While that’s true, I think by positioning ourselves at the 2nd state, it allows us to “negotiate” our way down to getting the 1st state. Its kind of like haggling. If you start at the more extreme position, opposition will (in an ideal scenario) try to find a middle ground to agree on. And that middle ground would look like the 1st state. It’s a way of combatting the ratcheting effect.

Woah. That sounds interesting. Care to elaborate?

It’s literally the artist’s self insert OC. How else are they supposed to communicate that they’re talking about a personal experience about them self and not speaking broadly on the topic? Notice how the person commissioning the NSFW art is pictured very plainly without much detail. That’s because they’re a generic stand-in. But the artist is more detailed, because they are a specific person.

Or. And hear me out here. The message of the comic is “the author thinks sex is gross. The author doesn’t like drawing sex. The author is willing to give up on those values for the right sum of money.” And it’s a tongue in cheek joke about how their opinions can be easily swayed by financial incentives, rather than a reflection of all artists.

I completely agree on the idea of voting for Harris for harm reduction. But I’m genuinely curious why you think her being elected would put us in a better position to get progressive reform. She showed that she was completely unwilling to back down or change her stance to get elected. Once she had won the election, there really isn’t any reason for her to change her stance. Even the idea that she would try to gain popularity to be reelected seems unlikely. Because if we have already proven that we’ll vote for someone not because they have good policies, but because they have less bad policies. The next election would be the same. With her most likely running for reelection. And either Trump or some other far right extremist running against her, forcing a repeat of the hypothetical 2024 election where she won.

It’s a rather bleak cycle, that makes it frustrating when people constantly hammer against the voters for not holding their nose and voting for the lesser of two evil, rather than the Democratic party in general for not listening to what their constituents want, and changing to a more populist progressive policy. I don’t agree with the protest voters, but I can at least empathize and understand where they’re coming from.

The really depressing thing is that even after losing because of it, we’re still not seeing much of a shift within the party. This should have been a wake up call for them. But it seems they still haven’t learned their lesson and seem more intent on using the Republican party as a cudgel to beat the population into voting for them, rather than actually adopting policies that make people want to vote for them.

I agree with the sentiment, but the reason they’re looking at third party apps is to avoid the control that payment processing companies have over censorship following the whole Visa/MasterCard issue.

Mind sharing what extension you use?

I’m not sure I follow your logic. This doesn’t seem like propaganda to me, or “technically true.” It just flat out is true. The headline doesn’t say that only ATC were receiving the emails. The headline is just highlighting that specific subgroup, because that’s the point of the article. Showing that while yes, all federal employees received those emails, one particular group received those emails, which were sent out shortly before 2 major incidents involving plane crashes.

The point isn’t that only ATC received this email. It’s about the consequences of sending this out to all federal federal employees across the board, and highlighting the risk of this using an example of consequences that have already happened. And most likely the buyouts aren’t directly responsible for the crashes, the timeline seems too quick for that. But considering that ATC is already understaffed, this is only going to exacerbate the problem we’re already seeing.

If I take a sledgehammer to all my walls, and knock down a load bearing wall in the process and cause the building to collapse, would you be upset about a headline reading “Man causes building collapse after knocking down load bearing wall”? Would you consider it propaganda because I wasn’t only knocking down load bearing walls, I was knocking down all the walls. Or would you understand that the headline is highlighting the part of the story that is relevant to the article that is being written.

I do agree with you on the main headline though. If I’m understanding the article correctly, they’re easing protections against gender and sexual orientation based protections, and increasing the hoops sexual assault victims have to jump through. So the headline is just blatantly misleading.

The thing that concerns me, is where does it stop? This is something I’ve been thinking about all through the election cycle, and even now. I understand the idea of voting for lesser evil. And that’s exactly what I did. But when you vote for the lesser evil, you are showing your support of that evil. You are sending a message that it’s an acceptable level of evil. That it’s tolerable as long as the alternative is something worse. And it allows the Democrats to keep shifting further right little by little.

We already saw that with Harris campaigning on having “the most lethal military”, and talking about how she’s going to continue building Trump’s wall. (Something Biden did, but at least wasn’t campaigning on, and acting like it’s a selling point). Maybe the next democratic candidate will be even more anti immigrant, but still pro lgbtqia+. So we have to vote for them over the Republican candidate. Then the next dem candidate is only pro lgb, but anti trans. Democrats were already talking about how Harris’s support of trans people lost her the election. When she never even openly campaigned on any trans issues as far as I saw.

And we can elect the lesser of two evils and then protest and send a message about the issues that we don’t support them on. But at the end of the day, what incentive do they have to change? What are you going to do about it? Not vote for them and get the greater evil?

Obviously voting 3rd party just splits the left leaning candidates votes and allows the right to win. But unconditional support of the democratic party seems like it just allows them to take a leisurely stroll towards the right every election. I don’t have an actual answer. But the idea of continuously voting for the lesser evil as the lesser evil becomes incrementally more evil doesn’t really sit well with me.

‘’’ Decipher #165 deciphered in ⏱️ 3m 26s ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ https://decipher.wtf/ ‘’’

If the brain worms tell RFK Jr. That psychedelics are actually a cancer cure, then legislation could be put forth to legalize psychedelics. But rather than allowing recreational use, or using them for a medical purpose based on scientific fact such as use in conjunction with therapy to treat depression, it could be legalized as prescribed medication for cancer. This has the drawbacks of not allowing access to people that could actually benefit from it, as well as now being used as a snake oil cure for something completely unrelated that will prevent people from getting other more effective treatment.

I think the implications here is that the reasons it gets legalized can have an impact on the specifics of the policy. Which would mean that they wouldn’t agree with the policy beyond the legalization itself.

What about Joe Biden made him sufficiently left while Kamala Harris wasn’t?

-Joe Biden wasn’t campaigning to finish building Trump’s wall. Or saying that actually it was a good idea to build the wall and the only problems were just that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for it and that he didn’t finish the job.

-Joe Biden wasn’t campaigning on being pro-fracking. And bragging about how he was the tie breaking vote for the IRA, which leased new land for fracking. (I understand there was more to this act, but Harris points to it as a way to show she supports fracking)

-At the time the genocide in Gaza hadn’t ramped up and gotten as much publicity as has now, so we didn’t get to hear Joe Biden’s stance on it.

-Joe Biden wasn’t calling to ensure America has the “strongest most lethal fighting force in the world”.

-Joe Biden didn’t align himself with the Cheneys.

You see that 10 million more Democrats voted for Biden, but stayed home for Harris and you believe the problem is with the people and not the candidate? Now granted, racism and sexism played a role in this for sure. But to attribute that much of a difference just to that? Most of the people that are deeply racist and sexist are already voting for Trump because he supports those ideas. And from what I’ve seen, the Republican voters stayed pretty consistent from last election. It was mainly a dip in Democratic voters. If the problem is with the voters and not just that Harris was an incredibly weak candidate, then why do you believe that many more people voted last election?

I watched this video when it came out and I disagree with the findings in it, because to me it seems less to indicate that people reject logic because of political affiliations, and more people are critical of studies that contradict prior knowledge.

People interpreting results on the skin cream have absolutely no frame of reference. There isn’t a brand name associated with the skin cream that might have some kind of recognition for people to have prior knowledge. The study that they are presented with is the first time they are seeing anything about this skin cream.

People weighing in on gun control, have a lot of prior knowledge on the topic. Now whether all this knowledge is based on facts or data is obviously questionable. But regardless they have prior experience with the topic. So naturally you are going to be critical of a study showing you results that directly contradict your prior knowledge. Also from the video it doesn’t seem clear that they are asking them to specifically treat it like math problem and make judgements based on the study alone. They are asked whether they think gun control is effective. And while obviously they have the infographic right in front of them, most people are not going to base their judgements solely on that data alone.

To put it another way, what if the study was based on something non-political, like say whether smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day improves or worsened lung capacity over the course of a decade? I think most people would be heavily critical of the study that shows smoking improved lung capacity even if the data they are presented reflects that. And I don’t think it would be because they are simply rejecting logic and numeracy based on affiliations. It’s because they have prior information and knowledge that directly contradicts the singular study that is presented to them.

And this is ignoring the fact that while the statistic they use to measure the effectiveness for the cream is very tangible and direct. Either the rash improves or it worsens. And you can make direct comparisons with the control groups. In the gun control study you are comparing different sets of cities, ones that have gun control laws and ones that don’t. You aren’t comparing the same set of cities before and after gun control. So already this is a poor study. Then to make matters worse the statistic they use to measure the effectiveness is “crime worsened” and “crime improved”. Not crime committed with firearms. Or even just violent crimes. Just crimes. And in cities where gun control laws have been implemented, crime is naturally going to go up because there is a new law for people to break. Anybody who isn’t following the gun control laws in that city are committing a crime whereas people in the cities without those laws are doing the exact same thing, but it’s just not counted towards “crime” because it hasn’t been outlawed.

That’s exactly the reason that people didn’t vote.

There’s no civilization in sight.

Your options are

1. drink the pond water and get dysentery. Struggle to find help while you are slowed down by your illness and shit yourself to death.

2. drink the bucket of shit. Same problem just much quicker

3. drink the camel piss. It’s sterile, (edit: I stand corrected) and provides some hydration

4. just fucking give up because all these choices are dire and no matter what you’re probably going to die because there is no sign of civilization or rescue, or another clean source of water, or things getting remotely better for you.

And you’re yelling at people for not happily slurping up the pond water and subjecting themselves to dysentery. Some people are going to have the fortitude to do whatever it takes for survival. And some people in that situation just give up.

People didn’t vote because of apathy, and no hope that things will get better in the future. Yes Harris is better than Trump. But she’s still a step in the wrong direction. Just because it wasn’t a running long jump towards doom doesn’t mean it’s not making progress in the same direction. You want people to vote for you? Inspire your fucking voter base. Give them something to rally behind. Make them excited. Give them hope. Give them a reason to stand in line for hours to vote after working an 8 hour day. Have strong policies that inspire confidence in your capabilities. Don’t make a large part of your campaign ‘at least I’m better than the other person’. That’s your selling point? Not how good you are. Just how less bad you are.

Let’s preface with the fact I voted for Harris, and understand where you’re coming from with lesser evil voting.

But the other half of your argument is that with the way that Harris was tacking to the right to try to gain moderate voters, the choice was between voting between fascism now and fascism later down the line.

But if we vote for fascism later then we have time to distance ourselves from fascism.

By sitting at home happy that you did your job and ‘defeated’ fascism, until the next election where your choice is again fascism now and fascism a little less later down the line?

As the Dems keep drifting further and further right. At what point do you put your foot down and demand actual progressive policies? And how do you get those demands to actually be listened to when the party knows you’ll vote for them because “at least we’re not as bad as the other guys. What choice do you have?” Supporting her is a message to the Democratic party that their strategy of slowly becoming more conservative wins elections. And this is the reason that I was very conflicted about voting for her, but just held my nose and did it for the greater good.

The average US citizen is not going to sit down and parse through 80 pages of policy. Why the fuck didn’t she promote it in interviews? Every speech and interview I have seen she just skirts around questions and gives vague answers, very frequently repeating herself almost verbatim. It really didn’t inspire confidence. And I say this as someone who voted for her.

I 100% agree with you on everything in this comment. My only point is that regardless of how badly trump wants to finish the job, Harris certainly doesn’t seem to want to stop it. And as such, she isn’t free from criticism. Moreover she needs to hear more criticism to push her into walking back her support of Israel “defending itself” by retaliating in a wildly disproportionate fashion. And the key time to do it was in the lead up to the election, because if she felt like enough people were upset about it that it could cost her the election, it had a higher chance of making a difference.

It’s possible to believe Trump is an evil piece of shit, but also that Harris needs to improve. Just because she’s the better choice doesn’t mean she’s perfect.

This really cuts to the core of the issue. Why would they need to listen to what people are saying if they’ve already won the election? To bolster their chances of being re-elected? But then the next election will most likely be a repeat. Vote for me or else the fascists win. Then we elect them, even though they state while they are running that they plan to do [x]. We make a big fuss to tell them we don’t want them to do [x]. They follow through with what they clearly stated while campaigning. And then next election it’s the same thing again. The only bargaining chip we really have as the American people is our vote.

If the situation is really that dire. (And I absolutely believe it is) And American democracy as a whole is at stake, who is really the one to blame? The people holding steadfastly to their beliefs and saying that they don’t feel comfortable/ good voting for someone who is saying they will continue to support genocide? Or the person that sees people saying that and points the finger at them as the problem instead of hearing them out and changing your policy to gain their votes? I understand that also poses the risk of losing votes, but do you really want the votes of people thirsting for genocide?

All of this being said I do completely understand that this is the choice that we’ve been stuck with, and that things will be massively worse if Trump does get elected. I’m voting for Harris, but I can’t say that I really blame people who feel like they can’t in good conscience. And I hate seeing everyone telling them to just shut up, vote Harris and worry about it after.

This looks amazing! Especially love the kitchen, workshop, and clean up areas. It’s great to give people a space to do things they don’t necessarily have the equipment or means to on their own. Which reminds me I should see if there are any publicly available workshops in my area.