11 ms·

How does electing a dictator who promises "Vote for me and I will make it worse" help, though? That's the part I don't get. If the dictator promised to round

How does electing a dictator who promises "Vote for me and I will make it worse" help, though? That's the part I don't get. If the dictator promised to round up these CEOs and send them to El Salvador without a trial, that would be one thing... but the opposite is true, and I think the electorate understood that well enough.

beej71 2y ago
Some people feel that anything different must be better. But they are unfortunately incorrect.
HumblyTossed 2y ago
Because people are desperate for something to change. The status quo is literally killing people. I'm not saying I agree with their voting decision, but I can, in part, understand their frustration.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- anderber 2y ago
  You can never doubt that things can get a lot worse, no matter how bad they currently are. This is what we're finding out now.
- simonh 2y ago
  So they vote for the party that eviscerated the ACA and defends the medical insurance industry. Look at Trump’s talking points. It’s all about immigrants, foreigners and wokeism that are coming to get what you have. The US is a wealthy, prosperous nation, and I think even lower income segments of the US population are aware they’re night and day better off than people in the same economic segment in the countries immigrants come from. Wanting more is part of it, but it’s mainly about not sharing what Americans have, even though it’s not actually under threat. That doesn’t matter, people still feel threatened. I’m a Brit. My mother is a wealthy middle class retired woman in a safe idyllic bit of countryside, but she is utterly obsessed with foreigners coming to rape and steal and destroy British society. They’re all coming to get us. She reads in the papers (The Daily Mail) and sees it on TV (GB News) every day.
- hkpack 2y ago
  I see this tactic exploited to the maximum by foreign state propaganda machines. In my country which was targeted to the max by Russian propaganda, they are using the same playbook as in the US right now. 1. take any real complicated issue and blow it out of proportion so people think that it is a life and death situation. 2. heavily promote the most unfit person for the job 3. blame the worsen outcome to the predecessor Rinse and repeat and you'll see the country drown in chaos and everyone blames everyone. You can always argue that it is the real people, but if you look really close to the systems of promoting the divisive content - the powerhouse of it is always bot networks only followed by real people. I think that the most of the division in western societies have to be studied from the perspective of foreign influence.
  - ivan_gammel 2y ago
    The primary reason why Russia can exploit the failures of the system is that those failures exist. Western political elites are locked into old alignments and captured by special interests groups. They became more opportunistic and less values-driven, ignoring modern challenges and demographic changes and becoming less competent in general. This is why in Europe, which is more democratic than USA, we see significant changes in political landscape with new parties emerging on the right and on the left and getting visible share of votes. USA has a major flaw that doesn’t allow the country to escape bipartisan system, so it’s going to agonize in its current state until it finally breaks. Foreign influence here is really a secondary matter.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Ironically the fix for this is quite simple. Use score voting instead of first past the post. Score voting is simple: It's the voting system the judges use in the Olympics. Voters give each candidate a score. Highest average (i.e. the one who would get the gold) gets the seat. The flaw in first past the post is that it gives any viable third party the powerful incentive to merge with the major party they're most similar to, because otherwise they split the vote and both lose. So you get a two party system. Score voting doesn't have that, you don't have to change any other part of the system to make it work, and then the two party system everybody hates goes away.
- pavlov 2y ago
  But in fact the candidate who pretends to be the alternative is supported by the very same vested interests that the voters hate. Wall Street and healthcare CEOs spent big on Trump. This is a great achievement of the American media environment: people vote for the status quo fully believing they’re voting against it. And somebody ending up in a prison in El Salvador is the sacrificial lamb that is needed to make this equation work.
  - Whoppertime 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - mikeyouse 2y ago
      “Big pharma” spent nothing on Bernie Sanders because healthcare execs hate him and he doesn’t take money from corporate PACs. Individual, low level employees donated to him for the same reason they donate to any other politician. This has been widely known and understood since the baseless false equivalency was raised months ago and that you still repeat it just demonstrates the depths of the bad faith. https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-rfk-jr-misrepresented-002800073.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-rfk-jr-misrepresented-...
      - Whoppertime 2y ago
        "Corporations themselves cannot donate directly to federal candidates, but they can make donations through corporate PACs. The owners of companies and their employees also can make individual donations. For donations that exceed $200, campaigns are generally required to ask for information about the industry in which the contributor works, and they are required to disclose that information if provided. In the 2019-20 Congressional funding cycle, Sanders received more money from people employed in the field classified by OpenSecrets as "pharmaceuticals/health products" ($1.4 million) than any other member of Congress. He also received roughly $400,000 from people employed in "pharmaceutical manufacturing." This does not mean he received nearly $2 million from "the pharmaceutical industry," — it means the money was from people employed, in any capacity, in that field." So pharmaceutical companies cannot donate money directly to candidates, so they fact check it as false, saying it was the employees donating the money and not Pfizer directly, but acknowledging he did receive $1,400,000 from people that work in pharmaceuticals/health products, and $400,000 from people working in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Are we to presume that there is no strings attached when Bernie Sanders is receiving the money? Or are we supposed to offer the benefit of the doubt you wouldn't offer to a Republican politician who said that he didn't receive 1.4 million dollars from the NRA, but employees of the NRA, and a further $400,000 from people in Firearm Manufacturing
y33t 2y ago
People are getting screwed every which way so any change seems like an opportunity for improvement. Even Ukraine was excited to see Biden leave office so they could at least have a chance for a better arrangement with America.
- LeafItAlone 2y ago
  >Even Ukraine was excited to see Biden leave office so they could at least have a chance for a better arrangement with America. That doesn’t align with what I saw. Can you provide evidence? Because it was pretty clear to me that it would go exactly as it has, which is pretty terribly for Ukraine. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Trump%E2%80%93Zelenskyy_Oval_Office_meeting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Trump%E2%80%93Zelenskyy... - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna200977 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna200977
  - y33t 2y ago
    It was in an Economist article sometime around December; unfortunately I canceled my subscription because of their screen-hijacking ads, so I'm not able to find it. Problem was, Ukraine was being chipped away slowly by Russia and Biden wasn't giving them more aid. The thought was that Trump may shake things up a bit so they at least had a chance to improve their situation. Obviously that hope was misplaced, but Biden was too afraid of provoking of Russia to do anything but slow them down. Ukraine knew they were suffering a slow death, so basically any change was reason for hope.
    - LeafItAlone 2y ago
      If you do find that singular article, I’d be interested in reading it. I do have access to The Economist, so I’d just need a link.
throw10920 2y ago
Desperation makes most intelligent beings, including humans, less rational - not more.
candiddevmike 2y ago
30% of Americans would rather have nothing than see people who they consider undesirables have anything.
- zarathustreal 2y ago
  A charitable interpretation would be that they consider justice (consequences that fit the choices one makes) more important than ownership of material things ..and frankly they’re not wrong. No unjust system can maintain itself in the long term, the choice is “personal sacrifice” or “destroy everything” and it’s quite easy to make
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    That seems like a narrow definition of "justice." Shouldn't it also encompass freedom from the consequences of prejudicial choices made by others? Not every negative consequence arises from one's personal actions, after all.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      > Shouldn't it also encompass freedom from the consequences of prejudicial choices made by others Not necessarily? That’s hardly within the traditional American notion of the scope of government. Core american principles focus on protecting people from the government, not the government protecting people from each other.
      - candiddevmike 2y ago
        > Core american principles focus on protecting people from the government, not the government protecting people from each other. What part of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" do you think doesn't involve protecting people from each other?
        rayiner 2y ago
        Thomas Jefferson coined that phrase. Show me where he talks about a muscular government protecting people from each other. To a certain extent, that’s a baseline function of every government, sure. But there is a tension between “a government big enough to protect people from each other” and a “government big enough to deprive citizens of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The founding American principles draw the line between those two in a different place than other traditions.
zarathustreal 2y ago
Boggles the mind that people like this exist, it’s like everyone lives in an entirely separate reality.. how do we fix this?
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Go back in time and stop this any of the other times we took a big step this direction. The thrust this direction has been going strong since the '70s. We wrote out a detailed plan for jumping off a cliff, took several slow but steady and large steps toward the edge of the cliff, inched our shoes right over the edge, grabbed the railing, leaaaaaned way over, a little farther, a little farther, released finger go, then another, then completely let go. We're in free fall, the decades in which anyone could have stopped it are all in the past. There's nothing to grab, no path to turn around on, we're just falling now.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gsibble 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > Obamacare destroyed a system that made most people very happy with it. I've experienced it myself. I was perfectly happy with my insurance until its price skyrocketed and they denied me all sorts of stuff in the last 10 years. Insurance premiums have been on a steady sloped upwards march since the 1970s.
- jghn 2y ago
  > which a majority of Americans do not want You may want to go look at how all the individual attributes of the ACA poll once they're phrased that way and not as in "Obamacare"
- fzeroracer 2y ago
  > Obamacare destroyed a system that made most people very happy with it. I've experienced it myself. I was perfectly happy with my insurance until its price skyrocketed and they denied me all sorts of stuff in the last 10 years. People were not happy with the system. I'm old enough to remember the pre-existing condition bullshit insurance companies pulled to avoid paying out in all situations. They classified the stroke my mother had in 2004 as a preexisting condition and refused coverage sending my family into bankruptcy. It was still a bandaid solution on a rotting wound but this revisionist history of the pre-ACA era does not exist.
CPLX 2y ago
Because they want to punish and humiliate the establishment that let this happen and so they pick the person that seems to also hate and be hated by the establishment.
potato3732842 2y ago
Common people across the board have been sick and tired of the establishment since 2000ish. First it was the tea party, then they voted for Obama because a younger black guy talking about change seemed credible, then occupy wall street, then Maga, then 2020/BLM, then Maga round 2. While these movements have all been coopted to various extents by various bits of the establishment power structure the underlying trend and common theme that is minting these (at least initially) grassroots is very clear and with each round the movements seem to gain a broader base. People of all political positions seek an alternate to the establishment. If people could pull their heads out of their partisan asses they'd see this. The color of the dictator may as well be the result of a coin toss. This is the result of a long term trend.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  The color of the dictator may as well be the result of a coin toss That seems disingenuous. Obama: "Vote for me and I'll bring you hope and change and healthcare and all this other stuff." Trump: "Vote for me and you won't have to bother voting again." There is simply no room for BSAB rationalization here.
  - Whoppertime 2y ago
    People voted for Obama hoping for an end to war in the Middle East. A lot of people who were protesting the Iraq War when George Bush was president had no problem with Obama expanding the conflict into Libya. The Snowden scandal happened under Obama, and showed that the excesses of the Patriot Act didn't stop under Obama. Can you understand why some people who voted for Obama hoping for peace in the middle east and a re-establishment of civil liberties could end up jaded?
- namdnay 2y ago
  > First it was the tea party, then they voted for Obama I very very very very much doubt these were the same people
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago

beej71 2y ago

Some people feel that anything different must be better. But they are unfortunately incorrect.

HumblyTossed 2y ago

Because people are desperate for something to change. The status quo is literally killing people. I'm not saying I agree with their voting decision, but I can, in part, understand their frustration.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anderber 2y ago
You can never doubt that things can get a lot worse, no matter how bad they currently are. This is what we're finding out now.
simonh 2y ago
So they vote for the party that eviscerated the ACA and defends the medical insurance industry. Look at Trump’s talking points. It’s all about immigrants, foreigners and wokeism that are coming to get what you have. The US is a wealthy, prosperous nation, and I think even lower income segments of the US population are aware they’re night and day better off than people in the same economic segment in the countries immigrants come from. Wanting more is part of it, but it’s mainly about not sharing what Americans have, even though it’s not actually under threat. That doesn’t matter, people still feel threatened. I’m a Brit. My mother is a wealthy middle class retired woman in a safe idyllic bit of countryside, but she is utterly obsessed with foreigners coming to rape and steal and destroy British society. They’re all coming to get us. She reads in the papers (The Daily Mail) and sees it on TV (GB News) every day.
hkpack 2y ago
I see this tactic exploited to the maximum by foreign state propaganda machines. In my country which was targeted to the max by Russian propaganda, they are using the same playbook as in the US right now. 1. take any real complicated issue and blow it out of proportion so people think that it is a life and death situation. 2. heavily promote the most unfit person for the job 3. blame the worsen outcome to the predecessor Rinse and repeat and you'll see the country drown in chaos and everyone blames everyone. You can always argue that it is the real people, but if you look really close to the systems of promoting the divisive content - the powerhouse of it is always bot networks only followed by real people. I think that the most of the division in western societies have to be studied from the perspective of foreign influence.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago
  The primary reason why Russia can exploit the failures of the system is that those failures exist. Western political elites are locked into old alignments and captured by special interests groups. They became more opportunistic and less values-driven, ignoring modern challenges and demographic changes and becoming less competent in general. This is why in Europe, which is more democratic than USA, we see significant changes in political landscape with new parties emerging on the right and on the left and getting visible share of votes. USA has a major flaw that doesn’t allow the country to escape bipartisan system, so it’s going to agonize in its current state until it finally breaks. Foreign influence here is really a secondary matter.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Ironically the fix for this is quite simple. Use score voting instead of first past the post. Score voting is simple: It's the voting system the judges use in the Olympics. Voters give each candidate a score. Highest average (i.e. the one who would get the gold) gets the seat. The flaw in first past the post is that it gives any viable third party the powerful incentive to merge with the major party they're most similar to, because otherwise they split the vote and both lose. So you get a two party system. Score voting doesn't have that, you don't have to change any other part of the system to make it work, and then the two party system everybody hates goes away.
pavlov 2y ago
But in fact the candidate who pretends to be the alternative is supported by the very same vested interests that the voters hate. Wall Street and healthcare CEOs spent big on Trump. This is a great achievement of the American media environment: people vote for the status quo fully believing they’re voting against it. And somebody ending up in a prison in El Salvador is the sacrificial lamb that is needed to make this equation work.
- Whoppertime 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - mikeyouse 2y ago
    “Big pharma” spent nothing on Bernie Sanders because healthcare execs hate him and he doesn’t take money from corporate PACs. Individual, low level employees donated to him for the same reason they donate to any other politician. This has been widely known and understood since the baseless false equivalency was raised months ago and that you still repeat it just demonstrates the depths of the bad faith. https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-rfk-jr-misrepresented-002800073.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-rfk-jr-misrepresented-...
    - Whoppertime 2y ago
      "Corporations themselves cannot donate directly to federal candidates, but they can make donations through corporate PACs. The owners of companies and their employees also can make individual donations. For donations that exceed $200, campaigns are generally required to ask for information about the industry in which the contributor works, and they are required to disclose that information if provided. In the 2019-20 Congressional funding cycle, Sanders received more money from people employed in the field classified by OpenSecrets as "pharmaceuticals/health products" ($1.4 million) than any other member of Congress. He also received roughly $400,000 from people employed in "pharmaceutical manufacturing." This does not mean he received nearly $2 million from "the pharmaceutical industry," — it means the money was from people employed, in any capacity, in that field." So pharmaceutical companies cannot donate money directly to candidates, so they fact check it as false, saying it was the employees donating the money and not Pfizer directly, but acknowledging he did receive $1,400,000 from people that work in pharmaceuticals/health products, and $400,000 from people working in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Are we to presume that there is no strings attached when Bernie Sanders is receiving the money? Or are we supposed to offer the benefit of the doubt you wouldn't offer to a Republican politician who said that he didn't receive 1.4 million dollars from the NRA, but employees of the NRA, and a further $400,000 from people in Firearm Manufacturing

y33t 2y ago

People are getting screwed every which way so any change seems like an opportunity for improvement. Even Ukraine was excited to see Biden leave office so they could at least have a chance for a better arrangement with America.

LeafItAlone 2y ago
>Even Ukraine was excited to see Biden leave office so they could at least have a chance for a better arrangement with America. That doesn’t align with what I saw. Can you provide evidence? Because it was pretty clear to me that it would go exactly as it has, which is pretty terribly for Ukraine. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Trump%E2%80%93Zelenskyy_Oval_Office_meeting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Trump%E2%80%93Zelenskyy... - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna200977 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna200977
- y33t 2y ago
  It was in an Economist article sometime around December; unfortunately I canceled my subscription because of their screen-hijacking ads, so I'm not able to find it. Problem was, Ukraine was being chipped away slowly by Russia and Biden wasn't giving them more aid. The thought was that Trump may shake things up a bit so they at least had a chance to improve their situation. Obviously that hope was misplaced, but Biden was too afraid of provoking of Russia to do anything but slow them down. Ukraine knew they were suffering a slow death, so basically any change was reason for hope.
  - LeafItAlone 2y ago
    If you do find that singular article, I’d be interested in reading it. I do have access to The Economist, so I’d just need a link.

throw10920 2y ago

Desperation makes most intelligent beings, including humans, less rational - not more.

candiddevmike 2y ago

30% of Americans would rather have nothing than see people who they consider undesirables have anything.

zarathustreal 2y ago
A charitable interpretation would be that they consider justice (consequences that fit the choices one makes) more important than ownership of material things ..and frankly they’re not wrong. No unjust system can maintain itself in the long term, the choice is “personal sacrifice” or “destroy everything” and it’s quite easy to make
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  That seems like a narrow definition of "justice." Shouldn't it also encompass freedom from the consequences of prejudicial choices made by others? Not every negative consequence arises from one's personal actions, after all.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    > Shouldn't it also encompass freedom from the consequences of prejudicial choices made by others Not necessarily? That’s hardly within the traditional American notion of the scope of government. Core american principles focus on protecting people from the government, not the government protecting people from each other.
    - candiddevmike 2y ago
      > Core american principles focus on protecting people from the government, not the government protecting people from each other. What part of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" do you think doesn't involve protecting people from each other?
      - rayiner 2y ago
        Thomas Jefferson coined that phrase. Show me where he talks about a muscular government protecting people from each other. To a certain extent, that’s a baseline function of every government, sure. But there is a tension between “a government big enough to protect people from each other” and a “government big enough to deprive citizens of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The founding American principles draw the line between those two in a different place than other traditions.

zarathustreal 2y ago

Boggles the mind that people like this exist, it’s like everyone lives in an entirely separate reality.. how do we fix this?

alabastervlog 2y ago
Go back in time and stop this any of the other times we took a big step this direction. The thrust this direction has been going strong since the '70s. We wrote out a detailed plan for jumping off a cliff, took several slow but steady and large steps toward the edge of the cliff, inched our shoes right over the edge, grabbed the railing, leaaaaaned way over, a little farther, a little farther, released finger go, then another, then completely let go. We're in free fall, the decades in which anyone could have stopped it are all in the past. There's nothing to grab, no path to turn around on, we're just falling now.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

gsibble 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ceejayoz 2y ago
> Obamacare destroyed a system that made most people very happy with it. I've experienced it myself. I was perfectly happy with my insurance until its price skyrocketed and they denied me all sorts of stuff in the last 10 years. Insurance premiums have been on a steady sloped upwards march since the 1970s.
jghn 2y ago
> which a majority of Americans do not want You may want to go look at how all the individual attributes of the ACA poll once they're phrased that way and not as in "Obamacare"
fzeroracer 2y ago
> Obamacare destroyed a system that made most people very happy with it. I've experienced it myself. I was perfectly happy with my insurance until its price skyrocketed and they denied me all sorts of stuff in the last 10 years. People were not happy with the system. I'm old enough to remember the pre-existing condition bullshit insurance companies pulled to avoid paying out in all situations. They classified the stroke my mother had in 2004 as a preexisting condition and refused coverage sending my family into bankruptcy. It was still a bandaid solution on a rotting wound but this revisionist history of the pre-ACA era does not exist.

CPLX 2y ago

Because they want to punish and humiliate the establishment that let this happen and so they pick the person that seems to also hate and be hated by the establishment.

potato3732842 2y ago

Common people across the board have been sick and tired of the establishment since 2000ish. First it was the tea party, then they voted for Obama because a younger black guy talking about change seemed credible, then occupy wall street, then Maga, then 2020/BLM, then Maga round 2. While these movements have all been coopted to various extents by various bits of the establishment power structure the underlying trend and common theme that is minting these (at least initially) grassroots is very clear and with each round the movements seem to gain a broader base. People of all political positions seek an alternate to the establishment. If people could pull their heads out of their partisan asses they'd see this. The color of the dictator may as well be the result of a coin toss. This is the result of a long term trend.

CamperBob2 2y ago
The color of the dictator may as well be the result of a coin toss That seems disingenuous. Obama: "Vote for me and I'll bring you hope and change and healthcare and all this other stuff." Trump: "Vote for me and you won't have to bother voting again." There is simply no room for BSAB rationalization here.
- Whoppertime 2y ago
  People voted for Obama hoping for an end to war in the Middle East. A lot of people who were protesting the Iraq War when George Bush was president had no problem with Obama expanding the conflict into Libya. The Snowden scandal happened under Obama, and showed that the excesses of the Patriot Act didn't stop under Obama. Can you understand why some people who voted for Obama hoping for peace in the middle east and a re-establishment of civil liberties could end up jaded?
namdnay 2y ago
> First it was the tea party, then they voted for Obama I very very very very much doubt these were the same people
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago