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Funny how facts become harder to ignore when they start affecting everyday life. Reality has a way of cutting through the noise.
Not big surprise. Pretty much my first thought when I saw the results from America.
Sometimes the truth doesn’t need defending. The results speak louder than anyone’s opinion.
A cult doesn’t believe their cult leader committed crimes.
Color me 50 shades of unsurprised.
The logic is sound unfortunately.
Assumption A every politician is a liar. Assumption B politicians are partisian and will say anything about the other side to win.
This is a core belief in the sticks.
Decades now of propaganda add: Hollywood and liberal news outlets are politicians and partisian for the democrats.
So when they say anything about Republicans it’s a partisan lie with no basis in truth.
Trump said these things, and therefor was speaking the assumed truth. That means he can’t be a politician, so he is exempt from the previous things.
I mean it’s stupid, because the default assumption are a logical falacy but it is the thread I run into, and it’s so ingrained into the thought loop they really struggle to change it.
That makes a lot of sense. It also explains why the republicans do everything they can to obstruct anything that would improve people’s day-to-day lives if credit could possibly go to the democrats. This line of thinking is so heavily weighted to tangible results that such a situation would destroy republican support.
I also appreciate that this explanation shows a rational-ized take on how the world works. That’s a much more fair take than the “right-wingers must be irrational/crazy” that a lot of people are quick to toss around.
This is the sort of cynicism that Russia seeks to exploit. It’s sad.
I have noticed a few things about modern/MAGA brand right wing folks:
- They have a great time hanging out with like minded folk, and feel at ease to speak their mind. They’re genuinely having fun.
- There is a lot of “both sides” as described, which is really a form of intellectual laziness. Black and white thinking is the easiest and least cognitively expensive. Everyone can get on board and fully aligned with simple ideas.
- They use the phrase “I believe” a lot. This I think is borrowed from church. Basically, belief is parallel to and as strong/meaningful as careful data-driven analysis.
- Maybe this is incidental, but their circles of concern are fairly limited. If it isn’t happening to them or someone they are close with, it is of little concern.
- Many will admit to not understanding something, to their credit.
- Politics are genuinely sports to them. Rallies are spectacles similar to attending a college football game.
- I think these voters just have trouble thinking in the abstract rather than in concrete terms. There is little attention paid to second-order effects of policy, particularly over longer periods of time.
- There is just a distinct lack of empathy.
- There is a fairly good proportion of conspiracists in the group.
- Senility is overrepresented in the group.
- Because of belief/loyalty as core principles, if something isn’t going well, an excuse can be made along the lines of “Trump is doing his best/is a good man facing headwinds”, or “things will get better soon”.
There is just a distinct lack of empathy.
This is the one I want to see a study on. The idea that a social group that has both a cultural identity and is lacking in empathy compared to other groups, is just wild to me. I really want to know how we got here.
Yeah I see this as a paradox of sorts. An intense focus on outgroups without empathy for them.
Is that along the lines of what you meant? Maybe I am misinterpreting
Kind of what I meant, yes. It opens questions like “does the group lack empathy for each other” and “is this a value that more resembles sociopathy or is it intense in/outgroup division?” Also, I’m wondering how far back this goes. Maybe we’re looking at attitudes and sentiment that go back to colonial days, possibly along bloodlines, where people that don’t think this way came along later and/or from other places?
They are also suspicious of long term of complex explanations and I believe this is because most systems that take advantage of this group (such as credit cards) have this same characteristic.
The narrow circle of concern makes things like climate change really hard to explain.
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Bullshit. They’re illiterate morons who believed whatever was politically convenient.
They’ve grown up in an environment that taught them to distrust media and therefore only believe that which directly affects them.
The reason they don’t seem to care about the millions of deaths caused by Trump’s cuts to USAID isn’t because they’re all sociopaths, but because they don’t believe it.
The rightwing propaganda doesn’t have to be believed in order to achieve its goal. The most dangerous thing isn’t the lies. It’s actually the skepticism towards the truth. They reached the point where their lies got so outrageous and distrust in news so high, they could actually start doing crazy shit like opening concentration camps for dissidents and attempting to rig elections, and people reading that news just saw it as the same insane lies, just from the other side of the aisle.
It’s not only the propaganda but it’s also the information about all the bad things doesnt make it past their privilege and racism. I know people from where I grew up who dont believe in systemic racism and seem to truly believe the 3 non white people they know have all the same ability to get a job and a bank account and house as they do and think others truly choose to sell drugs or work at McDonald’s not that it’s their only option.
Is it too much to ask for politicians that are not fraudulent rapist assholes?
Think how broken our system is to allow this to rise up the top.
To them it’s just “the other side lying” though. The same way trump lies about his opponents and they think it’s ok when he lies so they just ignore the other side all together assuming everything they say is lies too.
Same thing with q annon. They put out all of this obviously false info so when the real info about Epstein came out people would doubt it.
I don’t get it personally. I don’t see how they conspiracy-hole this and that, and pretend the most outrageous things, but then supposedly diesel or whatever is the last straw. Decades of being financially fucked into the ground by conservative policy, a decade of But Joe Biden!, and now diesel does it??? Ok I guess.
The rest of the economic woes are boiling the frog slowly, and have been inflicted during both parties being in power.
Large sudden swings in an unavoidable day to day resource that costs over a hundred a week are harder to miss.
It is how human psychology works. Fuel prices are something people are confronted with on a regular bases and they are a direct expensive, easy to understand, in the moment.
You can’t logic people out of situations they didn’t use logic to get thenselves into in the first place. They based everything on feels, feels that wouldn’t contradict their ideology. And at the upper levels projection took over and “do unto others before they do unto you” became the rule in a power grab.
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
Well yeah. “Economy” with an asterisk. Where everything is made up and the points don’t matter (except when the results feel right). Feels like this line of reasoning requires a whole lot of “obviously it’s this, this time, you can just tell” spackle to fill up the gaps.
no it’s because they support rape
no excuses
they support rape
God, I hate that the fight for democracy is essentially continuously trying to explain reality to the dumbest people to have ever lived, and hoping that they learn something.
This isn’t default democracy; this is a failure state created by the rich’s desire to own you (also known as capitalism). The media environment that makes such delusion possible and the deregulation that made that environment legal (looking at you Reagan and Clinton) were created by rich people and their stooges and they can (in theory) be destroyed by The People™. It also bears notice that when politics works for the average person (think FDR) it’s not quite that dysfunctional; again the current situation is a failure state created by the oligarchy controlling politics, though you could argue instead that the oligarchy is the default and periods where politics works for the average person are the exception.
Yeah, and every last bit of it comes down to the dumbest people on the planet buying in whole hog.
The ruling class explicitly set out to turn Americans into “perfect consumers”. They succeeded.
These dumbest people on the planet aren’t a contemptible series of individual failures or an accident, they were grown in a lab.
A system which cannot bear sober scrutiny must stupefy its subjects.
It can be both.
It’s explaining a reality that disagrees with the pre-conceived beliefs. The reason why Facebook works is that the algorithm makes it so it feeds them information that they already believe.
And because the people who buy into it are the dumbest people on the planet.
Clackton byelection was a sneak peek.
I was so disappointed that Binface didn’t win that one. I mean, I didn’t honestly expect him to, but I really wanted him to. And the idea of anybody voting for Nigel fucking Farage makes my skin crawl.
If you’ve got a better way of doing things, we’re all ears.
I mean, a really good start would be to pump as much money as possible into education and anti-poverty initiatives. Of course, the people who would oppose that are the dumbest people on the planet, so we’re kind of back to square 1.
Democracy but only I can vote.
I would vote for that. Wait, I can’t!
Aw man, do I gotta explain the reality of that suggestion to you?
I’m the king of the castle and my mac and cheese gets poisoned.
I think they’re being sarcastic
you can never tell with the kinds of people we get around here
Democracy but you gotta pass an IQ test threshold to vote/run?
I really wonder what’s the advantage of having stupid people voting/running besides virtue signaling you believe in equality (and having whole society pay for it, because your ego being massaged is more important than the common good).edit: Not gonna individually reply. ALL of you seem to not know the difference between literacy, knowledge, wealth, class and spatial, abstract, cognitive, matrix reasoning, etc (not even having a PhD or being able to score high in traditional education has anything to do with it), and it seems like years of Hollywood got you all believing in existence of “evil genius” and such, but you really should read about gifted people, high IQ, and moral reasoning. It’s the failure of moral reasoning, i.e. being dumb as fuck, that creates conservatism.
And about the argument of “selfish smart person” seeking political power, these thrive on the stupid people, that’s why you need smart voters. Duh.Now keep repeating in front of the mirror: “It’s for society’s own benefit that its most inept should guide it”, and check how you look saying it. Fight for your right to be governed by the stupid!
ps: So far, no one managed to point the advantage of having people with low cognitive capability deciding society’s direction. You just said you don’t like the idea of it being decided by people with higher cognition.
I’m going to address only the last part: what is the value of having stupid people vote.
The value in allowing stupid people to vote is that your opposition can’t change the definition of “stupid” to include only you and your friends.
The law is a blunt instrument. If we enshrine in law the power for Congress to deprive people of their vote, we have agreed that depriving people “for the right reasons” is justification for doing so, and now the question simply becomes “can you convince people this is a good reason to deprive people of their ability to vote”.
We already have this with Felons. They are a miniscule percent of the population though, so it cannot be abused to win an election. It’s bad enough the precedent kind of already exists. Expanding it would be self destructive
EDIT: Because it’s been brought up, felons who cannot vote make up 1.1% of the US population.
We already have this with Felons. They are a miniscule percent of the population though
Convicted felons make up almost 8% of the voting age population. That is not a “minuscule” percent. It’s enough to have changed 2/3 of all presidential elections.
so it cannot be abused to win an election
It is certainly actively being used to suppress Democrat power in general, and Black voting power specifically.
You are wildly wrong.
1.1% of the population cannot vote due to felony conviction.
And those people are distributed across the political spectrum just like any other demographic.
If you’re going to quote bullshit stats, at least post a link to some fringe blog to back it up sort of
You are too ignorant to be that smug.
Or is it just racism? Who doesn’t know that Black people are wildly overrepresented in the prison population? Or that Black people overwhelmingly vote Democrat? Those are really basic facts.
The 1.1% you quote, specifically only refers to the non Black population. It’s 5%-10% of the Black population. Which ends up being 2% of the total population of the country. Though it varies wildly from state to state. In some states it is as high as 6% of the total population.
That is by no means insignificant.
I got my numbers from the exact same source. Your own link contradicts you. 4 million is not 2% of the US pop. 4 million is 1.1% of the population.
I never said they were split 50/50. I said they were distributed.
Meaning it’s not “four million votes for Democrats”
And fuck you for assuming my ethics. I think the fact that felons can’t vote is absolutely immoral. Nobody should be deprived of their vote.
But I don’t lie about statistics.
IQ tests are too problematic. Let’s go old school and you need to be a 18+ male land owner to vote. /s
Fortunately, one can’t buy intelligence.
Democracy but you gotta pass an IQ test threshold to vote/run?
Setting aside the inherent authoritarianism in excluding double digit percentages of the population from voting, the fact that it wouldn’t work (the negative correlation between intelligence and conservatism is real but small) and the effects of socioeconomic status and race on IQ, historically this is a very good way to disenfranchise minorities (look up literacy tests).
I really wonder what’s the advantage of having stupid people voting/running besides virtue signaling you believe in equality (and having whole society pay for it).
Democracy? Again this is a inherently authoritarian idea, but even if it wasn’t it would quickly be used for authoritarian ends.
Democracy but you gotta pass an IQ test threshold to vote/run?
Dude, they already tried that in US. Learn some history.
Right? Here in this thread about how we have to constantly get ignorant people to understand why things are bad ideas, and one of the earnest suggestions is poll tests.
Jesus Christ.
https://secure.splcenter.org/page/67431/survey/1
And of all things to suggest, IQ?
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/racism-intelligence-test-scores
We are so fucked aren’t we? It just feels inevitable at this point and the most we can do is (maybe) delay it.
First off because “IQ tests” don’t test for brainworms. There’s plenty of people who possess the mental capacity to pass a test like that, but who use that brainpower to come up with creative ways to defend wrong ideas rather than thinking critically. This is a large part of why IQ tests are meaningless, because even if they were capable of accurately assessing raw brainpower, they’re certainly not capable of assessing how you choose to use that brainpower.
If you make a test that does test for brainworms then you have the question of who or what body decides what’s a brainworm, and at that point you might as well just give that body dictatorial control. There’s no possible way to do that in a remotely objective fashion, the body could easily just say, “Capitalism is obviously right so anyone who doesn’t agree with it should be barred from voting.” Or, if it were me, I might decide that anyone who thinks that people having low IQs is the problem with our political systems is, themself, obviously unqualified.
Really, it’s not that different from the Catholic Church gathering together a bunch of highly educated scholars behind closed doors to debate what they thought made sense and then trying to enforce that on everyone. At least way back then, they had the justification that most of the population was fully illiterate.
The problem with intelligence requirements is two-fold.
First, intelligence is difficult to quantify. I often hear that IQ tests are unreliable or only test for certain areas of what could be called intelligence.
Second, such requirements would instantly become politicized and designed to prevent certain groups from being politically active. This exact thing happened after the US civil war when literacy tests were required and designed specifically to keep black people from being able to vote.
Additionally, I just don’t know that intelligence is the quality that matters most. A selfish smart person is just going to be good at benefitting themself politically at the expense of others. The focus should be on getting more people politically active who will use their political power to benefit others beyond themselves. Of course, that’s probably even more difficult to test for than intelligence.
I think the better way to do it is to have a test which doesn’t test for intelligence (although I agree that it basically does test for intelligence but not explicitly) but for understanding of the topic at hand.
It’s a simple test, it’s just one question, “what, if elected, would this person do?” You must be able to identify at least one actual policy of the politician you’re voting for. Trump told everyone who he was, and what he would do, and they still voted for him and then acted all surprised. Because they’re total exposure to his policies was whatever they read on Facebook which was actually not what he said.
IQ is inherently racist
Do yourself a favor and read the book ‘Starship Troopers.’
The author has a ball playing with political ideas. His take is that after WW3 [a limited nuclear was, not an all out holocaust] angry veterans returned home and saw anarchy. They united and cleaned up the baddies, then enshrined the idea that only veterans would be allowed to vote. Centuries later, anyone, no matter how physically weak can join the military and do a term of service and get full citizenship. It’s explicitly stated that most of the army is ‘make work,’ an extended boot camp with no actual fighting involved. You just have to earn your vote.
Another fun author is Ross Thomas. Washington reporter turned crime novelist, his books always have a political slant. ‘The Fools In Town Are On Our Side’ is about a political fixer whose plan to clean up a small city is to make it ‘so corrupt even the pimps will vote for reform’
https://bookshop.org/beta-search?bkshp-astro=t&keywords=ross+thomas
Amazing that you find any correlation.
What part confused you?
Having fun or talking about abstract ideas?
None. I already addressed it in the edit section of my original comment.
I was actually having a conversation with someone else in the thread.
So, yes, you were confused.
And we come back to Ronald Reagan.
Reagan gutted the FCC. There used to be rules restricting the number of TV/radio stations one company could own. There used to be a Fairness Doctrine that gave equal time to anyone who opposed an editorial.
There are still roots of this with Nixon. He was able to walk away with his indiscretions. Then we got Fox News.
Back in the day, after Ford pardoned Nixon, there were two kinds of folks.
Most of the Nixon haters were willing to accept his resignation. Very few people at that time were ready to see an American President on trial, let alone behind bars.
Nixon’s pals looked at everything and started plotting to make sure none of them would ever be treated like that.
Bill Clinton did the most damage to any sort of stop measures to prevent what we are dealing w/ MSM right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
That’s a line that the ‘BoTH SidES ArE tHe SAme’ crowd loves to use.
Clinton had no control of Congress in 1996. It was a Bill the GOP wanted and was going to pass with or without Clinton. Reagan started gutting the FCC and Bush Sr. kept it up
It’s like saying the caboose is what killed the guy who got hit by a train.
The President can veto Congress per Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution. So Slick Willy could have nixed this and chose not to.
The “Two Party” system wants the same thing. Control.
And explain in detail exactly how Clinton could have singlehandedly turned back the clock to the days before cable TV and the internet.
I’m glad people are finally starting to see the BoTh SIdes aRE tHe SAme line actually helps the GOP.
It’s not just that. Those people are also really really stupid. They don’t have the ability to connect any dots. They can hear the dumbest shit straight from Trump’s mouth and they don’t realize he’s an idiot. Where they get the news from is a secondary issue. If you forced them to watch CNN all day they would simply not understand any of it. But yes, they can understand diesel getting expensive the same way a dog can understand a stick. When prices fall they will still not understand why it happened and will go back to voting for racists and homophobes.
Actually, they’ve done studies where they’ve taken people off Fox News, and had them watch other news, and their political views soften very quickly when exposed to stories they don’t hear in the Conservative Propaganda Machine.
I have a business acquaintance who is still an unapologetic MAGA, and he isn’t aware of 75% of the crazy shit that’s these people do, and when I tell him, he thinks it’s all fake, because Trump and MAGA wouldn’t do anything bad. He has Fox News playing next to his desk all day long, every day. It’s his sole source of news.
yes, that being his sole source of news makes him stupid
But if I assume people are stupid, I can just feel angry and superior about it. If it’s a solvable problem like education and news reform then I have to do work and also recognize that some of what created my views is the luck of my environment.
Honestly, I’m just floored by the fact that “Fox News” is allowed to present itself as a news channel and even have the word “news” in their title.
Fox News has, in multiple court fights, successfully argued that certain primetime opinion programming is rhetorical, hyperbolic, or “opinion” such that a reasonable viewer would not take specific charged assertions as literal fact, a defense credited by judges in cases including Tucker Carlson’s dismissal in 2020 [1] and described in subsequent coverage [2]. That courtroom strategy — framing provocative programming as not intended or likely to be read as factual reporting — has become a recurring legal tool for hosts and defendants facing defamation suits [3] [4].
Now comes the claim that you can’t expect to literally believe the words that come out of Carlson’s mouth. And that assertion is not coming from Carlson’s critics. It’s being made by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and by Fox News’s own lawyers in defending Carlson against accusations of slander. It worked, by the way.
The name “Fox News” should either be illegal, or Fox should be forced to constantly have a “this is not a fact but opinion” text somewhere on screen to be easily seen in big letters, or the law should re-asses what a “reasonable audience” is, or maybe ask (at the voting booth) if you believe Fox News and therefore become disqualified from voting, as you’re definitely not matching the “reasonable” part.
Them getting away with calling themselves “news” and at the same time arguing that they’re “not news, but entertainment and opinion” in court is not just dishonest but straight up evil. If you title yourself as “news”, you gotta think about what you say before you open your mouth, as otherwise what you’re doing is literally intentionally misrepresenting media.
Aunt clara can’t conspiracy theory the oil and gas industry?!?!
British petroleum invented the carbon footprint and climate change denialism but aunt clara want to talk about little simon’s gender…
Has there ever been a more shameless shower of bastards than BP? Talk about choosing the greater evil.
Forgot to also add they killed Mohamed Mozadegh, the first democratically elected president of iran in 1953, a socialist and instead placed the Shah with the help of the british crown and the US gov, If you wonder why Iran has it for europe and the US, this is the tip of the iceberg of why. Plenty of fucked up shit happened later as well.
And then the Iranian Revolution deposed the Shah, and started the current regime. MAGA likes to speak of this incident as the beginning of the Iran War, instead of America’s illegal coup in 1953. It’s always THEIR fault.
There are plenty of other events like flight 655 which was a passenger flight from Tehran in the 90s which got shot down by a US navy warship for no reason. 300 innocent people died because of a miscommunicated order by the navy personel.
To add something; I like to think of Hegel in those moment and the master/servant dialectic,simply; two consciousness find themselves in a shared space. Since they exist for themselves in that first moment and are encountering a plurality for the first time, they enter a conflict. One wins, the other loses and both establish different states of self-consciousness due to this.
The loser becomes the servant, has to think of himself and his duty to the master, and finds meaning and recognition in the master’s eyes. The master does not think of the servant’s thoughts, only his own. The servant in the eyes of the master gains meaning, he can revolt, improve, love or hate, whilst the master is not seen, he only is, and this means his self-conception is not anchored, thus the master cannot reach self-consciousness but his servant can as he experiences a higher authority.
In practical scenarios, this is what explains in my eyes the hubris of the powerful and the optimism of the miserable. The tyrant punishes through anger, because he cannot gain any satisfaction from his state, whilst the one in servitude learns through his opression what resilience is, finds internal freedom and liberation by experiencing the worst. This really resonates with the psychotic crisis/mania the US states are going through right now and the strange self-aware calm the Iranians show whilst being in the most vulnerable position.
No, it’s traditionally so in lock step with the GOP, it’s impossible to separate them.
Yep, they’re all clincally diagnosable as having presistent, specific delusions.
