“John Brown wears a hangman’s noose for a necktie up in Heaven. I asked him about it, and he said, ‘Where’s yours? Where’s yours?’” -Kurt Vonnegut

That will fix the broken system.

That’s what gets me about this whole thing. There’s plenty of core of truth to the idea that the Democrats are very bad, although yes the alternative currently is infinitely worse. There are thousands of things that any given person could do to try to fix that or work for better things in American politics. Refusing to elect Democrats anymore, no matter what, is 0 of them, and will make things quite a lot worse.

It’s like punishing your child for bad grades by refusing to feed them anymore. One, it doesn’t address the problem, two, it will make even the thing you say you are upset about and trying to fix, infinitely worse.

It’s also relevant that Biden did more for blue collar jobs in the States than anyone since Lyndon Johnson. Along with climate change, it’s something he actually took seriously and fought for, and achieved some success with, which made him a massive outlier in the party of Clinton and Chuck Schumer and all those assholes. How he got that through our current congress, I have absolutely no idea.

And, of course, no one really noticed, because our media is awful and people on social media have no idea what they’re talking about. Even the “sophisticated” left has still been talking about it as if none of that or the climate action had happened.

Is it your impression that Cuomo is a liberal?

I also have noticed that literally 0 of the “we can’t vote for Democrats, stop voting for them, that is the way to progress” strategists have anything to say about candidates to support before the primary, protest organizations to join in the meantime, anything generally productive that is outside of the general election they’re so gung-ho about giving their input to.

Right now would be the time to be looking around for good midterm or primary candidates who aren’t corporate whores, talking up third parties or reforms that would make third parties viable, all that kind of stuff. Nope. Just “let the Republicans win” in the general election, and then, crickets. And now occasionally popping up to shit on Gavin Newsom when he’s tangling with Trump, like a romantic partner who is grabbing on your arm and screaming “stop it!” while you’re in the middle of a fistfight. Just fuckin’ helping, the lot of them, from morning till night.

I’m aware that it has nothing to do with what you’re talking about. I’m making a whole different point, directly addressing what you’re talking about but from a different point of view (distinct from “what ‘we’ are talking about” in your parlance). That’s generally how it works.

Back in 2023, when this article was written when we were trying to figure out who to vote for, it made perfect sense to talk about that. Now that people are talking about how to not get thrown into concentration camps for being a Democrat, people are talking about something different.

The fact that one of the most infamous of the “anti Biden all the time” trolls elected to suddenly become nail-bitingly concerned about Newsom’s progressive credentials, and repost this thing from a whole nother pre-CECOT era as if it was relevant, doesn’t change what people are talking about presently, present tense.

I’m aware that you would like them to be talking about various holes and nitpicks in Newsom’s agenda and reasons why he is deeply problematic, and change the subject away from reasons why he is in the news, present tense. Who knows, you may succeed, it worked gangbusters in the last election and I see no reason to think it would stop working now.

I used to moderate some communities. I still do but I used to too.

When did I allegedly ban you, and from where?

He’s also a rich, corrupt slime ball who has nothing but disdain for ordinary people. He’s not a good candidate.

Completely agree with 100% of this. I hate that he’s sort of the default “big white guy face of the Democrats.” But also, I like that he’s at least making some substantive effort to fuck up Trump’s attempt to seize control of the country and throw all his enemies into the camps. I wish there were a few more people in power who were doing that. If he’s only doing it because he’s being a ponce who wants to make a name for himself, fuckin’ great, I hope he gets turbo narcissism tomorrow and starts doing it twice as hard.

vote blue no matter who

Literally the only time I hear this is from people on Lemmy who are trying to criticize some potential ally by being embittered.

Nobody is talking about voting for Gavin Newsom. We’re talking about it being good that he’s irritating Trump by taking concrete steps to preserve our democracy. You would be the guy in the revolution who’s constantly trying to root out “counterrevolutionaries” in the ranks and snitching people to the secret police because they’re not revolutionary enough, right during the run-up to the big battle to see if the movement can even survive.

With all due respect, as I understand where this sentiment comes from, that is how Trump gained momentum and won.

Trump gained momentum and won because the people in this country don’t know their ass from their elbow in terms of what is happening, and their whole picture of politics is based on confusion and incredibly effective weaponized propaganda.

You presented a child with a pretty unappealing fast food burger that had gone cold anyway, and a big lump of shit laced with (and labeled as) rat poison, and then he selected the shit and ate the whole thing. And your reaction is, “Well the burger should have been better.” I mean, it’s not at all an incorrect statement. But I feel like the way it played out should be automatic proof that the burger quality wasn’t the core of the issue.

Here, let me draw you a pie chart of what happened in the election:

• US media is awful: 25%
• US political education is bad: 20%
• Deliberate propaganda flooding into social media, such that a ton of Hispanics including undocumented immigrants voted for Trump: 20%
• Democrats are corporate dogshit: 15%
• People just don’t care: 10%
• Inflation / immigrants: 8%
• Democrats failed to make a clean break, stand up for Palestine and unions, et cetera, and galvanize the activist left: 2%
• Election fuckery: ???% but probably not 0

I actually 100% agree with you that modern Democrats are horrible. Like I said at the beginning, I definitely don’t like Newsom, and then you saw fit to lecture me about how I need to understand that he’s not all that good. The problem is that our political system rewards people for being dogshit, and punishes them or casts them out if they are not. So yes, it’s not real surprising that most of the Democrats are shit. IDK how people who seem so informed about politics and talk about it so incessantly keep being surprised by that apparently.

We need to fix our political system. There are a million ways to do that. Some people are working on them very hard. We need to be in the streets, right now, we need to be working hard to make a future before we all wind up in the camps. Sure, let’s replace Gavin Newsom WITH SOMEONE THAT WILL BE BETTER. Just shitting on him randomly is not going to improve the system. Neither did it for Kamala Harris, neither did it for Biden.

I voted for Bernie. I voted in the primaries. I’ve been to protests. I’ve contacted my congresspeople. I did some volunteering in this last election. I honestly don’t really know what to do. But it constantly pisses me off to see this lazy and entitled mindset where people are just going to sit back and let the whole place slide into the fucking ocean because our “left” party hasn’t reached the point, independently, that they feel like it needs to have reached before they’ll feel comfortable supporting, and so who cares what happens even when people are straight-up dying at the hands of the government.

My sibling it’s not going to get there on its own. It’s American politics. It’s fucking horrible. The DNC will not redeem itself just through people withholding votes. They’ll shrug, walk across the aisle, and keep making six figures. They don’t give a shit.

Tell me: What activist organization can I sign up with? What can I do? I’m genuinely asking. I already know that spending time online shitting on the Democrats will accomplish fuck-all to save the country. It’s just you and me wasting our ever dwindling allocation of remaining time wasting our fucking breath.

So, okay, you’re lecturing me on what I need to understand. Tell me: Who should I sign up with? How should I get involved? How can I fix this? If Gavin Newsom is a POS, then who should I be supporting and working for instead? And what on God’s green earth is the point of spending any energy at all shitting on Newsom in the meantime, to suppress by one little sliver some of the outrage when Trump puts him in the camps because he’s “not a progressive” and that’s super important to remember right now? I mean, fuck it, don’t answer that last part, you don’t need to. But what should I do?

I’ve had multiple people on Lemmy tell me that Bernie Sanders is a Zionist, and they can’t in good conscience support him.

And yes, it’s fake. I mean, some of it might be stupidity or useful-idiot-ness. But some of it is absolutely just people deliberately trying to hurt the left, and it’s succeeding very very well.

I know, I know. Just like Biden Kamala Harris wasn’t what America needed right now. It was super important for everyone to hear, and keep in mind and remember. I sure do appreciate you working so hard to keep the most important things to focus on front-of-mind for everyone, thanks so much.

Sorry, do I know you? I’m extremely sure I have never banned you. Are you just following a “how to stir shit with somebody who used to be in a moderator role” checklist or something?

Rules that improve the discourse of the community from the users’ perspective isn’t really how lemmy.world does things. Most of the big communities seem to have mods that vigorously enforce things no one wants, and don’t bother to enforce things that people would like to see.

Gaza’s Health Ministry is obligated to be conservative. The true death toll was almost certainly above 150,000 even before the starvation really started, and of course the number of people crippled. stunted, or otherwise ruined for life is much much greater.

There’s a reason it’s coming back around to the fore, I suspect. Because it’s time to play the favorite game of “This left person isn’t left enough! Let’s attack him!”

I mean yeah Gavin Newsom is kind of a POS. I don’t even like the guy, he’s not particularly left-wing and I wish the Democrats had more better standard bearers than this guy. But what the fuck, he is fighting against Trump and that’s a good thing. Supporting Gavin Newsom for sticking his thumb in Trump’s eye is absolutely in no way incompatible with supporting more genuine left-wing people (including supporting replacing Newsom with someone better as soon as that becomes feasible.) Just replacing him with “let’s let the bad guys win instead” is fuckin’ stupid.

“Hey, Jack. Can I just say ‘investigate for being transgender’? There’s no such thing as ‘transvestigate.’”

“That’s great, that’s why you’re here.”

(thumbs up)

Honestly, man, I get what you’re saying, but also at some point all that stuff just becomes someone else’s problem.

This is what people forget about the social contract: It goes both ways, it was an agreement for the benefit of all. The old way was that if you had a problem with someone, you showed up at their house with a bat / with some friends. That wasn’t really the way, and so we arrived at this deal where no one had to do that, but then people always start to fuck over other people involved in the system thinking that that “no one will show up at my place with a bat, whatever I do” arrangement is a law of nature. It’s not.