• InternetUser2012@lemmy.today
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    18 days ago

    Back when Obama made it where you couldn’t be evicted and bailed out the auto industry, I had a friend that drove a car hauler. He wasn’t paying his house payment and lived for free for a year, and only had a job because of the bailout. He talked mad shit about the bailout and about people living and not paying their rent. This is republikkklown logic. I was blown away and said to him, he wouldn’t have a job or a place to live if it wasn’t for that. He said he’d live somewhere else and get a different job.

    Since then, he lives with his wife and child in his mom’s house with a shit job and complains about people being on welfare. They don’t get it.

    • Soup@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      If there’s any way they can punch down instead of address their own issues they’ll take it. It’s why they resort to going after made up nonsense or the most vulnerable.

      • SyntaxTerror@feddit.org
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        16 days ago

        This is happening right now in Germany. In two of our 16 federal states, the fascist party got around 30% of votes through fear mongering and propaganda. In one of the states, all of the remaining parties would be needed to create a functionable government with a majority, containing the whole spectrum from left to right. I am not sure about the future of this state.

        • Soup@lemmy.world
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          16 days ago

          So that one state is a minority government? If it weren’t for the fact the right is just objectively wrong about literally everything I actually prefer a setup where no one party has a majority. Majorities mean that the ruling party can just ignore everyone else and huge numbers of people just have effectively zero representation.

          • SyntaxTerror@feddit.org
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            16 days ago

            Election day was only yesterday, so the exploratory talks for possible coalitions are only just beginning. The party with the second most votes (conservative) had already announced that it does not want to form a coalition with the party “Die Linke” (our leftmost party, this is also the case nationwide) but also not with the fascists. This leaves only a minority government with a center-left party and a new party that has both radical right and radical left issues in its program (if I have understood this new party correctly). But “Die Linke” has already said that it would play along with a minority government, even if it is not part of it, as long as they agree or negotiate on the respective issues.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No. No.”

        Actor Craig T Nelson on how the government never helped him.

        • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          So help me there was some big deal right wing personality who talked about how the government shouldn’t subsidize education by saying that when he was a kid he wanted an education so he… went down to the public library and read books there. Not a hint of irony. Can’t remember exactly who it was, but the dissonance stuck with me.

            • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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              17 days ago

              The difficulty in locating the original is that Republicans are ALWAYS trying to destroy public education and public libraries, so it’s kind of like trying to Google John Smith.

          • the post of tom joad@sh.itjust.works
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            17 days ago

            Hmm, while it’s widely quoted i dunno if there is audio/video to find

            give me a bit to see if i can dig that up. If anyone wants to try as well it was in Simpsonville, South Carolina, by an unidentified person to congressman Bob Inglis.

            Edit: it was reported by the Washington Post as happening on July 28 2009. While the Simpsonville town hall website keeps audio and transcriptions of its meetings, it seems to have purged all meeting records before 2015. Anyone else wanna take a crack at it?

    • MrVilliam@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      I literally knew a girl who said this. She truly had no idea that they were the same thing, but rattled on about wanting it gone while benefiting from it.

      I also knew an older woman who hated Obama and said “he’s arrogant for naming that after himself.” She didn’t believe me that her favorite channel was the one who named it after him unofficially and that its official name was ACA.

      They truly just repeat bullshit until it sticks, and it usually works on the people who don’t bother to diversify their information sources. It’s so goddamn frustrating.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        She didn’t believe me that her favorite channel was the one who named it after him unofficially and that its official name was ACA.

        That can’t be true, because I’ve heard it called Obamacare 30 times. Everyone knows it!

        • jaybone@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          “Everyone says so”

          It’s like an introduction to fallacies in a freshman year philosophy class.

  • FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io
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    18 days ago

    This is why the GOP has fought to destroy the public education system for decades: It’s way easier to manipulate poorly educated people to vote against their own interests compared to well educated people who are more likely to have learned critical thinking.

    • jaybone@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      See here’s what I’m wondering, if they are so easy to manipulate, why can’t the left just manipulate them into voting democrat?

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
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        17 days ago

        They’re easy to manipulate if you play off their basic tribal fears and religious bigotry. The Democrats are far from a perfect party but they at the very least aren’t openly bigots.

      • orcrist@lemm.ee
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        16 days ago

        Because honesty and integrity matter for society. We’re trying to create a better world, not replace the Republicans with Democrats who behave just as badly but have a different name.

    • Fillicia@sh.itjust.works
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      17 days ago

      Same vibe as:

      “I won’t work overtime because I end up losing money on taxes”

      That’s not how tax brackets work!

      • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        That’s not how tax brackets should work. But sadly for last year’s state tax I came across it. [Example numbers] Previously I had 24,200 annual salary but zero tax as it was below 25,000. Even though personal deductions are 10,000, below 25 was considered too low to tax. This year, due to a mistake from employers I was paid for two weeks retroactively, now I have 25,300. Instead of taxing 300 above 25,000 the tax was for 15,300 after deduction. So I had to pay taxes which decreased the money below 25,000 which should not happen if income below 25,000 pays no tax.

        And considering there might be things like not qualifying for financial assistance and other things when you cross 25,000 (again example numbers), the actual benefit of making slightly below that, is higher than making slightly above that…

        So the system is putting a resistance to overcome poverty. Either you start making double of what you are making, or stay on your lane. Because trying to improve your situation by only a little is harmful.

          • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
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            15 days ago

            I know it’s an edge case. But the edge case of having to pay more on taxes on increasing income existing for incomes close to poverty line seems counterproductive, doesn’t it?

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      Lots of people working the service sector are trained to hate one another. The assumption is always that the other guy isn’t pulling their weight, never that the establishment is understaffed or the staff undertrained and overworked.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    16 days ago

    I’m not American, but this happens a lot more than you’d think.

    I live in Canada.

    A relative of a friend actually voted for a party called “the People’s party of Canada”, and one of their goals as a party was to eliminate subsidized housing. That relative of my friend… lived in subsidized housing and was not able to afford to have a home if not subsidized.

    They literally voted for a party that, if they had won, would have made them homeless.

    I don’t think that the PPC won a single district (giving them no seats in government); much to their benefit and their disappointment.

    Schools really need to teach critical thinking.

  • Kalkaline @leminal.space
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    17 days ago

    What they (Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, centrists) really want is emergency departments over run with patients who can’t get care for chronic conditions and then they have an excuse to repeal EMTALA. At that point they’ll be able to sink people deep into medical debt and when social security and Medicare/Medicaid fails to cover the costs then we can force medically disabled people into low wage jobs and take their assets to sell at pennies on the dollar to mega corps and further consolidate wealth in this country.

    We should instead create a pipeline for that wealth to flow through the lower and middle class on it’s way up to the top bringing the floor up and making sure basic infrastructure like medical care has the funding it needs.

  • dudinax@programming.dev
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    17 days ago

    “Social Security’s great for the old folks, but there’s no way it’ll be around when we’re old”

    Votes for the guy trying to destroy social security.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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      17 days ago

      I mean, technically that’s correct, if they keep voting for the guy trying to destroy social security lol

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        Ronald Reagan was cutting advertising telling people that Social Security was going to go bankrupt in a generation back in 1961.

        Then he took office in 1980 (after he’d predicted bankruptcy) on the position and “fixed” SS by raising taxes on low income Americans and gutting their benefits. But the subsequent multi-trillion dollar trust fund didn’t satisfy SS scalds. They still insisted it was going bankrupt, so Republicans raised taxes and gutted benefits again under Clinton and Gingrich, while introducing alternative privatized savings programs (401k, IRA, etc).

        But that still didn’t satisfy scalds. They tried to privatize the program in 2005 under Bush Jr. That failed, but we still got an earful about how SS was going to fail in the next 20 years if we didn’t do something. So then Obama tried to pass another round of cuts and tax hikes in 2013, but Republicans killed that too. So then Trump claimed we were headed to a Fiscal Cliff in 2017, and tried to privatize SS, but Republicans refused to pass that either.

        At this point, we’ve passed repeated deadlines under which SS was supposedly going to fail. The 1970s, the 1980s, the 2000s, the 2020s… We’re still waiting on the Big Cliff in 2037, but since COVID killed several million people far sooner than expected, that’s thrown the math of significantly.

        I anticipate we will continue to hear people predicting the end of SS until Congress finally finds the majority they need to kill it.

  • vga@sopuli.xyz
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    17 days ago

    Cool meme, but surely you realize that using a system and being against the system are not in conflict.

    Then again if they like the system and think it shouldn’t be dismantled and still vote for someone who wants to dismantle, that’s dumb stupid.

    • orcrist@lemm.ee
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      17 days ago

      Not sure how you can apply that principle here. If people don’t want insurance at all, we get it, but this is all about people who could not get insurance before and now are paying for this 100% optional thing.

      Of course they could be in favor of NHS or an equivalent. That’s certainly possible. But I think you were not going that direction with your logic.

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    I supported the ACA (though would’ve preferred a public option), but the one time I actually needed to use it, was for my Dad when his private insurance from his job kicked him off after retirement, the rates and coverage seemed bad, like it was just such a hassle with no great benefits. It’s only when I realized my Dad could still get Tricare that I switched over to that and that was a million times better (even more reason for govt-funded healthcare). I have no idea why my Dad hadn’t been using it the whole time either, he probably wasted tens of thousands of dollars getting private insurance. I still think ACA is a step in the right direction, BUT public option still needs to happen, Fuck Joe Lieberman for blocking that.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      It’s only when I realized my Dad could still get Tricare that I switched over to that and that was a million times better (even more reason for govt-funded healthcare).

      One of the biggest flaws of the ACA is how it’s engineered to be worse than employee sponsored care. Can’t actually just open up Medicare For All or you’ll make the private insurance system sad.

    • EnderWiggin@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      The ACA is good when you actually reach out to a patient care “assister” for support. You can get rates WAY lower than advertised if you work with someone who can help navigate it. I think the program is actually tremendous, but it’s been made intentionally cumbersome and difficult to use by the folks trying to kill it. I’ve used it twice while out of work back in 2016 and again over the pandemic and had completely free plans that covered my “tier 3” prescriptions and specialist (rheumatology) appointments.

  • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    You can mathematically group the people in your life in such a way so that half of the people you know are stupider than the other half.
    I swear to fuckin’ god, man, politics make it real easy to tell who goes in which half. It’s not a perfect method, but it works at least 85% of the goddamned time.

  • Pickle_Jr@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    17 days ago

    In Kansas it’s a hot issue to expand ACA benefits and has widely popular support. Yet we for some reason keep on voting I’m Republicans whose major issues are just removing tax brackets.