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Yes, the same stupid shit in multiple threads. Heading quickly for a block.

This is it. If they acknowledge the information terrain is lost ... they don't know *what* to do. It feels hopeless. They fix what they can grab onto!

That basic problem -- the problem of the information environment, which I've banged on about for 20+ years now -- is upstream of *everything* else. There's no simple fix. It's certainly not going to be fixed with clever word choice or policy proposals. You have to shift the deep mythologies.

As currently constituted, the left, Dems -- whatever you want to call "everyone to the left of Republicans" -- simply does not have the capacity to do that. They don't have the voices or footsoldiers, they don't have the venues & outlets, they don't have the money backing it all.

"Dems care more about trans & woke than practical stuff" wasn't just a GOP "message" -- it was echoed by thousands of voices, in thousands of outlets & venues & formats, in an endless nonstop loop for close to a decade. *That*, and only that, is how you shift those deep cultural mythologies.

This is why I always kind of laugh about "Dems are bad at messaging." The actual words that come out of actual Dem mouths barely reach the political obsessives! They are so far from the life world of the disconnected voter that they might as well speak latin. Find-grained word choice is irrelevant.

It's really, genuinely difficult to put yourself in the headspace of the average disconnected, not-paying-attention voter if you know things. It's notoriously difficult for people who know about things to imagine the world from the perspective of people who don't!

All you need is for strict-daddy patriarchy to be ambient in the culture & then "you silly unrealistic kids can't have nice things" *sounds* right to people who don't know any better. That's what Republicans always say, so they sound like the strict daddy, so they're "better on the economy."

And given the demands of the attention economy & the dynamics of algorithmic media, those mythologies are now just being continually reinforced, because hearing something that "sounds right" is what causes people to click. No one is learning or following what's actually going on. Just us freaks.

A reminder that people who know anything about politics -- what the parties are, what they stand for, their record, who they've elected, how government works -- are a freakish minority. Most people know *nothing at all* past the vague mythologies that sift down through pop culture.

To me it's more specific: I'm not aware of a single person who reacted by saying "maybe I should do things differently." No one changed their political *behavior*. Everyone, every faction, just doubled down on their schtick, said "see we were right all along." It is to despair.

It never fails.

Ohio passed HB 15, a bipartisan energy bill that included aspects of permitting reform, last summer. It took effect August 15. Since then, the state has approved 2 solar projects with a combined 419 MW. It has rejected 2 others with 330 MW. It has approved 1,936 MW of behind the meter gas plants.

This is dumb slopulist policy that would make transit worse and encourage more people to drive. Vote for Nithya.

Centrists always present these takes as savvy "harsh truths" for the left, but they're the most pathetic kind of ignorant, cowardly self-soothing. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

They are scared, all the time. It's the most primal driver of conservative politics.

Fear. Literally "heightened threat response," measurable by tests. It drives people to want clarity, clear lines between in groups & out groups. There's a reason fascists everywhere turn to rhetoric about infection, about the Other bringing in dirt & disease.

It's all fear of the other at root. Or even more simply: it's just fear.

Pretty much all of them. Occasionally city boundaries will include enough deep suburbs/exurbs for red to outvote blue, but urban cores are pretty much blue without exception. The greater density = more blue correlation holds with spooky consistency.

I guess it's all a matter of perspective. In my mind, 30% of my fellow Americans is a lot!