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9 hours agoIn this we agree.
The democrats are just the blue colored boot of the oligarchs.
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023
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Naive is the Democratic party’s current position of favoring those donors over voters.
I understand that they’ve done a cynical calculus and decided to leave those voters on the sidelines. It is a failing strategy that successfully got them billions of dollars and lost the election.
It is not that I do not understand the deeper reason, it is that I reject it as a failure.
The thing that has driven me crazy for so long is this is the situation in America.
There are 70M Americans that will vote Republican and nothing will ever change their minds
There are 70M Americans that will vote Democrat and nothing will ever change their minds
There are a couple million independent undecided voters that everyone goes after
Then there are 100M+ people that sit out the election and no one seems to try to understand what would make them vote. It’s so crazy that we have just decided that there are red states and blue states and that’s how it is. A party that could retain some of either party while activating half the people that sit out would be a force to reckon with.
As the Democratic Party has tried to find some way to win again they have gone after which group? The handful of independents and the 70M republicans that aren’t going to vote for them ever. And the people sitting it out probably aren’t looking for them to shift right, if so they would be republicans.
Honestly I’m not sure American businesses are very smart.
I imagine corpos do want trump, but it seems as short sighted as going after quarterly profits ahead of all else.
Ok, so you own a corporation and want those pesky “water break” regulations that are really cutting into your profits to go away. So you back trump. He tweets out “WORKERS DRINKING WATER ON THE CLOCK, SAD AND BIGLY BAD” and they decide that’s an official act and you can squeeze an extra 15 minutes out of your workers.
Meanwhile, he puts a 20% tariff on all your inputs.
I don’t support, but could at least understand, companies wanting this guy out of some rank greed. But he’s articulated positions that would be awful for most businesses. Every serious economist has looked at his tariff plan and gone “oh yea, that would destroy the economy”
The man personally probably doesn’t give a shit. He wants power and admiration and if someone like Stephen Miller says “hey this plan I have for changing how divorce and abortion work is good for your campaign / presidency” then he will go along with it.
The threat of a man like trump is not that he personally wants to do a bunch of bad things (although he does seem to think a lot of awful ideas with clear history and mechanism of not working, like tariffs, are smart and good). It’s that he doesn’t care about the people around him that want to do awful things.
Bernie supporters also ended up being one of the most loyal voting blocks for Clinton.
A higher percentage of his voters backed Clinton than her voters backed Obama in 2008
From https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/did-bernie-sanders-cost-hillary-clinton-the-presidency/
As a Bernie bro that voted for Clinton in 2016, there is this very small number of very voca Bernie supporters that screech the loudest and give everyone else a bad name.
Yes, I think that’s part of it, I shouldn’t be able to read every letter in your signature. I don’t trust that :D
There’s a reason there’s a print line under the signature line, your signature should be some vague squiggle.
I always hated how I was taught to write the capital letters in my name and then I was sitting in civics class and looking at the Declaration of Independence and stole big parts of my current signature from our founding fathers.
They knew how to write their names with style.
Read the sticker, he doesn’t own a franchise he owns the “DG Empire” what a dork
Ok it shouldn’t be a big deal, but I’ve found that you can tell a lot by a signature.
This guys signature looks like a 7th graders.
Edit: wow I just noticed the “DG Empire” on the sticker. Emperor Axe Body Spray over here
Why is that important? I mean it’s not really, I’ll fully admit I’m being petty. But I’ve found that people that write like they’ve just learned cursive do so because they seldom write things. Now this observation is likely less true today than it was in the Jurassic period when I grew up and had to write out schoolwork, but given that this guy owns a McDonald’s franchise I’m gonna guess he had to handwrite schoolwork too.
There is just something visceral about this signature, it’s a sloppy and bad version of textbook cursive. One of the things that happens when people write a lot is that they develop their own handwriting style.
Anyways, the sentiment in this letter and the stupid stunt are enough to hate, but this signature is just awful 1 / 10 please try harder.
After his 40 minute solo dance party, he’s probably exhausted.
1·1 month agodeleted by creator
Reminds me of this https://youtu.be/zhbL8FFKARg?si=pAPl8FJs_D6B96yH
Let’s say he was dictator for one day only, just as a fun thought experiment.
That is also awful
Imagine someone walking into your house and saying, “I’m only going to ignore the law for 15 minutes while I’m here tonight.” Sorry, what the absolute fuck. Even if they kept their word that’s a monstrous thing to say, what the fuck are you going to do for those 15 minutes?!
That’s when you kick that fucker out of your house. So America, let’s kick that fucker out of this house.
We had a bunch of stalls in the 90s without doors, but the janitors told us it was just because asshole kids would break the doors for fun and the school would run out of money to repair them.
Even just partially damaging a door can make it a dangerous enough that the school would rather take it down than risk a lawsuit.
Made more sense to me than some sort of anti masturbation strategy. High school kids are fucking dumb as shit and I can definitely imagine them breaking stall doors for fun
4·1 month agoI suppose you might get to kill people but that doesn’t mean that the law is going to be ok with that. Proportionality of force is a thing. Stand your ground states are doing their best to change that, but that’s a very mixed bag.
If you shoot and kill someone for blocking your waymo and being a creep, in most places you are going to have to convince a district attorney and a jury that you were justified in ending their life. Even if you do that and escape criminal liability, you’ll then have to convince more people not to hold you liable in civil court.
Sounds pretty cool to go “I got a shooty bang bang so if I feel threatened in any way I can come out blasting.” It is true in the moment, but if you place any value on your future liberty, money, and time you might want to consider the ramifications of killing another human being.
Finally, even if society decides you shouldn’t face any criminal or civil penalty for killing someone, you will have to face yourself. Sitting behind a keyboard it sounds badass to shoot someone that’s pissing you off. In the moment you will probably feel justified. Many a young man sent to war or employed as a police officer didn’t think that taking a life would change them, only to find the reality of taking a life is not what the action movies promised. Self doubt, self loathing, ptsd, depression, these are all common reactions to reckoning with the fact that you are the cause of another persons death.
It is hard to feel like a righteous badass as you watch a grieving widow mourn someone that may have even done something stupid or wrong, knowing that their child has no father now and their wife no partner. Are these people jerks and creeps, sure, is the punishment for being a jerk or creep death, rarely. It is a heavy burden to carry to end another.
It’s true that consultants seem to love these “extremely clever” plays. I imagine if Harris wins, you’ll see a lot more “let’s switch the candidate out and get an excitement bump like that thing that worked that one time.”
I looked for data to try to quantify the demographics of Green Party voters and couldn’t find much, if you’ve got some I’d love to see it.
I suppose the thing that stands out to me is how Republican and Democratic programming works. Both parties enforce norms and spend a lot of time programming at their constituencies. I believe that trump was able to take over the Republican Party against the wishes of the party leadership because he intuitively understood this. He sorta hijacked this programming because he knew the dog whistles and catch phrases and was willing to shamelessly iterate and say whatever would work. Here’s a fun article about him thinking “drain the swamp” was a bad line and then embracing it wholeheartedly when it worked https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/2016-trump-explains-why-he-didnt-like-the-phrase-drain-the-swamp-but-now-does/2016/10/26/4a2f257a-9be0-11e6-b552-b1f85e484086_video.html
This programming is where we get political tropes from. It’s why if you see a thumbnail about “woke dei bullshit” you can be pretty sure that’s going to be a conservative complaint video.
When I look at the Green Party messaging, if they are trying to attract republicans as much as democrats, it’s weird. The comms are full of Republican third rails like social justice, the carousel says that the Green Party is the birthplace of the green new deal, the rail against corporate power. Now this isn’t to say there wouldn’t be anyone on the right that wouldn’t be cool with these ideas, but to frame it in these terms goes against decades of Republican talking points and programming.
It’s not like support for the green new deal is something of a question on the right. They have been upset about the non-green new deal since FDR passed it, and I’ve never seen a single Republican politician or talking head have anything but disdain for the green new deal. As you point out, they didn’t promote it because they like it, but as a way to knee cap AOC which backfired.
If you start with the belief that I hold that the Green Party has no chance of winning, which seems like a reasonable starting point. Every voter that would have voted for Harris and instead votes for stein is net 1 vote for trump and every voter that would have voted for trump and instead votes for stein is net 1 vote for Harris.
I scroll around gp.org and it doesn’t have anything that looks like it’s aimed at attracting Republican voters. I do see a lot of stuff that seems like it could be aimed at attracting leftist and crunchy democratic voters. That’s not a criticism or anything, if that’s where their policy values are, that’s perfectly fine. But I just struggle to really think there are a ton of people about to vote for trump that are going to end up on that website and think “oh wow, finally a party that actually wants to work towards social justice.”
As someone that is left of the Democratic Party I recognize a lot of the things on this website, it’s a lot of the things the democrats have been promising and failing to deliver for a long time. Perhaps because so many of the talking points and policies are so familiar and feel so comfortable to me as someone who is disappointed in the democratic party’s failure to deliver on these things I find it hard to believe that republicans are looking at this site and thinking “I’ve found my people”
If the republicans thought that the Green Party was going to be an attractive option for their voters in 2000 they certainly adopted an odd strategy
Hoping to boost Ralph Nader in states where he is threatening to hurt Al Gore, a Republican group is launching TV ads featuring Nader attacking the vice president.
The ads by the Republican Leadership Council will begin airing Monday in Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington, all states that are part of Gore’s base and where Nader is polling well. The group plans to spend more than $100,000 at first and hopes to raise more over the weekend.
It’s not some crazy conspiracy either, the Republican Leadership Council explained the ad buys in this way
The Republican Leadership Council, a centrist GOP group, has been helpful to Bush before, airing ads during the Republican primaries critical of challenger Steve Forbes. Several members of the RLC board were early Bush supporters.
The RLC ads will run initially in four markets: Eugene and Portland, Ore.; Madison, Wis., and Seattle.
Mark Miller, the group’s executive director, said the ads are partly a response to commercials being run by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, which argue that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.
“Ralph Nader doesn’t believe that,” Miller said. “Ralph Nader and his supporters are not backing down because they believe Al Gore has had numerous broken promises.”
Miller added that some of Nader’s supporters have bragged that Nader has never had help from “soft money,” the unrestricted donations used by parties and interest groups.
“We’ll put an end to that,” Miller said.
You might notice how the answer doesn’t really make any sense, a pro Bush Republican PAC wanted to run ads in Gore strongholds promoting Nader with the argument that Gore broke numerous promises. Why? Because groups said that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. It sounds like they are trying to counter this but then their actions fully support that idea.
Maybe some republicans could be persuaded to join the greens, but I pay attention to how people spend their money because talk is cheap. If republicans spend money to promote Nader in states they want to win, they obviously think they’ll poach more gore voters than Bush voters, it just doesn’t make sense otherwise.
I actually agree that the Green Party is staking out policy positions that both parties have abandoned, but I still think the abandoned policies they’ve picked up to champion are still more attractive to left leaning people than right leaning people.
Unless the WSJ has been taken over by liberals, owned by famous liberal Rupert Murdoch, they seem to be following a similar path now https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/jill-stein-republican-support-harris-voters-5a194ebf
So while I imagine some of these policy positions might be attractive to some disaffected republicans, republicans seem to think it will be useful to promote them. The only way that makes any kind of sense is if they think it will attract more potential Democratic Party voters than republican.
I thought we were just casting aspersions for fun 🤣
I have to imagine that media understands this and doesn’t care.
A responsible media, one that cares about the outcomes, would zero in on the salient dangerous parts of trumps agenda. If we had a media ecosystem that actually cared about informing people, they would have actually explained what Project 2025 is, they could have even read parts of it stopping to let experts weigh in.
We don’t have that. We have a capitalist media which like all actors in capitalism chase profits. The media companies know that trump is going to do some weird shit everyday and that by reporting on that weird shit they can get the eyeballs on the cialis commercials, because that’s their real goal. Selling ad inventory and making that ad inventory as profitable as possible, if news or information happens as a side effect, fine, but it’s not the goal.
During trumps first term I used to watch msnbc most evenings, it was the same 4 stories first told by the news, then by Rachel Maddow, then by Lawrence O’Donnell, then by whatever was on after Lawrence O’Donnell. Looking back it was the least information dense thing you could imagine. 4 facts repeated ad nauseam over 4 hours. Now they all had different guests on but the guests job was to do a few things. One, reassure you that this is important and you should pay attention. Two, tell you how outrageous it is so that you’ll pay attention. Three, prognosticate wildly about the ramifications so that you’ll stay tuned for more information.
The populace largely follows this drum beat, but the populace is also to blame. You see it outside the realm of politics too, the average person likes novelty and scandal and gossip. You can see this in things like twitter trends. Something happens, there is a viral video, and suddenly for millions of people it’s the most important thing in the world. It’s new, it’s outrageous, it’s exciting to talk about and be listened to. In some ways corporate media, whose goal is to generate profits, just realized “this is what people want” they want us to cover the story of the day or week and give them that salacious novelty.
Trump just happens to be extremely good at generating the kind of events that are perfect for this formula. He’s a man that will do or say anything to make his base cheer, and often those things are batshit crazy and he doesn’t care that they are batshit crazy because people are clapping.
The story there is that there is a man with a lot of power with no externally observable moral center that is willing to do or say anything to increase his power. But that’s a complicated story, that would take a lot of time and effort and dot connecting, what if someone gets confused or bored and turns away. Then the ad inventory won’t be as valuable because there’s fewer eyeballs. Better to go with whatever weird thing he did or said today, simple, understandable, and it will cause the emotional reactions we know keep people tuning in making our ad inventory highly profitable.
If Biden were more interesting they would do it to him, they try from time to time, oh look he bit a baby dressed as a chicken on Halloween. He just isn’t out in public doing 3 hour rallies daily that the news can sift through for best hits.
Finally there is the staying power. Why does trump end up in this cycle more than others. The way the cycle is supposed to play out is
Step 3 never happens for trump. His supporters do not care about the thing that’s outraging people today. They will never stop supporting him and he will never feel shame, he feels the opposite, he’s proud of the way he can manipulate this machine.
So the news doesn’t get a step three, but this is the formula, so back to step 1. So for trump you do get this unique media cycle of weird / bad thing -> outrage -> nothing. And that nothing sits in the air like an unresolved chord at the end of a music piece, it’s discordant and unsettling and there is no resolution coming. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that might make people stop watching the news. Better spin up the next thing so people will forget about last weeks outrage and start fresh.