#american by belief.

[communistkenobi]

The deeply moralist tone that a lot of discussions about media representation take on here are primarily neoliberal before they are anything else. Like the shouting matches people get into about “purity culture” “pro/anti” etc nonsense (even if I think it’s true that some people have a deeply christian worldview about what art ought to say and represent about the world) are downstream of the basic neoliberal assumption that we can and must educate the public by being consumers in a market. “Bad representation” is often framed as a writer’s/developer’s/director’s/etc’s failure to properly educate their audience, or to educate them the wrong way with bad information about the world (which will compel their audience to act, behave, internalise or otherwise believe these bad representations about some social issue). Likewise, to “consume” or give money to a piece of media with Bad Representation is to legitimate and make stronger these bad representations in the world, an act which will cause more people to believe or internalise bad things about themselves or other people. And at the heart of both of those claims is, again, the assumption that mass public education should be undertaken by artists in a private market, who are responsible for creating moral fables and political allegories that they will instil in their audiences by selling it to them. These conversations often become pure nonsense if you don’t accept that the moral and political education of the world should be directed by like, studio executives or tv actors or authors on twitter. There is no horizon of possibility being imagined beyond purchasing, as an individual consumer in a market, your way into good beliefs about the world, instilled in you by Media Product 

[an-ivy-covered-summer]

i know this will be a controversial statement for some people on this website, but you guys need to understand that being a radical communist with zero awareness of the nuance of living on planet earth is really not very different from being an alt-right extremist.

if you’re past the point of using logical thinking and understanding that societies and politics are complex and can be wildly different from one place to another, you’re just a fanatic, in spite of the place in the spectrum you place yourself on. you’re too swayed and brainwashed by propaganda. you’re just a blind fanatic, and your agenda becomes dangerous for real people living in the real world.

[mamaangiwine]

Native American spirituality isn't your jumping off point for New Age. It's not your resource for New Age talking points. Our myths are not your's to mine for "proof" for your conspiracies or to change for your "prophecies". Our spirituality has nothing to do with "vibrations", negative of otherwise.

Stop trying to swallow Native American spirituality. Stop using it to justify your surface level spirituality.

Most of all, stop acting like New Age is the natural successor to Native Spirituality- we're the natural successors, because we're still here.

[anghraine]

I'm trying to redirect my political thoughts from my fandom escape blog again, but I found something interesting enough that I thought I'd talk a little about it.

Occasionally I choose suffering (looking at the more granular 2024 exit poll breakdowns rather than the summaries that I mostly don't trust much at this point). Anyway, I did find something intriguing, if not particularly surprising, in the CNN exit polls, which were done in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin with a sample size of 22,914 voters.

(I mention the specific states forming the sample because this pretty notably excludes any blue states while including some reliably Republican ones.)

Anyway, most exit polls including CNN's let respondents identify their place on the US political spectrum: conservative, moderate, or liberal (reminder that "liberal" in US usage can be a pejorative for "less leftist than me" but also a shorthand for "radical leftist" but also for "anyone who doesn't seek a cishet white Christian ethnostate", but also can be a more neutral synonym for progressives and/or leftists and is often used that way, as here). So you can look at the election results for each of these ideological factions and what share of the overall sample size they represent.

The interesting thing: this "liberal" category accounted for very similar proportions to 2020 of the overall vote in the sample (24% in 2020, 23% in 2024—a difference well within the margin of error of exit polling). There is no need to explain liberals/leftists staying home in 2024: at least in terms of proportions of the overall electorate, they didn't. Just under 1/4 of voters in 2024 were liberals or leftists, just as in 2020.

Okay, if the most leftwards faction of the US political spectrum actually formed a similar proportion of the electorate, then who did they vote for?

Harris. In CNN's own exit polls from 2020, 89% of this faction voted for Biden, and (surprisingly!) a full 10% voted for Trump. God knows what motivated that 10% Trump share after four years of his hellscape of an administration at the height of COVID, but in any case, that support cratered in 2024. 91% of this group voted for Harris and only 4% for Trump. It's an estimate, but it looks like these very peculiar Trump voters had enough of him in 2024 and around half either voted third party this time or for Harris.

So which faction is Trump's victory coming from? Further consolidation of the far right?

In part, yes! 90% of conservatives voted for Trump in 2024, vs 85% in 2020—likely, some conservatives who voted third party or even for Biden in 2020 came "home" this year. However, conservative turnout was actually a little down in 2024, proportionally speaking: conservatives dropped from 38% of the sample in 2020 to 34% in 2024.

But there's one more major faction in all this: "moderates" or centrists. To be clear, we're talking about the US version of centrism, given that this is a US organization polling US voters about US politicians, not "Bernie would be center-right in Denmark" or whatever. This moderate faction jumped from 38% of the overall sample in 2020 to 42% in 2024, and they swung hard towards Trump, though Harris still won a plurality of them. In 2020, 64% of moderates voted for Biden vs 34% for Trump. In 2024, 57% of them voted for Harris vs 40% for Trump—that is, the Democratic lead among centrists dropped precipitously from +30 to +17.

Tl;dr—ideologically speaking, this data suggests that Trump owes his victory to gains among both right-wing and centrist voters rather than some faction of would-be leftists or progressives apathetically staying home or voting third-party or otherwise deserting Democrats (because they're insufficiently radical or for any other reason).

Oh, and if you're curious as to how this compares to CNN's 2016 exit polls, I also checked those! Harris's 84-point lead among the most leftwards faction is a significant improvement from HRC's 74-point lead in 2016. Trump also got 10% of that group in 2016, as in 2020, so it's this campaign—not Hillary's or Biden's—that managed to eat into whatever the hell is going on with that group.

Harris's +17 with moderates is actually a slight improvement on Hillary's +12 in 2016. Biden's jump to a +30 lead among centrists in 2020 represented either a backlash against Trump from centrists, or Biden's own rapport with that group, or some mysterious issue some of those voters had with both HRC and Harris (I wonder what it could be!!), or some combination thereof. Regardless, there are a lot of actual ideologically centrist voters in the USA and not just would-be leftists who haven't heard the good news of Marx yet. And Trump has an iron grip on the right wing at this point: he beat Hillary with conservatives by +65 in 2016, then beat Biden with an even larger margin of +71, then leapt to a 81-point lead over Harris with right-wing voters this year.

[gorgynei]

loving monsters 𓁢 𓁢

'Start Here' by Caitlyn Siehl / 'Wolf Like Me' by TV On The Radio / Wolf Children (2012) / The Shape of Water (2017) / Beauty and the Beast (1991) / 'Suck the Blood from My Wound' by Ezra Furman / An American Werewolf In London (1981) / A Monster in Paris (2011)

[cuubism]

talked about the election with my psychiatrist and she was like 'there are definitely concerns but I think ultimately common sense and reason will prevail'

and i'm just like 🤨 ma'am. this is the united states of america

[onlyancunin]

I'm scared.

It's scary to see someone who doesn't consider you a human being to have so much power.

As a Pole I'm literally scared of what does it mean for Russia and future of Europe.

I fear for Ukraine. I fear for any country near Russia. I fear for Poland, historically invaded by Russia many times, and already mentioned by Russians as a possible next target.

I fear for women in US. We already have our almost-total abortion ban in Poland. And it doesn't matter that under some circumstances the abortion is permitted if the medical staff is too scared of legal repercussions to do anything. It doesn't matter that it's permissible if the country allows the OBGYN and others to follow the "conscience clause", which is just a fancy word for forcing religion down women's throats. If performing a medical procedure goes against your religion, do not become a fucking doctor.

Women die over this. It's not just religion. It's not just politics. Along with the abortion ban goes the penalization of any help anyone can offer to women wanting to terminate pregnancy. We are left alone with this.

And don't even get me started on the minorities in the US. You know, I remember, there was a guy in Europe, a Prussian artist-visionaire, who had similar ideas about mass segregation of people. They even set up places for them to stay. I wonder how did that one go, hmmmm.

I... I just need a nap.

Seasonal depression hits especially hard this year.

[haveyouseenthisseries-poll]

[northlight14]

With the election results, I wanna take this opportunity to put out a quick reminder.

If you voted Trump, or support him in any way, shape or form, get the fuck off my blog. Block me, do not interact with me, unfollow me if you do for some reason.

My blog is not, and will never be, a safe place for you

[manderleyfire]

– What's keeping us apart ain't even real, your daddy, his religion, it's got nothing to do with us. – It's not just his, it's mine too. I've got the same spirit in me, why don't you see that?

Alice Englert and Walton Goggins in Them That Follow (2019), dir. Dan Madison Savage & Brittany Poulton

[tired-and-swaggy]

people still mad at chappell but once a again she is correct… you NEED to criticize politicians. even the ones you vote for. obviously there is a better choice in this election. but that does not been to accept her awful policies. you should always fight for what you believe in. never settle.

[browsethestacks]

The Thrilling Aventure Hour

Art by Dustin Weaver

[thelesbiandeli]

Hey babe wake up, the minecraft youtubers changed his video title again

[sherlockholmeshound]

whenever ppl try to come up with some version of 'romance and love isn't forbidden by the jedi, on this one novel-'

i'm just...

[bigothteddies]

picking out the most blasphemous band shirts I own to wear whenever my younger sisters RIH (Republican-In-Hiding) religious boyfriend is over

[aashiqeddiediaz]

in the interest of complacency, here are some screenshots of polls right up until november 8, 2016:

(from this website) - there are many more polls in here, but i just took a screenshot of one bunch as an example. the graph is made of an aggregate of 1,106 polls total.

you cannot trust the polls. hillary clinton was up in the polls pretty much her entire campaign by a huge margin and she still lost. the only way to ensure that the polls reflect true is to increase voter registration, ensure people go out and actually vote, and make sure people know what's at stake this election.

also, i got a few people saying that the democratic party isn't appealing to single-issue voters re: my last post. and you're right. they're not. kamala's speech on the war in gaza was shoehorned and empty at best, and reflected that same zionist outlook we've been watching pretty much the whole time. but the whole point of that post was to urge people to elect a president who would actually listen, and to look at all the other issues that are also at stake in this election.

it's so fucking shitty that we have to come down to that, but we have a greater chance of getting what we want re: palestine if kamala's president than if trump is re-elected. not to mention kamala will protect women's rights, reproductive rights, queer rights, cut taxes for middle-classes, and reduce debt (and more). trump endeavours to do the exact opposite, and his support for netanyahu is far greater than kamala's or even joe biden's is.

i also think that people are seeing trump as "the devil we know" since he's been in power once and we know what he'd be like as a president, but in reality, him being in power once nearly broke the democracy. him being in power twice will finish the job.

the anger at the biden-harris administration resulting in people not voting for kamala harris will only punish american citizens for generations to come.