Let me know when Trump matches his 2020 support

This morning.

Whew! Biden refused to take aggressive action on climate change like his voters wanted. Glad we’re finally on the right track!

/s

I think we should absolutely consider foreign actors as the likely seed for some of these flashy, rage-bait stories. Russia’s primary goal since 2015 has been to keep us from trusting one another, and I expect them to ramp up messaging to leftist groups over the next few months. We’re uncertain, isolated, and afraid, and that makes us likely targets for cultural wedge disinformation.

Turnout went up in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina, yet Trump flipped or increased the margins in all four. Turnout in PA appears to have dropped only a little, but Trump’s 2024 margin is 60% higher than Biden’s 2020 margin. Even in swing states it appears the red shift was consistent across all areas and significantly higher than any perceived turnout change. Where we see turnout significantly down is in blue states, which are kinda beside the point. Plus there are over 7 million uncounted votes in California alone.

The whole country turned to the right.

Yes, it did. The evidence is widespread. Across multiple sources.

It happened in unexpected demographics and in unexpected regions.

It’s important to note that he’s at 72.6 million votes, and counting. We can’t say he “got” more or fewer votes than in 2020 because they’re still tallying ballots. He’s getting more every hour. (edit: According to AP, he’s gained ~100k votes since I first wrote this comment an hour ago.)

I fish a lot. I fish with blue collar types and run in circles with fishing guides. I know a fishing guide who spends 8-12 hours per day on the water, something like 200 days per year with clients and many others just scouting so he can put clients on more fish. He has a part time retail job for the days he’s not fishing. He doesn’t doom scroll all day, and probably only gets a few minutes to scroll Instagram or Twitter in the evening before he goes to sleep because he’s up before sunrise driving to spots and loading his raft/gear into the water and pulling everything out to wash it in the evening. Sometimes he drives over an hour to fish, sometimes he stays overnight in certain areas. He doesn’t really read the news, he only interacts with a handful of other fishing guides and fishermen, he works two jobs, and that’s it.

I also fish with another guy in construction management. He’s on site most days, probably doom scrolls a little bit. He’s a relatively smart guy, savvy on niche musical genres and other really weird technical topics, but not educated at all and never graduated college. He’s kinda engaged but not really, and he does pretty well to filter all the political stuff out so he can focus on things that he’s interested in.

Harris proposed absolutely nothing for either of them. No tax proposals that would help them, no improvements to their health insurance (though both are probably through the ACA), no job/industry prospects, no financial assurances, just…nothing. All they heard were abortion, democracy, and “not Trump.” Neither of them even like Trump, and they find MAGA cringey AF, but they both said almost exactly the same thing to me at some point over the past few months:

“I mean, I’m fucked either way, so it really doesn’t matter.”

And you know what? They’re absolutely right. They are. Trump’s the only one who even tries to speak to their concerns, and for many people that’s enough.

I’m not. With the exception of the terminally online left or people with familial or cultural ties to Palestine, it’s at best a back burner issue. It certainly impacted her vote share in certain areas, but that’s not why the whole country turned to the right. She didn’t lose NC, GA, NV, and AZ because of Gaza. She lost because of the economy and immigration. Those of us who spend a large portion of our days/weeks glued to these threads forget that we tend to blow certain things far out of proportion compared to how the average American sees it. We think our pet issues are the pet issues of the electorate, and they’re simply not, no matter how much moralizing and finger wagging we do.

Democrats broke supermajorities in WI and NC (barely), yet both states went to Trump. Abortion rights won in AZ, NV, and MT, yet it looks like all three states are going to Trump (not that MT is a surprise). That’s a pretty damning indictment of the Harris campaign.

Per Rule 1, do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.

Here is the abstract of the study you cited (Guth et al 2020):

Recently, epidemiological studies have suggested that fluoride is a human developmental neurotoxicant that reduces measures of intelligence in children, placing it into the same category as toxic metals (lead, methylmercury, arsenic) and polychlorinated biphenyls. If true, this assessment would be highly relevant considering the widespread fluoridation of drinking water and the worldwide use of fluoride in oral hygiene products such as toothpaste…based on the totality of currently available scientific evidence, the present review does not support the presumption that fluoride should be assessed as a human developmental neurotoxicant at the current exposure levels in Europe.

Emphasis mine. Let me rephrase with a made up example:

Recently it’s been suggested that carbon dioxide is poisonous. If true, then the fact that humans are breathing carbon dioxide is worrisome. We reviewed the research, and carbon dioxide is not poisonous in the concentration to which humans are normally exposed. They would have to inhale 80-100% CO2 for an extended duration, and that scenario is highly unlikely because that concentration can only be achieved in a laboratory.

Your study is not saying fluoride is a toxin. It’s saying people have claimed it’s a toxin, they looked into it, and that conclusion is bogus. The study that’s routinely cited as claiming it’s a toxin is this one. Here is Guth et al’s analysis of that study:

In this publication, the authors cited one of their previous studies, a meta-analysis from 2012 of 27 cross-sectional studies investigating children exposed to fluoride in drinking water (Choi et al. 2012). There, a decreased IQ was observed in ‘fluoride exposed’ compared to ‘reference populations’. However, Choi et al. (Choi et al. 2012) also discussed limitations of their findings, e.g., that critical confounders were not considered and age adjustment of cognitive test scores were not reported in most studies included in the meta-analysis. Nevertheless, in the Lancet Neurology review (Grandjean and Landrigan 2014), the authors concluded that fluoride is a human developmental neurotoxicant, although no novel data and arguments were presented. Moreover, it was stated that ‘confounding from other substances seems unlikely in most of these studies’ (Grandjean and Landrigan 2014) without supporting this statement with data. Besides this questionable reinterpretation, further limitations of the meta-analysis have already been discussed in detail by other authors (Feldman 2014; Gelinas and Allukian 2014; Sabour and Ghorbani 2013; Sutton et al. 2015), e.g., the use of non-validated IQ tests (Feldman 2014), exposure of the children to a relatively highly polluted environment, the subsequent risk of possible confounding substances (Feldman 2014; Gelinas and Allukian 2014), and an overall low quality of the meta-analysis (Sutton et al. 2015). Moreover, in the time period after the introduction of fluoridation of drinking water, IQs in general have increased (Feldman 2014). This may be due to secondary factors, such as improved education.

The study you’ve cited does not say fluoride is a developmental neurotoxin. It very explicitly says it is not. Do not claim that it is.

Removed as misinformation. Additional rule violations will prompt a ban.

Removed for clearly misrepresenting health research findings.

I didn’t say you are, nor was I responding to you. I was giving them the term they were trying to define.

It’s called “presupposing a frame”, and Innuendo Studios did a really good piece about it here.

Per Rule 1, do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.

Per Rule 1, do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.

Now to say that you cut family off because of how they vote

But cutting family off because they share a different political viewpoint

Again, that’s not what’s happening here. Stop misrepresenting what people are saying to you.

People who snivel about sensitive feelings when they have absolutely no idea

This you?

The way people are writing off family instead of just talking to them is awful.

This is the most circular argument I’ve ever been a part of. Can’t say I didn’t try.

I have friends who were abandoned by their parents and subsequently adopted. I lost a half-sibling with mental illness after their religious paternal family subjected them to actual exorcisms and other emotional trauma which eventually led to their suicide. My wife has a new 60-year old biological sister that she discovered 2 years ago via DNA. I have friends who cut ties with physically and sexually abusive parents. Family is quite mutable, we are under no obligation to hold fast to toxic blood relatives, and in many cases what we consider “reprehensible” depends entirely on how “reprehensible” the blood relative’s committed offenses are.

I’m going to assume you’re just arguing from extremely limited personal experience and save the long list of expletives I want to hurl at you on behalf of my friends and family because I’d prefer not to be banned from this community. Good day to you.

Trust me, most of us have tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried. Some certainly may have preemptively cut people out without discussion, but most of us have beaten our heads against a wall for almost a decade now, trying to convince them that we’re human beings with dignity who deserve respect. We just withdraw from engagement, piece by piece, until there’s nothing lost by just giving up. Cutting them off is usually the last and most consequential move, rather than the first.