I like how Jon Stewart put it this week:

“Republicans rely on loopholes, while Democrats rely on norms.”

His whole thing this week was begging the Democrats to fight, to start getting dirty, throwing punches, to basically just not roll over.

But he kept reiterating the Dems need to get over the norms, they need to stop relying on the norms. He cited the hypocrisy of not approving Garland, but rushing through Amy Coney Barrett, and showed how the Dems brought McConnell’s own words to the floor of the Senate.

“And thus, Amy Coney Barrett, head hung, was forced to return to her homestead in-- Wait, what’s that? They didn’t give a fuck?!”

Or the Parliamentarian not allowing something Biden proposed to move forward, and Biden just rolled over. “Oh, uh, we didn’t know about that rule.”

I’m incredibly disappointed too, they’re supposed to fight for us, regardless of circumstances, and we get… The response we get. I completely agree the GOP and Trump were telling us they were going to steal it, and had precedent that clearly tried to last time, and the Dems just… Accepted it. The GOP launched dozens of lawsuits and recounts over handfuls of ballots, but the Dems have just moved on despite these statistical anomalies.

Not a great way to maintain your already waning support among your voting base: telling them they need to fight and support them in their fight, and then they just stop fighting.

Oh shit or get off the pot, ffs.

But he did his best, and that’s all that matters at the end of the day. 🙄 God was I livid when he fucking said that.

I’m trans, and that’s what bothers me the most about those two congressional Democrats coming out against trans athletes in sports. Parroting the “biological boys in girl’s sports” line the right has been using for years now.

They were so comfortable saying it, that’s what pisses me off the most. It shows me it’s not ingrained in the party’s platform, and we were just a token group to support when they thought we brought in enough votes. So they’d rather scapegoat us and try to court a minority of moderate Republicans that won’t vote for them anyway.

It showed me we, trans people, don’t matter to the DNC. Maybe we matter to the electorate of the DNC, but we don’t matter to the DNC.

Oh 100%.

I agree wholeheartedly, believe me.

I have a lot of socially unpopular opinions regarding how technology has and is progressing, and how dependent we’re becoming on all of it.

Yep, so why don’t the Dems do the same things, but to actually benefit the average person?

I understand people are going to say, “Well, we have to respect decorum and the rule of law,” but… How’s that going for us? The GOP doesn’t care, and we keep pretending they’ll find the line they won’t cross to accomplish their evil agenda…

So why can’t the Dems break the rules to actually help the American people and show them they’re willing to get things done? This isn’t a “I gotcha” moment or praising the GOP, I just don’t understand it beyond “they’re the same party, one just pretends to care.”

I think it was more of a long way to say “manual windows and door handles have worked since cars were invented, why are we reinventing the wheel and introducing new fail points on something like a door handle by making it electric?”

I believe we are still issuing Purple Hearts from that 500,000 surplus to our troops.

It’s also interesting to note that we’re basically lucky the Japanese surrendered after the second bomb. We didn’t have any more ready to go.

Personally, I’m of the mind that we did save both American and Japanese lives by dropping the bombs versus invading the Japanese mainland. People forget how fiercely loyal the WWII-era Japanese soldier was to their cause. They had to play messages from the emperor to get the military to surrender, otherwise they just believed it was propaganda, and the Japanese propaganda of the day told them the American soldiers were coming to rape and kill every last one of them.

One of the proposed weapons for an assault on the main Japanese islands was a bat-incendiary bomb. The bomb would be filled with bats that were strapped with time-delay incendiary bombs. The bomb would land and break apart, and the bats would scatter and hide amongst the houses in attics and what not. Eventually the bombs would detonate, and whatever Japanese town/city would be engulfed in flames city-wide.

Three Mile Island, and they want to do it to power their AI development. Not move their current servers and infrastructure to the nuclear power grid.

And the owner of Three Mile Island, who’s working with Microsoft, is trying to get the fed to give him the money needed to get the plant running again. Taxpayer money for Microsoft’s AI project that they’ll reap all the reward from.

We’re well aware, and it’s honestly getting old hearing “wElL tHe ReSt Of ThE wOrLd,” yeah, the UK voted to leave the EU and ousted a party to replace them with Labour who don’t want to hold another referendum on the vote.

India continues to elect the populist and nationalist Modi as their PM, because he gives them bags of rice with his name on them and tells them it’s ok to hate Muslims.

Germany is flirting with fascism again, and they’ve got all the stuff Americans are apparently too fucking stupid to get done, right?

Dutch police just rounded up a bunch of pro-Palestinian protesters, protesting peacefully, and then started beating them for not moving fast enough.

Oh, and the majority of European countries are freaking the fuck out about immigration and the floods of immigrants trying to come into their countries. And funnily enough, your politicians speak about immigrants the same way our Republicans do.

But you’re right, the people who weren’t alive 50 years ago when all of this should have been done, yeah, that’s our fucking fault too, right?

They raised over a billion dollars after Harris got the nomination.

They spent a quarter of that on sending door knockers to the same people’s houses 2-3 times.

And they donate money to Republican outsider campaigns to try to siphon votes off the Republican incumbent (who they usually still lose to anyway).

They would absolutely spend millions of dollars thinking they were going to lose. It’s not their money, and their lives will not change whether it’s spent or not.

Gotta love when users go to insulting intelligence and acting like them screaming their argument louder makes them more corrector.

You’re lived experience is yours, it’s not the lived experience of everyone. Not everyone has the means, money, ability, or desire to just sell everything they own and start over somewhere new, completely alone.

So, once again, not everyone can just drop everything, hop in a plane, and hope the new country takes them in with zero issue.

You’re also a man, I assume, since you mentioned a deceased wife and then your children. And since you’re German, odds are you’re also white. So how easy is it for the Arab trans woman to just drop everything and be accepted in a completely new country with no rights as a non-citizen?

Oh wait, they’re just being silly, they should just be a white man from a European country, and follow your exact life path because it’s the only possible way, and any other way is lazy.

You’re laughably out of touch, and since you’ve resorted to insults, I’m done with this conversation. I swear Lemmy is worse than Reddit, ffs.

Edit:

tHeRe’S nO LaNgUaGe ReQuIrEmEnT

I’m goad this worked out for you (despite you never naming which country you immigrated from and which you emigrated to). But I assume you’re not American, and haven’t actually looked into this. And you’re wildly, wildly out of touch if you think your exception to the rule is somehow the rule.

Yes, they do care if you’re American, yes they do care what degrees and certifications you hold, and yes, they do expect you to be proficient in the language. I’ve looked into, parts of Canada require you to have a certain level of proficiency in French. The Netherlands want you proficient in Dutch, the countries that people want to move to require language proficiency if your only language is English.

Your advice is basically drop everything, move somewhere, and hope they don’t deport you. Wow, what a way to live a life, why hasn’t everyone in America done this, and if it’s so easy, why do all these countries have these application processes and wait times and language tests? Why do so few Americans actually emigrate every year?

Must be because we’re all stupid and don’t understand you just move somewhere, live in squalor for an indefinite period of time (minimum two years, it sounds like), and then everything just works out. Wow, it’s so easy.

And how long did it take to learn the language? Was it done beforehand? What skills do you have? What country were you immigrating to, and which were you emigrating from? How much money did you have put aside, and what did you liquidate? What was the legal process like, and did you receive help? Were you allowed to live permanently in your new country before being granted citizenship? Did you have any connections in your new country? Did you have any sort of employment lined up? How did you and your family survive if you just up and moved? Did you have any pets and what was the process to have them emigrated vis vaccines, physical, breed/species restrictions, etc?

You act like everyone who may want to leave can just sell their positions, buy a plane ticket, and start over with the money in their pocket and the clothes on their back, and with enough hard work, they can get through it. Yeah, maybe. But it’s not like you apply tomorrow and are granted citizenship a week later and you’re on your way. There is months/years of work that goes into the emigration process, and it varies wildly by country.

But the reality is, most countries don’t want American immigrants, and even when they do, they normally expect you to already be proficient at the new language and will test for it (which can take month/years to learn for people), and they’re normally looking for specific occupations or qualifications. They don’t want brick layers and retail associates, they want software engineers and nurses and doctors.

Didn’t Trump try this with the DEA and states that legalised marijuana? Something about they wanted to start going after individuals and stuff because it’s still federally illegal?

I just remember a majority of the state’s said, “Go for it, but we’re not helping you in any way.” And they basically dropped it.

I’m hopeful similar situations will hold.

Unfortunately, we don’t all have the choice to jump ship. 🤷‍♀️

This is what I’ve been trying to get across to the people screeching about anyone who didn’t vote versus voting for Harris (I voted for Harris, just fyi, begrudgingly).

Voters were vocally and publically opposed to the genocide in Palestine being aided by the Biden admin, but the DNC would not back down, making these half-ass “Well, if Israel crossed the fifth line we drew, ooh, they’re really in for it this time! That next phone call, I’m gonna use the F word!”

Voters were making their concerns and their internal conflict known online, and they were either outright attacked for being a Trump supporter (y’know, instead of a human being trying to weigh which lives matter more in their voting decision). Or, you were told that we just had to bite the bullet “one more time,” and then this time we’ll be able to get the party to listen to us, and start to move in progressive directions.

But when you pointed out that there was no way to know the DNC would actually listen based on 2016 and 2020, and the fact the longer the campaign went on the further right Harris and her policies shifted… You were dismissed and screamed at for being a Trump supporter.

And this just proves to me that the DNC was never, has never, and will never compromise with their voting base on anything. Period. Even now, what are DNC pundits going on the news and saying? "The voters failed us, the DNC went too far left this election, the voters are tired of “wOkE” policies, I’ve even heard two Democratic politicians throw trans people under the bus.

The party of supposed LGBTQ+ lost an election and immediately turned on one of the most marginalized groups of their voting base.

But no, no, they’ll totally listen to us after we get them elected and give them over a billion dollars in campaign money. 🙄

I had a friend in the Navy back around 2015 that wholeheartedly believed that this is why America would fail.

The US government is the longest, unchanged Democracy in the world. We’ve had the same documents, modified slightly but not enough, as the rule of land for almost 250 years now.

He equated it to a white board that, over 250 years, kept having stuff added to it, but nothing was “removed,” just crossed out and something written next to it, or over it.

And now 250 years later, we’ve essentially resorted to trying to fill the spaces between lines and letters and around the margins, but they’ve already been filled, so we’re just writing over what’s already written.

Fair enough. I would work on how you phrase your argument, cause I don’t think I’m the only one who thought you were defending neoliberalism and liberalism.

But the Dems need to use the data and facts or non-corporate economists then, and message it so the average American understands this will mean more money for them, better benefits, protections, and comfort.

They’re not going to research the positions and research of economists they’ve never heard of. They don’t have the time, and many don’t care, they just want to know if the end result will actually benefit them or not.

Not saying that’s how it should be, but that it is how it is. Hence why I was saying a political machine with decades of ivy league education between them and millions of dollars at their disposal need to figure out how to get the 60% of Americans who don’t vote, to vote.

And ignoring the human factor of politics while doubling down on data and facts that the average American couldn’t relate to was a huge contributing factor for Harris losing.