote for the right? Because why would they side with your camp when you just called them scum, because you don't understand their intentions for voting for him/the party?
Which is extra unfortunate, because your comment up until that part was pretty good.
I understand their intentions. I understand that these votes come out of a place of fear. They are unhappy and a lying demagogue is pointing them to a solution and fuels them with hate. [1]
I also understand that they willfully choose to ignore massive red flags and are a bunch of hypocrites. These people have no shame and need to be shamed. It is the key emotion that leads to change and motivates to action.
Sadly, due to electoral interference by totalitarian regimes, media outlets, Musk, and the internet in general, these people who would otherwise be ostracized by the community due to their antisocial behaviours have been normalized.
Once you're set up like that, it's extremely difficult to get out of. I am afraid that the US has check-mated itself for at least an entire generation. The only thing that can drive a change is hope and basic human decency, ethics and morality.
Which brings us back to people wilfully being the exact opposites of those values. We've had lying oppressive demagogues probably since the dawn of humanity. Most certainly in the last century.
However, despite being afraid and frustrated, many people sided against such leaders. And this is why I consider not doing so a personal moral failing.
> These people have no shame and need to be shamed. It is the key emotion that leads to change and motivates to action.
> these people who would otherwise be ostracized by the community due to their antisocial behaviours have been normalized.
The Internet (or global communication in general) does indeed mean shame won't work, because people can just ignore you and go find people who support them - whether that's Trump, Musk, or some randoms on the Internet is irrelevant.
So let's double down on the shame thing, which has worked out so well lately?
> The only thing that can drive a change is hope and basic human decency, ethics and morality.
I think the crux of many social issues is that people have different ideas about what 'basic human decency, ethics and morality' even mean.
> I think the crux of many social issues is that people have different ideas about what 'basic human decency, ethics and morality' even mean.
Everybody knows that lying, stealing, swindling, rape, misogyny, selfishness, narcissism, taking pride in ignorance and probably a dozen more wouldn't make that list. Everybody.
People vote for who they identify with as this gives legitimacy and backing to their own views and behaviours.
Morality is not universally as simple as 'stealing is bad' - a basic lesson in ethics, really. Is it bad to steal food for your starving family? If your answer is a simple 'yes', then I applaud you your certainty in life. I wish I had that. But for me, and many others, things aren't quite that simple.
In any case, I wasn't really referring to things like those on your list (one of those things is really not like the others, by the way. Seems very bad faith to me) but more things like trans issues, immigration, welfare, etc.
Just so you know, this is exactly the sort of divisive rhetoric - from all sides of the political spectrum - that has led America down this path, and will continue to do so.
You can chalk it up to "stupidity", which is rather silly on its face, or you can acknowledge that this result is the symptom of something far deeper, and try to explore what those issues are, and try to find solutions.
Has there been a root cause analysis on why the racists and misogynists only strike sometimes? They appeared to be powerless when the Democrats nominate charismatic candidates like Obama. My read from a distance is the man was propelled somewhat by his racial background.
I put it - as an outside chance - that it is possible that the policies and outcomes of said policies have a bearing on the voting decisions people make.
Millions of desperate people from very different cultures came into the country overwhelming welfare services and small communities, getting paid under the table by greedy businesses undercutting Americans and subverting labor laws. The current party in power allowed this influx to reach record levels, and didn’t do a thing about it. Any path to amnesty for these people down the road will change our political landscape forever, and Americans never voted for this policy.
Seems a bit of an overclaim. Strategic questions of how to handle the border was a defining issue in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections. Americans are continuously voting on border policy, it is one of the major elements of their national conversation. What the Biden administration did was a bit extreme but ballpark what was on the tin when he was voted in.
What is it a result of? I'm guessing: voters blamed post-covid global economic downturn on Biden because he was around at the time.
Erosion of democracy didn't seem to trouble the minds of the land of the free very much. I'm not too worried by Trump's second term, but I'm anxious about his third and fourth. One other issue is a fear of turning into Mexico, which people seem to think might happen by letting Mexicans in, but may yet be accomplished in a home-grown manner through insurrections and dismantling institutions.
It's well documented that Americans are, on average, quite undereducated. And it's also quite well documented that most of the people that vote for Trump are poorly educated.
So, not stupidity, no. But a lack of education can look similar.
I'd argue that anyone blandly categorizing dozens of millions of people who vote for a candidate (including many from communities of color and among immigrant demographics) as just uneducated ignorants is themselves overwhelmingly ignorant.
You can be against Trump for many good reasons, but a good look at why he won is about much more than just deriding his supporters as ignorant.
I am painting one side as kinda evil and other one perfectly within norms of non-evil. Not angelic, but clearly and significantly less anti-democratic and destruction seeking.
I think that the politics got to this point because the "sides" are graded on the curve. No matter how bad one side gets, you are supposed to project best possible intentions on them, worst possible intentions on their liberal opposition just so someone can say "they are the same". Like common. The long term plan to destroy Roe vs Wade for real and worked. The rights of gays and trans are going down the drain. There is literal plan to make anticonception harder to get. Trump was literally talking about this being last election and literally tried the coup after last election.
Can we please, stop with the nonsense? I remember center mocking feminists when they said abortion rights are at dangers. Guess what, they were right.
This is not about needing to listen in a more approving way. It is about needing to listen and oppose more strongly, because what they say about themselves is that they find "evil" to be something to aspire to.
How is accusing him of being a Nazi, an extremist, a dictator, etc "taking the high ground"? He was already president once and was provably NOT Hitler..
Firstly, Democratic establishment goes out of their way to not say these. Which is their mistake, GOP has no equivalent problem to accuse democrats of evil.
Second, he literally said he aspires to be a dictator, talks approvingly about dictators, and he does engage in literal extremist rhetoric on his rallies. You can be Nazi, an extremist, a dictator while not being literally Hitler in every single detail.
He likes when people say that about him. Not saying those is just lying, insisting that others dont say those is insisting on everyone lying.
All other things aside, don't you think choosing a convicted sex offender over an empty suit is quite damning on its own? Are his values the values USA wants to promote both internally and externally? Apparently so. :(
