American democracy health thread

It seems appropriate the Supreme Court is listening to arguments related to LGBT+ today (specifically T). No doubt they will decide on the side of the anti-trans people, just to give us a preview of what is to come for the LGBT+ community. Trump made hostility to the trans community a central feature of his campaign, and there are enough anti-gay, anti-trans people out there who are more than happy to see us suffer that they were more than happy to vote for a dictator-want-to-be (or willing to sit it out because they can't give a damn about our lives).

 

Dear Jesus. This sucks.

I wish you happiness and serenity. And stay out of the Trump Supporter’s Thread!

 

I saw some Pew survey info from not too long ago that 30% of American adults could pass a basic civics quiz and 28% could pass a basic science assessment (graph interpretation, cause/effect, hypothesis, do antibiotics work on viruses, etc). So maybe 25% pass both. I imagine if we tacked on a critical thinking assessment we could get that 25% below 20%. And when we get into things like climate change, vaccines, obstacles to getting legislation passed, how courts influence policy and equal protection, etc people need that basic knowledge.

Combine that with the fragmented mediascape where some venues are probably 95/5 on the side of the less informed and some are probably 20/80 on the side of the more informed and everything in between…not promising.

 

That is an amazing career and achievement @Sounders78. I know it is not an easy decision and I fell for you. All the best in your chapter in life.
I have a few friends and acquaintances who are actively planing to leave the country. A lesbian couple that I know in Maryland has made the firs steps to move to Spain in the next couple of months. They are petrified of what could happen to their marriage under this new regime.

 

You sound like my college-aged son who was waffling on voting for Kamala because of her "stance on Gaza" Sonny, I hate to break it to you, but our pols are almost exclusively behind whatever Israel does. He's young so he expects a presidential candidate to tick all the boxes. What's your excuse?

 

In another thread, @The Jitty Slitter mentioned this interview:

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/michael-weiss-and-thomas-zimmer-competent

I just listened to it. Yes, it's worth a listen.

 

Yeah, the Trump Error is a thumb in the eye of common decency, but you'll be better off. Marriage equality could be going bye-bye at some point in the near future and violence against LBGTQ folks is not out of the question.

I'll get thru the holidays OK and then by mid January will be dreading what's coming down the pike as the Shitshow Part II kicks into gear.

 

Yeah, the uptick in violence is inevitable. The main question is not whether or not it will get bad, but rather how bad it will get.

 

Yes the stupidity is spreading. I hang out with of course members of the black community and the elders didn't vote for him but they admitted some of their kids did.

What we realized is for a large section of them, they do not understand economics and the only language that they really have is the cost of things. So the idea that things would be cheaper if we weren't spending money in Ukraine to them make sense. Or we're wasting money we could be spending on citizens giving it to illegals. They do not have the ability to fully explain and understand their economic wage issues, lies with a lot of policies that limit how much people can earn and where they can work. So the whole process of fair wages and how to fight for those rights seem a lot more complicated.

Not to mention Economic ignorance of the populace of how long policies take to take affect.

 

Fly safe, fly true. Enjoy your retirement.

 

The right wing folks certainly aren't dumb.

They are in position to dominate politics for 50 years because the left is too myopic, insular, and frankly ignorant to understand what their actions look like from the outside.

The left doesn't have to talk about how everyone else is stupid. Their policies scream it from the rooftops. "We're going to price you out of your car because there's a magic climate god we have to make sacrifices to or she will destroy us; you can't buy a house because you don't give politicians enough money to compete with international investors; we're going to ship in a bunch of folks from india to take your job because you're too demanding and racist, lets make meat more expensive because the climate god says so; your kids need to be forced to view porn in school because we don't have kids of our own but we know better and we want you to know who's in charge; we're going to use the institutions to ruin innocent peoples lives because they are in the way of our agenda; we're mean white women against the white colonizer but we are going to colonize your culture and change your heritage to Latinx because you have the oppressive gender binary embedded in it...on and on and on.

The left has absolutely no idea what they look like from the outside. Totally ignorant. I mean... the left created institutions to create more walls of ignorance around themselves by using censorship to eliminate competing ideas. They don't realize what that looks like to anyone with a functional brain. They look like weak fascist tyrants.

The number of Democrats that the modern left has turned into Trump supporters is shocking. Democrats are so smart that they replaced people like Gabbard, Musk, Andreessen, Sacks, and Rogan with Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney, Victoria Nuland, and John Bolton. Smart.

They attacked hispanic culture and institutions (including openly targeting Christians, particularly Catholics, with their secret police) and were surprised when they lost nearly 30% of the hispanic/latino vote. Smart.

Here's the craziest one of all...young people who watched Democrats force them into lockdown, who listen to leftists do nothing but push the narrative that the future is going to suck and that they will own nothing and be happy...those young people are more right wing than anything we have seen in this country in a long time, and after Trump has success and they see what its like to have a little freedom and opportunity crack open the hopeful door into their future, the country will change for multiple generations. And its not going to be to the left.

You guys have yet to see just how extensive your loss really is, How deep to the root it goes. Why? Because you thought you didn't have to look...it was beneath you to look. In doing so you have made yourselves irrelevant.

Everyone understands the left very well. The left just doesn't understand much outside their circles.

The next democrat winner wont be like Obama. They'll be like Trump.

 

Thanks for proving my point about education and poor understanding of civics and the economy. Now please don't quote me again, it was physically painful reading someone so ignorant about so many things.

 

I have read quite a few comments from magats lately, they are generally bigoted, ill-informed and stupid but this dude takes the cake. I mean, how can someone operates in the normal world while being so pathologically ignorant? This is a special kind.....

 

From what I have seen from the more vocal MAGA supporters, their biggest gripe is that they were called stupid.

And then they keep talking and show why they were called stupid.

 

So like a Trump of the Left?

 

"Well stupid wins elections now so neener-neener!"

MAGAts

 

I don't agree with this point. If neither candidate in an election is attractive enough for me to vote for, why would I join either of their electoral coalitions? As a citizen of a Republic, my vote needs to be earned, not taken for granted.

 

This talk about uneducated this or that is anti-democratic.

This take would so not fly in South America. It would be absolutely trashed. Less than a hundred years ago many of our countries did not allow voting unless you could read or write. Indeed, Brazil did not allow it until 1984. This was rightly identified as disenfranchisement and thankfully the vote is now universal. Anybody complaining about intelligence this or uneducated that is rightfully outed as an elitist.

 

Because it's not just a candidate you are voting for, it's also a party. And that party will have a significant impact on your life and the lives of people around you. When one candidate and party are threatening physical harm on millions of people, you do have a moral obligation* to cast a vote, even if you don't like the individual candidates.

*unless, of course, you are a narcissist and lack any semblance of morality.

 

Not in absolute terms, but one big divide in the vote right now is educated (56-42 in favor of Harris) vs uneducated (56-43 in favor of Trump). [Usual disclaimers that not all educated people are smart and not all non-educated people are dumb.]

 

This is a particularly sensitive issue in Bolivia and our political and social environment has become the focus of a lot of recent anthropological study over the last couple of decades. There are multiple ways that uneducated and uniformed people figure out rational voting methods that benefit their group.

 

If you look at the Leopard ate my face thread, there are plenty examples of people not being smart enough to realize they were being played.

 

I would posit that voting against your interests just to stick it to the libs is not a smart move.