I think a lot of people read this as “I want credit for my kindness”

I actually think the real animator of the right is much worse.

They want to choose who is deserving of their kindness.

They want to be able to choose who gets help. Person that did something they don’t agree with, no help. Person that’s sympathetic to them, help.

That’s the reason they dislike systematic assistance. Because someone that doesn’t deserve help might get some.

So I’m nearing 40 and I’ve been a progressive / leftist now for over 20 years.

I remember getting pepper sprayed by capitol police for protesting the Iraq war and the halcyon days of thinking George W Bush would go down as our dumbest president.

I saw Obama capture the imagination of a progressive generation promising hope and change and then getting into office and giving us a heritage foundation plan that further entrenched the insurance industry into a dysfunctional for-profit healthcare system.

The entire time the democratic faithful have said, “vote blue no matter who” and the pragmatic progressive and democratic allies that want a party that cares about the issues they care about have gone “more and better democrats”

For two decades of my life I’ve been told the way to get policies that don’t just favor the ultra rich at the expense of everyone else is to elect more democrats and have these fights in the primary. Don’t split the vote by having progressives run outside the party, that will end in ruin. 20 years later we can name every progressive fire brand by name because the party only lets us have a few.

I’ve watched this strategy fail over and over. I think it might be time for the progressives and further left elements to make our own party. I look back now and think, I’d much rather have spent the last 20 years building a viable alternative, but if 20 years ago was the best time to start, the second best time is right now.

The democrats have failed in every imaginable way, and when the greatest test came along, would they defend the constitution and hold a bunch of fascists accountable. They failed. They dithered, they let bygones be bygones, they dragged their feet. And the fascists emboldened by this lack of consequences are now enjoying the cancerous fruits of their labor.

Their scare tactics are endless.

Here’s a really interesting video that Forbes just put out about Mamdani

https://youtube.com/shorts/AORpISxUCig

I think given the tone the VO is striking this is supposed to be damning or something. The comments though are great.

I think that’s the only encouraging thing in all this. Every so often the media can’t control the narrative.

They failed with Luigi so hard they just memory holed the entire thing. Every thing they tried failed, he’s a terrible criminal that gunned down a family man, people reacted with their personal stories about how UHC had destroyed their families. They give him a 50 person armed escort, the internet turns it into rap album memes.

Luigi went from having 24/7 coverage to not a peep when the media realized that people weren’t going to buy their spin.

At the end of the day all the wealthy can really do is suggest their version of the world over and over. All the people have to do is reject it.

As a Bernie supporter for every campaign he ran, I saw him get fucked over. I still remember when all the centrists rallied behind Biden so he could win a bunch of primaries in states he would end up losing in the general election and that was it, the story was now that Biden had unstoppable momentum.

I remember saying at the time that a Biden presidency would just be hitting snooze on fascism and the very serious Dems telling me I was just dining on sour grapes.

I’ll finish the rest of this post after I show my papers to ICE, trumps personal paramilitary which is now one of the best well funded organizations in the world.

Bernie lost the primaries.

Sure the corporate media spent every day talking about what a dangerous unelectable person he was.

Sure the same corporate media was happy to report about how because of super delegates he had basically no shot at winning and a smart voter wouldn’t throw their vote away on such a dangerous lunatic.

Sure Chris Matthews literally said that he was worried people like him would be executed by chairmen sanders

And yea the DNC marshaled all their money and influence against him.

And then the corporate media did just start calling whoever he was running against the presumptive nominee.

But that’s what makes these dangerous leftists so unelectable, billionaires and millionaires paid by billionaires keep calling them unelectable.

Won’t someone please, for once, think about the poor billionaires and what’s best for them and their media companies?

It’s not really a generational thing.

The DNC has been bought by the donor class. They operate under the (not insane) belief that they need huge sums of money to win elections.

Mamdani makes the donors unhappy, it’s as simple as that.

Mamdani is around the same age Pete Buttigieg was when he started getting into the national spotlight. Buttigieg doesn’t threaten the donor class, so full support. Fun memes and tweets about him going on Fox News and making a host look like a fool.

You see any popular candidate get crapped on by the DNC, go read what the candidate wants to do and ask yourself a simple question “does this threaten the wealth of the donor class?” If the answer is yes you are guaranteed that the DNC establishment are going to be fighting that candidate.

It’s why Mamdani’s win was such a big deal. The establishment was all about Cuomo and they still aren’t lining up behind the voters pick.

The thing is it looks like the party will be happy to let their bigger names just refuse to endorse him. Media will spend the next few months attacking him for being a scary socialist. And the dnc will suddenly lose track of their “vote blue no matter who” bumper stickers and be happy to fundraise for cuomo as an independent.

I’m sure though they will send Mamdani and old button making machine or something so they can claim that “this is why we don’t run far left candidates, maybe next cycle we could run Liz Cheney instead!”

I’m enjoying the idea of someone going IRL hunting and their only training is the Pokémon games.

Just out in the woods, gently tossing pokeballs at very confused deer.

Vote blue no matter who!

Ok the voters have chosen Mamdani, all the centrist Dems who demand progressives not run spoilers are gonna vote blue no matter who right?

Right?!

You want to tell me that’s photoshop. No, it says clear as day in big letter MS-13

It’ll be interesting to see who wants to hire this guy going forward, who wants to work with him.

I’ve worked in startups for about 20 years, I can’t imagine him being very welcome at one of those.

In any of the larger tech giants I imagine he’s going to run into plenty of engineers that don’t want a thing to do with him.

I imagine he’d be welcome at the right wing tech dumpsters that shit out things like truth social.

The thing is after this “high” I would think he would be insufferable even to those that could stand his politics, I can’t imagine going from riding high thinking you could rewrite the social security office with AI to doing your weekly standup about how many sprint points you accomplished on that bug that keeps showing “No Truths” under trump every time there’s a surge in traffic.

There’s a reason so many child stars crash out. Reaching those heights, being told you are some sort of wunderkind that early in life doesn’t set you up for success.

He may have to learn humility and grow through sheer necessity.

The constitution allows for no such thing. The constitution is pretty crystal clear that only the congress can declare war.

The congress passed a law saying the president can take military action that then comes under review by the congress. The President can do that without a declaration of war.

This power the president has is one granted by the legislature not by the constitution.

“Technologist” is a hell of a glaze for this douchebag.

He’s a child that thought AI was magic and could fix everything being taken advantage of by the worlds richest man to tear down necessary functions of the government.

He doesn’t have the life experience to realize how awful his choices have been. He has two paths ahead of him. He can either double down and make money continuing his grift with people politically aligned with the horrible project he aided. Or he can try to learn and grow and somehow come to grips with the shame of what he’s done.

I left Reddit 2 or 3 years back and have only used Lemmy since.

I joined through Lemm.ee so recently had to move over to Lemmy.zip

I think this was a net positive for me overall. Lemmy has a lot less content which helped me break the “I’m slightly bored let me pull out my phone and scroll Reddit” addiction I didn’t even realize I had. Now I check Lemmy maybe once or twice a day, still see the big important events and the couple communities I care about.

I was never one for twitter, so I don’t bother with trying to find a replacement for that.

Overall the less social media I use the better I feel. I think future generations will look back on our constant use of social media and dopamine mining the same way we look back on how people used to smoke everywhere.

We know it’s bad for us, but we like the dopamine so everyone just does it everywhere, we give toddlers tablets so they can start dopamine mining as early as possible. I hope our descendants look back at this time with a sense of “holy shit they just let people smoke in the nurseries at the hospital?!”