I directly answered your question, and you seem to have ignored what I said. Plus you really should reexamine your assumptions about the importance of Gaza, the “ease” of withdrawing support, how much Democrats have moved rightward, and how many centrist Republicans vote for Democrats.

Your level of frustration with the process is inversely proportional to your awareness of these trends, of which Democratic leaders are likely well aware. Moreover, you seem to be valuing the strongly-held opinions of voters in non-swing states (what you’re calling “deep blue states” or “areas that effectively don’t matter”) more highly than the maybe-less-strongly held opinions of voters in swing states. If 5% of Democratic voters in California want sushi, and 5% of Democratic voters in Pennsylvania want steak, I’m picking steak and telling the California voters to take a hike. Their opinion doesn’t even register on my radar thanks to the electoral consequences of pissing off the Pennsylvanians who wanted steak.

No. If 5% of my voting base sits out over a single issue, I’m going to lose my interest in trying to triangulate their support and move in another direction to identify a more persuadable bloc of voters. That goes more if the abandonment is repetitive, and if the issues constantly change, or if the issue is something I can’t bend on for electoral reasons.

If one bloc of voters is easier to please than another, then I’m moving in their direction, even if it’s rightward. Unfortunately it’s winner-take-all, and you’re either in power or you’re not. There are no half-wins.

So, first, the way you copy+paste that response is difficult to follow, counterintuitive, and unnecessary.

Second, yes the KPD were often in violent conflict with the centrist parties. Violence had been reciprocal, unfortunately. And I’m not sure why Marx (a centrist) aligning with the DNVP years before undermines the broader point that it wasn’t Marx who elevated Hitler to the chancellorship. Sometimes US Democrats have negotiated with Republicans, but that doesn’t mean they’re responsible for everything Republicans have done or will do.

In this case, Thälmann and the BVP share the blame for not seeing Hitler and the conservatives as a bigger, more existential threat. Whatever threat Thälmann perceived from the SPD, BVP, and Marx’s former allies (the DNVP), they obviously dwarfed in comparison to the threat of the Nazis. Not saying their fears were unjustified, mind you, only that they obviously chose wrong by not looking at the bigger picture. Maybe they thought they were doing the right thing in holding true to their principles and not joining forces with the SPD and BVP, but it’s obvious now that they should have taken strategic influence more seriously, for all of their sakes.

Edit: Looks like the .ml brigade showed up in force today.

The mistake Ernst Thälmann made was not throwing his support behind checks notes Paul von Hindenburg, the man who ordered the police massacre of the Spartacus League?

Um…no? Von Hindenburg was the conservative. They’d have thrown their support behind the centrist, Wilhelm Marx, who lost by about 3%, thanks (in part) to the 6.3% Thälmann took. The rest of the blame lay with the BVP when they protested against the Social Democrats by siding with von Hindenburg.

Who elevated Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship in 1933?

Von Hindenburg, with the help of the governing coalition formed by the Nazis and DNVP, all of whom were conservative.

What point are you trying to make?

Wait, aren’t ALL of those colors inadvertently transposed? The reds and blues are wrong.

I heard, “This…motherfu-- former president.”

Just wanted to direct folks to [email protected], which is a brand new community for exactly these kinds of discussions. Cheers!

We dont need congress to expand the SC court…

Literally all four of those options require legislation to move through the halls of Congress. Did you even read that source?

Removing for editorializing the title, and locked due to multiple violations of Lemmy’s ToS.

The problem in NC might be atypical, though. State office pays $13,951 per year, and I’m not sure if that’s comparable to other states but it damn sure isn’t enough to entice anyone who isn’t already independently wealthy (and who can take 6 months off per year and not lose their job).

To be sure, the NC Democratic Party is utter dogshit at recruiting new talent, but they’re also fighting a seriously uphill battle in trying to find people who are willing to make literally below poverty level just to serve.

Wait, was he the good guy with a gun or the bad guy with a gun?

Same in NC.

Well put. I’ll also add that in left-leaning communities there’s almost always more attention being paid to dark money flowing into our elections from groups like AIPAC than there is being paid to dark money flowing into our elections via third parties. Dark money is certainly a corrupting influence if it gets injected directly into the campaign process for one of the two major parties, but it’s equally troublesome that third parties are frequently (if not always) funded from the ground up by an opposing party specifically for the purpose of ratfucking an election. Whether or not third parties are in on the game or simply willingly ignorant stooges, their effect is always the same. And the fact that they’re essentially invisible except during presidential election cycles provides a strong bit of evidence for the latter.

When analysts first noticed Spamouflage five years ago, the network tended to post generically pro-China, anti-American content. In recent years, the tone sharpened as Spamouflage expanded and began focusing on divisive political topics like gun control, crime, race relations and support for Israel during its war in Gaza. The network also began creating large numbers of fake accounts designed to mimic American users.

Spamouflage accounts don’t post much original content, instead using platforms like X or TikTok to recycle and repost content from far-right and far-left users. Some of the accounts seemed designed to appeal to Republicans, while others cater to Democrats.

I argued against the bot for a week. I hated the damn thing, and I pointed to the negative feedback as evidence in my discussions. I also held off on making sweeping assessments or making any rushed decisions because a vote manipulation ring was simultaneously uncovered, and we had no idea how deep the manipulation went. Could the feedback have been manipulated? No idea! Should we go by votes only? No idea!

I took the time to let the team read the feedback and discuss the costs and benefits, and in the end the votes were only part of the picture. Another part is the visceral commitment of a vocal minority to overwhelming the community with commentary (and reports) to such an extent that the people who are calm and supportive get drowned out and downvoted, along with anyone who happens to agree with them. Not entirely sure those folks have committed as much energy to downvoting every critical comment as was the case on the other side though.

The team took 12 days to work through disagreements (there were many) so we could come to a consensus position, and lo and behold, the bot is gone. The fact that the people who want the bot gone feel like they’re being dismissed is flabbergasting to me. It’s gone. Mission accomplished!

Yes it does.

Yeah, we were told they disrupted a downvote ring. I have no fucking idea where those accounts voted, except that we took vote totals with a grain of salt because we were in the dark. I’m frankly used to being bombarded with downvotes every time i comment in this community (edit: One person went out of their way to downvote each of my last 7 comments, for example.). So in my eyes, votes were (and continue to be) compromised, and we were informed about the ring while we were deliberating bot feedback. I tried to connect the dots with incomplete information because I’m not an admin. What else are you looking for here?

Yes, cutting a snippet out of a sentence with broader context is a classic form of bad faith argumentation:

if we’re not allowed to point to votes as a source of valid information, then sorting by “top” is equally invalid.

The “if” conditional is pretty fundamental in that sentence. To cut it out and then paraphrase it to mean something it doesn’t is one of the oldest tricks in the book.

No, in this community. We were told that the admins found a vote manipulation ring in our threads. I don’t have admin level access, so I have no idea where they voted for what.

or that votes on upvoted comments ought to be ignored because of vote manipulation

No one on the mod team said that. If you’re going to appeal that we be honest in our engagement, the least you can do is be honest in yours.