PhilipTheBucket

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.

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.

I'm pretty sure that if they are doing that on Lemmy, it's not without a human in the loop. I've been doing some experimentation with it, and I don't think it's a fully automated response.

I have some thoughts on it, along with a whole series of unfounded Fediverse conspiracy theories. I don't think they are doing fully automated bot responses. They might have LLMs helping to craft long, hostile messages that always carry the right framings and narratives at scale, but there wouldn't really be a way to detect that as far as I can see, so I'm not sure how much it bears thinking about. I do think systematically hijacking posts and making sure the comments look "right" is part of their system.

Take a look at this:

https://ponder.cat/comment/835655

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?