Some people will be miserable no matter who is running
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Some people think criticizing is the same thing as not supporting.
If you want things to get better, you have to honestly and critically examine your leaders, not blindly support them and pretend they are flawless. Shutting down criticism is short-sighted nonsense and will only lead to worse candidates in the future.
Right. The problem with the current political atmosphere in America is that only one of the two parties is actually self-critical. The other is a cult of personality that can do no wrong. They set the reality from the top, and everyone below falls in line.
Only one side of the political aisle in the US will ever actually admit they were wrong about something instead of doubling down on it. Only one side will, at this point, admit defeat even.
In a Real Politik sense, this is a weakness.
Even Fox was calling out the tone after Trump was shot. They acknowledged Trump himself has used language akin to encouraging violence on many occasions, while the worst the left has done is label him a fascist - a mostly accurate term. Yet, people had been praising those violent remarks while calling out democrats, even after discovering the shooter was a devout Republican.
There is no introspection among them.
even after discovering the shooter was a devout Republican.
Was he? He’d voted in what, one election as a registered Republican and made one tiny donation to ActBlue. I doubt he was a terribly devout anything politically. I suspect once more about him becomes public it’s going to be about fame seeking.rather than a political message. After all his name is going to be in the history books, and would have been there more prominently if he’d landed the shot.
They interviewed his colleagues at school and they were adamant that he was very much on the conservative side.
Then why target Trump? Surely he wrote some kind of something about his goal there? I doubt he thought killing Trump would trigger the meteoric rise of a “true” conservative leader who would mobilize the right under Trump’s martyrdom and that no one would notice his political affiliation in the process.
You can ask him, if you’d like…
The working theory is that he was part of Project 2025, and felt betrayed (as all of Trump’s former supporters have been) when he disavowed himself of involvement in it (as he pretty much had to since it was terrorism).
It’s a stupid pattern. Trump claims he supports X with no plan to support X, then when talking to X’s opponents, says he opposes X; then does nothing either way unless it benefits him. Millions of people are only slowly figuring this out.
You can ask him, if you’d like…
Let me just pull out my Ouija board, though I’ve never been the best with it…
The working theory is that he was part of Project 2025, and felt betrayed (as all of Trump’s former supporters have been) when he disavowed himself of involvement in it (as he pretty much had to since it was terrorism).
A 20 year old community college student was “part of” Project 2025? In what context do you mean here?
Like I said, I suspect the 20 year old community college student that had voted as a Republican in exactly one election and made exactly one small donation to a Democrat PAC was probably not stewed into a murderous rage against the presidential candidate that is the de facto cult leader of the party he was registered as for political reasons.
Supposedly his final social media post was a message on Steam reading: “July 13th will be my debut, watch how it goes” That feels much more like chasing notoriety than a political manifesto.
Go ask a psychologist, there are a billion fucking reasons for a human to snap and do irrational shit.
People don’t even need to snap to be consistently irrational.
Exactly. Those in the highest positions of power should damn well have criticism. The argument otherwise seems to imply that accountability and transparency have no place in American politics
It’s funny how the tribalism of those demanding unwavering support of The Chief is very much a walk back from the spirit of Democracy (“they represent us”) and into Monarchy (“we owe fealty to them”).
The less Democratic a country is - and hence the less representative its leaders are - the worse this shit is.
The reality of the situation is the time for that is November 6th and later (or during the primaries or the last 4 years).
For the months between the primary concluding and the general election concluding, if you support the candidate, then criticism is a distraction that undermines the goal of getting them elected.
So you are free to criticize of course, but it’s a practical concern to be aware of that you are convincing others to not vote at all or vote against the candidate.
The positive take would be to start with the “Trump is too old for 4 more years as a President” memes.
Instead we have these “those who don’t instantly bend the knee are against us” memes that, frankly, have quite the wiff of the typical Far-Right/Foreign Propaganda Op purposefully sowing division on the Left.
🤖 posting the “Anti-Harris Memes are an Op by the Far Right” 🤝 🤖 posting “Anyone complaining about Anti-Harris memes is an Op by the Far Right”
Good point: good old Stupidity is also a valid explanation for having a knee-jerk reaction of starting fights with those whose help you need.
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She’s a woman, and she’s black, of course there will be opposition.
It’ll be interesting to see what minor controversy from her past that voters glom onto and equivocate with Trump’s blatant assault on democracy.
She argued in court in favor of California’s death penalty, and she threatened to jail parents of truant kids while she was the DA in San Francisco. It’s more complicated than those sound bites–like, it was her job to argue the state’s position–but you’ll get the sound bite opposition.
I don’t like Harris since I support 2A rights in addition to things like LGBTQ+ rights, and right to choose, but I like her odds of winning more than I liked Biden’s.
Truancy courts are not controversial. Literally holding a parent criminally liable for not sending their child to school. Maybe there’d be less Lord of the Flies gangs of tweenage criminals in every major city if truancy was better enforced.
Truancy courts are not controversial.
Throwing people in prison does not benefit the children of those people.
And truancy courts don’t typically target far right homeschooler quiverfull families. They’re aimed squarely at Two Income Trap working families and poor single parents, already under the gun thanks to poor bussing policies, no statutory time off from work, and abysmal access to health care.
Truancy laws are a tool of the School-To-Prison Pipeline. They substitute a criminal mandate for accessible education.
Maybe there’d be less Lord of the Flies gangs of tweenage criminals in every major city if truancy was better enforced.
More daycare, free school breakfast/dinner programs, public after school activities, and less child homelessness would go much farther towards reducing delinquent kids than arresting their parents.
truancy courts don’t typically target far right homeschooler quiverfull families.
…Because they don’t have to. The homeschoolers are home schooling (or, at least claiming to do so), whereas truant kids aren’t being educated at all. If the parents that were going to truancy courts were home schooling kids, they could just say that and be done with it. (I’m no fan of home schooling; I think that it’s almost always a disservice to the kids. But it’s still a legal right.)
IIRC, Harris had other programs that she was using/working with to reduce truancy rates, and courts were the last-ditch effort for parents that refused to even show up for anything else. If I recall correctly–and please, fact check me here–no parents received any jail time for truancy while she was a DA. It was used as a tool to get parents to take truancy seriously.
And yes, I agree that school lunches, etc. would all help, But there’s only so many tools that a district attorney has to use. The DA can’t mandate a tax to cover daycare or after school activities; that’s the job of the city council or state legislature.
The homeschoolers are home schooling (or, at least claiming to do so)
Right. Which is to say they pretend to teach and we pretend to believe them.
But these homeschool kids come out with all the same problems as their school skipping counterparts. They’re misinformed, anti-social, and often xenophobic. They have trouble holding down jobs outside of a family business or parent’s career. They’re prone to crime and drug abuse. They don’t do well in higher education. But they’re spared the indignity of seeing their parents dragged into prison or being sent their themselves, so they’ve got that going for them at least.
And yes, I agree that school lunches, etc. would all help, But there’s only so many tools that a district attorney has to use.
Maybe the DA shouldn’t be the one charged with fixing the problem.
Right. Which is to say they pretend to teach and we pretend to believe them.
Yes. But that’s the way the system works. We’ve decided, as a society, that parents have the right to manage their child’s education, as long as they at least claim to be educating them. Parents of truant children aren’t making that claim at all. They’re more than welcome to do that, if that’s what they want, but they’re usually not interested in attempting home schooling either.
And yes, I agree that home schooling is, in almost all cases, a problem. I know some parents choose it because the schools refuse to follow IEPs for children with documented disabilities, and they simply don’t have the resources to sue the schools to force compliance. But that’s not most families that home school.
Maybe the DA shouldn’t be the one charged with fixing the problem.
The DA is charged with fixing only one part of the problem, rather than the entire problem. In an ideal world, all of the systems would be working together perfectly, but since we have some people that are determined to break the system, and since they keep throwing sabots in the machinery, that’s not happening.
I was homeschooled from kindergarten through highschool. While I don’t dispute much of what you said here (I was mis- and under- informed, I was anti-social, and I was xenophobic), I think the situation is more nuanced than you make it out to be.
First, I don’t think it’s the role of the school to make sure that students are not xenophobic or anti-social.
Second, it took me one remedial class in college (trigonometry) to get caught up.
By the time I reached the university level, I was extremely good at learning things on my own, and the raw information was available online. The ability to learn on my own without anyone holding my hand has proven to be very useful, and it’s a skill that is lacking in a lot of public school graduates.
They shouldn’t be. But I recall the way that they were framed at the time made them sound really bad. When you looked into it, and realized that no one had even gotten past the threatened with arrest part, it started to make a lot more sense.
Yeah just like that.
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She’s also half Indian and therefore also Asian. She is like a Republican’s “all you can hate” buffet.
As if they were less hateful towards the white old man…
This was something I struggled with during the early years of the Obama presidency. At least initially, while the avenues of attack that right wing demagogues deployed against him were unique in their racist overtones, the volume and intensity wasn’t all that much different from what was directed against Clinton or Gore.
Then, as the years went on, they went progressively more insane and vitriolic. It turns out, I think, that it’s a lot easier to get a casual racist on your side if you can use the upending of the racial status quo to activate them.
I’m undecided on that because that increasing racism by Republicans towards Obama coincided with the period when both Democracts and Republicans moved more and more of their political propaganda into the domain of Identitarian Wars: whilst before there was still a lot of talk about Economics, later the loud shouting was all about people’s race, country of birth, religion, gender and sexual orientation.
It’s unclear if the increase of the racism from the Republicans towards Obama was directly due to Obama’s being a black POTUS or if it was a reflection of a wider trend: it’s just as logical an explanation that with the 2008 Crash and both parties being unified in shoving money to Financial Institutions and saving large Asset Owners at a significant cost (i.e. Austerity) for the rest of Society, they had to switch their discourse from Economics (were their actions in the post-2008 Crash had made painfully clear there was no significant difference between both) and into the Moral space, which from the side of the Republicans means amongst other things turning up the racist speech, with Obama being the most visible minority-member recipient of it.
There’s a double standard for Democrats, even if you’re an old white man. There’s also a double standard for women. And there’s a double standard for minorities. And it’s not just Republicans who hold them but voters all around. Harris is about to be on the receiving end of all of it.
She could have dodged all this criticism by running as a Republican (and then getting ignored by all the old white guys at the RNC).
This idea that any criticism of her is invalid and just misogyny/racism is bullshit. She is a very flawed candidate, ESPECIALLY for people of color.
Why especially for people of color?
Her activity as a prosecutor. A particular standout for me was prosecuting lower income parents of color for school absenteeism. While I firmly believe children should be educated, I don’t think throwing overworked low income parents in jail is going to help keep those children in school, well supervised, and ultimately safe.
We’re electing a president, not a monarch. Nobody is above criticism, and there’s a weird segment of people who act like criticism from the left exists only to help the right.
Like, I actually saw someone say we shouldn’t do it because it’s too nuanced for the average voter, and sorry but I don’t do paternalism like that. If reading criticism of how a candidate isn’t far enough left makes you vote further right, that’s a basic political literacy problem.
I mean, we could focus on defeating the GOP and the day after the election results come in start using social pressure to guide our elected officials. If the criticism risks the GOP seizing even more power, it might be counterproductive to your goals even if the criticism is valid.
Any good faith criticism of the Dem candidate should be obvious in its criticisms that R policies are inherently worse. For example, Harris’ record as DA is worth criticizing, but any bad decisions related to imprisoning people are going to be a million times worse under Trump, as Project 2025 shows.
Any good faith criticism of the Dem candidate should be obvious in its criticisms that R policies are inherently worse.
Your argument would be great if we didn’t live in the reality presented below. There are too many people sitting on the fence who legitimately cannot discern between a mediocre candidate and a career conman, criminal rapist. Where you see nuance, others see “she’s no better than Trump”.
I like Harris as much as I like Biden, which is not at all, but the alternative is the very real possibility of the end of America.
For my money those charts will look very different after the next debate.
There’s also not a combination of words that’s going to convince me leftists criticizing Dems are going to kill America. Even if Trump gets elected, you are missing every potential lesson if what you take away is “leftists too mean.”
Yeah discouraging voters has never led anywhere bad before.
Being honest isn’t discouraging, it’s not being infantilizing.
Normal people don’t read lefty struggle sessions on the internet. 🙄
It’s a good thing they only let “normal” people vote.
Exactly this. On this platform and elsewhere, there is a lot of well-meaning criticism but there are many agents of chaos or narrative pushers that disguise themselves as genuine criticism. I try to interact genuinely and give an opportunity to demonstrate that they are looking for a constructive path forward for the party.
Well, last time we pushed Biden left it was called too soon after election, give them time to form a plan. Form a cabinet, figure out policies.
Then it was midterms. Questioning the policies for misterm gives Republicans a win. They have to keep these conservative polices set by the last Republican to win over Republican voters.
Then it’s 2024. Questioning policies is a win for Republicans. They need to win this election, and then we can push them left.
I’m hoping it ends with a younger nominee.
Biden enacted the most left-wing policies of any president in US history. If that’s not enough for you, you won’t be satisfied with anyone who will get elected in the US.
Vote anyway.
It’s a lot easier to criticize the Democratic Party if the GOP is first discarded as useless trash and gets no votes in an election. Then we can decide who among our progressive candidates actually has the best approach forward.
Yet I keep seeing this thought assumed, that a 100% blue vote would “give them too much unchecked power”. This is the difference: We have a party while the GOP has a person. A bullet 2 inches to the right would have destroyed their whole movement.
Because when all those people do is criticize Democrats, sabotage outreach efforts, and don’t put any time or effort into defeating fascists, then it is very obvious where they stand.
Like I get it - huffing farts from time to time is great. But you gotta take a break and mix some productive advocacy and outreach if you actually care about Democracy instead of just smelling farts.
Just to point out… many people don’t care about the Democrats, except as a bulwark against the even more right-leaning Republicans. It’s not an institution that they respect and admire, but one they grudgingly tolerate.
I only joined the party so I could vote for Bernie in the 2016 primaries! 😉
If people want a shift to the left, they have to make sure that the Democrats crush the Repulicans for a few election cycles so that the Overton window can stop moving right and go left instead.
Unfortunately, the Repulicans are voting in a united front every election, no matter what.
The Democrats are notably terrible voters. They don’t show up like the Republicans do.
Maybe I’m super cynical, but does that really matter on Lemmy and the platforms connected to it?
Like, who’s reading this comment section that’s actually on the fence about going out and voting for a Harris ticket? It has to be a miniscule fraction.
Can she remember what she had for breakfast? If so, she’s got my vote.
And this is why I’ll never be president.
Seriously. I NEVER know what she had for breakfast.
is it a binary thing? because there’s a very good chance it’s not mcdonald’s, which can’t be said for the other side
Well maybe you could be president if you stopped eating avocado toast and made coffee at home.
I almost always make coffee at home since I work from home, and I don’t like avocado. So maybe I can be president? Though I’m not sure if there’s ever been a US president that doesn’t like avocado.
I’d vote for you if you legalize my medicinal cocaine.
Don’t forget about my emotional support prostitute.
I like both at the same time so you can try pushing rope into a bored looking lady for three hundred bucks an hour.
Naturally. That’s where I have my best ideas.
She could be a human suit full of spiders and she would have my vote.
Three dwarves in a trenchcoat, even
As someone who has literally almost burnt a house down because of a spider, I second this.
Bro y u gotta do me like that?
Yikes.
Before you say Trump can too, hamburgers don’t count as breakfast.
At least he remembered lol
Just a reminder that Harris has a voting record to the left of all Senate Democrats.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/kamala_harris/412678/report-card/2020
from your own link, that’s only because she’s the least bipartisan dem in the senate.
govtrack’s “left-right ideology” ranking is flawed, it doesn’t look at the content of the bills at all. in govtrack’s own words the ideology ranking “may be measuring something else, perhaps something more closely related to partisan-ness”.
Not compromising with fascists is a good quality to have as well.
I don’t know.
I really dislike Harris. She’s probably the bottom of my pick list for the nominee and a Dem President.
But it’s not like a gaping sore of a liability the way Biden was.
I’m excited the conversation can finally shift to “Trump fell asleep during his own convention? Doesn’t he seem tired in his speech?”
I think it being a woman nominee is an interesting newsworthy discussion point at a time when the other party is actively working to harm women - even if she’s the last of the many other qualified women I’d rather see in the position.
I don’t like her, I don’t like listening to her nonsensical off the cuff statements, I thought she did very poorly in the 2020 campaign, I am anxious about a law enforcement politician as President in a system with too much Presidential power over the Justice department.
But in spite of all that, I just don’t care enough to push back strongly on her.
She’s boring in the neoliberal way we’ve gotten used to, but she’s not addled and she’s not a neo-Nazi, and with an interesting VP pick she’s a ticket I could potentially even be excited about four months from now instead of watching her be put into a nursing home as the October surprise.
I’d love to see an actual competitive open convention, but barring that I’m just going to accept a turd sandwich that’s palatable, as even that seemed like a stretch a week ago, and I’ll take what I can get.
If you’d like something to be excited about consider how much psychological damage losing an election to a woman of color will do to not just trump, but Bannon and miller.
I’d love for them to feel their ideology so rejected that they give up and finish drinking themselves to death.
I want to see this so bad!!
If you’d like something to be excited about consider how much psychological damage losing an election to a woman of color will do to not just trump, but Bannon and miller.
Hell, there’s a part of my cold, cold heart that will be warmed to know that Hillary Clinton might live to see a woman become POTUS, and that woman will not be a Clinton.
I don’t like Harris at all. She’s just more status quo. We need big changes. Climate crisis is looming.
The more salient point though, is that I don’t think she is the candidate to beat Trump. She just isn’t very likable. She’s not inspiring anyone.
We need someone with some juice to beat Trump. We need a candidate that gets people excited.
She doesn’t need to be inspiring. She just needs to not be half dead.
I think people are underestimating just how weak of a candidate Trump has become.
It just wasn’t really able to be capitalized on because we were doing a whole “the emperor has clothes” thing on the left so the left media couldn’t point out Trump running around naked.
He’s old and tired. And there’s now 4 months to show him as not only a fascist, but a half dead one that’s meandering and weak.
He was only able to cosplay as a strongman when his opponent was literally presenting with Parkinson’s. Against a younger person the narrative immediately becomes “old man yells at clouds” and his BS can be rebranded as ‘confused.’
I’m firmly of the opinion that no positive change will happen in time unless it’s at the point of a sword.
And I’m still backing Harris. The Democratics would never permit a progressive to run, but at least this way we have a chance at 8 years before fascism wins. With Biden, we would have been lucky to get 4.
And who knows, maybe she’ll pick a progressive VP to maintain the appearance of being for the working class!
Who is the one to beat Donald in your opinion?
I agree. But there’s not enough time to get momentum on any of the other front runners. She has the biggest name without a lot of negativity from Right propaganda (Newsom).
She’s our candidate. Any kind of run off is going to waste time and probably fragment the party. I’ll vote for Harris. Not as happily as I would even the old and faltering Biden that dropped out. But I’ll fall in line and vote for her, and promote her to others.
Because it’s our best chance.
This whole debate among the American left just feels to me as a big sign of “letting perfect be the enemy of good”
Your first mistake is considering the Democratic party “Left.”
Your first mistake is thinking that you’re contributing to the discussion
Truly a thoughtful counterpoint.
I was a major biden naysayer. Id always love more but this was a huge ask that was answered. Lets kick republican ass
If we get someone better, I’ll be shocked.
Aaaaaaand there we go. First one I’ve seen so far. Here’s a slow golf clap for ya…
I mean, there are valid reasons to be anti-Harris, she’s still a right-winger. Leftists aren’t going to be happy voting for any right-winger by default.
Harris could take a firm anti-genocide stance, or promise something big and popular like Medicare for All, which would see increased voter turnout from the Left. However, given her track record, I doubt she would pivot in this direction, instead focusing on being a younger and healthier Joe Biden, essentially. That should make liberals more likely to turn out, so still a net-gain for the Dems.
It’s really too early to tell.
She campaigned for President by proudly supporting Medicare for all.
Yes, then dropped out before the Primaries. This was during a time when there were other candidates like Bernie and Warren pushing hard for it. We will see if she takes this back up, or tries to maintain a “younger Biden” approach.
Harris called for a ceasefire in Gaza in March. She co-sponsored Bernie’s Medicare for All bill. She spent most of her VP term focusing on abortion rights. She pushed for Marijuana rescheduling, which is still ongoing. She checks all the boxes for me.
We will have to see where she moves her campaign. America in 2024 is not America in 2020, where progressive policies were salient. Now, the bar has been lowered to “no genocide,” yet genocide is still a popular DNC position, despite the wishes of the electorate.
Kamala may try to run her campaign on big hope and promises, ie progressive policies and toning down the warhawkish Biden foreign policy, but given the right-wing trajectory of the DNC she may try to focus on garnering establishment support now that she has essentially been handed the nomination.
Only time will tell.
I wonder if all those rampant anti Biden astroturfers are going to create new accounts to dump on Harris, or if they’ll just continue on.
Haven’t seen any Linkerbaan posts about her yet. We’ll see.
Now that “Genocide Joe” is out, the Lemmy-Leftists LARPing as communists have gone mask-off and are just proudly pushing accelerationism.
It was always a front.
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She is just as genocidal as Biden. We are being critical because at least for me I was gaslit into voting for Biden despite all the red flags.
I knew that Biden was anti-Arab and specifically anti-Palestinian. But liberals assured me it will be fine. Well it isn’t fine we got a genocide. Once bitten twice shy.
Well, good thing Trump doesn’t have any red flags at all right?
Still on the Trump Train, huh?
Probably, but misogyny and racism is easier to call out than defending an old man who shouldn’t be behind the wheel of a car, let alone a country.
And Trump is still too damn old, even ignoring the fact that he’s a repugnant human being to boot.
Trump’s very obviously much less mentally competent than Biden. Biden rambled a couple of times. Trump rarely forms a coherent sentence at all.
I’ll say that Biden sounds less competent at a glance. Like if you watch and go through his mental process, you understand how the mistake he made happened but you know the substance of what he was trying to say.
Usually Trump says stuff that, on the surface, sounds like maybe something but if you try to think about it it makes no sense.
Wow, how weird it’s the same 4 ppl posting them 🥱
Sleepy Trump
