This isn’t quite the question you asked, but my best advice based on being in survival mode some time ago is: Get a Costco membership or borrow someone’s card, and start to get small batches of $50-100 worth of groceries from there at a time. Plan it ahead for what you’ll need for the couple of weeks coming up. Big sacks of rice or flour, cases of tinned bean or veggies, milk and eggs or cheese, peanut butter, cheese and oranges once you’ve got a reserve of the staples. Potatoes, olive oil, bread, Annie’s mac and cheese.

Even if you’re only buying 3-5 things with each trip, your money will go pretty far and it’s wonderful to have some basic stuff in the cupboard all month and then be spending your money on filling in new stuff you want, instead of just on survival.

I have no potato recipes for the now, this is just some stuff for later that worked for me.

“Wombat Kombat” was right there, though.

They said “no” because to them, the most important thing is blaming Kamala for whatever happened in some way. They’re disagreeing with you because you didn’t do that, and trying to correct you on it.

You blamed the voter, which was the right response. I would expand that to include blaming the obviously Russian-influenced campiagn, however it happened, that convinced this person that Ukraine was a hugely important issue in this campaign in this particular bizarre way.

We can give some blame to Kamala for her messaging, sure. But the thing you didn’t do, that made them say “no,” was redirect the whole conversation into a conversation about how it’s all Kamala’s fault and nothing else.

I’m not saying I want to copy their model here. I’m just saying that materially, they’ve got it figured out and got their operation working, with most of their people living reasonably well and supportive of the state, and a big place on the world stage.

I’ll put it this way: Look at the war between Russia and Ukraine, with the mouse absolutely tearing up the cat for 2 years and counting now, and then imagine how a war between Russia and China would go.

Guys: You know that if you ruin the US with Trump, then even if you can undo the sanctions, you still won’t have access to all these Western markets that you’re so upset you can’t have access to. You won’t become any better at war, and all of a sudden start being able to win against a modern army. All you’ll do is replace lack of access to a working market with working access to a broken market.

There’s a maximum size that any nation-state’s operation can grow to, under a king. It’s just not sustainable to make it work on a big scale if people have no reason to care because it’s all under someone else’s thumb. It’s why all the European powers were always fractured from each other like a big game of Civilization. The Soviet state at least pretended to care and take care of its people, and had people loyal to the cause, so it was able to grow to half the world. Once it was all under King Putin, it collapsed to its present sorry state and then just stayed there.

The US is way above that size limit. If Trump’s movement succeeds as remaking it as a kingdom, which it has a pretty credible shot at doing, the west is fucked. But that still doesn’t mean you’ll all of a sudden have silicon valley and Hollywood. It just means no one will have it.

You’ve had 25 years to make your thing thrive. Plenty of people have done it. China did. It’s not just us being mean to you.

They’re part of a wide community that saw a bunch of messaging about how “I will NEVER vote for Kamala Harris because (reason), I just feel like (thought-terminating cliche)”, and got suckered by it. It happened that the reason was “Palestine” and the thought-terminating cliche was, “genocide is a red line for me” or one of the other flavors. I think you’re right that the Palestine audience was pretty small, but the total of all the audiences was absolutely massive. I think that was what cost Harris the election. They just know how to do manipulation of the public on a whole new level.

The messaging was even often contradictory depending on the audience being spoken to. She enabled a genocide, and she betrayed Israel, and she’s soft on crime and crime is everywhere, and she’s a cop who locked up black men for possession of a joint, and she’s even more cruel than Trump on immigration, and she wants to wreck our country with open borders, and she ruined the economy.

Only a tiny fraction of it was ever true, but if you’re the target audience for some piece of it, and got exposed to the messaging every day, it starts to sink in. It’ll resonate with you.

The one thing that’s darkly comic about this whole situation is that Netanyahu hasn’t yet realized what a terrible partner Trump is for anything. He’s going to rush into a full-scale war with Iran, and then ask Trump to be sending all the aircraft carriers and weapons and doing all the agonized diplomacy Biden has been doing for him that always shields him from consequences, basically try to guilt trip the US into winning the war for him. And someday, instead of doing that, Trump’s going to say, “I tried but they wanted me to put it in writing or something, I don’t know, this is hard” and stop returning his calls.

My curiosity was just aroused because you blamed 8% inflation which hit every country worldwide and is related to how much companies want to charge individuals for private transactions, on US government spending on behalf of Ukraine, the total over all years of which added up to 1% of the federal budget for one year, and had nothing to do with either private individuals or companies. It’s a staggeringly weird leap to make. Unless you were, say, trying to find a reason why aid for Ukraine would be a foolish thing for governments to do, and trying to make the case that it was hurting the individuals in those countries using some sort of moon-logic.

Usually, the government spending money domestically on weapons or whatever, and then giving the product away somewhere so we have to make more of whatever it is right away, stimulates the economy. Even aside from those other weird aspects of your decision to say that, it’s also a backwards thing to say in terms of how government spending usually works.

Here’s the median, in inflation-adjusted dollars:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-income-in-the-united-states/

It bombed in 2022 and then went back up. It’ll be higher in 2024 than it ever was, and it’ll probably keep going up until anywhere from 0 to 2 years into Trump’s presidency, and then it’ll bomb again much harder as everything goes completely to shit. The normal cycle would be that it gets handed back over to a Democrat in 2028, he spends the first 2-3 years of his presidency fixing things from the previous Republican’s disaster as happened in 2009-2012 and in 2021-2022, and then during the next election everyone blames that 2-3 years on the Democrat and says the Republicans are better with money.

We’re about to go so far off the map that it seems unlikely for that cycle to happen this time, but that would be the normal cycle.

Biden wanting to stop supporting Israel is complete crap.

Yes, I agree.

It sounds like you missed the point of my message. Biden was awful on Israel. My point was that because Israel could become a liability for him, it got blown up on social media in a way where the legitimate and impassioned protest movement became a huge electoral issue for him. And, in the corners of social media where you hang out, it’s all over social media, always in the face of everyone whose vote it might impact, and front of mind for you, every day, in a way that I’m guessing Occupy Wall Street or the protests against the Uyghur genocide were not. And then, when it was Kamala Harris, everything he’d done translated seamlessly over to her, with almost no loss of impact.

There’s a whole other population of people for which inflation is that issue. They see it constantly on social media, it’s always linked to Biden Kamala, and Trump is so much better. Trump will fix it. That one has a lot less validity than the Gaza criticism, but it has a lot broader appeal. And so, with that in their ear every day, it’s not surprising that a lot of them didn’t show up for Kamal Harris, or got suckered into voting for Trump thinking somehow that he’ll fix it.

Left-wing social media could have blown up Biden’s absolutely historic actions on climate change into the same magnitude of issue as Gaza was, and blown it up in everyone’s ear all day every day, and heard about what a catastrophe Trump will be, but they didn’t. Why is that? Because no one’s paying for that message to get out there.

I’m not saying the Gaza protestors, or their cause, are fake. I’m saying that the way things got covered and represented on social media was artificially generated to hurt Biden Kamala, and it worked.

I think it’s hilarious, if they think that writing nice articles about him will mean that he’ll spare them.

He doesn’t care. He just wants to hurt. And they’re already in his crosshairs, whatever they do. At least if they stuck to their guns, they’d have a few allies among the other side.

I have to be honest, I am panicking a little bit.

Nothing will change instantly, or everywhere all at once, but it could get very bad, and not even a long time from now.

No more detached from reality than the stuff I see on Lemmy every day… it’s just from the other direction, so it seems comical in its wrongness because it’s a type of nonsense that you haven’t been conditioned to. You weren’t the target audience for that message so you didn’t get it. A lot of people did, though.

Spoken like someone who hasn’t figured out that it was all a ruse from the beginning.

“Biden has BETRAYED Israel, he paused weapons, he pushed for a cease-fire. He yelled at Netanyahu and threatened some sort of mild theoretical consequences if he just rolled over Gaza with a line of bulldozers and killed 90% instead of 10%. We need him out NOW.”

“Biden has BETRAYED the people of Gaza by failing to prevent Netanyahu from the war Netanyahu unilaterally started, sending weapons shipments like every other US President has always done, also don’t pay any attention to the substantial differences between Harris and Biden on this issue, just focus on the fact the we need him out NOW I mean her.”

“Biden has BETRAYED the people of middle America by letting millions of immigrants in, shutting down Trump’s most horrible policies, migrant crime, look at this person whose daughter died. We need him out NOW.”

“Biden has BETRAYED immigrants by failing to completely undo decades of racism in immigration, only shutting down the most heinous 30% of Trump’s policies even with the Republicans fighting tooth and nail to stop him shutting down that 30%. It’s all his fault, also he made it worse in some vague emotionally-loaded ways. We need him out NOW.”

And the centrists bought it, and the leftists bought it too, and they never even compared notes to realize they were getting the exact opposite messaging and a good part of all sides of the messaging was made-up emotionally loaded lies tailored to what would make an impact. Most of the stuff about Biden just got reused against Kamala Harris unchanged, and it was so well-worn by that point that it still worked.

And they never paid all that much attention to what they were getting in, when they got him out now I mean her.

And now, we’ve got it in instead, and god help us.

they lived under better circumstances in the last Trump term

I was disinfecting my groceries, and Trump was confiscating my PPE to send it somewhere else. I was getting Covid checks, which was nice, but it wasn’t exactly the same as working. I couldn’t leave the house for a while. I couldn’t buy certain mechanical things without going on a 3-month wait list. I knew some people who died.

They think they lived under better circumstances in the last Trump term, because the media and people like you spreading a certain type of mental landscape and inviting them to inhabit it. But that’s not actually what happened.

instead of the democrats putting the work to meet these people they have chosen to belittle them

If belittling the people could cost you support in America, Trump would be in prison right now.

Now if you ask whether the media told people that Democrats were belittling them, now that’s a different story. That, to me, seems a lot more worth examining than it does to lecture the Democrats how important it is not to do some things they didn’t do, that the media said they did.

Yeah. My initial presentation was unclear. Partly because it’s such a weird conspiratorial thing to believe that I kind of had to come at it sideways.

I’m saying that the comments under this post look manipulated, especially when compared with comments on Beehaw, which makes sense considering that beehaw excludes Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works which is where a ton of troll accounts come from.

A haaaaaa

Hey, what do you think of Alexei Navalny?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/

Trump fucked it, Biden unfucked it better than any other country in the world after Covid, and Biden got the blame.

As is tradition. Universally. It’s one of the few things in American politics that always happens in exactly the same way, with no real wiggle room depending on how you want to measure things or who you ask for the explanation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party

Both rich people and working people do better under Democrats, and both rich people and working people do worse under Republicans. Always.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/

Like I said: Trump fucked it, Biden unfucked it starting in January 2021 and got it under control. And, because the media laps up a good narrative like no other, Biden got the blame for what Trump did, when the US recovered better from Covid inflation than pretty much every other country in the world.

If you’re struggling now, and “holding your vote in protest of the Democrats,” then I withdraw a little bit of my sympathy. You’re going to get it right up the ass very hard in the next few years, if you did that, and although it won’t be completely your fault you will have helped make it happen.