“The Onion is proud to acquire Infowars, and we look forward to continuing its storied tradition of scaring the site’s users with lies until they fork over their cold, hard cash,” said The Onion CEO Ben Collins. “Or Bitcoin. We will also accept Bitcoin.”

This is great!

When I was 11, that was 5th grade and we would rotate being on “safety patrol” which is where you would stand, by yourself, at certain intersections and make sure the younger kids waited for cars to pass and it was safe before crossing the street. Of course we walked to those spots by ourselves. And by age 12 I was babysitting other people’s kids.

So those people and their rules are crazy. If we really aren’t letting kids walk somewhere by themselves by age 10-11, no wonder our society is so dysfunctional. This has got to be very detrimental to the personal and social development of the children.

I would have thought a red state like Georgia would not have what they call “Nanny state” laws? I’d like to see the actual wording of the “reckless conduct” law they would be charging her under. Does it actually specify how, when and where your children can go unsupervised and what ages of children it applies to, or do the cops just get to “use their own judgement”?

edit to add: I feel sorry for kids growing up today and apparently in the last 20 years or so. When I was a kid our mothers just said “Be back by supper” and we went out and played wherever. they didn’t know where we were. No cell phones to track us.

I have a pre-touchscreen era (for its model anyway) 2012 car. I’m hoping by the time I have to get a new car this touchscreen fad will have come and gone. How are you supposed to use those things in the winter when you have gloves on?

Your console, my price?

I never use Google, so this is from a blank slate search. The top result for “can i c” is “can I change my vote?” Also the top 2 results for “what is” by itself are: “what is the 4b movement” and “what is a tariff”. Here come the leopards.

And I don’t have any drugs either.

Supposedly there was a leaked report from 23andme showing she was genetically not black.

Whenever some stupid shit comes out of trump’s mouth his minions go put out propaganda to make him be “right”. They have bot armies to amplify their posts to spread themand make people believe it (plus his followers already want to believe it so their job is easy). Musk has made this very easy to do on Xitter.

So this is just another example. When he said she wasn’t black and got made fun of, they rushed to put out propaganda on social media that there was a 23andme test showing she wasn’t Black and “see? he was right!” and amplified it to spread it even more. They do that with everything, like after the debate they put out pictures of grills with meat cooking on them that they said were cats and everyone just believes it.

He is sending another $6 billion to Ukraine.

The Democratic primaries were held as always. Biden won, as the sitting president (almost?) always does because there are no serious challengers. Maybe there should have been a stronger effort to challenge him but it would have probably accomplished nothing but disruption. After he dropped out there wasn’t time to hold new primaries.

But yeah, that’s why I said people have a lot more power further down the ballot, the more local the closer it is to the people and the more democratic. On a national level your voice is one among millions and as you say, the earlier primary states have the most power. and unfortunately yes, that voting strategy usually takes many election cycles of concerted effort by a movement to start working. On the R side, you could say it started back in the 80’s with the “moral majority” movement. One thing they did that was really effective was focusing their efforts on the State level and getting control of state legislatures.

A couple of things that make this harder for D’s is that it is a big tent party with diverse positions that can make it like herding cats, whereas with R’s their positions have been much more consistent (until the first trump candidacy and presidency, and now they’re consistent again, all having fallen into line under him). The other thing is that R’s and conservatives are spread out everywhere in the rural areas, while D’s and liberals are concentrated in the cities as a minority of the population in the many red states and an oversized majority in the few blue states. That also works to the R’s advantage in controlling more state legislatures. It’s a tough situation.

I think they’re making a distinction between policy issues and social issues. The policy issues are popular but the social issues not so much. I read that R’s ran a huge ad buy with an anti-trans ad that was very effective in swinging lots of male voters over to them. That’s one example of what they mean by the “woke” stuff. It scares conservatives and moderate dems–not the objective reality of the policies as much as messaging spin they put on it, designed to create fear and loathing. Like it or not, it’s effective.

They will run whoever wins in the primaries, which means that voting in the primaries is where you have much more power. Start early on supporting candidates who you think can win and help them win the primaries.

This works much better in down-ballot races than at the POTUS-level, but even there if you get a big enough movement going it can work. That’s how Trump got the R nomination in 2016 after all–the R establishment hated him and didn’t want him to win but he got the votes.

On the DNC side, after outcry about what happened with Bernie in 2016, they changed the rules to limit the power of the superdelegates to rig things like they did it 2016, by preventing them from voting on the first ballot and other rules on what they can do. Whether those reforms are enough has not yet been tested.

No of course I can’t blame them because it’s the only thing that makes sense to do. That’s what I saying. I blame the people who won’t vote for Dems if they don’t perfectly align with everything they want or don’t pass their purity test.

Magats took over the Republican party because they consistently voted for whichever R won the primary, even if it wasn’t the one they wanted to win the primary. R’s have always done this, but Magats especially have been turning out to do this since 2008 when gasp! the Black guy won (they started out as the Tea party). On top of that they did a lot of activism. Parading around with their guns was the part they liked best about that. They took a name for their movement; the TEA (taxed enough already) party was a stupid name and they looked like idiots with their teabags, but it worked for them and they eventually got their demagogue.

The Democratic party can be moved to the left with this same strategy. Vote for the more left-leaning or whoever you like best in the primary, then vote for whoever has the D by their name in the general. When they learn that they can actually count on getting enough votes from their base, they’ll stop futilely chasing votes from the right. At the same time you have to do activism and keep the movement growing, which makes sure they clearly know what you want and creates pressure to influence their policies. You don’t give up after one election cycle because it takes time and work…

Ceding your power by not voting doesn’t make politicians care about you–it’s not like boycotting a business that wants to sell you something. Politicians want to please those who vote for them, not those who don’t. Learn from the magats. First you put the politicians closer to your views into power, then keep pressuring them to enact the policies you want. Not sit around and wait for them to enact the agenda you want first and after that you’ll vote for them. Think about how training a dog works.

If it was just the fact of a two party system, why did it take over 200 years to do it?

That’s exactly it. It’s hard to admit that almost half the voting population is totally on board with trump–his “flaws” are not a bug, they’re a feature. He increased the size of his base, bringing in millions of Latinos, Gen Z men, and men of all races. It’s not that they simply hate the Dems, it’s that they love what trump is offering. In spite of that it there did exist enough more voters that don’t like trump (it would have taken 5 million more) to stop him, but they either didn’t give a shit or they wanted it to happen (to “punish” the dems). That’s the reality.

Yep, every time Dems can’t get enough votes from the left to win, because they aren’t “left/pure enough” for them, what they learn is to shift to the right to find votes.

Whereas since voters on the right will always vote for the one with the R by their name even if they don’t think the candidate is “right enough”, their party learns that it doesn’t have to move to the left to find enough votes and stays to the right or moves even further to the right.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/breaking-down-gender-gap-gen-z-politics-desk-rcna177155 about the poll results they’re referring to in the article. Gen Z has the biggest gender gap of all the age groups, with women for Harris by a 33 point margin, but the men about evenly split between Harris and Trump.

If you think about the new voters coming of voting age for this election, it’s been 9 years since Trump rode down the escalator to kick off his campaign. So they were too young to hear about or pay attention to a lot the unsavory stuff about him back then, like the Access Hollywood tape. For some reason, many Gen Z men find him appealing, but not Gen Z women. For instance today I saw this video of two Gen Z young women hearing the Access Hollywood audio for the first time. You can see how horrified they are (as most normal people were back when it first came out).

Not only that but they can train their AI’s on all their subscribers’ journal entries. Check F-Droid.org for some free, privacy respecting FLOSS journaling apps.

Sheesh, you’re a bit late, folks. Besides, Stein is in the race specifically for the purpose of helping Trump win, so she wouldn’t listen to them anyway.

Her campaign had record-setting grass roots donations. She didn’t need to kow-tow to wealthy donors to get enough funding–that is not the reason she’s running as moderate. It’s because she needs lots of votes from moderates and anti-trump republicans if she’s going to win (and I do think she will). And by the way, “stealing votes”?! That’s not stealing votes ffs, it’s winning them. Even then the race is way too close.

I don’t think you realize how many Democratic men can’t, won’t, or have a real hard time bringing themselves to vote for her because she’s a woman. Lots of interviews on video showing them. It’s so ironic to me that their main reason is they say “women are too emotional to be given the responsibility.” When trump is the biggest ketchup-throwing cry baby ever to occupy the Oval office? I can’t count how many times I’ve seen male senators and congressmen losing their shit while the women are the calm adults in the room. John Boehner, who was Speaker of the House, used to burst into tears on the House floor at the drop of a hat. But I digress.

Point is, not even Democrats are as liberal as you think they are. Only a faction of them are very liberal. (Out of curiosity, do you live in a blue state, and/or a large urban area? I wonder why you think there are that many truly liberal voters in the United States.)

I do agree with your first sentence that intense anti-trumpism is the reason we might finally get a woman president. Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t happen. The US is just not like other democracies that way.