would_be_appreciated

Two things I don't see anybody saying:

1. BlueSky is has venture capital funding, giving it greater marketing capabilities. Capitalism isn't won by having a better product, it's won by convincing people they should buy your product.
2. Dumb luck. Sometimes things just go viral, and you can try to figure it out in hindsight, but even that's just a guess. If people could accurately predict what was going to be popular, venture capitalists wouldn't have like a 90% miss rate.

Puberty blockers are reversible - that's not a lifelong decision. That information should have been in the article, and if we didn't live in a dumbshit rightwing dystopia where press is owned by the conservatives and also fears retribution from the conservatives, that information would've been in there.

Surgery? Sure, let's have that conversation - though I would certainly argue it's not the state's business what happens between a child, their parents, and their doctors, any more than it would be any other lifelong medical procedure. But it's at least a little murky. But this decision isn't surgery, it's puberty blockers. Not murky. Just evil.

People with that kind of money don't work, they own. They'll hire somebody to do those 80 hours while they rape underage trafficked girls.

Yeah, how often do the Republicans actually manage to come together to stop Trump?

One major problem here is the lack of community. It was easier to get in-person events organized when the default was to do things in person. #resistance isn't just more common because people aren't willing to be in person, but because it's not as easy to get involved.

As far as actual political groups are concerned, a lot of them have very little online presence, or their information is only available through something like Facebook where you need an account to view it. Those that are more available frequently only hold their meetings online, and many make it difficult to find how to get involved because you have to navigate through all their requests for donations to find there's very little else available.

But that's just my experience over the last few years. I imagine it'll get a lot worse when these groups aren't legally allowed to exist.

The point is that there's sanctions, and the sanctions are supposed to prevent those parts from getting into Russia. It's not surprising to a lot of us that sanctions are ineffective at anything other than hurting the general population, but it's good to report it and have that data point.

Not who brought it up, but it's essentially just checking a box if you approve of the candidate, and check as many boxes as you want. Highest number of box checks wins. I'd take it over first past the post, but I prefer RCV still. Proponents of approval voting say it helps weed out extreme candidates, but I find the most extreme candidates in the US have historically been a huge net win, so I'd prefer to give them a better shot at winning.

Conservative messaging wins propaganda battles because it's simple. Democrats can't use the same tactics, because they'll be less effective no matter what. Preventing consolidation of media and monopolization of media would be more effective, since it's a centrally coordinated effort. Or just preventing anybody from having enough money that they'd even have the ability to do that.

Embarrassing to live in a society so puritanical news articles have to dance around this.

If we get elections in the future, it's possible we'll get Democrats in two of the branches, and if they get their shit together they can pack the courts. It's not entirely hopeless, but it does ride on the Democrats being remotely competent as an organization for even a brief period of time.

God, this article is awful.

There's stuff like this:

A majority of voters nationally said Trump was a strong leader; slightly fewer than half said the same about Harris.

...which implies there's some significant difference here without giving you the specific numbers. Is this 51% to 49%? They go into the Latino specifics, but only for Trump, but even break it down further to say what percent of Latinos think Trump is strong versus the percentage of Latinas that think Trump is strong.

The AP is always held up as this infallibly unbiased source, but even if we agree that being unabashedly both-sides centrist is unbiased, that's not even close to what's happening here. To even remotely both-sides this you'd have to show all the people that think asking the question of Trump's strength is an absolute joke and it's bizarre we're even discussing it because the only people that believe in strongman leadership are literal fascists.

With respect to the actual headline and meat of the article, it also doesn't challenge the assumption that Trump would be better for the economy. If you're going to include people who were brainwashed into believing that, you have to juxtapose them with the endless historical precedents and current studies that show his policies will absolutely be detrimental to the economy. Even corporations are going to tank in the long term, because you can't steal from the working class forever.

By continuing Trump's campaign propaganda without serious challenge, this is a right-wing article in support of his administration. A more centrist article would say something closer to "Trump tricks public into believing he'll be better for the economy" because that's the reality of what happened.

Like for a reasonable, ethical individual, that should 100% be enough.

Conservatives have never been reasonable, ethical individuals. Slavery, Jim Crow, against women's suffrage, against the equal rights amendment, against social security, against gay and trans rights, the list goes on forever. The country's fight isn't to change a conservative's mind, it's to get enough of the non-conservatives to engage, protest, and vote such that they overwhelm the small but galvanized conservative base.

When you win on those issues, those conservatives don't change their mind. They continue to support slavery, or voter suppression, or the issues of their time, but eventually they die off. Then you have new fights with the new conservatives.