Considering how much climate change the Wyoming Oil&Gas industry contributes and how much of Wyoming burns every summer, they were already doing that.
The Secret reason the Dems keep losing
Well, they don’t. Next issue.
Does he say anything worth listening to?
Well, I think so, which is why I posted the thing. 
Worth watching.
He talks about the reduced engagement with political organizations; how it went from something people met to do in their spare time and set agendas vs how membership of e.g. the Democratic Party mostly just means you’ll be contacted for fundraisers and find out later what the party thinks is important.
@mindysan33 @nosaj I watched it. I don’t necessarily agree with him. It seemed like more left-wing self abuse that was unexpectedly nostalgic.
Republican voters are not more politically engaged with their party. They just didn’t want to vote for a brown woman who might possibly support trans rights.
I think his argument that paying money and maybe showing up for door knocking isn’t the same thing as actual engagement.
But yeah, I think the Democratic party needs to rethink their strategies and stop abandoning the left and actual democratic practices. If more of us had an actual say, maybe they’d have more success at the top of the ticket.
They also don’t like Democrats, as some number of them believe that they are satanic.
I know of a republican who met a love interest in a church in a small town. Rumor has it this person was living in a city a few hours away and rapidly fell in love. Wanna say second marriage. Real fast they decide to get married so the person buys a house in the new small town and runs for city council in the new small town. While also planning this sudden wedding. Put a lot of emotional stuff on socials too. Like when while moving there for the first time. Won it on sheer footwork with no further preparations than being in the right church at the time. The relationship fell through. Put the house on the market. More drama on socials. Then decided to stay after some one reminded them they kind of took a job. This person was kicked out of the church they initially were supported by. And now they are city council. But I have to ask myself why people put up with this because they definitely do. WTF kind of chaos is this shit though?
But that’s how easy it is to win a seat as a republican. So fuck all the analytics, ya know? Fuck them they don’t mean shit and the people writing these articles are like:
Yes. Literally. I was going to also mention their obsession with “grooming” and weather modification, but decided to keep it simple.
Yeah it’s hard to meet the “engagement” levels of people who want to literally shoot their neighbors to prove a political point in a holy war against people who aren’t Republican… and that really is where we are.
Maybe matching that energy is not a worthy goal.
I feel like the healthiest strategy is if I just don’t let myself give a shit about a single op ed that doesn’t first and foremost address that as the primary problem here. Honestly I don’t want to hear another opinion on it. I want the problem actually addressed with some specialized expertise and some functional legislation and I only want to hear from people who have suggestions about that really… kwim?
Sure, but the video I posted is concerned with engagement of democratic voters over and above donating, door knocking, etc… He’s not wrong that the democratic party has become top-down and doesn’t offer any mechanism anymore for bottom up, grassroots shaping of the party. That really is a problem, as much as the racism, misogyn, transphobia, and other kinds of bigotry that activates conservatives… And the fact that so many of us have no faith in any of our institutions any more, because they do no reflect us or our interests, but that of the elite classes.
I don’t think Conover is wrong that we have a lack of civic engagement, and on the right, organizations like the NRA have filled in that gap. I mean, do YOU feel personally invested in the Democratic party as an organization? Or any sort of civic organization that would inform their politics? I don’t think that negates the many other explanations for why people embrace Trump, but is an added layer of why - this is yet another set of institutions that have failed all of us, and there are forces out there who understand that and worked to fill in the gaps left from that failure. But again, I think he’s specifically concerned with Democratic voters, not with the people who have gone full on fascist (which is filling that gap, as it offers up a sense of purpose, as awful as that purpose is)…
I don’t think Conover is wrong either, but I think he, and almost everyone else posting videos and writing blog posts about why Democrats lost, seems to be downplaying the effect of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation. I don’t think any amount of civic engagement is going to convince Joe Everyman who works on the line at the local factory that the school he sends his son to every day isn’t going to trans his son without his permission or knowledge. Yes, absolutely, the Democratic Party needs to do more than just raise money and send out bullshit texts like “Hi! This is Kamala”. But we have got to address the elephant in the room first. If we don’t fix that, nothing else is going to matter. And Republicans also mostly just raise money and send out bullshit texts like “Hi! This is J.D.” They’re also doing things from the top down. And they’re engaging in disinformation, misinformation, voter suppression, and every other trick in the book to convince people to vote for them when their policy ideas are enormously unpopular.
Boo Yah!
that the very wealthy folk around me - those what pretty much own the island (what voted for tRump), do NOT actually believe the nonsense, doesn’t make it easier to dispel the notion of the “know-nothings” further north on the mainland, who seem to believe all of that bullshit.
how do we claw back decency and understanding of objective reality from a cult of stupidity and rejection?
how do i - not a member of “the club” - make a simple, yet irrefutable response to their made-up worldview that gets all the attention, and try to bring back a reality-based field to even begin to discuss a future?
you don’t have to answer that
This story is wild, and I don’t completely understand it. But it looks like a judge that was originally appointed to his seat 2 years ago by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp lost in his bid for reelection this year and then tried to resign before his term was up, I guess so Kemp could appoint someone else, bypassing the elected judge? I don’t know, I don’t understand that part, but Kemp refused to accept the resignation, saying that they needed to respect the results of the election. So then the judge killed himself yesterday.
Yeah, I do get that and that makes sense… but I think here he is also trying to address larger systemic issues. And I think we can also say that our media institutions are part of the problems of failing institutions that are far less democratic in nature and hence far more likely to be dismissed out of hand… Can you imagine any journalist associated with the mainstream outlets doing what Walter Cronkite did during the Tet Offensive and going there and calling bullshit on what the pentagon was saying? I don’t think any of us can, because they wouldn’t. Most likely, it was the media finally covering vietnam based on facts on the ground rather than just taking the Pentagon (and military contractors, etc) at their word.
I guess I see this as a larger problem with institutions and the erosion of the civic work of democracy, and how that isn’t really addressed. Part of that comes from the end of Jim Crow and greater Black civic engagement, along with the expansion of rights for women, LGBQT+ rights, etc (and the more active and vocal civil rights movements that pushed on past the mainstream civil rights movement).
The propaganda that you’re talking about runs very deep and largely underpinned the mainstream thought of many, if not most, white Americans since before we were a country. It informed our founding documents and much of our understanding of who should get access to the public sphere, and it was constantly changing over time. That’s why that propaganda is so effective, because lots of white people believe it, and they prefer their psychic wage of whiteness to actual equity. The best propaganda is built on already existing understanding of reality. If people believe that they are white (or that gender is a binary, or that men are superior to women, etc, etc), then leaning into that with propaganda becomes the preferred method of social control. then you add on a deep mistrust of the mass media (for very good reason) with the rise of social media that seems much more “real” and “authentic”… it’s really a recipe for utter disaster…
All that being said, I don’t think you’re wrong, but I think that as long as institutions (including the media) are not viewed as trustworthy, then people are going to continue to abandon those institutions and seek alternatives, making many people easy pickings for fascism.
Holy shit! If they do a story on this on the local public radio station, I’ll try to remember to post it…
Perhaps we need to remind them that Trump does not have a mandate because he won with only 31% of the vote.
And Kamala lost by 1.5%.
They won’t believe that. Hell, they still think Trump won in 2020.