this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
264 points (99.6% liked)
Political Memes
11740 readers
2208 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
1) Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
2) No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
3) Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
4) No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
5) No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not just in politics, but there's a real problem with people just insisting on repeateded benefit of doubts that someone is operating in good faith...
Over and over again, I keep seeing people think that just because they care about facts and logic, that other people have to care about facts and logic.
That's not how a human brain works, it's never how our brains worked.
Human brains love explanations but hate thinking. If they've accepted an explanation and you try to talk them out of it with facts and logic, a sizable percentage of humans will get confused and just shut down cognitive thinking and fall back on emotion.
That's why so many trolls just blindly throw emotional charged labels around.
You can't say/do anything to change their minds, they've placed you in a box, and that box has a bad word on it. They'll never calm down enough to re-evaluate if that was the right box, now that you're in the box the only thing that matters is the label, they'll never look at anything else.
It's a very very simplified outlook, and once someone has that view it's incredibly difficult for them to dig out of it. Millions and millons of years of evolution have reinforced that false positives don't matter and it's safer to assume the box marked "enemy" only contains enemies.
A false positive means you don't interact with an outsider, but thinking an enemy is safe might mean they kill you.
The problem, as usual, is people running on instinct because they weren't educated enough to prefer facts and logic. Global poverty makes it worse, because poverty makes our brains focus on short term and that means distrust.
It's what I see as defining modern politics, particularly in the GOP/MAGA/Conservative groups. Bad faith actors taking advantage of every possible norm to manipulate and get what they want. It's a consistent behavior that Democrats either naively or purposely ignore. Over and over.
It's exploded past that tho..
Like "everything is political" and all, but it comes up all over.
And it's not just a rightwing thing either these days. Hasn't been for a while.
Republicans dove into it headfirst decades ago, but neoliberals tried for 30 years to see if it could work on enough Dem voters to get us to accept neoliberals.
Look at how Hillary/Joe/Kamala ran their campaigns, they didn't focus on what positives they could bring, just that MAGA was bad and we need to vote against MAGA, any criticism of them and theyd call that person MAGA even if they were left of Hillary/Joe/Kamala.
It (and this should be obvious) was the exact same strategy.
What's fucked is that was the norm for so long, the attitude is becoming pervasive all over society.
That was the entire point of my first comment, not sure if that clarified.
The silver lining tho, is that path failed so badly the voting members of the DNC (they vote for chair when a dem.doesnt become president) finally picked another path. The downside is those neoliberals still exist, still control the media, and are still pushing that same strategy... And it's actually working because people want to believe the DNC is still controlled by those neoliberals, even when the neoliberals are also shit talking the DNC now
Like, I can't think of a more prescient example of people on the left falling for it, than people who are just so used to the DNC being shit, they think the new chair has to be shit, because he's in a box labeled "DNC" even tho that box really only ever should contain the DNC chair, because they are the party and accountable to no one.
So when the old chair leaves and a new one legitimately goes in that box, the box still saying "DNC" doesn't matter, because there was a 100% turnover of "The DNC".
It's as dumb as blaming whoever the next president is for what trump is doing today, and logically it shouldn't be difficult to explain that to people.
But best of luck if you ever try
Which, just to complete the thought, is why authoritarians love policies that keep people in poverty, even when they harm society's economic output enough to reduce profits for the oligarchs themselves.
Poor people are in survival mode. People in survival mode don't act rationally and are much easier manipulated.