Don’t whitewash those wars. Sure, Israel is going above and beyond in finding new and exiting war crimes to commit, but the US wars were also horrendous.

What an incredibly stupid comment. No, they did not campaign on “the opposite of building the wall.” They literally said, we’re the ones actually trying to build the wall, and Trump is blocking us because he’s all talk. You are uniformed about this.

Accusing me of watching Fox News is also laughable. Fox News did not support the Democrats’ narrative that they were border hawks, actually. Their position was always that the Democrats were soft on immigration, which they said was bad.

Senate Republicans block border security bill as they campaign on border chaos - NBC

The Biden Administration says it is using executive power to allow border wall construction in Texas - AP

Deportations by ICE jump to 10 year high in 2024, surpassing Trump-era peak - CBS

Biden pulls from Trump’s immigration playbook in election year twist - CNN

Don’t accuse me of being misinformed when you don’t know shit.

Democrats also campaigned on deporting Hispanics, and even more Hispanics voted for the Democrats. I guess that’s also a really stupid thing to do and should be pointed out to those stupid people?

I’m so sick of people trying to change the way entire demographics of people behave rather than trying to change the way one political party’s leadership behaves. It’s so fucking stupid that y’all waste your time trying to pressure literally millions of people to become unconditional supporters of the Democrats rather than trying to pressure the Democrats to adopt positions that would win them over. Like, however stupid you think it is for Hispanics to only vote for the deporter you like slightly more than the deporter you don’t like, your approach here is like 10x stupider.

One person vs tens of millions of people, but since that one person is a member of the ruling class, we couldn’t possibly criticize her or try to pressure her to change, no, that’s not our place, our place is merely to ensure our peers are loyal to our rulers no matter what.

Also yes Democrats may have claimed some things about republicans, but on the flip side Republicans also claimed constantly that democrats are softies letting every one and their mother in, so it sort of cancels out.

“Why didn’t they just listen to what the Republicans said about us?”

Even with this insane line of logic you’re expecting them to follow, Kamala still won Latinos. Only by a few points, compared to previous elections where the Democrats did not attempt to run to the right of Republicans on immigration, but more of them still voted for her. Just not enough to overcome the votes of white people. If we’re going to point fingers at entire demographics like this, then we ought to blame the people who are actually most responsible, right? But somehow, it’s always minorities who catch the most blame, isn’t it?

Blaming voters for things instead of politicians and campaigns is completely backwards and unproductive. Even if it wasn’t, I’m not going to blame them for taking the democrats at their word for what they were going to do. That’s nonsense. If your campaign depends on people seeing through your lies and still voting for you, it’s a stupid fucking campaign.

It’s like you didn’t read a single thing I said, most crucially the part where I tell people like you to go fuck yourselves.

Everybody in this thread going like, “It was so obvious he was going to do this, how could they be so stupid?”

I’ll tell you why: it’s because the Democrats ran as border hawks. Remember when they were saying, “We’re the ones who actually tried to pass a bill to crack down on immigration, but Trump blocked it.” The Democrats actively downplayed the threat that Trump posed by trying to claim that he was all talk. They completely abandoned any argument like, “Trump wants to build a wall because he’s racist,” in favor of “We’re the ones who actually want to build the wall.” If you’re saying that Latinos were “stupid” or whatever, what you’re saying is that the Democrats were lying and it should’ve been obvious to Latinos that they were lying, and because it was so obvious they were lying, they should’ve voted for them. Which is an absolutely insane thing to say.

When you have two candidates fighting over who’s going to be tougher on immigration, it’s really not that surprising that people who might be affected by that issue don’t vote based on that issue. And many Latinos have conservative cultural values. Absent a clear argument for vote against Trump, like that he’s racist, that his talk about cracking down on “illegals” won’t stop there, they voted based on other shit.

Of course, this reality is utterly unimaginable to the DNC, because it’s taken as unquestionable dogma that the way to win votes is by moving to the right and appealing to the mythical centrist swing voter. The reality is that if you can draw this hard moral line, and stand by it, then you can convince people that you’re actually going to protect their rights and that they should put aside other, less important concerns for the sake of defending this moral line. Even if that requires going out on a limb and adopting a more “extreme” position. Even now, there’s a lot of silence coming from the centrist Dems when they ought to be shouting from the rooftops about this shit, because oh no, what if we alienate the three people in the country who actually liked Dick Cheney.

I fucking hate anybody who tries to pull this “leopards ate their face” bit about vulnerable minorities who were abandoned by both parties. Go fuck yourself. Legitimately, go fuck yourself. You don’t get to stan a party that says, “Fuck you, vote for me,” and then act all smug when people don’t vote for them and get screwed over by the other side. Yeah, it was obvious they’d get screwed over by the other side, but your side was also promising to screw them over. Christ.

“Here’s my card. If you wouldn’t mind signing it and giving it back to me, we just need 30% to get a vote on forming a union.”

In 2020, she had all the time in the world, and she mismanaged things badly enough that she ended up dropping out before a single vote was cast. What happened in 2024 was purely advantageous to her, she got to skip the primary altogether and only had to keep it together for 15 weeks. Few people in history have ever received such a privileged ramp towards the presidency.

The primary process is an additional hoop that a candidate has to jump through, they have to appeal to a different segment of the people than in the general, which may leave them having to pivot or backtrack on their positions. They may have to endure bad blood, or harsher criticism from people who had been invested in another candidate. You could say that the lack of the primary cost the Democrats the election but only in the sense that Kamala probably wouldn’t have won a primary and we’d have gotten someone better.

15 weeks is also plenty of time to get a message out. Other countries do much shorter campaign lengths. And in the current situation where most people are driven by “negative partisanship,” voting against the people they hate more, being relatively unknown (not that a VP is that unknown) can be advantageous.

The main thing was policy but she was also just an unpopular politician with bad political instincts (campaigning with the Cheney 's lol), and she basically got to fail upwards and bypass any of the checks that would’ve recognized that unpopularity before it was too late.

Hindenburg, who ran as a left wing centrist.

There wasn’t anything “left-wing” about Hindenburg. He ran on maintaining the status quo - a status quo that was a rapidly deteriorating depression with very high unemployment. He represented business interests and was never going to do any of the major reforms that would’ve been necessary to save the republic (if anything could).

The social democrats decided to throw unconditional support to these centrist parties for the sake of stability. They didn’t seem to have any actual understanding of why conditions were deteriorating, why extremism was rising, or what needed to be done in order to address it - all they could ever think to do was support the bourgeoisie in order to buy time - in order to sleepwalk into fascism.

Naturally, as Hindenburg represented bourgeois interests, he was always going to side with the far-right against the left, if he had to choose. And, since conditions were declining with no plan to actually fix anything, he was always going to end up in the position of having to choose.

I would say that there are similarities, though, yes.

Spine? Conviction?

Whatever it is, the important takeaway is if future campaigns take the same approach, they’re liable to get the same results.

I swear, liberals will latch on to anything to avoid admitting their candidates’ actual faults and recognizing reality.

Objectively the worst electoral map since the Republicans took California.

The “pied piper” strategy, where Democrats fund far-right candidates in Republican primaries in order to create a situation where they’re the only alternative to someone abhorrent, rather than actually offering the voters what they want.

Aka the reason we got Trump.

Nobody sidestepped special effects like film noir did. They made a whole genre out of, “If we dim the lights enough, nobody will notice we stole this set from a different movie.”

The history of film noir is something really special that came together due to a unique set of circumstances (saddle up for an infodump). The Great Depression had given popularity to pulp fiction novels, generally focusing on working class protagonists struggling to keep a roof over their heads, and often viewing power and social structures through cynical terms. Meanwhile, in Germany, Hitler destroyed the German film industry, which had previously been the best in the world. A bunch of people who were generally some combination of gay/Jewish/communist/film makers came to America and brought their expertise, expressionist style, and antifascist perspectives to Hollywood, where it blended with existing American culture to create something entirely new.

Every iconic aspect of film noir was that way for a reason - even if the reason was often, “saving money,” like I mentioned before. The older, grizzled detective and the young femme fatale were cast out of necessity, especially during wartime when young men who would have otherwise dominated those roles were out fighting (or expected to be). While of course they are product of their time and can contain sexist themes, they provided roles for women that were more complex and had more agency than before. And they were also subject to censorship, but some movies, such as Crossfire (1947), snuck hidden meanings under the radar. The book Crossfire was based on was centered around a homophobic murder, but the Hays Code prohibited any mention of homosexuality, so the plot was changed to a racist/antisemitic murder (which also capitalized on the anti-Nazi sentiment of the time) - but with subtext alluding to the original plot. The effect is that the two forms of bigotry are linked together (tagline: “Hate Is Like A Loaded Gun!”), and the director later said that the Code, “had a very good effect because it made us think. If we wanted to get something across that was censorable… we had to do it deviously. We had to be clever. And it usually turned out to be much better than if we had done it straight.”

Film noir’s fans cut across demographics, popular with women and men alike. Back in those days, going to the movie theater was an all-day affair with multiple films shown, and film noir movies generally occupied the role of “B movies” (necessitating their cheap production values), but the point is that they were just targeted towards… moviegoers. And I don’t want to paint it as just, “foreign socialists promoting their agenda through hidden messages” or that sort of thing, it genuinely was a blending of perspectives and cultures that (much as I hate to say it as a certified America hater) really represents America at it’s best, the dream that we ought to aspire to. There really was something magical happening in the cultural dialogue that these movies are the product of.

But of course, we’re not allowed to have nice things. Due to McCarthyism, the alliances and blending of cultures and ideas that had allowed the genre to exist were ripped apart. People were pressured to name names and sell out their colleagues, which spawned distrust and animosity, betrayal and grudges that would disrupt the industry even after the direct threat had passed. And eventually replacing film noir and it’s proletarian focus and cynical view of society, came the spy movies, glorifying government agents infiltrating other countries as part of this global ideological conflict against communism. Propagandizing trash. Dead art taking no risks and presenting nothing to challenge the audience.

Anyway, film noir is cool and fun and artsy and had a progressive (for its time, at least) current insofar as it was allowed to.

I mixed up the threads, which wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t followed me around dragging it out into another thread in a desperate attempt to weasel out of providing the evidence that you don’t have because it doesn’t exist.

Evidence or GTFO.

Witch, tankie, sealion, fascist, it doesn’t matter the label, the tactics employed are the exact same.

lol this thread is off the rails and should probably get modded

Yes, it should be. I was trying to shitpost in peace when PJ comes here trying to start shit with me to distract from another conversation in order to weasel out of providing any evidence.

offered evidence of some (supposedly controversial) event.

Lol no he did not. Not even a shred. On principle, even.

See, I’m accused of being a witch, and by asking for proof that any witchcraft actually happened I’m questioning the Inquisition and proving my guilt.

How will I ever recover?