Oh yes no disagreement there, but by all appearances it’s probably still going to be a fairly close shave – much closer to 50/50 ballpark than, say, 40 / 60 or let alone 30 / 70. So out of the people who do bother to vote, around half of them are still probably going to vote from Trump

Oh yes, liberals absolutely are way worse about this, but I do see it even with actual leftists. It feels like with “centrists,” the deal seems to be what you described: a sort of “well, certainly the leopards won’t eat my face, and I don’t like messing with the status quo because it works well enough for me.” However, with some leftists, it seems to be more about an optimistic view of “the human condition” and an assumption that people are, by and large, good and want to do good (even to folks they don’t know).

I’m a degrowth anarchist myself, and since I live in Finland, I get to enjoy proportional representation. I vote for a democratic socialist party that is at least reasonably close to my values and actually has a chance of landing parliament seats and governmental positions. Over the decades, I’ve noted that many “actual” leftist voters and politicians are maybe a bit… well, let’s say a bit too upbeat about what sort of animal Homo sapiens actually is. These are folks who genuinely do care about “woke” stuff like intersectionality and put in the work towards really changing things, but who seem to think that deep down, everybody wants a just, more equal society and not a hierarchical hellhole where the “strong” dominate some “lesser” social classes (foreigners, poor people, whatever)

My question is, if it’s sad and shameful, why is Trump still so popular in polls?

Sure, they may say it’s “sad and shameful”, but it’s clearly not bad enough for them to not want to vote for Trump anyhow.

If Trump was just a normal businessman, he never would have gotten elected. His base likes the horribleness. They think he will be horrible only to people they feel deserve it.

So many on the left seem to think that deep down people are good, and that if they just knew all the horrible shit conservatives are saying and planning they wouldn’t vote for them. There’s just this near-total refusal to acknowledge that for a scarily large proportion of the population, that horrible shit is their reason for voting for conservatives, and not only will pointing it out not help, trying to educate them generally just won’t work.

Unlike what some people have been claiming, looks like doubling down on the fascist rhetoric and bigotry hasn’t made Trump any less popular.

If anything it’s made him more popular.

Unhinged orange turd’s Nazi wankfest now worth more than Spacecunt’s Nazi wankfest, yay.

Almost like fascists didn’t want people to know all the fascist shit they get up to

Huge surprise that a social media platform run by a billionaire cryptofascist who hired a Project 2025 member to run the site’s public policy in the Southern US would let anti-government militias do whatever they want.

This meme is the funniest Napoleon Dynamite scene

Will have the “mature tone of the original trilogy”.

Did we play a completely different original trilogy? Eg. framing Miranda’s ass in every shot was super duper mature, y’all

My main nit is that Rogue Incursion is hamstrung by how well one can tolerate existing in a tense VR setting for extended periods of time. (For me, I felt insane after taking my headset off, like I hadn’t blinked once in 30 minutes.)

Yyyyeeeaaaahhh, I probably couldn’t go 3 minutes 😅 I’m a big 'ol wuss and I just can’t do horror games, even though I absolutely love horror movies and the Alien franchise – I get so immersed in games that survival horror stuff is just a nope for me

Literally the foundation of conservative “political ideology”.

100% guaranteed she believes in a white Jesus and would go into apoplectic conservative rage if you pointed out good 'ol Jebus was brown

Requiring people to use their real name would take out a lot of the noise, the false and misleading info, and the unqualified opinions that people are blasting out into the ether, and then other people who don’t know any better find it and feel with their ape brains that their own malformed opinions and emotions are validated.

But requiring all internet users to identify (somehow, let’s leave the implementation aside for now) would also mean that anyone living in a repressive regime would be even more fucked than they are now, and it’d mean that even people living in at least nominally democratic countries but with a nonzero amount of violent conservatives would be an easier target, since there’d be no pseudonymity.

As to your last point, we are definitely not cognitively equipped for what we have. Can we equip ourselves now, after the fact?

Frankly I doubt it. The cat is out of the bag, and I really don’t know how we can unfuck this situation – at least without significant amounts of social upheaval and bloodshed in the interim

Oh yes it makes absolute sense, I just find it hilarious that reich-wingers will say “woke leftist commies are pro-Russia” like they think it’s a bad thing while simultaneously idolizing Russia and Putin. I’d hate to drag 1984 into this, but it’s just such a classic example of doublethink that it’d be amazing to behold if these fucks weren’t in power

Yeah the democratic socialist party here in Finland that I vote for (The Left Alliance) has had some of the most vocal opponents of Russia for years now, even before Russia’s invasion of Crimea way back when. Funnily (?) enough the right wing extremists currently in government say leftists are pro-Russian like they think it’s a bad thing, while at the same time being explicitly pro-Russian – some going as far as visiting “Hitler youth camps” organized by Russia some years ago and claiming they were doing super secret spy stuff when questioned about it earlier this year.

What really baffles me about some self-described leftists is how can anyone look at the shit Russians do on a daily basis and go “yes, this country seems nice and progressive and very anti-imperialist.”

I’m against innocent people being killed. I’m sorry that upsets you.
[…]
You can get angry at me because I don’t like that, but that’s just another lack of compassion, and I won’t be surprised.

cries about people being rude

makes weird jabs about formatting when their hypocrisy is pointed out

People like him make it clear that we’re soon going to be in a “us or them” situation here – these people literally want to murder leftists, 50% of the country’s voting age population supports them (and distressingly the youth vote went to the right), and their rhetoric is getting more and more violent by the day.

This current government is normalizing fascist speech and tactics, and it won’t be too long until talk of some sort of final solution to the leftist question will be completely normal, and after that it won’t be too long until they actually start implementing it. Unfortunately the majority of people who are willing to use political violence are conservatives, because like I said, soon it’s going to be us or them.

Unfortunately the voting system is the only sane part about Finland. Our current government is so far right that it includes multiple literal neo-Nazis and a pedophile neo-Nazi (who stepped in to replace a neo-Nazi), and multiple ministers (well ok, a minister and the Speaker of the Parliament) have fantasized in public about murdering eg. gay people or foreigners. The Speaker of the Parliament is also one of the right wing mass murderer Breivik’s idols, and has obliquely spoken in support of Breivik’s act of terror.

This place is a conservative shithole and I suggest anyone considering a vacation here to go somewhere else, especially if you’re not white or cishet