Sometimes I'll see people just yeet fast food bags out the car window, like wtf? And I find tons and tons of litter all over even where there's trash cans just a few feet away. People who do this suck. How selfish do you have to be to ruin the environment and cause a mess for everyone else to save maybe fifteen seconds of effort?
I don't remember people being willing to openly say things about how they look forward to seeing people get run people over or how cyclists ruin society and need to be eradicated (wtf?), back when I started riding a decade ago. Did I just not notice at the time or has it actually gotten noticeably worse?
I dunno about anyone else but it certainly doesn't feel like any of the software or services I use on a regular basis have gotten markedly more feature filled or reliable in the last year - in fact it's the opposite for most of them.
I hear stories from all over the tech world about how simply using a coding agent is old hat now and people should be using git worktrees to have 5+ agents running in parallel working on 5+ separate new features at the same time. It sounds like a great way to maximize your spend on AI providers but where are all these new features that are getting built at least 5x faster than before? Is the effect of all this new effort visible anywhere?
(and as a developer myself I don't know how anyone keeps up with the LLM output - I can't review one agent's code as quickly as it generates it, let alone 5)
Extremely long and very informative video on the topic but basically, fascists argue in bad faith to try to upset their opponents and reject the idea of a knowable, factual reality in favor of a mythical, eternal "truth" which is above all questioning. If any evidence suggests their truth might be wrong, that evidence is wrong. This is how JD Vance talking about Haitians eating pets can simultaneously be an obviously invented story, where he admits it didn't actually happen on national television, and feel "true" to millions of voters. See also how voters know Trump is lying but they take him "seriously and not literally".
But why is it always far right? Why is the mythical "truth" always about enforcing hierarchy and needing to "disinfect" (thanks, Stephen Crowder) society from the undesirables (minorities, LGBTQ people, communists, anyone who opposes fascists) who are causing all the ills we are experiencing? Couldn't it just as easily be, I dunno, about equality and the need to value everyone? Is there something that marries the mindset of being willing to endure cognitive dissonance and knowingly or unknowingly make arguments you don't even believe yourself in favor of "the greater good" of your political project, with that project inevitably being right wing?
I don't get how this happens, I've had people on the left say quite mean things to me that I disagree with but I don't go "oh if you think I'm a bigot now I might as well be one because you'll hate me either way"
But then there's a ton of people in e.g. the manosphere who proudly say things like "I decided to become the monster you accused me of being" like this is some sort of epic origin story? Are they all like 14 years old?
I've always been baffled by Trump being seen as this masculine icon despite obviously being a whiny, overweight, sad man who has never worked a day in his life.
But now the same people I know who think Trump is super manly and worry about how "alpha" they are think Tucker Carlson is the next male icon, and they can't stop talking about how masculine he is. Isn't this the guy with the bow tie and the testicle tanning and who spends his time complaining into a microphone? What the hell are these guys doing so well that tons of dudes are falling over themselves to celebrate how they're "real men" who will bring masculinity back and other red pill shit?
Is it as simple as being right wing and mean to women and you're a male hero now? Surely it can't be that simplistic?
I don't have any concrete examples or guidelines or else I wouldn't need to ask, but I think we all know it when we see it. I dunno, I think for example someone saying "the language of defund the police may cost us winnable swing races" is more likely to be intending to be constructive, while someone saying "the left needs to stop hating white men" or "Democrats are class traitors" isn't constructive.
I can't tell if people around me are arguing in bad faith or seriously think that NBA players can join the WNBA whenever they want just by saying "I'm a woman now"? And they say this is the world the left wants, where any man can declare themselves a woman whenever it's convenient in order to dominate sports or invade your locker rooms and stuff like that?
By this I mean that the claim that liberals are smug and condescending effectively always wins an argument. As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no response you can make to an assertion of being condescending and smug that doesn't feed into that. Asking for an example? That's smug. Trying to explain and clarify your meaning? That's condescending. It wins every argument, every time.
Same with the statement "this is why Trump won" or "this is why everyone hates liberals". I have yet to see an effective response which doesn't feed into the belief that we're so annoying and insufferable that people will vote for fascism just to shut us up.
And naturally, if we don't respond, and cede the conversation, they win by default.
Hell, I'm pretty sure by even asking this question, I'm providing a great example of why liberals are so awful and why Trump won because everyone justifiably hates us, etc etc
Are there any strategies we can use against these arguments that don't make us look even worse? And are there any analogous rhetorical traps we can use against the right, that reliably make them look bad to a social media audience?
I hear stuff from random people who I would classify as totally "normal", not committed Trump supporters but people who try to avoid politics, about what they think Democrats want and it baffles me. They believe we want things like "no more police and prosecuting crimes is racist so we can't do that" and at the same time "if you call someone accidentally by the wrong pronoun they want to put you in jail for hate speech".
This is, to me, obviously ridiculous. Why is this crazy straw man of us believable to average voters? Meanehile I don't have a link handy but I think there was a study showing that voters don't believe the (to me, very obviously believable) things that Republicans have said on record they want to do, such as cutting Medicaid or cutting taxes for the wealthy.
To be clear, I don't agree with this or think it would be good, but I think I'm in a clear minority and that a candidate with these views would win in a landslide. This is definitely what the Trump base wants, culture wars and the language of populism is the root of his base. And there are a ton of people on the left who seem eager to "drop the culture war" and let minorities suffer if we get some economic populism out of the deal.
See the position that seems to be getting more and more popular that the working class has been failed by Democrats and would get on board with a leftist economic campaign, if only we could unite against the elites and "woke issues" like feminism or LGBTQ rights.
Progressives and the left say their ideas would benefit the working class (and I agree) but the working classes don't agree. Instead they want right wing policies. Should we be giving them what we know would be to their benefit, or giving them what they want even when we (and experts) know that it would be harmful to them?
Democratic socialists and progressives in general support policies that aim to help the working class and campaign on being defenders of the working class, yet that same working class hates them even more than they do ordinary moderate liberals. It's so strange, espousing policies that help the poorest leads to losing support among the poor.
That's the conclusion I draw from the (apparent) popular consensus that racism and sexism have been solved and don't have an impact anymore so DEI is really about subjugating white people and men to "punish them for the actions of their ancestors", women already have it better than men in society so feminism is about ensuring female supremacy, and so on. And how it's a popular view that e.g. feminists can't be trusted because they will always advocate for women to advance and men to suffer, no matter how unfair it is. Similarly how anti racism activists are really trying to uplift people of color by marginalizing white people
I'm not sure why else every action or statement we make gets responses (which I believe) of "you're looking down on us and belittling and disrespecting us so we won't vote for you." But somehow there are significant numbers of people who flipped from Biden to Trump or from not voting to Trump, despite him being way meaner and nastier about the people who didn't vote for him.
What's causing this difference? Why is it that when we say "people who aren't wealthy are voting against their interests by voting Republican" we are terribly insulting them by doubting their intelligence and choices and losing them as potential voters, but Trump coming out and saying people who allowed Democrats to win are the enemy within destroying the country won him votes among the very people that he was denigrating?
I saw a comment somewhere identifying top rural issues as needing to be "tough on crime" which they see cities as cesspools of, opposing what they see as unjustified handouts to city dwellers, and very very strongly anti immigration and pro deportation. This tracks very well with my experience.
I don't understand why though? Here in New England people are incredibly mad about the Southern border which I can't imagine being farther away from in the country and it having less of an impact here. Same with people talking shit about all the crime in places like Framingham or Worcester or Springfield, places I know these people never go to because they think those cities are crime ridden hellholes. Or the people in the suburbs I know who are incredibly angry about the NYC congestion charge because it's an unfair tax, I ask them when the last time they drove to NYC is and it's a decade or more, with no plans to visit again.
Am I missing something? Why are they so mad about stuff that as far as I can tell has no impact on their lives whatsoever?
This comes up with topics like gun control, vaccines, etc. "You can't stop everyone from dying or suffering" is the gist of the counterarguments I hear.
etc etc
Why is "some person will still do/experience X thing" an apparently compelling counterargument to "we can have a policy to reduce the rate of X thing happening"? What messaging should we use to make this counterargument less effective? It seems as though the public thinks of issues as either "it happens" or "it doesn't" and the rate or prevalence of the issues doesn't get taken into account.
Examples of statements/questions I would categorize as such:
I'm not sure how to describe all these, but they all make me very uncomfortable. They can be framed as honest statements but I think we can all agree that they are more likely to be knowingly false arguments in an attempt to persuade or bait us into angry responses that turn off onlookers.
But what should we do? I can't very will be upset about people on the right who mock us for asking for sources for their trans hysteria, and then be upset about people asking us for sources for things like "the right is more likely to be racist"?
I heard a take the other day along the lines of "it should be considered a monumental failure by the left that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are seen as more relatable and more likeable than the average liberal." And about how "liberal professors like Ibram X. Kendi are the most loathed people in America."
I can't disagree, the average American sees Trump and Musk as "fun guys to have a beer with" and hates liberal intellectuals especially for being "elitist". How did we lose the likeability contest to these guys who publicly celebrate how amazing and right they are all the time and how much they're winning and "bombing the right people" or whatever? It's insane but somehow this is what is happening.
Apparently he's seriously considering running, alongside MTG or Thomas Massie. I think he has a very good chance, I hate his views but he's one of the most popular media figures in America, behind only Joe Rogan.
He's got a decent amount of support from the left as well (strangely) - people like Briahna Joy Gray say he would be better than AOC and anecdotally I know a lot of former Bernie supporters who are all on board with his isolationist and pro-masculine views.