Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lays out battle plan against 'shockingly dim' Trump White House
Summary
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged countering the Trump administration’s policies by resisting at every turn, arguing that its incompetence makes it vulnerable.
Her remarks followed chaos caused by a rescinded executive order that temporarily shut down Medicaid portals nationwide.
She encouraged activists to take offline action, citing ongoing mobilization efforts.
Her strategy focuses on making governance difficult for Trump, calling his administration “dangerous and cruel” but also “shockingly dim.”
https://www.rawstory.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-2671031806/Open linkView original on lemmy.world1233
Comments308
Any kind of on the ground movement or mobilization needs political support in the halls of power. It's what made the resistance demonstrated against Trump the first term possible, and the dynamic goes both ways. On the ground resistance gives political actors the space to be resilient. Resilient politicians give in the ground movement space to work.
Basically all other Democrats other than Bernie and AOC shrivelling up and hiding in their shells will have a chilling effect on our ability to organize on the ground.
I've been bitching about the lack of leadership from the Democrats for a while now - I'm glad to see that others are seeing it too.
They need to dump Wasserman-Schulz. She's a big part of the reason we're in this mess.
I made a comment recently going through the list of the campaign advisors for Harris which included;
mostly C-suite executives, advisors for the richest peoples trust funds and literally a representative from New Orleans who had to step down after it was discovered he was the top recipient for bribes from the oil industry but is still apparently a great choice for directly advising the DNC.
It's not just one person it's the whole of the DNC that's like this. They bow to decorum while underhandedly stuffing their pockets with cash just like the Republicans. They just want it to look professional while they do it.
They need to give a shit about others and the average citizen not just see this as their rightful place to make money because they deserve it for being better connected. That's why we are in this mess.
It's all been downhill since JFK...
LBJ at least pushed for laws, he helped convince white senators to vote for the Civil Rights Act. I think if we had a second LBJ, we'd have something done.
...I'd rather not have a new VIetnam war if that was the case, however.
Heinrich from NM has made it clear that he will pushback. Let’s see what that looks like. I suggest folks that can contact your reps, now and frequently.
Every day I have sent mine a note from the contact form on their pages. Angrily
Don't use the contact form or send an email. Call them. Even better, show up in person if possible. The contact form can be filled out from anywhere by anything, same as sending an email. Calling at least lets them know an actual person, likely a local voter, holds the views expressed and is more memorable and harder to ignore. Showing up in person even more so.
You make a good point, especially in these times.
It's funny. sounds like you're giving up already, and blaming the Dems.
You got Bernie and the Squad.
If you want to put some backbone in the Dems in office, go out and start a voter registration drive. Let them see that there are people who will support them.
What is it about the lemm.ee domain that produces accounts with the most cringe, awful takes?
Speaking only for myself, it's because peepee poopoo.
But for a more serious and less cringe-attempt of a response, I know that when I joined the Reddit API exodus, I initially tried to make an account on .world. I sent a few applications without response over a couple of weeks, then tried signing up for beehaw (because I'm from Texas and I thought the name was cute). Finally, I found some article that said that lemm.ee was doing quick or immediate approvals and just went with it. When my friends mentioned similar difficulties, I told them about lemm.ee, too.
I find it so rare to see contributions from other .ee users, but I'll take your word for it that we suck. I'm willing to believe that.
I think I'm the only one that never bothers to look at someone's domain, and just approach all posters on equal footing instead of relying on some weird sectarian nonsense based on what website they found that has decent up time and open registration...
That's far too reasonable and measured. Get off the internet, you... you... Poopie-head!
(╯︵╰,)
I definitely start out that way. Generally only checking when someone has an especially bad take. That said I haven't noticed any more shit coming from lemm.ee than .world And certainly not as bad as any .ML.
Based
lemm.ee has one of if not the best admin, and was always running more smoothly in earlier versions. More than that, when other bugs were taking out .world and many others, lemm.ee was already immune and the admin helped the other instances sort theirs out too. lemm.ee has a lot of good users.
However, when hexbear was banned, users on that instance started moonlighting on other instances. There were very few instances that were still federated with hexbear but also with the others, where all the conversation was - many wanted one account that could browse both. Several went to lemmy.ml, the instance run by the formal lemmy developers, and there was a noticeable shift in user behaviour from the instance. But lemm.ee never really was targeted by the hexbear brigading that led to their defederation with everyone else, perhaps because lemm.ee doesn't really have any massive communities itself, not as big as the others.
So yeah, lemm.ee can still browse hexbear, and with that you get a sizeable chunk of their userbase spilling over. So some lemm.ee users do indeed suck. It's not as bad as .ml, though, and I think that's in no small part thanks to the lemm.ee admin team keeping the more extremist users in check.
Thanks for that! I'll have to mostly take your word for it.
Except for the .ml part. What on Earth is going on over there???
The two devs themselves are massive tankies. They also run lemmygrad.
Sorry, but this sounds like a completely unhinged attempt to blame hexbear for everything that goes wrong anywhere.
The post from Dagwood222 that UnderpantsWeevil was complaining about couldn't have been more completely opposite to the usual hexbear take. When is the last time that any hexbear user defended democrats like Dagwood222 did?
The statement was
Now, I wouldn't say that's really appropriate here, Dagwood222's comment above that wasn't cringe nor awful. However, apparently UnderpantsWeevil already has this perception of lemm.ee users, and hexbear users making up a chunk of the userbase is my explanation for that.
No one ever really spoke bad of lemm.ee users before the hexbear defederations, and it was a clear echo of the complaints about lemmy.ml users that also started at the same time. It's just a bandwagon/circlejerk, really; a cheap way of getting upvotes from other users not on those instances that only has a pinch of truth. But that pinch is what I was describing.
OK, now I understand a little bit better what you were trying to say, and I agree that all the complaining about any particular major instance is pure bandwagon/circlejerking/stereotyping/etc.
In my personal view, lemmy.world is the worst Lemmy instance for a variety of reasons, but I don't think it's all .world users or even a majority, so I don't go around complaining about .world in every thread here like people do about hexbear and lemmygrad.
It's gotten so bad that, like you said, people are witch-hunting even other instances because they still federate with hexbear and lemmygrad and people think they're secretly harboring underground users of those instances. It's McCarthyism all over again.
I think they just assume that everyone is a weak kneed and terminally online as themselves.
Hey that's our job!
What part of registering voters is 'cringe' to you?
The lack of self awareness in this comment is truly sublime.
So enlighten me. Did you have a better plan in 2024? Somethings besides voting? What's your sure-fire winning strategy that you didn't use yet?
Who's talking about voting as resistance, besides you? There's a conversation to be had about it sure, but it's not the conversation being had now, here. You trying to shift the focus to a subject you're comfortably confident about discussing is why you're being criticized, not for the merit of what you're saying on its own.
What? The time for a voter registration drive was a year ago. We're well past that now. You can't vote out a dictator.
It's time for more direct action. We need protests. We need strikes. We need people in the streets fighting for their rights because they're being taken away by the day.
Understanding and recognizing how the world functions isn't equivalent to giving up. Nor is "hope" for the sake of hope any kind of a strategy. And yes. The Dem's are the fucking problem and always have been. Nothing about this fascist takeover would have ever been possible with out the complicity and milquetoast politics of Democrats. They are a worthless and abhorrent party with no integrity and barely worth supporting, beyond the weakest possible argument of them being the "lessor" evil. The rise of fascism would be impossible with out the previous 30 years of normalization politics out of Democrats. Start a voter registration drive? Give me a fucking break with the navel gazing. Voting isn't going to save the Union.
We may need the squad to break away from a Democratic party that has shown its self incapable of wielding power in such a way as to prevent the rise of fascism. What we'll need for on the ground movements to be successful is support in some way from the halls of power. That doesn't necessarily mean working with Democrats.
I dunno, seems like the fascists are the problem, actually.
The moderates that tolerate fascists and thus enable them are always the problem, actually. The fascists fail without them but succeed with them, every time.
So the fascists... aren't the problem?
My comment didn't even slightly say anything even remotely resembling that, and you fucking know it. Quit commenting in bad faith.
It did, though. Or at least the message you're presenting seems to indicate that.
I'm fairly sure you phrased it like this as a retort to the first commenter's comment, but you gotta see how insisting the blame 'actually' lies with the moderates and the people enabling the fascists is pretty clearly interpretable as shifting the responsibility. Both parties are to blame, but you're implying that the bulk of the criticism lies with the people being passive about allowing the fascist takeover instead of with the people exploiting the resource they've found in moderates by doing the fascism.
Dems didn't get their shit together and exploit the moderates first to prevent this, but while that does make them culpable for the current fascist power grab, it does not make them equally culpable, and that is the position you seem to be presenting.
Maybe learn like, even a tiny bit about the history of fascism and how it comes into being and how it takes power.
What's the alternative? Register as Republicans and do a hostile takeover of that party?
State level electoral reform
Honestly, it would be a lot easier to do a hostile takeover of the Green Party. If Democrats are so damned worried about splitting the vote, they don't have to field a candidate. It's not like they are interested in fielding one that can win anyway.
Who is this 'we' you speak of?
I really wanted Bernie in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Somehow 'we' managed not to get out and get him nominated.
But now, somehow, 'we' are going to get organized.
Until 'we' shows me that they can organize a weinie roast, I'll stick with the people who are actually on the ballot.
I also notice that you had nothing to say about registering voters as an actual tool.
I guess you missed the part where we were manning barricades and taking tear gas canisters to the face in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.. directly confronting fascism on the streets and taking it to them. Your obtuseness has no external meaning.
If voting changed anything about this system, they'd make it illegal. Voting as a strategy to stop fascism was attempted in 2020. The result was a 4 year hiatus, but with no real ability or intention to take action against fascism. Biden could have had Trump arrested on day fucking one of taking power. He chose not to. Democrats chose to only make a show of any kind of consequences for a literal attempted coup, because to them, it simply wasn't a priority. Voting as a strategy to change the system doesn't work when the people you are obligated to vote for as the "opposition party" are not, and will not, and have no interest in changing the system: ie, Democrats.
I agree with everything you said 100%, except the bit about how if voting worked it'd be illegal. Republicans are literally trying to make it that way. One of their main goals is to disenfranchise as many poor people and minorities as possible, bc if everyone voted, republicans would lose every election by a landslide. That's why they love things like manually registering to vote, randomly deregistering people, the electoral college, and hand counting ballots, while opposing mail-in and absentee ballots, automatic voter registration, RCV, basically anything that gives Americans more voting power. Voting is very much the least you can do to affect change in America, but it is still a thing you can and should do regularly before republicans abolish it
So, in other words, bOTh SidES arE tHe SAMe. Don't vote, because it doesn't work.
At a certain point its obvious that you are just intentionally missing the point.
It's like you just type away and don't even bother reading what you wrote.
Everyone who says this with mixed case sarcasm does so out of bitter disappointment at the remaining differences.
The parties agree on more shit than they should.
Humans and apes share of 98% of genetic material.
The Dems have given up. Because it's time for them to take a vacation after playing the part for their rich donors for the last 4 years.
Another NPC saying "The Left who didn't vote are to blame" as a concern troll for the Right... Sowing the seeds of doubt basically. Shame on you but you have no shame.
Bruh why? It's not race/sex/gender/able-ist, stop letting right wing propagandists dictate what words you can use.
Cool! Don't "Bruh" me either then. You guys sound like you're about to vomit on me, mid-syllable.
We all have dog in this fight. Apparently so do the people who voted third party and refuse to see the leopards.
One of the reasons Hitler took power in Germany is that the other political parties couldn't put aside their grudges and unite around a leader who would promise to keep the system running. If Harris had won last year we'd be sure of having elections in 2026. Now it's up in the air.
To put that another way, though, a leader who only promises to keep the system running and not to actually fix it is part of how fascists win. Delaying the problem to 2028 isn't the same as actually fixing the problem, and it seems the Democrats never had any intention of doing the latter.
It isn't chump and his taintsuckers you gotta worry about.
It's the army of Federalist Society lawyers and policy experts around him. They've spent decades figuring out the removed in the armor of our governmental system. Figuring out how to dismantle it piece by piece.
Edit - wtf is that removed about? Wait....oh. bot thinks I did a racism.
Fucken hell, that's the correct fucking way to define a gap in armor. Bullshit. I really want to try a bunch of slurs out and see what sets it off.
This is surely the most rational reaction to being slightly inconvenienced by a word filter.
SEE WHAT YOU'RE MAKING ME DO? NOW I HAVE TO SAY THE N WORD... I DON'T WANT TO BUT YOU GAVE ME NO CHOICE!
"What if I come up with an entirely fictitious, nigh-impossible combination of circumstances to try and corner you into accepting my racial prejudice?"
also the answer is yes. Just because it's a last wish doesn't make it okay. it's not like you can wish to do crimes for example.
I'd be slightly curious about why a child would make that particular dying wish, why they think anyone really has the power to either grant (if the wish is to say it without anyone thinking badly of them) or prevent that wish (if they just want to be able to say it, they already can), but mostly just lose any sympathy I might have had for the kid because I wouldn't expect any good answer to that first question.
Making hard eye contact while slowly donning burger king crown
Anyone else remember Neopets? They had a filter that was extreme and multilingual. I can't count how many times I'd write a friendly message, the filter would block it, and I would end up editing chunks of text trying to avoid whatever word or series of letters the filter thought was inappropriate. Sometimes it'd be a few letters embedded in another word (like "associate" being banned for the letters a s s.) But sometimes, I was truly stumped. The only explanation I can think of is that some letters in English words matched up to swears in other languages.
Anyway, fun fact - I met my first boyfriend through that site. We decided to see how dirty we could talk while still getting messages past the filter. We used innuendos, slang, and other turns of phrase with each other just to see what we could get away with.
In the end, all that filter did was make us more creative at communicating forbidden topics. Whoops ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Nintendo still does this. There are pokemon names you can't use as nicknames because it gets filtered. Most recently: Moltres EX gets caught by the filter on TCG Pocket and you can't label your deck after it. "Violet" was blocked on an older game because "viol" is French for "rape". Lazy, overcorrecting filter.
Would a younger kid have understood what was being talked about or would it have gone over their head like the dirty jokes in kids cartoons? If the latter, the filters did their job. Neopets was probably one of the rare instances where parents actually signed the permission slips for their under 13 year old kids to use the social aspects. I know my parents did and it was the only site they ever did that for.
Not much since you're on .world. .ml is much more strict.
Jebus. I still haven't figured out if .ml is government funded or true believers. Very strange to me.
It's the home instance of the founders of Lemmy, who are communists. I don't know their views on authoritarian communism like Stalin or Mao, but people who thought these were good leaders are the "tankies" you may have heard of. There are a lot of them on .ml.
I've basically only ran into 90% left wing, sporadic sprinklings of conservative, tankie, liberal, other. "A lot of them" is pulling extra weight here.
Fair enough. They are more visible than most commenters, stand out to me at least, so maybe it seems like a lot.
Confirmation Bias is a hell of a drug.
I must be a classy enlightened centrist since I have never had my words removed.
Entire comments removed & bans, on the other hand...
Can't upset the Chinese on .ml 😂
Wait until you try the in-game chat in Rocket League. You can't even type "Discord". It's a banned word. 🤡
They’re probably trying to prevent people spamming discord invite links in game. I don’t necessarily have an issue with that. If someone got invited to a scam discord server from RL chat, blowback would definitely hit RL for allowing that on-ramp. If you vibe with someone and want to invite them to a discord server to enable teaming up easier, you can always send them the code after the discord.gg/ part of the link.
That's gotta be it, yeah. You're absolutely right.
Although typing in another language is absolutely impossible, at least for us in Sweden. So many basic words get bleeped, even if the banned word is only part of a larger word. An example: "I have to stop playing now" -> "Jag måste sluta spela nu". "slut" is banned, sentence looks like this: "Jag måste ***** spela nu"
And it's like that for like a substantial amount of sentences. So we'll just go on Discord to talk. But we can't say "hop on discord" or similar, so we just immediately say "disc" 😆
Go removed ahead you removed.
It's clbuttic bowdlerization.
Would it not be kink? not …
Ha. Reminds me of an Asian standup comedian who had this routine about how he grew up in the inner city where the basketball nets were made of chains and so the chains didn't go 'swish,' they went 'chіnk.' So when guys wanted to play basketball, they said, "let's go shoot us up some chіnk."
Thank you, Cyrillic letter і, for letting me bypass the bot to tell that joke. Because I've remembered that joke for years.
lemmy.ml removes certain words, other instances don't.
Of course the tankies get their pants all knotted over THIS.
Are you saying your comment was edited?
.ml replaces certain words with "removed"
In this case it seems to have been this term.
The "r" word will be removed too.
I haven't noticed what the others are. I swear fairly often and those haven't been removed. I would guess only things that are slurs etc.
Edit: It was removed from my link as well. LOL. Look up "gap in suit of armor" if you haven't figured it out already. Kinda ironically, when it's used as a slur it's against chinese people.
There are better Lemmy hosts out there, just waiting for you to join.
Gimme a list.
There was as guy running around with a list of smaller, worthwhile instances.
I ended up on lemmy.zip more recently after starting on kbin, then moving to .world.
lemm.ee seems to be gaining popularity.
sh.itjust.works is also pretty well represented, its users seem normal enough afaik.
lemmy.dbzer0 is an anarchist instance, their admin is super knowledgeable and seems like a cool guy.
lemmy.blåhaj.zone is a radically inclusive, safe instance. They're virulently anti-bigotry and anything perceived as "anti-marginalized" groups will likely be removed/banned.
There are hundreds of instances, 569 as of writing this. Some are niche and focused on specific hobbies or uses and a bunch of others are general purpose. It's worth clicking around and sorting a few different ways to find a server you like. Remember you can export your settings and import them into an account on another instances so moving is relatively painless.
Thank you very much.
I resent the implication that I am normal!
Seriously though it's a p chill instance
Bookmarked. Thank you for this insight.
lemmyverse.net
Huh. Where can I get such informative descriptions of the different instances on that site?
The front page of each instance has a sidebar.
I chose this one because it had the piracy community
I just signed up with the first one that worked, and it still took a while to actually get it created.
To attack the c h eye nk in someone's armor shouldn't be censored. Its a word that has meaning other than rascist. Bot should be smarter.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chink
I don't mind removed, but the group of people I don't care for is the removed. They're almost as bad as removed!
Wtf was removed
chink in their armor.
Omg...what an idiotic auto moderation
What do you expect from marxist leninists?
I really need someone to explain all the random marxist leninists bogey-man bigotry that happens on this site at some point. Like this is a completely weird-o comment, about a political ideology that's effecting a word filter for possible rascism? and on .world people still label it marxist?!
I'm aware there is deep historical connotations which I haven't spent years researching so I try not to defend or participate but it feels like since people push back against "instance hating", we've gotta pour on any political hatred we could possibly see in the shadows. I'm just gonna assume this is another bad faith comment striking up fear and hatred till I learn otherwise.
My dude, what do you think the .ml in your instance stands for?
They're asking what automod removing an out of context word has to do with marxism/ leninism. This kind of error can happen on any instance that automatically removes slurs, and that particular one isnt exactly commonly used either way.
.ml is Mali and marxist-leninists tend to use .ml as their hosting domain of choice the way that a lot of Generative AI domains are hosted in Anguilla because of the .ai domain.
Am I still missing something? This is posted on the instance of .world, wtf are we talking about .ml and politics for? If your instance filters your comments on other instances than that's concerning and something I didn't know.
edit: removed the sarcasm in the hopes someone actually responds to what the problem is.
Man, it's just classic tribalism and confirmation bias. People assume the most obnoxious voices are representative of all Communist spaces and that's poisoned a lot of perception here. Folks love having a villain to pick on and reddit.world here has decided "tankies are the bad guy".
Similar to chips in the armor
What was removed ? I don't understand
A small imperfection in armor sometimes used to refer derogatorally towards people of east Asian decent
Thanks !!
Chinamen is not the preferred nomenclature, Dude.
Look, this isn't a guy who built the... I mean what's your point, man ? what's the word ?? I'm out of my element
A lot of Lemmy users really need to understand this. Far too often I see people deride any action that doesn't immediately fix all problems in the world as worthless or meaningless, simply because they lack the imagination needed to see how small actions can add up to big changes.
That's true, but it can also be used in reverse as a pacifying mechanism. For example, contributing to making the US the most incarcerated population in the world with ridiculously strict "tough on crime" legislation and then pardoning a small fraction of prisoners. Another example is forcing student loan debt to stick around through bankruptcy, but then forgiving a tiny fraction of loans. It's a move to pretend change is in motion, but it's so small and so slow that it's never going to actually solve the problem. This is especially bad when the other party makes such huge moves in the negative direction while we're supposed to be content with tiny steps toward "progress".
Neighbor, you're who they're speaking to...
What is this pacifying people from, do you imagine?
Like, let's say Trump gives the order to disband all DEI committees everywhere, and a lot of people who like theirs resist the order to do so at every turn. Malicious compliance, straight-up refusal, sleight of hand. This pacifying resistance means they won't...?
Republican strategists are masters of the long con. Trump has been coming since Nixon.
I understand what you're saying, i really do, but i did NOT need the mental image you just gave me...
I’ll just apologize ahead of time, but you made me think of this.
https://youtu.be/0TdJSRg2S9E
🤣
Even if the actions really do nothing, they get people active and organized, so that they can take more effective actions later on.
I honestly think a lot of this criticism is people's internalized rationalization for why they themselves don't take action.
This Lemmy user has the right idea.
It's letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Well, they focused on one issue and ignored the convicted rapist insurrectionist in the room.
Incrementalism got us here. At some point, you have to realize that you can't stop a flash flood by bailing with a solo cup and shouting "I'm helping!"
It's a stalling tactic to placate chumps while they sell us all out.
So it's better to do nothing while they sell you all out?
Note how they bitch without bringing any actionable suggestions, but instead try to denigrate those that are taking action, all done with a sense of superiority.
That's not what I said.
Don't be so easily placated. They're selling you out.
Who? Who is selling you out? Ocasio Cortez? Really?
Incrementalist democrats. Pay a tiny bit of attention.
So far you haven't said what you think people should be doing. You've just said "this type of resistance is a waste of time."
Without an alternative proposal that really sounds like "do nothing."
Cool. Where?
https://lemmy.ca/comment/14239329
You lied about what I said then. Thanks.
The difference being that the incrementalism was outsourced to elected officials. What I understand that sentence to mean to say is that it needs every one of you who is able to do anything of any magnitude. It adds up. And like kattfisk says, you get active and organized. You have more power than you think and democracy is more than just drawing a few crosses in a box every few years.
I mean, who is going to do it if not you? What have the heroes from the Democratic party been up to since the peaceful transition of power? Some of the Dem senators voted for many of Trumps catastrophic picks. In a time where the White House is flooding the zone (as Steve Bannon put it some time ago), Shumer is giving speeches on the senate floor, that no one is listening to and Dem leadership is scheduling emergency meetings for after the reason for the meeting goes into effect. Finally AOC shows some kind of leadership and calls upon all of you to mobilize and resist fascism and you react with "it's a stalling tactic"? Please realize that you want the same thing. But if you want a mass movement, you will need to be organized on a smaller scale first or else it will fizzle out quickly.
AOC is not calling for incrementalism.
That's what I'm saying. Because neither did the user you replied to. They didn't call for politicians to take small steps over time, but for everyone to take action so it adds up. Big difference.
No, they just misrepresented the position of people who are sick if incrementalism for the sake of sliding right:
This is like not believing in macro evolution.
Actually, I think a lack of incrementalism got us here. We incremented in the wrong direction.
Ever hear of punctuated equilibrium?
Sure is neat how Republicans get to do what they want all at once but we need decades of baby steps and half measures.
The Republicans only get to push things this far after decades of baby steps and half measures to get there. Things like getting fox news going, getting to draw congressional districts, slowly getting courts set up to let their movements work, working smaller representative races to get a foothold, facing a rejection as they tried to go all out with the tea party. Finally their preparation has a house, Senate, supreme Court, that was ready and willing to enable this effort.
So, what were Democrats doing while all this was going on? What was their celebrated incrementalism setting up?
Because it looks to me like they spent all this time moving to the right, incrementally of course.
The whole "If the Democrats don't immediately and completely do everything I want I'm not going to participate at all" is a self-fulfilling philosophy.
On the republican side, when the larger party was "too far to the left", they didn't just throw up their hands, they worked at it, slogging away at the relatively less glamorous task of mucking about within the framework of their party, getting small victories and parlaying them to broader victories and preparation to have their time when the ground was ready. But the entire time supporting the party closest to what they wanted while they worked things even as the party failed to move as far as they wanted. All the time learning lessons on how to advance even the parts of their agenda that kept getting rejected even by their own party. They were clowns, mocked, too ridiculous to really be feared, but they were ultimately pragmatic and as a result, here they are...
It's also belittling to anyone who isn't 100% satisfied with everything Democrats do.
Progressives have a choice of two parties that are moving away from what they want. Republicans have two parties that listen to them.
I strongly disagree. As in all things, you need to pick your battles.
It's absolutely possible to take a counter productive action with the best of intentions.
If all Dems had her tenacity and honest interest in helping the middle class, we wouldn't be where we are.
It's not that people don't mention Republicans in statements like that because they're letting them off the hook; it's that they don't bother mentioning them because they're a lost cause.
"Why aren't you mad at the Republicans we keep acting like?!"
Eh, I wouldn't go that far. They aren't acting like Republicans; they are acting normal despite the abnormal situation.
In fact, that's the problem: they should've acted more like the Republicans, in the sense of forcefully pushing through changes and daring the opposition to stop them (except good things instead of cartoonishly evil ones). But that would go against their nature, representing the neoliberal status quo.
They adopted republican border policy and ran republican anti-trans talking points in their own ads. They supported strikebreaking and genocide. I said they acted like republicans because they did.
If Democrats could say "poor" we might not be where we are.
Thankfully Republicans will do it.
Turns out when all you want are loyalists, all you get are dumb assess.
I thought this was obvious to everyone. Heck, Futurama had this as a joke 20 years ago when Zapp Brannigan stuffed his crew with nothing but loyalists who fall apart immediately.
That was much more "chain of command is incompetent but we have no choice but to obey" rather than "blind loyalty". Did you forget the episode where he was dishonorably discharged by the DOOP for blowing up the space station with the ribbon cutting laser? His second in command, Kiff, is literally constantly pointing out how stupid and incompetent Zapp is. Hell, even "I sent wave after wave of my own men against the killbots until their counter overflowed", arguably the worst case of being a loyalist to Zapp, ended in a win for Earth. They didn't fall apart and collapse - they defeated the unstoppable killbot army and got a medal(show them the medal Kiff).
Gir!
Hehe it is the best. Been using Gir as my avatar for things most of my life 😂
Philosophical inbreeding is also not good.
He got rid of DEI to make more room for cronyism.
First president with gage earrings.
Does smashing your head against the podium give you gauges? Cause he clearly doesn't have anything missing (except for intelligence, compassion, and empathy) and they wouldn't release the medical record, so the likelihood he was hit or grazed by the bullet is IMO is slim to none.
He was bleeding... like, you can see the blood.
"Gauges" is just funny.
Based
Basically, resist. Do not comply in advance. Make them fire you. Challenge that firing in court.
finally, a person with a STRATEGY. so sick of the whining.
she needs volunteers for personal escort and safety. i think she is going to be targeted.
She has employees
Donate to her
That "might" is doing so much heavy lifting, it's getting a hernia.
This isn't strategy. A strategy is a long-term plan. This is just a tactic.
I just hope she comes out of this unscathed. It only takes one loon with a shiv... and now there's millions of 'em.
I used to work for social services in Colorado. There was a Lady there that was fired without cause. She fought it, won in court, got her job back, and I'm pretty sure back pay. Beth, talking bout you, she said always fight, she has and it has always paid off.
I'd fight for the back pay, but if someone fired me without cause I wouldn't want to work for them anymore.
In that position you're far more protected from retaliation than a "regular person" -- it's easier to prove with an established history and courts really don't like have their judgments undermined. You've also shown your employer trying to screw with you is expensive.
Go back and do your job to the letter. They're either going to be very wary of pissing you off, or they're going to do something stupid and you'll get another payout.
If you get your job back you may be entitled to severance and potentially pension
A lot of times, the manager that caused all that trouble by firing you doesn't get to be a manager anymore.
Good luck to her.
Her point is that everyone has to pitch in and do their little bit to make things harder for this administration. This resistance has to be built from the bottom up.
I already wasted 20 years of my life in sacrifice to politics. I want to be done and other than venting about how we're doomed I more or less am done, thank you.
I hope I'm wrong, and I earnestly wish her luck but I do not owe a population of people who chose Trump a single solitary fucking thing. I'm bitter, exhausted, and my patience is gone.
Cool...
But if you're done, why are you here trying to convince others to give up?
If it's too much for you, that happens.
Go check out from politics, dont hang out and tell people it's pointless to try. Literally no one is happy in that scenario except trump.
I'm not, I'm just angry and bitter and venting. Its not rational its seeking catharsis from lashing out.
Coulda fooled me, most people I know lashing out don't recognize they're lashing out and dont explicitly say they're not being rational.
Real catch-22 moment here, if you know your being irrational, you're not actually irrational.
Not one person in this world is rational or sane. It would take a sane world to create a sane person and we just can't help but pass on our issues even at our best attempts.
When people are acting foolish and know it at least they know. That means they can recognize it and change if they currently aren't. It's when they don't recognize it at all that we must be wary of their intentions.
Its probably something to do with being autistic but IDK.
I'm not being rational anymore since the election, I'm just giving in a lot to bad impulses because I don't have much fight in me anymore because before I kind thought things were worth fighting for. Now I look around at the average stranger and think "7/10 times that person either voted for Trump or failed to vote meaning I probably hate them." And then like, half of the remainder who voted Harris were probably libs that were anti-Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 so I don't think I'd be happy to meet them either. Its not good for my mental health and there is no solution but suffering a now pointless fucking existence.
I know other thoughts floating in my head are new as well and I'm not super thrilled about them.
Sure shit sucks right now, doesn't mean it's not worth fighting to fix. If you're burnt out from being politically engaged for a decade, disconnect from it for a while, and actually disconnect from it until you get to a better head state, not just scream into the algorithm about how you think its all pointless. As cliche as it is, touch some grass, go outside, breathe some fresh air, find somewhere quiet and disconnect for a bit. Pick up a hobby that doesn't result in being terminally online, disc golf is pretty affordable and surpringly more common than you think.
If you're done with politics, then just stop. This isn't an airport, you don't need to loudly announce your departure.
How about I loudly announce whatever the fuck I want.
So childish. "I didn't get what I want! I quit!" "You can't tell me what to do!". Get over yourself.
As if no drag queen has never once loudly shouted
There are lots of people out there with all kinds of takes. Don't just assume what you want to be true. (Even if it might be)
White, yes. Bisexual though. AMAB, but honestly IDK what my gender is. I just go by he/him for convenience though.
Significantly Autistic. Negative net worth from the expense of a nearly worthless college degree. Live in a red state rural American wasteland. Terrified of death yet still with suicidal idealization as of late.
But honestly none of this matters. Concern over Identity is all virtue ethics. I don't care about virtue ethics. My identity doesn't intrinsically matter outside the consequences of it. Whether I'm correct matters. Consequences matter. Or at least, mattered.
I owe you literally nothing. I owe the world literally nothing. I could just off myself out of spite and I'd be 100% in the right because I literally did not choose to be born, no individual chooses to be born.
That said, I earnestly wanted the world to be better. I used to have a small sliver of hope for that. My resentment toward politics comes from seemingly having to swim up a fucking waterfall while people who ought to have been my allies hold my ankles.
"Whine, whine, whine." The world doesn't owe you anything either, bud. And the only people that piss and moan about that are privileged children. Adults get to work making things happen, and understand it'll be long, frustrating work to do so.
It’s understandable why you feel this way, but ultimately unproductive:
— Plato
I don't know if I'm capable of being productive. I'm having a mental breakdown.
Stop watching the news and focus on things you can control in your own life. Grow plants. Read. Paint. Create something with your hands. Try a new recipe. Help a friend or family member out. Call your parents and have them talk about their lives. Hope things get better soon.
Apparently not exhausted enough to just sit silently instead of actively depressing the discourse and actions of others.
Staying silent is exhausting.
I've spent the last 20+ years of my life fighting for my right to simply exist in this country, and the reward is a government that vilifies me for being brown, neurodivergent, trans, and gay. I'm done, I'm taking the next opportunity out of here.
Understandable.
Just a bunch of cowards who don't want to recognize the impotence of their unwillingness to get involved directly.
"Walking away" isn't a thing in this case. You are not entitled to choose not to fulfill your obligations as a citizen.
Even if you want to emigrate, that's not your choice: you have to convince some other country to let you in. Until that happens, you're fucking stuck here and you have to suck it up, buttercup, and deal with it!
Have the balls to just say you want her to fail.
People help her and do it together, or it doesn't work. Band together against nazis.
But I don't want her to fail. I want to be wrong, desperately. I legitimately want to feel fucking stupid about being doomer in 4 years.
I'll probably try to help in non-risky ways at best but I think I might be pretty useless anyway. Being an atheist and terrified of death/non-existence yet also resenting having been born doesn't tend to make one particularly productive in meaningfully resisting death cult nazi's.
Since people outside the south tend to not know that the phrase is generally uttered as a sincere one after someone has emotionally moved you, whose bite exists only in that context (ie, you have moved them to pity) I choose to interpret it in the former way, the same way my Democratic southern grandmother would have. Bless her heart, she is doing the Lord’s work.
Thanks
It is one of my pet peeves. My grandma was the sweetest woman on earth, one of her go to phrases doesn’t deserve this one dimensional understanding! You can only have it as an insanely effective burn if it’s usually sincere! I will get up on a soapbox and bang pots and pans about this all day if I’m allowed, haha.
When you hire yes men, you get some pretty dumb people.
I also think we ought to stop being consumers at a broad level. It's clear the rich don't actually trickle anything down and instead hoard it to invest. So, they won't spend to prop up the economy.
For one, stop using Amazon. Cancel Prime. Use other search engines than Google. Don't use WhatsApp. Cancel and delete your Instagram, Facebook and Twitter if you haven't already. Don't buy Apple products.
For each of those services and products above, there is at least one alternative.
I would also delete reddit and TikTok if you haven't already! I don't know if there's a good replacement for short form videos but TikTok is censoring like crazy, plus all the other bad shit they do.
Loops is coming soon, and it's federated!
Yay! Thank you, this is a nice nugget of news.
Unfortunately I can't upvote this more than once. Also, if only I could force people to follow this advice.
Is there a reliable resource for good alternatives to these services? I've prepared my own, which I can share. But I know I'm missing a lot of options.
Edit: I found this page, which has some good ones. But it's far from complete from a social network perspective.
I would love to start something in my city, and I've already been trying, but it's hard to get people to mobilize. It's disheartening at the very least. Any ideas on how I can be helpful to my country aside from voting?
I'd highly recommend this handy guide on how to find local groups that are building the foundations to fight back.
Get involved in mutual aid groups if possible. Those folks will be able to guide you best on how to be effective in your community.
I've joined a few groups but I feel I'm not doing enough.
Do what you can now and keep your mind open to new opportunities. This isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. Don’t burn yourself out looking to do everything you possibly can. The important thing is to build that muscle of direct action instead of letting it atrophy through complacency or learned helplessness. That way, when you’re really needed you’ll be able to mobilize.
This is such a good answer and it's exactly what I needed to read. Thank you kind internet strangler.
I've said it before, the Democrats need to take pieces out of the Republican playbook and stonewall the GOP at every opportunity. The problem is that they Democratic party is really a coalition, whereas the modern Republicans are a hierarchy, so getting everyone to lock shields and advance is damn near impossible. Especially since establishment "centrist" Dems are just Republicans from the 80s and unfortunately they're the ones calling the shots. None of the progressives are stupid enough to tip the boat over while rocking it, so we've ended up here. Again.
I've said it over and over, the Dems need to be more Machiavelli and less Mr. Rogers.
That would be a great plan if the Dems were not spineless at best and complicit at worse
People see comments like this and get discouraged to vote or do anything meaningful. Life is choosing the lesser of two evils. By not choosing you have chosen the greater evil thus making you complicit.
Bullshit. Electoral reform in the blue states must happen. Red states as well but we all know republicans stance on more democracy.
Democrats have lost their "we are the only people resisting the republicans" privilege. They should have lost it long ago but we sure gave em every chance we could. No more chances, no more safe states/seats.
This shouldn't be hard to pass. Alaska already has a Ranked choice voting system. Plus Democrats are huge democracy supporters... right?
::: spoiler Videos on Electoral Reform
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems we can try out.
STAR voting
Alternative vote
Ranked Choice voting
Range Voting
Single Transferable Vote
Mixed Member Proportional representation :::
If you do electoral reform in just the blue states, you strengthen the republicans who will then take all of the red states, and get a bit of some blue states
Who says electoral reform only happens in blue states? Alaska has always been Republican since the beginning of its statehood but they have better electoral system with its ranked choice voting.
Fact of the matter is that most Americans are somewhere in the middle, and have more in common than you would be led to believe. Social media being controlled by powers that be divide and conquer the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans. If Alaska managed to even have a progressive system despite being a red state, then so are others. Get like-minded people in red states to also organise. Contrary to stereotype, there are many conservatives who are sane and also agree that money in politics is the major problem. You just haven't found them.
The comment I replied to
Judging from the downvotes, there are plenty of liberals who benefit from the status quo and choosing to be tone deaf.
Yes, that's more or less central to liberalism.
Always.
That lesser evil still don't want Medicare for all, raise the federal minimum wage, and building more affordable housing-- all of which are actually what suffocate many Americans in the ever worsening wealth inequality. That's why people took the chance to vote Trump who promised tax cut, even though most Americans know they it doesn't actually benefit them but the 1%.
Look outside of the American mainstream news bubble and discourse that want you to pick the two lesser evils, instead of thinking outside the box. The only way for ordinary Americans to win basic rights is to organise and mobilise by advocating both ranked choice voting and promoting third parties. It won't happen in federal level so start on the local and state levels, and the changes will go up the chain to federal level. It's not like Americans haven't gone and out mobilised before for a better change. The people simply need to rediscover that they have the power.
Bad Change - Republicans
"Fundamentally nothing will change" - Democrats
Change Americans need - ?
You will be happy with the breadcrumbs we give you or you are getting a bad change from Republicans. - Democrats
Americans want Medicare for all, raising minimum wage and affordable housing, which Democrats are voting down. If you don't recognise that then you benefit from the status quo and refuse to admit it.
You will be happy with the bad change we give you because the bad change from republicans will be worse - democrats.
Hang on. You're saying that Democrats want bad change. But the other guy says nothing will change. Do liberals want change or no change? I'm so confused. No wonder the Democrats would rather lose.
Two people can speculate differently concerning the same set of circumstances. I hope this clears things up for you.
Let the greater of two evils win until there's a perfect option to vote for. Got it.
Eight hour working day, even the basic implementation of minimum wage, forbidding child labour, abolishing slavery, women being allowed to work outside their home and even 14-day paid leave were once considered "not perfect".
Do you know how these aforementioned basic rights and privileges we take for granted were actually achieved? Organising. But of course liberals won't get it. They benefit from the status quo. Either that or many Americans have been conditioned to think within an allowed frame of discourse by corporations and its media.
Hey, if you organise but vote D in the cases where it's the best chance to keep R out, I'm happy
If you don't vote D in the cases where it's the best chance to keep R out, you're effectively supporting R regardless what you're telling yourself. If you're also organising, nice, but if your organising is to convince more people to effectively support R like you, we'd all be better off if you quit.
Who says vote D or R? Organise to have other third parties. They may not have a chance to win in federal elections, but they do well in local and state elections. Then work your way up to influence the federal government (and it's not like there has never been a third party gaining seats in Congress and Senate).
Read the quote from Noam Chomsky. You're being bamboozled to think tribally. You probably just don't hear about third parties in local and state level because the media wants you think within a spectrum of thoughts they allow people to have. Think outside the box. There are many other options.
Go for it, but also vote D where they're the only realistic option to R.
Otherwise, support for a third party becomes support for R, as previously with the greens
*Life in MURICA...
So shut up and be happy.
He is definitely confused, weak and incompetent, backed by confused, weak and incompetent Republicans.
Let's just hope they are so incompetent that they can't do as much harm as they would like to. Fingers crossed.
Simple Sabotage Manual
The problem is decades ago Democrats did not make changes to help the poor and lower middle classes fast enough and extreme enough to show that they were the party of the common worker and get a dominant position for multiple election cycles, allowing them to put in policies to stop inflation.
Do you want Jesus/religion and extreme poverty for the lower classes?
or Do you want abortion and mild poverty for the lower classes?
Moral wedge issues resulted in a lot of lost votes because for decades Democrats offered only minimal or marginal economic benefits for the lower classes. Their platform was so conservative they lost power completely over moral wedge issues and now can't get it back. Also, now the US is in so much debt that something like DOGE (which is covert austerity measures camouflaged as conservatism) is actually prudent and necessary.
DOGE is not prudent or nessessary, its "we have tried nothing and were all out of ideas". There has not been a proper budget in decades, we do not give the IRS the resources to go after wealthy tax evaders and we keep giving tax breaks to those least in need of them...
Both parties have failed at gaining the political will to fix anything and now that the scales are tipped in the GOPs favor, they alone opt to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even if you are right, and you may be, other forms of austerity measures or balanced budgets etc simply haven't been politically feasible to implement, otherwise they would have been done. My point is that Democrats could have prevented this whole mess by offering the poor a more more lucrative platform, so lucrative that perhaps they cared less about religion and moral wedge issues, but they clung to a more moderate platform, allowing wedge issues to become a large factor in how people voted, leading to the present situation.
The Senate: "We can't hear you over conforming Trump's Secretary of State nomination unanimously!“
Said Secretary, Marco Rubio: immediately bans accurate passports for trans, nongender, and intersex people 🤦🤬
Alright, she was eligible to run this time. Can we get her in the white house before she turns 80?
Bit late. I appreciate her efforts to resist, and we all need to do that, but it honestly is too late now. The time to resist this was last year. Now we’re in disaster recovery, which requires a whole different kind of resistance, and it feels like even people like her don’t quite understand where we are now.
Because of all the people who haven’t fucking listened to the warnings, we’ve entered actual fascism, and regular resistance won’t work anymore. Thinking it will only makes more of us believe small actions or Strong Words will save us. This isn’t 1930 Germany like we were warning last year, it’s 1939 Germany now, and der führer is beginning to build the camps.
Are you going to keep ignoring us when you’re ruffling the ashes of your compatriots from your hair? I honestly believe you will.
You've convinced me. I was planning to start attending my local town meetings and lend my support to the few outnumbered progressives there, but instead I think I'll just hoard canned goods and hunker down.
If that’s what you took from my comment, I’m sorry. Obviously those are things we should do.
My point is we’ve been pushing people to do exactly those things for decades (eta and have been doing them ourselves) and it hasn’t worked. We need to do much more than that now.
Fair enough. I agree that we all need to do more, but I think that's going to look different for everyone. For someone like me, it means getting off the Internet and actually showing up - not blowing up a federal building or whatever "much more" implies.
Much more is relative.
Yes, thank you for that. That’s much more for many people. If you actually do that, it will be awesome.
Might I ask you for even more, though? You’re already starting to do it, but will you speak out to people IRL like you’re doing with me? Challenge their views like you’re doing here? It really helps people to think critically.
I think both you and her are wrong. Dems lost big in this last election. So it's time to take a fucking step back and ask why. What needs changing? The party is in trouble. And they are in trouble because they are listening to big business and political consultants and not voters and people like AOC and Bernie. Kamala was supposed to be easy 'safe' candidate to defeat Trump. How'd that work? Hillary was supposed to be the 'safe' candidate to beat him the first time. Safer than Bernie and his 'crazy radical platform' of actually making the country work for the fucking people who live in it. How'd that work out?
Maybe having candidates that manipulate the primary process and count on superdelegates doesn't work. Maybe putting someone forward who polled at 2% among Democrats before election season doesn't work. Maybe 'I'm not Trump' isn't fucking good enough to win the White House.
Unfortunately I don't see many Democrats talking about this lesson, let alone taking it to heart. So I am looking forward to four more years of complaining and hopelessly attempting damage control while putting forward no new ideas whatsoever.
We can ask all we want. The party's about to appoint Pelosi's choice for chair. Again. They're never going to change.
Then they will continue to lose elections. Not being Trump obviously isn't enough.
Obviously we should ask why. But any answers we come up with in response to whatever strategy we’ve been using will be horribly outdated already because we’re no longer operating under even a veiled democracy.
That was the biggest answer to ‘why’ this last time. Because this is outright, honest to dog fascism. That’s why nothing worked. Because you cannot fight fascism with normal discourse. Because Dems, the media, and everyone still tried to pretend we were working under the status quo when we absolutely were not, and anyone trying to call that out was treated as some kind of alarmist. And the fascists know this, and take advantage of it in their propaganda. Most of us don’t want to believe there’s a true, real, legitimate fascist movement, and fascists use that against us.
It doesn’t actually matter how good Dem candidates are – Dems could run Jesus himself, seen by all as descending from on high and streamed simultaneously on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch, and it wouldn’t have mattered. They would easily reject Jesus and get all the centrists to oppose him. We’re in an unprecedented age of propaganda owned exclusively by a handful of sociopaths who know they can buy sentiment, views, and votes. They did, and there’s little we can do about it.
It doesn’t matter what democrats say or do at this point. We’re past that.
You must be fun at resistance parties. I guess it's time to annihilate ourselves through labor then (งツ)ว
I’m just saying we need different, more modern strategies. What we’ve been doing doesn’t work.
We can do better. I don’t know the answer, but we can’t keep doing the same things.
If only AOC didn't whip up a battle plan to prevent the union strike when she voted to protect the rail corporation.
Oh no, this option isn't perfect in every way for all people, and thus indistinguishable from being worthless?
Yup, get used to it, electoralism is an enemy of all but the strongest class
Can you imagine if Republicans approached Trump this way?
She deserves criticism for that, and she should apologize. Your downvoters either support strikebreaking or support AOC even when she does the wrong thing.
She deserves criticism for that but she still does a lot of good and should not be discounted. Saying “if only” kinda sounds like “I would like this good thing she’s suggesting (the subject of the article where they are responding “if only “), if only she didn’t do something I disagreed with once”. A more productive tact would be “I still don’t like that she didn’t support the striking rail workers but the plan she describes here is …”
Agreed. I like AOC and I want her to succeed, despite the efforts of her own party. Liking a candidate doesn't mean you shirk your responsibility to hold them accountable when they do the wrong thing, though. Quite the opposite. You don't want them to go all Fetterman on you.
Oof... But haven't you heard? He's free of having to listen to any criticism now because something something leftists, something something never was.
Ugh I can't believe he went all Fetterman on us.
So the guy went out and stated what he wanted to do, we held an election that he won, and the plan is to stand against everything he tries to do. How are we defending democracy exactly?
Easy. Defending democracy means defending the Constitution. Most of what he wants to do is unconstitutional.
I didn't vote for him. Why should he get to say what I do?
That is what it means to be part of a democracy. In 2028, whomever wins, I hope them success in improving America and would not act as an obstruction to everything they attempt to do. Like it or not American democracy chose him to lead.
If that's the case then I would like to opt out of the democracy, please.
Easy, let's scream and ramble against the voters, blaming them for our horrendous campaign, while at the same time , keep focusing on policy that the 99.9% of voters don't care about.
I mean, who is not gonna love to have their hard earned money taken away in taxes for a multi million dollars program that will only benefit 0.018% of the population!
Affordable housing? The fuck is that? No man, we need to focus on pronouns! That's easier!
A bloated federal government? Didn't you read before? People LOVE to have their hard earned money taken away in taxes! If anything, we should be giving away people's money! And while at that, make the state bigger and all powerful!
That way, on the next election, they will feel more likely to vote for us!
It's genius!