mozz

1. Favorite pastime
2. I'm a little skeptical that it's any kind of productive use of time, too, but someone is paying for organized propaganda operations on Lemmy which honestly is a little surprising to me but seems to indicate that it has an impact on elections to some extent, so maybe me doing work to debunk it is worthwhile, too
3. I have untreated mental illness that causes me to spend time on it, out of all possible proportion to how much I should spend

Pick 2

IDK, maybe pick 3

All the Democrats are too close to the center except for a handful of congress people. Honestly, I won't disagree with your earlier point there. But my point was that Gore out of all the Democratic candidates was pretty fuckin sensible in terms of seeing big problems and wanting to deal with them, instead of just having a big party for all the defense contractors and oil companies and Wall Street.

But yes, Nader was a factor, sure. Also: I actually know somebody that worked in politics for quite a while, and her take on the whole Florida debacle was very interesting to me -- basically that it was a failure of on-the-ground organizing by the Democrats; that they should have been able to pick up right away that people were at risk of getting confused by the ballots, and have someone at every polling station that could be able to give a little spiel (or cause the election workers to give a spiel) about how to mark your vote correctly. Like, it was rigged (on many different levels, including in my opinion deliberately making the ballot confusing in a way that would confuse a certain percent of Gore voters), but also every election is "rigged" somewhat, to whatever extent each side can get away with, and part of your job as a political organization is to watch close and be sharp and not let the other side get away with stuff.

IDK if I agree with her, but that was her take on it and she has a lot more firsthand experience than me.

Yeah. Plus the continuation of that conversation tends to go:

"Okay. He raised literally about a trillion dollars via corporate tax increases, which he then spent on climate change and working people, achieving incremental but quite significant results."

"Yeah but did he OVERTURN CAPITALISM AND AMERICAN IMPERIALISM? Because if not PROJECT 2025 BECOMES ALL THE DEMOCRATS FAULT"

That doesn't make sense for a couple different reasons, but thinking how to explain that it is wrong actually led to me to realize that Hotelling's Law is a not insignificant part of the incentives at work in a FPTP system which is yet another reason not to use them.

(Basically, in short, whatever point Gore staked out on the little spectrum, Nader can gather some votes by picking a different point. Doesn't mean a damn thing about how good the point either person picked was or the relation between them. But yes, mathematical pressure on both "main" candidates to move to the center and similar to each other is absolutely a real thing and I hadn't fully realized that before, although it seems totally obvious in retrospect and like I should have realized it before this.)

You said, how could anyone have assaulted this woman (or anyone else involved in this discussion), when I just saw a photo of her, and she doesn't look pregnant to me.

But sure, I'm the Charlie Kelly in this mailroom. Okay. I wasn't even gonna bring it up again.

Okay so there's a wonderful book about the zoo, I can't even remember the title and I am not motivated enough to find it. It's all true though; just this guy's stories about working in the zoo which are pretty fascinating by and large

So anyway, in it, they need to gather some rhino semen. One of the younger employees comes up with this great idea that we're gonna make a big fake rhino, and I'll hide inside it with the sample container, and we'll stick it in the enclosure and the rhino will fuck it and I'll be inside and I'll make sure everything is lined up and we'll get the little container of rhino cum. Easy peasy, can't believe you guys didn't think of this

So his mentor says I don't think that's a good idea all things considered

They go back and forth, and finally the mentor says fine. Tell you what. Make up your fake rhino, just don't get in it, just set up the sample bottle the best way you can rig it up and I know it might be better if you're in there to make sure everything is aligned but I think we can do this idea of yours without anybody having to be inside the fake rhino (well, anyone human you know, har har).

So he does that, spends a bunch of time on the fake rhino, they stick it in the enclosure. The rhino sees the thing, snorts at it, shakes its head downward a little bit, and charges the fucking thing, knocks it over, and starts stomping on it and just absolutely wrecking it in comprehensive fashion, taking this really methodical approach to breaking and stomping every little bit of the thing for quite some time to make sure it's completely flattened and destroyed, and then when it's done walks away to get some food.

The two men just watch the whole operation in total silence the whole time it's playing out, and then the mentor says to the young guy well you gave it a go, congratulations, but we still need to figure out how to get the rhino cum so please let me know what you come up with for plan B.

flood of these type of memes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVvCDSK5NsQ&t=2289s

Yeah. It could just be that they are a leftist who just doesn’t have much at all of a factual understanding of 20th century history in any respect, and is substituting an overall rosy picture of anything non Western instead of even the broadest of broad strokes of factual statements and understanding

But… it could also be someone who didn’t have a Western education with its notable gaps in what we wanna admit happened, and instead had a different education with a different set of notable gaps on what we wanna admit happened, such that it didn’t even occur to them that praising the USSR’s justice system would be a totally bizarre thing to say from the perspective of being supposedly a Westerner talking to another Westerner.

I have a theory which one it is

The president has quite a bit of ability to set priorities and work assignments within the justice dept and intelligence agencies and other parts of the executive branch. Unlike legislative things, he really can just say “put 1,000 people on this Bin Laden thing” one day and just from that they just go off and do it exactly like he said.

Bush did pretty much the exact opposite, actively refusing to use his leadership position to instruct the people who worked for him to do anything about the threat that they were telling him existed. Idk if anything Gore did would have made a difference, but there definitely is a consensus that Bush fucked up on recognizing and reacting, in retrospect.

Al Gore

too centrist

I am fascinated to wonder who is upvoting this.

I mean, it’s true that the left base didn’t completely show up for him. Enough of them showed up that he won the popular vote and the electoral college, but if the vigorous activist left that was focused on WTO and GATT and other non electoral issues had been on the ground in the same way that Roger Stone’s machine was, they might have been able to stop Bush from stealing the election, and we might have had action on climate change back before it was too late, no global war on terror affecting hundreds of thousands of lives, no ISIS, no 2008 financial crash, and we might not have had all the failures to take US intelligence’s warnings seriously, that led to 9/11. Plus God knows what else actual forward progress.

Reframing “the US news media is so corrupted by propaganda that the average viewer can’t determine who is better between Gore and Bush, by a large enough margin to overcome a pretty blatant coup” as being all Gore’s fault somehow, is the most Lemmy-fake-leftist thing I’ve seen today, and I’ve seen someone praise the USSR’s justice system and someone else say that Biden shut down Trump’s insulin price cap.

“Too centrist”

Get the fuck out of here

You’re right about Hillary though, that part is true