There are also people I know (many of whom are relatives) who seem like normal people but then support Trump and all of his policies. I want to think they’re not horrible people and that they’re just brainwashed, but recently I’ve been seeing some of my friends jump on the alt-right bandwagon and posting extremely racist stuff to be “edgy”, even after leaving the far-right culture bubble they lived in. This is the sort of stuff that even when I was still a conservative I would never have thought it would be okay to promote, and I grew up in the same environment they did so it seems like they know perfectly well what they’re doing. After all of this I’m starting to think that maybe many of them are genuinely terrible people.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Recently I looked up what has been going on in various European countries, and it seems like with a lot of them there’s an extreme populist party with about 20% control, there’s a less extreme party that’s still queerphobic and anti-abortion but more willing to compromise with maybe about 15% control, and then there’s more liberal but economically conservative parties parties making it so the total of economically conservative parties including the above two is above 50%. These countries also have actual progressive and even some left-wing representation in government.

Contrast this with the US, which only has a populist party and a socially liberal but economically conservative party that a bunch of people are brainwashed to think is literally communism. There is very little progressive representation even though the country has a significant number of progressives, and people who want less government regulations are voting Republican regardless of their stances on social issues. Meanwhile polls say that opposition to LGBTQ rights and abortion is probably around 30% which is not much different than the European countries I looked at. So I think half the problem is that democracy in the US is basically dysfunctional.

However, 30% opposition to LGBTQ and abortion rights is still fucking bad, and I’m still trying to figure out whether it is the propaganda to blame or the people themselves. Additionally racism and xenophobia had been on the rise everywhere and has basically gained popular support at this point so democracy clearly isn’t going to solve this.

For the average Republican voter yes. Neo-Nazis and rulers are probably more intelligent though.

I have mine set to 18 hours

No, the blood is on liberals who allow the Democrats to support a genocide and get away with it without losing their votes to an anti-genocide candidate. Also on the Democrats for making their platform regressive and boring in favor of their donors so people lose interest in them and they lose.

So it’s the leftists fault for not voting hard enough between two pro-genocide candidates. What were we supposed to do to vote against the genocide, vote third party?

and move where? to another country electing fascists?

I use lemmyverse.net for finding communities

If supporting Kamala is your definition of a leftist echochamber you clearly haven’t browsed Lemmy much

I just don’t get how people are looking at Harris’ stance as being pro-genocide.

Blinken stated here:

In speaking with him the other day after he made his decision about not seeking re-election, what he’s intensely focused on is the work that remains over these next six months to continue the efforts, the work that we’ve been doing, particularly trying to bring peace to the Middle East, ending the war in Gaza, putting that region on a better trajectory

However, as you said earlier:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is the one who wields the power to deny Israel’s aid.

Regarding:

There’s way more background on why Blinken has only stopped two aids and also because of classification reasons, not every stopping of aid can be published

I would like to hear more on this.

A lot of the funds that Israel is getting, is funding they secured before the Gaza invasion.

I did come across this where apparently Israel secured funding through a deal with the Obama administration.

I’m not sure what other reasons there may be that Blinken isn’t stopping the military aid which I would like to hear, but it seems to me like both the Obama and Biden administrations are the ones that pulled us into the genocide and that Blinken is playing the “we are working toward a ceasefire” card while not stopping the genocide, and figures like Harris are also playing the same card while pushing the same anti-protest rhetoric as Zionists. This article does suggest that Harris isn’t going to have Blinken as Secretary of State and that her new pick might be more critical of Israel so it seems like there’s at least some chance she might deviate from what Biden is currently doing; however, the article also suggests that she will have a similar approach to foreign policy as Biden. Aside from that, with the track record of Democrats historically supporting Israel and siding with donors against the interests of people along with their recently having dropped multiple progressive issues, I don’t think people are convinced that Harris (and many Democrats in general) is going to stop the genocide (not saying that Trump who openly supports Israel is going to be any better).

I’m trying to understand how this system works and came across this article from Al Jazeera which, if I’m reading it correctly, is saying that the US did determine gross human rights violations but the Biden administration is refusing to apply the Leahy Law. Doesn’t this mean that Biden does have the authority to stop sending military aid but isn’t, or am I misunderstanding something? Also, aside from Leahy Law why can’t he veto the military aid?

TikTok is popular because it’s addicting, not because it’s useful, so I don’t understand why anyone would use this.

You mean like memes such as this one that deliberately leave out all sorts of context and misrepresent a political issue by oversimplifying it?

Plus we have Democrat-run cities implementing AI to spot homeless people, so add that to both rails as well

Trump is targeting mostly far-right evangelicals who have a common vision on what they want the country to look like. He has a lot of energy when doing so, and because of how similar their interests are he could get away with all sorts of stuff and they would still vote for him.

Harris (and Democrats in general) is the only alternative mainstream candidate that everyone else has, and that “everyone else” consists of all sorts of people with conflicting interests: liberals, neoliberals, centrists, progressives, leftists, different religious groups or cultures, varying economic demographics, racial minorities, LGBTQ, and immigrants for instance. They’re trying to appeal to all of them at once, but because they don’t have a shared vision, nobody is happy and they get more scrutinized. To make at least some of them happy, they need to focus on certain groups and deprioritize the interests of other groups. However, once they do that then the groups they deprioritize get angry since they no longer have representation, and the groups that are still there remain skeptical because of the history of not working for their interests in the past.

The advantage that third parties like PSL have is that from the start, they’re trying to appeal to a specific group of people with a common vision like Trump is instead of trying to play both sides with conflicting groups and making nobody happy. The problem (aside from the election duopoly bought out by corporations) is that they are a very small political minority so they have no real chance of winning the election without winning over people from other groups which is a challenge, especially when there are many more unknowns when it comes to progressing than there are when it comes to reverting to a previous state so there is more fragmentation due to those sort of disagreements.

If she took a firm stance on stopping the killing in Gaza the electoral college could very easily hand their votes to trump.

Why couldn’t they do a better job pushing Palestine as a civil rights issue and raising awareness among their voter base like they’ve successfully done with LGBTQ and women’s rights? Or at the very least pretend to support Israel to appear more centrist while stopping the genocide instead of pretending to support Palestinians then handing Israel tons of weapons? Plus it seems like many voters are more concerned about our own economy than what’s happening on the other side of the world, so regarding combining pro-Palestine with their current economic policies I don’t see how that would be a big issue in attracting undecided voters. The only real obstacle I can think of here is donors and the media beholding the party to their interests, which is a much bigger problem than just the electoral college.

Edit: Wait I think I misread your post, I assumed you were talking about swing states controlling the outcome not the electors themselves.

I ended up in a debate yesterday about who is more likely to win the election and looked into this more carefully, this article if I am reading it correctly is saying that Harris dropped 0 percentage points and Trump dropped 1 percentage points and assumed that the 1 percentage point was voters headed toward Stein, which seems very odd and clickbaity and I’m honestly disappointed this article was posted and taken seriously.

Right now Al Jazeera is saying that Arab American voters are tied 41 to 42 percent Harris and Trump respectively, compared to 59 percent Biden in 2020 and 17 percent Biden in 2023. Which would make me assume about 20% voting for Stein coming from previous Democrat voters making them a loud minority. I’ve also seen multiple anecdotes of Harris winning over Republican votes so it seems like that 1% drop in Trump support could be coming from that rather than people leaving Trump for Stein. So what I said earlier was probably BS it looks like (although I’m kind of surprised the Trump support is this high).

What would you call Alpine Linux?

Maybe they have a way to unblock major search engine crawlers but block it for everyone else now? I know Cloudflare was doing something similar for some bot protection mechanism, and this seems like something news outlets would want to do also.

Doesn’t NYT cut off most of the article now? I used to just be able to disable JS but that didn’t work anymore last I checked.