My comment was more about the hypocrisy of the term “American values”. The people who most loudly espouse “American Values” rarely do more than pay lip service to ideals they think are good in a vacuum, but never actually support in practice when those values are tested even a little bit (democracy, equality, free speech, the right to protest, etc etc).

That may not be a uniquely American trait, either, but it is still annoyingly present enough it warrants complaining about.

This technically isn’t a filibuster, apparently.

But yes, they could suspend the filibuster rule, potentially. I’m not sure of the specifics. It might require 60 votes?

Should be. But isn’t.

American Values TM©®

No worries! The only reason to evaluate (or re-evaluate) a piece of software is if you have a need or desire the software might fulfill. And if you don’t have either, it literally doesn’t matter, lol.

I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it’s original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!

I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums… but it’s so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.

In that regard, fuck Discord.

I’m not super informed here. Why do you think the new DNC chair will change how the Dem primaries will be operated?

I tried googling around myself, but couldn’t really find anything meaningful. But that’s probably more a reflection of how tired my brain is than anything (work’s been hell).

If you have anything readily available you could share, I’d love to feel some positivity about the Democrat party.

Well, I suppose one way to look at it is that we needed the unified front against Trump, but didn’t get it. So for now, and especially for the midterms, maybe now’s the time to get an alternative party started?

And then they can choose to run a presidential candidate in 2028 or not, depending on the momentum they get?

I dunno. Mostly thinking out loud here.

What would it take to get a primary system up and running for Independents (or more accurately I guess it would have to be a proper party for a primary to make sense)?

I assume it’s some combo of setting up the event hosting ($$$) and somehow coming up with the rules for deciding on how to operate the primary (schedule, thresholds for qualification, voting system, etc). And unfortunately I have no idea how to accomplish either.

I’ll be the first to admit I have no idea what my Chucklefuck in Chief means by trying to get rid of voting booths.

But if I had to guess, I think he means literally the booths. As in, no privacy. Just paper on a desk where anyone can see what you’re doing.

If it isn’t clear, this fucker has no idea what a free and fair election is SUPPOSED to look like. He just wants to make sure whatever system we end up with favors him and him alone. And for some reason, voting booths are catching his ire. Maybe he feels insecure not knowing if Melania actually voted for him.

I mean if you want to blame liberals and leftists go on ahead I suppose, thanks for being unhelpful.

I wouldn’t bet on MAGA suddenly waking up to class conflict to the point of guillotines unless Trump points his grubby little finger at them.

What a world that would be.

Rise up against whom though? Their violence is not driven on principle. It’s out of trust and loyalty to a con man who told them to “fight like hell”. What makes you think they’ll turn on him? Other than a tiny handful of folks, when have the leapords eating their faces stopped them from offering their faces up on silver platters at the leopard’s feast?

Will they ever wise up though?

Scoreboard shows these people, the most violent among them, are disconnected from reality and blindly trust Trump and his cronies.

I can’t even get my MAGA mom to believe Musk did a Nazi salute. “Apparently he was throwing his heart to the crowd.” Granted, she’s not politically engaged, she just listens to my dad who stopped watching Fox News because it wasn’t conservative enough. So yeah.

I’d somehow never heard this argument before, so I found some random article about it: https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/2023/06/slavery-militias-and-methodologies-thoughts-on-carl-boguss-madisons-militia

I can’t speak to the quality of the source above, but they argue that your basic thesis is true, but is not the full story. All the former colonies (including non-slave states) wanted militias instead of a peacetime national military, which was as much or more of a driver for adoption of the 2nd amendment than the idea of using militias for appearing slave rebellions.

But that’s just literally the first article I read about it, so I dunno.

I’m no economist, but I hear the economists are not thrilled with what Trump is doing to the economy. We’re headed for a recession at minimum, if those folks are anything to go by.

Two things started the slow 10ish year journey to atheism for me. I can’t remember which happened first.

Some Mormon lads doing their mandatory missionary work knocked on our door when I was home alone. I decided, screw it, kill them with kindness. Maybe I’ll convert them! After I got them some ice water, they started the spiel. It was so stupid, how could anyone believe this? Then I thought, wait, how is what I believe any more believable? That was an unsettling thought that I could never really shake.

I also challenged myself to read the entire Bible (NIV) front to back (which I did, thankyouverymuch). I already had a lot of apologetics for the pentateuch warfare, slavery, etc. but in Psalms there’s a verse that basically goes, “blessed is he who dashes the babies on the rocks.” And like. What the fuck is that. In what possible circumstances is killing babies okay, let alone with God’s explicit endorsement? That also stuck in my head ever since.

There was a lot else in between, but years later I stumbled into a copy of The God Delusion. “Know thine enemy, right?” So I read it on lunch breaks at work. While I now know the book has a reputation for kinda bad philosophy, by the end it had tidily dismantled the last vestiges of the purely “rational” arguments to believe in God I still had. So I sat there, an atheist for the first time in my life.

What’s really weird about all this is Vance is married to an ethnically Indian woman. But he does the Christian nationalist white supremacist schtick.

I have to imagine that the Silicon Valley style tech bro culture that Vance was inculcated into is so full of high skill Indian and Asian people that he has something of a blind spot to what his political rhetoric will do to those people, too. I honestly don’t know how he squares any of his beliefs. Or if he even bothers to try to have a consistent set of beliefs in the first place.

Vance is so much worse than I initially thought. And my standards were already super low thanks to the unambiguously racist villainizing of Haitian migrants in Ohio at the VP debate, but holy shit this was grotesque. Literal schoolyard bully shit.

Survey researchers are well aware of the biases from different data collection methods. Phone polling tending to overrepresent old folks is a a big one. They try to balance that out with various statistical weighting methods, usually by combining with census data or other demographic survey sets.

It’s unfortunate, but yeah we do have about a third of the country going hard conservative/fascist.

This was very helpful to read. Thank you.