Mix in some red food coloring and you’ve got yourself a good time

If your chance of winning hinges on your opponent suddenly not being there anymore, that conclusion is kind of anti-democratic in nature. If (for example) someone says “Things will eventually start getting better once all the boomers are gone”, they’ve already decided who their enemy is and that there’s no use trying to have discussions with them about how to fix things. The world around them slowly becomes less about different people with different ideas and it metastasizes into a country where half of their neighbors want them dead and because of that, they’d see half their neighbors dead as well. This doesn’t go away if trump is defeated in November. Civil war will be right around the corner until people start talking to each other again. The militarism of both parties and the fascism of republicans will, over time, be seen as a less necessary weapon against “the enemy” and divisive politics will ease up. That being said, don’t waste your breath on literal armed Nazis/white supremacist groups. They’re an artifact of the fears and stresses of this current system and have decided the best course of action is the most harmful. They will be less of an issue once society at large isn’t gasping for air and don’t have to blame their woes on one particular group.

My point is, we don’t solve the issue of rising fascism within our borders by waiting it out and hoping it all blows away with time, only coming out from your shelter one day out of the whole year to do political action. Embrace democracy if you believe in it and talk to people who disagree with you(preferably in-person) about why you think the things you think and why it should be changed. Show up to town halls, get to know your local government, join local activism groups. If you want things to change for the better, you can’t just keep doing the same thing that got us into this mess.

And the situation we’re in will continue to get worse as long as long as we’re playing the hand that’s been dealt to us instead of taking an active roll in improving things around us.

Yes, yes. we all know republicans are worse. But democrats could’ve entirely prevented this, which they didn’t. They enabled it. Being better than republicans doesn’t mean the situation is better with democrats. In fact, it’s getting so much worse every single year.

My state is ruby red and even the fairly large city I live in is red. Begging people to vote specifically for biden in situations like ours only makes people more apathetic since they know Biden has no shot. But if you tell people how to be more politically involved outside of voting, they’ll be more empowered to want to vote just so they can get people more aligned with them in their local and state elections. It’s the state government in red states like ours that will enact awful policies that we will actually feel. Pushing an unpopular president as the main reason to show up to the booth will only make them stay home instead.

Tangential: Covid is still killing a ton of people every month (though it gets better in warmer weather). This past January had over 10k covid deaths that were largely ignored by Biden and pretty much everyone else who are desperate to show how “good” things are now. But also, I’d caution against being hopeful for another pandemic that would wipe out conservatives since it’s tiptoeing on fascism, which you’re trying to be distinctly different to, eh? If a huge portion of Americans are fascist, America will be a fascist nation. I’ve heard conservatives wish that CA would sink into the ocean and that NYC would get swept away from a hurricane and I hope to god we haven’t ratcheted so far that now democrats are wishing and hoping for the deaths of their political enemy.

Here’s the press release from Atlanta.

And if you want to read an article about it, here’s one from Time

I feel like this reply is for someone else? We’re both coming from a leftist position. Democrats only think they’re being overrun with bots and propaganda because they aren’t actually politically informed enough to know the valid reasons why people don’t like them.

You should research cop cities. Atlanta democrats voted to fund theirs.

So you know what state that person resides? You’ve confirmed they live in a swing state where their vote for president actually matters? (This is not me advocating against voting since local/state positions are important, but if you’re focused on president, only a handful of states really make a difference at all).

Queer person here: we’ve had to violently fight for our rights and were successful in the past and we will do it again if we need to, so expecting a vote for anything will fix the issues of the marginalized is very out of touch. Doing nothing but voting is 99% political apathy, and it very much feels like all this browbeating is coming from someone who only votes and mayyyyybe donates to the ACLU or planned parenthood once every couple years. Do some real work and stop spending so much of your mental energy on inconsequential (assuming you don’t live in a handful of swing states) things. Build coalitions. Form or join unions. Stand up for what is right and protest what is wrong.

If you don’t know the answer to this already, I suppose the backlash against Biden from progressives might seem like bots or foreign propaganda.

Or maybe if the average American stood with the marginalized instead of yelling at them to fall in line, we wouldn’t constantly have issues where the marginalized are systemically murdered and imprisoned. The blood isn’t on their hands for having morals and boundaries. It’s on the masses who refuse to give up even an ounce of comfort to lend a hand to the downtrodden. The path the democrats are on is the same path the current republicans have walked before.

Who are you willing to sacrifice for your own comfort? Why is that a valid position? Because the other guy points that same weapon at you instead and it’s scary? How many different groups are you willing to put on that sacrifice list until you just turn into a fascist republican? “Just following orders” is just as cowardly a response as “It was my only choice”.

If America is going to go through the trouble to convert everything to metric, might as well switch to base 10/decimal time as well lol

I was more of a Zork Nemesis kid, but I’ll definitely be getting this.

Not that it matters because the point comes across fine, and being hyper fixated on grammar is a form of gatekeeping, but “badly” seems weird here. It might just be an American English or regional American thing to me, but in school, the whole good/well & bad/poor thing was made pretty distinct. Good and bad were descriptors of action where well and poor were descriptors of feeling. I can do good (things) or do bad (things), but things can go well or go poorly.

Grammar stackexchange seems to disagree with me though

This is definitely AI. And kinda old AI at that. The backgrounds are nondescript, the facial hair is ambiguous, the face looks like one of those “upload a photo to see it realistically move with the magic of AI”, the shirt looks airbrushed and ambiguous, he has dark eyes instead of very blue eyes like in real life, and if you try to look up pictures of any interviews of him in those particular years, he usually has facial hair and a button down, sometimes with a jacket.

Compare the upper right and lower left picture on this post with this similar meme. Film grain is missing (possibly due to AI “beauty filters”?) and how the upper right image, his eyes are way more blue. I think the original meme creator probably wanted to make it look like all 4 pictures were the same gray shirt rather than 4 different gray shirts since the bottom left shirt in the picture I posted is heathered gray instead of flat gray.

I had to return my bone conduction headphones because it tickled my ears too much when I turned it up so loud that I could hear it over my bike machine. My wired headphones kept dying from my sweat, so I just ended up getting some waterproof-ish JBL in-ear headphones so I don’t have to worry about destroying any of my wireless headphones.

Apple has a masterclass of tiering their products in just a way so that in every tier but the upper tiers, you’re giving up something really important. If you spend the least you possibly can on a MacBook, apple guarantees you’re going to have a very bad time for “doing the bare minimum to be seen with a laptop with an apple logo on it”. Their whole tier system is an exercise in “how can we get away with fucking up these things just enough so the customer feels like it is necessary to spend a little bit more” every step of the way. Then they make it unupgradable so you can’t sidestep their crafted feature tier system.

Don’t have compete with BYD if you don’t allow them to be competition in the US.

President decided by sortition (like jury selection) with a less military-focused role, cabinet members decided by voting on a list of working professionals in the applicable field (aka someone who works in agricultural sciences to be secretary of agriculture), housing as a human right, functional petitions that can initiate a direct vote in a special election on any issue with enough signatures. Ban prison labor and for profit prisons. Ban private schools and invest heavily in public schools. Employees of public services like libraries, schools, gov jobs pay no taxes. De-militarize the police. Sever the relationship between police and current/former prosecutors (possibly by only getting out-of-county prosecutors to oversee cases involving police?), enshrine prisoner voting rights, enshrine Land back policy, no corporate ownership of single family homes. Rent for an apartment has to be split to be exactly what the mortgage currently costs for the owner of the building + overhead, repairs and community agreed upon updates (if the building has no mortgage anymore, it is lowered to be only what is needed for overhead etc.- being a landlord shouldn’t be profitable, it should be a service), salary has to be clearly marked on every job posting and if it is found out that they are underpaying what they advertise, the labor board can fine the company by percentage of total profit increasing 2x every time it happens. All jobs are union eligible except for police. State tax benefits to influence city centers to become car-free. Loitering is a protected activity. Ban EULAs that can change at the will of the company. Force companies to pay out money to those they stole data from and sold. Ban the NSA, TSA, FBI, and CIA. Ban the stock market in some way that wouldn’t be awful. Ban more performant car/truck tires that’s causing our microplastics problem in favor of almost entirely naturally decomposing tire compounds. All vehicles and machinery are subject to the emissions standards of cars. Farmers are always allowed to set up a stand and sell products from their farm in parking lots (even parking lots of grocery stores). No unmarked police cars and no police sirens at night. No 24 hour news cycle. Crackdown on javascript’s power on the internet. Break up apple, google, Microsoft, and any other behemoth I’m forgetting. Ban court fees. Ban non-competes. 3-4 day workweek. On top of location representation in our federal government, include wage representation and age representation as well. Surprise, all businesses are co-ops now! There’s probably way more, but I can only fantasize so much lol