[goes on mastadon]

random opinions:

Not saying I don’t go in for it sometimes. But its a bit like Twitter. It feels like an entire auditorium talking all at once, to everyone, all at once.

It physically hurts me to think about the number of times here, on this platform, people tried to gaslight us on this.

First it never happened.

Then, when we showed them the interview where he said it, we were told it was just “misconstruing” what Biden said.

Then, it wasn’t a campaign promise.

Then, when in 2024 when Biden confirmed it was a campaign promise, it didn’t matter, because “beating Trump” was too important; but if “beating Trump” was so important, then why were they insisting on sticking with Biden?

I just. Sometimes I can’t even.

Banana republic republic

Serious answers only.

The worlds too dark to take anything too seriously right now.

Well maybe not 0 possibility.

You think platforming her says this thing over here.

No the Harris/Walz campaign thought that.

No but like, you have an interpretation of what platforming her says or means. I do too. The campaign also does. So does everyone who reads it as a news headline. I wasn’t specific on what that thing was, just that, we all interpret it as saying “something”.

I mean. It drives it home completely. Its the whole point practically. She was deeply unpopular with Republicans. So what did bringing her, and the other Republicans that the campaign chose to platform, into the tent; what did the campaign get for it?

What it shows is the level of understanding of electoralism and the electorate campaign had. Time and space are limited. Politics is a transactional game. Who does the campaign decide to platform and how? Who do they get for surrogates? What is it they are trying to gain when they do the things they do. Who is a thing working on, or at least, who is it intended to work on?

Liz Cheney. An A+ scoring “pro-life”, anti-abortion Republican was who Harris thought was one of the most important figures to dedicate substantial amounts of campaign time to. At a time when women had just seen the literal physical rights to their own body stripped away from them.

So who was “being got” by platforming Cheney?

Like I get it. You think platforming her says this thing over here. And maybe it does, it also says this thing over here. I’m putting it out there as “one more baffling and catastrophic decision”, which was a baffling and catastrophic decision at the time it was being made, and that is the rub. Harris is not a victim of circumstance. She had a 1.5 billion dollar warchest at her disposal. She spent it platforming a failed republican politician from one of the most hated political dynasties of all time.

If you can just break down further why you think the Cheney example doesn’t support, I’m interested. I have my suspicions as to why you think that, but I want to hear what you have to say first. I’m going to write my answer in a spoiler tag below, but please don’t click until you respond (or do, whatever).

Read: They still don’t have a replacement for Trump.

Queen Latifa basically never endorses anyone.

you’re not paying attention to reality

You are not the arbiter of what reality is. Representative Zooey Zephyr flipped 27 Republican votes in an extremely conservative state with the power of rhetoric. So don’t tell me that people cant be convinced to vote differently. Sure sexism exist. Yes mysogeny exists. Yes, absolutely, there are structural disadvantages to being a woman running for any elected position. But like… Thats not what 2024 was. Its an intentional blindness to the deep failings the Harris campaign and Harris the candidate.

No Hawaii isn’t in Canda yet, but we’re hoping

#FormerlyAlignedWithTheBritishMonarcy

jfc thats not why she lost.

This is why she lost:

She COMPLETELY fumbles the ball on an UTTER LAY UP of a fucking question. You are on a national fucking interview in an extremly compressed election run, and you dont have a fucking answer to that question?

She could have said something dumb like “Yeah put the toilet seat down in the white house bathroom” and gotten a laugh. Say he should have gone further with infrastructure or he should have fought harder. But jesus christ in a fucking change election where the incumbent was POLLING IN THE LOW THIRTIES, YOU SAY YOU WOULD DO NOTHING DIFFERENT?

💯

She ran a terrible campaign. She COULD have won. She made material decisions around who to listen to and how to campaign that prevented it.

jfc christ exactly.

How is it that some of you take perpetually the wrong lessons from electoral politics (not you @givesomefucks@lemmy.world, the person you are responding to).

Where are you getting these pudding headed takes?

SHE RAN WITH LIZ FUCKING CHENEY PEOPLE!!

The war criminals nepo daughter.

The name TWO GENERATIONS of voters learned to blame for the dysfunction which was Iraq and Afghanistan. A name Democratic voters were litterally conditioned to hate.

Liz Cheney, an incumbent who lost her primary with 27% of the vote. Thats who Harris decided to run with.

Just…

Just notice how technocratic and neoliberal the original take is. The idea behind it, is that you just need to line up the perfect set of identities and qualifications, and then, then they’ll win. Its the exact worm-brained thinking that gave us Hillary Clinton. That’s the way to win elections. When they fucking blow it because the person has because thats not how fucking elections work, they have an easy fucking way to wash their hands by blaming sexism.

Guys: What was her fucking platform? Can anyone in this room tell me what the FUCK Harris was actually running on? Like other than “I want to be President”, what the fuck was she proposing in 2024?

And then she ran HARD to the right. She fucking ran to the right of fucking Biden for ffs.

And like, I don’t think we should be (necessarily) talking about Harris either, but not because of her identity or race, but because she ran a dog shit fucking campaign and threw what should have been a fucking lay up with how deeply unpopular Trump is. And she blew it because she listened to people who give advice like OP. I think when you blow an election like she did, any one, you just gotta go away from electoralism, like (thankfully) Hillary did.

But don’t stop giving us ladies to run. Run Warren again. Run AOC. Run Porter. But jesus christ stop pretending that voters base their entire fucking vote on the identity of the candidate as an excuse to run dogshit neoliberal campaigns.

🤷

I can tell you that the situation is pretty dire.

I think of the graduating at our local HS, Sr’s in 2024, only 12% could do math at their grade level? Might have been worse. Might have been 5%.

Interestingly, my understanding of the way in which flu vaccine was (in part) produced involved injecting blood infected with a the flu into developing chicken embryos (eggs), allowing them to develop the flu, and several probably very complicated steps later, you’ve got flu virus particles for a vaccine.

Any ways…

I just want to make two points about the decline in education. One is Reagan, and the attachment of funding dollars for education to property taxes (Prop 13? California?), and the other the emphasis on standardized testing that came under Bush in Florida, and was nationalized under Bush the president.

I think these two Republican (led, Democrats later adopted them) policies were some of the most destructive to our education system.

I think we need a new party. Schumer is/ has pretty much tanked any chance at a midterm comeback with this form of governance. Democrats have somehow become less popular while Trump lights the world on fire and pisses on its ashes. The brand is toast. No one wants to vote for Democrats and no one should want to be a Democrat.

So I’ve tried it a couple times now, with varying degrees of success, but I want to write a paper which takes a lifecycle approach to excess deaths by industry. My goal was to come up with a deaths/ billion estimate, to figure out a quantity of wealth after which we could decide, the person holding that wealth has effectively committed murder; then we buffer it by 10x to account for the fuzziness of the math, and we set that as the global maximum wealth cap.

Its practically impossible to believe that any industry results in 0 deaths per billion. However, when I did the first couple intial forrays into the research, its very dificult to pin down exaclty which is the source industry for a given death (for example, fossil fuels contribute massively to peoples deaths. But so does tobacco. Electric vehicles dont have tail pipe emissions, but might use fossil fuels in their construction, etc… etc…)

Here is some summary output from that.

To compare the estimated premature deaths per billion dollars of profit between tech companies and a fossil fuel extraction company, we'll examine ExxonMobil as a representative example.

ExxonMobil's Annual Profit:

In 2024, ExxonMobil reported a net income of $33.7 billion.
investor.exxonmobil.com

Estimating Premature Deaths Due to Fossil Fuel Emissions:

A study by Vohra et al. (2021) estimated that fossil fuel combustion-related fine particulate matter (PM₂.₅) pollution was responsible for approximately 10.2 million premature deaths globally in 2012.
investor.exxonmobil.com

Calculating Premature Deaths per Billion Dollars of Profit:

To estimate the number of premature deaths attributable to ExxonMobil's operations per billion dollars of profit, we can use the following approach:

    Global Fossil Fuel CO₂ Emissions: Approximately 35 billion metric tons annually.

    ExxonMobil's Contribution: ExxonMobil's operations contribute to a portion of these emissions. While exact figures vary, estimates suggest that ExxonMobil's products account for about 1.3 billion metric tons of CO₂ emissions annually, representing approximately 3.7% of global fossil fuel CO₂ emissions.

    Attributable Premature Deaths: Applying this percentage to the global premature deaths:
    10,200,000 deaths×0.037≈377,400 deaths
    10,200,000deaths×0.037≈377,400deaths

    Deaths per Billion Dollars of Profit:
    377,400 deaths33.7 billion USD≈11,200 deaths per billion USD
    33.7billion USD377,400deaths​≈11,200deaths per billion USD

Comparison with Tech Companies:

Previously, we estimated the number of premature deaths per billion dollars of profit for tech companies, assuming their energy consumption was entirely sourced from fossil fuels:

    Samsung: Approximately 1,004 deaths per billion USD

    Google (Alphabet): Approximately 153 deaths per billion USD

    Microsoft: Approximately 209 deaths per billion USD

Conclusion:

If we attribute a proportional share of global premature deaths from fossil fuel emissions to ExxonMobil based on its contribution to global CO₂ emissions, the company is associated with approximately 11,200 premature deaths per billion dollars of profit. This figure is significantly higher than the estimates for tech companies, reflecting the direct role of fossil fuel extraction and production in contributing to air pollution and associated health impacts.

It kills me because he did have a heart issue during the 2020 campaign and it really did kill some momentum he had. But obviously it didn’t last in any substantive way.