OBJECTION! @ Objection @lemmy.ml Posts 19Comments 2,782Joined 1 yr. ago
Anecdotally, my sister does. I was baffled when she said it and had to try my best to respond politely, because she's the only other person in my family who isn't a Republican.
From my perspective, she bombed out of 2020 despite being a media darling cast as the frontrunner, and then was just handed the nomination in 2024 without a real primary and still lost, both of which demonstrate she has terrible political instincts and isn't popular enough to win. From her perspective, the fact that she dropped out in 2020 before any votes were casts means she was never given a fair chance, and the fact that she was handed the nomination meant she didn't have enough time to make her case and the unusual circumstances are what caused her to lose, and if she just had another chance she'd nail it.
I'm pretty sure she's an outlier though and most people are just saying Kamala because of name recognition.
So, since they did not in fact "have the left in the bag," "going for centrists" was not, in fact, "strategically speaking the right move." Even by your own dumbass reasoning you're wrong.
This excuse is rolled out every time your favorite "centrists" eat shit, which is most of the time. The underlying logic that moving right is the way to win is above critique, no matter how many times it's tried and failed. The Democratic party and their candidates and campaigns are all of course above critique, they can never fail, they can only be failed. You can only ever punch down and tell voters to change their behavior to accommodate the candidate's positions, and never tell the candidate they should accommodate their constituents. The whole concept of democracy is meaningless at that point, just a popularity contest for which face will do the same awful shit, a game for rich sociopaths to fight over prestige and position, rather than a way for common people to have any sort of influence whatsoever over policy.
The left warned them loudly and clearly and they ignored us, as they always do. If course, we weren't the entire reason they lost, although I wish we were, because if we have the power and will to deny them wins, then they have no choice but to give into our demands or fade into irrelevance. Exercising this power is the only possible way to make them listen, or, if they won't listen, it's conveniently also the way to go about creating a new party that will.
He's confirmed alive, but that doesn't mean they haven't killed others, or that they won't reach that point as time goes on. The Nazis didn't start mass executions right away, but once you were in their camps, you probably weren't getting out alive.
Their methodology involves asking people a bunch of questions and then if they don't get 100% correct they're counted as believing misinformation. Putting aside the unreliability of online polls, that's a pretty misleading way of framing it, if you ask me.
If you asked people 10 questions about just about anything, you'd probably find a substantial number of people who don't get every one right. In fact, they did do this under the heading, "Disinformation Nation: Americans Widely Believe False Claims on a Range of Topics." That's probably why they found that, "Respondents identifying as Democrats were about as likely (82 percent) to believe at least one of the 10 false claims as those identifying as Republicans (81 percent)."
Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about. If you are first encountering a claim in that context, you pretty much just have to guess whether you think it's true based on vibes. And you can easily set up misleading vibes, like, "Conservative initiative Project 2025 proposes cutting or eliminating Social Security" which is false because it's not explicitly stated, but it does explicitly state a whole bunch of other horrible shit, so like, if you get got by that one it doesn't really show that you believe in an inaccurate picture of the world, just that you got tripped up by details. But that claim dings you for "believing misinformation" just as much as " COVID-19 vaccines killed 15 million people worldwide."
So like it doesn't really tell us very much about how far reaching disinformation really is, the results are more of a reflection of their methodology.
Not exactly.
On July 1, 2024, the Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview, at least presumptive immunity for official acts within the outer perimeter of their official responsibility, and no immunity for unofficial acts.
So if they rule that something isn't an official act, or outside of the president's constitutional powers, they can still find it illegal. It means that the courts can effectively "pardon" the president if they rule that he was acting within the scope of his official responsibility, but it doesn't mean that they gave their ability to prosecute if they choose to.
Whether the president has the power to "self-pardon," effectively giving him total immunity to the law, is another angle, but that has not been tested in court.
Of course, Trump could simply choose to ignore the courts the same way Andrew Jackson did and it's not clear that anything would happen to him, at least while he's in office and is commander in chief.
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If you look at the historical polls about the direction of the country, wrong track always win, it is just a matter of how bad.
Yeah, no shit. That's the point. What you're bragging about is "Most people hate us, but they hate us marginally less than they hated the other guy." It's pretty pathetic that that's the point we're at.
Significant improvement since taking office is a good first step for the Trump administration.
It's not a "good first step for the Trump administration." Trump didn't do shit to actually improve anything, it's just that he has a significant following who defend anything and everything he does, or are willing to give a different face a chance. Democratic voters are more likely to vote reluctantly while still seeing the country on the wrong track if their guy wins. It means nothing. The minority of people who think like you are simply wrong and the majority who disagree with you are correct.
You’re correct, but in the end those same tankies are also the ones that want a fascist state because they’re basically a capitalist state on the brink of collapse – a good ground for revolution that tankies wish for.
This is the dumbest shit ever and not what we believe. Y'all don't ever listen to the things we actually say, you just make shit up and repeat it to each other until it becomes accepted as obviously true, regardless of any basis in reality.
A fascist state is not "good ground for revolution." There have been many far-right states that have successfully hunted down and exterminated the left and survived for quite a long while. And the conditions in the US are such that in an armed conflict the right would obviously have a major advantage. Should conditions decline, it's far more likely that we'd have a right-wing revolution than a left-wing one.
The problem is that conditions are declining under both Republicans and Democrats. Neither party offers any possibility of actually halting or reversing the decline, or averting any of the many, many crises, some of which are looming and some of which are actively happening. Liberals are fully content to accept this state of affairs for some reason - they just want a more gradual decline which will still lead to crises, the far-right gaining strength and power, and the complete extermination of the left and vulnerable populations. As long as that gets pushed back 5 or 10 years, perfectly acceptable to them, and worth sacrificing any attempts to actually fix the problems - which is what us "tankies" would prefer to happen.
If I were an "accelerationist," looking to bring about a fascist state on the bizarre logic that it would somehow be "good ground" for a left-wing revolution, then why would I have a problem with either side? Conditions will continue to decline regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in charge. What, am I just so impatient that I couldn't wait a few more years? If that's what I believed, I'd just disengage from politics and not give a shit what happens, confident in the fact that the inevitable decline will bring about socialism, somehow. Doesn't really seem worth the effort.
Unfortunately, this "accelerationist" concept doesn't actually track with history. People have lived - and do, currently live in much, much worse conditions than we have in the US, often for generations. Slavery persisted for centuries, and yes there were slave revolts but they were often disorganized and put down. This idea that bad conditions automatically create successful left-wing revolutions makes no sense to anyone who's actually capable of thinking beyond a meme level.
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According to your own stats, the majority of people disagree with that assessment and think things are still getting worse.
But regardless, what people think isn't necessarily reflective of reality. This is the best argument you can muster, not that Trump is actually improving things in specific, tangible ways, but just, "My guy has managed to convince marginally fewer people to hate him than hated the last guy." Of course, we'll see how many people still feel that way by the end of his term when we'll have likely fallen into a recession thanks to his bullshit.
I have not but I may look into it
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
I mean, I guess you could look at it that way, to an extent. But the larger effect is that it reinforces the threat against every other major news outlet, in a very blunt and overt way.
I don't expect the AP to suddenly radicalize over it or anything.
"Not just fascists, but also those who oppose fascism and are trying to build an alternative to fascism" got it.
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What stage of decline is it when Trumpers are bragging about a stat that still shows a majority of the population saying we're on the wrong track?
How is this legal?
Having a spot in the white house press pool is legally a privilege, not a right. The AP can still operate and write whatever they like, they're just not invited to exclusive press briefings.
This is a long-standing conflict of interest that incentivizes the press to field softball questions and avoid writing critical stories in hopes of getting priority treatment from the government, but typically it works in a more subtle way.
You left out "as before." Regardless, I'm trans myself, so I do suffer "exactly the same" as the groups you mentioned since I'm part of them. I'm just not willing to take your horrific, insane, and suicidal devil's bargain of selling out another minority for temporary, fleeting safety until you find us politically inconvenient and make the exact same calculus about us as you do for Palestinians. As I said, I'm fucked either way, so I may as well go down swinging, at least trying to fight for my survival.
Please stop speaking for us and using us a crudgel to shame people into supporting your shitty corporate genocidaires.
Suffering less is absolutely a privilege. In what universe would it not be?
You said that suffering "exactly the same" as the examples you brought up was "privileged," meaning that suffering itself is a privilege, not "suffering less."
I'm not sure if you’ve noticed but I really only read the first two sentences of your replies.
You literally can't understand any idea that doesn't fit on a bumper sticker 💀
This is some seriously weak shit. The only connection is that the poster "teases" that he's Elon Musk. Speaking as Beyoncè, even if he outright said "I am Elon Musk" it still wouldn't be strong evidence, but he didn't even say that, he just posted a bunch of random gibberish that some people read as metaphorically suggesting a connection.
This is QAnon conspiracy nonsense, and repeating it on the pretext of "I'm not saying this, I'm just talking about what other people are saying" is still spreading it.
I mean, sure, maybe this account was Elon Musk in the same way Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer, but like, it's not actually.
Maybe you suffer exactly the same. Good for you. Enjoy that privilege.
"Suffering is privilege" god I hate it when y'all co-opt progressive language to argue for a right-wing agenda like this. I'd rather you just call me a slur.
But maybe next time use that privilege to help those who aren’t as lucky.
That's literally what I did this time. Except that Palestinians either don't register to you as human beings, or you've made peace with sacrificing them in exactly the same way you'll make peace with sacrificing trans people and immigrants the moment you feel we're too much of a liability.
There are so many ongoing crises that I can't even keep track of them all and the Democrats don't want to do shit to fix any of them and your solution is to salt your own fields and just keep sleepwalking straight into collapse. It's literal insanity.
It's terrifying but it's not entirely new, that "red line" was crossed long ago, with thunderous applause. Bush did this shit too, disappearing people off the streets with no due process and sending them off to be tortured at a CIA blacksite or Egyptian prison. And extraordinary rendition also goes back to Clinton, and then Obama explicitly reaffirmed that the US considers itself to have jurisdiction over every country on earth, that it can freely drone strike anywhere it thinks there are terrorists - and that can include US citizens as well.
These tools have existed for 20 years or more and constitute a massive violation of civil liberties both for Americans and for the entire world, they are fundamentally incompatible with a free society, and there was no telling how far they could be taken. These concerns were largely ignored and brushed aside because of 9/11 and the "Jack Bauer" fantasy of being a badass antihero who breaks all the rules to get things done, there was a virtually complete bipartisan consensus that these tools needed to exist and at no point has anyone had the opportunity to vote against any of it.
Trump is of course expanding the scale of it, which is terrifying. Maybe you're right that he'll be remembered as the "tipping point" into fascism, but the real tipping point was Bush, who was all the more terrifying because he was doing it while having like a 90% approval rating. Trump is just taking the mask off and doing it in a blatant, incompetent, and unpopular way, which makes him in some ways more dangerous and in some ways less.
Of course you could make the argument that it goes further back than Bush, the US has a long history of toppling democratically elected governments and disappearing people to blacksites, running experiments like MKUltra and the like. But there was a massive shift in discourse after 9/11 where caring at all about civil liberties meant you wanted the terrorists to win.
This might be corny but I remember a movie from my childhood - Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame - certainly a flawed movie in many respects, but you can tell that it was very obviously made before 9/11, because otherwise it would've read as a call to action to rise up and overthrow the US government. The bad guy is obsessed with hunting down minorities to the point that he burns and kills innocents, doing whatever it takes to get them, his ultimate act of crossing the line is violating the right of sanctuary, breaking and entering a place of worship that he wasn't legally allowed to, at which point the heroic captain of the guard turns to open rebellion and rallies the masses against him - it's a direct allegory for Bush's presidency and calls for soldiers to disobey orders and turn against the government - except for the fact that it was made before he took office. Growing up at this time, I watched those virtues become vices and those vices become virtues. A mere five years later and Judge Claude Frollo would be the based antihero doing whatever was necessary to save Paris from terrorist infiltration while Captain Pheobus would be the weak disloyal liberal traitor undermining Paris' safety through the sin of empathy because of his whiny "rules" about whose houses you're allowed to burn down. (Although tbf, it was attacked at release, but the people attacking it were considered the far-right fringe as opposed to the mainstream discourse).
Trump is worse only because he's further down the line of where this shit was always headed and where I've been saying it was headed since I was like 13 when libertarian weirdos like Ron Paul were the closest thing we had to any kind of opposition to any of it. I'm glad people are finally waking up to the fact that the president has dictatorial powers and that that's a bad thing, but please remember that when the next, more competent fascist gets in and does all the same shit while being more "respectable" and having better PR.
If I do choose salt, then I won't grow any plants and will starve come winter anyway. Who gives a shit?
It's impossible to reason with you people, no matter what kind of analogy I use, your brains are fully seeped in the ideology of dying slowly, that's all you can imagine and all you aspire to.
I'm not going to spread salt over my own fields to stop someone from spreading nuclear waste, I'm going to get out there and wave a fucking stick at anyone who comes around trying to spread either, and if the rest of you damn fools would get out of that damn salt tractor and join me, we might actually have a chance at actual survival. Until then, even if your tractors are stronger than my stick, at least I'll die trying to survive.