[opsnooperfax]

I don’t think blue team good, red team bad is a very mature take on US politics. When it comes to substantive policy, voters do not get a choice. The same wars will be fought. The same lobbies will have their way. Just because one side will make tactless, self-deifying inaugural speeches about how the sea levels will cease to rise and the Earth will start to heal, that does not make it so.

I think that if these sensors were providing useful, actionable information more valuable than their maintenance cost is not well supported.

[tremon]

The only sensible take is blue team good cop, red team bad cop; they're still both cops, working for the system and against you. You can see from the voting record that there's always just enough dems to defect to pass through any laws that the GOP wants through. The Democrats in congress are still guilty of treason against the Constitution, the number of exceptions to that rule remains in the single digits.

The only non-violent way to save your country is to primary all current incumbents and convict both party leadership for treason.

[tombert]

Yeah, no, it actually is mature enough.

I hate divisive language like this, but Trump's only major concrete "policy" (if you can call it that) during his 2024 campaign was that he was going to somehow lower grocery prices by instituting tariffs, so basically "I'm going to lower prices by raising prices".

That kind of idiotic quasi-doublespeak should have been a disqualifier for anyone with at least a two-digit IQ, but apparently it's not. The only scenarios that I can see for this:

1) People actually believed the idiotic notion that "other countries" pay the tariffs.

This is so idiotic because even if that were true, which it's not, those costs would still be ruled into the price. "No such thing as a free lunch" is very literally the first thing I learned in high school economics.

If people are that stupid then they can be blamed for their idiotic decisions to vote for a despot.

2) They didn't believe in the tariff rhetoric, and wanted to vote for Trump based on a nebulous "personality".

This is stupid. If you really are voting for people because you think you'd "like to have a beer with them", then you should be blamed when bad things happen from that idiotic decision.

----

Kamala wasn't a great candidate, but I really hate this sort of "both sides"-ing people do to try and engage in apologetics for people's ridiculous decision to vote for the guy who, as far as I can tell, has literally no expertise in anything.

[kxrm]

> People actually believed the idiotic notion that "other countries" pay the tariffs.

Many believed this, think about how many Americans do not understand the Progressive Tax system. I believe it has been intentional for many years to keep up some of these misunderstanding of basic governance.

[tombert]

I mean, I guess?

I don't really feel like I needed to be taught that tariffs would raise prices. I'm not some hypergenius, it really seems pretty obvious to me.

[ArmadilloGang]

You are engaged in a hacker news debate after 11 PM. You are not exactly a spitting image of the average American adult.

[tombert]

No one has ever accused me of being "average", I'm definitely a weird dude.

I don't think I'm that smart though.

[asdff]

Half the country can't read at a 6 grade level. You are in fact one of the hypergeniuses.

[watwut]

This talking point mostly just shows people dont know what those grade in literacy means.

[FireBeyond]

Yeah, but at the risk of being unoriginal, "Think about how dumb the average American is... and then realize half of the country is dumber than him."

Or more practically and relevant to this? Number one Google search on Election Day? "Did Biden drop out?" Not the world's most informed electorate.

[kakacik]

Average IQ in US hovers around 100. It means half of population is lower, from what I've found online it seems like a standard bell curve distribution.

You can't talk about higher concepts with people on the low part of the scale, I mean come on we are adults and experienced this in our lives 1000x over. It can easily end up insulting to them or make them feel (even more) sidelined. trump's campaign aimed very effectively in that below-100 crowd, for the second time. Easy to understand statements even if completely incorrect, appeal to negative emotions instead of rational facts.

At the end, everybody knew what kind of POS they are dealing with and everybody voted accordingly. Talks about strong/weak candidate are beyond useless and pathetic excuse and attempt to shift blame - even if you have a choice between strong leader hitler and weaker freedom-liking candidate its ridiculous to state 'but the other person was weak so I went against all my moral values'. If one actually has them - maybe thats core of the issue, many people like to pretend but deep inside are not that nice or caring.

[Hikikomori]

IQ tests are designed to always have 100 as the average, which is why its not going up over time.

[xp84]

All the tariffs were stupid, Trump is mostly stupid and completely corrupt, but voters felt a justifiable need to punish the Democrats for a presidency where they were gaslit every day. Inflation? What inflation? And the economy is great, actually! Biden’s mind is sharp as a tack! etc. That’s before you get into culture war social issues topics, where the Democrats were miles away from the average non-blue-haired voter. And not only that, Dems ran another campaign with a tone of “Everyone who disagrees with me is an evil and/or stupid bigot” - H. Clinton’s winning strategy.

I was glad to see Harris lose, as I thought losing to Trump would sufficiently humiliate all those responsible for pushing the asinine platform and unlikeable candidate on us into changing their ways. Sadly, Dems still learned absolutely nothing and changed nothing. “A perfect campaign.”

[xp84]

Case in point, the several proud Democrats I've offended, who can't refute any of this reality, the downvote being their only copium.

[tombert]

It's just the same old "blame everyone but the idiots that voted for Trump" excuse that was stupid in 2024, 2025, and 2026.

I didn't downvote your comment (and couldn't even if I wanted to because it's a direct reply), but I did think the comment was pretty silly.

[xp84]

As long as you believe only "idiots" vote for the other party, you still don't get it.