I’m late to the party here but still wanted to take a moment to thank you for the share - quite an interesting read. Cheers.

Y’all? Excuse me sir/madam, but it’s y’all that needs to cut it out with the rhetoric.

The level of effort to cast a vote, even in states with aggressive voter suppression, is still lower than the impact that the next 4-6 years of policy will have. Every state has options for mail voting or early voting.

You’d have a hard time convincing me that someone who intends to vote would decide not to unless they’re simply too lazy to be bothered. If mild shaming encourages even a single person to exercise their right to vote, it’s worth doing.

In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that it’s people like you coming out here and coddling people with your sYsTeMiC iSsUeS that is enabling people to consider voting and instead think, “hmm, do I want to deal with the systemic voter suppression issue or should I just skip voting this time? Yeah, I don’t want to wait in a line or cast my vote early, so best to just sit this one out and complain about the outcome.”

It’s not victim blaming, it’s reminding people that they have a CIVIC DUTY to vote, just like registering for the draft or getting called for jury duty.

I did not know about mega-anna as a term before. Is it always hyphenated, or did you add that for emphasis?

Nah our approach to polls is fundamentally misguided based on the way we communicate in 2024 - most of them still rely on essentially wardialing a target area until someone answers, so it fundamentally skews toward an older crowd and those gullible enough to take a phone call from an unknown number.

And still everyone will act shocked when they have to eat shit when they elect the “everyone is gonna eat some shit” party.

Isn’t that the tough bit about American Exceptionalism? Americans can’t ALL be exceptional (by definition) and the messaging about how a rising tide lifts all boats simply doesn’t translate to most people.

Tbf, Americans tend to be more than happy to work together (in short bursts) during moments of national crisis, but when everything is moving along normally policy debates become unnecessarily contentious.

I completely agree with you. My theory is that there are a whole lot of Americans for whom the public education system failed horribly in their attempt to teach civics.

Oh, and I’m sure racism and sexism are also playing a meaningful role.

Yes, this is not uncommon in US politics.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

In U.S. politics, the period between (presidential and congressional) elections in November and the inauguration of officials early in the following year is commonly called the “lame-duck period”.

A president elected to a second term is sometimes seen as a lame duck from early in the second term, since term limits prevent them from contesting re-election four years later. However, not personally having to face the electorate again makes a second-term president more powerful than they were in their first term as they are thus freer to take politically unpopular actions. However, this comes with caveats; as the de facto leader of their political party, the president’s actions affect how the party performs in the midterm elections two years into the second term, and, to some extent, the success of that party’s nominee in the next presidential election four years in the future. For these reasons, it can be argued that a president in their second term is not a lame duck at all.

So while you’re right that the assertion the author is making is misguided, it’s a fallacy that is made often enough that some might conflate it with reality.

I mean shit, Dick Cheney is left of Trump. What does that say?

Never in the history of mankind has conservatism been stopped by pacifism.

• American Civil Rights Movement
• Indian Independence from Britain
• Singing Revolution in the Baltics
• Arab Spring

There are tons more examples but the point is that I only need one because your statement was so broadly inflammatory.

I don’t disagree with your sentiment, but to claim that violence is the only way to make societal progress makes you seem intentionally obtuse.

This is objectively and verifiably false. Recommend you cool your jets a smidgen, the darkest hour is just before the dawn.

At this point it’s more about motivating voters to show up than swaying voters from one side to the other.

Consider the uncommitted voter movement in Michigan - those folks aren’t likely to ever vote for Trump, he’s even farther from their position on the issue. The risk that they primarily represent is not submitting a ballot at all.

Expect ads in Michigan, and to a lesser extent nationwide, advertising how Biden’s support of Israel has evolved in recent weeks, including the recent (failed - China/Russia vetoed) UN vote to call for a ceasefire in GAZA, which the US supported.

It feels like lots of people holding their breath until “prices go back down”, passing out from a lack of oxygen, waking up, asking why the prices are still so damn high, then holding their breath again when they’re told, “this is just the price now, deal with it”.

I mean don’t get me wrong, it would be neat if we could go back to 1990 prices, but that just isn’t how this works, nor should it be our goal.

Don’t need the luck, I don’t chase fool’s errands.

In this thread: “Biden did not have a 1-on-1 conversation with my manager that resulted in a massive raise, so I declare these statistics invalid!”

This seems to happen a lot on Lemmy, makes me miss the Economics subreddit.

I know that not everyone has had the opportunity to take classes in economics, but the amount of people who are unable to see past their own nose is incredible.

How would we prefer our leaders to make policy decisions? Should they pick a random 10 people and ask what they think, or would it be better to gather a wide range of data on the topic to build an understanding of the economic impacts for 300M+ people? I’d argue that it would be irresponsible for policymakers to ignore the aggregate statistics, but commenters in this thread seem dead set on asserting that because their personal circumstances don’t follow the narrative, the statistics must be a lie.

I suspect that the goal with this program is to advantage first time home buyers over their competitors, such as REITs and hedge funds that have been indiscriminately buying up housing across the country. Obviously the devil is in the details but there’s a way to implement this that makes sense and isn’t insane, but we’ll have to wait until the bill passes to see if that’s the path we take.

Your article is two years old and provides a mountain of speculation about economics that didn’t pan out in reality. Seriously, check it out, inflation in the US peaked lower than the UK or EU, and has trended below them consistently through today.

Go ahead and argue about the relative stability of more insular economies like Japan and China, but the Fed did exactly what they set out to do, and they did it more effectively than other comparable central banks.

You know only a tiny little slice went to working class Americans right?

Like, everyone got the $1400, even Bill Gates. But a lot went to people, companies, and states that just didn’t need it.

Objectively, verifiably false. Single taxpayers under $75k, couples under $150k. Bill Gates didn’t benefit. Maybe you’re thinking of the stimulus that Trump signed that blindly handed out thousands of dollars to businesses with little to no accountability?

Ah yes, I believe you’ve encountered people in the wild who support leopards eating their face. This is a documented phenomenon and I, for one, don’t have a clue what can be done about it.

Nah, everyone who says, “don’t vote third party” simply paid attention in their civics class and understands how our electoral system works.

Independents have won federal offices before, not the presidency, but we have evidence showing that third parties can win elections. However, if two candidates are clear frontrunners, voting for a third party doesn’t positively contribute to the outcome of the election.

In fact, the data shows that a vote for a minority candidate makes it more likely that the winner of the election will hold views that are actually farther from one’s preferences than if one voted for a majority candidate. This is a big part of the push for states to move to ranked choice voting, so that voters don’t need to make this kind of electoral compromise.

If you’re in Maine, Alaska, or Hawaii, you may be in luck! Otherwise, you can put your hands over your eyes and yell about the injustice of it all, but it doesn’t change the facts; which is why grownups having political discussions dismiss minority candidates as being irrelevant to the discussion.

I hear you and agree that it’s frustrating.

From an electoral politics perspective, it doesn’t make any sense to have a full-on, guns blazing primary. We have hundreds of years of history showing that the incumbent has a huge advantage and, frankly, nobody with enough money to make a difference wants to burn their money weakening the incumbent for the sake of policy discussion.

Israel’s behavior is abhorrent. However, Americans behaved horrifically after 9/11 and many of their allies stuck by them then, so in a way there is an expectation that they will be there for Israel during this time; foreign policy is inexorably nuanced and compromising.

Perhaps if there were no issues other than Israel’s war we would be having a different conversation. Even if we blindly ignore the fact that Trump’s foreign policy is blatantly anti-Muslim, the fact is that Trump & his allies were just at CPAC making speeches about their plans to bring an end to democracy and nobody around here has found a way to beat Trump other than Biden. Party leadership (the establishment) has set the course and while the choice is certainly unsavory, is it worse than the alternative?