Went on All today and saw many posts celebrating Sen. Feindtein's recent passing. Why is she so hated on the left?
Went on All today and saw many posts celebrating Sen. Feindtein's recent passing. Why is she so hated on the left?
I'm not from California, so I don't know much about her; but this genuinely surprised me, especially how vicious and vitriolic the comments were. What's going on there?
Since you’re getting troll comments from right wingers I’ll try to give an actual answer
Feinstein was no longer mentally fit to serve in office. She was essentially the pre-cursor to a weekend at Bernie’s setup. She was not cognitively present enough to vote on legislation or even hold a conversation.
People are glad she passed because it means her seat is open to someone who can actually work on policy and benefit their constituents.
Liberals are not exactly a fan of letting the elderly die in office after the RBG situation that ended up with a stacked court when she had the option to retire under Obama.
Also Lemmy has definitely been having more right wing trolls recently and it’s making me want to use the platform less.
She was also more of a neoliberal centrist, and had some moments that were, at best, terrible optics. She condescendingly admonished some kids asking her about her stance on climate change. As mayor of San Francisco, she defended flying the Confederate Flag as part of a monument to American Historical Flags. Then when a black man climbed the pole in a Union uniform to tear it down, she replaced it the next day. So he climbed the pole the next day and took it down again, and he was arrested. She put it back up the third day and posted guards to keep it up. She later "evolved" on the issue of flying the Confederate flag.
As mayor, she was violently anti-punk music, and was considered far more conservative than her predecessor. She became mayor after her predecessor was assassinated by political rival and former police officer, who also killed Harvey Milk in the same shopting. The assassin was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served 5 years in prison. Her administration was notably friendlier to police and real estate development.
Did I mention she made millions of dollars in real estate and investments? After the 2022 death of her third husband, her net worth was estimated at around $90 million, making her one of the top 5 or so wealthiest Senators. I say "or so" because it's really hard to pin down how much Senators have or what they earn, and there are alarmingly few regulations regarding disclosures of investments in the Senate. Feinstein sat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, and the Senate Committee on Appropriations.
In 2013, she blamed the Sandy Hook shootings on violent video games.
And when it became obvious that she was no longer in control of her mental faculties, she refused to step down.
Also Lemmy has definitely been having more right wing trolls recently and it’s making me want to use the platform less.
God forbid your echo chamber get tainted 🙄
There's a difference between discussion with differing opinions and simple trolling to rile people up. Posting things as though they are settled fact without willingness to be argued against is bad faith trolling. We should ban/exterminate X class of people is also trolling since it puts an impossibly wide brush to a group based on some singular characteristic.
Username checks out.
Unlike Reddit, you can shit on those trolls. Go shit on them, my child. Be like the bamboo: bend and whip them to pain.
bend and whip them to pain.
I think most of them are into that judging by their AOC memes.
She isn’t hated by the far left any more than any other neo-lib.
She’s hated because she needed to retire decades ago. Senate Judiciary confirmations have completely stalled because she hasn’t been healthy enough to attend hearings. Trump stacked federal judgeships with unqualified partisan hacks and democrats have been unable to respond. The senate needs her vote to maintain their majority, and her health issues effectively loses the democrats majority. She is clearly senile and confused at all of her recent public appearances.
So, don't get me wrong, she sucked in many ways. I've wanted her out for a long time. But this is actually a problem for us as I understand it. The Dems got any judgeships because of her decrepit self and her seniority in the judiciary committee, and I believe the committee now devolves to Republican leadership, meaning no more judges at all.
Partly because of her voting record/neoliberal bullshit, and partly because she was senile and should've retired. There might've been other issues on top of those two things, but as far as I'm aware, those were the big ones.
I think "she was senile and should've retired" is being profoundly gentle. She should have retired decades ago, and she should have spent her most recent term in hospice. She's an even more potent symbol than Mitch McConnell of how pathetically, worthlessly, disgustingly, pointlessly geriatric our government is.
Presumably she kept getting re-elected every 6 years, no? I know that's not a good enough reason for her to justify running, but what's a democratic solution that isn't also ageist?
If someone has freak genes, or sufficiently advanced technology to remain in perfect health physical and mentally at (ex.) 150 years old, we wouldn't want laws that say, "sorry, people past 80 are generally senile, so you're not allowed to run".
I feel like if the people don't want a 90yo senator, then they shouldn't elect an 85yo candidate, and we can't do much better than that. This is also why we have so many redundant representatives, one bad one shouldn't be capable of sinking the whole ship.
One reason I don't like her is she was mean to a bunch of kids asking her to vote to save the planet.
Not just mean. Dismissive, rude, condescending. It is disgusting that a politician can do this to a bunch of kids looking to brighten their future. Disgusting. You could just see the hope disappear from those kids' eyes.
Seriously, all she had to do was make a bunch of supportive noises, pose for some pictures and then have her staff usher them out - she went out of her way to shit all over those kids and the adults/teens that were with them, with her only real argument being "fuck you - I'm a politician, i don't have to do shit you say"
Yeah her asshole reaction to those awesome kids was truly awful. I already had problems with her stance on a number of other issues (domestic surveillance, for example), but the way she treated those kids made me lose all respect for her.
To be fair, her reaction might have been early dementia.
To be completely fair, if you have early dementia you shouldn't be a Senator.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
she was mean to a bunch of kids asking her to vote to save the planet
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The time she flew a Confederate treason flag outside the SF mayors office to court racist Democrats is part of it. Even had she done nothing else wrong that's enough for me to search every corner of hell when I get there, find her and piss on her.
She essentially embodied the suppression of leftist and progressive movements in the Democratic Party. That is why a lot of leftist and progressive people may not be hurting over the news.
One thing that comes to mind: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/encryption-crypto-wars-backdoors-timeline-security-privacy/
Now that's a real answer, thank you.
She was trash and her politics were trash.
She's not. She's hated by the Far Left, because she wasn't far left enough. Don't rely on Lemmy to give you a balanced, accurate picture of the political landscape.
Okay, but why? is the question more than who?
I didn't want to use a charged term like "far left" originally, but given that that's the segment celebrating today, what's the reason?
I mean, it's pretty clear to me from reading the negative comments in the posts commemorating her death that they took issue with the fact that she wasn't 100% progressive in all respects, that she believed in working with conservative politicians to get things done via compromise, and that she didn't think corporate suits and cops were all evil. In other words, she was a moderate Democrat.
So, from what I can tell, that's the why, but the who really does matter, because you were specifically asking about the comments you're seeing here on Lemmy, and Lemmy is disproportionately representative of Far Left Anarcho-Communists (i.e. whack jobs with a lot of passion, but little intelligence). You wouldn't see these kinds of criticisms of Feinstein in a more balanced political forum as they'd get drowned out by the sensible people.
Edit: Here's a good article detailing her complicated relationship with the gay community, which also sheds some light on why she wasn't the perfect liberal.
Yeah, lemmy is very biased.
So is reality. Wonder why certain people want to keep others from voting.
She was an old woman in the democratic party. That's three things a lot of people on the internet hate. Since most agree she was a politician not fit for her job anymore they can go all out with the insults without getting too much backlash.