Well, this thread was entertaining until I read this comment

Not mad though, this is what people should be talking about

Asking (paraphrasing) "hey what are you wrong about but unwilling to admit?" and then sticking a (metaphorical) "I think Nickleback is a pretty good band" opinion in the middle of it feels like a harder challenge than the designers of AskLemmy were intending

Some people suck, definitely, but most people I've met in my life have been pretty good. The problem is that the sucky people are very determined to become powerful and inflict their suck on the rest of us.

Wright County Circuit Court Judge Craig Carter wrote, “If we don’t let a 16-year-old buy a six-pack of beer and a pack of smokes

I am normally the last person to give a shit about overly informal language, but for fucks fucking sake Missouri, you couldn't find one person in your state with the intellectual capacity to realize that "If the state does not permit the purchase of alcohol nor tobacco by minors" maybe sounds a bit more serious? Like, the actual ruling itself is an offensive embarrassment, but I really can't get over the fact that it's written like a freakin facebook post.

Law schools get absolutely stupid about the ritual of exams. Some of that is because every law school class has some ambitious and devious people in it who will try to cheat if they think they can get away with it, but a lot of it is because law is dominated by old assholes with distorted memories about how much they suffered and how hard they had to work back in the day and see it as their duty to inflict that imagined suffering on the next generation.

The congressionally mandated agreement allows transition aides to work with federal agencies and access non-public information and gives a green light to government workers to talk to the transition team.

...

Transition aides must sign statements that they have no financial positions that could pose a conflict of interest before they receive access to non-public federal information.

I'm sure none of them would ever lie about that /s

They kept the good stuff under wraps and tried to play it safe but not spooking anyone with "communism."

This is it exactly, and I feel like this bit of this Salon article (arc'd) perfectly captures why this happened

Tobias described a dynamic where campaign staff and candidates are hesitant to publicly push back on the assertions of billionaire donors like Hoffman, even if the campaign doesn't intend to let them direct policy.

Tobias indicated that the apparent influence of the super-wealthy has a dual effect. It undermines the Democratic Party’s support from its traditional base by steering policy discussions away from economically populist ideas that go against the interest of the wealthy, while simultaneously helping support candidates who are charismatic but don’t come into politics with a consistent ideological framework.

The influence of billionaires was directly early in Harris’ bid for the presidency when moguls like Mark Cuban warned the Harris campaign that a billionaire tax, for example, would be too aggressive, according to the Washington Post. Other business executives, like Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and Harris’ brother-in-law, also served as advisors and, according to the Atlantic, helped steer the campaign away from criticism of corporate power.

Been reliable allies to the United States

I think the way more important thing (if only because we can do something about it) are all the rich idiots ostensibly on our side getting out of pocket

Tobias described a dynamic where campaign staff and candidates are hesitant to publicly push back on the assertions of billionaire donors like Hoffman, even if the campaign doesn't intend to let them direct policy.

Tobias indicated that the apparent influence of the super-wealthy has a dual effect. It undermines the Democratic Party’s support from its traditional base by steering policy discussions away from economically populist ideas that go against the interest of the wealthy, while simultaneously helping support candidates who are charismatic but don’t come into politics with a consistent ideological framework.

The influence of billionaires was directly early in Harris’ bid for the presidency when moguls like Mark Cuban warned the Harris campaign that a billionaire tax, for example, would be too aggressive, according to the Washington Post. Other business executives, like Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and Harris’ brother-in-law, also served as advisors and, according to the Atlantic, helped steer the campaign away from criticism of corporate power.

Like Musk and Putin are shitheads who are going to do shithead things until we force them to stop, but at least our ostensible allies could stop screwing us over in the meantime

e; Just now noticing that I forgot which thread I was commenting in and I just relinked the OP, which was a silly thing to spend effort on, but spending the effort to delete it at this point also seems silly

Yeah, but they're also kinda canaries in the coal mine. If corps don't feel pressured to do this lip service (which I will fully admit is almost always meaningless in and of itself) that's a bad sign for society in general.

Nah, he was just looking out for himself and liked his odds better with the armed officers than with the angry mob. Fact is if he thought he could get away with imposing his ideal Christian dictatorship on all of us he'd do it in a heartbeat.

He's an asshole and an idiot who was stupid enough to work for Donald Trump in the first place, and thinking that moron dirtbags like him have anything valuable to say is only going to dig America into a deeper hole.

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

Author of the article? Probably yes. OP? No, this is a fascinatingly wrong opinion (imo).

Who fucking cares what Mike Pence thinks? Republicans hate his guts since Trump turned on him and everyone else has always hated him, and he doesn't have any political power, so his opinion has like negative news value these days. I guess mainstream media companies just can't resist his dynamic intellect and incredible charisma /s (that "/s" doesn't really feel sufficient, he makes Jeff Sessions look smart and Jared Kushner seem human)

Also Pence you forgot you aren't VP anymore

ABC also forgot, how the hell this moron's opinion is worth a whole ass news article is completely beyond me

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

They pretty clearly do matter since we're all getting what they're getting

Either way, this would explain the discrepancy between the average policy preferences of the generation as a whole and what the ones who voted in 2024 voted for, we're basically talking about different groups

Did Trump actually win more young voters overall or just a larger percentage of the voters who bothered to show up?

This only matters if people in the federal government are willing to say "You don't have any legal authority to tell me to do anything and I don't want to help you, so go away" which I wouldn't count on always being the case

A redundant efficiency department with no direct way to make changes, it's like nominating a sex trafficker to be the attorney general or something