Comment on Is anyone else getting a bit of schadenfreude from the news each day?

spizzat2@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

I understand the appeal of this, but it’s definitely not healthy or helpful. I have to assume that most of these “swindled” people were low-information voters. Generally, people have more important things to do than keep track of what their representatives are doing. I assume they saw nothing more than, “democrats are in charge, and inflation is a huge issue.”, and conservative news was happy to play up that angle without discussing why inflation is a problem. The democrats’ message of “it’s not as bad as you think it is/look at how much we’ve accomplished/we’re still fixing it” wasn’t very cohesive and didn’t really resound with people, either.

I don’t know what the appropriate response is. Empathy is hard. You don’t have to forgive them for electing a fascist, wanna-be dictator, but you do have to give them “an out”. No one likes to eat crow, so if they can’t find a way to save face, they’re just going to double down, no matter how much it hurts everyone. So far, “how was I supposed to know?” is the closest thing I’ve seen to a way to avoid embarrassment, so I think we’re going to have to let them have that one.

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