politics

Of course people are tuning out. Please keep in mind I am saying the following as a mostly liberal slightly libertarian.

What has passed for liberal culture over the last decade has included an awful lot of outrage over every injustice but not an awful lot of solid action to correct those injustices. The Democratic party has tried to harness that with a lot of identity politics that avoid the real issues. And so the result is you have a ton of people who are always upset but things never get better.

So of course people burn out. Or they get cynical and decide nothing is going to change so it's not worth getting worked up over. You see a lot of that in this very thread.

To anyone angry at me, downvote me if you want, but if you want change actually fucking do something. Stop consuming short form content like Twitter and TikTok, start consuming long form things that make you think and expose you to different viewpoints. Lex Friedman interviews are a good place to start.

Understand that not everybody who disagrees with you is bad or evil or malicious.
Very few issues are simple. There is rarely an absolute obvious right and wrong. And if somebody adopts a viewpoint you think is wrong, consider that maybe they have reasons they think it's right and use those reasons to challenge your own beliefs. You may conclude that they are still wrong, but you must be open to the possibility that you might be wrong. If you aren't open to being wrong, why should they be?
And in the world where nobody can admit they are wrong, nothing productive happens. You just have two sides shouting at each other.

Then take a step back from your own personal outrage and think about what is actually important. If you had to choose between ensuring every American has good health care, and ensuring every American has their pronouns recognized, which do you think is more important? So which one are you focusing your advocacy and speech on?

The simple fact is, if you (and I am addressing everybody on all sides here) stop getting riled up over wedge issues and start focusing on the things that The majority of the country can agree on, you might find there's an awfully big agenda of problems we all agree should be fixed that aren't even being discussed.

I’m 41. I’ve been involved with activism since I was 20. Things keep getting worse. Time to try something different.

I’m also trying to shift my views to be more like Carlin, where I stop caring about what happens.

are showing a more subdued response

...That's because, if you're smart, you keep your responses off public channels. Didn't anyone learn anything from January 6? Don't fucking plan in public.

He's not even fucking in office yet. I think what's really irritating the media is we aren't all resubscribing to papers again. Sorry guys, this ain't 2016 and we're not going to handle it the same way we handled 2016.

Personally, I'm buying electronics and appliances now so that I don't have to face his dumb tariff price hikes, and I've renewed my passport.

It's honestly the Democrats that make me feel drained. They're the party that ostensibly represents my political leanings, but they've spent the last year funding a genocide, cozying up to Republicans like Liz Cheney, and abandoning the economic populism that got them elected in 2020. If they were at least winning, ignoring progressives like me would be justified, but nope! They made an 80-year-old man their candidate without holding a primary, replaced him at the last minute with a candidate who didn't even make it to Iowa in 2020, and the walked into their largest electoral defeat since...what, 2004?

Trump is vile, and petty, and cruel, and I'm genuinely scared of the damage he'll do to our country, but that's what I expect from him. The fact that the only opposition party to the fascists is this group of cowardly, selfish failures is so demoralizing. If we can't wrestle control of the party away from these incompetent geriatrics, I honestly don't know if there's any hope for American democracy.

Temptation? I've already gone to "fuck it - burn it to the ground". There's not fuck-all I'm going to do at this point that is going to make any difference.

Until Democrats stop being Republican-lite, they'll never learn. And this is what they get. Apathy and disillusionment.

I get the inflation and low-information voter angle, but watching Trump win by such a wide margin was just straight disheartening. At least with Hillary losing, you could complain about the electoral college and how few votes could have flipped it. Trump ran the table this time. His people showed up, and ours didn't. Democrats are completely lost. They can't craft a narrative that sticks in people's heads to save their lives. "Weird" got traction, but "weird" doesn't do shit for working people, who are struggling with no end in sight.

Plus, I'm waiting to see what happens. Trump is older and angrier, but he was always lazy. I'm hoping he spends all his time golfing and rage-tweeting while accomplishing very little. He'll cut taxes for rich people and appoint shitty judges for sure, but hopefully he gets bored quickly and focuses on personal grift over wrecking the country long-term.

The fuck am I supposed to do? I've been organizing, I've been to protests, I've done everything I can to head this disaster off. I'll be fine throughout this and I'll do what I can to take care of the innocents who're going to suffer, but what the fuck else is there to do? Clearly people either want this, or don't care enough to try and stop it. So, fuck it. They can reap what they sow. Maybe this will wake some of them up, or they'll all fucking die of the next big pandemic and then they won't be a problem any more.

Pretty much the majority of Americans.

The older I get and the more things I witness like Citizens United happen, the more economically rightward both parties become, the more ruthless the Republicans become to be rewarded by The Base, the more feckless the opposition becomes. The more we vote and Democrats do nothing, or just enough Republicans win to stop them. We vote and the people we vote for suddenly go "oops I was actually a consevative the whole time!" The more time passes the more I realize organized violence or riots are really are more than likely the only things that will actually change anything. The older I get though the more I realize that will never happen.

We're all far too "civil" and hope voting for the oligarch lite will save us. We're far too propagandized and are denied the only real changes we need to how we vote to stop this trend. We will have to be pushed until it's really really really bad for anyone to actually organize a revolt. By then it will be far too late.

Apathy helps the oppressor, but engagement hasn't shown to have much of a positive affect either. :/

Merrick Garland and the $upreme Court slowly snuffed out any hope for America with a pillow over her nose and mouth

I’m sick of hearing about the asshole, and sick of hearing about him getting “slammed” by some celebrity or politician, and sick of hearing how he’s a huge threat so we need to send a sternly worded letter.

Getting upset over this is so draining, especially because there’s nothing we can do to stop him in the short term.