Obama was incredibly “friendly” towards the worst amongst the Finance industry in how he chose to “rescue the Economy” by basically sacrificing everybody else to make them get away with minimal losses in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash.

Obama also made a ton of money in the speech circuit after that (he is very literally a multimillionaire) a lot of which paid directly and indirectly by Finance Industry companies.

Feel free to connect the dots.

Corruption makes a lot of money for politicians on both sides of the aisle in America.

Democrats didn’t go after Republican corruption because they too would be caught in the net if it was indeed done via an independent Justice System.

You see this exact same effect in other countries with voting systems that boost the representation of the two largest parties - neither of them ever goes after Corruption because both of them have been thoroughly captured by corrupt politicians and you even get the effect in Parliamentary systems that some of the few things they both vote together on is weakening existing anti-corruption legislation and defeating new anti-corruption legislation.

Parties which regularly get real power, such as the two main parties in Power Duopoly “democracies”, always attract the most crooked people around (similarly to power monopolies - I.e autocracies) and are guaranted to turn rotten even when they start from the most honest and fair beginnings.

It’s my impression that the ability for Instrospection is a rare trait in people as is Self-Criticism.

Not that I think Carl’s dictum doesn’t apply to those who have those traits: I just think it’s harder for it to happen to them and it’s easier (but not guaranteed) for them to spot that status of being captured by a belief in themselves and get out of it or at least try to work around it.

The good old “Hey! Look over here!” never fails to distract the masses from what really matters.

True, good point on Israel.

Liberal politicians are the ones who are “Relaxed about Genocidal ethno-Fascism”, whilst it makes sense that genuine Liberals (so, Liberal out of principle, not merely political followers), would also be against what’s going on in Israel if only because killing people is the ultimate reduction of their freedom.

I should have been more clear about meaning Liberal Politicians when I used the word “Liberal”.

I don’t actually think Identity Politics is Liberal, I think it’s something build on top of Liberalism by politicians, in the best cases out of convenience - it’s far easier to address certain things by reducing people to identity groups and then fighting for entire groups and/or passing measures that affect all of a group equally and it actually works up to a point - and in the worst cases just as pure hypocrisy and even greed - it makes for simple slogans that politically work well and are easy to sell, brings them votes and if a politician happens to be a member of an identity that person can advance their own personal upsides by claiming measures that benefit them are for the identity group (this by the way, is also how the Far-Right tends to use identity politics, only they use different identities).

That said you’re at the very least misreading my words on the whole “oppressed becoming the oppressor” - what I wrote is that all groups contain people who will do bad things when they have the power and no accountability. At no point did I claimed they were oppressed, oppressors or one of them who had become the other, much less part of “THE oppressed” or “THE oppressor”.

Sure, sometimes the tables turn and people who are themselves oppressed and members of a group containing mainly oppressed get power and then become themselves oppressors, but that’s not related to any identity and it’s not even needed that the whole group stops being oppressed, just that individual: it’s simply that assholes who are powerless usually risk a lot by acting as assholes, whilst people in positions of power can often act as assholes if they so wish and get away with it, so assholes will do it.

Further, there is no need for those people to be in a grand category called “THE oppressed” or “THE oppressors” - often assholes who behave meekly when faced with somebody with more power will behave as assholes towards those with less power: such double-face is a pretty common dynamic in schoolyard bullies or even company bullies (look to middle and lower level management to find those). Such people are both oppressed and oppressors - in other words, even at this level the trying to tag people as something isn’t helpful: both the oppression done to that person in the middle and the oppression that person themself does are wrong and should be stopped, and an “oppressor” tag here just muddles a situation were there are two wrong actions going on and the victim of one happens to be the perpetrator of the other.

Just to add a little bit to it:

“The greatest good for the greatest number”, a basic leftwing principle, sometimes collides with “everybody should be free to do what they want with their own things and willing adults”, a basic liberal principle, for example when it comes to some people excessivelly hoarding resources or using their ownership of an exclusive resource to extract rents from others, because it goes against the “greatest good for the greatest number” even whilst it is aligned with the whole freedom to do what they want with their own things.

At other times both are perfectly aligned: for example when it comes to the freedom from discrimination for those with a different sexual orientation than the majority, since that freedom both fulfills the “the greatest good” principle and the “freedom to do what they want” one.

Now, if one really digs down on it, maximum freedom turns out to actually require different ownership laws (if exclusive resources have owners rather than being shared, then the freedom of the non-owners is being restricted), but in decades of following and even being involved in politics, I have yet to hear a single Liberal (even those who supposedly are not Neoliberal) even mention that specific form (probably the most widespread and highest impact one) of restriction on the Freedom of most people, much less suggest changing it.

Well, White Supremacy is also the politics of identy, i.e. Identity Politics.

The Racism is the seeing of other human beings as defined above all by the genetics they were born with (i.e. race, gender, sexual orientation), the religious affiliation they got from their parents or the geographical location they were born in and then presuming things about them based on that (which is quite literally Prejudice), it’s not in which specific race/gender/sexual-orientation/religion/nationality you see as good/victims or bad/oppressors.

One is not any less Racist when, for example, the race whose people one presumes are “good people” is not White - the Racism is the making presumptions about people based on their race, so the specific races such a prejudiced person thinks are “good” or “bad” are entirelly relevant in determining if the one making presumptions is a Racist or not.

Ultimatelly, all such “identity” groups have good people and bad people, and when they’re in a situation with power and no accountability, bad people do bad things independently of their “identity”.

This Racism of the modern self-identified Identity Politics practicioners was made painfully obvious by how the Liberals in places like the US and Germany reacted to the Israeli Genocide in Gaza - for years they’ve been prejudiced about people based on their ethnicity whilst passing that shit as anti-racism because their list of “good ethnicities” and “bad ethnicities” was different from that of the traditional racists, and one of the “good ethnicities” in their worldview was Jews and when it turned out that the self-proclaimed representatives of all Jews - Israel - was led by some trully horrible people who were mass murdering people based on their ethnicity, out came the Liberals in its defense because of the ethnicity it claimed to represent (and often being very overt about how it was all due to ethnicity, such as how Scholz in Germany and Biden in the US very overtly stating their “unwavering support for the Jewish Nation”), and further making their prejudices and racism obvious with the ultra-racist claim that Israel represented the Jewish Religion even when many Jews said it did not, and the even more extreme racist accusations of anti-semitism against those demonstrating against the Israeli Genocide (imagine how extremelly racist you have to be to claim that being against Genocide is being against the Jewish Religion, which logically is the same as saying Genocide is a Jewish thing). These self-proclaimed anti-racists didn’t drop their support for Israel as anybody driven by principles would have done based on their actions, they doubled down on it and did it very overtly based solely on the ethnicity that country claims to represent, exactly like all the other Racists act.

This shit is no less Racists than supporting the government of Appartheid South Africa because of them being though of as White.

Anyways, the fairest and real Leftie take on unfairness and suffering is to correct the unfairness and suffering and go at it by descending order of intensity (i.e. start by going after the biggest ones), quite independently of the genetics the victims and perpetrators were born with or the “reasons” why some assholes - the tradition racists - go around inflicting pain on others: the action is that is wrong and must be punished and the hurt and harm to the victimed corrected and grabing the “logic” of the aggressor and twisting it around keeps the agressor’s way of thinking alive and hence the unfairness of treatment, and just moves the unfairness around rather than stop it.

I think it would be obvious after 4 decades of Neoliberalism that you can’t deregulate your way into prosperity and in fact the very opposite happens: you end up with consumers constantly swindled, widely sold products that cause long term problems like cancer, all manner of systemic problems having grown uncontrollably (most notably Negative Externalities) and lots of markets turned into cartels and monopolies (with prices up, quality down and improvement stopped) - enshitification is the product of deregulation, as is the housing market bubble, the internet access local monopolies in large parts of the US (and associated high prices for shit service compared to the rest of the World) and a lot of other things.

“Small government” is a content-free slogan rather than a solution: absolutely, in some areas there is too much “government” (for example, the oversized military spend), yet in others there is too little (a National Health Service would literally make Healthcare in the US consume half of what it does in GDP terms so “big government” there would actually be the smart solution business-wise). It’s a problem of how Government is managed, which is a hard thing to do and solve and were the devil is in the details, not just a simple sounding “solution” of “just make it smaller” that sounds good but solves nothing.

Migration is a complex problem. I think that legal immigrants should be treated as guests because they were literally invited in, but that does not extend to illegal ones.

Immigration (as an economic strategy of a country) can indeed be a problem, especially if it’s done too fast and with low integration because whilst immigrants bring themselves as workers, they also bring their needs for products and services and that’s more works that needs to be done or in other words, more jobs - so when they arrive they are workers competing for jobs but over time they also cause more jobs to be created because they too are consumers buying products and services which have to be produced by even more workers - whilst the low integration is a problem because of cultural clashes between the immigrants and the locals (maybe more of a problem in Europe than the US) because people coming from different countries don’t have the same assumptions as the locals on how on is supposed to behave in certain situations (some being small details and other much bigger) and hence can behave in ways that other see as weird or even anti-social, which in large numbers generates conflict. With time living in a new country an immigrant will adjust to be a lot more like the locals, but if the influx of immigrants is too many in too little time there are too many clashes with those freshly immigrated who haven’t learned to behave more like the locals and people in a host country end up feeling that immigrants are unpleasant people , even bad people.

Immigration (the legal kind, approved by Governments) is being used to paper-over flaws in the way a country is being managed (for example, in my own country politicians caused massive house price inflation and other problems, mainly affecting young adults, so the end result is lower birth rates and hence an aging population, which is then made up with immigration, and this is so extreme that in this country literally half of university graduates leave the country and then they’re replaced with immigrants with much lower educational levels) plus it’s massively good for the wealthy (both because it increases worker competition for jobs when they arrive and because it eventually pushes up the size of the Economy as a whole, and whilst normal people’s prosperity relates to the size of the Economy per-capita, the wealthy are the ones taking slices from the whole of the Economy so for them and them only, growing the Economy by adding more people is a gain), so problematic Immigration is really a consequence of problems at a political level (and that includes Corruption) - the country is not being managed for the good of most people and high Immigration is both part of that directly (it makes the Wealthy wealthier) and indirectly because it’s used to paper over problems caused by that political mismanagement (like in my country young adults leaving or having fewer children because life is way too expensive for them here and salaries are low, so then immigrants are imported because there is a lack of workers).

Immigrants themselves, however (as I say, the legal kind, hence people like you and me who were invited and changed their whole lives and invested time and effort in the country they came to) shouldn’t be treated as the problem - they’re just people doing their lives the best they can in a perfectly legit way. Look at the Politicians for the people to blame for Immigration reaching problematic levels.

Anyways, the more general point I’m making is that a lot of the problems you see have been created by very much local people in positions of power doing what’s best for themselves and for those who will pay them (and most definitely politicians in the US are Corrupt as fuck), and afterwards scapegoating the problems they themselves caused on something or somebody else and the easiest target there is are the most powerless people in the country (who don’t even have a right to vote) - immigrants.

You’re participating in the same circle jerk.

You’ve concluded that Trump is a huge Fascist and a danger beyond all other considerations (but not the Democrats, even though they’re giving weapons to an ethno-Fascist regime committing Genocide which is literally “supporting Fascism”) and you reached that conclusion from consuming Democrat propaganda in places like Lemmy with no actual use of skepticism, so now you repeat it.

Meanwhile all those people who don’t think like you and all the posters whose posts you read here, had very different levels in the like-hate Trump scale, and the like-dislike Democrats one, and the trust-distrust what the Democrats/Republicans say scales, the politically engaged scale, the thinking that my vote makes a difference to my life scale, the what matters to me most in life scale and other such scales in human belief and behaviour that together add up to make them or not go vote and for whom they vote, which in this election also included things like the flexibility or inflexibility of one’s principles thanks to the Democrats activelly breaking a really strong set of principle for lots of people when they supported with weapons the commiting of a Genocide in first Gaza and now also Lebanon.

The “incompetence” was the Democrats with their words and actions targetting a point in all those scales that turned off a lot more people that it turned on. The 14 million less Democrat votes make it undeniable that it wasn’t Trump that conviced those votes to flip, it was the Democrats that failed at convincing enough people to vote for them, so clearly their words and actions turned off from voting a lot of people.

The “entitlement” is the idea that everybody is equally politically aware as you, trusting about what the Democrats say of Trump as you, fearful of Trump as you, trusting that voting maters as you and so on. I’ve been a member of two different political parties over the years (in two different countries) and this blindness is incredibly common amongst party members: such strongly politically active and highly tribalist people just don’t get it that most of voters don’t think like them, not even close and it gets worse when they end up in circle jerks like the one here in Lemmy during the US Presidentials - they basically just strengthen each other’s beliefs in that what’s right or wrong, what will work or not work to help their side and what people think or don’t think, all with no actual proof being involved just the say so of like minded people, a pretty straighforward “groupthink” situation.

(In fact it was my experience with canvassing and leafletting in those two parties and countries that opened my eyes to the reality that in terms of engagement and trust in politics most people are nowhere like you and me.)

Even more “entitlement” is the idea that your values, forecasts and interpretation of the world are the right ones and those of the ones who didn’t vote are wrong, then compounded with the idea that others should just do as you think they should and if they don’t they’re wrong (all of which on display in this meme and all the type of posts here blaming the 14 millions) - this a pretty straightforward “I know best and others should follow my lead”, pure entitlement.

The “stupidity” is that the kind of people that have been engaging in this sort of thinking and posture are unable to, now that it has been shown beyond doubt that is complete total bollocks, review their own beliefs, behaviour and ideas in light of it. Instead they just blame everybody else like self-deluded simpletons.

For a non-American this thread and other like this are hilarious: the people who spent the last year campaigning “Vote Not Trump” now blame everybody else but themselves for how their strategy of having a candidate who did nothing to appeal to voters and sold fear of the other instead, failed miserably.

So they post tons of such “it’s the fault of everybody else” memes as topics were they and other members of the tribe make posts with wild ass reasons for why it really is everybody else’s faults and responding to such posts from others by basically saying “yeah, you’re so right”, like one gigantic circle jerk, pretty much a continuation of what they were doing for a whole fucking year - a big fat circle jerk whilst not paying attention to anybody else - only now they’re doing it with sad faces.

Sure, it’s the 14 millions who stayed home that are to blame, not the massive incompetence of the DNC and the mindless tribalist muppets trading dumb Trump and Vance memes whilst thinking that their “leaders” deserved a win merelly for wearing the right pin on their jacket and not being Trump, without needing to actually have policies that appealed to their natural voters.

“Bloody natural Democrat voters, not going to polls and doing what they’re supposed to do!”

What a heady, heady mix of stupidity and sense of entitlement.

Reminds me of the whole saying: “Only two things are infinite - the Universe and Human Stupidity - and we’re not sure about the first”

IHMO, if you just look at it like any other form of Tribalism (i.e. Political, National and even Sports) it absolutelly makes sense that people whose identity is a Religion (or a Political Party, Nation or even Sports club) cannot emotionally accept that those of “their tribe” are bad since one of the core foundations of Tribalism is exactly that “we” are good and it’s the “others” that are bad.

The massive and for them extremelly important mental and emotional construct of self-validation and self-aggrandizing such people have based on their identity as member of a tribe (all those “we members-of-tribe are something-good” beliefs) - often at the cost of personal achievement recognition or as compensation for lack of personal achievement - would collapse if they accepted that the basic axiom of “membership of the tribe makes/proves people good/superior” is not true, so at the most basic psychological level they’re driven to not question that axiom and to deny anything that might disprove it.

There’s Progress in Technology and Science, but Socially and Psychologically Humans have barelly changed in millenia.

I think people often people confuse Scientific and Technological Progress with general progress, when for Human Society in general it’s really more of a case of Same Monkeys, Better Tools.

(All of this IMHO)

I would say that mansplaining is an actual real phenomenon, sometimes directly so (guys that do believe they know better than women) and other times indirectly, in cultures were men behave in a more assertive and aggressive way than women in conversations in groups and take over the conversation, in practice creating situations were they’ve taken over explaining something which a woman in the same group is vastly more qualified to explain.

However the word “mansplaining” has been so massivelly abused by mysandrists cosplaying as Feminists (to the point that in the last couple of years the most loud and frequent use of that word was by said mysandrists making prejudiced statements), that now there’s a natural “bullshit!” reaction to anybody using it.

If you’re a mindless tribalist, the “tribe” it’s based on is the thing that maters the most, and for some of those their tribe or at least and important part of its identity is a specific religion (often it’s even a specific sect within a major religion).

If you actually use your brain for thinking (instead of just as a cranium filling mass that keep it from collapsing into a vacuum) then it is indeed irrelevant the religion The Handmaid’s Tale is based on.

It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.

In your specially crafted scenario it is indeed applicable.

However that’s not at all how it’s being used here. Here it’s just another variant of the propaganda used in the last year or so by the members of the Democrat tribe which boils down to “if you don’t vote Democrat you’re voting Trump”, which is a blantant false dichotomy and falacy.

Couple such sleazy salesman style of political propaganda with their active support of a Genocide were tens of thousands of children have already been murderer and, when seen in the broader context of World Politics, the Democrats are almost as low and disgusting as the Republicans.

To add insult to injury, I suspect that it’s the continued expectation amongst the Democrat Party leadership that the use of these propaganda techniques will retain enough of the Leftwing vote for them to win no matter what they do, that has allowed Biden during the last year to overtly support a Genocide to the point of doing things like sending Israel the very 2000lb bombs (which the US Military refuses to use because of their massive collateral damage) that they used in bombing Lebanese neighbourhoods: by having been parroting for months shit like this false-choice meme, these people have enabled Israel to be sent the very weapons with massive collateral damage that they used in bombing civilians and have hence been indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands.

(Had they instead been putting pressure on the Democrat Party, as the Israeli Neue Nazi side did for themselves via AIPAC, things would likely be very different now).

I too am not an American, I just have been involved in politics in two countries and seen it right up close in another two and after having been massivelly exposed to American Political Propaganda here in Lemmy in the last year or so, find it appallingly manipulative and deceitful, from both sides, though far more hypocrite from the Democrat side (Republicans are more users of straightforward lies rather than using more sophisticated methods of deceit such as presenting false choices like this one or cherry picking).

Funnilly enough, my enormous disgust with this kind of sleazy propaganda grew up during the decade I lived in the UK, especially the Leave Referendum period: compared with The Netherlands and Portugal were I lived before that, English politics, which is dominated by Public School types, is insanelly heavy on this kind of sleazy slimmy posh-salesman discourse crafted to mislead without outright lying and especially after my decade living amongst the plain speaking Dutch, I’ve come to really detest that kind of hypocrisy, especially when, like here, it’s deployed to cover those commiting morally unacceptable acts such as activelly supporting the mass murder of human beings.

It was bad enough when such style of politics was used in the UK to screw the lives of millions and its even worse when it’s used in America to enable the outright murder of hundreds of thousands of people, over 40% of whom are children.

I can barelly begin to convey my utter disgust with such practices and those who use them to enable what can only be described as evil-doing.

… whomever keeps misportraying a person casting a single vote amongst 200 million as them individually making the final decision.

There are over 200 million voters.

A thought experiment about an individual choice is not even close to applicable to the choice facing a single voter since in that thought experiment not-choosing is the same as making the default choice whilst in a vote not-chosing is leaving the choice to all other voters.

The use of this though experiment as a metaphor for the choice facing individual American voters is downright deceitful and propagandistic, self-servingly so since it’s being used to try and boost the chances of one side.

The liberals claiming to be different from the far-right muppets whilst engaging in the same kind of simpleton take on politics would be hilarious if the results of them having been propaganda muppets for decades weren’t so bad for everybody (by moving the center of American politics so far to the Right that it now sits on what is considered Far Right in World political terms).

The only upside of this shit is that by now pretty much nobody outside the US looks to it for references on Politics - even the Far-Right in Europe stays away from lots of American quirks like hyper-religiosity.

For this to be correct the"moral high" track should go to before the junction since it’s literally a choice of leaving the decision to others.

In this specific case were what’s portrayed is the lever in the hands of each individual person amongst over 200 millions voters (rather than, say, the choice in the hands of people like Biden, who pretty much has an individual Genocide/No-Genocide choice), it’s not Logical to portray the choice of sticking with one’s moral principles as a choice for either side since there are still millions of other people needed for the choice to be made - in fact it’s downright deceitful and self-serving propaganda to misportray what’s literally a “I refrain from chosing hence leave the choice to the rest” as a being the same as a choice for one of the options.

The whole use of this format were an individual is represented as being alone in making a choice when the actual situation is “one vote amongst hundreds of millions” is downright deceitful and self-serving propaganda.