Waiting for the announcement from the White House that they just saved 2.5 billion Americans from dying.
Every person in this nation now owes 10 life debts to dear leader.
immutable
joined 2 years ago
I think a lot of the things on this list are not actually goals of the Democratic Party.
Here’s their platform https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdf
The term “universal healthcare” is not in there. Instead they want to continue a market based approach to increase access to healthcare and health insurance. (Page 19)
“Free education” is also not part of their platform, instead they want affordable education. (Page 26)
There is a pretty lengthy chapter (chapter 4) on the climate crisis and how they want to tackle that, so I’ll give you a green economy.
Page 13 does include a paragraph about raising the minimum wage.
Page 50 includes a (to me at least) very underwhelming fig leaf towards some minor electoral reform.
Chapter six talks about expanding civil rights to more people but not really materially increasing the scope of civil rights.
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I would love for there to be a party aggressively pursuing the goals you are talking about, I think you and I would likely agree on the most important things for this country.
A couple real important ones you think the democrats are attempting to achieve don’t appear to be things the Democratic Party actually intends to do. Universal healthcare and free education being the big two that would really make a massive difference in the nation. And you don’t have to believe me, you can read their platform and see they don’t intend to deliver those things, not with any size majority.
Further, platforms are talk and talk is cheap. It’s one thing to say you want to raise the minimum wage, it’s another to do it. The minimum wage was last raised in 2009. That’s 16 years, and this isn’t even a cornerstone they run on because they know it would scare off their moneyed backers. This is why you see pictures of Bernie sanders or the squad fighting for $15 while the rank and file dem politician stays far away.
Well I think there’s some validity to this, but not just because “democrats bad”
We are seeing across the western world a resurgence in far right parties that are largely running on a populist sentiment that “things are bad and we were great once and let’s go back”
Why does this messaging resonate with so many? Propaganda has its role to play, but propaganda works best when there is a truth to the underlying message.
We are at the tail end of over half a century of neoliberal policy. Now I don’t use neoliberal as so many do as a pejorative, but as a descriptor. As Nancy Pelosi so eloquently stated “We're capitalists and that's just the way it is.”
Now if you enjoy your life subscription under capitalism, especially our super fun late stage capitalism, there’s lots to dislike. The right has decided that while they will wholeheartedly support the capitalist machine, they are going to go out and stump like populists, telling people that they are getting screwed over and a vote for them is a vote to end the screwing, even better, it’s a vote to screw over people you don’t like, you get to do the screwing for once!
The Democratic Party can’t seem to find a coherent message because at the end of the day, the neoliberal project they are working on is going smoothly. The fact that your rent is going up, that private companies own the prisons and all the houses, that’s the free market free marketing baby.
I think the ire is misdirected, but it comes from this gnawing feeling that while the right is awful and doing awful things the democrats aren’t articulating any real alternative. And you don’t have to believe me, I think the trump - Biden - trump pattern shows you that to a lot of Americans things didn’t get better.
Now you and I might sit here secure in the knowledge that within the neoliberal world order as established, Biden did amazingly well. Our economy the envy of the world in how we tackled inflation and had one of the softest landings. But we exist in a system that has expected catastrophic failure roughly every 7 years and we see it happening more and more often. A system that doesn’t seem capable or willing to tackle the most pressing issues that people face. And so it is cold comfort when the Democratic Party goes “yes everything sucks and is getting worse, but believe us this is the best we can do with how the system works”
It’s not super surprising that if someone comes around and says “that system is bullshit” that people are excited. It sucks major ass that the guy saying it has no idea what the system is, how to build a better system, etc. But it also sucks that the democratic party’s response is basically, “put us back in charge and we will restore this system that is hurting a lot of people and really kinda sucks ass and only benefits a few super wealthy donors”
People want someone to stand up and articulate a compelling vision for the future and then deliver on it. For everything wrong with trump, he understands that first part, and he’s unmoored by any kind of morals or ethics so he’s willing to spend hours painting in great and baffling detail just how wonderful his future is going to be. He’s so good at it that his followers don’t even mind that it never happens.
Under what authority?
Is the emergency authorization he’s been using and saying the imports are bringing in fentanyl somehow applicable here?
Does the fentanyl somehow shoot into my eyes when watching a foreign movie?
Have we just completely stopped the part where we go “hey, that doesn’t seem to be something you have the power to do” and moved fully into the dictator era?
Black people around the nation wait to find out which Haitian gang they’ve always been a part of as part of their deportation.
Truly America is the land of the free*
*terms and conditions apply, may not actually contain freedom
McDonald’s is so expensive now that if my family is going to eat out there are lots of better options at the same price point.
That’s why people came to you McDonald’s, cheap food.
A combo costs $13 here in Ohio, for that price I could go get a burrito from chipotle, or a bowl from bibibop, or a sub from Jersey mikes, or a hundred other better options.
If I want something cheaper I can go to Taco Bell and get a $5 box.
So at the price point I can get better food, there’s also equally quality food at lower price points, why does anyone still go to McDonald’s
Can you fight them as hard as they fought you
Nope
Filibuster maybe?
Only when there’s nothing pending
Procedural moves that slow them down
Nah
Could you at least not vote to enable them
Votes to enable them silently with intense eye contact
What the fuck can you do?
Pulls out phone, texts you for $20 for their battle fund
Jesus fucking christ
Well that makes more sense than LLMs I suppose. Doesn’t really make a lot of sense why musk would want that given the one thing he doesn’t run is an ad network.
As someone that works in the tech sector though, this idea doesn’t really seem super compelling. The advertisers already have this data, so it just seems like a weird kind of heist to go pull off.
Advertisers already know how much money you make, what illnesses your suffering from (based on things you search for), I mean we live in an unprecedented surveillance states.
Maybe musk wanted his own version of that to sell to people, that’s a somewhat plausible scenario. This just sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory and the rule for a conspiracy theory is “someone has to make money” for the theory to be true.
Is musk a piece of shit, sure. Does the government have data, yep. Does taking the data from the government make musk money, maybe? I guess in the world where it’s a play for him to close the gap on a bunch of demographic information people can already buy from google or X, which he owns.
So I suppose if we see X or xAI offering significantly improved ad targeting or data brokerage that would make this all hang together.
Fucking moron is from Ohio. As a fellow Ohioan, let me say this loud and clear JD, you couchfucker, Ohio fought for the union.
The ancestors of this great state beat confederates like a drum. If you love those shitbag losers so much get the fuck out.
I never really understood the idea of the popular kids in high school. I wasn’t popular but wasn’t unpopular, just sorta a regular dude.
I remember thinking how odd it was that people liked people simply because a lot of people liked that person. Or that those people felt like they were better than others because a lot of people liked them.
Then I graduated and got into the real world and there were celebrities but beyond that there were no popular kids anymore. And celebrities were generally well known for some actual thing they could do exceptionally well, acting, singing, sports, etc.
Then social media gave us influencers which are just popular kids for adults. People follow them because lots of people follow them and some of them are genuinely talented but a lot of them are just flexing with wealth (or pretending to) or just attractive.
I remember being relieved that the “popular kids” was a thing people grew out of, and kinda appalled that we somehow engineered it back into adulthood.