If someone didn’t say thing A, but you’re pretending they did so you can make a big fuss about how they’re wrong about thing A when they actually said thing B, please don’t do that.

In fact, in general, it’s not good to try to “win” the conversation. If you said your thing, and they said their thing, and you all had your chance to understand it and make any counter arguments and ask questions, then the mission is accomplished. Not everyone has to see things the same way, just understand each other.

I think you’re right.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources#Metro

Where’s fact check bot, now that we need him. I’ll delete the post.

I feel like, at this point, the trolls are just taking a victory lap and seeing how much anger they can extract from all of us hapless ones.

I’ve known people whose individual politics were so insufferable that it caused other people to stop hanging out with them. Was it the communists? No. They were widely accepted, weirdly enough even among the conservatives. It was the aggressive academic leftists talking about feminism / ableism / words you’re not allowed to say / and so on. They were like some kind of MAGA caricature of the left, come to life in living color.

I think it’s because the communists never ordered anyone else to obey their ideology or else officially be a bad person. They just were communists, and everyone else could do their thing, too.

Your point is right, though. Neither of those are on the same level as someone who supports deporting the neighbors and bomb threats to the polling station even after it starts happening in the real world.

I hope this is just a new style of trolling, designed to draw out what I’m sure will be a lot of negative attention.

If you’re really gullible enough to be serious about all this, then go fuck yourself. “Mostly worried about the economy.” You can check back in with me the first time someone in your neighborhood gets hauled away in the mass deportations, or when the price of groceries goes up 50%. My guess is the first will happen before the second, but we’ll have to wait and see.

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.

There are people who went through the holocaust who compared Trump in 2016 to Hitler. They, if anyone, understand the gravity of the comparison, and made it a little bit carefully. But they said that the way he speaks, the way everyone who is his enemy is an animal who must be destroyed, is very similar.

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.

Well… if it makes you feel better, they’ll get punished, too. I think most of those people are unknowingly living within a very cushy society which has been set up and maintained for them, which is nearing its end, to be replaced by one much more difficult and dangerous.

They’re victims too. They had so much propaganda, and so much bad education, and so many legitimate grievances about a government that since the 1990s at least has mostly forgotten about them.

I try to be kind in my thinking. They might attack and someone might have to defend against them. They might get attacked by the same system they supported in the beginning. A lot of them are going to get hurt, some of them very badly. None of that is good, even a little bit. Some of it “has to happen” and some will just happen because it happens. But I don’t hold any of it against them nearly as much as I do against the people at the top that engineered this whole thing on purpose, with full awareness.

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.

If they are outside the US, actively in contest with it in some kind of zero-sum game, then I don’t have too much to say that’s upset with them.

If they are outside the US and angry about its imperialism, I think they have yet to learn that the US doesn’t have a monopoly on it, and some of the other brands are somehow even worse. But the temporary or permanent collapse of the US might still be a good thing for them, depending.

If they are in the US, and edgelording, then fuck ‘em. I don’t exactly wish on them what’s in store, but there is a certain grim anticipation, I guess, of the day they start to learn about the reality of what they’ve been talking about.

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?