voldage

You're the one baselessly claiming that the left protested by not voting, the protests I spoke of were those where people came out in the streets, because those actually happened. Nothing in the article or my comments pointed to people on the left not wanting to vote. Also, you seem to have missed the part where regular people disliked the genocide.

Are you joking? Or are you delusional? Have you linked the article you meant to? The article said that support of Israel doing genocide in Gaza is low. People obviously protested the military support for genocide, that much I believe is a given, as people did that in all major democratic countries even if those countries didn't support Israel in any way. And you're claiming that Harris lost elections not because she failed to convince her electorate that she will do something about it, but rather because this electorate protested? And you're blaming the fact that protests happened solely on the left, and think that broader populace was fine with genocide until leftists did something?

I'm pretty sure you have to be trolling at this point, but okay. Lets square it up. USA provided military and diplomatic aid to Israel, that allowed Israel to conduct a Palestinian genocide in Gaza. They could have stopped the support at that point, but they didn't. People protested spending their tax money on exploding children in Gaza, and USA government attempted to silence those protests, which included censuring Rashida Talib. Biden outright lied, claiming he saw photos of newborns beheaded by Hamas, a claim we know now was completely false. And lets not talk about the morality of it all, lets talk about optics, how that entire affair looked like to USA citizens. Democrats came out like blood hungry warmongers and Biden refused to do anything about that. He sometimes said that he asked Netanyahu to stop, but got ignored and rewarded Israel with more taxpayer paid weapons. That made Dems look additionally weak. Then the shift happened and Harris came into the forefront, where she every now and then said something to the effect of "she will do something to help", but continued to refuse to platform pro-palestinian voices and to promise to take care of Israel defences, for example here. She and her party has all the power, in the eyes of the people, to do something right now (or rather, back then, now Biden sent even more weapons), but she did nothing. One of her most clipped moments was her admission she wouldn't do anything differently from Biden, who already had all that blood on his hands in the eyes of the voters.

And you blame the protesters for asking her to do something instead of her for doing nothing/not enough? And not even the protesters, you're singling out the leftists as the people who caused harm here, while they asked the other side to stop, and other side happily enabled genocide. You do realise it's not just left wing and people interested in politics that care about people dying, right? Because aaaall of that above convinced people who didn't think about politics on a daily basis that Harris is unworthy of trust, which put her on a level playing field with Trump. Some of those people even bought the argument that Trump is anti-war and went to vote for him. And you think the left did it? That they were the sole force of disapproval that caused the protests to erupt, and not that protests were obviously justified and most likely reaction to bombs exploding children in Gaza?

The blame for that lies entirely on Dems, specifically on Biden and Harris. They could have done the popular thing and stopped sending weapons to Israel. They didn't, and it caused a lot of people to think worse of them because of that. Out of those folks, those who didn't want to understand politics and flet they didn't have anything to worry about regardless of who won, or had any other number of median voter thoughts, decided to stay home. Or vote Trump, since he confidently claimed he will stop that war, despite obviously not planning to.

Blaming protesters protesting an unpopular and sustained political decision of the ruling government for this government losing the elections is wild. The mental gymnastics you must need to perform to justify that take baffle me. The gall to blame the left specifically for all that, as if all people wouldn't respond to genocide negatively, is incredible. Overall, 10/10, would not reccomend. I don't intend to engage further in this discussion if that's the kind of bullshit you want to drag up, personally I find it sort of disgusting.

I don't know how reliable those numbers are, but that was exactly my point - Dems lost votes on alienating arab and genocide disliking voters and leftists attempted many times to persuade Harris to change her stance on support for Israel. Unless you believe all arabs and anti-genocide voters are leftists I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with that link.

There was no "science" done to prove that washing hands had effect on mortality, until someone tested that and found that to be the case. So it's not "old science" vs "new science" but rather "no science" vs "science". Lead was used because it was available. Radium was used because it was pretty. Bloodletting was considered helpful strictly because of tradition of bloodletting and because no one done the rigorous testing with valid methodology to check if it actually works, or if it's just a folk belief that it does.

You keep presenting cases where people just didn't know something and didn't care to figure it out, and call it "science" because someone baselessly believed in it. It's irrational. And before you start anew with ignoring my arguments and listing more cases of people not knowing something as a proof that scientific process is harmful, I seriously don't care. I originally commented about traditions being bad reasons for doing anything with the assumption we have some common ground in our understanding of how science work, and trying to convice someone that science does work is a fair bit too tall of a task to engage with. I'm not interested in that, sorry.

And now, the risk of the child dying during childbirth is twice as likely if the birth happens in homes instead of happening in hospitals. Almost like discovery of germs and development of antiseptics had consequences. Those pesky doctors must be tracking those homeborn children down and eliminating them in the name of science! Oops!

My brother in Christ, I've just explained in detail how those points were critique so Dems could fix their campaign and convince the populace to vote for them, and you answered to that as if I told you those were reasons leftists didn't go to vote. I know the Trump would be worse. That's precisely why the left tried to persuade Dems to change their direction. I don't know if you're answering just on reaction, without any thought going that, or are you wearing some blinds not allowing you to hear my arguments. The original point was that you claimed the left didn't show up for the elections, and to my detailed argument about how that doesn't make any sense seeing how desperate the left was for Harris victory, you replied with basically "yes it does". Yes, Harris should have dismantled lies of the right about illegal immigration, instead of legitimizing it and allowing the right to change it from just the "border issue" to "economy issue based on the unsafe border". Since Dems instead went with "yes the border is a problem but we will fix it" the average voter had no reason not to believe that the border was the pressing issue GOP made it up to be. Why would you or I care about the fact that people spreading those lies are insane? They shouldn't have tried to placate the GOP decision makers who spread this propaganda, but dismantle their lies so general populace had opposing viewpoint.

"You’re pretending that the verbiage didn’t change to ‘don’t vote/vote 3rd party because of this’" Yeah, it absolutely didn't change to that. None of the major leftist political media creators suggested voting for 3rd party instead of Harris, especially in the swing states. What happened on lemmy.ml was Russian bots posting bullshit. And I won't deny those posts were posted and comments commented, but you yourself know fully well those were bots, so what the hell are you talking about and why are you blaming that on the left? Not to mention that ml ideologically represents only a small subset of the "left" and most folks don't consider tankies leftists due to their authoritarian bent, that's beside the point. It was absolutely against the best interests of the left to not vote for Harris, which is why the left canvased and campaigned for her, despite not agreeing with her message.

If Dems shitty campaign was 100% the reason Trump won, then he'd have won 100% of the votes. There were many reasons that helped him, including the fact that USA is racist and sexist and many people probably just didn't want to vote for black woman. Leftists helped Dems get a bit more %, though in current political landscape the left doesn't have nearly enough power to influence decisions of major politicians, and unfortunately Harris decided to ignore them.

It's not armchair analysis, the critique from the left was constructive and included how to change the messaging to improve the odds. I won't be able to tell you that Dems would have had amazing victory if they did everything or anything the left tried to persuade them to do, since they didn't and I don't know how the future would have looked then, or how the right would have responded, but you can't also claim they wouldn't or go into the territory of claiming that they actually harmed Harris chances. You could have claimed that if the left was silent, it doesn't make much sense even with the point you've initially made (that they didn't show up because Harris wasn't left-leaning enough), since even if the left was complicit in spreading anti-Harris propaganda - opposite of which happened - they would have still applied pressure on Dems to address their issues. I never claimed that Dems would have definitely won if they listened to the left; it was you, who claimed that Dems lost because of some apparent actions from the left, to support of which you only have a handful of posts on a platform you're aware have been heavily botted, as it was repeatedly discussed topic. Out of us two I'd definitely see you more leaning into having a confirmation bias in this case, especially since you're ignoring just how absurd the idea of the left boycotting Harris is. Trump literally said he wants to take care of the "radical left" in the country "using army if that's required", USA citizens with a leftist footprint in social media were threatened with death by a president candidate, and you think anyone from the left wanted that to happen? Unlike centrists the left campaigned for Harris as if their lives depended on that, because their lives did depend on that! You are delusional if you believe it was leftists that failed to show up on the elections day. They were very active in attempts to make Harris more electable, and Dems lost despite that, not thanks to it.

Your unreasonable bias against any attempts to understand the world instead of relying on traditions of unknown origin does not substitute an argument against it. Neither empirical or analitical method of scientific research is limited to some sort of elitist and corrupt academia, so your view of academia being elitist and corrupt doesn't disprove the efficiency of those methods. And no, the knowledge doesn't come from practice at all, if it did then ritually practiced traditions would lead to understanding of their roots and their purpose, and humans didn't learn about spreading of diseases from burial rites, but rather from events when those rites weren't practiced. Furthermore, we didn't learn how to deal with those diseases from the traditions, but rather from breaking away from them and studying bodies instead of getting rid of them - which faced much backlash from the church, which wanted to uphold tradition no matter what.

The knowledge comes not from practice, but from study, from testing different approaches and writing down what worked, until you get testing sample high enough to figure out why it worked. And then, people who figured it out probably taught others what to do without sharing in enough details why it works, and puff you have a tradition. And if people do share why stuff works and publish their research data and methodology, then we have knowledge, based on which other researchers can conduct their own research, check if they get similar results and whatnot. Peer review is a rather robust standard for truth, as far as human capabilities go.

Academia being gamified in a way that only approved research gets funding or spotlight has nothing to do with traditions themselves being any good either. Most often power is legitimized via tradition, and many scientific institutes were muzzled because power following tradition found their pursuit of knowledge undesireable. The fact that many research topics are taboo is direct result of that.

Lastly, your idea that the academia is isolated from the "feedback" of the "real world" is completely nonsensical. Nothing that's not peer reviewed isn't treated as particulary valuable, and you peer review the research by repeating the tests with the same methodology. That's specifically the feedback from the real world. Any sort of feedback that shows some parts of tradition should be changed is commonly met with resistance however, so it stands to reason that the opposite of what you claimed is actually the truth, and it's tradition that suffers from lack of the "feedback from the real world".

Well seal clubbing is pretty bad for one. But the point isn't whenever there are bad traditions, but whenever tradition is a good or bad reason to do something. Rites themselves do nothing, burying or burning the body does. Understanding why you're doing something is vastly better than doing it because of some (possibly reasonable but unknown) ancient reason no one is able to point out. Taboo of incest is less related to traditions, and more to biology which causes people not to be attracted to their siblings in most cases. There is no ceremony or ritual to prohibition of incest, so I'd say it's not a tradition. The tradition that have existed, however, was inbreeding of royal families, that wanted to keep their blood pure, which led to copious amount of incest and genetic defects. Many traditions rose from the dominance of one group over another and existed to legitimize this dominance further. Tradition of women being unable to vote, earn money or chose their spouse was born from the many generations of oppression. Tradition of black people being segregated away from white in USA was born out of dehumanization of slaves. There are many cases of traditional honor suicides (like seppuku) or honor killing (like stoning of women accused of adultery) in different traditions as well.

I could keep listing "bad traditions with bad reasons" but that's not the point I've originally made, more of a reply to your point about traditions being born out of useful or natural/survival reasons, which I believe those examples should disprove. The point is still that doing something solely because of tradition is bad, you need knowledge to do that well and in current age there is absolutely no reason not to seek that knowledge. In the past, when people were illiterate an easily digestible oral tradition was useful thing, but we're way past times when we have no good way to ensure the complicated reasons for doing things are preserved. What if some tradition results in oppression of some people and it's source is unknown or so ancient it's no longer applicable, should it be upkept? Conversely, should the ritual blood sacrifice be kept in the celebration of plentiful harvest to appease the gods, or should you only keep the parts like dancing around the bonfire and socializing, because those things are fun and healthy for the community?

If there is wisdom hidden in the tradition, then you want to figure it out, but if it's kept cryptic, unknown and attempts to research it are met with disdain because someone tries to compromise your tradition, then it's probably better to fuck around and find out what would happen if you didn't perform the tradition. And if something bad happens, then at least you can write it down and pass to the next generation as the actual reason for doing things. I seriously doubt there is anything left in human traditions that was figured out in the past, and is currently impossible to decipher or comprehend just by analysis, without even doing empirical tests. And if for some reason something isn't, then do those tests and find out. If you're worried about some arcane knowledge of the ancients that is too enigmatic for us to understand just by looking, you can try doing something differently in isolated environment, with various precautions and on limited sample. No reason to keep it as "tradition" instead of "reason", especially since the underlying reason could have been good, but due to no one knowing what it was, the method could have degenerated over the generations to the point of being ineffective.

You've disconnected reason from the action and outcome. Killing someone will have bad outcome regardless of reason, but if your reason for the murder was some sort of tradition, it would imply that it's justified in your eyes and you'd do it again, and also teach your children and community to do it, and normalise it, fight against legislation that would stop it etc. I believe it would be difficult, though probably not impossible, to formulate a reason worse than tradition without referencing tradition or custom in some way. And then there is also the frequency of how often traditions are used as reason or excuse to achieve a cruel outcome to consider. If baby pandas were no. 1 reason for human death in the world by few orders of magnitude, we would probably consider them "the worst" in some way.

If anything, most leftists tuned down their criticism of the Biden/Harris administration in the few past months leading to the election, especially since Harris was announced as replacement. Critique of USA letting the Gaza genocide happen was absolutely going on strong all the way since Israel started bombing hospitals in retaliation for October 7, and critique of Biden's capitulation to the right on the border issue was going strong ever since Texas started putting barbed wire in water crossings and Biden decided he'd rather double down on xenophobia and "strong border" instead of dismantling the lies from the right. I would say the critique got strongest when those protests on campuses happened and the government started to crack down on dissidents and banning people for being against Israel. To be fair, with the critique also came some praise, since Biden's administration did some neat things for working class, and when Minnesota democrats won the slim majority and started voting as united block to put in place progressive legislation they were celebrated by the internet left as the example to follow... Which also was a critique of the federal dems, who failed to act that way.

I'd wager you just tuned that out and it only started to be an issue to you, once the elections got closer. The left got ignored for the entire 4 years, despite ceaselessly clamoring about changes that need to happen, and now they got singled out as the reason why dems lost. Also, what was mostly critiqued wasn't the government to be, but the campaign messaging, which absolutely could have been changed for more persuasive instead of borderline threatening and legitimizing the lies of the GOP. It was a shitty campaign, and Dems should have course corrected instead of, well, losing.

Your original point was that it was somehow the left that failed to show up for elections, and you put blame on them for dems losing. Now you switched gear to claiming that there was some conspiracy from the left to spread anti-harris propaganda, to get Trump to win, which is completely nonsensical keeping in mind what goals the left in USA has. Unless that's what you're suggesting, that the left united with the right to bring down the center, or something like that? I'd love to hear how you think that came down. And following that logic, I guess you'd want Dems to "cut ties" with the left even further and look for allies on the right? Because if so, it would be picture perfect example of what the post depicts, and it would be very funny if not for being very tragic.

There is also the issue of Jill Stein and her army of bots, but I feel like it would be too much of an undeserved insult to you to assume you think those people were from the left and not from the right. She was an obvious spoiler candidate put forward by GOP, I've never heard any praise of her in the leftist media bubble. Trump did praise her, Cornell West and RFK though, and she did pop up relatively recently, as she does every 4 years when it's time to promote a book and fall of democracy. It would be a failure of basic political literacy to consider her as anything else than a right wing spoiler candidate, especially after almost 4 years of silence from her side, so I'm just getting that out of the way unless you want to challenge that point in some way for some reason.

Don't mistake criticism for spreading fear, leftists did commonly and openly agree that Trump would be far worse. Dems had time to change their messaging in accordance with that critique and they didn't. Claiming that their campaign that leftists critiqued for being ineffective failed because leftists pleaded for Dems to change it is trying to have the cake and eat it. Again, if leftists proposing different campaign direction could possibly have enough political momentum to actually discourage 14% of voters from voting, then it would absolutely be a critical error from the Harris side not to listen to them. As "the left" isn't unified block that speaks in unified voice, while the DMC is, the fault in that case would lie on the Dems side. And again again, assuming that was the case would be very naive. The wide consensus on the left was that voting for Harris was absolutely the only option to stop fascism from taking hold. People who failed to show up were people that didn't care about politics enough and partialy believed Trump lies, or assumed "he wouldn't be so bad", or didn't care which of those 2 parties would win because they assumed nothing would have changed. Trump agenda is extremely conservative, and vast majority of people on the left recognised that as a threat. Claiming they didn't show up to vote despite all the clamour about Trump being Hitler from the left is a weak attempt at scapegoating them.

Most people said that Kamala went right due to her and Biden capitulation of the border topic, that she attempted to outflank the GOP from the right, which polls show was a losing strategy. This is very different from the accused left wing purity testing, which barely happend this election cycle, because most outspoken people on the left absolutely supported voting for Harris despite not agreeing with her. I don't know how tuned in you were on this side of the media landscape, but the messaging from the left was that Trump is hitlerian and will most likely want to imprison or kill people from the left, as all fascists in the past did once they took the power. The left in USA was never this alarmist and geared up to fight for their continued existence, so the idea that they instead stayed in homes as a show of protest is frankly unrealistic.

What I saw on lemmy past those few months was a shit ton of posts like this one - antagonizing the left and claiming that they won't vote because of the Gaza genocide. Also a lot of other kinds of voter shaming or blackmail. I don't know if it was maliciously botted or if DNC strategists actually thought it was a good idea - which I doubt - but continously mentioning the worst looking aspect of potential Harris presidency worked in Dems favour. And there, again, leftists argued that it was a losing strategy and that it will cost Harris voters more. They wanted some pressure to be put on Harris, so she would divert from this cataclysmic collision course. Barely anyone even spoke against voting for her at all. If your analysis of the sentiment in months leading to the elections pointed to that, you most likely had your head up your ass.

The left had everything to lose in those elections. They went and canvased for Harris despite not agreeing with her message. They tried to course correct the disastrous campaign she led, and often was met with unrelenting arrogance of the center claiming that nothing can or should be done with Dems messaging about Israel or the border. Topics of price gouging or feeding children, despite being popular with voters across the line were dropped almost immediately, and instead pro-corporate and business-as-usual messaging went out. The left repeatedly said that Dems would lose if they wont change, and now they did lose because they refused to do that.

I'm not even from the USA, so I wasn't that exposed to the mainstream USA media, but I know this anti-leftist propaganda was also constantly droned in TV. I know however how the internet side of left wing media looked like, and it was almost unanonymous that everyone needed to go vote for Harris or else the democracy will die. And that's why I'm fairly sure that your accusations of the left causing the Harris loss are bullshit - if anything, they were the people most concerned about it.

As for anyone actually calling to vote 3rd party, you surely do realise those were bots or paid shills, right? They never even went beyond in explaining the Jizz Stain policy the point of "unlike Harris she hates Jews", and overall their attempts to convice anyone were very uninspiring. She did get 0.4% iirc, so someone did fall for that, but come on, you know that's bullshit. The left absolutely did not support or endorse her.

The voices of "you should not vote for Harris" were very sparse, so you would be hard pressed to claim that they represented a significant portion of left wing users on lemmy. Those people complained instead about Harris fucking up, which she did, and now you're blaming her loss on the left based on those aformentioned sparse voices instead of learning from the criticism of the vast majority of the people from the left. What you're basicially claiming is that those 14% missing voters were result of leftist activism against Harris instead of the ineffective campaign, but I bet you also believe at the same time it would be dumb to listen to the left (that had apparently this much political power to sway so many voters) because listening to their advice at any point would weaken the DMC. So even if I was somehow wrong with my assesment of the internet left willingness to vote, your point that Dems lost because of the left would still be wrong, because if they could have possibly bridged the gap of 14%, then they absolutely should have been the target audience of the campaign, and Harris should have instead done everything the left asked of her instead of alienating them. I don't believe that was the case, as again, the left was very motivated to vote for Harris, but if it was, it would only show how bad the Dems campaign was.

My legs got numb and I'm long done pooping so cheers, sorry for the long comment, I need to eat more fiber.