I’m not who you were asking, but I’ve got at least two problems with this,

The biggest problem is cherry picking examples to reach a conclusion while ignoring contradicting evidence. We had plenty of more successful pop culture stuff that had overtly progressive and feminist themes, and conservative stuff doing well isn’t really a new phenomenon this year (the article even points this out where it talks about American Sniper and Passion of the Christ).

The second biggest problem is that the numbers underlying this are suspect - it’s easy to manipulate streaming numbers and book sales, and church groups are taking whole congregations to movies if they think it’s a culture war win. Also, reading Sydney Sweeney and hawk-tuah girl as conservative wins are stretches that the author never really justifies (not to mention seeing Beyonce getting shit out by the CMAs as anything other than a sign that country music executives don’t like independent black women who already have successful music careers beyond their influence).

Which gets to a problem that might only bug me, but this article has nothing to say about any of the art it’s bringing up and misses what I think could be an actually interesting conversation - what does the kind of art conservatives are getting into tell us about them? Like, the fact that they’ve meme-d around hawk-tuah girl, when did conservatives get “sex positive”? (rape positive if we’re being honest, but that’d be a conclusion an article could build towards by actually engaging with the material)

e; ttpos

Meanwhile, the success of Chappell Roan, Inside Out 2, and the Fallout TV series tell us absolutely nothing /s

I don’t see how you could possibly see his attacks on migrants, trans kids, etc. as anything other than punching down.

Also, why are you holding the Democratic party accountable for down voters here or other randos online who say stuff about Trump supporters? They’re pretty distinct groups, and the fact is elected Dems bent over backwards to talk as nicely about Trump supporters as they could.

And I actually think that was a big part of what I think their real voter engagement problem was, which is that everything Dems say comes off like inauthentic over polished political bullshit to a lot of voters. I think simultaneously trying to say “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” and “Trump supporters are not garbage” sounds insane (like, if you’re supporting an existential threat to democracy you just inarguably are a garbage human being, sorry not sorry).

I don’t think we should make it a centerpiece of our message or waste a bunch of time on it, but if we get a direct question about Republican party supporters we have to respect our potential voters enough to say “Yes, they are garbage, roughly 35-40% of this country are bad people who are willing to hurt others to get what they want and that’s why it’s so important for the rest of us to put aside our difference and work together to stop them.”

That is a completely accurate depiction of what every member and supporter of the Democratic party has said, which has certainly been much more hurtful than Republicans’ repeated threats to rape and kill us /s

I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’d want to be friends with scumbags. If we had a democracy in this country we wouldn’t have to give a shit what rich weirdos who live vastly different lives than most of us think.

Oh I’m sure they exist, there’s a lot of selfish scumbags in this country unfortunately. Thank goodness they only get one vote no matter how much money they hoard.

If Biden seriously made that offer in b) I would be very strongly tempted to stay home on election day.

People keep lying to themselves and trying to believe that Trump is the problem and that he’s not just the most visible symptom of a Republican party that crossed the line way back in the 1960s when they started campaigning to get the KKK’s votes and undermining our foreign policy/national security for political wins. Haley, Romney, Cheney, etc. - they are all threats to the country as is anyone who collaborate with any of them.

And when they completely ignore her request (that she’s making knowing full well she has no leverage to make it happen) she’ll keep being a member of the Republican party and keep raising funds for them anyway

Yeah, totally agreed, the “they want these things and allow themselves to be cowed by threats” thing was exactly my point, I should probably edit that to be more clear

Also, beyond the call to arms for vigilantes, you would also see a much much more aggressive response from law enforcement (like, compare their response to the Bundys occupying some territory vs the cop city protesters)

e; I’m adding an edit message at the top of this comment - don’t make death threats against Republican lawmakers. They’re not actually being intimidated into doing things, they’re just using these death threats as an excuse, and the cops and prosecutors are going to go way harder on anyone left leaning, so it won’t accomplish anything besides putting you in a prison cell.

If this is what works on these shitbags then clearly the problem here is that they aren’t getting enough death threats from people who want to keep their democracy in this country

Republicans fall in line because they’re amoral dirt bags who never had any interest in serving this country and just got elected to help themselves, the fact that they can be intimidated into serving Donald Trump is just further proof of this painfully obvious state of affairs

It just rings extremely hollow after he spent the last three years shoveling money at state police departments that are going to keep on harassing and brutalizing people by the tens of thousands for marijuana possession, not to mention the fact that he could reschedule and effectively legalize marijuana on a federal level but chooses not to do so

More generally speaking, you just can’t be surprised that people are skeptical of Biden when his supporters constantly ignore context and straight up lie to pretend that he’s someone he’s not

After an Israeli bomb has blown your grandmother, children, and whole extended family into chunks of viscera, who knows what you’d overlook

FTR, I personally don’t support the intentional targeting of civilians or the use of rape as a weapon of war, but I can understand how some people end up in that very evil headspace given what they’ve been through

I’m personally hoping for imprisonment, financially debilitating fines, and prohibitions from founding or serving in any kind of corporate or nonprofit organization*, and for that set of punishments to happen to every single scumbag who had the complete disregard for morality and good sense that was required to ever do a favor for Donald Trump. Do that sort of thing to the right 200 or so people in this country and maybe our politics can stop being so fucked up all the time.

*As an officer/broad member/decision-maker, if they end up with a job as a receptionist or custodian at the local YMCA that’s fine

Republicans in Michigan testified in a Lansing court that Donald Trump’s campaign was directly involved with putting together a team to create a false certificate that said he won the 2020 presidential election.

Former Michigan Republican Party Communications Director Tony Zammit said he thought people such as Trump lawyer Shawn Flynn had taken advantage of people who ended up signing the document.

“I thought they were going along with what the lawyers were telling them,” he said in a preliminary hearing Thursday, according to The Detroit News. Zammit said the meeting took place on December 14.

So senior Republican party officials in Michigan are just in the habit of signing their name to legal paperwork without asking what it means? If we can’t trust your signature how can we trust anything you say?

No, the Trump campaign was a bunch of criminals who came to you with the idea of doing a crime, but MI Republicans knew or should have known what was being asked of them. Everyone involved in this on the Trump campaign side and Republican party side belongs in prison.

Oh, boo hoo, he didn’t have any friends and had to be well fed and lonesome in a mansion

He should have fucking hung, for prolonging the Vietnam war by five years and hundreds of thousands of bodies if for nothing else

Fair enough, but I think this article is reasonably critical

But critics warn the system is unproven at best — and at worst, providing a technological justification for the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

“It appears to be an attack aimed at maximum devastation of the Gaza Strip,” says Lucy Suchman, an anthropologist and professor emeritus at Lancaster University in England who studies military technology. If the AI system is really working as claimed by Israel’s military, “how do you explain that?” she asks

…

The Israeli military did not respond directly to NPR’s inquiries about the Gospel. In the November 2 post, it said the system allows the military to “produce targets for precise attacks on infrastructures associated with Hamas, while causing great damage to the enemy and minimal harm to those not involved,” according to an unnamed spokesperson.

But critics question whether the Gospel and other associated AI systems are in fact performing as the military claims. Khlaaf notes that artificial intelligence depends entirely on training data to make its decisions.

“The nature of AI systems is to provide outcomes based on statistical and probabilistic inferences and correlations from historical data, and not any type of reasoning, factual evidence, or ‘causation,’” she says. “Given the track record of high error-rates of AI systems, imprecisely and biasedly automating targets is really not far from indiscriminate targeting.”

Some accusations about the Gospel go further. A report by the Israeli publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call asserts that the system is being used to manufacture targets so that Israeli military forces can continue to bombard Gaza at an enormous rate, punishing the general Palestinian population.

This should be re-titled, “how to argue when both people are coming at it in good faith.”

Precisely.

I also like to jump on those clarifying statements when I see them with supporting information/links and to just try to get a conversation going with the clarifier that buries the troll’s comments down thread.

I would counter though, by saying the vast majority of people are not agents of any kind of evil, on purpose at least, and are simply misled.

Yeah, I definitely think this is right, and for the vast majority of people/conversations this is all great advice and the mindset you should start a discussion with. But if/when the other person shows they’re not going to be reasoned with, it’s time to stop talking and either start looking for enough allies that you no longer need the unreasonable person’s votes/support or looking for ways to make the unreasonable person’s life difficult to the point where they want to compromise with you to make whatever you’re doing stop (I’m not saying to break any laws, I’m thinking litigation, investigations, leaking information to journalists, organizing press conferences and protests etc., things like that).

Of course… your debate partner is not an agent of evil

This is just not always true in political debates, there are some straight up evil people out there.

The strategies articulated here are great ones for engaging in a debate if your goal is simply to learn more as an individual (a worthy and important thing we should all do sometimes), but they’re not necessarily the right approach to enacting political change and bettering society as a whole.

This is looking at lawyers who have already been proven to or admitted misconduct, so none of this really applies.

But while we’re at it - pretty funny how when it’s a question of powerful people being held accountable there’s this “no, we must move more slowly and get this exactly right” nonsense, but when it’s poor people in criminal court judges are all “the fact that the officer’s testimony deviated from their written report in a couple small details isn’t important, let’s move on” and we have to wait a decade for the Innocence Project to come along