• SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            5 months ago

            Excuse me, but HOW THE FUCK do you LOSE INTEREST in politics?!

            Is there too much lead in people’s food or something?

              • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                5 months ago

                I think you’re right on most things here. But I do think there have been studies showing that attention spans have never really been that high to begin with. Not that catering to that is good or bad, necessarily. But I just wanted to point that out.

                Do you have any proposed solutions?

            • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              5 months ago

              I don’t mean to be mean, but you need to talk to more people.

              A lot of people in America simply do not believe they can change anything. Either because they don’t know how, they’ve never shown up to a town hall, or because the only politics they hear about are from states and federal buildings they’ll never live or work in, or because the only politics they hear about outside of Trump being a dipshit is some 2% thing that will do something which might lead to something else maybe, or because South Park taught them that caring about anything is cringe and, actually, the smartest people spend all day making fun of anyone with an idea.

              I mean, let me ask another question: how the fuck do you lose interest in unions? And yet, the US lost interest a looong time ago.

              • MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. Things don’t change because they don’t participate. They don’t participate because things didn’t change.

                90% of things people claim are the reason they don’t vote could be changed if they fucking voted.

                • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  5 months ago

                  There is an element of people wanting their fast food and being displeased that civil rights took multiple decades to build.

                  That said, it isn’t just their fault. The Democrats, generally, do not know how to be exciting. As much as people say they’re not interested, it’s not entirely true; there is a spark that has yet to be ignited.

            • rumba@lemmy.zip
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              5 months ago

              Mostly they just want both sides to burn down and be replaced with something less horrible

              But the right has enough supporters to win.

              And at this point, short of the SCOTUS getting overthrown before the finish, ushering in fascism, all the politics are just arranging deckchairs on the Titanic.

              • MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                A bit a of a childish all-or-nothing argument.

                They can keep hoping for unattainable perfection. In the meantime, others are happy to take power.

                • rumba@lemmy.zip
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                  5 months ago

                  A bit a of a childish all-or-nothing argument.

                  Ohh screw that. We’ve got a bunch of sleepers in the left that they activate everytime the fucking race gets close, 90% of the left is complicit, selfish and owned. There’s nothing going on in the governemnt right now that’s ok and getting the left back in won’t change shit.

                  We need accountability, checks and balances and the scotus needs guaranteed representation

                  childish my ass, keep hoping for things to just get better and stay as they are or go back a couple years and watch it collaps around you. That’s myopic and a pipe dream

      • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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        5 months ago

        It’s hard to rig an entire country, but it gets a lot easier when you really only have to rig 7 states. Then it gets even easier when all you have to do is program the voting machines to switch the votes in a single race. That’s how we ended up with MILLIONS of ballots with a straight Democratic ticket, but with Trump at the top.

        Do you know a single person that voted that way? Have you ever heard of a specific person who did? Has the media ever trotted out a single person, anywhere in the country, that voted that way? I’ve never heard of a single example, and yet within minutes of the race going to Trump, the Dems were proclaiming that he’d won “fair & square,” before the dust had even settled to start looking at an investigation.

        They just conceded the election security of the race from the outset, as if they’d decided in advance that they knew they’d lose by cheating, and they didn’t know how to stop it, so they planned in advance to pretend it didn’t happen, rather than explain their spectacular dereliction to the nation.

        That race was the worst example of election fraud in American history, and it was done in the wide open, and the Dems did absolutely nothing to stop it or investigate it. This was the one race that Donald Trump absolutely had to win to stay out of prison. He has cheated at literally EVERYTHING in his entire life. Now we are supposed to believe that the one race where his life literally depends on winning, is the one, single instance in his entire life where he decided to play totally by the rules, and NOT cheat.

        Please, others may be that stupid, but I’m not.

          • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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            5 months ago

            First of all, I live in Florida, sooo Conservative region? Yeah.

            Trump/Putin/Musk - two of the worst foreign Psychopathic Oligarchs in the world, with infinite access to money and the best and most experienced computer programmers and hackers on the planet, with no loyalty or patriotism towards the United States, teamed up with an American Psychopathic Oligarch wannabe, who also has no loyalty, all viewing America as a big, fat, lazy RICH target to be ruthlessly and mercilessly exploited.

            All they had to do was swap the votes for one race, in 7 states. That kind of cheating would be difficult for individual Congressional or Senate races, but not for the presidential race. All that was need was access to the voting machines, and Putin’s hackers have no doubt been working on that for years.

            We all saw it happen. Both Trump and Musk had multiple meetings with Putin, by phone and in person, during the Biden administration, and they didn’t try to hide it. It was all reported widely in the media.

            And now EVERYTHING that was promised in P2025 is happening, and STILL people want to pretend that it was a fair election.

            They told us they were going to steal the election, they did everything they said, the results are exactly what they said they would be, and yet, somehow there are people who still believe that MAGA won fairly.

            WTF is WRONG with everybody?

              • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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                5 months ago

                THEY WON BY CHEATING! If we don’t address that single issue, they will do it worse next time, and he is going to win in 2028 with 98% of the “vote,” and use that to justify ignoring the Constitutional prohibition of a third term.

                You can’t reasonably expect to win against a election fraud scheme that has already succeeded once, and is in the process of getting even more streamlined.

                You can keep trying to find the people who refused to vote in the most attended election in history, but it will never be enough to outpace vote switching, it only gives them more votes to switch.

                  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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                    5 months ago

                    I’ve been following politics since the 60s, so I know what’s going on, too. One thing I’ve learned in life is that you can’t let the guy who is always winning by cheating to continue. It is highly demoralizing to everyone else. It doesn’t help that the cheater usually rubs his ill-gotten wins in everyone’s faces.

                    They have developed a wide-ranging system of cheating, that just evolves and gets stronger. You will NEVER win an election until you address it. Even if you do manage to win one, they will just use their short period out of power to improve their cheating strategy to win next time, which is exactly what they did between 2020 and 2024.

                    The system is broken, and it needs to be fixed. Just using the broken system harder is only going to make things worse. When an appliance is acting up, you don’t just pound on it, you fix it properly.

      • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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        5 months ago

        The Trump/ Putin/ Musk cabal rigged the election, and we ALL know it.

        He won EVERY swing state? Puh-leeeze. I’ve got good Critical Thinking Skills, and they have been screeching in my brain ever since Election Day 2024.

    • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
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      5 months ago

      “The overall turnout of eligible voters in the 2024 general election was 63.7%. This was lower than the 2020 record of 66.6% but higher than every other election year since at least 2004.”

      People did vote. Constantly blaming the small group of disillusioned voters is just weird.

          • IronBird@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            mandatory voting looks like a small price to pay for a (more) healthy democracy, Australia seems to be doing a lot better than the other British colonies right now

            of course with the US, something like that would have to be combined with an extensive overhaul of public education (moving away from the “breed compliant factory workers”-goal), because healthy democracy also requires an educated population capable of knowing when they’re being lied too

            • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
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              5 months ago

              Argentina has mandatory voting and they have Milei. How healthy is that?

              Argentina also votes on Sunday (a change way simpler than reforming education) and last elections they had 77% turnout. A lot of people simply don’t participate in the democracy and there’s no way around it. No one serious expect 100% people to vote and blames the 30% that doesn’t for the outcomes.

              • MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip
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                5 months ago

                No one expects 100%. Australia hovers around 90% turnout.

                The rest below is me just working out some numbers, and isn’t meant to convince anyone of anything.


                There are ~236 million Americans citizens of voting age, of whom 73.6% (174 million) are registered to vote.

                Of the 174 million registered voters, 155.2 million voted.

                Of the 155.2m, 77.3m voted for Trump, 75.0m voted for Harris, and 2.9m voted for someone else. Not that this is how the system works, but more people voted for “someone other than Trump” than voted for him.

                If 90% of the 174m voters had voted, that would have increased turnout by 1.4m voters. Not enough to change the popular vote, even if they were all for Harris (though depending on distribution there is at least some small chance the Electoral College votes would have changed enough).

                If 90% (212.4m) of the 236m eligible voters had voted, that’s 57.2m more votes to cast.

                Pew Research says that polled non-voters went 44% for Trump, 40% for Harris. Applying that to our hypothetical 57.2m voters, it’s 22.9m more for Harris and 25.2m more for Trump, bringing our totals to 102.5m Trump, 97.9m Harris, and a new block of 9.2m undecided. Note that two of those figures rounded up, so the apparent total is 212.6m rather than 212.4m.

                The difference between Trump-Harris at this point is 4.6m votes. For Harris to tie/win the popular vote on the new undecided block, she would have needed 75% of them (Harris 6.9% vs. Trump 2.3m).

                All of that hinges on polls reflecting reality, which lately is much easier to question (not based on misinformation, just with polling managing so often not matching the real vote results).

                Thank you for going on this numbers journey with me.

          • MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip
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            5 months ago

            90%, 80%, hell, even 70%. The general wisdom (not necessarily as true today) is that the higher the turnout in U.S. elections, the more likely the democrat is to win. That was the driver of the attached:

    • Aneb@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      All the people who did vote for the cheeto are responsible as well. And I think that was the point, marriage equality was on the ballot 14 years after the supreme court ruling

      • blakemiller@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The point I think is that this was largely preventable from within our own ranks. Because we didn’t turn out, the minority was allowed to rule. Yes, the minority is responsible but they were a forgone conclusion. Inaction on the left allowed a preventable outcome to occur.

          • Soulg@ani.social
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            5 months ago

            They are the left party in the us, fuck off with this worthless game

            • Aneb@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Wow I’m surprised you got down voted. Objectively the Democratic party represents the Left. Whether the Left has any better choices is not their fault, fucking spineless politicians eroded our faith that Democrats could do good for the country. America is a two party system unfortunately, and unfairly, so to anyone who down voted you… Does the Republican party represent the Left? Fuck no, and fuck off. I’m a progressive but thats not party affiliation

    • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      At some point we need to tell the “internet people who tell us who to blame” that hillary would have won in 2016 if not for the electoral college. At some point people just give up and that was the entire democratic party in 2024.

      Not a single person in the democrats has a plan to fix democracy in the US and until they do the gerrymandering, electoral college and republican rule by minority will continue

      • 🦄🦄🦄@feddit.org
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        5 months ago

        Cool story, would still have been nice to avoid the transgender genocide or killing health insurance.

        • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I’m sure all the finger pointing at neighbors will help, instead of, you know, taking 5 minutes to understand how we got here and why its going to continue.

          • return2ozma@lemmy.worldOP
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            5 months ago

            65 million don’t vote. “But Trump” is not a legit platform to run on. You have to give voters something to vote for. Dems fucked up

            • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              That’s exactly it. Dems keep throwing winnable elections and when they do get power they don’t attempt to implement any reforms to make it harder for republicans to hold power both electorally and monetarily so their voters get poorer and disenfranchised and leave.

              • MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                Donald Trump is the president you fucking moron. Happy to vote for Biden in 2020 but not Harris, essentially just a younger Biden.

                Two options. You’re phony or you’re stupid.

                • Eugene V. Debs' Ghost@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  5 months ago

                  I voted for Harris in California. I didn’t like it and it didn’t impact much, but I did. She still lost because she didn’t make herself different enough from Biden, who had low polling rates, plus courted Republicans who got us into this mess.

            • Soulg@ani.social
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              5 months ago

              The problem is that should have been the only platform needed, but still wasn’t enough

            • MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Democratic VOTERS fucked up, the party did not. So many pathetic excuses for such a stupid decision in November.

              • return2ozma@lemmy.worldOP
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                5 months ago

                The party didn’t even hold a primary and said you have to vote for who we tell you to vote for. “Ugh fine, what is she running on?” … “Nothing! Do you want Trump to win?”

      • MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        At some point people just give up

        Why? They won in 2020…

        Did you all fucking forget or something?

        Keep waiting for perfection, dumbass. Meanwhile, Republicans are destroying the country.

        • hark@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          You’re so right, support for genocide was just a minor mark against perfection. Keep compromising, soon you’ll be agreeing that democrats shouldn’t fight for marriage equality because some other issue is on the table and we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of slightly better than rabid nazis.

        • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          2020 was only winnable for biden because trump fucked up covid so bad. The media hole is so assymmetric that a solid 25% of the US population (including donald trump, because this shit works on him too) believe biden was president in 2020. The fabricated immigration crisis was also extremely successful. Democrats keep trying to meet halfway on whole lies and it never worked.

          Dems did nothing to break up the media/tech oligarchs during that time and now we’re paying for it. Dems have to be willing to play hard ball democracy. And most likely ICE and the FBI will make a bunch of crazy arrests during election season to try and hamper elections and smear candidates.

    • fodor@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      That’s all nice and good but you’re just wrong because of the electoral college. I voted, but I also knew that in my state, my vote would not change the result and it has never changed the result in my lifetime. So if one of my friends decided to stay home, I wouldn’t judge them for that. There aren’t enough of us in our state to change the results. That’s the sad reality, and you need to understand that so that you stop blaming innocent well-intentioned people who actually understand their own reality better than you do.

    • theparadox@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Hey, guys, I found that comment! You know, the one where some smug prick tries to remind everyone how correct they were… ::checks watch:: 11 months ago.

      Thank goodness they showed up. I was afraid there was going to be a political post that didn’t devolve into liberals and leftists screaming at each other about lesser evils and supporting genocide.

      I guess someone needs to do the important work of making sure those who oppose christo-fucking-fascists never find common ground.

        • theparadox@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Lol. Imagine thinking you have any idea what the fuck you are talking about. It really shouldn’t matter so god damn much but I voted, for Harris. I’m just not an immature shitbird that can’t empathize and can’t move on.

          They messed up, sure. Get over it and solve today’s problems instead of constantly, repeatedly, over and over again, bring it up and lording it over them. Infighting keeps Trump in power. You have no moral high ground.

      • mriormro@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        Those that chose not to vote are absolutely responsible for this.

        You’re not going to wriggle out of culpability.

        • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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          5 months ago

          I did vote, so let’s dispense with that false self-righteousness at the top.

          Sure lots of people didn’t vote, but that happens in every election. There were more votes than ever before, so this election actually had FEWER non-voters than ever before.

          They contributed, but they are not fully RESPONSIBLE for it. The Biden administration let MAGA run wild, instead of declaring it a domestic terrorist operation, and a serious national security threat, and rounded up ALL of their treasonous leaders, including propagandists like Rupert Murdoch and Steve Bannon, and sending them to Gitmo for extensive interrogation.

          The Biden administration allowed them to work their election fraud strategies in the wide open, as we saw it all happening before our eyes. They even admitted to it over and over as it was going on, and the Biden administration did less than nothing to combat it. That was far more destructive than FEWER non-voters than any previous election.

          You can’t allow MAGA to steal the election, and then blame ourselves for their crimes.

          • mriormro@lemmy.zip
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            5 months ago

            That’s a lot of words to say that you don’t know how to hold people accountable.

            • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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              5 months ago

              Blaming the fewest number of non-voters in history instead of the worst election fraud in history is lazy thinking.

              If you worked in bank, and you knew you had employees who were openly stealing from your bank, would you ignore the theft, and instead blame the customers who aren’t putting enough money in the bank to stay ahead of the embezzlement? “Gee, if we only had more people putting money in the bank, maybe it wouldn’t make any difference how much my dishonest employees steal. It’s the fault of our non-customers who refuse to be part of our openly corrupt system that our bank is failing, not the thieves.”

              That’s exactly how Dems have treated the biggest election fraud in American history, yet I’M not holding people accountable?