I can’t even blame them.
I mean, how do you not fish that pool?
*phish
no i hate them
It’s all going to scammers anyway
I ask myself this every day. Why not just sell some MAGA Jesus trinkets?
When I am feeling more altruistic than greedy, why not toss up a bunch of “PATRIOTS THE COUNTRY NEEDS YOUR HELP TO FIGHT ELECTION FRAUD” and then just donate all the proceeds to campaigns for people against insurrection and fake electors. There’s no lie or fraud on that, just exploiting the bias of delusional clowns. I guess “patriots” is a lie, that’s about it.
This is brilliant. Someone absolutely needs to do this.
Morals unfortunately.
The moral thing to do is disarm them of their money to stop it going towards Trump/etc.
It’s not immoral to truthfully tell someone they are donating to stop election fraud.
Trump supports aren’t real people. Their sentience has been classified as below that of plants. Morals don’t apply.
I’m not going to say they’re not real or not sentient. But I will absolutely say that they are selfish. They lack the empathy required to understand how things will affect others. They lack the willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. They lack the humility required to understand that they could be wrong, and the critical reasoning required to change their views in the face of new evidence.
Almost every conservative I’ve ever met is either extremely rich or lives in microcosm. Hell, I’ve got extended family that have never travelled outside of their hometown and anything foreign or different to them is either ridiculed or shunned.
They want a social hierarchy, and they want their place in it preserved. God forbid people get equitable standing.
That goes for both…
Yup.
You know how I know my maga relative lost everything he tried to “invest” in crypto? Because he suddenly STFU about it.
There was a while in 2019(I think) when all the office talk(software firm) was crypto then it just stopped it was glorious.
It didn’t stop, sadly. Everyone just started talking about AI instead.
Yeah, times like 2019 are the best times to buy actually.
When crypto is up, the hype gets out of control and fools rush in to buy. The best time to buy is when crypto is “dead” once again.
(On the other hand bitcoin and proof-of-work is already any obsolete technology… And almost all NFTs are trash… So stick with ETH or whatever instead.)
Is it immoral to harm a demographic, that consistently harms everyone else?
The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually “okay” people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.
The problem is though, they are dumb. Don’t get me wrong or think I’m sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20’s after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.
A lot of people haven’t learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don’t exercise it. My take is that we’re expecting people to exercise muscles they’ve never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate “care” into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their “news station” praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who “hate america” and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you’re so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.
We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.
I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.
I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don’t make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.
Let’s save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it’s pure evil.
My personal experience essentially echoes what you’ve said. I’ve usually found that when I actually ask Trump supporters, which is probably most of the people I know, what they think and why, they are pretty candid about it. They will also voice frustrations, many of which I can understand or even agree with them on. There is a lot more common ground there than you might think.
The problem is that most of the issues are complex and nuanced. Not that surprising. Issues that impact the population of an entire country, or even a sizeable chunk of it, are bound to be pretty complex. Here’s where things go off the rails.
Kind of like you said, Joe Blow from Louisiana is often uneducated at best or a complete moron at worst. Joe Blow does not understand all the complexity surrounding the issues he’s upset about and figures that if he doesn’t understand it, neither does anyone else. He’s also a little too proud to admit he doesn’t understand it.
This is why Republican party completely abandoned an issues bases platform, aside from completely fabricated pearl clutching social issues like those scary tRaNs PeOpLe or AboRtIoN. They know full well that they have nothing when it comes to meaningful solutions to actual problems and if they did, the few supporters they have with functioning brain cells would start to ask to many pesky questions. A divide and conquer strategy is much simpler and more effective; albeit incredibly destructive.
I have a gaming group that I regularly spend time with, they are about as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We have back-country gun-toting conservatives playing alongside college campus protesting trans girls, hispanic immigrants, US marines, housewives, people from China and Philippines, midwest American Christians and one extremely loving gay couple who do everything together.
While we do have a few ground rules, more like courtesy guidelines, like no arguing about politics, it’s not something I’ve ever had to enforce or moderate, and if you were to overhear the group on an average gaming night, you would think they are just the closest and tightest group of people who lift each other up, help each other out, laughing together and telling lewd jokes until they laugh so hard together that they wheeze.
This group has been the end-product of years of “distillation” in that the people who have issues with other people’s identity or politics or can’t set aside ego to have fun with people and make new friends, they just have naturally fallen by the wayside, so what’s left is a group of people who are bound together by something much stronger than politics or ideology, and that’s intelligence.
The one common thread that everyone left here has is that they are sharp, they like to talk through issues, they talk about ideas and science and sociology and relationships and enjoy the very simple act of trying to understand other people.
Curiosity about others will carry you through life far, far further than one might think.
This is also something that many people outside of the USA don’t understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.
49% of the americans
More accurately, 49% of voters. Out of all of the eligible voters in the 2020 election only 66% actually voted. And, that election had the highest turnout in over a century.
So when trying to calculate how many eligible voters voted for Trump in 2020 you’ll have to take the statistics above into consideration.
49% of 66% is 32% if my math is correct. 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump.
Sorry for being pedantic but it annoys me when people say that half of America supports Trump when it’s just not true.
I’m bad at math, but should that be 32% of Americans not voters.
Well you should subtract out the kids. I’m not going to get irritated about someone under the age of 18 not voting. That’s why it should be eligible voters, not Americans.
33%, but yeah. Both are true.
66% of eligible are voting, 33% of eligible are not voting. Of the 66% that did vote, half of those (I used 49%) voted for Trump. Half of the 66% is 33%.
So, of the eligible voters, 33% voted Biden, 33% voted Trump, and 33% didn’t vote.
Or, if you want math:
.66 * .49 = .32 or 32%
Edit: I misunderstood the question and gave an off-topic answer. Someone else commented the correct reason: not all Americans are eligible to vote. Children, felons in certain States, etc. Since they didn’t/can’t vote they’re not counted in the “half of America” statistic often quoted.
Half of eligible voters voted for trump, which is about 32% of America in 2020.
Forget empathy. Trumperinas do NOT vote their own interests.
MAGAGAs (make america great and glorious again) are poor and oppressed but vote to lower the taxes on the billionaires and to raise them on themselves, vote to take away public services from themselves, vote to remove the remaining 2 regulations on the megacorps, banks, and big landlords that oppress them.
In a world that made sense everyone in favor of deregulation should be forced to ride Boeing, and leave us, the sane folks, alone.
They got convinced that the interests of the billionaire class align with their own. That’s stupidity. You can’t fix stupid with empathy.
I don’t want empathetic people. I want people to rep their actual material interests, cogently and sincerely.
Right now we have people voting for the “leopards eating faces” party get surprised when their faces get eaten, because the morons wanted to believe they were the leopards too.
Servative trash. No mercy for the servatives. And I am tired of all the moralizing language. Kumba fucking ya. Horseshit. We ain’t gonna hug and kiss this shit all better. Morality is a fairy tale and we cannot base a world worth living in on a lie. Morality is a lie on the scale of religion. Morality is what causes people to self-restrict and self-censor. Morality is what prevents the guillotines.
If morality were against the status quo and against the interests of the billionaires, it would have been outlawed!
We all need to rep our material interests. Even one billionaire is a policy failure.
Is it immoral to harm them? Yes, its bad to harm anyone.
Do I give the slightest fuck about them being victims? Hell no.
Why?
Because, to be short about it, my give a fuck is reserved for innocent people. Not for hateful bigots, terrorists, and enemies of the state who want to overthrow our democratic way of life in favor of having a rotten jackolantern as a mentally declining god emperor.
Watching them get fucked in the way they’ve tried to fuck everyone else give me the same delight as watching gas station robbers be met with a shotgun from the clerk and earn an emergency trip to the surgical suite via the ER.
I dont wish it on them, but I will take delight in it.
Its hard because people can use that as an excuse to harm people they pretend is harming them.
But in this case i just couldn’t care less. Drain them for every penny they’ve got. Hold them upside down and beat them like a piñata.
Sigh. Do you want the answer we are supposed to say or the answer we secretly want to say?
This is ‘the ends justifies the means’ line of thinking. Very unethical. But it can also be very cathartic.
Treading a dangerous line here, but I lean towards no
They’re probably the same demographic in some ways in that they’re right wing and Trump supporters, they’re just in the upper echelon of the grifters not the grifted.
I get the feeling, I really do. However, I can’t think of many things that would radicalise someone more than losing all their money or being buried under a pile of debt. Being these sorts of types, they’ll only go one way. On reflection, I’m sure you recognise the very specific and historically recognisable tinder box.
I mean, it still might not be immoral. They can all get fucked. Just, maybe not in that specific way is all im saying.
A different kind of person is telling you to spare your empathy. Its the same strategy those in the MAGA camp are pulling.
No.
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Why make it hard on yourself when idiots self-select into an easy target audience?
Less money for Trump to scam from them… The Crypto Scammers are doing good for once.
Good choice, most are dumb as fuck. If I were evil I would absolutely grift them. They make it so easy!
They’re already being grifted, they have already passed the first filter.
People sometimes wonder why scam emails and phone calls are so obvious, with mis-spellings, bad grammar and poor English. The thing is that they do this on purpose. Running a scam takes time and energy, you want to work marks that you know can be manipulated easily, and if someone can’t determine that an email from “micosaft.pAypal-Customre-Sercicve.com” isn’t legit, they’re VERY likely to buy the story that they have to send money via Western Union to some random address in Kazakhstan to get their share of the king’s inheritance.
Being in maga is basically that. If you’re wearing a red hat and waving flags and spouting off FOX news lines to anyone who will listen, you’re a mark.
Makes sense. Thieves filtering for easy marks is probably older than writing.
It’s not the onion. But now the whole world is the Onion.
I can think of no better irony at this point than The Onion switching directions and becoming a real news outlet.
And future generations wokld look at their archived 80s/90s stories, and think they were real.
And thus the cycle begins anew.
That’s brilliant.
You know how once in a blue moon you look at news story that’s sounds completely crazy and go “huh”? Like when buzzfeed suddenly started using all their clickbait money to fund good, legitimate journamism?
This would be that.
Or like when all the news outlets were reporting that the Queen had died. AND EVERYBODY BELIEVED THEM!!!
She’s not dead. She’s still out there. Roaming the streets. Seeking justice among a seedy criminal underbelly, seeking personial closure for the deaths of her parents in an alley when she was a child.
…wait, I might be thinking of Ted Turner.
stupid, dumb people, easier target. Who can blame the scammers? :D
Scammers usually try to target 🎯 gullible people like old people. Usually people who don’t understand what’s going on.
If you’re gonna type out target, why the emoji?
MAGA Supporters would be reading it 🤣
Credulous as well. Conspiracy theory and aliens magazines used to have tons of ads for scams.
I have had the misfortune of Mixing shows for Newsmax…that is literally their stick
Their shtick?
Well I wasn’t smart enough to say no to working for that god awful place briefly… I’m certainly not smart enough to spel gud
Them beating you in the head with their stick probably didn’t help.
Not at all… ha
Their schtick.
I thought so too, and schtick is a valid variant, but dictionaries list shtick first.
Yeah, both are correct in English.
I’d love to see a study on the religiosity, political affiliation, education, wealth, career, and age of people who get scammed and the types of scams they fell for.
And donate to a left leaning charity? Chaotic good
Nah, just targeting the low hanging fruit in a get rich quick scheme. I’m not crying though.
Not sure whether “let them fight” or “spidermen pointing” meme is more appropriate
I’d pick spidermen
Is there really a difference if the money goes to crypto guys or some GOP PAC? They are both scammers from the word go.
And as scammers prefer to target the most gullible idiots, they already have a perfect target group for their “business” with the MAGA brains.
The money going to crypto guys has less negative impact and might even help some 3rd world north Koreans actually afford food. Any money going to the GOP only brings pain and suffering.
Either way it’s going to organized crime. At least the crypto scammers are unlikely to influence the election!
Yes, crypto guys aren’t interested in using the money to help the US become a fascist hellscape.
Non paywall linky:
Cultists are easy to swindle.
