But you can be mad and still love someone.

Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian American, said he would run in a primary to be the Democratic nominee in 2028

John Fetterman, the maverick Democratic senator who has provoked widespread anger by increasingly siding with Republicans, is to be challenged for his Pennsylvania seat by a democratic socialist candidate who is originally from Gaza.

Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian American, said he would run in a primary to be the Democratic nominee in 2028, when Fetterman’s seat is up for re-election.

The move is the first sign of Fetterman’s weakened position in the party since the Democrats won back control of the Senate in last week’s US midterm elections, when the party won at least 54 of the upper chamber’s 100 seats.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/48201538

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/friendship-2

Alt text

Later it turns out to be a gay bar, and things go better than expected.

Bonus panel

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/mop/p/1306410/what-you-heard

Today has been especially bad, and was inspired sadly by about 6 straight posts of only negativity here.

I want to say that being negative towards something is not a bad thing, it's very valid to critique things. However, a community becomes toxic when the majority of it's content is negative.

Gaming is an obvious one. It's very obvious all around the internet that gaming communities are negative generally, and Lemmy certainly takes the cake. In the case of GTA 6 coming out this month we can (and have) had multiple stories about Rockstar's unethical practices, the pricing, ownership, and to be clear I agree with all of it. However, there is also valid positive things that people want to discuss but are immediately downvoted to hell, or have comments brigaded on with responses like "Don't you know about X, Y, or Z??"

I've been in comment threads where people have told me that they are afraid to post here because of the responses they might get. Now this is absolutely true everywhere, and we will often respond "You just have to tune them out" but the scales are shifting to the majority of responses are negative.

New users will not simply block/tune out the majority of commenters. New users will see that a community is toxic and turn around and go back to where they felt it was better.

This is the root of my frustration - that Lemmy is no longer a geeky place where people can talk about Star Trek and Linux - but that it's becoming a toxic place where if you aren't talking about why Star Trek and Linux are the only good things on the planet that it should be called out over and over.

Worse is that the scales a tipping to simply being "If it is popular, it is not good" which is a huge red flag for toxic community. To be clear it does not mean that if something is popular that it must be good, but instead we are falling for the same trap that is on corporate social media.

Anger and toxicity are fun, they are dopamine hits. So when there's a huge post about <> and everyone dogpiles, everyone has that dopamine hit and it spreads, and it makes people want to dogpile more. Unfortunately I think this has left individual posts, and this is now driving a large part of our comment sections, that people feel included when they are all dogpiling on a popular thing. It's addictive.

It's incessant and exhausting being here some days.

Some examples to think on:

• Harry Potter fans (who have already said they will not buy anything from Rowling again and are aware) who still want to enjoy the books/movies they already own, but are shouted down and downvoted
• Sports fans posting about football, to have jokes about "sportsball" made to them.
  • (Is that really any different from nerds being made fun of by jocks in highschool, only this is in reverse and worse yet, we're supposedly more mature now?)
• Freaking pumpkin spice. The world is on fire and people get a tiny bit of joy out of cinnamon and allspice, can we let them just enjoy that?!

I think that sums it all up, I wish people could just enjoy things here without having the majority of comments be about why they shouldn't enjoy it. I think this attitude has already lost of a good chunk of users who could be adding to the fediverse, instead now back on corporate social media.

It's anecdotal but I've shown the fediverse to 3 other people who are trekkie nerds like me. They gave up in less than a week not because the fediverse was complicated, but because they felt like they weren't wanted here.

Be the positive change, be encouraging. Don't belittle for someone for liking a popular thing if you like something more obscure, instead post about obscure thing and why you like it and share it! Inform users of things like Rowlings insane shit-headery, but don't demean them for still enjoying the books. If you don't like sports that's cool, but let them cheer on their team.

Thanks for listening. I'm going to have a pumpkin spice latte now.

News channel trailed NBC and ABC, but edged out CNN, MS Now and CBS in primetime hours on midterm election night

On a midterm election night that was a huge disappointment for Republicans, with Democrats taking control of the US House and Senate, the country’s most prominent conservative television network seemingly felt the brunt of viewer disillusionment with Donald Trump and his party, according to final audience numbers released on Thursday.

The Fox News channel, which often leads among all news networks in viewership on election nights, fell behind two top broadcasters on Tuesday. According to ratings dating from the Nielsen firm, the network averaged 4.3 million total viewers between 8 and 11pm, behind broadcast networks NBC (6.7 million viewers) and ABC (5.2 million viewers), though it edged out fellow cable networks CNN (4.1 million viewers) and MS Now (3.7 million viewers). Fox News handedly defeat CBS News, which attracted just 2.8 million viewers. CNN performed better in the 25-to-54 age demographic prized by advertisers, besting Fox News, MS Now and CBS.

xkcd #3322: Dragonfly

Title text:

I'm excited for Dragonfly, because on the list of places in the solar system that I desperately want more pictures from, 'Titan's surface' is right up there at the top with 'Jupiter's atmosphere.'

Transcript:

Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com

Source: https://xkcd.com/3322/

explainxkcd for #3322

The New York Times editorial board is wrong. Principled progressive politics on the Bernie Sanders model is still the path forward.

There is a very simple political narrative, repeated ad nauseum, that goes something like this:

The average American does not like “extreme” politicians of the right or left. As the right becomes more extreme, Democrats should “occupy the center lane,” offering “moderate” solutions with broad appeal. If they become too “extreme,” they will alienate the average voter. They should therefore retreat from excessively “progressive” positions, proving themselves to be the “reasonable” alternative to the right. When Democrats lose, it is because they have “gone too far left,” and they must return to the sensible, careful, reasonable center in order to win.

(I use quotes because I think all of these terms need to be questioned rather than accepted at face value.)

This is, roughly, the thesis of the New York Times editorial board’s recent article “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win,” which makes a forceful argument that Democrats must abandon progressivism for the sake of stopping Donald Trump. Not only is centrism pragmatic, the Times argues, but the need to stop the right is so urgent that Democrats have no choice but to embrace centrism. There is simply no alternative.

The case the Times editorial board makes for the political efficacy of centrism is unpersuasive, which I will get to. But before I do, let me first object to the terms of the debate. The question the Times answers is, effectively: are Democrats more likely to win elections on centrist or progressive platforms? The unstated premise of the piece is that Democrats should do whatever makes them most likely to win elections, and so if the answer to that question is “they are more likely to win on centrist platforms,” that means they should run on centrist platforms. Whenever we consider a political position, they want us to ask ourselves “how does it poll?”, and not “is it right?” or “is it true?”

This may sound so obviously correct that it does not require defending—what, you don’t want to win elections?—but that is not so. Imagine we are in the year 1960, and a hotly debated political question is whether it should be legal for companies to discriminate on the basis of race. Now imagine we pose the question: “Are Democrats more likely to win elections if they endorse full racial equality or if they hedge on it?” We might find out that Democrats are more likely to win elections if they decline to endorse full equality, because much of the American public is still outright racist.

But that would not lead us to the automatic conclusion that Democrats should not endorse racial equality. In fact, such a conclusion would be highly morally questionable, because it would suggest that vital moral principles are not worth defending if they make it even slightly harder to get elected. To use a more extreme hypothetical, what if the data showed us that candidates who engaged in explicitly racist messaging were more likely to win, because demagoguery works? Would the Times recommend going full racist in order to win? (To be honest, they might.)

The Times argues that the data show “moderate candidates fare a few percentage points better, on average, than otherwise similar candidates,” and because “a few” points can be the difference between winning and losing, this is a sound argument for consistently remaining centrist. But that is so only if you don’t care much about the stances you are abandoning by embracing centrism. This is easy for the Times, because they hold centrist values, and do not appear to feel any inner conflict about abandoning, say, immigrants and trans people for the sake of winning elections. But to those of us who think immigrant rights and trans rights are important in the same way as Black civil rights, showing that defending the marginalized might cost “a few” percentage points in swing districts does not provide proof that we should ditch the issue. Instead, accepting the empirical finding would lead us to a different conclusion: we simply have to work harder to win elections, because the path of justice is more challenging than the path of expedience.