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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I've been reading up more on Tulsi Gabbard. Honestly, she has an incredible and distinguished track record- from being a medic in Iraq, to her Hawaiian heritage.

If she really does get the DNI position in the Trump cabinet, there is strong chance that she will attempt a bid for President immediately after.

This could cause competition for the Thelians hoping for more JD Vance after Trump leaves office. But I'm not here to wargame 2028 campaign hypotheticals when Trump isn't even sworn in yet.

It seems she and her husband converted to hinduism.

My immediate take is that her presence and native pacific islander background means you know she ascended, and worked for the positions she had. Her brief stint as a Democrat is a bit odd, but otherwise she looks like she has a pretty pristine track record that's really hard to shit on.

Her being anti-lgbt, with a track record of policies that would otherwise be fairly progressive, she seems like a standard, good pick for almost any position in ... any president's cabinet?

From reading the wiki page, I'm having a hard time figuring out why anyone would mouth-froth over the idea of her having any position of power.

Dear Mottizens, what is your view on her? Any information I've missed?

She's a crank with similar vibes to RFK Jr. or Ron Paul, although they have very different voting records. The fact this group has ascended now is thanks to the Republicans being dominated by the Dale Gribble voters.

  • -18

Uh, how exactly is she a crank? She’s a Hare Krishna who doesn’t hide her ‘member of a very conservative religion’ views on social issues while having some progressive ideas and being opposed to US intervention.

r/neoliberal on suicide watch rn.

I know, reddit. But they are so confident that she’s a Russian agent. What’s the deal with that? Is it just normal radlib demoralized Russia hysteria? It seems deeper than that.

On a related note; I’ve been on Reddit a lot in the last week, mostly out of morbid curiosity. I had stayed away for probably 12-18 months, and it’s terrible. A much worse echo chamber than I remember, and it was incredibly bad before. Good god.

Geeze. You weren't kidding about neoliberal being hysterical today. They're in rare form. I expect this from /r/politics and their ilk. I thought neoliberal thought they were high brow.

Always check the sub overlap thing, whatever it's called (and if it still works with the API restrictions). Neoliberal users are basically just the political wing of /r/traaaaaansIRL_egg-crackers.

Focus on winning the election, focus on telling people what they want to hear and hide behind the carpet all of the progressive electoral poison pills. After you’re in power, you can go back to those points.

If there isn't a name for this there needs to be. The sneering condescension and treating voters as pawns to be manipulated, and expecting them to never figure it out no matter how many times you openly say you're lying to them, as if they're video game NPCs who can't see you stealing if you stick a bucket on their heads.

And hey, to my discredit I thought it was working for them again right up until 2am on election night.

Machiavellian. There’s already a name for it. And to be fair, what they’re describing is exactly how politics actually works in a democratic system. The name of the game is to get people to vote for you and you do that by convincing people to want to vote for you. Propaganda is constant in our system driven into every media and cultural outlet it can be. You’ve been taught to want certain things, to believe certain policies will give you a better life. That’s manipulation, and quite often lying to people, and almost certainly “hiding poison pills under the carpet”.

The truism of politics, no matter what the system actually looks like is pretty simple. If you get power, you get to rule, if you don’t, you watch other people rule. There’s nothing unusual about the concept. In autocratic systems, you have to overthrow the current government, in democratic ones, you have to get voted in. Either way, you have to get access to the levers of power before the policies you have in mind actually count for anything.

And treating peasants like peasants is fairly common. It would be the same in any type of system with any party or faction you care to name. Most people in a nation are peasants or even serfs with little to no political control over anything. The sneering condescension is simply reality — despite what both parties tell the voters every couple of years, you actually don’t matter to them, and they actually do hold you to be beneath them.

And treating peasants like peasants is fairly common

It just happened. What do people think Trump just did? If the Democrats take anything away from this election other than "run the most charismatic person you can" and "just tell the bleating sheep what they want to hear" then they are miscalculating

Well damn. Why didn't the Democrats do that?