I’m perfectly content with letting Lemmy grow organically. If it achieves a wider user base, great, but I’m also fine if it doesn’t. I think any attempts to deliberately make it more palatable to a wider audience should be heavily scrutinized, though. This isn’t to say all changes such an audience would want are bad, or should be denied, but I’ve seen too many sites completely shit on the wants and needs of their existing users in order to have broader appeal, and I would rather avoid that.

Eh, I wouldn’t put it past them to run someone and keep handlers on them at all times to win the primary, and then let them loose on their own during the general election, if such a thing were feasible. The one thing I have confidence in the GOP to do, besides line their pockets, is any dirty trick they think they can get away with, no matter how crazy a scheme is involved, if it’ll let them get ahead and cement their own power. Besides, there was a point where those centrists certainly did play better with the general population than anyone even accused of being a socialist not all that long ago, and I don’t think the GOP of the time had much in the way of moral scruples back then, either.

Parties might not be able to purge voters from their membership, but at the very least, the Democratic Caucus can expel members by a 2/3 vote. Straight from their site, rule 1 on page 6 of the pdf they have embedded there. On the face of it, she should no longer be considered a member in good standing, and should be expelled from the Democratic Caucus as a result.

In order to maintain membership in good standing, Members shall not participate in campaign activities for any candidate in a partisan federal election who is not a Member of the Democratic Party.

I kind of figured there had to be a way for parties to prevent just anyone from running under their party, or the Republicans would have ran deliberately terrible candidates as Democrats in races to try and rig things long ago, by this stage.

Good on them for taking a stand and following their conscience here. Anyone still working for her should be black listed from future Democrat campaigns and positions.

Can’t believe Stevens decided she wanted to go down in history for people to point at when they say some Democrats would rather lose elections than win by having a leftist, anti-Zionist win. Absolutely crazy she just went full mask off there.

Yeah, that’s the plan for the time being. We’ll see what comes of it, but I suspect the old guard won’t go down quietly, and I find it helpful to point out their hypocrisy, particularly in a case like this. Stevens would clearly rather see the Dems lose than to win it with a progressive that hasn’t compromised with them on positions where the old guard are completely out of touch with the broader voting public and morality.

The Vote Blue No Matter Blue group has been the typical, centrist Democrats of old. I don’t know how you struggle so much with seeing the hypocrisy when the very same sort of Democrat that calls for party unity to get people to rally around an unpopular candidate is now trying to put conditions on her support for him in the election literally in the final stretches of the campaign. This is absolutely asinine sabotage from the very same sort of person who will be saying “Vote Blue No Matter Who” when a new Chuck Schumer wins a ratfucked primary and nobody actually likes the guy in the generals. Yet, now they want to put conditions on supporting a candidate who is broadly popular with the Democratic base in Michigan and is their best chance in the general election, by making him adopt positions of the person who lost to him in the primaries.

You see them all over threads about candidates nobody likes for the next presidential elections, like running Newsom or letting Kamala lose a second time, as well as in threads defending shitty Dems who decided to jump on the anti-trans bandwagon for this election cycle. It’s not too hard to notice their conspicuous absence elsewhere if you just tag users, and they tend to get tagged pretty quick as they love to troll with other neolib tropes like still swallowing blatant Israeli propaganda and calling people antisemitic or racist when they disagree or provide evidence that disproves their claims. That’s just using basic site functionality, though, so I regret to disappoint you with the lack of mystery and whimsy in the explanation.

Yep, that’s her. I think if the Democratic party has any chance of being saved, it needs to have some sort of disciplinary measures to hold accountable people who campaign as Democrats, then seem to turn into nothing more than a source of obstruction for the party platform and to attack other Democratic candidates. You don’t want to completely shut down discussion and dissent, but there need to be methods to hold politicians accountable when they repeatedly do this.

Kind of wild how it’s always radio silence from the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” brigade in comment sections like this, where you have a centrist Dem using their platform to bash a progressive or leftist candidate just a couple days prior to elections, but the other day I was seeing them elsewhere telling people that they need to shut up with criticism of Gavin Newsom already, because he is (according to them) the likely presidential nominee for 2028, and now is not the time for criticizing each other. Where’s the outrage and insistence that El-Sayed will be better than any GOP candidate, so we need to support him now? Oh, that’s right, that slogan is really just meant as a cudgel to punch left, I forgot we aren’t meant to think it really extends to dirty progressives and socialists. My bad.

You might still well be able to do that by the time 2028 rolls around, but it wouldn’t surprise me if you couldn’t build one that runs the sort of AAA games that have been used to set consoles apart from PC, and certainly not with the same ease. You or I might well be able to put together such a PC with minimal fuss, but the very idea of buying and assembling components to build a PC is a non-starter for most of the market. It’s more work than it’s worth to them if they need to do that, rather than just buying something ready made off the shelf. And if they decide they can forgo the big budget console selling titles for this one, they would probably just do better to fire up GOG, Steam, or the market of their choice and run the games on the computer they already have. There’s no reason to plunk down $1200 on a new computer, if you’re only going to be playing stuff like reissues of games from previous generations and indie titles.

The way hardware prices have been increasing, this might still be a price point that has them selling at a loss by the time 2028 rolls around, so there’s that.