Groundhog day

Let's hope it's not the last one...
One of the best uses of this meme I've seen so far
- One of the best uses of this meme I've seen so far, so far

It really is hard to put Republican assholery on a scale of "worst in our lifetime".

GWB got us in multiple multiple decade long wars.

Mitt Romney or Dick Cheney might have turned the great recession into another great depression.

Trump nearly got us into another full blown recession, got rid of Roe V Wade, tried to overturn Democracy, and nearly got us into a war with Iran.

Trump this time around will try to overturn Democracy again, might bring back the full blown recession we almost had, will let Russia steamroll Ukraine, will support Israel harder than any US president, etc. etc.

You forgot the grandfather of assholery, Ronald Regan. 90 % of the fuckery today can be linked back to that piece of shit.
- It goes back before that, when Boothe killed Lincoln and reconstruction failed and we let the south keep southing it got fucked.
  Nixon recognized it and used it to get elected, and Reagan got the economy fucking us, and Bush 2 profited from starting wars on surpluses from the previous administration. Then trump wasted Obama’s hard work on the economy with tax cuts and shit handling of a pandemic.
But it's fearmongering, and you AREN'T going to scare THESE ubermensch with your dastardly threats of "Literally what the opposition has promised to do"! That's what WEAK people fall for.
Or something like that.
I saaaay we stop being nice and start working together. These two things are the big problems of the left.
Mitt Romney would not have let Russia invade Ukraine. He's been a staunch enemy of Putin's aggression.
It would have been simple. Put US troops on the border in the hundreds of thousands. Russia doesn't invade.
Oh, I completely agree. Republicans have consistently gotten worse. At the same time, so has literally every Democrat since Carter. Every Democratic president since Clinton has moved to the right. For example: Obamacare? More like exactly what Reagan proposed to “fix” the insurance industry. And people forget that Biden was the “moderate” to pull that crazy “leftist Obama” back towards the “center”. And now Biden is called a crazy leftist. So now we have 2 right-wing choices. One that thinks capitalism fixes everything, supports genocide because it’s profitable, and says “but we like queer people (as long as they have money and don’t ask for anything)”. The other is a literal fascist. The fact is that either party is good for big business and bad for everyone else.
- It's a bit reductionist to boil Obama down to the shit implementation of Obamacare that the GOP killed in the womb. I encourage you to read on it. TL;DR, it was gonna be pretty good, but the GOP threw a fit that it was going to be a win for Dems and tanked it. You're also leaving out the fact that Obama expanded gay rights and got talking about climate change on a policy level. Should both of those things happened sooner? Yes, but that's letting perfect be the enemy of good.
  Biden isn't amazing and honestly, I don't care for him much. However, I doubt he letting the genocide in Gaza happen for profits. With the Dem's own party, Israel is a divisive issue and I'm sure he's having to tread carefully so it doesn't shoot in the foot later because politicians are scummy petty people

It's like all those "heat records" that supposedly "proves" that climate is "changing".

Every single month they keep getting broken, sheesh!

It looks like a conspiracy if you ask me - all those "scientists" with their... "facts"! Everyone saying the same thing all the time - it sure sounds like they are pushing an agenda to me! What if I don't want to be educated though - did they ever stop to think about that, hrm!?

Like, are we to believe it's purely coincidence that the scientists are making these claims AT THE SAME TIME as the graphs are showing heat levels rising? seems like they're just cashing in on a good grift! We all know how scientists are about money making schemes.
- All that "I want to eat food", "I want food for my family", "that's not enough food I want more food" nonsense! Why don't they just eat the climate like Zeus intended?
How dare you provide "scientific" proofs? What do you think this is, a logical discussion?? I need someone to yell the facts at me, that way they'll sink in more better
- Okay then... how's this?
  It must be a cyber Greta /s 🤣
What am I supposed to do about the climate anyways? I conserve as much as possible and a billionaire uses up my lifetime of CO2 in a day. Stop telling me i have the power to fix it cause I don't
- Be the change you want to see in the world
  You can't control others, but you can control your own life. So do what you can.
- More like an hour (or two, but less than an entire day).
  Tbf, a single jet like Taylor Swift's flies "only" every other day (170 flights out of 365 days in 2022). So her jet might not produce as much as one person's entire year - it could be a little bit less (like 1-6 months?:-P).
  I have not researched it but I still wonder about the facts there: like if each plane can hold 20 people, and takes >12 people each trip (I'm totally pulling all these numbers entirely out of my ass btw), plus there are security considerations for her to appear in public and be mobbed, where innocents could be hurt e.g. an unnoticed child trampled to death - just how cost-effective vs. not is it, really?
  Unfortunately we will almost certainly never know, bc our for-profit media will only allow stories that make us angry and depressed. Boring stories like "Boeing flights do not fall from the sky >99.9% of the time" don't make the headlines or even the back pages.
  I don't know if Taylor Swift is right to fly by private jet, and I don't know that she's not, I'm saying we'll never know, nor can we trust our media to tell us, nor our leaders to care (except in the sense of accepting bribes to specifically not care - probably not even from her directly but other business people like Musk and Bezos who want to fly their planes, and may be better at hiding how many trips they take whereas she could be more naive about her own usage).
  You don't have the power to fix it, no matter what they say. So be free and do as you please.:-) How we all choose to be is not about reaching any kind of goal, these days.
- Vote. Tell people you vote for that reach out to you that this is one of your concerns and should be one of theirs. Otherwise, we all just do the best we can.

And they aren't wrong. Every current election is the most important of your life. Not just presidential. If you choose not to participate intelligently. And loose access or rights as a result. You will likely never get them back.

No, no, this time they're going to SHOW the mean ol' democrats by voting third party. When the opposition, consisting of literal fascists who tried an autocoup the last time they were in power, ensures they never have a say again, it won't bother them a single goddamn bit.
- ah yes the pantsuit lady school of electoral strategy where you pointedly ignore any and all criticism and then blame your voter base when you lose
  how did it go last time i don't remember

Yeah the problem is if you want to actually win you can't just keep saying it's the most important election and you have to vote for us or else over and over again. People will get desensitized eventually and stop caring and then the fascists will win. You have to do good things that make people want to vote for you and judging by public opinion Biden has not been doing the best at that. (This isn't how I feel, I'm still gonna vote for him to stop Trump and I think people should vote for Biden. I'm just saying why average people who aren't this dialed into politics aren't gonna keep voting and that will be the downfall of Biden.)
they’ve said this 3 elections in a row
You don't think anyone was saying it in 2008 or 2004 or 1996 or 1984? Nevermind the off-years, the municipal elections, the special elections, the judicial elections, the time when your favorite politician is on a singing show...
The problem is that fascism keeps gaining territory
Isn't it curious that Democrats can hold every branch of the federal government in 2008 only to watch fascism grow out of control on their watch? And then, by 2016, the cancer is everywhere, so we need to vote them all out. But the people we're voting for won't do a fucking thing to keep ACB off the bench for three months. So there goes the Courts. And then they've got Congressional majorities and the Presidency in 2021, but... oops, again! Can't prosecute Trump. Can't prosecute DeSantis. Can't prosecute Ken Paxton. Can't even prosecute Rudy fucking Guiliani.
And now we're back in 2024, begging for votes, because we need one more shot to do our fucking jobs, please, please, PLEASE, just one more vote, we promise this time it'll be different!
Only this time, we're sending 2000 lb bunker busters to Israel so they can slaughter Palestinians, while our candidate of choice is getting up in front of college crowds to tell them that any kind of protest is an illegal form of antisemitism. And the entire pitch for the Presidency this time around appears to be "If you don't vote for me, the wealthiest people in the country will hit the big Heat Up The Planet button until we all bake to death (but even if you do they still might)".
Cool cool cool. Love democracy.
They keep wanting their voters to feel that way, while apparently not being bothered enough to do something about it themselves. Like, are we supposed to believe that this election could plunge the US into 1000 years of darkness, but at the same time we absolutely cannot stop supporting a genocide halfway across the world, even if that may well make the difference in the election?
I've been hearing that it's the most important election of my lifetime since at least 2008. The problem is that this kind of rhetoric becomes meaningless over time. The Democrats need to stop telling people it's the most important election of their lives and starting telling them why it's important. "The policies that Trump is advocating for are literally fascism, and the right-wing extremists in the Supreme Court won't stop him," carries a lot more weight than, "Hey, I know I say this a lot, but this is actually a once in a lifetime, super important election."
- he Democrats need to stop telling people it’s the most important election of their lives and starting telling them why it’s important. “The policies that Trump is advocating for are literally fascism, and the right-wing extremists in the Supreme Court won’t stop him,” carries a lot more weight than, “Hey, I know I say this a lot, but this is actually a once in a lifetime, super important election.”
  What do you think we've been saying.

What Republicans realized decades ago is this is fundamentally true. Every election is the most important election. They just leave off the "...so far" that should be at the end of the statement.

I think before Reagan (or maybe Gingrich) people could reasonably see some elections as less consequential than others. But the Republicans realized that it's all about building. Build a bench of charismatic, intelligent, possibly sociopathic individuals. Get them in local government and then state government and then federal government. Tell your base voters that you're building something that will one day pay off.

Just keep building, just keep building, and one day you have a juggernaut. Especially if your opponents didn't build to match.

Democrats spent the 80s and 90s assuming the status was quo. They spent the last half of the 90s and the 00s living in the fantasy that what people liked about Clinton was the fiscal conservatism without the religion, so they should be more conservative.

Only very recently have progressives started breaking through.

Now we have to build.

Luckily the Republicans have hitched their wagon to a human wrecking ball. That might let Democrats catch up sooner than they otherwise would.

Democrats spent the 80s and 90s assuming the status was quo.
This was the Golden Age for liberalism. It was the age after the bountiful 80's, but before the communication age started shining light into all the dark corners of our society. People could live in blissful ignorance of societal problems as the just fed and fed from a growing housing bubble.
- I mean, you totally forgot how 9/11 changed our ENTIRE outlook on the world.

archcomrade

What's the chances this isn't a tankie?

He isn't defending Genocide Joe's warcrimes so pretty low.
- Biden said it's not a genocide so calling him Genocide Joe is factually wrong..

the most important election of your lifetime was the one that didn't land us here

ship's sailed, bitches

I'd go so far as to say it was bush v gore but it doesn't fuckin matter now; mighta been whoever lost to reagan's fault, him and thatcher really fucked everything up

I’d go so far as to say it was bush v gore
That election was decided 5 to 4.

I mean this one it is actually true.

Is Midwest.Social an offshoot of Hexbear or something?

- Careful. I've heard that's still in the splash zone
Midwest.social is the only whole instance that I suspect of being operated at least partly by shill / propaganda accounts. Maybe that's a weird outlandish accusation to make, but some of the admins are on the "no voting for Biden amirite" train which is unusual. And it's not the holistic "we are out of our gourds on all geopolitical issues" way that Hexbear users are. Midwest.social is like radical left people but a large part of the left radical criticism seems to be directed only at the Democrats. And, the whole "We are Midwest, we are from Ohio, look, it says [Ohio] right after my user name so you know I'm from the Midwest" thing is weird. There are plenty of regional servers but none of them give me the same "yo wtf is up with that" vibe like midwest.social does.
IDK. Maybe that sounds uncompelling, like an extraordinary claim with very sketchy evidence. But I looked around it a bit and it seemed just sort of off in a way that's hard now for me to articulate beyond saying that it seemed weird.
- I don't think it's outlandish; that's exactly what I've noticed from every single post coming from the instance or it's users and why it feels like Hexbear. Just constant, obnoxious hot takes about throwing away their vote because "both sides bad" instead of constant obnoxious hot takes about communist countries.
- lmao yes I am sure that there are propaganda campaigns targeting a website of chronically online open source nerds, whose active userbase is less than one percent of one percent of Facebook's. yes.
- It's not outlandish to say they are extreme Leftists - their sidebar says it straight up:
  A lemmy server for, but not limited to, leftists in the Midwest USA
  They perhaps could have made it even more clear by naming themselves "Midwest.Leftists" instead of Midwest.Social:-).
OP's name is also Hella sus.
I'm just from the Midwest, don't compare me to Hexbear. I don't even know much about it, just that they are always angry.
Does the domain name really matter that much?
Oh no! Not what a yiffit user thinks!
Anyway...

I know I'll get downvotes to hell for saying this, but I think RFK would make a great president.

I know he's said some shit before. I'm aware of the ivermectin solution against COVID and some other bad stuff he said. But I think he based these ideas on the wrong information and wrong advice that he received. But his heart is at the right place.

He's done some great work at defending the environment and defending workers' rights and fight against corporations, which are things he genuinely cares about very much.

I think with the proper counsel that white horse experts can provide him, he can be a very good president.

RFK is a skid mark on the Kennedy name. He knowingly snake-oiled ivermectin, counter to the data and extreme majority of medical professsionals. Don’t pretend it was an “oopsie- he was told the wrong thing!” That’s super disingenuous.
He’s not even a good snake oil salesman. If you honestly believe the shit you used to defend him, I have some tickets to heaven I can get you for a killer discount lmao
- Ok for sure the ivermectin thing wasn't smart. But it was the only alternative to the vaccine being talked about at the time. While that was a mistake, he does have a good point about pharmaceutical companies pushing out the COVID vaccines very quickly and making as killing in profits. Many people have reported serious permanent side effect to those vaccines. Maybe there should've been a bit more quality assurance or more tests to ensure there wouldn't be any problems. Then again, it was in a period where the vaccine was absolutely necessary and as soon as possible. So... Yeah. We didn't really have a choice.
One of the main jobs of the president is assigning work to other people. The president isn’t supposed to be the best economist, the best strategist, the top scientist, or the best trade planner. They’re supposed to make decisions based on the input of the people they selected for the position.
My biggest concern with Bernie (who is someone I absolutely admire and who I’ve supported for decades) is that he is total crap at picking staff and then he stays loyal to them.
There’s a tendency in western political philosophy that basically says that the king himself is a good person, but he has bad advisors. This is done for ego-saving, as people would rather criticize advisors than the king.
RFK is truly unhinged. He’s a conspiracy theorist. He’s the weird uncle you don’t invite to Thanksgiving. I wouldn’t let him house sit for me. If the guy can’t even win over his family members, I don’t think he’s promising. He’s being funded to run as a spoiler by the opposition, and I expect his support to plummet as soon as he’s actually put in front of a mic and gets national attention. Remember when Herman Cain was the Republican front runner until people figured out more about him? I think this is basically that.
- I'd actually really like to see how he would fare in a debate. I'd really like to hear what he has to say.
  I think the media is giving him a bad rap on purpose because American media is so biased and is completely bought by the Democrats or Republicans.
  Also, for the record, I'm not American or living in America. So I'm from the outside looking in. I've read some of the stuff RFK said and it doesn't sound like he's unhinged or a conspiracy theorist. Except for the death of JFK and his father and how that was the CIA. But, I wouldn't even be surprised if that was true. America's so fucked up.
To your last point, we always said that at least GWB had “good advisors” but that just made him easier to manipulate. I don’t think it’s bad that we expect the president of the whole country to be smart. I want them to be smarter than me!