Some, sure.

My aunt is a conservative lobbyist and a drunk. She drinks a bunch of vodka and then texts me and my family about all of the violence that is going to be done to people she hates (including some groups that people in my family belong to). This isn't "blue hair makes me feel weird." This is "I want college professors to be shot." Those are the texts I receive.

On top of that, they lack the streets smarts that people living in high population density areas (that is, cities) develop for seeing through scammers and conmen. City people can tell that other city people are untrustworthy when they are hypocrites or caught in a lie. Rural folk seem to just distrust city folk vibes, and get tricked by lying, hypocritical politicians who use classic door-to-door salesman tactics like wearing a suit, appearing rich, and speaking confidently.

Edit: Street smarts isn't just about dealing with people on the streets. It's also recognizing which of your office coworkers in a competitive work environment are lying or misleading others to personally benefit via performance reviews and promotions. You contrast this with meeting other city people with tattoos, piercings, dark skin, or bending gender, and you figure out that red flags have nothing to do with superficial appearance.

The uncomfortable reality I've had to face is that a lot of these people really, genuinely, enjoy other people suffering.

I think it comes from a place of the American vision of work. This idea that things that are good don't come easy, and that it requires sacrifice. That if some people aren't getting hurt, then it's not working.

So they view these people getting hurt as a good thing. They use terms like "bleed" to describe the executive agencies getting gutted. They have a medieval view of it, like blood letting is a legitimate solution to problems. That, because there are tears and suffering, something of substance must be getting accomplished.

But sometimes bad things are just bad. And sometimes good things don't require suffering. They don't understand that.

That's been my experience as well. There is a large population of uneducated people (At least in terms of critical thinking) in the US that are not able to understand the impact of what is happening regarding what this administration is doing. And I think this is by design as the attacks on educational systems are increasing.

I don't buy that. They have allowed their ignorance to be weaponised against the entire country, and if they refuse to acknowledge that, they are complicit in its destruction.

You're completing brushing over the rampant racism and xenophobia in white conservative America.

Discomfort? Omg :) Yet it’s not taking anything to anyone, it’s not costing them anything and if they don’t feel the need to state pronouns nobody is going to force them to do so… so why refuse a little acceptance to the Other. A while back, some got crucified for having different ideas… Happy Easter to those who celebrate and a happy weekend to all others :)

A system is what it does, not what the spec says it should do, and "Christianity" is what Christians do.

American Evangelicals and Trump supporters are no less Christian than Catholics during the Crusades and Inquisition. That is the system.

The flipside of the "states' rights" movement is that the Federal Government is much weaker: so while it's easier to strip away rights and dismantle federal institutions, it's also easier for individuals to oppose the concrete harm that'd cause by working the levers of their local government. https://plush.city/@scarlet/114355949314782873 gives a few concrete things that individuals (not even groups) can do, which might make an outsized difference.

I know things feel dire, and things are certainly very bad for sure, but they have been bad before and things turned around. The Gilded Age comes to mind. Hell, even Nazi Germany didn't last forever.

Don't despair. Do what you can to make the world you want to see, accept the things outside your control, turn off social media, and stay positive!

It is difficult for people to be unhappy with two choices unless given a third that they can be happy with. When you are either with us or against us, there aren't much people who will be dissatisfied with both at the same time, since that isn't an option given to them.

I agree: it’s strange and misleading statistics seemingly.

> a black man in the white house and women on the presidential ballot. The retrograde prejudices so deeply ingrained in the country’s memome that we are still in the throes of an anaphylactic reaction to an acute melatonin allergy.

This is the most obscenely wrong take I can imagine, and I'll gladly explain why I say that.

Your AI-generated response plainly ignores a country in love with Michael Jordan and Whitney Houston for decades, for example, and are choosing skin deep characteristics to fit _your_ narrative, while ignoring the things voters repeatedly emphasized as damning, all of which were color blind: a complete lack of policy by the "woman on the ticket", condescension from Hillary that people not following her directives "need to get over themselves", Obama chastising black men that they must vote as he says. It's a playbook on the alienation of voters.

The irony being that Trump enriches himself and rewards politicians [mainstream or otherwise] for corruption to a greater extent than any previous politician, and doesn't even try to hide it. The people that are happy their savings and/or chances of making rent next week are being eroded to enrich Trump insiders because at least random mid level professionals and Hispanic people with autism awareness tattoos are suffering more deserve everything they get.

You can be biased but adopt a systematic methodology and a deontology system, both of which help journalists mitigate their bias and produce quality reporting.

The big issue with the current news ecosystem and social media is their complete disregard for this methodology. By discarding the journalistic methodology, they make themselves propagandists, not journalists.

Objective reality, it exists.

Telling your audience obviously false / anti-factual lies, without any regard for fact checking, is not just "biased reporting". And it is inherently wrong, malevolent, evil.

Anyway, I'm amazed each time I hear right wingers who did not get the joke seemingly complaining about how Reality has a left leaning political bias...

Is that a fact?

What if there is something inherently wrong with bias, but there is also no possibility to solve it. I see people operating under the idea that if there is something inherently wrong, then there must exist some solution to that inherent wrongness. What if the underlying issue is that there are flaws in humans that cannot be fixed and any attempt to manage is going to still leave some victims of the issue unprotected?

Fox and MSNBC are relentlessly partisan, but CNN aims for the center and misses. There's a big difference, and it's wild that Republicans got away with pretending that CNN was in the Fox/MSNBC tier just by repeating it as dogma until in their own minds it became true.

What about trying to be in the middle/upper part of this chart?

https://adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Media-B...

The adults are talking, shh.

Where did you see any reference to any source or lean in what you replied to? You are projecting your viewpoint on which is good or bad.

> He also has children whose continued success he probably cares about.

Does he ever talk about them using anything other than abstract platitudes like "great?"

You seem to have missed the point. For one, I’m not telling you this is a good thing or that this is how it ought to be. For two, even in the fable the wolf was real in the end. The problem is, the wolf wasn’t real the last time, or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. You can quibble over whether prior politicians were heralds of the wolf or not, but that wasn’t the message. The message was that the wolf was at the gates. And when no wolf materialized, people grew resistant to the idea of the cries ever having meaning. So now we have a wolf, and the problem we are facing is that the people who we need to convince that the wolf is real have no reason at all to believe us until their sheep are being eaten by a wolf in front of them. So how do you convince someone that has no incentive to believe you that this time you’re telling the truth? That’s the problem to be solved. Everything else is just a side show.