I’m not disagreeing with the fact that the Democratic Party shouldn’t be cozying up with billionaires, but I’m not convinced that the most significant reason for the Harris’ loss. I think misogyny played a role.

I think Democrats don’t know how to create a zeitgeist of high-brow, uplifting pugnacity that punches through bullshit. “Oh you think ‘boys’ should be able to play in women’s sports?” “It’s a game!” “You sound pretty privileged to not have to think about scholarships for students to go to college!” “Shut the fuck up about peoples’ genitals, and let’s do something about people going to school. Let’s prepare children for the real world in school while they’re growing up, and if they want to go off to college after that, let’s make that affordable.”

The “Green New Deal” — do want to grow the economy with new industries? Do you know how much more expensive living with the consequences of climate change will be — do you like the cost of housing now?

“Poor people should have to work to receive help.” — (1) They already do, and (2) shut the fuck up and stop calling yourself a Christian unless you want to at least pretend to know the tenets of your religion. You would have been whipped in the temple.

Stop giving Republicans so many opportunities to go on bullshitting without checking them. That won’t immediately manifest the world we want to see, but it will at least shift the momentum.

… and cue the facial Equal Protection problems.

They’ll ask to have it “sent it back to the states.”

I guess my idea was that locking the comment thread wouldn’t censor the viewpoints, and everyone could still read the differing views while tamping down on toxicity.

If a conversation isn’t productive and people are just becoming mean and ugly toward each other, then all we’re left with is people being mean and ugly toward each other. That doesn’t promote community, it creates rage bait. And not that it necessarily means a conversation can’t be productive, I would assume — although maybe incorrectly — that the reason people are on Lemmy is because they’ve seen what happens when rage is monetized on social media platforms, and they came here to get away from that.

Mod here: We’ve received several reports from this comment thread. If I had the power to lock just this thread, I would because I can see how this conversation has some seeds for productive discourse, but that doesn’t seem to be the direction that things are headed toward right now.

I would encourage people to reread what each other has said, and rather than immediately thinking of a rebuttal, read it a second or third time until you can interpret what the other person said a different way than you initially read it.

Mod here: We’ve received several reports from this comment thread. If I had the power to lock just this thread, I would because I can see how this conversation has some seeds for productive discourse, but that doesn’t seem to be the direction that things are headed toward right now.

I would encourage people to reread what each other has said, and rather than immediately thinking of a rebuttal, read it a second or third time until you can interpret what the other person said a different way than you initially read it.

A report was received about this breaching rule 1. In this case, the title used to submit the link provides more context than the original title, and will be allowed to remain.

I hope she finds a healthier relationship.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a way to edit the title, but I think this article would have been clearer with a comma. I’m going to leave it up, but sticky this here with a clearer title: “[The] Senator [Who] Elon Musk Called a ‘Traitor’ Gets Rid of His Tesla: Don’t Want a Car Built By an ‘A**hole’.”

Thanks!

We’re not talking about a threat to Democrats, we’re talking about a threat to democracy. Go back in history, and look at Germany between the mid 1920s to the 1940s. Puritanical votes in the face of authoritarianism didn’t empower people to combat genocide, it decimated their ability to do something about it. RFK, Jr., the environmental advocate was so firm in his beliefs that he went groveling to the guy that pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accords, doesn’t believe in Climate Change, and just generally doesn’t give a shit about anyone or anything unless it benefits him. RFK Jr. wasn’t a serious candidate. Stein? The woman shows up every four years, and didn’t even know how many members of Congress there are — and she’s the one that should be trusted to know the policy and diplomatic complexities to bring peace to an ideological, geo-political battle spanning millennia? Are those the “other things” you demanded? In order to accomplish things in the real world, it takes consensus and working together in order to achieve results without dictatorial power. A vote for Harris isn’t a vote for genocide or a perfect world, it’s a vote for moving forward — or if you want to be super cynical about it, a choice for one of the two candidates that can win who is the least likely candidate to exacerbate tensions and cause the spilling of more innocent blood.

If you can’t understand that, then it just means I can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. There isn’t a third option out there that is coming to save us — it’s up to us to save us, even if we have to do it piece-by-piece because there is no magic snapping of the fingers that is going to fix this.

Except, you’re implying that’s not what you’re doing. You want to believe that your vote can accomplish everything you want, as easily snapping your fingers, but that’s not how it works. No positive change in history has happened in a day, but you seem to want to vote as if positive change can happen immediately.

The “long term” doesn’t matter if the candidate that wants to “be a dictator on day one” gets his way, but you know what, maybe your self-righteousness will save us all. You say what you want but you have no way of achieving it. So, bye Felicia.

It’s not a religion, it’s reality and acknowledging that we can’t always get what we want when we want, and sometimes, the best option is harm reduction. You’re going on and on, like voting is always about ideological purity, but it’s not. The current system we have means you can push as far in whatever direction you want during the primary elections, but when it comes down to the general election, there are two viable candidates. The reality is, most third party slates, don’t even have a path to 270 electoral votes. Of the two that do, only the Libertarian Party has ever received an electoral vote, and that was in 1972 because of a “faithless elector,” rather than support at the ballot box. The Green Party? They only show up every four years to make perfect the enemy of better. They’re not serious. That leaves you with Trump and Harris. If we characterize them as cynically as you seem to view them, the choice is between someone that impulsive, vindictive, transactional, and devoid of even being able to pretend to a modicum of empathy, versus someone that isn’t stopping genocide fast enough. Of those two, which one do you think is more likely to exacerbate genocide the most?

Saying you’re not going to vote for a candidate that “allows genocide,” doesn’t mean genocide isn’t going to happen, it just means you get to feel better about yourself rather than inching things toward less genocide that might actually save some lives. So take how you will feel about yourself voting for someone that “allows genocide,” and set that aside, and ask yourself, out of the two, who is going to make it worse and who will make it less worse — because that vote has real life-and-death consequences.

At the risk of feeding a sea lion, there’s actually a simple reason a candidate might shift their position toward voters that are already “guaranteed” to vote for them: if that “guaranteed” base grows, it provides a voting offset that could allow the candidate to worry less about losing the support of less progressive voters.

I still prefer to refer to him as “Leon.”

Leon Musk is weird.

There’s a lot more to deciding the president than this… this was just cathartic.