It’s honestly the Democrats that make me feel drained. They’re the party that ostensibly represents my political leanings, but they’ve spent the last year funding a genocide, cozying up to Republicans like Liz Cheney, and abandoning the economic populism that got them elected in 2020. If they were at least winning, ignoring progressives like me would be justified, but nope! They made an 80-year-old man their candidate without holding a primary, replaced him at the last minute with a candidate who didn’t even make it to Iowa in 2020, and the walked into their largest electoral defeat since…what, 2004?

Trump is vile, and petty, and cruel, and I’m genuinely scared of the damage he’ll do to our country, but that’s what I expect from him. The fact that the only opposition party to the fascists is this group of cowardly, selfish failures is so demoralizing. If we can’t wrestle control of the party away from these incompetent geriatrics, I honestly don’t know if there’s any hope for American democracy.

Yes, but they cut a deal with the Republicans, who were stalling them with procedural maneuvers that were forcing them to stay late at night, and of course, it’s a bad deal. They got seven district court judges approved in exchange for abandoning the appointment of 4 appeals court judges. Appeals court judges are much more powerful, so this wasn’t a great move, but now they don’t have to stay up past their bedtimes, and they might even get to go on Christmas vacation early.

…I don’t disagree, but I’m struggling to see how this is related to my comment. Are you replying to the right person?

I would also like them to do that too, but I would prefer they do it for something other than nepotism.

• It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).

Yup, pretty much. I tried Mastodon and found it very unintuitive, but BlueSky was immediately understandable as a former Twitter user. I don’t really use either that much, but I’ve spent way more time with BlueSky.

Honestly, it’s the same with Lemmy. I tried a lot of Reddit alternatives, both federated and centralized, and I landed on Lemmy because A) It has the only decently-sized user base and B) my preferred Reddit app, Sync, moved to Lemmy. Lemmy is similar enough to Reddit on it’s own that transitioning over wouldn’t have been difficult, but having Sync just made it that much easier.

That’s why like Emma Vigeland. She’s calm, cool, and pretty open minded, and when things do get confrontational, it’s Tim Pool that’s screeching, not her.

Yeah, I fell off of TYT in 2017 or 2018 for a lot of the same reasons I can’t stand listening to right-wing pundits; a lot of smug and little information (mostly from Cenk). I hadn’t heard anything about Ana Kasperian. What happened with her?

There are some leftist podcasts that I like, but they are kinda just angry and unproductive, like The Insurgents; I only listen to them when I’m deeply angry or they have a good guest. The Lever is probably the best new left-wing podcast I’m listening to right now, and the Majority Report is always great.

I follow a lot of podcasts that are either center-left sources or Democratic party cheerleaders: NPR and the NPR Politics Podcast, Ezra Klein (God he’s an insufferable twat), the Daily, Pod Save America…some of these I listen to because I want to know what the, “mainstream American left,” believes, some of them just have good information; NPR’s Up First is a great 15 minute morning news wrap, and the Daily does good in depth reporting (even better when Michael Barbaro is on vacation).

I don’t listen to right-wing pundits like Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh very often. They’re mostly culture war crap, and there’s usually very little information to be gained from them. I do regularly read conservative reporting though, mostly WSJ and the Economist.

“Prove.” Adorable.

…no, not what I said. 10% in PAC money on top of half a billion in direct campaign spending.

Right, so, TL;DR, no, you have no data that contradicts my point, but you will continue to insist that the fact that Russian bots and billionaires exist is proof. This is why your entire argument is vibes-based, not reality-based.

It is deeply funny that you still don’t understand the difference between a centrist platform and moderate voters, and that you keep insisting Trump has a centerist platform without being able to articulate a single centrist position he’s taken. Anyway, it’s clear I can’t make understand how you fundamentally don’t understand the terms you’re misusing, so my parting advice would be to learn more or talk less. Good luck, champ.

You’re the one claiming that Trump won because of a grassroots campaign without any evidence to support that.

Not what I said. I said that Trump ran a grassroots campaign (which is true and I even linked to an article about it), which I brought up to refute this statement of yours: “I don’t think Bernie would get any air time if he was just funded by grassroots donations.” I didn’t say being a grassroots campaign was the cause of his win, just that it clearly wasn’t an obstacle for him. Given that Trump was successful with a grassroots campaign, and that both Harris and Clinton heavily outspent him, there is no reason to believe that Bernie wouldn’t be able to succeed as well on a grassroots campaign with less funding.

So far, the only argument against this you’ve been able to present is that Russia has trolls and billionaires exist. While those are technically facts, they’re not data that contradict any of my points. Since you don’t seem to have any of that, I think we’re done here.

First. He did the centrist message. Jobs, wages, inflation. Ok? Those are the messages that the center voted for Trump on.

What in the Dunning-Kruger are you talking about? “Jobs, wages, inflation,” isn’t a fucking message, dude. It’s just three issues that you are assigning to moderates (I’m gonna start using, “moderates,” for voters in the political center, maybe that will help you, because you seem really confused). Maybe moderates claimed those were their biggest issues this cycle, but that doesn’t mean talking about them is, “doing the centrist message.”

Do you get the difference between an issue and a message? “Guns,” is an issue. A message is what you want to do about that issue. Gun control is considered a left wing message. Expanding gun rights is considered right wing. Modest regulations surrounding gun ownership is considered centrist. Do you see how saying, “He did the centrist message,” and then naming issues instead a message is fucking incoherent? Are you starting to understand the difference between talking about an issue that’s important to moderates and having a centrist message?

What won Trump the election? What part pushed him over the edge to win? I’m saying it was the center voter.

Oh my fucking God dude, no one’s disagreeing. It’s just not relevant to anything I was saying in the thread up until the point where you interjected. I was talking about centrist platforms being unpopular with the electorate, and you’re talking about Trump winning voters who consider themselves moderate. Do you get how those are two different things?

The first thing, the one I was talking about, is the centrist message the Democrats ran on. Ok second. This is second. Separate from the first point, is what you were talking about, which is how moderates voted this election. Do you see how those are different things? Do you see that I’m talking about policy and you’re talking about voter blocks? Do you get the difference yet?

Small business? Sounds good in theory but how many voters run a small business? Not enough. It has no appeal for the 99.9% of center voters that just work a standard job.

THIS IS LITERALLY MY WHOLE FUCKING POINT DUDE. It was a centrist policy! It’s a policy that didn’t go too far left or too far right. I agree that this centrist policy didn’t appeal to moderates; it didn’t appeal to anybody! That’s what I was literally saying in the comment you decided to jump in on.

You know what does appeal to the center voter? What Trump says about jobs, inflation, manufacturing. And we’re right back to the start

Yeah dude, and what did he say about those things? Not the issue, the message. Was it that American jobs were being stolen by migrants? Was it that manufacturing losses were the result of globalization, and that aggressive tariffs would fix that? Was it that reckless government spending through the American Rescue Plan was caused inflation? Do you see that, even if those issues matter to moderates, the message isn’t centrist, it’s far-right? Is any of this getting through to you?

I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ dude, I was trying to be nice at first, but Jesus Fucking Christ. It’s bad enough that you wasted this much fucking time because you couldn’t figure out the difference between moderate voters and centrist policies, but to actually be this condescending while you fumble around with terms you don’t understand is fucking unreal.

You’re asking for me to get specific to an unecessary level to pretend that Russians didn’t influence the elections because I can’t quantify it. Bad faith argument.

I can’t quantify how many times I took a shit in 2023. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Now that’s a bad faith argument. You’re the one that’s making all the claims. You’re claiming a Sanders campaign could never stand up to the money and influence of the billionaire class, and it’s you claiming all the evidence of Trump doing exactly that doesn’t count. And while I never said Russian interference didn’t affect the election, you’re the one claiming that it was so influential that it invalidated the grassroots nature of Trump’s campaign.

You’re the one making proclamations on why Sanders would lose and why Trump won, and you’re the one refusing to back it up with anything other than, “trust me bro.” So, again, back up any of your claims with actual evidence or just STOP TALKING.

Show me data then. How much of Trump’s grassroots campaign is actually astroturfed Russian propaganda? What non-financial support did billionaires give Trump, and what are the quantifiable outcomes of that support. Say something other than, “[X] event happened, and this is my unsubstantiated opinion on how that changed the outcome of the election,” or just stop talking.

OK, I get it now. You’re conflating people in the political center with centrism. People who consider themselves politically centrist may have voted for Trump because they liked his message in jobs and manufacturing, but it was not a centrist message. It was a far right message that included blaming immigrants for job losses and promoting isolationist trade policies. By comparison, Harris had a centrist policy of tax credits for small businesses, and that did not appeal to people who consider themselves the political center.

So, when I said, “Harris and Hillary’s losses in the general prove that Americans aren’t that centrist,” I mean that people are rejecting centrist policy measures. It has nothing to do with people in the center voting for him.

OK, so gonna recap here; you think it didn’t matter that the DNC conspired against Bernie in 2020 because billionaires would have used their wealth to crush his grassroots campaign. I’ve shown you data that proves the Harris campaign spent a half-billion more than Trump in 2016, that more dark money went to Harris than Trump, and that Trump won with the type of small-donor grassroots campaign that Bernie had, and your conter argument is a fact sheet on Russian disinformation campaigns. Nice vibes dude.

I…I don’t really know what to say to this, dude. You’re just declaring things are, “center.” Like…jobs, inflation, and manufacturing are issues, but they’re not on a political spectrum. They’re usually seen as working class issues, since the loss of American manufacturing, increasing prices, and unemployment and low wages (assuming that’s what you mean by, “jobs,”) usually hurt the working class, but that doesn’t make them inherently right or left wing, and the lack of a political orientation doesn’t mean they’re, “center.”

Like, take manufacturing jobs. You can approach that from a left-wing position, and say that we need harsh tax penalties for companies that ship jobs overseas, or take a right-wing position, and say we need to deregulate manufacturing to make U.S. manufacturing cost less. A centrist position would probably look like tax-credits for companies that manufacture in the U.S. But when you say manufacturing is centrist, I have no idea what that means.

Bernie can’t compete with only grassroots donations.

Literally all of the data I shared says the fucking opposite, dude! On top of that, Trump was running a grassroots campaign in 2016 that broke GOP records for small-donor money, and he won even though Clinton out-spent him. So, what actual evidence do you have to back up your assertions here? Or is it just the vibes?