mozz

“Democrat voters” “Democrat party”

I asked about this curious phrasing in this comment - what’s your take on it? Why do you think there might be a notable overlap between the users who are so fed up with the Democratic Party that they’re against Biden, and the users who even though they are obviously left wing people, use a traditionally conservative turn of phrase?

Hey, quick question:

• There are 229 accounts in Lemmy that have used the phrase “Democratic Party” more than once in the last 6 months or so.
• There are 188 that have used the phrase “Republican Party” more than once.
• There are 25 that have used the phrase “Democrat Party” more than once

So that does kind of make sense… “Democrat Party” is something I pretty much never hear outside of conservative circles. In most of the left it’s un heard of. It always sounds really weird to me and I don’t think it would ever occur to me to use it. It’s not surprising that it’s so rare to hear it on Lemmy.

So what I’m wondering is why there’s so much overlap between the users who do use that very unusual phrasing and the ones who are SUPER left. Like really left. Like so left that they’re mad at Joe Biden and even Bernie SANDERS isn’t left enough for them, and they want people not to support those people. Because of course they’re not left enough.

Any thoughts on it? You’re on that list, both the using that phrase part and the being super left part. Can you remember where in your reading you might have picked up that phrasing and started using it?

The whole site is bonkers, like Geocities level

Guy just say what you want to say, my attention span isn’t that bad

I completely missed that "Tuna" was involved with the actual username of this person you were talking to. I thought you were just being forthright and jocular with them. I like my version better.

1. They are polling dead even; even if the polls are garbage that's some sort of indication that "guaranteed winner" is false no matter how hard people keep repeating it
2. That said, I get what you're getting at. It's really too bad there's that big stasis rift in reality that means nothing can possibly change except replacing Biden with some other candidate, and that that action and that action alone is guaranteed to produce a good result, no matter how we do it.

Fucking rift

It's a little easier to figure out if there is one answer that is clearly and unequivocally wrong.

25/25/50/75 or something just doesn't have as neat a mapping of numbers into conceptual categories, for some reason, to me

I mean, in terms of the differences between the numbers in this chart and the numbers from the CBO that I posted.

Yeah that’s fair

Not to say replacing Biden is automatically a bad idea. I am mostly reacting to the idea that that’ll solve all the problems and we should just do it right away and not think about exactly with who or what will happen next and if you have questions about the plan you’re the enemy (and also, for some reason, what seems to often go alongside it which is saying a bunch of stuff about Biden which objectively isn’t true).

Some of the shills were swearing to me the other day that they were around in the 1990s and they and all their friends were super excited about how Bill Clinton balanced the federal budget, and then Obama was this big swing to the right, which Biden was a continuation of, like light-years to the right of the progressive sea change that Clinton had been…

My brother in Christ I was around activists in the 90s and the Obama years and I can promise you that that’s not how it played out. Depending on your age and how much you know about Biden’s economic accomplishments, Biden is either the best president the country has had in your lifetime or the second best. Full stop. For, I think, almost anyone who’s of an age to be realistically on Lemmy. The only way to make it any different than that is to go all the way back to JFK, and then still on top not to be aware of what’s been happening to income inequality in the last few years.

Mm hm

What’s your explanation for the military budget thing?

If you want to go with his analysis we should already have switched to Harris.

Oh! If you're saying that switching to Harris would be a good idea, that would be a totally logical and honestly not really that crazy thing that we could have talked about.

Some guy was coming in here talking about how every time Biden opens his mouth, his poll numbers get worse, and just kind of emphasizing this wild counterfactual in service of creating a narrative that didn't exist. I was talking with that guy. If you see him, tell him I looked at the polls you sent me and he's wrong.

It was so weird. But enjoyable to me.

Actually, I remembered that I think I accused one of them, or many of them, of being bots, so maybe that sort of undoes my "no no I would never do that to someone just because they disagreed with me" thesis 🙂

The thing is, something really weird happened that made me think it. I said something along the lines of "hey this source is actually really good, I don't agree with the conclusions you're drawing 100%, but thank you for sending it to me I learned a lot" and got back a response like "how can you ever expect to learn anything if you're just dismissing sources out of hand etc etc, you need to open your mind and be open to opposing points of view, you're just being ignorant"... I don't remember it exactly, but it was a response that when I looked at it, I realized would be a sort of boilerplate comment that would serve as a generic hostile response to almost anything. And, by sheer stupid dumb luck, it happened that it was total non matching nonsense to this total unusual backwards degree as applied to what I had actually said, which was a sort of unusually friendly and open-to-discussion response.

It was like the "They Live" glasses came on, and I started looking at every response in the thread like that. Like what the fuck is this? Was that guy just not reading what I wrote and in some sort of hategasm where he was just typing anything... or am I in a bot lobby right now? What the fuck is going on?

IDK, I never really figured it out. But it was definitely very weird. Definitely some of the people in there were real human tankies and like I say I learned a decent amount by talking with them (for way too fucking long, IDK why). But it was, now that I think about it, my very first encounter on Lemmy with some user that made me wonder what the fuck was even going on on the other side of the keyboard because it made literally 0 sense at all, what had just happened.