Oh I get it now. You’re saying that “there won’t be a next election”. Careful with the self fufulling prophecies. If you don’t want to succumb to that, I recommend getting involved locally. Whoever you trust electorally will need your help now to build a bulwark for 2026, and getting your hands dirty will help you get over the pessimism.
Occam’s razor isn’t “the simplest, most reductive answer is usually right” it’s “entities must not be created beyond nessecity”. It argues that when you have two hypotheses which have equal explanatory power, you should usually choose the one that has fewer elements (assumptions, new rules). The classic example is a heliocentric solar system vs a geocentric one. Geocentric needs very complex laws of motion to get the sidereal motion correct, heliocentric doesn’t.
“everyone is racist” doesn’t have the same explanatory power as the detailed analysis you’re seeing journalists and your fellow lemmy users construct of Biden, Harris, and the Democratic establishments failure to recognize the need for loud populist messaging and unforced errors depressing voter enthusiasm, therefore we cannot apply Occam’s razor to the situation.
Say it then. We’re in the period of time where we must critically evaluate the failures of the political machine that delivered this. I’m trying my level best to provide detailed, informative assessment of what I’m seeing without resorting to vitriol or anger, both online and in real life. If you have additional details, provide them. This is the time for vigorous debate, and reassessment, and I see the Democrats as much more of allies than the Republicans, so if you, or any other liberal can get past the phase where you’re upset with the leftists who have broadly provided critical support for the Democratic coalliton, I welcome your input.
Except money evidently doesn’t buy it by itself. If it did Harris would have won. Effective messaging (Where is the Dem Joe Rogan? They kicked the closest thing they have out of the DNC for expressing broadly popular opinions) and playing to the base of people willing to vote for you (Dems will never get those Republican voters no matter how many immigrants they promise to stop at the border) wins elections.
Well 71 million Trump voters over 244 million eligible voters is 29%.
This is spectacular to hear. I have to wonder if the shift in control will exacerbate the issues that prevented the passing of a budget, however. I haven’t thought it through fully yet, but whatever the make up of the senate and house are, passing a budget is priority #1, and how that shakes out is going to be one of, if not the most significant short term effect on the economic situation of regular people.
Liberalism is the political project which gave us the 18th century liberal revolutions of for instance, the US and France. It centers invidivual freedoms like free speech, association, and the right to own and use private property without interference from the government. It can be seen as a reaction by the land owning middle classes of the 17th and 18th centuries to the power of divine right monarchs, and is the founding principal of both the Democratic and Republican parties. It centralizes human rationality and debate of ideas as means of finding true paths to the future.
Leftism is an umbrella term which holds a few groups in it (Most notably Social democrats, Communist Socialist, and Communist Anarchist ideologies). It can be traced back through history to many times and places, but modern forms of it originate in the utopian socialism of post-revolution France. Leftism promotes the primacy of human well being and equality (or at least more equally distributed material wealth) over property rights. Generally this takes the form of support for the abolition of class society (owner class vs worker class), belief in worker-centered policy, trade unionism, worker cooperativity, and internationalism… but again, it is a big umbrella, and there is a lot of deviation from this formula. In place of rationalism and debate of ideas, Leftism generally centers material conditions and material outcomes of policy.
If that is really the path forward the y’all need to peel off almost a sixth about a tenth (Math is hard) of the Republican’s Presidential election year voting base while simultaneously not losing any additional support on the social democratic left wing of their own party. I’m not sure that’s realistic.
This is a weird meme. The Democrats actively tried to court suburban white voters and other traditionally right-Leaning demographics. They tried to peel Republicans off. The democrats never offered socialists a cup labeled “liberalism”, they offered “moderate republicans” a cup labeled “Border Control and Bush era political icons” and they said “Bro. I already told you I will only ever vote for Republicans”.
Ok. First. Those votes were not, like, commies or something. Communists broadly (but not universally ) have no faith in electoral politics beyond the ability to demonstrate how useless electoral politics are for the kinds of change they see as required. The missing votes are likely non-explicitly-ideological Americans, and the disenfranchised left wing of the Democrat coalition, who are not revolutionary socialists - they are better described as social democrats. And why so many of them voted for Biden was, at least in significant part three things that you’re pretending don’t exist with this meme.
Tremendous dislike of Trump… which is actually still true, but he was not currently the president during this election. Trump had just spent the last few months massively fucking up the pandemic response very publicly and got covid immediately prior to the election, which made him look stupid and incompetent.
Because of COVID policies, voting had literally never been easier. Shit loads of people voted early because it was universally available. Led to highest turnout ever.
A competitive democratic primary process meant that we had a candidate selection process people could believe in to some degree. Brenie and Biden ran, and Biden won. Bernie voters saw that, looked at the situation and said “This is tolerable because we had a real process, and we can accept Biden as a stop gap under the conditions of Trump needing to be removed, and Biden being a 1 term President”. It wasn’t 2016, where a significant portion of potential Democrat voters saw the DNC’s treatment of Bernie as unfair, and it wasn’t 2024 where Biden decided to run with no true Primary after the deal was “single term president”, then abruptly dropped out (good idea, shoulda done it 2 years earlier) and effectively appointed his successor by decree.
2020 was an anomaly, and as is true of 2020 in most data sets, using it as a comparison point requires many many qualifications, but Trump gained 40000 votes, Harris lost 10 million. Trump did not perform better, Harris lost voter enthusiasm, which hasn’t actually been on the Democrat’s side in presidential elections (which have more non-explicitly-ideological voters) since, like, Obama. It’s not even necessarily that she needed to be “more left”. It’s that she needed to reflect the public’s distrust of the political status quo and promise material gain for working people explicitly at the expense of someone else (Trump chose , for instance, immigrants and the democrats as the bad guys, but Harris could have chosen, say, rich fuckers like Musk) . She needed to be ready to rip up the floor boards, and she wasn’t even ready to say she’d break from fucking Biden (who is broadly unpopular) on policy.
I really, really wish y’all democrats would stop trying to purge your own party of any dissent, because y’all coming out of this with the right lesson will be the difference between a brief period of Republican control, or several elections cycles of Democrats being unviable as a party.
A lot of expensive hobbies don’t have to be expensive. I’m a musician, and I have spent thousands of dollars on musical equipment but realistically, if I weren’t going to play out, or record high quality songs, you can get away with just a $200-$300 guitar (you might even be able to go lower. Cheap guitars are crazy good these days), a used amp, a tuner, and a cable. With that alone you have a lifetime of entertainment and challange, and the most expensive long-term cost is your strings. It’s honestly a steal in term of cost to entertainment ratio.
Now. That said. The real challenge is not falling into GAS (Gear Aquisition Syndrome), which is a real challange. And if you become even mildly capable on guitar you’re probably gonna wanna play live and record too, so, easier said than done, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.
People don’t vote because politicians don’t materially benefit them. When politicians provide significant support to regular ass people in way that materially benefit them you will see more voters turn out, not when you whine to them about them not voting. If politicians wanted this to occur, our state reps and their staffers would be in our work places, talking to people, giving them reasons to be involved with the political party apparatus, and providing material aid to the poorest and least represented among us with their own hands. We have bad voter turn out because shitty, myopic politics breeds political disinvestment. This post has it pretty much exactly backwards.
Anecdotally, I have friends from MA who don’t give one fuck about politics. Haven’t voted in years despite me telling them, messaging them with voter registration status, and locations, giving them every resource they need to make it as easy as possible. None of it mattered. Two of these friends in the last year have told me they want to vote for Governor Healy because they intend to use the free community college program, unprompted. Went out of their way to tell me. Another friend told me they like their state rep because they showed up at a union rally for their union and my friend realized from talking to the politician personally that the rep was a socialist who just happened to have a D next to their name.
So if throwing paint at a entierly replaceable cover for a dusty old painting is too far gone to be acceptable, what action can we take to stop oil production? Like. It needs to stop. To continue producing fossil fuels is a death cult. It needs to stop, like, a decade ago. I ask genuinely, how is this too far, and what is an acceptable response to an existential threat?
edit: On the off chance someone reads this so long after the post, I just want to point out that nobody actually engaged with my question here.
George Bush Jr. has the most impressive ability to sound like the dumbest motherfucker in the room always. He should also be tried as a war criminal.
“Yeah. I really do want a big salty lugee in my mouth” ~ Oyster Enjoyers
Yeah, but because our government views technological dominance as a National Security issue we can be sure that this will come to nothing bc China Bad™.
Who does IP serve? It seems to me it serves very wealthy people who have the legal means to protect it. With that in mind, I think we should just get rid of it.
Is he fondling the grunt’s junk?
Damn. And these bitches are charging me 12 dollars a lb for ham?
I think I used to play Halo 3 with that guy