He / They
Yeah, this one was wild. A bunch of our ballot measures went badly, including the heavier sentencing for drugs one getting overwhelming support, even among Democrats. The minimum wage increase also get rejected.
This was apparently the election where people decided to be their worst selves.
Honestly, I’d love to see a month-long pause on discussing the presidential race itself.
State-level stuff, ballot measures, etc, no problem, but IMO there’s not going to be any productive discussion of the presidential race right now; there’s still too little information, too many emotions, etc.
That aside, (because that’s not the kind of thing that should happen without the community agreeing to it) I know that I’m probably part of the problem because Politics is where I tend to comment the most, and I’m going to stick to discussions of what to do next rather than wasting any more energy on litigating what went wrong at this point.
I have my suspicions about what happened, but that’s all they are as of right now, same as anyone else. But I do know for sure that I’m pissed off, and I know that I’m not going to be able to keep it from affecting how I engage with people if we get into an argument.
I’m just glad we all have this community, because it’s definitely an anchor-point for me right now (and thank you, mods, for all your work maintaining it).
So until failed neoliberalism stops failing, we have to keep supporting it? Seems a little backwards. If mediocre neoliberalism was beating fascism, I’d be more okay with getting behind it.
Why keep supporting the losers and thinking they’ll miraculously turn into winners?
After Biden dropped out, I was cheerleading for Harris. I didn’t like her policies, but she had much better chances than Biden, and it seemed like she understood what pitfalls to avoid.
Didn’t matter. The DNC doesn’t understand what is needed to win. They’re still running a playbook from 1996. They think the undecideds are in between them and the GOP, when in actuality they’re to the Left.
Instead, the DNC has now absorbed a bunch of “never Trumper” repubs who clearly aren’t willing to vote for a woman, but will let a geriatric white guy eke out a win if you promise not to do the social justice.
I think the DNC being a “big tent” party has allowed it to accept a large number of very questionable supporters, who for instance won’t vote for women, and who think that Cop City and broken windows policing is totally fine akshually, and whose jaws don’t drop when someone says to “send social workers into the homes” of black parents…
Ultimately, we probably will never know exactly which demo(s) sat out, and everyone will end up just interpreting their own side as the right path forwards. Depressing stuff.
I did, absolutely. I’m much more suspicious of the older, more Centrist people who told me they didn’t think America was “ready to elect a woman”. I suspect that most of them really meant they weren’t ready, and sat out.
My nephew is trans, with an openly hostile anti-trans father (my POS Trumper brother, who luckily does not live with his kids), and lives in a swing state that went red last night. Very worried for him and every other trans person in this shit hole.
I’m also pissed off that, based on the numbers we’re seeing, this is the second time that Democrat voters across the country have sat out rather than elect a woman. Honestly, I shouldn’t even be surprised anymore.
Stay strong, everyone, things are gonna get rough.
The genius of these tactics is that these campaigns aren’t making anyone racist, they’re just giving people an opportunity to feel safe showing it. Conservatives long to return to a time when they could just be like, “yeah, if you’re in this town after sundown and you’re not white, we’re gonna hang you” (which it’s important to note, was still a thing as recently as the 1980s).
Since they can’t do that quite as openly now, they look to any kind of news reports they can to use our American sense of “justice” (meaning retributive, where we tend to collectively dehumanize criminals) to shield them expressing racist views. When those reports aren’t there, they just make them up.
Us Millennials and GenXers are old now. :P Fortnight used to be a kids game, because GenZ were still kids. Now they’re adults, and Fortnite ain’t a GenAlpha game.
As much as the US is an imperialist colonial state, they also keep the other ones (Russia, China) in check. Both of them were subsumed by state-capitalism, and became just as expansionist and xenophobic as the US is. I don’t want any of them around, but all 3 breaking up ain’t in the cards right now, and unchecked imperialism is exactly what made the US so dangerous to the “margins of the world” for so long.
Nah, and I say this as an ansoc who would love for the US to break up, but there’s just no appetite for that at any scale large enough to actually cause this.
Even at the time of the Civil War, it was only when state governments decided to secede that things kicked off, and no states now- no matter how “blue” they are- are going to try that. It would be up to individuals, and there’s just no organizational capability for that at the scale needed to force a civil war. The closest we might ever get is a bunch of individual attacks or small-scale violent mobs.
This is already a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Legal_Counsel
They want a “shadow” version of it (meaning not officially sanctioned), that will just draft legal justifications, not actually interpret legality.
I found out my brother has been a Trumper since 2016, and keeps it secret from his friends, who he knows would not be okay with it. Not so much “shy”, as “knows he’s an asshole, but literally only cares about religion”. He’s just a misogynist, is the reality.
That’s awesome, thank you for that!
Heartening news. Even if the alt-right manosphere is hoovering up more young men, if their message isn’t invigorating them to vote it limits the ‘blast radius’ pretty significantly.
I actually like this.
This is not a gimmick of handing out “random” checks (which, we now know, all went to people who had already voted Republican), this affects all members equally, as a statement of values.
You can write in “abstain”, or leave blank, whatever you want if you don’t want to endorse any particular candidate, but democracy is important, and this might help push people to overcome the inconveniences that are often used to discourage people from voting.
I don’t know, I understand his concerns, but I don’t personally trust that what we’d get would be better than what we have, in total.
There are states who absolutely need federal oversight, or even just management, of their elections, because they’ve shown repeatedly that they are in the business of deliberate and persistent disenfranchisement. Then there are states who do much better now than any standard that a federal “bipartisan” commission would push in an emergency…
And who decides if it’s an emergency? The commission? The President? SCOTUS?
It’s tough because Federalism is a bad system, and creates these problems by its very nature, but this doesn’t change or correct for that system, it just creates another actor with vested authority over elections.
Is this going to be Lethal Company, but in the Control world? 'Cause I’d play that.
If you want everything to burn, and the US to cease being a country, vote for Trump
That’s literally the dead opposite of what would happen. Trump will make the US into an authoritarian, dictatorial police state, not dissolve it.
Anyone who thinks voting for Trump is the better option for Arabs or Muslims is a fool.
That said, Harris has had every opportunity to signal a break from Biden in her policy towards Israel, and she’s turned it down.
Arab and Muslim Americans are truly finding out just how second-class they are.
Don’t want to vote for a candidate who keeps publicly stating that the country actively socializing plans to starve people will continue to receive their support? Get ready to be told you’re a horrible person who’s wasting your vote, and how you don’t care about other minorities (who apparently don’t have a responsibility to vote for your interests, like you do their’s).
Little side-tangent, but @trslim@pawb.social if you like base-building RTSes, you should check out Earth 2150 if you have not already. It’s old, but it’s imo one of the best out there. There are 3 factions, each with their own campaign, and very different styles of units, and during the campaign you have a home base that you build, and from which you can build and send out units to your in-progress missions (i.e. build a tank in your homebase, load it into a helicopter, send the helicopter to your in-mission base’s landing zone, and unload tank for use… and vice-versa for keeping units that you build in the mission zone, etc).
There are also Earth 2140 and Earth 2160, but I never fell in love with those 2 (Earth 2160 isn’t bad, and has a cool alien faction that is basically a roaming mothership that builds units, rather than a traditional ‘base’).