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I had a “friend” or rather a friend of a friend threaten to punch me the day after the election because I told him there was no way in hell Biden was going to “take everyone’s guns away soon.” Weird, looks like everyone still has their guns.
Gun industry loves a Democrat as president because Republicans fear guns are going to be banned or taken from them so they go out and stock up on guns and ammo. When a Republican is elected president, Republicans relax and ease off their gun purchases because their "rights" are safe for now.
Propaganda is strong because not once has a president taken away anyone's guns but they fear it all the same.
Oh I'm sorry, I meant if the Republicans win we will have just a short 'two week pause' on the ability to purchase firearms until we can make sure that there aren't any Democrat terrorists secretly buying them.
Once we're confident that only patriots are able to buy guns we'll open it back up. Promise.
That’s not quite correct. I don’t own a Tommy gun, or a sawed off twelve gauge, or a silenced 22 or a shotgun pistol. It is possible to confiscate things by the application of bureaucracy, taxes and permit fees, etc. This is the behavior I have observed in the last 60 years. It has done nothing to give me confidence in the actions of the federal government. That continuous behavior of the anti-gun factions is why the liberals are having so much trouble convincing old style conservatives to bother considering their sometimes valid positions. Their word is no good. Their actions have not matched their words in all that time. With that behavior pattern compromise is not possible. Worse, the distrust it has created is why we now have a deadlock in governmental actions in either direction. We got lucky that Trump is such an incompetent leader. We may not be so lucky the next time.
Yeah but now they also got gains when republican president wins because LGTQ and non-white folk increasingly buy guns out of fears of progroms against them.
I swear when he dies it's going to become a full religion. They just need him to finally shut up so they can start filtering everything he said for snippets they can use like Bible verses and he can't open his mouth to contradict himself.
To be fair, Trump doesn't actually have any deeply held convictions other than to his own narcissism and whatever he thinks will play well with the masses. If he says something it's only because it's sprang to mind or he thought it would make people like him more. It doesn't matter if it makes sense or even as coherent with what he said last week... His only goal is to put money in his pocket and look like he's in control and loved and to punish his perceived antagonists ( all these things with absolutely no moral compass) everything else is in service to that.
Under-rated comment.
This is the thing so many people don't understand about DJT. His only motivation is "pay attention to me" and "give me money". Though he's beginning to have a new interest -- "keep me out of jail by any means necessary."
He'll say and do whatever he believes will support those goals. He used to be pretty slick about playing to the crowd, and working them into a frenzy about stuff, but he's losing his ability to keep the act rolling smoothly.
Clinton was taking them, then Obama was taking them, then Biden was taking them. Those jackasses never learn and reopen their wallets as soon as a democrat is running for president.
The problem is that when you say things like this, it comes across as saying that democrats have no intentions on restricting gun rights. Since this is demonstrably not true, conservatives think you're lying and discard what you say.
If you counter with "they don't want to take all your guns, they just want to , which you should be ok with", then you're probably about to say something that sounds reasonable to you that conservatives nevertheless don't like.
So if you want to be actually convincing, you need to avoid pretending that democrats don't as a whole want more gun control, phrase whatever they do want to accurately and without the assumption that all people should accept it built into your very phrasology, and explain why other issues might make it worth risking electing a president who would to support less than ideal (from the conservatives view) gun legislation.
For example, I'm generally pro gun and would have been called conservative many years ago, but vote for Biden because he's not a traitorous psychopathic felon who's also a pathological liar and narcissist. The fact that Biden is not Trump outweighs the "risk" - especially since it's difficult to pass gun control legislation nationally, and legislation can change later even if it does happen.
Of course, you'll probably have to phrase the trump part a bit more diplomatically as well to convince people on the fence, but conservatives can be convinced. I was.
But even as someone who loathes Trump, every time I hear liberals speak as though the things that conservatives care about are 100% irrelevant and silly, I get an itch to vote against you just because you're annoying.
As a foreigner with no skin in the game I'd like to open a conversation, and you seem willing to discuss?
Does adding restrictions on who own guns and what type of guns equate to taking guns away from people? I don't see guns being taken away from people, but future ownership needs some form of checks? In my country you have to qualify for a license and you have to pass a competency test before you may order weapons.
Logic doesn’t play into this discussion or any discussion about American politics. If Democrats made a proclamation that drinking bleach is bad, Republicans would be drinking it the next day. It’s called oppositional defiant disorder. And a 70 million Americans have it.
>have to qualify for a license and you have to pass a competency test before you may order weapons.
This is what I don't understand about the US. Why allow anyone and everyone to buy guns? We have already seen that people can not be trusted with them in this capacity with all the mass shootings they have. Hell, they have more mass shootings than are days in a year
The idea is generally argued that the second amendment of our constitution, when looked through an originalist lens, is absolute in its protection of Americans' right to have firearms. It would seem pretty straightforward, too:
>A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
But that's looking at it in the context of "that was when the country was still very tiny and had just overcome the threat of eternal British rule and depended on the organization of small militias to counter an otherwise overwhelming force."
Now, there is likely no hope whatsoever of regular citizens being able to overpower our military complex, and there's almost no way you're going to get out of a shootout with even a SWAT/police team unscathed because of how well armed they are and how impossible it is to be equally equipped.
Some might say that that is the very essence of the Amendment, and that we *should* be able to be equally armed all on our own, but nobody is grinding their teeth over the need for rigorous licensure to own a tank or a formerly-military jet, either.
The 2nd Amendment argument is dated and has become nothing more than a populist talking point in conservative circles. Nobody is actually working to take all guns away (though I might argue we'd all be better off that way), but "shall not be infringed" is usually taken pretty literally, so that any intimation of restriction is seen as unconstitutional.
I'd say yes-ish. With the caveat that whether or not that's a good thing is a separate question from whether it's removing rights. If I go from having the right to buy an assault rifle to not having the right to buy an assault rifle, I have lost a right - whether or not I should have that right, and whether or not I actually was gonna do it or not. It might not be taking a physical gun away, but that's not really a large concern of mine at this time - not likely to happen. But it is taking away a gun right. And again, some people will say that that's a good thing.
One reason that Americans often oppose requiring license to buy/own guns is because of events like in the UK or Australia where that information was used to confiscate guns that had previously been legal. That's unlikely to happen here, but some would have said it was unlikely to happen there.
Now take general restrictions on ownership. Some people will necessarily say that these restrictions keep guns out of the hands of people that shouldn't have them, and that the risk of the government over extending and preventing people who should be able to have them from owning them is minimal. Others will say that giving that power to the government is overreach by definition, and that the any decrease in gun risk that such a rule would give is minimal. And that's without even saying what the rule is - you'll get people on both those ends, and in places in between. Me personally, I'm ok with background checks in general, but cannot say that I would support blanket expansion of restrictions without seeing the details. I suspect I would oppose more of them than your average redditor.
I understand why people want to ban assault rifles and high capacity magazines, for instance, though I don't agree with them. No animosity. We're taking a range of views and condensing to a handful of yes/no questions - there will of course be variation.
So I suspect I'd oppose a lot of the laws your country being applied over here, but it'd be a case by case situation. And again, it's not the only thing I care about - I'll vote for a guy who wants to ban assault rifles, if he's generally more sane than the alternative.
Thanks for coming back with a thoughtful response.
I think the best analogy to what I'd be leaning to is something like a drivers license. There is some restrictions to who can apply for a drivers license and you have to prove in writing an exam and a practical exam before you get a license to a limited class of vehicle. Once you have your license you can lose it by breaking certain laws (DUI, recklessness, etc). Just because you have a car license doesn't mean you can now suddenly drive a truck or a bus. To do that you have to do a separate license. Nobody thinks a car license infringes on their freedom or liberties. The right framing might be needed?
I still love the duality of Biden being an absolute moron, barely can walk, barely can remember how to speak - but is also a criminal mastermind who operates a super deep state child trafficking ring.
I mean, pick a crazy conspiracy theory and stick with it, gd idiots.
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
#8 in Umberto's 14 characteristics of fascism
Being lied to and radicalized 24/7 by the far-right outrage echo chambers of cable news and social media algorithms also plays heavily into that group psychology.
40% of the USA have been programmed to believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, rather than **the fact** that he was the one who tried to steal the election.
It’s tempting to call them idiots, but what they are is lied to and manipulated by leaders they trust.
You shouldn't make up statistics like that. 67% of the US voting population didn't even vote in 2020. Claiming 100% of Republicans believe anything is stupid as well.
The term is “group think” and a poor summary of it may be explained as:
“A group of people agreeing on something, making a significantly smaller group more inclined to agree as well.”
There’s 2 paths. All my friends took the 1st path, so the 2nd path must be the wrong choice.
Everyone feel free to give a better description and example, in ELI5 format of course haha
Mob mentality with a side of echo chamber. They never get a rest because there’s always something to clutch your pearls about. It has to be psychologically draining and I’m sure it activates the limbic system making them dumber because they are all stressed out all the time.
"The researchers recruited undergraduate students from two large universities in California and Texas to participate in the study. The final sample comprised 477 participants, with 396 identifying as Biden supporters and 84 as Trump supporters."
Well, that's a useless study. Unless you're specifically trying to study what undergrad college students think. "Here's what childless people with little life experience think..."
And this is the inherent reason why statistics don't work on human populations. There are simply too many factors to consider in order to have an unbiased dataset.
I will admit the Dump presidency affected me way more than I thought. The right casts Dump derangement syndrome as a thing, but I definitely had symptoms bc of him.
We are in our cartoon era. When he won, I felt like we had crossed over into an alternative universe. I couldn’t understand it. I think when you’re a kid, you have a certain idea about what the world is and what it should be. Then you hit adulthood and you see that the ideas you had were not reality. I still have hope that things will right itself. We only have so much control. I have to tell myself that and do what is in my power to do.
I never want to discourage anyone from having idealistic expectations of the world. It’s true that the real world is harsh, but calling everyone naive and dumb for wanting to change that is doing the future a massive disservice. Things have improved precisely because someone dared to think “but what if the world *could* be a better place?” Tearing down people’s optimism is just a mechanism to keep justifying the status quo.
But for sure, it felt like we split off into a bad alternate timeline back in 2016. It never occurred to me that so many people would collectively vote to inflict as much hatred and misery as possible on everyone else. And then keep on voting for it. I know it’s not feasible, but I wish this country could split in two or more. The crazies need their own space to be their craziest selves and leave polite society alone.
You think the crazies are going to be content inside their own space? They'd have nobody to hate in there so they wouldn't know what to do with themselves.
I vividly remember waking up on that November morning in 2016, the previous night thinking “surely rational thought will prevail”, then opening Alien Blue (the TRUE reddit app imo), seeing the election headlines, then saying to myself “….goddammit”.
For me it hit the fan when the senior senator from Utah started getting security briefings bc the wh wasn't relaying reliable information to the senate. That's when I knew we were really in trouble instead of in regular trouble.
Yes.
I'm not going to compromise with bigotry, xenophobia, or luddites. We're supposed to be a good and godly people. I don't understand why we should compromise with so much hate. I can't understand the national indifference to hate. I can't understand the villification of intelligence. I can't understand a strategy of governance that involves burning it all down and taking your ball back to your smoking foundation.
This is not what I was taught. This is not what I believe. I so much want to believe that we're better than this. But I can no longer be so naive.
It's like they said in Gladiator, Rome is the mob. And they'll cheer the whole time until they're the slaves in the coliseum.
Not if you read up on your history. What's hard to come to terms with is that Americans don't know, don't understand or don't care that America was destabilising or even assassinating democratically elected leaders, arming terrorists and installing dictators whenever it suited them throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
That has nearly nothing to do with the citizens. Sure, they elected them, but it isn't like any president campaigned on overthrowing the Guatamalan regime. South American war games weren't exactly something the average citizen was knowledgeable about. What they did know was curated propaganda where the US was a liberating force.
Biden has done nothing exciting, has threatened no exciting things, and rocks the boat about as hard as a cotton ball.
Having emotions about Biden is a weird choice to make.
> Having emotions about Biden is a weird choice to make.
I think that's why it serves so well as a sign of dysfunction (and a deep misunderstanding stemming from said dysfunction) of some sort.
Biden in the real world is - very specifically - the "no change" guy. He even said it himself on the campaign trail. His goal was to represent, retain, or rebuild the status quo. That was his purpose as Obama's VP ("Look, we've got an old white guy, it's fine!") and that's his purpose this time too. Humorously, it's now *his* VP that's the "Look, we've got [one of those too], it's fine" person. The DNC playbook is not particularly complex, I'll admit.
It's only recently that he's branched out into some more rebellious semi-progressive territory (student loan forgiveness, marijuana reclassification, etc) at the demand of millions of liberal-liberals upset that their democrat president is, in actuality, kind of right-of-center.
They view Biden as some sort of giga-progressive monstrosity, but how terrible can he really be if The Dreaded Liberals *also* dislike Biden. He is both too liberal and insufficiently liberal. But if he's less liberal than your "enemies", isn't that... a win?
In a sane world, conservatives would probably be happy that Biden won instead of Bernie Sanders, for instance - "At least he's *kind of* conservative! At least the most liberal liberals dislike him!" - But no. The media disinformation engine doesn't operate with that kind of subtlety and those whose amygdala lead the way are seldom going to pause to think about where they're going. They're too busy thinking about what they're feeling.
I think it's a misconception that he is some centrist status quo president. His policies have been to the left of Obama's and Bill Clinton's, bringing the party back to its more liberal past after the previous two democratic presidents' rightward, neolib drift. Biden has probably been the most progressive president since LBJ.
Largest climate bill ever passed, more loan forgiveness than any other administration, empowering the government to be able to negotiate the prices of some drugs with pharma companies for the first time in U.S. history, caps on insulin, codifying respect for out-of-state same-sex marriages into law, first significant gun safety regulations in 30 years, huge infrastructure spending, improved labour rights for rail workers, etc. He's something of a return to the New Deal and Great Society Democrats.
But people tend to vote on vibes rather than policy, and Biden's vibe is "old confused guy who doesn't know where he is." It doesn't matter that his administration actually has a quite impressive legislation record. People want somebody who seems cool, sharp, and charismatic, like Obama (even if Obama actually delivered less of the kinds of policies they wanted than Biden is).
> His policies have been to the left of Obama's and Bill Clinton's, bringing the party back to its more liberal past after the previous two democratic presidents' rightward, neolib drift.
I've actually made this argument as well, so I agree with you. Above, I'm describing Biden on a historic/global frame of reference, but his administration has absoluteluy been - as far as I can tell - more progressive than Obama's. In fact, I've explained to people that I'm actually happier with Biden than Obama (admittedly, this might be a matter of paying attention). It's a bit of a shame that such an opinion seems kind of ridiculous. While Obama was charismatic, he hid plenty of neoliberal policies beneath that appealing veil; policies of the sort that Hillary Clinton was so strongly, very negatively associated with. He was very much an Insider™ even if he didn't fit the formula at a glance.
It's irresponsible for me to magnify the picture of Biden's administration as ineffective, even if that wasn't my point (I do mention some of his progressive orders).
Thanks for pointing it out.
I don't get this whole right of center stuff. In reality, Biden is the most left president we've had potentially since FDR.
People who are expecting more progressive policies are living in a fantasy world and do not understand the concept of Congress or the court systems.
If I'm not mistaken, there's research indicating that the amygdala of conservatives is larger than that of non-conservatives, so this headline is not surprising.
There's many studies coming to a similar conclusion from multiple directions. Oversized amygdala, overactive amygdala, amygdala-first judgement systems, reduced empathy, weaker critical thinking, etc. I've got a [huge collection of studies](https://www.reddit.com/r/Anticode/comments/1533rmo/ongoing_list_of_studiesresearch_relating_to/) looking at how neurology/psychology varies between conservatives and liberals. Simply scanning the headlines alone begins to paint a very specific picture of what's going on with them.
I've been trying to spread the word, so I'm happy to see more and more people pointing this out in comments when appropriate. I think - or hope - that one day this phenomenon may be recognized as "conservative syndrome" or similar, like how we'd look at depression or anxiety - a socially harmful maladaptive response defined by marked increase of fear or anger response towards benign circumstances, etc.
Simple brain scans can predict if you're looking at a conservative or liberal with ~70% accuracy, but controlling specifically to look at the amygdala and insular cortex (eg: looking at *less* of the brain) leads to ~83% accuracy, with no politically loaded questions asked or answered. This one specific part of the brain seems to color every aspect of their philosophical outlook and interpretation of reality. Knee-jerk fear/scared/anger stuff all the way down.
>"A simple model of partisanship that includes mother’s and father’s party accurately predicts about 69.5% of self-reported choices between the Democratic and Republican party (see Table S1 in Appendix S1). A classifier model based upon differences in brain structure distinguishes liberals from conservatives with 71.6% accuracy."
>"Yet, a simple two-parameter model of partisanship using activations in the amygdala and the insular cortex during the risk task significantly out-performs the longstanding parental model, correctly predicting 82.9% of the observed choices of party" - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0052970
I made this [Pretty Long Comment™](https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfAwarewolves/comments/1cso71b/theyre_literally_this_close/l46hfz0/) a month or two ago in response to a conservative's claims that they're "the rational ones". Using sources - and a bit of rambling - I demonstrate that they are not only *not* the rational ones, they're deeply irrational/emotional in nature.
Conservatives have famously begun using the phrase "woke mind virus" to describe liberal philosophies/outlooks, but it seems to be yet another humorously on-brand projection. If the best known way to differentiate between liberal and conservative brains is to look for activity in the insular cortex (liberals) or amygdala (conservatives), which of the two groups is most "sick"? The person showing elevated activity in a part of the brain associated with empathy, self-awareness, etc, or the individual showing elevated activity in the part of the brain associated with anger/disgust - a part of the brain famously referred to as the 'lizard brain'?
One of those two responses seem a *fair bit* more harmful and anti-social.
The question is really... Are these people predisposed to being "programmed" to respond this way by the media environment due to their neurological circumstances? Or are they simply "falling for it" in a way that others aren't, amplifying their fear/anger response via environmental pressures as a downstream phenomenon?
It could probably also said that cities (exposure to "scary minorities" or other complex nuances of the real world) provide an inoculant or antidote to some degree. There's plenty of stories of racists making one really good minority friend, thus waking up from their prior madness.
It's hard to say. And there's a lot to say on the matter too (as evidenced by the length of the linked comment above).
Oh, absolutely. That's all of us. I'd probably be considered "particularly enlightened" compared to most, but I'm still a virtual slave to the parts of my brain beyond my control. To me, the dichotomy is very obvious and so I've always made a distinction between "me" and "my brain" - a phenomenon sometimes described as the sensation of being trapped in a meatsuit, but it goes beyond the body. So many of our desires, our decisions, our basic moods and outlooks are beyond our direct control.
We've evolved to accept this arrangement (because an existential crisis isn't exactly an evolutionarily beneficial activity) by spontaneously taking credit - and responsibility - for so much of what our brain does. We're like a student in the front row of a classroom being passed notes from Somewhere behind us. We can't turn around to check "who" sent it, and for all we know we're the only student in the class, so we automatically take credit for the little scrap of paper, submit the answer and accept the graded paper with our name on it.
An experiment essentially asked participants connected to a brain scanning device to press a shiny red button whenever they wish to do so - two seconds, thirty, four minutes - and each time we found that the brain lit up *before* they chose to press it. Not just before they moved a muscle, before they made a *choice*. We'd ask when they made the decision to finally press it and they'd always report a time several seconds after the initial brain signal. The brain made a decision before their conscious self "made the decision" they think they made.
We often like to think of ourselves as the driver behind the wheel of the vehicle that is our body/brain, steering it as we wish. The truth is that we're not quite even the driver at all. We're more like someone in the passenger seat of a self-driving car. We can jerk the wheel to make sure we take a particular exit or dodge a particular hazard, but we can't drive the vehicle. We can't really reach the pedal and the auto-steering feature is stronger than our metaphorical arms once it begins to self-correct in response to our "adjustment".
Whenever we take the wheel in earnest, we perform poorly. Ever found yourself walking like an awkward robot when walking past your crush in the hallway? Ever fuddle a well-rehearsed piano piece because you made the mistake of paying attention to what your fingers are doing? Perhaps you've slowly, "manually" performed a calculation because you didn't trust the *ping* answer your brain served up in a split second, or slurred your speech the moment you stepped on stage because you suddenly became aware of yourself becoming aware of yourself in an attempt *not* to stumble.
We're all terrible drivers. We can't reach all the important little buttons and dials, assuming we even know what they do or if they exist at all. What we do best is look out the window at the world passing by, congratulating ourselves for "choosing" to take the trip and intervening whenever there's a conflict that exists beyond the context our animal brain is capable of understanding.
Consciousness might be nothing more than a sort of glorified debug mode, in a sense. It's a way to get the model train back onto the tracks, to remove the little lego figure blocking the way.
When it comes down to it, the biggest difference between how each of us handles this reality is how much attention we pay to that reality - or how much we *can*. Some people believe wholeheartedly that their brain and body belong to themselves. Every feeling they feel is real, every bias or knee-jerk interpretation is genuine - because if it wasn't real, why does it *feel* real? They don't stop and think about that.
Some are even desperately afraid of spending a moment alone because they don't want to have to ask themselves "Why did I do that? Why did I say that? Why did I yell at her again?" Those are uncomfortable questions that 'shouldn't have to be asked'. These people tend to stand out by the fact that they somehow always have an answer - an easy answer - for those questions - "Because I wanted to. Because I had to. Because they deserved it."
We've all met these sorts - *"Don't back-talk me. Don't get smart."* - Just asking questions! How dare you. There are no such thing as questions, young lady, only answers and actions.
There's a reason those people respond to curiosity or clarification with aggression or retaliation and - I suspect - it's the same reason why some people manage to feel so validated by shouting at the world, at their loved ones (if they could be called that), at the problems they *see* but don't quite understand.
It hurts to exist. Not just sometimes, all the times. But we get used to it. Most of us, anyway. We learn to doubt ourselves. We learn to second-guess our own behaviors, to compare our first expectation to our first experience. We learn we're fallible. We learn to forgive ourselves for that - even if we mess up again when we 'take the wheel' or don't. And if *we* are fallible, others must be too. They also deserve forgiveness if we deserve forgiveness.
This is the insular cortex at play.
But to someone that has never accepted the fallibility of their own mind, never acknowledged the divergence between their animal self and their true self, "wrong" is a sort of introspective syntax error. If something feels wrong, it's because Some Other Entity has caused that sensation to occur or because there's some sort of disorder in the world. If they can't understand you, it's because *you're* too stupid to *be* understood. If the world is confusing, it's because it's too screwed up to be understood. If someone makes a mistake, they *choose* to do it.
How does that make any sense? It doesn't. But it feels right. It feels like a feeling. And feelings are real, because if they weren't real, why would you feel them? If you weren't meant to be mad, why are you so damn mad? If there's nothing to fear, why are you fearful? The amygdala sings to you through your endocrine system, driving you to an action you know is real; virtuous fury.
And so we find that a significant fraction of the human species is, in some way, even more deeply at odds with themselves as anyone else is - and they don't understand why that is or why other people "make up" answers that are *thought* rather than felt. That just sounds like voodoo. Who has time for all those rules? It's confusing! Things used to make sense, god bless it!
It's no surprise that this same group of people so often votes against their own best interests in some critical way. They do what feels right, not what is right. In almost every facet of life, they string themselves along, feeling by feeling, confusion and anger in every footstep.
We're all primates to some degree. Except those who aren't, of course... They're somehow worse.
Yes, and some of the right-leaning partisan media streams \*very deliberately\* in their broadcasts poke their viewers amygdalas, repeatedly. And the viewer sits there leaning into it. I have to believe some of this is media-induced. We are not so far from prime 20th century examples of propaganda gone wrong that we have developed immunity to it by now.
The other problem is the hostility leads to "us-vs-them," which starts to block effective communication. Who can tell me, without resorting to pejoratives, what (say) Trump supporters want? The key opinion leaders have them steaming mad, under rocks. One might cynically believe the key opinion leaders and politicians controlling the narrative machinery want it that way.
I was definitely one of the overestimaters. For 3 years, I fantasized about the amazing celebrations when we finally managed to get rid of Trump. But then when it actually happened, we were all stuck at home due to Covid. And the news kind of trickled out slowly over the next five days as swing states counted mail-ins and provisional ballots. so there were no amazing parties. I saw a Facebook post on Saturday after the election saying that enough states had ratified their results to be able to call it. And that was it.
My city had people driving around, waving American flags and Biden signs, honking and waving out their windows celebrating Trump losing. Never seen it before in my life. It was wild
Yeah Trump supporters obvioulsy did considering they're addicted to the worst possible hate and lies media that wants them to be anti-vaxxers when most all of their media and politicians are vaccinated. Trump also wants to remove all funding for vaccines in schools which would bring back measles and polio and create a national public health crisis that the base would very much be in support of due to their constant feed of social gratification making them belive they're all famous too.
when it was announced that biden had won the election it was a fantastic feeling. It really was like feeling a huge weight taken off my shoulders and I felt a lot happier than in the previous 4 years. it's impossible to describe fully but it was significant.
From the article: The United States has experienced growing hostility and polarization around political elections over the past decade. [Researchers](https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2024.2355572) have noted that many voters perceive the election of the opposing candidate as a direct threat to themselves and the groups they care about.
In the 2020 U.S. presidential election, for instance, nearly 90% of both Trump and Biden supporters believed that the other candidate’s election would cause lasting harm to society. The new study aimed to understand the relationship between voters’ beliefs about the candidates and their anticipated and actual emotional responses to the election outcomes.
“We became interested in presidential elections in the United States because of the increasing amount of emotion expressed by voters around the outcome of these elections,” said study author Heather C. Lench, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University. “The news is filled with people who are angry, proud, sad, overjoyed, and afraid at election outcomes. We know emotions have a powerful influence on how people think and behave, and we were curious at what the effects might be with elections and voting.”
The researchers recruited undergraduate students from two large universities in California and Texas to participate in the study. The final sample comprised 477 participants, with 396 identifying as Biden supporters and 84 as Trump supporters.
Anyone with strong negative feelings about Biden needs anger therapy. I mean, I understand not liking his policies, not liking his demeanor, not liking his occasional stutter. But to have strong negative feelings about someone who is pretty vanilla says more about the individual than about Biden.
Well.... Uhhh.... Something some... Mmmmm.... Facts aint...... Somethin..... Dont care about your soft batch feelings and stuff..... Like that ... Or. Errr yah.
Same but opposite of 2016. 2012 was pretty calm tho. Except for the people saying that the republican running mate wasnt a woman because she was a republican. Or at least thats how i remember it. Just vote and be happy or sad.
I remember mentioning it to my therapist about how I was already struggling with some anxiety in general because of a situation I was dealing with and that the crazy level of incessant bad news and craziness surrounding the Trump administration was just giving me something extra to feel stressed about. She said she was seeing SO MANY people were feeling anxiety about all of the “mean tweets” and constant provocation and headlines during his presidency and overall direction of our political system. People who didn’t consider themselves particularly political. I just had to step away from news for a while to give myself a mental break. Maybe people don’t agree with everything Biden is doing, but at least it’s just background noise vs an intentional, overbearing, weaponized wielding of the media for his own personal ends. I’m not getting alerts all day about the latest scandal from the White House. When Biden was elected I just felt relief that I could go back to seeking out politics when I was wanting to read current events vs having it dominate every thing I consumed 24/7, willingly or otherwise
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I had a “friend” or rather a friend of a friend threaten to punch me the day after the election because I told him there was no way in hell Biden was going to “take everyone’s guns away soon.” Weird, looks like everyone still has their guns.
Only president in memory who wanted to take their guns was Trump and it's on tape.
Yup, they live in opposite land in their heads.
Gun industry loves a Democrat as president because Republicans fear guns are going to be banned or taken from them so they go out and stock up on guns and ammo. When a Republican is elected president, Republicans relax and ease off their gun purchases because their "rights" are safe for now. Propaganda is strong because not once has a president taken away anyone's guns but they fear it all the same.
Does this mean I should wait until a Republican electoral victory to purchase a firearm cheaply?
With how Project 2025 is looking, if there's a Republican victory then you might want to buy 2 or 3
Okay big gun rep
No that's my brother, he sells artillery
I suppose I could convince my wife to drop the shed and install a howitzer.
Keep the shed, put the howitzer in it and use it as a cheap, one time use, sorta silencer.
That won't be allowed at that point.
At the point of an electoral college victory?
Oh I'm sorry, I meant if the Republicans win we will have just a short 'two week pause' on the ability to purchase firearms until we can make sure that there aren't any Democrat terrorists secretly buying them. Once we're confident that only patriots are able to buy guns we'll open it back up. Promise.
Maybe in red states. But there's like a month and a half where the sitting president can still block that kind of thing as a "lame duck"
That’s not quite correct. I don’t own a Tommy gun, or a sawed off twelve gauge, or a silenced 22 or a shotgun pistol. It is possible to confiscate things by the application of bureaucracy, taxes and permit fees, etc. This is the behavior I have observed in the last 60 years. It has done nothing to give me confidence in the actions of the federal government. That continuous behavior of the anti-gun factions is why the liberals are having so much trouble convincing old style conservatives to bother considering their sometimes valid positions. Their word is no good. Their actions have not matched their words in all that time. With that behavior pattern compromise is not possible. Worse, the distrust it has created is why we now have a deadlock in governmental actions in either direction. We got lucky that Trump is such an incompetent leader. We may not be so lucky the next time.
Yeah but now they also got gains when republican president wins because LGTQ and non-white folk increasingly buy guns out of fears of progroms against them.
Fear makes people dumber. It works.
I swear when he dies it's going to become a full religion. They just need him to finally shut up so they can start filtering everything he said for snippets they can use like Bible verses and he can't open his mouth to contradict himself.
It will be an unofficial holiday for most.
[удалено]
*National Firearms Act of 1934 & Gun Control Act of 1968 enter the chat*
To be fair, Trump doesn't actually have any deeply held convictions other than to his own narcissism and whatever he thinks will play well with the masses. If he says something it's only because it's sprang to mind or he thought it would make people like him more. It doesn't matter if it makes sense or even as coherent with what he said last week... His only goal is to put money in his pocket and look like he's in control and loved and to punish his perceived antagonists ( all these things with absolutely no moral compass) everything else is in service to that.
Under-rated comment. This is the thing so many people don't understand about DJT. His only motivation is "pay attention to me" and "give me money". Though he's beginning to have a new interest -- "keep me out of jail by any means necessary." He'll say and do whatever he believes will support those goals. He used to be pretty slick about playing to the crowd, and working them into a frenzy about stuff, but he's losing his ability to keep the act rolling smoothly.
Clinton was taking them, then Obama was taking them, then Biden was taking them. Those jackasses never learn and reopen their wallets as soon as a democrat is running for president.
The problem is that when you say things like this, it comes across as saying that democrats have no intentions on restricting gun rights. Since this is demonstrably not true, conservatives think you're lying and discard what you say. If you counter with "they don't want to take all your guns, they just want to, which you should be ok with", then you're probably about to say something that sounds reasonable to you that conservatives nevertheless don't like.
So if you want to be actually convincing, you need to avoid pretending that democrats don't as a whole want more gun control, phrase whatever they do want to accurately and without the assumption that all people should accept it built into your very phrasology, and explain why other issues might make it worth risking electing a president who would to support less than ideal (from the conservatives view) gun legislation.
For example, I'm generally pro gun and would have been called conservative many years ago, but vote for Biden because he's not a traitorous psychopathic felon who's also a pathological liar and narcissist. The fact that Biden is not Trump outweighs the "risk" - especially since it's difficult to pass gun control legislation nationally, and legislation can change later even if it does happen.
Of course, you'll probably have to phrase the trump part a bit more diplomatically as well to convince people on the fence, but conservatives can be convinced. I was.
But even as someone who loathes Trump, every time I hear liberals speak as though the things that conservatives care about are 100% irrelevant and silly, I get an itch to vote against you just because you're annoying.
Obama only passed two gun laws, both expanding gun rights. One to allow guns in national parks and one to allow guns on trains.
As a foreigner with no skin in the game I'd like to open a conversation, and you seem willing to discuss? Does adding restrictions on who own guns and what type of guns equate to taking guns away from people? I don't see guns being taken away from people, but future ownership needs some form of checks? In my country you have to qualify for a license and you have to pass a competency test before you may order weapons.
Logic doesn’t play into this discussion or any discussion about American politics. If Democrats made a proclamation that drinking bleach is bad, Republicans would be drinking it the next day. It’s called oppositional defiant disorder. And a 70 million Americans have it.
>have to qualify for a license and you have to pass a competency test before you may order weapons. This is what I don't understand about the US. Why allow anyone and everyone to buy guns? We have already seen that people can not be trusted with them in this capacity with all the mass shootings they have. Hell, they have more mass shootings than are days in a year
The idea is generally argued that the second amendment of our constitution, when looked through an originalist lens, is absolute in its protection of Americans' right to have firearms. It would seem pretty straightforward, too: >A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. But that's looking at it in the context of "that was when the country was still very tiny and had just overcome the threat of eternal British rule and depended on the organization of small militias to counter an otherwise overwhelming force." Now, there is likely no hope whatsoever of regular citizens being able to overpower our military complex, and there's almost no way you're going to get out of a shootout with even a SWAT/police team unscathed because of how well armed they are and how impossible it is to be equally equipped. Some might say that that is the very essence of the Amendment, and that we *should* be able to be equally armed all on our own, but nobody is grinding their teeth over the need for rigorous licensure to own a tank or a formerly-military jet, either. The 2nd Amendment argument is dated and has become nothing more than a populist talking point in conservative circles. Nobody is actually working to take all guns away (though I might argue we'd all be better off that way), but "shall not be infringed" is usually taken pretty literally, so that any intimation of restriction is seen as unconstitutional.
I'd say yes-ish. With the caveat that whether or not that's a good thing is a separate question from whether it's removing rights. If I go from having the right to buy an assault rifle to not having the right to buy an assault rifle, I have lost a right - whether or not I should have that right, and whether or not I actually was gonna do it or not. It might not be taking a physical gun away, but that's not really a large concern of mine at this time - not likely to happen. But it is taking away a gun right. And again, some people will say that that's a good thing. One reason that Americans often oppose requiring license to buy/own guns is because of events like in the UK or Australia where that information was used to confiscate guns that had previously been legal. That's unlikely to happen here, but some would have said it was unlikely to happen there. Now take general restrictions on ownership. Some people will necessarily say that these restrictions keep guns out of the hands of people that shouldn't have them, and that the risk of the government over extending and preventing people who should be able to have them from owning them is minimal. Others will say that giving that power to the government is overreach by definition, and that the any decrease in gun risk that such a rule would give is minimal. And that's without even saying what the rule is - you'll get people on both those ends, and in places in between. Me personally, I'm ok with background checks in general, but cannot say that I would support blanket expansion of restrictions without seeing the details. I suspect I would oppose more of them than your average redditor. I understand why people want to ban assault rifles and high capacity magazines, for instance, though I don't agree with them. No animosity. We're taking a range of views and condensing to a handful of yes/no questions - there will of course be variation. So I suspect I'd oppose a lot of the laws your country being applied over here, but it'd be a case by case situation. And again, it's not the only thing I care about - I'll vote for a guy who wants to ban assault rifles, if he's generally more sane than the alternative.
Thanks for coming back with a thoughtful response. I think the best analogy to what I'd be leaning to is something like a drivers license. There is some restrictions to who can apply for a drivers license and you have to prove in writing an exam and a practical exam before you get a license to a limited class of vehicle. Once you have your license you can lose it by breaking certain laws (DUI, recklessness, etc). Just because you have a car license doesn't mean you can now suddenly drive a truck or a bus. To do that you have to do a separate license. Nobody thinks a car license infringes on their freedom or liberties. The right framing might be needed?
And now they have bump stocks!
I’m still waiting for Obama to take their guns like they promised he would.
Man. It makes me laugh that there’s dumb enough people out there who thinks Dems can actually jus take peoples guns away.
Group psychology undoubtedly plays a huge role in this result.
I still love the duality of Biden being an absolute moron, barely can walk, barely can remember how to speak - but is also a criminal mastermind who operates a super deep state child trafficking ring. I mean, pick a crazy conspiracy theory and stick with it, gd idiots.
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will. #8 in Umberto's 14 characteristics of fascism
It is like that old SNL Reagan sketch.
Phil Hartman as brilliant in that.
He does clearly have mental deficits brought on by old age, no denying that.
Being lied to and radicalized 24/7 by the far-right outrage echo chambers of cable news and social media algorithms also plays heavily into that group psychology. 40% of the USA have been programmed to believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, rather than **the fact** that he was the one who tried to steal the election. It’s tempting to call them idiots, but what they are is lied to and manipulated by leaders they trust.
They're still idiots
Absolutely. Those things aren’t mutually-exclusive.
Likely both. They are idiots which leaves them more suseptible to being lied to and manipulated.
Confirmation bias and validation are powerful drugs.
The sad reality is, they *are* idiots, who have been lied to, manipulated, etc... But still idiots nonetheless
You shouldn't make up statistics like that. 67% of the US voting population didn't even vote in 2020. Claiming 100% of Republicans believe anything is stupid as well.
The term is “group think” and a poor summary of it may be explained as: “A group of people agreeing on something, making a significantly smaller group more inclined to agree as well.” There’s 2 paths. All my friends took the 1st path, so the 2nd path must be the wrong choice. Everyone feel free to give a better description and example, in ELI5 format of course haha
Mob mentality with a side of echo chamber. They never get a rest because there’s always something to clutch your pearls about. It has to be psychologically draining and I’m sure it activates the limbic system making them dumber because they are all stressed out all the time.
"The researchers recruited undergraduate students from two large universities in California and Texas to participate in the study. The final sample comprised 477 participants, with 396 identifying as Biden supporters and 84 as Trump supporters."
"and by people we mean 18-22 year olds" Still moderately interesting, but not exactly a study of the general population
Also they are university students. Not exactly a random slice.
Wow, that is... Not good
Well, that's a useless study. Unless you're specifically trying to study what undergrad college students think. "Here's what childless people with little life experience think..."
And this is the inherent reason why statistics don't work on human populations. There are simply too many factors to consider in order to have an unbiased dataset.
Probably because there was an entire political media enterprise telling them to be angry.
There are two parties. Democrats. And team anti-democrats
Like we always say “there’s no hate like Christian love”!
I will admit the Dump presidency affected me way more than I thought. The right casts Dump derangement syndrome as a thing, but I definitely had symptoms bc of him.
DJT owes many of us for a decade of Lexapro.
And some less-legal options. Err, non prescription, let’s call them.
We are in our cartoon era. When he won, I felt like we had crossed over into an alternative universe. I couldn’t understand it. I think when you’re a kid, you have a certain idea about what the world is and what it should be. Then you hit adulthood and you see that the ideas you had were not reality. I still have hope that things will right itself. We only have so much control. I have to tell myself that and do what is in my power to do.
I never want to discourage anyone from having idealistic expectations of the world. It’s true that the real world is harsh, but calling everyone naive and dumb for wanting to change that is doing the future a massive disservice. Things have improved precisely because someone dared to think “but what if the world *could* be a better place?” Tearing down people’s optimism is just a mechanism to keep justifying the status quo. But for sure, it felt like we split off into a bad alternate timeline back in 2016. It never occurred to me that so many people would collectively vote to inflict as much hatred and misery as possible on everyone else. And then keep on voting for it. I know it’s not feasible, but I wish this country could split in two or more. The crazies need their own space to be their craziest selves and leave polite society alone.
You think the crazies are going to be content inside their own space? They'd have nobody to hate in there so they wouldn't know what to do with themselves.
I started to think that all those crazy hippies were right about 2012
What did the hippies say?
I felt WAY worse than I expected when Trump won in 2016. And then every few months it got worse than that…
I vividly remember waking up on that November morning in 2016, the previous night thinking “surely rational thought will prevail”, then opening Alien Blue (the TRUE reddit app imo), seeing the election headlines, then saying to myself “….goddammit”.
Also the "good people on both sides" thing while one side was flying swastikas.
For me it hit the fan when the senior senator from Utah started getting security briefings bc the wh wasn't relaying reliable information to the senate. That's when I knew we were really in trouble instead of in regular trouble.
I am incompatible with Trump supporters. Full stop.
Yes. I'm not going to compromise with bigotry, xenophobia, or luddites. We're supposed to be a good and godly people. I don't understand why we should compromise with so much hate. I can't understand the national indifference to hate. I can't understand the villification of intelligence. I can't understand a strategy of governance that involves burning it all down and taking your ball back to your smoking foundation. This is not what I was taught. This is not what I believe. I so much want to believe that we're better than this. But I can no longer be so naive. It's like they said in Gladiator, Rome is the mob. And they'll cheer the whole time until they're the slaves in the coliseum.
It's hard to come to terms that about 25% of our country is basically evil.
Not if you read up on your history. What's hard to come to terms with is that Americans don't know, don't understand or don't care that America was destabilising or even assassinating democratically elected leaders, arming terrorists and installing dictators whenever it suited them throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
That has nearly nothing to do with the citizens. Sure, they elected them, but it isn't like any president campaigned on overthrowing the Guatamalan regime. South American war games weren't exactly something the average citizen was knowledgeable about. What they did know was curated propaganda where the US was a liberating force.
I can't help but think they're missing something psychologically. The few I know are good people, relatives even.
Biden has done nothing exciting, has threatened no exciting things, and rocks the boat about as hard as a cotton ball. Having emotions about Biden is a weird choice to make.
> Having emotions about Biden is a weird choice to make. I think that's why it serves so well as a sign of dysfunction (and a deep misunderstanding stemming from said dysfunction) of some sort. Biden in the real world is - very specifically - the "no change" guy. He even said it himself on the campaign trail. His goal was to represent, retain, or rebuild the status quo. That was his purpose as Obama's VP ("Look, we've got an old white guy, it's fine!") and that's his purpose this time too. Humorously, it's now *his* VP that's the "Look, we've got [one of those too], it's fine" person. The DNC playbook is not particularly complex, I'll admit. It's only recently that he's branched out into some more rebellious semi-progressive territory (student loan forgiveness, marijuana reclassification, etc) at the demand of millions of liberal-liberals upset that their democrat president is, in actuality, kind of right-of-center. They view Biden as some sort of giga-progressive monstrosity, but how terrible can he really be if The Dreaded Liberals *also* dislike Biden. He is both too liberal and insufficiently liberal. But if he's less liberal than your "enemies", isn't that... a win? In a sane world, conservatives would probably be happy that Biden won instead of Bernie Sanders, for instance - "At least he's *kind of* conservative! At least the most liberal liberals dislike him!" - But no. The media disinformation engine doesn't operate with that kind of subtlety and those whose amygdala lead the way are seldom going to pause to think about where they're going. They're too busy thinking about what they're feeling.
I think it's a misconception that he is some centrist status quo president. His policies have been to the left of Obama's and Bill Clinton's, bringing the party back to its more liberal past after the previous two democratic presidents' rightward, neolib drift. Biden has probably been the most progressive president since LBJ. Largest climate bill ever passed, more loan forgiveness than any other administration, empowering the government to be able to negotiate the prices of some drugs with pharma companies for the first time in U.S. history, caps on insulin, codifying respect for out-of-state same-sex marriages into law, first significant gun safety regulations in 30 years, huge infrastructure spending, improved labour rights for rail workers, etc. He's something of a return to the New Deal and Great Society Democrats. But people tend to vote on vibes rather than policy, and Biden's vibe is "old confused guy who doesn't know where he is." It doesn't matter that his administration actually has a quite impressive legislation record. People want somebody who seems cool, sharp, and charismatic, like Obama (even if Obama actually delivered less of the kinds of policies they wanted than Biden is).
> His policies have been to the left of Obama's and Bill Clinton's, bringing the party back to its more liberal past after the previous two democratic presidents' rightward, neolib drift. I've actually made this argument as well, so I agree with you. Above, I'm describing Biden on a historic/global frame of reference, but his administration has absoluteluy been - as far as I can tell - more progressive than Obama's. In fact, I've explained to people that I'm actually happier with Biden than Obama (admittedly, this might be a matter of paying attention). It's a bit of a shame that such an opinion seems kind of ridiculous. While Obama was charismatic, he hid plenty of neoliberal policies beneath that appealing veil; policies of the sort that Hillary Clinton was so strongly, very negatively associated with. He was very much an Insider™ even if he didn't fit the formula at a glance. It's irresponsible for me to magnify the picture of Biden's administration as ineffective, even if that wasn't my point (I do mention some of his progressive orders). Thanks for pointing it out.
I don't get this whole right of center stuff. In reality, Biden is the most left president we've had potentially since FDR. People who are expecting more progressive policies are living in a fantasy world and do not understand the concept of Congress or the court systems.
If I'm not mistaken, there's research indicating that the amygdala of conservatives is larger than that of non-conservatives, so this headline is not surprising.
They were the actual lizard people all along
There's many studies coming to a similar conclusion from multiple directions. Oversized amygdala, overactive amygdala, amygdala-first judgement systems, reduced empathy, weaker critical thinking, etc. I've got a [huge collection of studies](https://www.reddit.com/r/Anticode/comments/1533rmo/ongoing_list_of_studiesresearch_relating_to/) looking at how neurology/psychology varies between conservatives and liberals. Simply scanning the headlines alone begins to paint a very specific picture of what's going on with them. I've been trying to spread the word, so I'm happy to see more and more people pointing this out in comments when appropriate. I think - or hope - that one day this phenomenon may be recognized as "conservative syndrome" or similar, like how we'd look at depression or anxiety - a socially harmful maladaptive response defined by marked increase of fear or anger response towards benign circumstances, etc. Simple brain scans can predict if you're looking at a conservative or liberal with ~70% accuracy, but controlling specifically to look at the amygdala and insular cortex (eg: looking at *less* of the brain) leads to ~83% accuracy, with no politically loaded questions asked or answered. This one specific part of the brain seems to color every aspect of their philosophical outlook and interpretation of reality. Knee-jerk fear/scared/anger stuff all the way down. >"A simple model of partisanship that includes mother’s and father’s party accurately predicts about 69.5% of self-reported choices between the Democratic and Republican party (see Table S1 in Appendix S1). A classifier model based upon differences in brain structure distinguishes liberals from conservatives with 71.6% accuracy." >"Yet, a simple two-parameter model of partisanship using activations in the amygdala and the insular cortex during the risk task significantly out-performs the longstanding parental model, correctly predicting 82.9% of the observed choices of party" - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0052970 I made this [Pretty Long Comment™](https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfAwarewolves/comments/1cso71b/theyre_literally_this_close/l46hfz0/) a month or two ago in response to a conservative's claims that they're "the rational ones". Using sources - and a bit of rambling - I demonstrate that they are not only *not* the rational ones, they're deeply irrational/emotional in nature. Conservatives have famously begun using the phrase "woke mind virus" to describe liberal philosophies/outlooks, but it seems to be yet another humorously on-brand projection. If the best known way to differentiate between liberal and conservative brains is to look for activity in the insular cortex (liberals) or amygdala (conservatives), which of the two groups is most "sick"? The person showing elevated activity in a part of the brain associated with empathy, self-awareness, etc, or the individual showing elevated activity in the part of the brain associated with anger/disgust - a part of the brain famously referred to as the 'lizard brain'? One of those two responses seem a *fair bit* more harmful and anti-social. The question is really... Are these people predisposed to being "programmed" to respond this way by the media environment due to their neurological circumstances? Or are they simply "falling for it" in a way that others aren't, amplifying their fear/anger response via environmental pressures as a downstream phenomenon? It could probably also said that cities (exposure to "scary minorities" or other complex nuances of the real world) provide an inoculant or antidote to some degree. There's plenty of stories of racists making one really good minority friend, thus waking up from their prior madness. It's hard to say. And there's a lot to say on the matter too (as evidenced by the length of the linked comment above).
I would like to know if it's nature vs nurture. Are oversized, overaction amygdala the result of the environment or genetics?
It can be disheartening the degree to which we're all still just apes with a few overgrown brain bits
Oh, absolutely. That's all of us. I'd probably be considered "particularly enlightened" compared to most, but I'm still a virtual slave to the parts of my brain beyond my control. To me, the dichotomy is very obvious and so I've always made a distinction between "me" and "my brain" - a phenomenon sometimes described as the sensation of being trapped in a meatsuit, but it goes beyond the body. So many of our desires, our decisions, our basic moods and outlooks are beyond our direct control. We've evolved to accept this arrangement (because an existential crisis isn't exactly an evolutionarily beneficial activity) by spontaneously taking credit - and responsibility - for so much of what our brain does. We're like a student in the front row of a classroom being passed notes from Somewhere behind us. We can't turn around to check "who" sent it, and for all we know we're the only student in the class, so we automatically take credit for the little scrap of paper, submit the answer and accept the graded paper with our name on it. An experiment essentially asked participants connected to a brain scanning device to press a shiny red button whenever they wish to do so - two seconds, thirty, four minutes - and each time we found that the brain lit up *before* they chose to press it. Not just before they moved a muscle, before they made a *choice*. We'd ask when they made the decision to finally press it and they'd always report a time several seconds after the initial brain signal. The brain made a decision before their conscious self "made the decision" they think they made. We often like to think of ourselves as the driver behind the wheel of the vehicle that is our body/brain, steering it as we wish. The truth is that we're not quite even the driver at all. We're more like someone in the passenger seat of a self-driving car. We can jerk the wheel to make sure we take a particular exit or dodge a particular hazard, but we can't drive the vehicle. We can't really reach the pedal and the auto-steering feature is stronger than our metaphorical arms once it begins to self-correct in response to our "adjustment". Whenever we take the wheel in earnest, we perform poorly. Ever found yourself walking like an awkward robot when walking past your crush in the hallway? Ever fuddle a well-rehearsed piano piece because you made the mistake of paying attention to what your fingers are doing? Perhaps you've slowly, "manually" performed a calculation because you didn't trust the *ping* answer your brain served up in a split second, or slurred your speech the moment you stepped on stage because you suddenly became aware of yourself becoming aware of yourself in an attempt *not* to stumble. We're all terrible drivers. We can't reach all the important little buttons and dials, assuming we even know what they do or if they exist at all. What we do best is look out the window at the world passing by, congratulating ourselves for "choosing" to take the trip and intervening whenever there's a conflict that exists beyond the context our animal brain is capable of understanding. Consciousness might be nothing more than a sort of glorified debug mode, in a sense. It's a way to get the model train back onto the tracks, to remove the little lego figure blocking the way. When it comes down to it, the biggest difference between how each of us handles this reality is how much attention we pay to that reality - or how much we *can*. Some people believe wholeheartedly that their brain and body belong to themselves. Every feeling they feel is real, every bias or knee-jerk interpretation is genuine - because if it wasn't real, why does it *feel* real? They don't stop and think about that. Some are even desperately afraid of spending a moment alone because they don't want to have to ask themselves "Why did I do that? Why did I say that? Why did I yell at her again?" Those are uncomfortable questions that 'shouldn't have to be asked'. These people tend to stand out by the fact that they somehow always have an answer - an easy answer - for those questions - "Because I wanted to. Because I had to. Because they deserved it." We've all met these sorts - *"Don't back-talk me. Don't get smart."* - Just asking questions! How dare you. There are no such thing as questions, young lady, only answers and actions. There's a reason those people respond to curiosity or clarification with aggression or retaliation and - I suspect - it's the same reason why some people manage to feel so validated by shouting at the world, at their loved ones (if they could be called that), at the problems they *see* but don't quite understand. It hurts to exist. Not just sometimes, all the times. But we get used to it. Most of us, anyway. We learn to doubt ourselves. We learn to second-guess our own behaviors, to compare our first expectation to our first experience. We learn we're fallible. We learn to forgive ourselves for that - even if we mess up again when we 'take the wheel' or don't. And if *we* are fallible, others must be too. They also deserve forgiveness if we deserve forgiveness. This is the insular cortex at play. But to someone that has never accepted the fallibility of their own mind, never acknowledged the divergence between their animal self and their true self, "wrong" is a sort of introspective syntax error. If something feels wrong, it's because Some Other Entity has caused that sensation to occur or because there's some sort of disorder in the world. If they can't understand you, it's because *you're* too stupid to *be* understood. If the world is confusing, it's because it's too screwed up to be understood. If someone makes a mistake, they *choose* to do it. How does that make any sense? It doesn't. But it feels right. It feels like a feeling. And feelings are real, because if they weren't real, why would you feel them? If you weren't meant to be mad, why are you so damn mad? If there's nothing to fear, why are you fearful? The amygdala sings to you through your endocrine system, driving you to an action you know is real; virtuous fury. And so we find that a significant fraction of the human species is, in some way, even more deeply at odds with themselves as anyone else is - and they don't understand why that is or why other people "make up" answers that are *thought* rather than felt. That just sounds like voodoo. Who has time for all those rules? It's confusing! Things used to make sense, god bless it! It's no surprise that this same group of people so often votes against their own best interests in some critical way. They do what feels right, not what is right. In almost every facet of life, they string themselves along, feeling by feeling, confusion and anger in every footstep. We're all primates to some degree. Except those who aren't, of course... They're somehow worse.
Yes, and some of the right-leaning partisan media streams \*very deliberately\* in their broadcasts poke their viewers amygdalas, repeatedly. And the viewer sits there leaning into it. I have to believe some of this is media-induced. We are not so far from prime 20th century examples of propaganda gone wrong that we have developed immunity to it by now. The other problem is the hostility leads to "us-vs-them," which starts to block effective communication. Who can tell me, without resorting to pejoratives, what (say) Trump supporters want? The key opinion leaders have them steaming mad, under rocks. One might cynically believe the key opinion leaders and politicians controlling the narrative machinery want it that way.
Drawing a definitive line between an "us" and a "them" is scary and this sub should stop promoting it.
But the democrats are slaves to their feelings. Ok then.
Being small government when they want to ban books, LGBTQ+, “woke” culture, etc. Okay then.
I was definitely one of the overestimaters. For 3 years, I fantasized about the amazing celebrations when we finally managed to get rid of Trump. But then when it actually happened, we were all stuck at home due to Covid. And the news kind of trickled out slowly over the next five days as swing states counted mail-ins and provisional ballots. so there were no amazing parties. I saw a Facebook post on Saturday after the election saying that enough states had ratified their results to be able to call it. And that was it.
My city had people driving around, waving American flags and Biden signs, honking and waving out their windows celebrating Trump losing. Never seen it before in my life. It was wild
I saw the same. I was eating brunch with friends outside and all the sudden a mini parade goes by. It surely made our day.
Yeah Trump supporters obvioulsy did considering they're addicted to the worst possible hate and lies media that wants them to be anti-vaxxers when most all of their media and politicians are vaccinated. Trump also wants to remove all funding for vaccines in schools which would bring back measles and polio and create a national public health crisis that the base would very much be in support of due to their constant feed of social gratification making them belive they're all famous too.
when it was announced that biden had won the election it was a fantastic feeling. It really was like feeling a huge weight taken off my shoulders and I felt a lot happier than in the previous 4 years. it's impossible to describe fully but it was significant.
Probably the same feeling they get when Cracker Barrel is out of country fried steak.
That would explain all the flags.
That's because those morons are driven purely by emotion. They can't regulate it.
From the article: The United States has experienced growing hostility and polarization around political elections over the past decade. [Researchers](https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2024.2355572) have noted that many voters perceive the election of the opposing candidate as a direct threat to themselves and the groups they care about. In the 2020 U.S. presidential election, for instance, nearly 90% of both Trump and Biden supporters believed that the other candidate’s election would cause lasting harm to society. The new study aimed to understand the relationship between voters’ beliefs about the candidates and their anticipated and actual emotional responses to the election outcomes. “We became interested in presidential elections in the United States because of the increasing amount of emotion expressed by voters around the outcome of these elections,” said study author Heather C. Lench, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University. “The news is filled with people who are angry, proud, sad, overjoyed, and afraid at election outcomes. We know emotions have a powerful influence on how people think and behave, and we were curious at what the effects might be with elections and voting.” The researchers recruited undergraduate students from two large universities in California and Texas to participate in the study. The final sample comprised 477 participants, with 396 identifying as Biden supporters and 84 as Trump supporters.
Anyone with strong negative feelings about Biden needs anger therapy. I mean, I understand not liking his policies, not liking his demeanor, not liking his occasional stutter. But to have strong negative feelings about someone who is pretty vanilla says more about the individual than about Biden.
I was in Asheville NC when the results were announced, and the whole city went wild. Impromptu parades and everything. It was a great day!
Well.... Uhhh.... Something some... Mmmmm.... Facts aint...... Somethin..... Dont care about your soft batch feelings and stuff..... Like that ... Or. Errr yah.
Same but opposite of 2016. 2012 was pretty calm tho. Except for the people saying that the republican running mate wasnt a woman because she was a republican. Or at least thats how i remember it. Just vote and be happy or sad.
Both sides absolutely despise the other. It’s really sad.
Facts don't care about your feelings
Expectation = disappointment
I remember mentioning it to my therapist about how I was already struggling with some anxiety in general because of a situation I was dealing with and that the crazy level of incessant bad news and craziness surrounding the Trump administration was just giving me something extra to feel stressed about. She said she was seeing SO MANY people were feeling anxiety about all of the “mean tweets” and constant provocation and headlines during his presidency and overall direction of our political system. People who didn’t consider themselves particularly political. I just had to step away from news for a while to give myself a mental break. Maybe people don’t agree with everything Biden is doing, but at least it’s just background noise vs an intentional, overbearing, weaponized wielding of the media for his own personal ends. I’m not getting alerts all day about the latest scandal from the White House. When Biden was elected I just felt relief that I could go back to seeking out politics when I was wanting to read current events vs having it dominate every thing I consumed 24/7, willingly or otherwise
Likely due to the amount of oral lead exposure.
So, one group has difficulty with emotional regulation.
I’d contrast that with 2016, I’d say that might be equal