Voters want change, but still remain unsatisfied with their options
I’ll take old over criminal or fascist.
Especially an old man just restored a chunk of the social safety net. No, it’s not enough yet, but Republicans are making sure of that.
The main fear with an old person is the instability it could cause if they grew ill. But the other two options are guaranteed instability. So I think I’ll take my chances.
Also keep in mind that trump is basically as old as Biden.
And shows far more signs of being old. (The memory recall test thingy is not something given to someone of obviously sound mind,)
Yeah. Strong “one of those things is not like the others” energy to this headline, lol.
Yep!
I would too, but like, could not limit it to just those three choices please?
It’s the illusion of choice, like one may give a toddler: would you like to have bacon or sausage with your breakfast? It’s the same product, different flavor.
Maybe in the worst funded public school system breakfast ever conceived …
Bacon is a cured pork- usually belly, and typically sliced.
Sausage is a seasoned ground meat… er… product… that might be cured or smoked or not, might be stuffed into casings or not, might (usually, unless specified,) be pork. Or not.
The two products are vastly different. And, in point of fact … Biden and the other two are also vastly different.
You might have had a point if you had said “it’d be like asking if you want cheap sausage or dogs shit.” I’ll let you figure out which is what.
Typical liberal. I’m left of that but thank you for the pedantry. It’s still pork and that goes to the wealthy and corporations, is the point. I’ll let you figure out which group works for the commoners.
This is actually what I find funny about conservatives. They paint someone like me as way extreme left anarchocommunist or something and its like. This is rediculous. Im just left of center and the party I vote for is just right of center. Your party is the one so extreme you see center as left.
I’m leftist too and would love for someone other than old centrist men to run the country but saying Biden and Trump are the same is just ignorant. One is a straight up racist, misogynist fascist who has done irreparable damage to the country, and the other is at least somewhat competent and has enacted policies like the COVID relief stipend and pausing student loan debt payments. Yes, he also is a shill for big companies and should be doing way more. But it does make a difference for millions of people. All you do by treating them as the same is discourage people from voting, and that voter apathy is what got us trump, and could get us desantes. Short of a political revolution, that still is our best way to enact actual change. Plus, those things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Good politician-bad politician ruse imo. It’s not the age so much as the recorded history. That Overton Window is so right, it’s wrong, now.
So what’s the solution? Again, voting is the only real way to get any change done right now, and while it’s minimal, I’d rather have a politician that has a minimal good effect vs none at all. The right thrives on voter apathy, they want you to feel like both sides are the same so they can take power, strip away voter rights, and stay in power - exactly what’s happening in conservative states like Florida and Texas.
Trust me, I want there to be another option, some sort of large-scale protest or revolution. But in lieu of that, the least we can do is make sure the minimal amount of damage is done.
The thing about an old president is that even if he grows senile, there’s the entire rest of their administration that generally have the same goals in mind as them.
How did that work with tfg and Ronnie?
Why is that the option, though? The majority of people who complain about the choices probably know who they’ll vote for even if it’s not a great choice, but how are these 3 the absolute best our country has to offer? Who’s pulling the strings to force this choice down our throats?
The fourth pillar of American democracy, media.
By buying out news media they control the narrative. Now they’re coming for the platforms to control the narrative of public discourse
There’s protection for these things from government ownership, because these are how democracy works. If you control the flow of information (or worse, convince them of false facts), you can warp the consensus in a certain directions
One side is advocating all sorts of crazy shit (much of which they don’t actually want) and spreading easily consumed nonsense to justify it, and the other side is pointing at them and going “this is who will be in charge if you don’t go with us”
This whole thing is a performance - sure, they’re actually competing and have slightly different goals, but all this fighting over social issues is just a way for them to act freely on the issues that actually matter. They don’t actually care about abortion or trans people, they care about the money.
They just use hot button issues so they can give us a choice between people who are going to lie to our faces and screw us over, and we’ll fight each other over them instead of attempting to actually change anything. The effects may matter for us, but no matter who we choose-they’ll win and we’ll lose.
When someone gives you a false choice, the only right choice is to attack the contrivance that took away your choice - we need to take back our media and organize
Who is “they” in phrases like “they control the narrative” and “they’re coming for the platforms”?
I feel that it should be pointed out that Trump is also a fascist.
And old
He’s the total package! Like, the kind of package you’d set on fire and leave on a neighbor’s porch.
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It wasn’t for lack of trying.
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I hear you and I understand you. Remember, tfg wanted to “just start shooting” protesters, redrew a hurricane’s projected path, wanted to nuke the hurricanes iirc, etc. The “adults in the room” did a piss-poor job of whistle-blowing, but my goodness, had they not contained him as much as they did, I’m pretty sure his worst would have looked a lot more dire.
Thank you for an amicable reply that furthers thought. I’m just of the opinion he really wanted to go that way. I’m open to deeper thought experiment, if you want to continue this.
Btw, I am sorry if I came off as dismissive or minimizing of your predecessors’ experience. That’s not my intention and I don’t want to be insensitive. I’m very afraid that if something isn’t done to curb the rightward slide my country is experiencing, we’re going to get there quickly.
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Criticism isn’t wrong, it can be healthy and productive. How people criticize is another topic. I’m blunt and it comes off the wrong way. I’m sorry for that, I’m thinking it’s because my compatriots and certain neighbors are outright rude and it’s because we’ve so underserved ourselves, academically, financially, and humanitarianly.
Nuking hurricanes is a surprisingly recurrent idea, it’s been around since the 50ies, and is probably the most American thing ever.
Personally I think the Bush administration did more harm with its senseless wars, pointless torture and mass surveillance programs.
And the Biden administration ‘Ministry of Truth’ is downright Orwellian.Trump was horrible as far as discourse is concerned, but actions wise, US policy has been consistently evil. Only less openly so.
Of course I don’t live there, so my view reflects that.I live here on the Southeastern seaboard, and concur!
Not to diminish that experience. But that also started with people laughing at Hitler all over Europe. Just like we laughed at Trump, our luck is that America seems to be 50/50 not 80/20 like the Nazis benfore WW2.
Hey maybe all America needs is extreme poverty for more people to give in to the strong man logic and we ain’t safe.
Your story is moving but the nazis existed before that and before they where in power. Germany was a democracy that became a fascist state. It did not start out with guns to the head. This is what he and others mean when they call him a fascist. Not ww2 fully have taken over fascist but the having barfights with communists fascists before the took over.
No-one said he is a Nazi, just that he’s a fascist. There are multiple different flavours of fascism – it isn’t all literally shooting people in the head and ordering thousands of people into death camps, it can be more subtle and insidious than that.
Also worth mentioning that fascism generally doesn’t start with the ethnic cleansing and mass murder, it starts with things like; scapegoating minorities, being overly tough on crime, and peddling misinformation. It takes quite a few years for the fascists to gain enough power to be able to enact the kind of policies that are generally pretty unpopular among normal people.
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Go check out what UN peacekeepers do in war-ravaged countries, in fact, recall abu ghirab and other US atrocities. Let’s not collectively assume all Russian soldiers are “animals.” We’re all animals and bloodlust isn’t as far from us as we may prefer to think.
You’re excusing Soviet atrocities by saying “what about the US.” Try doing the same trick to excuse Nazi atrocities.
Tankies are disgusting.
It’s the state of politics that the wealthy elite owners of the country absolutely enjoy
Voters no longer vote for who they want
They vote for the best of the worst that is given to them
They vote for the best of the worst that is given to them
Nothing new about that.
I was a lot less worried about Mitt Romney.
Not even best. Many people vote purely against the thing they don’t want, rather than voting for the thing they do want.
And low information, single (wedge) issue voters. So many liberals voted against abortion.
This is how the conservative base has been voting for decades.
There has not been a time for ripe in modern times for a strong 3rd party candidate. To bad the whole system is rigged against it.
3rd party, on a national scale, is guaranteed to fail in fptp. The only one who wins in fptp is the least hated (of 2) candidate. 3rd party votes just suck votes that could be voted against that most hated candidate
This isn’t inherently a failure of first past the post, this is a failure of human psychology.
No, it’s definitely a FPTP failure. If you have progressive third party candidate who mostly attracts voters who would otherwise have voted Democrat, it splits the vote. Even if the majority of people voted for either the third party or the Democrat candidate (let’s say 30% each), the Republican candidate would get win even with 60% of people not wanting them.
I suspect you’re thinking of people being afraid to vote third party and thus dooming the third party to lose, but the fallacy of that is assuming that everyone would genuinely vote for the third party over other candidates, which isn’t the case. Articles like the one we’re commenting on are only pointing out the most common belief.
First past the post voting systems prevent viable third parties because of human psychology. Why are we pretending to argue about how we phrase this?
If everyone do preferred a third party candidate actually voted third party, that would change. That’s just another establishment talking point.
That time was 2016, which is why gary johnson got so many votes.
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Fascist, criminal, or geezer.
Ngl I know which one I’m picking (the old fart).
Totally normal “democracy”, working very well. 🙃
Sound about right.
sample size of 1000 though. you’d think they’d be able to find tens of thousands of people
It’s a pretty typical size for political polls.
A sample size of 1000 means that the results are very likely within 3% of the entire population.
If you instead survey 10,000 people, your results will very likely be within 1% of the entire population.
It’s diminishing returns. For most pollsters, an extra 2% accuracy is not worth ten times the effort.
It’s similar to coin flip math. Getting 6+ heads on 10 flips is not hard. Getting 60+ heads on 100 flips is way harder. Getting 600+ heads on 1000 flips? No way. In fact, even getting 530+ heads on 1000 flips is very unlikely
i guess I dont understand statistics then - how is a survey of 10000 people accurate within 1% of the entire population? sure, there are a lot of towns that size or smaller, but it isnt like they’re traveling there to do the survey (as it’d skew the result).
They don’t survey 10000 people in one town. They try to get a randomly chosen sample of 10000 people, or even 1000 people, across the entire United States.
If the entire United States is 50% men and 50% women, then a randomly chosen sample of 10000 will likely contain no more than 5100 men and no more than 5100 women. A sample of 1000 will likely contain no more than 530 men and no more than 530 women.
Now replace “men” and “women” with “Democrat” and “Republican”, or any other demographic. That’s how you end up with a group of people that reasonably represents the entire United States.
DeSantis won Florida’s 2022 gubernatorial election with 60% of the vote. If somehow Trump isn’t able to run for the presidency it’s a landslide victory for DeSantis v Biden.
DeSantis’ faltering popularity in the GOP race shows that whatever is popular in Florida isn’t necessarily popular everywhere else. I don’t think it’s a guarantee Biden loses to DeSantis, if it comes to that.
There are, in fact, other states besides Florida.
It’s impossible to know that for sure.
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Personally, i think it had to do with his opponent. Everyone said the Democrat candidate was shite.
At this point, I’d be in favor of just asking 9 first-graders what their favorite single digit number is, and granting the position of POTUS to whoever’s social security number matches the one they generated.
But, given our current options I’d take a clueless old man over a lucid fascist in a fuckin’ heart beat. How is this really being presented as a dilemma? Would you rather have your house a bit too chili, or burn the whole thing down? Sure I don’t like either option, but deciding which one’s better kinda plays out like those cheesy banking commercials.
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The thing about Trump vs Biden is that they are both known quantities as presidents, and Biden (for all his faults) is simply much more competent.
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biden is corrupt and can’t string together coherent sentences
I simply cannot fathom that as a reason for voting for Trump, given the choice. Those exact criticisms apply to Trump in immense quantity.
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Srsly, what is this account?
I can’t belive this is the same guy who posted the cute cat picture, immediately followed by a weird cryptic political monologue reminiscent of DIO’s diary
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Heck, I am not even American, and I think this too
Wait, Trump is no longer fascist?
Not as fascist as desantis.
Trump had fascist tendencies, desantis is trying it out in practice.
