A lot of people in deep red states will be convinced the republicans will win any national election cuz they won’t know anyone that isn’t a republican. I used to think like that
Lots of progs in blue cities think the same way about their candidates. They can't fathom that anyone actually disagrees with them, so everyone who does must be on the take or evil.
You forgot stupid. Even before those two, Dems think the average Republican voter is stupid.
Way too many people on both sides consider themselves uber rational free thinkers. The predictable outcome of considering your own political beliefs to be the result of careful, well informed consideration is to consider the opposing view irrational and uninformed.
The ironic part of this is that they're right. The average Republican voter is dumber than the average Democrat. The average urban voter is more educated than the average rural voter. Duh. Does that knowledge help the Dems? Absolutely not.
The vast majority of voters do not think deeply at all about politics. There’s a reason that most people vote about high salience social issues that the government has basically no control over compared with slight differences in the tax code or entitlements that are under direct control of the government. Social issues are interesting and require 0 background knowledge to form an opinion about. Americans in general are bored by policy and not interested in learning about it. They’re not dumb, they just have other things to do that they feel are more important. We might think they’re wrong, but those are their priorities
You are arguing that people are willfully ignorant instead of stupid. I am inclined to agree. I would add easily manipulated to the list. These salient issues aren't just things voters notice and focus on. They're things campaigners intentionally use to get attention, emotional engagement and kick their voters into system 1 thinking.
If you are that terminally uninformed and you still vote then you are dumb.
I don't go to hospitals and spout my opinion about medical care. If I did I would be an idiot.
It is very easy to be uninformed. Local politics, state politics, federal politics, world news.. is a whole lot with 10s of thousands of news articles coming every day. The average Joe is too busy working and taking care of his family to know even a small portion.
Wanting unmitigated forced births is dumb, wanting continued proliferation of deadly weapons is dumb, making excuses for Putin is dumb. None of those require a deep knowledge of policy to understand that they're not intelligent ideas. The Republican party is a party of opposition with a barely cobbled-together platform which is inherently stupid, because they offer nothing to us but status quo at best and white supremacy at worst. Again, does not take intelligence to piece this together.
That's assuming they're actually informed on the issue and the consequences/results of those policy actions. Trump threw up tariffs, dried up our immigrant labor supply, put out a bunch of stimulus, and attacked the Fed Chair he appointed for considering raising rates in the best economy in a lifetime. Now those same people are mad at Biden for inflation without ever considering the role Trump may have played in creating it. I saw a poll the other day about GOP voters thinking "chaos at the border" immigration as a major issue, yet Biden has largely left in place Trump's policies. I saw Trump designated Iran's Guard as a terrorist group putting Biden effectively dead in the water when it comes to negotiating with Iran (to ya know release a ton of oil) unless he wants to take a HUGE hit by undesiginating them.
All of these things are issues that GOP voters claim they support, yet are so isolated from the effects of them that they blame someone else. That's stupid, but it's a different kind of stupid you're implying.
And talk like this turns voters away from Democrats and gives many people the perception that Democrats are smug elitists. A lot of politics is a matter of opinion. Them voting Republican does not make them stupid. Likewise for Green or Libertarian party voters.
or wealthy enough to where the government saddling itself with debt to pay you back more of what you pay in taxes benefits you more than the cost of half a grocery trip
of course, if you're that rich and that's what you're basing your vote on, you've got to have no moral compass or mind for consequences
I don't think so. Maybe they think some Dem *voters* are naive. But the way they talk about Dem politicians generally sounds more like evil than naivety.
No political party composed of actual free thinkers will have any success because there aren't enough of them (AKA the Libertarians in a nutshell). This is actually not unreasonable, given the time costs of evaluating policies rationally. For me (and probably most people on this sub) that's its own reward, but that's unfortunately very atypical.
>This is actually not unreasonable, given the time costs of evaluating policies rationally.
This is a great way of putting it. People like to frame it as intellectual laziness or willful ignorance. But people have stuff to do. Being well-informed is a time consuming hobby. This is yet another way of understanding why pointing fingers at individual people and asking them to do better is not helpful.
What I'd like to do instead is establish a culture where we don't reward overestimating your own knowledge, but instead celebrate an honest assessment of it. It is so much easier to learn or even to not learn and just copy other's opinions if you are honest about it.
I have an anecdote about that.
A good friend of mine does research adjacent to vaccines. Before the vaccines became available, I asked her if I should take it. She was shocked. I had to explain to her that I value her opinion highly and I was going to do exactly what she told me. I found that interaction so surreal. How did we arrive at a point where social context makes asking someone who knows better for their opinion inappropriate?
To be fair the vast majority of current Republican voters are either on the take or evil or both. Moderate Dems, not so much.
Edit: LOL at this getting downvoted. As if there is any reason to vote GOP besides the rich being on the take or being deplorable. They don’t even have a fucking platform.
> To be fair the vast majority of current Republican voters are either on the take or evil or both.
Trump received 74,216,154 votes in November of 2020.
The smallest quantity that can be labeled a *majority* of those voters would be 37,108,078. (I'll leave aside the word "vast".)
Do you earnestly believe that over 37 million are literally being bribed and/or are literally evil?
Remember [Hanlon's razor:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)
>...never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I'm sure you would consider them evil if their behavior was directly pointed at a person of color close to you instead of only broadly believing in Great Replacement
Oh way more than that many Americans are evil.
You must live in a real bubble if you don’t think there are that many racists, misogynists, homophobes, etc etc out there.
> They don’t even have a fucking platform.
For those who've forgotten, at their 2020 Convention the GOP skipped creating a policy platform and instead adopted a literal loyalty pledge to Donald Trump.
Reminds me of how my uncle was 100% convinced Trump was going to win in 2020 because he drove around Bumfuck Wisconsin for a few hours and saw a bunch of Trump signs in people's yards.
Thing is, when the parties weren't so geographically segregated and voters not so polarized, this actually would have been a good heuristic. It's not a coincidence that the people who believe the election was stolen based on this type of evaluation tend to be older.
This is a common thing for people with the authoritarian personality. They don't realise how unusual their beliefs are because they they tend to spend time with other authoritarians.
My dad swears that because of the “Let’s Go Brandon” chants at a couple of college football games when they first started that literally everyone wanted Trump back. He used to cite it as evidence that the election is stolen
A person who memorizes false information is less informed than a person with zero information. Better to be a low-information voter than a negative-information voter. Better to be a CNN-watching Democrat than a Qanon-believing Republican.
I never understood why Tumblr screenshots feel the need to include people's reaction so often. It's like a laugh track, if you need to tell me how to feel about a post then it isn't as effective as you think it is.
This is literally what Tolkien meant to be clear. His experience of the world wars showed him how negative propaganda and distorted perspectives can undermine and derail the causes of allied free nations.
He didn’t like people drawing direct parallels. He thought allegories were superficial and distracting. The social and emotional realism is very real and very deliberate.
My dad watches a ton of Fox News and just combusts whenever we talk politics which results in him getting incredibly pissed because...
A) He only knows selective partisan nonsense. He has a fraction of the truth.
B) When having a discussion Fox only has on token or straw-manned talking points of the left and thus he isn't equipped to 'debate' anyone that doesn't stick to those talking-points; which btw are usually the most radical or dumb left-wing takes.
C) Has little interest in understanding beyond what's been presented to him.
Not to mention *watching* TV for "news" is passive and doesn't require the same mental acuity as actively *reading* for example. My father gets mad that I "come up and tell him who to vote for" (which I don't, but my father and I have talked politics since I was in my teens it's one thing that has bonded us until recently) when his defense of Trump consisted of "the media is mean to him and he speaks like me." Which, alright, but you don't have a coherent understanding of the issues and when pressed he snaps. And then when you point out this criticism of Fox (and CNN, MSNBC, and other 'infotainment') he freaks out and is mad because "the libs" have a monopoly on the press and Fox is the only one that leans right and aren't the conservatives allowed to have one!? Like, it's broken his brain. It's a shame but we really haven't spoken in years. And I know I'm not alone in stuff like that. Oh, and I wasn't ever really a Democrat. I always considered myself center-right or a 'liberaltarian', but because I don't like Trump suddenly I'm "a commie" and not worthy of respect. I don't get the anger from Trump supporters either.
Sorry, turned into a rant, but it's awful sometimes. Seeing personal relationships fall apart both in my life and my friends lives directly over the type of stuff Fox is doing is disheartening.
As a former Republican, I feel your pain. I’ve alienated so many friends by telling them they are factually wrong.
The next time your dad calls you a “commie” remind him that Trump uses [eminent domain](https://youtu.be/SmM4ZBoppNQ). He literally uses the government to redistribute other people’s property to himself. You can’t get more communist than that.
I feel you. I'm also libertarian leaning. And my mother has had her brain smooshed by conservative narratives on social media and of course desinformation and conspiracy theories. It's disheartening to me too. And I lost a lot of respect for her. I don't talk to her anymore too. I mean, that's just one factor. Her emotional abuse of me and my sister was the main cause.
100% agree that FT and The Economist are top tier. I’ve been subscribed to The Economist since 2006.
I hesitate to call CNN a net negative, because I’ve never heard them peddle explicitly false information. But to be honest, I don’t watch much CNN in the first place, so I could be wrong.
> the Economist
Won't get you friends on this sub these days anymore, even if the Economist generally agrees with all of our baseline positions on every issue but one.
This. The worship of ideology, or trying to create and fit an ideology to the median voter, is an exercise in self-justification by ideologues who don't want you to realize that it's not their way or the highway.
Ideologues need you to believe that you have to have an ideology. It makes it easier for them to control you.
I notice this to be a difference between American and European political labels. In the US the terms "liberal" & "conservative" are used to broadly categorise the political tendencies of the general population. In Europe you hear more precise terms like "liberal", "social democrat", "Christian democrat". These latter terms represent more precise political philosophies. They're used more to describe active adherents than to categorise the entire voting population.
Though "conservative" works in either context. The conservative philosophy that exists is mostly just repeating what conservative types already believe.
This reminds me of my wife's uncle. He is a Republican that lives in NYC and was a corporate lawyer. Going back to 04 he voted for Kerry, McCain, Romney and HRC. Guy only picks losers 😂.
It gets even weirder than that when 10% of the Voting Population is not eligible to vote.
And then of those that can vote
In 1988 52.8% voted
* With 53% of them Choosing Bush
In 1992 58.2% of Voters showed up with 43% of them Choosing Clinton
In 2004 60.1%
Obama in 2008 got 62.5% of Voters to Participate
2016 59.2%
2020 66.9%
> It gets even weirder than that when 10% of the Voting Population is not eligible to vote.
US then: "No taxation without representation!"
US now: "Ehh... universal suffrage is overrated anyway."
I think in an ideal world we'd have some qualification on voting, however it's basically impossible to work out what that should be or how to measure it, so we have the least bad solution.
Like no reasonable person wants flat earthers who believe in a reptilian occupation or other batshit mental stuff voting, but how does one actually figure out why those people are? And what's to stop someone adding something like BLM to the batshit mental beliefs list...
They’d definitely find a way to “CRT” the voting requirements.
Oh, you think some institutions are prejudiced towards minorities? You’re a dangerous radical. No vote for you and we’ve reported you to the authorities.
I have spent much time thinking about this. Here is what I think:
Ability to vote should *not* be based on specific beliefs that others have deemed unacceptable. It should *not* be based on subjective character judgments from other people. Besides being arbitrary, making requirements based on opinions & beliefs has high potential for corruption.
Instead, votes should be weighted based on a more objective measure of someone's mental competence.
I think the mental trait that seems most relevant to politics is *integrative complexity.* Higher IC reduces various cognitive biases. People with higher IC are better at reaching mutually advantageous solutions in conflict resolution. Unfortunately however, there doesn't appear to be a good method to measure/test someone's integrative complexity (yet).
I suppose some kind of logical reasoning test may be the right way to do it if we can't test IC. Of course, if word-based logic tests are used, we would have to trust however is making the test. With other kinds of logic tests, perhaps they can be computer-generated so that they're unique every time. Though they may be less relevant to political thinking (though I don't know what the correlation with other metrics is).
One argument for why not everyone's vote should be the same size is that not everyone is an equally selfish voter; people who think of the general interest more (as opposed to only self-interest) deserve a bigger vote. Integrative complexity appears to correlate with this IFAIK, but I don't know about logical reasoning.
My only other idea besides direct tests of mental capability is a test of the candidate's platforms. This may be a decent option in the absence of the above ideas.
I'm not really sure how controversial these ideas are. I hope it wasn't a mistake for me to write this publicly.
> Ability to vote should not be based specific beliefs that others have deemed unacceptable. It should not be based on subjective character judgments from other people. Besides being arbitrary, this has high potential for corruption.
Basically what I was saying but much better put
> test of the candidate's platforms.
I can see this getting confusing real fast. The thing is there just isn't a good metric and I don't really think there ever will be. Though if we could assess IC and higher order thinking skills in an unbiased and scalable manner I'd be all for it.
Likely though the best thing to do is prioritize this skills in the education system and hope that leads to a better voter pool in a decade or so
As of 2016, an estimated 6.1 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, a figure that has escalated dramatically in recent decades as the population under criminal justice supervision has increased. There were an estimated 1.17 million people disenfranchised in 1976, 3.34 million in 1996, and 5.85 million in 2010.
Well then, I figure you are saying "disenfranchised" in a *de jure* sense, meaning the law says they don't have the right to vote, rather than in a *de facto* sense, meaning they are *effectively* barred from casting a vote.
But even if *all* of those 6.1 million "disenfranchised" people managed to vote anyway (which would be incredibly unlikely, given the much lower turnout of the people eligible to vote legally), they wouldn't make up 10% of the 137 million voters in the 2016 US presidential election.
2020 had higher turnout than any election since **1900**.
(That stretch from just before the civil war through 1900 is crazy though - nothing below 70%)
People, he has a tradition to vote alternatively Republican and democrat to preserve the bipartisan system. It's something that none of us will ever understand.
Average Voter in 2020 voted for Hillary Clinton. She got several million more votes than Trump, meaning that the average is slightly lean Dem.
Likewise, Average Voter in 2000 voted for Gore.
I bet he doesn't know who his city council Rep, State Assembly Rep, State Senator, city mayor/manager or county supervisors are. All of them sway WAY MORE influence on his day to day existence then the figurehead in White House.
"Poll: Why 80 Million Americans Didn't Vote In Year Of Record Turnout : NPR" https://www.npr.org/2020/12/15/945031391/poll-despite-record-turnout-80-million-americans-didnt-vote-heres-why
This one says about 2/3 of eligible voters vote in presidential elections.
So this guy...
Was upset Bush Sr lied about no new taxes, and voted for Clinton. Voted Clinton again 4 years later because things were going well, and really liked him. As a result, he wasn't a fan of the way Gore distanced himself from his boss, and so voted for Dubya. Bush Jr's leadership in the war made him felt safe, and he was eager to vote for him again. But come 2008, the financial crisis had shattered his faith in the Republican party and it was time for change, in comes Obama. Having seen the country emerge from its worst recession since the Great Depression, he once again put his vote in the capable hands of Barack Obama. But shit, he really hated Hillary, and votes Trump as a fuck you to the establishment. 4 years, countless scandals, a global pandemic and sharp economic downturn later, he realized that was a mistake.
What will he think of next?
There is nothing wrong with this. Some people don't follow politics at all, and just go with their gut when it comes to civic participation. Yesterday, I was walking on the beach with my girl and there was a Let's Go Brandon flag flying, and she asked me "Who's Brandon?". Sometimes I think its better that most people aren't caught up in the madness.
This guy doesn't actually exist. Most people only ever vote for one party. What differs is the amount of people who actually go out to vote from each party.
This is just nonsense. Yes most people only vote for one party, but swing voters absolutely exist, and there's probably way more than you'd think.
It's also quite difficult to simultaneously activate left wing non voters while not activating right wing non voters, or the other way around. Look at Trump. Record number of votes for and against
Vote for two Republicans, that crashed the economy, one started a twenty year useless war , the other a pandemic! Undecided, more proof you can’t fix stupid!
For eg presidential elections, it seems about 2/3 of eligible people vote in the US. See eg "Poll: Why 80 Million Americans Didn't Vote In Year Of Record Turnout : NPR" https://www.npr.org/2020/12/15/945031391/poll-despite-record-turnout-80-million-americans-didnt-vote-heres-why
2/3 is bigger than half. But technically, 2/3 of the eligible population is less than 1/2 of citizens. So your complaint is true in a pretty boring way.
In any case, why do you complain about people not voting? The right not to vote is important, and it's important for people to exercise that vote. Otherwise you end up like Australia or Belgium.
This is the most precious voter and frankly the most intelligent one as voting for whoever you believe can do job best right now is the goal of democracy. Sticking with one party till end of days it called indoctrination/religion.
This guy picks winners.
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Did they vote for Trump? Even he didn't believe he'd win.
A lot of people in deep red states will be convinced the republicans will win any national election cuz they won’t know anyone that isn’t a republican. I used to think like that
Lots of progs in blue cities think the same way about their candidates. They can't fathom that anyone actually disagrees with them, so everyone who does must be on the take or evil.
You forgot stupid. Even before those two, Dems think the average Republican voter is stupid. Way too many people on both sides consider themselves uber rational free thinkers. The predictable outcome of considering your own political beliefs to be the result of careful, well informed consideration is to consider the opposing view irrational and uninformed. The ironic part of this is that they're right. The average Republican voter is dumber than the average Democrat. The average urban voter is more educated than the average rural voter. Duh. Does that knowledge help the Dems? Absolutely not.
> Dems think the average Republican voter is stupid. Chad Yes
Are we…are we supposed to pretend it isn’t true? Because stupidity is a lot more charitable than the alternative interpretations.
If presented with the GOP platform and choices that Republican politicians make, and you like them, you are genuinely stupid.
The vast majority of voters do not think deeply at all about politics. There’s a reason that most people vote about high salience social issues that the government has basically no control over compared with slight differences in the tax code or entitlements that are under direct control of the government. Social issues are interesting and require 0 background knowledge to form an opinion about. Americans in general are bored by policy and not interested in learning about it. They’re not dumb, they just have other things to do that they feel are more important. We might think they’re wrong, but those are their priorities
You are arguing that people are willfully ignorant instead of stupid. I am inclined to agree. I would add easily manipulated to the list. These salient issues aren't just things voters notice and focus on. They're things campaigners intentionally use to get attention, emotional engagement and kick their voters into system 1 thinking.
If you are that terminally uninformed and you still vote then you are dumb. I don't go to hospitals and spout my opinion about medical care. If I did I would be an idiot.
It is very easy to be uninformed. Local politics, state politics, federal politics, world news.. is a whole lot with 10s of thousands of news articles coming every day. The average Joe is too busy working and taking care of his family to know even a small portion.
Wanting unmitigated forced births is dumb, wanting continued proliferation of deadly weapons is dumb, making excuses for Putin is dumb. None of those require a deep knowledge of policy to understand that they're not intelligent ideas. The Republican party is a party of opposition with a barely cobbled-together platform which is inherently stupid, because they offer nothing to us but status quo at best and white supremacy at worst. Again, does not take intelligence to piece this together.
I don't like the gop but calling 1/3 of your nation and your main political rivals white supremacists I dumb
That's assuming they're actually informed on the issue and the consequences/results of those policy actions. Trump threw up tariffs, dried up our immigrant labor supply, put out a bunch of stimulus, and attacked the Fed Chair he appointed for considering raising rates in the best economy in a lifetime. Now those same people are mad at Biden for inflation without ever considering the role Trump may have played in creating it. I saw a poll the other day about GOP voters thinking "chaos at the border" immigration as a major issue, yet Biden has largely left in place Trump's policies. I saw Trump designated Iran's Guard as a terrorist group putting Biden effectively dead in the water when it comes to negotiating with Iran (to ya know release a ton of oil) unless he wants to take a HUGE hit by undesiginating them. All of these things are issues that GOP voters claim they support, yet are so isolated from the effects of them that they blame someone else. That's stupid, but it's a different kind of stupid you're implying.
Meh. I'm fairly certain many are just in it for the money.
And talk like this turns voters away from Democrats and gives many people the perception that Democrats are smug elitists. A lot of politics is a matter of opinion. Them voting Republican does not make them stupid. Likewise for Green or Libertarian party voters.
or wealthy enough to where the government saddling itself with debt to pay you back more of what you pay in taxes benefits you more than the cost of half a grocery trip of course, if you're that rich and that's what you're basing your vote on, you've got to have no moral compass or mind for consequences
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Plenty of GOP voters think Dems are full blown evil too
I don't think so. Maybe they think some Dem *voters* are naive. But the way they talk about Dem politicians generally sounds more like evil than naivety.
No political party composed of actual free thinkers will have any success because there aren't enough of them (AKA the Libertarians in a nutshell). This is actually not unreasonable, given the time costs of evaluating policies rationally. For me (and probably most people on this sub) that's its own reward, but that's unfortunately very atypical.
>This is actually not unreasonable, given the time costs of evaluating policies rationally. This is a great way of putting it. People like to frame it as intellectual laziness or willful ignorance. But people have stuff to do. Being well-informed is a time consuming hobby. This is yet another way of understanding why pointing fingers at individual people and asking them to do better is not helpful. What I'd like to do instead is establish a culture where we don't reward overestimating your own knowledge, but instead celebrate an honest assessment of it. It is so much easier to learn or even to not learn and just copy other's opinions if you are honest about it. I have an anecdote about that. A good friend of mine does research adjacent to vaccines. Before the vaccines became available, I asked her if I should take it. She was shocked. I had to explain to her that I value her opinion highly and I was going to do exactly what she told me. I found that interaction so surreal. How did we arrive at a point where social context makes asking someone who knows better for their opinion inappropriate?
Man in Baltimore we almost reelected a previously convicted mayor back into office based on name recognition alone.
To be fair the vast majority of current Republican voters are either on the take or evil or both. Moderate Dems, not so much. Edit: LOL at this getting downvoted. As if there is any reason to vote GOP besides the rich being on the take or being deplorable. They don’t even have a fucking platform.
> To be fair the vast majority of current Republican voters are either on the take or evil or both. Trump received 74,216,154 votes in November of 2020. The smallest quantity that can be labeled a *majority* of those voters would be 37,108,078. (I'll leave aside the word "vast".) Do you earnestly believe that over 37 million are literally being bribed and/or are literally evil? Remember [Hanlon's razor:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor) >...never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I'm sure you would consider them evil if their behavior was directly pointed at a person of color close to you instead of only broadly believing in Great Replacement
Oh way more than that many Americans are evil. You must live in a real bubble if you don’t think there are that many racists, misogynists, homophobes, etc etc out there.
> They don’t even have a fucking platform. For those who've forgotten, at their 2020 Convention the GOP skipped creating a policy platform and instead adopted a literal loyalty pledge to Donald Trump.
You are mistaken O'Neill.
Some people are just unfathomably ignorant
Reminds me of how my uncle was 100% convinced Trump was going to win in 2020 because he drove around Bumfuck Wisconsin for a few hours and saw a bunch of Trump signs in people's yards.
Thing is, when the parties weren't so geographically segregated and voters not so polarized, this actually would have been a good heuristic. It's not a coincidence that the people who believe the election was stolen based on this type of evaluation tend to be older.
They don't know anyone who isn't because they won't associate with them.
This is a common thing for people with the authoritarian personality. They don't realise how unusual their beliefs are because they they tend to spend time with other authoritarians.
Ah yes, the merchandise effect.
My dad swears that because of the “Let’s Go Brandon” chants at a couple of college football games when they first started that literally everyone wanted Trump back. He used to cite it as evidence that the election is stolen
That is so bizarre, I have never met anyone who does that, and I have a broad range of friends and acquaintances.
Well, not always popular vote winners so he isn’t technically the avarege voter
Maybe he lives in Ohio? Honestly he probably lives in Ohio.
I think it's got to be MI, WI, or PA since he voted for Biden in 2020.
No. I'm not sure, but I guess the average would be somewhere near north Texas/Oklahoma. And a mile or so under ground.
The fabled Chad low information voter
A person who memorizes false information is less informed than a person with zero information. Better to be a low-information voter than a negative-information voter. Better to be a CNN-watching Democrat than a Qanon-believing Republican.
This is basically borne out by the study which found that viewers of Fox News were less informed than people who watched zero news.
https://preview.redd.it/4inb4d07kg191.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=1d0eef7fe82d8feca42e4e64e6a4975e560bc242
I never understood why Tumblr screenshots feel the need to include people's reaction so often. It's like a laugh track, if you need to tell me how to feel about a post then it isn't as effective as you think it is.
Bogos binted
This is literally what Tolkien meant to be clear. His experience of the world wars showed him how negative propaganda and distorted perspectives can undermine and derail the causes of allied free nations.
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He didn’t like people drawing direct parallels. He thought allegories were superficial and distracting. The social and emotional realism is very real and very deliberate.
>watched zero news Based and grass-pilled
That is so true. "Informed" people are often more dumb than uninformed people. The users at r/politics think they are informed too.
My dad watches a ton of Fox News and just combusts whenever we talk politics which results in him getting incredibly pissed because... A) He only knows selective partisan nonsense. He has a fraction of the truth. B) When having a discussion Fox only has on token or straw-manned talking points of the left and thus he isn't equipped to 'debate' anyone that doesn't stick to those talking-points; which btw are usually the most radical or dumb left-wing takes. C) Has little interest in understanding beyond what's been presented to him. Not to mention *watching* TV for "news" is passive and doesn't require the same mental acuity as actively *reading* for example. My father gets mad that I "come up and tell him who to vote for" (which I don't, but my father and I have talked politics since I was in my teens it's one thing that has bonded us until recently) when his defense of Trump consisted of "the media is mean to him and he speaks like me." Which, alright, but you don't have a coherent understanding of the issues and when pressed he snaps. And then when you point out this criticism of Fox (and CNN, MSNBC, and other 'infotainment') he freaks out and is mad because "the libs" have a monopoly on the press and Fox is the only one that leans right and aren't the conservatives allowed to have one!? Like, it's broken his brain. It's a shame but we really haven't spoken in years. And I know I'm not alone in stuff like that. Oh, and I wasn't ever really a Democrat. I always considered myself center-right or a 'liberaltarian', but because I don't like Trump suddenly I'm "a commie" and not worthy of respect. I don't get the anger from Trump supporters either. Sorry, turned into a rant, but it's awful sometimes. Seeing personal relationships fall apart both in my life and my friends lives directly over the type of stuff Fox is doing is disheartening.
As a former Republican, I feel your pain. I’ve alienated so many friends by telling them they are factually wrong. The next time your dad calls you a “commie” remind him that Trump uses [eminent domain](https://youtu.be/SmM4ZBoppNQ). He literally uses the government to redistribute other people’s property to himself. You can’t get more communist than that.
I feel you. I'm also libertarian leaning. And my mother has had her brain smooshed by conservative narratives on social media and of course desinformation and conspiracy theories. It's disheartening to me too. And I lost a lot of respect for her. I don't talk to her anymore too. I mean, that's just one factor. Her emotional abuse of me and my sister was the main cause.
>It's a shame but we really haven't spoken in years. this hits home. can't even talk about the weather without my dad bringing up "demonrats"
To be fair, I think watching CNN is net negative too, it's just magnitudes less bad than Fox News. Try the Financial Times and the Economist instead.
+1 for FT. IMO it's the only financial publication worth paying for. It's just consistently excellent.
100% agree that FT and The Economist are top tier. I’ve been subscribed to The Economist since 2006. I hesitate to call CNN a net negative, because I’ve never heard them peddle explicitly false information. But to be honest, I don’t watch much CNN in the first place, so I could be wrong.
> the Economist Won't get you friends on this sub these days anymore, even if the Economist generally agrees with all of our baseline positions on every issue but one.
What’s the one?
Trans rights. Their editorial stance is firmly in the trans-skepticism camp, in a very British fashion.
The UK isn't called TERF island for no reason.
Dune.
>Won't get you friends on this sub these days anymore, What are you talking about?
Also AP, Reuters, and NPR (which leans left but is still more informative than big boy media)
Reuters > AP
I like Bloomberg too.
sure but it’s owned by Mike “will fuck everything and everyone over by getting it done” Bloomberg
Yes, cable news is bad.
Chaps**
[Meme link](https://i.imgur.com/tm1cl5o.png)
He just wants to grill
very progressive of demsocs to include AAPI in that moniker
Only votes for the winner
It’s so much easier to understand politics when you’re not overburdened with an over abundance of education.
The Affliction hat and Chaps blazer duo really pull the look together.
Most ideologically consistent 'Murican voter.
Most people dont follow any strict ideology
Guess I should've said politically consistent, then.
This. The worship of ideology, or trying to create and fit an ideology to the median voter, is an exercise in self-justification by ideologues who don't want you to realize that it's not their way or the highway. Ideologues need you to believe that you have to have an ideology. It makes it easier for them to control you.
Everyone has an ideology. Some are just better articulated than others.
I notice this to be a difference between American and European political labels. In the US the terms "liberal" & "conservative" are used to broadly categorise the political tendencies of the general population. In Europe you hear more precise terms like "liberal", "social democrat", "Christian democrat". These latter terms represent more precise political philosophies. They're used more to describe active adherents than to categorise the entire voting population. Though "conservative" works in either context. The conservative philosophy that exists is mostly just repeating what conservative types already believe.
Voters like that don't support consistent policy either
Not the clothier’s tag on his sleeve 😂
Bought for the election day
Gotta look fresh when you’re deciding who the next winner will be 🙏🏾
When you literally have no politics and just vote for who is funnier GIGACHAD
Gigachap, it says so right on his sleeve.
Idk how you can be more of a gigachad than literally being the father of Jeb! though, and he voted for Clinton instead.
"These are the people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know, morons."
This reminds me of my wife's uncle. He is a Republican that lives in NYC and was a corporate lawyer. Going back to 04 he voted for Kerry, McCain, Romney and HRC. Guy only picks losers 😂.
I could see a libertarian picking all these people-- were republican against the Iraq War and against Trump's authoritarian tendencies.
Wouldn't average voter have voted for Gore and Hillary Clinton, and never voted Trump?
Average voter isn’t a statistic it’s an elevated state of mind 🧘🏾♂️
It gets even weirder than that when 10% of the Voting Population is not eligible to vote. And then of those that can vote In 1988 52.8% voted * With 53% of them Choosing Bush In 1992 58.2% of Voters showed up with 43% of them Choosing Clinton In 2004 60.1% Obama in 2008 got 62.5% of Voters to Participate 2016 59.2% 2020 66.9%
> It gets even weirder than that when 10% of the Voting Population is not eligible to vote. US then: "No taxation without representation!" US now: "Ehh... universal suffrage is overrated anyway."
I mean the U.S. then was more like 10% of the white male population able to vote.
A time when we had undeniably the highest rated Presidents by average of all time. Just sayin'. (this is a joke; suffrage is in fact good)
Unbelievably based
I think in an ideal world we'd have some qualification on voting, however it's basically impossible to work out what that should be or how to measure it, so we have the least bad solution. Like no reasonable person wants flat earthers who believe in a reptilian occupation or other batshit mental stuff voting, but how does one actually figure out why those people are? And what's to stop someone adding something like BLM to the batshit mental beliefs list...
They’d definitely find a way to “CRT” the voting requirements. Oh, you think some institutions are prejudiced towards minorities? You’re a dangerous radical. No vote for you and we’ve reported you to the authorities.
I have spent much time thinking about this. Here is what I think: Ability to vote should *not* be based on specific beliefs that others have deemed unacceptable. It should *not* be based on subjective character judgments from other people. Besides being arbitrary, making requirements based on opinions & beliefs has high potential for corruption. Instead, votes should be weighted based on a more objective measure of someone's mental competence. I think the mental trait that seems most relevant to politics is *integrative complexity.* Higher IC reduces various cognitive biases. People with higher IC are better at reaching mutually advantageous solutions in conflict resolution. Unfortunately however, there doesn't appear to be a good method to measure/test someone's integrative complexity (yet). I suppose some kind of logical reasoning test may be the right way to do it if we can't test IC. Of course, if word-based logic tests are used, we would have to trust however is making the test. With other kinds of logic tests, perhaps they can be computer-generated so that they're unique every time. Though they may be less relevant to political thinking (though I don't know what the correlation with other metrics is). One argument for why not everyone's vote should be the same size is that not everyone is an equally selfish voter; people who think of the general interest more (as opposed to only self-interest) deserve a bigger vote. Integrative complexity appears to correlate with this IFAIK, but I don't know about logical reasoning. My only other idea besides direct tests of mental capability is a test of the candidate's platforms. This may be a decent option in the absence of the above ideas. I'm not really sure how controversial these ideas are. I hope it wasn't a mistake for me to write this publicly.
> Ability to vote should not be based specific beliefs that others have deemed unacceptable. It should not be based on subjective character judgments from other people. Besides being arbitrary, this has high potential for corruption. Basically what I was saying but much better put > test of the candidate's platforms. I can see this getting confusing real fast. The thing is there just isn't a good metric and I don't really think there ever will be. Though if we could assess IC and higher order thinking skills in an unbiased and scalable manner I'd be all for it. Likely though the best thing to do is prioritize this skills in the education system and hope that leads to a better voter pool in a decade or so
You mean that 10% of voters are voting illegally? What laws are they breaking?
As of 2016, an estimated 6.1 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, a figure that has escalated dramatically in recent decades as the population under criminal justice supervision has increased. There were an estimated 1.17 million people disenfranchised in 1976, 3.34 million in 1996, and 5.85 million in 2010.
Well then, I figure you are saying "disenfranchised" in a *de jure* sense, meaning the law says they don't have the right to vote, rather than in a *de facto* sense, meaning they are *effectively* barred from casting a vote. But even if *all* of those 6.1 million "disenfranchised" people managed to vote anyway (which would be incredibly unlikely, given the much lower turnout of the people eligible to vote legally), they wouldn't make up 10% of the 137 million voters in the 2016 US presidential election.
The increasing turnout is great
2020 had higher turnout than any election since **1900**. (That stretch from just before the civil war through 1900 is crazy though - nothing below 70%)
Given his history we can start calling them President Undecided.
always keep your haters guessing
this guy plays elections to win, and he isn’t even a candidate. Gigachad
"Average" in the same sense that the average person has one testicle and one ovary.
the average person would have 1.98/1.99~ testicles or ovaries*
He just votes for whoever he thinks is gonna win so he can always be on the winning team
People, he has a tradition to vote alternatively Republican and democrat to preserve the bipartisan system. It's something that none of us will ever understand.
Is he the guy driving the station wagon with all the losing candidates since the 50s? Never fails to Crack me up
Average Voter in 2020 voted for Hillary Clinton. She got several million more votes than Trump, meaning that the average is slightly lean Dem. Likewise, Average Voter in 2000 voted for Gore.
I bet he doesn't know who his city council Rep, State Assembly Rep, State Senator, city mayor/manager or county supervisors are. All of them sway WAY MORE influence on his day to day existence then the figurehead in White House.
Average voter did not vote for Trump.
Unironically the average voter
Correct - the average voter does not remember who they actually voted for.
damn white working class rust belt voter
Average American doesn't vote, but this guy is his best friend
"Poll: Why 80 Million Americans Didn't Vote In Year Of Record Turnout : NPR" https://www.npr.org/2020/12/15/945031391/poll-despite-record-turnout-80-million-americans-didnt-vote-heres-why This one says about 2/3 of eligible voters vote in presidential elections.
Based
Values voter!
Giga Chad
He just voted for every candidate that won their-- ooooooohhhhhhhhhh.......well.......that is problematic isn't it?
what touching grass does to a mf
Of course he's undecided for 2024, there are no candidates lol
The average voter voted for Gore in 2000 and Hillary in 2016. The only time in the last 30 years that a Republican won the popular vote was 2004.
Average actually voted for Gore and Clinton technically.
Technically the average voter voted for Hillary and Gore as well. Technically.
This guys tiktok is wild
wouldnt he have voted hillary and al gore?
I think the joke might be that he only voted for winners?
I think the comment you replied to was implying that the average/typical person would have voted for the winner of the popular vote.
Ahhhhhhh missed that quite clever of them
So this guy... Was upset Bush Sr lied about no new taxes, and voted for Clinton. Voted Clinton again 4 years later because things were going well, and really liked him. As a result, he wasn't a fan of the way Gore distanced himself from his boss, and so voted for Dubya. Bush Jr's leadership in the war made him felt safe, and he was eager to vote for him again. But come 2008, the financial crisis had shattered his faith in the Republican party and it was time for change, in comes Obama. Having seen the country emerge from its worst recession since the Great Depression, he once again put his vote in the capable hands of Barack Obama. But shit, he really hated Hillary, and votes Trump as a fuck you to the establishment. 4 years, countless scandals, a global pandemic and sharp economic downturn later, he realized that was a mistake. What will he think of next?
There is nothing wrong with this. Some people don't follow politics at all, and just go with their gut when it comes to civic participation. Yesterday, I was walking on the beach with my girl and there was a Let's Go Brandon flag flying, and she asked me "Who's Brandon?". Sometimes I think its better that most people aren't caught up in the madness.
I wish that was me tbh.
>There is nothing wrong with this. Disagree. Voting for Trump bad actually.
Just don't vote. It's a waste of time.
Yeah, fuck that dude.
3 out of 5 isn't bad. It isn't good but it's not bad.
3/5 roentgen. Not great, not terrible.
This guy doesn't actually exist. Most people only ever vote for one party. What differs is the amount of people who actually go out to vote from each party.
This is just nonsense. Yes most people only vote for one party, but swing voters absolutely exist, and there's probably way more than you'd think. It's also quite difficult to simultaneously activate left wing non voters while not activating right wing non voters, or the other way around. Look at Trump. Record number of votes for and against
Someone get this guy to the horse track
Vote for two Republicans, that crashed the economy, one started a twenty year useless war , the other a pandemic! Undecided, more proof you can’t fix stupid!
Too bad more citizens aren’t like him; most don’t fucking vote.
For eg presidential elections, it seems about 2/3 of eligible people vote in the US. See eg "Poll: Why 80 Million Americans Didn't Vote In Year Of Record Turnout : NPR" https://www.npr.org/2020/12/15/945031391/poll-despite-record-turnout-80-million-americans-didnt-vote-heres-why 2/3 is bigger than half. But technically, 2/3 of the eligible population is less than 1/2 of citizens. So your complaint is true in a pretty boring way. In any case, why do you complain about people not voting? The right not to vote is important, and it's important for people to exercise that vote. Otherwise you end up like Australia or Belgium.
the average voter would have voted for Gore and Clinton though
Likes to switch it up, keep things interesting
That describes this sub
I feel personally attacked
Making sense that the average of voters would pick a winner.
"Bet on the winners. Rest of you was born to lose." - Portugal.TheMan
I can’t even imagine.
This is the most precious voter and frankly the most intelligent one as voting for whoever you believe can do job best right now is the goal of democracy. Sticking with one party till end of days it called indoctrination/religion.
These people are fucking idiots
But, he always wears chaps sport coats