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Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: to clarify further, in the context of the reply below -
The thing that's particularly bad about this comment is that it pours scorn on a group of people that is defined by their class and intellect, which is just the kind of sentiment we don't want to see on HN. By all means, criticize politicians and others in power. Let's not scapegoat people at the very bottom of the heap for all the ills of the world.
It's by design that those splits happen, when the desk jockeys earning six-figures are seen (and a lot of times, see themselves) as a completely different caste of people than the factory workers, gig workers, etc. it sucks all the air out of the room from real issues: less fortunate people left behind, lack of opportunities, the encroaching of work precarity which will eventually turn even to the current high-earning workers. It completely erases any reasonable public discourse about the real causes of all the social malaise symptoms we experience on the day-to-day.
It's harder to give any sympathy to people voting against their best interests, they've been swindled, bamboozled, and are completely oblivious to the bamboozle, which makes it all the more frustrating. Still, at least extending some pity to their ignorance might help oneself to feel less angry (but still disappointed) about their decisions, they don't know better and it fucking sucks.
The issue is that this isn't a new phenomenon. This has been happening since at least Reagan (over 40 years ago). That cross-section of America has decided to vote against their interests in every major election for decades. I'm over it.
And instead of recognizing that like normal people, they want to push the onus onto literally anything else (immigrants, trans people, higher education). Fuck that. And fuck them for continuing to want to drag us back to the stone age.
They are fed lies and don't have the capacity to understand they are lies. It's partly their fault (for the lack of curiosity) but it's also systemic, such a phenomenon can only happen in this scale if there are systems fostering, and procreating it.
Not saying your feelings are invalid, at all, they are absolutely understandable but it's also the reaction wanted by the ones keeping others uneducated: a larger divide, an ever increasing gap between the people most similar in society. It's divide-and-conquer, we waste our time and energy raging against folks who are purely ignorant, not against the ones keeping them ignorant and easily manipulated. We lost our temper trying to converse with them, which further increases the division.
Not here to give any solutions or tell you to change behaviours, applying in real life a more measured approach to reach these people is really fucking hard, frustrating, etc. but just saying that the reaction of "fuck'em" is exactly part of the strategy for continuing dividing and conquering us.
what's even worse is not just how stupid things are, but how mean they are as well. And I absolutely not saying that calling them stupid is a solution, but it's THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND. Seriously. The last 8 years have been chalk full of articles and pieces on how Democrats can reach those people, and they all essentially say the same thing: They like that he's an asshole. So fuck them.
Pretending it was because we didn't baby the MAGA voters enough is misguided, IMO.
(I’m not saying that nobody changed their vote, only that looking at percentage point changes distorts the view unless you factor in disproportionate no-show rates.)
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/ken-paxton-voter-...
Do that multiple times and you may end-up with a dicator(or at least someone who can become a dictator) sooner or later.
But rather than coming up with a new, more nuanced view of what's happening people would rather trot out old tropes like *republicans are white and racist and bad*.
Even with all the anti-immigrant stuff Trump increased his share of non-native born american voters.
The refusal of people on the left to update their world view was one of the big reasons why they lost the election.
I thought this Ezra Klien interview taling about election polling data was informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx0J7dIlL7c