Not voting is just plain lazy, that’s all.

You know I’d actually like to push back on this. The people who elected trump were white, uneducated, low information voters. I don’t think people who aren’t interested in politics, in the political system, who don’t care to look into the ideas that shape the economy, shape the policy, beyond a couple weeks every four years, I don’t think those people should be voting. I think it should be their choice, but I think their choice should probably be to not vote, because in that case, their votes are going to do damage. You could see thinkpieces floating all around before the election of people talking about how higher levels of voter turnout across the board, contrary to classical thought, would help republicans this time around, rather than democrats, mostly hinging on those same kinds of low-information voters, part of the younger generation which have aged into it. Your classic 22 year old joe rogan bro voters that like free weed, but don’t understand abortion rights because they’re not women, and think trump will give them some sort of economic opportunity.

Me personally, I would rather those probably just admit that they have no idea what the hell is going on, and choose not to vote.

I believe that would be equally accurate, yes. The republicans have been pretty responsive to their base’s social desires, mostly with like, white, uneducated, evangelical christian psychos, but they haven’t really passed any policy which tangibly makes their life better, and there’s only so much you can do to address the fundamental cognitive dissonance. If cost of living goes up and not down, which it in all likelihood will if trump rocks the boat too much, then they’re gonna have to resort to the same playbook that democrats do in order to play off that failure.

The only real difference there is that the republican voter base is more primed to believe those excuses just sort of as a matter of their media ecosystem and position in the political sphere. But you’ll see them still resort to hand-wringing over how those pesky elitist democrats just blocked their real policy, and then when they lose, about how next time, they’ll really do something to help out the people, they just weren’t able to get it all off the ground because we only had four years and the economy’s gonna get worse before it gets better and the democratic admin is just gonna be coasting on our improvements and so on and so on. If you talk to republicans, especially the older, not explicitly fascist ones, the post-reagan ones, you’ll notice this pretty similar sort of rhetoric.

Those low information, low turnout, suburbanite, implicitly biased “I’m not racist but” or “racism doesn’t mean anything anymore” republicans make up a pretty big chunk of their coalition. I would say even they probably make up a majority, and the terminally online turbochud fascist extremists are the minority that’s growing at a somewhat alarming rate.

I mean, it’s what obama did, and he had a pretty successful series of campaigns. I dunno, gay marriage, legal weed, and the ACA were all of what he did, pretty much, outside of drone striking a shit ton of people and deporting a fuck ton of people, so I think you can pretty much just lie and give out the most sparing, minor of all handouts, and then pretty much people will jump on board.

Of course, this raises the related question that if people are considering getting themselves thrown in prison for the food and housing, that says a lot about the state of social services in that country and maybe something else needs fixing more badly.

Generally that’s where I would peg that as a train of thought, yeah. I don’t think you need an incentive to keep people from going to prison. People don’t want to go to prison, generally, it’s not a good thing even in, say, Finland, or whatever other example people want to use. People sticking up a bank for one dollar to get healthcare isn’t a state of affairs that you have if you already have free healthcare. Trying to get arrested to avoid homelessness isn’t a problem if you can already avoid homelessness through normal social institutions. In fact, I’d say that avoiding homelessness through conventional means is greatly idealm considering a shit ton of homeless people interface with the law, and are arrested and processed regularly, and lots of inmates are homeless immediately upon getting out. It’s a whole system, not just in one part, which is what makes it so hard to get rid of or reform away, and perhaps even impossible.

The State should not force the prisoners to work, but it also shouldn’t be the State’s responsibility to provide janitors or cooks to look after them.

You should understand that this represents a logistical problem for the prison. Now they have to ensure that prisoners are certified and trained to handle food, no small feat, and you also have to be conscious of the idea that prisoners could pretty easily stop doing dishes, making food, eating food, as a form of hunger strike, in order to protest the very fact that they’re being made to make food, on top of the fact that they’re being extricated from society, deprived of the right to be a productive member of society, deprived of the ability to socialize with other people that aren’t criminals, deprived of free access to information, really, any freedom whatsoever.

That’s along with the argument the other commenter brought up, about prisoners just organizing themselves into a de-facto government where the most shat on prisoners will have to do everything. If you decide to come up with a constant rotation, a chore wheel, then at a certain level this just devolves into massive levels of prison corruption, where a couple bribes to a couple prisoner guards can change around some labor forms and then suddenly, again, the most shat upon prisoners are doing all the labor.

You don’t eliminate these inefficiencies at any point, either, these inefficiencies rear their heads more the more people you arrest and put into the prison, the more things you criminalize, the higher the recidivism rates. None of these issues resolve magically, they get worse.

This is effectively just the same as advocating for the status quo as it currently exists, with the only minor difference between, say, making license plates or fighting fires, being that instead, they’re just doing domestic labor which is much closer to them in proximity, and easier for you to think of as their personal responsibility to handle. That doesn’t matter so much, what matters in reality here are the numbers.

The idea is that you’re trying to recoup the costs immediately through something like a labor camp, which is what this still is. That’s sort of an option of last resort, or an option that is used, in most circumstances, as it is right now, for members of political opposition or other kinds of outright status-quo threats. You instead should make the calculation in the broad strokes, years down the line. Can these murderers, thieves, and perhaps even, gasp, loiterers, be taught to be functioning members of society? Can they give back more than they have taken from the taxpayer over the course of their life? More than just for the individuals, but can these prisoners do this on the whole?

That’s the way you should be thinking about this, not “Can we save 15 bucks here and there by not paying someone to clean up or cook for the prisoners?”. By framing it like that, you’ve bought into the argument that supports the status quo organization, here.

it’s not an excuse, we’re just telling you the reality. how do you think hitler got elected?

well, hey, they’re all american voters, right, and apparently we’re all too moronic to understand the basic things at stake, so maybe that is what we deserve, right?

She also had Taylor Swift, Bernie Sanders, Obama, Mark Cuban, multple military generals endorsing her, among others.

ah yes, taylor swift, noted political figure. surely, that will drive turnout. obama and bernie sanders, yes, great choices, truly, this will save us even when we’re not campaigning on their policies. mark cuban. yes. multiple military generals, very cool.

extrapolate what you actually mean with this train of thought. what do you think the democrats should’ve actually done differently? they’re the ones who’ve lost, what should they have done more? who should they have appealed to? seems like everyone wants to put the emphasis solely on the trump voters and the non-voters, and since the non-voters are non-voters, oh, wowie, look at that, all we have left are trump voters to go after.

shocker. I wonder what the party will head after, with this train of thought? I wonder which direction they’ll go in? surely, they wouldn’t double down, right? surely, they wouldn’t go further after the trump voters, after all the committed registered republican voters that turned out last time switched and… lost them a percentage point in that category, this go around. from 6% to 5%. we should emphasize the trump voters more, we should go after them more, obviously, because they’re the only ones willing to vote!

extract what you’re talking about, extrapolate. if you just run around up in your feels as a non-american, blaming the wind for blowing, then you’re just gonna end up blasting darpanet even harder.

So, we can wring our hands about how awful our fellow man is for not seeing the clear moral imperative that we do (exactly like the Genocide-Joe folks have been doing for months), or we can recognize that Dems need to start doing things differently.

no no, don’t you understand? the american voter is just too racist, because they voted for donald trump, so we just need to tack harder to the right, I mean the center, actually I do just mean the right. then, surely, they will vote for the democratic party in overwhelming, obama-era numbers.

I’m going to suggest this book as some personal reading on this issue. But the point I would more broadly make is that running exclusively oppositional candidates does not work, and I would say that’s probably because they don’t really present a clear vision of the future, they only present opposition to something rhetorically. By opposing something in that way, you sort of, only serve to reinforce that thing. Only define yourself in relation to it.

That’s also not really to speak about how she legitimately presented an incredibly conservative face to her campaign, and if that’s the case, people would just vote for the guy who’s actually just conservative.

all the left things that left people care about aren’t just progressive policy, they’re populist policy. Abortion makes the most sense when classified as a healthcare issue. Universal healthcare, and medicare for all, consistently polls popular. So does increasing the minimum wage. So does student loan forgiveness, and free college, which is why biden campaigned on that.

Harris’ most popular policy was probably price controls, because despite all the hemming and hawwing that economists get up to whenever you touch any economic lever, that’s something that the american people can believe will decrease their costs of living. people don’t give a shit about the left, or about ideologies, you’re right on that front, as the person before you is. but make no mistake, those policies which tangibly reign in the economy, control it, and give people free shit, those are, at the very least, progressive policies, if not outright leftist policies.

blue maga and blueanon wasn’t just a sort of tongue in cheek name, it was also an accurate description. we’ve seen this shit burgeoning up, to me, most notably with the people who were adamant that trump didn’t actually get shot and it was all a PR stunt. been lost in the sauce for a while.

There was an absolute mountain of evidence that Trump would be a disaster.

nobody gives a fuck about that. most people aren’t clocked into online politics. they just live under one admin where trump benefits from obama’s policy, things are squeaky clean for the most part, and then they’re chilling, and then they move to living under joe biden where a once in a lifetime (hopefully, haha) pandemic decides to fuck shit up during the transition from one admin to the other, on top of inheriting a much worse economy, and then they attribute that to biden. it’s not a super complicated figure, there, and that’s all on top of biden just not being a very popular candidate to begin with.

if you actually look at the numbers, then the third party candidates had less of an effect for kamala than the third party candidates for trump did. which makes sense, because RFK, at the least, was campaigning on some sort of dystopian vision of the future that his deluded q-anon supporters actually liked, and he had money. jill stein is just grifting like always, basically, no change there, and no change with the lesser known candidates either, really. the bigger story is that a shit ton of the voters stayed home.

everyone wants to shift blame from the democratic party, which has obviously either mishandled this campaign or intentionally lost as a party of controlled opposition, and shift the blame onto the voters. ah, well, it was latino men’s fault for being too socially conservative! ah, it was the third party voters and the leftists! it was the arab americans, who should’ve voted after we funded the bombs that killed their whole entire family! it was trans people, for just being too weird! those are all legitimate explanations I’ve heard people bring up, and I’d classify them all as basically the same, because they all equally have no evidence behind them. the real story is that she had low voter turnout. probably because she was associated with the least popular administration in decades, and refused to distinguish herself from that, and on top of that, campaigned with like, liz cheney. the most she did was offer like, tax exemptions for people starting small businesses, and tax exemptions for people who haven’t missed their rent a single time in the last kajillion years. it’s not rocket science, that’s just not really an inspiring campaign. if they had low voter turnout, that’s probably why, it’s probably not because america is just too racist to vote for a black woman or whatever shit everyone’s bloviating about so they can justify the democratic party turning to the right even more.

that’s more accurate, yeah. definitely in 2016 he ran as a moderate, and with this more recent campaign, it’s not so much that he ran a great campaign (lost 2 million voters), but more that I think he just had enough raw momentum and low information, working class voters wanted to manifest him into being the “make the economy good” guy, that they really didn’t give a shit about whatever he was doing up in the news cycle. At the most, they can just dismiss that as something he’s saying to get elected because “he’s smart”, or something he’s doing to make the democrats mad, which is funny. beyond that, it doesn’t matter so much for them what his specific platform is.

I dunno, I think it was mostly that they wanted joe to step down later on in order to justify not having a primary, and dispelling a populist candidate, like tim walz may have been, a populist candidate which goes against the interests of the donors, and could’ve still probably gone through with a ton of funding and a groundswell of support regardless (see: kamala getting 1 billion dollars), from the running. Then, they can run kamala by default, and it doesn’t matter whether or not she really wins or loses, as she’s still campaigning on basically the platform that the republicans of 2016 were running on. I dunno so much if the time was the problem, other countries have full elections in as much time, I think the real problem was the electoral calculus that runs everything the scenes, as it has always been, and I think a lot of people got their brain cooked by brat summer and coconut memes into believing this was somehow going to be any better than 2016.

The most I’ve seen anyone able to manifest is that she wasn’t an old white man, and instead, she was too radical, because she was black, indian, and a woman. I have seen milquetoast liberals saying this, black people saying this, indians saying this, and women saying this. I don’t really know how true it is, and I guess I never will know because she really didn’t run a good enough campaign for me to actually run any sort of postmortem analysis relative to someone else’s real turnout, because she wasn’t even a baseline democrat, she ran below the baseline in terms of promises. She campaigned with dick “killed a million people” cheney and his wife. I dunno. somehow I don’t believe that it’s because democrat voters are just super racist or sexist or whatever.

I’m cynical, so I see it as that the Democrats can’t be or do those things, because the need for campaign donations has turned them into a fundamentally neo-liberal party that stands for wealth and corporate greed.

finally somebody’s fucking saying it. party of controlled opposition. everyone has liked to pretend since the 90’s and even before that this generational streak of incompetence in policy time and time again is the product of some sort of infernal curse, some sort of streak of bad luck, some sort of unrelated descent of the american populace’s IQ points that just naturally predisposes them towards fascism. it’s not. it’s an intentional befouling. they are fine with losing, it will not be them that suffers. what they’re not fine with, is populist policy actually getting passed. you can even do the obama thing and then lie about it, and then just face the occupy protests later on and tell them all to fuck off. they are even too afraid of that, so entrenched in their own ideology are they. it’s insane and ridiculous to believe that this is just due to some sort of incompetence. if it is, then it’s structural in nature, needs to be pulled out by the root, and is probably not really reformable or recoverable at the highest levels, because we’ve had this problem even since the hundred year old jimmy carter in hospice was in office.

those 75 million americans have done exactly the same shit they’ve been doing since like, the year 2000. or beyond. every guy the republicans have ever run has been some variety of racist, scam artist, rapist, or straight dumbass rich guy failson. the next election, if there is one, which there probably will be, they will do the same thing again. the election after that, and after that, and after that. it’s not rocket science. it’s the basic functioning of the system. to get mad at them is sort of like trying to piss into the wind in order to spite it. you just get piss all over yourself. either that, or you face the other direction and break the record in the meaningless pissing contest.

if you don’t offer a material reality to people, a vision of the future, if you don’t offer people anything, they will not come out to vote for you. kamala actually did worse, instead, she decided, hey, we’ll campaign with liz cheney, we’ll say that building the wall is a good idea, we’ll say that we need to be tougher on immigration, have a more lethal military, continue the genocide that’s currently going on, and then change nothing from biden’s famously extremely unpopular administration other than appoint more conservatives to the cabinet in the name of being bipartisan. oh, and small business tax exemptions, and tax cuts for first time homebuyers that haven’t missed a rent payment in the last 2,000 years. the only good thing she campaigned on was price controls for groceries, but then she dropped that like a hot potato as soon as she could.

really inspiring stuff. then, as always, every sensible person on the planet says, hey, this is maybe not a great idea, instead maybe we should’ve had a primary so they could’ve pushed through a candidate that didn’t get less votes than ANDREW FUCKING YANG, noted bipartisan techbro-appealing dumbshit idiot, maybe we should campaign on medicare for all, funding for housing, free college, student debt relief, a stronger FTC, or perhaps she could’ve said hey, we’ll pack the court, we’ll reverse the roe v. wade decision, and then we’ll try to codify roe v. wade and the million other legal decisions that we need to codify in order to guarantee american citizens some basic amount of rights. All of those would be incredibly popular decisions that would present a vision of the future.

she didn’t do any of that, and then she lost, and then somehow the focus is on the people who voted, 2 million less from last time, for trump. it’s insane shit.

no, but everyone wants to pretend that everyone became ultra-super racist idiot trump voters over the course of 4 years because they listened to a lot of joe rogan, rather than listening to a bunch of CNN like good little vote piggies. see one infographic of a bunch of red arrows everywhere and then everyone loses their fucking minds and decides that the only way to win the next election is to become more racist. if only they tack to the right harder, then they’ll win, they just need to be more racist, see, and then it’ll work!

and the problem is that this is exactly the lesson they want to learn. it’s the lesson they have an interest in learning because they are also a right wing party. maybe it’s because there’s just gonna be more posters running around two days after the election because this is the top drama and it’s eating up time they otherwise would’ve spent talking about celebrity drama or whatever, but we can talk for years about how the democrats, anywhere else, would be a center-right party of neoliberal warmongers that are fundamentally unwilling to give positive material concessions to basically any of their voters. as soon as the election gets called, that all vanishes, suddenly they’ve run the most perfect campaign of all time, and really, it was the voters that were at fault, and if anything, they should be more racist. it’s not that the economy sucked, that they didn’t present an enthusiastic, optimistic, or hell, coherent, vision of the future. no, it’s because they just weren’t racist enough.

it’s 2016 all over again. the punishments will continue until morale improves, time is a flat circle, and I keep falling down the stairs.

do’h

7. Joker laugh HAHAHAHAHAHA