“Wombat Kombat” was right there, though.

They said “no” because to them, the most important thing is blaming Kamala for whatever happened in some way. They’re disagreeing with you because you didn’t do that, and trying to correct you on it.

You blamed the voter, which was the right response. I would expand that to include blaming the obviously Russian-influenced campiagn, however it happened, that convinced this person that Ukraine was a hugely important issue in this campaign in this particular bizarre way.

We can give some blame to Kamala for her messaging, sure. But the thing you didn’t do, that made them say “no,” was redirect the whole conversation into a conversation about how it’s all Kamala’s fault and nothing else.

My curiosity was just aroused because you blamed 8% inflation which hit every country worldwide and is related to how much companies want to charge individuals for private transactions, on US government spending on behalf of Ukraine, the total over all years of which added up to 1% of the federal budget for one year, and had nothing to do with either private individuals or companies. It’s a staggeringly weird leap to make. Unless you were, say, trying to find a reason why aid for Ukraine would be a foolish thing for governments to do, and trying to make the case that it was hurting the individuals in those countries using some sort of moon-logic.

Usually, the government spending money domestically on weapons or whatever, and then giving the product away somewhere so we have to make more of whatever it is right away, stimulates the economy. Even aside from those other weird aspects of your decision to say that, it’s also a backwards thing to say in terms of how government spending usually works.

Here’s the median, in inflation-adjusted dollars:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-income-in-the-united-states/

It bombed in 2022 and then went back up. It’ll be higher in 2024 than it ever was, and it’ll probably keep going up until anywhere from 0 to 2 years into Trump’s presidency, and then it’ll bomb again much harder as everything goes completely to shit. The normal cycle would be that it gets handed back over to a Democrat in 2028, he spends the first 2-3 years of his presidency fixing things from the previous Republican’s disaster as happened in 2009-2012 and in 2021-2022, and then during the next election everyone blames that 2-3 years on the Democrat and says the Republicans are better with money.

We’re about to go so far off the map that it seems unlikely for that cycle to happen this time, but that would be the normal cycle.

Biden wanting to stop supporting Israel is complete crap.

Yes, I agree.

It sounds like you missed the point of my message. Biden was awful on Israel. My point was that because Israel could become a liability for him, it got blown up on social media in a way where the legitimate and impassioned protest movement became a huge electoral issue for him. And, in the corners of social media where you hang out, it’s all over social media, always in the face of everyone whose vote it might impact, and front of mind for you, every day, in a way that I’m guessing Occupy Wall Street or the protests against the Uyghur genocide were not. And then, when it was Kamala Harris, everything he’d done translated seamlessly over to her, with almost no loss of impact.

There’s a whole other population of people for which inflation is that issue. They see it constantly on social media, it’s always linked to Biden Kamala, and Trump is so much better. Trump will fix it. That one has a lot less validity than the Gaza criticism, but it has a lot broader appeal. And so, with that in their ear every day, it’s not surprising that a lot of them didn’t show up for Kamal Harris, or got suckered into voting for Trump thinking somehow that he’ll fix it.

Left-wing social media could have blown up Biden’s absolutely historic actions on climate change into the same magnitude of issue as Gaza was, and blown it up in everyone’s ear all day every day, and heard about what a catastrophe Trump will be, but they didn’t. Why is that? Because no one’s paying for that message to get out there.

I’m not saying the Gaza protestors, or their cause, are fake. I’m saying that the way things got covered and represented on social media was artificially generated to hurt Biden Kamala, and it worked.

I think it’s hilarious, if they think that writing nice articles about him will mean that he’ll spare them.

He doesn’t care. He just wants to hurt. And they’re already in his crosshairs, whatever they do. At least if they stuck to their guns, they’d have a few allies among the other side.

I have to be honest, I am panicking a little bit.

Nothing will change instantly, or everywhere all at once, but it could get very bad, and not even a long time from now.

No more detached from reality than the stuff I see on Lemmy every day… it’s just from the other direction, so it seems comical in its wrongness because it’s a type of nonsense that you haven’t been conditioned to. You weren’t the target audience for that message so you didn’t get it. A lot of people did, though.

Spoken like someone who hasn’t figured out that it was all a ruse from the beginning.

“Biden has BETRAYED Israel, he paused weapons, he pushed for a cease-fire. He yelled at Netanyahu and threatened some sort of mild theoretical consequences if he just rolled over Gaza with a line of bulldozers and killed 90% instead of 10%. We need him out NOW.”

“Biden has BETRAYED the people of Gaza by failing to prevent Netanyahu from the war Netanyahu unilaterally started, sending weapons shipments like every other US President has always done, also don’t pay any attention to the substantial differences between Harris and Biden on this issue, just focus on the fact the we need him out NOW I mean her.”

“Biden has BETRAYED the people of middle America by letting millions of immigrants in, shutting down Trump’s most horrible policies, migrant crime, look at this person whose daughter died. We need him out NOW.”

“Biden has BETRAYED immigrants by failing to completely undo decades of racism in immigration, only shutting down the most heinous 30% of Trump’s policies even with the Republicans fighting tooth and nail to stop him shutting down that 30%. It’s all his fault, also he made it worse in some vague emotionally-loaded ways. We need him out NOW.”

And the centrists bought it, and the leftists bought it too, and they never even compared notes to realize they were getting the exact opposite messaging and a good part of all sides of the messaging was made-up emotionally loaded lies tailored to what would make an impact. Most of the stuff about Biden just got reused against Kamala Harris unchanged, and it was so well-worn by that point that it still worked.

And they never paid all that much attention to what they were getting in, when they got him out now I mean her.

And now, we’ve got it in instead, and god help us.

they lived under better circumstances in the last Trump term

I was disinfecting my groceries, and Trump was confiscating my PPE to send it somewhere else. I was getting Covid checks, which was nice, but it wasn’t exactly the same as working. I couldn’t leave the house for a while. I couldn’t buy certain mechanical things without going on a 3-month wait list. I knew some people who died.

They think they lived under better circumstances in the last Trump term, because the media and people like you spreading a certain type of mental landscape and inviting them to inhabit it. But that’s not actually what happened.

instead of the democrats putting the work to meet these people they have chosen to belittle them

If belittling the people could cost you support in America, Trump would be in prison right now.

Now if you ask whether the media told people that Democrats were belittling them, now that’s a different story. That, to me, seems a lot more worth examining than it does to lecture the Democrats how important it is not to do some things they didn’t do, that the media said they did.

Yeah. My initial presentation was unclear. Partly because it’s such a weird conspiratorial thing to believe that I kind of had to come at it sideways.

I’m saying that the comments under this post look manipulated, especially when compared with comments on Beehaw, which makes sense considering that beehaw excludes Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works which is where a ton of troll accounts come from.

A haaaaaa

Hey, what do you think of Alexei Navalny?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/

Trump fucked it, Biden unfucked it better than any other country in the world after Covid, and Biden got the blame.

As is tradition. Universally. It’s one of the few things in American politics that always happens in exactly the same way, with no real wiggle room depending on how you want to measure things or who you ask for the explanation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party

Both rich people and working people do better under Democrats, and both rich people and working people do worse under Republicans. Always.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/

Like I said: Trump fucked it, Biden unfucked it starting in January 2021 and got it under control. And, because the media laps up a good narrative like no other, Biden got the blame for what Trump did, when the US recovered better from Covid inflation than pretty much every other country in the world.

If you’re struggling now, and “holding your vote in protest of the Democrats,” then I withdraw a little bit of my sympathy. You’re going to get it right up the ass very hard in the next few years, if you did that, and although it won’t be completely your fault you will have helped make it happen.

I was so confused because the voting pattern on this comment is so dramatically different than it was on the comments early on in this exact same discussion here, or in other posts where we’ve been discussing basically the exact same thing.

Sort the comments on this post by “old” and you’ll see what I’m talking about. You won’t see everyone claiming that the Democrats did nothing at all for the economy for the last 4 years. It won’t be all the other way, either, but you’ll see a healthy interplay between a couple of different main points of view. It won’t be all one way.

I don’t usually come to the big communities on lemmy.world for pretty much this exact same reason, so like I say, I was just confused. I looked back on some of my other comments in other communities, where there’s actually a large-scale consensus that yesterday’s tragedy was largely the fault of the people who were holding out voting for the Democrats because they hadn’t done enough to fix everything up, including for example the economy from the last time the Republicans broke it all.

One thing that I suddenly realized is that some of those comments with that very-different-from-this consensus are on Beehaw, which while it still has representation on it from the socialists and anti-liberals, whatever you want to call it, has defederated from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world because they were at the time too infested with troll accounts. And I used some of my magic powers to look at who’s been voting for this comment with all these universal upvotes…

And lo, I was enlightened.

Edit: Another funny thing happened. The parent comment that this is in reply to was the top comment, 3 hours old, when I made this comment, which was the only reply at that time. Now, in just the last half hour, there are suddenly 7 other comments and replies competing for space at the top of the page, instead of it just being the parent comment and this one as a reply. A lot of those are some variety of “Democrats fucked it” comment.

My guess is that there will be a flurry of continued conversation, and then once things die down, it will all somehow coalesce into there being a few “Democrats fucked it” comments all the way up at the top of the page, with a whole bunch of upvotes, creating a narrative. I’m not sure. But that is how I would guess, if I had to guess.

Edit2: Called it. Look at the default-sorted comments now.

It doesn’t particularly matter. It’s over at this point. But it’s interesting to look at one particular microcosm on one particular platform of one thing that made it happen, I think.

Obama won his election after being a good bit to the right of either Biden or Harris. I think most of what’s changed since then is the awesome power of the influence operations which succeed at creating alternate realities for people where Trump is important to vote for, and Harris is important not to vote for, depending on the person being targeted.

I’m not trying to be closed-minded about it, and maybe my meme as applied to you was unfair. I’m a little bit on edge when talking with the “what the Democrats did wrong” crowd on Lemmy, since a lot of them also like to make up imagined sins for the Democrats, helping to create that alternate reality, to go alongside any well-intentioned criticism they are giving.

The bottom line is, the Democrats lost for a variety of reasons some of which were their fault and some weren’t, and we are thoroughly fucked as a result. I don’t think people realize how bad it’s going to be.

You know what else doesn’t work?

Not voting and letting Trump get elected.

That shit’s going to do more damage to the left than a million Hillary Clintons depressing the turnout.

(I have more I could say on it, especially pertaining to the difference between accurately describing sins of the Democrats which are depressing turnout versus making up imaginary sins of the Democrats which people will then believe which will depress turnout, but I’m not planning on a long exchange so I’ll leave it there.)

Tell people “healthcare will be free” or “We will cap rent and build housing that won’t cost more than 3x local median income” and then people can’t afford not to vote for you.

1. It would have to go through congress, which wouldn’t approve it, so it would be a lie.
2. They told people “I won’t do mass deportations or order the assassinations of my enemies” and it didn’t work. Why do you assume that this other stuff would?