it’s not an excuse, we’re just telling you the reality. how do you think hitler got elected?

well, hey, they’re all american voters, right, and apparently we’re all too moronic to understand the basic things at stake, so maybe that is what we deserve, right?

She also had Taylor Swift, Bernie Sanders, Obama, Mark Cuban, multple military generals endorsing her, among others.

ah yes, taylor swift, noted political figure. surely, that will drive turnout. obama and bernie sanders, yes, great choices, truly, this will save us even when we’re not campaigning on their policies. mark cuban. yes. multiple military generals, very cool.

extrapolate what you actually mean with this train of thought. what do you think the democrats should’ve actually done differently? they’re the ones who’ve lost, what should they have done more? who should they have appealed to? seems like everyone wants to put the emphasis solely on the trump voters and the non-voters, and since the non-voters are non-voters, oh, wowie, look at that, all we have left are trump voters to go after.

shocker. I wonder what the party will head after, with this train of thought? I wonder which direction they’ll go in? surely, they wouldn’t double down, right? surely, they wouldn’t go further after the trump voters, after all the committed registered republican voters that turned out last time switched and… lost them a percentage point in that category, this go around. from 6% to 5%. we should emphasize the trump voters more, we should go after them more, obviously, because they’re the only ones willing to vote!

extract what you’re talking about, extrapolate. if you just run around up in your feels as a non-american, blaming the wind for blowing, then you’re just gonna end up blasting darpanet even harder.

So, we can wring our hands about how awful our fellow man is for not seeing the clear moral imperative that we do (exactly like the Genocide-Joe folks have been doing for months), or we can recognize that Dems need to start doing things differently.

no no, don’t you understand? the american voter is just too racist, because they voted for donald trump, so we just need to tack harder to the right, I mean the center, actually I do just mean the right. then, surely, they will vote for the democratic party in overwhelming, obama-era numbers.

I’m going to suggest this book as some personal reading on this issue. But the point I would more broadly make is that running exclusively oppositional candidates does not work, and I would say that’s probably because they don’t really present a clear vision of the future, they only present opposition to something rhetorically. By opposing something in that way, you sort of, only serve to reinforce that thing. Only define yourself in relation to it.

That’s also not really to speak about how she legitimately presented an incredibly conservative face to her campaign, and if that’s the case, people would just vote for the guy who’s actually just conservative.

all the left things that left people care about aren’t just progressive policy, they’re populist policy. Abortion makes the most sense when classified as a healthcare issue. Universal healthcare, and medicare for all, consistently polls popular. So does increasing the minimum wage. So does student loan forgiveness, and free college, which is why biden campaigned on that.

Harris’ most popular policy was probably price controls, because despite all the hemming and hawwing that economists get up to whenever you touch any economic lever, that’s something that the american people can believe will decrease their costs of living. people don’t give a shit about the left, or about ideologies, you’re right on that front, as the person before you is. but make no mistake, those policies which tangibly reign in the economy, control it, and give people free shit, those are, at the very least, progressive policies, if not outright leftist policies.

blue maga and blueanon wasn’t just a sort of tongue in cheek name, it was also an accurate description. we’ve seen this shit burgeoning up, to me, most notably with the people who were adamant that trump didn’t actually get shot and it was all a PR stunt. been lost in the sauce for a while.

There was an absolute mountain of evidence that Trump would be a disaster.

nobody gives a fuck about that. most people aren’t clocked into online politics. they just live under one admin where trump benefits from obama’s policy, things are squeaky clean for the most part, and then they’re chilling, and then they move to living under joe biden where a once in a lifetime (hopefully, haha) pandemic decides to fuck shit up during the transition from one admin to the other, on top of inheriting a much worse economy, and then they attribute that to biden. it’s not a super complicated figure, there, and that’s all on top of biden just not being a very popular candidate to begin with.

if you actually look at the numbers, then the third party candidates had less of an effect for kamala than the third party candidates for trump did. which makes sense, because RFK, at the least, was campaigning on some sort of dystopian vision of the future that his deluded q-anon supporters actually liked, and he had money. jill stein is just grifting like always, basically, no change there, and no change with the lesser known candidates either, really. the bigger story is that a shit ton of the voters stayed home.

everyone wants to shift blame from the democratic party, which has obviously either mishandled this campaign or intentionally lost as a party of controlled opposition, and shift the blame onto the voters. ah, well, it was latino men’s fault for being too socially conservative! ah, it was the third party voters and the leftists! it was the arab americans, who should’ve voted after we funded the bombs that killed their whole entire family! it was trans people, for just being too weird! those are all legitimate explanations I’ve heard people bring up, and I’d classify them all as basically the same, because they all equally have no evidence behind them. the real story is that she had low voter turnout. probably because she was associated with the least popular administration in decades, and refused to distinguish herself from that, and on top of that, campaigned with like, liz cheney. the most she did was offer like, tax exemptions for people starting small businesses, and tax exemptions for people who haven’t missed their rent a single time in the last kajillion years. it’s not rocket science, that’s just not really an inspiring campaign. if they had low voter turnout, that’s probably why, it’s probably not because america is just too racist to vote for a black woman or whatever shit everyone’s bloviating about so they can justify the democratic party turning to the right even more.

that’s more accurate, yeah. definitely in 2016 he ran as a moderate, and with this more recent campaign, it’s not so much that he ran a great campaign (lost 2 million voters), but more that I think he just had enough raw momentum and low information, working class voters wanted to manifest him into being the “make the economy good” guy, that they really didn’t give a shit about whatever he was doing up in the news cycle. At the most, they can just dismiss that as something he’s saying to get elected because “he’s smart”, or something he’s doing to make the democrats mad, which is funny. beyond that, it doesn’t matter so much for them what his specific platform is.

I dunno, I think it was mostly that they wanted joe to step down later on in order to justify not having a primary, and dispelling a populist candidate, like tim walz may have been, a populist candidate which goes against the interests of the donors, and could’ve still probably gone through with a ton of funding and a groundswell of support regardless (see: kamala getting 1 billion dollars), from the running. Then, they can run kamala by default, and it doesn’t matter whether or not she really wins or loses, as she’s still campaigning on basically the platform that the republicans of 2016 were running on. I dunno so much if the time was the problem, other countries have full elections in as much time, I think the real problem was the electoral calculus that runs everything the scenes, as it has always been, and I think a lot of people got their brain cooked by brat summer and coconut memes into believing this was somehow going to be any better than 2016.

The most I’ve seen anyone able to manifest is that she wasn’t an old white man, and instead, she was too radical, because she was black, indian, and a woman. I have seen milquetoast liberals saying this, black people saying this, indians saying this, and women saying this. I don’t really know how true it is, and I guess I never will know because she really didn’t run a good enough campaign for me to actually run any sort of postmortem analysis relative to someone else’s real turnout, because she wasn’t even a baseline democrat, she ran below the baseline in terms of promises. She campaigned with dick “killed a million people” cheney and his wife. I dunno. somehow I don’t believe that it’s because democrat voters are just super racist or sexist or whatever.

I’m cynical, so I see it as that the Democrats can’t be or do those things, because the need for campaign donations has turned them into a fundamentally neo-liberal party that stands for wealth and corporate greed.

finally somebody’s fucking saying it. party of controlled opposition. everyone has liked to pretend since the 90’s and even before that this generational streak of incompetence in policy time and time again is the product of some sort of infernal curse, some sort of streak of bad luck, some sort of unrelated descent of the american populace’s IQ points that just naturally predisposes them towards fascism. it’s not. it’s an intentional befouling. they are fine with losing, it will not be them that suffers. what they’re not fine with, is populist policy actually getting passed. you can even do the obama thing and then lie about it, and then just face the occupy protests later on and tell them all to fuck off. they are even too afraid of that, so entrenched in their own ideology are they. it’s insane and ridiculous to believe that this is just due to some sort of incompetence. if it is, then it’s structural in nature, needs to be pulled out by the root, and is probably not really reformable or recoverable at the highest levels, because we’ve had this problem even since the hundred year old jimmy carter in hospice was in office.

those 75 million americans have done exactly the same shit they’ve been doing since like, the year 2000. or beyond. every guy the republicans have ever run has been some variety of racist, scam artist, rapist, or straight dumbass rich guy failson. the next election, if there is one, which there probably will be, they will do the same thing again. the election after that, and after that, and after that. it’s not rocket science. it’s the basic functioning of the system. to get mad at them is sort of like trying to piss into the wind in order to spite it. you just get piss all over yourself. either that, or you face the other direction and break the record in the meaningless pissing contest.

if you don’t offer a material reality to people, a vision of the future, if you don’t offer people anything, they will not come out to vote for you. kamala actually did worse, instead, she decided, hey, we’ll campaign with liz cheney, we’ll say that building the wall is a good idea, we’ll say that we need to be tougher on immigration, have a more lethal military, continue the genocide that’s currently going on, and then change nothing from biden’s famously extremely unpopular administration other than appoint more conservatives to the cabinet in the name of being bipartisan. oh, and small business tax exemptions, and tax cuts for first time homebuyers that haven’t missed a rent payment in the last 2,000 years. the only good thing she campaigned on was price controls for groceries, but then she dropped that like a hot potato as soon as she could.

really inspiring stuff. then, as always, every sensible person on the planet says, hey, this is maybe not a great idea, instead maybe we should’ve had a primary so they could’ve pushed through a candidate that didn’t get less votes than ANDREW FUCKING YANG, noted bipartisan techbro-appealing dumbshit idiot, maybe we should campaign on medicare for all, funding for housing, free college, student debt relief, a stronger FTC, or perhaps she could’ve said hey, we’ll pack the court, we’ll reverse the roe v. wade decision, and then we’ll try to codify roe v. wade and the million other legal decisions that we need to codify in order to guarantee american citizens some basic amount of rights. All of those would be incredibly popular decisions that would present a vision of the future.

she didn’t do any of that, and then she lost, and then somehow the focus is on the people who voted, 2 million less from last time, for trump. it’s insane shit.

no, but everyone wants to pretend that everyone became ultra-super racist idiot trump voters over the course of 4 years because they listened to a lot of joe rogan, rather than listening to a bunch of CNN like good little vote piggies. see one infographic of a bunch of red arrows everywhere and then everyone loses their fucking minds and decides that the only way to win the next election is to become more racist. if only they tack to the right harder, then they’ll win, they just need to be more racist, see, and then it’ll work!

and the problem is that this is exactly the lesson they want to learn. it’s the lesson they have an interest in learning because they are also a right wing party. maybe it’s because there’s just gonna be more posters running around two days after the election because this is the top drama and it’s eating up time they otherwise would’ve spent talking about celebrity drama or whatever, but we can talk for years about how the democrats, anywhere else, would be a center-right party of neoliberal warmongers that are fundamentally unwilling to give positive material concessions to basically any of their voters. as soon as the election gets called, that all vanishes, suddenly they’ve run the most perfect campaign of all time, and really, it was the voters that were at fault, and if anything, they should be more racist. it’s not that the economy sucked, that they didn’t present an enthusiastic, optimistic, or hell, coherent, vision of the future. no, it’s because they just weren’t racist enough.

it’s 2016 all over again. the punishments will continue until morale improves, time is a flat circle, and I keep falling down the stairs.

do’h

7. Joker laugh HAHAHAHAHAHA

I would like to point out that this is just what robin hood is

I am familiar, in part, that’s what I was kinda thinking of when I wrote that. I probably should’ve brought it up explicitly, though, you’re correct. I have seen/heard that recent numbers have been up for membership but I haven’t heard enough beyond that to know whether or not the organization itself is actually performing well or is doing anything for members, so I guess I didn’t feel comfortable explicitly talking about it.

Seems like the short version of my Intro to American Politics class at Uni.

What’s insane is that’s something you have to go to university to be taught. In this society, where it is purported that democracy is part of the fundamental fabric, most people understand absolutely nothing. If they even get taught about relatively basic things like what I’ve described, which is to say nothing of the legalese-reading abilities you might need to verify that, say, a ballot measure is what it says it is, they apparently don’t end up remembering any of it. So instead we get doomed to listen to the same conversations, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, every election cycle. They’re like cicadas, waking up every couple years, chirping, and then immediately going back to sleep as soon as it’s over.

I dunno. I find legitimate political debates to be interesting, informative, at least sometimes when I can tolerate the cringe levels at work there. I’ve been unfortunately forced to take a crash course, kick start education on every political conflict that’s been started as a result of israel, which also includes like, political context surrounding every country they fuck with, and every country that supports those countries that israel fucks with. I find that, if heartbreaking, to be a good opportunity for me to learn, because at least I get somewhere with that. But I dunno, I feel like the tendency of the average commenter is just to scroll past, or read whatever the top line I’ve posted is and then try to get me to spoonfeed them on that basis, which is obviously never going to work because they can just spin the conversation whatever direction they want, where they’ll probably end up learning less than nothing, they’ll probably just use me as another vector to reinforce their own beliefs.

So, I dunno. It all seems totally hopeless to me. I remembered forums being a much more useful vector for talking to people, but more and more often it seems like it’s less worthwhile, and I just end up retreating to my own bubble, using whatever outlet I find to post like I’m posting to a personal blog that I know nobody is going to read. It’s worthless. If I were to optimize this paragraph I’ve written, with citations, much clearer language, and make it more succinct, and then post that under all these types of posts, or, propagate that as copypasta, then despite it being more well thought out and ultimately much less spammy than the idiotic bad faith trolling that most people tend to engage in, it would probably, maybe rightly, get banned on the basis of being spam. More and more, this place, every place online, reveals itself to just be another horrible vector for the propaganda of whatever interested parties decide to manipulate the levers and pulleys controlling the tubes.

Now I classify myself as an anarchist. Not sure what went wrong.

And, see, I never even got that far. I’m still just some guy that want everyone to have healthcare and good public infrastructure, and wants wars and genocides to not be happening constantly. I don’t even know what political system is supposed to make that work, and I don’t really give a fuck which one it takes, I just want that to be the case.

Yeah, pretty much, that’s pretty much all I’ve said, yeah

Unfortunately, after a year of witnessing their entire ethnicity being written off as an acceptable casualty in the name of international diplomacy and foreign lobbying, they’ve become numb and just stopped caring.

The craziest part of this to me is that this isn’t the first time this has happened since it’s started like… since the country has been founded. So the fact they’re really still willing to engage politically at all is a pretty good testament to their character, I would say.