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ITT: “Yeah but it’s their job to ‘appeal’ to me; it’s not my job to vote for them, and I gotta say ‘not the end of democracy’ isn’t a big selling point for me tbh. Dance for me, candidate! Dance!”
Imagine politicians actually trying to get elected. How absurd would that be?
This is like claiming that if you go to a restaurant, and the food tastes like shit, it's the customers' fault.
OP: These framings we see in the media have absolutely nothing to do with which candidate is more qualified to run the country
Me: Actually I would add to that that these framings are specifically inserted into the discourse by corporate media to elevate some candidates and depress some candidates, with the depressingly effective aim of making people dislike the corporate unfriendly candidates
Posters ITT: Hey like 20 or 30 of us have the exact same new framing we’d like to present that has nothing to do with which candidate is more qualified to run the country. It might be a much much better framing than, which candidate is better to vote for, or factual things about the candidate’s record. We all feel that exact same way about it being important to look at it this way.
You can have the best product in the universe, but if you can't sell it, then it doesn't matter. When trying to argue a douche is better than a turd, you really need your presentation going. None of the American politicians (except maybe Bernie) are remotely qualified to run a country of any size, so stop trying to make it about who is the most qualified.
Aw man
I tried to set you up to say something like, yeah but what has Biden even done other than “not Trump” (as if that “doesn’t count” somehow as a reason to pick him instead of Trump), but you didn’t take the bait. You just came out with conflating “which product is best marketed” with “which is the product we actually want”, and somehow came down on the side of best-marketed. Idk what that’s about. And then you simply said that no one is qualified.
Idk, that’s a little bit close to teeing up what I wanted to say (talking about Biden’s qualification), so I’ll go ahead and put it up anyway.
- 40% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030
- 15% minimum corporate tax
- Actual labor people in charge of the NLRB for the first time in God knows how long leading to all these union wins
- Hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan forgiveness
- Big wage gains at the bottom end of the scale even when adjusted for massive historic inflation
That’s a partial sampling. And that was with a pretty hostile congress and Supreme Court; most of it was watered down versions after he tried to do more aggressive stuff.
Hahah, man, the world's a weird place. I love this exchange.
This is like saying that if you go to a restaurant, and the food tastes like shit, it's the customers' fault.
Holy Jesus is this a flawed analogy. I'll try to fix it for you:
If you go to a restaurant where for some reason every present customer votes for a cook out of a lineup of cooks who each only prepare certain dishes, and out of which only two are consistently popular enough to get the majority of customers to vote for them.
Out of these two, both let the manager pick the dishes. But one only makes meals out of tofu, which isn't terrible but not worth going out for, and the customers only vote for him because they're afraid it's the only choice that will beat the other guy. The other cook just scrapes and serves the sludge off the bottom of the stove but has run a successful decades-long campaign to convince their customers that sludge tastes better than tofu. None of those customers have ever tried tofu so they don't know better.
Despite the fact that it's obvious that the issue with this system is overwhelmingly the manager running a shitty restaurant and the cooks pitting the customers against each other, the small but vocal subset of customers who just want a steak are blaming the other customers like it's their fault.
"The candidate has done nothing to earn my vote, so I'm not voting for them."
"wtf why aren't people voting for the candidate I support?! They must just hate everyone and be a fascist since they can't see the obvious righteousness of my candidate"
These people never realize that this is a two way street. If candidates are going to earn votes, that means their candidate has to earn votes too and not just accept them for granted. They have to build bridges to achieve their goals. You can tell that those burning bridges don't actually care about their espoused virtues -- they just want to be right and stick it to their enemies.
Yeah. Plus the continuation of that conversation tends to go:
"Okay. He raised literally about a trillion dollars via corporate tax increases, which he then spent on climate change and working people, achieving incremental but quite significant results."
"Yeah but did he OVERTURN CAPITALISM AND AMERICAN IMPERIALISM? Because if not PROJECT 2025 BECOMES ALL THE DEMOCRATS FAULT"
AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
Ironically most of these people also tend to make arguments in favor of Russian imperialism when they talk about how NATO is actually to blame for the war and Ukraine should accept a peace agreement.
Almost as if...
I asked one of them randomly earlier what they think of the war in Ukraine, and they don't want to discuss it, just keep talking to me about Joe Biden
Add in the fact that some in the group demanding to be appealled to is out of touch with where the actual populace is at to the degree that they dont even realize that to appeal to them on unpopular positions would alienate more voters than they represent. Couple that with the fact that demands on items that are unrealistic to implement without wide-scale support in the populace, and you have a small group of people you have to spend alot of energy and political capital to appeal to, in ways that are largely symbolic in practice, all while that group insults you and offers next to nothing--"Dance for our vote! Grovel for our vote you fucking murderers!!".
And then they are so perpetually online in their echo chambers they dont realize their views actually aren't very popular, so insular they wonder why the rest of us don't spend all day catering to their bullshit!