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Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?
- jazz9k 4mo ago[flagged]
- zer0zzz 4mo ago“ Republicans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and deny the results of that election. The dividing line is the denial itself: the willingness to hold that an election was stolen in the absence of evidence. That single belief turns out to be a genetic marker. Everything else travels with it.” He doesn’t seem to be talking about conservatives or republicans broadly; seems like he’s focusing on a much smaller minority of people in society with very specific and fringe views. Perhaps it is “bias” to lump these people with the rest of conservatives.
- TacticalCoder 4mo agoDo you seriously buy the "explanation" that "liberals vote so much more by mail-in" that both Pennsylvania and Georgia flipped even though Trump was largely ahead in both? Two states that, btw, were won by the Republicans in 2024. Which should give some food for thoughts too. I think Trump is both crazy and senile now but I also think he may be the only US president to have ever won the elections three times. Now I do also believe that, even in the face of cheating (probably by the same who then guided senile-Biden's auto-pen for four years), republicans should have accepted the defeat instead of trying to launch an insurrection.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- watwut 4mo agoYes and there is nothing suspect about liberals voting more by mail. Demographically it checks out. Complains about biden auto pen and biden are kind of clearly fake given Trump mental state.
- zer0zzz 4mo agoIf anything the voters are completely in line with what their respective candidate told them to do.
- hotdog1492 4mo agoYou've identified yourself on the metric. I'm trying to decide if that's a result of self-reflection, or its absence.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoIn the absence of any legally-valid proof to the contrary in 60 court cases, then yes, I do buy that explanation. Those who want to claim election fraud had every chance to prove it. They failed spectacularly.
- helpful-guy 4mo agoPlenty of things to take issue with here, but I'll only mention the least controversial -- FDR won four elections.
- onetimeusename 4mo ago"liberals vote so much more by mail-in" They do. See page 4. (https://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2020-12/How-we-voted-in-2020-v01.pdf https://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2020-12/How-...)
- zer0zzz 4mo agoBuddy I lived in Georgia during that election. I definitely believe it based on vibes alone.
- zer0zzz 4mo agoIt’s also not complicated: the respective voters simply did what trump or Biden told them to do.
- watwut 4mo agoConservative vote is literally "cruelty is the point" and "empathy is bad thing" vote. That vote was motivated by explicit wish to harm and by masculinity being defined as "manly man is asshole" ideology. Liberals are big tent of "not like that" that encompasses also assholes, but, crutially, not only them
- ethanplant 4mo ago“This article reached a conclusion from the author’s perspective” is not a criticism of writing. It is a description of writing. Good writing is almost never neutral. It can be fair, careful, honest, and proportionate. But if it has nothing to say, it isn’t good writing.
- elzbardico 4mo agoI learned that I don't need to agree 100% with an author's premises to find value in what she writes. She is a bit partisan, but on the other side, it is about time for us on the right to completely re-evaluate MAGA, and go about creating a third way, distinct from the old mainstream republicanism of the McCains and Bushes, but also critical of what MAGA turned out to be.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoI'd settle for a return to McCain.
- convolvatron 4mo agowhat would consider to be the essential characteristics of a third way?
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- rafterydj 4mo agois the author of this post in thread? i do not like the AI voice it reads like.
- Cpoll 4mo agoI didn't notice any obvious markers, weird prose, or meandering in this one.
- jbotz 4mo agoIt's rather full of "it's not X, it's Y" and expository paragraph followed by short sentence counter-point, and "read that again". But no, I don't think it's AI, I think it's just written in a style that happens to be an attractor for LLMs.
- wilbo 4mo agoI also got strong AI vibes, but I enjoyed the content. I thought it was a interesting summary of topics I've read many times before and even if the content was AI-assisted, does it matter? It seems there was a strong guiding hand in presenting a popular topic in a new way.
- ekelsen 4mo agoIt matters because I don't like the style. I wouldn't like it if a human wrote it. I don't like the style so much that I won't read things written with it. So maybe she had something interesting to say, but it was not communicated to me because I bounced.
- tanseydavid 4mo agoAnd then you came to tell the rest of us that "you did not read it?" Why do that?
- ekelsen 4mo agoI would believe she wrote it in this style if you can point to any of her writing pre 2022 that is similar in style. Does that exist? Genuinely curious.
- rayiner 4mo agoIt's remarkable that this article talks about Tammany Hall, Plato, and MAGA, without mentioning the throughline among them: immigration. Tammany Hall’s peak century coincided with mass immigration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall. As Wikipedia explains: "In the 1840s, over 130,000 Irish immigrants arrived in New York City to escape the Great Famine, arriving in poverty and joining scores of thousands of their fellow countrymen who had arrived over the prior decades. By 1855, 34 percent of the city's voter population was composed of Irish immigrants. By providing these new arrivals with patronage employment, job referrals, legal aid, food, shelter, employment insurance, and other extralegal services, including citizenship and naturalization services, Tammany secured the lifelong support of the large and growing Irish population, which would form the majority of its electoral base for the next century. In exchange for these services, the Tammany political machine harvested Irish immigrant votes." The article also quotes Plato, who predicted Tammany Hall 2,400 years earlier. Plato saw good government as a precarious and fragile thing that could be achieved only through careful cultivation of the polity's "constitution"--not just a legal document, but the political "way of life." As a result, Plato's ideal city had strong borders and was insulated from both trade and immigration: https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/983154/1/EXOPOLITICS-OF-PLATO-and-ARISTOTLE.pdf https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/983154/1/EXO.... "In most states of course, such confusion is a way of life with which people learned to cope by various compromises, as was the case when immigrants are allowed into a country (PS, 293d). But such compromises were neither necessary nor desirable for Plato, since any policy of unrestricted immigration would destroy his political constitution (PL, 736c; 950a). Aristotle agreed that immigration was a dangerous thing because it pitted newcomers against those already established, thus creating tensions and frictions between them." Plato's Republic describes a society's descent into anarchy as involving the erasure of distinctions between citizens and foreigners: "the metic" (legal permanent resident) "becomes the equal of a citizen and the citizen of a metic, and similarly with the foreigner." The author sets up an astute point linking Tammany Hall, Plato, and MAGA republicans, but somehow whiffs the conclusion. The U.S. didn’t defeat Tammany Hall through unspecified “fighting back”—it did so through assimilation and homogenization. The U.S. enacted restrictive immigration law in 1921. That, coupled with a population boom, dropped the foreign born population from 15% to under 5% and largely erased the separate identity of Ellis Island immigrants. That neutering of ethnic attachments made it impossible to sustain political machines that were built on ethnic solidarity.
- aaron695 4mo ago[dead]
- rayiner 4mo ago[dead]