Sooner or later, you will get trapped somewhere forever. Over the course of an infinite lifespan, the odds that a building collapses on you or a tunnel caves in on you basically become 100%. Someday, you will fall into the hole that you will stay in until the sun explodes, and then you will drift in the void until the heat death of the universe.

Thank you. Something about me was rubbing me the wrong way, but I couldn’t articulate it.

Democrats will still blame Stein if they lose, and even though their explicit strategy is to pick off disaffected Republicans, they’ll never blame Chase Oliver. It’s just like in 2016, when Hillary used the exact same strategy, and they blamed Stein, even though Gary Johnson took home a much higher percentage of the vote in most swing states. They don’t care about spoiler candidates; they just want to punch left, especially when they need a scapegoat for a loss.

Those are the vibes that I’ve been getting in the last month and it’s scaring the shit out of me.

Super weird that your reaction to an article about how Kamala Harris is losing crucial Muslim support in Michigan is, “Nice try , Russians!” How brain-poisoned have you become that you’re rejecting inconvenient information?

Yeah, earlier in her campaign, I was optimistic that she was just trying not to undermine Biden’s foreign policy, and that she would eventually take an at least slightly more critical position on Israel. So far, though, she’s seems entirely committed to Israel’s escalating violence, and she won’t even make the smallest gesture towards the Palestinian community. I didn’t expect her to denounce Israel, but staying lock-step with Biden on this is looking like political suicide.

I didn’t think it was the absence of work that made people fat and lazy, but blind consumerism. Those people could have used their time pursuing knowledge, creating art, or even just building a community with their crew mates, but instead, they engaged in the same type of mindless consumption that killed their planet. They lived in a post-needs society, but they had been so conditioned by capitalism (or more accurately, an AI that had no framework for human happiness beyond capitalism) that they couldn’t think of anything to do but consume.

No, this is literally where the U.S. falls on a global political spectrum. The Democrats would be considered center-right in most other nations. Even by their own historical standards, they’re center right; if you took a Democrat from 1975 and transported them to 1995, they’d ask you why the party had adopted the Republicans’ fiscal policies.

Whenever people say that you grow more conservative when you get older, they’re working from the premise that you’ll grow more affluent and comfortable later in life. For Americans, that just isn’t true anymore. Wages are mostly stagnant, home ownership is much less attainable, and cost of living is at an all time high. Yet for some reason, pundits just can’t figure out why millenials aren’t getting more conservative as they age, or why zoomers appear to be following this trend.

I’m guessing the legal department had been looking for a test case to see how far they could take the forced arbitration clause in the Disney+ ToS, but they didn’t consult the PR department as to whether this would be a good idea.

Exactly. People share articles every week about Republican voter suppression tactics like limiting polling locations and creating voter ID laws, then turn around and whine when voters don’t show up for their candidates. Even if you aren’t a victim of these laws, if you have to vote in person, you usually have 12 hours on a weekday to vote. If you work 8 hours a day, and you commute an hour each way, that’s 2 hours to vote. For a working-class person with a family, that’s a big ask. That’s time they normally spend making dinner for their kids and getting ready for the next day. Voting is a right, but having the time to do it a luxury.

Well, if it’s a platitude it must be true.

Well, again, it’s pretty hard to quantify how many people are not voting on principle, but again, if we use third-party voters as a guide, that’s probably not true. For Hillary, analysis shows that even if every single Jill Stien voter had gone to Clinton, she still would have needed to win over 50% of Gary Johnson’s voters (who were obviously unlikely to consider themselves leftists) to win..

Bush and Gore is different, since Bush won by 537 votes in Florida, so sure, if the Nader voters had gone to Gore, he would have won. You could probably also assume that there were 537 disgruntled leftists who decided to stay home as well, but with a margin that small, almost anything could have changed the outcome. If all the voters who stayed home with a cold went out and voted Gore might have won.

You’re working from a premise that there’s a large contingent of leftists who are withholding their vote on principle, and if they just voted, the Democrats would always win. But there’s no data to assume that’s true, and it’s just as likely that there are as many conservatives doing the exact same thing. So what’s point here? If only all the leftists who didn’t vote on principle came out, but all the conservatives who didn’t vote on principle still stayed home, things would be different? You could blame pretty much any group for your candidates’ loss with logic like that.

No, it wouldn’t. It’s very difficult to quantify how many people don’t vote as a protest vs. don’t vote out of apathy, but the Green Party, Libertarian Party, and all other third parties combined took home less than 2% of the total vote in the last Presidential election. Even if we assumed that just as many people were staying home in protest, and that they were entirely made up of disgruntled leftists, that would only maybe affect the outcome of some swing states if the numbers are unevenly distributed. It certainly wouldn’t remake history.

The internet (and Lemmy especially) might be full of high-minded leftists claiming they stay home on moral principle, but the majority of people who don’t vote are just tired, working class people who have to squeeze voting in around work and family on a random Tuesday. If you want them to turn out, you have to give them a candidate that speaks to them enough that they’ll take time out of their day vote. (Well, that or a make mail-in voting universal in all 50 states, or make voting day a federal holiday, or a bunch of other things that will never get through Congress.)

Huh. I honestly didn’t give it much thought when I made the comment. Just kinda thought anything other than 180° and 360° might not be clear, and 180° seemed too low.

“Alright, now I’m just going to adjust your neck by giving it a quick 360° rotation.”

Oh, Lindell is not a grifter; he’s a true believer. He didn’t bet the world $5 million because it was a scam. He did it because he was certain he was right, and he thought he could make everybody see that. Guys like Jack Posobiec and Charlie Kirk are grifters. Lindell’s basically like any other MAGA chud that was convinced to ruin his life for Trump.

Honestly, unless we close the offshore tax loophole, reducing or increasing the corporate tax rate is basically symbolic, since the federal tax rate is functionally 0% for most cooperations.

Yeah, the fact that this sounded a lot like one of his anti-Trump stump speeches, coupled with the fact that he barely mentioned Kamala, makes me think he’s been rehearsing this one since before July 21st.

Fair enough, I’ll adjust my search terms to see if I can find anything on that. I agree that Assange is a PoS, and it does seem like his Kremlin ties are genuine. I tend to be skeptical when the security agencies tell us someone is secretly a Russian asset (like when the state department revoked Snowden’s passport while he was stopped in Russia on his way to Ecuador, then accused him of going there to aid Russia, even though they literally forced him to be there), but it certainly seems like Assange had or developed an interest in aiding the Russian government.

Wikileaks was unfortunately too centered around Assange himself, and only had a non-governing advisory board as it’s infrastructure, so there really was no way to separate the organization from the man. It’s a shame, because I think the work they did (especially early on) was very important, and I think the world is worse off without an organization like them.