chaonaut

There is a lot of "invisible" work that party orgs do. If you want to see why big names and attention alone don't work, look at the Green Party. They have name recognition, ballot access and even get a bit of the vote each presidential election. What they're missing is the "ground game" that gives the presence in nearly every race in every precinct, and the local engagement to actually win an appreciable chunk of elections every year (not just the presidential years).

As a fellow old fuck, surely you must remember Obama publicly opposing gay marriage to win voters, no? And, surely, of like me, you've been voting in primaries and "off-year" elections for decades like I have, you must remember the various progressives running for the Dem nomination only to have people like John Kerry and Al Gore be the "exciting, energetic" candidates. Sure, we can point to Clinton, but his strategy involved being conservative enough to pull in Reagan Dems and middle class Republicans, as well as the usual Democratic mainstays. You know, the play the Dems keep running while not having someone with Bill's "good ole boy" personality to pull it off.

And, yeah, it's been a breath of fresh air seeing unions do as well as they have recently, after being pounded into the dirt for decades. And, yeah, the economy is doing better, but people still struggle to pay for groceries and housing. Do you remember when George Bush couldn't answer what the price of milk was, and how hard he got beat up over that? Did you vote in '92? I was too young, but I still remember hearing about the price of milk everywhere for a long stretch there.

I dunno, I'm just kind of tired of voting Blue election after election while getting told the issues that are important to me just can't be done right now, because we need to appeal enough to Republicans again. Having to fight tooth and nail to get whatever issues some ground, be it civil rights, the environment or social services, and then see it up on the chopping block the moment Dems need to "compromise" with Republicans to not tear up a different right. And we still lose, or win just enough to not have enough of a majority to get anything done. The closest I've seen to Dems doing well while I've been able to vote? When they embraced the possibility of change and getting things done with Obama's Hope campaign.

And, again, this is coming from someone who has voted for Harris, votes in primaries and off-year elections, who has done phone banking for the Dems, been involved in local orgs, has advocated to disillusioned voters to get out to the polls to vote because of how awful the alternative for not voting is.

But, you tell me: how successful was the Dem's strategy this cycle? Did they manage to pick up votes on their right flank? What was the gain in conservative Dem voters vs. the loss in progressives? How does the gap compare to previous elections? What sort of voters did their appeal to "the middle" yield? I'm something of a numbers wonk at the end of the day and tend to be more receptive to the analysis instead of what I see as knee-jerk scapegoating, so tell me what went well this time around.

Weird, seems like it's been the repeated denial of progressive issues while courting further and further right that has cost the Democrats the four of the past seven elections, no matter how much we beg for the slightest crumb of civil rights.

I remember how much we had to fight Democrats to get Gay Marriage and LGBT rights in general, and have seen how far they have fled from unions and healthcare. And I say this as someone who has actually done phone banking for the Dems, and has been telling people who are personally invested in what happens to people in Palestine that Harris is the best option on the ballot.

But, yeah, I guess individual voters are the best people to blame, and complaining that people cared enough about an issue to get out and do political action are the problem, and we should smugly congratulate ourselves that they should have just shut up and got with the program, their friends and family members be damned.

Well, what's important is that Harris never listened to people who care about Palestinians. Surely, we will all be better off that the Harris campaign decided to hew closely to Biden's policies, court Republicans for her cabinet and chase suburban Trump voters. Clearly, this is entirely the fault of individual voters, and we all agree that the campaign, corporate media organizations and monied interests bear no responsibility for this whatsoever.

Signal is moderation.

Generating signal is moderating noise. The first moderator of any message is the person converting ideas into language. Understanding the interplay of how messages get moderated by the various layers they pass through is what media literacy is.

I holding my finger over the button as long as possible in the hope that the button that the "spotless prosecutorial record" will suddenly add the "stop abetting a genocide" portion we've been asking for since before they changed out the previous button, but I guess I'll be going for the option that isn't currently telling me how my existence is threatening to them and hope that they'll follow through on valuing human life this time around.

I miss when signal-to-noise ratio was common parlance of the Internet.

Making usable spaces is tough work, but having worthwhile content drowned in an ocean of noise is seemingly the default of corporate controlled media anymore, so much have they abandoned paying attention to what they publish. That you don't know who is editorializing and moderating the places you frequent and have opinions on the job they're doing says to me that you're not doing the work that being media literate requires, which is all the more important when so much of it is generated content with no consideration given to reality.

If you look back at panel 2, there's a potential third one to research

Then you must be quite frustrated that Israel disagrees.

Netanyahu says Israel will cut Gaza off from Egypt, taking control of Palestinian enclave’s remaining border

Israel seized control of the Rafah border crossing. The impact could be devastating

And Egypt's borders were not completely open. In part, because they did were not aiding Israel doing a forced displacement of Palestinian citizens. As a reminder, the forcible removal of a people, in whole or in part, is one of the kinds of genocide. Perhaps you might want to consider why you're advocating for the forced displacement of an entire people. Why Egypt has not fully opened its Gaza border for fleeing Palestinians

You know who look like whales? Problem spenders who spend far beyond their means, and are preyed upon by predatory business practices that use psychological manipulation to encourage people to spend as much as as they can. Like, I've literally watched video game developer conference talks where a dev explains in great detail and depth on how to hijack human psychology to milk every last dollar they can. Whales stopped being "those who can afford to spend" a long time ago.

Palestine's border crossings are controlled by Israel. Early on, Israel stopped allowing border crossing. To the point that a major international concern was the inability for any aid trucks to enter. Additionally, movement within the West Bank has been heavily restricted by Israel's checkpoints. And Israel has for a very long time actively denied Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes if they do leave. If it is difficult to understand why this sort of forced movement and controlled borders is an issue, I encourage you to read up on the Trail of Tears and South African Apartheid.

Movement and Access in the West Bank | August 2023 West Bank movement restrictions make life harder for residents and aid organisations