That’s fine, but completely screws over rural people. You would need subsidies or something if you live outside metro areas.

Let me just point out that being hostile to people who challenge your preconceived notions is not a sign of great intelligence.

How do you define far right? I’d guess most of the people around me would be considered far right by lemmy standards, and I’m not aware of any of them being concerned about tampons. But maybe I just don’t know about the real far right.

Wasn’t my experience, but I will take your word for it. I’d heard of it of course, but always in a vague, third-hand kind of way, or like it used to be a thing when they first came out. Caveat: I’m a guy. But that said I’m surrounded by very conservative and religious people and my wife is from an even more conservative part of the country, and the tampon thing was never an issue. She says she never even heard about that, and the only thing related to tampons she remembers was about risk of toxic shock if you leave them in too long.

That one hit a little close to home?

The tampon thing is about requiring schools to put them in the boys bathrooms, which is a totally different thing. But also my response is about my experience in the US.

I’m not saying it never happened, just that it isn’t a thing anymore, not in any mainstream sense. Obviously there are small communities or whatever. There always are, but they are not representative of any significant group of people and can’t be pointed to as an example of some kind. This is the kind of thing lemmy/reddit does all the time that gets really annoying. It’s low effort circle jerking, and people just eat it up because it makes them feel superior.

Yeah I guess I don’t know much about the Uk or other countries, I’m just speaking for my experience in the US.

They know all of this, but the only thing that matters is making the opposition look bad. The narrative is the only thing that matters, and reality or context are mere inconveniences. It’s a politics thing. Annoying if you want the truth, but unfortunately effective in a popularity contest like the US elections.

Lol it’s not a thing. I have no idea what lemmy people go on about sometimes.

I’d argue that customer service experience isn’t that relevant to a job running a country, that there is other experience I’d consider much more relevant.

Yeah maybe, but every second you spend defending or deflecting that kind of thing is a win for blue team. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. If you are reacting, you are losing. Tbh the pictures could be real too, in which case he definitely can’t talk about it because the opposition would eat him alive, even if the reality were pretty unremarkable.

Yeah but also if they take time to deny or explain everything, then they come across as defensive and weak. The reality is that in a popularity contest, rumors are effective if you aren’t above them. I think Trump team’s best strategy would be to ignore the salacious news/rumors for a while, then make a dismissive response about the opposition making things up because they are nasty and small minded people. I’m sure that’s what they are doing, but it will be interesting to see. Trump needs to reassert himself as the cool kid somehow and responding and reacting won’t do it.

You don’t actually believe it do you? I thought it was obvious that these are memes like the couch thing.

I’m talking about things like pointing to extreme views and radicals on the other side as though they are examples of the norm, intentionally propagating lies, bad faith arguments etc. The sort of thing that is only about your team winning and the other team losing. Discussing ideas is much more interesting than circle jerking about how evil such and such is or intentionally spreading misinformation because you know it helps your team.

And yes, your examples would be the same type of thing, though I’d have to take your word for it that they happened that way.

Path to fascism and handmaid’s tale are also slippery slopes though. I don’t think the right has a monopoly on that kind of rhetoric. The rest of that is kind of weird, though understandably can be hard to get used to for people who struggle with change. But I’m not sure I agree about sports. I think that’s a complicated topic and feel bad for women who want to be competitive in their own space. The Olympics thing is even more complicated than the usual transgender debate, but ultimately women’s sports is going to have to decide how exclusionary they are going to be. They already exclude men, so they will have to determine who else to exclude in order to protect their competition. Maybe the answer is to be less exclusive, but anyway that’s why this is a hard topic.

You can jump to extremist rhetoric and zero sum game thinking, but I don’t think it helps anything. It’s no better than what the worst of them are doing.

Well the couch thing is not real of course, but also not sure what you mean about the slippery slope. I guess maybe the bad weird thing kind of makes sense though, but that’s open to interpretation and pretty relative to what you consider normal.

I mean, did you forget that the Democrats started it? They launched a campaign to call Republicans weird in a derisive and condescending way. Democrats used it as an attack, as a negative trait, as something gross and repulsive. It doesn’t make sense to me, and I still have no idea what they were trying to accomplish with this strategy. Did they forget that a good part of their base takes pride in being weird?

That makes as much sense as a cure for cancer does.

I saw a town hall recently with a bunch of democrats giving speeches and they were all doing it too, making fun of people and trying for low effort zingers. It just didn’t really work, seemed forced. Like junior high kids trying to gain social capital by making fun of people. But in general it seems like the strategy is to try energize the Democrat base with populist tactics rather than taking the high road and hoping that regular Americans actually want something different.