Fair. I think this graph of the personal savings rate the last 5 years explains everything. Both Biden and Harris were fighting an uphill battle against these numbers the whole time.
Notice how everyone’s savings goes up during pandemic relief and then tanks as those benefits end and inflation continues to stay high?
Like, this wasn’t “I’m sacrificing the Palestinian people for my own safety”, it was “This is literally the least bad option for Palestine as well.” People in Palestine understood this. But apparently it’s too emotionally charged for some online ‘leftists’.
No, the least bad option is no genocide.
If everyone who tried to quell dissent on Harris’s policies on Gaza instead pushed on the administration I guarantee they would’ve changed their mind. They adapted other issues through out the campaign. But they didn’t on this one because they thought they could get away with a genocide and still win the election.
And even your article says they don’t think Harris winning will stop the suffering either, so very motivating for people /s. If you want voters, you need to give them motivation. Apathy is the worst thing that can happen for turn out. Telling them to vote for the person killing their family sounds like the most demotivating thing I can think of. It’s not emotionally charged, well it is, but it’s just electoral strategy, too.
The good news is that they have established their power as a coalition, and hopefully we can leverage this in the future. Now the Zionists aren’t the only votes they have to be scared of losing, and we can build on that to pull the Dems left. Maybe. I hope lol.
This is quite hilarious considering the same people you’re defending.
What people? Those trying to push the party left so it doesn’t lose like this every year? Genocide victims? Sorry, but I will never feel bad about defending people fighting against a genocide or suffering from one. You’re willing to try but my morals don’t bend that way.
See, every time a Dem loses, I’m told it’s messaging, but every time it’s pointed out what messages the Dem actually put out, it’s drowned out by the fact that both left and right do nothing but beat the drum on whatever they see as the Dem candidate’s weakness regardless of what their strengths are.
True, everyone has an opinion. The right says the Dems are too far left, but Kamala hewed to the center hard this time, including a record number of Republicans at the DNC, and still lost. There are a bunch of other reasons I think this keeps revealing itself to be false (blue candidates, including women, and ballot measures winning down ballot all over the country even in states that went to Trump, Trump winning on vague populist vibes of the economy as revealed in opinion polls with the other fascist part of his policies like immigration or scary trans people being ranked less in priority, his more multi-racial voters suggesting that too, the change in numbers between 2020 for Trump and Harris shows people not switching to conservative but instead just a depressed turn out, the Muslim vote numbers for Biden in 2020 being like 86% compared to Harris in 2024 being something like 40%, etc). She ran a standard Democratic campaign emblematic of not only the current administration but every one during their lifetime since Reagan, and people are tired of neoliberalism, although most can’t express that, they can still feel it. People hear about these nice, liberal policies, but they don’t see it reflected in their bank accounts, so they stop caring about the Democrat’s technocratic incremental 12 point plans after awhile, because they’ve heard these are happening under Biden, too, but they figure they must not do anything. But I guess that’s just another opinion lol.
I know other people think it’s her not having enough time or Biden not dropping out soon enough or something. That might have helped give her more time to spread her policies, but I doubt that was the main reason. I still think she could’ve won with the right strategy with the time she had and that huge upswing of energy when she entered the race.
I don’t know, maybe something like saying the Palestinian people must be helped to “realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination” while calling for a ceasefire and saying she “will not be silent” on Gazan suffering?
It’s hard for people to believe that when the administration you are a part of says the same thing while continuing to arm the genocidal IDF army for the tunes of billions of dollars. Not to mention denying Palestinian speakers at the DNC while inviting families of hostages, bringing up October 7th first every interview and calling that the biggest tragedy, saying you wouldn’t change anything from the Biden campaign, emphasizing Israel every time Palestine is brought up before and after Palestine, kicking out a Muslim person in the audience at a rally, sending the cops after protestors, saying we’ll have the most lethal army in the world, saying Iran is the world’s biggest threat while their neighbor is doing a genocide, her staff reiterating that an arms embargo was 100% off the table removing any chance of leverage to enact material change, Trump going to their community before you do, and it goes on and on… That quote comes off insincere when everything else you do and say indicates the opposite. The fact that another red line has come and passed without the US changing position on Israel proves the Biden administration’s insincerity on this issue even more.
Oh, wait, that’s right, the selfsame people who said “Calling for a ceasefire is all I need to vote for the Dem candidate” immediately moved their goalposts once it happened, because Palestinian genocide was never the actual issue. They don’t give a single fuck about more deaths or less deaths. They just want to play purity politics, and people giving them asspats for doing so are encouraging this behavior.
Nah, it’s because the White House purposefully and cynically used a different definition of the word ceasefire than the one all the activists and aid workers understood it to mean. This article explains it well. A ceasefire without leverage would cause the genocide to resume immediately after a hostage exchange, and everyone knows this because Israel is the aggressor and has been since the 1920’s. If her campaign didn’t clarify that an arms embargo is 100% off the table, against our own laws btw, than maybe just a call for a ceasefire would’ve worked, but I doubt it without some sort of explanation of how she was going to accomplish it. She was willing to explain how she’d accomplish other policies, such as through tax credits and such, but not that one for some reason except to say Diplomacy which hasn’t worked for the last year, and everyone knows won’t work now.
“Bullying is when you point out that a strategy is dogshit and senseless, and the more you do it, the more bullying it is.”
I hope not, because that’s what I’ve been saying about the Democratic electoral strategy since before the election lol. I see bullying as more ad hominem attacks, like telling people if they don’t vote for the person arming the person killing their family, you’ll exult in them all dieing or getting deported. Not saying you’ve done that specifically, buts it’s gotten pretty racist in here lately (but not as bad as Reddit at least).
Like, I don’t know what the fuck to tell you. You voted for Harris, so you clearly understand on some level that abstaining is a dogshit answer, but you seem to be bending backwards to accommodate morons who’ve just willfully assisted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people, minimum, for no other reason than their own vanity.
The thing is, I thought it would’ve been a lot easier to convince the candidate to change their genocide policy than convincing thousands of people to change their moral values. Essentially, it’s because I wanted her to win that I foresaw a problem with her electoral strategy and kept trying to do something. It’s why I started that vote swapping thread that went nowhere and kept trying to encourage empathizing with the unhappy people in the US rather than ignoring them. Because I saw blaming the voters in 2016 didn’t fix shit, and instead we’re going to have to learn some lessons. But no one was learning them, instead trusting that 2020 wasn’t just a fluke because of the pandemic.
Idk man, I know we’re all hurt right now, but at this point I’m seriously losing hope in the Democratic party, and I blame them 1000% more than the voters because if I could see the mistakes being made there’s no way other more qualified people couldn’t either. If they win 2028 it’s purely because continual enshittification and failing material conditions means that the voters will vote against anyone in power during the death throes of this falling empire, and not because they’ll change anything. That’s my guess - that unless another Bernie-like figure with Obama’s charisma comes, in who’s also promising sweeping changes to the internal systems of the US and not just trying to treat the symptoms - that we’re going to be switching off on one-term Presidents forever.
At least some other people are realizing this, too. I just hope that the country is not too atomized to assemble some sort of alternate coalition before its too late. We need to get off these tracks before we fall into fascism.
Sorry for the length of all this, I won’t blame you if you skip most of It. Adding spoiler tags so it doesn’t take up too much room in the thread. Honestly, this comment has been a great way to organize my thoughts and feeling on all this, too. It wasn’t when I started, I didn’t mean to subject you and Lemmy to it, I think we’re all just looking for catharsis right now lol.
I agree with everything you’re saying except for this part. A lot of voters are very dumb (they mostly voted for Trump and he is planning tariffs that will tank the economy, including for them, for example). But, the Democrats also need to adapt to the voter base and the issues they care about. I think both things can be true lol.
And you were trying to do that by throwing a whole other demographic under the bus. We shouldn’t be surprised this country is okay with genocide and then voted for Trump, because it reveals they were already primed for fascism and atomized enough to leave various groups behind.
For conservatives it’s women, LGBTQ people, and “the elite”, while for liberals it seems to be latino men, Muslims, and the working-class (and kinda trans people because she started getting super vague about helping them near the end of the campaign). The people who right now are like, “Well fuck you guys for voting Trump, I guess it’s every person for themselves, got to look after my own now”, well that’s how lots of people felt before the election when no one was helping them with the genocide, refused to even hear them out, so of course their turnout was depressed.
And they were a tiny minority, btw, if they all voted for Harris she still would’ve lost. More people didn’t turn out because their savings were decreased because their wages haven’t matched the rise in inflation. Even though Biden had helped lower inflation, people still felt left behind, and rather than not listen to them or say they’re wrong, they should’ve empathized with them and said, don’t worry we’ll help out.
We will never go forward if we continue on in this manner instead of having solidarity, but that can never happen if you guys keep interpreting warnings and advice as Russian bots and use that as an opportunity to tear down others, plug your ears, and prop up a genocide. And ya, I voted for Harris, they had some good policies, but it was a messaging thing. They should’ve taken the good economic stuff from their website (stopping price gouging and we’re going to hold companies accountable, the $25,000 to help buy a home thing, fighting pharmacy companies to make medicine affordable, etc), keep abortion in there as it was a strong issue, and maybe add some new stuff (we’ll bring back some pandemic measures to help you buy food and build up your savings again, like child tax credit or loans, because that’s when people remember having the most savings), don’t be afraid to say working-class instead of the middle-class, and then hammered that over and over again. Instead their most repeated talking points were that they’re saving democracy, they’ll reach out to neocon Republicans and put them in the cabinet, have the most lethal army in the world, and keep doing all the same stuff as the current Administration, a presently unpopular one. And abortion, but I think that was actually a good strategy, it just should have been supplemented with the other stuff.
There was also stuff they could’ve said to appease the Muslim voters while still being vague for the pro-genocide people, like “We will uphold the law with regards to selling weapons to allies.” It’s not a 100% yes on the arms embargo but it gives hope to people looking for any lifeline on the Gaza issue. It’s like what she about the trans thing.
But anyway, they didn’t do that, and the signs for this result were there when liberals, like the ones in this very thread, refused to abandon bullying as a strategy, and continued to think they could just gaslight people into thinking it would work after it didn’t work in 2016. Maybe it’ll work in 2028 if we still have democracy then, but only because people will be tired of Trump again by then and they’ll be able to run literally anyone to beat him (like in 2020).
So your solution is less criticism of the party? No wonder the Dems never learn.
You can’t just assume everyone who didn’t vote is a leftist or did it for Palestine. That’s kinda crazy, and you have no proof of that. You’re just assuming that so you have an excuse to get mad at people who don’t deserve it instead of your precious DNC. More realistically, they’re just non-political people who don’t do research, didn’t care, and weren’t charged enough to go vote by the Dems message and rhetoric, and did they probably have a short as hell memory because they weren’t scared enough of Trump (maybe because he was a known quantity or something). Those people googling if Biden dropped out the night of the election or had no idea RFK dropped out? They’re probably more like them.
TERF Island isn’t much better. You’ll probably have to fight there, too. Once they’re done with fighting trans people, they’ll go back to fighting other LGBTQ people, it happens every time. But I get wanting to leave the US. I’ve been considering it, too. You got to do what’s best for your family.
No leftist thinks “Joe wasn’t that bad”. On his watch Israel has killed an estimated almost 200,000 people (using more accurate figures by the Lancet and people on the ground since their health center basically can’t count anymore since they don’t have the infrastructure), started their initiation of the general’s plan starving out Northern Gaza, made everyone but a doctor flee the last hospital in Northern Gaza, start taking over West Bank, killed a record number of journalists in any conflict ever, kill the people they were negotiating with multiple times, and let them start a war with Lebanon and Iran. Oh and also sent backup to Yemen and put troops in Israel to protect them from retribution since apparently Israel is the only country allowed to defend themselves. Trump will do the same thing, but just talk about it more. It’ll be tough for him to reach those heights, even if he sends more troops in, it’ll just be continuing the logical next step of what Biden was doing.
It’s pretty normal for people not to vote for someone genociding their family. It’s her fault, not the voters. The same way Democrats threw away the votes of the left and Palestinians because they didn’t care if they were being genocided is the same logic the right uses to vote for Trump for the economy despite all the damage he’ll do to women and other minorities. You’re all equally selfish and you don’t have the moral high ground when you’re supporting a genocide and quieting any dissent on it. People tried to say this could lose her the election, but nothing can be the politicians fault, of course, just the voters.
Anyway, turns out it wasn’t the genocide anyway. She lost Michigan because of it probably but it didn’t matter anywhere else, and she lost the election before it was even added. You can add up all the third party votes and it didn’t amount to shit. It was the economy. It always is. People in fucking rural Pennsylvania haven’t been reading hexbear posts or whatever. They just didn’t buy what she was selling.
Or course, if it was the genocide, that just proves what the left was saying all along: she’s got to do better on this issue or she can lose the election, and she’d rather lose than not do a genocide. Turned out she probably would’ve lost either way but still, hopefully the next Democrat candidate will do better, or we can supplant the party with a new one that can run an actual campaign. You can keep doing the bullying thing, but it didn’t work this election, or in 2016, and it won’t work next election either. Stop trying to convince the voters to care about what you want them to care about, and telling them not to care about what you don’t care about, and time to meet them where they are.
Nor Alan Moore, the writer of V for Vendetta, another story about a totalitarian, ever watchful, fascist state.
I do, but the US and Western leadership of the world hasn’t exactly been roses, either. They’ve destabilized a country in essentially every region and continent except Australia and Antarctica. That’s why so much of the global south is trying to start another team. Not sure if it will work, but I can’t blame them for trying.
Not so much Russia, as the rest of the world south, like Brazil, South Africa, or China. It’s about 50% of the world population in BRICS now. But it’s so varied, not sure if they’ll be able to figure something out.
I still need to play Prey. It’s all on my wishlists on Steam or Gog, but haven’t gotten around to it.
Lol amazing metaphor. I’m remembering that one.
Hope they’re successful for the sake of countries like Cuba, but I imagine this will take a long time to set up and work out the kinks.
Oh nice. See, this is the kind of stuff I’ll have to look up lol
All 3 are pretty active, although the bottom one is a bot community hat automatically finds rising and popular communities in the fediverse. The top two are similar, but one seems to be about just generally bringing attention to communities people want more users in (community promo), and the other is about advertising newly created or revived communities (new communities).
I personally subscribe to all 3, but I’m always trying to find new communities to add to my home feed. I prefer using that over All or Local.
Yay! Hopefully they can turn it into something material to encourage a multipolar world, like get their payment system to work.
The Israel technique
That’s still happening? I forgot all about that.