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Forums - Politics Discussion - 2024 US Presidential Election

More racism.



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Ryuu96 said:

Just Trump saying more vile shit as per usual.

I legit would not be the slightest bit surprised if he whips out the n-word eventually.

As someonen who is mentally disabled, he can go fuck himself. He's a step away from saying the R word. I'd be less offended if he had just went ahead and said it, at least then it'd be amusing but to say it takes mentally disabled people to ruin things is infuriating, if I were American I'd choose someone with aspergers or lightly on the spectrum over all of the modern day presidents and I bet they'd do a better job, definitely better than Trump, Biden or Kamala. 



Ryuu96 said:

This rhetoric on migrants the past few weeks has been sickening, dude has just gone full blown "copy the Nazis" in his rhetoric, migrants are eating your pets, migrants are raping everyone, migrants are killing everyone, we're going to liberate our country from them, even the legal ones, blah blah blah. Straight up ranting about migrants is all he has now, he's attempting the win on pure hatred alone because his economic policies are fucking stupid, his foreign policy is garbage and his stances on abortion are awful and unpopular.

With nothing left to campaign on he turns to the old fashioned approach of creating an imaginary common enemy for the public, a thing that people can direct all their hatred towards and blame everything on, for Hitler it was the Jews and for Trump it's migrants, whether they're in the country legally or not, it makes no difference to his disgusting rhetoric and makes up any old bullshit to put fear and hatred into the common person who doesn't know any better and yes it is possible to campaign on immigration without going full-blown Hitler-mode but unfortunate for Trump, he was also the reason the last border bill was blocked.

But he's attacking migrants already legally in America too, this is way beyond "we have too many people coming into the country" when you're also attacking people here in America legally and talking about deporting those people and making up vicious lies about them, I think JD Vance? Made some bullshit up as well that they aren't here legally because in his mind the legal approval wasn't legal.

Donald Trump:  They’re poisoning the blood of our country.

Adolph Hitler: All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.



I've just learned that I'm apparently part of the Harris campaign's outreach to male collegiates! ...laughingembarassed They're reaching out to "geeks and nerds" and (a totally unrelated group) hardcore video gamers with Zoom-call fundraisers and targeted ads on IGN and such. Like this...

...and this...

So you are now convinced, right? wink I think so. You know, gamers, Mario...gamers! tongue-out

Or yeah, maybe the mixed reviews this gamer outreach campaign is getting even on the politically sympathetic ResetEra forums signifies the likely impact. I mean seriously, the first of those ads looks like a birthday card my aunt might've mailed me at some point when I was a kid. On a geekiness scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 2 and both points are for the use of pixelation. The other though, eh, I'll give a solid 6 because the Powerman 5000 reference made me chuckle, though the conspicuous use of the term "game", in contrast, feels cringe-inducingly on the nose. These appeals work better when they're comparable to turning your X banner photo lime green for brat summer, i.e. when they exhibit some real knowledge of the people and culture you're aiming to connect with, and the reality is that there is no Charli XCX analogy available to Kamala Harris in this space to help make these efforts viable. Harris has the likes of Mark Hamill and Lynda Carter among the geek celebs coming to bat for her, whereas Trump merely has Adin Ross, Xqx, Nickmercs, and Faze Banks; some of the most popular streamers out there. The imbalance is as obvious as the imbalance between Trump having the coveted Kid Rock endorsement while Harris merely has that of Taylor Swift, Beyonce Knowles, Billie Eilish, Megan Thee Stallion, Kesha, Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, etc. etc. etc. in her corner in the area of popular music icons. This VGC thread may be primarily frequented by liberals and progressives, but it's clear that gaming culture writ large, "geek" culture writ large, favors Trump. Even the ResetEra people know it, as you can see on their thread about this campaign. We know which way this particular vote is going to go.

In fact, I often see people on the left remark about feeling politically outnumbered by rightists in major gaming spaces (like the IGN community). What's up with that? Best assessment I've got is based on a survey of gamers' political opinions conducted by the American Entertainment Software Association back in 2015 (obviously using their definition of a gamer), as it remains the only study of its kind that I can find. I look at that data and compare its findings with the demographic data from the following year's presidential election to get a compare/contrast between the political appetites of American gamers vs. the U.S. population at large.

AMONG U.S. GAMERS, 2015:

48% conservatives
38% liberals
14% moderates/unknown

AMONG AMERICAN VOTERS, 2016:

39% moderates
35% conservatives
26% liberals

So, based on that data comparison, it looks like actually both ideological conservatives and liberals are over-represented in the gaming space and that the reason the opinion skew in gaming spaces seems so right wing is owed to the comparative absence of moderate voices therein. The ratio of conservatives to liberals isn't meaningfully different in either population sample (conservatives are +9 and +10 respectively over liberals), but there are very few mitigating voices in-between to help correct for that imbalance in the gaming space. That checks out with other well-known demographic factoids about the hardcore gaming population, such as that it skews younger, affluent, well-educated, male, and whiter than the population overall. Such a demo tends to be more politically engaged and (especially in connection to the youthfulness factor) more idealistic. There's likewise a higher level of party registration and cited interest in voting amongst gamers than amongst Americans overall corresponding to this more privileged population demography. The privileged demography is in large part a byproduct of the fairly high cost of gaming as a hobby, especially in the AAA space. (I'm not what might be considered a typical gamer, in other words.)

Anyway, this is reportedly part of a broader outreach by the Harris campaign to younger men. (The Harris campaign estimates that the IGN user population is roughly 80% male.) While most younger men report favoring Harris over Trump, they apparently tend to see Harris as a "lesser evil" type choice rather than somebody they can affirmatively support on her own merits and there's a want of changing that. ...Well I think we can see it's certainly true. Like even here on this thread, the liberals I've noticed tend to describe Harris that way; as a kind of "lesser evil" choice in their minds; someone they simply tolerate because of how bad the alternative is. That is indeed becoming a very foreign sentiment to yours truly, as someone who's become obsessed enough with Kamala Harris that I watched both her recent economic policy speech and the immigration policy one from yesterday and saved the links because they were so good! From yesterday's, I especially appreciated, and was impressed by, her extensive remarks about the fentanyl crisis in this country and array of clear, easy-to-understand ideas about things we can do about it. And while I find the percentage of her economic plan that's composed of tax breaks comical, I absolutely get, and love, what she's doing with that: ideas like raising the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit, subsidizing the construction of more affordable housing with strategically placed tax credits and giving people looking to start up a small business a $50,000 deduction...policies like those have much the same practical effect as just subsidizing those things directly, but this way you can be fighting the man, outsmarting Uncle Sam with your mastery of the tax code or whatever instead of taking taxpayer money like a parasite just because you're hungry and in need! She clearly understands how Americans think. What I like at least as much though are just the more direct measures she's championing to limit increases in the cost of living, like national rent control, banning grocery price gouging at the federal level, establishing price ceilings for prescription drugs, this sort of thing. In all of these ways and more, she has begun to clearly distinguish herself from President Biden in ways that I consider positive and frankly I find her the best candidate for president the Democrats have ever nominated in my lifetime. I'm just not surprised that she's among the only national level politicians in America with a net-positive average favorability rating as a person in all the polling aggregators, and no, I'm afraid I don't understand why that's only because of women.

Whatever the case though, I have to concede to finding the broader outreach to male voters, which includes stuff like embracing crypto and calls to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence, the least inspiring thing she's doing. I mean I get why she's pushing so aggressively to get the Silicon Valley biotech bro types back into the Democratic-voting camp; because if you don't do that then you can wind up with techno-fascist police states like Nayib Bukele's one in El Salvador. As conservative feminist Mary Harrington has pointed out, that kind of libertarian techno-fascism (which she calls "right-wing progressivism") appears to be the actual future of the global right much more than the ethno-nationalist and Christian nationalist tendencies. The likes of Bukele appear to be especially popular with the younger men of the global right who form its advance guard and future. So yeah, this may be a way of preventing something like that from ultimately happening here; keeping that population subset on board with the lower-case "D" democratic project. But still I can't help just disliking "Web3" instinctively. Crypto just looks like one big scam to me and artificial intelligence so far seems to be finding mostly negative, anti-social applications that should probably be slowed down and more heavily regulated rather than sped up in development. Just my opinion. At the end of the day though, issues like these are far from the most compelling ones to me in this election.

I guess that's all I have to say this evening.

Last edited by Jaicee - 5 days ago

JWeinCom said:
Ryuu96 said:

The too old suddenly stopped in the media once Biden dropped out, Lol.

Guy is struggling, he is clearly mentally and physically declining, I don't think he can do another 4 years in office

He's declining and it's not like he was a stable genius to begin with. Do you by any chance have a chart of number of rallies by harris?

Based on what I could find, Harris attended 6 rallies in August.

Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/07/us/politics/harris-trump-rally-crowds-size.html

https://ash.harvard.edu/articles/the-real-numbers-tracking-crowd-sizes-at-presidential-rallies/

I found that she has or will attend five rallies for September (NC, PA, GA, WI, NV).

Sources: https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2024/09/12/harris-criticizes-trump-debate-performance-in-first-campaign-rally-since-tuesday-night-s-showdown

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/live-blog/trump-harris-presidential-election-live-updates-rcna171172

https://www.kget.com/news/politics/ap-harris-is-set-to-rally-again-in-las-vegas-as-both-campaigns-emphasize-swing-state-nevada/

Last edited by Jimbo1337 - 5 days ago

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Trump alarms America, again.  And thankfully Trump is getting old enough so that his filter is leaving him and we are seeing the real person underneath. And it's scary that this guy has a serious chance of becoming president.  


https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-call-really-violent-day-compared-purge-1961090

Last edited by shavenferret - 4 days ago

shavenferret said:

Trump alarms America, again.  And thankfully Trump is getting old enough so that his filter is leaving him and we are seeing the real person underneath. And it's scary that this guy has a serious chance of becoming president.  


https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-call-really-violent-day-compared-purge-1961090

Lol. The dude who has almost been assassinated twice jerking off at the thought of a Purge-hour...Good luck with that one buddy.



Ryuu96 said:
shavenferret said:

Trump alarms America, again.  And thankfully Trump is getting old enough so that his filter is leaving him and we are seeing the real person underneath. And it's scary that this guy has a serious chance of becoming president.  


https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-call-really-violent-day-compared-purge-1961090

Lol. The dude who has almost been assassinated twice jerking off at the thought of a Purge-hour...Good luck with that one buddy.

Exactly, it's like he's got a hard on for turning Americans into lesser and evil minions, as a similar thing happened when he encouraged people to storm the capital. 



LegitHyperbole said:

How are these posts any different than what I posted in the US politics thread. ^ Massive misinformation.

If you're going to accuse someone of spreading misinformation, you should specify what part of the post is misinformation and correct that person with factual information, preferably from a credible source.

Do that and people might start taking you seriously.



Jaicee said:

I've just learned that I'm apparently part of the Harris campaign's outreach to male collegiates! ...laughingembarassed They're reaching out to "geeks and nerds" and (a totally unrelated group) hardcore video gamers with Zoom-call fundraisers and targeted ads on IGN and such. Like this...

...and this...

So you are now convinced, right? wink I think so. You know, gamers, Mario...gamers! tongue-out

Or yeah, maybe the mixed reviews this gamer outreach campaign is getting even on the politically sympathetic ResetEra forums signifies the likely impact. I mean seriously, the first of those ads looks like a birthday card my aunt might've mailed me at some point when I was a kid. On a geekiness scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 2 and both points are for the use of pixelation. The other though, eh, I'll give a solid 6 because the Powerman 5000 reference made me chuckle, though the conspicuous use of the term "game", in contrast, feels cringe-inducingly on the nose. These appeals work better when they're comparable to turning your X banner photo lime green for brat summer, i.e. when they exhibit some real knowledge of the people and culture you're aiming to connect with, and the reality is that there is no Charli XCX analogy available to Kamala Harris in this space to help make these efforts viable. Harris has the likes of Mark Hamill and Lynda Carter among the geek celebs coming to bat for her, whereas Trump merely has Adin Ross, Xqx, Nickmercs, and Faze Banks; some of the most popular streamers out there. The imbalance is as obvious as the imbalance between Trump having the coveted Kid Rock endorsement while Harris merely has that of Taylor Swift, Beyonce Knowles, Billie Eilish, Megan Thee Stallion, Kesha, Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, etc. etc. etc. in her corner in the area of popular music icons. This VGC thread may be primarily frequented by liberals and progressives, but it's clear that gaming culture writ large, "geek" culture writ large, favors Trump. Even the ResetEra people know it, as you can see on their thread about this campaign. We know which way this particular vote is going to go.

In fact, I often see people on the left remark about feeling politically outnumbered by rightists in major gaming spaces (like the IGN community). What's up with that? Best assessment I've got is based on a survey of gamers' political opinions conducted by the American Entertainment Software Association back in 2015 (obviously using their definition of a gamer), as it remains the only study of its kind that I can find. I look at that data and compare its findings with the demographic data from the following year's presidential election to get a compare/contrast between the political appetites of American gamers vs. the U.S. population at large.

AMONG U.S. GAMERS, 2015:

48% conservatives
38% liberals
14% moderates/unknown

AMONG AMERICAN VOTERS, 2016:

39% moderates
35% conservatives
26% liberals

So, based on that data comparison, it looks like actually both ideological conservatives and liberals are over-represented in the gaming space and that the reason the opinion skew in gaming spaces seems so right wing is owed to the comparative absence of moderate voices therein. The ratio of conservatives to liberals isn't meaningfully different in either population sample (conservatives are +9 and +10 respectively over liberals), but there are very few mitigating voices in-between to help correct for that imbalance in the gaming space. That checks out with other well-known demographic factoids about the hardcore gaming population, such as that it skews younger, affluent, well-educated, male, and whiter than the population overall. Such a demo tends to be more politically engaged and (especially in connection to the youthfulness factor) more idealistic. There's likewise a higher level of party registration and cited interest in voting amongst gamers than amongst Americans overall corresponding to this more privileged population demography. The privileged demography is in large part a byproduct of the fairly high cost of gaming as a hobby, especially in the AAA space. (I'm not what might be considered a typical gamer, in other words.)

Anyway, this is reportedly part of a broader outreach by the Harris campaign to younger men. (The Harris campaign estimates that the IGN user population is roughly 80% male.) While most younger men report favoring Harris over Trump, they apparently tend to see Harris as a "lesser evil" type choice rather than somebody they can affirmatively support on her own merits and there's a want of changing that. ...Well I think we can see it's certainly true. Like even here on this thread, the liberals I've noticed tend to describe Harris that way; as a kind of "lesser evil" choice in their minds; someone they simply tolerate because of how bad the alternative is. That is indeed becoming a very foreign sentiment to yours truly, as someone who's become obsessed enough with Kamala Harris that I watched both her recent economic policy speech and the immigration policy one from yesterday and saved the links because they were so good! From yesterday's, I especially appreciated, and was impressed by, her extensive remarks about the fentanyl crisis in this country and array of clear, easy-to-understand ideas about things we can do about it. And while I find the percentage of her economic plan that's composed of tax breaks comical, I absolutely get, and love, what she's doing with that: ideas like raising the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit, subsidizing the construction of more affordable housing with strategically placed tax credits and giving people looking to start up a small business a $50,000 deduction...policies like those have much the same practical effect as just subsidizing those things directly, but this way you can be fighting the man, outsmarting Uncle Sam with your mastery of the tax code or whatever instead of taking taxpayer money like a parasite just because you're hungry and in need! She clearly understands how Americans think. What I like at least as much though are just the more direct measures she's championing to limit increases in the cost of living, like national rent control, banning grocery price gouging at the federal level, establishing price ceilings for prescription drugs, this sort of thing. In all of these ways and more, she has begun to clearly distinguish herself from President Biden in ways that I consider positive and frankly I find her the best candidate for president the Democrats have ever nominated in my lifetime. I'm just not surprised that she's among the only national level politicians in America with a net-positive average favorability rating as a person in all the polling aggregators, and no, I'm afraid I don't understand why that's only because of women.

Whatever the case though, I have to concede to finding the broader outreach to male voters, which includes stuff like embracing crypto and calls to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence, the least inspiring thing she's doing. I mean I get why she's pushing so aggressively to get the Silicon Valley biotech bro types back into the Democratic-voting camp; because if you don't do that then you can wind up with techno-fascist police states like Nayib Bukele's one in El Salvador. As conservative feminist Mary Harrington has pointed out, that kind of libertarian techno-fascism (which she calls "right-wing progressivism") appears to be the actual future of the global right much more than the ethno-nationalist and Christian nationalist tendencies. The likes of Bukele appear to be especially popular with the younger men of the global right who form its advance guard and future. So yeah, this may be a way of preventing something like that from ultimately happening here; keeping that population subset on board with the lower-case "D" democratic project. But still I can't help just disliking "Web3" instinctively. Crypto just looks like one big scam to me and artificial intelligence so far seems to be finding mostly negative, anti-social applications that should probably be slowed down and more heavily regulated rather than sped up in development. Just my opinion. At the end of the day though, issues like these are far from the most compelling ones to me in this election.

I guess that's all I have to say this evening.

In terms of gamers political leanings on forums and the like, I think it's less about the overall split of views, and more about who is more likely to talk about politics.

There is a certain, unfortunately large, subset of conservatives who view essentially everything as part of a culture war and therefore political. See Tucker Carlson's meltdown over the green M&M not wearing high heels anymore which I still can't believe is a real thing that actually happened. Those types are likely to make their political views known in random gaming topics, since they are essentially paranoid conspiracy theorists who are easily triggered. And of course other weirdos are happy to see people that are as weird as they are, so it could quickly become a circle jerk which I think makes it seem that conservatives are more prevalent than they really are. 

Meanwhile some more liberal users will try to argue. Others will roll their eyes and figure it is pointless. Those who are just a little bit liberal or conservative or are moderate are probably just like "fuck, I just came here to talk about games" and are likely to just leave the conversation rather than engage. So, it creates the appearance that there are a lot of conservatives when, in my opinion, it's more a matter of conservatives being louder and more obnoxious about it in places where it's not really warranted. 

Last edited by JWeinCom - 4 days ago