No Stupid Questions

America responds well to showmenship. Its kind of our core problem.

You summed it up correctly. The thing is the presidential race used to be a horse show, but that format was somehow easily hijacked by a rodeo clown.

90% of Americans are no better informed than you are on how realistic of a portrayal it is. In fact, I've met many people who are proud of how willfully ignorant they are of politics.

Often I think it's because of big psyops against America.

I wonder if the issue here is you don't appreciate how stupid your own proletariat is (i.e., as stupid and vulnerable as the American populis, but not exposed to the same intense propaganda). I think humans everywhere are surprisingly gullible and illogical.

No, that's fairly accurate. It's a clown show.

The thing with American politics is that Americans love, LOVE TV shows and movies. Everything they do publicly has to be framed, presented, and consumed, as if it were a TV show or movie. So that's what the political machine does. Kamala Harris raised like a $1000000000. A BILLION dollars! What does the political machine do with that much money? It puts on a damn good show and broadcasts it to the world hoping it's a better show than what Trump is making. So yes you are watching the same show we are. It's entertaining, horrifying, hilarious, disgusting, sad and hopeful. But if you want to see what the real work is like in politics then you will have to read the book. A LOT of books, and many Americans don't like to read.

Yeah it's that terrible, but look at the rest of the world. Putin enjoys a lot of support from the same people he's sending to die, Modi in India wins elections by a large margin on a platform of basically "Fuck Sikhs and Muslims". Add China and basically most of humanity lives under someone who is blatantly racist, corrupt, generally horrible, or a combination thereof. And Western Europe doesn't have a leg to stand on either, the UK ignored dire warnings and voted for Brexit without even understanding what it is.

Humans don't believe what's objectively correct, they believe what they want to believe. This makes feeding people what they want to hear a very successful strategy, and one that psychopaths have an advantage in pursuing.

Ask not for whom the right-wing propaganda bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

It’s important to realize that in most democracies this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of the system. The founders of these systems wanted to ensure that major decisions were deliberated, not rushed into, and that there wasn’t a lot of room for an executive power to make snap choices that would determine the future of the nation.

Absolutely it's a clownshow.

If you ask me, the whole point of it is to get everyone to sort themselves into one of two horrific camps, where they'll feel like any criticism of the people in power is an attack on them for voting for them - or, if they don't vote, then they generally disengage from politics entirely. It's probably the most effective system of propaganda ever designed, because you don't even need to tell people that horrible people are on their side, they'll happily convince themselves of it all on their own. It's basically a race to the bottom where one side being dogshit allows the other side to be dogshit because there's no alternative, and of course every politician wants to be as dogshit as they can get away with because that's how you win favor with the corporate donors, who have no practical limit on how much money they can spend to influence the outcome.

There's also this level of spectacle in our elections that's above and beyond anywhere else in the world, we treat it like a reality show, and our debates are complete jokes where nothing substantive is ever discussed. We have absurdly long election cycles and entire industries around milking them for entertainment. It's unlikely that we will ever even begin moving in the right direction in the foreseeable future, because the brainworms run so deep.

The worst part is when the spectacle becomes so eye-catching that people from other countries get drawn into it and start thinking in terms of our politics and what we define as normal or reasonable. Americans rarely learn from non-American perspectives and we have corporate influence constantly pushing in the direction of maximizing short term profits over all other priorities, and so our country is unable to understand or adapt to the changing conditions of the modern world, which is why we are in decline.

Look at us only as a cautionary tale of what not to do.

The really interesting thing about Harris is so much of her support comes from people who hate Trump and want to stop him at all costs. There's this large contingent of voters who have never voted for a candidate they like, they've only ever voted strategically to stop the candidate they hate. "Democracy"