No major social media is being crowdbacked by communities outside of what lemmy itself is.

But that’s exactly where the Democratic party could help. Their primary activity is fundraising. With all the money they spend hiring pop stars to sing at events, they could be creating an actual media presence for themselves instead.

The Democrats had it during their entire presidency

Specificity is the path to the truth. People call out for “the list”, but don’t seem to know exactly what this is. Given that all this activity is illegal, there’s little point in storing a list of illegal sex clients in QuickBooks.

Instead, the closest thing would probably be a contact list, with people who were in on it and not mixed in. Prosecutors definitely have such a list, as it was shown in court - exhibit “GX52”. This list was partly shown in the Maxwell trial, but also sealed by the judge - not Democrats. Supposedly it contains “many, many, many, many names” including some with “massage at Palm Beach”.

Now you could say, why didn’t Biden tell the DOJ to release that list. Probably for the same reason he didn’t tell them to drop the prosecution of Hunter, which he later pardoned him for. Be cynical as you want about the separation of the DOJ and the president, (which Trump has consistently ignored) Biden did make a show of upholding it. And releasing the list to embarrass Trump would be a pretty blatant violation of that principle. It would also probably violate the seal order, making DOJ attorneys vulnerable to contempt.

Imagine doing such a bad job as mayor that even as an incumbent, you’re polling behind Curtis Sliwa.

It’s part of why they lost and a big part of why they’ll keep losing. Everyone says they have no message. But how would we know if they did? They have no place to put it.

Here’s Elon just before the 2024 election telling Tucker Carlson:

If Trump wins that Epstein client list is gonna become public. And some of those billionaires behind Kamala are terrified of that outcome

I’ll just point out the risk of what I’ll call “Joe Roganing” here. Elon pretends he hates both parties while there’s no election coming up. Then when the election arrives he “makes up his mind” and endorses Republicans. This allows him to 1) attract people fed up with both parties just to hand them to Republicans, and 2) have a credible that that forces Republicans to do his bidding.

Well that would eliminate the whole point of corporations, which is to make it easy to raise money.

Let’s start with an understanding of why corporations suck in the first place. The root of all good and evil in a corporation is limited lability. This allows investors to not have to worry that they’re going to lose more than their investment, so they don’t need to think too hard before putting their money in some company they just heard of. This is great for investors and for the corporation.

But this comes with a cost to everyone else. There’s the direct cost that if the corporation ends up owing people money through excessive debt, negligence, or illegal activities, they can declare bankruptcy and the investors don’t have to worry any paying for those (other than their losses on the stock). But I suspect the more pernicious effect is that the investors’ lack of concern over their investment as anything but a vehicle of profit basically leads them to pick sociopathic CEOs and demand profit maximizing behavior at the cost of social good and even long term stability. And since all this sociopathic activity is really great at amassing money, it’s kind of a big power boost for sociopathy overall.

However, the ease of investing can be a good thing for society too - basically it allows a lot of people to retire at some point, and allows for rapid funding of new ideas. So is there a way to get corporations back under control without throwing out the baby? I tend to think we should tax corporations higher if nothing else, as it is we do the opposite thanks to Trump’s last tax cut plan.

Ackman is also a part owner of X, and that platform will also definitely be a big part of an effort to defeat Mamdani.

Edit: a family member just asked me what I think of Mamdani wanting to put a tax on all hiring, saying he proposed a 35% tax on the salary of all new hires. I googled this, and the only results are on X. The fix is in.

Fair enough, but this is the opposite of going for the eyes and throat. This is attacking Trump where he’s least vulnerable. It’s an uphill frontal assault on Trump Castle, armed with a nerf gun. The best you can hope for is a valiant effort.

Better option would be they should stop pretending they have power, and go out there in the media and into communities and yell about how Republicans have too much power, and need it taken away.

I’m sorry I know this impeachment is important to all your emotional needs after feeling bullied and all, but it would be extremely helpful to Trump.

Bear with me please. Here’s how impeachment actually works:

1. Trump does something terrible that is extremely unpopular.
2. Outrage forces Democrats to impeach him.
3. Because impeachment requires a 2/3 majority, which is literally unobtainable for Democrats even after the midterms, there’s absolutely no chance whatsoever he gets convicted, so he wins at the Senate.
4. Trump declares victory, says the whole thing was a hoax.
5. (This is the key) Low information voters regard the issue as now settled in Trump’s favor.
6. No one talks about the illegal war, leading the Jan 6 riot, or trying to corruptly shake down Zelensky again, because these are all now worthless as attacks against Trump.

See the last two impeachments. There’s no way this works well. American democracy sucks, but realize it’s a game. You can’t win at poker by playing every hand, no matter how much you deserve to win. Impeachment is a 2-7 off suit. Fold it on sight.

I get that this is upvoted a lot due to being constructive but it also reflects a lot of Republican media tropes about the left that aren’t really true - and that’s why trying to “fix” these things won’t work - because it misses the real problem.

Examples: No significant figure on the left is saying “men are rapists”, or telling men to be more like women, etc. Reducing suicide, safer workplaces, and reducing excessive prison sentences are all priorities for the left and not for the right.

I think the real problem is quite simple: Republicans have invested heavily in portraying themselves as the “masculine party”, and in driving the narratives I’ve mentioned. And because Republican leaders like the Murdochs and Elon tend to be men, they’re best at driving those narratives.

Which goes to the real underlying problem with the left as a whole - no ability to drive or counter a media narrative. The right has Fox news and Elon’s control over Twitter, which they can and do regularly use to create whatever narrative they want. Notice how for example they just made white south African farmer killings a topic all of a sudden. The left has a bunch of corporate media whose top priority is selling truck ads. Sure, maybe the reporters themselves are left leaning, but they have no top down guidance as to what narratives to build.

And until the left creates some sort of media capability to create and control narratives, the right will always have a leg up. And because of that, none of the well intentioned ideas here will actually work. If the left tries to appeal to men, the right will decide how those appeals will be interpreted.

It wouldn’t be a Trump administration without reality TV drama. That harms millions of people.

The party The people that vote in the primaries for the party that claims to be “for the people” keeps putting centrists in charge.

Most people don’t vote in the Democratic primaries. Did you?

If this is AI it’s pretty good. These are the Flatirons in Boulder, CO.

On the contrary it’s right, perhaps even acute

Assuming you actually believe I misunderstood their argument, perhaps it would be more useful to explain their actual argument that I’m not grasping?

So this version of the argument basically amounts to: people who have harmed society should contribute to social welfare that bolsters the economy and society collectively. Which while a solid effort and earning my upvote, 1) the_petty_auntie’s reply doesn’t show signs of making this particular argument and 2) in this particular case, it fails because society as a whole wasn’t harmed by her son’s actions - rather a particular victim was. And as the victim was a teen at the time of the incident, it’s unlikely that the victim would be able to take advantage of student loan forgiveness unless it happened many years ago.

The question asks why the audience’s student loans should be repaid now when hers were not. The response is that the reason is the same as paying for her son’s prison sentence for raping a minor, which is “betterment of society”. Let’s count the number of ways this fails:

• “For the betterment of society” is a justification that could be used for pretty much any defensible policy decision. It really doesn’t further the argument at all unless there is something specified about how paying student loans makes society better.
• RAPING A MINOR is in caps both to indicate shoutiness and to emphasize this aspect of the crime, which again, is hard to tie back to an argument about student loans
• The main failure - the fact that it’s a blatant ad hominem directed at the poster for having a son who raped a minor, which is an evidently successful attempt to hide the weakness of the purported argument by casting the OP as someone whom one would not want to be associated with by virtue of being a parent to a rapist. This implied argument, which is the real argument, is invalid in the absence of evidence that rapist-parents cannot have valid opinions.
• It’s also a particularly egregious example of an ad hominem because it relies on guilt/worthiness by blood relation, the same concept behind ideas like racism and even worse, inheritance.

Better answers might include:

• Education costs have risen to a degree that the fairness calculation is now different
• Student loan debt is a threat to the whole economy and just as bailing out banks sometimes makes sense, bailing out student loan holders might as well
• Financial inequality is out of control and we should dispense with antiquated notions of “fairness” to the wealthy when circumstances have been more fair to them overall than at any time in the past

But these answers would not get reposted on social media as much because they don’t play into tribalism and social drama.

All three people here are terrible

Differences in matters of taste leads to disgust