I don’t know, more conservatives have gone after Trump than anyone.

Ohio is such a weird state. It is notorious for being an unpleasant place to live and I have met dozens of Ohioans who are very pleased to live anywhere else. That being said I disproportionatly have enjoyed the company of the Ohio refugees I’ve met. It has a way of exporting some cool people

You’re onto a very important aspect of fascist rhetoric. The lies have to be absurd. They have to be obviously wrong. They need the kind of people who are looking to belong to something greater than themselves, not people who look for evidence. Lies like these are a great filter to end up with uncritically loyal followers. Same as any cult.

Sartre wrote about the tendencies of anti-semites in 1944 who followed a similar model of “belief” to contemporary conservatives. Here’s a breakdown of that essay.

I think you’re making a similar mistake that I have made many times, which is to assume that others are putting more thought into their decisions and beliefs than they actually do.

Among the conservatives, there are a handful of bad actors who are aware of the grift and are deliberately lying to promote themselves and their scam enterprises. The rest of the conservatives are using the cultural practice derived from a religious and/or nationalistic upbringing to uncritically have “faith” in whatever the party line is. Regardless of intelligence, if someone is vulnerable to group dynamics like this (also existing in other cults), it is more important to conform and receive validation from the group than it is to pointlessly research whether or not the group’s belief is true and risk ostracisation.

It’s not really falling for conspiracies, it’s more like conforming to cult beliefs. Conservatives don’t really understand the things they say or why they believe what they do.

I am getting very, very sick of the trend of Democrats spending more time trying to appeal to bigoted conservatives than trying to actually represent their own constituents or help the people they ostensibly care about.

Clinton made it ok, Obama made it cool, and since 2016 it’s been tradition for the Democrats. Citizens United made our elections into a bidding war and the Democrats are often pretty frank that courting billionaires is about not getting outspent by Republicans. As long as they represent the cause of the problem most leftists are concerned about by accepting bribes, they figure they might as well go for conservatives since they seem easier to convince of things.

The mistake they’re making of course is that conservatives don’t get convinced by rhetoric or appeals, they get convinced by the strong looking one who promises to defend them from all the scapegoats. They can’t out scapegoat the Republicans about the border wall and it’s a little insulting that they thought they could, but it’s better to them than risking their funding by being ethical in our hopelessly corrupt system.

It’s a classic trolley problem. For many American voters it’s a choice between their family members being murdered or more of their family members being murdered. Pull the lever to set the trolley on track to kill fewer of your family members.

The thing about the trolley problem is that it is far from unanimous how people react to being put in that position. There are many people who will not pull the lever to deliberately endorse the murder of their family members even if it means that more of their family will be killed. It is more for politicians to react to the sensibilities of their constituents than it is for constituents to conform to the desires of their politicians. It’s Kamala’s election to lose. Fortunately and unfortunately she’s very flexible and reacts to pressure. Never let up.

You know, Hamas is coming after the US next, and once they start attacking Americans, there’s no turning back.

This is a scary comment. The comment this was in response to indicated it was wrong to commit genocide on Palestinians. Instead of even making an attempt to redefine or minimize the genocide, this comment instead argued that the genocide would be functional. It is functional to commit genocide on Palestinian people to prevent “Hamas is coming after the US next.” Nevermind that this doesn’t even make sense to argue at all, just the fact that it was offered as a justification for genocide should create a moment of pause for anyone following along.

Is it voters’ fault for not voting correctly, or is it Democrats’ fault for directly spiting voters and asking for their vote anyway? Democrats may never know…

If there’s an impasse, spending millions of dollars trying to get conservatives to vote for Democrats has proven to be a losing strategy. Even the series of hints the Kamala campaign is dropping at wanting to do the right thing is getting voters riled up especially among younger people. It’s worth taking the risk of being less corrupt.

For no particular reason I’ll leave a parody of one of my favorite poems here:

Trump’s presidential campaign wasn’t racist.
And if it was, it hardy had any effect on the election.
And if it did, it was really more about class than racism anyway.
And if it was actually about race, I wouldn’t obfuscate that.
And if I did, I’m not racist.
And if I am, it’s only because you talk about racism so much.

Donald Trump sure did in 2016.

Never forget that when you are speaking to someone who strongly identifies with American Conservatism, you are speaking to a child in an adult body. You can’t have the same expectations that you would have of a mature adult. The fact that anyone would see this as an effective “attack” who is over the age of 8 is embarrassing.

I am feeling the Kamala campaign like I was feeling the Biden presidency up until October 2023. A series of pleasant surprises.

The only thing capital C Conservatives are trying to conserve are prejudices.

She is still saying that and probably will continue to. Kamala is not someone to ever support uncritically. She’s a politician who is thinking strategically and has been known to publicly suspend her ostensible personal morals in the interests of the state (such as when she legally defended the death penalty while stating she personally opposed it at the same time). This is not a person to put faith in, this is a politician who just indicated she is willing to give on this position in return for political support. It’s not enough yet but this is significant progress in my opinion.

It’s a major rhetorical shift for sure and Biden would certainly never have done this. I want to see a lot more progress so hopefully they get the attention they need from this feeler to take some next steps.

The Supreme Court members who made this decision are in official act range right now at this moment. Donald Trump is in official act range at this moment as well. Not to draw conclusions but I’m not sure how serious the Democrats are about staying in power.

I would like to see this poll again with “no one” as an option. No one won anything at this debate. Anyone pleased by Trump’s performance would have been pleased no matter what, and everyone else is horrified.

This could be this decade’s Citizen’s United. Neo-liberalism especially among the court has been whittling away at the economy of regular people and the ability of the government to regulate business since at least the 70’s. Privatization never stopped or even abated, regulatory capture has been common, and businesses themselves write the bills for the congresspeople whose campaign they bankrolled to pass quid pro quo. We already have a severe lack of regulation and now we’re going to have no regulation. We just handed the entire country over to a class of gangsters whose morals are exactly the same as Donald Trump’s but wield a much greater degree of violence domestically and worldwide.

Good for Goldman Sachs