seaQueue

@seaQueue@lemmy.world
38 Post – 1019 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

I'm a little teapot đź«–

Yeah 34 was essentially a hit on one particular AIDS foundation in LA that's politically active. Landlord associations took offense and went after them with 34

Check this shit out: https://calmatters.org/california-voter-guide-2024/propositions/prop-34-patient-spending/

As usual voters fell for the packaging rather than actually reading about the effects.

Most Americans have never had critical thinking as part of their educational curricula. If you're very lucky you'll cover critical thinking skills as part of AP English in highschool, otherwise that's a second semester course your freshman year of college. Most Americans can't look at a particular piece of media and unpack what it's saying and why it's saying it. Americans are ridiculously easy to manipulate as a result.

Hard to pull that off when the entire core of the DNC is permanently latched onto the corporate teat.

We have a lot of work ahead of us if we want to break the core of the party and force even a smidgen of compromise out of them that costs their corporate donors profits.

It doesn't work, they ran plenty of ads on P2025 and people responded that "Trump won't really do that, Dems are just trying to scare us."

The Dems kept making big proclamations about how the economy has rebounded under the Biden administration. But no one except the wealthy has benefited from that.

And that's just a microcosm of Dem policy for the last ~35y. We get it, Democrats are better at government, we all fucking know it. What everyone has been waiting for is a Democrat who'll come along and say "the top 15% of the country has taken 90% of the wealth over the last 35y, it's time for everyone to share in the prosperity."

People are sick of neoliberal business as usual, this is why Hillary lost, this is why Kamala lost. This is why every single Dem candidate from here on out is going to be viewed with skepticism and voters will continue to stay home. People would rather hand the country to a narcissistic kleptocrat and hope for the best than accept four more years of neoliberal business as usual while they try to eke out a meagre existence with ever increasing costs of rent, food, healthcare, energy, insurance and corporate profits.

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I think that was a huge part of Trump's appeal. It's hard to be happy about watching the wealthy drain the country for 35y while you're stuck working at Wal-Mart or a gig job and effectively treading water while waiting for a medical emergency to bankrupt you or for prices on everyday goods to outpace you. It's a choice between getting fucked over while a certain class of person gets richer or fucking everybody over and that appealed to a whole lot of people.

Fun fact, the average American public school education doesn't include critical thinking skills in the language curriculum. You either get your introduction to this in AP English (if you're a high scoring highschooler) or during your first year of college/university.

It's mind blowing how many people can't pick apart a given piece of media and think about what message it conveys and why it conveys it.

So yeah, Americans are ripe for manipulation.

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Republicans decided back in the late 70s and early 80s that the public was too educated (and too hard to control) so they decided to do something about it. 45y of slashed education funding and standards later here we are.

What she needed was outrage at those responsible. Corporations.

The DNC isn't allowed to bite the hand that feeds them their funding

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So many of the problems Dems want to address are so easy to sell too. It's like they don't actually want to win or achieve anything, they're content to be a permanent minority opposition party that continues fundraising and campaigning ad infinitum.

Dems fucked around are in the process of finding out that you can't run as the pro labor party when you haven't done much to improve labor's material conditions in like 35-40y.

We've had like 25y of limp dick Dem moral high road at this point and it should be clear that this approach doesn't sell to anyone except the educated minority. Guess what? The educated are a minority and you need a majority to win elections.

Meritocracy was always a myth spread to allow capital to operate freely. If you failed then it was your fault, nevermind that the deck was stacked heavily against you.

Hey man, we can post slurs online while taking a shit or look at porn any time. What else would we use the internet for?

It's the working class economy, stupid

Why waste the time?

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Democrats, liberals and progressives quabble over issues that seem more like worrying whether they are wearing the right color shoes.

When the entire upper echelon of the national party is content and happy because they're suckling from the corporate teat that tends to happen. We've tried to run pro working class candidates but the national party absolutely loves to rat fuck them.

The wealthy love periods when our economy collapses, it gives them the opportunity to buy all of the assets from everyone down below for pennies on the dollar. Five years later they've made 20x what they spent and can sell that back to the poor schmucks for twice what it's worth.

And laptops, and phones, and literally every other electronic thing you might want to buy

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They started using stabilizers in cheap ice cream a while back. That helps it have the fluffy texture you expect even though it doesn't have nearly enough fat to churn up nicely by itself.

Buy expensive ice cream with a higher fat content (more cream content and or egg yolks,) it's worth the extra money.

Also it helps to bring an insulated freezer bag when you go to the store, the melt and refreeze between the store freezer and home does unpleasant things to ice cream texture. If you've ever had icy or hard ice cream it has probably melted at some point during transit before refreezing.

Edit: if you feel like microdosing ice cream facts today here's a treat from 18y ago: https://archive.ph/2012.09.09-004911/http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/dining/26cream.html?_r=1. Cheap ice cream is a pretty heavily engineered food at this point.

You mean we shouldn't build the torment Nexus from the best selling dystopian book Don't build the torment Nexus?

The joke's on us, we've been in the dystopic megacorp era since the 00's.

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Now add a major new program aimed at blue collar voters (Harris lacked this) and a major new program aimed at Latino and/or Black voters (Harris lacked this too).

This is it right here, Dems didn't have a big economic plan to get folks back to where they were before the pandemic and so blue collar voters just didn't turn out for them.

We've had 32y of the neoliberal Democrat party and the bulk of the wealth created during that time has funnelled to the top 10%. Voters want to hear about the plan to give them a share of prosperity too and until that's on the menu they're not going to show up unless a previous Republican administration makes some sort of catastrophic fuck up.

Bush walked into the 2008 crash with his face and Obama ran on change and opportunity for all. He won, then passed healthcare reform and won again. Hillary pushed neoliberal business as usual and her foreign policy expertise and failed. Biden won because Trump catastrophically fucked up the government's COVID response and voters didn't trust him to steer the country out of it. Harris ran on neoliberal business as usual at a time shortly after record setting inflation (and corporate profits) without spending any time talking about how she'd address these things or how they were going to make new opportunity for the working class. It shouldn't be a surprise that her campaign failed, neoliberalism isn't particularly popular with anyone except the wealthy and the educated who see the long term benefit of democrats other policies.

It's pretty easy to see the pattern, Democrats don't represent the change voters want to see unless we're coming out of a catastrophic economic fuck-up during the prior administration.

What does that buy you, an unpredictable win every 8-12y followed by 4 more years of business as usual?

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Basically Dems were just out of touch with the most important part of their base until it was too late.

Which is their consistent problem every election when the prior Republican admin hasn't made a catastrophic fuck-up.

You can't run on the "we're pro labor" platform and expect the working class to show up for you when your pro labor stance hasn't put money directly into working class pockets since the 1970s or 1980s.

Where are the big public works programs? Where's the massive government spending that employed millions? That's why labor showed up for Democrats in the 1900s, when there were huge govt contracts that employed organized labor, and it's no surprise at all that when Democrats abandoned those policies labor stopped being reliable supporters.

You want to run a successful campaign? Talk about the massive public spending that employed hundreds of thousands during your prior admin. Talk jobs. Talk improved standard of living. Talk taxing corporations to pay for those things and voters will hand you a landslide. Democrats are so afraid of taxing corporations to pay for social spending that directly recruits voters to their cause that they're seen as corporate stooges. And honestly, they kinda are at this point.

I feel attacked every time I hear this one.

And also, uncomfortably, seen

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Faces will be cheap though, there are plenty of those to go around for the next few years

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Or we could just get the neolibs out of the core of the Democratic party. They've been more concerned with corporate donor profits than the welfare of the working class since the 90s.

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You need someone who's very obviously pushing a "change and prosperity for all" message at this point. A standard neoliberal has very little chance of winning at a time when we've suffered 2? 3? once in a lifetime economic crises in the last 25y.

There needs to be some plan to include everyone in the economic prosperity that we've funnelled to the top 10% and the candidate needs to beat that drum over and over until there's no space left to talk about anything else. We already know Democrats are for women's issues, we already know Democrats are for equal racial opportunity, we already know Democrats are (generally) more sane than the other guy - now we need to tell folks that we've got the better plan to uplift everyone that's fallen behind over the last 30y.

When the other side has candidates willing to say "I'll break the law to change things" you really have to step up your game beyond "we're better for long term growth and stability, and by the way we're not the other guy and we ❤️ PoC."

(Honestly it's exhausting that this needs to be spelled out, it's like national Democrats don't know a single person who's been left behind over the last 30y.)

Dems under Biden tried to pass an immigration reform bill that Republicans wrote under Trump and Republicans shot it down so they could run on an immigration reform platform and pass it themselves

This election, like every failed election effort since 2000, was a referendum on the democratic party platform: neoliberal business as usual for the top 15% sprinkled with "we're not Republicans"

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No, please no. Newsom is a textbook greasy CA neoliberal, a Newsom presidency would do next to nothing for the working class and bring a load of benefits to the wealthy.

I generally support his policies on education, environmental protection and long term economic stability but his positions on housing, single payer healthcare, corruption and democratic representation are awful.

So far he's: vetoed a statewide upzoning bill that would get dense housing built statewide near public transit corridors, vetoed ranked preference voting across CA, opposed single payer healthcare and let the CPUC ride roughshod over utility customers and saddle them with PG&E's felonious wildfire liability. The dude is Grey Davis's protege and was basically raised by the Getty family, he's absolutely not the candidate to run in a tight economy where populism is surging.

Edit: fun fact, we called him Teflon Gavin when he ran San Francisco. Nothing sticks to this guy's PR. Fox news consumers have had 10+y of "commie California's Gavin Newsom" poured into their heads in preparation for his eventual Whitehouse run and that will matter when he presents his slick well-fed wealthy self to middle America.

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Lemmy, I like the simple post structure with all related commentary under the original submission.

Mastodon is fine for people who like it but it's hard to follow the thread of replies as every reply is its own individual post.

I guess the twatter format makes sense for dashing off quick messages but I find it hard to follow and it's difficult to find communities and topics of interest without also including a shit-ton of noise along with the signal.

That's the part the DNC doesn't get. Every single successful campaign since 2000 has run on a change and reform platform. This time they ran with "we'll continue business as usual" and it's absolutely no surprise they were crushed.

(Edit. Seriously, listen to Kamala on The View when asked what she'd do differently to improve the economy. Her response was that they're very proud of Bidenomics and nothing would fundamentally change.)

Voters want reform so that 95% of the profit from the economy doesn't go to Wall St. Voters want public spending on things that make everyone's daily lives better. Better roads, more reliable electrical grids, bridges that aren't falling apart, downtowns with actual businesses that aren't corporate franchises, houses that they can afford. Reboot the CCC and offer jobs building those things, offer jobs that pay enough for people to move out of their parent's houses and start their own lives, offer to crack down on corporate profiteering, offer labor something other than "we're less bad than the Republicans are." Offer to bootstrap small and medium businesses, talk about kick-starting American manufacturing, talk about the jobs you'll create and the spending you'll do making lives better for everyone rather than just the corporate profiteers.

We already know that neoliberalism works for Wall St, voters are waiting to hear about what works for them too. Make that the core of your campaign if you want to win the popularity contest.

When I logged in about six weeks after the ownership change my feed included Elon Musk, Andrew Tate and 2-3 other right wing influencers. I follow none of these people, I have zero interest in what they have to say and I find them reprehensible. I deleted my account and haven't used the platform since.

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Every time I think the rubes couldn't possibly be stupider we have an election and I'm proved wrong

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Finally. Are they actually hiring decent UX folks this time or are they using the people who designed 1980s VCR programming UIs again?

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Whatever they can get their hands on, including your unique hardware identifiers

You don't need a union to strike, you can self organize and just do it

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200% markup doesn't matter when you're billing it straight to the client anyway 🍻