Maybe just this once, for old time’s sake.

One of the few things I miss from Reddit were the extra small communities like the one for QC. I liked being able to chat with the 30 other people who read this comic daily.

🧅^- anion

Voting is about choosing good candidates well before it gets pared down to 2 options. It’s about choosing a good local government, choosing good representatives, choosing good senators. If the only thing you care about is the President, then you’ll never have a good pool of options from which the parties will pick a presidential candidate. They’re not on our side - it’s our job to force their hand with a deck stacked with good candidates. But only the people who pay attention to politics well before election year get to have a say in stuff like that.

Okay, and how do you plan to get them into the hearts and minds of around 50% of the population in the next 2 months, when the vast majority haven’t even heard of her? It’s not enough to have someone who could be a good president, you also need to get people to vote for them. If you want most of the population to vote for someone, they need to be aware of them as a viable option years beforehand.

I agree that the 2 choices are pawns of the rich, but even if every person who knew about Claudia voted for her, she wouldn’t even get enough votes for her to make the news, much less win. We’re talking about tens of millions of people voting in unison for an election win to happen in this country. At this stage in the game, there are only 2 candidates with that kind of draw power. If you want to focus on the 2028 election (assuming there is one, since there clearly won’t be if Trump wins) to get a 3rd viable candidate on that ballot, that’s a noble plan, but by now this election’s potential winners are already down to 2.

Voting isn’t about closing your eyes and saying “I want someone good to win!” It’s about assessing which people might actually win, and voting for the one that best aligns with your views, however loosely. It’s about strategy. If you want to change that, you need to build national presence in the name of your preferred candidate, and you need to start years ahead of the elections. Big changes don’t happen at the ballot, they happen during the campaigning stage and beforehand. If your candidate isn’t on the news every day leading up to the election, most voters won’t even know they’re an option.

I put my alarm far enough away that I need to get up to turn it off. By then I’m already out of bed, which is otherwise the hardest part for me by far.

People playing tag 💪

As someone who works with door hardware, this would be a pretty easy interview.

I lived in Minneapolis during the protests, and someone did light up a gas station just a block from my house, but I wasn’t concerned - I’d already prepared to lose everything when I joined the protests. Fighting back against the government is going to take sacrifices, both from willing and unwilling participants; if we’re too afraid of stepping on people’s toes, then those in power will just use that angle to quash any up-and-coming resistances.

If protests are something people can just ignore until they’re over, then that’s what they’ll do - they need to be polarizing in order to actually get people to make a change. The enemy of positive change isn’t always negative change - it’s often an apathetic population who would rather not put forth the effort to make any change at all. If people are pressured to take a side by a sufficiently disruptive protest, they’ll usually join their fellow downtrodden, but you need to force them to make that decision.

People are scared that if you acknowledge the fact that Biden is concerning as a presidential candidate in any way, people will be less likely to vote for him; the sad state of the matter is that Biden is the only candidate who has a chance to beat Trump at this late of a stage in the game. The reasoning that we need to avoid criticizing him as a result of that is bullshit though, since if you’re closing your eyes and voting for your default color, then such discussion won’t affect to your vote, and if you’re actually paying attention to the state of our upcoming election, then you’ll already be well aware that being against Trump forces you to vote Biden, so your vote is locked in, regardless of how depressing it is. Nobody’s still hemming and hawing at this point, and even if some are, some random meme on Lemmy isn’t going to be the thing that finally gets them to make up their mind.

There’s no reason we can’t acknowledge the fact that, while being better than Donald Trump should win Biden the presidential election, it’s not an accomplishment, and in a vacuum he’s a terrible candidate. In fact, we specifically need to point out that we knew this scenario was coming for the past 4 years, and have organized no major uprisings, or even major educational movements to try to get people to force out a different Democratic candidate in the primaries; we’ve sat on our asses ever since the last election, and there’s no reason to think we won’t do the same going into the next election unless we start forcing a change in the DNC right now.

These “both sides” discussions aren’t about whether or not to choose to vote for Biden, they’re about getting people to notice the fact that we vote for the “lesser evil” every 4 years, saying that the time to make a change is after we’re solidified our candidate’s victory, but then once we’ve done that we do nothing until we’re in the same “lesser evil” situation again 4 years later. If we want to ever have a situation where we’re voting for a president we’d actually like, we need to start planning out how to force that to happen now, because even 4 whole years isn’t a very long time frame to for us to push such a large change.

I can understand some people are scared that Trump is going to win because too many people chose to vote 3rd party, or choose not to vote, but everyone who’s paying attention enough to be swayed by political discussion is already aware that we specifically need to vote for Biden in order for Trump to lose, so at this point the fanatical drive to quash any criticism of him as a presidential candidate seems nearly tailor-made to sow even more apathy among the voting population, making them feel not only forced into voting for Biden, but forced into liking it as well. In the end I think the efforts to prevent discussion about how neither candidate is an objectively good candidate is going to ultimately cause fewer people to vote at all, since they’ll feel as though they can’t even air out their grievances with the candidate they’d already begrudgingly chosen to vote for.

And he’s got 38 degrees in fucking.

Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don’t bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.

Why the long face?

That’s the thing. We think 2 steps forward 1 step back is making progress, but the steps forward are tiny, and the steps back are huge.

Huh, that’s interesting. Though, how do you pick MLK specifically out of a recording of an orgy, let alone definitively enough for it to be damning to his reputation?

But they were writing the letter under the guise of just being some guy. I’d believe the government could make the public think I’m some sexual deviant, but not a random person writing a letter to me.

Is there something I’m missing, or is this letter nothing more than an old-timey version of modern internet comments and conservative “LGBTQ+ people are somehow pedophiles!” claims that are as outlandish as they are unfounded? Like, how is claiming a reverend has secret massive orgies he’s clearly not having going to get him to kill himself? He probably just read this, said “Well that’s a load of nonsense.” and threw it away without another thought.

Toxicity isn’t as simple as “toxic = toxic + toxic.” While some byproducts of plastic breakdown are toxic, the bacteria are further dissolving those as well, going until they get glucose, as they wouldn’t be able to eat it if that wasn’t the end product. There are probably still some toxic byproducts that get excreted rather than broken down, but plastic breakdown already releases toxins under normal conditions, so that’s already a problem we’re going to have to tackle. If these bacteria can get past the first issue of breaking it down in the first place, then that’s a net positive.

I’m a bit of a noob about privacy, but wouldn’t preventing people from knowing you’re using Tor be pretty important? I know that, among people who know of Tor, but don’t know much about it, the use of Tor alone is generally associated with criminal activity, and often conjures up imagery of worse things than just piracy.

If I were to tell my friends I was thinking of using Tor, and I didn’t immediately have a good explanation of what I’d use it for beyond “privacy,” then they’d think I was into some nasty shit. I’d imagine the ISPs, and anyone else they might give/sell their info to, would be suspicious of anyone logged to be using Tor.

It doesn’t matter if you’re blind or not if you’re not going to bother to look. Most people simply don’t assess their media for underlying messages. They see Professor X as the good guy and Magneto as a bad guy, and don’t think any more about them. They don’t ask how or why they can be identified as the protagonist/antagonist, they just identify the general alignment and that’s it.