volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@kissane Well I think it's complicated on all sides because on one hand the meta haters don't let reality interfere with their claims, and on the other side meta itself seems kind of poorly run, so I'm not sure they know how they are going to monetize the information they vacuum up.

So it ends up being unreasonable people complaining about unreasonable people around a topic that is fundamentally unreasonable.

There's no high road there. Just a mess.

@Joe_Hill but none of that amounts to supporting the claims being made.

Despite claims to the contrary, the US has laws surrounding the presidential election process, and Trump acted within those laws.

Maybe we should change the laws. Well we actually did, but maybe we should change them more. That's a fair discussion to have.

But with the sanction of US law these claims against Trump just don't stand.

@DMTea

@jaystephens denying the facts doesn't make them untrue. It just makes the arguer clearly wrong.

Yes it is undemocratic. Just stomping the foot and declaring it otherwise doesn't change the fact that it is undemocratic.

@liquor_american @chrisgeidner

@Joe_Hill honestly I never found the time too do more reading into the pizzagate conspiracy, so I have a lot of reading piling up.

That's how far behind I am on my nutty conspiracy reading list at this point.

I promise once I get done with reading about the clintons and pedophilia and whatever the hell that was about I'll get around to reading about your conspiracy theory too.

@DMTea @liquor_american @chrisgeidner

@Joe_Hill so if you read the ruling, it's not exactly true to the record.

You say like it or not, but really I don't care. I don't live in Colorado. I actually don't care what they rule. They can find whatever the hell they want for their own citizens.

This ruling is obviously wrong because it gets the facts wrong. It gaslights the citizens of the state, but again, none of my business.

PS, I have no idea why any of my replies would be hidden that's just how this platform works apparently, I have no idea what any of that is about.

Seems pretty fitting for this topic though

@thomasapowell but then the thing is, claims of hypocrisy are nice in theoretical, but when they impact the real world they involve real people hanging in the balance.

If you're being threatened with punishment hypocrisy is hardly something that's going to be on your mind.

So it really doesn't matter. The Constitution says what it says, and it can be changed if we want to, but we really don't care to change it at this point.

@StarkRG

@emarktaylor@thecanadian.social no.

@thomasapowell I've been listening to a lot of conservatives and I haven't heard any of them talking about the 14th as being woke.

They mainly talk about it being misconstrued.

Big difference.

@StarkRG so fix it.

If the amendment is so poorly worded propose an amendment to fix the wording.

It's not that the Supreme Court ignored the first half of the sentence, it's that the first half didn't say anything compelling. Which, again, if that's your hangup, propose an amendment to fix it.

That's how that process works.

@thomasapowell

@emarktaylor@thecanadian.social dangerous to let voters vote how they want? @dick_nixon

@CassandraZeroCovid The two are not contradictory.

Even if the democratic process landed on an anti-democratic conclusion it's still anti-democratic.

And if that's what you support then great!
If you want to put up a roadblock against voters from voting for their preferred candidate great!

Nothing says we can't vote to encumber future votes. That's definitely possible.

Might I interest you in a poll tax, though?

@liquor_american @chrisgeidner

@Kozmo One problem is, this policy runs counter to climate change concerns as the trees late in their life cycle tend to release carbon into the atmosphere. Harvesting them ends up being a form of carbon sequestration.

So this policy announcement is actually anti climate concern.

@lauren but that's not what the literature shows, and it's not what my experience interacting with Trump voters or listening to mainstream conservatives show either.

Okay you're talking about the emotional attachment, but in my experience and from what I see in the literature that's not what Trump voting is about.

His appeal is largely based on projections of reality, of policy, of what people think he is really doing as president, not pure emotion.

And so if you correct the record that does have a big impact.

@lauren I have a lot of reasons to believe that's not the case.

On one hand there's the academic polling showing that Trump voters disagree with each other, and that's what I tried to emphasize before, if you point that out you immediately create a rift in his support base.

But mainly the thing I want to emphasize is, he was not a very successful president. And Democrats only prop him up with his base by acting like he did all of this stuff. When he really didn't. Democrats (by which I mean Trump opponents, whatever word you want to use) only give more fuel to his fire by talking about him as if he was this great mover and shaker that might return. No, he was a jerk who didn't know how anything worked and so he screwed up left and right and failed to keep his promises. THAT'S his story that we should be talking about, if we want to talk about him at all.

If not for Democrats' fluffing Trump would not be on the stage in any significant way today.

I know so many Trump voters. I've read the academic literature. And really the only thing that might be propelling him into winning a new election is his enemies that keep his voters focused on things other than his policies and track record.

Trump's actual record is that of an absolute loser without any broadly acceptable policy stance.
Unfortunately, very few people are looking at that as they are focused on all this other nonsense, so he gets to skate.

@lolgop That's not what they said, though.

@lauren so I think the most important thing you got wrong in your comments is when you say that they are very happy with what he did during his presidency.

They're not.

They are very happy with what they were misled into thinking he did during his presidency, a bunch of things that didn't actually happen, in particular a TON of promises that he made that he didn't keep.

So what we should be doing is highlighting that he broke his promises, that he was such a loser, that he let his own supporters down. But unfortunately for whatever reason Trump opponents are more excited about pretending that the guy was some kind of success, talking about things he supposedly did do, which only builds them up to his base.

Trump supporters are not happy with what he did during his presidency because he didn't do what he said he was going to do. They are happy with these lies about what he did, though.

And that gets back to my point:

It's really easy to defeat Trump. You just have to be honest, point out to the capitalists that the guy is being an isolationist, and point out to the isolationists that he's being a globalist. On his record he stands no chance of ever holding political office again.

And so many of his voters are open to noticing that.

Unfortunately that message, again the real one, the one based on fact, is not playing any significant role that I've seen in US discourse.

Instead we let the guy say coffeffve or whatever that was, and we let it go instead of pointing out what a loser he is.

Trump had a terrible track record but Democrats seem too busy trying to build him up as a evil villain than to point out to Republicans that he let them down.

@lauren I think it makes all the difference because if we focused on and reported on what an empty suit of a loser Trump is, it would really deflate him among his supporters.

Even if we focused on how his own supporters don't agree about policies, even that would unmask him for being such an empty shell of a person, since his own supporters don't agree about the positions that he's taking.

I mean, for example, just highlight how half of his supporters are isolationist and the other half are capitalist and that alone would really undermine his support as his own supporters would have to grapple with those contradictory stances that he supposedly stands for.

It makes all the difference that Trump's base is so fractured but they are effectively unified by the way we talk about them.

And that's the thing: If we talked about Trump more honestly (or, better, didn't talk about him at all) then he would completely fail in the political arena as he deserves to.

Trump's enemies are basically his best friends at this point, their rhetoric pumping him up and making him anything even approachable to an electable candidate.

@DMTea Well no to deny it is to look at the facts and see that those claims amount to nutty conspiracy theories that just don't match with the record.

We have a huge problem in the country today that people don't know what is true and what's not true. People are so happy to pursue bias confirmation that they buy into all of these stories that just don't fit the substantive record, that again are pretty out there conspiracy theories.

We really should be calling out the folks who are promoting those stories because of the way they sew discord, and heck, even help get trolls like Trump re-elected.

That does nothing good for any of us.

But you can name call if you want. The problem is that I'm sure neither of us wants the guy to be re-elected, but unfortunately going down that road sets him up for it.