Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Last week's thread
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
re: election results. unfortunately i'm not surprised or even disappointed by now. it makes me feel sad for my 2015 self and her naivete. she didn't understand what a disgusting and evil culture she lived in
I don’t have too much coherent to say right now
fuck the fascists for what they’ve done and what they intend to do
fuck the neoliberals for doing their best to convince marginalized people that they shouldn’t defend themselves against a terrible fate
fuck the accelerationists for pumping shitheaded propaganda into the fediverse, for the victory lap they’re taking now, and for the general idea that their revolution is worth our deaths
shit’s about to get very hard and very weird and I can’t stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life
what a surprise, the thread all the leftist shitposters on mastodon boosted about how you’re a class traitor if you don’t vote for the Green Party (who I don’t buy as socialist) or “any other socialist party” (fucking who??? am I supposed to write “socialism” on my ballot in crayon???) conveniently went missing
anyway post your favorite fuckhead accelerationist here, mastodon’s a shooting gallery tonight
i do love how the "anti-imperialist" protest vote against harris was a choice between like three or four putin apologists. the state of the US left is really fucked up and i don't want to look at it ever again.
i bet the self-described antiimperialists going all for Southern Lebanon Parking Lot 2024 feel real smug right now
I've intentionally been avoiding feeds the last few days because I just do not have the headspace for it, but I quickly checked on shit now
and
fuck
Didn't the Green Party woman also just go 'I'm pro Israel' the day for the election or so? Which I think is one of the reason she might have picked up a few moves (the idea she might be more pro gaza I mean).
The bad guys have definitely learned a new sort of trick. Haven't wrapped my head around it yet, but it is bad, innit?
Apologies for the screed:
Quick recap:
2016-2020: executive orders every day, non-elected positions being captured by conservatives, dems just hand-wringing and tweeting. but Dems get lucky with a pandemic and trump loses
2021-2024: weekend at biden’s.
Where was the election reform? The dismantling or reform of the electoral colleges? The extra seats on the SC? Bribing the public with stimulus packages to boost the economy?
Remember when we pushed Biden left? Remember when the dems preserved abortion rights, prevented the invasion of ukraine, and stopped bankrolling Israel’s genocide?
“exercise your democratic rights and voice by voting for our candidate that wasn’t democratically chosen as our candidate”. “vote blue and do not voice any critical thought”. “any vote that isn’t for the party that didn’t meaningfully reverse or prevent conservative actions is a vote for trump”.
In sum: the bad guys didn’t do anything new.
The closest we got to a trump loss was some republican spook who went to a trump rally with a gun because it was closer than the harris rally.
According to some reports the dems simply stayed home and he even lost votes compared to 2020
The thing that's most baffling to me is how the difference in ground game had zero impact. We were pounding the pavement, doors got fuckin knocked. The GOP did less than zero, firing their entire staff responsible for in-person outreach and gave 100 million to PACs run by grifters who put it directly into their own pockets.
Unless we've missed a trick, retail politics as it has existed is dead.
Dem talking heads spending so much energy courting moderate conservative votes was an excellent way to demobilise their base. They really gave their all to lose an election that should have been a free win.
This wasn't a free win, however. The reason Harris took over in the first place was because Biden's performance in the debate was poor enough that the Democrats thought there was no longer any chance with him, and this was already with lowering approval ratings. Had he stayed, I bet Trump's victory would have been even wider.
Definitely, there was no coming back from that debate.
I mean, I don't think it was unreasonable to expect liberals to show up against someone who's sole policy proposals were mass deportations and political reprisals, and so I can understand the logic of focusing on the center (which in US politics means center-right).
But this being the democratic party, they also couldn't commit to an actual narrative to make that play. Rather than "look at their ties to Big Tech!" or even sticking with "look how weird these people are!" they had to go hat-in-hand and stake themselves to divisive (to say nothing of abhorrent) policies because that's the only connection they could try to make. I think we're seeing a major problem with the whole "big tent" concept.
It was twitter. Elon Musk joins Trump's team. What happens? Harris' chances begin to drop.
Trump did lose support, but there was probably enough propaganda on Twitter to make enough people go "both sides" and just sit out the election.
and of course, Twitter and Facebook style influence campaigns work just as well or even better elsewhere, in communities that haven’t hardened themselves against that type of bullshit
2/3 of regular users don't use adblock, cambridge analytica may be disbanded as a company, but the approach they made still is a thing
Cambridge Analytica even came back from the dead, so that's still around.
(At least, I think? I'm not really sure what the surviving companies are like or what they were doing without Facebook's API)
this is the bad place
IDK, do you really think twitter still has that much cultural relevance? ugh
I'm sure it played a part, though.
facebook is still big somehow and i see no reason why shrimp jesus irradiated brains of boomer population would be not susceptible to it like it was still 2016
Ten years ago, I naively thought that people might grow a sort of mental callus against online bullshit. Big L for me! Turns out that there's no such thing as magical self-assembling media literacy.
Given that Trump lost votes compared to 2020, I think it's past the peak of its relevance. Not many new people are entering the self-referential echo chamber. It's one of the main vectors for crypto and meme stock scams, as well as the main vector for Musk himself. When all those promises are broken once again, fatigue will start to set in among the bluechecks. It may linger, but it will be a spent force by the end of the decade. Keep up social pressure to get people to leave.
I'm seeing some takes now that the ground game did make a difference of a couple of points in the swing states, where it was concentrated, it's just that that wasn't enough.
Not enough for the presidential race, sadly; perhaps enough to scrape by with a few Senate victories.
Here in TN, we had a monster grassroots door knocking/letter writing movent. We did manage to get a couple of rad women into the general assembly--with several heart-breakingly-close misses--but not nearly as many as we'd hoped, and the vile supermajority is still in place. Anecdotally, we are seeing the actual useful activists here getting radicalized rather than demotivated, which will be important re: surviving the present kakiclysm
Also, I'd just like to say I appreciate ya.
strong agree
minor upside: it's going to be a good time to make lists of people who suddenly feel comfortable to mask off
fucking fuck this sucks
correct. keep receipts.
So much this
Not surprised, still very disappointed, I feel sick.
Yeah this is fucked up. I feel so bad for everybody (esp the Americans, but this will hurt the world). Shit this prob means I should start looking into seriously helping out locally when all this explodes into more international shit. (Which imho is the best you can do anyway, do things locally, build a bit of a support network for your community).
(Note I'm not American, but I think this will end badly, just the fucker stepping out of the paris accord for example, and all the weird blowhard fascists this will make feel emboldened to do more politics locally).
E: I really hope the people who go 'this is the same as in 2020, wait till all votes are counted' are correct and not on hopeium.
i think they indeed are on hopium/copium
I can't tell, US elections have imho always been extremely dumb. (But, in the past decades+ ours have not been much better).
both by electoral college and by popular vote trump has advantage, and worse than that house and senate are republican now
Yeah, turns out this is the bad place.
The history books are going to refer to this era as "The Stupid Years".
Because all of this is very fucking stupid.
I fully expect they are, even as I also hope they're not.
Well, it's more like 2000, really, in the sense that the courts are being used to restrict voting rights. There's strong evidence of flagrant UOCAVA violations: thousands of absentee ballots which should affect the federal election have been challenged in swing states. Edit: Here is part 1 and part 2 from an attorney whose Pennsylvania UOCAVA ballot was challenged; he goes through the law and explains what he's going to do.
I think I'm more angry than anything. l hadn't realized how tight my media bubble had gotten and was pretty sure this wasn't realistic. I had gotten myself ready for another round of 2020 nonsense and denial, not this.
The level of fucked we are is too big for words
I wanted to say something darkly comedic about the AI bubble popping under the new regime, but my heart is too sick to make a joke
Слава Україні. The world has failed you.
are you US-based? very sorry, take care
yes, i am. i've been plotting to get out for years but i've been too depressed since my partner died to make any progress tbh. i've no idea what to do
ugh that sucks, I'm sorry
I would suggest Canada, but we're set to get our own Trump in power in about a year or so. Too many people looking on the house on fire and thinking that pouring gasoline on it is the best solution.
The American electorate has just covered itself with gasoline because eggs cost 2 dollars more. Come January they strike the match. gg. HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE NOVEMBER 5TH. My only consolation is that I'll hopefully get to watch some of the Magas/non voters/vote-your-conscience peeps suffer before the end. But Ol musky and peter thiel will be in their gilded bunkers while the fires consume us all.
yeah, a lot of broke trumpists will get fucked over, along with all other broke americans, getting worse if they are lgbt or non-white or need healthcare, or are migrants. on top of palestinians, lebanese (done deal at this point), ukrainians (likely) and maybe taiwanese
one thing that i can think of that could reduce damage is that while some policies are stupid, cruel and obviously harmful for everyone, that didn't stop them previously, but this might make line no go up for billionaire republicans, and if they have trump's ear, that could make their implementation ineffective on purpose. i mean here specifically undocumented migrant work whose deportation would make post-covid inflation look like a joke
Nashville, here. I hear ya.
I don't know what else to say, I can't explain any of this, but also please know that you're not alone out there.