Are people on the left saying this?
The 2 things I’ve really not liked about biden is he
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Continued trump era boarder policies significantly harming refugees.
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Has doggedly supported israel in their current genocide campaign.
Other wise his admin has ranged from pretty good to business as usual. 1000% better than trump, but also with some glaring problems.
Are people on the left saying this?
A few. A small, but very loud group online. They’re larger on the Fediverse than most places.
They’re called “Blue MAGA”.
Usually, that’s the accusation leveled towards “Vote Blue no matter who” types, not the far-left types who deny that Democrats have ever done anything that has improved anyone’s life.
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No, and I don’t know where I suggested they would be?
it’s in the meme
Oh, I meant the people saying all the stuff that SpongeBob is showing Patrick.
Blue MAGA are vociferous that Biden is the second coming of Jesus Christ.
I have never, ever come across this person, but I will totally vote blue no matter who when the opposition is today’s average Republican
And that’s why they’ll never change
I vote in the primaries too
That’s… not a thing. I can walk outside and find a MAGA, I would have to troll online depths to find anyone that thinks Biden is great.
You haven’t been on reddit’s politics subreddit, or on BlueSky enough then.
Correct. Why would I go to either place?
2 is huge, but you forgot that he busted the railroad union which directly led to ohio burning down
I’m no fan of Biden (though I did and will vote for him) but that’s not what happened. He did not bust the unions, the 12 unions still exist. He broke a strike, which is the intended purpose of the Railway Labor Act of 1926.
The law he put before congress to force a resolution to the three year negotiation deadlock would have guaranteed the workers 7 days of sick leave per year (they wanted 15). It passed the House but the Senate knocked it down to 1 day, with a 14% immediate pay increase and an additional 25% over the next five years.
Biden continued negotiate for the unions to get the sick days. They don’t all have them yet, but at this point 61% of the workers do have 4 short notice paid sick days with the option to trade three personal days for an additional 3 short notice sick days. Negotiations are still happening, the Biden administration is still part of them.
The Ohio derailment disaster was not a result of worker error (or lack of sick days) but lack of maintenance regulations, which was not something that was being negotiated at that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_labor_dispute
Beau of the Fifth Column, Let’s Talk About Biden, the Rails and Sick days… Youtube link
I just thought union busting was something of a proud American tradition.
It’s true, we bust unions like their kneecaps were full of oil.
2 is kinda irrelevant in the context of the election though. If you think Biden supports them too much wait until you see the alternative. Trump doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy to say “Palestinians need our help”. He strikes me as the guy who’ll say “See? This is why I’m writing a new Muslim ban”
Continued trump era boarder policies significantly harming refugees.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t his Administration forced to continue those by SCotUS?
Has doggedly supported israel in their current genocide campaign.
Agree, but that looks like it’s starting to turn as well.
Agree, but that looks like it’s starting to turn as well
Honest question, where have you seen this?
All I’ve seen is talk about possibly maybe telling them to stop genociding. Other than that it’s business as usual. The whole siding with Israel at the ICJ trial isn’t a great look
Honest question, where have you seen this?
In international politics, there are very few unscripted statements. What is said is an important reflection of a country’s concerns, and behind-the-scenes demands. There is a distinct contrast between statements from before the current crisis and statements since, especially compared to the unconditional bootlicking normally offered by the US State Department to Israel.
We are at a point where support for the current course is wavering, and there is the possibility of change in our Israel policy, depending on how the opinions of the electorate continue to develop on the issue.
Remember when Kamalla Harris said during her speach at COP28 something about the US putting pressure on Israel and then not a week later the US vetoed the resolution for a Cease Fire at the UN Security Council?!
It’s wasn’t even that long ago that this happenned.
There really is no reason at all to believe that the Biden Administration has finally given up on their practice of trying to sway voters their way by nothing more than “talking the talk” whilst completelly refusing to “walk the walk” (at times, quite the contrary)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t his Administration forced to continue those by SCotUS?
Some, but he’s also put some effort of his own on being seen as ‘tough on the border’ due to increased migration.
A stupid decision, but a predictable one considering the hand-wringing our population goes through every fucking time there’s a bump in scary furriners coming in to this land which our ancestors were born i-oh, wait
scotus has no enforcement arm.
I think the DNC finally discovered Lemmy. There’s been a huge uptick of VBNMW and “how dare anyone question Biden” posts. Voters can be critical of Biden and the Dems and still vote for them to “stop Trump”. Even though Trump is merely a symptom of the crappy system we have.
Edit: also, calling the far left nut jobs isn’t going to win any of them over.
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“Stopped second Cold War and arguably saved democracy in Europe”
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves on either count.
yeah and im a big supporter (well relative to what I see on the internets) but obviously all of it is not attributable to him. All the same there have been more things that actually improve my quality of life over what any other president has done in my lifetime and all in one term with an adversarial congress. I loved obama but man he wasted a nice majority trying to play fair with a bunch of known cheaters.
I mean, Biden has the ‘bipartisanship’ disease too. But I certainly won’t pretend that he’s done nothing.
well you have to compromise to some degree but man obamas first term he was bending over backwards to get their input and sign off and they still fought everything he did tooth and nail. He figured it out his second term but had lost the majority at that point.
Agreed, not sure a proxy war against Russia is stopping a cold war.
Also it’s been proven presidential policy has little to do with economic outcome and unemployment rates. Honestly any president other than Trump probably would’ve caused an economic upturn due to the unpredictability of Trump. Also the pandemic being SOMEWHAT over has more to do with unemployment than Biden.
Fewer people looking for work because they realized that working a minimum job is worse than not having a job also lowers unemployment.
And a lot of old people finally retiring.
The fed playing with interest rates certainly has and has had a direct and measurable impact on the current economic situation.
You can argue that the fed is independent from the president, but the fact is they generally do whatever the president suggests.
He’s actually done the exact opposite when he directly refused to supply Ukraine with long range missiles early in the conflict, when they had the manpower and logistics to attack Russia directly. But instead he doomed Ukraine to a war of attrition what they can’t possibly hope to win without a serious import of soldiers (which isn’t happening). Biden handed Ukraine to Russia.
hindsight is 20-20, and even then i’m not sure that would have been the right choice
back then we there were a lot of people legitimately very worried that russia would use nukes if they felt “cheated”… international diplomacy is a tricky shit show of a game. who knows what would have happened
Enemy boots on your land is the only time I can think to legitimately use a nuclear weapon
Does Russia have a history of acting only under responsible and legitimate circumstances?
Never implied they did.
Mm, misread you then, sorry.
If you want leftists to vote for dems, despite dems pissing on leftists at every possible chance and yelling at leftists to fall in line, I’ll show you how.
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Point out that voting will never, ever, ever move the democrat party to the left. You cannot vote the party harder to the left.
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Point out that Republicans are going to remain fascists.
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Point out that voting third party is a spoiler vote and will result in fascists winning.
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Point out that the actual way to move to the left is to unionize and organize at the grassroots level, to apply bottom-up pressure on the top.
The answer is not to pretend that Biden is anything other than a Neoliberal Capitalist. Leftists will correctly point out that Biden is still a lukewarm neoliberal maintaining the status quo, and feel further alienated by being told they should love him anyways. That just encourages voter apathy.
My local democratic party texted me to ask me to consider running for office (I live in a very deep red state). I laugh at the idea, because I’m pretty sure that they don’t want a pro-2A anarchist and Satanist running under their name. My wife nixed the idea because she doesn’t want us to get firebombed.
My local democratic party texted me to ask me to consider running for office (I live in a very deep red state). I laugh at the idea, because I’m pretty sure that they don’t want a pro-2A anarchist and Satanist running under their name. My wife nixed the idea because she doesn’t want us to get firebombed.
You should run dude. I’m dead ass serious. You can win rural districts where dickless corporate bootlicking democrats can’t.
Here’s the secret code: Don’t run as a Democrat. Run as an independent.
Grass roots too. All you need is name recognition and no one, I mean no one, will know what you are actually like.
Believe me, that does not work here. This is a Republican area. The winner of the Republican primary is the winner of the general election in the county I live in. It is very much Good Ol’ Boy as well; you aren’t getting any support from the machine unless you’ve been kissing their ass for years.
We need people like you to run though, it’s hard to vote for it if nobody is running to represent the platform. Especially at the local level where it can make a big difference.
Lmmfao, they already made it clear why they couldn’t run (dems wouldn’t want them anywhere near their name), never mind that even if they did they’d never get anywhere near power. Just look at the treatment lukewarm Sanders gets for merely suggesting to tax the rich, just imagine what the propaganda machine would do with a self declared anarchist…
You people still don’t get it, do you - the system is running as it was designed to, you never were and never will be who it works for.
word, the USA cares more about protecting it’s corporations than it’s citizens
and every USA citizen believes they will be rich one day, let that sink in person reading this. lmao 😂🫵
word, the USA cares more about protecting it’s corporations than it’s citizens
and every USA citizen believes they will be rich one day, let that sink in person reading this. lmao 😂🫵
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It worked for Diddlin’ Donnie.
To quote myself,
My wife nixed the idea because she doesn’t want us to get firebombed.
I’m sure you think that’s a joke. I assure you, it’s not.
Im not American but thinking about getting my citizenship before 2032ish (so out of this voting cycle and maybe the next) actually, the more I hear about voting for a third party is a waste, the more tempting it is. Not saying that because I’m trying to be an edge lord, or a trump supporter, or whatever else I’m sure someone will accuse me of - but because if your policy dept is so out of ideas that all you have is “vote for us or else… …you… will have voted for someone else. And they might be bad. Neener neener” then surely anything except the Biden/Trump dichotomy has got to be worth a try?
Then to top it all that my vote won’t make a difference, to either party, it’s just pro forma so we can flip between blue Reagan and red Reagan every 8 years like normal… like - how is that not an invitation to want to fuck the system and look at third parties?
If there was no point in voting for a third party because the I didn’t have to hold my nose because Democrats smelled good then you’d have no argument from me.
Voting for third party presently is voting for a spearhead with no spear. There’s no mass movement for it, thus no pressure to actually stand up to the massive DNC or GOP. That’s why leftists need to touch grass and organize, so that third party can be viable.
Getting the order wrong means more GOP fascism in office, getting the order right means an actual third party becomes viable.
Describing Biden as Pro-Regan is insane, or even just the slightly less bad version of Trump is. Biden has been amazing.
it was a tongue-in-cheek jab at neo liberalism, not intended as a deep dive forensic analysis of which predecessor most closely correlates to each president.
Voting will move the party left, if people vote for that. But they don’t because leftists are a tiny, fringe political minority. That’s why Biden is in office and not Bernie.
Can’t wait to prove you wrong at the democratic primary oh wait shit we’re not really doing one of those for some reason
“Let’s do something that we’ve not done since the 80’s (and was disastrous for us) & will greatly increase our chances of a Fascist USA!”
What do you think would happen that would prove me wrong? A democratic primary is a great way to increase the chances of a Republican victory.
Or it will make it worse. Its not 1976.
I guess we’ll see. But pretty much everyone agrees that not undermining the unity of the Democratic party in one of the most divisive elections in American history as facism is knocking at the door, is a good idea.
Highlighting the diversity and love for democracy is better. More authority behavior is not what we need.
It’s not more authoritarian behaviour, it’s a very standard precedent that people are arbitrarily getting annoyed about this election cycle. Ideally maybe there would be a democratic primary, but the least authoritarian thing to do right now is keep Trump out of office.
Running Biden is a great way to have a trump victory
LOL. we already had one. Bernie lost… twice I might add. I hope another person like Bernie runs after Biden’s, or Trump’s :(, 2nd term because even Bernie himself helped talk about things Democrats didn’t talk about (healthcare for all for instance).
You are missing the entire point…
You’re doing exactly what you accuse the other side of doing while accepting the 1%'s bullshit argument that there is literally no hope of actual change.
Next 4 years, Next 4 years, Next 4 years, almost there guys don’t worry about it.
Picking the better of 2 evils is not democracy.
From your(and my) perspective it’s the better of two evils, there are plenty of average democrats that chose Biden on the merits.
I’ve literally never met anyone in real life who actually supports Biden, I’m not saying they don’t exist, just that he doesn’t exactly get people excited to vote, it’s literally just “not Trump”
Yet he got more votes than Bernie. So people definitely like Biden more.
Lol there is hope for change. 4 and 8 years ago, Bernie could have been a candidate. There wasn’t enough people that voted for him in either election, so Hilary and Biden took it. Now, you do need to wait 4 years because Biden is the incumbent, who historically have a good chance at winning. In 4 years, if people want progressive candidate, vote canvas and donate. If not enough people do, then that obviously means not enough people want s progressive candidate.
Bernie
lostwon then got told to eat a dick, and then his voters were told to eat a dick in court.Then democrats blamed those voters for not voting dem after telling them all to fuck the fuck off.
Citation needed
Voting will not move the party left. The only reason the dems are in power at all, is because the vast amounts of wealth of Capitalists support them. There’s no bottom-up pressure. Even if Bernie was in office, he’d have to fight tooth and nail with the democrats to get things done, not just the Republicans.
We don’t really know what it would be like to have Bernie in office, because he wasn’t popular enough to get there. But I could imagine it would be hard for him, yes, because no one wants him to be President.
There is bottom up pressure. Clearly. Self-evidently. There could be more if people who don’t want the Republicans in power actually made any kind of effort politically, rather than complained on Lemmy about unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that a cabal of spooky capitalists subvert the Democratic process so your vote doesn’t matter.
The Dems are in power because they won the election, solely because more people voted for them than the Republicans. If you VOTE, you effect change.
People wanted Bernie, Biden was voted for during the primaries in states that went to Trump anyways. The DNC does not want Bernie, so even if he made it to the presidency he would not be able to enact change. Who you can vote for is picked by the wealthy who influence the media and government, Capitalists.
It is absolutely not an unsubstantiated conspiracy, it’s a well-known and documented fact. Pretending that the democratic process within America is not hand-picked and chosen by large corporations and Capitalists is naive and unsubstantiated.
Some people wanted Bernie, most didn’t. That’s why he didn’t win. You have no idea what the DNC wants. The DNC has no authority to try and sabotage a Sanders presidency, that’s a wild thing to say. There were some emails 7 years ago and those people resigned. They’re not going to rig it. Or ignore the vote.
If who you can vote for IS decided by the Evil Capitalists, how did Sanders get onto the ballot, then get millions of votes in 2016 & 2020? How did he run a campaign without a superpac, beating out millionaires with massive campaign funds?
I guess it’s cool if you think politics doesn’t matter because it’s all a conspiracy, it just means your political beliefs have zero chance of getting anywhere.
Here is a good article on the hurdles Bernie had put in his way by the DNC.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201101090855/https://berniewouldhavelost.com/
Which brings us to the goal for this essay: To allow someone with one hour and no background in polling or statistics to come away with an intimate understanding of the real story behind the 2020 Democratic Primary. If you are someone with even a kernel of doubt about the legitimacy of the results, this is, without hyperbole, the most important document you will ever read.
You might as well be linking me to the Q board on 8chan. This guy is huffing litres of copium.
That’s actually ahistorical, Bernie was fucked over in 2016 and was beating Hillary until superdelagates got involved. In 2020, Bernie beat Biden in most states that Biden beat Trump in, Biden only picked up steam when it came to red state primaries. The people want Bernie.
Did Bernie win, though? No. Again, superdelegates and careful design of the electoral process prevents anyone from actually rocking the boat.
Politics absolutely matters, elections at the federal level are loss prevention, and at the local level you can genuinely get Socialists into office. However, meaningful political change occurs when there’s grassroots momentum, like the Civil Rights Movement and Black Panthers. Unionization is one of the best ways to force political change.
Please, feel free to continue mouthing off and putting words in my mouth, you can continue being a radlib and supporting the status quo like your life depends on it, unfortunately I’m not privledged enough to not advocate for meaningful change.
Ok I will continue ‘mouthing off’.
Clinton won the popular vote. Bernie would have had to get nearly ALL the superdelegates to vote against the popular vote to win. All they did was cement Clinton’s victory. His campaign also raised and spent more money.
I don’t know where your reading of 2016 has come from. Is this just copium that Bernie didn’t win? which part of the less votes from more money is the capitalist conspiracy?
And again, Biden beat Bernie even harder than Clinton did. People vote for who they want to be president. America doesn’t want Bernie to be President.
And look at that, the popularity of Bernie has moved the Democrats further left.
I have been to every size of town and city all over the US and it doesn’t appear leftists a fringe minority. The people that accurately labels themselves as a leftist is probably a minority, but many many people are adherents of left wing views, but with no accessible way to push or vote for their ideals. People will support socialist policies without realizing as well, like guaranteeing healthcare or housing for all. People’s ideas of politics are all over the place in the US.
People when polled like the idea of healthcare and housing for all, but support drops off rapidly when you start getting into the weeds of polling actual policy. At the end of the day, coherent ‘leftists’ i.e. socialist adjacent people are a small fraction of the population, and a small fraction of those people would ever go further than larping or complaining on Lemmy.
The fact is there is next to zero political will for true left wing views to enter the stage, and has been shown repeatedly in the multiple resounding defeats candidates like Bernie have suffered, who isn’t even particularly radical. It’s going to be a long time and a lot of work to get a seat at the table for anything like that, and basically no one is putting that work in productively.
The other option some leftists like the idea of is revolution, but if they can’t leave their bedrooms to participate at the basic level in this system, there is no chance they’ll put the work in to overthrow it.
This attitude right here?
Exactly why the orange won.
The MIC picks, not us.
END THE MIC
Part of the issue that drives us to point out what Biden has done is that we often get a response of “BOTH sides are fascists and exactly the same, so why should I care?”, which then must be refuted.
Otherwise I agree entirely.
The answer to that kind of framing isn’t to show how good the dems are, but how bad the Republicans are. Again, the dems are not interested in appealing to leftists in any way, so again, this kind of posturing is what encourages leftist voter apathy.
If a leftist says both sides are the same, show how much worse Republicans treat anyone that isn’t a cishet white male over the age of 35, and how legitimately dangerous they can be for our loved ones that aren’t in that category, even if they are.
If a leftist says both sides are the same, show how much worse Republicans treat anyone that isn’t a cishet white male over the age of 35, and how legitimately dangerous they can be for our loved ones that aren’t in that category, even if they are.
But that’s the thing, when we point out that the GOP treats anyone that isn’t a cishet white male like dogshit, the inevitable refrain is that the Dems are ‘just as bad’. How are we supposed to refute that without pointing out policies of the Dems that are, quite explicitly, NOT ‘just as bad’?
By showing that the Republicans are worse, like I said. Biden is factually enabling genocide in Gaza, yes. The answer isn’t to support Israel, of course, but to show Trump’s track record of foreign policy blunders that would lead to acceleration, as a quick example.
If this theoretical leftist genuinely believes there’s no difference, they likely haven’t read theory, are a fed, or are only interested in virtue signaling and genuinely won’t be harmed by Republicans anyways.
By showing that the Republicans are worse, like I said.
My point is that any relative comparison requires both positions to be demonstrated to the doubting, otherwise all that’s proven is that Republicans are bad, which we all already know.
Show how dems are less bad, don’t frame it as “dems are good actually.” That’s my point.
Nah, what you want to point out is that Biden winning is the most accelerationist outcome due to how few would accept his victory and how much the Republicans will attempt to sabotage the results.Trump winning will just usher in fascism without any fight.
The only way to move the party to the left is to get more involved. Whining that they aren’t reaching out won’t achieve anything. A party is made up of people. Want the party to move more left and reach out further left? Be one of those people in the party and do it yourself, don’t expect others to do it for you.
No, a party is an interest group. Both major US parties act in the interest of the bourgeoisie and the US voting system is designed to make it hard to contend that. Until you guys discover representational voting on a national level, the democracy will falter.
The only way to move the party to the left is to get more involved. Whining that they aren’t reaching out won’t achieve anything. A party is made up of people. Want the party to move more left and reach out further left? Be one of those people in the party and do it yourself, don’t expect others to do it for you.
Yep. And work outside of it.
But mostly be involved and become a leader in your community. Find ways to engage with people, identify their needs, and address them.
So sad to see Lemmy is downvoting something like this. Really shows how clueless even the most politically opinionated are.
For such a politically active platform, people here don’t seem to really understand how people work in politics. It’s not as simple as “come up with the right policy and people will vote for it”. The vast majority of voters are not paying that much attention and are easily misled. A good example is California. One of the most liberal states, and they have a direct democracy system for amending the state constitution. Should be a slam dunk for leftist right? Nope, couldn’t be farther from the truth. Corporations pull every dirty trick in the book and spend billions of dollars spreading misinformation and pulling every legal trick in the book to get their will through, and as a result voters, not representatives, but voters, vote for props that go directly against their interests because they’ve been lied to and fell for it. Every election year there’s a bunch of horrible things on the ballot and it’s a nail biter seeing if the voters fell for it. Getting the right things passed, and also getting voters to actually go for it is nowhere as simple as people here act like it is, and people here don’t even provide any solutions, they just want to meme and complain while sitting on their asses instead of getting engaged and getting others engaged.
People love making this argument until you actually show up and get bullied for not showing up sooner then bullied for having different priorities than the herd then bullied for not supporting the milquetoast candidate at the moment.
Dems are just as faschie, even at the local level. You can’t move people left who are just as religious about their mid right position as christofascists are theirs.
The wealthy DNC donors pick and choose who makes up the party at the federal level. You may get an upset local win against a Neoliberal dem, but the party is the way it is by design.
You can also lobby your local government. Look them up, book a 30 minute appointment, dress the part show up and make your pitch. Sure it will barely bump the needle but if normies start doing this it can start to nudge that needle a little
Even just calling your local politicians can nudge that needle.
Sooo many people think electoralism is is just casting your vote every 4 years when it’s necessary to vote twice a year and stay in contact with your politicians.
I started going to school board meetings recently and have had a few people shocked at me just being a dude with a young child in, the district showing up to see how things run, sure it’s boring as hell but I had established a report with one of the members(long story) so him seeing me at the meeting was encouraging to him.
Man, I need to start attending my local school board meetings. My kids’ll be starting soon and it would be a good way to get a feel for the direction of things. I was a student senate nerd in college so I have a feeling I’ll be weirdly engrossed in the whole thing.
That just encourages voter apathy.
The fact that you can say all of that yet still come back to electoral politics as anything other than a charade and a farce is mind boggling…
Playing within the limited rules set by those in power to give the little people the illusion of choice is NEVER going to change anything of any substance.
I don’t think you read my whole point. Voting won’t bring positive change, just prevent negative change. Positive change comes from actually touching grass and unionizing, organizing, and building up bottom-up movements.
Of course you can vote a party harder to the left. You just can’t be lazy about it. So many you people sit there and wait until a presidential election and then complain. That’s not what you do you have to start early. You have to find candidates and nurture them you have to vote in primaries you have to work on elections. You want change you got to make the change. Most leftists don’t do that. They’d rather sit back and wait.
You cannot vote a party to the left. I do vote, especially for leftist candidates in local elections, but the DNC exists as it does because of large, wealthy Capitalists influencing it via donations, same as the GOP. Even if Bernie won, which I would have loved, he would have had to fight tooth and nail against the Democrats to get anything done.
The system is designed to prevent radical change.
So theoretically people on the left have done this work and have fielded Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips, and (at one time) Kennedy. What happens when states simply don’t hold primaries?
Acting like the DNC would ever move to the left (when their “left-totally-not-fascism” is bringing in that sweet sweet oil $$$$$)?
I genuinely do not see a day where enough of the boomers are out of office to fix this shit.
3rd party is how we end the MIC
Dont fall for the third Party rethoric.
Just swallow your pride and vote for something that does NOT help the fascists win.
Which is Biden.
🥾 😛
Mathematically, 3rd parties cannot work in the USA until we get rid of FPtP voting. The GOP outlaws other voting methods where they can. See Florida & Tennessee.
3rd Parties also don’t seem to want to put in the work required at lower levels of governance to be taken seriously.
If you could prove Duverger’s Law wrong, you’d be famous, but you can’t, so you’re just shouting into the ether instead.
Voting is a chess move, not a love letter.
I said the dems will never move to the left via electoralism, and without bottom up pressure, third party is a spearhead with no spear. You need to build up grassroots pressure from the bottom up for third party to ever be viable.
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“saved democracy in Europe”? i’d argue democracy works better here than in the US of A, and certainly not due to any US president
Is unemployment actually down, or is this just like number fudging from folks who work 3 part time jobs?
There’s a LOT more homeless people than I remember ever seeing before.
Unemployment is measured as people who are eligible and looking for work but not employed. People who have left the workforce for reasons other than getting laid off/fired (like quitting to take care of a sick family member) or people who have given up looking for work are not counted, even if they want a job. It’s measured by a CPS survey of 60,000 households, and I doubt it includes homeless people (or anyone without a permanent address).
I’ve heard the opposition party claim the unemployment is under-counted during the Obama, Trump, and Biden years by excluding job seekers who have given up on finding employment. That’s probably true, but if it is it has probably been pretty consistently under-counted for decades by both parties.
People that give up are no longer “unemployed”, which is why they aren’t counted. They wouldn’t even count in the labor force either, which is the sum of unemployed and employed people.
Right, and the argument that many Republicans made during the Obama years and many Democrats made during the Trump years is that they should count in the labor force, because they want to be in the labor force but have been disenfranchised. Then there’s also the people who are no longer counted because their state has pushed them off Welfare and moved them onto Disability, which has no pathway back to the workforce. It’s a very long story involving Welfare reform and a lack of job opportunities, but low unemployment and Welfare rates are greatly impacted by people who want to work but are forced into going on disability.
Yeah I didn’t mean to shit on Biden or anything; just seems like we’re not quantifying this in a very meaningful way.
It’d be like celebrating that food insecurity is at an all time low! woohoo!! …because access to affordable food is now so bad that 75% of the people dealing with food insecurity have starved to death since it was last measured.
(numbers pulled from ass for demonstration sake)
Yeah, for sure. My point is just that any under-count has probably been relatively consistent for at least 20 years, so the number is most likely reliably wrong if it’s wrong. If the numbers say unemployment is down under Biden, it probably is down under Biden, even if it’s not as low as the report says.
Unemployment is a meaningless statistic due to the weird definition. The more useful statistic is #of jobs divided by total population, which peaked in 1970 and has been declining fairly consistently ever since
That’s like claiming you have more bread by cutting the slices thinner.
Unemployment stats are typically useless for other reasons. For example, this is the definition of unemployed.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed
In the Current Population Survey, people are classified as unemployed if they meet all of the following criteria:
- They were not employed during the survey reference week.
- They were available for work during the survey reference week, except for temporary illness.
- They made at least one specific, active effort to find a job during the 4-week period ending with the survey reference week (see active job search methods) OR they were temporarily laid off and expecting to be recalled to their job.
Done an hour of DoorDash or whatever? Homeless? Not unemployed. It’s very much a meaningless stat and governments around the world game it all the time.
Not that I disagree with you, but if you counted all people who didn’t have a job then you’d skew the statistic even more by counting voluntary stay at home parents and other people who don’t work because they don’t need to.
Can you come up with a criteria that accounts for those who don’t have a job because the system prevents their access to the market without counting voluntary unemployment?
but if you counted all people who didn’t have a job then you’d skew the statistic even more by counting voluntary stay at home parents and other people who don’t work because they don’t need to.
Why is this important? Number of people with jobs / number of people is a statistic that obviously shouldn’t be 100%, but if it goes up or down that’s something we should pay attention to. If we suddenly have a large spike in people who stay at home and don’t work, we should at least understand why
Not one that would be completely accurate.
The best I’ve seen was a measure of underemployment, in which somebody wants more money/better work, is actively looking, but can’t get it. It would have to be through random surveys and extrapolate up, rather than something they can get from the benefits office.
Except this doesn’t capture it really, either, since the number of people with multiple jobs has been increasing steadily
Oh yeah maybe the statistic I was thinking of was percent of population that has a job
Homeless doesn’t equal unemployed. There are a lot of people who have a job but can’t afford housing
I’m not sure what’s the case now, but I keenly remember how Obama “decreased” unemployment by having lots of people being counted as “out of the job market” instead, hence they were not counted for the official unemployment figure.
You can actually see the growth in the latter number correlated with the fall in the former if you look at the graphs with the data from back then.
There was no guarantee that the American economy fully recovered after Covid. It seems to be assumed by a lot of people, but it is certainly not true.
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BINGO. Yes, 2-3 job having people are counted 3x :).
Otherwise, how else would the numbers be so abysmally out of touch ;)?
Does the 1% already know that? Yes.
No, they are literally not counted 3x. You can easily look up the formula. Is it a perfect metric? Of course not, but no need to bring in disinformation.
I don’t know the stats being referred to, but if there is a number stated like ‘x number of jobs added’, where is it said that it doesn’t include people with multiple jobs? I’ve seen reports a few times about ‘jobs added’, and it seems to be referring to positions being filled, couldn’t it be one person in multiple positions?
I’ve seen reports a few times about ‘jobs added’, and it seems to be referring to positions being filled, couldn’t it be one person in multiple positions?
That is not what this statistic is about though.
You’re not wrong, and they don’t usually qualify for unemployment. Also “border secured” is a joke, the reason they’re catching more is because the traffic level is unprecedented. The number I keep hearing is 15 million during his presidency.
Lots of homeless people work. I thought this was just like common knowledge but I guess not
Some yes, some no. I know a lot of homeless people.
secured the border
What does that mean though. Concentration camps for undocumented People? Kids in cages? You think that’s a good thing? People are dying in US camps, and you’re presenting that as a ‘haha gotcha liberals they DO kill migrants’
Fuck that.
Also genocide. Never forget that Biden is aiding and abetting a genocide. Don’t fucking look away because he’s your guy, motherfuckers
There’s plenty to complain about, but the significant thing is that every one of those things that are complained about are specifically as bad or worse with his opposition. It would be different if any of it were “Biden aids Israel who is committing genocide, but Trump is against aid to Israel!” or “Biden keeps kids in cages at the border, but Trump would get the border handled more humanely!” Trump unequivocally supports Israel curb-stomping Palestine, and Trump made a lot of the changes that put kids in cages, and his rhetoric suggests he only plans on hitting immigrants harder.
But I get it, there is plenty to complain about with Biden, not least of which is aiding genocide. The meme, though, is concerning the argument that Biden has done nothing while in office, which is clearly not true.
Yup. He has put more immigrants behind bars in makeshift concentration camps than any other president. Inspirational stuff. And supporting genocide? Good old Amerikkkan values right there, some real 20th century stuff from this decrepit ghoul.
‘But the other side is worse’
I’m fully aware that the other side is basically Trump, and Trump will be the end of democracy. A nightmare for everyone but a very select few. A totalitarian moron driven by the worst US politics has to offer. It will be the end of civil liberties.
But don’t let Biden slither away with any of the shit he’s pulling.
So I don’t disagree that we need to get less chosey and start voting for the lesser evil at the very least (not even american here bu the UK also has a choice between fuckwad A and B right now) But the bar for ‘extreme leftists’ has now gotten so low that depending on the company simply suggesting that we shouldn’t leave people to die on the street will get you classified as ‘extreme leftist’
With the jackass before him setting bar so low, Joe could have just redecorated the oval office and I’d have considered it a win. Its a bummer Doing The Job like a damn adult doesn’t get enough ink …
[I got a bot to automatically delete all my comments over 1 month old so you can’t see this comment anymore]
This doesn’t even mention many of the infrastructure programs that help people directly - the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, American Rescue Plan Act, WIIN, WIFIA, and probably more that I don’t know about. There is so much work in water lines and roads/bridges because of Biden.
Let’s not forget he took over in Jan. 2021. Accelerating vaccine rollout was on his watch:
“With COVID-19 surging and vaccinations off to a slow start, President-elect Joe Biden will rapidly release most available vaccine doses to protect more people, his office said Friday, a reversal of Trump administration policies.”
https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid-19-vaccine-developments-in-2021
Lol saved democracy in Europe, if the rest is just as accurate then he indeed hasn’t been very active in office
Who created this Liberal porn?
You missed:
- Enabled and bankrolled the slaughter of over 27,000 Palestinians.
- Bombed Iraq, Syria and Yemen
You don’t need to listen to far right nutjobs. They were never going to vote for any Democrat candidate.
You do need to listen to us far left “nutjobs” if you think you need our votes.
EDIT: Goddamn for a group that loves to call us "childish " moderates really don’t appreciate being told they can’t get what they want on their own and have to gasp cooperate with others.
