If someone didn’t say thing A, but you’re pretending they did so you can make a big fuss about how they’re wrong about thing A when they actually said thing B, please don’t do that.

In fact, in general, it’s not good to try to “win” the conversation. If you said your thing, and they said their thing, and you all had your chance to understand it and make any counter arguments and ask questions, then the mission is accomplished. Not everyone has to see things the same way, just understand each other.

Blame can be shared.

If one person left a bunch of oily rags in my home, and then when they caught fire, someone else refused to fight the fire but in fact let it actively continue, then I can blame both people.

As long as a majority of Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, Sanders’ economic policies have less mass appeal and offer more opportunities for attack ads than you think. It needs to be stressed that people voted for Trump not just because he’s a loud-mouthed racist and sexist and they like that, but also because he inherited the (irrational) image of Republicans being better for the economy.

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/trackers/fame-and-popularity-bernie-sanders

He’s more popular than either Trump or Kamala Harris was, and people seemed to think both of them had enough mass appeal.

The image of Trump exists more or less in a media vacuum, because they can’t say much of anything about either Trump or Kamala. Bernie speaks directly about the economy, in terms that people can understand, and every time he says things, he draws wild amounts of appeal from the both the downtrodden right-voting people and the downtrodden left-voting people, who are otherwise left with nothing but responding to the vague promptings of the media within the vacuum.

Even Trump has to imitate Bernie’s type of speaking, talking about draining the swamp and fighting for the little man, but he can’t do it very well. The media has to fill in the blanks for him. Bernie can do it directly, and from what I’ve seen, it works very well. Do you remember when he went on Joe Rogan and what people’s reaction was to that?

Public opinion on Israel was, even among college kids, very different in 2016, before the current wave of massed anti-Israel propaganda from Russian, Chinese and Iranian bot farms sweeping over social media - and even now most voters (as in: people who actually vote) are still more pro-Israel than pro-Palestine (which makes sense, given how important of a partner Israel is to the US) - and it’s still not high on the list of priorities for most, not even remotely high enough to be mentioned side-by-side with economic policy, which is and almost always has been the number one priority.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/611375/americans-views-israel-palestinian-authority-down.aspx

You might be right. I think a huge factor is that on left-wing social media, which is what you and I use, the Gaza issue was hugely amplified and linked to Biden/Harris, in a way that other issues that were much more favorable were not. For the normie social media, I think they did the same thing with the economy, which also worked gangbusters.

Are you saying that the polls are completely wrong? What are you basing the idea on that the “majority of the people” (reminder: the majority of voters just elected Trump - he actually got the popular vote this time, which is deeply, deeply troubling) have left-leaning positions on the economy and Israel?

I am saying the polls are, in general, completely wrong, yes. I think the most recent election which was anything but the toss-up they predicted is a good example of that.

Bernie’s economics are “left,” but within the spectrum of the average American voter, they aren’t seen as left-only. He doesn’t care much about Democrat branding issues. He cares about people’s pain and how to stick it to the crooks, and he speaks well about it. That’s why the Democrats didn’t like him.

I think a lot of it hinges on what a “moderate” is, in the American political frame of reference, and whether one of those is good enough for most of the American people who don’t live in Washington or NYC to ever have a chance of living a decent life.

You’ve got a point, I guess, about some of it. But I still mostly stick by my statement that Hillary fucked it, when Bernie would have crushed it, on economic policy and sanity in our Israel policy among several other key issues where the majority of people feel very differently than the people in DC and on the news do.

What were her big accomplishments in the senate again?

Here’s Bernie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders#Legislation_2

I’m not against her because she is blue, or a lady. Those are both good things. I’m against her because she was the last wave of the Clinton-era conservatism that poisoned the Democrats and lost them supporters which led in large part to our current catastrophe. For more, see the source article.

My curiosity was just aroused because you blamed 8% inflation which hit every country worldwide and is related to how much companies want to charge individuals for private transactions, on US government spending on behalf of Ukraine, the total over all years of which added up to 1% of the federal budget for one year, and had nothing to do with either private individuals or companies. It’s a staggeringly weird leap to make. Unless you were, say, trying to find a reason why aid for Ukraine would be a foolish thing for governments to do, and trying to make the case that it was hurting the individuals in those countries using some sort of moon-logic.

Usually, the government spending money domestically on weapons or whatever, and then giving the product away somewhere so we have to make more of whatever it is right away, stimulates the economy. Even aside from those other weird aspects of your decision to say that, it’s also a backwards thing to say in terms of how government spending usually works.

Here’s the median, in inflation-adjusted dollars:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-income-in-the-united-states/

It bombed in 2022 and then went back up. It’ll be higher in 2024 than it ever was, and it’ll probably keep going up until anywhere from 0 to 2 years into Trump’s presidency, and then it’ll bomb again much harder as everything goes completely to shit. The normal cycle would be that it gets handed back over to a Democrat in 2028, he spends the first 2-3 years of his presidency fixing things from the previous Republican’s disaster as happened in 2009-2012 and in 2021-2022, and then during the next election everyone blames that 2-3 years on the Democrat and says the Republicans are better with money.

We’re about to go so far off the map that it seems unlikely for that cycle to happen this time, but that would be the normal cycle.

Biden wanting to stop supporting Israel is complete crap.

Yes, I agree.

It sounds like you missed the point of my message. Biden was awful on Israel. My point was that because Israel could become a liability for him, it got blown up on social media in a way where the legitimate and impassioned protest movement became a huge electoral issue for him. And, in the corners of social media where you hang out, it’s all over social media, always in the face of everyone whose vote it might impact, and front of mind for you, every day, in a way that I’m guessing Occupy Wall Street or the protests against the Uyghur genocide were not. And then, when it was Kamala Harris, everything he’d done translated seamlessly over to her, with almost no loss of impact.

There’s a whole other population of people for which inflation is that issue. They see it constantly on social media, it’s always linked to Biden Kamala, and Trump is so much better. Trump will fix it. That one has a lot less validity than the Gaza criticism, but it has a lot broader appeal. And so, with that in their ear every day, it’s not surprising that a lot of them didn’t show up for Kamal Harris, or got suckered into voting for Trump thinking somehow that he’ll fix it.

Left-wing social media could have blown up Biden’s absolutely historic actions on climate change into the same magnitude of issue as Gaza was, and blown it up in everyone’s ear all day every day, and heard about what a catastrophe Trump will be, but they didn’t. Why is that? Because no one’s paying for that message to get out there.

I’m not saying the Gaza protestors, or their cause, are fake. I’m saying that the way things got covered and represented on social media was artificially generated to hurt Biden Kamala, and it worked.

I think it’s hilarious, if they think that writing nice articles about him will mean that he’ll spare them.

He doesn’t care. He just wants to hurt. And they’re already in his crosshairs, whatever they do. At least if they stuck to their guns, they’d have a few allies among the other side.

Bernie would have won the fuck out of 2016.

Hillary almost won, and she had essentially nothing to bring beyond being blue, a lady, and continuing the status quo. On top of that she is too fake for politics, which is a high level of fakeness. Bernie would have been an upgrade to everyone who doesn’t work in DC.

How he would have done as president, I have no idea. But he absolutely would have won.

I’m usually the one defending the Democrats against whatever accusation, and I completely approve this message. It’s the 2016 DNC’s fault, and a lot of them are still around making equally bad and corrupt decisions.

The difference being that it takes the standpoint, “We need to take over the Democrats or make something better, so the world doesn’t burn.” It’s the similar but very different standpoint, “It’s the Democratic Party’s fault that the world is burning and I’m not helping until they get better” that is unhelpful.

Edit: https://lemmy.world/post/21721606

There are people who went through the holocaust who compared Trump in 2016 to Hitler. They, if anyone, understand the gravity of the comparison, and made it a little bit carefully. But they said that the way he speaks, the way everyone who is his enemy is an animal who must be destroyed, is very similar.

I have to be honest, I am panicking a little bit.

Nothing will change instantly, or everywhere all at once, but it could get very bad, and not even a long time from now.

No more detached from reality than the stuff I see on Lemmy every day… it’s just from the other direction, so it seems comical in its wrongness because it’s a type of nonsense that you haven’t been conditioned to. You weren’t the target audience for that message so you didn’t get it. A lot of people did, though.

Spoken like someone who hasn’t figured out that it was all a ruse from the beginning.

“Biden has BETRAYED Israel, he paused weapons, he pushed for a cease-fire. He yelled at Netanyahu and threatened some sort of mild theoretical consequences if he just rolled over Gaza with a line of bulldozers and killed 90% instead of 10%. We need him out NOW.”

“Biden has BETRAYED the people of Gaza by failing to prevent Netanyahu from the war Netanyahu unilaterally started, sending weapons shipments like every other US President has always done, also don’t pay any attention to the substantial differences between Harris and Biden on this issue, just focus on the fact the we need him out NOW I mean her.”

“Biden has BETRAYED the people of middle America by letting millions of immigrants in, shutting down Trump’s most horrible policies, migrant crime, look at this person whose daughter died. We need him out NOW.”

“Biden has BETRAYED immigrants by failing to completely undo decades of racism in immigration, only shutting down the most heinous 30% of Trump’s policies even with the Republicans fighting tooth and nail to stop him shutting down that 30%. It’s all his fault, also he made it worse in some vague emotionally-loaded ways. We need him out NOW.”

And the centrists bought it, and the leftists bought it too, and they never even compared notes to realize they were getting the exact opposite messaging and a good part of all sides of the messaging was made-up emotionally loaded lies tailored to what would make an impact. Most of the stuff about Biden just got reused against Kamala Harris unchanged, and it was so well-worn by that point that it still worked.

And they never paid all that much attention to what they were getting in, when they got him out now I mean her.

And now, we’ve got it in instead, and god help us.

Well… if it makes you feel better, they’ll get punished, too. I think most of those people are unknowingly living within a very cushy society which has been set up and maintained for them, which is nearing its end, to be replaced by one much more difficult and dangerous.

They’re victims too. They had so much propaganda, and so much bad education, and so many legitimate grievances about a government that since the 1990s at least has mostly forgotten about them.

I try to be kind in my thinking. They might attack and someone might have to defend against them. They might get attacked by the same system they supported in the beginning. A lot of them are going to get hurt, some of them very badly. None of that is good, even a little bit. Some of it “has to happen” and some will just happen because it happens. But I don’t hold any of it against them nearly as much as I do against the people at the top that engineered this whole thing on purpose, with full awareness.

I absolutely did not read your entire comment. The hypocrisy just stuck out to me from a glance. I wasn’t planning to continue to read.

Along with, of course, the hypocrisy of the fact that you’re now applying a purity test before you will vote for a Democrat, even in hindsight, even if she has only the vaguest of connections with the holocaust in Gaza, and even if the alternative is a hundred times worse including for Gaza.

It’s done. I’m not sure why I’m still talking about it. I think I just still have some nervous energy left over because of the question of what the fuck I’m going to do now.

I’m pretty sure that if they are doing that on Lemmy, it’s not without a human in the loop. I’ve been doing some experimentation with it, and I don’t think it’s a fully automated response.

I have some thoughts on it, along with a whole series of unfounded Fediverse conspiracy theories. I don’t think they are doing fully automated bot responses. They might have LLMs helping to craft long, hostile messages that always carry the right framings and narratives at scale, but there wouldn’t really be a way to detect that as far as I can see, so I’m not sure how much it bears thinking about. I do think systematically hijacking posts and making sure the comments look “right” is part of their system.

Take a look at this:

https://ponder.cat/comment/835655

I’ve spent enough of my arguing about politics energy for today, especially now that the horse has left the barn.

https://ponder.cat/comment/839212

https://ponder.cat/comment/837488

https://ponder.cat/comment/835981

That’s my response. There’s some good stuff in there. I do not require any kind of response on any of it.