mozz

What indicators do you think would be accurate? I can probably find them for almost any metric

I think the media has a huge amount to do with that.

This story is exactly the same headline we've been seeing pretty consistently for quite a while... except, they threw in that one word "wrongly" and then gave some objective data to back it up. And yet, that one little change makes it so out of step with the rest of the coverage (which just reports the polls, somehow not factoring in that roughly 50% of the country watches "conservative" media which is openly and explicitly a propaganda operation against all Democrats no matter what at all times).

And so, cognitive dissonance takes over, and this whole comments section is full of people freaking out about how dare they try to say with numbers that our corporate hellscape of an economy is actually moving in the right direction for the first time in God knows how long, and demanding instead to see inaccurate stories about how it's all getting worse.

Yeah, it's accurate; a lot of that monster inflation that spiked in 2022 and then came back down was Covid follow-on effects, and it definitely made people worse off even to this day. Blaming Biden for that seems weird though.

Sure. Two ways to visualize:

Income by race -- you can literally see the lines squeezing together, as income on the higher lines falls (inflation), and income on the lower lines rises even beating inflation.

GINI coefficient is the usual statistical metric. It's a little more abstracted, but maybe more rigorous. Anyway you can see the steady trend line of it always going up, and then a little down tick at the end as it drops. Not really like "oh okay it's fixed now," but definitely also not "okay Biden spiked income inequality like everyone else does," since it started moving in the actual opposite direction.

You are assuming they are in the United States

Fascism is greatly concerned with overt displays of power, "honor," physical strength as a core value instead of reason or integrity, that kind of thing.

That's not fully incompatible with femaleness, but it does tend to work out in practice as a male-dominated system that features subjugation of women, of a piece with its subjugation of anything else that's vulnerable in any way.

I know; I was surprised about it too. IDK; maybe they just don't like to leave stones unturned or something?

And it's not less than 1% of 1%, it's 3% of 1%. There are DOZENS of us

It is the second one, coupled with profound irritation that there’s so much malicious bullshit in this innocent internet forum, designed to further destroy the governance in my country and harm me and lots of other people.

It might seem like a weird thing to get so worked up about, but l’m pretty sure that, aggregated together with all the other malicious organized propaganda on the internet, it does real damage in the real world (and not a small amount.)

The analogy from the cartoon is actually deeply flawed for the present situation; back about 10-15 years I think it was pretty accurate.

What it should be now, the best that I can make it out, is a pretty big boat that's in quite a bit of mechanical trouble to the point that there's a lot of unrest on board and it may not make it back to land and may get sunk by the next big storm. And, on board is:

Republicans actively drilling more holes, setting the engine on fire for some reason, stealing the flares and emergency beacon so they can sell them off to each other, shitting in the water supply, basically doing too many different bad things to even count or keep track of

A third of the people labeled with "Democrat" helping them, a third looking the other way or making vague attempts to tell them to stop, a third vigorously trying to stop them, sometimes with some level of success

Biden presiding over that whole process, and somehow producing some level of progress on the most critical of the problems, which is actually pretty shocking considering how fuckin insane the entire boat is at this point.

(Oh and also one of the Republicans has a handgun and keeps talking about how we need to shoot every single person on the boat who isn't a Republican, and a lot of the Republicans are agreeing with him and saying they should have handguns too)

A tiny handful of people who are actually trying to organize, work on problems, work out how we might be able to get to land, put together water distillation since we're running out, better system for choosing who's in charge, some genuine improvement to our situation.

And then, a certain body of people who are swearing they are actually part of that last group, but who spend 100% of their time saying they don't see any difference between Biden guy and handgun guy, and some of the other people were punching some of the last group, and anyway what about the water, no wait I meant what about the flares, he hasn't even done anything about the flares... just more or less a constant drumbeat of opposition with none of the forward movement that comes from the last group. And, whenever someone starts yelling at them about handgun guy who literally might want to murder them, they accuse that person of oh isn't that convenient that now I have to support Biden-guy now, I guess now you're ordering me around that somehow I have to or else handgun guy will come after me, I bet Biden and handgun guy set the whole thing up themselves.

That's still an oversimplification. But it seems somewhat more complete and accurate than the cartoon. My man: Start talking about ranked choice voting. Start talking about joining Extinction Rebellion. If you want to do better than Biden, fuckin do it, it sounds great. But saying that letting Trump win this particular election is anything other than the end of the world, is just lying.

This is one report about it. It's fair to ask for sources of course but also literally all I had to do was do one web search.

Yeah, fair enough; maybe I picked a wrong example for one of my examples. I think most of the time, it's not that way though. Not that I'm saying that makes war good or anything.