I wasn’t implying you were talking about defense, I was just saying that if you’re only about money then you can make a lot of it developing weapons for the government.

Different universities specialize in different things. I went to an engineering university that issued mostly engineering degrees, plus a few business degrees. Both of my state’s public universities also have fairly large colleges of engineering with quite a few engineering programs run by them. You’re also not only competing locally, but with remote, outsource and H1B visa workers. There is plenty of supply.

God forbid you have to train an employee in the specialization you’re looking for once in a while.

After telling a generation of kids to get stem degrees or they’ll be doomed to flip burgers, I feel I have the responsibility to say this is no longer the case. The jobs still pay well but; between ghost job listings, recent layoffs, and every entry level job wanting like 4 years of hyper specific experience; I have observed it being nearly impossible to enter the job market or move around it right now, and the whole thing feels very oversaturated.

Unless you’re willing to build bombs. Don’t know much about that end of it cause I’m not interested in developing things intended to kill people. but that’s where the money is if that’s what you’re about.

Nah if you read it it’s definitely still the onion

I’m not downplaying anything or suggesting we’d be going back to the current status quo in four years, and if you actually read what I wrote in a slightly less cynical way you’d understand that.

I’m telling you now that things will decline under trump and you will vote for the new status quo that will have been wrought about in four years instead of pushing for a platform that even expresses a desire to make things better, and you will fight against anyone telling you we should work together to achieve that end.

I’m not going around calling anybody anything, and I’m especially not denigrating their intelligence. We’re not allowed to question your candidates and you’re so convinced of your own righteousness that anyone who disagrees is a dipshit or a fascist that deserves everything bad coming to them. But sure, you guys are definitely morally superior to MAGA and totally different from them in every way.

Also, voting for democrats is not “taking action against the Republicans”, it’s taking action for Democrats, because a) that’s just the reality of how voting works, no matter how much you libs cry foul and doublethink yourselves into believing it’s not, and b) the Democrats are not taking action against the Republicans. If they were, they would have done something in the last 4 years to prevent the Republicans gaining ground or at the very least run a campaign that wasn’t objectively bad and ceded the framing on every issue to the Republicans, making themselves look incompetent.

This outcome works for them, the DNC, just as much as it does for Republicans. They don’t give a shit about winning elections and they don’t give a shit about you or trans people or minorities or any people who will actually suffer under Republican policy, no matter how strong of a hallucination you get from them being the only alternative to the Republicans you’re allowed to consider in our quote-unquote “democracy”.

Nah, this works for Republicans. Things will decline and Republicans will be voted out in 4 years, the Democrats will maintain the best case scenario of the status quo for the time, and then 4 years after that the Republicans will get voted back in, probably a Vance or Musk type. It’ll be a circus, the democrats will barely try and probably actively throw the election. You libs will all have false hope, refuse to see the campaign for what it is, and go right back to blaming the voters when the candidate of “this is all very good actually and should keep happening as it is currently, and fuck anyone who says otherwise” loses yet again.

It’s very clear what is happening and yet because you feel cornered, you refuse to get mad at anyone on your side who actually has the power to change things, and reject them for not doing so in order to make room for someone who will. You stand for nothing so you fall for anything. Well your “team” has been doing that long enough, and look where it got us. Perhaps you’re right and it’s too late now, but more of the same was never going to fix this.

Nothing that any of us could have done could ever counteract a bad (or good, this goes both ways) campaign on the national level. Sorry. Vote harder next time I guess.

Anything to avoid self reflection.

This isn’t a leftist phenomenon, it’s a liberal one. As the saying goes: Scratch a lib, a fascist bleeds.

All over the internet you’ll see liberals blaming brown people, LGBTQ, and women for democrat’s loss; assuming Kamala lost because she’s a black woman, despite all evidence pointing to her campaign; and even taking joy in the misery that Republicans will bring to all Americans as a way to get back at those people. They will learn all the wrong lessons from this, and the news media will feed those lessons to them.

They will never reflect on why the Democrats weren’t able to reach those people. Instead they choose to direct their hate at their fellow Americans for not falling in line, enthusiastically going to vote, and somehow convincing anyone else to do so, for a party that promised them nothing. They will act like this makes them any better than Republican voters, or the third-party and non-voters they hate so much. They will not see the wedge being driven between them and the left who stands for their class interests.

They won’t see that what really split their vote was Democrats’ legitimizing of Republicans stances by adopting Republican framing on the issues, and as a result, looking like a weak and feckless alternative to Republicans. This strategy only got the center to vote Republican and depressed turnout on the left, because they weren’t even going to be an obstacle for all the things Republicans wanted to do.

They refuse to see the democrats for what they are, doing everything they could to lose that election if the alternative meant they’d even nominally have to appear left of center. Americans are looking for answers, and Democrats utterly failed to provide them, utterly failed to counter a particularly weak republican platform. No amount of catastrophising can defeat the bad messaging and politics of an incompetent national campaign.

They stand for nothing, so they’ll fall for anything.

Oh I’m totally with you, it’s the rest of this instance that you have to contend with

Right, which is why you educate them and make the case for them to vote for you, or else the other side will spread their disinformation without any competing narrative. That’s kind of the entire point of a presidential campaign. Just calling people idiots isn’t going to make them not be idiots.

How do you expect people to think any differently when there is nobody combatting that narrative at the national level? That is something the Democrats could have been hammering on.

He won because Kamala underperformed. They both underperformed compared to 2020 actually, Kamala just moreso.

Voters are disillusioned with Democrats, and it’s no wonder why when the Democrats keep running on policy that is unpopular with their base and relying on orange man bad to get their voters to the polls. It worked once, and then nothing changed, so of course it wasn’t going to work again. Stop trying to push the blame off on voters and use this time to reflect on your own party’s election strategy.

Which one was that again?

No. You’re rationalizing an objectively bad campaign. “Playing it safe” would have been running a good campaign with popular policies and listening to voters’ demands, running on improving the average American’s material conditions and communicating what good they’ve done to that end thus far. Not picking up reactionary right-wing policies and trying to come out on top by completely ceding the issues to the side that invented them, hoping that cynicism alone will somehow get everyone to turn out to vote. The Republicans are not going to be beat at their own game.

I just thought the population would be more sober minded about the threat of ceding democracy to a demagogue who now has unchecked legal authority to remake society in his own image.

Most normal people don’t want to believe that this is the case. They don’t have to, they have had the privilege of ignoring it, for they are not the ones being persecuted. It’s background noise and if anything it turns them off.

People care about healthcare, education, cost of living, career prospects, inflation, basic rights, y’know stuff that pertains to them in their everyday lives. If the Republicans are the only ones pointing that stuff out and offering any solutions, even if their reasons and solutions are bullshit and serve bigoted ends, people will be swayed to vote for them and will doubt and explain away all the negative media because it’s unpleasant to think about.

Democrats just don’t seem to be willing to champion popular policy, and that is why they lost.

Anyways, seems like we’re only somewhat in disagreement.

We must be watching different elections and your version must have historic turnout, since americans are so enthusiastic about deporting immigrants and flattening gaza, no?

Cause in mine I just see two unpopular candidates except one of them has cultivated a delusional cult to propel them forward and the other has the american electorate convinced that being evil is non-negotiable.

No, I am very acutely aware of how we got here. Clearly their strategy did not work or they would have won tonight. It’s a trick and you fell for it, hard. Of course you wouldn’t want to admit that.

Anyone out there that is gung ho about the border and arming Israel was always going to vote Republican. Ceding the narrative on those only reinforced the Republican base, and not offering anything material depressed the Democrat base. The whole time they’ve been pandering to imaginary voters and you’ll first gaslight yourself into believing those voters exist and your country is a horrible place of garbage people before you’ll admit that your side could have done things differently to appeal to more voters.

I think we need to stop wondering why Republicans are doing so well and with that, lamenting that just over half of the minority voting population in this country will proudly vote for open fascists; stop imagining voters in the middle who are going to magically defect from the right if Democrats outflank them on the right’s own invented issues; and start asking ourselves whose votes the Democrats are actually campaigning for if not ours.

If what you say is true, and I’m not suggesting it is- if our furthest left “viable” party can win on a platform that is funding genocide and barely opposing the fascists Republicans, then we were doomed no matter what.

Firsf of all, don’t project your own arrogance onto the rest of us. Second, even ignoring Palestine, it was an objectively bad campaign. She didn’t offer anything material to vote for beyond not being trump.

arming a genocide and going in on anti-crime and -migrant rhetoric is “playing it safe” jfc