Being born to narcissistic parents was extremely controversial in my childhood home. I was the selfish little ingrate in the house who kept asking for things even though they already provided a house and food most of the time, and that was very polarizing for my parents.

I don’t know, more conservatives have gone after Trump than anyone.

Ohio is such a weird state. It is notorious for being an unpleasant place to live and I have met dozens of Ohioans who are very pleased to live anywhere else. That being said I disproportionatly have enjoyed the company of the Ohio refugees I’ve met. It has a way of exporting some cool people

You’re onto a very important aspect of fascist rhetoric. The lies have to be absurd. They have to be obviously wrong. They need the kind of people who are looking to belong to something greater than themselves, not people who look for evidence. Lies like these are a great filter to end up with uncritically loyal followers. Same as any cult.

Sartre wrote about the tendencies of anti-semites in 1944 who followed a similar model of “belief” to contemporary conservatives. Here’s a breakdown of that essay.

I think you’re making a similar mistake that I have made many times, which is to assume that others are putting more thought into their decisions and beliefs than they actually do.

Among the conservatives, there are a handful of bad actors who are aware of the grift and are deliberately lying to promote themselves and their scam enterprises. The rest of the conservatives are using the cultural practice derived from a religious and/or nationalistic upbringing to uncritically have “faith” in whatever the party line is. Regardless of intelligence, if someone is vulnerable to group dynamics like this (also existing in other cults), it is more important to conform and receive validation from the group than it is to pointlessly research whether or not the group’s belief is true and risk ostracisation.

It’s not really falling for conspiracies, it’s more like conforming to cult beliefs. Conservatives don’t really understand the things they say or why they believe what they do.

This I think is wishful thinking. If they already made the trade and profited, they’re not going to care about the people scooping according to what they did. If the followers-on like me overinflate or kill the asset depending on what the cheater did all it would do is damage the economy. If you are in a position of aristocratic privilege such that insider trading is possible for you, destroying the economy is an opportunity to acquire assets at a bargain.

The difference is that on most days people would need to hide their inside trades. One day a year it would all be out in the open because nothing could happen to anyone. It would wreck the economy and collect wealth in the hands of those who already have it, but if you ride the corruption wave you may not end up among the have-nots.

It the best day of the year to get rich from the imaginary economy of assets. Set a bot to match the trades of some people who will be insider trading and cash in every year.

I am getting very, very sick of the trend of Democrats spending more time trying to appeal to bigoted conservatives than trying to actually represent their own constituents or help the people they ostensibly care about.

Clinton made it ok, Obama made it cool, and since 2016 it’s been tradition for the Democrats. Citizens United made our elections into a bidding war and the Democrats are often pretty frank that courting billionaires is about not getting outspent by Republicans. As long as they represent the cause of the problem most leftists are concerned about by accepting bribes, they figure they might as well go for conservatives since they seem easier to convince of things.

The mistake they’re making of course is that conservatives don’t get convinced by rhetoric or appeals, they get convinced by the strong looking one who promises to defend them from all the scapegoats. They can’t out scapegoat the Republicans about the border wall and it’s a little insulting that they thought they could, but it’s better to them than risking their funding by being ethical in our hopelessly corrupt system.

It’s a classic trolley problem. For many American voters it’s a choice between their family members being murdered or more of their family members being murdered. Pull the lever to set the trolley on track to kill fewer of your family members.

The thing about the trolley problem is that it is far from unanimous how people react to being put in that position. There are many people who will not pull the lever to deliberately endorse the murder of their family members even if it means that more of their family will be killed. It is more for politicians to react to the sensibilities of their constituents than it is for constituents to conform to the desires of their politicians. It’s Kamala’s election to lose. Fortunately and unfortunately she’s very flexible and reacts to pressure. Never let up.

You know, Hamas is coming after the US next, and once they start attacking Americans, there’s no turning back.

This is a scary comment. The comment this was in response to indicated it was wrong to commit genocide on Palestinians. Instead of even making an attempt to redefine or minimize the genocide, this comment instead argued that the genocide would be functional. It is functional to commit genocide on Palestinian people to prevent “Hamas is coming after the US next.” Nevermind that this doesn’t even make sense to argue at all, just the fact that it was offered as a justification for genocide should create a moment of pause for anyone following along.

The same way to deal with depression about anything. Depression is an illness that renders one incapable of helping themselves or others and debilitates people from contributing to the solution to the problems which contributed to the depression. Depression should be treated as an illness to be cured before anything else.

As far as being not being depressed by events beyond one’s control, it requires effort since even being aware and concerned by such problems of this magnitude is highly unnatural and highly unintuitive. It is necessary to consciously come to peace with the world and humanity as it is. The universe is chaotic and we have as much control over the collective will of billions of completely ignorant and afraid people as we do over natural disasters just with less ability to predict when issues will occur. Although it is the case that we have a good grasp of the environmental issue, we have absolutely no grasp of how get plutocrats not to behave like plutocrats having no care for anything or anyone other than increasing their personal fortunes meaninglessly or to get the majority of people to understand the degree to which it is a problem that we continue to allow this. Being upset that humans are failing to achieve stable societies just as we have always failed for the entire 10,000 years we have been trying to achieve them is having unrealistic and unfair expectations of our species. Everyone is trying their best and no one knows what they’re doing really. It may be scarier to consider how much less agency people have than they believe they have initially, but it does allow one to have the comfort of more consistently helpful expectations of oneself and others.

Is it voters’ fault for not voting correctly, or is it Democrats’ fault for directly spiting voters and asking for their vote anyway? Democrats may never know…

If there’s an impasse, spending millions of dollars trying to get conservatives to vote for Democrats has proven to be a losing strategy. Even the series of hints the Kamala campaign is dropping at wanting to do the right thing is getting voters riled up especially among younger people. It’s worth taking the risk of being less corrupt.

Cars are going to have an advantage over pedestrians most of the time.

For no particular reason I’ll leave a parody of one of my favorite poems here:

Trump’s presidential campaign wasn’t racist.
And if it was, it hardy had any effect on the election.
And if it did, it was really more about class than racism anyway.
And if it was actually about race, I wouldn’t obfuscate that.
And if I did, I’m not racist.
And if I am, it’s only because you talk about racism so much.

Donald Trump sure did in 2016.

Never forget that when you are speaking to someone who strongly identifies with American Conservatism, you are speaking to a child in an adult body. You can’t have the same expectations that you would have of a mature adult. The fact that anyone would see this as an effective “attack” who is over the age of 8 is embarrassing.

I am feeling the Kamala campaign like I was feeling the Biden presidency up until October 2023. A series of pleasant surprises.

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