Blackbeard

Blackbeard, 2 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Netanyahu wants Trump and will continue to ignore all attempts to intervene until Trump is elected, at which point Gaza will be annexed, the remaining Palestinians will be killed or “relocated”, and he will pressure Trump to bomb Iran. The ICJ, UN, Europe, and Democrats no longer have any influence on the Israeli right-wing government. This is all for naught.

Bibi will name it Trump Alley or something else equally ridiculous, just like he did with the Golan Heights.

Blackbeard, 1 day ago

Not according to the source I linked. His split with Biden and the Democrats has been years in the making, and has reached a point of no return. He wants Trump, and he’s willing to drag Biden through the mud to get Trump. This is not according to Bibi, this is according to people who worked for Obama and Biden, as well as Democrats in Congress.

Blackbeard, 1 day ago

Either choice he makes does that. And Netanyahu knows this.

Blackbeard, 1 day ago (edited 4 hours ago)

If he turns on Israel, he will lose in a landslide. Of that you can be absolutely certain.

Blackbeard, 1 day ago

Israel ≠ Netanyahu

There’s a very big difference between what the broader Jewish community prefers and what Netanyahu’s right-wing government prefers. But, to be sure, the best way to make those one in the same would be to withdraw support.

Blackbeard, 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Copying this relevant text because it’s clear lemmings are going to bury this in knee-jerk downvotes because “muh fee-fees”, despite the fact that if they bothered to read past the headline they’d find it actually supports a lot of what they’re saying:

Democrats might consider the possibility that keeping younger voters on their side has less to do with the pet issues of activist groups that purport to speak in these voters’ name and more to do with the issues that loom large in these voters’ everyday lives: inflation, health care and housing. These issues, shared with the broader electorate, are the material substrate of the world these generations will inhabit for better or worse. Would a Biden second term address these issues? If so, how? Right now, younger voters are not convinced that another four years would deliver what they want.

And Democrats would also be wise to consider the experience of European countries where right-leaning populist parties have lately been doing especially well among younger voters. Far from repelling these voters, many find the antiestablishment and elite-bashing politics of these new parties attractive, channeling their dissatisfaction with the recent past, the status quo and “politics as usual.”

Edit - For anybody still reading this, if you want to see something really wild, check this:

Go to /r/politics, sort by controversial.

Take a gander at all the leftists complaining that they’re burying anti-Biden stories in downvotes.

Then come back here and take a look at how those same leftists respond to posts like this.

Then really try to process the implications of that dichotomy.

Everyone wants an echo chamber.

Literally everyone.

Blackbeard, 2 days ago

Self fulfilling prophecy… i do want to downvote this childish crap. It adds nothing and makes you seem unserious.

I don’t care. I gave it enough hours to figure out whether anyone would really give it the time of day. It was buried in half a dozen downvotes before a single comment was posted. Whether or not you like my tone is flatly irrelevant, so keep piling on.

Blackbeard, 2 days ago

It was buried in half a dozen downvotes before a single comment was posted.

Blackbeard, 3 days ago

BoTh SiDeS aRe ThE sAmE!!!@

Blackbeard, 3 days ago

The world you guys live in must be a really wild place.

Blackbeard, 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Never thought I’d see the day when this would become a satire about the left…

Blackbeard, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

The statistics of this very article are the evidence. It’s right there in black and white!

A majority of Americans say that their own personal finances are doing well, and even when the question is expanded to their whole state, voters say the economy has improved.

You countered by dismissing it, so I met you where you wanted to be. But even that wasn’t enough to dig you out of your preconceived belief. Carry on with your circle jerk.

Blackbeard, 4 days ago

A majority of Americans say that their own personal finances are doing well, and even when the question is expanded to their whole state, voters say the economy has improved.

Then from the source itself:

60% said their financial situation is good or excellent.

Blackbeard, 4 days ago

reuters.com/…/us-appeals-court-upholds-bidens-15-…

courthousenews.com/democrats-push-for-17-minimum-…

www.cnn.com/2021/01/26/politics/…/index.html

Furthermore, wage growth has been beating inflation for the most recent 12 months.

Blackbeard, 4 days ago

Source?

Blackbeard, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Damn, I didn’t even realize OP’s article was sourcing a 2023 poll. Well here are the updated numbers for 2024:

63% of Americans rate their current financial situation as being “good,” including 19% of us who say it’s “very good.”

Exactly half (50%) say their personal financial situation is excellent or good

U.S. adults scored a 48.92 on our financial well-being scale

This source puts low income consumer confidence at 57.1%

68% of respondents saying the current quality of their financial life is what they expected or better

So overall the numbers haven’t changed much since 2023 on how people see their own personal finances. Your point that, despite that, they still think the economy is getting worse just reiterates what the article is saying. For some people their finances are bad and they think things are getting worse. For some people their finances are good ant they think things are getting better. But strangely, for some people their finances are good but they still think things are getting worse. Or, to put it another way, some people think they’re in good shape, but the economy is in bad shape, which is a pretty weird disconnect. And the number of people in that last category is not small.

Blackbeard, 4 days ago

Point taken. Still, though, the commenter I was replying to seemed to be suggesting stagnant wages and minimum wage both need attention. Despite the fact that the post-Covid wage gain boost seems to be an artifact of a labor market distortion, the rest of my sources show very real and very public pushes for measures that could meaningfully address the stagnation if they were passed into law. If effort is what people are clamoring for, there seems to be no shortage of it. It just seems to me that folks don’t like to engage with the actual political realities of our situation, whereby we still need a broad consensus to achieve any legislative movement, and that broad consensus is impossible as long as Republicans share power at the Congressional level. They seem to be blaming Democrats for the fact that Republicans exist and are intransigent.

Blackbeard, 4 days ago

I think that’s a fairly subjective interpretation. Is a bill being written and endorsed by part of the party an indication of “real effort”?

I mean, if you’re a Congressional representative in a non-leadership position and you can’t get past the filibuster, I’d argue drafting a bill to address a problem is just about the best you can do. So yes, I’d argue that’s doing a very good job. I don’t hold it against the bill drafter that they have to deal with institutional inertia and a multi-party, bicameral federal bureaucracy.

I think the problem is that the DNC leadership’s only qualifier is seniority, so the “progressive” party is being helmed by ancient millionaires who were only really progressive by comparison during the regan era.

I don’t disagree, that’s a serious problem. It’s a bit more complicated than seniority alone, but seniority is still the anchor. But still, the rules are determined by majority vote in conference, and so unless I’m missing something that means a majority of the Democrats in the conference settle on the committee assignment rules each session. That certainly bakes in a significant amount of inertia because the folks already in a position of power retain that power through fluctuations in voter sentiment, but that also means that it would only take a simple majority to completely change those rules. The Senate Caucus leader chooses the Rules Committee which can recommend changes. The House Caucus rules can be modified only by the Speaker, but the Speaker is elected by the full Caucus, so for all intents and purposes a simple majority in either the Senate or the House could change the conference/caucus rules if they chose to. There isn’t currently a simple majority in either house that intends to change that rule structure, and so the problem doesn’t appear to be that the party is helmed by certain individuals, it’s that the party as a whole doesn’t intend to change the way they choose their leaders.

I can see your point, but this also ignores the fact that a lot of powerful Democrats are basically center right on the political compass and have been effectively captured by corporate interests, and have been for decades.

I can see why you think that, and at some times I think that as well, but rather than ascribe malevolent intentions to them I prefer to figure out how they got to Congress in the first place. In that regard, the true question is, do those powerful Democrats represent the center of gravity of the voting population that put them there? Or, more simply, is the average Democratic voter centrist or progressive? If the average Democratic voter is centrist, then we could argue that these leaders are simply representing the will of their constituents. If the average Democratic voter is progressive, then we could argue there’s some kind of institutional block to that will being reflected in the actions of the Party, which could be reflected in those rules or their inability to change them.

The most recent data I can find is from 2021, and it essentially says that even if we combine “outsider left” with “progressive left”, that bloc still only represents 28% of the voting bloc that is Dem/Lean Dem. “Democratic mainstays” and “establishment liberals” represent 51% of the Dem/Lean Dem bloc. Conservatives even make up 6% of that overall bloc, so in this context I’d group them together. If we grant that “stressed sideliners” might also fall into the more left-leaning category, we come to an explanatory break point of 57% that fall from center left to center right, and 42% that fall from left to far left. So in that respect the center of gravity of the party very much is on the moderate end, which would explain the leadership and rule dynamics described above. In short, there are more voters who agree with the moderate wing of the party than who disagree with it.

From the perspective of Lemmy, which leans overwhelmingly left, I can see how that might seem like an institutional or corrupting block of your ideals and intentions, but if we step back from the distorted view we have inside this particular platform, the fact remains that centrist Dems have power because the party itself is centrist. I get how that can feel deeply disappointing, and I get how that 42% might feel marginalized and sidelined, but at the end of the day it’s a majority-rules kind of situation, and so until that balance tips in favor of the left wing I don’t see that process meaningfully changing. Heck, it could even be argued that if those centrist Dems dramatically altered the rules in favor of a distributive model of power, and if that resulted in a disproportionate increase in the power of the left wing, their voters might be rightly pissed that the party is no longer representing their interests. I can’t imagine the next election going very well for them, because those centrists could very easily shift to the right, because they’re kinda right to begin with.

The problem, it seems, is with voters, not with the party. Which brings me to your final point:

You could argue that their commitment to third way politics has caused the current political situation where conservatives feel confident enough to be this intransigent in the first place. I personally feel that democratic leadership would rather have someone like Trump in the Whitehouse than someone like Bernie Sanders.

I agree completely. Third way neoliberalism is largely to blame for the state of our unequal and top-heavy economy, and it’s deeply imbedded because the conservative coalitions in both parties (in the 80s and 90s) found common ground in greasing the wheels for that economic transition to occur. The stress that system is putting our country under is starting to open up some very large cracks in American society as a whole.

But at the end of the day, the solution to that seems to be to elect more progressive candidates to office so the power balance tips in your favor. Joe Manchin would have no real power if there were about 2-3 more progressive Senators, at which point you could change the committee assignment rules to be more distributive. Same could be said about the centrist House members, but I’m sure the math is a bit steeper just because the House caucus is bigger. But since Senators are elected statewide, they kinda hew centrist by definition because they have to appeal to the whole electorate, so that might be a tall order. The House is where that sentiment would be more readily affected, but we’re captured by a conservative judiciary that’s decided gerrymandering is totally peachy. That’s not helped by the fact that leftists are clustering geographically, which dilutes their voting power even in situations where gerrymandering isn’t the main problem. They’re quite literally moving away from political races they might be able to win.

Blackbeard, 4 days ago

Right, but the argument is about the democratic party as a whole not the few individuals with no power within the party that are doing a good job.

Which is why the rest of my commentary addressed the party, its leadership structure, and its voters…

I don’t think it’s that complicated. With the two party system the main hurdle is just securing the support of the DNC. Once you’re established the choice is the incumbent or a conservative. So I think most elected officials may have represented their constituents level of progressive ideas at the time they were first elected. So in a party where we claim to be progressives, the elected officials are conserving the status quo of when they were first elected 30 years ago.

I think that’s grossly oversimplifying things, to the point where I’m not even sure it’s worth investing more effort in a response.

I get that, but I tend to believe American politics has the propensity to have the cart lead the horse. If the cart spent over a decade screaming at the horse that Democrats are the reasonable party, and reasonable people have to make concessions to conservative to make that progress, no matter how unreasonable those conservatives are…then of course a large portion of the constituents will still hold those beliefs in the long run.

I think the problem with arguing against a metaphor is that it’s grounded in how you, specifically, see the problem. I simply can’t argue against how you see things, nor do I intend to try.

Third way politics was not invented by the democratic constituents, stop the steal was not invented by conservative constituents. The unfortunate reality of America is that most of the people voting are being influenced by the leadership of political parties instead of the political parties being influenced by the constituency.

I give human beings way more credit than that, especially in aggregate. The exact same could be said about you being influenced by some kind of outside group, and I’m sure you’d argue that your beliefs are sincere and informed by evidence and experience. If you’re taking the position that your beliefs are legitimate, but everyone else’s beliefs are influenced by propaganda, then you and I are seeing the world very differently.

I’m not sure this is worth either of our time anymore. Best of luck.

Blackbeard, 3 days ago

Good one! You really got me there!

🙄🥱

Blackbeard, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

I cited those sources specifically to show what his enemies will flood the airwaves with if he changes course. Their bias is exactly the problem I’m illuminating.

Blackbeard, 4 days ago

“Don’t worry about the media that helped orchestrate this in swing states across the nation.”

Staggering strategic genius right there.