volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@janisf no, not at all. I don't particularly have faith in people, but at the same time, I do notice that people do get to vote, even if they vote for very stupid things.

And really, recognizing that people are voting for stupid things is part of trying to encourage people to stop voting for stupid things.

@libramoon no because there are actual rules for how the US government works.

Sure, one can have an opinion about whether those rules are good or bad, but they are what they are. You might as well be denying that there exists a supreme Court at all.

No, it exists. And it doesn't work the way you seem to think it works.

@janisf no, by definition the system is absolutely not more complex than the votes. The entire point of the design, the entire focus of the design, is to ensure that it is not more complex than the votes.

But that's fine if you need to be done. But I would flat out say that you are factually wrong here.

We have systems set up to specifically put votes at the core of the democratic operation. Again, the whole point is that it is not more complex than votes. The US system learned from the British system to make it so.

@janisf You're not looking at the causality though.

Unfathomable? No. It's exactly within what I'm saying here.

I fathom it actively! And I think you're missing it.

@libramoon it's like disagreeing about whether the world is round. Okay. Maybe we just disagree. In my opinion, it's pretty foolish to be a flat earther, but go for it I guess.

It doesn't seem like a productive way to go though.

@TheConversationUS yeah I sure wish Democrats would have remembered that before they nominated such a flawed person.

That's really the message. Next time nominate someone better, because you don't necessarily have our votes.

@libramoon well then you're not seeing how the real world actually works, and whoever you're listening to is lying to you. You need to find better sources of information if this is what you're seeing.

@janisf what in the world?

How does capitalism make men beat their wives and children? How do they profit off of that?

@janisf but the machine is us. We have the votes.

No I see the marginal accountability that dumped Biden. It's just not enough. He lost the support of some of the elite so he got dumped, but when he needs to hold them accountable to the whole party, not just the elite.p

@dougiec3 The good news is it doesn't really matter if they accept it or not. We don't rely on losers accepting losses.

A lot of people seem to forget that.

Trump is not president today even if he doesn't accept that reality. It's still reality under our system, and it would be ridiculous for it to be any other way.

@gearhead and I would reply that you need to grow up and realize the bigger picture.

The Democratic party nominated this flawed candidate and threatens to grant Trump the win on the basis of assuming that they would get our votes regardless of who they nominated. They could have nominated someone better, and maybe they would have if they didn't think they were entitled to our votes.

It's not a rhetorical slap in the face. It's a call for Democrats to do better as a party to serve us better, to serve the country better.

Statements like if the GOP succeeds your right to your opinions is doomed, that's just propaganda, it's nonsense and it's being used to try to trap our votes

The party should have had a legit primary process to capture the democratic outcome. The powers that be in the party made the choice to skip it and go with this bad candidate instead.

For the sake of future elections, we should not reward that.

It sucks that they did that, but they need to be accountable for the loss of votes.

@DJ_2280 and the reason it doesn't matter is because the manifesto has been roundly rejected on a bipartisan basis.

@ChemicalEyeGuy it is not at all true that Donald Trump took away the freedom to have an abortion.

That's simply false.

@johnzajac you misunderstand.

@libramoon since the other justices can do whatever they want, it's troubling to see this story going around that promotes the community that Roberts is controlling them all.

That's the problem.

So many people are getting that message and repeating it on social media, but it's outright false, it's something of a conspiracy theory when we could really use a lot less of those.

@EtherNRhum I would say a huge part of the problem is that vast swaths of America disagree on what the facts are, and so people seek solutions to try to bridge that gulf.

Trump came to political relevance as so many sought a useful idiot to fill that void. One bit of evidence of this is the studies showing that the groups that backed him themselves don't agree with each other. They just all wanted to find an empty vessel to use.

So it's an enormous problem that so many people have disagreements about the factual reality, and so far the US has not shown any real progress in trying to reconcile those misbeliefs within the population.

We can go farther down the rabbit hole into the causes for that, but the main point here is that Trump is an effect, not a cause. If you pay attention to his voters they tend to gravitate toward ideas sometimes weeks before he bothers getting around to expressing them.

They tell him what to say and believe, not the other way around.

@LoreleiArmstrong well that's factually incorrect.

@janisf in that case you really just need to stay out of politics in general, just don't engage with it at all, if you can't stand to be fully informed then as I always say just go read a book under a tree.

We should not be beholden to politics. They should work for us not the other way around. And if they're not working out for you just go live a better life without getting involved in the fight.

But, if you're not up for the whole fight, then yeah, it's going to screw with your head to be only half in

@Nonilex

@EMCBerlin I think it's really important to point out that articles like these mislead the public by equating not taking money from people with taking money from people.

That sort of accounting gimmickry makes for good headlines but misleads the general public.

This is why so many people have lost faith in journalism, because people notice.