shikitohno

I’m sure it won’t happen, but there’s a part of me that would just love to hear that when the negotiations get to Idaho, Idaho is just like “Nah, hard pass, we don’t want you either.”

I’m not convinced that these problems would be addressed by a smaller population. On average, people today are better educated, more peaceful, and better nourished than they were 100 or 500 years ago. I think this is mainly due to technological progress rather than population size.

I didn’t read it as saying smaller populations would fix this necessarily, but that we should focus on fixing those problems before we worry too much about falling birth rates outside of countries like Japan and Korea that have such elderly populations. Even if letting the population drop doesn’t directly cause the prevalence of these problems to drop as well, I think trying to force the matter of growing the population before addressing these problems would likely only aggravate them. We can’t necessarily count on technological progress to keep up with infinite population grow, so we’ll continue to outpace our ability to find adequate solutions with our ability to generate massive problems for ourselves.

My personal favorite was my insurance at my last job had my prescription coverage managed by CVS caremark. I have a few prescriptions I probably need to take the rest of my life, and after the initial fill at my local pharmacy, they would refuse to cover it unless I had my doctor resend the script to their mail-order service, and had the gall to claim it was for my convenience. Some of said medication is controlled such that I can only refill it within a few days of my current fill running out, bud will conveniently also cause some rather unpleasant withdrawals if I miss a couple of doses. So, “for my convenience,” rather than calling in a refill and walking the two blocks to my local pharmacy, which has my refill ready in 30 minutes for me literally every time, I had to send it off to CVS. Then hope they filled it quick enough and there weren’t any Sundays or holidays to mess with it.

I was under the impression that he was supposed to be handing off the role to Kamala, which was meant to be a shift towards a young(er) leader, woman and person of color that they hoped would check enough boxes for younger voters to make them think she was an actual progressive. That plan seems to have been nixed once they realized she has so little appeal across the board, she could probably lose a popularity contest to any number of infectious diseases, and Kamala 2024 got scrubbed.

They potentially could have found other viable alternatives, but they would have represented an actual shift in party leadership rather than bowing down to the party orthodoxy, so the DNC would never actually support them.

What they really want is another candidate like Obama that is charismatic and can talk in a way that convinces voters who don’t feel represented by the current Democratic party to say, “This is the candidate who can deliver on reshaping the party in line with my views,” while having no intentions of meaningfully deviating from the party line. I think the experience with Obama is still fresh enough in the minds of these voters that they are on guard against the same sort of deception a second time.

Something like this to produce graded readers is a great idea, but I don’t see anything in the ad itself that indicates it’s for language learners. If this is for a general audience for native speakers, then it’s enabling people to avoid learning to read (and ultimately use) more complex and nuanced language, in favor of infantilizing consumers and spoon feeding them everything.

The only use case I could see this being a positive for when aimed at native speakers would be something like adult literacy programs, or maybe homeschooling for kids with difficulties learning to read who don’t have the trained, professional support that one would hope they might have in a more typical school setting. For adults who struggle with illiteracy, I could see this being quite beneficial, though. It’s something that people will often be embarrassed about to begin with, and somebody who’s feeling self-conscious about this could be demotivated by only being able to read books aimed at children. Even if they say “Screw it, I need to do this,” it can be difficult to maintain motivation and interest when the only content you can find at your reading level is written for little kids. If they could have adult materials adapted to a level that’s challenging but manageable for them, I could certainly see that being a good thing.

That it only becomes a topic of popular discussion once every two years doesn’t mean people are sitting on their hands the rest of the time. I’ve volunteered on local, state and Congressional campaigns, mostly translating campaign website and literature/fliers into Spanish. I’ve done this in the lead up to the 2020 presidential elections, state assembly, city council and mayoral races here. If I talk to people about this stuff outside explicitly political gatherings or a presidential election cycle, I’m an annoying leftist who won’t shut up about politics. When the rest of the country gets off their collective ass and pretends to care, I get “Why haven’t you done anything in between election cycles, you’re not serious,” from the same people who didn’t want to hear about local elections the last few years.

Yeah, it’s pretty exhausting having the same liberals disengage between presidential elections and then pretend to be the arbiters of serious politicking once every 4 years to try and punch left and exclude any actual leftist viewpoints. Thanks for doing your part to keep that liberal tradition going strong.

When it comes to the Democrats and* the left* — from the Biden campaign on down to the activists

What’s with calling out the left on this, when the closest they get to a leftist organization they take issue with is a climate advocacy group. The left has been pretty clear that Biden is not the man for the moment since the go, and for our troubles, we’ve been called everything from stupid and naïve, to privileged white people who don’t care about insert minority group here (and ignore that not all leftists are rich, white people, there are plenty of POC active in leftist politics, though critics, often privileged white people themselves, do love to erase their existence in the same breath they claim to be looking out for them), to either useful idiots or fully cognizant agitators working on behalf of enemy states. Centrist Democrats and liberals have been the ones trying to tell anyone who will listen that the same old play will not just be good enough, but is actually our only option to win, and they’re trying to leave the left to take the fall for their mistake, yet again.

Some of it is political calculation. If the president steps aside, the logical candidate is Vice-President Kamala Harris, but Harris has struggled in office and her poor poll ratings mirror those of Biden. If the Democratic Party tries to sideline Harris and open the door to other candidates through an open convention, they risk alienating her and her supporters and opening up further wounds in the Democratic coalition.

What, risk all four of her supporters? Oh, darn, there go the chances of winning ever again.

Democrats are not going to win with a staid campaign by the usual corporate boot-licking line of candidates they’ve relied on up until now. The sooner they accept that and get behind a candidate who is pushing for systemic changes on issues that actually resonate with your average Americans and the problems they face in their daily lives, as opposed what matters only to their donors, the better for them this time around. Heck, if they actually follow through and make some of those changes, even better.

There’s a lot of racists out there. I feel like if she’s at the top of the ticket, she’s gonna get dragged down.

This is just preemptive cope to avoid having to reflect on whether the Democratic leadership and its preferred candidates are actually the thing that needs change, and she’s not even an actual candidate yet. Kamala’s biggest problem is not that she isn’t white. Obama was a Black man, but he had heaps of charisma. Kamala has all the charisma of a plate of lutefisk,and people flat out do not like her. She is also irrevocably tied to Biden and his legacy, likely to her detriment amongst the crowds you would most worry about not voting for her because of her not being white.

For some of their more conservative members, they’ve certainly done so in the past, but I’m pretty sure that @SeattleRain@lemmy.world is just talking about the self-defeating obsession that Democrats have with appearing non-partisan. Yes, they do need to compromise to an extent to get something through the house at the moment, but they have essentially self-sabotaged in the past when they had the majorities to not need to do so, yet insist on negotiating with the Republicans anyway because they hope moderate Republicans will give them credit for not ramming legislation through in a one-sided fashion.

This really only works when the other party is engaging in negotiations in good faith, which the Republicans do not. As a result, the Democrats give the GOP initiative on steering bills and policies as they like, winding up with compromised legislation that doesn’t please their actual base, while also not getting credit from the Republicans they’re hoping to sway in some sense.

For an easy example of this, look at talks about eliminating the filibuster earlier in Biden’s presidency. Manchin and Sinema made it a dead idea, but even before that, Biden has been opposed because of his obsession with reaching across the aisle in an age where trying to do so only serves to stop his agenda dead in its tracks. Rather than get their elbows out and bully the two hold outs into falling in line (which was supposed to be what Manchin was good for, at least. I kept hearing, “He disrupts things, but he falls in line when it counts,” but pretty much never saw evidence of this), they just shrugged and collectively let the agenda die or get neutered, because to do otherwise would not be bipartisan.

I don’t think it’s necessarily being so concerned with integrity as to deliberately self-sabotage, but rather that this was a potentially viable strategy 40-50 years ago, and many of the eldritch horrors in party leadership, Biden included, just haven’t gotten the message that the situation has changed in the interim. Part of Biden’s campaign pitch was that he’s worked in Congress for so long and has the relations that would let him reach out to the other side to get stuff passed, and he just gets taken advantage of when trying to do so. The Republicans have long since moved on to a strategy of “Ram through whatever you can while you’re in power, and obstruct, obstruct, obstruct when you aren’t.” They generally aren’t concerned at all with what non-GOP voters think of them and their actions, which lets them just bulldoze their way through the process while racking up points with their base for being effective at advancing the agenda, regardless of how hypocritical/immoral they are in the process. Just see Mitch McConnell when Obama tried appointing a justice to the Supreme Court near the end of his term versus his response to Trump doing the same.

I would also say there’s just a fundamentally different level of at least the appearance of integrity necessary on the Democratic side, and Democratic voters are less willing to accept that the ends justifies the means. This is clearly illustrated just by looking at the fallout for pretty much any Republican having a sex scandal, versus it happening to a Democrat. In his initial scandal, Anthony Weiner didn’t even engage in a criminal act, having sent a 21-year old woman a sexually explicit photo. In less than a month, Nancy Pelosi had called for an investigation into it and he’d resigned his seat. In contrast, Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case and has had heaps of sexual assault and harassment accusations brought against him, yet the party of family values, good, Christian morals, and law and order is still completely behind him.