BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software pro

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2 yr. ago

Young people getting out and voting is WHY Biden won.

Yes, young people showing up tipped it that way. It worked out better for Biden than it did for Clinton and I'm really glad about that.

But did they show up because Biden earned their vote, or because a ham sandwich vs. Trump would have got their vote?

By the time we reached the general election, Biden had proven he was the candidate to vote for to cause the most positive change possible.

Certainly in the general he was vastly preferable to Trump, but was he really a better choice in the primary than, say, Sanders or Warren or Buttigieg? I see a lot of confident assertions and untestable claims about that, but I suspect we'd all do well to consider the Democratic primaries as first and foremost a money contest, as secondly a process by which the money people signal to the voters which candidates they will support or tolerate- and in which whoever designates "the candidates that can win" has leverage to get voters to give up on what they might really want in order to get someone who "can win". In other words, are the primaries really a way of getting to know the will of the people, or are they a means of pressuring a critical mass of people to vote a way the donors will accept and then presenting that as the genuine will of the people?

There's a certain begging-of-the-question involved when we use confident claims about who "can win" to influence the way people vote. After all,

Folks got to pay for news to get good news.

Unfortunately, partisan propaganda and outright disinformation is free, while factual and informative news tends to be behind paywalls

This has a way of segregating people that don't have discretionary money to subscribe to news services into epistemic bubbles, and the bubble dwellers' votes count for just as much as everybody else's. In a democracy, you really do need voters in general to be informed and unfortunately, not everybody in the media/politics sphere wants everybody to be informed and some folks in there just want people indoctrinated into their way of thinking.

Stop being an entitled idiot and Vote.

Please don't assume I'm entitled or an idiot, and I do vote.
I vote consistently for Democrats in the general because they're the least-bad option. I participate in the primaries. I am trying to help, try not to shoot the messenger.

With that said, this was a pitch-perfect example of jumping to the wrong conclusion and being a jerk about the thing you imagined (even though I am not it). I should be allowed to express frustration over what I see as self-defeating behavior, and sure enough you volunteered to exemplify it by turning what could have been a constructive exchange into a shitty one. Do better.

The 2016 and 2020 elections both had historically high turnouts.

2016's turnout was 55% of eligible voters. That's not historically high. Clinton underperformed Obama in total votes received.

2020's turnout was historically high- it's tough to say whether that was all anti-Trump energy (in which a ham sandwich with a (D) next to its name could have won, or if it was all pro-Biden energy that no other Democrat could have received (but TBH, I kinda suspect it's more the former than the latter)

Would Bernie have been able to get more votes than Biden, then follow it up by passing as much impactful legislation (e.g., the IRA) as Biden did? We can’t really know

Probably not, given that centrists seem to prefer kneecapping progressives to supporting them.

As for things we "can't really know", we do know 100% that Clinton didn't win in 2016, and that resulted in flipping SCOTUS rightward for a generation, the overturn of Roe, it meant that we'd have the pandemic under leadership that just wanted people to pretend it wasn't there and sacrifice themselves for the economy, it was a terrible shit-show and the biggest thing we all got was ballooning debt so the billionaires could get their tax cuts and American foreign policy experienced setbacks from which it may never recover.

He’d be labeled a full commie

So was Biden. So was Obama. So was FDR. So was Kennedy. So was LBJ. They've called every Democrat to the left of Hoover a communist since Woodrow Wilson's administration. This "oh no, we have to nominate people that republicans will accept or they'll call us names" nonsense is quite possibly the worst sort of preemptive-surrender politics imaginable and I imagine it has something to do with why young people don't vote

They don’t exist. Not in politics, at least. All we get are crooks and 80 year olds.

In a real way, both major parties are still fighting out the battles of the civil rights era, and are effectively led by people who came of age then. Unfortunately, that they (or their ideas) are still running the show in the way that they are means both parties are stuck in a particular past, forever trying to avoid the calamity they're fighting to un-do

The GOP's leadership is fighting like a wounded animal to un-do desegregation and Roe, and to dismantle voting rights and industrial regulation

The Dem's leadership have spent decades fighting super-hard to prevent their voters from advancing progressives out of primaries and into general elections. McGovern's loss in 1972, they think, is forever evidence that progressives can't win and their subsequent curb-stomping of progressives (denying them party support, fighting hard to prevent them from winning primaries) serves as evidence to their way of thinking that 'progressives can't win'.

That this last bit (progs can't win, never mind we make sure they can't, so you have to vote for what wins or else all is lost) begs the question it pretends to answer seems pretty obvious to me. It has the same energy as saying 'socialism doesn't work' and then pointing to socialist governments that 'didn't work' because CIA ran coups to depose them and replace them with right-wing dictatorships. Of course these things don't work when you kill them off, the whole argument becomes self-fulfilling and circular.

the primary process on the left actually does select for the strongest candidates.

Does it tho?

The 2016 general election was a contest between candidates with historically low favorables It took just 27.2% of eligible voters (in the right places) to put Trump in the White House Clinton underperformed Obama, while Trump over-performed Romney

If 'Did not vote' had been a candidate in the 2016 general, it would have won in a landslide https://brilliantmaps.com/did-not-vote/

people want progressive policy, but are afraid to vote for progressive politicians, and hedge their bets on the “safe” candidate.

This, so much.

It's so, so exhausting to keep on being told that "voters don't want progressive policies because they don't vote for progressive candidates" when the same people saying that are also the ones working the hardest (and spending the most money) to defeat progressive candidates by presenting them as 'risky' and doing their best to get voters to vote for the candidates backed by more money.

I would love to see American voting switch to Ranked Choice Voting. I'm tired of hearing the parties leverage voters' fear of splitting the vote into compromising on a vote that 'can win'- that pattern wags the dog far too much for my liking.

It's also frustrating to watch the Dems fight against taking up policy that young people say they want because "young people don't vote". It's as if people won't vote for you if you keep on promising not to do the things they want

With the GOP going completely off the rails the easiest path to victory is to simply go middle of the road and pick up all those independents/centrists and conservatives with brains.

I think we may have found out that's a risky strategy in the general election in 2016. It's as if having a choice between a status quo centrist and republican crazies isn't good for turnout- when the American Dream is increasingly regarded to be a cruel joke by young voters and the result is such low turnout that if 'did not vote' had been a candidate it would have won, maybe it's time for the Dems do some soul searching here.

I don’t see him suddenly switching to anything resembling a “strong progressive agenda” because it will just give his GOP opponent ammo to claim “see he’s radical too”.

I don't see him switching either, and in any case it doesn't make sense for him to run away from progressives to avoid being called radical- after all, they're calling him radical anyhow and it's unlikely they'd stop doing that

To the extent that running to 'the center' is seen as just appeasing Republicans in trade for no benefit to anyone but those Republicans (I think it is seen that way by a lot of younger, left and independent voters), I take the view that the one thing the Democrats must do (if they do nothing else) is keep on pressing hard on antitrust enforcement and restoring unions and labor protections and promoting environmental protection. If they don't, I expect a lot of stupid protest votes going to the green party or other splitter factions set there to split the democrats and lower the bar enough for the GOP to heave a fascist boomer into the white house where they will finish the job of dismantling American democracy

As a cyclist I really do look forward to the day where good AI is consistently better than the average-to-worst drivers out there; the bar is depressingly low and the stakes are high.

I write (and test) software for a living and my experience with Tesla as a consumer device is that it's many generations away from being something I would trust.

Also, I've seen what happens to product quality when management overrides its engineers in the way elon does- we get pre-alpha quality out there in the wild, being tested on a public that didn't sign up for that shit

At this point I'm actively evangelizing fedi platforms as functional replacements-

• Insta-> pixelfed
• birdsite-> mastadon/firefish/misskey
• fb-> friendica
• reddit-> lemmy etc

The only thing meta has that's worth anything to me is... my friends and family all have accounts there, it's the only means I have of staying in touch with some of them. If I convince half of them to migrate it's a win-win

It sounds like they’re coming up with stupid terms to create boogeymen and scapegoats

That's exactly what they're doing. It amounts to putting a misleading label on the thing and telling people what the label means instead of what the underlying substance is. Rhetorically speaking, it's 3-card monte and it annoys me so much

At this point facebook is like a needy ex that won't let go. I haven't posted or logged on there in a long time but it keeps on sending email and push notifications

I know, I can turn that sort of thing off, but omg will it STFU already

Yes! your fedi client will spit out a text file (.csv format I think) of accounts you follow, or of accounts following you and I forget how many other kinds of information (like block or mute lists, etc). You can share that with others, or if you decide to migrate to a different instance, you can use that in your new account to automate following of everyone you followed in your old account.

how people find accounts they like to follow.

The low-hanging fruit is sometimes checking out posters that show up in your feed because someone you do follow boosted their post. This sort of amounts to having the people you follow nominate people for you to also follow.

(fwiw, boosting a post just shares it to your followers, liking it just notifies the poster that you liked it)

FWIW you can follow hashtags in mastadon If you know where to look you can see trending hashtags In other fedi clients (particularly firefish) you can configure antennae and channels to give you the ability to have pre-set feed filters and focuses (e.g. search by hashtag, keyword/subject, etc) You can also curate lists (can include people you don't follow if you don't want) in case you want to look at what the law or history or cycling people on fedi are talking about just now. Often when I want to change subject I'll check to see what #lawFedi or #histodon or #biketooter have to offer today

If that sounds a bit like rolling your own algorithms, that's probably because it sort of is

I'm with you on the legislate differently part.

The background of Section 230(c)(2) is an unfortunate 1995 court ruling that held that if you moderate any content whatsoever, you should be regarded as its publisher (and therefore ought to be legally liable for whatever awful nonsense your users put on your platform). This perversely created incentive for web forum operators (and a then-fledgling social media industry) to not moderate content at all in order to gain immunity from liability- and that in turn transformed broad swathes of the social internet into an unmoderated cesspool full of Nazis and conspiracy theories and vaccine disinformation, all targeting people with inadequate critical thinking faculties to really process it responsibly.

The intent of 230(c)(2) was to encourage platform operators to feel safe to moderate harmful content, but it also protects them if they don't. The result is a wild-west, if you will, in which it's perfectly legal for social media operators in the USA to look the other way when known-unlawful use of their platforms (like advertising stolen goods, or sex trafficking, or coordinating a coup attempt, or making porn labeled 'underage' searchable) goes on.

It was probably done in good faith, but in hindsight it was naïve and carved out the American internet as a magical zone of no-responsibility.

I would pay money to see that done! The subject is really not talked about in our schooling well enough; we hear a lot about how throwing off a monarchy meant we now have a legislature and a president, but the transition from colony-under-king to republic carried the judiciary forward as a largely feudal institution.

Under feudal/colonial rule, it used to be trade associations or guilds that would write rules to govern business conduct, but those typically required signoff from the local Lord/Governor's son (or deputy) to be enforceable- the switch to a republic meant there really wasn't an analogous executive signoff so it's not surprising that American corporate power would eventually forge private administrative authority into a sort of sovereign/antidemocratic right to rule their spheres... right up to the point that state and federal governments decided to impose regulation on them.

This conflict, between advocates of private vs public administrative rule, is one of the central threads of the conflict between today's oligarchy and American democracy and it gets far less attention than it deserves.

Until we are able to sort out the cost/tech to make a green-sourced grid (such that the role of utilities is to capture surpluses from when the sun shines and the wind blows and sell it back when transient sources aren't producing) nuclear is going to be an important part of a non-carbon-producing energy portfolio.

Already it's cheaper to bring new solar and wind online than any other sort of electrical production; the fact that those are transient supply sources is the last major obstacle to phasing carbon fuels entirely out of the grid. If nuclear can be brought safely online it could mean pushing the use of fossil energy entirely into use cases where energy density is critical (like military aviation)

Either way, you're not wrong

What the hell is presidential discipline?

It's the spanking they think daddies are supposed to give their misbehaving children to straighten them out. Yes, it's stupid as hell and it tips their hand to clearly show they are already in the mindset of resorting to punishment vs. reason and thinking of the president in the mold of a king vs. a public servant with deliberately limited powers.