In just under five hours, I have to give an outreach presentation on immigration options for US military veterans and their families. Roughly a third of my presentation is on Biden Administration policies that will be in the dumpster on day one of Trump’s return, if not sooner as the Trumpists already in DHS functionary positions can already smell blood in the water. The rest (what’s codified into law, and not merely executive branch policy) should survive at least a couple of weeks, assuming the Fascist Party manages to hold onto the House after all. And maybe not a whole lot longer even if control of the House flips (because there are already plenty of milquetoast Fascist enablers in the Democratic Party who are ready to just follow the Fascists off whatever cliff they start driving towards).
I heartily endorse this thread. Fuck trump. Fuck his stupid followers. Fuck all of those who didn’t bother to vote. Fuck everybody who voted 3rd party because ‘Harris is bad, too, mkay?’. Fuck the billionaires and other public figures who either endorsed trump or cowardly refused to speak out, because they made a terrible ‘Pascal’s Wager’ style bet on the possibility of trump winning.
The sad thing is, even if the people who voted for trump get their faces metaphorically eaten in the next 4 years because they are bankrupted by shitty health care or their loved ones are deported, or whatever, will somehow rationalize it away by blaming it on Democrats in Congress or something else.
For the record I don’t like either party either. Or Trump or Harris personally. And I think the 4 major candidates(President/Vice President) are the worst field of my lifetime.
I wavered back and forth about whether I was going to vote at all.
I ended up voting for Harris mostly because I thought she was the lesser of two “evils” and the Democrats would do a better job reigning her in than the Republicans would do with Trump. Trump is too much of a loose cannon for me.
P.S. I don’t think Harris is “evil”–I just do not find her to inspiring.
Yup. It was somehow always the Democrats’ responsibility to prevent it without their voting for them. Or to just abandon all their positions and turn into Republicans-but-nice.
No, come on, please. They ended up making the right decision. A right vote is a right vote.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
This quasi-Mencken saying is way, way too mild. The OP is along the right tracks.
I just saw a graphic where something like 70% of the voters think the economy is in poor or worse shape. Despite, you know, data that says the exact opposite.
Stupidity was always rampant. With social media it’s an entrenched reality. Throw in a huge dose of misogyny and American democracy is dead.
Drowned out by that wishy-washy crap in the first place. There are apparently millions who were ambivalent enough about it to make a difference.
And the lesson for the next time won’t be “well, maybe the Dems need to cater to progressives more so they will be more enthusiastic”. The lesson will be “we need to shift to the right”.
GAHHH trying to avoid all current event media right now (other than the SDMB) and I turn my TV to the streaming channels on my Firestick to watch something completely non-trump related. And the previews show election result coverage with a big pic of trump. I was hoping to not see his stupid fucking fat orange face anymore. And now that face and his hateful idiotic voice will continue to show up everywhere in the media, but now it’s once again the stupid fucking fat orange face and hateful idiotic voice of the President of the United States. This is truly some real life Mandela effect-style bizarro world.
Yeah, but there’s a well-known lag time between when the key indicators of economic health improve, and when regular people actually feel that improvement. All the graphs and pie charts in the world aren’t going to move someone whose wages haven’t caught up with inflation yet.
When the Affordable Care Act was in the making (Late-2000’s - Obama), there were endless surveys gauging people’s opinions.
ALL the opinion polls about “Obamacare” skewed strongly negative. ALL the opinion polls about the actual components of the ACA skewed strongly positive.
[Worth noting that the ACA is hugely popular today.]
What does that tell us?
Right-wing propaganda is a powerful thing, and
People can’t be bothered with reading and understanding pretty simple information.
[“A vibecession is a period of widespread pessimism about the economy regardless of the actual economic situation.”]
I decided to watch The Leftovers, season 3, episode 7. Available to stream on Max for those who have it. If you’ve seen it, you might be able to guess why I’d gravitate to that particular episode of that particular series.
Speaking of children…
My wife subs in our local elementary school. One 8-year-old (second grade!) heard another say something against Trump a few days ago, and the first one (whose parents are known Trump supporters) pushed the second to the ground, hard.
Its this kind of awful, empathy-free, selfish,often violent behavior that Trump and his kind have been green-lighting – celebrating – for nine years and counting. It really does change (many) people’s behavior. It’s okay to be an asshole – great, in fact! This is not entirely new in our country (Jim Crow-era Southern whites, or later; Reagan-era Gordon Gekkos…), but it’s spread and deepened like a raging fire in recent years. I have to work extra hard to make sure my kid isn’t infected. I have to even work on making sure I’m not coarsened and dragged down.
He is taking the country back, to the years just prior to his birth, and many of us may soon be encouraging each other to treat fascists as Americans did in those years. It seems likely that it will come to that.