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Fact is, even with such high diesel prices, this wasn’t a real tsunami. Blue won, but not by that much. Blue don’t have a supermajority in either of the houses. This means that there’s a huge portion of the electorate still thinking that they prefer trump over a dem candidate.
Aunt clara can’t conspiracy theory the oil and gas industry?!?!
British petroleum invented the carbon footprint and climate change denialism but aunt clara want to talk about little simon’s gender…
Has there ever been a more shameless shower of bastards than BP? Talk about choosing the greater evil.
Forgot to also add they killed Mohamed Mozadegh, the first democratically elected president of iran in 1953, a socialist and instead placed the Shah with the help of the british crown and the US gov, If you wonder why Iran has it for europe and the US, this is the tip of the iceberg of why. Plenty of fucked up shit happened later as well.
It’s not just that. Those people are also really really stupid. They don’t have the ability to connect any dots. They can hear the dumbest shit straight from Trump’s mouth and they don’t realize he’s an idiot. Where they get the news from is a secondary issue. If you forced them to watch CNN all day they would simply not understand any of it. But yes, they can understand diesel getting expensive the same way a dog can understand a stick. When prices fall they will still not understand why it happened and will go back to voting for racists and homophobes.
God, I hate that the fight for democracy is essentially continuously trying to explain reality to the dumbest people to have ever lived, and hoping that they learn something.
This isn’t default democracy; this is a failure state created by the rich’s desire to own you (also known as capitalism). The media environment that makes such delusion possible and the deregulation that made that environment legal (looking at you Reagan and Clinton) were created by rich people and their stooges and they can (in theory) be destroyed by The People™. It also bears notice that when politics works for the average person (think FDR) it’s not quite that dysfunctional; again the current situation is a failure state created by the oligarchy controlling politics, though you could argue instead that the oligarchy is the default and periods where politics works for the average person are the exception.
It’s explaining a reality that disagrees with the pre-conceived beliefs. The reason why Facebook works is that the algorithm makes it so it feeds them information that they already believe.
If you’ve got a better way of doing things, we’re all ears.
Democracy but only I can vote.
I would vote for that. Wait, I can’t!
Aw man, do I gotta explain the reality of that suggestion to you?
I’m the king of the castle and my mac and cheese gets poisoned.
I think they’re being sarcastic
you can never tell with the kinds of people we get around here
Democracy but you gotta pass an IQ test threshold to vote/run?
I really wonder what’s the advantage of having stupid people voting/running besides virtue signaling you believe in equality (and having whole society pay for it, because your ego being massaged is more important than the common good).edit: Not gonna individually reply. ALL of you seem to not know the difference between literacy, knowledge, wealth and spatial, abstract, cognitive, matrix reasoning, etc (not even having a PhD or being able to score high in traditional education has anything to do with it), and it seems like years of Hollywood got you all believing in existence of “evil genius” and such, but you really should read about gifted people, high IQ, and moral reasoning. It’s the failure of moral reasoning, i.e. being dumb as fuck, that creates conservatism.
And about the argument of “selfish smart person” seeking political power, that’s why you need smart voters, these thrive on the stupid people. Duh.Now keep repeating in front of the mirror: “It’s for society’s own benefit that its most inept people should guide it”, and check how you look saying it. Fight for your right to be governed by the stupid!
ps: So far, no one managed to point the advantage of having people with low cognitive capability deciding society’s direction. You just said you don’t like the idea of it being decided by people with higher cognition.
IQ tests are too problematic. Let’s go old school and you need to be a 18+ male land owner to vote. /s
Fortunately, one can’t buy intelligence.
I’m going to address only the last part: what is the value of having stupid people vote.
The value in allowing stupid people to vote is that your opposition can’t change the definition of “stupid” to include only you and your friends.
The law is a blunt instrument. If we enshrine in law the power for Congress to deprive people of their vote, we have agreed that depriving people “for the right reasons” is justification for doing so, and now the question simply becomes “can you convince people this is a good reason to deprive people of their ability to vote”.
We already have this with Felons. They are a miniscule percent of the population though, so it cannot be abused to win an election. It’s bad enough the precedent kind of already exists. Expanding it would be self destructive
EDIT: Because it’s been brought up, felons who cannot vote make up 1.1% of the US population.
We already have this with Felons. They are a miniscule percent of the population though
Convicted felons make up almost 8% of the voting age population. That is not a “minuscule” percent. It’s enough to have changed 2/3 of all presidential elections.
so it cannot be abused to win an election
It is certainly actively being used to suppress Democrat power in general, and Black voting power specifically.
You are wildly wrong.
1.1% of the population cannot vote due to felony conviction.
And those people are distributed across the political spectrum just like any other demographic.
If you’re going to quote bullshit stats, at least post a link to some fringe blog to back it up sort of
You are too ignorant to be that smug.
Or is it just racism? Who doesn’t know that Black people are wildly overrepresented in the prison population? Or that Black people overwhelmingly vote Democrat? Those are really basic facts.
The 1.1% you quote, specifically only refers to the non Black population. It’s 5%-10% of the Black population. Which ends up being 2% of the total population of the country. Though it varies wildly from state to state. In some states it is as high as 6% of the total population.
That is by no means insignificant.
I got my numbers from the exact same source. Your own link contradicts you. 4 million is not 2% of the US pop. 4 million is 1.1% of the population.
I never said they were split 50/50. I said they were distributed.
Meaning it’s not “four million votes for Democrats”
And fuck you for assuming my ethics. I think the fact that felons can’t vote is absolutely immoral. Nobody should be deprived of their vote.
But I don’t lie about statistics.
Democracy but you gotta pass an IQ test threshold to vote/run?
Setting aside the inherent authoritarianism in excluding double digit percentages of the population from voting, the fact that it wouldn’t work (the negative correlation between intelligence and conservatism is real but small) and the effects of socioeconomic status and race on IQ, historically this is a very good way to disenfranchise minorities (look up literacy tests).
I really wonder what’s the advantage of having stupid people voting/running besides virtue signaling you believe in equality (and having whole society pay for it).
Democracy? Again this is a inherently authoritarian idea, but even if it wasn’t it would quickly be used for authoritarian ends.
First off because “IQ tests” don’t test for brainworms. There’s plenty of people who possess the mental capacity to pass a test like that, but who use that brainpower to come up with creative ways to defend wrong ideas rather than thinking critically. This is a large part of why IQ tests are meaningless, because even if they were capable of accurately assessing raw brainpower, they’re certainly not capable of assessing how you choose to use that brainpower.
If you make a test that does test for brainworms then you have the question of who or what body decides what’s a brainworm, and at that point you might as well just give that body dictatorial control. There’s no possible way to do that in a remotely objective fashion, the body could easily just say, “Capitalism is obviously right so anyone who doesn’t agree with it should be barred from voting.” Or, if it were me, I might decide that anyone who thinks that people having low IQs is the problem with our political systems is, themself, obviously unqualified.
Really, it’s not that different from the Catholic Church gathering together a bunch of highly educated scholars behind closed doors to debate what they thought made sense and then trying to enforce that on everyone. At least way back then, they had the justification that most of the population was fully illiterate.
I think the better way to do it is to have a test which doesn’t test for intelligence (although I agree that it basically does test for intelligence but not explicitly) but for understanding of the topic at hand.
It’s a simple test, it’s just one question, “what, if elected, would this person do?” You must be able to identify at least one actual policy of the politician you’re voting for. Trump told everyone who he was, and what he would do, and they still voted for him and then acted all surprised. Because they’re total exposure to his policies was whatever they read on Facebook which was actually not what he said.
Democracy but you gotta pass an IQ test threshold to vote/run?
Dude, they already tried that in US. Learn some history.
The problem with intelligence requirements is two-fold.
First, intelligence is difficult to quantify. I often hear that IQ tests are unreliable or only test for certain areas of what could be called intelligence.
Second, such requirements would instantly become politicized and designed to prevent certain groups from being politically active. This exact thing happened after the US civil war when literacy tests were required and designed specifically to keep black people from being able to vote.
Additionally, I just don’t know that intelligence is the quality that matters most. A selfish smart person is just going to be good at benefitting themself politically at the expense of others. The focus should be on getting more people politically active who will use their political power to benefit others beyond themselves. Of course, that’s probably even more difficult to test for than intelligence.
And we come back to Ronald Reagan.
Reagan gutted the FCC. There used to be rules restricting the number of TV/radio stations one company could own. There used to be a Fairness Doctrine that gave equal time to anyone who opposed an editorial.
Bill Clinton did the most damage to any sort of stop measures to prevent what we are dealing w/ MSM right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
There are still roots of this with Nixon. He was able to walk away with his indiscretions. Then we got Fox News.
Back in the day, after Ford pardoned Nixon, there were two kinds of folks.
Most of the Nixon haters were willing to accept his resignation. Very few people at that time were ready to see an American President on trial, let alone behind bars.
Nixon’s pals looked at everything and started plotting to make sure none of them would ever be treated like that.
The big issue is that the elite have built a propaganda machine that would give Goebbels a raging hard-on.
Why are Americans obsessed with gender reassignment more than much else? Of all the things.
Because it’s peculiar and a classic outgroup. Can’t kill gays and black people as freely anymore, so they went elsewhere.
A more comprehensive answer, because oligarchs need to steal money from somewhere in order to fuel their fortunes. They disenfranchise some to take from them and distract people with culture wars. It’s globally very politically consistent.
Yep. The anti gay propaganda failed hard over a decade ago so they pivoted to a much smaller group, less understood and harder to empathise with. Sympathy is one thing, but if you’re not trans, it’s damned hard to imagine yourself in those shoes. On top of all that, everyone knows a gay person, much less so trans folks.
And trans people have even more against them! Know how we automatically and instinctively identify someone’s sex from a quarter second glance of a quarter profile? Trans people can turn that sense on its ear and that freaks some people out.
I don’t give a shit, but I can see why they’re a perfect target. If we can keep our eye on, “trans rights are human rights”, we can overcome this thing eventually.
These same people couldn’t even bring themselves to say “black lives matter [if all lives matter]”.
It’s perplexing that a nation (or rather 50 nations) can have both the friendliest people and simultaneously the most hateful people (I mean politically significant numbers of them).
Living in the South is truly bizarre. I’ve never seen such warm and heartfelt interracial relations in more liberal cities, and at the same time such blatant racism. Seems we’re mostly ok with “the blacks”, but my Asian wife has caught some clear bullshit. I’m not one to pull the rAcISM card quickly, and neither is she, but she’s told me tales. Since Trump 2.0, she’s clearly persona non grata when we travel Mississippi. They were much nicer, or seemed so, before.
Other actors creating a misinformation campaign to confuse the electorate. We have seen what Fox news and CNN and the 25 hour news channels have done in the 90s and amplified it and democratized it and made it freely accessible to everyone with an internet connection. Grandma never stood a chance against it.
This is true, but it’s also true that Cambridge Analytica specifically utilized military psychological operations tactics to weaponize messaging via social media.
Facepals et. al. are more virulent and sadistic than they would have been without evil manipulation.
IDK who Cambridge Analytics is, but since the 1950s the US advertising industry started using military techniques to induce feelings of inadequacy, isolation and hopelessness in viewers, offering products as cures. People want to blame the epidemic of depression on their chosen modern circumstance du jour, but it really comes from a lifetime of conditioning.
That was a Facebook thing
Our government should have protected the people from this
As with everything wrong with this country, thank you Reagan.
They still can!
Edit: we… we still can
The OP could never be more true here. It’s the alternative reality(ies,) that are the problem here, not our fellow citizens, bar some.
