Thanks, I hate it

Yeah, tbh, it seems like it should be a lot closer to midnight. If things are this bad and we’re still over a minute, what’s it going to take?

[noticing that almost all the projections fall off a cliff right about now]

Oh.

Oh no.

Okay, so, question: how much of this could be alleviated by changing how we do things? I.E. building dense apartments and walkable neighborhood commercial with good bike lanes and public transit instead of sprawled out single family home hellscapes?

Yeah, yeah, I dig it, the US IS room 1408.

Yeah, I know. Honest question, and don’t doxx yourself, are you doing anything about it? I’m trying to build resilience in my community by organizing locally.

Both of mine are AuDHD (or maybe ADHD Gold edition?) and I love them for exactly who they are, even with what a huge pain in the ass the neurodivergence can be sometimes. It frankly annoys me when people, almost always people who never had any experience raising autistic kids, send me “cures” for autism. They don’t need to be cured, fuckers, this is who they are, stop telling me to put them on juice cleanses or what the fuck ever.

I think a lot of it is down to the fact that these kids can be difficult, there’s no two ways about it. That makes people uncomfortable, and they want to solve that discomfort by helping. How do you help? Well, their autism related behaviors are what made them uncomfortable, so let’s make the autism go away. Unfortunately, there’s a huge grift industry around “helping” autistic kids.

No, I get what they’re saying. A lot of the veterans I know think that cops are totally out of control. The military is, relatively speaking, a little less likely to be as horrible as possible about this. It still shouldn’t be happening.

Yeah, uh… If you think that American companies aren’t doing this same thing and handing your data over to the government without a warrant among other bad uses, I have some bad news for you. This is pretty much par for the course, and I’m pretty sure that we’re witnessing a well financed negative media blitz happening to try and keep OpenAI from getting all of its spaghetti spilled. Watch for the government to try and ban deepseek for “national security” reasons soon.

Federal politics is too wide and deep, too insulated from the average person, and too corrupted by special interests for any realistic plan (like a protest) to have the required effect. At least, that’s my opinion. They’ll either just get dismissed as a bunch of know-nothing goofs and bulldozed a la Occupy, or they’ll be labelled as dangerous and cracked down upon with passion a la BLM.

My best, most actionable and practical advice is to write off the federal government completely. In my mind, they’re essentially an occupying force at this point. Instead, focus on forming local networks and connections. Go to city council meetings, go to local advocacy groups, push for change that you want to see there, and organize with other folks there.

Somebody posted a reverse Tiananmen Square copypasta, where it contained all the talking points that the American mass media and government hates, and this made me think of that. Soon, Chinese trolls will be cutting our internet connections by asking about J6.

Yep, had republicans I know believe Trump when he said he knew nothing about P2025, now here they are following it to the letter.

This is just the start. He’s going to purge every competent person who believes in the national mythology / shows an ounce of backbone and replace them with incompetent yes men. These people tend to be very intelligent, resourceful, and well-connected. I don’t think this will be the last we see of them. Something tells me that giving a whole lot of people who plotted the overthrows of multiple foreign governments lots of time off together maybe isn’t his most brilliant idea yet.

Thanks for the reasonable discussion as well. I dunno, I kinda agree, but I also think that it’s not for nothing that there are Obama-Bernie-Trump voters. The through line there is change, people are desperate for LOTS of it, and the one time in the last 12 years the democrats kind of offered it (Biden), they won. This is the exact moment the Harris campaign was fucking cooked:

https://youtu.be/QVD17hg4O7o

That should have set off more alarms than the control room at Chornobyl. Talking down to your base for not supporting you enough is a really, really, really bad sign (and look) and someone should have hit the panic button. Instead, they played it like 2016 and made a bunch of celebrity appearances.

Look, blame me if it makes you feel better, but imo the democrats were trying to play with fire by trapping voters between Trump and their donors and betting that they wouldn’t pick Trump. Then, they went and did it a second time. All I’m saying then and now is that we’d be better off-- both in terms of being further from Nazis AND in terms of winning elections-- not playing with that fire and actually doing a meaningful campaign. It’s like watching your kid touch the stove twice in a row (while telling them not to, mind you) and getting mad at the stove for burning them.

Ah, yes, John Kasich’s well known clean energy, free college, marijuana decriminalization, corporate tax raising, LGBT supporting, pro-DEI, anti-price gouging, pro-choice, public healthcare expansion platform

Harris was some of those, yes, but I think you’re being pretty generous in a few places here.

I’m not happy Trump won, and that’s why I think it’s important to hold Democrats accountable for their fuckups that got us here, rather than letting them blame the voters. I think that Not Trump isn’t a compelling message- regardless of whether you or I think it SHOULD be- and that the democrats, much more than a few dorks online, did a lot of work turning off their own base in the last 12 years in exchange for peeling off, idk, like five Republicans.

Not necessarily let’s get it over with as much as “let’s stop ratcheting right in order to win some elections and make stuff better”. Since 2016, there has NEVER been a good time to vote third party or criticize the democrats. Basically, since Trump got on scene, the democrats became so completely fragile that you can’t say bad stuff about them or disagree with them or they’ll lose :(

But let’s get real. The Harris campaign didn’t have a lot of meat to offer people, their entire strategy was “not Trump”. That’s not great, but then it’s also “not Trump” while telling everyone that the economy is fine actually, that they’re going to keep giving Israel billions in bombs but don’t worry because they’re totally going to do the ceasefire this time, that they’re going to crack down on the border even harder, and that they’re going to support expanding fracking. They weren’t saying “we’re the opposite of Trump” when they said “not Trump”. This might as well have been a Republican primary with John Kasich vs Trump.

Well, anyway, I guess a few of us shattered the Harris campaign into a trillion tiny pieces when we tried to push for good policies that might have actually won them the election. Snark aside, I am legitimately disappointed that this is where things are at; we should have been able to fix it, but we didn’t have the political will, and now we’ve already got democrats signalling the eagerness to work with the Trump presidency. We’re here now, can we please talk about how to make stuff better yet?

Look, my dude. The democrats were basically just trailing the republicans by maybe 12 years. At best, this victory would have bought us just a few more years of uneasy status quo and failing to address the causes and conditions that brought us to this point. As things were, we were getting our Nazi arc sooner or later. I’d rather choose no Nazis at all, and have the uncomfortable conversations needed to make that happen. Until we address the conditions that brought us to this point, we would, at any rate, inevitably tip into open fascism; shutting up, falling in line, and hoping that they’ll win if we don’t think bad thoughts about the democrats won’t fix it. Let’s face it, there wasn’t a political appetite for fixing it in the next four years, as there wasn’t in the last four years (see: Merrick Garland). We needed to fix it, and we still do.

Just so I’m clear, I’ve read chunks of Project 2025. My kids are on the chopping block. I am begging the democrats to do better than being diet Nazi.

Tl;Dr the election was the only place that we had to have that discussion.

Look, there was a primary in the literal sense, I voted in it, but there wasn’t a primary in the practical sense. There were no debates, no discussion of his platform for '24, Biden didn’t campaign, and the Democratic party / Biden Campaign worked HARD to shut down questions about Biden’s viability or the Mandela effect where everyone seemed to remember him promising to be a single term president. I mean, I could swear I remember it too; I’m still puzzled about where so many folks got the idea. Then, once we were way past the primary, we found out that Biden was nowhere even near viable shape for the campaign trail. He put on the most disastrously bad debate performance in presidential debate history against an opponent that should have been (and was just four years prior) a joke. None of his other “see? He’s fine” appearances before or after inspired much faith either. So, we basically ended up with Harris and zero discussion about her platform. At first, I was really excited and eager to see what her platform would be. As time went on, though, I started seeing more and more that reminded me of HRC '16 and less meat to get excited about. If there had been a real primary in a practical sense, I would not have voted for Harris (and didn’t vote for Biden, I think I voted Phillips) on the platform she had.

The primaries are a time for the campaigns to work with voters and figure this stuff out, see what appeals to the base and is likely to get them to turn out. We never got to have that conversation with Harris, we barely had it at all with Biden. The only place we could have it is during the election, and my hope was (and remains) that campaigns are agile enough to respond when their base gives them feedback. I don’t support the Democrats because they’re Democrats, I support them because they offer the closest practical path to policies I want to see enacted. I want to see good policy win, and I think good policy will get the democrats their wins. We can’t ever improve if we can’t be accept criticism, and when it comes to politics, the appropriate way to criticize is a bit like finding the appropriate way to protest according to Fox News. We need to have these conversations to get better, and I absolutely do blame the Harris and Biden campaigns for putting themselves in such vulnerable positions and failing to respond appropriately to criticism. Their job is to get elected, and they failed.

If all it took was people on social grumbling about their terrible policy plank to sink the campaign, maybe, just maybe, they ran a shit campaign and there’s lessons to be learned.

Not only that, but many (but not all) of the implementations of those policies were either middling or incomplete, and there was still so much further to go on progressive economic policies, that it was truly baffling to me that they basically rolled out the “mission accomplished” banner on the economy when the 2024 campaigns were asked about it. Democrats seem terminally terrified of casting stones within the party, to the point of refusing to acknowledge the reality that voters are experiencing because it might make the guys not seeking election look bad. It was frustrating to see that while I was financially worse off then when Biden took office, as was almost everyone else I knew, the democrats were crowing about how great the economy was and essentially declaring economic victory for Biden. I remember getting banned by more than one Mastodon account and labelled a Trump supporter when I raised concerns that this messaging was going to fail to resonate.

It’s similarly frustrating now to see the Democratic party leadership and presidential campaign staff saying “well, yes, that makes twice we’ve lost what should have been the easiest election ever, but we made no mistakes and have nothing to learn here except that we need to be more like Republicans.” Likewise, it’s concerning to see Democrats legitimizing this administration and already announcing that they’re eager to work with them where their priorities align. It makes me think a lot about how back in the 30s, the capitalists were all too ready to align with the Nazis, and a big chunk of the democrats are occupied by the crony capitalist block. I really hope the democrats as a party can get their shit together on a national level, but I’m not counting on it. I’m expecting a lot of lip service about resistance as 96% of them fall in line.

They did do some of it in 20, but Biden actually brought some stuff to the table; two things that spring to mind are student loan forgiveness and national passenger rail revitalization, there’s probably some others I can’t think of ATM. Yeah, in hindsight, the loan forgiveness ended up not being much to write home about, and the rail revitalization might be getting derailed, but at least he had some actually useful and interesting policy planks besides “not Trump” and “look, it’s [celebrity]!”