Evangelicals are now the inmates who have taken over the asylum.

I mean, not that I’m pro-this scenario, but I don’t think in this hypothetical there would be anyone who would take on Russia, china, and the US. More like “whatever you three are doing…I guess we’re doing too.”

One could make the argument that the leftists are right, and the people who keep supporting the democrats as they continually walk us down the path toward collapse are the ones that are slurping up propaganda about the system being able to save itself.

Look at the long list of anarchist and leftist thinkers. They’ve been ignored and shunted off to the side since the late 1800s. Arrested, killed, devastated by state propaganda. Assassinated, vilified.

All the while, democrats have been walking hand in hand with the republicans, defending the rotting corpse of capitalism as it drags us all under. We’ve had answers as to why so many are suffering. But those answers are a threat to the ownership class and the prevailing order. And I would argue that not upturning that order, instead opting to vote for the “lesser of two evils” no matter what, is 50% responsible for the situation we’re in.

You said it yourself. You want spineless, feckless, out of touch leaders so that we can avoid spiteful, hateful leaders. The spineless, feckless out of touch bunch was courting the spiteful hateful bunch. Because throughout history, liberals will reach for the fascists when the cry for true change to help the people become deafening. Look at France. Right now. The liberal, trying to hold onto power and the standing order, formed a coalition with the right wing, instead of the left wing that won the majority of the votes. Look at Harris, parading around the fuckin Cheney family when people were really just asking them to stop slaughtering children in Gaza and the West Bank.

Isn’t following that same path, regardless of the recorded history of a fascist outcome the more likely candidate for “slurping up propaganda?” Blaming the electorate for their entirely reasonable wants being ignored.

This is exactly how fascists have come to power. Through a desire to maintain the status quo and an uneasy alliance between liberals and the right wing. Defenders of the status quo thinking it’s better to go fascist than to challenge the prevailing order. Blaming the people who want real change when the people you were voting for lurched right is the definition of succumbing to a propaganda campaign.

You can’t say that it didn’t contribute at all. I don’t think anyone is. And if they are, they’re stupid. But trying to boil it down to just that answer is even more stupid.

Harris retained more male Biden voters than female.

Capitalism is eating people alive. And people are fuckin sick of it. The democrats are the one party that actually pretends to try to appear to be on the “right” side, but will throw the working class under their campaign bus the minute the big money donors pull on their strings. So the betrayal people feel from the dems is fuckin palpable.

That, I think, is the biggest contributor. We are told they are the ones that will actually do good, but then get in office and “stay the course,” so their voters turn on them. Then we get people like trump and bush in office, and people are disgusted, so we hold our noses and vote for the democrats. But they’re Lucy and we’re Charlie Brown, and the cycle starts all over again. Meanwhile, the Overton window keeps lurching to the right, capitalism scorches the earth and robs us blind, and we all get more desperate. People are angrier than ever, and feel even more betrayed because it’s increasingly clear to more and more people that we have no one in our corner.

But here come the democrats again, telling us we’re on the right path, that we just have to trust them and their incrementalism nonsense while they try to court some nonexistent right-leaning swing voter. They fucked up bad on that last point this go round. They turned their backs on us in a big way to parade the Cheneys around telling us they were going to put republicans in the White House even if the democrats win? What in the fuck were they thinking?

Yes you do. We all do.

She was progressive by saying she would saying she would have a Republican in her cabinet. So…”progress…?”

Not to mention, Kamala kept a higher percentage of biden’s male voters than female.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/XUI7E/

They lost anyone left of bush. They offered no vision for the future except “you guys good now? Because we’re doin’ more of this with a few republicans in the cabinet! Vote for me?”

Kamala actually retained more male Biden voters than female.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/XUI7E/

Exactly. I don’t fear becoming a minority at all. I’ve lived in countries where I was a minority as a white person. I…didn’t really register that fact. I knew one other white person that lived there.

These people are sick. It’s like the people who think everyone must be repressing their gay urges and that attractive gay people are dangerous because it makes repressing those feelings harder. Like…bro. You’re gay. That’s cool. None of us are going to treat you any differently. Only people who think it’s some curable disease will. People…like you.

You’re just racist, my dude. Those of us who aren’t…don’t care about becoming minorities. I think it would give us some fuckin character, honestly. White majority nations main characteristic is, like, genocide and colonialism. Nah, I’m good.

I’m not going deny that there were certainly sexist people that wouldn’t vote for a woman. But I don’t think I can agree it was the difference between winning and losing.

I think it’s much, much more likely that the progressive voting bloc that was able to start winning the primaries in 2020 and was railroaded by the party (twice) that’s been completely shunted off to the side in favor of some mythical swing Republican voter is very much the reason.

They think putting a woman of color up as the candidate would be enough to win that bloc. Which goes to show the root of the problem. It’s the rainbow capitalist issue. “If we slap a pride flag on the person of color we got as our new representative and change our single bathroom signs to say ‘all gender,’ we’ll be in the right! We’ll fool those hippies and socialist dirtbags yet!”

This has failed them. Over and over. The most thinking people of the entire country (biased opinion, I grant) aren’t easily appeased. Things were so bad in 2020 that bloc mostly held their noses to vote for Biden. And they figured running against trump was the only ammunition they needed to lock down that bloc and they could hold them no problem while also courting the neocons!

They are funding a genocide. Basically perpetrating it. They were going to have to bend over backwards to get anyone left of Biden to vote for them. And they unquestionably didn’t. They basically told us to go fuck ourselves. Again.

And they fucked themselves by doing so.

Say you get two choices.

One is to poison a town’s water supply without telling them.

The other is poison that towns water supply, not tell them, and then pick off survivors as they flee from the town.

Can you stomach voting for poisoning a town’s water supply if you’re firmly against poisoning people, just because anyone fleeing the town would be able to leave if they managed to survive? That’s the choice we were being asked to make. I get that it’s definitely worse to shoot the survivors, but in the end…either way your vote was to poison people. Some people have strong feelings about it. So strong they couldn’t stomach being the ones to sign on to it.

We all know it’s worse adding the slaughter of the fleeing survivors…but signing your name to the poisoning is unthinkable for a lot of people. It kinda should be unthinkable for all of us.

And you’re just saying “well, all you people are racist!”

See how silly that is?

Nuance, man.

No, you’re still not getting it. And I wasn’t the original person you were arguing with. I voted for Harris, but there is so much nuance involved in the decision that writing it all off as racism is beyond stupid and helps no one but you—the same way the “I won’t vote for Harris because it’s a vote for ____” people were only doing it for themselves. Basically, it’s a glass house and stones situation. You’re both guilty of the same thing.

Translation: “I’m not listening or even willing to pretend to engage in nuance! Which means YOURE RACIST!”

It’s been swinging right since about 2012, worldwide. This is a symptom of that disease. The world has been falling more and more to right wing authoritarian fear mongering and xenophobia. Across Europe, the South Pacific, South America, Africa. Literally every continent has been swinging to the right and flirting with that doomsday trend of falling to fascist takeovers every, like, 80 years or so. And it’s back. Like some fucking cancer you just can’t beat.

Just frame it as “Muslim” and the right will get it done for you. They do love voting against their own interests.

So, so, so much of this is the Israel/palestine issue. I cannot imagine it’s different. Especially when you talk about younger people and college educated voters.

But it’s not just because people care about it. It’s that it was a massive, opportunistic wedge issue that people looking to depress turnout used to bolster trumps chances. I’m not going to say who those people were that wanted to see this change, but the amount of people I’ve seen talking about it online, the amount of people I’ve talked to in person who just didn’t vote and cited the genocide…there’s no doubt in my mind it was Kamala’s silence until literally yesterday about “doing everything in her power to end the war in Gaza” that really put the nail in the coffin for her. And even that is light language (the day before Election Day, no less) when discussing genocide. But you see, those of us who care about it had this button purposefully pressed for us in order to hurt Kamala’s chances. Even when I’m describing that situation, I have a hard time not framing it as the legitimate issue it is. Because it’s a massive issue. A fuckin holocaust is happening before our eyes.

But things are about to get much, much worse for those people. Because the internet stoked the (very legitimate) feelings of anger. It’s not a solution to blow the entire situation up so you can say “well I didn’t vote for genocide.” It’s happening. And it’s about to get so much worse.

Well…all the battleground states that are most important and basically decide the election are all “leaning trump” or “most likely trump.” Like…literally almost all of them.

Something interesting I never considered: would branding, that is over in a second or two, really hurt more than a 2-4 hour tattoo?

Side note, has anyone seen that horrific video of the college kids branding each other and the one held the iron on someone’s chest for like 10 seconds and pushed down and you could actually see it sinking into the persons body?

It’s fucking vile and I had finally forgotten about it but now I just remembered and I fuckin hate it

I was just talking about this book and the adaptation. Both excellent examples of their respective media types. And maybe the most faithful book adaptation I’ve ever seen.

I have some ether we can huff. Can you get up to upstate New York in the next 20 min