I’m a progressive, volunteered for Bernie’s campaigns. I don’t remember electing you to speak for me, maybe you don’t have your finger so squarely on the pulse of every single progressive.
I plan to vote for Biden, am I excited about it, no. Is the Democratic Party going to put up anyone else, no. Would me holding back my vote matter, no.
There is no world where “not voting for the least bad option” equals anything other than the most bad option winning. You can be upset that that’s the word you happen to find yourself in, no one asked me if having to pick between the two jackboots of the capital class was how we should arrange things either.
One thing I haven’t heard is what’s the alternative. You have my full attention, what would you actually concretely hope to have happen. Let’s say you could convince a large number of Democratic Party voters to follow your lead, what would you have them do?
Perhaps watching the Democratic Party leadership gut the chances of Sanders twice to put up boring ass garbage candidates has hardened my heart. Would you have them sit out the primary convention, great Biden still wins because of super delegates. Would you have them protest and hold back their votes in November, great trump wins. Is there some other thing that’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan?
Ok, but concretely, how do you want to do that? This meme?
I believe you, you think that Biden’s support for Israel will ensure his defeat. What do you think could get him to change his position, I highly doubt he’s browsing lemmy.
I get your frustration and I read some of your other comments and I don’t really disagree with you. The thing is, the people disagreeing with you in this thread agree with the deeper concern. I’m concerned that Biden’s support for Israel will make him lose too. I don’t believe there is anything the voting public can do to change that support. I believe that support has been bought and paid for by the capitalists that want that support for whatever awful reason they have, and that our shambling “plutocracy in democracy clothing” means we won’t be able to change that.
So I look at the line you are pushing and I think, what are the likely outcomes of this effort.
Biden retracting his support for Israel, no.
Some people on lemmy getting disenchanted and sitting home, maybe.
The horse race obsessed media running endless stories about Biden losing the left and the youth vote, which while true, act as a flywheel suppressing more voters, absolutely
And I just can’t figure out the point. Maybe you are more optimistic than me, maybe you still believe that shouting into the social media zone could swell a grassroots rebellion, get Biden to change his stance, and secure his victory. I just have a hard time believing it.
Now if you told me you were going to start a super pac and throw 10s of millions of dollars at the campaign but only if they move on Israel, yea, that could work. Shitposting here isn’t doing anything but demoralizing pragmatic leftists that understand what a shitty fucking dumpster fire of a system we have and are also worried Biden’s unwavering support for Israel is going to fuck us all over. And I struggle to understand who that helps
We both think his position on Israel is a shit position that imperils his election.
Few questions for you in good faith.
How many voters do you think he loses in the other position. There are a lot of democratic voters that do strongly support Israel and might be put off by him pulling support of denouncing them. They could stay at home or withhold donations also imperiling his chances of winning the election.
What do you mean by “if progressives are loud enough.” What does that loudness look like? In 2020 you had Warren with popular support and Sanders turning out 50k people to rallies, that’s pretty frightening to a candidate and could get them to make concessions to bring them into the fold. The democrats aren’t running a primary (in any meaningful way) so what does “being loud” look like. Is it just posting wherever you can, is it some direct action, a protest, a rally? What about it would be more successful than the student led protests we see on college campuses that don’t seem to be doing much to sway Biden or his inner circle?
What do you think about the possible negative effects of such action? Are you concerned at all that there is some non-zero number of people that would have voted for Biden but see enough negative content they decide to sit it out unable to stomach voting for him?
Honestly I wish I had your optimism that we could work towards making a substantial change here to the course of events. I find what’s happening reprehensible, monstrous even. I took part in the Iraq war protests, took a bus from Ohio to DC to march in what was at the time one of the largest protests. Got there and was pepper sprayed by Capitol police but stayed in the fight, organized protests in Columbus in support of Medicare for all. I still work in my local community to try to make things better, but I found that “being loud’ even being historically loud didn’t move the needle because the system they taught me in school about how America works and the reality of how America really works are so different. Our representatives spend more time dialing for dollars calling up and begging the donor class for donations than they do legislating.
That’s the perspective I come into this with, almost 30 years of being told to organize, protest, vote. That the pendulum would swing back. Go read some of the comments on any YouTube video covering campus protests, see how much glee the right takes from watching the police crack down on them. What should we do when the tools they tell you will lead to your freedom energize your opponents and leave the people that supposedly represent you unmoved?
Capitalism is just the idea that capital is privately owned and the economy is loosely organized around that concept.
From the IMF
In a capitalist economy, capital assets—such as factories, mines, and railroads—can be privately owned and controlled, labor is purchased for money wages, capital gains accrue to private owners, and prices allocate capital and labor between competing uses
If you compare this to something like socialism which says that capital assets should be held by the society at large. There is no one guy that can own a mine but the mine is owned by society at large.
Capitalism often likes to wear the clothes of “free markets” because most people like the idea of freedom. Not a lot of people are super keen on the idea that “some rich guy should be allowed to own all the railroads if he wants” (unless you are a rich guy that owns a bunch of railroads) so capitalists like to conflate capitalism and the free market as though they are one inseparable idea.
Other economic systems can also have free markets with collective ownership. Worker cooperatives, for example, exist within capitalist economies.
The existence of a stock market is not actually needed for capitalism. The people that own the means of production don’t necessarily need to set up a system where people can purchase a share of their companies. It might be an emergent property of capitalism, if people don’t want to start their own profit generating enterprises but want to share in the gains of a profit generating enterprise they would be willing buyers. People with profit generating enterprises might be willing sellers if they think they could over time generate more profit by raising capital from the stock buyers. But if you didn’t have a stock market and private individuals controlled the capital assets of your society, by definition you’d still be capitalist since that’s the defining characteristic.
As an example you could outlaw all financial instruments in America and as long as I can still own a factory and sell my goods for a profit, it would still be capitalism.
I think economic systems are fascinating. We often colloquially conflate various things that tend to happen together but really aren’t related at all. Of course if I hold the capital assets I would want you to associate capitalism with the positive aspects of a free market and sorta ignore the part where I get to own the capital asset and charge everyone else to have access to it.
Yea a lot of economic thinkers have tried to define capital.
I tend to think of capital mostly in the terms of means of production. Capital comprises the things that make things. But different economic thinkers draw different boundaries.
I think regardless of where you draw the boundaries the sea of capitalism is an interesting one, one where you let private individuals own those things. There are definitely parts that become almost philosophical. Take for instance mining rights. The mountain sits there for millennia, completely unowned. Then one day some people show up. No one owns that mountain, if people need rocks from the mountain anyone can walk up there and take them. Then you get enough people together and they say “together we are a nation, our nation owns that mountain.” Then capitalism does this neat magic trick where the nation can sell the mountain to one of the people in the nation and then he owns the mountain. You need a rock from the mountain, too damn bad, Greg bought the mountain and now you have to buy your rocks from him.
When you strip away all the abstractions we put up, it’s kinda wild. I find capitalism’s frequent marriage to democracy to be kinda fascinating too because the systems are sorta in opposition. When no one owned the mountain, all were free to take rocks, one could argue they vote with their rock collecting hands, that’s quite democratic. Once the nation claims the mountain, if that nation were democratic, the people could vote on the best way to use the rocks and that’s quite democratic too. But once the nation sells it to Greg, the fate of the mountain is in Greg’s hands. The people have no further say in the mountain or how much rocks cost or anything really, it is the least democratic outcome.
Based on your interpretation every group could simply be redefined into illegitimate.
We are for democracy
Oh so you think that monarchy is bad and you want to define yourself as excluding loyal subjects of the king! That will never be legitimate.
Leftist think that democracy should extend into the economic realm as well and what we should do with the means of production should be governed by the people and not just whoever happens to own the capital. One way to word that would be anti-capitalist, but another way would be to word it as economic democracy.
So if you require an inclusive definition for something to be legitimate, there you go. Liberals in America do not seek to do away with capitalism, you would be hard pressed to find any that do. If you support capitalism, then by the fact that capitalism’s private ownership is mutually exclusive with democratic control of the economy, you don’t support a democratic control of the economy.
You can’t have a vegan meat eater, not because of any moral assessment on veganism or meat eating, but because those two terms are mutually exclusive.
I remember back in 2015 people were saying that trump was saying that he would build a wall and Mexico would pay for it. I thought, “I wonder what he actually said that got chopped up and editorialized this way?”
Every day after that has been me realizing that if you dig any deeper on the stupid shit it just gets stupider. We will kill off the planet because one time trump bought a cheap led bulb that didn’t flatter his natural orange glow quite enough and now we can only have coal fired power plants. Every stupid thing he says has an even stupider story behind it which itself probably has an even stupider story behind that and on and on. It’s truly astounding
I am Brazilian, so they are really common, and wild, people drink piss, shave peoples hair, ruin people’s clothes, get drunk, and once a person even died, how are they, if they exist in you country?
Whenever she makes a video about something I know about it’s chock a block with misunderstandings on her part. Now my field is much different, so that’s not really too surprising.
What I find detestable though is that she will look into the camera, say something fucking stupid, and say it with a straight face and a degree of confidence that misleads other.
If more and more people started voting 3rd party, how long would it feasibly take to enact change? 2 election cycles? 4? 10? Does it ever even happen?
Mathematically as long as the system is first-past-the-post, it always tends towards 2 major parties. Let’s say we could solve the prisoners dilemma we find ourselves caught in, it’s interesting sometimes to consider what the results of outlier scenarios would be.
So let’s imagine a world in which you could convince voters to embrace 3rd parties. Pew Research has some voter statistics that are useful www.pewresearch.org/…/voter-turnout-2018-2022/
Only 37% of Americans reliably voted in the last 3 elections with a roughly even split between the two major parties. So let’s use 40% with an even split to make the numbers more convenient.
So we have an America where 20% of eligible voters vote for the Democratic Party, 20% vote for the Republican Party, and 60% stay home. Let’s imagine a best case scenario for 3rd party voting where a quarter of the democrats, a quarter of the republicans, and an additional 10% of the population that would sit it out are activated by the new choices these parties represent. This america now looks like. 15% reliably vote for democrats, 15% reliably vote for republicans, 20% are willing to vote for a 3rd party and now only 50% sit out.
Because it’s first past the post voting, there are many ways that the 20% can split amongst multiple parties such that the incumbent major parties still win the plurality. It actually doesn’t take much, 2 third parties splitting as unevenly as 14% of the population and 6% of the population ends up still letting the majority party with 15% of the population win. So we come to find that even with a larger population of possible voters than the 2 major parties, they still have to work together quite a bit to win.
Now let’s further imagine that the third parties are able to hold together they form a new independent party that get at least 16% of the population to vote for them and beat the incumbent majority parties.
Have we freed ourselves from being dominated by 2 parties? No, we just switched who does the dominating. The voters in the democratic and Republican parties will see which way the wind is blowing and shuffle around until there are two parties competing again, because in fptp there is a serious penalty to spoiler votes.
Now maybe it would be worthwhile just to put new people in charge. But the most likely outcome is whoever you elect ends up bowing to the same pressures that make the current 2 parties such trash fires and the donors that wrote checks with elephants or donkeys on them to have their way will be just as capable of writing out those donations to a bullmouse.
I’m all for electoral reform and reform in the government. But make no mistake, people posting on Lemmy that you shouldn’t vote because both options suck aren’t doing it out of a serious concern about legitimizing the process. The process is flawed but there’s no outcome of the election where they go “brave patriots all over this nation sat at home and so it doesn’t count.”
Real reform would require sustained and substantial action from the populace and even if you were to prefer that method of action, it would obviously still be advantageous to vote for the candidate that you think would create policies and laws under which that grassroots action would have the highest probability of success.
What a lot of technical people want is a forum. They want to have every problem discussed one time and then if someone brings it up again they can link to it and not have to discuss it again. This exists, it’s called stackoverflow and if technical people want someone to close their question as “already answered” or “off topic” they can go there.
Most discord communities though aren’t attempting to build a permanent corpus of knowledge carefully curated and searchable. Instead it’s basically the polar opposite, someone can show up and ask the question that every beginner stubs their toe on and people answer it and chat with them and help them learn.
It is more work for the people giving out the help, but it is seems like it’s what new users want. A place they can ask a question and get an answer or get someone to ask them questions to improve their question.
A lot of technical people get blinded by their own knowledge. Indexable searchable information is great if you know what to search for, but new people seldom do and they don’t even know the right way to formulate the questions. Asking other human beings that know what they are doing is a good way to learn stuff. Discord facilitates that, people like that, and no amount of highly technical people kicking their feet and holding their breathe and shouting at the communities “you are doing it wrong, you need a highly curated forum where questions are never asked twice” is going to stop human nature.
This is also what the Muni does in San Francisco. Random ticket inspection on the light rail with a decent fine if you didn’t pay.
BART, the Bay Area subway system is spending a bunch to install new fare gates that you can’t push past which the news is reporting is going well, so that seems like another viable option.
How exactly? The Democratic Party isn’t exactly soliciting recommendations from the general public. The primaries are where you would vote for a more viable candidate but without backing from one of the major parties there are no realistic viable alternatives.
The best anyone can do right now is not vote for Biden in the primary (or vote for a non viable candidate) and that just creates a narrative that Biden doesn’t have support.
I think I initially misread your post as Biden voters owning and overcoming it, but I think you were more saying for Biden to do that.
I think he’s trying to some extent, I saw him on Seth Meyers the other night and he seemed like any other old man politician. I think the problem is that he is old, there’s not much he can do about that, if he goes out and acts young… well nothing seems older than an old person acting young.
His talking points do often include actual accomplishments, I think the problem is that the accomplishments don’t feel good. One he cited on that Seth Meyers appearance is that coming out of the post pandemic inflation the US is doing best of the developed nations. Let’s say this is true, this is still hard to run on. Everyone is experiencing inflation but our policies made it so we experienced it the least. This is so abstract to your average voter, where the idea “Biden made prices go up” is wrong (if it were just Biden, other nations wouldn’t also experience inflation too) but easily grasped.
Overall, I think the big mistake is the party letting him run again. But the Democratic Party being dog shit at election strategy is par for the course
“Perfect” as the steak knives jut at random angles.
This take up so much more space than a butcher block and I’m sure those holes are going to smell great after a few months of crumbs mix with wet knife drippings in the dark zone beneath the counter. Luckily it’s completely inaccessible to any kind of cleaning.
I’ve always thought it so odd how people can look at something like greed and we pretty much all agree, that thing is bad.
Go out to dinner with some friends and just start taking everyone’s food and drink and you aren’t getting invited out again.
Then for our society we were like “what if we let greed be the driving force of this thing and the greediest people who take up the absolute most for themselves we will turn into celebrities!”
In my life I’ve known lots of people and most have been pretty regular fine people. It’s like our entire society is being held back by a small group of people going “no you can’t have nice things because if you had a nice thing a person like me would come in and fuck it all up to make a profit” and then we put those people in charge.
I think furniture assembly is more about being able to work together for a common goal and communicate what you need the other person to do and listen to what they need you to do.
For some reason a lot of people struggle to assemble ikea stuff (I honestly don’t know why, I’ve assembled dozens of items and it’s not rocket science). But there’s definitely been moments when I’ve been assembling some shelf and need my wife to assist with a two person step. If the assembly has been frustrating you have a really good test of how well can the two of you communicate through frustration and work together.
So maybe you are great at ikea assembly and don’t have the frustration factor, or you are a wonderful communicator and listener. For a lot of people though it’s that “this is the 12th step, I’m annoyed because I did the 9th step backwards and had to undo some shit, I’ve stripped this fucking screw… I’m gonna slide this piece and you need to guide it past the shelves, past them, you see how it’s hitting the fucking piece of wood, I need it not to do that!!!”
You probably shouldn’t marry everyone you can build a shelf with, but if you can’t effectively communicate when frustrated doing something trivial like building a shelf with someone you should work on that before tying the knot.
I tried to go back and watch the Dark Knight Batman movies because I remembered enjoying them when they first came out.
There’s an early scene where there is a Batman impersonator and he goes “what’s the difference between me and you” and Batman goes “I’m not wearing hockey pads”
It’s supposed to be a real zinger. As I watched it though the realization hit me that what he’s really saying is “because I have money so the rules don’t apply to me” and then I realized that that’s kinda the entire point of Batman. He’s a billionaire that’s decided he’s wealthy enough that silly things like laws don’t apply to him.
Really made me not enjoy the movie and I ended up turning it off.
People that are upset about electron should consider it’s not:
Electron App vs Wonderful Fully Supported Native Linux Application
The reality is that your choice is largely:
Electron App vs No App (maybe running their windows app in wine if you can get that to work)
It’s not like companies are going to go build a native linux app but electron got in their way. It was always electron or no support.
So if you like the app, remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something. There’s no trophy you get at the end of your life for “most cumulative ram left idle”
Endless Sky is an open source space merchant game with space battles, a huge amount of ships and variety, dozens of alien species, multiple storylines, and so much more. I think my favorite part is how accessible it is to contribute to the game; most things like storylines, quests, and ship outfits can be added or modified with...
Bless America (lemmy.world)
Someone stop the ride, I want to get off (midwest.social)
In this house we share the bananas (lemmy.world)
Funny, those guys don't usually agree on that much (lemm.ee)
Do any of them know what the word “liberal” actually means?
Trump, reciting songs and praising cannibals, draws yawns and raises eyebrows (www.yahoo.com)
'Swing is king': Ex-Clinton adviser warns Biden against 'pitching too much to the base' (www.alternet.org)
Alternet.org
Teen pizza delivery driver shot at multiple times after parking in the wrong driveway (www.nbcnews.com)
Interview with the victim....
how are the “welccme parties” of universities in your country?
I am Brazilian, so they are really common, and wild, people drink piss, shave peoples hair, ruin people’s clothes, get drunk, and once a person even died, how are they, if they exist in you country?
Sulfur Better than Hydrogen for Energy Storage, Engineers Find (youtu.be)
I Think I Am Committing Voter Fraud (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Enshittification Continues: Discord to begin showing advertisements on it's free platform (archive.is)
They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
The NYPD Spent $150 Million to Catch Farebeaters Who Cost the MTA $104,000 (hellgatenyc.com)
The Big Change Between the 2020 and 2024 Races: Biden Is Unpopular (www.nytimes.com)
Archived at web.archive.org/web/…/poll-biden-trump-2024.html
Because this is so much better than a butcher block! (files.catbox.moe)
The judge seemed annoyed at sovereign citizen (more in comments). (lemmy.world)
You're just a kid, how would you know what you want for the rest of your life? (lemmy.world)
It's important that he lives by a code (startrek.website)
I HATE electron (lemmy.ohaa.xyz)
Some love for my favorite open source game, Endless Sky (endless-sky.github.io)
Endless Sky is an open source space merchant game with space battles, a huge amount of ships and variety, dozens of alien species, multiple storylines, and so much more. I think my favorite part is how accessible it is to contribute to the game; most things like storylines, quests, and ship outfits can be added or modified with...