A conscience really is a goddamn hindrance in this world rather than a net positive.

Sort of. People without a conscience and without the power, privilege and/or social tools to abuse that often also end up pretty badly. Like how narcissism can lead both to (unwanted) social isolation, or even prison time, and then also sometimes to a successful business/political career or creating your own adoring cult, depending on other factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic to the person.

EDIT: Accidentally posted while still typing and reading, aaah, this is unfinished.

EDIT2: Okay, this is as done as I will do it, I also looked at the clock, and I won`t be awake for long now anyway.

EDIT3: Okay, this one is the last one, I really have to get to bed, because I am also noticing how diving into this is not good for my health. But turns out you can disregard the stuff I wrote below except for the last sentence, and me still thinking the data is more ambivalent narrative-wise. But while I still maintain the language was confusing, I finally noticed an unambivalent line from the survey: “Of the following issues, choose any that played a role in your [vote for presidential candidate/decision to not to vote for president]. Check all that apply.” So, yes, this was indeed also non-voters.

I admit, now that I explicitly checked, that is also how I would interpret (from the PDF):

This survey is based on 604 interviews conducted by YouGov on the internet of registered voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and not Kamala Harris in 2024.

But it is also just ambivalent enough to create questions when combined with the language of the article: Since both the study and the article seem to be by the same institute, I doubt it’s a miscommunication error. The language of the article is repeatedly so specific.

For Biden 2020 Voters Who Cast A Ballot For Someone Besides Harris

29% of voters nationally who voted for Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Kamala Harris

When Biden 2020 voters cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024

And then there are questions in the PDF like:

Next, think back to how you voted in 2024. You will see issues that some say may have impacted their vote. For each of those, please say how you feel about that issue.

That seem to indicate that this indeed only targeted people that did vote.

So, colour me genuinely confused, it seems like such a specific and deliberate usage of language. And I have to admit, it feels weird to me, especially considering the IMEU has an interest in making Gaza the most important topic. Note that the same numbers of the survey could also be used to support different narratives, like: 68% said abortion access was important to them and influenced how they voted in 2024, vs 27% saying the same about violence in Gaza. Or Question 12 vs 13, showing that on a policy difference exclusively on Gaza, the people surveyed would still predominately support the Democrat, and only 8% mention not voting if the Democrat supports Israel unconditionally. So, this also does not fit the narrative neatly.

But if this does indeed represent non-voters as well, and one third of those truly did not vote because of Gaza, yes, that is indeed a large enough group to swing close results in battleground states.

Ah, thank you, my search-fu did not provide me good numbers like that.

However, unless I am misreading them heavily, those numbers don’t seem to lay out what you mention. They are exclusively about “Biden 2020 Voters Who Cast A Ballot For Someone Besides Harris”. Again - I don’t think that group is large enough, because even combined, all the left-of-Democrats third party votes seem to be negligible. That is “29% of voters nationally who voted for Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Kamala Harris in 2024”. So, again, if I combine Jill Stein, Cornell West, and Claudia De la Cruz, that is 0.72% of the popular vote. Even with a naive calculation of taking all 29% of those that would then be commies like that, that seems like not enough to put Trump into office, unless highly concentrated in very embattled swing states.

EDIT: OK, I forgot, that means also people voting Trump, not just third party. So the influence could theoretically be more. But I doubt commie agitprop pushed a lot of people to outright voting Trump.

Hmm, maybe, it is always hard to prove an effect like that. Best one could do is exit polling with specific questions of what influenced the decision, and other polls in general. I was interested what polling was available there, most I found was just non-voters as a larger group, which seems to be predominately non-politically engaged and mostly centrist. One article I have found seems to indicate the non-voting Democrats don’t really fit the narrative of being swayed by radical left influencers and agitprop either.

I am also unsure how visible those kind of influencers were on mainstream social media, as I am not active there at all. I always had the feeling they were mostly visible in their own bubbles and by people who got angry at them, thus also getting them served by the algorithms. Their effect on motivating people to stay home, I’d be genuinely interested in seeing in polling numbers, but I sadly could not find any polls with questions like “who influenced your decision to not vote”.

In general, psychology-wise, I think motivating people to stay home that would have voted otherwise is I believe a much lower effect, than the failure in motivating people to get up and vote, who would have stayed home otherwise. Which was not the responsibility of those commie influencers the way I estimate it. However - I admit there may have been an effect: By inducing fatigue in activists that had to argue with them, taking away time and resources for trying to reach and motivate properly undecided non-voters.

I am European, so, an outsider perspective, but…

I’d love to know actual numbers, because I get the feeling “commies who voted third party” are too small a group to swing elections. Just a quick look at the numbers on Wikipedia give 0.11% for the Socialism and Liberation candidate. Jill Stein got more, as did RFK even after he had withdrawn already, but I doubt they were the popular choice of the communists arguing here on Lemmy during the election campaign. (Where I, personally, argued for voting for first Biden, then Harris, because I did not see the left in the US as organised enough to react to the kind of oppression Trump would bring early, whereas I’d wager a Democrat would not have escalated like this. Just to root my own bias for context.)

I am not saying it is impossible that they could have swung a very close state, but I admit, I do think it is very improbable.

So, this feels very much like impotent rage to me, directed at the annoying but ultimately equally impotent agitprop people on here. They are loud on here, but do you really think they were that influential during the election?

As just a personal thing, the original mute watching was so surreal and unique, I enjoyed it more - solving the mystery of what is happening from what’s shown visually alone (and some subdued music) - but that is a deeply subjective thing.

you should also get back together with that girlfriend and be on the phone with her while you watch it.

Oh no, I couldn’t do that to her, she definitely deserved better.

That is a possible explanation, although I think it was weirder than that, because I remember checking some “obvious” settings like that afterwards. I also re-encoded the file with VLC media player out of curiosity, where it should have just re-encoded whatever audio track it had, without adjusting it to a specific output device, and the resulting file then also had the same issue when played in SMPLayer (whereas the original worked in SMPlayer).

I might still have both files laying around on my NAS, but I myself at least don’t really have the energy right now to go into a rabbit hole again years after the fact, and sharing them would be non-trivial.

So, I once watched The Lighthouse together with my then girlfriend remotely, being in a long distance relationship at the time. We used the same file, started at the same time and were in chat together.

The audio codec of this (of course 100% legal) file for some reason did not work with my VLC player properly. There were no voices. But it also wasn’t just complete silence, some music and subtle, surreal sound effects came through. None of this was happening for my ex, btw, even though we had the same file.

Talking about the movie in chat and afterwards was fascinating, I only then realised it was, in fact, not a masterful, purposeful, stylistic choice: A major production not just in black and white, but as a silent movie. I also was able to get the essential things that happened and the important plot points, so that is also another point very much in favour of the film.

One large problem there: All the people that are “stupid” in the way you describe think exactly the same way you do here. It’s why I think arrogance and the inability to stand being humiliated by deferring to other people’s expertise, as well as a feeling of being privileged to be above the needs of other people, as well as a paranoid fear of others intruding on your space is the more pressing problem.

I have lived with and worked with people with actual learning disabilities, thanks to my own different disability, and “stupidity” is not the problem, it’s okay to be stupid. It’s not okay to demand the whole world submit to your emotional wellbeing and feelings of superiority and privilege.

So, to pre-empt a counterargument: It is true, just as numbers, this is a naive calculation. Money does not necessarily equal actually produced goods and services, and a lot of that wealth is not liquid. So, ending poverty is more complicated than just taking money. But reducing it to that, is usually also a straw man.

Firstly: This still means that there has been an increasing flow of actual influence and liquid wealth from the bottom to the top. Just as market dynamics tend to create - consolidation of capital. And with it, markets are less and less capable to service the needs of people.

Then: All that non-liquid money, even if it couldn’t be translated easily into ending poverty without further reforms, is also a tremendous, obscene power base, that kings of old would have only dreamt of, reaching globally. As investments within the purview of the 1%, they at best service their personal human fancies and interests, which can even be philanthropic at times, but even then cannot undo the damage that was necessary to exist for the wealth to be concentrated like that in the first place - and at worst service a rather cold, purely “logical” short-term profit incentive in bundled investments, where even that miniscule human touch of personal fancies has been removed. Having that wealth - or its equivalent in labour power and resources - under the control of 1% of humanity, is deeply undemocratic and follows the logic of further and further concentration of wealth within that system - and history has shown this to happen at the cost of human dignity and life.

And lastly: Even if it gets more complicated than just “take money from the rich and give it to the poor” - that does not mean, that the status quo is not perverse and that redistributing that money is not meaningful. It just means that the social functions of money (investments regulating production; managing access to who gets their needs met and who doesn’t; Regulating what wants beyond needs get fulfilled for whom), have to be re-thought and re-structured more fundamentally - after taking that money to already allow for human dignity and more sustainable investments even within the status quo.

Yupp, don’t let them tell you yet another “compromise” candidate, who “at least isn’t the red elephant person” is gonna cut it. They have been losing elections, they spark no enthusiasm, they are not the “safe option”.

That being said, do organise and network outside of party politics, too. Elections are an important part of everything, they to mould the status quo to some degree, and can heavily shift context of further political work - but getting beyond the structural shit that put Trump into power requires more than that. Joining (preferrably radical) unions, showing up to town halls and the likes, networking with neighbours and friends for mutual aid and emergency support, community defence organisations, civil rights orgs, etc. etc. Both informal and formal organisation is needed wherever you can.

So, the gambit of authoritarian regimes in those situations is: If you see an opposition leaving controlled status and gaining popularity, and you know that suppressing that popularity (at their home) is hard, the main course of action is beating it down, brutally. Thought you could put hope into a candidate of your own choosing as people? Well, we will just put him into a prison and/or deport him, and/or terrorise you with blunt force, while telling everyone outside your group, that you are part of the evil to be defeated.

If that works or backfires on them heavily depends on conviction and organisation of the (working class) people of New York. So if you are part of that, don’t let yourself be intimidated, and be prepared for some fucked up suppression attempts. (best way of preparing is joining with organisations and networking with friends and neighbours for mutual aid and independent communication/info networks when shit hits the fan.)

Right? Remember when “Bushisms” were a thing, they feel almost sensible now, just silly little mistakes in speech. Or how the media discussed that his calls for a fight of “good vs evil” were crossing a line, and people were still concerned abotu that. Or how there was a real discourse that warned, that debating if torture is “sometimes justified” would lead to a descend into barbarism…

Lords are nothing without peasants, but they can also never fully acknowledge the rights of peasants to existence and dignity. It’s the master servant dialectic in new clothes with all its usual trappings.

https://anubis.techaro.lol/

Meanwhile, the POV bots should be getting:

(I have to set it one up for my Fediverse stuff one of these days as well)

I believe self hosting saves me money in the short term
i believe self hosting saves me money in the long run

I can add to the voices here that have this as one big consideration. With some second-hand hardware, it’s very cheap to set up almost unlimited cloud space for personal use.

the existence of wrong information doesn’t negate the existence of good information on the same medium.

When there are no proper ways to sift through and structure that information, it kind of does, but your point overall is still not wrong, just this part I think misses part of the picture.

people just don’t want to put in any work and want to blame something other than themselves.

Yes, although I dare say that it is not as simple as saying “just do better” and “putting work in” - when there’s a massive amount of work and resources put into getting people de-facto addicted to primarily ad-driven engagement with mostly garbage information.

case in point: maga–how many of us have been outright shouting that trump is a conman, and here’s the literal proof–the information, which is good, is right there. and yet people still choose to death threaten dr. fauci because they “don’t like” the good information.

That, however, very much stands. The original vision really, really thought that truth and quality would win out in a “marketplace of ideas”. However, narcissistic appeasement and a combination of humiliating and then making people feel powerful by proxy wins out, especially considering there is no guiding consensus.

Availability to information is important, and that includes making it possible to sift through the mountains of nonsense, including teaching how to spot nonsense. But on top of that, it requires a solid foundation for society, and a consensus to direct what is true and what not (science, functioning professional journalism, etc.) Otherwise, when there is no consensus guiding towards (but not setting completely in stone) “truth”, it will always be whatever is emotionally convenient from individual to individual - and the dynamics of the system will favour information that both panders to narcissistic self-affirmation (not necessarily positive emotions), as well as beating you down in a way that you crave those from your ego being made fragile to begin with.

That’s an issue that can come up, when your inside guy for market manipulation with all the power necessary for the scheme is also an impulsive narcissist, who never was that bright to begin with, but is also clearly losing some mental faculties due to age, too.

I do think you could be right, but I also think it is a proper dilemma, that it is impossible to really know. An immature attempt at revolution can be impossible to tell apart from a proper revolutionary moment, and a genuinely well-advised conservative “let’s not hastily break something” can be impossible to tell apart from useful idiots for reactionary movements, while living in the historical moment those things are happening. I think, to some degree at least, we just have to accept that uncertainty, and that the course of history is not simply determinable in the chaos of the lived reality.

Doesn’t mean, that there is nothing at all to be analysed, no visions to be had, just that ultimately, every single historical movement will have to live with the reality of “crossing the Rubicon”-moments, where no amount of knowledge, no amount of theory, no amount of smug analysis can really tell the outcome.

I, personally, think advancements beyond social democracy should be possible already - I think the basic ideas laid out in the Gotha Critique (overcoming of monetary system through non-exchangeable production/distribution with a voucher-like system), in combination with advancements in Cybernetics already made within the 20th century (as well as computers to better implement the Cybernetics on top of that), could provide for a system, in which necessary labour can be jointly coordinated, with the aim of reducing work days and increasing value in everyday lives, along with a richer use of free time (think: education, makerspaces, creative hobbies like art and programming) beyond socially necessary labour.

But can I be certain? No. Do I think it is worth fighting for? Definitely.