Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
And yet, after getting run over, they acquiesced and acclimated to the situation very fast, and Trump ended up governing pretty much like a standard Republican, and now there's not a particular visible difference between the "Trump movement" and the Republican party in itself.
My point was more that when you're talking about the national politics at this level, there's no firm line separating a wholly grassroots movement from a wholly artificial one. All notable movements have at least some organic popular support, all movements also involve someone planning things from the above and conducting at least campaigns of at least some level of artificiality.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
The oceans stopped rising?
...one of your examples of a cult of personality around Obama is a misphrased version of his own speech?
Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless.
This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
This was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.
He's exhorting the troops ('if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it'), and he's not even saying that the oceans stopped rising but that the rise begins to slow.
Meanwhile, a considerable share of American Protestants believe(d) that Trump is anointed by God to be the President, and the share is not insignificant even if there's a comparison question regarding whether all Presidents are anointed by God.
The God-Emperor stuff was both funny and a satire by someone not a fan of Trump, it was taken up ironically because hell, yeah it was funny and cool at the same time.
I'm not sure what the satire part is in reference to. Probably the first memes I saw about Trump (his campaign didn't instantly take off in the online crowd so it ook a bit of time for them to start accumulating in places where I'd spot them) were God-Emperor memes, presented in a ha-ha-only-serious tone.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
To me, it just seems like, for the last 3 years, many of the Covid skeptics and Covid conspiracists have been doing constant victory laps on evidence that is insufficient, to say the least. Yes, some of the contrarian things were correct, but there was a large number of wild claims about vaccine killing half or third of people taking in space of years, sterilizing people to the degree of "unvaccinated sperm becoming more valuable than gold", being filled with gunk that basically makes your veins look like huge black worms etc. that obviously didn't come true. Sure, not every Covid skeptic said this stuff, or even most of them, but the more moderate skeptics still seemed, at least to me, generally unwilling to start debunking the wilder variants. At least insofar as my personal experience goes, I do not know anyone who seems to have suffered a major vaccine injury (nor do I know anyone who has died of Covid, though one guy I know apparently came pretty close), which makes me question those who claimed to encounter vaccine injuries left and right.
There's Rogan saying that all the conspiracy theorists were correct on the basis of a report saying that "Operation Warp Speed Was a Great Success and Helped Save Millions of Lives", which obviously would be the complete opposite of reality if the mRNA drugs manufactured and distributed as a part of OWS were deadly poison. Indeed, a great number of Covid skeptics ended up fulsomely praising - not just supporting as the last bad option but actively campaigning for - Trump, who has never stopped bragging about his great vaccine and successful Warp Speed operation and, when pressed on the incongruity, usually resulting to "well, he didn't support a mandate!", as if it was still OK to use tremendous amounts of tax money in order to support a lie and actively push a deadly poison on people, which is what he would have been doing if the mRNA vaccine claims were correct.
As said, the mainstream Covid response was flawed in many ways, opened a room for a lot of corruption and included a push for mandates and vaccine passports in a way that almost certainly has caused more harm than good in eroding public trust to public health authorities and experts - but the "counter-experts" don't seem particularly willing to utilize the same standard of evaluation on themselves, or their own community.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
It would seem obvious to me that there are, in fact, a lot of Americans who like what the Democratic Party has on offer - obviously! A party can't survive for ages if no-one likes what it has on offer! - and are happy to have it represented by what has always seemed to me a basically (though not expectionally) competent politician (competent at politics, that is) who happened to have an off-season in 2020 and doesn't have an off-season now. Thus, there is not anything particularly special to what is happening now.
What I wonder about is how hard it seems to be for American conservatives to believe that there exists a non-astroturf sentiment (and what does astroturf even mean these days, anyway? Both major parties have well-honed political machines to make basically literally any movement existing within their purview at least partly astroturf if you choose to look at it that way) supporting American liberalism organically. Why wouldn't there be? The last four years have seemed to be quite good for a fair few Americans, materially, especially compared to what is the most natural comparison to me - Europe's continuing malaise and doldrums.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
19d ago
Imagine thinking a President was practically the Second Coming
The QAnon stuff goes here.
and deifying him in art
...and the "God-Emperor" memes, among others, go here.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9mo ago
We're now in a situation where both the public defenders and prosecutors are bought by the same leftist billionaire, and the entire justice system is a circus of sociopathic procedural manipulation to achieve political outcomes.
...the actual achieved outcome was that they executed the guy, no?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
The idea that you were, at one point, bound to lose (particularly immediately after the assassination attempt) and, all of a sudden, you're now bound to win is pretty exciting in itself, no?
One could argue that the Dems had a say in picking their candidate - in 2020, when they accepted Harris as the person who would take the reins if the President became killed or incapacitated. Now the President is sort of incapacitated - yes, it's a very odd sort of incapacitation that apparently means you can no longer run for Presidency but can still function as a President, technically - so Harris takes the reins for that one particular thing.
Personally, I'm not too sure whether the tension inherent in Biden being smoked out by the media and party elites has been quite resolved yet and might still come up and bite Harris on the butt after the convention fever is out, and it is certainly not confirmed that Harris's current lead will continue, but I guess it'll take until November to see what will happen.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
I have never seen any evidence that Harris has the intelligence or insight required to lead a nation.
Does Trump?
I don't think this switch will be good for the Dems (Biden staying would also not have been good for them, it's a no-win situation), but at least they can now make the instant switcheroo to "It's Trump who is old and demented, HE should drop out now".
Which climate scientists have made a prediction including a date of extinction for the human race, particularly one with a date that currently counts as definitely falsified (presumably in the sense of having already passed)?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8mo ago
He's gonna lose all the libertarian support, all the weird center-left? populist RFK support and so on.
He's going to lose maybe 1/3 of those, if that. The rest will get into the Trump cult mindset where Trump is always right and will either change their own ideologies to match wholesale, explain away Trump's actions (5-dimensional chess!) or just ignore the cognitive dissonance. I mean, that's been the general pattern with so many others Trump converts previously, why would it change?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Are you forgetting they booted their speaker for the first time in history?
And how much did that change, concretely?
Again, there doesn't seem to be a particular visible difference between the "Trump movement" and the Republican party - because the Republican Party is Trump's party, and what the Trump movement does is follow Trump and rationalize his actions, no matter what they are. Trump wants Mehmet Oz as a candidate in Pennsylvania despite him being an obvious charlatan? Then Oz is a candidate. Trump wants to moderate on abortion, or throw away free-market principles? Then that happens. Anti-vaxxers who believe the vaccine was a genocide going to bat for Trump, who couldn't stop talking about his big beautiful vaccine that came to be because of him? No sign of cognitive dissonance in evidence.
What the "non-Trump" Republican Party, insofar as it has an independent existence (staffers, politicians etc.) thinks, seems to be ephemeral. Either they pledge allegiance to Trump or they're out. And it's easy to pledge allegiance since Trump didn't want any radical ideological changes anyhow - the most radical things he did, ie. around Jan 6, were simply related to his continual desire to cling in power.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
No, but there's an election where you vote for a ticket consisting of a president and a VP.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
29d ago
Yeah, things like "40 years old childless women are viewed as empowered role models" always make me ask... by whom? Certainly not by the droves of guys posting about empty egg cartons on the social media? But somehow those guys never seem to make it into the assumed group of viewers indicated by the passive tense, as if they - and countless other people who might not post those things but still think that way - are somehow not a part of the society.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Again, I'm not sure why people are insisting on this. Is there something particular gained, apart from - again - the geopolitical interest?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5mo ago
Everyone I've seen using the term "woke right" has belonged to the right-oriented anti-woke group themselves.
It makes plenty enough sense if one just interprets "woke" to mean authoritarianism. There certainly are plenty of authoritarian right-wingers.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
Perhaps I should specify I was talking specifically about vaccine skeptics (i.e. those generally opposed to mRNA vaccination), which Bhattacharya (or Tegnell, referred to in another post) wasn't.
Generally speaking what caused this thought was the Joe Rogan quote about "conspiracy theorists being right about everything", in which case it was Rogan implicitly dumping a lot of people with varying views in the same category.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
Why would people demand such extreme interventions as imprisoning all of society to protect themselves from a spicy cold, while ignoring the 20 QALY bills littering the ground called "stop smoking", "stop being fat", "stop drinking" and such?
Well, one difference would be that Covid interventions were supposed to be temporary, which they indeed were.
If the government was so gung-ho for lockdowns, why did it then eventually stop wanting them? There's a pretty obvious narrative for why the public fear abated - Omicron meant that pretty much everyone got Covid and it was quite mild, so the fear abated - but I've never seen a proper explanation from Covid skeptics why this happened (after and during many of them were mired in doomerism about how the lockdowns would just go on forever and ever or would be reinstated "right the next winter when the cases start rising again" when that didn't happen), apart from saying that some protests in a few countries led to a worldwide ending of restrictions, which would probably make them far and away the most effective protests in the history of mankind.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Insofar as such half-joke-half-smear claims go, "JD Vance had sex with a couch" is rather benign compared to, say, "Big Mike Obama" or the implications of "I have information leading to the arrest of Hillary Clinton" and the like.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Trump had four years to make a deal with Putin already on Ukraine that would solve the conflict for good (after all, it started in 2014). The most notable attempt, the 2018 summit, achieved exactly jack and shit.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
It's also quite likely that Republicans were implicitly or explicitly saying that Joe is demented long before he was actually exhibiting signs of it, which must have created a bit of a boy-cries-wolf effect for many Dems.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
In a way, though, I rather envy the Democrats' ability to snap quickly into place around a candidate, utterly unbothered by whatever claims they made or positions they staked out a mere week ago.
Republicans demonstrated much the same ability in 2016, though, albeit on a longer schedule.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Whether "woke right" exists or doesn't, "The Right" surely does, and this US administration does rather effectively speak for the Right in the American context.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
29d ago
Yeah. I move in / post in / am at least aware of many different circles of guys (old high school friends, nerdy types, lefty types from my lefty activist days, church guys, football fans etc.), mostly millennials but sometimes trending towards zoomer, and in all of the circles a clear majority of guys is either married, in a steady relationship or has no trouble with dates, perhaps barring the church guys who obviously are playing a somewhat different game (and even there there's been a number of marriages recently, typically to girls from the same parish). Of course the traditional answer is that since I'm an (early) millennial I can't possibly know what it's like with zoomers, but even the younger guys in my circles seem to be doing OK.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1mo ago
Or "Western countries are about to be overrun by invading immigrants, it's already a civil war, unless we act we are going to be enslaved by Muslims in a short time" and then breaking kayfabe when someone takes up guns and starts fighting the said civil war form the nationalist side.
The only thing this chatter proves is that Hillary Derangement Syndrome is still going strong. A number of Republicans just can't let go of a long-time enemy, to the point of fantasizing about facing her yet again and again.
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