YOU are speaking!
Have you made any poignant commentary on the recent election in the U.S.? Do you have a good response to liberals who are upset with the results or process of the election? Have you written or seen something as a comment reply/post that you think has standalone value? Did you see a new take or analysis you hadn’t previously considered?
Whether it’s a long idea with lots of context, or a short and sweet one liner, we want those thoughts aggregated here. This post is intended to be a resource for comrades to draw from when having actual discussions outside of Hexbear both online or IRL regarding the election.
Consider this a mini-effortpost aggregator. This is not for shitposts, but humor is completely acceptable if it helps make the point.
-Can't blame third parties, the margins are too big and they wouldn't have mattered in a single state.
-Can't blame non-voters, voter turnout was relatively high.
-Can't blame the Electoral College, Trump won the popular vote by almost twice the difference that Hillary has in 2016.
-Can't blame it on people being ignorant of the ramifications, Trump had already been president for 4 years, he was the presumptive nominee all along, and throughout election season he actually polled higher than his favorability when he left office.
-Can't blame corruption or voting machines, the last week of polling had Trump ahead, and the exit polling lines up with the results.
The only thing the Democrats have to blame is themselves, for running a bad campaign with an inferior candidate and striking out on a softball.A close friend of mine was remarking in the last few weeks how the Democrats had pivoted from the "weird" messaging, which seemed to be working, back to the "he's dangerous and unstable and a threat to democracy" messaging, which they knew from experience did not have much of an effect. In fact, from exit polls, out of people who said "democracy in this country is threatened" or prioritized a candidate's capacity to do the job, a clear majority supported Trump! This is yet another damning piece of evidence that suggests that Democrats were actively not doing what they could to win the election. Either they prioritized fundraising at the expense of outcome, or they actually threw it.
Also, Allan Lichtman BTFO.
I'm personally waiting for Hilary Clinton to tell us who's to blame for this
What are you suggesting we blame it on? My gut impulse has been to say it was a bad strategy that didn't mobilize the voters Dems won with before, while Trumps turnout was static. Which I think is kinda a turnout based argument but if that's a mistake I want to catch and stop that now.
For anyone talking with trans friends or loved ones, here's a good resource @marcie@lemmy.ml prepared.
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Some things I would caution here for clarification:
Matrix is known to leak metadata and has weaker E2E encryption than other E2E encrypted platforms.
Signal is better than most platforms for one-on-one messaging (can also be used for larger groups but doesn't have channels) but it has shady requirements like requiring a phone number and requiring an Android or iOS device (doesn't support less corporate OSes like Linux as primary device) and the desktop application message storage not being secure (largely a desktop OS problem since their security tends to be horrible, but Signal could add more protections and doesn't), and other weird things like requiring proprietary libraries and not having fully FOSS builds and crypto stuff. It's not anonymous meaning theoretically the Signal backend could link sender IP addresses to exact recipients which is just enough data to be useful to intelligence agencies if Signal happens to be compromised (which they have received government funding in the past and suspiciously stopped updating their backend repo for like a year not too long ago). Signal is fine for the average person, but I've seen political activist groups use it and act like they're anonymous and I would be very careful in that situation. Otherwise if you know people that use Signal it's still better than most platforms, I would recommend using the Molly client which is actually FOSS and has more security features than the official Signal client.
Cwtch looks like the overall best alternative to Signal since it is decentralized, doesn't require a phone number, has all of the main encryption features Signal has, and has an option for running a server to reduce battery life and increase message delivery reliability. Briar is similar and works over Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi making it a decent option for protests (if you even bring a phone). SimpleX Chat looks better than Signal as well since it doesn't require a phone number. Also XMPP which is decentralized and self-hosted but it requires a server setup. I haven't really used either of these platforms though so I can't attest to whether they actually work well.
Lemmy and Mastodon are not private unless you are very careful in signing up for a public instance and not revealing your identity, assuming the instance you sign up for even allows that. However, they aren't run by corporations with shady agendas which is the most important part.
Ultimately the fault lies in Harris and democratic leadership who were in charge of the campaign. Harris got like 10 million fewer votes than Biden and you can't blame that on any one group. They made the conscious decisions that led them to have only a few million more votes than Hillary got almost a decade ago.
If someone is hell bent on a certain race/ethnicity let them know it can't purely be black or Latino voters fault if this is a majority white country. Are these people going to vote scold white people for sitting out or voting wrong? Democrats seem to lash out against their supposed allies more than the apathetic whites. They just write off the disengaged and target the apparently 20% of African American men that voted for Trump this time. Most of them still voted for Harris and if they went against voting for a black Democrat then she had to have a terrible campaign since that is one of the most loyal voting blocks in the United States.
Also, important to remember that Hispanics/Latinos aren't a coherent group within the United States. Some are fifth generation jet ski dealers that don't know Spanish and some are recent citizens who work as day laborers and need their ballot to be in Spanish. There's too much variety to tie them together like can be done with other groups.
lmao AOCIA is already on live breaking out the crocodile tears she perfected during Trumps first term.
I've been trying to figure out how to innoculate/poison the rhetoric in use that gets people to go along with whatever liberal/conservative talking heads set as an agenda for discourse.
Deconstructing rhetoric, analysis of media narratives - "media literacy" - more generally. I need a really fast way to read people into that frame such that they are immediately deonstructing narratives as soon as they feel empowered to do so.
I basically want to utterly snuff out the average person's credulity towards people who are seeking power or modelling behavior from a highly visible place.
In order for things to get better, people have to have the tools they need to distrust power. That needs to be paramount, over anything else. Once you have people going "oh wow that's kinda bullshit" rather than uncritically entering a receptive state and parroting what the guy on their screen told them to say and think, a lot of the work will just get done on its own
We really need to be poisoning the rhetorical space as much as possible. I need something that devalues propaganda the same way capital is trying to use AI to devalue art. I need something that poisons the dataset.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I try to go "diagonally." Don't go full on, strike true and at weak points without wasting any additional effort. Analyze each opening. There isn't an easy one-stop formula, sometimes you have to focus on peripheral aspects, as long as you shatter the liberal worldview bit by bit.
There has been a silent protest voter class ignored by mainstream reporting, tabulations, and analysis that can be found hidden within ballot reader error rates. These voters are casting ballots with no presidential candidate, but potentially ballot questions and down ballot votes filled in. They are consciously abstaining from all candidates for president and represent a active but non participating voter. There must be a reason these people cast a vote for no one right? Because they're not "selfishly voting 3rd party" after all, and not voting for their "unicorn" candidate. The only conclusion is that no one is winning these people over with their policies at the federal level, and know local races matter to them more.
Maybe this isnt the place to have this discussion, but I think it would be great to make these mega threads a regular thing. We have a lot of work to do, people to radicalize, etc.
It begins now.
More accurately, it was always here, but now is an opportune moment now that liberals are disillusioned. This is an opportunity we must take.
Is there a way to force liberals to reckon with all the stuff they just stopped caring about the day Biden became president? Like the camps of migrants? A lot of them went full border wall with Biden. Now they're probably going to start caring again.
They'll care about what the media pushes on them, I wouldn't expect much more than that.
I don't think this would be a fruitful line of discussion. They don't perceive themselves that way, so it just kind of bounces off and makes you unlikable (cause you're calling them a shitty person to some extent, regardless of whether you're correct or not).
Focus on common ground, and you'll be able to stand on that ground and clean up that sort of stuff later on.
Make some slide decks
You should organize your thoughts into slide decks that you can use to keep you organized and have evidence on hand to make your point, instead of having to scrounge up a screenshot from your downloads folder when you need it.
Socialist education is complex in the imperial core. You kinda need to understand like 8-12 different concepts at once before it all clicks (and even then someone may not fully agree at that point, it just starts making sense). Slides will help you lay all that out, and that sort of structure will make it easy for someone to digest as well, since you'll be able to specify what you will talk about when. Fewer tangents cause you can say "we are gonna talk about that coming up", so you can stay focused.
Your own arguments will sharpen up. There's definitely some lazy shit that's propagated on Hexbear/Twitter, and it'll start to become obvious where you have weak points when you start to structure your thoughts into a slide deck.
Get to the conversation
Trying to get a couple of people to sit down and take a lecture from you is borderline cringy, however the point is that right now, liberals are ready to learn. It shouldn't be hard to bring them to
"we agree on a lot: Trump bad and Democrats offer nothing except losing to Republicans, We need to do more about it."
followed by
"We've talked about socialism a bit in our conversation, but socialism is really a complex topic that it's taken me years to get a grasp on, it would be cool if we could sit down sometime and I can share what I know. I want to get us on the same page so we can start working on some political decisions together.".
These real life discussions will make you razor sharp in a way that posting online can not. Keep it interesting, add a bit of humor, and make it look nice. You should be able to educate people that you want to work with using this resource you craft for yourself (it's ideal to develop the slides yourself).
People do not actually want to educate themselves, and if you aren't doing it, CNN and the NYT are instead.
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One step closer to revolution. Only time will tell if it's a fascist one
I wish I could just work every day to meet quotas to achieve a five year plan and complain about how boring it is with my coworkers while hanging out in a public third space after our 5 hour full time shifts, before going home to our brutalist social housing block and calling it a day
That tagline, you know the one, occupies my daydreams at my job.
·1 hour agoThat tagline, you know the one
I don't, which one? (https://hexbear.net/api/v3/site lists all taglines, best on Firefox on PC)
get home from work in the United Soviet States of America in 2024
thirty hour weeks are tough, but I get more vacation days than most people in order to make up for it
boot up my home PC, an Electronika 9100 XMT
it's located in my garage, in a standard rack mount along with its standard power source and network components
head to the terminal in my living room to actually use it
computer monitor makes a satisfying hum as it comes to life
see the logo for the default OS pop up
it's a Linux distribution maintained by the Computing Centre of the Academy of Sciences
it's good enough
go into Firefox, log onto my favorite website\n\n>it's called Hexbear, it's a pretty standard BBCode forum
see that I have a private message\n\n>a comrade is calling me a revisionist
they sent me a picture of a pig pooping on its balls"
It's my favorite tagline by far, it seeps into the wrinkles in my brain and spreads like a mold.
Oh yea, that one is great
When you run on the status quo, and the status quo sucks, people are gonna turn to whoever manages to present themselves as an alternative.
When you run to the right, and the people who like right-wing policies already have a party giving them the policies they want, they're not gonna switch parties, and you're just going to alienate the parts of your base/coalition that are affected by those policies.
Not an effortpost but I think those are two simple, straightforward responses to anyone being like, "How could this possibly happen?"
I'm also running around countering any "she lost because she's a woman" takes with with Tammy Baldwin in WI and Elissa Slotkin in MI winning despite their states going to Trump, which are two invaluable rhetorical data points, imo.
It's looking like abortion on the ballot over performed Harris as well.
We've barely gotten past processing democrats third once in a lifetime fuck up in recent memory but I think we are missing out on imagining ehat a Trump presidency actually looks like.
That motherfucker is already doing interviews by refusing to respond to questions and slowly swaying to yacht rock, imagine when he's president for a week and he has to make a decision and hee settles it by a ymca dance competition with the joint chiefs of staff.
There's a very slim chance something happens to Biden (or he steps down to let kamala be pres for a day) next January, Trump is sworn in and then ousted and we get our very own 4 empowers in one year.
Plus it would be hilarious if going forward the numbering of president's was fucked up because one person was pres for one day in a purely symbolic gesture half the country refuses to acknowledge and half the country decides is incredibly important.
when he's president for a week and he has to make a decision and hee settles it by a ymca dance competition with the joint chiefs of staff.
Critical support for making the Empire slightly more dysfunctional /joking
spoiler
Ofc the national security state does what it wants regardless, any actual resistance to that gets you JFKed
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Comrades in the Pacific Northwest might be interested in my post from last week, opening discussion about a socialist movement originating in and focusing on Cascadia: https://hexbear.net/comment/5576727
There are flaws, but rhetorically it should be liberal-friendly. We live in the most politically progressive region of the US, but we are constrained by U.S. federal politics. Perhaps we should develop a Cascadian identity of our own that better represents us. Getting your politics from CNN or MSNBC will never ever take you there (as has been thoroughly proven for three elections, how much harder can our states support Democrats?bits not enough).
Just read your post and you may have answered the question, but the concept of Cascadian secession has already been taken up by conservatives and white nationalists, right? So if it were to be a movement to try and radicalize more people to the left how would we break away from that association?
