3 ms·

I'm not sure I'll ever get over the fact that so many people, including a surprisingly large number of people here, voted for and support this clearly inept, me

by kccoder 11mo ago

I'm not sure I'll ever get over the fact that so many people, including a surprisingly large number of people here, voted for and support this clearly inept, mean, clueless, inarticulate, sloppy, disgusting, empathy-lacking, greedy, corrupt, incompetent, evil, childish fool to lead them. How anyone cannot see who this man clearly is after minimal exposure is simply beyond me. I keep telling myself that his supporters are just fools because that is much more comforting than alternative explanations, primarily that they LIKE was he is doing, all of it. We can fix foolishness (education), but I'm not sure how we fix a populace which doesn't value democracy and enjoys watching innocent people suffer.

pfannkuchen 11mo ago
I think many people are (perhaps subconsciously, it’s wrongthink these days) worried about the rapid demographic slide, and he’s the only guy to even pretend to want to do something about it. He also has a lot of other random opinions, which I think most people don’t care one way or another about as long as he pretends to deal with the thing they are subconsciously worried about (not that what he’s doing does anything meaningful in that regard, but the subconscious is not very good at math).
- mindslight 11mo ago
  Sure, but the responsibility for this dynamic is still on them. They've been buying into this abjectly brain dead narrative about the cause of the demographic slide - blaming immigration instead of the looting elites who have been turning the financial screws of wealth extraction, making it ever-harder to have kids. As women entered the workforce, the definition of full time employment hours should have halved, right? And failing that, people's saved wealth should have gone up such that they had more negotiating power with their employers and working hours naturally went down. Instead the looters turned up the financial treadmill of low interest rates, dumping all the gains from having double the workforce, plus technological progress, plus offshoring into an asset bubble to benefit the wealthy. This is precisely why "the rent is too damn high". But still rather than coming to terms with how they've been continuously enabling this by supporting fake "fiscal responsibility" Republicans (Democrats would have still printed most of that new money but at least spread it around a bit), they're leaning right back into that broken immigration narrative like a child's fucking security blanket - always getting stuck focusing on individuals who are different and turning to personal hate, while never even perceiving the system that has been deliberately set up to screw them over.
  - pfannkuchen 11mo ago
    The slide objectively is due to immigration, though. If you look at the demographics that were present prior to the massive immigration policy change in 1965, they are at about the same ratio as they were prior. Have you looked those up before, and do you disagree with that statement? The looting stuff also happened, for sure, but in the counterfactual where the immigration policy hadn’t changed in the way that it did, we would be in a temporary and self correcting situation of “too many old people”, not in any permanent change demographically. Now if we want to say that the people doing the looting are the same people who wanted the immigration policy changed, then yes I could see an argument where the looting is the root cause. But looting can be dealt with separately and it seems to be a much trickier problem as it’s more of a self interest vs society interest, prisoner’s dilemma, human nature type situation as opposed to a pretty simple and well defined problem on the other hand. Not that I think Trump is actually doing or will do anything significant about it, just that focusing on immigration isn’t that dumb in the abstract. Now, we also do have a situation where it’s considered immoral to reject outsiders. So there is a subconscious temptation to route around immigration as the main problem, else one violates one’s own moral programming. I wonder if you could introspect to see if that’s happening on your end? Like rejecting outsiders has been normal human programming up until less than 100 years ago, the people who literally fought the Nazis would today be called Nazis for their mainstream-at-the-time views, etc. Something weird happened to morality…
    - mindslight 11mo ago
      One of the difficulties discussing this topic is the large amount of Motte-and-Baileys. For instance, I engaged with your term "demographic slide" in good faith, giving it the charitable interpretation of how most people, especially the middle classes, are having a hard time finding the time/resources to have kids/families - a positive sum context wherein people are focused on their own individual concerns. You've now rewarded my engagement by dragging the term into a negative-sum racism-first context where the ethnic makeup of the country is of primary concern - as if I have already accepted that premise. Do some people care about this? Sure. Do as many people fundamentally care about this as to make it a reasonable framing of the issue? Especially without reactionary talk radio (and now social media) pushing these simplistic narratives to run cover for the looters? I would say definitely not. We are a nation of immigrants, and a young one at that. If you rewound the clock to 150 years ago, you could be making the same point about a "demographic slide" towards the Irish. And yet now they're just an accepted part of "good" American society. We don't get to be a global superpower by insulating ourselves from the rest of the world. So as I said, the way I see it is that the real issues driving the mass flip-the-table frustration are economic disenfranchisement and the destruction of individual liberty. Racism-first narratives drag us even further back to the fucking dark ages. If you want to die on that hill, then go right ahead. Otherwise if you've just perhaps overfit some comforting too-easy explanations, then pull the fuck up and maybe we can save our society together.
- UncleMeat 11mo ago
  "I voted for the historically corrupt president because I'm worried about there being more nonwhites who live near me" makes it worse in my mind, not better.

by kccoder 11mo ago

pfannkuchen 11mo ago

I think many people are (perhaps subconsciously, it’s wrongthink these days) worried about the rapid demographic slide, and he’s the only guy to even pretend to want to do something about it. He also has a lot of other random opinions, which I think most people don’t care one way or another about as long as he pretends to deal with the thing they are subconsciously worried about (not that what he’s doing does anything meaningful in that regard, but the subconscious is not very good at math).

mindslight 11mo ago
Sure, but the responsibility for this dynamic is still on them. They've been buying into this abjectly brain dead narrative about the cause of the demographic slide - blaming immigration instead of the looting elites who have been turning the financial screws of wealth extraction, making it ever-harder to have kids. As women entered the workforce, the definition of full time employment hours should have halved, right? And failing that, people's saved wealth should have gone up such that they had more negotiating power with their employers and working hours naturally went down. Instead the looters turned up the financial treadmill of low interest rates, dumping all the gains from having double the workforce, plus technological progress, plus offshoring into an asset bubble to benefit the wealthy. This is precisely why "the rent is too damn high". But still rather than coming to terms with how they've been continuously enabling this by supporting fake "fiscal responsibility" Republicans (Democrats would have still printed most of that new money but at least spread it around a bit), they're leaning right back into that broken immigration narrative like a child's fucking security blanket - always getting stuck focusing on individuals who are different and turning to personal hate, while never even perceiving the system that has been deliberately set up to screw them over.
- pfannkuchen 11mo ago
  The slide objectively is due to immigration, though. If you look at the demographics that were present prior to the massive immigration policy change in 1965, they are at about the same ratio as they were prior. Have you looked those up before, and do you disagree with that statement? The looting stuff also happened, for sure, but in the counterfactual where the immigration policy hadn’t changed in the way that it did, we would be in a temporary and self correcting situation of “too many old people”, not in any permanent change demographically. Now if we want to say that the people doing the looting are the same people who wanted the immigration policy changed, then yes I could see an argument where the looting is the root cause. But looting can be dealt with separately and it seems to be a much trickier problem as it’s more of a self interest vs society interest, prisoner’s dilemma, human nature type situation as opposed to a pretty simple and well defined problem on the other hand. Not that I think Trump is actually doing or will do anything significant about it, just that focusing on immigration isn’t that dumb in the abstract. Now, we also do have a situation where it’s considered immoral to reject outsiders. So there is a subconscious temptation to route around immigration as the main problem, else one violates one’s own moral programming. I wonder if you could introspect to see if that’s happening on your end? Like rejecting outsiders has been normal human programming up until less than 100 years ago, the people who literally fought the Nazis would today be called Nazis for their mainstream-at-the-time views, etc. Something weird happened to morality…
  - mindslight 11mo ago
    One of the difficulties discussing this topic is the large amount of Motte-and-Baileys. For instance, I engaged with your term "demographic slide" in good faith, giving it the charitable interpretation of how most people, especially the middle classes, are having a hard time finding the time/resources to have kids/families - a positive sum context wherein people are focused on their own individual concerns. You've now rewarded my engagement by dragging the term into a negative-sum racism-first context where the ethnic makeup of the country is of primary concern - as if I have already accepted that premise. Do some people care about this? Sure. Do as many people fundamentally care about this as to make it a reasonable framing of the issue? Especially without reactionary talk radio (and now social media) pushing these simplistic narratives to run cover for the looters? I would say definitely not. We are a nation of immigrants, and a young one at that. If you rewound the clock to 150 years ago, you could be making the same point about a "demographic slide" towards the Irish. And yet now they're just an accepted part of "good" American society. We don't get to be a global superpower by insulating ourselves from the rest of the world. So as I said, the way I see it is that the real issues driving the mass flip-the-table frustration are economic disenfranchisement and the destruction of individual liberty. Racism-first narratives drag us even further back to the fucking dark ages. If you want to die on that hill, then go right ahead. Otherwise if you've just perhaps overfit some comforting too-easy explanations, then pull the fuck up and maybe we can save our society together.
UncleMeat 11mo ago
"I voted for the historically corrupt president because I'm worried about there being more nonwhites who live near me" makes it worse in my mind, not better.