Comment on I'm gonna mute this one
Tja@programming.dev 18 hours agoTheir talking points were the typical that are considered “leftist” in America (and centrist in Europe): universal Healthcare, free education/forgiving student debt, etc. Whether they were bots or not is impossible to say in this day and age.
Wolf@lemmy.today 18 hours ago
Well, do you think it’s at all likely or remotely reasonable that someone who was in favor of universal healthcare and free education would prefer a fascist dictator over a center-right Dem? It may not be possible to know for sure, but there certainly are signs.
Were these people in r/politics or on Facebook by any chance? It’s not surprising that the most popular places online to discuss politics would be a prime target for bots and Russians posing as American leftists.
After Biden finally dropped out, I was advocating we try and get anyone other than Harris- someone who might actually win, on the ballot, but that is not the same as saying I would vote for Trump or not Vote.
I can 100% relate to people who didn’t want to vote for Harris, I didn’t want to vote for her, but our election system gives us very little choice in the matter.
Tja@programming.dev 17 hours ago
I don’t go on Facebook and my Facebook circles weren’t interested in us politics anyway. It was r/politics, news, memes, latestagecapitalism, basically everywhere, both on reddit and lemmy. They are still here, every new gop fuck up asking why democrats didn’t do anything to stop it. They are in this very comment section.
Back then the argument was “I cannot support biden (later Harris) because they are not perfect on issue X”. I do believe people can be so stupid. Maybe they didn’t vote for trump, but definitely actively discouraged people from voting blue.
Wolf@lemmy.today 15 hours ago
Again, I’m not sure where you are from but I’m sure its hard to understand what it’s like to be an American right now. People criticize the Democrats because most of us who aren’t Republicans (which lumps all Liberals in with Leftists) want better than the scraps we have been thrown.
Every since I was a kid and able to pay attention to politics, the Democrats have been asking us to vote for someone who is problematic, but better than the alternative. “Vote the lesser of two evils” they say, or you will be handing the country over to a monster. And every election the Dems head more and more to the right. But in the Land of the Free we have no fucking other alternatives. We either accept the shit that is forced upon us, or allow a monster to rule. So no, putting Democrats on blast for ‘not being perfect’ is not the same thing as discouraging people to vote.
How many times did you ask yourself if the comment you are reading might have come from and been upvoted by a bot or foreign agent? Because Americans do have to be vigilant for that. Also, it’s highly likely that republicans reading such a comment would upvote it as well.
You don’t think that its the Democrats job to try and stop the GOP? You don’t think that’s what the people who voted for them want them to do? If you look at those comments chances are they are complaining about the Democrats who are actually not doing anything to try and stop it. We aren’t asking that about the ones who are trying but failing.
I wish it were as simple as ‘not being perfect’. I would kill to have a party I could vote for that was 99% of the way there. Fuck I’d be happy with 70% honestly. I don’t blame you for not keeping a super close eye on American politics, but Biden is one of the people directly responsible for our disgusting, ill conceived, immoral, ineffective, and harmful ‘War on Drugs’. He’s part of the reason violence is as high as it is. He’s one of the people directly responsible for the insane incarceration rates. He helped make it legal for the cops to LITERALLY steal from Americans. “Not perfect”? Fuck off with that shit.
Harris isn’t any better, as California’s AG she fought the Supreme Court for YEARS to keep human beings locked up in prisons so overcrowded that even the SCOTUS ruled that it was ‘Cruel and Unusual Punishment’ (that’s actually illegal here believe it or not) Why? So she could use those prisoners as literal slave labor (We didn’t get rid of Slavery entirely in the U.S., it’s still ok if the Government does it). She also fought to make ‘Civil Asset Forfeiture’ even easier for the cops (the whole “it’s legal for the cops to steal from you” thing). She’s a ‘Tough on Crime’ right winger and always has been, despite what Fox news has to say about her. She and Biden were perfect- for each other.
As you rightly point out what passes for ‘the left’ in America is considered centrist in Europe, and you want us to what? Thank our lucky stars that the Democrats aren’t literal fascists? Are we supposed to just accept worse and worse out of the DNC until one day we are voting for literal fascists because the alternative is a super-ultra-mega fascist?
Tja@programming.dev 13 hours ago
I feel you, my point is that the time for fighting for a better democrat candidate is during the primaries (or now), not during an election. Plenty of “leftists” online (and real people like Muslims in Michigan who said it on TV) actively shit talked Harris weeks before the election.
And every time the primaries come, people decide quite decisively that they want the problematic candidate (Clinton, Biden) over the one that would bring change.
And the second topic, why the democrats don’t do anything to stop the gop, two things:
because they fucking can’t, the are in the minority fucking everywhere. Americans had 4 years of trump, the covid debacle, the Capitol assault, the Georgia thing, the criminal convictions, the sexual assaults and the nuclear secrets in the shitter (to name a few), then 4 years of Biden where Israel continued to kill Palestinians as they always have and eggs got expensive and they decided to go back to trump in a landslide. No amount of boring speeches or whatever redditors and lemmings accuse the dems of justify that. The plurality of American voters (almost a majority) are morons with the memory of a goldfish and now they are looking to shift the blame for what they themselves have caused. We voted for trump, but how could we know wlyhat he would do X? (besides him saying “I will do X” repeatedly on TV, X being a part of project 2025 and trump voters wearing t-shirts “X is coming” constantly at rallies). Why arent democrats saving us now, X is all their fault.
why isn’t the question: “why are the Republicans doing it?” in the first place…