You all ready for the 2020 elections? This is the big one, friends. This will decide whether we have 4 more years of authoritarian dystopia, or 4 years of a slightly different authoritarian dystopia. Get out there and vote. Huge stakes. Some of the biggest stakes. I’ve heard people talking, very smart people, and they’re saying these stakes are big. Huge even.
Which color of corporatist, war monger kool-aid do you want to chug? You want that fruit punch, or the baja blast? Both will give you diabetes, but the baja blast gives you a kinder, gentler, sweeter form of diabetes. Some people don’t mind the diabetes, as long as the diabetes is civil and soft spoken while it eats their leg away.
I’m already seeing the same goofy-ass predictions on social media that occurred in 2016. People posting their convoluted forecasts that seem to defy all logic and convey a complete lack of touch with reality. Here are a few:
These aren’t the worst, but I forgot to save the worst at the time I saw them, so these will have to do. For anyone who needs a refresher on how monumentally wrong the media and pundits were in 2016, here’s a small sample:
I think the reason these folks are so terrible at predicting elections is that they tend to have a very one-dimensional view of reality. They all live in the same area, surrounded by people who think and act exactly like they do. There’s very little diversity of thought, or life experience in these circles. If everyone you know says Hillary Clinton is going to win, what reason do you have to think otherwise? Just about everyone in my gated community is voting Democrat, so they’re obviously going to win, right? To be fair this goes the other direction too. There are no doubt plenty of people who can’t fathom an outcome where Biden wins this current election. The difference is that these people usually aren’t employed by the major media companies followed by millions of people.
Hillary was pretty damn sure she had that election in the bag as well though:
The fact of the matter is that this election will be close, just like the 2016 elections were. Anyone not living in a complete bubble would agree I should hope. The media lives in a bubble, which is why they are constantly wrong.
Anybody remember right before Joker came out in theaters, when the media desperately tried to create a false narrative that people were going to be influenced by the main character and shoot up theaters? The internet remembers:
This of course, never panned out. The media never got their sensational bloodbath(s) to write further articles about while raking in those outrage clicks and making ad revenue hand over fist. Poor media. I feel sorry for them. 😢
Sensationalism gets views. It’s why people who aren’t even in the media insist on typing out stupid shit like this and posting it on social media:
This is beyond asinine. It was probably also posted merely to get clicks and draw traffic to this weirdo’s account, but there are people who actually believe these conspiracies.
Anyone remember prior to the 2016 elections when the media also incorrectly predicted that Trump supporters would riot if he lost the election? This magazine cover remembers:
Turns out they almost hit the mark here. What they got wrong however, was that it was Hillary that lost, and her followers were the ones doing the things depicted in this image. This is projection at its finest. It’s also why you should take media predictions with a grain of salt, if not ignore them completely. It’s usually just outrage porn to capitalize on people’s fears and sell more copies.
Another thing to ignore are those ridiculous “This person/group/pet has predicted the election results before” nonsense. You can stumble into this distinction via pure chance. Let’s say on a given year 10,000 pundits, organizations or whatever make a prediction between 2 candidates. With a simple coin toss guess, roughly 5,000 will guess correctly. Four years later, of those 5,000, half will guess correctly on a coin toss prediction. After 12 years, 1250 were right. After 16 years, 625 were correct. 20 years later (5 elections) 312.5 were correct. By this time, those that guessed wrong the first year, but correct every successive year have a 4 election, 16 year streak, and so on.
The number of people/farm animals/inanimate objects that might have guessed 4,5,6 elections correctly is going to be rather huge, and thus inconsequential. We’re talking a 1 in 2 chance of being correct on any given year in a two-party system. This is like the astrology of vote predictions. Meaningless, but entertaining perhaps.
Everyone should just remain calm and realize that regardless of who wins, nothing substantive will change. You still won’t get affordable healthcare, the government will continue finding ways to spy on you and strip you of your rights, and your taxes will continue funding wars overseas that you have no say in. There is a silver lining though:
That is true progress. We are truly blessed to live in this progressive era.
Before I head out, I have some actual good news for real though. Turns out the Patriot Act expired last June:
This is the same Patriot Act that bad president Bush initially passed, and good president Obama kept renewing after getting elected on a platform condemning it. Every time it’s about to expire, the government votes to keep it around, but only after adding new dystopian amendments that consistently ignore Constitutional rights. Trump had initially backed the Act, until he suspected it had been used against him by the previous administration, at which point he unpredictably started to see it as a problem.
It’s important to reiterate that Democrats and Republicans have both consistently backed this Act. This means there’s a good chance the next Democrat or Republican elected after Trump will attempt to push the bill, or a similar bill through again. So if Trump does end up with a second term, at least there will be one upside: four years of slightly less government spying.
Happy voting, everyone!