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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2024

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  • Plain ignorance is part of it, but I really don’t think it’s the driving factor. You don’t vote for Trump because you lack some key knowledge, no matter how trivial that knowledge is. You vote for him because you’ve been inundated with conservative media for decades, and you have no grasp on reality anymore. You really believe Harris is going to hold you at gunpoint and replace your gas heaters with electric. You really believe she’s going to sell the United States to China for a hundred bucks. You might even believe there’s a war on men, a war on your religion, a war on everything that brings you meaning to your life. If I truly believed the things that conservative media was saying, I’d vote for him too.

    It’s not just ignorance. It’s brainwashing.


  • They should have given people on the left some reason to be motivated to vote though, not just fear.

    This is the massive key that I really don’t think the Democratic party understands. When people are scared, they vote conservative. There are literal studies that show fear is the driving force behind conservative voters. Democrats need to make them feel safe. That’s one of the reasons Obama was so successful - he ran on change and hope. Fear works for Republicans. It doesn’t work for Democrats. But they see fear working for Republicans, so they copy it.







  • Your ability to participate in political organization and not immediately be killed or thrown in jail depends on the people who are in power. The United States isn’t immune to regressing to that society, and it’s very clear the Republicans are doing what they can to move in that direction.

    Voting for the Democrats and doing nothing else is far from ideal and won’t fix the institutional problems, but it will help prevent new major problems, like mass murder for criticizing the government, from popping up.

    Voting for the Democrats so you can continue activism is step one, and is an important step. It’s also a trivially easy step with no downside. It’s just not the only step.


  • For fun, I went and investigated this, and learned a lot! Greta refuses to fly, citing the emissions caused by air travel, so she goes by boat instead. She crossed the Atlantic on the Malizia II, a racing yacht that sounds like a miserable time because it doesn’t have basic facilities like a toilet. She was taken across by Boris Herrmann of team Malizia, who (as you might guess) race the boat. Neither she nor her parents own it.

    She’s also crossed on La Vagabonde, known for its Youtube channel where its owners, as far as I can tell, just kind of sail around. The owners don’t resemble her parents, either.

    I also found a particularly bizzare claim including a notably doctored picture that she was “caught” on a yacht with Leonardo DiCaprio. Even that one doesn’t claim her family owns it.

    I legitimately can’t even find a fake news site that makes the claim you’re making. Did you make it up whole cloth? To what end? What relevance would it even have to the topic? Is the idea that “big green energy” is coming for oil companies, and her family made their money off of green energy, and the entire purpose of her activism is to be part of big green energy’s master plan to take over big oil?



  • As great as it would be if she won Iowa, this is the most obvious outlier poll that ever existed. Almost nobody’s even polling Iowa because it’s not close, and the few polls other than this one show Trump as a clear winner.

    I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve been seeing thread after thread of these one-off polls and just general “there’s no way Harris can lose” mentality. She had a huge lead around the time she announced Walz, but it’s been downhill since then. Most reliable predictors have her losing at this point. That sucks, but it doesn’t help to pretend it’s not happening.

    Do what you can to get Harris the win, but also consider what your options are if she doesn’t.



  • Same answer it’s been for my whole lifetime: a small number of extremely wealthy individuals pumping a constant stream of money into conservative media with the express purpose of changing public opinion.

    People who’ve been listening to this stuff their entire lives don’t live in the real world. They legitimately don’t believe in reality, and after a certain point I’m not sure it’s possible to bring them back. Much like climate change, this kind of thing should’ve been stopped at the source decades ago, and it might just be too late now.


  • The point of a billionaire owning a newspaper isn’t to be profitable or maximize readership. It’s to leverage the readership you do have into power and control. It doesn’t matter if this came out, and it doesn’t matter if it loses, say, a quarter of its readership. Bezos still gets to use it on the remaining readership and he successfully converts or kills one of the most significant Democratic-sympathizing papers in the nation.

    Rupert Murdoch bought up the New York Post when it was a failing paper, and it continued to lose money for decades. I believe it’s profitable now, but that was never the purpose. It wasn’t for Bezos either.

    Edit: a great parallel example of this is Musk/Twitter - huge financial loss, but it doesn’t matter, because that wasn’t the point. And if the polls are any indicator, it’s been incredibly effective and worth every penny.