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Comment by cagenut

9 hours ago

honestly, look internally. after the plane from qatar. after the son-in-law's real estate dealings. after the visible-to-everyone kalshi and oil futures bets frontrunning the administrations announcements. for you to still feel the need to frame things as "border-line (to be polite)" is, in and of itself, the perfect example of the overall problem.

take your inability to draw a clear-as-day conclusion and state it plainly and multiply it by another ~50M "centrists" who continue to believe that staying "not political" and "avoiding the news" is a viable strategy to just wait the problem out.

until the checked out cowards realize that strategy isn't going to work, things will continue to get worse.

"no politics" might as as well be the second maga slogan.

"no politics" is the immune response to the social-media-fueled, conspiracy-theory-driven "we are the good guys, you basically deserve to die" craze.

Both sides are culpable here. In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen (Republicans in 2020, Democrats with the since-debunked 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal). Other countries had different issues, but the shape of the problem was basically the same everywhere.

If you keep being called bad words for years for no reason, seeing your side do the exact same thing, no surprise you tune out.

  • I'd say the bigger issue in 2016 was the Russian interference, which has been proven and has lead to convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

    > Simultaneously, the Republican-led Senate and House Intelligence Committees conducted their own investigations into the Russians' activities. The Senate committee's report, released in five volumes between July 2019 and August 2020, found that the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive campaign" to sabotage the election in favor of Trump

    I'm also curious how you think Cambridge Analytica was debunked. I don't see any mention of debunking on their wikipedia page, but I do see facebook being fined billions for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

  • > In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen

    This is not even remotely true.

    One party broadly mobilized a country wide effort to overthrow an election and usurp the incoming duly elected government, culminating in a violent attack on congress itself.

    The other party had concerns about foreign interference in our elections.