• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
cake
Cake day: January 13th, 2025

help-circle








  • The issue I have is that there is an incredibly corrupt, absolutely vile, but completely legal explanation for the massive difference in down-ballot participation; Musk and other billionaires flooded social media platforms with heavy pro-Trump propoganda. Easily influenced people were pushed to vote for Trump, but given no directions for how to vote locally, so they didn’t.

    Should these votes be counted is another question entirely. I personally don’t view it any differently than vote buying, as these voters are essentially agents fulfilling their orders, but there’s nothing on the books that bars anyone from manipulating low-intelligence people from voting how they’re told.






  • There’s some interesting theories in this thread, but I want to bring up one that I don’t see talked about much; American democracy has been so dysfunctional for so long, the average American citizen absolutely assumes they’re being lied to on the campaign trail. Nobody ever believes a politician is going to accomplish even a quarter of the things they campaign on here. This is a big part of what made Trump so popular, with the line of thinking being “he’s an outsider, so he’ll be different.” The problem then becomes one of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, Trump being an outsider should be a reason to always take what he says at its face value. On the other, Trump is a politician now, and as established, politicians always lie on the campaign trail, so why would you expect him to keep his promises?

    I’m not going to pretend to understand how the average American is able to do the mental gymnastics necessary to maintain these two contradictory ideals, but I think it’s important to point out that a lot of his supporters grew up with zero faith in the democratic process ever helping them.







  • There’s nothing wrong with having preferences. Discrimination gets a bad rap because of it’s association with racism, homophobia, etc, but everybody discriminates all the time, every day, typically about incredibly simple stuff. At the end of the day, it’s just recognizing differences in people and making decisions based on those differences. Yeah, you shouldn’t let something like race or gender impact a decision to hire someone, but you’re already discriminating against one gender when selecting romantic partners. (unless you’re bisexual and have exactly a 50/50 preference) If you’re only attracted to people with athletic builds, you’ll be discriminating against tons of people with health conditions. If you’re looking for a goth partner, you’re discriminating against all the people with happy families. I don’t really think discriminating over pheremones is any different.