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A compulsory voting law (with a federal holiday, etc.) was once seen as a surefire way to entrench Democrat control. I now think it would benefit the GOP much more, perhaps to the point of stranglehold.

While the transition was probably coming anyway, Craigslist and its free listing killed a lot of revenue newspapers, especially smaller ones, needed to survive

Media thrives on the excitement factor. Someone replied it is business. Hype has taken over media selling us what? Can we not tell the difference real and pretend, quality and faux? I do not believe that.

THIS ^^^^^ x1000

Seems like a few of them are going to have to fall off the cliff before any of them will believe the cliff is real.

Those people weren't backing genocide of Palestinians because of a desire for personal gain. They were backing it because they hate Palestinians. Different kind of evil. Don't confuse the two.

I think someone who purposely lies about genocide should look in the mirror to find the idiot.

I've always thought that, plus people are wedded to eroneous beliefs even when confronted with strong evidence of their error.

also need faster turnaround times in case of big fuckups - the inability to call & force snap elections prolongs catastrophes and obscures responsibility

starmer being the exception that proves the rule

I hate to say this as a neo yellow dog dem but Dem leadership does not want to remove the filibuster et al because then they’d have no excuse not to raise taxes on themselves

if we survive this, a constitutional convention is in order. Should we ditch the presidential system?

I really do think that a lot of median voter brain disease is because the nominal and actual values that the US governments have are so wildly divergent. Of course you assume that in a democracy, holding power is downstream of popular legitimacy! It’s crazy to think otherwise! Except.

i don’t buy that they aren’t dumb, they’re simply misinformed. FFS we have access to more info than any humans ever in our pockets. if you can’t search google for free IVF + trump, then you are dumb. democracies come with duties and obligations, not just rights and freedoms.

Unfortunately we’re seeing first hand why first-past-the-post is kind of a shit system.

Imagine if the U.S. had a real multiparty system. If we had four left-of-center parties and Biden, Schumer, and Jeffries were determined to be wet noodles in the face of Trump... the resistance would simply gravitate to the other 3 parties and the Democrats would just die off. Problem solved.

Side note: I think this is also why Australian voters have consistently refused to cut ties with the English monarchy, because for too many of them President = US Politics

Something I've been thinking about is, if we get out of this mess, how can we make these ideas toxic enough to be less of a threat. And I think part of that has to be a government that's way more comfortable with propagandizing the good things it does for people.

Good idea, sure, but owning a smart phone can be tied to employment. At my place of work, we have to get a code from an app in order to log in

This is probably true but I have a relative who is crazy maga and who does not have internet, she believes the craziest stuff due to the Christian radio station she listens to.

I've only read the first couple of Dune books, but I think a lot about the fact that those stories are set in a future world where, long before, humans literally destroyed all computers on purpose because that seemed like the smart move.

Your empathy has to step in front of your self interest or you can't really be a human being.

The idea of voting for your self interest is so foreign to me. You get this opportunity to express, in a fairly meaningless symbolic way, what kind of world you want to live in. Why would you choose to be selfish? In a limited sense I understand Trump supporters who eschew their interests.

Yes. Like all GOP, she cares only about herself. Idiot,sheep,moron,deplorable,mentally stunted, these people are dumb. They don't possess critical thinking skills. Oh, their ignorance is intentional, by the way. A bunch of morons running around, shooting their selves in the feet.

Maybe she has learned a lesson. I read the whole article. She wanted something for free and made a terrible decision. She thought about it for 15 minutes at the ballot box. Voted for a rapist, believing a rapist. As an assault victim. Really. SMH.

Part of me think the dems need to do a better job at pointing out the individual benefits of helping others. People vote for their own self interests. This isn't a shocker. Bolstering medicaid / medicare won't directly impact a lot of voters. A bunch of incontinent old people in the streets does tho

My God she’s a victim of sexual assault and yet just because her family sided with the predator in chief she voted for him. Seriously messed up.

Yeah, the value judgment was that she was worth less. A social fabric of victim blaming and furious misogyny is itself a powerful bamboozle.

People are also being actively lied to, all the goddamned time

Exactly.

Damn you Holden Caulfield!

I will admit that is tough when the agenda setters and leaders in media are obviously Trump cheerleaders

Some wise old baseball manager (i forget who) once said a large part of his job was keeping the players who hated him away from those who haven't made up their mind yet

Yea, I mean grifters take in the desperate and the gullible and there were a lot of both last year. Difficult for me to put myself in the headspace of someone who groks Trump hates women but thinks he'll give them free IVF tho.

Yep! These are exactly the type of voters we need to welcome into the fold - along with non-voters- so we have a resounding victory in 26 & 28 that defeats trumpism once and for all.

It’s why I’m not sure we will ever get out of this cycle where the left only wins by picking up the ashes from the policies of the right-wing. And each time, the rebuilding is less and less of its former self.

That was launched / stolen some years later correct?

like, "woman sees TikTok claiming that Trump will do whatever, immediately believes it, doesn't bother to look for any other information"...what could CNN have done differently to address that?

They want perceived leadership and easy answers. Republicans have provided "leadership" in the form of easy answers and scapegoats. The massive disinformation network on the right does a great job of selling their lies and the MSM is dead. Until that dynamic is challenged we lose low info voters.

I’m writing about this in a couple of weeks, but what the big tech companies are really best at is the race to the bottom. They have completely devalued every market they’ve entered, from hardware to advertising to news and entertainment media. Sometimes it’s good for us, but usually it’s ruinous.

i can add a bit more in this case! There was actually a push within NPR itself to go more "centrist", and this wasn't new either. Hell, it might've been 10 years ago at this point when i read an article that had one of the higher-ups there saying "we need to make NPR safe for capitalism"

Worse, rather than lean into the advantage of trad media as a differentiator, they tried to make it *more* like the new meme-driven social media, and compete on disadvantageous turf.

Net Neutrality movement was a partial driver of this, insuring that consumers would continue kicking in ~$70/mo to subsidize the content/ad industry, driving marginal cost of audience size to near zero and creating attention economy with winner take all market dynamics