voldage

I'm all for building class consciousness and having people be involved deeply and personally in politics, but USA absolutely isn't there yet. You need populist messaging and need to make sure people see you in good light if you want to win elections. People didn't believe Harris nor Biden what they were saying about Trump, even though those things were true. People had few bad years economically, and while they knew it was due to covid, they blamed Dems. It was irrational, just as Trump's image as a working men ally, but the electorate isn't moved by rationality, but rather - you got it - vibes. Entire charade about inflation was a lie, but they failed to communicate that. They added fuel to the fire by even acknowledging the illegal immigrants narrative, despite everything showing that both legal and illegal immigrants commited far less crimes on average than USA born citizens. They cracked down on pro-palestinian protests and fed the antisemitic conspiracy theories. It goes on, and on, and on. And I get that you might disagree with me on whenever those things were good or not, but it doesn't matter, if they can't make more people think Dems have their best interests in mind. It's literally the single job they have during the campaign, and if they can't instill the feeling that people must vote for them or else fascists will win, then it's on them. They did it wrong. You can't expect people that doesn't care about politics to rally up behind them spontaneously, they need to be rallied. You can't expect people passionate about human lives not to protest a genocide, you need not to support it and not give them a reason to protest. And no, I'm not talking about protesting as in not voting - we already had several rounds of surveys that showed beyond any doubt, that those people in swing states voted almost exclusively for Harris, despite their grievances. It was mostly people who felt neither side had anything good to offer that failed to show up. And it's those people, who aren't interested in politics, who just want to do their thing, that Harris and her staff was supposed to convince, but the vibes were off, children died, protestors got maced and locked up, and lies about immigration and inflation were left not debunked. They came out strong after announcement of the ticket and got a record high funds from small value donations, but quickly changed their tune to pro-corporate businesses as usual, and the median voter visibly wasn't convinced by that. The surveys showed that people felt the economy was bad, so how could the messaging of "we won't change shit" convince them? Price gouging bit was good, too bad it was dropped stright away within a week. Tim Walz calling the fascist out was very good, but he got muzzled almost immediately. And then what, Liz Cheney? Bill Clinton telling Arabs in Michigan that "Jews were there first"? I mean, come on, you can't say you believe they did great and that their messaging was impeccable. And even if you somehow do, voters didn't, and you need at the very least to acknowledge that fact. The messaging was ineffectual, and that's on Dems. They also cultivated the image of government that is immune to change and stagnant, although that's not the issue with campaign but with their politics in general, and that made their electorate less interested when very radical change threatened them. Some people were radicalized specifically by this percieved stagnation and voted Trump just for something to change. Harris and her team had a lot of material to work with, but decided to keep to the old and tested playbook instead, which, judging by the elections results, was a mistake. People that were somewhat interested in politics and believed that Trump was bad, voted overwhelmingly for Harris, even if they disliked her or her campaign, but that's a drop im a bucket. Most people don't care, and you need politicians to reach them to make them care - or else they might blame them for something bad in their lives, maybe completely unrelated, maybe not, and just vote out of spite for the opposition, or maybe just wallow in apathy and not vote at all. I hope I made my point clearer, if it wasn't transparent previously.

They weren't unaware of the policy because of "whining", but because Dems failed to effectively communicate their proposals. They also failed to combat misinformation from the right, but this I'll forgive them for this one because at the very least they had opponent in that field that pushed back. That's not the case for their atrocious campaign that bled voters left and right.

If Americans are unaware or not happy with the candidate stances on various policies, that's entirely the candidate fault. And when the stances they're aware of are "I wouldn't do anything differently than Joe Biden" when JB had to be switched out from the race due to his unpopularity, then the candidate just digs their electoral grave.

You're entirely missing the point of my previous comment. Dems lost, because they couldn't make their voters feel like they were the right choice. You're sarcastic about "vibing" but it's exactly what required for politician to win an elections. People aren't wise and don't delve in deep in policy, as it is excellently shown by morons playing catch up with economic difficulties Trump's rule already brought. It's politician job to make their electorate trust them. It is their failure if they can't (or don't want to, if they are bought as controlled opposition) make that happen. You really can't say that "Dems had great campaign but people didn't like it" because it's precisely the popularity that makes the campaign great. And no, Harris and her team had terrible campaign, and lost to the opponent that was very easy to trip up and expose. You trying to blame people for not vibing with genocide doesn't help either. And if me telling you that Dems had bad campaign "lowers your faith in humanity", then it seems you might be in a cult and not be ready for a mature discussion about the direction that Dems politics will take them. You might want to have that checked out.

People didn't vote for Harris because her campaign sucked ass, it's her and her staff who failed to convince people to vote for her, not people who voiced their dissatisfaction with her proposed policy. They need to do better, and if they do, then people excercising their freedom of speech on the internet won't sway votes away from the party. Idea that people shouldn't be allowed to complain about the genocide because it voices loudly the dissatisfaction over the party actions and that may lead to lower voter turnout is flawed to it's core. Those comments are the symptom of the problem, the sign that there is something wrong with the way they directed the campaign, not the source of it. You will get nowhere by silencing the dissidents, you need to take away their reasons to complain, not their means. Until Dems learn this lesson, they won't win elections again, not with the antiestabilishment vibes and lack of trust towards the government that are prevailent im USA. Not only this messaging of censure won't work, it will only piss off the electorate and alienate them further. Before the elections I have assumed that this campaign to shame people into voting was a psy op, but it seems like it's actually their position on the matter, which definitely makes me think they're controlled opposition at this point. They can't actually think this kind of messaging helps them in any way, right? This arrogant approach is specifically why Republican electorate hates them. If they want to win, like, ever, they need to work on that.

Russia invaded Ukraine under a very weak pretense of de-nazification, and buldozed over a lot of privately owned means of production, including foreign owned. They had some reputation to lose back then, now the worst that could happen would be Trump getting pissed at them and threatening them to escalate the war, but never doing so, because he's still beholden to the capital interests, and this war has been extremely lucrative for the world's main exporter of weapons. At best(for Putin) Trump would claim that Zelensky is using private contractors as human shields and that Zelensky broke the deal because the yield of the mining operations was lower than promised, and because of that USA will help Russia deal with the terrorists that overtook the land.

As for the nuclear war - billionaires that push this war forward for their profit aren't interested in living in bunkers, they want to lie on beaches and be sucked off by sex trafficed slaves. The war will never escalate beyond the point where it would endanger their profits, and definitely not to the point where they might worry for their lifes. No major player in this conflict that's capable of employing a nuclear armaments will ever do so for those reasons, not to mention the soft power they would lose if they did - not that Trump and Putin are very concerned with soft power...

Russia doesn't mind continuing, USA doesn't mind either, it's just that Trump lied in his campaign promises that he did, and now he's making a stink about it not being possible because Zelensky is a dictator. If they can cause an election in Ukraine and do a coup once Zelensky wins, or forge some different series of events that leads to Ukraine changing it's president to one aligned with Russia, then it would be a preferable outcome for them, but it's going to be difficult without losing a lot of influence and power, and Trump is already very unpopular, so I feel it's unlikely they would try, but I wouldn't put it past them. Trump antagonized both the world and his own citizens, and the backlash is growing to a degree where he might lack means to control it. Zelensky probably saw that as his most viable way out, so he chose to argue with Trump and J. D. Vance, and hoped that the backlash will limit their further meddling. Not that he had any good option there, but out of bad ones this one at least didn't lock all Ukrainian cards in a bad deal. At this point Ukraine can try dealing with Europe, Turkey (was it Turkey? I think so) or even China, and they still have those tasty minerals that Trump helped advertise.

Europe in general has to rethink their means of defence, and if Ukraine has something valuable, a new military alliance with more hawkish stance against both Russia and USA, one that would include security assurances for Ukraine and other member states, is not out of question. If fascism in USA keep getting worse, then Europe will definitely need it. If the bubble bursts, they may include USA in this alliance in the future, though probably without as much sway as it had in NATO. Not saying that it will happen, just a wild shot in the dark, but there are more options for Ukraine now, than if Zelensky went along with the farce, and, I don't know, apologized for being a dictator and promised to be a good boy.

The idea that any deal with Russia that wouldn't include rock solid security guarantees would lead to stopping the killing, much less any sort of peace, is extremely naive. This issue is ongoing ever since Russia annexed Crimea, there have been many deals and all of them failed to stop Putin from breaking them. The issue is very simple - Trump can not (and absolutely doesn't want to, from the looks of things) convince Putin to stop the war, because Putin doesn't want the war to stop. It was shown time and time again that they aren't willing to stop their invasion, and only thing that ever thwarted their progress was military opposition. There is no reason to believe that Russia wouldn't just continue the invasion after the deal with USA is made. And Ukraine wouldn't have any benefit from this kind of deal, so why would they go through with it?

Since you watched all of it, as unbearable to watch it was, you probably also heard the comments of Trump in the interview afterwards - that he organized and prolonged this discussion to show the world that Zelensky can not be negotiated with. Whatever you might believe in, it's hard to imagine that as anything else other than admission that Trump never expected his "deal" to go through. They jumped and insulted the president of soverign country and blamed him for the war their close friend started. If your reaction to that is "he shouldn't have reacted to the provocation", then you're missing the point of why they provoked him in the first place. This way, at the very least, he made sure the world despised Trump and that all other allies of Ukraine were sympathetic. His only choice is to weather this storm until the fascist bubble in USA bursts and there is some chance for diplomacy in the future.

As for the economic entanglements, they mean nothing in times when USA is incapable of diplomacy and Russia is unwilling of adhering to any deals. Speaking of any trades where Ukraine is giving up their minerals before USA promises to push Russia outside of Ukraine borders is meaningless, and Ukraine wouldn't get anything out of that.

I mean, that only proves that those trans people are sneaking into bathrooms. We all know that the deep state dedicates a substantial amount of resources to make sure trans women get to piss in the sinks in women bathrooms. That's why they make them so good at sports, so they can ninja their way to the most purests of sinks. And the eggs are expensive because the deep state loans the money for transing kids from the Big Egg. Why did you think those trans people call cis people eggs? They're going to eat us. And piss in our sinks.

It's as if I complained that the boxer I bet my money on came to the fight with the pillows strapped to his gloves and you claimed that he lost because I complained. Get real.

1. Didn't vote, I'm not from USA, already told you
2. I'm following the news myself, thank you
3. My "activism" was limited to pointing flaws in Dems strategy in comments under posts on lemmy
4. Trump annexation insanity looks bleak in contrast to a year of murdering children in Gaza, especially seeing how it was a year leading to elections. So far, only on the topic of Gaza, he's doing incompareably less harm than Dems did. Though sure, I doubt it will hold.

You really don't see it, though, do you? The surveys paint the obvious picture that people flet turned off at the Dems for Dems supporting a genocide, and you read that as a reason to bully those people and not as a reason for Dems to do anything different. You call my disapointed comments about Dems failed strategy to shame the voters into voting despite their disapproval of what the government did an "activism" instead of thinking how a regular person would think of a government official that supports murder of Palestinian children. I mean, come on, you can't have your head so far your ass that you wouldn't see how that made Dems electability chance drop to the bottom, even against Trump.

You claim it's my "activism" that made Dems lose, completely in spite of what the surveys say, of my non-existent range (especially in comparison to Dems, lol), and even in spite of me never telling anyone not to vote for them - I did the opposite, many times. You have to be insane to try to put the blame on people that said the Dems strategy was bad instead of putting the blame on Dems for implementing this strategy. And I give you 100% chance that Dems will lose in 2028 again unless you absolute morons change your approach, including both you and people like you, shaming people for disagreeing as a part of your completely impotent "activism", and the party itself.

Seeing no push back from the Dems side it's hard to imagine they weren't in on it. The reason they lost is because they hammered on with pro-genocidal sentiment and with completely non-effective outflanking Reps from the right, and now the next administration is continuing what previous one started. Nothing out of ordinary, though I do feel rather silly for believing that Dems had any reason to listen to their voters and that they wouldn't instead listen to donors that paid for the campaigns of the both sides.

For the record, I do believe that losing to Trump required incredible effort from the Dems side, and damn them they pulled their weight.

So in your view Fox News should be banned because they're propaganda machine for the right wing, calling out Dems for their faults and praising Reps for anything they did? Or because they're lying pieces of shit that helped manufacture a false narrative that eroded democracy and allowed fascists to get in power? Because, as far as I know, tiktok didn't do the later and it's the platform that got banned.

And how is it different than Dems calling Trump Hitler, regardless of how accurate it was? Should they also be tried for "propaganda"? And how about goverments claiming they're doing well, should they be tried for propaganda? How about the entire red scare propaganda? How about anti-arab propaganda? Putting someone on a trial for "propaganda" is a dangerous violation of free speech. If you can prove they've been lying, then at best they're at the same playing field as the government suing them, and in case of tiktok as far as I am aware there is no evidence that they were spreading any lies. It's just that they weren't censoring the genocide Israel commited in Gaza, unlike platforms aligned with USA, like Meta or Twitter. Which censorship was most definitely a propaganda, but instead of them it's tiktok that's being punished for not doing it? It's nonsense. Boosting negative commentary about foreign country is basic freedom of speech, and attempting to silence that feels very dictatorial. It's what China did with a lot of internet for spreading propaganda against them, don't you feel like removing Youtube access in China for making anti-chinese material available was bad for free speech? I wouldn't mind tiktok getting closed for spying on people, but it's obvious they don't want a precedent for that. Blocking propaganda? Bullshit.

As for me "being fine with" other peoples freedom of speech, I dislike what they had to say and I'd want them to be punished for lying, but I'd never advocate against them having option to speak. You end up living in a dictatorship by doing that. I'm not a free speech absolutist, by any stretch of imagination, but banning platforms for containing content casting bad light on you is going too far for me. Especially since there are much better reasons to do so.

There is no difference, neither should be allowed to do that. Person I replied to claimed the issue is chinese propaganda instead of any actual security risks.