Guys

Every single RCV initiative that I am aware of has come from a ballot referendum

Just put it on the ballot. Y’all are adding too many extra steps that require cooperation from the political class.

Hey, neat! It’s a couple of talking points.

When people hold up dollar amounts like Biden is doing a lot, that number is inflated by fraudulent interest

“They are lying to you about numbers, don’t pay attention to the numbers! Just in general; no numbers. Pay attention to my vague, inflated, ever-shifting claims, instead.”

Biden is just paying with our tax money.

“This politician is spending our money!” (mostly this one is emotional impact – it is true that practically everything the government does is spending people’s tax dollars, but suggesting that some specific thing is them spending your money is alarming to people on a survival level and triggers this kind of hatred for the situation overall)

But he’s literally doing the bare minimum

“Okay, he is making progress, but it doesn’t count!”

drastically overpaying meaning for the same dollar amount, more people should be getting loan forgiveness.

Literally no idea what you are talking about here. I think you messed up by making it too specific, so it’s factually untrue – you gotta keep it within the realm of technically true but wildly misleading things (“paying with our tax money”).

Are you suggesting that when Biden forgives $10k of student loan debt, the borrower is receiving less than $10k worth of forgiveness? How would that even work? I think you got too excited at the keyboard and let your typing-froth get too close to factual reality and kind of exposed the fact that it’s all made up bad faith bullshit.

It sounds great if you only read headlines tho…

“I’m the well informed one! If you disagree with me you are foolish / naive / victim of propaganda / etc!”

Making excuses for Biden always just ends up arguing against moderate politicians like Biden. It’s their fault we’re in this shitty situation to begin with

Bringing factual reality = “making excuses for Biden”

General bad faith bitterness and blaming. It’s actually pretty remarkable how effective this is at turning “Biden tried to forgive $500B in student loans and has been fighting against efforts to stop him and still has succeeded in forgiving $167B and is still trying to do more” into “it’s his fault student loans even exist in the first place! Fuck him for pretending to care with his massive student loan forgiveness program positively impacting millions of people!”

Overall I rate this like a 4/10. You hit a bunch of general points that can produce an emotional impact and could literally be applied to anything, and you hit honestly a pretty good rhythm of nonstop firehosing claims wrapped up in a way that they could produce an impact. You got too factual, though; even one claim that is objective and testable and 100% false (the thing about “drastically overpaying” which doesn’t even make sense as applied to student loan forgiveness), can sort of snap people back into the realization that you’re just jabbering anything you can come up with to attack Biden with no connection to reality.

you were talking about FPTP and asked if I wanted dems to lose instead

Incorrect

Want I said was “What do you want them to do, try to lose, instead?”

Can you compare and contrast those two statements and why they are radically different?

There was also a pretty central point I made towards the end of the message, which you seem to have missed. I’ll give a hint: It was that quite a lot of Democrats have been s_ppor_ing efforts to reform the voting system so that third parties could have a decent chance of winning

And I had a link which listed quite a lot of them by name

Can you fill in the missing two letters in my fill in the blank? I’m tryin to make it easy to recall my argument here, which you seem to have missed in a particular ironic fashion hence the whole runaround of asking you what I had said.

I don’t think you are a bot, no. I think you forgot what I said, and what you replied with had absolutely no bearing on any point that I made or the link I included. You just kinda had something you wanted to say, and didn’t notice the relationship that existed between the points that I had made and the things you were typing “in response” to them, just kind of went ahead with typing your talking points as if I hadn’t said something that related to them in a pretty direct way.

So… what was it? I mean, you made a reply to me, so presumably you were responding in some sense to what I wrote down, so you should be able to skim your reply and recall what I linked to and remember your thought process when you were typing it up in response to the reply that you definitely read and understood. Right? Or not?

Hmm fascinating

So, I just now edited to take away my comment that you were responding to. Can you tell me what my comment said before I edited it? I.e. what parts of it you were responding to when you typed your response?

(Temporarily removed to make a point. Here’s the original comment, now restored:)

The Democrats’ etc etc is yet another example of their fear of things that will lose them elections in the FPTP system. What do you want them to do, try to lose, instead? Say “yes split the vote so the other people will win and start shooting everyone’s pets on sight if they look Mexican or whatever our opponents want to do?”

Reform the voting system

If only some of the supporters of that reform were Democrats, it might be gaining traction in some places

Oh wait

what matters is Harris said it to show solidarity to the workers in the US to garner their votes

What a perfectly sensible reason to let Trump come to power and order the military to start shooting protestors with live ammunition

Surely, the metrics of your political decision making are totally logical

I think he’s foolish enough to get on board with a presidential campaign which is purely designed to benefit conservative candidates.

Several people on Lemmy have told me they respect his view or his insight on American society or etc. I’ve listened to a couple of his speeches (including ones that were specifically recommended to me), couldn’t really arrive at anything that was being argued within them other than an occasional vague nod to the idea that imperialism and corporate oppression are bad, came back and asked okay what specific things do you like about what he says? No one yet has even attempted to answer that question.

He’s a pure spoiler candidate, and one of his top two campaign priorities I ran across trying to get a handle on him was to stop aid to Ukraine. He’s bullshit.

aspoilerfakeleftistsayswhat

100% the same

Dude I’ve never been so happy to be wrong as fuck

I had a feeling you wouldn’t have an answer for what her messaging should be / what she should do instead.

Honestly, like I say, I do sort of agree that it’s off-putting and misleading messaging, and that maybe it would be better to make some sort of attempt to communicate what’s actually going on and what the Democrats have been trying to do (since our media seems uninterested in doing that fairly important thing.) But, it is complex. Maybe it is right to just talk “border security”, lean into that, and if people get confused but still vote for her, then whatever it is fine.

But yes it’s a bunch of shit to attack her with headlines that claim she said something she never said. IDK if she will make a genuine attempt to fix the border, but Biden did make that genuine attempt, and you attacked him with precisely the same messaging, so I think it’s fair to call this one bad faith also.

(Edit: Also I see what you meant about “angry”; I went back in fixed it in my message)

Hello! Okay so, one, she didn’t say that. The quote was:

“Our administration worked on the most significant border security bill in decades. Some of the most conservative Republicans in Washington, D.C., supported the bill. Even the Border Patrol endorsed it. It was all set to pass, but at the last minute, Trump directed his allies in the Senate to vote it down.”

There’s also a quote that’s a little closer, from this pretty good article about the rally where this all happened:

“Donald Trump does not care about border security — he only cares about himself,” Harris said. “As president, I will bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed, and I will sign it into law, and show Donald Trump what real leadership looks like," she said.

So, she’s not claiming she’s tougher on border policy than Trump is, but it is fair to say she is pivoting to a “border security” narrative. In order to explain why she wants to pass a border bill, it is necessary to explain what is actually going on at the border. Because our media is shit, almost no one knows; I suspect she’s pivoting to “border security” as a narrative because she’s being attacked from the right on it, and because something genuinely does need to be done, and she wants to lay the groundwork for making the attempt. But anyway. What is happening is that there are two big problems in immigration in this country:

1. There’s a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons
2. We’re rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #1), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it’s fuckin dangerous

There’s also a problem that the whole agency in charge of the border police is for the most part made of racist people, but that one is unfixable unless Harris can fire the whole agency en masse and then find 40,000 people who want to be immigration police who are not racist. So, unfixable. The other two problems do have legislative solutions, but the Republicans blocked anything Biden did, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don’t wait for a year before their case is heard).

And, any time a Democrat tries to do anything about any of this, e.g. reducing the rate of people allowed to come across the border, or increasing the number of judges to reduce the backlog, or increasing funding for ICE, everyone on the left as far as I can tell thinks they’re just being cruel on purpose for no reason and gets really mad.

So, OP: What should the Democrats do? You are (edit angry) attacking them because they are talking about border security and trying to fix this mess. What should their messaging be instead (since you seem angry about this particular messaging, which again, you kind of have a point about “tough on the border” being a callous message in addition to feeding into the false media narrative)? And, what their legislative action?

49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power”

Nearly all of these statements are, I think, undeniable if you’re paying attention. I’m surprised the percentages are so low.

“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys.”

(Emphasis mine)

And that is exactly the point where the misinterpretation train leaves the station. The excitement generated by Bernie Sanders / Beto O’Rourke / etc seems to suggest otherwise.

If you wanted to check whether young voters feel that the right answer to that bleakness you asked them about is to give up on politics and let whatever happens happen, rather than to get involved and fix it, you could have asked them that directly. My observation is that they are voting and getting involved in protest movements a lot more so than other younger generations in the recent past, but it kinda sounds like you don’t want that to be true, so you asked them something different and then decided that they said something different than they did.