mozz

Curious about this, maybe you can help me:

What's your theory for why the voting ratio of this post is 20:1 in favor of "voting makes sense in this election", and the ratio of the comments is like 1:1? Or do you just not think that's odd?

I have my theory, but I'm curious what yours is.

This is like a teenager getting all upset that the family can't go on a trip because money is tight and saying it's not faaaaaaaaaiiir.

Yes, powerful people are trying to do evil with the levers of government. There are people who wake up all day every day and try to prevent them, or to make good things happen anyway, with varying levels of success. Just getting all whiny about it because everything's not automatic or already fixed for you, and you have to either do what you can within the system or work for change outside the system or else get used to things being shitty (and with Trump maybe get exponentially worse), shows a lack of understanding of how the world works.

I got a little curious and started looking over your user.

• You said you were homeless and a military recruiter kept dropping off care packages for you and that's how you got in the military
• You take an interest in China / TikTok stories that's just slightly unusual, to me
• You said you worked for the Democratic party but the rank-and-file shunned you because you were too left for their neoliberalism (posted under a story about Bernie fucking Sanders who was the most popular politician of his generation with the rank and file, I guess because he was neoliberal enough for them)
• You said you got banned from .world because they were hosting Nazi content -- can you point me to that Nazi content?

Overall, I call bullshit

“Democrat party”

Some of them, yeah. Not all, and maybe that’s a pretty valid reason to criticize their moral courage. But Jordan Klepper has done some pretty fascinating interviews with e.g. Nikki Haley supporters who have realized what a monster Trump is.

(Some of whom say they’ll maybe still vote for him…)

Yeah who knows dude

Most of the time I try to respond to people as if they were real and sincere unless they give me a specific reason to think they're not, even if internally I have some doubts.

40% reduction in emissions predicted by 2030 (not that that's enough, but it's definitely a difference from what Trump would have done)

(If you can tell me Trump maybe isn't real, I can tell you, yes it's definitely going to happen exactly that way because the New York Times told me so. The truth probably lies between those two extremes.)

*2014

I'm gonna get a little self congratulatory about it. During Covid, I was watching the news coming out of China, and somewhat ahead of the curve on explaining to people that it was going to be a huge deal, even down to the specifics of we're going to need to stay home for a while but it won't be an apocalypse, we want to stock up on masks, things like that. One of my friends actually told me I seemed like I had the inside track on it. If I was just watching CNN for what was going to happen I would have been absolutely an idiot about it... I actually remember when the news and CDC was telling people masks didn't work, and me telling someone "This might sound a little weird, but I actually don't think that's true." And then explaining why.

I've known people who've worked for presidential candidates and spent some amount of time with them. The world is not as isolated and theoretical as you're making it sound. I get what you're saying, but there's a whole world of experience beyond just what happens on the screen. If you're purely in the consumer mode then yes. If you're active in the actual events then you start to learn what is worth listening to and see what seems well-founded in terms of how things actually play out.

That's why abortion is a good touchstone. It's a lot of Republicans' first harsh wake up call to the idea that the news and how things are packaged has been lying to them all this time. I've been wrong about things plenty of time, but IDK why you would assume my only experience with the world is just what I'm observing on the screen.

You can actually do this.

It's way more complex than a tour -- it's a whole process; among other things, they have average Joe Schmoes from both major parties overseeing everything (i.e. not like the DNC's agents, more like Betty who's been doing it since the 1970s), and they do things like hand recounts of randomly selected portions of the ballots that got fed into the machines, to give warning signs if someone has tried to rig the machines. It's definitely not perfect; in the early 2000s there were very, very strong indications that the Republicans were rigging election machines on a pretty big scale. But I think asserting that just because you personally don't understand how it works it means it must be untrustworthy is also not really airtight either.

My strongest argument for saying that it's not rigged is that, if it was rigged, I think it's highly unlikely that the establishment powers would have picked Trump. But yes, by signing up as an election worker, you can literally see for yourself a lot of the safeguards that are in place (at least in your area) and decide for yourself whether you think they're overall trustworthy.

Who do you imagine is showing me presentations, that make me think these things? I'm just curious.

Family separations at the border; for anyone in one of those families, the result of Trump being in office during that time versus Clinton or Biden is pretty fuckin significant

He's not the only one

It's almost as if they have a little script of a handful of arguments that they like to switch among, and aren't actually organically reading the content and having organic thoughts that they feel like sharing in response, so it sometimes doesn't register with them if one of the things on their list has some specific connection with the meme they're responding to. Result, they don't react differently or even acknowledge the connection, they just say the thing on their list.

Almost as if