Summary
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged countering the Trump administration’s policies by resisting at every turn, arguing that its incompetence makes it vulnerable.
Her remarks followed chaos caused by a rescinded executive order that temporarily shut down Medicaid portals nationwide.
She encouraged activists to take offline action, citing ongoing mobilization efforts.
Her strategy focuses on making governance difficult for Trump, calling his administration “dangerous and cruel” but also “shockingly dim.”
The problem is decades ago Democrats did not make changes to help the poor and lower middle classes fast enough and extreme enough to show that they were the party of the common worker and get a dominant position for multiple election cycles, allowing them to put in policies to stop inflation.
Do you want Jesus/religion and extreme poverty for the lower classes?
or Do you want abortion and mild poverty for the lower classes?
Moral wedge issues resulted in a lot of lost votes because for decades Democrats offered only minimal or marginal economic benefits for the lower classes. Their platform was so conservative they lost power completely over moral wedge issues and now can’t get it back. Also, now the US is in so much debt that something like DOGE (which is covert austerity measures camouflaged as conservatism) is actually prudent and necessary.
DOGE is not prudent or nessessary, its “we have tried nothing and were all out of ideas”. There has not been a proper budget in decades, we do not give the IRS the resources to go after wealthy tax evaders and we keep giving tax breaks to those least in need of them…
Both parties have failed at gaining the political will to fix anything and now that the scales are tipped in the GOPs favor, they alone opt to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even if you are right, and you may be, other forms of austerity measures or balanced budgets etc simply haven’t been politically feasible to implement, otherwise they would have been done. My point is that Democrats could have prevented this whole mess by offering the poor a more more lucrative platform, so lucrative that perhaps they cared less about religion and moral wedge issues, but they clung to a more moderate platform, allowing wedge issues to become a large factor in how people voted, leading to the present situation.
“It’s important to know that a lot of productive activity is happening in person and offline, too,” she said. “Not all of it can be broadcast online, but we’ve had hundreds of people showing up to our trainings, mobilizations, and more. Keep going. Tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. Everything matters.”
So the guy went out and stated what he wanted to do, we held an election that he won, and the plan is to stand against everything he tries to do. How are we defending democracy exactly?
Easy. Defending democracy means defending the Constitution. Most of what he wants to do is unconstitutional.
Easy, let’s scream and ramble against the voters, blaming them for our horrendous campaign, while at the same time , keep focusing on policy that the 99.9% of voters don’t care about.
I mean, who is not gonna love to have their hard earned money taken away in taxes for a multi million dollars program that will only benefit 0.018% of the population!
Affordable housing? The fuck is that? No man, we need to focus on pronouns! That’s easier!
A bloated federal government? Didn’t you read before? People LOVE to have their hard earned money taken away in taxes! If anything, we should be giving away people’s money! And while at that, make the state bigger and all powerful!
That way, on the next election, they will feel more likely to vote for us!
It’s genius!
I also think we ought to stop being consumers at a broad level. It’s clear the rich don’t actually trickle anything down and instead hoard it to invest. So, they won’t spend to prop up the economy.
For one, stop using Amazon. Cancel Prime. Use other search engines than Google. Don’t use WhatsApp. Cancel and delete your Instagram, Facebook and Twitter if you haven’t already. Don’t buy Apple products.
For each of those services and products above, there is at least one alternative.
I would also delete reddit and TikTok if you haven’t already! I don’t know if there’s a good replacement for short form videos but TikTok is censoring like crazy, plus all the other bad shit they do.
Loops is coming soon, and it’s federated!
Yay! Thank you, this is a nice nugget of news.
Unfortunately I can’t upvote this more than once. Also, if only I could force people to follow this advice.
I’ve said it before, the Democrats need to take pieces out of the Republican playbook and stonewall the GOP at every opportunity. The problem is that they Democratic party is really a coalition, whereas the modern Republicans are a hierarchy, so getting everyone to lock shields and advance is damn near impossible. Especially since establishment “centrist” Dems are just Republicans from the 80s and unfortunately they’re the ones calling the shots. None of the progressives are stupid enough to tip the boat over while rocking it, so we’ve ended up here. Again.
I’ve said it over and over, the Dems need to be more Machiavelli and less Mr. Rogers.
For a long time, I thought the Democrats were fighting valiantly but just overwhelmed by the oligarchy and the Republicans. Then I saw that the Democrats keep losing fights they should win, and figured they must be weak and ineffectual. Then I kept seeing them backing off without putting up a fight at all, and decided they were gutless cowards. Finally I noticed that enough of them keep voting with Republicans to always make sure the Republicans more of less win almost every fight, and that they keep starting from a center position and bargaining to the right, and eventually it became impossible to ignore the only conclusion that fits the facts: The Democrats are not overmatched, they aren’t weak, they aren’t cowards… They are complicit.
I used to work for social services in Colorado. There was a Lady there that was fired without cause. She fought it, won in court, got her job back, and I’m pretty sure back pay. Beth, talking bout you, she said always fight, she has and it has always paid off.
I’d fight for the back pay, but if someone fired me without cause I wouldn’t want to work for them anymore.
A lot of times, the manager that caused all that trouble by firing you doesn’t get to be a manager anymore.
In that position you’re far more protected from retaliation than a “regular person” – it’s easier to prove with an established history and courts really don’t like have their judgments undermined. You’ve also shown your employer trying to screw with you is expensive.
Go back and do your job to the letter. They’re either going to be very wary of pissing you off, or they’re going to do something stupid and you’ll get another payout.
If you get your job back you may be entitled to severance and potentially pension
I would love to start something in my city, and I’ve already been trying, but it’s hard to get people to mobilize. It’s disheartening at the very least. Any ideas on how I can be helpful to my country aside from voting?
I’d highly recommend this handy guide on how to find local groups that are building the foundations to fight back.
Get involved in mutual aid groups if possible. Those folks will be able to guide you best on how to be effective in your community.
I’ve joined a few groups but I feel I’m not doing enough.
Do what you can now and keep your mind open to new opportunities. This isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. Don’t burn yourself out looking to do everything you possibly can. The important thing is to build that muscle of direct action instead of letting it atrophy through complacency or learned helplessness. That way, when you’re really needed you’ll be able to mobilize.
He is definitely confused, weak and incompetent, backed by confused, weak and incompetent Republicans.
Let’s just hope they are so incompetent that they can’t do as much harm as they would like to. Fingers crossed.
Basically, resist. Do not comply in advance. Make them fire you. Challenge that firing in court.
I just hope she comes out of this unscathed. It only takes one loon with a shiv… and now there’s millions of 'em.
Turns out when all you want are loyalists, all you get are dumb assess.
I thought this was obvious to everyone. Heck, Futurama had this as a joke 20 years ago when Zapp Brannigan stuffed his crew with nothing but loyalists who fall apart immediately.
That was much more “chain of command is incompetent but we have no choice but to obey” rather than “blind loyalty”. Did you forget the episode where he was dishonorably discharged by the DOOP for blowing up the space station with the ribbon cutting laser? His second in command, Kiff, is literally constantly pointing out how stupid and incompetent Zapp is. Hell, even “I sent wave after wave of my own men against the killbots until their counter overflowed”, arguably the worst case of being a loyalist to Zapp, ended in a win for Earth. They didn’t fall apart and collapse - they defeated the unstoppable killbot army and got a medal(show them the medal Kiff).
Gir!
Hehe it is the best. Been using Gir as my avatar for things most of my life 😂
Philosophical inbreeding is also not good.
If only AOC didn’t have a battle plan to prevent the union strike when she voted to protect the rail corporation.
Oh no, this option isn’t perfect in every way for all people, and thus indistinguishable from being worthless?
Yup, get used to it, electoralism is an enemy of all but the strongest class
She deserves criticism for that, and she should apologize. Your downvoters either support strikebreaking or support AOC even when she does the wrong thing.
She deserves criticism for that but she still does a lot of good and should not be discounted. Saying “if only” kinda sounds like “I would like this good thing she’s suggesting (the subject of the article where they are responding “if only “), if only she didn’t do something I disagreed with once”. A more productive tact would be “I still don’t like that she didn’t support the striking rail workers but the plan she describes here is …”
She deserves criticism for that but she still does a lot of good and should not be discounted.
Agreed. I like AOC and I want her to succeed, despite the efforts of her own party. Liking a candidate doesn’t mean you shirk your responsibility to hold them accountable when they do the wrong thing, though. Quite the opposite. You don’t want them to go all Fetterman on you.
Bit late. I appreciate her efforts to resist, and we all need to do that, but it honestly is too late now. The time to resist this was last year. Now we’re in disaster recovery, which requires a whole different kind of resistance, and it feels like even people like her don’t quite understand where we are now.
Because of all the people who haven’t fucking listened to the warnings, we’ve entered actual fascism, and regular resistance won’t work anymore. Thinking it will only makes more of us believe small actions or Strong Words will save us. This isn’t 1930 Germany like we were warning last year, it’s 1939 Germany now, and der führer is beginning to build the camps.
Are you going to keep ignoring us when you’re ruffling the ashes of your compatriots from your hair? I honestly believe you will.
You’ve convinced me. I was planning to start attending my local town meetings and lend my support to the few outnumbered progressives there, but instead I think I’ll just hoard canned goods and hunker down.
If that’s what you took from my comment, I’m sorry. Obviously those are things we should do.
My point is we’ve been pushing people to do exactly those things for decades (eta and have been doing them ourselves) and it hasn’t worked. We need to do much more than that now.
Fair enough. I agree that we all need to do more, but I think that’s going to look different for everyone. For someone like me, it means getting off the Internet and actually showing up - not blowing up a federal building or whatever “much more” implies.
Much more is relative.
For someone like me, it means getting off the Internet and actually showing up.
Yes, thank you for that. That’s much more for many people. If you actually do that, it will be awesome.
Might I ask you for even more, though? You’re already starting to do it, but will you speak out to people IRL like you’re doing with me? Challenge their views like you’re doing here? It really helps people to think critically.
You must be fun at resistance parties. I guess it’s time to annihilate ourselves through labor then (งツ)ว
I’m just saying we need different, more modern strategies. What we’ve been doing doesn’t work.
We can do better. I don’t know the answer, but we can’t keep doing the same things.
I think both you and her are wrong. Dems lost big in this last election. So it’s time to take a fucking step back and ask why. What needs changing? The party is in trouble. And they are in trouble because they are listening to big business and political consultants and not voters and people like AOC and Bernie. Kamala was supposed to be easy ‘safe’ candidate to defeat Trump. How’d that work? Hillary was supposed to be the ‘safe’ candidate to beat him the first time. Safer than Bernie and his ‘crazy radical platform’ of actually making the country work for the fucking people who live in it. How’d that work out?
Maybe having candidates that manipulate the primary process and count on superdelegates doesn’t work. Maybe putting someone forward who polled at 2% among Democrats before election season doesn’t work. Maybe ‘I’m not Trump’ isn’t fucking good enough to win the White House.
Unfortunately I don’t see many Democrats talking about this lesson, let alone taking it to heart. So I am looking forward to four more years of complaining and hopelessly attempting damage control while putting forward no new ideas whatsoever.
I think both you and her are wrong. Dems lost big in this last election. So it’s time to take a fucking step back and ask why.
We can ask all we want. The party’s about to appoint Pelosi’s choice for chair. Again. They’re never going to change.
So it’s time to take a fucking step back and ask why.
Obviously we should ask why. But any answers we come up with in response to whatever strategy we’ve been using will be horribly outdated already because we’re no longer operating under even a veiled democracy.
That was the biggest answer to ‘why’ this last time. Because this is outright, honest to dog fascism. That’s why nothing worked. Because you cannot fight fascism with normal discourse. Because Dems, the media, and everyone still tried to pretend we were working under the status quo when we absolutely were not, and anyone trying to call that out was treated as some kind of alarmist. And the fascists know this, and take advantage of it in their propaganda. Most of us don’t want to believe there’s a true, real, legitimate fascist movement, and fascists use that against us.
It doesn’t actually matter how good Dem candidates are – Dems could run Jesus himself, seen by all as descending from on high and streamed simultaneously on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch, and it wouldn’t have mattered. They would easily reject Jesus and get all the centrists to oppose him. We’re in an unprecedented age of propaganda owned exclusively by a handful of sociopaths who know they can buy sentiment, views, and votes. They did, and there’s little we can do about it.
It doesn’t matter what democrats say or do at this point. We’re past that.
finally, a person with a STRATEGY. so sick of the whining.
she needs volunteers for personal escort and safety. i think she is going to be targeted.
This isn’t strategy. A strategy is a long-term plan. This is just a tactic.
If she’s gonna be persecuted, the DNC and the Clintons might be also involved in that
That “might” is doing so much heavy lifting, it’s getting a hernia.
Hahahaha ok good point
She has employees
Donate to her
It isn’t chump and his taintsuckers you gotta worry about.
It’s the army of Federalist Society lawyers and policy experts around him. They’ve spent decades figuring out the removed in the armor of our governmental system. Figuring out how to dismantle it piece by piece.
Edit - wtf is that removed about? Wait…oh. bot thinks I did a racism.
I don’t mind removed, but the group of people I don’t care for is the removed. They’re almost as bad as removed!
To attack the c h eye nk in someone’s armor shouldn’t be censored. Its a word that has meaning other than rascist. Bot should be smarter.
What was removed ? I don’t understand
A small imperfection in armor sometimes used to refer derogatorally towards people of east Asian decent
Chinamen is not the preferred nomenclature, Dude.
Look, this isn’t a guy who built the… I mean what’s your point, man ? what’s the word ?? I’m out of my element
Wtf was removed
chink in their armor.
Omg…what an idiotic auto moderation
What do you expect from marxist leninists?
I really need someone to explain all the random marxist leninists bogey-man bigotry that happens on this site at some point. Like this is a completely weird-o comment, about a political ideology that’s effecting a word filter for possible rascism? and on .world people still label it marxist?!
I’m aware there is deep historical connotations which I haven’t spent years researching so I try not to defend or participate but it feels like since people push back against “instance hating”, we’ve gotta pour on any political hatred we could possibly see in the shadows. I’m just gonna assume this is another bad faith comment striking up fear and hatred till I learn otherwise.
Man, it’s just classic tribalism and confirmation bias. People assume the most obnoxious voices are representative of all Communist spaces and that’s poisoned a lot of perception here. Folks love having a villain to pick on and reddit.world here has decided “tankies are the bad guy”.
My dude, what do you think the .ml in your instance stands for?
.ml is Mali and marxist-leninists tend to use .ml as their hosting domain of choice the way that a lot of Generative AI domains are hosted in Anguilla because of the .ai domain.
They’re asking what automod removing an out of context word has to do with marxism/ leninism. This kind of error can happen on any instance that automatically removes slurs, and that particular one isnt exactly commonly used either way.
Am I still missing something? This is posted on the instance of .world, wtf are we talking about .ml and politics for? If your instance filters your comments on other instances than that’s concerning and something I didn’t know.
edit: removed the sarcasm in the hopes someone actually responds to what the problem is.
Ha. Reminds me of an Asian standup comedian who had this routine about how he grew up in the inner city where the basketball nets were made of chains and so the chains didn’t go ‘swish,’ they went ‘chіnk.’ So when guys wanted to play basketball, they said, “let’s go shoot us up some chіnk.”
Thank you, Cyrillic letter і, for letting me bypass the bot to tell that joke. Because I’ve remembered that joke for years.
Are you saying your comment was edited?
.ml replaces certain words with “removed”
In this case it seems to have been this term.
The “r” word will be removed too.
I haven’t noticed what the others are. I swear fairly often and those haven’t been removed. I would guess only things that are slurs etc.
Edit: It was removed from my link as well. LOL. Look up “gap in suit of armor” if you haven’t figured it out already. Kinda ironically, when it’s used as a slur it’s against chinese people.
There are better Lemmy hosts out there, just waiting for you to join.
I just signed up with the first one that worked, and it still took a while to actually get it created.
Gimme a list.
I chose this one because it had the piracy community
There was as guy running around with a list of smaller, worthwhile instances.
I ended up on lemmy.zip more recently after starting on kbin, then moving to .world.
lemm.ee seems to be gaining popularity.
sh.itjust.works is also pretty well represented, its users seem normal enough afaik.
lemmy.dbzer0 is an anarchist instance, their admin is super knowledgeable and seems like a cool guy.
lemmy.blåhaj.zone is a radically inclusive, safe instance. They’re virulently anti-bigotry and anything perceived as “anti-marginalized” groups will likely be removed/banned.
There are hundreds of instances, 569 as of writing this. Some are niche and focused on specific hobbies or uses and a bunch of others are general purpose. It’s worth clicking around and sorting a few different ways to find a server you like. Remember you can export your settings and import them into an account on another instances so moving is relatively painless.
sh.itjust.works is also pretty well represented, its users seem normal enough afaik.
I resent the implication that I am normal!
Seriously though it’s a p chill instance
Bookmarked. Thank you for this insight.
Huh. Where can I get such informative descriptions of the different instances on that site?
The front page of each instance has a sidebar.
Thank you very much.
Fucken hell, that’s the correct fucking way to define a gap in armor. Bullshit. I really want to try a bunch of slurs out and see what sets it off.
It’s clbuttic bowdlerization.
Would it not be kink? not …
Wait until you try the in-game chat in Rocket League. You can’t even type “Discord”. It’s a banned word. 🤡
I really want to try a bunch of slurs out
This is surely the most rational reaction to being slightly inconvenienced by a word filter.
Anyone else remember Neopets? They had a filter that was extreme and multilingual. I can’t count how many times I’d write a friendly message, the filter would block it, and I would end up editing chunks of text trying to avoid whatever word or series of letters the filter thought was inappropriate. Sometimes it’d be a few letters embedded in another word (like “associate” being banned for the letters a s s.) But sometimes, I was truly stumped. The only explanation I can think of is that some letters in English words matched up to swears in other languages.
Anyway, fun fact - I met my first boyfriend through that site. We decided to see how dirty we could talk while still getting messages past the filter. We used innuendos, slang, and other turns of phrase with each other just to see what we could get away with.
In the end, all that filter did was make us more creative at communicating forbidden topics. Whoops ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Would a younger kid have understood what was being talked about or would it have gone over their head like the dirty jokes in kids cartoons? If the latter, the filters did their job. Neopets was probably one of the rare instances where parents actually signed the permission slips for their under 13 year old kids to use the social aspects. I know my parents did and it was the only site they ever did that for.
Nintendo still does this. There are pokemon names you can’t use as nicknames because it gets filtered. Most recently: Moltres EX gets caught by the filter on TCG Pocket and you can’t label your deck after it. “Violet” was blocked on an older game because “viol” is French for “rape”. Lazy, overcorrecting filter.
SEE WHAT YOU’RE MAKING ME DO? NOW I HAVE TO SAY THE N WORD… I DON’T WANT TO BUT YOU GAVE ME NO CHOICE!
Making hard eye contact while slowly donning burger king crown
I’d be slightly curious about why a child would make that particular dying wish, why they think anyone really has the power to either grant (if the wish is to say it without anyone thinking badly of them) or prevent that wish (if they just want to be able to say it, they already can), but mostly just lose any sympathy I might have had for the kid because I wouldn’t expect any good answer to that first question.
“What if I come up with an entirely fictitious, nigh-impossible combination of circumstances to try and corner you into accepting my racial prejudice?”
also the answer is yes. Just because it’s a last wish doesn’t make it okay. it’s not like you can wish to do crimes for example.
Go removed ahead you removed.
Not much since you’re on .world. .ml is much more strict.
Can’t upset the Chinese on .ml 😂
I must be a classy enlightened centrist since I have never had my words removed.
Entire comments removed & bans, on the other hand…
Jebus. I still haven’t figured out if .ml is government funded or true believers. Very strange to me.
It’s the home instance of the founders of Lemmy, who are communists. I don’t know their views on authoritarian communism like Stalin or Mao, but people who thought these were good leaders are the “tankies” you may have heard of. There are a lot of them on .ml.
I’ve basically only ran into 90% left wing, sporadic sprinklings of conservative, tankie, liberal, other. “A lot of them” is pulling extra weight here.
Fair enough. They are more visible than most commenters, stand out to me at least, so maybe it seems like a lot.
Confirmation Bias is a hell of a drug.
