Give it a rest. I can argue back my point of view to you, and we can go back and forth a little, and it’s pointless.

I can guarantee you that people in large numbers will get their doors kicked in by the police and hauled away, and laws will get passed that make it a crime to be anti-Republican. How wide a scale and how bad that all will get isn’t certain, but I think it will be pretty bad.

Your days of pointing at the Democrats as the problem need to stop, and their days of pointing at the Bernie Sanders crowd and the Palestine protestors as the problem need to stop, because even if we (edit: don’t) do put all that bullshit aside and start fighting together against the real enemy for real, we might not win. I really don’t care who’s right anymore. Before the election, I did. That stuff is over.

The more people who are still convinced that their own side needs to be made into the enemy in any respect, the harder that fight will get, and it’ll already be hard, and bad.

Bernie Sanders did that, and it did great. It wasn’t enough to win, partly because the Democrats fucked him.

At this point, you’ll have to contend with massive social-media operations which are working against and shaping the narratives that most of the country use as a substitute for news, to understand what’s happening in the world. I think the time to be able to do it has passed, for a little while, without on-the-ground anti-electoral organizing on a massive scale.

See who you can find in your area. It’s about to get real, I think.

All the people who were doing that are now pushing RCV or other election reforms that would make it realistic for third parties to be able to get all the way to winning. The third-party people who are running in FPTP elections are, almost universally, either attention-seekers or deliberate spoiler candidates. Bernie Sanders, when he was running, joined up with the Democrats instead of running as a spoiler candidate, because he’s making an earnest attempt at making things better.

It doesn’t really matter now because we’ve slipped one rung down the civilizational Maslow pyramid now, and are in for a fight to preserve the right in any capacity to elect who we want in power. But, whenever we make it back out to the other side of that, it’d be nice to remember to reconfigure the system so third parties can actually win, first, and then run third party candidates after that, not the other way around.

Sanders got fucked in 2016 and the Democrats who get nominated aren’t great and yes it’s partially the Democrats’ fault they got so few votes in 2024. I strongly disagree that it’s chiefly their fault, but that horse is out of the barn now, and also the barn is on fire now and connected to the house with the children inside.

There will be some incredible shit going down in the next few years. It’ll be a challenge to have any sort of elections in 2028 that have anything non-Republican in any position to win anything. I don’t think it will happen.

If you want to have a conversation about how we get left-wing values to win in future elections, start with how we fight to preserve basic freedoms like elections that don’t have Trump’s election integrity squad in charge of them, and free speech online, and the military not being used against American protestors.

I hope I’m wrong but I think some real shit is going to go down real soon. I don’t think we should assume elections are going to be normal and then plan from that assumption.

Blame can be shared.

If one person left a bunch of oily rags in my home, and then when they caught fire, someone else refused to fight the fire but in fact let it actively continue, then I can blame both people.

As long as a majority of Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, Sanders’ economic policies have less mass appeal and offer more opportunities for attack ads than you think. It needs to be stressed that people voted for Trump not just because he’s a loud-mouthed racist and sexist and they like that, but also because he inherited the (irrational) image of Republicans being better for the economy.

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/trackers/fame-and-popularity-bernie-sanders

He’s more popular than either Trump or Kamala Harris was, and people seemed to think both of them had enough mass appeal.

The image of Trump exists more or less in a media vacuum, because they can’t say much of anything about either Trump or Kamala. Bernie speaks directly about the economy, in terms that people can understand, and every time he says things, he draws wild amounts of appeal from the both the downtrodden right-voting people and the downtrodden left-voting people, who are otherwise left with nothing but responding to the vague promptings of the media within the vacuum.

Even Trump has to imitate Bernie’s type of speaking, talking about draining the swamp and fighting for the little man, but he can’t do it very well. The media has to fill in the blanks for him. Bernie can do it directly, and from what I’ve seen, it works very well. Do you remember when he went on Joe Rogan and what people’s reaction was to that?

Public opinion on Israel was, even among college kids, very different in 2016, before the current wave of massed anti-Israel propaganda from Russian, Chinese and Iranian bot farms sweeping over social media - and even now most voters (as in: people who actually vote) are still more pro-Israel than pro-Palestine (which makes sense, given how important of a partner Israel is to the US) - and it’s still not high on the list of priorities for most, not even remotely high enough to be mentioned side-by-side with economic policy, which is and almost always has been the number one priority.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/611375/americans-views-israel-palestinian-authority-down.aspx

You might be right. I think a huge factor is that on left-wing social media, which is what you and I use, the Gaza issue was hugely amplified and linked to Biden/Harris, in a way that other issues that were much more favorable were not. For the normie social media, I think they did the same thing with the economy, which also worked gangbusters.

Are you saying that the polls are completely wrong? What are you basing the idea on that the “majority of the people” (reminder: the majority of voters just elected Trump - he actually got the popular vote this time, which is deeply, deeply troubling) have left-leaning positions on the economy and Israel?

I am saying the polls are, in general, completely wrong, yes. I think the most recent election which was anything but the toss-up they predicted is a good example of that.

Bernie’s economics are “left,” but within the spectrum of the average American voter, they aren’t seen as left-only. He doesn’t care much about Democrat branding issues. He cares about people’s pain and how to stick it to the crooks, and he speaks well about it. That’s why the Democrats didn’t like him.

I feel like, at this point, the trolls are just taking a victory lap and seeing how much anger they can extract from all of us hapless ones.

I think a lot of it hinges on what a “moderate” is, in the American political frame of reference, and whether one of those is good enough for most of the American people who don’t live in Washington or NYC to ever have a chance of living a decent life.

You’ve got a point, I guess, about some of it. But I still mostly stick by my statement that Hillary fucked it, when Bernie would have crushed it, on economic policy and sanity in our Israel policy among several other key issues where the majority of people feel very differently than the people in DC and on the news do.

I’ve known people whose individual politics were so insufferable that it caused other people to stop hanging out with them. Was it the communists? No. They were widely accepted, weirdly enough even among the conservatives. It was the aggressive academic leftists talking about feminism / ableism / words you’re not allowed to say / and so on. They were like some kind of MAGA caricature of the left, come to life in living color.

I think it’s because the communists never ordered anyone else to obey their ideology or else officially be a bad person. They just were communists, and everyone else could do their thing, too.

Your point is right, though. Neither of those are on the same level as someone who supports deporting the neighbors and bomb threats to the polling station even after it starts happening in the real world.

I hope this is just a new style of trolling, designed to draw out what I’m sure will be a lot of negative attention.

If you’re really gullible enough to be serious about all this, then go fuck yourself. “Mostly worried about the economy.” You can check back in with me the first time someone in your neighborhood gets hauled away in the mass deportations, or when the price of groceries goes up 50%. My guess is the first will happen before the second, but we’ll have to wait and see.

What were her big accomplishments in the senate again?

Here’s Bernie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders#Legislation_2

I’m not against her because she is blue, or a lady. Those are both good things. I’m against her because she was the last wave of the Clinton-era conservatism that poisoned the Democrats and lost them supporters which led in large part to our current catastrophe. For more, see the source article.

Bernie would have won the fuck out of 2016.

Hillary almost won, and she had essentially nothing to bring beyond being blue, a lady, and continuing the status quo. On top of that she is too fake for politics, which is a high level of fakeness. Bernie would have been an upgrade to everyone who doesn’t work in DC.

How he would have done as president, I have no idea. But he absolutely would have won.

I’m usually the one defending the Democrats against whatever accusation, and I completely approve this message. It’s the 2016 DNC’s fault, and a lot of them are still around making equally bad and corrupt decisions.

The difference being that it takes the standpoint, “We need to take over the Democrats or make something better, so the world doesn’t burn.” It’s the similar but very different standpoint, “It’s the Democratic Party’s fault that the world is burning and I’m not helping until they get better” that is unhelpful.

Edit: https://lemmy.world/post/21721606

There are people who went through the holocaust who compared Trump in 2016 to Hitler. They, if anyone, understand the gravity of the comparison, and made it a little bit carefully. But they said that the way he speaks, the way everyone who is his enemy is an animal who must be destroyed, is very similar.

Well… if it makes you feel better, they’ll get punished, too. I think most of those people are unknowingly living within a very cushy society which has been set up and maintained for them, which is nearing its end, to be replaced by one much more difficult and dangerous.

They’re victims too. They had so much propaganda, and so much bad education, and so many legitimate grievances about a government that since the 1990s at least has mostly forgotten about them.

I try to be kind in my thinking. They might attack and someone might have to defend against them. They might get attacked by the same system they supported in the beginning. A lot of them are going to get hurt, some of them very badly. None of that is good, even a little bit. Some of it “has to happen” and some will just happen because it happens. But I don’t hold any of it against them nearly as much as I do against the people at the top that engineered this whole thing on purpose, with full awareness.

I absolutely did not read your entire comment. The hypocrisy just stuck out to me from a glance. I wasn’t planning to continue to read.

Along with, of course, the hypocrisy of the fact that you’re now applying a purity test before you will vote for a Democrat, even in hindsight, even if she has only the vaguest of connections with the holocaust in Gaza, and even if the alternative is a hundred times worse including for Gaza.

It’s done. I’m not sure why I’m still talking about it. I think I just still have some nervous energy left over because of the question of what the fuck I’m going to do now.

I’m pretty sure that if they are doing that on Lemmy, it’s not without a human in the loop. I’ve been doing some experimentation with it, and I don’t think it’s a fully automated response.

I have some thoughts on it, along with a whole series of unfounded Fediverse conspiracy theories. I don’t think they are doing fully automated bot responses. They might have LLMs helping to craft long, hostile messages that always carry the right framings and narratives at scale, but there wouldn’t really be a way to detect that as far as I can see, so I’m not sure how much it bears thinking about. I do think systematically hijacking posts and making sure the comments look “right” is part of their system.

Take a look at this:

https://ponder.cat/comment/835655

I’ve spent enough of my arguing about politics energy for today, especially now that the horse has left the barn.

https://ponder.cat/comment/839212

https://ponder.cat/comment/837488

https://ponder.cat/comment/835981

That’s my response. There’s some good stuff in there. I do not require any kind of response on any of it.

• Media fault: 20%
• Putin / Musk / etc interference fault: 25%
• America dumb fault: 30%
• Long history of shitty Democrats fault: 15%
• Kamala Harris fault: 10%

Sure, you can say she shouldn’t have done the 10%. Would it have been enough? After watching what Biden did and how people reacted to him, probably not.

But anyway, we’ll never know. Also, I don’t know why the 10% is the most important part, to you. The other parts are fixable, going forward.

Well, maybe not now.

(Edit: Math is hard)