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On May 30 2025 02:27 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2025 01:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On May 30 2025 01:46 WombaT wrote:On May 30 2025 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On May 30 2025 01:15 WombaT wrote:On May 30 2025 00:03 Zambrah wrote:
Reminder that swing voters arent a serious group of people in the US and that driving the turnout of your base is significantly more important.
Do good positive things, trying to rhetorically push back on liars and charlatans has not proven to be useful, Trump won twice, and the only reason he lost once was likely because of a colossal world wide pandemic.
Talk a lot and do nothing is the losing Democrat ideology, the focus should be on building a vision of a positive future, not spending energy counteracting the lies of freaks, they will always lie faster and more than you can counteract. + Show Spoiler +What if some people don’t want positive things? If punishing their perceived enemies outweighs potential improvement to their lives?
I think it’s all quite important. You need the tangible, provable good shit and aspiration. You gotta convince the reasonable, and you’ve gotta ostracise the unreasonable.
Collectively, I’d say folks of our vague persuasions are going 0/3 in doing these effectively. But I still think they’re all pretty important. Maybe 2/3 is enough, maybe even 1 but you’re not doing much with zero.
I find the reaction to Luigi Mangione rather instructive in ways. There was plenty of cheering of that even from everyday conservatives? Why was that? Well conservatives get screwed by insurance companies too.
Why does this anger not actualise into more bipartisan calls for reform then? Well some think alternatives are worse, or not viable. There’s a metric fuckton of evidence to the contrary, but perhaps some aren’t aware. Industry propaganda is strong too.
There are others who are angry at the healthcare industry when it screws them, but they don’t want to fund a system that stops other people being screwed. Not their responsibility. Which is pretty asshole mentality. Going back to my trifecta from earlier: 1. You sell the ‘we can do better, we’re fucking America!’ Maybe some state does its own reforms and they work, as an exemplar. 2. Collectively this makes it a lot easier to sell to people who like the idea, but are scared of the ‘unknown’ or reticent for those kind of reasons. 3. Any holdouts are either stakeholders, or folks who don’t want to pay for a better societal outcome. Those aren’t difficult positions to attack. I think we quite frequently end up in almost paradoxical positions quite often. If you just did the radical thing, and it worked, the radical thing would be popular. But you can’t do the radical thing, because the idea is unpopular (in some quarters), or seen as unviable. This is basically the lifecycle of " RomneyObamaCare", which is the pinnacle achievement of Democrats in our lifetimes. It was also too far right for Nixon and Republicans of the 1970's and still got 0 Republican votes 40 years later when Democrats decided it wasn't too far right for them anymore. What you're saying ostensibly sounds reasonable, in practice, it's actually detestable. What else is one going to do? If the country has shifted on this issue to the degree Nixon’s plan was considered too far right, while the extremely similar Obamacare is too left these aren’t exactly fertile grounds It means that 50 years of that strategy shifted the country and culminated in Democrats biggest accomplishment being too far right for Nixon and 1970's Republicans. My preferences aside, reasonable people have to do something else. Advocating them continuing is, as I said, detestable. Do what else then? My crude framework doesn’t preclude doing other things. More engaged political activism is still within the purview of it. Maybe a blog post convinces some people, maybe it takes a series of mass protests and rallies to get a sufficient groundswell, whatever it is. Part of what I've been pointing out for years now is that the "white moderate" strategy you were advocating, and Democrats have been using for ~50 years, replaced stuff that was working better (responsible for virtually all the progress that has all but stopped since it was abandoned for what you're advocating). Essentially for the sake of civility/negative peace.
It was an arguably reasonable position to give it a shot back then (though plenty said it was ridiculous then). It has proven itself preposterous as a path forward since.
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Northern Ireland24666 Posts
On May 30 2025 02:32 Zambrah wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2025 00:40 LightSpectra wrote:On May 30 2025 00:03 Zambrah wrote:
Reminder that swing voters arent a serious group of people in the US and that driving the turnout of your base is significantly more important.
Do good positive things, trying to rhetorically push back on liars and charlatans has not proven to be useful, Trump won twice, and the only reason he lost once was likely because of a colossal world wide pandemic.
Talk a lot and do nothing is the losing Democrat ideology, the focus should be on building a vision of a positive future, not spending energy counteracting the lies of freaks, they will always lie faster and more than you can counteract. The majority of Americans don't want positivity, they want it to be socially acceptable to be openly bigoted. They will always give into their worst impulses until it's made beyond clear that they can't mass hurt minorities without also getting hurt themselves in the process. But they can't realize that if they're busy falling for blatant lies like "tariffs are a tax on foreign countries" or "your wages will skyrocket once all the immigrants are gone". Hard disagree. Obama won, Americans are clearly capable of electing a black man, so bigotry cant be their primary motivator. If we look at who Americans have liked to elect, its clear that theres a preference for big, positive visions for the future focused on the promise of bold action, even if theyre always various degrees of lies, its what Americans want. They want their lives to meaningfully improve instead of only being thrown into chaos or at best only had the decay halted some. Democrats are too spineless and captured to deliver on meaningful change, and Republicans are actually kind of alright at delivering on meaningful change but their meaningful change is a Hell World. Instead of pushing Kamalas and Hillarys with no charisma and no real vision beyond minor technocratic improvements, Democrats should have been cultivating more Obamas and trying to actually recapture the working class. Instead we got the technocratic, visionless charisma voices, and wow they lost. Show nested quote +I find the reaction to Luigi Mangione rather instructive in ways. There was plenty of cheering of that even from everyday conservatives? Why was that? Well conservatives get screwed by insurance companies too. Stuff like that is why I maintain that its possible to sway conservatives away from their republican voting habits, not all or even maybe most of them, but more than enough, not to change them into swing voters, but to make them original West Virginia style Democrats who believe in strong labor and shit. People just want things to improve, they at least dont want things to fucking degrade. "Its not as bad as it could have been" as corporations and CEOs rake in infinite money, cost of housing explodes, cost of food explodes, these are things that people materially feel and addressing these things can earn you a lot of loyal voters. Noone in American politics seems to give two shits about actually making the lives of the average American any better though, the only ones who do are constantly sidelined by their party because it scares the billionaire donors who throw the fancy fundraiser lunch parties they love to socialize at.
It’s part of it, Joe and Jane Public are kinda to blame as well.
It angers them, but they don’t like the actual potential solutions either.
I’ll sure as fuck blame CEOs and corporations. But give an alternative and the alternative loses. I assume West Virginia Democrats are vaguely equivalent to what we call ‘Old Labour’ here (i.e. pre-Blair, more leaning socialist/SocDem
We tried going back there with Corbyn, didn’t work. Why didn’t it work? A lot of people didn’t want what was being sold. A pity, but oh well.
Brexit even less can I blame corporate Britain, most of corporate Britain wasn’t in favour.
A problem I think chunks of the left has is they just underestimate how many dicks there are out there, and how many idiots. You have this bunch of potential converts, if only you dangled the right policy. Except they’ll just reject it, they’re more angry at brown people coming into the country than attempts to redress their material conditions.
I won’t cease my advocacy for leftist politics regardless, but that’s the lay of the land as I see it. Obviously corporations and propaganda feed into it, the problem is the body politik and their sensibilities.
It’s an extreme example but like, what if Israel just converted to Islam. There’d probably be less friction over Palestine right? I mean there would, but what are the chances of that?
Well, to a lesser extreme so too some reinvigoration of leftist politics if only you dangle the right carrot. It’s frequently dangled and frequently rejected. Sure not in power per capita, but average Joe and Jane are the ones who do this, not billionaires.
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On May 30 2025 03:05 oBlade wrote:
Pretty sure George Stephanopoulos had to pony up millions for running with that.
Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll
"After Donald Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, his legal team and his defenders lodged a frequent talking point. Despite Carroll’s claims that Trump had raped her, they noted, the jury stopped short of saying he committed that particular offense. Instead, jurors opted for a second option: sexual abuse. [...] A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood."
On May 30 2025 02:59 KwarK wrote:
The more I think about it the more absolutely despicable what oblade just said becomes. Utterly irredeemable. He doesn't say it didn't happen, he contextualized it as just one thing in a long list of trivial things that we all agree that Trump does that he just does not give the tiniest shit about.
Yep. Notice the blatant diversion in the reply to my comment.
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On May 30 2025 02:59 KwarK wrote:
The more I think about it the more absolutely despicable what oblade just said becomes. Utterly irredeemable. He doesn't say it didn't happen, he contextualized it as just one thing in a long list of trivial things that we all agree that Trump does that he just does not give the tiniest shit about.
It's the part of my post that he snipped off that bothers him. He does give a shit, it's just that the rapist is the only one that stepped up to save "generations of successful people" from having their culture dilluted and eventually evaporated so he has to defend him no mater what. Because in their mind this is to save civilization.
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Biden won more votes than Obama. First candidate to win more votes than nonvoters in U.S. history, in fact. What was it about him? The stellar charisma? The bold, progressive vision of the future? I mean, you could chalk it up entirely to the pandemic, but I could counter by saying Obama only won because he was riding on GWB's 25% approval rating too.
My counterpoint would be that Obama won twice in a row, Trump's general mismanagement of anything he so much at casts his malevolent orange gaze towards at least lost him an election. I would argue that this is because people are attuned to what is affecting their lives. The way covid was handled affected their lives materially in a way they can feel and they voted him out.
Hilary Clinton was double digits ahead of Trump two weeks before the 2016 election, until Jim Comey handed the election to him on a silver platter by announcing her email server investigation would be re-opened (she was ultimately exonerated a second time). Exit polls showed Harris lost not because she was personally unlikable but because of inflation, which Republicans blamed entirely on Biden despite it affecting almost every country in the world at the time.
She may have been polling ahead, but polling is clearly not something anyone can really rely on in our modern era of politics. I remember there was a poll that had Harris landsliding Trump, but that didnt manifest because polling isnt particularly reliable for these things. It was likely never an election that Hillary could win on double digit margins.
Also, I would say that if Harris lost because people were dissatisfied with the way inflation impacted their lives, then thats evidence that people are going to put how their lives are affected first, above hating black people or women. Noone is paying any attention to how theoretically anything is handled, they are paying attention to what it does to their lives. Im paying enough attention to politics to understand it was a shitty global phenomenon and Biden did okay stifling its effects on the US, but at the same time I also saw rents nearly double around me. Most people are only seeing the rents double around them without any context, and no amount of context fixes that rent doubled around them.
Point being: truth matters. Clinton and Harris lost because of blatant lies, Biden won because Trump couldn't lie his way out of the shit economy. We should be spending more resources on debunking lies, not less.
Noone talking about how Trump fucked up mattered, what mattered was all of the material impacts that people literally could feel happening to them from Trump's covid mismanagement. Debunking Fox News lies on CNBC doesnt do anything, these are not shared demographics, there simply arent many good places for people to debunk lies because of how ideologically segregated so much of media is. You will never have enough money to counter lies because lies can be shat out multiple times a sentence and require significantly more effort, time, and resources to debunk. You cannot keep up with that flood, and frankly I dont believe it matters anyways.
Focus on improving people's lives with a positive vision for the future. Thats it.
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On May 30 2025 02:30 oBlade wrote:There's nothing stopping KwarK from attacking federal agents or Teslas, he just doesn't want to get arrested. He can afford anything. There's no practical reason in his way. And obviously his personally not driving a Tesla isn't saving any of the people who are being targeted by law enforcement simply for breaking the law. But he won't actually do anything - because the affordability he enjoys comes from being married to the system so he can't betray it. Even GH's plans to actually get people to do something later are better than just pretending you would do something now. Show nested quote +On May 30 2025 00:38 Dan HH wrote:On May 29 2025 18:28 Godwrath wrote:
Arguing with right-wing voters about corruption cases has an extremely long track record of going absolutely nowhere. They don’t care. When they reply with a flat “and?”, it’s not sarcasm, it’s honesty. They genuinely don’t care, and it’s not because they think corruption is good; it’s because they’ve completely normalized it. In their eyes, everyone is corrupt. Every party, every politician, every institutio, it’s all rotten. So why bother pretending otherwise? They do care, they wish Trump wasn't corrupt, or an imbecile, or a rapist and that they didn't have to defend him for it. I hear he also puts ketchup on well done steak, wears crocs with socks, breathes through his mouth, capitalizes random words, and oh yes clubs baby seals.
Shame on you for attempting to minimize rape by shrugging it off with a comparison to putting ketchup on steak. What the hell is wrong with you?
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On May 29 2025 23:00 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On May 29 2025 22:36 Jankisa wrote:
You can, just like you keep dodging and pretending like you aren't aware of the pardon shitshow pretend like you don't admire Carlson, despite spending the last page of writing praising and defending him, once again, I don't think anyone's buying it but you can keep on trucking buddy. That was the exact same post I said I watch TYT, Einstein. I was not "defending" him. You just haven't followed the thread. Tucker Carlson does not need my or anyone else's "defense." Tucker Carlson is not a criminal, you are not a prosecutor, and I am not the stand-in lawyer for everyone and everything you hate. The last of those 3 especially you need to disabuse yourself of.
I'm absolutely shocked by two things here, that you are watching the people who grifted to the right when they noticed where the wind is blowing in 2024., and that you managed to, once again, completely dodge talking about the case that started this whole thing despite quoting me mentioning it for the 3rd time.
The cherry on the cake is the fact that you really, really can't let go of your fan boy attitude for Tucker enough to let it go. It's OK buddy, it's OK that you fell for it, it's OK that you like someone I think is a moron, you don't need to prove anything to anyone.
Go buy some TRUMP tokens and write a heartfelt email to Tucker, maybe even send some money to your boy Bannon and he'll put it into building that big, beautiful wall <3 .
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On May 30 2025 02:30 oBlade wrote:There's nothing stopping KwarK from attacking federal agents or Teslas, he just doesn't want to get arrested. He can afford anything. There's no practical reason in his way. And obviously his personally not driving a Tesla isn't saving any of the people who are being targeted by law enforcement simply for breaking the law. But he won't actually do anything - because the affordability he enjoys comes from being married to the system so he can't betray it. Even GH's plans to actually get people to do something later are better than just pretending you would do something now. Show nested quote +On May 30 2025 00:38 Dan HH wrote:On May 29 2025 18:28 Godwrath wrote:
Arguing with right-wing voters about corruption cases has an extremely long track record of going absolutely nowhere. They don’t care. When they reply with a flat “and?”, it’s not sarcasm, it’s honesty. They genuinely don’t care, and it’s not because they think corruption is good; it’s because they’ve completely normalized it. In their eyes, everyone is corrupt. Every party, every politician, every institutio, it’s all rotten. So why bother pretending otherwise? They do care, they wish Trump wasn't corrupt, or an imbecile, or a rapist and that they didn't have to defend him for it. I hear he also puts ketchup on well done steak, wears crocs with socks, breathes through his mouth, capitalizes random words, and oh yes clubs baby seals.
Why do you defend that objectively completely morally compromised man?
It’s a serious question. He is, you will excuse me, a fucking asshole, by every single metric and every moral system.
Do you think being such a horrible person is a good thing for a leader, because that makes him strong, or do you just close your eyes because it’s worth it politically?
I am genuinely curious and get 0 opportunity to speak irl with anyone who finds him remotely acceptable, so don’t take it as a rhetorical question or an attack.
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On May 30 2025 20:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2025 02:30 oBlade wrote:There's nothing stopping KwarK from attacking federal agents or Teslas, he just doesn't want to get arrested. He can afford anything. There's no practical reason in his way. And obviously his personally not driving a Tesla isn't saving any of the people who are being targeted by law enforcement simply for breaking the law. But he won't actually do anything - because the affordability he enjoys comes from being married to the system so he can't betray it. Even GH's plans to actually get people to do something later are better than just pretending you would do something now. On May 30 2025 00:38 Dan HH wrote:On May 29 2025 18:28 Godwrath wrote:
Arguing with right-wing voters about corruption cases has an extremely long track record of going absolutely nowhere. They don’t care. When they reply with a flat “and?”, it’s not sarcasm, it’s honesty. They genuinely don’t care, and it’s not because they think corruption is good; it’s because they’ve completely normalized it. In their eyes, everyone is corrupt. Every party, every politician, every institutio, it’s all rotten. So why bother pretending otherwise? They do care, they wish Trump wasn't corrupt, or an imbecile, or a rapist and that they didn't have to defend him for it. I hear he also puts ketchup on well done steak, wears crocs with socks, breathes through his mouth, capitalizes random words, and oh yes clubs baby seals. Why do you defend that objectively completely morally compromised man? It’s a serious question. He is, you will excuse me, a fucking asshole, by every single metric and every moral system. Do you think being such a horrible person is a good thing for a leader, because that makes him strong, or do you just close your eyes because it’s worth it politically? I am genuinely curious and get 0 opportunity to speak irl with anyone who finds him remotely acceptable, so don’t take it as a rhetorical question or an attack.
He's not defending trump. He's defending the office of the President. The same way he did with Biden and Obama...oh wait...
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