Breaking: U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether to revisit marriage equality
The justices will privately decide whether to hear a challenge to same-sex marriage brought by former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis.
You're viewing a single thread.
All the people that didn't vote are partly responsible for this.
Last presidential election had the highest turnout of voters and youth voters in American history.
Our problem is much more depressing and much more deeply baked-in.
More than 1 in 3 people didn't vote.
That's probably accurate but not unusual, it still had some of the highest turnout in history and the data backs this up, we didn't have as much of turnout problem as an attention span and informed voter problem.
The problem was more revealed in exit polling determining that people largely didn't see a difference between candidates, saw no difference between Harris and Biden (kinda true) but saw Trump as a "lets see how he does" option because he wasn't in charge when egg prices went up.
Studies have shown the Trump beat out Dems in all categories and it has a lot to do with people largely losing interest in politics and just marginally paying attention to social media propaganda, which skews heavily right. Financial uncertainty often pushes populations towards conservatism and authoritarian leaders, and Dems are very, very bad at this kind of populism.
Excuse me, but HOW THE FUCK do you LOSE INTEREST in politics?!
Is there too much lead in people's food or something?
Almost everything has become media entertainment, media is about capturing attention-spans because attention is monetized via commercials and clicks on affiliates and the like. This has led to an arms-race in grabbing attention faster and faster, so now the general population, and I mean MOST people, pay less attention to anything that requires patience or does not provide immediate dopamine hits.
This is just the state we're in, it's widespread and it's a massive problem and AI is making it even worse every day.
The average grade-school teacher reports they have to design curriculums around 3 - 7 minutes maximum attention-spans, that anything more than a few minutes at a time and kids will start fidgeting, looking around and acting disinterested, nor can teachers even give kids homework anymore because they use ChatGTP to finish it most of the time. Adults aren't in much better shape. About a full quarter of America's adult population are functionally illiterate, meaning while they can usually work out words and text messages via context, they can't read an article or a book, they can't assemble paragraphs to form narration in their minds.
This is why we're in this mess right now, because many people are exploiting this trend and only a handful of people are raising awareness about it and trying to get us broadly to put the electronic devices down. Which nobody wants to do, nor can we all do because of the need to use smartphones and computers in our daily lives.
I think you're right on most things here. But I do think there have been studies showing that attention spans have never really been that high to begin with. Not that catering to that is good or bad, necessarily. But I just wanted to point that out.
Do you have any proposed solutions?
I think it's a natural tendency for natural systems, including human minds, to seek the easiest paths and short attention spans are a consequence of not needing longer attention, but it still does our society harm when products and entertainment exploit this ingrained tendency or function to make the problem worse.
It's natural to want high-calorie food because we have millions of years of survival and struggle wired into us, and only about a century or two of plentiful pastries and chicken nuggets whenever want. Same deal and we need to start looking at our minds the way we look at our diets.
To that end, some places have restricted access to social media for youth, which is a good start. But we really need to push the idea that consuming slop at an early age is as bad as consuming junk food. Since we don't really have a handle on obesity and childhood medical issues due to diet despite being well aware of the dangers... I don't have a lot of hope for our mental diets, being less understood and more socially acceptable to consume mental slop constantly.
It's possible things will crash really bad and we will have to correct a problem, post-hoc and figure out how to make better outcomes well after we suffer a lot of harm, IE: leaded gasoline, ozone-depleting chemicals, etc. But it's also possible that we won't make that correction and we will have a societal setback as the class-war becomes very different, a division between people who can hold a thought and those who can't.
We may also see AI radically change the landscape entirely. There is going to be less incentive to even try to correct the problem if each of us has an AI agent or tool that gives us the outcomes we want or provides answers no matter how fried we are. Or maybe better AI systems will become better tutors and companions and we will see the situation improve. It's way too soon to say how that's going to pan out. It might be our most pivotal and least predictable period in human history right now.
I don't mean to be mean, but you need to talk to more people.
A lot of people in America simply do not believe they can change anything. Either because they don't know how, they've never shown up to a town hall, or because the only politics they hear about are from states and federal buildings they'll never live or work in, or because the only politics they hear about outside of Trump being a dipshit is some 2% thing that will do something which might lead to something else maybe, or because South Park taught them that caring about anything is cringe and, actually, the smartest people spend all day making fun of anyone with an idea.
I mean, let me ask another question: how the fuck do you lose interest in unions? And yet, the US lost interest a looong time ago.
It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Things don't change because they don't participate. They don't participate because things didn't change.
90% of things people claim are the reason they don't vote could be changed if they fucking voted.
There is an element of people wanting their fast food and being displeased that civil rights took multiple decades to build.
That said, it isn't just their fault. The Democrats, generally, do not know how to be exciting. As much as people say they're not interested, it's not entirely true; there is a spark that has yet to be ignited.
Also, even if you're not counting the large swath of the population who are chronically attention-span handicapped, the average middle-class American family has to work 6 - 7 days a week to support the increasing costs of raising families and having homes.
Most of these people don't watch the news, they barely have time to watch a disney movie with their kids Sunday night before browsing social media for 30 minutes and going to bed to start the week all over. People are incredibly overworked and distracted. Politics doesn't seem to touch you in this kind of life because the US protects the middle-class to some degree, as long as you're putting in your 80 - 100 hours of work each week between yourself and your partner, you will just barely make the bills and expenses, you will have just enough for expenses and never enough to stop or take a break.
These families are good people, they just don't have a margin in their life to care about politics. This is the system that's been engineered to keep people from mobilizing and working together.
Mostly they just want both sides to burn down and be replaced with something less horrible
But the right has enough supporters to win.
And at this point, short of the SCOTUS getting overthrown before the finish, ushering in fascism, all the politics are just arranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
A bit a of a childish all-or-nothing argument.
They can keep hoping for unattainable perfection. In the meantime, others are happy to take power.
A bit a of a childish all-or-nothing argument.
Ohh screw that. We've got a bunch of sleepers in the left that they activate everytime the fucking race gets close, 90% of the left is complicit, selfish and owned. There's nothing going on in the governemnt right now that's ok and getting the left back in won't change shit.
We need accountability, checks and balances and the scotus needs guaranteed representation
childish my ass, keep hoping for things to just get better and stay as they are or go back a couple years and watch it collaps around you. That's myopic and a pipe dream
It's hard to rig an entire country, but it gets a lot easier when you really only have to rig 7 states. Then it gets even easier when all you have to do is program the voting machines to switch the votes in a single race. That's how we ended up with MILLIONS of ballots with a straight Democratic ticket, but with Trump at the top.
Do you know a single person that voted that way? Have you ever heard of a specific person who did? Has the media ever trotted out a single person, anywhere in the country, that voted that way? I've never heard of a single example, and yet within minutes of the race going to Trump, the Dems were proclaiming that he'd won "fair & square," before the dust had even settled to start looking at an investigation.
They just conceded the election security of the race from the outset, as if they'd decided in advance that they knew they'd lose by cheating, and they didn't know how to stop it, so they planned in advance to pretend it didn't happen, rather than explain their spectacular dereliction to the nation.
That race was the worst example of election fraud in American history, and it was done in the wide open, and the Dems did absolutely nothing to stop it or investigate it. This was the one race that Donald Trump absolutely had to win to stay out of prison. He has cheated at literally EVERYTHING in his entire life. Now we are supposed to believe that the one race where his life literally depends on winning, is the one, single instance in his entire life where he decided to play totally by the rules, and NOT cheat.
Please, others may be that stupid, but I'm not.
Do you know a single person that voted that way? Have you ever heard of a specific person who did?
You likely don't live in a conservative or even liberal area. The demographics of the last election might also be throwing people, as a lot of people you wouldn't expect had their hate and fear ramped up and didn't pay much attention past "Trump is gonna hurt people you don't like" so we had a lot of young people, people of color and even goddamn immigrants voting for Trump.
Have you not seen the vast neighborhoods of Trump yard signs and stickers? I know you and others want to believe that the election was handedly stolen but it was mostly just manipulated via social engineering on larger scales. Easier to do, and pans out in the exit polling and the large number of Americans who straight up say they didn't really care who won and stuck to Trump because they saw Harris as more Biden.
The reality is at once more depressing and more disappointing, so I get why it's easier to believe that nobody actually supports Trump. And honestly I don't think people do, it's just that the people who matter most in electoral politics stopped caring.
First of all, I live in Florida, sooo Conservative region? Yeah.
Trump/Putin/Musk - two of the worst foreign Psychopathic Oligarchs in the world, with infinite access to money and the best and most experienced computer programmers and hackers on the planet, with no loyalty or patriotism towards the United States, teamed up with an American Psychopathic Oligarch wannabe, who also has no loyalty, all viewing America as a big, fat, lazy RICH target to be ruthlessly and mercilessly exploited.
All they had to do was swap the votes for one race, in 7 states. That kind of cheating would be difficult for individual Congressional or Senate races, but not for the presidential race. All that was need was access to the voting machines, and Putin's hackers have no doubt been working on that for years.
We all saw it happen. Both Trump and Musk had multiple meetings with Putin, by phone and in person, during the Biden administration, and they didn't try to hide it. It was all reported widely in the media.
And now EVERYTHING that was promised in P2025 is happening, and STILL people want to pretend that it was a fair election.
They told us they were going to steal the election, they did everything they said, the results are exactly what they said they would be, and yet, somehow there are people who still believe that MAGA won fairly.
WTF is WRONG with everybody?
I'm not saying they won "fairly" because there is no such thing. I am saying that if we shift the blame for this conservative sweep that is not just isolated the US, on election rigging and not a massive problem with our society, our communication and our social systems, we are going to fucking lose harder next time. It's denial. It's the same as pretending nazis were inhuman monsters and not regular people like any of us.
It's dangerous.
It's as dangerous as fucking binary thinking where we can't accept that there is nuance. The left is as bad as the right in this. If someone says "There may be complications" that doesn't mean "DUR DEE DUR TRUMP DID NOTHING WRONG."
There are shades of grey in the world. The right doesn't understand this, but if you CAN understand this, you are better than them, you are smarter than them. Otherwise you're just another vulnerable mind in a world that now preys on vulnerable minds.
THEY WON BY CHEATING! If we don't address that single issue, they will do it worse next time, and he is going to win in 2028 with 98% of the "vote," and use that to justify ignoring the Constitutional prohibition of a third term.
You can't reasonably expect to win against a election fraud scheme that has already succeeded once, and is in the process of getting even more streamlined.
You can keep trying to find the people who refused to vote in the most attended election in history, but it will never be enough to outpace vote switching, it only gives them more votes to switch.
Capital letters don't really change anything. I've said what I said based on decades of watching these things, I know how the world works. If we chase around cheating evidence we will lose even more. It's not how the game works. The real problem is people and what Americans think and feel, if you fix any level of cheating you will still have that as a much worse problem.
But this is also why we don't see politicians going after election fraud to any large degree, because they also understand how things work.
I've been following politics since the 60s, so I know what's going on, too. One thing I've learned in life is that you can't let the guy who is always winning by cheating to continue. It is highly demoralizing to everyone else. It doesn't help that the cheater usually rubs his ill-gotten wins in everyone's faces.
They have developed a wide-ranging system of cheating, that just evolves and gets stronger. You will NEVER win an election until you address it. Even if you do manage to win one, they will just use their short period out of power to improve their cheating strategy to win next time, which is exactly what they did between 2020 and 2024.
The system is broken, and it needs to be fixed. Just using the broken system harder is only going to make things worse. When an appliance is acting up, you don't just pound on it, you fix it properly.
Good luck with that.
The Trump/ Putin/ Musk cabal rigged the election, and we ALL know it.
He won EVERY swing state? Puh-leeeze. I've got good Critical Thinking Skills, and they have been screeching in my brain ever since Election Day 2024.
Unfortunately, we have an entire civilization with "screeching messages" in their ears right now, we have a population largely reactive and only thinking that they're thinking, people are fed nonsense, a deluge of headlines that blur reality and fantasy. I have to explain to people working in my team in the morning huddles when they are chatting that no, we did not in fact discover Atlantis and a mermaid kingdom. No, there are no giant floating eyeballs in space. We did not discover a city on Mars, aliens have (as far as we know) NOT been in contact with anyone, much less politicians. When media and headlines on stories are designed to sensationalize, people stop paying attention and stop believing anything but what they want to hear, and you can change people's ideas what they want to hear.
I'm quite sure efforts were made to swing the election manually, via voting machines and ballots, maybe those efforts made a difference, but a lot of people who have never been involved in the logistics of voting in a country this size have no concept of how hard it is to rig. Remember, this was part of the huge contention with Trump when he lost in 2020, he claimed fraud and because of those claims everyone got a better glimpse into how secure the US's elections are. They are secure simply because the scale of the operation needed to change results is staggering.
I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, but I think the election was stolen via more subtle and broad, sweeping methods, which is more efficient and less easy to track down individuals responsible - I am talking large-scale social engineering. It doesn't take a lot and it doesn't give back a lot, but it can be enough to turn a tide, it can be enough to shift perspectives just enough, it can be enough to capitalize on public mistrust and frustration and it can select for the people most vulnerable to specific, tailored messaging.
And this was before AI was what it is today, I expect the next elections are going to be even more baffling.
"The overall turnout of eligible voters in the 2024 general election was 63.7%. This was lower than the 2020 record of 66.6% but higher than every other election year since at least 2004."
People did vote. Constantly blaming the small group of disillusioned voters is just weird.
"The small group" of more than one in three people that didn't vote.
Oh, you were actually aiming at 100% turnout. Well, that's just silly.
mandatory voting looks like a small price to pay for a (more) healthy democracy, Australia seems to be doing a lot better than the other British colonies right now
of course with the US, something like that would have to be combined with an extensive overhaul of public education (moving away from the "breed compliant factory workers"-goal), because healthy democracy also requires an educated population capable of knowing when they're being lied too
Argentina has mandatory voting and they have Milei. How healthy is that?
Argentina also votes on Sunday (a change way simpler than reforming education) and last elections they had 77% turnout. A lot of people simply don't participate in the democracy and there's no way around it. No one serious expect 100% people to vote and blames the 30% that doesn't for the outcomes.
No one expects 100%. Australia hovers around 90% turnout.
The rest below is me just working out some numbers, and isn't meant to convince anyone of anything.
There are ~236 million Americans citizens of voting age, of whom 73.6% (174 million) are registered to vote.
Of the 174 million registered voters, 155.2 million voted.
Of the 155.2m, 77.3m voted for Trump, 75.0m voted for Harris, and 2.9m voted for someone else. Not that this is how the system works, but more people voted for "someone other than Trump" than voted for him.
If 90% of the 174m voters had voted, that would have increased turnout by 1.4m voters. Not enough to change the popular vote, even if they were all for Harris (though depending on distribution there is at least some small chance the Electoral College votes would have changed enough).
If 90% (212.4m) of the 236m eligible voters had voted, that's 57.2m more votes to cast.
Pew Research says that polled non-voters went 44% for Trump, 40% for Harris. Applying that to our hypothetical 57.2m voters, it's 22.9m more for Harris and 25.2m more for Trump, bringing our totals to 102.5m Trump, 97.9m Harris, and a new block of 9.2m undecided. Note that two of those figures rounded up, so the apparent total is 212.6m rather than 212.4m.
The difference between Trump-Harris at this point is 4.6m votes. For Harris to tie/win the popular vote on the new undecided block, she would have needed 75% of them (Harris 6.9% vs. Trump 2.3m).
All of that hinges on polls reflecting reality, which lately is much easier to question (not based on misinformation, just with polling managing so often not matching the real vote results).
Thank you for going on this numbers journey with me.
90%, 80%, hell, even 70%. The general wisdom (not necessarily as true today) is that the higher the turnout in U.S. elections, the more likely the democrat is to win. That was the driver of the attached:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/upshot/turnout-2024-election-trump-harris.html
NYT reported that data suggests that nonvoters would have given Trump a larger win.
Every non-voter in California is responsible for this /s
All the people who did vote for the cheeto are responsible as well. And I think that was the point, marriage equality was on the ballot 14 years after the supreme court ruling
The point I think is that this was largely preventable from within our own ranks. Because we didn’t turn out, the minority was allowed to rule. Yes, the minority is responsible but they were a forgone conclusion. Inaction on the left allowed a preventable outcome to occur.
Democrats aren't "left."
Silence, online contrarian!
They are the left party in the us, fuck off with this worthless game
Wow I'm surprised you got down voted. Objectively the Democratic party represents the Left. Whether the Left has any better choices is not their fault, fucking spineless politicians eroded our faith that Democrats could do good for the country. America is a two party system unfortunately, and unfairly, so to anyone who down voted you... Does the Republican party represent the Left? Fuck no, and fuck off. I'm a progressive but thats not party affiliation
And those who refused to vote against.
At some point we need to tell the "internet people who tell us who to blame" that hillary would have won in 2016 if not for the electoral college. At some point people just give up and that was the entire democratic party in 2024.
Not a single person in the democrats has a plan to fix democracy in the US and until they do the gerrymandering, electoral college and republican rule by minority will continue
Cool story, would still have been nice to avoid the transgender genocide or killing health insurance.
I'm sure all the finger pointing at neighbors will help, instead of, you know, taking 5 minutes to understand how we got here and why its going to continue.
65 million don't vote. "But Trump" is not a legit platform to run on. You have to give voters something to vote for. Dems fucked up
That's exactly it. Dems keep throwing winnable elections and when they do get power they don't attempt to implement any reforms to make it harder for republicans to hold power both electorally and monetarily so their voters get poorer and disenfranchised and leave.
Yeah all that "reform" is really happening now, isn't it?
I mean Zorhan is a good sign things might finally be changing.
Noo! The democrats were entitled to your vote! Vote blue no matter who they wanna deport and remove!
Donald Trump is the president you fucking moron. Happy to vote for Biden in 2020 but not Harris, essentially just a younger Biden.
Two options. You're phony or you're stupid.
I voted for Harris in California. I didn't like it and it didn't impact much, but I did. She still lost because she didn't make herself different enough from Biden, who had low polling rates, plus courted Republicans who got us into this mess.
The problem is that should have been the only platform needed, but still wasn't enough
Democratic VOTERS fucked up, the party did not. So many pathetic excuses for such a stupid decision in November.
The party didn't even hold a primary and said you have to vote for who we tell you to vote for. "Ugh fine, what is she running on?" ... "Nothing! Do you want Trump to win?"
Amazing how they refuse to blame the people with more data, money, and people instead of the people who are in states that didn't matter (solid blue or solid red).
That's why I voted for Biden and it was much better than this. I never liked him. Still don't.
I can do both, don't worry.
That's EXACTLY what OP is doing.
At some point people just give up
Why? They won in 2020....
Did you all fucking forget or something?
Keep waiting for perfection, dumbass. Meanwhile, Republicans are destroying the country.
You're so right, support for genocide was just a minor mark against perfection. Keep compromising, soon you'll be agreeing that democrats shouldn't fight for marriage equality because some other issue is on the table and we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of slightly better than rabid nazis.
2020 was only winnable for biden because trump fucked up covid so bad. The media hole is so assymmetric that a solid 25% of the US population (including donald trump, because this shit works on him too) believe biden was president in 2020. The fabricated immigration crisis was also extremely successful. Democrats keep trying to meet halfway on whole lies and it never worked.
Dems did nothing to break up the media/tech oligarchs during that time and now we're paying for it. Dems have to be willing to play hard ball democracy. And most likely ICE and the FBI will make a bunch of crazy arrests during election season to try and hamper elections and smear candidates.
That's all nice and good but you're just wrong because of the electoral college. I voted, but I also knew that in my state, my vote would not change the result and it has never changed the result in my lifetime. So if one of my friends decided to stay home, I wouldn't judge them for that. There aren't enough of us in our state to change the results. That's the sad reality, and you need to understand that so that you stop blaming innocent well-intentioned people who actually understand their own reality better than you do.
Hey, guys, I found that comment! You know, the one where some smug prick tries to remind everyone how correct they were.. ::checks watch:: 11 months ago.
Thank goodness they showed up. I was afraid there was going to be a political post that didn't devolve into liberals and leftists screaming at each other about lesser evils and supporting genocide.
I guess someone needs to do the important work of making sure those who oppose christo-fucking-fascists never find common ground.
Imagine thinking you have the moral high ground after helping bring Trump to power.
Lol. Imagine thinking you have any idea what the fuck you are talking about. It really shouldn't matter so god damn much but I voted, for Harris. I'm just not an immature shitbird that can't empathize and can't move on.
They messed up, sure. Get over it and solve today's problems instead of constantly, repeatedly, over and over again, bring it up and lording it over them. Infighting keeps Trump in power. You have no moral high ground.
No, they aren't. The Trump/ Putin/ Musk cabal rigged the election, and we ALL know it.
Those that chose not to vote are absolutely responsible for this.
You're not going to wriggle out of culpability.
I did vote, so let's dispense with that false self-righteousness at the top.
Sure lots of people didn't vote, but that happens in every election. There were more votes than ever before, so this election actually had FEWER non-voters than ever before.
They contributed, but they are not fully RESPONSIBLE for it. The Biden administration let MAGA run wild, instead of declaring it a domestic terrorist operation, and a serious national security threat, and rounded up ALL of their treasonous leaders, including propagandists like Rupert Murdoch and Steve Bannon, and sending them to Gitmo for extensive interrogation.
The Biden administration allowed them to work their election fraud strategies in the wide open, as we saw it all happening before our eyes. They even admitted to it over and over as it was going on, and the Biden administration did less than nothing to combat it. That was far more destructive than FEWER non-voters than any previous election.
You can't allow MAGA to steal the election, and then blame ourselves for their crimes.
That's a lot of words to say that you don't know how to hold people accountable.
Blaming the fewest number of non-voters in history instead of the worst election fraud in history is lazy thinking.
If you worked in bank, and you knew you had employees who were openly stealing from your bank, would you ignore the theft, and instead blame the customers who aren't putting enough money in the bank to stay ahead of the embezzlement? "Gee, if we only had more people putting money in the bank, maybe it wouldn't make any difference how much my dishonest employees steal. It's the fault of our non-customers who refuse to be part of our openly corrupt system that our bank is failing, not the thieves."
That's exactly how Dems have treated the biggest election fraud in American history, yet I'M not holding people accountable?
