this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
366 points (96.7% liked)
Political Memes
9061 readers
2443 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Let's be real. There's a lot of really fucking stupid people out there but that's not the root issue. Especially since not everyone responsible for this clusterfuck -- gestures broadly at ~~American~~ society -- is stupid. Some of them are very smart, just morally bankrupt.
Even the dumbest of the dumbest Americans realize that things have gone rather poorly for them over a long period of time. They're not wrong about that and they're justifiably upset.
Are a lot of them stupid for electing a pathologically lying, serial raping, failed businessman twice? Absolutely. But that's still not the real problem. The problem is the motive behind the action.
The motive that instead of recognizing that a rising tide lifts all ships and working towards the collective good says, "I want things to be worse for someone else than they are for me."
That level of selfishness and lack of empathy has successfully made things worse for everyone. The US's cardinal sin is the falacy of the "rugged individual." John Donne rightly wrote, "No man is an island entire of itself. Every one is a piece of the continent; a part of the main." Every lgbt+ person who faces discrimination, every immigrant who is whisked away by thugs in masks, every person who remains unfed or unclothed while the ultra rich get richer is an assault on humanity at large.
What's truly frustrating is being deeply angered by the repeated, blatant moral failures and yet feeling like you are powerless to stop it.
Edit: I realize that there are lot of stupid things going on in the world and lots of people on Lemmy who are not American. So please take this comment as just one man's reflection on his own surroundings.
I think our hangup with trying to figure out if negative outcomes are rooted in what someone knows/doesn't know, versus what someone's subjective, internal motivations are, is a false dichotomy and a useless mental exercise when we can treat it all the same way for better outcomes. I am more concerned with material reality than what's going on in someone's head. It's not like we can throw the average asshole or moron into school or an education camp and "fix" them. The only way we fight negative outcomes in a society broadly is to create strong disincentives for anti-social or anti-community behavior. Shame, punishment, public humiliation, and in worst cases incarceration or expulsion.
This forces the dumb and evil alike, if there is even a difference in most cases, to think before acting and make choices that won't end up with them in the ol' stockade having rotting vegetables thrown at their face.
Dumb is evil and evil is dumb. Not all dumb people are evil, but all evil people do things against the interest of society or even themselves, which is "dumb" according to the rest of society. Lets normalize moving past this argument entirely and dealing with universally accepted consequences for doing bad things. We have to stop giving stupid people some kind of pass for pulling our society apart at the seams.