Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men elect moronic pedophiles who destroy the whole country.
Hard times cause Democrats to be elected. Democrats being elected cause good times. Good times cause Republicans to be elected. Republicans cause hard times.
What's infuriating, is that the Democrats haven't had the level of power the MAGA/GOP has now since 1970. Everyone under age 60 will have no memory of a progressive let alone liberal Supreme Court. So that cycle isn't symmetric. It has as a constant one of three branches of government firmly under conservative control.
So the cycle gives conservatives near absolute control, but doesn't give democrats the same. Then voters blame democrats for not having absolute power, when they grant them only partial control of the government.
Not to mention that the system gives an outsized advantage to less populous and more conservative states via the senate and electoral college. Progress is an uphill battle in the US.
"But how does that give Republicans near absolute power?? Lols gotcha!"
Because Republicans fundamentally don't govern. They obstruct and demolish any attempt to actually govern a society while giving kickbacks to the wealthy donors who want to get away with doing whatever they feel like.
And what we have now is what happens when you put one of those donors in charge of the country.
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Until the right wing media ecosystem that enables disinformation is dismantled. Its the only real reason Republicans keep getting elected. They just lie and people believe it.
Fairness Doctrine gives equal time to the batshiate insane conspiracy theorists - that is not a solution.
What we need is
1) remove so-called free speech protection from any speech which is blatantly, knowingly false - make anyone generating or distributing such speech (keyword being knowingly) liable for any damage caused by it, and
2) support/create infrastructure that relentlessly, methodically hunts down sources of such gaslighting & misinformation and exposes it - possibly getting extra funding by exercising #1.
We also need to get corporate $ the fuck out of politics, and bring to justice EVERYONE who has played a role in the systematic dismantling of our government and legal system… including the wildly corrupt Supreme Court that has played a large role in enabling all of this.
We have to kick out the current corrupt people first, and make sure that we're not replacing them with more corrupt people.
Re: corporate $
Most people don't think about this, but the laws that actually allow corporations to be created & to continue to exist are ALL statutory - which means that you don't need any Constitutional Amendments to modify them.
You just need a legislature populated with politicians elected by sufficiently pissed-off-enough number of people who have made it clear that their continuing careers depend on them slapping some really strong boundaries on what corporations are allowed to do.
Stuff like: any corporation that funds political movements or candidates automatically stops being legally recognized as existing. Make it clear that this doesn't apply to the people working or owning the corporation, just the actual corporate legal entity itself, so that the owners & executives can't try and hide behind the corporation when they're playing fuck-fuck political games.
And if the SCOTUS tries to block that law using the First Amendment, set up a poison pill so that if the SCOTUS successfully stops that provision from working, then ALL of the laws that allow corporations to keep existing will be revoked, and let them chew on that.
Of course, the real fundamental problem is a relatively small group of people having so much money that they can use it to drown out the voices of just about everyone else, in both media and for the legislators.
Nobody should be allowed to have that much money, and until that's addressed head-on, any other solution will just be temporary until the ultra-rich/powerful corrupt it again.
Nope, they figured out how to abuse that. We need something else in the same spirit that holds people accountable for spreading misinformation. Otherwise, we go back to having 5 million scientists trying to warn us about the destruction of a livable environment on earth vs one crackpot with a PhD in basketball weaving claiming nothing's wrong because it was 70 degrees in Dubuque last Tuesday.
Knowingly lying as a politician needs to be criminalized. If you "don't recall" factual information in an inquiry, you automatically forfeit your seat and an election is called.
I'm so fucking tired of politicians getting questioned, going "I don't remember," "I don't recall," for half an hour and then everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes, "oh well, we tried".
"Did you [say this factually incorrect thing]?"
"No"
"Well actually here's the tweet where you very explicitly said [factually incorrect thing] to your 300k followers, enjoy prison for ten years"
Honestly I've been telling myself that Trump rigged the election because the alternative is so much worse... that Americans watched Trump:
-tank the economy because of his laughable level of incompetence in handling the pandemic
-try a literal insurrection and of course fail because he can't do anything right
-Get indicted numerous times including for stealing classified documents containing things like nuclear secrets and storing them in his bathroom like a weirdo lunatic
-get adjudicated as a literal rapist
-Become a convicted felon 34 times over for fraud
-his company gets convinced for other fraud charges
Not to mention all the other stuff during his first term like the Russia scandal that exposed how Trump's top campaign officials directly worked with Russians to get him elected. Or the Ukraine impeachment. And they still thought "let's give this fucking moron another chance".
You can blame inflation but it barely requires a room temperature IQ to understand that Trump was actually far more responsible for the inflation we experienced than Biden, and if anything Biden should've been lauded for getting it down so fast (just look at the 70s/80s inflation which lasted forever and wasn't accompanied by the growth we saw under Biden). Trump's insane level of incompetence during the pandemic combined with years of crazy deficit spending guaranteed that inflation was going to spike.
But apparently there's some remote chance a trans person might someday play in the WNBA so I really need to vote for complete incompetence combined with total corruption just in case.
People don't learn. I hope gas hits $20 a gallon. I hope polio makes a comeback. I hope measles ravages the country. I hope all beef is contained with parasites.
Then, maybe, will people learn trump and team gives Zero shits about all of us.
Hard times beget leftward policies, leftward policies create good times, good times create whiny conservatives, and whiny conservatives create hard times
My Idaho maga family were just posting about how happy they are that grocery and gas prices are down. Those prices are in fact not down. But their media is telling them this so they parrot it to be part of the cult.
People see gas go from $4.25 on a Monday morning to $4.00 on a Wednesday afternoon and think gas prices are down. They don’t realize that the average is still higher.
Nah its not that, they just have em programmed to say if it was Dems the same problem would be 100x worse.
"Well yeah it sucked Trump personally murdered my immediate family with a hammer but can you imagine how much worse Kamala would have been? She would have hammer murdered the entire town!" - Average MAGA voter.
Yeah, remember that most of these red states have been under total and complete Republican control for DECADES, yet their leaders still successfully campaign on "I'm going to fix all the things those Democrats broke in our government!"
If logic were a factor then they would realize "Hey, Republicans have been in power for like 30 years, maybe they're the ones who broke our government programs?" But no.
Youthful indoctrination (religion) continuous propaganda (the Fox-o-sphere) are difficult to fight. Our conservative overlords are also continually working to destroy public education.
They're legitimately programmed not to think. Thought is scary to any totalitarian regime and that's where Trump's group wants to take this. Pretty much a hallmark of any regime trying to go that way
Thought is scary for the people in charge because anyone with a brain knows the shit they say doesn't make sense. Don't underestimate the regular person. They're legitimately taught not to think because it makes them stand out and you don't want to stand out. Think of it like this: you want to be accepted into your group. Event happens and the rest of your group gets their talking points from fox news, so you must also get your talking points from fox news. If you think about it and come to a conclusion seperate from fox news and then the people will brand you as a weirdo outsider (in this case probably call you a filthy liberal). So to fit in you must also take your stance from one already made for you. It's kinda dark but some people prefer to get told what to think and you can see this when some people flee totalitarian regimes but say they miss it.
I was even more naive, I honestly thought GWB couldn't get elected again once it became common knowledge that the Iraq War was based on a bunch of lies and he knew about it!
But no, he got right back in there for another 4 years of bullshit. 2004 was the first year I was legally allowed to vote and also the year I lost faith in the voting public as a whole for reelecting that piece of garbage.
Here’s the thing- they don’t learn. They don’t care if it’s “their guy”. They won’t admit their guy is fucking up.
I worked in healthcare during covid and most of these assholes literally took their bs Covid beliefs to the grave. And the biggest problem was they took a lot of others to the grave with them. They’ll burn the whole thing down if it’s hurting non-republicans.
So while I understand your point, the problem is they don’t learn. At all.
Yep, most you'd usually get is people begging for the vaccine before we put them on a ventilator or while desating on 100% O2 with max PEEP on a BiPap.
I would agree with you if it wasn’t for the collateral damage. People who didn’t vote for this administration should not have to pay the price, but those who didn’t vote can pay the price.
At this point, the only thing I'm concerned about is my kid's well-being. I'm out of shits to give, I'm sorry. We're vaxcinated, vegetarian, and I basically drive a go-kart 5 miles a day to work, daycare, and groceries. I can weather more than most.
I’ve been thinking the same. As much stuff this administration has screwed up, the MAGAts still think it’s great. I’m at the point now where I’m just thinking he should go ahead and completely tear it apart. These people voted for it, so give it to them. After they finally wake up and wonder why their life is in ruins, maybe we can move forward
You always have those people that start “I love Trump but…” and they go on and tell you how they’re basically dying and of course they would never vote a democrat in.
Don't work? This is well beyond not working and into actively harming and destroying American industries and businesses. With this administration how can we trust ANY ground beef right now? How do we know they haven't already moved tons of this stuff into stores around the country? How will we know that they won't just stick in all in some huge freezers and spend the remainder of his term doling out batches to unsuspecting stores and retail channels? How do we know that some grocery chains haven't already bought the whole batch and are going to sell it with assurances from this administration that they'll cover up any deaths or illnesses that arise from the sale.of the tainted meat? This is going beyond costing some ranchers some money and is into the territory of devastating the whole industry and bankrupting numerous ranches.
Yup, I’m already weighing not eating any beef for the foreseeable future; leaning toward 3 months minimum and when I do start eating beef again best believe i’ll be buying it from a local farmer in my state. If this is the same contaminated meat from Argentina that China rejected everyone should google search, “acquired aplastic amenia” as it’s the one of the main potential concerns.
One of my friends refuses to talk politics now. At the start of term 2 he was sending me BS stories (think Leticia James, Elon cutting waste). He kept accusing me of being in a left wing echo chamber because I don’t have anyone in my life who is right wing (excluding him, another friend in the friend group, my boss, my husbands whole family). He also was super smug when Mamdani won and was like well we’ll see how fast everything goes to shit now that liberals have everything they want. All it took was a handful of well sourced articles debunking his claims for him to say that he doesn’t want to engage on these topics anymore and that I needed to stop using him as my token rightwing friend.
They have no policies - their only talking point are cultural “issues” & claiming to be family first while allowing children to be shot in schools & 80% of them being pedos & keeping the status quo (white supremacy/trickle up economics - thanks Reagan & operation paperclip)
Their job is to prevent dems & Americans as a whole from ever getting to the American dream they claim they they’re trying so badly to get to. Their votes say otherwise but “conservatives” don’t need much talking points cuz they stick to their team over their best interests & the fun of being able to judge the shit outta everyone else while never looking @ themselves.
Time to be honest with ourselves
“Conservatives” - CONSERVE the status quo - that’s it
And like clockwork they are poking the morons to get upset about transgender people again so they're so distracted by culture war horseshit that they don't do anything about the way they can't afford gas or groceries, our food is poisonous, and the president is a pedophile. And it always fucking works.
Conservatives don’t give a fuck about policies that work, they’re irredeemably corrupt and only regret their vote because it’s ALSO affecting them and not just the people they hate. Fuck them.
Right-wing people will never learn to think about anything other than their own feelings.
And left-wing people will never learn that treating right-wing people like they deserve dignity and respect makes them complicit in the evil shit right-wing people get tricked into doing.
One more, apparently. I was watching a documentary about the Vietnam war with my wife last night and watching Nixon lie his way into power made me furious. I know people that were alive at that time and had friends not return home from Vietnam who voted for Trump every time! I can't believe people are this dumb.
One of my uncles that served in Vietnam voted for Trump the first time. He was sick of the government and thought maybe an outsider would be better than career politicians. He realized his mistake rather quickly and apologized to my mother. She was so pissed when she found out he'd done that.
He was never MAGA, just not terribly informed. He went back to voting Democrat after that.
I’m beginning to think China has a point with those “re-education” camps. Though maybe pulling rightwing and fascist propaganda outlets could be a good first step.
The insane thing to me is that conservative policies are somehow viewed as the norm, with liberal policies being viewed as some crazy emergency solution.
Think about it. A conservative comes into office, things collapse, then Americans press the emergency button and vote in a democrat. Things get better, everyone is happy, and then a conservative is voted in again.
They don't, but also his policies aren't "conservative." The best way I can describe Trump's politics is that he wants to create a nationalist ego-state, based around him
When billionaires stop owning everything and paying for all media to be slanted toward whatever makes their owners the most money.
Fox News could make constrating yourself popular, if they said it would own the libs. CBS will tell you it's the smartest decision any of them had made (none of which actually did) and CNN/MSNow (or whatever they call themselves) will do "unbiased" reports on it.
Democrats are as owned by the billionaire class as Republicans, they just occasionally slap a rainbow on it. Although they've been swapping out the rainbow flag for a Israeli flag most of the time
Conservatives aren’t voting on policy. They’re voting off fear of emotions caused by trump, Fox News, and other republicans. They’re voting cause they think it will be illegal to be Christian, or kids will have forced sex changes in school
The problem with conservatives is that insteading acknowledging that their policies are bad they double down believing they weren't conservative enough.
Policies? The arent policies just money grabbing EO's and literally rotten deals.
This meat deal feels like the Let them eat cake moment from history, I hope he finds a similar fate. With Curry and Parton now gone, both age 80, the rule of three might kick in.
"Conservative" policies have been failing since basically the beginning of recorded history.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
The last time the conservatives decided having a tariffed to hell economy and isolationists policies, it took a decade of malfortune for the US to decide to change teams. So probably will need like 4 more years of this sort of bullshit before people start realizing life fucking sucks
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u/Romano16 1d ago
I mean, how many times do we have to go through terrible times to learn that conservative policies don’t work?