The odds
The invisible accordion playing goes into overdrive.
Also hilarious – he tells us he gets everything wrong.
And they didn’t correct her once, and they corrected me everything I said, practically –
Now why might that be, Bozo?
Sure, in theory, it could be because they are Unfair to donalds. But it could also be because YOU GOT EVERYTHING WRONG.
Think about it, accordion-boy. Put the hands down for a second and think. You’re ignorant and lazy, plus you’re dishonest, so how surprising is it really if every damn thing you say is either wrong or a lie?
and yet…and yet, the election is too close to call. Half/over half of the American voters still want this babbling baboon to be President. We are doomed.
Honestly think “Bronze AgeCollapse”. Modern capitalist industrial society is teetering into total collapse.
I know. It’s a nightmare.
If it makes you feel better, it’s not really that many. A sizeable portion of eligible voters don’t actually vote, so the plurality that wins is a but a subset of a subset. It’s another of the linguistic tricks contributing to our distorted view of reality.
Nullius, that’s a truth a lot of Americans don’t know. It’s also a problem, though, because it means a large portion of voters don’t give a damn if the orange dictator wins or not.
Nullius — also, Trump hasn’t won an actual majority of votes in any election, but no, it doesn’t make me feel any better!
It brings to mind Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, books that urge us to remember how close the US has gotten to letting fascism take over.
But over on the left, genderism and wokism’s hostility to freedom of expression, and the left/centre-left media sabotaging their own reputations in the service of gender and woke, have given the far right a very big boost in the US and Canada.
It’s gotten to the point that if I were to tweet about It Can’t Happen Here and The Plot Against America, many of my followers would probably assume I was warning everyone about the dangers of the Democrats, instead of the dangers of the party that’s backed by Russia and led by a senile racist lunatic.
I sincerely hope that the Dems win the election tidily, and with the threat of Trumpism finally behind them, they can at least begin to right their ship. UK Labour took at least a few baby steps towards reconciliation with gender criticals after they comfortably trounced the Tories.
Here’s hoping we see more of that.
The primary electorate is pretty much the only thing that matters most of the time… If a higher proportion of the population voted in those we’d certainly get different results; presumably we’d get more broadly appealing candidates that way.
Iknklast@4:
I think this overlooks a key portion of the equation. It’s not that some folks ‘don’t care’ about the idea of another Trump term, but rather that they’ve been convinced by decades of gerrymandering, voter suppression, court packing, and other shenanigans that ‘caring’ won’t matter, and that voting won’t matter. At most, for many of them, a Harris win just means staving off the ultimate decline of America for another four years–they aren’t buying the idea that the Democrats are actually going to change anything for the better.
Convincing people who do care that voting now will have an effect is key to winning this race.
In many states, because of the Electoral College, voting won’t matter.
For president.
There is no possible way that Harris will take the very red state of Alabama, where I live. However, there are important elections for Congress, and for state and local offices. That’s probably more true in other states, even other red states, but those with functional state Democratic Parties, so that candidates are fielded for most offices.
It is a problem, though, that people are so fixated on the presidential election that they don’t show up to vote for these other offices, because they think their votes don’t matter, period, end of story. But control of the chambers of Congress, control of state legislatures, and even the mundane idea of electing decent people to various offices, those votes still matter. And ballot measures, and state constitutional amendments (no end to those in Alabama), those are important, often enough.
And, in some places, there are actually enough potential votes for Harris to give the state’s electoral votes to her, despite the apparently large amount of support for Trump. But that’s not the only reason to vote.
As I recall, in addition to there being no audience to go ‘crazy’, DT was corrected only three times, not ‘seven or eight times’ – how do those Fox people sit there with straight faces?
Freemage, there are certainly valid reasons people think their vote doesn’t matter, but the situation I described is more common than most people realize. For years, I lived and worked in a world where I was the only one who voted, and it wasn’t because they thought their vote didn’t matter. It’s because they didn’t care.
Part of this is the media, too, which plays up the ‘not a dime’s worth of difference’ narrative and downplays real differences between the candidates – or uses them to show each party is equally out of touch. Part of it, though, is just the fact that for most people, the only thing that matters is the stretch of street they drive on, the plot of land they live on, and the city where they work/take recreation/shop…and only those parts of the city where they personally have a stake.
This country has a serious problem: it’s too big. With the distance between the coasts, and the large expanse of somewhat empty territory in between, people don’t know their compatriots, and don’t care. Often the ones they do know they don’t like, and don’t want them to share in any possible bounty the government might provide. It goes against the narrative of connectedness, but this seems to have accelerated in the age of the internet and global media.
When you don’t know the rest of the people, and you don’t care about those you know, let alone those you don’t know, democracy becomes just a shrug. Voting takes a small amount of work, but informed voting takes quite a bit, even in the age of the internet. Shrug. Knowing what your taxes pay for requires some effort on your part, more than screaming about ‘welfare queens’. Shrug. Knowing the differences, the real differences, between the parties takes work. Shrug.
It’s almost hard for me to remember that now, once I became part of a community where most people voted, and at least a third of those knew something about the people/issues they were voting on. Still, I can’t forget the many shrugs I’ve seen by people who really don’t care about it, all they want is to pick up their paycheck and go get things.