First of all, I don’t even understand the mindset of someone who doesn’t vote. So you don’t really like any of the candidates, so what? Vote for the least worst option or the actual worst option could win (see: 2016).
Second, to be fair, any party could try running someone who’s less than a million years old. American politics are so bizarre this way. Canada’s current PM was 43 when he was elected and still more than 30 years younger than America’s current president. Parliament is populated largely by middle agers and a few younger members, whereas congress is a sea of bald and gray, pockmarked by a small handful of 40 somethings? Shit is ridiculous.
The greater evil is doing the same thing over and over again as things get worse while expecting different results. The current state of the GOP is directly related to Bill Clinton’s Southern Strategy
Bill Clinton helped start the DNC shift to the right by appealing directly to southern Dixiecrats. And the Overton window has been moving to the right since
that's not historically accurate at all. he shifted to the right as a neoliberal, but he had nothing to do with dixiecrats nor the southern strategy. that happened 3 decades before him.
Well if we’re just making shit up I would rather drink orange juice than cyanide. The problem was the duopoly is that one is cyanide the other is arsenic
Do you not understand hypothetical examples when they’re presented to you? Do you have some major cognitive impairment which disallows you from comprehending them?
Are you saying that you can't see any difference between, for example, farting in an elevator vs stabbing a mother's eyes out in front of their children? Or are you just being dishonest and contrarian?
Too bad you don’t understand what the enlightened part is, when the left is talking about enlightened voters we are mocking centrists. And they’re too ignorant to understand that they are the punchline
So you're saying the act of handing a person a knife is equal to the act of stabbing someone with a knife.
I don't think you actually believe that, because it's ludicrous and illogical. I think you're just making up cute sayings in order to avoid actually addressing the subject.
This kind of dishonesty is tedious, to be frank. If this is all you're willing to contribute, then you can waste your own time.
I try not to do this, but here’s a reddit comment from 6 years ago that breaks down the voting records between Democrats and Republicans on major legislation.
Not them tho, you. Your privilege is why you can’t understand it.
Some people have to wait 8 hours in line while taking a day off work without pay. All for someone whose not going to actually help them. Their choice is “things get obviously worse for me” and “things get worse for me, but slower and no one talks about it”.
We could try actually following thru with campaign promises and helping them, but for some reason we dont. Once elected all the Dem presidents in the last 3-4 decades immediately start telling us their campaign promises are obviously impossible so they’re just not going to really try.
Even Obamacare was just Mitt Romney’s plan by the time it happened.
Personally tho, it takes less than an hour for me to vote and I get a paid half day from work to do so. So I always vote.
That doesn’t mean I assume it’s as easy for everyone else
Isn’t “things get worse slower” better than “things get worse right away?” What happened to pragmatism? If things get worse slower, there’s a chance to stop them in the future.
Not them tho, you. Your privilege is why you can’t understand it.
Are you determined to not have allies of any kind?
I get that your state is fucked, but as a resident of one of the other 49 states, my options to help are limited as long as we lack one of the the chambers of Congress since the gop is literally the problem here.
We could try actually following thru with campaign promises and helping them, but for some reason we dont.
That would be because we don’t have control of the House. It’s difficult to get work done when the side in control of the button that stops everything from working sits on the fucking button while shrieking racist epitaphs at the top of their lungs.
In a lot of areas voting isn’t easy. It’s something you have to work to do. Why stand in the freezing November air worried you’re gonna be late for work and lose your job if you’re not excited? Why do it in the morning? Because maybe you’re me in your 20s and don’t have a car and you can actually make it to when the polls open in the morning but not the evening with how the schedules run.
Why go up to the election office and force them to take your mail in ballet after it was rejected twice because your signature “didn’t match” if you’re not excited?
Why finagle a time in your day when you can stand in the cold for an hour without your baby if you’re not excited?
Why stand until you want to literally because the line was way longer than you thought it was and you didn’t bring a chair this time if you’re not excited?
All this happened to me over the course of me voting in my adult life. This doesn’t count how voting locations constantly move on me for reasons unknown. It’s not that the voting location moved. For some reason I was just assigned a different location. The times where I’ve been given the run around about where I should vote. The times where I tried to vote, but whoops all the machines are broken and I decided that I didn’t want to wait for a repair which could take hours.
Voting is hard. It can be a breezy affair, but I’ve never experienced that in presidential elections or midterms, only really in special state elections or pure local elections. The system is definitely rigged against you and you have to ask yourself if it’s worth fighting. Is denying my kid’s time with me worth this? Is enduring this strain on my body worth this? Is the mental energy when I’m tired from work worth this? I get what you’d say no even if I always say yes
Pretty sure that every state (with maybe a handful of exceptions?) provides for required unpaid time off work to vote. There's also lots of places that have early voting, for weeks ahead of an election, with early and late hours. Mail-in voting has expanded dramatically since Covid.
But I get it. There are also lots of places in the country where voting is hard, and there's a very clear reason why. The more people who vote, the more likely that a Democrat will win and a Republican will lose. It is always Republicans who want to make voting harder, and it is always Democrats who want to make voting easier.
You want it to be easy to vote, so you don't have to be as excited about voting? Go vote for the people who want to make it easy to vote, and stop voting for people who want to make it hard to vote. If nothing else, get excited about making it easier to vote.
For a lot of people “unpaid time off” isn’t a favor. You’re asking them to pay to vote.
Plus the rules frequently only come into play if their work shift makes it literally impossible to make it to the polls. If they could wake up from their third shift job to get in line as polls open before making it to their other job at 7:45 sharp, then no time off for you. If you need to get your kids to school during that time slot? Too bad, that’s time you could technically be voting, so it’s not your employer’s responsibility.
When someone has three kids and lives paycheck-to-paycheck, asking them to sacrifice pay to vote is not justified. You’re saying, “vote or feed your kids, pick one.”
I’m not saying that you should let your kids starve. I’m saying that this situation has been engineered on purpose, and that it perpetuates itself by design.
If I could, I would stand in line for you. I can afford it.
I didn't say it was perfect, certainly not everywhere. I was trying to point out that it's easier to vote in some places than in others, sometimes dramatically. And that it's really simple to know who's responsible for making it easier or harder.
Oh yeah, that’s another thing. For something that’s supposed to be a sacred right, voting is made absurdly difficult in the US.
In Canada, employers are legally obligated give up to three hours PTO to vote. There are usually two or three advance polls if election day doesn’t work for you. Every podunk town in the country has a polling station setup. Basically every form of ID imaginable is accepted. You can register to vote by mail online weeks before an election, receive your ballot and return it in the included prepaid envelope.
Elections Canada bends over backwards to give everyone the opportunity to vote. But it’s like America doesn’t actually want people to vote at all.
The full title/subtitle of the article is: Those 10,000 5-star reviews are fake. Now they’ll also be illegal. The FTC has proposed new rules that clarify what is and isn’t a deceptive online review — and would give it the power to fine $50,000 for each fake.
You give your top talent what they want. The problem is that they hired a consultant to find out what that was. The consultant, knowing on which side his bread was buttered, told the board what they wanted to hear, which is, after all, why they hired a consultant instead of just asking.
That’s exactly what the consultants are for and hiring them is an easy, low-cost (in the grand scheme of things) way of shifting responsibility aka “I don’t want to do any decision making that may and will be detrimental to the company so I will hire an “expert” to do it for me”.
It’s a balancing act though. A lot of top talent is going to leave either way, so over focusing on them hurts everyone else. Mandatory return to office was a lot more costly than most companies hoped for though. It was essentially a lay-off, but it left companies with pretty much only the bad employees compared to a more traditional approach.
Problem is that post-pandemic market is ripe for a layoff. Companies purposely over-hired during the pandemic and then in the past couple years the layoffs achieved 2 things: 1) Thin the staff to show shareholders a higher short term profit in an age where they cant get cheap loans and show they’re undertaking new risky ventures (interest rate is high from the fight against inflation), and 2) They can use the layoffs to undermine the leverage of employees to create a “hard pull” back to office policy. It makes laying off people much easier when they “volunteer”
What happened at my last job. The absolute moron head of HR told the engineers with 5-20 years experience how “we are all lucky to have jobs, and we would be flipping burgers at McDonalds if it were not for him”.
Most of us left, he didn’t even give us counter offer and said how we will all be begging him for our jobs back. He was dismissed by the Japanese management a few months later and told to never return.
We can't claim to know it left them with "bad" employees. I think there's vanishingly little evidence that recruiters actually go after the "good" employees effectively -- I'm pretty skeptical that a pro recruiter actually gets you better employees, they just make the process of getting employees way less stressful. We also have no reason to assume that a good or bad employee is correlated in any way with caring about not returning to office -- it's possible very bad employees are just as likely to quit as very good ones. How do you even tell good from bad, anyway?
What this "return to office" stuff definitely DOES do is preferentially retain the most obedient/desperate employees. Which may be part of the goal, along with low-key downsizing.
Every place I worked there were employees that I’m not sure how they had a job. Those people aren’t being contacted by recruiters, and they aren’t leaving voluntarily. Layoffs are a companies chance to remove some of these people.
It really says something that a country like Vietnam, a unitary Marxist-Leninist one-party socialist republic which was carpet bombed by the US and suffered abhorrent atrocities at the hands of Americans, would still rather have close ties with the US in large part because they're worried about China.
Vietnam is a unitary Marxist-Leninist one-party socialist republic, one of the two communist states (the other being Laos) in Southeast Asia. Although Vietnam remains officially committed to socialism as its defining creed, its economic policies have grown increasingly capitalist, with The Economist characterising its leadership as "ardently capitalist communists". Under the constitution, the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) asserts their role in all branches of the country's politics and society. The president is the elected head of state and the commander-in-chief of the military, serving as the chairman of the Council of Supreme Defence and Security, and holds the second highest office in Vietnam as well as performing executive functions and state appointments and setting policy.
100% hard agree. The media has gotten into a cycle of ‘here’s the crazy thing Trump did/said today!!!’ Followed by ‘Trump is taking us right into a dictatorship and there’s nothing anyone can do, be afraid!!!’
Meanwhile all the actual electoral vote polling show Trump losing to Biden worse than he did last time. Just go vote, people, in every election, every time. I don’t want people to be complacent but the numbers look terrible for Trump.
I don’t know what’s happening behind closed doors, but this is a great illustration of why Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly getting their news from sources other than Mainstream News. It’s practically right wing billionaire ghost writing, at this point.
None of that is untrue but it doesn’t account for GOP fuckery or voter apathy. Framing things in that way reminds me of all the “yeah right, HRC is gonna lose to Trump lol” comments we heard in 2016.
Yeah, but unlike those hopeful 2016 voters, we actually have extant, pattern forming data related to why instead of just assuming that "no one with more than two brain cells to rub together would actually vote for Trump".
There is a reason the GOP isn't releasing any internal polling.
I'm worried. biden's blowing it. democrats don't seem to understand how to win elections and we need a backup plan in case "just vote for biden really hard and hope the fascist storm blows over" doesn't work.
This is the issue though. I never saw so many apathetic voters or "protest voters" ignorant of how the US election system functions until I came to the fediverse. The sheer lack of civic understanding here is terrifying.
My favorite part of the word salad that is their argument is that the Supreme Court of Colorado erred but a lower District Court that found that Trump took a different oath was correct.
But the district court ultimately concluded that section 3 was inapplicable to President Trump because he never took an oath “as an officer of the United States.” App. 282a (¶ 313) (“[T]he Court is persuaded that ‘officers of the United States’ did not include the President of the United States.”)
Because we literally have the minutes of the discussion when the 39th Congress discussed the 14th Amendment and indicated that Section 3 would "obviously apply to the President" and that the explicit mentions in Section 3 were to alleviate confusion.
Why did you omit to exclude them [The office of the President and Vice President]?
— Sen. Reverdy Johnson (D-MD)
Let me call the Senator's attention to the words 'or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States'
— Sen. Lot Morrill (R-MA)
Senator Morrill shut down outright the notion that section three could ever be considered as "not applying to the President". That's how obvious it was to the people who wrote the Amendment that the entire point was that "we had a civil war, but just because we won did not mean the Confederates nor their rebellion would cease to exist".
More to the point.
This is to go into our Constitution and to stand to govern future insurrection as well as the present; and I should like to have that point definitely understood
— Sen. Peter G. Van Winkle (R-WV)
So let's be entirely clear here. Section 3 absolutely applies to the President and it absolutely applies to ANY insurrection. There are zero other ways to read this. We literally have the minutes of the discussion at that time. This isn't like we don't know what they intended, they were very clear that future people would try this shit and they absolutely wanted that eventuality covered. And Congressional record is acceptable evidence into the Supreme Court. If SCOTUS today ignores this record, I mean fuck, there's not a slicing it any other way than they're attempting to play favorites.
And on that, I highly doubt they'll buy this argument that Section 3 doesn't apply. Now they may find something else, but that it doesn't apply to the President, oh hell no. There was nobody in the Senate or House who questioned if Section 3 applied to the President during the 39th Congress. It did and saying it doesn't is some revisionist bullshit.
Now they do mention "Rucho v. Common Cause" in the argument. In this they're trying to portray that "is someone disqualified" as a political question rather a legal one. Courts aren't allowed to weigh in on political questions.
They also mention roles of Congress via the 20th Amendment, Article II, and section 5 of the 14th Amendment. And via these they indicate that it's implied that Congress is the one who disqualifies. However, they fail to mention the 10th Amendment where if the Constitution is silent on the matter and Congress has passed no law, then the law falls onto the States and the people thereafter. So the question that can be raised is Colorado's 10th Amendment right superseded by this "implied" Congressional consent?
It would give the SCOTUS a get out of jail free card by basically saying "well it's not up to SCOTUS, it's up to Congress" and calling it done. However, it would weaken one of their favorite things, State's Rights. Because the ability to determine disqualification on things like citizenship and age are very clearly at the State level, that's even a question. So it would make things this weird thing where if it's age or natural born status that's the States but someone with intent to hand the US over to Russia, nope that's Congress.
And above all else, why the fuck would we have an electoral college if some of the biggest issues on qualification are up to the whims of Congress? Like that does even make sense. But I think the electoral college should go away anyway, but that's a me thing.
At any point. There's wiggle room for SCOTUS to massively disappoint yet again! But on the question of does this apply to the President or not. HELL FUCKING YES IT DOES. Every record we have points to that conclusion. If Colorado's Supreme Court can err, so can the court that Trump is relying on to be correct on this issue.
They also mention roles of Congress via the 20th Amendment, Article II, and section 5 of the 14th Amendment. And via these they indicate that it's implied that Congress is the one who disqualifies.
With regard to the 14th Amendment Section Three, a person who has sworn an oath, and then engages in insurrection, is disqualified. Congress is given the power to "remove such disability;" this is wholly different from Congress being "the one who disqualifies."
This still leaves SCOTUS a perfect out: read the law, apply the law. SCOTUS should rule that Trump meets the characterization for someone disqualified from the ballot via 14S3, and that States, having the sole responsibility for operating elections, should disqualify him from their ballots - while making it very clear that this disability can be removed by a two-thirds vote from each House of Congress.
SCOTUS does not want to be responsible for disqualifying Trump; they don't have to be. In actual fact, he has disqualified himself, through the actions he took of his own free will. SCOTUS also does not want to be the last word on the subject; they don't have to be. Congress, and their vote (or lack thereof), would be the last word on the subject.
With regard to the 14th Amendment Section Three, a person who has sworn an oath, and then engages in insurrection, is disqualified. Congress is given the power to "remove such disability;" this is wholly different from Congress being "the one who disqualifies."
I couldn't agree more here. The notion that the one that removes the disability indicates that someone added it. Being silent on the who isn't an oversight by those who carefully framed the 14th. There's a realization outright that calling out traitors and ensuring that they cannot attempt rebellion was a role for anyone who swore to uphold the Constitution. To vest the power in a single branch is just inviting those seeking a rebellion to overtake that branch and call it mission complete.
Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote that there is a strong danger Giuliani is likely to hide his assets from plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss and is unlikely to succeed in having last week’s jury verdict overturned or cut down on appeal.
Attorneys for the two women still have to enforce the judgment against Giuliani, which may involve further court proceedings. But they do not have to wait the standard 30 days to begin trying to seize his assets.
Well, since he has refused to respond to the court’s order that he provide financial evidence (How the fuck does that work, by the way?) here is a list of some of his assets according to this link from February 2023.
He has, or had, a net worth of around $80 million. He has an apartment in NYC (currently listed for sale at around $6 million), 12 other apartments in NY, 2 mansions in TX, 2 penthouses in Manhattan, and 950 acres of Farmland in Ohio.
No …no it’s not it just isn’t. What this is a sensationalist headline trying to sow discord, despair, and defeat.
I understand the implication of a future where Trump or his like were in charge, but as dark as it looks I still think the majority of our country has better sense than to elect him president again. So what if he makes the Republican nomination it just confirms their lawless criminality.
In other words STOP with the crap attitudes that trump is “Inevitable” Shit… he’s not.
Would reminding them that Trump is a major reason abortion rights are on the backslide in the US help? Or that Republicans are running around banning (or trying to ban) books from libraries? Or that Republicans are largely refusing to allocate taxpayers’ money to help taxpayers?
It boils down to the fact that the Republican party’s position as being fiscally conservative typically entails reducing government spending by cutting funding to and thereby underfunding domestic programs that help taxpayers/citizens.
the majority of our country has better sense than to elect him president again.
The majority of country didn't elect him the first time and definitely isn't necessary to elect a president.
The presidency is decided by electoral college votes, not by the people's vote.
This is true. But calling the worst case scenario “inevitable” is doom and gloom surrender before the fight - stuff like this will just make people think “well, it’s hopeless, there’s nothing I can do” and so they do nothing when maybe they could have done something.
... the majority of our country has better sense than to elect him president again.
The majority of the country elected Clinton in 2016. American politics has always been structured in a way to appease the assholes by putting a heavy thumb on the scales to make them more powerful than they should be.
How can you call it sensationalist when you know that the consequences of Trump being elected that are listed in the article are highly likely to be true?
I don’t consider it sensationalist. I consider it to be a strong warning. If you read the article through to the end; you’ll note the tone changes and explains why this has happened. Is it potentially sounding the alarm too soon? Personally, I do not think so. It might be the intention of the author to scare someone of enough power into action extraordinary enough to Stop Trump.
Or maybe it will scare an everyday reader into leaving the country to escape the growing fascism, or into actually turning up at the polls and voting for anything but the Orange Tyrant.
Emphasis added - I will try to avoid highlighting who is responsible for the failures but they are listed in the article. I am not sympathizing with Trump Supporters; I am pointing at how this article outlines how we got here today.
What is certain, however, is that the odds of the United States falling into dictatorship have grown considerably because so many of the obstacles to it have been cleared and only a few are left. If eight years ago it seemed literally inconceivable that a man like Trump could be elected, that obstacle was cleared in 2016. If it then seemed unimaginable that an American president would try to remain in office after losing an election, that obstacle was cleared in 2020. And if no one could believe that Trump, having tried and failed to invalidate the election and stop the counting of electoral college votes, would nevertheless reemerge as the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party and its nominee again in 2024, well, we are about to see that obstacle cleared as well. In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.
TL;DR: The odds are higher because the listed barriers have been cleared.
Yes, I know that most people don’t think an asteroid is heading toward us and that’s part of the problem. But just as big a problem has been those who do see the risk but for a variety of reasons have not thought it necessary to make any sacrifices to prevent it. At each point along the way, our political leaders, and we as voters, have let opportunities to stop Trump pass on the assumption that he would eventually meet some obstacle he could not overcome. Republicans could have stopped Trump from winning the nomination in 2016, but they didn’t. The voters could have elected Hillary Clinton, but they didn’t. Republican senators could have voted to convict Trump in either of his impeachment trials, which might have made his run for president much more difficult, but they didn’t.
TL;DR: There were many people in power who could have stopped him, but did not, as they felt certain that "Surely the next obstacle will stop him. The next obstacle did not stop him
Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work. At each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors, actions that did not align with their immediate interests or even merely their preferences. It would have been extraordinary for all the Republicans running against Trump in 2016 to decide to give up their hopes for the presidency and unite around one of them. Instead, they behaved normally, spending their time and money attacking each other, assuming that Trump was not their most serious challenge, or that someone else would bring him down, and thereby opened a clear path for Trump’s nomination. And they have, with just a few exceptions, done the same this election cycle. It would have been extraordinary had Mitch McConnell and many other Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own party. Instead, they assumed that after Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was finished and it was therefore safe not to convict him and thus avoid becoming pariahs among the vast throng of Trump supporters. In each instance, people believed they could go on pursuing their personal interests and ambitions as usual in the confidence that somewhere down the line, someone or something else, or simply fate, would stop him. Why should they be the ones to sacrifice their careers? Given the choice between a high-risk gamble and hoping for the best, people generally hope for the best. Given the choice between doing the dirty work yourself and letting others do it, people generally prefer the latter.
TL;DR: The Psychology is briefly explained; and it highlights how extraordinary that taking action would have been for the person(s) in question.
A paralyzing psychology of appeasement has also been at work. At each stage, the price of stopping Trump has risen higher and higher. In 2016, the price was forgoing a shot at the White House. Once Trump was elected, the price of opposition, or even the absence of obsequious loyalty, became the end of one’s political career, as Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Paul D. Ryan and many others discovered. By 2020, the price had risen again. As Mitt Romney recounts in McKay Coppins’s recent biography, Republican members of Congress contemplating voting for Trump’s impeachment and conviction feared for their physical safety and that of their families. There is no reason that fear should be any less today. But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family?
TL;DR: More Psychology is explained briefly and it highlights that the price to stop Trump has been rising exponentially with each step.
However I also never imagined my country (Holland) the PVV extreme-right would become the biggest party by far. People really have gone mad. Even some of my friends are now so hostile against immigrants and transsexuality in particular, I just don’t know where it comes from. I guess they doomscroll too much in the wrong places and edge each other on or something.
I, honestly, don’t want him to die. I hope that he has perfect health, but finds himself sent to prison for the rest of his life. Then, he can have perfect health as he sees everything he built over his life (business and political) torn to shreds.
Trump just falling dead from a heart attack tomorrow would be too easy an out for him.
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