I’m not from California, so I don’t know much about her; but this genuinely surprised me, especially how vicious and vitriolic the comments were. What’s going on there?
Since you’re getting troll comments from right wingers I’ll try to give an actual answer
Feinstein was no longer mentally fit to serve in office. She was essentially the pre-cursor to a weekend at Bernie’s setup. She was not cognitively present enough to vote on legislation or even hold a conversation.
People are glad she passed because it means her seat is open to someone who can actually work on policy and benefit their constituents.
Liberals are not exactly a fan of letting the elderly die in office after the RBG situation that ended up with a stacked court when she had the option to retire under Obama.
Also Lemmy has definitely been having more right wing trolls recently and it’s making me want to use the platform less.
Unlike Reddit, you can shit on those trolls. Go shit on them, my child. Be like the bamboo: bend and whip them to pain.
bend and whip them to pain.
I think most of them are into that judging by their AOC memes.
Awwww, you had the site since it’s beginning, you don’t care to hear opinions other than groupthink from leftists? Too fucking bad. Make a safe space.
You are cringe lmfao
She isn’t hated by the far left any more than any other neo-lib.
She’s hated because she needed to retire decades ago. Senate Judiciary confirmations have completely stalled because she hasn’t been healthy enough to attend hearings. Trump stacked federal judgeships with unqualified partisan hacks and democrats have been unable to respond. The senate needs her vote to maintain their majority, and her health issues effectively loses the democrats majority. She is clearly senile and confused at all of her recent public appearances.
They literally wheeled her out into Congress like two weeks ago. It was friggin sad. Do these people take a blood sacrifice to stay in office until they’re dead or something?
So, don’t get me wrong, she sucked in many ways. I’ve wanted her out for a long time. But this is actually a problem for us as I understand it. The Dems got any judgeships because of her decrepit self and her seniority in the judiciary committee, and I believe the committee now devolves to Republican leadership, meaning no more judges at all.
Partly because of her voting record/neoliberal bullshit, and partly because she was senile and should’ve retired. There might’ve been other issues on top of those two things, but as far as I’m aware, those were the big ones.
I think “she was senile and should’ve retired” is being profoundly gentle. She should have retired decades ago, and she should have spent her most recent term in hospice. She’s an even more potent symbol than Mitch McConnell of how pathetically, worthlessly, disgustingly, pointlessly geriatric our government is.
Presumably she kept getting re-elected every 6 years, no? I know that’s not a good enough reason for her to justify running, but what’s a democratic solution that isn’t also ageist?
If someone has freak genes, or sufficiently advanced technology to remain in perfect health physical and mentally at (ex.) 150 years old, we wouldn’t want laws that say, “sorry, people past 80 are generally senile, so you’re not allowed to run”.
I feel like if the people don’t want a 90yo senator, then they shouldn’t elect an 85yo candidate, and we can’t do much better than that. This is also why we have so many redundant representatives, one bad one shouldn’t be capable of sinking the whole ship.
we wouldn’t want laws that say, “sorry, people past 80 are generally senile, so you’re not allowed to run”.
I do. We have laws that say “Sorry, people under are usually stupid, so you’re not allowed to run” Not everyone under the age should be denied the right to run/vote, but we decide as a society when someone has lived enough to make choices. Why is it so hard to do the same for an upper age?
I think you accidentally an age, but I get your point.
The difference is that we have scientific evidence that demonstrates categorically, without any outliers, that humans below a certain age do not have fully developed brains. On the flip side, we don’t have any scientific evidence that necessitates that a human loses their mental faculties after a certain age. Anecdotally, my great grandmother lived to 104, was living in her own house the entire time, and could hold a coherent conversation about the early 1900s no problem (up until the last year or two). In her 90s she legitimately said, “what’s wrong with me, all of my friends are dead, why am I still fine?”
Meanwhile, not only has life expectancy been constantly rising over the last few hundred years, but scientists are actively trying to slow or even reverse aging in humans. It’s perhaps unlikely, but not impossible for humans to unlock immortality at some point in the near future.
Point being, you can’t say anything is necessarily true about all adults after a certain age, just like you can’t say anything is necessarily true about
/insert race/. So it would be the definition of ageism.What you really want is some kind of aptitude test to verify that they are still minimally capable of doing their job, but for the same reason that’s not used to admit people to vote, you can never be certain that the test doesn’t introduce a bias thereby disenfranchising people. So I really think the best we can do is a democracy…something better than first past the post would probably help though.
Edit: btw, i think I see now how you missed an age. Apparently things in angle brackets just get deleted :/
“What if fictional technology” isn’t a particularly compelling argument in my book.
I mean, that’s the essence of all science fiction, virtually all of which are increasingly relevant every year.
But it’s not even necessary for you to understand my argument. There’s nothing that necessitates that a human loses their mental faculties beyond a certain age. To arbitrarily draw a line would be the definition of ageism.
You know…I’m fine with that.
Beyond the fact your brain becomes feeble with age, there’s also the practical fact that there are people in congress who haven’t set foot inside a classroom since the fucking Eisenhower administration. Some of them graduated high school before plate tectonics was discovered or the transistor was invented. Here’s a question for ya: Should high school diplomas or college degrees expire?
Beyond the fact your brain becomes feeble with age
Again, not a fact. People can and do live beyond 100 without losing any mental faculties. What you mean to say is that, at the current time, as humans age, there is a high probability of them developing illnesses that result in mental degradation. That’s not the same as saying “it is a fact that your brain becomes feeble with age”.
there’s also the practical fact that there are people in congress who haven’t set foot inside a classroom since the fucking Eisenhower administration
I agree, that’s much more relevant.
Here’s a question for ya: Should high school diplomas or college degrees expire?
Maybe, maybe not. Either way, if the goal is to maintain a democratic system that isn’t designed to induce bias or favoritism of any class over another, then level of education should never be used as a legal requirement to run for political office. That is called an aristocracy. That’s not to say the job doesn’t have any minimum requirements; the voters are the ones interviewing and hiring for the position, and if education is important to them, they should prioritize it in the voting booth.
IMO if a democracy fails because the voters are too stupid, then it just wasn’t meant to be.
The solution is the dissolution of the private corporations deciding how the main (read: only) two parties in our country operate. Dianne only won because she was the Democratic candidate, and she got that because the DNC made it so. If there were more rigorous competition, I’m quite sure she would’ve been replaced a long time ago.
There’s nothing I can say to disagree, I think this answer is spot on. It serves as a perfect example of the difference between a functioning democracy and where we currently are.
then they shouldn’t elect an 85yo candidate
Remember kids! It’s not the fault of the consumers/voters/people, it’s the evil, uh, capitalists/Boomers/whatever. We need systemic change that forces personal responsibility and choice!
Then lemmy tells me the same people can topple capitalism and all get along as communists. And then they whine about how old people run everything because they vote.
Reminds me of my fatass friend standing at the bottom of the stairs hollering for a doughnut because it hurt her to walk upstairs.
One reason I don’t like her is she was mean to a bunch of kids asking her to vote to save the planet.
Not just mean. Dismissive, rude, condescending. It is disgusting that a politician can do this to a bunch of kids looking to brighten their future. Disgusting. You could just see the hope disappear from those kids’ eyes.
Seriously, all she had to do was make a bunch of supportive noises, pose for some pictures and then have her staff usher them out - she went out of her way to shit all over those kids and the adults/teens that were with them, with her only real argument being “fuck you - I’m a politician, i don’t have to do shit you say”
Yeah her asshole reaction to those awesome kids was truly awful. I already had problems with her stance on a number of other issues (domestic surveillance, for example), but the way she treated those kids made me lose all respect for her.
To be fair, her reaction might have been early dementia.
To be completely fair, if you have early dementia you shouldn’t be a Senator.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
she was mean to a bunch of kids asking her to vote to save the planet
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The time she flew a Confederate treason flag outside the SF mayors office to court racist Democrats is part of it. Even had she done nothing else wrong that’s enough for me to search every corner of hell when I get there, find her and piss on her.
She essentially embodied the suppression of leftist and progressive movements in the Democratic Party. That is why a lot of leftist and progressive people may not be hurting over the news.
She was trash and her politics were trash.
She was an old woman in the democratic party. That’s three things a lot of people on the internet hate. Since most agree she was a politician not fit for her job anymore they can go all out with the insults without getting too much backlash.
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They shouldn’t worry. They will replace her with a far left individual
If by “far left” you mean someone right-of-center like Biden, then I agree.
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She’s not. She’s hated by the Far Left, because she wasn’t far left enough. Don’t rely on Lemmy to give you a balanced, accurate picture of the political landscape.
our Overton window has gotten shoved so far right that anything vaguely to the left of center is viewed as “far left” (conservatives are even happy to shove center-right in with “far left”)
I don’t really understand what you’re saying, are you saying we’re now more right wing then we were 10, 15 years ago? That’s not really true…
Overton window – not the actual politics shifting so much as our view of those politics has shifted – instead of sitting over a centrist position keeping both left-wing and right-wing in view, the American window is positioned over right-wing bringing far-right into the perception of being acceptable and moving left-wing into the perception of being extremist
I don’t really get what you’re saying. What right wing extremist views are more centrist now then say the 90’s?
I kind of get this feeling like you’re about to give me some rant about “alt-right” behavior talking points, but people were definitely more sexist, ableist, transphobic, and racist back then compared to now it’s not even comparable. People were also way more religious, which is pretty auth right compared to now. Am I missing something?
I think in the “real world” we’ve slid left for sure, but political discourse is more of a doughnut than a box now. Algorithms and engagement metrics have pushed content people read to be more extreme and enraging. People also like to join insular communities and hate bond over caricatures of their enemies. Reddit has many popular subreddits to that effect. Lemmy has a lot of left ones, but it seems like most of the right ones were driven off.
On a global Geopolitical scale our(American) Left/Right perceptions have moved gradually right. What we consider the moderate right is closer to the far right in most other places. The same happens on the left. Our moderate left politicians are closer to the center of the scale, and the far left is more akin to liberal parties in other places.
The American scale has always been skewed this way, it’s not necessarily that it happened in the last 10-15 years, more that from the start it was shifted.
Okay, but why? is the question more than who?
I didn’t want to use a charged term like “far left” originally, but given that that’s the segment celebrating today, what’s the reason?
I mean, it’s pretty clear to me from reading the negative comments in the posts commemorating her death that they took issue with the fact that she wasn’t 100% progressive in all respects, that she believed in working with conservative politicians to get things done via compromise, and that she didn’t think corporate suits and cops were all evil. In other words, she was a moderate Democrat.
So, from what I can tell, that’s the why, but the who really does matter, because you were specifically asking about the comments you’re seeing here on Lemmy, and Lemmy is disproportionately representative of Far Left Anarcho-Communists (i.e. whack jobs with a lot of passion, but little intelligence). You wouldn’t see these kinds of criticisms of Feinstein in a more balanced political forum as they’d get drowned out by the sensible people.
Edit: Here’s a good article detailing her complicated relationship with the gay community, which also sheds some light on why she wasn’t the perfect liberal.
I did read that article; I tried to google this before posting.
