✮✮✮ !Trump Dump! ✮✮✮

RippedPhreak on 23/12/2024 at 18:19

Quote:

one particular brand of beer was sold in a store at cheaper price than another brand (they had the same quality) but people preferred to buy the most expensive one.

Hey, if advertising didn't work at least some of the time, there wouldn't be $billion$ dedicated to it. Might not be so straightforward though. Can you really look at two beers and know "these two have the same quality?" I can't. It's down to a matter of taste isn't it?

Plus if I'm in a more upscale store for other things already, I might grab beer while I'm already there versus driving to another store to find the same beer that's 10% off the price.

lowenz on 23/12/2024 at 19:48

Quote Posted by Aja

If you don't think that some people can be persuaded to change their vote in the future, you have no business opining about politics. Because that's what politics is. Elections aren't opportunities to count how many good and bad people exist. They aren't excuses to cut off some of your family members or high-school classmates. They are serious political contests for power, won by persuasion and turnout.

If you don't believe in the capacity of some people to change their minds, you don't believe in social change at all, because that's the only way it happens. You have no theory of change, because there is no theory of change without such persuasion. And without a theory of change, there is no politics: elections and other news become nothing more than a site of trauma, from which we must, out of self-care, protect ourselves and withdraw.

Well, to me the ones believing this are 1) idiots 2) power hungry

Politics is about management, not engagement.
*Representative* Democracy is about engagement so it's not politics, it's a power game where the chessboard is the institutions body (the one anarchists like me want to smash). It's a self-perpetuating monster and totally inhuman, being really a machine using humans as its agents teasing them with the "rights" bait.

demagogue on 23/12/2024 at 20:39

I wouldn't call half the country stupid. I'd say they were intentionally lied to on issues they've never studied.
And it's not benign lying, but because they're being transparently exploited and preyed on.

My disagreement with them often begins with the fact that I worry about my neighbors that support Trump and don't want to see them exploited any more than I want to see anyone exploited. To the extent I get upset, I'm pissed that they're being so flagrantly lied to and exploited. So it begins with care and concern about my fellow Americans.

Many of them believe that the 2020 election had rampant fraud. There were like 50 lawsuits on it, and I read the documentation for some of them (I recall the Michigan claim), which go into the 100s of pages each, that got down to the level of individual poll workers and machines, and even at that level they were scraping at a nothing burger.

What little irregularities they could found, which were by human error that you have in any human endeavor ever, were found and dealt with by election staff at the time. They want to believe there was fraud in the millions of people, and they couldn't even scrounge up evidence of individual instances of it in an election with over 100 million voters.

And they want to believe that tariffs and mass deportations of the majority of the country's agricultural and construction workers are going to make food and housing costs go down. The absurdity of that belief is something you should know already by high school economics. But that's what they were told, and they believe what they're told.

Anyway, everything is very open. They'll say if Trump had really committed a crime, he'd be in prison. He's not, so he must not have. If prices really would go up by tariffs, then these "economists" wouldn't be saying that they'll go down. If Trump was such a fraudster as you say, then he wouldn't have 70+ million people supporting him. They can't all be stupid.

Well I'll say they're right about something. When you have people disagreeing about even the simplest aspects of reality. Are egg prices going up or down? Was Trump really convicted a felony? Was the 2020 election really a fair election? There's no chance that both agree on what happened & they have a different interpretation. One side is most definitely completely wrong about everything they believe down to the fundamentals.

Tocky on 23/12/2024 at 22:47

Quote Posted by heywood

It's smug navel gazing and faux outrage for folks in the same bubble as them. I've said this before, calling people stupid does not bring them to your side. Calling them stupid harder just tunes them out. For contrast, let me give you a podcast from the Republican side. After you have watched both, tell me which is the stupid one.

First off, they are talking about two very different subjects, and second, Cody is being humorous while Erik is monotone boring as hell and never at any time comes to a point. He derives no conclusions. Erik seems more concerned with instilling a fear of China (and no mention of Russia) while throwing in vague, pointless, and frankly lying references to Obama and Biden as if they have anything to do with world bank loans or foreign shipping. Worse, it's a nebulous insinuation without any fact to back it up. Only an idiot would fall for that crap if they listened that far and I can tell you that only one percent of Republicans would listen halfway. He even referred to all the wars (without naming them) that started under Biden as if Biden had any hand in starting them. Who is stupid enough to fall for that crap? It's obvious Putin held off starting a war in Ukraine because his buddy Trump was in office and still feeding him intel and cooperating but as soon as he was out he did what he was always going to. No country in the world is afraid of or respects Trump. North Korea obtained intercontinental ability while Trump cooed about "love letters". What a farce.

So yeah, of the two Cody had the more concise and conclusive arguments. It helped that he was simply telling the truth and not trying to obfuscate using long winded jargon that came to no points. China is indeed taking advantage of the world bank and rules designed for developing countries... just as they were throughout the first Trump presidency. However voters here in the US are indeed stupid by a majority now. Of the two podcasts Cody had the more salient points. Simply stating a problem and blaming it on your opponent while ignoring the same thing went on during the tenure of your own guy is not some intelligent conclusion. It's not a conclusion at all.

Starker on 23/12/2024 at 23:52

I've been listening to the Focus Group podcast of the Bulwark where various Lord Dampnut supporters outline their reasons for voting for him and it has become exceedingly clear that half the US is living in a completely different information ecosystem, one where opinions that appear to confirm their worldview are vastly more valuable than the truth.

If you have way more free time than you know what to do with: (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJNKzTkCZE9tbZqSKCntLzBTsiWPIHS89)

Tocky on 24/12/2024 at 14:22

Quote Posted by Starker

Dearlord I am so ashamed FOR these people because they haven't the wit to be ashamed for themselves. They seem completely oblivious of the fact the very institution they used to put him in power is the one that he tried to destroy with his lies the last time around. Worse they bemoan the state of our journalism without understanding they are falling for the worst most conspiracy spouting one sided tabloid trash. They say they are proud of his cabinet picks like Gabbard who is a puppet and promoter of Putin being in charge of the very agency meant to protect us from expansionist authoritarian dictators like Putin. They say they like RFK who falls for conspiracy nonsense based on non-science. And Ramaswamy who does the same, who believes vaccines cause autism and refuses to listen to actual science, is now going to head medicine. The inmates are running the asylum and these utter idiots are cheering.

We are consistently being shot in the foot and voting in those doing the shooting. Make no mistake WE ARE IDIOTS.

WE ARE STUPID and have shown there is no doubt about it. What is it that we should do, ignore that?

Cipheron on 24/12/2024 at 19:21

Quote Posted by heywood

I see he's doubling down on the "You're stupid!" approach to convincing hearts and minds. Only this time, he set his sights wider. Not only are Republicans stupid, but Democrats too. And this episode is delivered with an extra helping of condescending and passive-aggressive sarcasm. If you're not in the bubble, his videos are unwatchable.

Well i pulled the transcript. From the intro:

Quote:

the most obvious and pressing are people stupid. Great question surprisingly the
answer is mostly no the American people aren't stupid

Quote:

people are however generally very ignorant when it comes to politics like a lot of us including we here often forget that most people aren't weird political nerds and I think after Trump's first Victory a lot of people just assumed that Americans when faced with what was presented as an aberration would become more involved but it turns out that Trump did the opposite of that at least according to the data

Quote:

the majority of political posts on Twitter an already Niche sample came from just 10% of users so that's a fraction of a fraction of people meanwhile most people at this time were either casual followers of politics or completely checked out by the end of 2023 and at the start of the election everyone was exhausted by politics and had a generally negative view of both candidates

Quote:

but rather I'm being dismissive of me of us of political junkies who can often times forget that most people aren't as plugged in and in fact want nothing more than to tune it out

So his whole argument is that people aren't 'stupid' but they've tuned it out and aren't paying attention. But they get **labeled** as stupid.

The part about the Democrats is pointing out that Democrats lose when they try to frame themselves as "Republicans Lite" and talk about maintaining the system. Maintaining the system isn't working for people so if you build your campaign around that people are not going to be excited to turn up. The two most successful campaigns were Clinton 1992 and Obama 2008, and the theme of both was "change". Change sells.

Harris actually watered down some of the more progressive change-based policies she was planning to run on due to corporate pressure, that's what happened. But they try to blame Democrats voters who stayed home in 2024 but not in 2020. It'll either be that 'Republicans are just stupid' or the Democrat voters are stupid or ungrateful, or that they were 'too nice to the wokes' - so trans people or pronouns cost the election. Never that the policies the Democratic leadership are pushing needed any fixing.

Fundamentally the issue about the Democrats is that the insiders are refusing to admit or consider that their campaign was anything but perfect, and are basically trying to claim that everyone else is the problem. That the core issue Cody is talking about, here's a Rollingstone article making the same points:

(https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/kamala-harris-what-went-wrong-1235183829/)

Pyrian on 24/12/2024 at 19:43

I think there's some irony in a video declaring that people aren't stupid, they're just tuned out, being described as a video calling people stupid by a guy who's definitely not stupid and clearly tuned it out.

Tocky on 24/12/2024 at 20:33

Nah. I think it is stupid to be tuned out when so much is at stake in the US and the world. It works out the same. When we put morons in charge we are the morons.

Nicker on 27/12/2024 at 19:06

It's getting a bit old, blaming the left because a bunch of crooks on the right convinced their "poorly educated" base to vote against their own best interest.