spit_evil_olive_tips @ spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org

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6 mo. ago

Biden took the biggest action on climate change ten times over

oh wow, are we at the "bringing up non-sequitur talking points" point of this debate already?

Jan 2023:

Federal data show the Biden administration approved 6,430 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years, outpacing the Trump administration’s 6,172 drilling-permit approvals in its first two years.

Feb 2023:

The Biden administration cleared the way on Wednesday for a controversial Arctic oil project, recommending that drilling proceed in an undeveloped section of the Alaskan tundra.

While the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, suggested that the project move forward with a more limited footprint, the changes would still allow ConocoPhillips, the company behind the development, to extract the full volume of oil it is targeting.

August 2024:

In a sit-down interview with CNN on Thursday, Vice President Harris said she wouldn’t ban fracking if elected president, a reversal of her position during her first presidential run.

The Democratic nominee attempted to explain why her position has changed from being against fracking to being in favor of it.

like I said, climate change is a complete non-sequitur from the conversation we were having - but if you look at it beyond a surface level, it still underscores the point I was trying to make. Democrats' opposition to climate change isn't based on principles, it's based on "say whatever we need to say to get elected".

and reduced income inequality for the first time in I have no idea how long

sigh. sure, let's play this game of non-sequiturs.

from the Census's own website:

Using pretax money income, the Gini index decreased by 1.2% between 2021 and 2022 (from 0.494 to 0.488). This annual change was the first time the Gini index had decreased since 2007, reversing the 1.2% increase between 2020 and 2021

which sounds great, until you scroll down...

In contrast to the 1.2% decrease in the Gini index calculated using pretax income, the annual change in the Gini index calculated using post-tax income increased 3.2% from 2021 to 2022.

so yeah, income inequality decreased...if you use a statistic that doesn't matter in the real world (income before taxes). but inequality increased if you use a statistic that reflects actual people's actual pocketbooks (post-tax income).

and even using the misleading pre-tax figures, the supposed decrease in inequality was from high incomes decreasing slightly, while low incomes stayed the same:

The 2022 data suggest that declines in real income at the middle and top of the income distribution drove the decrease in the Gini index.

At the 90th percentile, 10% of households in 2022 had income above $216,000, down 5.5% from the 2021 estimate of $228,600.

However, at the 10th percentile, 10% of households had income at or below $17,100 in 2022, not statistically different from 2021 ($16,890).

so Biden gets a talking point about how he reduced income inequality...but for actual low-income people, nothing materially improves. again, this underscores the point I was making. Democrats don't have "help poor people" as a principle, they just want to get votes based on a perception that they help the poor.

if a campaign had a principled stance of improving material conditions for poor people, then it probably wouldn't do things like have Uber's Chief Legal Officer as a campaign advisor. but I'm just a random guy on the internet and not a Democratic campaign strategist, so what do I know.

attempting to change course on Gaza would have lost her significant support from Israel-supporters, and I strongly suspect gained her pretty minimal support from Palestinian supporters.

this is inadvertently a perfect summation of the problem.

you're framing "what position should Harris have taken on genocide in Gaza" entirely in terms of would it have gained or lost her voters.

a 1938 poll asked people in the US if they supported allowing more European Jews to move to the US. 71% said no. advance that page by two slides, a 1942 poll found 93% of Americans supported internment of Japanese immigrants, and 59% supported internment of American citizens with Japanese ancestry.

opposition to genocide...is sometimes politically unpopular.

have you seen the first episode of Black Mirror, the one where the British PM gets blackmailed into fucking a pig? there's a somewhat-minor plot point in it, that I think got overshadowed by the rest of it. the PM is getting the results of real-time polls on Twitter, and based on the poll results he's constantly flip-flopping about whether or not he'll fuck the pig.

Republicans have principles. they're all bad principles, to be sure, but there are things they consistently believe in. Democrats have no principles. they'll campaign on anything they think will get them votes.

Republicans are anti-abortion. Democrats are pro-choice...except when they campaign for anti-abortion Democrats

Republicans are anti-immigrant. Democrats are pro-immigrant...except when they try to campaign on "border security" out of a misplaced belief that they'll win over "moderate" xenophobes"

Republicans are in favor of big business fucking over regular people. Democrats defend regular people...except when someone like FTC Chair Lina Khan goes after businesses connected with Democratic party donors

If your opponent was overtly in favor of ethnic cleansing, and you weren’t

"overtly" is doing some pretty heavy lifting there

if Trump was "overtly" in favor of genocide* what was Biden's position?

the Israeli military was (and is) committing genocide, with US-supplied weapons, and Biden insisted on continuing those weapons shipments (including in his lame duck period, when he could have stopped them without political backlash, if he actually cared to).

he repeated the genocide-denial talking point that the death count from the "Hamas-run" health ministry was artificially inflated.

at best, you could maybe say Biden was "covertly" in favor of genocide? he would certainly deny it, but actions speak louder than words, and there's a lot of actions that he took that were complicit in the genocide.

meanwhile, Trump on the campaign trail was somewhat "covert" as well. from March 2024:

“You’ve got to finish the problem,” Trump said on Fox News on Tuesday when asked about the war. “You had a horrible invasion that took place that would have never happened if I was president.”

When asked on the program whether he supported a cease-fire in Gaza, Trump demurred, avoiding an explicit position on Israel’s military effort that has now also left more than 30,000 people dead in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The likely 2024 Republican nominee has not provided his own position on U.S. or Israel's strategy throughout the five months of the war.

if you're politically savvy, it's not hard to read between the lines and understand what "finish the problem" really means. but that's still a dogwhistle. it's still "covert".

the point that I think those Uncommitted activists were making is that Democrats had an opportunity (and I would argue, an obligation) to be overtly against genocide. and to back that up with actual action, and not do some wishy-washy "we think death is bad. also we're sending Israel another multi-billion-dollar military aid package" crap.

this is a widespread, ongoing problem with Democratic campaigns - don't just point at the other guy and say "he'd be bad, so vote for me" but make a positive case for "I'd be good, so vote for me".

I try to avoid the "ethnic cleansing" euphemism

Trump’s illegal calls for ethnic cleansing are horrific, but as on so many other issues

Shut the fuck up.

if you're going to quote her, at least quote the full sentence of what she said. here's the same quote, with the part you omitted in bold:

"Trump’s illegal calls for ethnic cleansing are horrific, but as on so many other issues, Democrats had a chance to persuade voters they were the better alternative and they blew it."

most of this article is fairly ho-hum - a series of quotes from various people that are unsurprising given whatever their position is.

but then buried way down at the bottom, a little nugget of Actual News - as opposed to "political figure gives on-the-record statement to a journalist about what they think".

I hadn't seen this reported anywhere else:

A Harris organizer who worked on youth turnout said that senior campaign officials gave them an order: When they sent out mass volunteer or fundraising emails and people replied by asking about Gaza, they were told to mark it as “no response.” The result? They seldom ended up engaging with voters on that issue.

“We also didn’t create a new category for Gaza responses out of fear that category would be leaked. Instead we were told to mark them as ‘no response,’” the organizer said, faulting top Harris campaign leaders for failing to address the issue. “The only ‘clowns’ out there are those who were in senior leadership and decided to abdicate on this issue, who silenced a Palestinian speaker at the DNC, and who told us to ignore it every time a voter asked us about Gaza.”

just, head in the sand. literal head in the sand.

a smart campaign would have at least tracked this data.

even if the campaign steadfastly maintains their "we are entitled to your vote either way, so shut the fuck up and stop complaining" stance, you would want to gather the data about how many people on these contact lists responded and mentioned Gaza.

but they were scared of that data leaking. because it would have generated a bunch of "the DNC's own data shows it's out of touch with Democratic voters about Gaza" headlines. those headlines would have made the Democrats look bad. they would also have been true, but that's besides the point.

What’s the relevance of either of those questions for an election that happened three months ago? I don’t like relitigating unspooled events.

my brother in Cthulhu, you started this post by saying:

this is where thinking Biden wasn’t doing enough has led.

you should decide if you're for or against re-litigating things

Projecting your political beliefs and rationales on others is not Beeing Nice.

meanwhile, one paragraph above, you're projecting an opinion onto me that I don't have:

You’re welcome to your opinion that Biden or Harris would have been worse

Both DOGE and Project 2025 where public knowledge when people voted.

The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free

"journalism about such-and-such exists" is not the same as "such-and-such is common knowledge". the country is awash in propaganda.

I just find it almost comical that anyone thought Trump would be an improvement if not for the drastic outcomes we’re going to see.

OK...just to make sure I understand you correctly - the people you're mad at, are people who either voted for Trump, or didn't vote at all, because of their opinions about Biden's response to the genocide in Gaza.

if that's accurate, two questions:

a) what is your estimate for the size of that group of people?

b) how many actual individual people in that group can you identify by name? how many do you know personally? (vs having read a news story quoting them)

Explicit calls for ethnic cleansing were at least not on the table with the last administration.

Trump: we should ethnically cleanse Gaza

Democrats: 👏 HIRE 👏 MORE 👏 FEMALE 👏 GENOCIDE 👏 DENYING 👏 PRESS 👏 SECRETARIES 👏

from Wikipedia:

Among the many positive accomplishments by USAID over the course of its history was to help bring an end to apartheid in South Africa through peaceful means.

as usual, Trump doesn't give a shit. it's Musk who hates it. and it's not hard to figure out why.

I fear I've become something of an accelerationist in the past few days...

yeah, go ahead and pass this, you tech-illiterate xenophobic fucks.

we need to divide and conquer the fascist coalition. make them hate each other. make them consumed by infighting. give them more "oh I didn't realize there would be negative consequences that affected me personally" moments.

there's a whole lot of Silicon Valley techbro types who are on board with Musk and Trump because they think it's all lower taxes, less regulations for their startups, and less "wokeness". go ahead, pass a law that makes it a federal crime for them to click a GitHub download link. make it so that every Hacker News thread about AI is filled with American engineers bemoaning that they're legally prohibited from keeping up with the state-of-the-art. make their startups uncompetitive because they're required by law to pay inflated prices to subsidize OpenAI and other "American-made" plagiarism machines.

you’re so out of touch, i don’t even know what to say.

be more specific - out of touch with whom, exactly?

out of touch with the ~400 voting members of the DNC?

can you name any of those 400, off the top of your head? I can't, and I follow politics fairly closely.

the DNC itself doesn't even publish the complete list - it had to be leaked

Some of the at-large members have been on the national committee for many terms. Those include stalwarts of the party establishment like Donna Brazile, Harold Ickes, Minyon Moore, and Maria Cardona, triple-hitters who have led national campaigns or party conventions, show up frequently on cable TV as political commentators, and buckrake as lobbyists and/or well-paid public speakers. Brazile is a partner at “corporate reputation strategy firm” Purple Strategies, which has worked for BP, United Airlines, NASCAR, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and PhRMA. Ickes is a partner at Tiber Creek Group, whose clients include the Greater New York Hospital Association. Moore and Cardona are both partners at the Dewey Square Group, whose clients have included Lyft, McDonald’s, MGM Springfield, Sony Pictures, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and which has engaged in lobbying to undermine state labor protections.

this is the problem with Democrats in a nutshell - thinking "you're out of touch with lobbyists and political consultants" is a dunk on someone.

Martin had been the frontrunner from the beginning of the race, leveraging his relationships with the more than 400 voting members of the DNC that he forged over more than a decade of work inside the institutional Democratic Party.

real cool that 400 Democrats, all part of the existing party establishment, are the only people who get to vote in this.

from May 2024: The Struggle for Democracy in the Democratic Party

Even in the age of social media, the Democratic Party remains a stubbornly closed-off enterprise. At the top, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is a private corporation, as opposed to a membership organization like a labor union, and its leaders have impunity over how they set and enforce party rules. For decades, DNC insiders have gone to war to prevent basic transparency and grassroots reform efforts from gaining steam.

from a recent Jacobin article:

“There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money,” Ken Martin, a leading candidate for Chair of the Democratic Party, said at a forum on Sunday. “But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”

and from his twitter account in October 2023, quote-tweeting Twin Cities DSA "Statement of Solidarity with Palestine":

"From the river to the sea" is a chant used by extremists to support the destruction of Israel.

looks like we're in for 4 more years of the same feckless bullshit from Democrats.

in the Bush years we had "fw: fw: re: fwd: DON'T BUY GAS ON TUESDAY TO STICK IT TO THE OIL COMPANIES"

in the Trump years it seems like we're going to have "fill out this form with your name, email address, ZIP code and phone number, and we'll have a general strike Real Soon Now"

there is a realistic possibility of a general strike in 2028, due to planning by multiple labor unions to line up their contracts to all expire at the same time.

but this? eh. I support a general strike in principle, but I'm far from convinced that this is it.

the page that lists their "leaders" has...two dozen Instagram handles. including the follower count for each one. I'm gonna need a bit more information than that. who's actually leading leading it? if it's gonna be successful it ain't gonna be a committee of two dozen Instagram influencers, I know that much.

I think Rich Uncle Moneybags is too young to be considered for such an important position in DNC leadership.

Rich Uncle should wait his turn, and the position should really go to Great-Great-Grandpa Moneybags. he's been in a coma for 20 years but other than that he's in excellent health and has a vision that will lead the party forward into a new era of fundraising telegrams and victory over the Whig party.

if anything Trump’s isolationist tendencies work in Palestinians’ favor, and otherwise he’s neutral compared to Biden/Harris.

I don't even know where to begin peeling the onion of how incredibly stupid this statement is.

the genocide is (for now) over

"for now" is really doing some heavy lifting there

Netanyahu says Israel 'reserves right to resume war' and calls first phase a 'temporary ceasefire'

but also, even if the ceasefire was permanent, that doesn't mean the genocide stops.

if you bomb a bunch of hospitals, and then agree to a ceasefire, the hospitals don't magically come back into existence.

ditto water treatment plants and similar infrastructure. Diseases spread in Gaza as sewage contaminates camps and coast

a ceasefire means that the "dropped a bomb on a refugee camp" aspect of the genocide stops. the "there's a refugee camp with a never-ending stream of needless and preventable deaths" aspect of the genocide will continue unabated.

cheers to the NZ Herald for calling a spade a spade

the cowards at the "paper of record" NY Times went with "Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture"

BBC: Elon Musk's gesture at Trump rally draws scrutiny

The Guardian: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally

if Trump shot someone on 5th Ave these fucking lickspittles would probably give it a "President-involved shooting ignites debate over the limits of executive power" headline

there seems to be a pretty strong sentiment that TikTok users are all idiots (especially compared to us incredibly smart, sophisticated, and attractive Fediverse users) and therefore they deserve whatever happens to them.

it reminds me of the predictable response every time Florida gets hit by a hurricane, or Texas by a snowstorm, or whatever, and a bunch of liberals come out of the woodwork with the same tired old "they live in a red state, fuck em, I don't care what happens to them".

this seems to be a consistent theme in all the reporting I've read:

Per the report, Biden was bolstered to run for a second term — despite fears surrounding his age and low approval ratings — by the positive 2022 midterm elections results, where Democrats retained the Senate and only narrowly lost the House of Representatives.

which really shows just how brain-dead Biden and Democratic leadership are.

yes, they did better than expected in the midterms. but they still lost the House. and Biden was not on the ballot. a college freshman in a Political Science 101 class should be able to tell you that Democrats over-performing in the midterms does not necessarily tell you much about Biden's chances for re-election against Trump.

that boost in the midterms was in large part because of anger about the Dobbs ruling from the Supreme Court and the resulting state-level abortion bans. what did they do to capitalize on that anger? to try to focus it in a productive direction? basically nothing.

and of course, what else happened between the midterms and 2024? Israel intensified its genocide in Gaza in response to the October 7th attacks. Biden and the Democrats backed Israel, insisted on continuing to arm their military, and told anyone who didn't like it to shut up and stop complaining - on the assumption that they had no choice but to vote for Biden regardless. then a bunch of those voters get disillusioned, stay home on election day, and Biden does the shocked Pikachu face.