I also blame the 90M eligible voters that abstained from the election. Think about that for a second. There were 13M more people that did nothing, than all of the people that voted for Trump.
Welcome to adulthood. Make a choice or one will be made for you. If you stand for nothing, then you’ll fall for anything.
Ill respect someone that voted 3rd party or drew a cock and balls on the ballot over someone who didn’t bother.
Honestly I don’t think I would. That means it’s someone who’s informed as well as has the means to vote, and decided to let trump take over again.
The democrats support the FPTP system as well, if they lose because of it I feel they deserve it.
Not American though, I voted for a 3rd party candidate in the UK election. I don’t think anything will change until we make them lose too many votes to other parties.
Meh, blame the game, not the player. If someone wants to vote third party that’s their democratic right under the system. If you don’t like it fight for change to runoff voting.
Edit: hate it all you like, your system allows you to vote third party, so don’t be surprised when people do.
Inb4 people come here to defend their self-righteousness. No, nephews. You made a stupid choice for stupid reasons, and it’s time to accept your core values are obnoxious and self-centered, and then shape up.
Same phrase applies to non voters and trumpanzees alike. You were lied to and you fell for it … simple as
100% agree. I don’t really care what their reasons for not voting Harris was.
If they abstained from voting because of Israel, or her affiliation with the prison industrial complex, if it was something ignorant like skin color or gender, or if they voted against her because they either supported Trump, or just always voted Republican no matter what.
Trump voters and non voters decided that the worlds largest military should be long to fascists.
I have no respect for people who whine that this is not what they voted for, because it was. Ignorance is no excuse.
If you regret your actions, NOW is the time to make up for it. Become politically active, speak up, inform your friends, do SOMETHING!
If you didn’t vote for Harris in 2024, and you are not yet politically active against republicans, you deserve the bullets coming in your civil war.
So fucking glad i am not American.
nonvoters, tautologically, decided nothing.
Non-voters decided it wasn’t worth it to them to vote against fascism.
That makes fascism very much their fault too.
the democratic party decided they wanted trump to win the primary in 2016, when do they get blamed?
I blame them all the time too. The chair of the DNC had to step down because of their corruption in Bernies primary, but the courts ruled it wasn’t technically against any laws, so Hillary Clinton straight up hired her to run her campaign after that.
Its grotesque. But it doesn’t change the fact that anyone who didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 voted for fascism.
And then think about how the Democrats could have campaigned those people rather than chasing Republicans by adopting anti-immigration policies and platforming people like Liz Cheney, for example.
But they didn’t.
Welcome to adulthood. Establishment politicians, whether Republican or Democrat, are beholden to the rich and neoliberalism. We’re even seeing this with how establishment Dems are pushing back against populist, progressive figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC in favor of Cory Booker and Chris Murphy.
AND then consider how Joe Biden is coming back from the brink of death by saying that he and Jill will build back the Democratic party, thinking that people will forget how Biden shot down Bernie’s chances in 2020 or how he said he’d be a single term president, waiting until the first presidential debate with Trump months before the election to show just how fucking incompetent he is.
Maybe more people abstained from this election because the two biggest parties didn’t look any different, so who cares about the outcome!
You should really ask yourself why so many people just didn’t see the point in voting.
Voting doesn’t always mean you 100% agree with the party you are voting for. Sometimes it means that you vote for the least bad option to prevent system collapse. I say this as a South African whose only voting goal for years was to prevent the ANC from getting a sufficiently high majority to be able to change the constitution. We came insanely close a few times but made it through.
Not voting in the US election was a choice, a choice not to stand against Trump. So anyone who didn’t think Trump was bad enough to vote against, doesn’t get to blame the GOP for what’s happening.
All that is needed for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
That is a fair point, but for this to happen, there must have been a fair few who just didn’t see much difference between the two parties.
If they honestly thought both parties were equally bad, then they’re getting what they expected - an untrustworthy political party that doesn’t represent their values. I trust they’re feeling sufficiently vindicated.
I wonder what made the majority of those people not vote at all.
Probably go a long way making the days we vote federal holidays.
Ignorance. Willful or otherwise, there is no excuse when Trump was broadcasting his plans of dismantling our government to drive inequality and white supremacy.
Couldn’t have been successive gerrymandering, anti-voting laws, Democrats becoming Republican-Lite, increasing inflation, steadying wages, Democrats actively touting policies against the popular public mindset, Democrats failing to advertise their wins, Joe Biden going back on his word and waiting too long to drop out, Joe Biden and establishment Dems muting Kamala’s & Tim’s popular, progressive agenda, Joe Biden dropping out to force the least liked Californian politician to be the presidential front runner, Kamala literally saying she’s no different from Joe Biden, that we don’t have a federal holiday to allow all people the freedom to step away from the lifeline that is work to exercise their civic duty, on and on.
Nah, it wasn’t the system. People are just dumb.
And they are! Hell, I remember seeing interviews on Election Day where people still thought that it was Biden v. Trump. Even Trump forgot he wasn’t campaigning against Biden.
Democrats snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They could have accounted for all of these social issues, but establishment leadership doesn’t care for the working class if it means they still get their paycheck and their spotlight in Congress.
Apathy? Laziness? Or are the evil Democrats that kept people from voting against fascism in the room with you right now?
the yougov poll showed that it was because they didn’t want to be complicit w the gazan genocide
Which is pretty self-righteous, knowing full well that Trump has done for Netanyahu in his first term, and how he openly stated that Israel just needs to “finish the job.”
Trump: ‘Let lsrael finish the job’ in Gaza.
That was before the election. Also, everywhere I looked, experts were saying Trump would be worse for Palestinians. And now here we are. If people say they care about this issue, they had a duty to inform themselves about it. I just saw 2 articles about how Palestinian medics were handcuffed and executed. The 2nd was about Israeli snipers shooting children! Harris’ administration would have been far better for Palestinians. Plus, unlike Trump, she actually has the capacity of empathy and introspection. We could have pushed back on a lot of Pro-Israel policies and changed a lot. Guarantee it. Trump is worse.
Country: Has undemocratic two-party system. Elects a nutjob.
You guys: “The people are the problem!!1!1! Just vote for the only other party even if you don’t agree with them on anything!”
The people who voted for the guy directly endorsed by nazis and hate groups, who has an agenda drafted by a prominent hate-monger, are indeed the problem.
Yes, the other choice was a genocide apologist who ALSO sucks corporate dick, but has the decency to throw the average populous a bone now and again and doesn’t fuck up (as many) foreign trade deals and alliances.
Yes, the SOLUTION is to change our election system. But the PROBLEM is fascism, and a shit ton of people voted for more fascism.
Paste of part of my answer from another reply:
Imagine if Alice is a murderer, and she asks Bob if she should kill two people or five people. Bob says “five”. Now, I will of course be angry at Bob for choosing the obviously worse alternative, but I will in no way claim that he is the cause of the problem. I will not go out and rally support for “Only two people”, I will rally support for “Let’s get rid of Alice”.
Same scenario
You CAN’T stop Alice. You just can’t. You don’t have the man power or the legal means.
So your choices are, 2 people or 5 people. If you choose to do nothing, 5 people die, if you swallow the moral superiority, only 2 people die.
Which are you choosing?
You formulated a question where your answer means you don’t have ANY culpability even though you can clearly see the murders coming and mitigate it’s damage.
Yes, outside of this decision, campaign to have Alice executed or jailed or whatever, but that won’t stop Alice from killing 5 people, she’s just GOING TO WIN if you don’t stop her. You CAN reduce the number of deaths and continue to fight, hopefully with 3 more people to stand up to that kind of tyranny.
In this scenario, I’m not the one choosing, Bob is. And when Bob says “five”, i will be angry, but it will be nothing in comparison with my Anger towards Alice who now can kill five people instead of the two she has been killing on a regular basis before. She’s the one presenting the alternatives, Bob isn’t. She’s the one performing the murders, Bob isn’t. She’s the one that deserves my anger.
In a similar fashion I am not angry with anyone saying “two” either, “beacuse they could’ve said none yadayada”. I am, almost exclusively, angry with Alice.
Your stance is like a person seeing a riot from afar… deciding to walk towards the riot, the closer they get the more violence they see, the worst it looks, yet this person decides it’s no problem and keeps on walking closer and closer until they get to the heart of the riot, fire everywhere bullets flying around… one group tells the person to duck and get cover but this person decides it’s all the same and maybe those bullets don’t hurt as much as people say so they decide to jump right in the middle of the street.
Finally, when a bullet is heading their way, time slows down and with the bullet inches away from their forehead they say “well, I have no choice but to eat this bullet!, there is no other recourse now, I have no choice in the matter”
You seem to completely misunderstand me. Voting for any of the two main parties, both of whom want the country to be a tyrannical military megaforce that is no stranger to overthrowing democracies, is like accepting the faith of the bullet. Going against any such system is what I am advocating - NOT accepting the bullet. We simply seem to have different views of what the bullet is.
Imagine if Alice is a murderer, and she asks Bob if she should kill two people or five people. Bob says “five”. Now, I will of course be angry at Bob for choosing the obviously worse alternative, but I will in no way claim that he is the cause of the problem. I will not go out and rally support for “Only two people”, I will rally support for “Let’s get rid of Alice”.
No, you lack nuance
The democrats are the people telling to duck for cover, they are not solving the problem, but they are delaying the bullet to the head
You are also not advocating anything against the system. That would require at least some action.
In your example, you are not rallying agaist Alice, you are just refusing to make a choice so the rest will do it for you
The reality is, however you got there, that either 2 or 5 people will die. Your lack of participation ensures 5 people will die
In my example I very clearly am rallying against Alice. In every possible way. I would be fuming, throwing stones, screaming to everyone around me. But I would not accept her proposition to Bob. I would not claim that I “have” to play Alice’s game, because she’s in charge and I have to accept that. I don’t have to accept that. At all.
I would do everything I could to stop her, and almost all of my Anger would be towards her, not towards Bob (I obviously would be angry with him too but he’s after all not a murderer - Alice is).
Keep in mind that in the example, Bob probably believes for some reason that when Alice says two, she means ten.
Yes but in your example, not voting for 2 people to die guaranteed 5 did
You talk like voting for Kamala to prevent Trump means you nowbside with Kamala and the system in every way. Voting for the lesser evil does not stops you at all from rallying against the system and doing everything possible to change it.
You almost get me!
Vote for whoever you want! What I am saying is that your anger towards your peers who happened to indulge in different propaganda and voted for something different is misdirected.
The voters are not the problem.
I do get you, I just do not think letting MAGAs off the hook is accurate, fair or wise for the future… Same way I can understand someone stealing food out of hunger but wouldn’t condone them if they steal with violence
I get some people were fooled into this but I’m convinced MAGAs devotion for trump is not coming from “he’ll make the food cheap again” and more from “that’ll show <insert minority group here> who is the boss around here”
Full disclosure, I’m Canadian so these are not my peers although we do have equivalent ones
Im having a grand time pointing it out as often as possible. Oh you had to skip on lunchables because they went up this month? glad your vote is working out. Gas still the same price? wonder who is doing that now. Oh you didnt get your bonus check, due to increased business costs? I wonder why.
after WW2 and the horrors of the Nazis came fully to light…people kept asking…how did the German people let this happen? how did they let it continue until disaster fell? how could they have allowed such cruelty and degradation to occur?
THIS was how. by not paying attention. by ignoring the growing inequities and terror going on in their midst. BY PRETENDING EVERYTHING WAS OK.
and now WE are doing the same. it’s easy to ignore right now…it isn’t TOO bad…not TOO many people are being affected…yet.
we need to stop ignoring and start paying attention to exactly what they are doing.
For real. And yet some ppl still thinks he’s 4d chessing even after all this sht.
Why do you even assume they can even read in the first place ?
“But he promised (lied again) about not knowing a thing about it!”
“Trump’s all talk. He’s not going to do that.”
“Oh shit. He’s doing all that stupid shit.”
I don’t think they can read. I won’t blame them
But herp my derp, Trump claimed he knew nothing of it right before the election.
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice” - Rush, 1980
Meh. This meme is straight up lifted from /pol/, and people there usually go “I voted for this EXACTLY” when news break about how foreigners are abducted from streets and Vance is preparing for an ideological war with Europe.
“Moderates” and old geezer Republicans fell for his lies (again), big surprise. You won’t find them here. The people who made this meme (originally about Israel by the way) only lament how Trump has still not publicly executed Obama and Pelosi.
Yes, but don’t let your self righteousness turn a budding class war back into a culture war.
If Republican voters are suddenly waking up and thinking “this isn’t right” smacking them down with “this is what you voted for” is not going to help your cause.
“Yes, you’re right, this shouldn’t be happening and we should work together to stop it.”
deleted by creator
I’m sure the millions and millions of conservatives who use Lemmy are going to read this and really rethink their positions.
Do you not realize EVERY helpful message is important, and often shared across all platforms, and can be good talking points with Conservative friends?
Honestly, I don’t think it’s that important or helpful.
If you have conservative friends and feel the desire to try to engage and debate with them, you would be served a lot better by making an actual effort, understanding their positions and giving them all the rope they need. From there, addressing their specific worries and concerns and asking a lot of questions about why they have the concerns and fears they have… and it’s all fears, all the way down. They don’t care about facts, they have strong emotions that they can’t regulate and their brains latch onto any story to explain their feelings. Engage with the feelings and you can change them.
I have changed more hearts and minds than I can remember doing this, it’s not easy but you can change these simple people if you have the patience and energy. Human beings as a group are like locusts, a scourge upon the earth, a fluid that moves to the lowest places. But as individuals? Individual people are largely easy to influence and change, especially conservatives who only hold their positions because of fear of something.
Not saying that it’s not enjoyable and effective to make fun of the chuds with memes, but let’s all be honest that these memes and jokes are here for us to laugh over and feel catharsis from. If we all actually wanted a better world we would be marching in-mass on washington, arms locked with conservatives whom we have talked to and appealed to their emotions enough that they realized that they can be a part of a better group with a better identity. These people are dumber than dirt, you will get further with them with pity than you will with scorn. I know most people aren’t equipped for this, and I was because I was a self-defense teacher, a public speaker and used to debate right-wing people daily. If you’re anxious and/or non-social, don’t get yourself stressed even trying this until you get more experience.
while i don’t ardently agree with all your rhetoric it makes me feel such a sense of solace to see some of these ideas expressed in the wild.
it’s absolutely confounding how even seemingly rational people begin to emotionally seethe when presented with the fact that shitposting and generally bullying people isn’t activism. seems to be a very human thing.
i think a big part of the issue generally is that people think of their intelligence as some sort of absolute and continuous character trait rather than a discrete aspect of your personality; i.e, the idea someone is a “stupid” or “intelligent” person is of itself, a stupid idea lol. sometimes you’re the biggest brain in the room, sometimes you’re an idiot.
i appreciate your focus on the emotional aspect of it because that is certainly the more pertinent part. imo all humans average around the same intellectual capability, sans extreme outliers. it’s more about how people choose to use what is available to them than an actual lacking of mental capabilities. these people are just as rational as anyone else, it just happens that the vast landscape of knowledge itself is full of many pangs and holes that lead to nowhere; they seem stupid because there exists a seemingly logical perspective that causes them to infinitesimally and continually spin around these holes, like a coin in a make-a-wish donation thing. not sure if i’m conveying my rationale very well but i have found that the stuff in the cracks between ideas like this is often where the calculus of the universe hides in life.
. these people are just as rational as anyone else
I really appreciate your comment and writing here, but this is where I differ a bit, but it makes for a great segue into an equally important, adjacent point I’ve been mulling.
Nearly a quarter of the US population is functionally illiterate, meaning they can read individual words maybe, assemble the gist of a text message if it’s simple enough and makes liberal use of emojis, but they have no higher-compiling ability than that, they can’t read a post like this, they can’t read a book or even an instruction manual. And this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, there are vastly more who can kinda read okay if they really try, but have to struggle at it, and certainly can’t use language in their minds to form complex ideas or synthesize new information from reading or listening to words.
I think this is not getting nearly the attention it deserves, this should be a air-raid-siren alarm of urgency, everyone should be shutting down the entire country while we fix this. This is because the ability to use language, externally and internally, to “abstractify” complex ideas, to form new perspectives, to review the perspectives of others, this is what is separating a large swath of our population right now, because we just look at it as “stupid” when the real problem is deliberately seeded and far more insidious.
See, this isn’t a “fixable” problem in the traditional sense, we’re already cooked on this generation, it’s been proven that as a child develops they need to hit key milestones in development or they may never have things like full language capacity. Children raised by wolves or apes have been brought in and rehabilitated but they are never capable of learning more than the most basic language abilities.
This is what I believe corporate America is deliberately trying to do to our entire population by embracing anti-intellectualism, anti-education politics. By courting the religious right, by feeding all of us apps and games and videos and products designed to turn off conscious thought. Pushing things like AI that can “do the reading for you” or “do the art for you” and depriving billions from the exercise of forming a brain that can view ideas in multiple ways. I feel like I’m screaming into a void on this, but as people get more numb, they care less that they’re getting more numb.
everything you said here is absolutely correct and i’m glad at least some people recognize this issue. perhaps my use of the word rational in quotes was unfounded, i should’ve chosen better/more correct diction.
i suppose my point of “these people are just as rational as anyone else” is a bit of a misnomer and not exactly what i should’ve said; to clarify i probably more aptly meant “everyone, on average, has available to them the same basic cognitive faculties and it is a myth that the difference between these populations has something inherent to do with them as people,” which reading your reply you seem to agree with. i think this is key to fighting this, recognizing that on a grand scale it is in the course of life that these problems emerge vs the exact circumstances of birth. there’s definitely an argument about free will/determinism hidden here and you’d be valid to question how the circumstances of one’s birth relate to the course of your life (obviously, there is a strong relationship), but i digress. the important part is recognizing where these people “diverge” from what we would call “normal” is during life, not at the immediate beginning necessarily.
i like the example of literacy because it helps highlight the point i’m trying to make a little better, i think. most people adept in historiography and history would likely agree that there is a persistent myth that people in the past are somehow intellectually lesser than modern people. this of course isn’t true, but it’s difficult to explain why. to the layman it seems obvious that those in the past could do less than we can, but to the trained eye you can see that people have always been around the same level of average intelligence on a timescale comprehensible to human beings. improvements in average intelligence of the species are a very gradual evolutionary process that we can’t really perceive within the scale of human history; what has actually changed overtime is the sum of human knowledge. thus, people in hunter-gatherer societies were not “less intelligent” than their modern counterparts, they just used their intelligence differently. this is the crux of my argument. the literacy rate in prehistory, was… well, zero; as reading and writing had not been invented yet. but we don’t claim these people are less intelligent, for reasons described. literacy is intimately related to the problem at hand, but it is a symptom rather than a cause. i think we should extend that same logic to modern illiterates. they’re not necessarily lesser. taming the scourge of anti-intellectualism will hinge on truly understanding and recognizing that fact, which is something scientific outreach has done a poor job of imo. that has to do with the natural human inability to do true introspection along with the difficulty of the skill of empathy: problems that crop up in many facets of this debate.
although, as you describe, this is an active attack on us in what can only be described as a class war. modern LLMs and GPTs are another great case study. “intelligent” people are able to use these tools as nootropics and offload even more of their cognitive workload to the computer than ever before. it seems like most, however, aren’t capable of using them this way, as you point out. i think it speaks to the nature of intelligence enhancement tools generally. those who are capable can achieve greater things than they could alone. most, however, will see the opportunity to do less cognitive work as just that, a way to have to think less; and they then fail to properly utilize the tools in a way that is adverse to their own intellectual ability. interesting diactem, i think. speaks to the core of the problem.
i’m not so sure this is a problem we can even solve. there’s an episode of futurama where they travel to the distant future and all of humanity has diverged into two separate species of dumb, orcish brutes and frail, hyper-intellectual imps. maybe this truly is the path we are on, maybe the forces driving this divergence are too strong to be reconciled.
any thanks for listening to me ramble
I was gonna say not here on lemmy, maybe facebook, instagram and now Reddit is your targeted audience, but we understand the sentiment due to the fact that you will get censored and permanently banned/shadow banned.
As someone who has had over seven 12+ year-old accounts permanently banned and shadowbanned by reddit for dubious reasons or no reason at all, yeah they don’t want humans engaging there, they want their bot-army to simulate a human community but then can be adjusted with a dial to change the narrative to fit whatever the oligarchs want to push.
Tbt I just deactivate my account yesterday. I had an older account that I deactivated during 2020 madness. So I popped in a year back and this permanently banning people for “hate speech” or whatever that goes against the narrative is absolutely insane! It’s basically 1984 or Fahrenheit451.
I’m not convinced most conservatives can read.
they can; they just don’t.
Or they do, but it’s more harmful than anything because their reading comprehension is bad and they’re a magical thinking type human. So their take away is going to be outright wrong and they’re proud to be. Your truth has no value compared to how they feel, and they presuppose they’re correct and on equal footing as you despite having nothing to back up their claims.
The amount of times I’ve had people like this link to a source when badgered for one, and the link argues against their position is enough to cause dismay lol.
Is that better… or worse?
i think it’s on par with liberals reading and refusing to learn from it.
The situation with literacy in the USA does more to reveal exactly where and what we are far better than any other arguments about our wealth and society. We have a really big fucking problem here.
21% of adults in this country are FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE. This is mind-melting for the “richest nation on Earth.” We have nearly a quarter of our population who know how read words as necessary to survive but cannot string together text to form coherent narratives or even pictures in their heads. They can text with emojis and monosyllables but are deeply insecure about not being able to comprehend longer paragraphs and as a result rage against notions of logic and reason and fact-checking. This is what functional illiteracy means and we’ve all encountered it, and this is where much of our science-denial and irrational beliefs are coming from.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-statistics-2024-2025-where-we-are-now
America has become a Nazi bar. You are all responsible.
Some days I’m in a pub mood, some days I’m in a club mood, some days I skip the bar entirely and just pick up my life and family and flee to an earlier stage of capitalism.
No. A systematic de-democratization for decades combined with a non-democratic elective system to begin with is to blame. Don’t take out your anger on the average Joe, it is worth so much more to be angry at someone with actual power.
they’ll then tell you that he disavowed project 2025 because he doesn’t lie every other sentence.
“every politician lies” they’ll say about Kamala Harris’ affordable housing programs
