Excerpt from this Substack post: https://nickrafter.substack.com/p/the-rent-may-always-be-too-damn-high
The secret hidden in this article is that talking about the cost of living, cost of groceries, cost of gas resonates across party lines stronger than any culture war distractions. The way to bring down fascism is to simply talk about how expensive things are and why there is no help.
It’s the economy, stupid.
It’s because of them immigrants taking our jobs, right? Like those idiots voted for Trump because he talked about lowering prices. He did the opposite, but of course they are gonna vote for him again. Can’t vote for those dang socialists!
I fear people are just too dumb to ever not fall for it.
Ah, common clay of the new west
These are people of the land
You know… morons.
I don’t know why there had to be some weird background but here’s a still from the actual scene
So far west they’ve ended up on the East Coast again.
🤌Zohran Mamdani 🤌
It’s crazy how the emoji made me read that with an Italian accent.
but, specifically, Brad Pitt’s Italian accent from Inglourious Basterds
3rd most eyetallyan
Mamdani
“Zoo ran ma’am danny”
Nailed it.
Mamda Nia!
I think I understand the bizarre train of thought, something like:
- Democrats don’t care about my interests.
- Democrats are socialists, because the TV said so
- This guy doesn’t sound like other democrats
- That must be because he’s not a socialist, like they are.
I know rationally that running on material interests can cut through culture war bullshit, but it’s funny to see how it gets rationalized when it does.
Don’t forget " oh he’s Italian, so he is white" was probably a decent amount of their piggish thinking
Cuomo is also white/Italian though.
Cuomo is actually an italian surname
Actually Cuomo ends with an ‘o’, silly Billy.
I’m sorry but if I think Italian I immediately think slightly dark skin in my mind…idk not that it matters just what I visualize
What matters is that it’s the correct side of Mediterranean
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Funny thing is, there are at least a couple Middle-Eastern comedians on r/StandupComedy who made jokes about how the audience must be confused when the ‘Italian’ man on the stage starts talking about his Lebanese, Palestinian or Iranian background.
It’s insane that it works because these people are so dumb
I’m not going to argue they’re not dumb. But I think writing people off as dumb is a dead end. Trying to educate people in mass will never work, and honestly is scary. Re-education should chill everyone’s blood.
To me, it’s that they don’t have time to investigate further. They’ve adopted the R is good, and these talking points mean R mental model.
And that’s a problem that has scalable solutions. Four day work weeks. National holiday for voting. Increased paid time off for vacation and sick leave. Medicare for all.
These all give people their time back. Time to think about things other than how they’re feeding their kids this week.
Got the math wrong but the answer right.
This is why you gotta show your work.
Verifiable facts are a liberal conspiracy and they’ll have no part of it.
These people would wholeheartedly believe 2+2=5 if the Party says it.
I’ve also heard of such a “conservative” calling for the nationalisation of Google in order to save it from socialism.
…wh…what? What are the inner workings of that person’s brain…
If you look at it very superficially, the “logic” is not actually that hard to follow:
- Socialism is bad
- Google is doing something the person considers bad (be nice to minorities, LGBT or something)
- The person therefore thinks Google is being taken over by socialism
- Trump is anti-socialist
- Person trusts Trump
- Trump is the government
- To stop Google from its evil socialism, the government should step in and take over
As long as you’re unburdened by the slightest inkling of what socialism actually is, this line of “logic” makes some sort of sense.
You’re giving them too much credit already
I think there was a movie called Red Zone Cuba where the moral was everyone had to give their money and businesses to the US Government in order to stop communism.
Never heard of it, but i see it has a whopping 1.6/10 on IMDB. Must be a gem.
But yes, that sounds like exactly the same sort of logic.
Left and right shouldn’t matter. Policy is what matters. Simple as
Well there are left wing and right wing policies. The difference is there are no good right wing policies.
There are great right wing policies for the right wing.
So only for people with shit for brains.
I don’t think so. I think they are opportunists. It’s not that they’re dumb, it’s that they’re selfish.
If they were only selfish, but smart, they wouldn’t be voting for politicians whose demonstrated aim is to reduce their constituents’ wealth and funnel it into a class of people which their constituents have zero chance of ever joining.
No, they’re dumb. They’re certainly also selfish, but that’s because they’re dumb and can’t comprehend the value of helping someone else, because the feedback loop on that mechanism has more than one step before they receive value back, and because the value received is most often in intangibles.
Let’s agree that they are a) Selfish, b) Dumb.
In a local election that’s true. When it comes to seats in a larger body, you’ve gotta take the bad with the good to get anything done. If we added a dozen anti-abortion democrats in the Senate, Trump would be impeached. And abortion would be stuck. A shitty trade off, but one that would move closer to removing abortion bans in the longer term.
(ignoring the house just for the example)
When it comes to seats in a larger body, you’ve gotta take the bad with the good
That’s a great way to get stabbed in the back.
Look at what happened with Joe Lieberman. Dems backed him up even after he lost his primary in a bright blue state, and he repeatedly threw them under the bus.
Same with Jim Justice in W. Virginia.
That just means you made it to the front in the first place.
Indeed, but let me dream
left and right dictate the direction of policy. given that though the republicans in the us abandoned all conservative philosophy and embraced just facism.
It must be very limiting to only have two directions
most people don’t want to move in the other directions. they are either for facism or democracy and don’t move much. More flip.
A candidate might have hundreds of policies. Often they claim to support certain policies because they know those policies are popular, but don’t have any real belief or intention to follow up on those policies.
Political parties are effectively a “brand” so that people who don’t have the time or energy to read hundreds of policies and to ensure that the candidate claiming them is trustworthy and believes what they’re claiming. Parties often kick out members who no longer align with their views. A voter can vote for a certain party’s representative and know that what they’re getting aligns with that party’s general stance.
Left and right is a useful way to represent where various parties fall on a specific spectrum of beliefs. In reality there are multiple axes that can represent economic freedom, alignment with Christian religious beliefs, the strength of a social safety net, isolationist vs. interventionist foreign policy, etc.
But, “left” and “right” came from where groups of politicians stood in the early days of the French republic. They tended to group up with other like-minded people so even if they disagreed completely on certain things, they had generally the same world view. So, “left” and “right” is a good way to simplify things to know if in general a politician shares a certain set of beliefs.
Right and far right. Fixed that for you.
Also everyone knows both candidates are full of shit and won’t do anything that they promised.
I’m surprised this misconception isn’t more common. Conservatives constantly run on reducing the cost of living (despite doing the opposite), so someone actually vowing to do it with a plan in mind seems perfect for this lot
Yup, instead we all get strung up on not welcoming “racists” in our tent. Economic issues should be the main focus of the left!
The reason race is divisive is because Democrats, as a national party, refuse to run on economic issues that would endanger their corporate donors. In the absence of economic policies that would improve their lives, white people will vote for racial grievance every time.
Yup, corporations have truly become the enemy of the people. Just look at the obscene payouts from the tariff debacle. With my conspiracy hat on, I think that was the goal all along. A lot of these companies will have record profits this quarter because they get money from the taxpayer to cover the tariffs that regular consumers already paid. Insanity
Well, it seems like the propaganda and defunding schools worked as intended. These are the vote-cattle the right are working towards.
Don’t take this badly, but in my experience, formal Education doesn’t teach people Skepticism (the real deal, not the Denialism that morons have whilst thinking they’re being “skeptics”). It also doesn’t at all train people to be self-aware and spot when it’s an emotion (fear, wanting to belong, even hope) making them want to believe something rather than cold hard logic.
My formal Education is in Science and Engineering, and whilst education in those areas does push you more towards a more analytical kind of thinking and an as objective as possible measuring of things, most higher education out there is in soft “sciences” at best, or even just the kind of domains were the main required expertise is in convincing people, so the very opposite of being as Objective and Logical as possible.
From my observations even some people with higher education in a Sciences or Engineering domain are gullible cattle when it comes to politics, mainly because they don’t engage it with logic and the way of thinking they use in their professional life, but rather with tribalism (which is emotional) or just straight raw emotion (like anger or fear) and thus are stupidly simple to control and pretty much self-convince that whatever the propagandists want them to believe is true even when the most basic analysis of it immediatelly shows inconsistencies.
TL;DR Whilst better and more Education somewhat improves people’s resilience to propaganda, even the highest levels of Education in highly objective and analytical domains won’t make people immune to this shit, since people are controlled via emotional subconscious cognitive pathways, not logic, and even highly intellectual people who WANT to believe something will find some kind of seemingly “logic” explanation to conclude that which they want to believe is indeed so.
I mean… Ill take all of this type of brain-dead I can get
I know these individuals are on our side for these issues. Are they racist? Maybe, but welcome to America! Half this country still believes in the southern lost cause.
So the way to make them vote for socialists is to talk about costs. Looks like an easy win.
That, and just say what you’re going to do, rather than labelling yourself.
I always think of taking the angle of “people can call me whatever they like but I stand for these principles -” is always the right approach. Labels are much easier to subvert in people’s minds than actual plans of action.
Clearly the education system is getting too much funding. Somebody cut this waste.
We’re already spending this much and they’re still like this? Clearly it’s ineffective and needs to be gotten rid of entirely.
This isnt surprising one bit. Those people are probably above the average Intelligence of Americans actually.
The idiots really do ruin the world dont they.
Think of how stupid the average conservative is, then remember, half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin.
Reality is far worse than Idiocracy. The average is so much dumber than the people in that movie.
Republicans voting for Democrats because they don’t watch Fox News and thought he was a super Republican? I hope I never runs into these weirdos.
