He needs people he can relate to.

Yes, of course, in the campaign where she ignored the left, campaigned with and for Republicans, and abandoned minority groups, the real problem was wokeness. While there's always a factional blame game after an election loss, never in history has the argument from the centrists been so detached from the actual campaign that occurred.

I think the masses of voters who are much less easy to influence. They're not on Lemmy debating the topic or waiting for a community leader to decide the strategy. They probably didn't even do any sort of deep game theory about playing chicken and scaring the Democrats. They just got more pissed off as the news came through, as the Democrats made excuses and acted like nothing needed to change, and as people in their community reported deaths. We can debate and shout and rationalize here all we want, we can suppress the topic for the greater good, and all that will have zero impact on electorate-level perceptions. They're not here, there are too many for us to individually convince to change their mind, and they're probably not even open to listening to a coldly rational argument about lesser evils and other topics.

Even the people organizing these campaigns didn't have the influence to change their votes. Uncommitted endorsed Harris! But the whole thing was never in their control. They can only report the temperature they're feeling in the community and suggest moves they think would help get people back into the tent. Those Democratic operatives and elected officials should have the potential to influence Harris. They have names people know, and phone numbers to people of importance. If she was so corrupt and blocked off that even they couldn't reach her then we kind of do need the reckoning that could come from such an abject failure to keep the coalition together. There's no "push her to be better after the election" in that case.

“I think it is clear that Congress has a responsibility to act. We have legal tools here. And as I said, we cannot approve the sale of arms to a country that is in violation of our own laws on this."

F15s were just the next thing to be sent.

Are fighter jets not "arms"? They were just the next arms transfer being talked about at the time.

A useful aspect of Lockdown mode (on top of it potentially being quick) is that you can still get into the camera without unlocking it (for me it's a double tap on the power). When you're locked down they can't navigate to your photos, but you might want to be able to record things.

Ah, the nostalgia of early net flame wars. Those were the days.

I honestly thought that they’d eventually come around because of just how bad Trump was going to be for democracy, and moreover for the people they cared about. Sadly, they were so devoted to their game of chicken that some of their loved ones will pay for it.

The problem in this is that you can substitute either the Harris campaign or the Muslim voters for "they", and far too few people are applying it to the people with power. It seems inconceivable to these people that politicians actually need to address the concerns of the people they want to vote for them. They're like some sort of unknowable force without agency or responsibility. It's always the little guy's fault for not coming around to the whims of the politician.

What makes it all worse is that on one side you have a population with good reason to be acting emotionally and the other you have someone just making a calculation that they just didn't think they were worth it. Everyone shares blame for this result, but I get acting emotionally when you're being ignored by power while they send weapons to kill your families. I don't have any grace for sociopathic Democrats who would rather chase Republicans than take a moral stance for a constituency that voted for them in the past.

Congratulations, you told the Dems you weren’t going to vote for them, and now are surprised they ignored what you wanted.

This is such a completely broken and backward way to think about politics, but even so, the entire time representatives from that community (Democrats trying to get Harris elected) were trying to get them to do anything to head this off. At no point was there a "well, we're just never going to vote for you so look elsewhere", but that didn't stop the campaign for prioritizing literal Republicans over previously Democratic constituencies with unsurprisingly bad results.

And I am a non-Muslim Harris voter, but this liberal tendency to blame minorities for the failures of existing power structures cannot be suppressed.

First, I'm not the guy you were replying to.

Second, there may be a limit to what the United States can do in Gaza, but we know for sure Biden didn't ever even try to reach it. It's a much more strained interpretation to believe a highly empathic person cared deeply about the harm he was causing and did practically nothing to reduce it than to believe someone who has spent their entire life pursuing greater personal power, including multiple times where he supported wars in the Middle East, might be a bit of a sociopath. Making the former work requires inventing these unobservable stresses and reasons to explain why a seemingly immoral response is in fact secretly moral, while the latter lines up with our general understanding of people at the highest levels of power and the plain observations. The morality of a genocide is not complex.

And people in the community were warning for months that this was the consequence of refusing to denounce genocide. But somehow you only want to blame the racial and religious out group who can't even be credibly blamed for losing the election. You guys were claiming for months they weren't important and should be ignored, and now that the election is over and the thing Democratic leaders were warning of happened, suddenly it's all their fault?

Sure seems weird that this level of glee over predictable bad things happening seem hyperfocused on the racial out group with the best reason to vote emotionally.

I do take issue that you think he doesn’t care, at a human level I just don’t think that’s true.

How would you have any read on his personal feelings at all? And why would you care that they're being besmirched? His actions are what matter to the world and the only path by which any of us has to judge him.

Susan Collins expressed concerns, everything's going to be ok folks!

The article has a vague statement trying to make it sound like there were lots of restrictions, but I think it's just the 2000 lb. bombs, and maybe some sort of guidance system (IIRC). Because it's a fucking Fox News article for some reason.

Currently, U.S. restrictions include an embargo on a certain weapons shipment and limitations on various combat-related equipment, even if they do not involve explosive ordnance.

Allowing them is definitely more bad, but it's going from like 95% of maximum complicity to 100%.

Man, I've been dying to see people get fired for fucking up the election, but it seems like this woman/Michigan did ok. And to replace her they mention a nepo-baby insider revolving-door lobbyist/politician/appointee who lost his race. I swear Democratic party positions are often just make-work jobs for insider failures.

This research didn't use a million poems, it used 5 human and 5 generated poems. The 5 generated poems were simply the first five generated, they did not use a human to curate from a larger population.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4574559-warren-block-sale-f-15s-israel/

Current LLMs generate poems that people prefer to human-written poetry. Current image generators win art contests. They don't need to get better to produce more appealing art than humans. Maybe not every time, maybe the people writing the prompts and filtering results are inherent to producing quality results, but there's not some extra trick needed for people to find their outputs aesthetically appealing.

What actionable step would you expect her to do other than publicly call it bad and for congress to halt weapons transfers? Her only real power is in the senate and step one is rallying support with social influence.