Yeah, but if she held up a sign saying “people can grill vegetables too” then we wouldn’t be talking about it. Controversy sells clicks and drives engagement…

True dat.

I find that thinking people from all walks of life can get along with one another extremely well - by simply not being a jerk:-) - whereas even people from the same tribe/religion/belief/whatever cannot get along with one another or even deal with being alone, bc toxicity is painful.

It is naive to ignore people’s stated preferences in favor of what we ourselves might wish to happen. Man vs. Bear… it’s their choice, not ours, even if we “know better”.

I know more women who support Trump than men who do.

Then brace yourself for what is coming along with Project 2025… hard times are ahead for those who value Truth over Authority.

It does help though… it helps them. And that’s an important distinction that we would do well to recognize.

When a lion wants to eat you, b/c it is hungry or maybe it just wants to fatally bat you around for fun, it is not the lion’s job to not eat you - it is our job to not allow it to do so, or at least make our best attempt.

I am also not certain that this fight can be “won”. It most certainly can/will not if we do not even try.

Even so, there is value in learning things. Whatever comes after America will be rough, and it behooves us to wake the fuck up and face that rather than go back to sleep.

More to the point, it is more fun to live life awake and facing forward, than to have to constantly anticipate bad things that are inevitably coming but we have no idea when or how or what precisely it will look like. Maybe it won’t even be all that bad? But we’ll only know that if we look at it with our eyes.

But back to the fun aspect: why be Sisyphus, constantly struggling against things that we have no control over, when we can focus our attention on the things we can control? We cannot control “them” - we never will be able to control “them” - so why worry about it? That seems counterproductive. Instead, focus on what we can control, and the motivation returns. There is no spoon. No, seriously, there isn’t: we could only ever control ourselves, that’s it and that’s all that was ever possible, anywhere, at any time.

Another neat thing: when the USA broke away from England, it spawned an entire rash of similar actions in other colonies that gave the middle finger to the English kings, and other nations likewise ditched their own kings of their respective colonial empires as well (e.g. France). We inspired the entire fucking world. As Rome did before us. Even after we fall, nobody is taking that legacy away - it will live on for thousands of years when all of us have long since died, of causes natural and/or otherwise.

Moreover, they have updated to Democracy 2.0, while we remained mired in our 1.0 version, and really having downgraded even from that by allowing devolution into a 2-party system that brought us to this point. Maybe after a time we can import some of those newer democratic systems back in, if fascism replaces democracy and then democracy replaces that fascism, and we can have a bright shiny Democracy 3.0 then. Though one thing is for certain: Democracy 1.0 has already failed - not will fail in some future sense, but already. Either that or we can at least not be blamed overmuch for thinking thus, given how fatally we seem to be wounded lately.

Focus on what you can control. There is no spoon - only ourselves.

By that token though, are there any true leftists alive or dead that ever existed on planet earth? The issue with such an ideological purity test is that it keeps shifting around, forever trying to distinguish the pure and correct ones from those on the periphery who are somehow worse than those entirely outside bc these at least should have known better. I’m not even saying that you are wrong - obviously there’s a spectrum and obviously some people are more along it than others, but I’m saying that that entire mode of thinking is problematic in the practical sense. Example: isn’t my very own message hypocritically doing exactly this, and I would have done far better to have been more accepting of your words? 😜 So it’s like the trolly problem: not meant to find a practical solution, just something to consider in case it’s fun to do so.:-)

It is not meant for, nor aimed at, them. Rather it is to help liberals become woken up to the fact that conservatives aren’t merely temporarily displaced liberals themselves, who simply need a slight course correction and then they’ll be eternally grateful for being shown to be wrong (as we would in reverse), but rather how they think fundamentally, foundationally, in an entirely different manner.

And everything gets filtered by that worldview. Hence, even someone who was personally raped by Trump himself may still vote for him, believing not in “him” but in how he can be strategically useful to their cause of returning America to a state that never existed for us where an emperor can do whatever he wants, and somehow that’s what will make us great (again?). Just like how Russia is “great” and “strong” now - you know, in spite of literally all of the evidence to the contrary.

But lest my message get lost here: Innuendo Studios isn’t poking fun of conservatives for ignoring literally all of the facts that contradict their worldview and instead believing in their fantasical magical wonderland - rather, it helps liberals realize that we are the ones who are ignoring literally all of the facts that contradict our worldview and instead believing in our fantasical magical wonderland, e.g. where Bernie Sanders had some kind of a ghost of a chance at winning despite bucking the system of powerful elites, or that Hillary would win so easily that she didn’t even need to bother campaigning in the Midwestern states (beyond bringing hot sauce in her purse), or that people are so scared of Trump that Biden is a shoe-in despite not having earned people’s votes or being able to finish a sentence. We will receive our rude awakening, once again, and as always we will blame not enough people for voting or whatever tidbit lies easily within reach - anything rather than own up to the fact that irl reality is hard, and might involve some actual effort to understand, both others, and most especially ourselves.

You know that little boy near the end of Sixth Sense whispering “I see dead people, walking around like regular people - they don’t know they’re dead!”? Imagine instead that he said “we are the same, conservatives and liberals - other-group-person=bad but same-group-person=good, ignoring any inconvenient facts to the contrary”. This is why we’re fucked up the ass, and so easily led like sheep by the billionaires - bc we refuse to learn, from either failures or success, and instead merely tell stories to convince ourselves of the rightness of our respective causes, since we enjoy those calm stories more than the harshness and complexity of reality.

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar … Not with a bang, but…

- https://allpoetry.com/the-hollow-men

Thank you for the correction - it is Amazon that has 2 trillion and Tesla 1 trillion, but Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk themselves each have only ~0.2 trillion, so billionaires not trillionaires indeed. My words would carry more weight if I were more careful slinging them around:-).

While technically true, and for more reasons than you displayed knowledge of in the comments below (e.g., we really seem more of a “plutocracy”, where regardless of which side gets elected, the wealthy get their way outside of the legal system), it is also besides the point. We used to have more elements of democratic choices, like we were at least on the spectrum. Until Monday at least…

(1) trillionaires (such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk) bought out the media - “prime time news” no longer exists, as it used to, now instead we have advertising segments meant to increase profitz

(2) the christians do not care - as evidenced by the fact that they already know. They just used him to accomplish their ends, of restricting abortion and whatever. Authoritarians just don’t think in terms like right or wrong, and rather what am I told to feel about this or that?

(3) also, yes they are THAT MUCH against the LGBTQIA+ “agenda” (of living life free from outside interference) that they could have watched the event happen live, heard her screams, and still vote for Trump. Some would still vote that way even if he had done it personally to them. It is an entirely different mindset, and we would do well to listen to it, rather than be surprised a few months from now (as we were before in 2016).

(4) if you want to understand it moar better-er, the best teacher I’ve seen is The Alt Right Playbook, by Innuendo Studios - I recommend starting at the beginning and going all the way through it, but the most relevant one to this discussion I think is this one.

TLDR: they know, they don’t care in the slightest - truly.

Trump barely appointed those judges even, so much as Mitch McConnell held up their appointments so that the next, Republican, president could fill them.

At a guess, they seem to have been saying something like how the President should have pushed harder. Like if not on this exact issue, then on ending the special rules for filibustering, so as to be able to break through that Republican wall of obstructionism while the Dems had some amount of power. i.e. they are both bad, if not quite equally so, but the grown-ups i.e. tribal same-side are held to a higher level of responsibility than the children i.e. tribal other people-group bad. Which isn’t quite the same as saying that Dems are always wrong, just that they share in their level of responsibility too, for not fixing things.

And tbf this SCOTUS ruling on Monday seems to have been a game-changer. The excuse “but we can’t do anything about it” rings more hollow now, even if it was previously true.

Though it all seems a moot point anyway. At this point it looks like there’s an extremely good chance of Trump winning, or if by some freak occurrence not then as long as that ruling remains we’ll simply punt forward the end of democracy for another 4 years - which is itself a lie b/c from now on, democracy is already over, and instead of a President we now have elected emperors/god-kings. Man this is depressing:-(.

Oh yes, I earned these particular downvotes, to be sure.:-) But I was talking about OP.

It does make it hard to have intelligent discussions on Lemmy when we cannot handle anything other than strict agreement to whatever the crowd-think happens to fall upon that day.

Hey, first, my apologies. I read your graphic as being in response to the OP, maybe I had my screen zoomed in a little but while my point still stands I think, it has more than a little bit different emphasis to it in that case.

Anyway, I wholeheartedly agree that the leader needs to LEAD. Which is why, regardless of partisan politicking, if Biden or his advisors assess that he is too weak to do the job anymore, for whatever reason (sickness, maybe he was poisoned even, I’m not trying to start a conspiracy here just saying that regardless of anything that would be his “fault”), then part of the job is that he step down in such a case?

Risking things is good and all, when done properly. But stepping down in such a case would not be “timidity”, so much as being genuinely honest with oneself about the realities of the particular situation under consideration. i.e. these aren’t merely butterflies in one’s stomach i.e. performance anxiety that needs to be overcome - this is real, actual risk assessment of pros vs. cons for each of the paths forward, and strategically picking the one that offers the highest likelihood of success.

Steadfastness is a virtue, but stubbornness is a weakness. Hold fast to what is true, not refuse to budge merely bc you have no capacity to do otherwise.

Good points. I was thinking along the lines that youth votes might enjoy someone who could finish uttering a sentence, which neither of the current candidates can, really. And then the like 10 other people across the entire nation that because of the Electoral College, get to decide our collective fates.

There is a famous saying: “the buck stops here”.

It means that when someone is in charge, they assume responsibility for whatever happens under their command, rather than whinging about it being not their fault.

Trump seems to have never heard of this quote. However, that is irrelevant now bc as a former President, what are we expecting of him? Rather, we have expectations for the current one, which are either being met or they are… not.

Your graphic does not explain why it is not the job of a leader to do things to protect the democracy of this nation?

Oh well, soon enough there may not be political parties anymore and we won’t have to worry about any of this.