A man with 34 felony convictions can’t win the presidency in a nation where trust in institutions is high. It’s only in a culture where the justice system has long since lost its legitimacy that a man with such a thick criminal record as Trump glides by relatively unremarked. That one man can so effortlessly game American institutions to his own benefit says as much about the decrepit state of America’s institutions as it does about the moral decrepitude of the crook.
Well, no shit. It’s the same shit that sane people have been saying for a long time. If only the media wasn’t completely dominated by the billionaire class, we might actually be able to organize around collective outrage, but most people seem content to just consume whatever Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump tell them to consume and not think beyond that.
Their media is dominated by whispers in an echo chamber and at some point we’re gonna have to acknowledge the profound impacts. Someone makes a joke about kitty litter boxes for the furries in the school on telgram, next thing you know it’s on discord, then people are talking about it. Wildfire. That literally happened in Minnesota. These guys think they’re the counterculture and don’t watch news
This has been the major talking point in our house today. Rewinding the time, how did first-time 18 year old voters spend their very formative teenage years? What media did they consume at the time, and how?
Also, a question to the open because I can’t remember exactly: When did yall learn about the holocaust in american high school? For me it was maybe sophomore year? Weren’t these kids either social distancing, “attending” virtual school, being nutrient-deficient all the while, and also possibly running for their lives from a school shooter?
It’s possible these kids don’t even know what the holocaust is, and a large portion of eligible youth that only hears news from the Joe Rogan podcast just voted to repeat hell because “orange man funny, woman didn’t go on my favorite show”?
That’s a really good point about distance learning, but the most troubling thing is that this is a gigantic insidious thing that is affecting a billion people around the globe with no regard for demographics, and in our breadth of knowledge, we don’t even have any frame of reference. We have a good understanding of what happens when someone’s put in solitary confinement for a long time, or blasting a group with propaganda for a long time, or small groups that decide to turn away from society, but nothing in the world has ever happened on this kind of scale, not remotely close, as if a billion people are just turning feral, for lack of better word to describe it. We don’t know how to guide them back or anything. At some point it’ll have a name, it’ll be a syndrome. Is it gonna get worse and worse? We’ll find out
Edit: I think I should elaborate just a teeny little bit further. The crux is that this group spurns any Socratic dialogue because it’s too obvious, and Occam’s Razor is so simple that they choose to believe it’s what ‘they’ want ‘you’ to think, and opt for Occam’s Space Laser every single time. That’s what I meant by ‘feral’. When the majority behave like that nobody knows what’ll happen because you can no longer bother to integrate them, they’re the society now
Even if you learn about the holocaust, nobody really learns about the rise of Hitler and how a sympathetic judiciary and law enforcement gave him the lightest possible sentence for trying to do a coup. You get the impression that Hitler was a bad man who just showed up and singlehandedly invented anti-Semitism and somehow got the whole country on board with the holocaust.
Not yet. Not for a little while. First, a few things have to happen:
- When the Department of Education is obliterated and schools nationwide collapse, it will also cause economic turmoil, because a lot of MAGA idiots work for federally-funded school systems in red states. They just voted to have themselves fired.
- The inevitable nationwide ban on abortion will kill a lot of women who believed it wouldn’t happen and voted for him - despite how much he bragged about killing Roe.
- Measles, mumps, and rubella will all make startling comebacks as vaccination plummets. Seriously guys, get vaccinated while you can. Oh, and COVID-19 is going to have a massive resurgence once RNA-based vaccines are banned in the United States.
- With the purging of civil servants from the FBI, the IRS, and various other letter agencies, we’re going to have a giant, stupid government staffed primarily by incompetent sycophants. Expect actual, productive work associated with any of them to grind to a halt. Expect the FBI to expend resources needlessly investigating whoever Trump hates at the moment. Expect the IRS to make mistakes that aren’t in your favor, and you can’t do anything about.
- Infrastructure week will forever be in the future, while actual infrastructure will be falling apart due to lack of funding. This problem will be felt the most in red areas, despite efforts to punish blue ones for voting for Harris.
- If you receive health care through the Affordable Care Act and you’re MAGA, you’ll be very surprised to learn that “Obamacare” was another name for it, and that you’ve just lost your health care. [insert “congratulations, you played yourself” meme here]
- You think things are expensive now? The inevitable flood of tariffs, with no adults in the room to tell Trump it’s a stupid idea, will jack your prices up enormously. If you thought COVID-19 inflation was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
- The deeply, deeply stupid MAGA people who believed that Trump would leave their LGBTQ+ friends - well, former friends - alone will find out the hard way that voting to remove people’s rights is a good way to make them disown you.
After things are going really, really badly, and there are only Republicans in government to blame, a few will begin waking up and realizing they’ve been had.
And by then, it will be too late.
You didn’t even mention that the FTC will greenlight any merger and stop anti trust enforcement. Lina Khan did an amazing job, and that’s a long term, sustainable way to keep inflation at bay. After consolidation across industries combined with tariffs, inflation will go through the roof.
Saving this for future discussions because it’s absolutely spot on.
Also, for any Republicans complaining about Obamacare, kindly remind them that it was started by Republican Mitt Romney.
Also:
- When NOAA is dismantled, the National Weather Service gutted and privatised, the National Flood Insurance Program abolished, and FEMA ‘overhauled’, the government’s ability to predict and respond to increasing climate disasters will be severely hampered. Private insurance companies have already been fleeing at-risk areas, so the impact of future hurricane seasons will be devastating.
Don’t worry, Trump will be there to throw some paper towels into a crowd. Problem solved.
But even then, he will only help if they voted for him.
Maybe when Florida is completely uninhabitable for large chunks of the year, some Floridians will start to wonder if maybe there was something to what all those egghead scientists have been saying.
Nah. It’ll still be the Democrats’ fault. Somehow.
Ha well at least there is one silver lining for me. National Flood insurance being abolished would be great for me personally. I live inland and have a stupid river from a 40 year old map that doesn’t even exist now causing me to pay. The process to remove it is long and typically requires a surveyor that can cost thousands.
Just like the UK and Brexit. Both foreseeable political disasters.
I don’t know how much the UK collectively regrets Brexit yet. I come from a heavily Leave voting area and it was depressing as hell being a part of the vote count. Leave, Leave, Leave, Remain, Leave, Leave, Remain. Now in the most recent election, Farage’s Reform party got a concerningly high vote share, especially in areas like where I come from.
I was glad to see the Tories go, but I can’t be too happy about the UK election when I consider Reform. I think back to how UKIP were like at local government level. They’d campaign on absurd promises like “we’ll slash council tax and increase public services funding. Lots of things are possible if we get rid of those fat-cat Labour councillors”. Then they’d get enough councillors that they could cause real harm to their constituents by obstructing progress; it helped their cause to make the Labour majority council look bad. They could promise the world because they knew that they were never going to get enough councillors to change much, so they could blame their utter failure to do anything useful once elected on Labour (in my area at least. Apparently the same playbook works in Conservative majority areas too)
Brexit was unambiguously a political disaster. Many of the people who voted Leave have been actively harmed and I can’t even feel any schadenfreude at them because they haven’t connected the dots there. Like, I see people having their faces eaten off by the leopards they voted for, and they’re going “this is really hurting. See, this is why we needed the leopards eating faces party”. It’s honestly heartbreaking to witness.
We know. Most of us already do at least. The others will follow later. But it’ll be much, much too late.
They’ll deny they ever voted for the guy, same as all the Republicans that suddenly realise Bush and Cheney are the worst after cheerleading for them for 8 years.
Kamala Harris voters, 2024: 70,356,521
People who claim to have been Kamala Harris voters, 2030: 100,000,000+
Unfortunately I’m not sure it’s “most” hence the way the popular vote went.
Correct. Slightly more than one third of the population are still celebrating and slightly less than one third are already regretting it. Those are the two thirds who actually voted. The final third haven’t actually noticed we had an election yet because they never bother to participate. If any of them pull their heads out of their asses at some point, they will likely regret it too, but I wouldn’t put money on it.
No, they’ll just blame it on minorities
