16th May 2022, 7:21 AM
Every Chad knows that owners of dealerships are rich. They're the ones bragging about how their dad owns one so you can't talk to them like that, and then they're off to total their car just outside their own fraternity house. (I understand the meaning of "Chad" has changed online recently, but I'm using that early 2000's meaning).
In other news, once again you have the party leadership conflating "independent voter" with "centrist", unaware that the majority of independents are just too far left or far right for the current parties. I fall into a pretty far left camp, which shouldn't come as a surprise. (Though for all my "BURN IT DOWN!" rhetoric, I don't actually want to physically burn much of anything down and definitely don't want to get into a state of civil war if it can be at all avoided. Such a state would be far too unpredictable and could very well lead to a true dictatorship afterwards instead of an idealized Star Trek level utopia, not to mention such things will last at least a decade and result in countless lives cut short, and those already at the very bottom of society would be the first to suffer, the ones I'm trying to help. So, no, I don't want warfare, I just want change and I don't believe the current methods employed by the democrats will lead to that change at all. I vote democrat because it's the "damage mitigation" strategy, but if they want to win over more people that hold far left views, the party has to end their dreams of being a "big tent" and pick a side.
The republicans for their part figured this out already. They're courting a whole different set of independents, right wing fascists, and it's working. Well, not ALL of them. Mitch, for all his awfulness, seems to want to deTrumpify his party and kick the man out. He's making moves to do that, and at the state level, state governments are doing all they can to undermine the biggest Trump supporters in the party. It's been entertaining to say the least, but we have no idea who's actually going to succeed at this point. It's easy to say that it's better for the racism and the sexism and all their hate to be out in the open for all to see, because it's not hidden any more. For SOME people, that's true, but for a depressingly high number, them saying the racist parts out loud and proud is still apparently too subtle for them to believe they're racist. "I watched cartoon saying racism is bad so it's dead right?" Sorry, it isn't dead. Just like how Captain Planet may have made ridiculous caricatures of big business types actually ENJOYING their evil and as a result none of us believing the actual messages the show tried to promote until decades later, we've also found out those caricatures themselves are shockingly accurate. There really are people who happily sing songs about how much they love polluting stuff and how evil they are, or as one energy company CEO said "F everyone that isn't us". Alright, he didn't literally say that, he literally WROTE it down and sent it out. You know, like an 80's villain from a Schwarzenegger movie would do, but in the real world, where we live, right now. The real world where a giant corporation is about to launch floating airships stuffed with automated drones scurrying all over our skyline and where California and Australia are taking turns being infernos on opposite seasonal shifts (and where locally, dust bowl conditions have kicked up again over in our pan handle and are slowly making their way east...).
I say all that to say this. There ARE centrists left, and a lot of them, but they're not voting centrists. They're the indifferent, they're the ignorant, they're the ones that don't know enough to know they need to figure this out. The only centrists left any more are only "centrists" because they just don't care enough to vote. The brief encounters with political discourse are... these two people are fighting with each other, and fighting's bad, so they're both just as bad. It's a very Gen X attitude honestly, and it ignores the drastic shifting of the zeitgeist to the right in recent years, because they don't even know what that is. This is the most frightening thing, because we are about to have a whole generation that won't be exposed to necessary bedrock information we all learned in public school, which threatens to make not only a larger group of nonvoters, but a larger pool of people the republicans can lie to freely.
In other news, once again you have the party leadership conflating "independent voter" with "centrist", unaware that the majority of independents are just too far left or far right for the current parties. I fall into a pretty far left camp, which shouldn't come as a surprise. (Though for all my "BURN IT DOWN!" rhetoric, I don't actually want to physically burn much of anything down and definitely don't want to get into a state of civil war if it can be at all avoided. Such a state would be far too unpredictable and could very well lead to a true dictatorship afterwards instead of an idealized Star Trek level utopia, not to mention such things will last at least a decade and result in countless lives cut short, and those already at the very bottom of society would be the first to suffer, the ones I'm trying to help. So, no, I don't want warfare, I just want change and I don't believe the current methods employed by the democrats will lead to that change at all. I vote democrat because it's the "damage mitigation" strategy, but if they want to win over more people that hold far left views, the party has to end their dreams of being a "big tent" and pick a side.
The republicans for their part figured this out already. They're courting a whole different set of independents, right wing fascists, and it's working. Well, not ALL of them. Mitch, for all his awfulness, seems to want to deTrumpify his party and kick the man out. He's making moves to do that, and at the state level, state governments are doing all they can to undermine the biggest Trump supporters in the party. It's been entertaining to say the least, but we have no idea who's actually going to succeed at this point. It's easy to say that it's better for the racism and the sexism and all their hate to be out in the open for all to see, because it's not hidden any more. For SOME people, that's true, but for a depressingly high number, them saying the racist parts out loud and proud is still apparently too subtle for them to believe they're racist. "I watched cartoon saying racism is bad so it's dead right?" Sorry, it isn't dead. Just like how Captain Planet may have made ridiculous caricatures of big business types actually ENJOYING their evil and as a result none of us believing the actual messages the show tried to promote until decades later, we've also found out those caricatures themselves are shockingly accurate. There really are people who happily sing songs about how much they love polluting stuff and how evil they are, or as one energy company CEO said "F everyone that isn't us". Alright, he didn't literally say that, he literally WROTE it down and sent it out. You know, like an 80's villain from a Schwarzenegger movie would do, but in the real world, where we live, right now. The real world where a giant corporation is about to launch floating airships stuffed with automated drones scurrying all over our skyline and where California and Australia are taking turns being infernos on opposite seasonal shifts (and where locally, dust bowl conditions have kicked up again over in our pan handle and are slowly making their way east...).
I say all that to say this. There ARE centrists left, and a lot of them, but they're not voting centrists. They're the indifferent, they're the ignorant, they're the ones that don't know enough to know they need to figure this out. The only centrists left any more are only "centrists" because they just don't care enough to vote. The brief encounters with political discourse are... these two people are fighting with each other, and fighting's bad, so they're both just as bad. It's a very Gen X attitude honestly, and it ignores the drastic shifting of the zeitgeist to the right in recent years, because they don't even know what that is. This is the most frightening thing, because we are about to have a whole generation that won't be exposed to necessary bedrock information we all learned in public school, which threatens to make not only a larger group of nonvoters, but a larger pool of people the republicans can lie to freely.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)