Humans are animals that navigate life through the lens of emotions with logic being something that we have to work towards - so you may be closer to the truth than you think.

Yep. Lost a good and very smart friend to the anti vax conspiracies and maybe others by now.

I’ve also had to really pay attention and tell myself that I live in a liberal bubble and need to balance that bias against what is truth.

There are economic and progressive policy solutions to a problem like this but it seems Americans are more worried that a billionaire may have to spend a tiny fraction of their wealth to help fund these solutions and that is just unacceptable.

So there has to be a new department - headed by TWO different people that’s going to be dealing with efficiency in the government?

This has to be the dumbest timeline

I would say there is still some complicated stuff going on in the brain with knowing where your arm, hand, elbow and shoulder are in space as well how much force you need to apply (the precise amount of motor neurons to activate at the exact time) so you can toss the ball in the arc you need to catch it on the other side.

Yes death is inevitable but you do have the opportunity to guide how you are going to die, to a degree.

Treating your body like a garbage dump will give you a long slow miserable death as you age as the garbage destroys your body. Eating more healthy can lessen that effect.

and by continuing to give the people the right to vote adds a veil of legitimacy to the power of the government so there is less of a chance of a uprising.

I feel this with reading.

Personally I’ve never understood the flex around how many books someone has read in a year. I mean if you are a fast reader/comprehend-er then you be you. Yet I feel that most people are just reading book after book so they can get to some arbitrary number by the end of an arbitrary time frame.

But, hey if setting a goal of reading x number of books in y amount of time makes you happy - fucking go for it.

There is Holywood money in the world of progressive actors that could put something together but I don’t know that world and how it works so I have no idea if it’s something that is actually feasible.

It’s a frustratingly true response… sigh

Why hasn’t there been a push to counter the propaganda on social media with social media?

Use short form, humorous posts that integrate facts and ideas that give a different more positive take on others. I would guess there are great writers and actors that have a progressive-ish mindset that could put something like this together.

But honestly what is the reason this hasn’t been done? Or if it is being done why isn’t there more of a push to get it seen?

… and then these small government people will demand that the government help them out

Why all the hush-hush and meekness?

My feeling on this is that once an American politician gets established, they have won a few elections back to back, they start to gain influence and power. This then changes their view of their job. While it may have been to make changes to a system for the betterment of the citizenry early on, the increase in power and influence weirdly changes them and they become scared of losing their job.

With this change from “I’m here for my country” to “I’m here to have power and influence” they become more weak and more of a sycophant to those that have the money. If they start to rock the boat, speak out against the oligarchs, then there is a chance they will lose their seat of power and influence.

I genuinely feel that most people don’t vote for a policy they vote for a feeling.

I also think that either the DNC doesn’t understand the anger that many have about the wealth inequality or they just ignore it due to the donors they were courting. If they did understand this and understand that people vote with their feelings, I believe it would have been a closer race.

I didn’t say it wouldn’t have helped. That wasn’t the point of the comment.

What I was getting at was that if she wanted to motivate voters, especially more progressive voters, then she needed to go bigger than “build some houses and hand out some money.”

What they wanted to hear from their candidate was a bolder and stronger solution like outlawing corporations from owning thousands of homes. Take a firm stand on corporate greed and corporate inflation. But she never talked about that.

In high school we had one year of “world” history that went something like this:

Man “appeared” in Africa

Sometime later planted corn and stuff

Egypt, Italy and China had big dynasties and stuff

Now let’s talk about the important history: Western Europe and more importantly America!!!

America is awesome - we do cool stuff and we are amazing oh yea the natives … well they were well… uh America is awesome!

WWII we kicked ass

Communism is bad

Vietnam war happened

Have a great summer kids!

My feeling is that once the DNC starts to acknowledge the progressive ideas then they open the flood gates to challengers to their (limited) power.

One of the frustrations I had was her solution to the housing problem was to just build more houses and give out some money. Sure great, but what I wanted to hear, and I think many other also wanted to hear, was her talking about corporate hording of housing and what she would do about that situation. But she just ignored it completely and so did Biden.

I think instead if she came out swinging against corporate greed, even if she actually did nothing about it, would have given her more votes.

My one hope out of this is that the massive swing to the right will be countered with more vocal progressives.

honestly the left needs more table flipping candidates.

There is a large, young population that are progressive and angry. They want to see that reflected in the people they elect. They want to see passion in leaders that will end with positive changes. Yet instead we get milquetoast, bland middle of the road candidates that are not inspiring or interesting.

This is an example of what I am talking about

My take on this is that the DNC has never understood that to win the presidency in the last 20 years you need to be a fire brand.

I think this stared in 2008 with Obama who won I believe because he fired up the base with great speeches about hope and change. It didn’t really happen, BUT the man knew how to give a speech. That got people inspired to do something and they voted.

Bernie was another fire brand - told it like it was and it appealed to a large population.

trump won using the same idea, but just the opposite of hope and change yet it worked. It tapped into a visceral and deep frustration that this country has left them behind.

The modern view of the American president to the population is less of a wonky politician and more of a cheerleader for big ideas, even if those ideas are abhorrent and exceedingly horrifying.

Harris just wasn’t the person to pull this off, she was too wonky and it felt like the entire campaign was playing the old card of “we are not trump” Instead if they really wanted to win they would have found ( 2 years ago) a feisty out spoken progressive leaning firebrand that would have inspired people to vote for something better.

The only reason that (bland) Biden won was because of how badly trump fucked up the Covid response.