Congressional staff say the mood inside the Capitol is tense, stifling and bewildering as members brush off their constituents’ outrage.
Let’s see how the strategy of ignoring calls from your base a year before a contested election that your opponent polls higher in key states works out for them. It feels like the DNC is trying to lose in 2024 right now.
Lose to who? The republicans?
Sweetie, we’ve already established the gridlock of ‘lesser evil.’ All democrats have to do to win is be slightly less worse than the republicans, which is incredibly easy.
Which works every time, unless it doesn’t work.Like when Hillary Clinton lost against Donald Trump.
Yeah… hillary clinton wasn’t a good nominee.
Blame the DNC for manipulating a Clinton nomination win over Sanders.
She was at least slightly less worse than Trump though.
True, but the problem was the Dems assumed it was a slam dunk, and wound up pretty much handing Trump the presidency.
No she wasn’t. She would have been slightly less worse for the US only… for the rest of the planet, having a buffoon that was incompetent at neocolonialism was somewhat less worse.
The voting was US only,
Yes, I know… the rest of the world doesn’t get a say in the US’s shitfuckery. If we could, we’d vote the US out of existence.
I really think it might be a toss up. Good chance that bitch Hillary would have been just as bad
Yeah, like how Hillary would have given massive tax cuts to the rich, ended Roe v. Wade with three extremist SCOTUS judges, and instigated a riot when she lost the election. Just as bad.
Neither is Biden. A majority of democrats don’t want Biden to run again.
Except that right now Trump polls higher than Biden nearly across the board in the battleground states. You’d like to think it should be an easy victory against someone with multiple ongoing criminal court cases, but Biden is just that bad of a candidate.
The poll ur referring to is landline calls, bro… No one under 40 has a landline.
The New York Times/Siena College polls of 3,662 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were conducted in English and Spanish on cellular and landline telephones from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3, 2023. When all states are joined together, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points for all registered voters and plus or minus 2 percentage points for the likely electorate.
It wasn’t just landlines because they know that’s bad polling.
How many younger people answer unknown calls on their phone? I’m 46 and I don’t do that. And if I got a voicemail saying they wanted me to take a poll and to call them back, I would assume it was a scam.
Well, you don’t have to guess because that’s part of the statistics as well. 40% of the people polled were 44 and under. Also, they weighted the poll to help account for age. It’s not like professional pollsters and statisticians don’t know how to account for these sorts of things.
I know it’s scary that if the election were held today, Trump would have a very real chance at winning, but that’s the reality we live in. And right now, it is because Biden is such a weak candidate. A lot can change in 1 year. I hope that when it comes down to it, people will do the right thing and not vote for the insurrectionist. However, we have no reason to believe they will.
40% of the people polled were 44 and under.
That doesn’t mean it represents what those people think, it means that they chose a group out of the 40% of people under that age who would answer their phones when an unknown caller calls them to poll them.
Maybe the poll is accurate, but I am very dubious of any telephone poll’s accuracy at this point because so many people simply will not respond to an unknown caller.
Focus group polling might be more accurate because you can pick the demographics ahead of time, but I don’t know.
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If true, we peons pay the price for that, not them.
Let’s see how the strategy of ignoring calls from your base a year before a contested election that your opponent polls higher in key states works out for them. It feels like the DNC is trying to lose in 2024 right now.
the “vote for the lesser evil” crowd are an overwhelming majority and, they not only don’t care that dems don’t deserve your vote; but will use that overwhelming majority voice to blame you for enabling trump.
Okay, but the fact is there are only two viable choices and every vote that isn’t for Biden supports and enables Trump. That is true despite Biden being terrible. And he’s nowhere near as terrible as Trump. Read about Project 2025. People need to know about it. That is what Trump wants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
It is vital that be stopped. And that means voting for Biden.
This election there actually could be 3 viable candidates. Both major parties have such awful candidates that RFK Jr is polling the highest a 3rd party candidate has in a very long time. They show Biden and Trump both in the 30s percentile wise and RFK Jr at 24%. The “protest vote” seems to get stronger and stronger.
The cold, hard truth is that with a winner take all system, it will always be a lesser of two evils situation. Just like they want it to be.
Congressional staff say the mood inside the Capitol is tense, stifling and bewildering as members brush off their constituents’ outrage.
Why would this be any different than every other issue about which they’re ignoring their constituents?
Politicians have armies of statistics and pollsters to study people’s opinions and feedback.
They carefully choose a demographic groups they choose to appeal to, and they pick issues that will allow them to capture enough people who will begrudgingly support them as possible.
They don’t need the 1500th phone call saying the exact same thing as the last 1400 to understand who they’re representing and what their opinions are.
There are times contacting your representative in this way is important. When your road is fucked up or your local company is doing something they shouldn’t and nobody in the media or on the internet is talking about it.
Or sending a letter, answering a poll, so that their data people can sit and count them to figure out what they need to do in the next election cycle.
There are times contacting your representative in this way is important. When your road is fucked up or your local company is doing something they shouldn’t and nobody in the media or on the internet is talking about it.
But not literal genocide?
The representative is very well aware of what’s going on in Israel and is very aware of the protests and the opinions people have about it. You’re not informing them, and you’re not actually contributing anything by spamming them with phone calls about it.
And if you want to see literal genocide, let the Palestinians rule “from the river to the sea”. What they do to the Jews will make isis look like children in terms of their cruelty.
If you want to see literal genocide, turn on any TV and see what IDF is actually doing today, yesterday, tomorrow.
Not some hypothetical fictional Boogeyman.
Oh no, they’re inconvenienced by people telling the U.S. not to support the bombing of civilians in Gaza. How terrible…
They aren’t actually inconvenienced.
Probably enjoying a nice lobster brunch right now.
On the one hand, congressmen know that if they don’t back Israel unconditionally, they will be accused of being antisemitic, in league with Nazis.
On the other hand, Israel routinely violates human rights, it conducts an apartheid regime in the West Bank, it sponsors settlers whose actions clearly violate international law, and its conduct in Gaza looks more like genocide than it doesn’t. And it does all of that with US backing, despite US law forbidding the US from giving military aid to countries that …violate human rights.
So, if you recognize any of that, you’re a Nazi?
It’s so frustrating to know that our elected leaders are made to not recognize actual human rights violations, for fear of being accused of antisemitism even though Israel’s government is not the same thing as the Jewish people.
My social media is full of Jews pointing out that Israel’s actions goes against their faith, that they experience pain and shame knowing that Israel claims to do them in the name of Judaism.
Just once I wish American congresspeople had it in them to exhibit anything like moral courage.
It’s so crazy because I’m seeing the exact opposite. A bunch of Jewish folks in my extended family being vehemently pro Israel. It’s wild.
Does anyone actually believe contacting representatives matters?
If it did, why would they take bribes?
US Representatives care.
US Senators have achieved escape velocity and can just concentrate on their stock trading and junkets.
Good thing we don’t have direct democracy, something something mob rule.
Yeah, the mob would rule we need universal health care and to stop aid to Israel.
You know how many people actually complained about Janet Jackson’s boob reveal at the Superbowl?
25
It’s just that they each called 1,000 times.
I’m pretty sure Israel is calling in all the favors for supporting our gallavant through the Middle East in the name of revenge.
So that’s after they stole nukes, attacked our warship, and interfered in our elections.
Just one more little reminder that American democracy is an illusion and the choice that most of us get is as meaningful as “coke vs Pepsi”.
Who are you supposed to vote for if you are against sponsoring genocide?
The Democrats think that supporting genocide will still leave them with enough daylight between them and the actual fascists of the GOP, but it isn’t going to make people run to the polls on election night and Americans deserve an actual choice.
I’m not sure how my idea will come across but here goes.
This Gaza conflict is complicated as F. I think most people agree with that.
Pretty much everyone that’s touched it has blood on their hands by this point. And everyone in the fallout has been hurt in some immeasurably painful way.
The US involvement multiples the complexity because there is evidently a proxy between Hamas and Iran, and the US is already in opposition to Iran in other ways.
The US is also in the position of throwing its weight around in many other conflicts at the moment.
Diplomatically, this US is walking a thin line all over the place between needing to show strength vs compassion. Using negotiating finesse vs being strong fisted.
Inside the US, our representatives ideally can think for themselves, but as a party they hopefully work as a team to represent the American best interests, vis a vis “the people.” Specifically, I mean the people don’t always know what they want or how to get there, nor do they educate themselves as a whole about every issue at play. Not to mention that international diplomacy issues are very often not shared with the public.
So, yes, the average human with a functioning soul wants to see a ceasefire yesterday. But what if there is something else at play that we don’t know about, which justifies not pressuring Israel to stop?
“Man, it’s too complicated… I don’t know… man… None of my business…”
That’s all that I’m getting from this. This is not the first time in history when people have turned a blind eye to a massacre because “it’s too complicated”.
https://youtu.be/62I61kBahNY?si=EPFMpGYNM1gCK2iT
Michael Brooks on the complexity of Gaza.
Leadership of Hamas is in Qatar, money from Qatar was released through Israel by Bibi. So additional to this video showing how not complex it is, the Israeli leader wants Hamas in charge to make sure nothing peaceful happens in a joined Westbank and Gaza.
It’s not complicated to say that I don’t want my tax dollars to provide weapons to blow up people in their homes.
I think most people agree with that.
Only the ones filled to the brim with pro-Israeli and pro-colonialist propaganda agrees with you. You are either against white supremacist settler-colonialism or you’re not.
I think this response is why there’s so little productive dialogue out there. Everybody is too deeply entrenched.
No, this is very productive… more and more people in the world are seeing the monstrosity the west has created in Israel - even USians are waking up to it.
You’re not bemoaning a lack of “productivity” - you are bemoaning the fact that the propaganda shielding Israel which has been preventing “productivity” for the last seventy years is starting to implode.
I don’t directly have a dog in this fight, and I could never hope to properly untangle the moral standing of each side. At best I can comment on what I see as the obvious righteous mess that it has become.
Those who are entrenched in their positions and have resorted to slinging labels or using pejoritaves don’t move others closer to their positions, they move them further. That is what I mean by unproductive.
But I can comment on why the elected American representatives may be letting calls go to voicemail in regards to a ceasefire. Since the beginning of time as we know it, the winner of a conflict writes the history book, and Hamas doesn’t have enough apparent support to emerge from this still controlling Gaza.
I can imagine an American calculus that history will blame Hamas for the unnecessary deaths, and another few months of not changing the stance on Israel’s strategy will not impact the rest of the course of world affairs in any other significant way.
That is what I mean by unproductive.
The “marketplace of ideas” is a thoroughly debunked idea, Clyde - only the most desperate liberals cling to it these days.
the winner of a conflict writes the history book, and Hamas
The entire propaganda model that the US and Europe has spent untold treasure propping up for the last fifty years or so to protect their little white supremacist “fortress state” in the middle-east is falling apart right in front of our eyes… and there’s absolutely nothing that the (so-called) “west” can do to reverse that now.
This would not have happened were it not for Hamas’ attack.
They don’t get to write the history books in whatever way they see fit any more - those days are long gone. Any historian that pretends US hegemony in the middle-east hasn’t been significantly weakened due to the (so-called) “War On Terror” isn’t one that’s going to be taken very seriously.
USians
Just as I was starting to take you seriously,
You do know that “America” doesn’t stop at the Mexican border, right?
I know that the “United States of America” is the only country with the word “America” in its name. I know that the “United Mexican States” also has the words “united” and states" in its name – are Mexicans “USians” too?
I know that most Mexicans, by default, refer to people from the United States as “Americanos.” I know that most Canadians are quite happy not to be confused with the “Americans” from south of their border.
I know that people from the United States of America have been referred to as “Americans” for over 200 years. I know that when someone makes it a point to start calling someone else by a different name than the one that’s preferred, that person is usually pushing some outside agenda and should not be taken seriously in the conversation at-hand.
TL;DR: What does any of this have to do with your point about Israel and Gaza?
Mexicans, by default, refer to people from the United States as “Americanos.”
Oh, I’ve heard them refer to you by plenty of terms.
America have been referred to as “Americans” for over 200 years
By whom? Your fellow colonialists? Lol!
What does any of this have to do with your point about Israel and Gaza?
You’re the one that went on this little tangent because somebody referred to you by a term you don’t approve of, USian - you tell me?
Is it because the Biden admin already got Israel to agree to daily humanitarian pauses?
That’s like putting a bandaid on a severed limb
A fig leaf
Why should they be expected to have the manpower to answer every single one? A voicemail gets the message across perfectly fine.
Honestly, yeah. From what I’ve heard about Congressional offices, they basically just count the number of people expressing an opinion for/against a particular issue, and report that to the congressperson. Mail, calls, voicemail, emails, everything.
Why don’t they just let the average uninformed and outraged voter set international policy, or answer the phone and calmly explain to them why they’re wrong and go over the realpolitik intricacies of this conflict?
If discussing this matter on Lemmy has taught me anything. It’s that some people are outraged, partisan, and cannot be reasoned with. It’s no wonder they’re letting it go to voicemail.
difference they’re not on lemmy; they’re people to volunteered to work in a position where they have to deal with this behavior.
They’re elected by the people. Why shouldn’t the people get to talk to at the very least one of their staff?
Yeah, what are you supposed to do when someone yells down the phone ‘i saw a meme and now I’m basically an expert on this so you have to do what I say or you’re evil!’ or ‘the joooos control the world bank and eat babies, we should be helping kill them!’
It’s a painfully complex situation with no clear solution and a lot of hard choices, pretending you have some clairvoyant power or simple answer just means you don’t even begin to understand the situation.
