Our major disagreement is on analysis. I agree with the idea that we should be talking to voters and trying to convince them to vote Democrat, but your analysis leads you to ignore or avoid talking about the DNC because you don't think they are the main concern. I think we should be protesting the Establishment Dems outside their public offices and disrupting public events they are at to be more in their faces about how they are screwing up the moment. Candidates and people in positions of power should be speaking out against the Establishment the way David Hogg did. He took the scandal of being ejected from the DNC to propel the progressive movement forward with his Leaders We Deserve organization that helps get progressive candidates like Mamdani in NY or Alawieh in Michigan through the primaries.

But what I think should happen or am advocating for is not the core of the issue in our discussion. You think it is safe to ignore the DNC and Establishment Democrats because they do not represent a majority. I think it is unsafe to ignore the DNC and Establishment Democrats because they still have sizeable influence and power despite not representing the majority. You seem to think that the Establishment Democrats will learn their lesson if enough voters tell them what they want. I have seen Establishment Democrats run the same neoliberal playbook for almost 20 years and I know the current leadership will never learn. The Democratic party is hemorrhaging voters faster than you or I can stop the bleeding specifically because the leadership loves shooting themselves in the foot. You think we should focus on the voters and the leadership will come around. I think we should focus on the leadership and the voters will come around.

The Establishment Democrats have a lot of power. Haley Steven's only lost the Michigan primary by 1% after outspending Abdul El-Sayed over 10x. That means roughly, Haley Steven's spent over $10 for every vote compared to Abdul El-Sayed $1 per vote. She absolutely was being propped up by both the Israel lobby as well as Establishment Dems and that money went to waste. That money could have been way more useful in the general, but the DNC has been burning all their cash on fighting progressives instead. It's gotten to the point where the DNC is millions of dollars in debt and had to put up their physical building as collateral while the RNC has over $100 million in their warchest leading up to the midterms.

It is very important to talk about the Establishment Democrats because they are doing their best to lose all political power by dunking on their left flank instead of combating the Republicans. They would truly rather rule in hell than serve in heaven and they're gonna drag us all down to party with Lindsey Graham. As much as it sucks, the DNC still has a lot of power they are exerting that needs to be addressed before they cause the situation to become unsalvageable.

Your original claim was to ignore what the DNC is doing and to stop talking about them because what they are doing does not matter. I am saying that people should focus on the DNC and continue to talk about what they are doing because they are the biggest obstacle to getting Democrats elected.

I think it is important that Abdul almost lost because of stories like Francesca Hong who almost won. Money plays an outsized role in these elections and the money the DNC is spending is most definitely being focused on raising Establishment Democrat candidates. Sure they are raising money and contributions are up, but they are spending money faster than they are raising it to the point where they are in debt.

Spending money is important to increase influence. I think it's a good thing to spend money to try and unseat Republicans. But when we hear stories of Establishment Dems getting endorsed by other Establishment Dems, like Gov Tony Evers endorsing David Crowley in Wisconsin or Gov Gretchen Whitmer endorsing Haley Stevens in Michigan, this comes with fundraising and financial contributions from the establishment. This comes with buying ads for the establishment pick. It is a signal from the DNC to the voter base to unify behind a preferred "electible" candidate.

Abdul's victory is a good thing because it means that people can beat out money. It is also a cautionary tale of how far the Establishment Democrats will go to fight their progressive wing. They already know what the people want which is why Ken Martin released that anemic 2024 autopsy report that was clearly edited to omit key progressive issues.

I am disputing your original claim that it doesn't matter what the DNC wants. It absolutely matters what they want when they are the ones running the races and influencing elections to get their preferred candidates theough the primaries. They are actively trying to direct the voters instead of listening to the what the voters want. The DNC is absolutely the biggest problem that leads to depressing voter turnout. My problem with your original claim is the idea that we can tell people to vote for who they like without talking about what the DNC is doing. The reason people don't vote Democrat is directly a result of the DNC spending all their time and energy putting up terrible candidates.

To put it more simply, the Establishment Dems are attacking us. We ought to be defending ourselves.

Buddy, gas and eggs are $5; ain't nobody give a fuck about a minuscule amount of people winning 4th place in a swim meet.

We all know the DNC works to suppress candidates they don't like. Most famously, the DNC worked directly with the Hillary Clinton campaign to crush the Bernie Sanders campaign. So when Ken Martin claims "We are investing in a year-round distributed organizing operation capable of supporting races at every level of the ballot.", I feel it's pretty obvious what he means. The Establishment Democrats have historically been very weak opposing the Republicans while fighting tooth and nail against their own progressive wing. They are not spending money raising up candidates like Abdul El-Sayed or Francesca Hong, but neither are they simply waiting for the candidate that wins the primary. The DNC has a type and they are spending money to get that type of candidate through primaries into the general.

Abdul almost lost the primary despite very obviously being the best candidate for Michigan. This is because his opponent had an absurd amount of money. Money does influence elections and the DNC is beholden to their donors. The common voter can very clearly see these relationships and it depresses voter turnout whenever money wins. I agree with you that it is important to vote for progressives that are on the ballot, but you are framing these races as if the common voter has the same amount of influence as the establishment neoliberal. The DNC is the referee and it is blatantly bought and paid for.

"Just go vote" is not good advice because the opposition is spending absurd amounts of money to place obstacles in front of the populace. People like you and me who spend time talking about politics on lemmy are more politically active than the common voter. We need to help remove those obstacles so that everyone can vote for who they'd like instead of trip over manufactured concerns like electability.

I think Bernie would trade himself to get rid of the rest of the fossils. That's why he's been focusing on uplifting the next generation of progressives instead of clinging to power like Mitch McConnell.

There is no need to be coy, any well educated adult knows factual statements can be used for misleading purposes. Having an article title focused on the unprecedented nature of universal healthcare is a deliberate choice designed to negatively polarize the reader against it.

By 2019, we've known that universal healthcare would save hundreds of billions of dollars. As for the problems highlighted in the article, those are also easily addressed and have been many times by anyone seriously considering the topic. The new system that takes the place of private, for profit system will still need secretaries and logistical technicians. The main group that would be discarded is the useless middlemen who simply profit from the system. Retirement plans? A major concern of the elderly retirees is healthcare, which would be much cheaper with a universal plan. The money saved on healthcare can be used in other areas.

The article is focused mostly on the negative side effects the rich and wealthy beneficiaries would experience and tries to spread those fears to the common working person through needless fear mongering and a hyperfixation on the opinions of the wealthy. Of course the parasites would have negative opinions about being removed. This article is absolutely an argument against universal healthcare and it is absurd of you to claim otherwise. The US is the wealthiest country in the history of mankind and it is the only modern OECD nation without single payer healthcare.

People forget very quickly. Trump's COVID policies killed over a million people in this country and people straight up forgot about those terrible times and elected him into office a second time. I agree that it's super annoying to see the news basically go, "Idiot president says idiot things" everyday, but I genuinely think that if the news stopped reporting Trump's stupid shit, people would forget he's stupid.

School Days

Sturgeon's Law 90% of everything is garbage. The last 10% is worth dying for.

The establishment Democrats have trained their voter base very well to respond to "electability", which is shorthand for, "can this person win against the Republicans?" Establishment Dems have insisted that the most electable candidate is the one that can win Republican voters by offering policies Republican voters like, which recently includes stuff like being pro forced birth or against affordable housing. This has resulted in a lot of older folks in the Democratic voter base professing to like and prefer progressive candidates, but not voting for them out of fears of "electability".

Basically, the Establishment Democrat leaders have been using the Republican party as a threat to beat their voter base into compliance. "Vote for our candidates no matter what or you'll get a Republican." This has had two major results in the Democratic voter base: 1. Older voters becoming numb to the threat like an abuse victim deciding to disassociate and not participate. 2. Younger, "untrained" voters deciding to fight back by voting for the candidate they most agree with. This is why we have seen progressive candidates win "the youth vote" most consistently, which Establishment Dems have been trying to claim is mostly 18 year old college students, when in actuality they mean "anyone under 40". It has only stopped working recently because more and more older folks are checking out and not voting because the promises of the Establishment Dems haven't materialized for decades while younger voters are voting for progressive candidates.

I don't disagree that news reporting helped spread Trump's message, but far more consequential was the intentional Democratic national strategy of uplifitng Donald Trump because they thought he would be easy to beat. The Pied Piper strategy is well documented now with Democratic leadership working with the Hillary Clinton campaign to uplift Trump and tear down Bernie Sanders. Trump would not have become the Republican nominee if he was not being artificially inflated by the DNC.

I don't think ignoring people like MTG or Trump really works because the people they advertise to aren't gonna join the majority. Systemic action needs to be taken against them. Nick Fuentes, for example, waned in popularity after action was taken against him and he was banned from the internet. He is rising in popularity again because those actions have been reversed. These people know their ideas and policies are unpopular and rely upon regular folks not really knowing how disgusting they are. I think shining a light on them and directly calling them disgusting is an important step in actively banning them from public spaces.

The DNC has fumbled the bag to an epic degree. You are right that this should have been a slam dunk, easy win for the DNC. Unfortunately, the DNC also thought this race was easily won, so they just stopped trying.

The DNC made overtures toward conservative voters. "We're gonna build the wall" or "we're welcoming the Cheney's into our coalition". They needed to run on hope and change to activate low propensity voters. Instead, they ran on harm reduction without offering to change things for the better. The message was, "Trump is 100% Hitler, vote for us because we're only 90% Hitler".

The least the DNC could have done was lie about doing nice things.

GenAI doesn't "know" anything. A 15 year old who spends a year copying his friend's physics homework will learn a tiny bit of physics. GenAI is just generating something new without actually learning information.

It's a fancy auto-complete that looks at the entirety of human writing and guesses what word should come next based on statistical probability. That isn't learning, that's rolling dice 10,000 times and seeing what number comes up most often.

GenAI cannot "intend" anything. It cannot develop consciousness any more than Akinator or a Tickle-Me Elmo can. The correct way to handle this technology is to treat it with reality: as a tool that can quickly look at a lot of stuff and not as a developing mind.

I agree that people are stupid for not understanding how terrible Trump was and will be. However, I think a big problem was that the DNC didn't provide an attractive alternative to excite these dummies.

There was very obviously support for Harris early on when the DNC made some progressive decisions. Getting rid of Biden was a progressive choice. Choosing Tim Walz was a progressive choice. The DNC was immediately rewarded for these progressive choices with $1 billion in small donor donations.

The DNC got arrogant and decided to aggressively move in a conservative direction. Harris started talking about how she would build the wall and prosecute immigrants. The DNC welcomed the Cheneys with open arms. Harris told interviewers that she would be more conservative than Biden by accepting more Republicans in her Cabinet.

The DNC actively threw away their progressive supporters and gained absolutely nothing in return because the voters they were courting would never have voted for Harris anyway. Racists gonna vote Trump. Moderate conservatives gonna secretly vote Trump. People who want Republicans in a Presidential Cabinet are obviously gonna vote Trump.

If the DNC just focused on stuff like being pro choice or going into detail about fighting price gouging, that would have been much more successful than trying to attract the mythical "Moderate Conservative".

4 years ago, Democrats said the border wall was stupid and bad. They said that Republicans were racist for claiming all Mexicans were drug dealers and criminals. Today, Harris is saying she's gonna build the border wall, be tough on migrants, and has basically adopted Trump's policies on immigration.

There is no indication that the Democrats will not be just as bad as the Republicans on Israel in 4 years.

To address your second point "not voting for Harris is a vote for Trump"; why isn't the opposite true? "Not voting for Trump is a vote for Harris", follows the same logic, so refusing to vote or voting independent should be net neutral, no?

This election should be a slam dunk victory for Harris. The data shows that adopting leftist progressive policies is popular. Biden dropping out resulted in $4 million in small donor fundraising. Picking Walz resulted in another $2 million. People got really excited when it looked like the Democratic party was making leftist progressive movement.

Since then, the Dems have been aggressively moving towards the center. More lethal military, inciting panic about the border, ignoring Palestine. This has resulted in an extremely tight race as people are no longer excited to vote for Harris.

I want Harris to win. Moving leftward politically will attract more voters. Taking a firm stance on stopping the Israeli government's genocide is a leftist progressive policy. The bag is right there, she just needs to grab it.

A million people died from COVID because he encouraged anti vax conspiracies. He pulled the USA out of the Iran Nuclear deal. His Supreme Court picks rolled back abortion rights. His cabinet was full of grifters who sabotaged public services like the post office or the dept of education.

He did lots. I'd like him to never do anything again.

"I accidentally removed access for myself, haha. Google AI is crazy, huh?"