An aspect of this phenomenon (though not the entire explanation): Conservatives tend to oppose initiatives that are broadly beneficial - especially if they stand to help marginalized groups - if they require even a minor or suspected sacrifice on their part. In this case, inclusive of having to sublimate oneself to a public health campaign/the purported risk of side effects or autism, respectively.
I've also noticed that conservatives tend to have a pronounced reaction to the prospect of ills that have visited marginalized groups also becoming their problem. The US has a limited but sharp history of medical exploitation, particularly of minorities. Many conservatives think, "We're next, unless we resist forcefully."
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that pharmaceutical companies are profit driven and large swaths of the country have been impacted by pill addictions.
Trust the science- the pharmaceutical industry pushed the idea that Oxy is a less addictive than morphine. State medical boards across the country put their thumbs in their pockets.
But wait there's more! The whole concept of selling SSRIs to people based on another lie that they have a "chemical imbalance" when exercise has proven to be more beneficial.
What else? Oh, mass prescribing stimulants to children.
As a progressive, I agree that Big Pharma's profit motive is a major problem when it comes to public health campaigns like mass vaccination, and that those companies have not remotely answered adequately for many of their past misdeeds.
This is political drivel meant to superficially denounce "conservatives" by using soft words ("tend to," "broadly beneficial," "marginalized," "minor or suspected," "many conservatives") and it falls apart upon closer scrutiny.
The hardest part of modern day political discourse is saying something that is insightful while being concrete and, for insults/criticisms, not equally applicable to the "other" side. You haven't done that here. You can replace "conservative" with "liberal" in your post and have it be just as applicable because you haven't actually said anything.
You're doing that common conservative thing of correctly identifying the principle, but then taking a turn into ridiculousness when enumerating examples. We are, in fact, in this mess because of the upper middle/professional class. It's not because of green regulations or DEI. It's because that class has a vested interest in enabling the aforementioned billionaire charlatans and their flights of fancy/fear, no matter wht those might be. Literally, if we're talking about their retirement accounts. Why are the best minds of our generation working on ads and addiction machines? Why can't we, as a country, solve problems that poorer countries solved decades ago? Because so very few with a salary and mortgage can think 5-10 years ahead, outside of their plan to scale the crab bucket walls (as rugged individuals). It won't end until a critical mass are ready to say, when presented yet another boondoggle meant to impoverish their neighbors economically and spiritually, "I don't care, I won't do it, fire me," and mean it. The robots aren't ready yet; the wealthy and deleterious elements of society still need poorer cosigners. Snap the pen in half.
Your ideology and desire to demonize the billionares and the rulers and whatnot is limiting you here. There's only a few of them. They literally don't have sufficient brain power to think up all the stupid crap that goes on on the micro level that adds up to the macro problem.
The upper middle/professional class is the problem (this is a theme, there's a reason that every time there a real good bloody revolution in history they do poorly). They have pushed ideas that are grounded in sound principles (diversity and inclusivity are good, the proliferation of high tech communication is good, sustainable environmental practice are good) to the point of absurdity and recoil from the general public. They take these causes of the moment and run with them to absurd levels because that is a reliable way to make a quick buck with the way we've structured our society.
It's like telling a rookie engineer the priority to lighten the part and he shaves so much mass that it will obviously, even to him too readily in real world conditions despite passing in the simulation. He justifies it in his own mind in various ways but at the end of the day the reality is he DGAF. He got his bonus for hitting the metric and moved on. The upper middle class is that rookie engineer. The upper middle class decision makers got that bonus for increasing DEI (in a bad way that makes people hate it), making the production greener (if you don't measure what's offshored) and so on and so on. And of course such behavior comes around to cast shade upon those goals even if the goals are noble. Eventually management says "stop lightening things" in the same way that the populist leaders say things like "no more DEI crap". Such moves aren't the right answer per-say, and even they know it. But they do stop the bleeding enough to not be a serious existential problem for a little while until a new fad comes around.
I don't know how you get a whole society of people to give a crap generally and give a crap about the big picture impact of what they're doing. If I did then surely enough other people would and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
>to the point of absurdity and recoil from the general public
This is incorrect. The actions of wealthy people speak for themselves; they don't need to be demonized, they are plainly wrong on their face. That said, we're in agreement that these people don't have power without the less-wealthy people who enable them.
Well, there's the notion that price no longer quite reflects what's going on under the surface. Certainly, it's in the interests of an entity experiencing a run on its reserves to do everything it can to obfuscate any indication that a run is taking place, including suspicious price shifts. Perhaps it's even more suspicious that such clear movement isn't being reflected in price volatility. If there were no trouble, a small shift reflecting physical movement wouldn't be too dangerous to allow to happen. But what if it wouldn't be a small shift?
That's incorrect - or, at least, not seriously tested with a true far-left candidate with the DNC'S full backing. Dan Osborn was decidedly not that.
Bernie Sanders is, of course, the quintessential example, as he polled better against Trump than all 3 of Trump's eventual Democratic opponents. Katie Porter flipped a red district and was well known for taking corporate stooges to task; the DNC undermined her latest election, and now she's out of politics, IIRC.
Then there's the case in Kentucky, where Charles Booker had a real chance to unseat Mitch McConnell in 2020; he was exceptionally charismatic and had poll numbers that were rising terrifically fast because he was home-grown and made a point of trying to unite people through shared interest. The DNC shoveled millions into primary opponent Amy McGrath's campaign, and even locked black Kentuckians out of their sole voting center in Louisville, suppressing the vote; right-of-center McGrath won, but it's hard to overstate by how narrowly.
She was trounced in the general, and it's important to point out why: because she represented too little difference from McConnell. She was never going to peel voters off the real thing with a milquetoast knock-off. Booker growth in the polls before it was cut short was so pronounced becaus he offered a real choice to Kentuckians. But the problem, for the DNC, isn't that far-left policies aren't popular (they are, wildly, and particularly among the demos that stay home if not activated with a promise of positive change); it's that those policies are anathema to the elite within the party and party donors.
That's the actual reality. Which is sobering, because it means that the left's best chance to make real progress would be when an economic reckoning robs that elite of the funding to buy their preferred candidates.
Your example of a leftist that can win in a red state is...Bernie Sanders? Kamala won Vermont by 30+ points. That's not a red state.
Everything else you said was hypotheticals and wish casting. The DNC cleared the way for Dan Osborn and he still lost. I'm sorry that the state senator you like got beat in the primary. That's politics. Leftist got beat in SF in 2025. If you can't win SF I don't think there is hope for Kentucky.
Bernie Sanders won against Trump in h2h polls in 2016 and 2020, quite strongly. Booker was on his was to something similar. Even 2008 Obama campaigned left of Clinton (we made the correct choice as far as an electoral victory goes, then, if not necessarily policy-wise).
These are realities that the DNC won't face because it threatens their donors. SF is a bad example as a region on a neoliberal stranglehold that is only nominally leftist, but much more concerned with money. The political machine there is adept at crushing upstarts. Nancy Pelosi had a serious challenger several years ago; she refused to debate him, and bad actors with Pelosi connections torpedoed his efforts with specious harrasment campaigns.
Which is all to say that the DNC and its local arms go out of their way to actively scuttle anything that doesn't have their seal of approval. Hope in SF, Kentucky, and elsewhere is not a function of progressive electoral capability, but of establishment Democrats' willingness to play fair or dirty.
Harris beat Trump in H2H polls against Trump in 2024. What matters is likely voters in swing states. Sanders gets crushed across the board when it comes to people actually voting, which is why he lost the primaries. Pelosi gets donors, and her primary opponents don't. No smoke-filled rooms needed.
>Harris beat Trump in H2H polls against Trump in 2024.
Not as consistently, not by the same margins, and with a large amount of ambivalence from swing voters. They liked Sanders in a way that Harris could never emulate. Every election over the last generation, save 2012, was determined by answering the question, "Are you sufficiently different from the last guy?" Obama, Trump, Biden, and, yes, Sanders were. McCain, Romney, Clinton, Trump (ironically), and Harris were not.
Sanders lost Democratic primaries (sometimes in dubious fashion), but kicked our milquetoast candidates' butts with swing voters in swing states, which I agree is what matters (other than not losing the progressive base, which is also something he was good at). He peeled off independents and Republicans who were fed up with Democratic centrism; as with Trump, ANY change would do for them, as long as it was unequivocal. And Sanders had the advantage of not having a history of raping women. Our loss, sabotogating his campaign (literally).
Getting donors isn't a virtue. Several successful Democratic candidates have run on eschewing the wrong kinds of donors. Regardless, she uses the smoke-filled rooms anyway. And then lies about basic stuff like, "This will be my last time running for office." It's no wonder that people on both sides of the aisle hate her. She represents many of the reasons Democrats lose, and only wins herself through momentum and subterfuge.
This is a deeply interesting comment. Obviously, YouTube began and spent several years as an ad-free, subscription-free platform, so to state that no one has ever had the "right" to use YouTube without paying or watching ads is patently false. But why would someone make such statement? Are they too young to remember an ad-free YouTube? Do they have some vested interest in pushing the idea that the YT user experience has never been and never could be more consumer-friendly than it is? Has the state of political rhetoric in 2025 - the age of Applied Big Brother, where simply stating one's preferred history makes it "real" - trickled down to normal discourse?
Who knows? Anyway, I use an adblocker and Grayjay.
People can offer, graciously or not, you something for free.
They can then change their mind.
You are not entitled to it, you never had any “right” to it, and no force real or imagined in the universe will make that so.
I believe that payment in “exposure” is exploitative bullshit and many of my favorite video makers rely on revenue from YouTube as a not-insignificant portion of their income, so I pay.
Terms of Service say otherwise. Until the ads came in, users absolutely had a "right" to access YouTube's services for free. I'm sorry that you misspoke.
Cyberpunk has always been, "What if what happens to those people happened to us?" "Us" being the relatively affluent and stable first world, "those people" being the put-upon urban poor and working class (which I usually summarize as "black Americans" for American readers - to shake them out of their myopia regarding the social and racial politics of the genre - but, as you point out, should include people in Asia and elsewhere).
Its power has never been in its predictive ability, because so much of what defines cyberpunk is already happening. Instead, the consideration of, "That horrible thing can happen to me, too," opens the intellectual doorway (or third eye) to questions of self, cognizance, experience. The computers are just a light show, or a lens.
Preserving wealth is actually an uphill battle. It likes to leak; the wealthy need the help of systems and institutions to keep their largesse intact. If you want it to diffuse throughout society, stop guarding it, stop bailing them out, and tax them like you mean it.
So many policy decisions are about who to throw under the bus; flip the incidence from "mostly people without wealth" to "mostly people with wealth".
Semi-counterpoint: the actually smart, high-achieving young people adapt to the status quo. The ones one rung lower, who the prevailing system cast aside for some deficit or other, begin their own independent revolutions (often at the margin of society, and achieving little).
The rubes who blindly join someone else's revolution are neither the smartest nor the most high-achieving; they're just... useful.
You're describing Yarvin. Smart, but not smart enough to make it in the mainstream because he has racist authoritarian leanings. So he was cast out of mainstream hacker culture to toil on Urbit and his dark enlightment projects. The rubes are the kids in TFA.
It's incorrect to divorce this dynamic from its history, which is largely one of America's right wing/nativists using "states' rights" as a cover to infringe on the rights of marginalized people, which are supposed to be inalieanable from the federal government's point of view. You have to mention the applications of that ideology, which include secession, Jim Crow laws, and anti-abortion laws, among others.
It seems as good a time as any to point out that the environment in which people like this are making decisions is the one in which equal opportunity/affirmative action/DEI become tenable, if not necessary.
For those of you whinging about how unfair scope-broadening to force decision makers to at least consider marginalized people for opportunities is, the problem is not these initiatives, it's these people, who make it impossible to determine if someone is being rejected for merit or for some other reason.
In general, we have to get away from the idea that the highest score along a narrow measure is the be-all-end-all of merit, anyway. Set a reasonable floor of competence, and then either run a lottery or begin looking at other qualities.
What I've learned recently from these meritocracy advocates is competence is about your skin color. Black person working on a plane = disaster waiting to happen, no further evidence needed, but if you've got a nice and competent skin color and no other relevant credentials you're good to go at Andreessen Horowitz
My favorite example of this is Pete Hegseth. The fact that a man with zero qualifications, experience, or demonstrated aptitude to run an organization with 3.4 million employees and an $850 billion annual budget can go on and rail about how "woke hiring" allows unqualified people to rise to positions of prominence in government just shows that some people are completely incapable of shame or introspection.
The resumes of our former and current Sec of Defense:
General Lloyd Austin (Black):
- 12th Commander of United States Central Command
- 33rd Vice Chief of Staff of the Army
- 40th Director of the Joint Staff
Command:
- United States Central Command
- Vice Chief of Staff of the Army
- United States Forces – Iraq
- Multi-National Corps – Iraq
- XVIII Airborne Corps
- 10th Mountain Division
- 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division
- 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment
Awards: 31
Major Pete Hegseth (White):
- Fox News Weekend Host
Command: None
Awards: 4
When a guy with the second bio replaces a guy with the first bio under the banner of restoring meritocracy and rooting out DEI in the armed services, I think the message is clear what they mean by "meritocracy".
I've also noticed that conservatives tend to have a pronounced reaction to the prospect of ills that have visited marginalized groups also becoming their problem. The US has a limited but sharp history of medical exploitation, particularly of minorities. Many conservatives think, "We're next, unless we resist forcefully."
reply