Summary
A vulnerability in the new OPM email server allowed anyone to send mass messages to federal employees, exposing poor cybersecurity.
Over 13,000 NOAA staff received spam and vulgar messages, including crude jokes about Trump and bizarre newsletters, causing widespread outrage.
The breach resulted from an overhaul led by Elon Musk that installed underqualified personnel and an insecure in-house system, sparking a class-action lawsuit for cybersecurity failures.
The unsecured system also inadvertently revealed ties to Project 2025 and a plan to gather government employee data as Trump’s loyalists reshape federal operations.
We can put a significant amount of blame in the laps of Democrats (as in, DNC officials) and their sycophants and defenders in both media and online.
Lemmy itself worked to become an echo chamber reflecting an uncritical assessment of both Democrat performance from 2021-2024, and as well the legitimate electoral performance of both the Biden, and separately, the Harris campaign.
Reality: the denialism around how bad and unpopular both Biden and Harris were in their role as Executives in Cheif, did substantial damage to Harris and probably cost them the election.
That denialism was RAMPANT across lemmy, and still persists today.
You can not make a convincing argument that your team should be the ones elected when you are asking people to deny the evidence of their lives experience, and that’s exactly what both the Biden and Harris campaign did. Lemmy moderators also worked to suppress any media or users critical of Harris and Biden.
Harris needed to feel the pressure from the electorate that Americans sensed that the country wasn’t doing well and was going in the wrong direction. She needed to understand and respond to the fact that Americans, in general, wanted a change from how Democrats had been managing.
Building an echo chamber, in both mainstream media and social media, to shut that view point out, and ultimately leave it unaddressed, is why the Harris campaign failed.
That echo chamber shielded the campaign from critical information they needed to be aware of to make the right kinds of changes which might have led to success.
And every moderator here, who suppressed criticism, or who uses bans to create an echo chamber in forums like c/World, c/Politics, and c/PoliticalMemes is in part to blame.
Even now I routinely get hammered with downvotes when I say “Harris wasn’t a good candidate.”
I mean, elections are how you judge whether a candidate is a good candidate. We have an objective measure of how good a candidate she was. It wasn’t very.
I’m not sure what better candidate the Democrats could have fielded by the time Biden withdrew, but that just shows that Biden waited way too late to drop out.
The Democrats are masters at pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.
I love dismantling this take people have on Harris.
You are a bad poster. You didn’t convince me with your argument.
That statement, by your logic, is not an opinion - it’s “truthful”. Disregarding the validity of whatever argument you’re making, if you judge it by its convincingness, ignores the intelligence or bias of the audience. Then, it’s possible that ANY argument is bad.
Since you, FaceDeer, failed to convince me, Katana314, of your argument, you are a bad Lemmy poster.
In other words, to dismantle that bolded statement above, you have to recognize that voters, themselves, bear some blame for not being receptive to logical takes.
The purpose of a candidate isn’t to convince every single person to vote for them. It’s to convince enough of them to vote for them (and in the right places) to achieve victory in the election.
I don’t know how it looks on your instance, but on mine I’ve got twice as many upvotes on the comment you’re responding to than I do downvotes. If I was a candidate in an election that would be a pretty good result!
However, I’m not a candidate in an election. I’m a participant in a discussion forum. The mere fact that you’re engaging with my arguments and discussing them in a rational manner makes this a successful comment, and me a successful commenter.
I think the key here is that Harris could have been a better candidate, and at certain points, especially before the convention, she was a better candidate.
She specifically and intentionally pivoted away from the politics that work for the Democratic party, Democratic Socialism, and towards neoliberalism and neoconservatism, a politics that doesn’t work for the Democratic party. It was cheerleaded by many here on Lemmy, and when told that this wouldn’t work, that it was harmful to her electoral chances, that they were pivoting to a non-existent center, we were called bots, schills, fascists, communists, armchair activists (although many of us making these criticisms, like myself have litterally put in thousands of hours into political campaigns). The briggading, the trolling, the abuse, the gaslighting: moderators and some very prevalent posters here on Lemmy were directly responsible, if not complicit. It was structural, and moderation abuse allowed it to happen and allows it to persist. And while it’s not unique to Lemmy (the same process was happening on Reddit), this is our house and we are collectively responsible for the outcomes that happen here.
Yep, she dropped out before Iowa because she was polling this badly when she ran for President in her own right. So yeah:
The people running her campaign committed malpractice, and because of the 2 party system, it’s but like voters can vote for another party without throwing away their vote (which they still should’ve done outside of the swing states, but the left again didn’t have their shit together and the whole thing was a shitshow with Cornell West wasting everyone’s time running for a Greens nomination he wasn’t going to get).