I'm the opposite. I was talking to my therapist about being socially anxious. She said I didn't seem nervous talking to her. I told her "No offense, but I don't really care what you think of me so there's nothing to be nervous about."
There is a spot my dad and I used to go fishing. It is a large lake where one side is US and the other side is Canada. On the Canada side there is a dockside store where you can buy beer, maple syrup, and souvenirs. We stopped by the store every year before camping on the US side of the lake. One day we found out there is a little hut where we were supposed to stop first to check in with customs before going to the store. Oops.
Years ago I had a coworker fall down the online rabbit hole of denying the moon landing happened. I told him that in college I used the astronomy department's large telescope to look at the moon landing site myself, so I could guarantee that the landing actually happened. He knew me and trusted me, so he believed what I told him and stopped trusting the online conspiracists.
Of course you can't actually see the moon landing site through a telescope. I was lying. My lie countered their lie, so my friend believed the truth. The left needs to understand how this works and use it. The average person will believe an easily understood lie over a complicated truth.
We need to tell people fossil fuels cause autism. We need to tell people the covid vaccine makes it so aliens can't track you. We need to tell people that Trump is secretly sending out ICE to confiscate all guns from American citizens.
It's better than the usual Republican way of making their thoughts known which usually consists of a shoddily built bomb left on the doorstep or anonymously phoned in threats.
73 days. That's how long the Dems held the filibuster-proof trifecta that allowed Obamacare in the first place. They haven't had the power to force anything through since. It took everything they could do just to defend what little progress they made. The tactic you are talking about can't work if the other side can just filibuster everything.
Until Trump won a second time, there was still a possibility of fixing this within the system. You may be right that there is no solution within the system now. Finding a solution outside the system will bring violence and suffering beyond anything most living people have experienced, so I'm not exactly eager to give up on other methods.
Do you remember Obamacare and Republicans voting to repeal it literally hundreds of times? Where did that get us?
And now we have less control of the government. We can't even force a vote. The speaker can just refuse to allow it. There is no fight we can win. The best we can hope for is slowing the destruction.
The problem is that Democrats fail to demonstrate that voting for them is better than not voting at all to a large part of the electorate.
That's where the propaganda and foreign influence come in. Their entire effort centered around muddying the waters so people couldn't be sure what the reality was. And voter suppression certainly makes it easier for people to say fuck it.
The Democrats have plenty of problems, but none of that compares to Republicans who are worse in every conceivable way. Propaganda, foreign interference, and domestic voter suppression won this for Trump and his goons.
Yeah, that was an unpleasant surprise to me too. I found out when I was singing along with the song at karaoke and a native American friend of mine got really mad. Ending the song calling someone "boy" has a very different meaning when it's considered with racial context.
Like people confuse weather and climate, or sex and gender, people confuse the economy with their budget. The reality that the economy does not serve the average American is an entirely different problem than the covid recovery. The problem is income inequality has been growing for 50 years. (And Biden tried to help this with caps on medicine costs, college loan forgiveness, the child tax credit, and dozens of other things)
That would be valid if there were more than two choices. There were not. Not voting doesn't free you from moral culpability; it makes you morally culpable for either outcome. Inaction is acceptance of the worst happening.
I'm the opposite. I was talking to my therapist about being socially anxious. She said I didn't seem nervous talking to her. I told her "No offense, but I don't really care what you think of me so there's nothing to be nervous about."