This is the way. The constant bickering over the concept of “liberal” vs “actual left” is as exhausting as it is mostly futile.

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1. “Handset” is obfuscating legalese to refer to a cell phone in a way intending to distance the meaning of the word from the thing that the old and technologically illiterate people who rule on this use every day.

2. I’m no fan of their strategy, but cell phone providers have claimed for a long time that filling your phone with unremovable bloatware causes the overall price to decrease. Their argument is most likely that they will have to charge more once the propagators of that bloatware realize that they can no longer force it on people and wedge that as a reason to pay less to carriers.

3. The reality is that cell phones are priced based on what people will buy anyway and carriers pocket as much of the money as they can that third parties pay them for their bloatware. Ultimately because of that this ruling hurts their bottom line, but the above reasoning gives plausible deniability in the face of the law as it is interpreted by old technologically illiterate lawmakers

I think it’s not necessarily a contradiction to hold your pro-choice and anti-death penalty stance, but it’s still a contradiction to hold the pro-life and pro-death penalty stance if your reasoning behind the pro-life stance is that all life is sacred.

I agree that a person’s body autonomy and the state’s power to execute citizens should not overlap, but I still think that giving the “all life is sacred” line to justify pro-life and then being pro-death penalty “because some people deserve to die” amounts to hypocrisy.

A “boys club” scandal a couple years ago where the male higher-ups only hired women who would tolerate being sexually abused. Some ex-employees described it as “company culture” that propagated for a decade or more. There was an investigation after some women spoke out that led to a lawsuit, several top level managers being fired, and a couple CEOs being scrutinized really hard.

All of this is off the top of my head and maybe somewhat inaccurate, but that’s the gist of it.

Edit: Here’s an article for you

Here’s the thing, a weak Democrat candidate meant the GOP could ride the curtail of a natural red wave born from voter dissatisfaction into another Trump presidency. They didn’t have to try faced with Biden so they didn’t have as many opportunities to show their incompetence.

Now democrats have rallied and the writing is on the wall that Trump isn’t good enough just by the virtue of being the republican choice. He actually has to try, which he hasn’t done since 2016, and he’s pretty bad at trying.

The word you’re looking for is “euphemism”. The media always does this garbage to make the party of traitors seen like they have a point

It’s the natural conclusion of the strategy republicans set into motion to manipulate their base.

It started just after Watergate. Nixon was facing massive calls for justice from both sides. Republican think tanks realized that their base of conservatives consumed news from all sources that informed their mostly unbiased decision to hold their guy accountable. So those republican think tanks devised a plan to create a conservative news outlet that explicitly demonized other news so that the conservative base would never turn on one of their own again. That strategy was realized in the 90’s with the creation of Fox News.

Since then, conservative media has been slowly transforming politics from the perspective of the average conservative into a team sport, where the main motivation isn’t “who runs the country better” but rather “my team is better than yours”.

It wasn’t so pervasive 20 years ago, but conservative media has found themselves with a base that now only responds to the outrage they’ve been conditioning them with, and that has created the raging confrontational assholes you see today.

Being a conservative doesn’t mean what it used to. And that’s because the Republican leadership robbed conservatives of that in order to maintain control of their base.

These kinds of people, the ones who warp and twist society for their own gain, will always be around in some form or another. So will the people they fool into ushering in their brand of fascism.

I’ll grant you that the “anti-woke” crowd is particularly brain dead though

You’d think it would be a win, but honestly Trump is a clown. More “centrists” who detest Trump might rally around someone like DeSantis, that’s what I’m afraid of.

I know posting ben garrison is cheating, but this was years ago. They’d definitely latch on to the name as a tool to degrade him.

Hell, they’ve been trying to make the word “kamala” derogatory. Sorry Pete, even though you’d be as good a candidate as any, you’ve got butt in your name

I like the “formally” vs “formerly” suggesting Elon is never going to get away from Twitter in favor of X

Hey man, nice tittles

It’s not crazy, it’s intentional. Poor education combined with the lack of social structure creates a voting population ripe with anger over the shitty system and looking to blame someone instead of learn why it’s like that.

Conservative media is specially made to take uneducated and rage blind voters and churn out Republican candidates who pretty much only hold office because of manufactured spite towards democrats.

My mind is blown. This is very well written. Thank you

Our conservatives aren’t like conservatives elsewhere in the world. Our liberals are like your conservatives, policy wise.

Our conservatives are brainwashed by four decades of targeted conservative media that’s explicitly designed to keep them in an anger loop in order to create a political climate where republicans (who are the actual politicians) don’t have to appeal to the conservative base with actual policy.

Republicans, through channels like Fox News and OANN (seriously, go watch some of it and see what we’re dealing with here) have demonized everyone to the left of them so hard that entire generations of conservatives genuinely believe that there’s a bloody revolution coming.

It would be nice if it were actually bullshit, but these lunatics who make up half of our voting population put a con-man entertainer with zero political experience in the whitehouse for four years and installed conservative justices to our highest court who are systematically dismantling our democracy.

It’s very real. It’s so real that some of the less insane conservatives are waking up to how dangerous the details of this plan actually are, and that’s why Republicans are panicking about this.

The logic follows that the people who should be doing something are the ones that we elect. While it’s true that they aren’t doing anything either, the shit won’t really hit the fan until a republican gets the white house and actually starts abusing that power.

We still have time to resolve this without bloodshed and destruction. Most people see that and aren’t going to jump the gun on what could very well be the end of their lives in the most heavily armed per capita country on earth.

All fair points.

Sinema and Manchin could sit it out

Big problem. They are Republicans in Democrat clothes. They will, as they always do, find a reason to vote against

The other side of that coin is that if there is no demand for change, no one will be pressured to work out the logistics required. All change starts with people demanding a solution.

We need a solution right now more than we need a perfect plan of execution. The solution is being called for, to expand the Supreme Court to balance the blatant corruption pouring from the conservative justices. That’s the first step