If your chance of winning hinges on your opponent suddenly not being there anymore, that conclusion is kind of anti-democratic in nature. If (for example) someone says “Things will eventually start getting better once all the boomers are gone”, they’ve already decided who their enemy is and that there’s no use trying to have discussions with them about how to fix things. The world around them slowly becomes less about different people with different ideas and it metastasizes into a country where half of their neighbors want them dead and because of that, they’d see half their neighbors dead as well. This doesn’t go away if trump is defeated in November. Civil war will be right around the corner until people start talking to each other again. The militarism of both parties and the fascism of republicans will, over time, be seen as a less necessary weapon against “the enemy” and divisive politics will ease up. That being said, don’t waste your breath on literal armed Nazis/white supremacist groups. They’re an artifact of the fears and stresses of this current system and have decided the best course of action is the most harmful. They will be less of an issue once society at large isn’t gasping for air and don’t have to blame their woes on one particular group.

My point is, we don’t solve the issue of rising fascism within our borders by waiting it out and hoping it all blows away with time, only coming out from your shelter one day out of the whole year to do political action. Embrace democracy if you believe in it and talk to people who disagree with you(preferably in-person) about why you think the things you think and why it should be changed. Show up to town halls, get to know your local government, join local activism groups. If you want things to change for the better, you can’t just keep doing the same thing that got us into this mess.

And the situation we’re in will continue to get worse as long as long as we’re playing the hand that’s been dealt to us instead of taking an active roll in improving things around us.

Yes, yes. we all know republicans are worse. But democrats could’ve entirely prevented this, which they didn’t. They enabled it. Being better than republicans doesn’t mean the situation is better with democrats. In fact, it’s getting so much worse every single year.

My state is ruby red and even the fairly large city I live in is red. Begging people to vote specifically for biden in situations like ours only makes people more apathetic since they know Biden has no shot. But if you tell people how to be more politically involved outside of voting, they’ll be more empowered to want to vote just so they can get people more aligned with them in their local and state elections. It’s the state government in red states like ours that will enact awful policies that we will actually feel. Pushing an unpopular president as the main reason to show up to the booth will only make them stay home instead.

Tangential: Covid is still killing a ton of people every month (though it gets better in warmer weather). This past January had over 10k covid deaths that were largely ignored by Biden and pretty much everyone else who are desperate to show how “good” things are now. But also, I’d caution against being hopeful for another pandemic that would wipe out conservatives since it’s tiptoeing on fascism, which you’re trying to be distinctly different to, eh? If a huge portion of Americans are fascist, America will be a fascist nation. I’ve heard conservatives wish that CA would sink into the ocean and that NYC would get swept away from a hurricane and I hope to god we haven’t ratcheted so far that now democrats are wishing and hoping for the deaths of their political enemy.

Here’s the press release from Atlanta.

And if you want to read an article about it, here’s one from Time

I feel like this reply is for someone else? We’re both coming from a leftist position. Democrats only think they’re being overrun with bots and propaganda because they aren’t actually politically informed enough to know the valid reasons why people don’t like them.

You should research cop cities. Atlanta democrats voted to fund theirs.

So you know what state that person resides? You’ve confirmed they live in a swing state where their vote for president actually matters? (This is not me advocating against voting since local/state positions are important, but if you’re focused on president, only a handful of states really make a difference at all).

Queer person here: we’ve had to violently fight for our rights and were successful in the past and we will do it again if we need to, so expecting a vote for anything will fix the issues of the marginalized is very out of touch. Doing nothing but voting is 99% political apathy, and it very much feels like all this browbeating is coming from someone who only votes and mayyyyybe donates to the ACLU or planned parenthood once every couple years. Do some real work and stop spending so much of your mental energy on inconsequential (assuming you don’t live in a handful of swing states) things. Build coalitions. Form or join unions. Stand up for what is right and protest what is wrong.

If you don’t know the answer to this already, I suppose the backlash against Biden from progressives might seem like bots or foreign propaganda.

Or maybe if the average American stood with the marginalized instead of yelling at them to fall in line, we wouldn’t constantly have issues where the marginalized are systemically murdered and imprisoned. The blood isn’t on their hands for having morals and boundaries. It’s on the masses who refuse to give up even an ounce of comfort to lend a hand to the downtrodden. The path the democrats are on is the same path the current republicans have walked before.

Who are you willing to sacrifice for your own comfort? Why is that a valid position? Because the other guy points that same weapon at you instead and it’s scary? How many different groups are you willing to put on that sacrifice list until you just turn into a fascist republican? “Just following orders” is just as cowardly a response as “It was my only choice”.

If America is going to go through the trouble to convert everything to metric, might as well switch to base 10/decimal time as well lol

Not that it matters because the point comes across fine, and being hyper fixated on grammar is a form of gatekeeping, but “badly” seems weird here. It might just be an American English or regional American thing to me, but in school, the whole good/well & bad/poor thing was made pretty distinct. Good and bad were descriptors of action where well and poor were descriptors of feeling. I can do good (things) or do bad (things), but things can go well or go poorly.

Grammar stackexchange seems to disagree with me though

I had to return my bone conduction headphones because it tickled my ears too much when I turned it up so loud that I could hear it over my bike machine. My wired headphones kept dying from my sweat, so I just ended up getting some waterproof-ish JBL in-ear headphones so I don’t have to worry about destroying any of my wireless headphones.

Apple has a masterclass of tiering their products in just a way so that in every tier but the upper tiers, you’re giving up something really important. If you spend the least you possibly can on a MacBook, apple guarantees you’re going to have a very bad time for “doing the bare minimum to be seen with a laptop with an apple logo on it”. Their whole tier system is an exercise in “how can we get away with fucking up these things just enough so the customer feels like it is necessary to spend a little bit more” every step of the way. Then they make it unupgradable so you can’t sidestep their crafted feature tier system.

Don’t have compete with BYD if you don’t allow them to be competition in the US.

If this person’s beliefs are sincerely held, showing people on the internet the “the right way” to go about being serious about privacy is an impossible task. One can’t be on the World Wide Web and “be the change they wish see” (i.e. not be on the web) with regards to their privacy perspective.

And I’m not sure if it’s defeatist to state that all of us, just by being online, likely have some hooks in our mouths. It’s just the cost we pay for not being luddites. Yes, there’s benefits to not having a ton of hooks in us, which is why we do what we do, but even one hook is enough to steal your private info and sell it to everyone. We’re posting to the World Wide Web after all, not Gopher/Gemini/Onion. Hell, this goes beyond the internet since the DMV freely sells your personal information too. We make these limited sacrifices so we have an actual community instead of feeling like we’re self-righteous in our loneliness.

This isn’t nearly subtle enough to be funny. Just call a doner a gyro and call a gyro a doner.

What a terrible time for me to try to tell friends about how cool Gemini is

If transportation is necessary, find ways to mitigate emissions as best as possible. If emissions are unavoidable, use the thing with least emissions (small-tired lightweight vehicles) until you research a solution to a tire material that isn’t harmful (which is being worked on I think). Busses mitigate a dozen or two cars. Local rail mitigates a few busses and a few hundred cars. Essentially, personal vehicles should be small and lightweight, and essential mass transit or city services should be large enough to serve an entire area.