chaonaut

For whatever reason, when I'm hearing about Dems in the swing state I'm in, I'm hardly ever hearing why you should be excited to vote for the Dem candidate, but instead why the Rep candidate is so awful that you simply must vote Dem to stop them. Like, there was about a week(?) that Harris and Walz seemed to be coming out of the gate going "we're gonna be so awesome, don't even worry about the weirdos on the other side", but then it became "please, it is of Vital Importance you do not vote for Trump, we promise Harris will be better than him", and I just don't understand why they changed.

If the Uncommitted movement had tens of millions of registered voters come together and pledge to vote Harris if and only if she took a harder stance on Israel, that might have helped.

... are you familiar with what the Uncommitted National Movement was asking for? Like, half of Lemmy is bashing the Uncommitteds for the 15m vote difference between Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024.

Like, do you get that Listen to Michigan alone got 101k Uncommitted votes in the Michigan Dem Primary to Biden's 618k? That they had a stated goal of "an immediate and permanent ceasefire"? That there were Uncommitted delegates to the Democratic National Convention that were denied the opportunity to speak at the convention? That the there were protests outside the DNC demanding the Uncommitted movement be allowed to speak?

Which part of this is failing at being the movement you're saying the DNC would listen to? If the 15m gap is truly completely at the feet of the Uncommitted, then what are you saying was the reason that the DNC cut them out of their strategy?

There is a lot of "invisible" work that party orgs do. If you want to see why big names and attention alone don't work, look at the Green Party. They have name recognition, ballot access and even get a bit of the vote each presidential election. What they're missing is the "ground game" that gives the presence in nearly every race in every precinct, and the local engagement to actually win an appreciable chunk of elections every year (not just the presidential years).

Signal is moderation.

Generating signal is moderating noise. The first moderator of any message is the person converting ideas into language. Understanding the interplay of how messages get moderated by the various layers they pass through is what media literacy is.

I miss when signal-to-noise ratio was common parlance of the Internet.

Making usable spaces is tough work, but having worthwhile content drowned in an ocean of noise is seemingly the default of corporate controlled media anymore, so much have they abandoned paying attention to what they publish. That you don't know who is editorializing and moderating the places you frequent and have opinions on the job they're doing says to me that you're not doing the work that being media literate requires, which is all the more important when so much of it is generated content with no consideration given to reality.

Not so much on the fence between Harris and Trump, but on the bench, because apparently a significant demographic in my state is apparently not all that important to winning the swing state, and have been being iced out since before Harris was on the top of the ticket. Perhaps it is a failing of character to be unable to look past the continuing apologetics and support for a genocide and the emphasis on courting the "good" Republicans over the Progressives, but I can't just set that aside and pour my energy into cheerleading the presidential race. I don't have an option that I want, I have a choice between the status quo (which we know is leading us into bad places) and actively making things worse.

I'm not sure how "tens of billions of dollars of military aid" counts as not intervening in a foreign conflict.

It is a bit galling to be told endlessly that we must shut up and choose when the choice is "genocide or more genocide", even when the reason Harris is on the top of the ballot at all is as a result of speaking up about the issues with Biden. I'm not all that comfortable merely accepting that, to escape the chopping block myself, I must remain silent about my family members. I'm sorry that Harris is so tied to Israel's expansionist agenda that my inability to stomach rampant slaughter is threatening her and the Democratic party's chances against Trump and the Republican party, but I can't let some tens of thousands of killing go.

Perhaps they should have left Western style Manifest Destiny in the past.

Expecting Christians to follow a given text to the letter will always be setting yourself up for failure. Not only do people pick and choose the doctrine they follow (or more often have it picked and chosen for them by their spiritual leader), different traditions have different emphasis and even different texts they're operating off of. Expecting an legalistic following of a specific interpretation will leave you expecting far different behavior that most of your observations will show.

The Heritage Foundation is wild, and one of the most significant public policy groups with deep ties to American conservatism. Basically, any crazy policy that the Republican party has taken on as a major party plank in the past 50 years has a distressing high chance of having its roots in Heritage's recommendations.

For example, in 1981:

Among the 2,000 Heritage policy recommendations, approximately 60% of them were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan's first year in office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation

The prices for fixed costs have gone up, too. People need a place to live, the health to keep living, and ways of ensuring access to both, and the costs of all of those have gone up as well. A not insignificant chuck of people don't have discretionary spending to cut (not to mention how stressful living paycheck-to-paycheck on the bare essentials can be). Yes, it is certainly worth reevaluating budgets and determining where expenses can be lowered, but those margins have been getting thinner for a long while.