I was in college when this happened. Absolutely nobody thought he could win until Florida was called. Trump himself seemed mildly surprised in his victory speech.

Honestly this is sort of ridiculous.

• Biden is a Washington insider now, but that’s because he had a lifetime to make something of himself. He grew up in the middle class
• I think we can all agree Obama was an outsider without any sort of elaboration
• Bill Clinton grew up dirt poor in a state that basically only makes the news when something stupid happens.

All three had to climb the ladder in a huge way, that simply wouldn’t have been possible in a lot of other countries.

I also feel like Trump embodies the whole “anyone can be president” in his own sort of fucked up way. Trump obviously was born into immense wealth and enjoyed tremendous status, but he was in no way ever considered leadership material by America’s political elite. His election was a complete “wtf” moment and wouldn’t have happened in most countries. In a more rigid system we’d probably have had something like a Hillary Clinton v Jeb Bush election, which strictly speaking would have been better than what we got but also let’s be real we would have all hated it.

I’m not saying America is some pure meritocracy. Bush was a third generation political dynasty member. His opponents were also pretty well connected. It’s just that he’s only one of several presidents to get elected in the past 30 years.

Look man at this point saying either party has a monopoly on pedophilia is sort of ridiculous. It’s very obviously a rich/powerful thing, not a left/right thing.

I don’t see how anyone doesn’t understand that at some point. Diddy’s arrest was less than 24 hours ago.

No, but the idea that any random white guy could get away with what Trump gets away with is also laughable. Since 2016 there have been a million and one politicians trying to act Trumpian, and none of them enjoyed the nearly success Trump has.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, Trump seems to have this larger than life persona that has allowed him to escape scandal after scandal that would doom literally any other politician.

As a fun sidenote, look up DC Mayor Marion Barry. Dude made Trump look pedestrian.

Look man I don’t know how old you are, but this type of comment is what I’d expect a teenager to write. it’s not just that you’re acting like a massive asshole; You’re using insults and arguments that I’d expect a teenager to come up with. It’s the sort of argument that only works if the vast majority of people in the audience are already both deeply in your corner and also immature. Otherwise you’d just come off looking like a massive jackass.

Do you have any experience talking to people outside of an echo chamber? How does that go for you?

This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.

There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.

To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.

Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.

An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.

The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.

Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.

Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.

A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.

The CHIPS bill was a massive disappointment. It was cut down to 1/5th from the intended size due to house committee BS, and then the Biden administration decided to use it as a platform to enact a bunch of wholly unrelated social policies.

I’m not saying that jobs should not offer onsite daycare or have lofty environmental goals. However this was a bill designed to ensure the US maintains an advantage in a critical industry. Maybe put that stuff in another bill.

All the vegans I meet in real life are normal ass people.

Yeah I just think it’s funny a Senator took time out of his day to be like “we need a lobster emoji”

Does anyone remember when one of Maine’s US Senators lobbied Unicode to create a lobster emoji?

I feel like Game of Thrones could have had Harry Potter levels of cultural staying power if they didn’t completely fuck the ending.

Different divisions. This is more akin to when Sony decided to stop making floppy disks. The market is there for now, but it’s just not worth it from a financial perspective.

The amount of people burning their own blu rays is minimal. Even the type of people who emphasize owning their own content just use a NAS system.

Honestly at this point fuschia’s continued existence feels less like “investing in a product that will yield dividends long-term” and more “middle manager desperately trying to justify their job”.

Honestly if they got the cost down and figured out a better interaction mechanism than an app, I could see it being useful for older or disabled individuals.

For example, imagine someone is 55. They are still with it, and decently active for this age. However they have arthritis in their hands that makes tasks that require dexterity mildly uncomfortable. These kinds of shoes would be a pretty big boon for them in terms of staying active.

The issue is that they tried to make it some cool fashion accessory for Gen Z sneaker heads to buy.

You can tell the exec who greenlit this was a boomer because they went with IBM.

An AI drive through was always going to be difficult. IBM simply isn’t the company that can do stuff like that anymore, and they haven’t been for decades at this point.

We went through this with the whole “Windows 10 in S Mode”. The end result was a lot of pissed off consumers, both because of OS limitations and the fact the the HW specs of those devices were crap.

I’m convinced this was a foreign attempt to stir up and/or signal boost controversy.

Dude is the mayor of Baltimore. A DEI hire in that city would be a wealthy white man. It’s also had serious issues for decades regardless of who was in charge.

There isn’t an American alive who doesn’t know this. Trump commented that Baltimore was a rat infested shit hole. Obama commented that Baltimore had serious issues. There was a fucking Broadway musical where the opening song is how much the protagonist loves Baltimore where she giddily describes being surrounded by filth, sex offenders, and addicts.

There are different types of ignorance. Calling the mayor of Baltimore incompetent due to DEI falls under the “living under a rock for several decades” type of ignorance that I have a hard time believing is common among Twitter users.

The irony of this being posted on Lemmy.

I think the frustration comes from the fact that this could have easily been avoided. The primaries didn’t have to be a formality.

All new Google TVs have a “dumb mode” that you can configure at startup.