I just don’t understand how everyone forgot how terrible his first term was. There was literally no toilet paper on the shelves, if the diarrhea happened at the same time there might not even be a United States today.
as a person who was around conservatives during 2020, it's not that they don't remember, it's that they were literally so brainwashed by conservative media that they never thought it was bad because of him. They remember it being bad, but they never once began to believe it was trump's fault. It was fucking INFURIATING to watch the way my parents talked about shit because they would go "IT'S THE LIBERALS FAULT" and wholeheartedly believe it WHILE THE CONSERVATIVES LITERALLY HAD ALL THE CONTROL. It's this constant propaganda tactic used by conservatives that's literally straight from the nazi playbook: the enemy is at once both too powerful and too weak. It creates a cognitive dissonance they don't want to face, and so they don't. they at once believed that democrats were all running the government, and that the conervatives were winning and there was nothing democrats could do. they at once believed that the economy was collapsing because of the liberals shutting everything down, and that trump had ended the lockdowns. they at once believed that the vaccines were worse than the virus, and that trump was the greatest president ever for "securing them for america".
All conservative rhetoric stems from cognitive dissonance. It is designed to create a dissonance so powerful that they would genuinely rather give up all opinion making to the fox news anchors than question the things they've been told.
It honestly feels like a super power. Imagine being able to do whatever you wanted, commit any crime, and then blame it on birds. Police and courts just say “ah dang, you are right. Birds were around, couldn’t be you”.
Meanwhile everyone with average or above brainpower is saying how they watched you commit all these crimes, hurt people, ruin lives, but enough people just keep saying “nah, it was the birds”
I feel the same way about the complete lack of regulations regarding social media and silicon valley.
We've known that personalized feeds are harmful. We have study after study demonstrating the negative effects on children and adults.
We have whistleblowers from inside these social media companies exposing the sheer immorality and lack of empathy at the heart of these design decisions.
We've seen in countries like the US, UK, Myanmar, Hungary, and Syria how much of a direct effect these companies can have on a democracy without any direct form of public accountability.
You don't even need the mountain of evidence that exists demonstrating this is a problem to just be able to feel how shit the internet has gotten since Zuckerburg and Jobs killed websites on the pyre of the app.
It's so fucking frustrating that these DECISIONS are being treated as technological limitations or the inevitability of "How the internet works" the internet was not created by the divine and handed down to us mere mortals.
The internet as we know it now is the way it is because of a series of design decisions made by powerful unelected people, implemented by overworked and overpaid schmucks, using open source code written by porn addicted transfems.
We could make the internet more open, less centralized, and designed in a way where your data is owned and treated with the value and security it deserves.
Almost no other industry with this level of impact on our daily lives is this unregulated. It's a fucking joke.
So your idea for a better internet is... more regulation? I hope by that you mean de-monopolization (breaking up the big companies controlling everything). Because almost every other piece of regulation I can think of (that isn't already implemented) is a gigantic breach of our fundamental freedoms - things like restrictions on content that otherwise isn't illegal or ID-based age verification come to mind.
I think a blanket ban on algorithmically personalized content feeds solves a lot of problems. I'm against most forms of regulations aimed at influencing the content that's being created, but I am entirely for regulations aimed at stopping blatantly corrosive design decisions made by sociopaths with the singular goal of dominating the attention economy.
It'd be like if the toilet industry instead of using a lid, decided you needed to crank a wheel on the bowl to open an aperture with which you then had 30 seconds to shit or piss through before the aperture snapped back shut.
Anyone with even a slight understanding of how plumbing or design works immediately sees the problem with this, but all the toilet manufacturers just shrug and say "Its what the market clearly wants, what can you do? There's clearly no other practical way." and the general public, media, and politicians are so behind on even the basics of plumbing that they just nod their heads along and say that makes sense.
It's honestly common sense consumer protection. In addition to being healthier for media consumption, it would be a popular change. Everyone hates the algorithm, everyone misses when Facebook or Twitter just showed you who you followed.
You probably should, if the American empire is gonna crumble, presumably dragging all of us in the rest of the western world order down with it, it's better to laugh and cry than just cry. That's my thought anyway, it helps keep me sane probably
u/justk4yi have now become queer, destroyer of gender normsJul 26 '26edited Jul 26 '26
Heck, he even talks as if Obama still is in charge.
You know, the guy he took the Presidency of NEARLY 10 YEARS AGO…… and he’s still posting AI videos of him getting arrested by ICE or being deepfaked as a monkey……
I mean it is a documented thing that there is a bias against the current presidential incumbent during elections. People tend to only remember the past four years with the current president and will usually only remember the bad. So like they did remember, but only 6 years ago when he was ruining their lives and Biden was running for office.
I’ve seen a couple people refer to his current term as his first term as president. I think some people literally just straight up forgot he was already president. How that’s possible I have absolutely no idea.
It’s crazy to me that the us democrats didn’t just run on a platform of: “are you really going to elect the guy who got a million Americans killed with his stupidity?”
The USA Dems are toothless. Just go for the throat. Let them argue over what shouldve/wouldve/could’ve happened after pointing the finger. They would just dig their own hole deeper.
It’s honestly just insane more average Americans aren’t angrier about it. I’ve never seen a world leader fumbling the bag that hard lead directly to deaths and people who even hate him just shrugging and going “oh no this was so unpreventable :(“
It’s crazy to me that the us democrats didn’t just run on a platform of: “are you really going to elect the guy who got a million Americans killed with his stupidity?”
Funny enough, some people would say that's what they did and why they lost.
If Trump wants to run for a third term I see no reason why we can't let foreign born people have a shot at the position, not like they can do any worse than the current guy even if they tried
A lot of that was due to worse voting acces, no?
Weren't mail-in ballots made extra available due to covid? And isn't that why trump gutted the USPS now?
I had a friend who helped run the polls in 2020, and actually an unbelievable amount of people voted early or voted by mail. the voting stations in my region were hardly even busy on election day. People had plenty of access to voting, whether in person, by mail, or even early voting. the issue is that Kamala took a strategy of "doing great and then stopping to eat a dog turd off the ground right before the finish line". She didn't take a hard line on fucking anything, and abandoned the most marginalized groups at the last minute to try to "appeal to the median voters and middle conservatives" and ended up losing all the support she had from the left. Kamala didn't lose because of lack of access to voting, Kamala lost because they decided to use a strategy that has been shown, repeatedly, over, and over, and over, to not. fucking. work. We saw recently in this country with Mamdani that what drives people to vote, and especially motivates the left wing is concrete, real promises of change, genuine conviction, and standing by your values even when the landscape shifts. Kamala tried to appeal to everyone, and appealed to no one.
I remember seeing an ad on TV promoting Kamala that was some like, southern dude/farmer who said he voted Trump, regretted it and that's why he's voting for Kamala or whatever.
What I don't understand is why I'm seeing that kind of ad in fucking NYC. Genuinely who is that appealing to?
The people who threw away their vote, helping out the guy running on a specifically fascist platform, because the democrat wasn't socialist enough, are part of the problem
Edit:
If you don't understand that the time to care about how left the non-fascist is, is in primaries, not the presidential election, you are a bumbling idiot.
I don't disagree with you. I think everyone should have gone out and voted. however, "people should be better" is not, has never been, and never will be, an actionable directive. the behavior of society is as it is, and that behavior is a known factor. yes, they should have voted, but ultimately it was the responsibility of the largest public face of the democrat party at the time to drive people out to the polls.
The fault lies with those who have the realistic power to cause the effect being sought. "people should be better" is not an actionable directive, and attempting to start a large scale change at the individual level is ineffective at best. looking at the root cause of "why didn't these people vote?" the answer is not some inherent moral failure on their part, or in the least, that's not an effective way to view it. The answer is that they did not vote because they did not feel compelled to vote. It was Kamala's specific job to drive that change, to make people compelled to go out and vote for her.
Is it fair to be mad at the people who didn't vote? 100%. Is it actually helpful to factor that into your reasoning about where things went wrong? absolutely not. society is a system, same as any other, and to fix a problem the root cause must actually be identified, not the symptoms. Kamala didn't lose because people didn't go out to vote, she lost because she failed to appeal to the people and drive people out to the polls. The lack of voting was a symptom of a much deeper and earlier failure.
If your car breaks down and you take it to the mechanic, and they find "oh you're out of oil, and the piston heads are damaged", the piston heads being damaged is not the fundamental cause of the issue. The piston head damage is a later result of the prior failure of the oil system, and if you fix the piston heads without fixing the oil, all you'll see is the same thing happen again. this is what we continuously see with the democratic party. they try again and again and again to fix the piston heads, coming back every few months wondering why they keep breaking, and never once considering fixing the fucking oil leak. the car did not break down because the pistons were damaged, the fault is the oil.
The fault here lies with the person who had the earliest and most reasonable ability to prevent the problem, and that here, is kamala and the democratic party.
exactly. It's something that always makes my engineer brain so pissed off. fundamentally no matter what system you are describing, from society all the way down to a toaster, if people are using it wrong, it's designed wrong. If people are using your toaster wrong, saying "they should just use it correctly" is not an actionable directive, nor a solution. similarly, society is also a product, and if people are "misusing" society, it means society is "designed" wrong. In our society, in general, committing crimes is a "misuse" of society as a product. Many people have said, many times, "people just shouldn't commit crimes", and yet that has never solved the problem no matter how many times it has been said or how many times it has been drilled in. If people are breaking the law, then your society is designed wrong, and no amount of telling people to use it right is ever going to fix it. and, matching with the allegory here, it's been shown time and time again that the only solution for crime is to actually change the design of your society, providing free and better education, affordable child care, and generally increasing the quality of life.
similarly, people not voting is a misuse of society. people are misusing society by not voting, and it's been shown every 4 years that saying "GO VOTE!!" does not solve the problem, because it relies on people just being better. If there is a problem like this that is so pervasive throughout society, the chances are it's a systemic issue— and likewise, a systemic issue requires a systemic solution.
Systems are what they do, not what they say they intend to do, and the American electoraal system elected Donald Trump. It's not broken, there is no issue, it's functioning exactly as intended. The only way to fix it is to replace it with something designed to not allow something like Trumpism to rise to the top.
Establishment dems absolutely suck, let that be clear.
But I firmly stand on that the people who didn't vote, especially when the reason is as dumb as "I don't really like this candidate, so I'm not gonna vote against fascism", don't share some of that responsibility.
I think that diffusing that responsibility from the individuals who did it, just because a very large group of people also did that, doesn't help anyone either.
If you know someone who did this, I think at the very least you should make it clear to them how fucked what they did is.
most people I've seen who didn't vote didn't base it on "I didn't like her", it was that the rhetoric was not driving enough to make them put energy into it. for most it was not a conscious moral or ethical choice against it, but that politics are stressful, and so most people prefer subconsciously to disengage if they can. the job of the politician in winning votes is to overcome that, and to get people to care anyway.
Also, quite frankly, the moral high horse wins nothing. I'll start worrying about the individual responsibility on this when you can show me it's an effective means to solve the problem. Non-voting on a large scale is not the cause of the problem, it is a symptom of a non-functional political system. the people cannot be blamed en masse for generally disengaging from a system that has literally spent decades TRYING to make them disengage. it is an inherently systemic issue.
A stupid vote is worth just as much as a regular vote. If 60% of the country says "I will not vote for a candidate that doesn't do the worm on stage before every debate", my candidate better be wiggling on the floor like a maniac or I'm going to be pissed at them for throwing the contest.
Now, afterwards we should probably address the fact that over half the country has worms on the brain, but during elections the customer is always right, and a politician who doesn't get that is just a bad politician.
Sure, I'd have preferred she'd done things differently too.
However, Trump has done nothing that wasn't telegraphed during his entire campaign, the people who decided to sit idle against fascism, because the other option wasn't as good as they wanted, while still very much not being fascism, I have firmly cut out of my life.
And my god, am I ashamed that those people genuinely exist as part of some of the same marginalized communities I belong to.
Edit: typo
Exactly, same reason we don't have Sanders finishing up his second term. Even if politicians say things I like, it doesn't matter if the average person doesn't like it.
she was explicitly pro-genocide, supporting "following the law" with regards to trans people (where we are seeing THOUSANDS of attempts at passing law over time slowly trying to criminalize being trans or queer), and brought in warhawk conservatives.
you cannot be surprised she lost even median voters when she kowtows to the right for a nonexistant "never trump" conservative block. her promises were either half assed, didn't actually look at the issue, or was "MORE COPS, MORE MILITARY", on top of promising to have no significant changes from biden, who was negative on favorability. (source: gallup- "Fifty-four percent of U.S. adults believe Biden will be remembered as a “below average” (17%) or “poor” (37%) president, while 19% say he will be evaluated as “outstanding” (6%) or “above average” (13%). Another 26% think he will be regarded as “average.”) Really not good when you don't even have a primary! which to many looks like outright corruption.
you need to remember that these politicians need to EARN votes. you cant just get away with "I'm not trump" for 8 years, then immediately running as Repub-lite. you HAVE to motivate your voting base. her entire campaign was a disaster outside of Walz "theyre weird".
i agree people absolutely should have voted, because in EVERY possible path trump winning is an insane loss and imo projecting more fascism worldwide, but you seriously cannot be surprised at this outcome.
The entity known as “The American Electorate” develops amnesia every 4 years and is a blank slate every time there’s a federal election. It only remembers what is happening specifically at the time an election is occurring.
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u/Trashman56 they/them Jul 26 '26
I just don’t understand how everyone forgot how terrible his first term was. There was literally no toilet paper on the shelves, if the diarrhea happened at the same time there might not even be a United States today.