Honestly, I’d love to see a month-long pause on discussing the presidential race itself.

State-level stuff, ballot measures, etc, no problem, but IMO there’s not going to be any productive discussion of the presidential race right now; there’s still too little information, too many emotions, etc.

That aside, (because that’s not the kind of thing that should happen without the community agreeing to it) I know that I’m probably part of the problem because Politics is where I tend to comment the most, and I’m going to stick to discussions of what to do next rather than wasting any more energy on litigating what went wrong at this point.

I have my suspicions about what happened, but that’s all they are as of right now, same as anyone else. But I do know for sure that I’m pissed off, and I know that I’m not going to be able to keep it from affecting how I engage with people if we get into an argument.

I’m just glad we all have this community, because it’s definitely an anchor-point for me right now (and thank you, mods, for all your work maintaining it).

So until failed neoliberalism stops failing, we have to keep supporting it? Seems a little backwards. If mediocre neoliberalism was beating fascism, I’d be more okay with getting behind it.

Why keep supporting the losers and thinking they’ll miraculously turn into winners?

After Biden dropped out, I was cheerleading for Harris. I didn’t like her policies, but she had much better chances than Biden, and it seemed like she understood what pitfalls to avoid.

Didn’t matter. The DNC doesn’t understand what is needed to win. They’re still running a playbook from 1996. They think the undecideds are in between them and the GOP, when in actuality they’re to the Left.

Instead, the DNC has now absorbed a bunch of “never Trumper” repubs who clearly aren’t willing to vote for a woman, but will let a geriatric white guy eke out a win if you promise not to do the social justice.

I think the DNC being a “big tent” party has allowed it to accept a large number of very questionable supporters, who for instance won’t vote for women, and who think that Cop City and broken windows policing is totally fine akshually, and whose jaws don’t drop when someone says to “send social workers into the homes” of black parents…

Ultimately, we probably will never know exactly which demo(s) sat out, and everyone will end up just interpreting their own side as the right path forwards. Depressing stuff.

I did, absolutely. I’m much more suspicious of the older, more Centrist people who told me they didn’t think America was “ready to elect a woman”. I suspect that most of them really meant they weren’t ready, and sat out.

My nephew is trans, with an openly hostile anti-trans father (my POS Trumper brother, who luckily does not live with his kids), and lives in a swing state that went red last night. Very worried for him and every other trans person in this shit hole.

I’m also pissed off that, based on the numbers we’re seeing, this is the second time that Democrat voters across the country have sat out rather than elect a woman. Honestly, I shouldn’t even be surprised anymore.

Stay strong, everyone, things are gonna get rough.

The genius of these tactics is that these campaigns aren’t making anyone racist, they’re just giving people an opportunity to feel safe showing it. Conservatives long to return to a time when they could just be like, “yeah, if you’re in this town after sundown and you’re not white, we’re gonna hang you” (which it’s important to note, was still a thing as recently as the 1980s).

Since they can’t do that quite as openly now, they look to any kind of news reports they can to use our American sense of “justice” (meaning retributive, where we tend to collectively dehumanize criminals) to shield them expressing racist views. When those reports aren’t there, they just make them up.

Sadly true.

Not friendly enough when talking to customers? Bad employee.

Too friendly when talking to customers? Bad employee.

This is just about 1) creating an algorithmic justification for the racial profiling that managers already do, and 2) keeping employees in fear of termination so they put up with bullshit.

Side story about how shitty retail management is:

When I was working retail years ago (big box electronics store), our management employed a system of getting every new employee to 3 write-ups as fast as they could (I’m talking, within a month of starting), using literally any excuse they could, so they could hold the “one more write-up and you’re fired” over their head.

“AI” is definitely going to become a new tool for employee suppression.

“I am Iraqi, and I am also American, and Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”

Us Millennials and GenXers are old now. :P Fortnight used to be a kids game, because GenZ were still kids. Now they’re adults, and Fortnite ain’t a GenAlpha game.

As much as the US is an imperialist colonial state, they also keep the other ones (Russia, China) in check. Both of them were subsumed by state-capitalism, and became just as expansionist and xenophobic as the US is. I don’t want any of them around, but all 3 breaking up ain’t in the cards right now, and unchecked imperialism is exactly what made the US so dangerous to the “margins of the world” for so long.

Nah, and I say this as an ansoc who would love for the US to break up, but there’s just no appetite for that at any scale large enough to actually cause this.

Even at the time of the Civil War, it was only when state governments decided to secede that things kicked off, and no states now- no matter how “blue” they are- are going to try that. It would be up to individuals, and there’s just no organizational capability for that at the scale needed to force a civil war. The closest we might ever get is a bunch of individual attacks or small-scale violent mobs.

This is already a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Legal_Counsel

They want a “shadow” version of it (meaning not officially sanctioned), that will just draft legal justifications, not actually interpret legality.

I found out my brother has been a Trumper since 2016, and keeps it secret from his friends, who he knows would not be okay with it. Not so much “shy”, as “knows he’s an asshole, but literally only cares about religion”. He’s just a misogynist, is the reality.

That’s awesome, thank you for that!

The short form ones go on insta and tiktok.

It’s important to distinguish between why a company offers a service, and what people use the service for. TikTok gets used for lots of content that doesn’t go viral, and that doesn’t try to chase the algorithm.

You heard them, you’re in charge of video hosting now.

There is no such thing as a form of media that is only applicable to a specific scale of use. Long form and short form media is useful to large and small groups.

For example, my partner coaches high school policy debate, which has long form video training content, short form content (30 seconds - 5 minutes) like clips from tournament rounds or practices, for recruitment, and very short form (1 - 30 second) clips that are mostly memes.

Their shorter form content is explicitly meant not to be viral, it’s purely for their school, and other kids in their debate league. Most of it’s not even parsable by non-debaters. It’s only useful to their small community, but that’s what they want.

I actually kind of love the idea of a per diem Unknown User Limit. Like the first 5000 unregistered users can view the site, but after that they get dropped at ingress. Also, limit user signups per day (this ain’t about growing user base, it’s about preventing virality)!

Sure, you could still need an ingress server that can handle a high load to avoid the accidental ddos if word-of-mouth gets out about it, but that’s a million times lower of a requirement than a server that can handle serving a web page or app to the same number of users.

you’re failing to see the biases inherent to the content you’re consuming

You are underestimating people, I think. People choose their echo chambers because they understand that their positions are being challenged elsewhere. It’s not an inability to see the bias in what they consume, it’s a dislike of the alternative.

Every Trumper I talk to knows very well that Trump is unpopular, that Christian Nationalism is unpopular, that abortion rights are popular, etc, but they don’t care, and they don’t want to constantly be (rightfully) told and shown how dumb they are, so they wall themselves off in their gardens. “I’m just tired of hearing how bad Trump is all the time.”

Heartening news. Even if the alt-right manosphere is hoovering up more young men, if their message isn’t invigorating them to vote it limits the ‘blast radius’ pretty significantly.