Notices by Chairman Meow ᓚᘏᗢ 🦋🍉 (darcher@hachyderm.io)

@inthehands His stated reason was that Hawaii has a high proportion of federal employees.

The scuttlebutt on the hill is apparently that he got all the same fury everyone else was getting, but he has the fewest constituents, so he agreed to inflate the yea count as a favor to Schumer and Durbin. In exchange for ??? of course. But considering how much flak even the nays are going to get, he may well come to regret it.

@inthehands right, that's kind of the point. The people you're asking already acknowledge it. Some may even be taking action to reduce it.

If you want to encourage a broader movement to address misogynoir, it seems helpful to have an explanation for why that hasn't happened already. I mentioned the campaign because that was the original topic. Plus some future Black woman's campaign might benefit.

@futurebird @Voline @MisuseCase

@inthehands In that case what would the appropriate action(s) be?

Let's say some people need to acknowledge misogynoir. Who are they? How do we get them to acknowledge it? What will change once they do? And, more to the point, what could the Harris campaign have done differently? Let alone regular voters.

(FTR though, I'm with @futurebird. It' seems implausible shedding that many Biden '20 votes, in that many places, was mostly one big problem.)

@Voline @MisuseCase

Lots of people wildly underestimating how desperate the pro-genocide, anti-Iran, and save-Netanyahu factions (yes, yes, many of the same people!) will be to get an irreversible hot-war going in time for the US election.

The good news is thare are significant impediments - notably IDF leadership's reluctance to take on Hezbollah and IRGC, and IRGC's reluctance to take on the West. The bad news is it's not at all clear those will be enough.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/16/europe/israel-uk-france-iran-retaliation-intl-latam/index.html

Lol, just realized that Walz is probably one of those white people who has picked up on the role of "the nod" in Black culture as well. He just seems like that kind of person.

#WalzMayNotBeJewishBut when a class full of Chinese teenagers calls you "big-nosed one" plus a Chinese idiom that appears to be roughly equivalent to "mensch" then you definitely get the nod.

https://thehill.com/capital-living/20553-the-accidental-politician/

Apparently #WalzMayNotBeJewishBut hasn't landed outside Jewish social media.

My previous thought regarding this topic is that he's got the same "methodically over-achieving cousin" vibe Zelenskyy has. You know that one cousin who's just annoyingly accomplished and good at everything, and you can't help being grudgingly impressed? That's Tim Walz.

Geography too, eh? I'm grudgingly impressed.

https://mediaspace.esri.com/media/t/1_d2sqkrju

@inthehands Not my hill to defend, but if you think Harris can do better you don't need a plan, you just need leadership.

The problem is: "If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave ... that they will support Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken"

In fact Biden could resign early, make Harris POTUS, and effectively guarantee her the nomination. He probably won't even endorse her though. Pelosi, Jeffries and Schumer probably won't either. Weird, eh?

Jeebus. Pennsyltuckian, only 20, bullied. 💔

So to a first approximation, this is a kid who managed to age out of becoming a school shooter and then got radicalized (at least partly by Youtube) into being some kind of boogaloo boy instead. That does sound very much like the USA in 2024 doesn't it?

@NeonPurpleStar right, but I'm not asking anything to do with tiktok or what the best option is.

You said that person was engaged in deliberately anti-Dem propaganda. I'm curious what you think about why they're doing that. Do you think they're getting paid? Are they angry that Democrats aren't doing something they want done? What's your preferred explanation for that?

@ErikUden

@NeonPurpleStar what do you suppose is motivating that person to deliberately demoralize democratic party support? Is it just to get views? Are they secretly on the side of the fascists? Something else altogether?

@ErikUden

"When it comes to discussions with the Israelis, 'the focus is on injecting reality into Bibi’s calculations,' a separate senior U.S. official said..."

Well, that's been working great so far. By all means double down.

Some days I figure Biden must be trying to ensure the US is "forced" into a significant escalation in the ME, and he's just trying to time it for the electoral benefits. That'd be a perfectly reasonable strategy from his perspective.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/24/us-hezbollah-israel-attack-conflict-00164761

(Re: last boost)

https://www.salon.com/2024/05/07/cannons-secret-right-wing-getaway-why-didnt-we-know-about-this/

@inthehands ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm just responding to "politicians and parties are tools" as a statement about how politics works.

And it's also a good thing we're just a couple of bozos chattiing about politics on social media, where nobody gives a rat's ass what either of us think. If we were actually trying to organize people, the way we thought about our goals, and the way we phrased our messages would actually matter, for a lot of reasons.

@inthehands 100% agree with the first three, but I'd like to gently dispute that last one, because it's actually kind of dangerous.

Tools are things you have some modicum of direct control over.

Politicians and parties are not tools. They're capricious, unreliable and often actively hostile counterparties in an ongoing adversarial negotiation. Implying that voting any way "control" policy simply by voting, i.e. without additional activism, agitation, protest, etc, is demonstrably incorrect.

Speechless.

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/05/31/jewish-orgs-pull-support-from-oregon-food-bank-over-gaza-war-statement/

Last boost: It's Aussie press, not US, but it does give a good sense of why the Israel lobby was so obsessive about preventing the pro- vs anti-colonialist argument (which Jews have been having since the 70s) from turning into a real schism.

I don't know much about Israeli domestic politics but it's interesting how Trump and Netanyahu have such similar "malignant narcissist takes over and destroys established political party, possibly a whole country as well" vibes.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-06/compass-not-in-my-name-gaza-antony-loewenstein/103789964

I liked the Onion better when it was satire. It's gotten kind of depressing since they switched straight news.

(Figure with new ownership taking over maybe it's time to crank up some of the old schtick again.)

https://www.theonion.com/advisors-assure-biden-this-will-blow-over-once-all-gaza-1851452315

Little surprised how many people understand perfectly what it means for "zero interest rate phenomena" to come to an end in the world of finance, considering how reluctant we are to admit that "insanely abundant fossilized energy phenomena" and even "consistent seasons and temperatures phenomena" are coming to an end in the real world.