Given how Harris was chosen, I'm really not sure this is the year to make that argument.

Might want to add, "Does it consent?" to the end of that.

You think that media moguls are secretly supporting Trump, even though he has spent 8 years attacking their outlets and even recently threatened to revoke CBS' license, so they would ostensibly be acting against their self interest, while also leaving no evidence or paper trail to prove this support exists. Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me, dude! Anyway, it's been fun watching how far you'll go to avoid admitting you fell for a fake meme, but it seems like we're hitting a wall here, so...bye!

Hey, if you're ever wondering what people mean when they say, "Blue MAGA," it's this; 8 rambling paragraphs of conspiracy theories about media companies' CEOs, with no evidence or sources, to justify a debunked infographic. It's long-winded, "Fake News."

By saying the infographic is “debunked”, the implication is that media owners are not supporting trump. And I say again - they could very well be giving millions, as Elmo Musk does, without being directly identified in an FEC filing. So, the “debunking” is itself “debunked” by simply pointing out political donations can be unknown.

OK, but by the logic you're using, you could accuse anyone of anything. I could make an infographic that says, "Kamala Harris was caught killing small animals as a child," and when someone says that never happened, I could just say, "Well, juvenile records are almost always sealed and expunged, and people who seek power are often have sociopathic tendencies, so this debunking is debunked, since it's an unknown." It's just using the adage, "yhe absence of proof isn't the proof of absence," as a justification to continue spreading a lie.

There aren’t any PAC donation records because SCROTUS legalized dark money. Of course we could argue about it, OR just look at the editorial slants and take this obvious fact at face value.

Maybe you should clarify what the, "obvious fact," was that we should take at face value. Because based on the context, it really sounds like you wanted us to accept your debunked infographic as fact.

Well, A) I didn't say the Democrats had lost the working class. I said that their policies were not targeting the working class. Even this election, Kamala Harris' stump speeches repeatedly focus on the middle class but make no mention of the working class.

And B) those overall numbers don't factor in race or geography. The Democrats still do very strongly amongst black Americans because of the legacy of Civil Rights Act and the Republicans' Southern Strategy, and they are much more likely to live below the poverty line, but the black population is also unevenly distributed throughout the south and in northern urban population centers. Because of the Senate's structure and the Electoral College, winning white working class voters can be a successful path to power in the Midwest and most of the South, where blue-collar whites can deliver GOP victories. In fact, the Republicans have won white working class voters in 8 of the last 11 elections, and that support handed them the presidency in 6 of them.

That's why the Republicans have the reputation of being for the working class, and the Democrats don't. The Republicans are actively working to win working-class whites (and there's some evidence that Trump is gaining ground with working class black and Latino men), while the Democrats are actively trying to win moderate white-collar voters and assuming their base of working class minority voters will turn out

OK, so what you're saying is that you know there's no evidence to back up your claims, but you're assuming they're true based on your opinion of these outlets editorial decisions, and you'd like your opinion to be treated as a fact. Did I get that right?

Most elected Democrats had abandoned a working class message by the 90s. Jimmy Carter seems like a socialist by today's standards, but its important to remember that at the time, he was running on a pivot towards the center and an attempt to distance the party from the New Deal. Ted Kennedy's primary challenge was a campaign to return to their New Deal principles. Mondale and Dukakis were both moving to center as well, as the party had convinced themselves that Regan's success meant New Deal politics seemed fiscally irresponsible.

By the time Clinton was in power, the party was essentially a center-right party by their own historical standards. Clinton and the 1993 Congress passed legislation that actively hurt the middle class while helping the managerial and financial class. His deregulation of Wall Street was a gift to investors, while his work requirements for Welfare basically killed the program. Worst of all was NAFTA, which created the largest outsourcing of manufacturing jobs in American history.

Obama at least ran on a progressive platform (which should have proved to Democrats that centrism was not a winning strategy), but he governed like another moderate. He even attempted to pass another NAFTA like trade agreement, the TPP, and Trump successfully won over blue-collar workers by promising to kill that deal. Granted, he also won them over by blaming their economic woes on immigrants, and his opposition to the deal probably had more to do with his racist desire to undermine as many achievements of the first black President as he possibly could, but the TPP would have been another nail in the coffin of American manufacturing jobs.

Anyway, point is, aside from a few progressive hold-outs, the Democrats by-and-large pivoted away from their New Deal roots towards being technocratic centrists whose policies benefit investors and white-collar workers and often hurt the working class. Meanwhile, the Republicans, whose policies are even worse for the working class, are able to create the illusion of being on their side through scapegoating and dog whistles that appeal to blue-collar workers (particularly white blue-collar workers, although not exclusively).

Because the Democrats abandoned working class voters in the 80s and 90s to court the professional-managerial class in a pivot towards the center, and the Republicans were able to win over these disaffected blue-collar voters with resentment politics.

OK, but these two things aren't the same. This indictment came out in August or 2023, then was thrown out almost a year later due to the immunity ruling, but the prosecutor immediately vowed to refile, which he did in late August, and now he's released a bunch of Grand Jury documents that flesh out the case he's been working on for 14 months.

It's damning stuff, but not shocking, given that this story has been developing for over a year. It's certainly not as shocking as the FBI director announcing that in investigation into a presidential candidate, which everyone thought had been concluded 2 months prior, has been reopened 11 days before an election.

The news media chases clicks. It's bullshit, but that's what happens when advertising revenue dictates the media's interests. Knowing that, it makes a lot of sense that the story, "Documents released regarding last months refiled Trump indictment," got less coverage than, "FBI director suddenly announced Clinton probe reopened! What are in the mysterious new emails?"

Eh, it's a mixed bag. There's a very high concentration of centrist, "vote blue, no matter who," liberals in Political Memes. They're not the whole instance, but they've made a nice little echo chamber that makes them a pretty loud minority.

I certainly hope so; I'm on Wolrd, and most of my favorite communities are located on World, but I often find the admins' decision questionable, and I have just as many reservations about ml. I hope I could put together a good group of communities without either instance, but sometimes it feels like they're necessary to a good Lemmy experience. But either way, I think you're right, most instances won't defederate.

Look, the question was, "Do you think Lemmy and other parts of the fediverse will eventually enshittify? I think this would be an interesting discussion to have." I gave an answer explaining that I didn't think Lemmy would enshittify, but pointing out another senerio where Lemmy could collapse. Sorry if you found it too pessimistic, but if you didn't want to hear negativity, maybe this wasn't the discussion for you. Also, if your solution is, "make multiple accounts to get around defederation, start your own instance, or GTFO," that's going to be a problem for growth, because most users will pick GTFO.

Also, I think hyper-specialized instances will only exacerbate any potential schisms. Tribalism isn't necessarily political (although that is currently the central conflict on Lemmy). Admins could find divisions over rule enforcement, fediverse philosophy, or just get into good old-fashioned pissing contests. The admins on my instance recently created a real mess with the moderators of their own Vegan community, overriding their moderating decisions and then retroactively changing their own rules to justify it. Now imagine that conflict was between two instances, and you need to make a separate account just to talk about veganism. If anything, it seems like having an eclectic group of communities on each instance would be better than specializing, since admins would really have to consider whether it's worth cutting their users off from multiple diverse groups over a conflict.

I don't have the time or interest to do that, and it wouldn't fix the underlying problem of tribalism that I'm concerned about.

Fair enough, but the point is that the instance would still be cut off from a large portion of most users' content if it were to defederate from ml or world. And while tankies and centrists libs are the schism developing right now, it seems like that's a symptom of tribalism people have around instances, which I think could undermine the entire principle of federation in the first place.

sh.itjust.works seems to be doing well, playing nice with world, ml, hexbear, and grad, I just worry that a culture cliqueish I've seen so far could keep fracturing Lemmy so it can't develop a sustainable user base. But as I said, I haven't been on the platform that long, and this is just my guess of what Lemmy's version of enshittification might look like after being here a short time.

Right, and as long as I'm wrong about petty tribalism fracturing Lemmy, that's good. But if your insurance winds up cut off from World or ml because of petty infighting, that will be a problem

Interesting. A while ago, I read that zebra stripes were meant to confuse predators. Basically, the idea was that when they ran as a herd, their stripes made it difficult to tell where one zebra ended and the other began. I wonder if that's considered bunk now or if this is supposed to be an additional benefit.

Yeah, if I were ever to switch instances, that would probably be my next move. It's still really small, though. Green Text seems like the only decently sized community.

I've only been on this platform for a little less than a year, but my guess is it will be brought down by petty infighting, not financial incentives. World and a few other instances have already decided to defederate from hexbear, and there's enough tension between World and ml that defederation seems like a real possibility. While the goal may be a decentralized platform, the largest communities are on these two instances, and it they break apart their might not be enough content to keep new users' interest.

Even if Lemmy gets past the infighting between the liberal Reddit refugees of World and the, "old Lemmy,"" communists of ml, users seem to tie their identity very heavily towards their instance. I'm worried that in the long term, that will drive people away from committing to cross-instance communities; even now, I hear people brag about how they've blocked entire instances because they're full of, "centrists," or, "tankies." I think the downside of federation is that it leads to tribalism, and enough of it could kill the momentum Lemmy needs to grow.

I don't mean to sound down on Lemmy; it's the most interesting platform I've seen in years, and I'm curious to see how it develops. But at this point, I've abandoned Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and MySpace; I've learned that social media accounts are not permanent parts of your life. I'm having a lot of fun with Lemmy, but I don't expect to be using it in 5 years.