This is true, but it’s also incredibly dumb. Like teens that choose to hang out with local drug gangs and throw their future away. You can see why it happens, but it’s so wasteful and stupid, and always ends in misery.

What we are ultimately talking about is the depth of stupidity that people are capable of.

Before the flathearthers, Tea Party, Q-anon and the MAGA movements, we simply did not account for just how fucking dumb the average person can be under bad circumstances.

This is the essence of Trump’s rise to power. His political advisors called this “an opportunity” and tripled down on it. They believed that a bad-faith movement could build a coalition of the mentally unstable, susceptible morons, cultish religion indoctrinated, under-educated and socially fringed. Easily swept up with Nazi-style messaging and politics.

The solution: At an individual level, if you know someone you seek to save, work to expose them to real information by being a positive and understanding presence in their lives, and slowly showing them the way out of the prison of stupidity inside their own heads.

At a global level, we must exact hard costs on their movement as a whole and each participant as people. We must make it highly expensive and damaging to support fascism. They are already paying the price of being marginalized socially, but costs need to be much higher.

This cost is the reason Trump has not been able to inspire his moron minions to violence in the last couple years. They see that MAGA minions get imprisoned, their lives ruined, and possibly shot in the head, and they simply don’t turn up for Trump’s calls to violence anymore. The public cost of participation in fascism works as a deterrent, so we need to crank up the costs significantly higher.

If they think they are going to double down on fascism because you called them out, then you must triple down on exacting a price for their bullshit. At some point they’ll realize it’s not worth it. Just like all these MAGA men on dating apps now pretending to be apolitical because they can’t get any women to take them seriously. Suddenly, the pride in their shitty convictions is out the window when they realize they won’t be allowed to participate in society. Keep making them pay the price of choosing poorly. The harder you hit them, the faster you help them do some much needed introspection.

There is no license. That’s why a nakedly bad-faith propaganda network like Fox or RT can call themselves “News” and get away with it for decades at a time.

In the US, only money has a real say. The way to force news networks to shape up is to keep finding them in damages for deliberately misrepresenting the truth. In other words, treat their misinformation as the deliberate fraud that it is, identify how it’s hurting our society, put a $ number to that damage, and sue networks like Fox into extinction.

They already had to pay nearly a billion from hurting one company.

This was pretty fun and surprisingly wholesome even for him. He went into a town hall event that was like 70% hard MAGA people wearing red hats and Trump shirts. He talked to them as people and made fun of himself. He even wore the Trump hat and posed for pictures with the MAGA kids https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXOS8rYWgAAXW2s?format=jpg&name=900x900

Everyone seemed to be having a good time. The president did his best to entertain, and show people with a narrow worldview that there’s humans on the other side too.

The story of that red Trump hat he is wearing in the pic is that he traded it. He gave a MAGA guy a unique Biden presidential hat signed by him, the fancy WH ones they make specifically for the president to wear. In return, Biden demanded the red hat from that guy’s head as a trophy. Then they shook hands.

We don’t live in a perfect world. Someone is going to be president for the next 4 years, and at this stage of the game we have 2 distinct choices.

Also, what you called half-assed someone else might call the democracy process. Just because YOU want something doesn’t mean I want the same thing. Your vision for how to solve Palestine or Ukraine or improve wealth equality might be vastly different from mine. Just because you don’t get exactly what you want doesn’t mean the system is useless or not worth participating in. If you were to get exactly what you want, then I’d be getting walked over. If I get exactly what I want, then you’d say you are not being heard.

The only fair system is to elect a big-tent party and then work through dialog on trying to reach either consensus or fair compromise on the various topics. But we won’t have that option if we let the fascists get control and do their Project 2025 thing while ignoring us.

Here is another take. You vote for both:

1. The group that most closely resembles what you want AND
2. The group that most likely will listen to your requests during the administration

If there are things you want changed, Nov 5 is not the last day but the beginning. The next president will make decisions for 4 years, and every decision is influenced by people and our voices.

Ask yourself, between Harris and Trump, which administration is most likely to want the things I want, and which is most likely to listen and be influenced by my side of political views and the people I support?

For me, the answer is a hard NO on Trump, and a pretty solid Yes on Harris.

Like the other thread abut guns. Sure, the Dems talk about wanting gun reform and it never gets done because they don’t have a super majority in Congress. But the GOP is 100% against it and will never contribute. Which side is more likely to do anything to help the reform I want to see? 4 years of Dems is a good amount of time to press for issues and seek some improvements. If I let the GOP have 4 more years, we are not even going to talk about change until the next election.

Those that are willing to sit out an election because the Dems are not perfect, are inflicting the worst candidate on all of us and themselves. Don’t you dare later complain about school shootings, wealth inequality, tax cuts for the rich, abuse of queer folks, women’s rights, international inhumane policy. Don’t inflict Trump on us and then pretend to care about our issues or be on our side. If you sit out, you’ve picked a side.

Brazille was working for CNN at the time of Clinton, not ABC.

Harris is negotiating the rules of a debate she hadn’t agreed to yet since she wasn’t running for president at the time the debate was agreed to by BIDEN. Trump is also negotiating terms. Seems fair to me that they both get to negotiate for whatever they want before agreeing to final terms.

do a debate on a Conservative network

Conservative news network? WHERE? All I see on the right-wing are garbage propaganda outlets. Why would anyone serious agree to a debate at a propaganda outlet?

A debate has to happen on a real news network like ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, AP, Reuters, CNBC or something of the like, or hosted by a neutral university or some other serious institution. The point is to try to have less BS, not more.

And I agree, if the DNC operative Brazille gave one candidate the questions ahead and not the other, that’s a major issue and she is right to be shamed for it and have been removed by CNN. Nobody wants to see that favoritism crap, which is also the reason we can’t have the debate at Fox or any other trash-tier outlet either.

There’s also politicking involved. Trump is currently losing this election, so he should be more desperate to get a debate going even if he is most likely to do poorly. From a politics perspective, the Harris campaign is right to press Trump and push the rules to make him as uncomfortable as possible. Trump can back out if he wants, but he is the one that needs the debate the most. That’s just how politics works. If Trump was ahead he could simply avoid the debate and run a telethon by himself like he’s done in the past when he refused to participate, in the same vein of political gamesmanship. It’s only fair that when Harris is on top she gets to be the gamester. That’s Trump’s lack of decorum coming back to roost. Those that lead with being dicks get mirrored treatment when the tables turn.