Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
The bad guys have definitely learned a new sort of trick. Havenāt wrapped my head around it yet, but it is bad, innit?
Apologies for the screed:
Quick recap:
2016-2020: executive orders every day, non-elected positions being captured by conservatives, dems just hand-wringing and tweeting. but Dems get lucky with a pandemic and trump loses
2021-2024: weekend at bidenās.
Where was the election reform? The dismantling or reform of the electoral colleges? The extra seats on the SC? Bribing the public with stimulus packages to boost the economy?
Remember when we pushed Biden left? Remember when the dems preserved abortion rights, prevented the invasion of ukraine, and stopped bankrolling Israelās genocide?
āexercise your democratic rights and voice by voting for our candidate that wasnāt democratically chosen as our candidateā. āvote blue and do not voice any critical thoughtā. āany vote that isnāt for the party that didnāt meaningfully reverse or prevent conservative actions is a vote for trumpā.
In sum: the bad guys didnāt do anything new.
The closest we got to a trump loss was some republican spook who went to a trump rally with a gun because it was closer than the harris rally.
According to some reports the dems simply stayed home and he even lost votes compared to 2020
The thing thatās most baffling to me is how the difference in ground game had zero impact. We were pounding the pavement, doors got fuckin knocked. The GOP did less than zero, firing their entire staff responsible for in-person outreach and gave 100 million to PACs run by grifters who put it directly into their own pockets.
Unless weāve missed a trick, retail politics as it has existed is dead.
Dem talking heads spending so much energy courting moderate conservative votes was an excellent way to demobilise their base. They really gave their all to lose an election that should have been a free win.
This wasnāt a free win, however. The reason Harris took over in the first place was because Bidenās performance in the debate was poor enough that the Democrats thought there was no longer any chance with him, and this was already with lowering approval ratings. Had he stayed, I bet Trumpās victory would have been even wider.
Definitely, there was no coming back from that debate.
I mean, I donāt think it was unreasonable to expect liberals to show up against someone whoās sole policy proposals were mass deportations and political reprisals, and so I can understand the logic of focusing on the center (which in US politics means center-right).
But this being the democratic party, they also couldnāt commit to an actual narrative to make that play. Rather than ālook at their ties to Big Tech!ā or even sticking with ālook how weird these people are!ā they had to go hat-in-hand and stake themselves to divisive (to say nothing of abhorrent) policies because thatās the only connection they could try to make. I think weāre seeing a major problem with the whole ābig tentā concept.
It was twitter. Elon Musk joins Trumpās team. What happens? Harrisā chances begin to drop.
Trump did lose support, but there was probably enough propaganda on Twitter to make enough people go āboth sidesā and just sit out the election.
and of course, Twitter and Facebook style influence campaigns work just as well or even better elsewhere, in communities that havenāt hardened themselves against that type of bullshit
2/3 of regular users donāt use adblock, cambridge analytica may be disbanded as a company, but the approach they made still is a thing
Cambridge Analytica even came back from the dead, so thatās still around.
(At least, I think? Iām not really sure what the surviving companies are like or what they were doing without Facebookās API)
this is the bad place
IDK, do you really think twitter still has that much cultural relevance? ugh
Iām sure it played a part, though.
facebook is still big somehow and i see no reason why shrimp jesus irradiated brains of boomer population would be not susceptible to it like it was still 2016
Ten years ago, I naively thought that people might grow a sort of mental callus against online bullshit. Big L for me! Turns out that thereās no such thing as magical self-assembling media literacy.
Given that Trump lost votes compared to 2020, I think itās past the peak of its relevance. Not many new people are entering the self-referential echo chamber. Itās one of the main vectors for crypto and meme stock scams, as well as the main vector for Musk himself. When all those promises are broken once again, fatigue will start to set in among the bluechecks. It may linger, but it will be a spent force by the end of the decade. Keep up social pressure to get people to leave.
Iām seeing some takes now that the ground game did make a difference of a couple of points in the swing states, where it was concentrated, itās just that that wasnāt enough.
Not enough for the presidential race, sadly; perhaps enough to scrape by with a few Senate victories.
Here in TN, we had a monster grassroots door knocking/letter writing movent. We did manage to get a couple of rad women into the general assemblyāwith several heart-breakingly-close missesābut not nearly as many as weād hoped, and the vile supermajority is still in place. Anecdotally, we are seeing the actual useful activists here getting radicalized rather than demotivated, which will be important re: surviving the present kakiclysm
Also, Iād just like to say I appreciate ya.