I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary. In hindsight, he would have been obliterated, McGovern-style. Clinton and Biden treated him with kid gloves, but in a general election all of his questionable past – his unemployment, his wife’s involvement with that college financing thing, his honeymoon in the USSR, the rape essay – would have come out and been hammered relentlessly by Republicans (and a good chunk of Democrats).

In my experience, a lot of them aren’t dead, just slow. If you do post something, it still gets circulated to everyone subscribed and typically gets a decent amount of votes and comments.

I could see them maybe using a custom version of Deepseek for that second tier. Could be a boon for them if the inference costs are a lot lower.

It’s actually pretty rare for dictatorships to have only one legal party. Even North Korea is nominally a multi-party state. Such minor parties are just token controlled opposition ofc, but they serve to give a flimsy “democratic” veneer.

America’s trajectory rn is aiming closer to the illiberal/managed democracy of Hungary under Viktor Orban, where there are true opposition parties with an actual chance at winning, but the media, government, and electoral system is strongly biased against them.

Updated, thanks.

Democratic presidents since LBJ:

• Jimmy Carter
• Bill Clinton
• Barack Obama

Which ones had a bigger record of progressive economic accomplishments than Biden? Closest one is Obama, but his Recovery Act was less than half the size of Biden’s Rescue/Infra/IRA/CHIPS packages. Biden was also more strongly pro-union and pro-regulation, and accomplished his many wins in half the time and with far narrower majorities in both houses.

This would be a compelling argument if the Biden administration hadn’t been the most economically progressive since LBJ.

He used his platform to claim that murdered children were fake and that the parents were “crisis actors”. He so roiled his audience with blatantly false inflammatory bullshit that they began harassing the parents and sending them death threats, all for the crime of having their kindergartens shot to death in America. They absolutely suffered and the blame for their harassment lies entirely with that fucking sociopath (who has since admitted that yes, the massacre was real).

You can’t knock that boy over with a pail of water!

Fuck that. Did the Sandy Hook parents deserve to have their murdered children used as fodder for Jones’s conspiracy bullshit?

Reminds me of this really interesting video on the Mississippi Delta Chinese community – folks who are entirely of Chinese descent but who have thick Southern drawls and names like Gilroy, and still feel like outsiders despite living there their whole lives.

I laughed my ass off at the pathetic, baseless attempts to dispute the 2020 election, but never questioned their legal right to do so (which they failed miserably at). If suspicious Harris supporters believe they have convincing evidence of manipulation, then let their claims be examined and proven or disproven by a recount or in a court of law. Call it copium, but I’d rather check these claims out and be disappointed than pre-emptively assume they’re bullshit.

I see this claim so much, and it’s bullshit. Harris didn’t make a single policy concession to get Cheney on board. And why would she? The entire point of having her endorse was to send the message of “Trump is so dangerous that even people who disagree with me are choosing to support me.”

Harris didn’t move right! She supported expanding the child tax credit, legalizing marijuana, codifying Roe, etc.

She did campaign with Cheney, but didn’t endorse her or promise her a position of power or adopt any of her policy preferences. The whole point was to signal “Trump is so dangerous that even the most conservative leaders are setting aside their disagreements to support me.”

“Goodbye”

He wasted that for 2 years

Willful ignorance of everything passed in 2021-22 (and despite incredibly narrow margins) does not mean it didn’t happen.

I think it’s less out of fear and more about billionaire wannabe oligarchs tacitly supporting the candidate best aligned with their own interests.

While anything that gets people off Twitter is good, I’m sorely unimpressed by those artists who “had to” to patronize the racist transphobic neo-Nazi hellhole “because my audience is there”… until Musk’s policies happened to offend their own personal interests, by requiring training for their AI. Countless models trained on all public images already exist, jumping ship won’t prevent their work from being scraped elsewhere, and frankly, any one image or even portfolio will contribute virtually nothing to the result, so quitting in protest is largely symbolic. But so many peoples drew the line at that, and not at Musk making “cis” a slur, or protecting child pornographers, or boosting white supremacist supremacy theories. It’s really disappointing to see.

I imagine it’s because it’s the simplest, most common type of ball that you commonly see described as such. Like, baseballs and basketballs and soccer balls and beach balls exist, but out of context they’re typically called that rather than just “a ball”. So, a simple round ball. Giving it a pattern requires some extra thought, and of the solid colors red seems like the most common (think dodgeballs).

I pictured a smooth red rubber ball about the size of a baseball on my kitchen table. The “person” was more of an invisible force, not explicitly male but definitely not female. That might be male bias, or subtly thinking of myself doing it (combined with playing too many physics engine video games where your disembodied self pushes things around).

All of this was pretty vague though, like I didn’t really imagine the details of the room or the exact path of the ball other than knowing it would roll off and bounce on the floor.