The Most Powerful Man in America is a Nazi Sympathizer
Elon Musk is just the latest billionaire to exert tremendous influence over U.S. politics. When he says he supports Neo-Nazis, take him at his word.
Elon Musk is just the latest billionaire to exert tremendous influence over U.S. politics. When he says he supports Neo-Nazis, take him at his word.
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Wouldn't be the first time. But it ought to be the last.
Unfortunately people weren't convinced to get the fuck out and vote so. Y'know.
In b4 missing baby.
I'm gonna be so fucking upset if I actually called this one...
What does "missing baby" mean?
A horrible reference to a terrible tragedy surrounded in conspiracies featuring another rich and powerful Nazi.
what were the main conspiracy theories?
The ones I heard repeated in highschool by my teachers were that the family killed the baby and then tried to cover it up by hiring someone relatively unintelligent as a patsy.
The Wikipedia article contains some of the more mainstream inconsistencies and possible conspiracies
Unfortunately people weren’t convinced to get the fuck out and vote so. Y’know
Neoliberals complaining about people not wanting to vote for neoliberals just always reminds me of "nice guys" upset women picked the bear.
You don't understand why they made that decision, and rather than try to understand why so that you could better yourself, you're gonna keep stomping your feet for years saying only an idiot would pick a bear.
Which is normally true.
Except the only option is you
So while being marched to the gulag you're the guy that turns to the guy next to you and proudly proclaims "don't blame me, I voted for the bear". How bold
This the danger of treating every election like the last for the past 3 elections.
Neoliberals have failed to learn this lesson twice, because immediately after they're wrong they say there's nothing anyone can do.
They want to depress interest in politics to prevent voters from organizing.
They want us to all check out and stop paying attention so in three years they can say:
There's no time and all that matters is the letter by someone's name! Everyone has no choice but a bear or a nice guy!
But it's not. In a fair primary we could get so the choice is "decent human or bear" and go into the next election 100% confident people won't pick a bear.
Telling people how bad a bear is compared to you is what nice guys do.
Well adjusted humans would ask themselves why women view them as more dangerous than the bear.
Why won't you?
Edit:
And because it needs explicitly mentioned constantly to neoliberals, yes I held my nose.
The people who didn't aren't politically engaged right now. They were chased off by the shitty choice and no we have to win them back in time for 2028.
You're not helping to do that, your comments would just make them realize nothing's changed and stay away from politics.
Are you doing it intentionally or do you just not understand the consequences of your own actions?
Do YOU not understand how your nihilism and defeatism is deterring others from voting? I vote for the big fucking picture not the fine details. Would Kamala have been the best most left president ever? Probably not. Was she a better option at the time? Absolutely. Is the other option an existential threat to me and mine? Absolutely. If people can't understand THAT, then fuck them.
your nihilism and defeatism
What?!
You literally said we're being marched to a fucking gulag and I'm talking about how to best recoup non voters for 2028....
Like, why are you even trying to argue with me that Kamala was the right choice when I just said I held my nose and voted for her?
What do you not understand about this?
You're saying it's over, I'm saying we shouldnt stop fighting.
It's like Bizarro Superman where you keep saying everything backwards...
I'm bored, so I feel like sharing this idea with somebody who might give some fucks: I've seen a lot of think pieces about why Democrats lost so badly in this past election. Somebody on Lemmy linked Adam Conover's video yesterday, and that was one of the better ones. Adam's thesis is that the decline of civil society institutions, like clubs and unions, have left the Democratic Party acting like a privately-owned business, rather than a membership organization. All of these analyses are good, but remind me of the parable about the three blind men describing an elephant. In my hubris, I think I have model which succinctly describes the elephant.
Most of the loyal Democrats, the "blue no matter who" people, and harm-mitigation people have a mental model which comes down to voters considering the facts and making a more-or-less rational decision based on how a candidate's policies would serve the voter's own needs. One can see this in the way that Democratic candidates are stuck in the mode of describing wonky policy details, seeming to assume that voters can extrapolate how those details would affect the individual voter's life. That's why we get exasperated outbursts of, "bUt he'S wOrSE!", from people like the commenter above. Yeah, undoubtedly, but that's not how the human mind works.
The model I prefer to use to understand humans is to see us as sensory processing machines, rather than rational minds. It works so much better at the population level. (Our logical frontal lobes are recent evolutionary developments on top of the ancient animal brain and nervous system, after all.) Our politics these days is all about fear. (Some of it well-founded, much of it not.) When people are in danger and afraid, our nervous systems enter the "fight, flight, or freeze" response state. Flight is off the table; few of us can afford to leave our homes for another country, and where would we go that's not also in the same situation? Where we wouldn't be the very immigrants that the local right-wing parties are promising to Fight? The right wing, with its strong-man bluster, is very explicitly offering Fight. That much should be pretty obvious, even if the details of their plans don't make logical sense. The Democrats, on the other hand, do not fight. They compromise before the fight begins (see: the Affordable Care Act), fall back on decorum and norms, or debate whether they need to capitulate a little or a lot after an electoral loss to peel away centrist Republicans next time. And as Adam Conover pointed out, they won't let us into the party to Fight for ourselves.
So what's left? Well, the big elephant in the room that all the pundits struggle to explain with their think-pieces is why Democratic voters stayed home this past election. There it is: Flight is impossible; Fight isn't on offer; so they Freeze. And what that looks like is disengaging from politics. Consider Yeats's famous phrase from The Second Coming, "the best lack all conviction". It's almost like the same thing happened over 100 years ago, as right-wing populism surged then. Doesn't that sound a lot like all the loyal Democratic voters today deciding to stop following the news, getting off of social media, and distancing themselves from politics? Why some of them (like the commenter above) seem to have turned into FAFO/accelerationists? Doesn't that explain why The Adjuster unleashed a torrent of rage from seemingly out of nowhere, by offering Fight to people stuck in Freeze? And why some polls showed that a candidate (Bernie Sanders) offering even a mild version of Fight could've won as a Democrat in 2016?
Democrats need to either learn to fight hard, or get out of the way so that the rest of us can.
the Democratic Party acting like a privately-owned business, rather than a membership organization
The party is the DNC. When a Dem wins the vote for chair is mostly ceremonial. So it's a very small amount of people running it, especially since the "victory fund" means those few people control the flow of money to I think around 25 states?
The good news is it's not some huge organization like people assume. And it's easy to change.
2/2/25 is the chair election, since a Republican won the presidential it's a pretty fair election and there's a couple great front runners.
Most of the loyal Democrats, the “blue no matter who” people, and harm-mitigation people
They're liars. They ditched the party when Obama beat Hillary, but it didn't matter. It's a very small but vocal contingent of voters. And some of them are just copying party leadership and won't stay like that.
But if they do go to the Republican party and moderate them while we gain more from non voters?
That's a win/win. They can hang out with Liz Cheney and try to save the republican party, I'm all for it.
Our politics these days is all about fear.
Because it works on republicans and neoliberals blindly copy Republicans.
With over 70% 82.9% accuracy an untrained volunteer can predict the political affiliation thru nothing but a brain MRI. It's down by looking at the relative size of the prefrontal cortex and amygdala.
Large amygdala is higher adrenal reactions and more likely to be conservative, larger prefrontal cortex means more liberal.
Which is very impressive when you remember 1/3 roughly just stay out of it.
So what’s left?
Pandering to the part of the population with the larger pre-frontal cortex. Where things like critical thinking, long term planning, and empathy come from.
Which is essentially progressive policy.
But what direction the party takes really comes down to who becomes chair in February.
Most likely I expect to be 100% behind the DNC in a month and I'm fucking psyched. But I might be wrong
Edit:
I was wrong, that study I remembered was 82.9% accuracy, not 70%
Let's hope that they get somebody in charge of the DNC who knows how to fight, like Bernie or FDR did. That's how the party can motivate the Democratic-leaning voters, and seemingly paradoxically, actually win over those right-center voters they covet so much. Honestly, I haven't paid attention to who's in the running, aside from Ben Wikler, and based on what I've seen of his work in Wisconsin, that'd be a disaster.
and based on what I’ve seen of his work in Wisconsin, that’d be a disaster.
Eh, that's my pick, he's who I hope wins.
But the worst realistic case is Martin O'Malley. Not great, but still a huge improvement.
No where to go but up, silver lining I guess.
