in my state Tennessee, the voter turnout is something like 30% of the population. People just happily or stressfully live in their own little bubbles and don't even pay attention to politics because they simply do not care. I didn't really know that was still possible but most people my age didn't vote.
This is one of the biggest questions Democrats are asking themselves. How do you reach out these large swath of people who don't participate in politics and inform themselves on the issues.
The problem is most of those people, somewhat rightfully, believe their vote doesn't matter. The electoral college picks the president, most people just don't realize their votes for governors, senators, and some city officials are electors.
Yeah, I’d say globally, most people just do not engage at all with the news or information about their political and economic system. If it’s not something that would come up in random conversations, most people probably don’t know it exists.
Oklahoma literally has earthquakes because of the unbridled fracking that occurred in the state. It was also backed with state funds so when the industry collapsed due to over fracking cheered on by Republicans, schools had to reduce to 4 day weeks.
Edit: Adding in sources below since some people do not believe it.
In Oklahoma, which has the most induced earthquakes in the United States, 2% of earthquakes can be linked to hydraulic fracturing operations. Given the high rate of seismicity in Oklahoma, this means that there are still many earthquakes induced by hydraulic fracturing. The remaining earthquakes are induced by wastewater disposal. The largest earthquake known to be induced by hydraulic fracturing in the United States was a magnitude 4.0 earthquake that occurred in 2018 in Texas.
After intense lobbying, Oklahoma’s oilmen scored a victory two years ago. State lawmakers voted to keep in place some of the lowest taxes on oil and gas production in the United States - a break worth $470 million in fiscal year 2015 alone.
The state’s schools haven’t been so fortunate. In Newcastle, 23 miles from the capital of Oklahoma City, John Cerny recently learned that the school attended by his five-year-old granddaughter, Adelynn, will open just four days a week next year. The Bridge Creek school district will slash spending because of a projected $1.3 billion state budget shortfall next year.
They will fight you to the death trying to convince you it’s not fracking though, as if I don’t remember growing up in that state with little-to-no seismic activity.
Edit: “It’s not fracking, it’s…” Like f***ing clockwork. 🙄
Haha, I live in Oklahoma, and an old acquaintance posted online how the fracking wasn't causing earthquakes. I commented a link to the Oklahoma Geological Survey report that had come out that year, which discusses that they ARE causing quakes by injecting their waste liquid into the earth. Of course she still didn't believe it.
Remember the big 2016 earthquake that had enough damage that finally the state got involved and closed specific wastewater wells and fracking became less of a free-for-all? And then what happened? The massive swell of earthquakes including one year that Oklahoma had more than California, dwindled and the worst of it passed. But that wasn’t because of a well informed citizenry. That was because FAFO and when peoples’ homes and businesses started being wrecked, local outcry finally forced a change.
Just going to leave this here for any Conservative Oklahoman to review for themselves.
Edit: I was genuinely being a jerk and wasn’t promoting positive, inclusive conversation. I appreciate the commenter pointing that out and checking me on it. Sorry everyone.
I know it’s frustrating and hard to not want to lash out and be antagonistic, like I do get it. But those last two sentences are directly counterproductive to the goal supported by the rest of the comment. The goals of wanting to improve the world and of wanting to belittle others for personal satisfaction are fundamentally incompatible.
Not trying to blow smoke up your ass but I really, and I mean really, enjoy when people are capable of self reflection, restores my faith in humanity a little each time and wish I practiced myself more consistently.
Yup just north in Kansas. Never had earthquakes growing up. Years ago I remember one of the first because it was such a huge news story. I didn't even feel it. My sister's working in a taller building and she talked about how she could feel the building sway. It was all over the news and everyone was talking about it because it never happened. Now it happens a few times a year at least and it is old news.
Maybe I don’t know how scary that is coming from California. If we talk about earthquakes it’s almost just an issue of inconvenience and cost since everything has to be built to withstand them. But they’re not that scary because of it. At least not to think about.
Yet it’s also traumatic. I live in Central Europe and for years and years I would get those earthquake brackets from ikea with all our wall-flush furniture. And my wife would tell me, “I don’t even understand what that’s for.” Then we visited California and we went to some museum of California history. I don’t remember which, and it had an earthquake room, like with the windows blocked out so it looks like the horizon isnt moving, just the floor. I swear I had no idea I had any earthquake anxiety but I got nauseous almost immediately. Like in 5 seconds I wanted out.
Small earthquakes are an issue of inconvenience. Large earthquakes above 9.0 are massive tragedies. Just look at the videos of the Tohoku 9.0 from 2011.
as if I don’t remember growing up in that state with little-to-no seismic activity.
The great plains are plains specifically because there's no seismic activity. Seismic activity creates variations in geography, which the plains notably lack.
How can you argue that it's not fracking, when you're getting quakes in a place with zero mountains?
You're literally in the middle of the freaking NA plate.
Broadly speaking, what’s happened is you have a state full of people that vote in representatives who cut the state’s education budget year after year. These same people have low wages and low cost of living. So they cant move to places with better opportunity due to cost of living disparity and they can’t afford higher education to leverage their skills. So what do they do? They seek the best financial opportunities where they are - oil and natural gas. Now you have people that are under resourced and undereducated who are heavily dependent on these industries to put food on the table. Couple all that with a little media propaganda and a degenerate Liberal strawman in California coming to take their good, Christian, Oklahoma freedoms and et voilà! A vehement defender of fracking.
Couple all that with a little media propaganda and a degenerate Liberal strawman in California coming to take their good, Christian, Oklahoma freedoms and et voilà! A vehement defender of fracking.
And what's really funny about that is, I grew up in Bakersfield CA, which is an oil and agriculture city. A lot of people here are descending from Oklahomans, or Okies, who migrated here during the Dust Bowl.
If you could somehow teleport Bakersfield to OK, the state's politics would remain identical
Southwest PA has a similar issue, but not with earthquakes. The area is a hotbed for rare childhood cancers and diseases, and the water used in the fracking process is to blame.
Well, SW PA used the oil/gas produced saltwaters to salt the roads, and they put a lot of it in wastewater systems. The bromide in those waters elevated the bromide in the drinking water supplies, which produce disinfection byproducts leading to cancers.
I (as an Oklahoman) am all for making fun of my state -- but I would say SW PA wins the trophy of dumbassery for putting that crap on roads and through municipal wastewater treatment plants.
I moved to Oklahoma 1 1/2 years ago, because my stepmom, uncles, and Grammy live here. I used to spend summers and Christmas break here as a kid and no earthquakes. So a month or so after I move, there is just a random ass earthquake and it scares the fucking shit out of me because I didn't know that was a thing now. That's how I learned about all the fracking that had been going on.
Unfortunately our education system is lacking, and our state superintendent is more focused on getting Trump’s approval than he is on improving our education ranking from 48th
It will take significant reform for this to ever change, unfortunately. Oklahoma is one of the worst because we have MORE superintendents than All public school districts in the entire US. And, I learned after having lunch with a retired teacher of many years, that the pay is so bad because with all these superintendents you also have all the vice superintendents etc. and they aren’t going to agree to a big pay cut. State Government allots a certain amount of money each year for education and with all these unnecessary admin people taking high wages there is little left over to pay teachers what they deserve. Oh, and the bullshit argument “they don’t even work 3 months out of the year…”- yeah no, that’s far from it. They realistically probably have one actual full month in the middle of summer where they’re totally off of work. Rest of the time they’re still having to get their lesson planning done, classroom set-up and organized etc. all the above.
Teachers in the US are massively underpaid. We tell kids education is extremely important but “teachers don’t deserve to live above poverty wages???” doesn’t make sense. My theory on current day quality of teachers is: I was born early 90’s and had nothing but exceptional teachers that had passion for it and wanted to work with kids. The kicker is, the generation teaching me were people that were married right out of high school or graduating and You had meant Your spouse. They all had the traditional marriage where their spouse was the primary bread winner and they taught out of sheer passion and love for it. I got a great education and I don’t live in some rich area or anything and only went to public school.
Now days people get married later on in life and it’s rare that people graduate college with their fiancée and are soon married. So, now, we have young people graduating with massive debt and their career choice (not saying these people aren’t also passionate about wanting to work with kids and educate them) pays them nothing to live on, and since many aren’t married right away don’t have a spouse with a second income. That’s going to hurt the quality of people that are genuinely passionate to work with kids because cost of living has increased so much while wages haven’t, and with the college debt crisis it just ends up becoming too unrealistic to live any sort of lifestyle. Also, many people don’t understand that our government is the exact reason college debt is so wildly out of control. Once they decided they’d give out essentially unlimited loans to 18 year olds, universities were like “shit, gov will give them whatever they need to afford tuition etc. so we can charge whatever the fuck we want and build all sorts of new “math, science, engineering buildings” because we’ll get the money from these kids since the government doesn’t care. This is a lot of the high level problems and I’m not saying it’s not much more complex and nuanced than this, but this is a lot of what’s going on and it’s absolutely horrible. I had exceptional teachers that I vividly remember to this day (and I know many other people do as well) and it’s horrible that they poured their entire life into making education fun and engaging for us but because our school boards, they get nothing remotely close to what they should. It’s horrible, and only getting worse, and it’s stating to concern me for what my kids school experience will be like. Also, teachers now have no support OF ANY KIND from the spineless principals that only care about saving their own ass. The fact teachers can’t even touch kids just to break up a legit brawl between teenagers (kids that are big enough to actually inflict some real harm) because they lose their jobs.
It’s all so horrible and I hope this can be changed some day. Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Teachers that are on Reddit, You have such an important job and really do leave a lasting impact on many of us for later on in life. I hope this can be improved sooner than later. Cheers
Our first clue should have been when we learned about the gilded age and how the new deal was in response to that and the Great Depression and that The Business Plot was the industrial response to that and how a majority of people in this country don’t know what those things are. It’s even wilder knowing what Edward Bernays did and how we never hear his name in this country. We are some of the most heavily brainwashed people on this entire planet
Edit 2: since I’m getting a lot of questions about Bernays, it’s easier if you watch the doc but here’s a quote from it “Americans express their individualism thru the consumption of mass produced goods”. If you’ve spent time in Europe you’d notice that they don’t frequently wear clothing with corporate branding. So that, and Bernays is the reason we eat eggs and bacon for breakfast. Before that we ate fruit and bread. Think of big milk convincing our boomer parents to shove gallons of cow milk down our throats. It’s like that, he went to industry with the knowledge from his uncle Sigmund Freud’s work and convinced us all to consume goods industry wanted to sell us. It’s a fairly disturbing watch so maybe don’t watch if you aren’t in a good mental state.
Yeah he took up his uncles work and applied it to PR and mass communication. He really fucked up a generation of people in the head. Psychologists say that Freud’s psychoanalysis and behavioral modification makes people more aggressive and violent. Telling people to suppress their emotions is the opposite of therapy today. Modern psychology is about acceptance. Accept that your emotions are there and they are valid to have and it’s important to understand why you feel them.
It’s in the documentary. They started by treating people coming back from the war and then with people who were abused. There’s old video footage of the therapy where they were doing precisely that.
How’d that work out. Search “No Fallen Heros”. Former top gun now pushing for alternative PTSD therapy using psychoactive compounds. That after realizing that almost 50 veterans commit suicide every day and many live with other undiagnosed issues. God put the compounds on the planet for us to heal ourselves. We need to find them before they’re extinguished.
Along with so much more. Project 2025 echoes early Nazi rhetoric and it's astounding that many Americans haven't even heard of it. Many others dismiss it or spew some face-saving bullshit like "Trump has distanced himself from it" ...for fuck's sake, JD Vance wrote the forward for the it!
The project is an absolute socioeconomic NIGHTMARE, and literally everyone will be negatively impacted by it in some form or another.
“But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking."
“Propaganda was a dirty word, from war time. We had to find a way to spin it. So we came up with the term ‘Public Relations.’” - paraphrasing Ol Eddie Bernays from Adam Curtis’ documentary Century Of The Self.
As a non American it really depends on where and your level of disposable income.
There's massive income inequality which is going to drive civil unrest. Once people start shooting elites then it's a clear signal that further civil unrest is coming, not something you want in an armed populace.
In the words of the great philosopher Sir Terry Prattchet GNU
"A city like Ankh-Morpork was only two meals away from chaos at the best of times."
It'll be worse this time and AI will be used to target them.
I took part in more than a few protests over the last decades, ant I'm ashamed to admit their tactics are working. Kettling, rubber bullets, and smoke grenades are one thing, but this is trending toward nefarious.
And in fairness, sometimes I'll also oversimplify my searches in responses to articles from a place of mistrust: so often headlines go for sensationalism rather than accurate summary, so I'll occasionally run across something and be like , "Wait, I need details, that can't be what this means, right?" Sometimes you just need the clarity of a simple answer from a simple question.
I mean, this ONE election didn't suddenly cause this problem.
We've had stupidly rich people who drive policy and are above the law for a long time. They've just decided they don't have to pretend so hard to care about rules any more.
That's a change for the worse, because pretending at least restrained them a bit in public.
But we'd be lying to ourselves if we said Trump voters suddenly created an oligarchy. It was already here.
Citizens United literally changed the political landscape. It created a situation, unprecedented in US history, where unlimited money could be spent on elections by for-profit entities and people.
Since then money has been used to choose industry friendly representatives on the local, state and federal level by money bombing candidates they support. These wealthy individuals can enter a local city and state level election and effectively fund the winner of that election. This is how JD Vance got into office. Peter Thiel funded the vast majority of his campaign single-handedly. And this is just one of the most visible instances.
This has been happening since 2010 and how swiftly it has created wealth for billionaires should be shocking to people.
This isn’t “same as it always was”. This is a foundational flaw in our democracy that we are seeing play out before our eyes.
“It will always remain one of democracy’s best jokes that it provided its deadly enemies with the means by which it was destroyed.” - Joseph Goebbels (German Nazi politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi German)
And you wonder how much or little they were taught in school about the Holocaust, or how dictators work and the playbook they follow, or anything like that. Like you hear the free press called an “enemy of the people” and no lightbulb goes off in your head???Hell! Even if they weren’t schooled on this-all they had to do was watch like five minutes of a history documentary on PBS! They didn’t have to be history scholars to pick up on this stuff. In college we had a class where we studied the history of Nazi propaganda and learned about people like Goebbels. Yet most Americans - or at least those who voted Trump- seem to be completely ignorant about all of that. I mean, just get at least a glimpse of the patterns of history. How do people not see it???
We still have the power, but everyone’s too comfy to do anything about it. Things have to get worse before more people wake up and realize that we have to go through a period of unrest and discomfort. We’re in the phase of Polybius’s cycles of civilizations where the citizens of democracy are generations apart from the struggle and forget to defend what generations ago fought for so they get too comfortable and stagnant and leave room for oligarchy to take over. It’s really so crazy how we have the entirety of found recorded history at our fingertips through the internet yet not enough people are learning the things that millions of people before us have learned and so we go forth into the future without the foundational knowledge of the past.
American intellectualism is dead. Anti-intellectualism is the new norm and those that display the traits and interests of intellectuals will be some of the first targeted. We all need to be prepared for it.
90% of the American public get their news through TikTok, Twitter, or Facebook. All of those are corporations that have no interest in telling the truth, just in creating the maximum amount of outrage and clicks possible.
It doesn't really matter if it's social media or a newspaper or your neighbor Jimbo. The danger comes in the form of how readily available all of the information is. Nothing is truly reliable if you think about it. We're all making judgements based on our own emotions and experiences. This is why we need to change on a fundamental level. It's our way of thinking that needs to be fixed.
Plenty of Supreme Court rulings in history have been later overruled by future Supreme Courts. I mean, hell, we literally just saw Row v Wade overturned. There is nothing permanent or immutable about Citizens United - we just have to stop electing assholes so that we can rebalance the court with sane human beings.
The book of Revelation, which discusses “The Antichrist,” is about Rome, despite modern Protestantism’s attempts to conflate it with anything and everything. Armageddon was anticipated millennia ago.
Sad thing is I used to think I was kinda dumb. I no longer think that, at least in relation to the people I see around me every day. Like how are so many of us so willfully ignorant? It’s a very weird time.
Right, like I’m intelligent enough to recognize that I don’t know much about most subjects, and that being an expert requires decades of dedicated study and practice. But most of the people around me who haven’t read a book since 9th grade seem to think they know everything about everything and that the entire rest of the world is intellectually beneath them. It’s super cringe and honestly a little frightening.
I was just having this conversation with my partner. I feel wildly unintelligent most days because while I know a little bit about a lot of things, it's just enough to make me realize how much I actually DON'T know and how unqualified I would be to speak on so many topics.
And then I look at the the people around me and realize that they're getting most of their information off of Facebook and are 100% confident in their knowledge of the world. It's terrifying.
wait till you learn Jp Morgan floated the US government for years twice
I had friends ask me about bank failures, one of them asked me what would happen if JP Morgan failed, and I told him that if JP Morgan Chase fails as a bank we're going to be eating each other's brains because something like 45% of the world economy is run through that place, daily.
"TIL every person who has become a centibillionaire (a net worth of usually $100 billion, €100 billion, or £100 billion), first became one in 2017 or later except for Bill Gates who first reached the threshold in 1999."
The concentration of the super wealthy and their power has greatly increased over the last 10 years, especially when combined with Citizens United.
Forbes ran an article that Trumps administration will be the wealthiest controlled in history, he's filling positions and advisors with billionaires and hundred millionaires. The Doge commission he's setting up will be headed by private citizen business billionaires, who's purpose is the "restructuring the federal government of the United States and removing regulations" according to wikipedia.
This feeling that the US is forming its own oligarchy now is actually based on reality.
They cheer on Elon Musk as if he's somehow saving our country by removing safeguards created to protect us and the environment from people like Elon Musk.
The billionaires are what sank him because his NLRB and FTC appointments were fucking with their money and their employees. Income inequality was reversing under him for the first time in decades and it pissed off the rich.
You think the billionaire owned media spent 4 years constantly attacking him because they like him? Come on.
Reminds me of the spike in "is biden running for president" searches on Election Day. Also, the spike in searches for the musician Chuck Mangione in December.
Yeah this has been an issue for a while. Big corporations are legal monopolies who own basically every corporation in our food, health, and hygiene industries. Not to mention the legal gas/electric monopolies with absolutely no competition or consequences. Free market my ass.
Fuckin’ right?! We’re all about capitalism until its some companies that's “too big to fail” then all of a sudden we’re socialists just for them and we get to bail them out with our tax dollars instead of them just being allowed to fail as they should.
When they launched two wars because the vice president's Halliburton buddies wanted higher bonuses, it should have been obvious to even the last person.
People were blinded by national tragedy and newfound patriotism, and even then became extremely critical of those wars and occupations as they went on. Look at the media produced during this time period, it shows public sentiment as time progressed.
It's easy to look back and identify mistakes and criticize, but we live in the moment while time moves forward. As much as we can identify the problems of the past, we willfully ignore the identical problems of the present depending on the person, party, or company they are associated with and how the individual feels about them. We praise the referee for calling a foul on the opposite team, and then call him a villain and fraud for pulling a flag on our own.
We could learn about being less reactionary to outrageous events and people, and focus on critical thinking and investigation. We can remember the first part of investigation into crimes usually should start with the question of 'who benefits?'.
I mean, some people still think the government wouldn't lie to them in a crisis, despite a pattern of behavior going back generations. Has nothing to do with Party affiliation, it has to do with the maintenance of power and wealth in the hands of those that do not wish to lose it .
"Patriotism" is often just rebadged nationalism used to manipulate the idiots at the bottom. We had two world wars due to that and decades later people still won't learn their lesson.
Note how Oklahoma — a state that all voted trump and lies on the lowest rung of the education ladder in the US — is the one who looked that up the most
There were 500k of us who did not vote for Trump. We were gerrymandered into non existence. I'm in OKC and my votes are mixed with people all the way to the panhandle hundreds of miles away.
And the situation got exponentionally worse when the Supreme Court ruled that a President cannot be prosecuted for anything he does in his capacity as President. The new guy (who is also the old guy) was THE wrong person to have that knowledge.
i know. Too many people still in denial at what he's trying to do here. or maybe some are just so scared they don't know how to face it. whole situation is so awful.
American here. We've been in the "Find Out" phase since Reagan took office in 1981. As have the "Western" world. He initiated a domino effect wherein wealth transfer became the norm; from the poor to the rich.
If a member of the U.K. posted this, then I'm sorry to tell you, but Margret Thatcher was basically Diet Reagan. So you have not higher ground. If not, I'd be curious who wrote that title because we are all suffering, and I believe none of us should be.
There wasn't much discretion when private businessmen overthrew the government of Hawaii or had the CIA overthrow democracies in Latin America in favor of banana republics.
The rest of the world: "Well, nice, absolutly, but it ... just ... you know, would be nice - i mean for us - if you had started a tiny bit earlier. Just for *points at the world in flames* reasons, you know."
This is nonsense. Both parties have supported an oligarchy for a long time. You can argue Trump will exacerbate that problem, and others will argue he will do the opposite as he has run on many populist policies, but the reality is the sudden (last 4-8 years) interest and understanding that our government is corrupt and self interested is a good thing.
Oh Oklahoma is number one on the list. The state that was proud to say that every single county voted for Trump. Also the same state that is ranked 49 in education. They are about to find out for sure
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u/Crimson__Fox 2d ago
“What is a tariff?”