OV9

Who, or what, will ultimately be the boy from the Emperor's New Clothes ??

Somebody'll eventually go "Hang on... Trump is killing the average deep south MAGA type and must be stopped" and his whole house of cards will come tumbling down...

It will come when he starts lying unconvincingly to the MAGA set

It doesn’t matter at this point, the damage was done when Elon and his goons got access to the government systems.

They could go to civil war and the genie’s not going back in the bottle.

One trend that is clear is that farmers are really good at the whole turkeys voting for Christmas thing regardless of what country they’re in

From the outside looking in it all seems utterly bonkers.

I made the mistake of adding a comment to a post about Elon musks 150hour working week and got several Americans telling me to “get over it, your side lost, whiney liberal” type comments.

Still, our media are being pretty one sided, barely reporting on what’s going on. ITV news even reported how he was cheered as he entered the Super Bowl and only Taylor Swift was Booed, despite plenty of videos doing the rounds of trump getting plenty.

Zero coverage that I’ve seen of the protests virtually every state has had.

dinny_g wrote: Tue Feb 11, 2025 12:51 pm It will come when he starts lying unconvincingly to the MAGA set

As long as he's performatively "owning the libs" they'll never turn on him. Even the price of eggs, one of the most straightforward issues he ran on, has been flipped from being all the Dem's fault and he'll bring prices down, to it being patriotic to pay more for eggs.

"Patriotic" is and will be the excuse for everything. It's an incredibly powerful emotion in the American psyche.

Just look at Lord Mandelson’s recent change in tone and how we have to respect Trump’s mandate.
I’m guessing we’re going to be very pro Trump from a government perspective as there’s trade deals and tariffs on the line, supposedly worth 2.5% gdp and the economy is currently flat. So it’s that or a recession.

I suppose watching that cunt trump string that cunt mandelson along will be mildly entertaining.

It really is crazy to see how the world is becoming one big polarised mess of opposing echo chambers, none of whom will listen to anything that does not reinforce their views.

Clearly the right is doing a better job of thriving in this environment, but it's very sad to see how what would ordinarily be seen as wild fringe conspiracy theories gaining traction with large groups of people. Fundamentally I see it as a failure of the western education systems, how can we have so many people unable to deploy basic reasoning?

It also might not be a very popular observation in these parts, but IMO there is an element that some left leaning policy became so focused on protecting increasingly small groups of people at the expense of large groups that a rebellion was inevitable. I think there's an element of that in what we're seeing now. People can be quite resistant to change and need to be introduced to it in baby steps.

duncs500 wrote: Tue Feb 11, 2025 2:02 pm but IMO there is an element that some left leaning policy became so focused on protecting increasingly small groups of people at the expense of large groups

This...

Name one

No point

Of course Dinny

Heaven forbid you have to back up anything you say.

There is nothing that can be said to you about any topic that veers to the left which won't be met with dogmatic refusal to engage in any type of meaningful debate.

You've become Lefty Broccers... best left alone...

That’s bullshit and you know it.

I’ll happily discuss any point of view, I’m not going to coddle people because they read too much Daily Mail though.

All you or duncs has to do is provide 1 left leaning policy that favours a minority at the expense of a larger group. Can’t be that hard if it happens so often.

I'm not just talking political policy, although things like company policies are guided by it. I'm not trying to get into a debate zed, not much of it bothers or affects me, I'm more saying that for people with conservative values I suspect there is a perception that a lot of things have gone to far, and that might be not so much that they've gone too far but they've gone too fast for your average person to adjust.

Perception is the key word there, can’t do much about ignorance if people don’t want to learn.

ZedLeg wrote: Tue Feb 11, 2025 2:36 pm Perception is the key word there, can’t do much about ignorance if people don’t want to learn.

Alas if that perception is spread far and wide enough, that can become a destructive force whether real or imagined. It's a bit pointless to just dismiss it as a potential driver for some of the silliness we're seeing now because you don't like the idea that some people a perceiving something you don't agree with.

Anyway, I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about since you asked, which no doubt you'll shoot down, but hey-ho:

My wife's company recently forced a policy on all employees that they are not allowed to not express their pronouns on their email signatures. The reason for the policy is that someone who does wish to express their (perhaps less common garden) pronouns may feel more exposed due to it standing out next to another signature. That is an example of a policy that effectively steamrollers the vast majority to give support to more than likely a tiny minority. My wife preferred not to express her pronouns, but her preferences were not considered significant when devising the policy.

Not a big deal, but you multiply that kind of thing and it makes people feel like they're being ignored.

Just a thought, maybe if we treated half baked corporate hr policy as that instead of acting like every memo about respecting chosen pronouns is akin to compelled language. The subject wouldn’t be as contentious.

I wrote that before I read yours