Electionstrut 2024
Grafwritah2
21 Posts
And.... go.
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Grafwritah2
21 Posts
Comments
I just don't understand why, based on his human character alone, anyone would want DT.
Musk and corporate greed will set the policy by proxy. It's probably not a different storyline with KH but AFAIK, she was human at some point.
Nah your instincts are both correct. With some exceptions the Strut has not been a conservative crowd; and more importantly, "this is different" is right too.
I think since like 1945 there's been an illusion in the US that "we are the superpower, we control the world, we are competent, we are strong" and it's painful for a lot of generations that lived through what felt like stability provided by those things to face up to the fact that the States is not in a permanent meteoric rise. It's a construction of history just like any other empire.
This inability to handle historical change comes from early on in life - how history is taught to us, as if the founding documents, the ideas of a bunch of slavemasters, are tantamount to gospel and can withstand any historical forces. A lot of disillusionment from older generations is turning into ugly instincts. A lot of this has precedent in history elsewhere, it shouldn't come as a surprise really, but "it can't happen here" is rapidly getting proven wrong wherever it might've been applied in the past.
I think there's a lot more people can do about it than they know though. Voting is something that takes like an hour once every few years. Assuming you're not already worth billions, building political power, group power, the power to defend and support yourself and your community, takes longer than that but can't be taken away as easily. You don't have to be 18 (or a citizen) to start that either.
I really appreciate this sort of commenting, this really helps me understand better. I feel like the reaction is coming across as "they can't do this" in place of what they are actually feeling "how is this possible." I don't really understand how people see the choice between the two as such a hard one, trump is not like a bad person in the metaphorical sense that he "doesn't stand for me or you, yada yada" but in the sense that he is literally a criminal. The amount of people that actually voted is like half of the people that live here, and that was more than normal for this election.
You comparing politics to discussing religion is so fitting for me because I absolutely agree, we as people want to find purpose in a crowd, so we make everything so extreme because we think that if we are apart of something we have to represent that thing to its extremes. I avoid it for 2 reasons, 1. it's pointless, as you said, and 2. I don't really represent my word yet as a non voter, so I leave that to the people who need to discuss it with each other rather than hear my opinion as someone who didn't really have to study the candidates. I will say, I barely studied them and I feel like I know more than many voters. People don't really vote for what they want to see, they just stick with "red or blue" because we make everything apart of our personality.
Setting aside the set of people who just didn't vote as happens in every election, the country has clearly spoken. It wasn't a razor thin margin, and it wasn't a quirk of the electoral college vs. the popular vote. And it wasn't just limited to the President, either; Republicans swept the country and many areas that are Democratic strongholds shifted to the right a bit.
Personal opinion, Democrats went too far to the extreme on a number of their policies and alienated swaths of the populace, ran Biden when that was never going to fly, threw in Kamala at the last minute who was a weak candidate and had no time to develop her own brand, and basically made a mess of everything. Obama was the last strong candidate with a mass appeal that the Democrats have run and don't seem to have anyone on deck to compete against a strong personality like Trump.
I agree with others considering all of the track record of Trump both inside and outside of office that the majority of Americans were like "this is the guy that's going to fix things" is odd. I won't say surprising as I expected him to win, honestly, but that so many people felt Trump is the solution to the errors the Biden administration has made is a head scratcher to me.
I agree completely, Kamala really seemed like she was new to politics, she mostly just tried to fit in with the people around her, hence why she used accents that weren’t her own when she was at rallies in the south. Trump is somehow charismatic to people, and he’s a very good businessman, I applaud him for that, business men almost always have to make bad choices to get higher up, because it’s super hard to become successful without having some ideologies that some would see as bad. I guess I’m not super disappointed honestly because in the grand scheme of things this will pass, I’ll live. It’s a big deal now but we can persevere, I think Election Day is super crazy because it has a sort of “football team” thing that people love to fight over.
Good businessman? Please. Before the election, he was going broke, squandered millions from his inheritance, and almost every business he has ever run has gone bust. This is just a fallacy. Being good at business should not apply to democracy, because it's not meant to make a profit. Almost everything wrong with the Western world is because of the neoliberals who tried to make a buck off government services.
This is actually really fair, I guess I want a reason to justify in my mind how he has gotten so far. I hate him, and I don’t understand what people see, or what they are being told to see.
Regardless of political manifesto from either side - the fact that the majority of voters don't care he's a convicted felon and probably a rh*ypist is the worst look.
It means this is acceptable as he leads by example.
I noticed this over here in lockdown; most people generally followed the rules until it was revealed that Dominic Cummings decided he could drive where he wanted whenever he wanted and Boris was having piss-ups inside number ten.
Almost immediately, people stopped caring and became equally selfish. And that fucking mood has persisted, in my view.
People follow the most "successful" or just want reason to justify their feelings that they don't have to care. It tracks that who is put as the leader is based on profits.
Idk how I didn't even see you said this, but what does "shit like this mean"? i'm just not sure exactly what you mean
What extreme are you referring to and which policies?
I guess I was talking about the election result, but more broadly:
Incoherent political movements toward punishing scapegoats over any kind of vision of the future. Nothing will get better for anyone, but your purple haired grandson you hate, or the immigrants in your neighborhood, or just women generally, will have it worse than you. The ideology behind Trump has completely abandoned the idea that political power can be wielded to improve any voter or regular person's life (no one can remember the last time that happened. Maybe the COVID checks, but that's it).
And honestly the alternative from the Dems is not far from this - they don't promise to imprison and persecute enemies as much (though they damn well tried re:immigration this time around), but their offering is that things will get worse less rapidly under their watch. Not that things will get better. No more money in your pocket, not improvement in services from the collective wealth of the richest nation ever to exist in all of history, no baseline of dignity to everyone's existence that no one need fear falling below, no peace, no progress toward a world where there won't be 2 billion climate refugees in a handful of years, no feeling that you have a form of group power of self-determination within your community, whether that's your home, neighborhood, workplace or whatever. Certainly not your nation, or your world.
Politics play out strictly as an aesthetic, a consumer choice you use to signal the kind of person you are. Absolutely no promise to wield the levers of power toward a specific end. Everything is mystified, automatic, behind a curtain - you can't possibly understand what we do here in the halls of power. The function of government and the ends it works toward categorically cannot be as simple as giving the people what they want. And no one can explain why the choice was between two parties that do not reflect in any way what their voters want when polled on "issues" or specific political ends. No one can explain why even the people who "win" are miserable and will continue to be so, with their only satisfaction from having won being that they get to witness others' suffering.
Older generations especially: thinking, voting and acting politically as if the world will be sucked into a black hole when they die. Nothing matters beyond them, not even their own children. Zero vision of a world after their existence ends, zero concern for it. The fact that the crypto and AI bubbles that are now powerful lobbies in government are literally mortgaging the suffering of children born today via climate disaster, mass displacement and the terrifying actions you can imagine governments like this will manifest in response to those things: war, exploitation, imprisonment or abuse of refugees, genocide? And it's all for a bunch of temporary wealth for a handful of sociopaths. Even dangling stories of temporary wealth for a few is enough to send many millions of people onto the bandwagon, chasing that ludicrous simulacrum of "wealth" - which in its true form is personal dignity, peace, stability, community, self-determination (in the form of freedom to move, time to oneself to develop one's own person, freedom to decide how to live), a lot of things that generally money alone doesn't give you; a lot of things that depend on the people around you having roughly the same material "wealth" as you, not you having the most.
This level of deep, deep dysfunction of a society - what is supposed to be a collaborative project to protect and share amongst one another - has come about for a few historical reasons. The profit margin for capital is getting thinner everywhere. Or everywhere real. Tech bubble products don't collect your garbage or make your tap water not give you cholera. Maybe the US was able to stave off this dissolution for so long because of the national wealth it was able to gain through being first a genocidal takeover of an entire resource-rich continent, and then after that, a military superpower, dictating the terms of global trade, industry and investment. But it's starting to feel in a collective subconscious way that it's not hanging onto that status forever. So they look for internal enemies, they give up on anything getting better because the real way you could improve things for yourself is to improve things for the parts of the world you've traditionally exploited and stomped on. You can't build a wall big enough to keep out the sun, the seas, the clouds. Or refugees from the parts of the world you've made hell.
When you had it big, and you lose it, it does very weird things to people's self-regard as a nation. Look at the UK crying its eyes out every time it doesn't win a world cup, a sport a billion+ people play, of which 60 million are British. Why SHOULD they be world class? Why are they paying the United States to basically lease nuclear weapons so they can feel really big and strong, like a real global player? Because a hundred years ago they had colonies in every time zone, and they built a couple of pretty stone colonnaded city centres with the ill-gotten money from that network of global exploitation. They can go it alone! Vote Brexit! It's like society-scale dementia. And it's coming for the States, where it will play out differently. And the States has enough nuclear weapons to kill every human on the planet a hundred times over.
Sorry this isn't super coherent. I'm not VI Lenin I'm just some guy.
meanwhile, trump's base all came out. whatever else motivated those voters, he promised radical change (tarrifs) that will bring back manufacturing jobs, so i'm sure many ppl held their nose and voted for him. at least it was something radical! and now americans get to experience that radical change, brought to you by the (new) Status Quo. sure to be less fair than the previous one.
i also think national elections (everywhere?) in this social media age are being, uh, globalized like everything else. everyone must be f'ing with everyone else's elections! so we're all just suckers to the game in new and exciting ways. stuff like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1gouvit/youre_being_targeted_by_disinformation_networks/
(source: not american)
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions
Cory is always a good read.
That post is so spot on. I don't use Tiktok, FB, X or IG, but I consume a lot of travel and language related content on YouTube; nothing negative or controversial. Even then, I have noticed a sharp increase in the frequency, engagement and angry, ad-hominem discourse in these "X country vs. Y country", "Europeans HATE Americans" and vice-versa, "don't EVER visit this country because it SUCKS", etc. in the comments sections of videos and newsfeed articles that the algorithm recommends to me over the past several years. I know trolls, flame wars and mostly harmless cultural humor/observations have been part of the Internet landscape forever. Russia isn't behind everything, but they have a lot to benefit from this brand of aggressive "us vs. them" content targeted to Westerners.
Ultimately elections are a political popularity contest - are you are or are you not saying what the populace wants to hear, and is what you are saying agreeing with the majority who can elect you?
I think the Democrats on both the national as well as state and local levels in some situations could have throttled things back a bit, still moved their agendas forward, and possibly had better results in the recent elections.
Take immigration, for instance - it's clearly been a barely controlled cluster fuck over the last few years. If they regulated the flow a bit more and took a little more time to try to filter out those coming with nefarious intentions, they still could have robust immigration, support those that are coming to the US who truly are fleeing dangerous situations, and most likely shave off some of the very visible negative press that has come with the poorly controlled and filtered flow that the country has had.
Similarly on a state/local level the hands off on low level crime has clearly backfired in many areas. They could have had some level of reform to be more reasonable - such as adjusted bail and sentencing policies for low level offenders - without giving criminals free reign to loot stores with little to no repercussions.
Both of those scenarios could have been handled better to still advance their policies without the boatload of negative press. And those are the ones that had unanticipated and undesired results - ultimately to win over the majority of voters on a national level they would do better with a more moderate approach.
I could say the same for Republicans but this year they were in the lucky position to benefit from the backlash against the above (and more) against Democrats.
American national politics pivots on a relatively small amount of fringe voters. Democrats have been in control and had a lot of visible fuckups. I think the Republicans saying we'll try some drastic but opposite policies was sufficient to sway enough of those fringe voters to put the majority on their side.
I know we can also say Trump had a lot of visible fuckups, but he ultimately has not been responsible for the direction of the country over the last 4 years. I do truly think if there was a more moderate third party candidate that had the resources to be viable they would give both the Democrats and Republicans a run for their money.
I honestly think a lot of that was just Clickbait to drive traffic. What sounds more interesting to read/watch, "Europeans HATE Americans because..." or "European guy loved his trip to St. Louis".
It's very annoying and most of them are garbage, but I do think that drives clicks.
Definitely. The point I was trying to make was that, as stated in the Reddit post ketan linked to, those with nefarious geopolitical intent insert themselves into certain popular topics or social movements, act as outside agitators and get people arguing.
Another example would be how years ago, hashtags like "save the children" and "bring back our girls" were hijacked to spread QAnon/Pizzagate nonsense. Nonprofits who work hard to eliminate real life human trafficking have nothing to do with nonexistant "Democrat politicians and celebrities kidnap children and drain their blood", but Russian troll farms made it so.
Point taken. Aside from the noise that generates that obfuscates the real problems (and solutions), does that really take away from the people who aren't morons? What I want to say is does anyone that wasn't born with fetal alcohol syndrome really believe Hillary Clinton was facilitating trafficking of children from the non-existent basement of a pizza shop? Or maybe it doesn't matter - if they stir up enough morons they'll get the result they want, which is confusion and idiots showing up to pizza shops with guns looking for non-existent children.