I’ve seen this image floating around for a while, which breaks down the reasoning - or lack thereof in certain media - pretty well.

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Eh, it’s just removing unnecessary words as most headlines do. “Cheney says Republicans (that are) against Trump but (are) not backing Harris (are) ‘not (doing) enough’”

My groups usually think of them as a powerful fey creature who sometimes just whisks people away for an indeterminate amount of time, only to bring them back later.

A lot of cops are so high strung that you essentially have to pretend you’re having the time of your life while interacting with them - any nervousness or annoyance is taken to mean that you’re potentially a violent criminal who could kill them at any moment.

Just the realization that a woman holding a pot of hot water could hypothetically use it as a weapon, however unlikely it was in this scenario, was enough to make him instinctively shoot with only minor notice that still did nothing to prevent him from killing her even as she began cowering and apologizing.

This is the culture we’ve allowed the police to build in this country; the job is dangerous, and they’re only human, so they believe they should be forgiven for being scared regardless of the situation, and should be forgiven for taking drastic measures while they’re scared.

I mean, most of them probably became judges specifically to gain the power to choose who needs to follow what laws - as well as the profitable position that puts them in for rich criminals who don’t want to go to jail.

Voting is about choosing good candidates well before it gets pared down to 2 options. It’s about choosing a good local government, choosing good representatives, choosing good senators. If the only thing you care about is the President, then you’ll never have a good pool of options from which the parties will pick a presidential candidate. They’re not on our side - it’s our job to force their hand with a deck stacked with good candidates. But only the people who pay attention to politics well before election year get to have a say in stuff like that.

Okay, and how do you plan to get them into the hearts and minds of around 50% of the population in the next 2 months, when the vast majority haven’t even heard of her? It’s not enough to have someone who could be a good president, you also need to get people to vote for them. If you want most of the population to vote for someone, they need to be aware of them as a viable option years beforehand.

I agree that the 2 choices are pawns of the rich, but even if every person who knew about Claudia voted for her, she wouldn’t even get enough votes for her to make the news, much less win. We’re talking about tens of millions of people voting in unison for an election win to happen in this country. At this stage in the game, there are only 2 candidates with that kind of draw power. If you want to focus on the 2028 election (assuming there is one, since there clearly won’t be if Trump wins) to get a 3rd viable candidate on that ballot, that’s a noble plan, but by now this election’s potential winners are already down to 2.

Voting isn’t about closing your eyes and saying “I want someone good to win!” It’s about assessing which people might actually win, and voting for the one that best aligns with your views, however loosely. It’s about strategy. If you want to change that, you need to build national presence in the name of your preferred candidate, and you need to start years ahead of the elections. Big changes don’t happen at the ballot, they happen during the campaigning stage and beforehand. If your candidate isn’t on the news every day leading up to the election, most voters won’t even know they’re an option.

Yeah, people are acting like this is up to chance - rich people throw money at their problems, and so long as someone is willing to spend their time catching it instead of doing their job, it works. It’s going to work. The 5 year sentence is for poor people they want to get rid of, not for rich people they want to profit from.

As I said, yes, but also, let’s work together to stop the slapping…

I put my alarm far enough away that I need to get up to turn it off. By then I’m already out of bed, which is otherwise the hardest part for me by far.

To be fair, if we did raise minimum wage, they’d use it as an excuse to raise prices again. We still need to get higher minimum wage of course, but we also need get much tighter restrictions on corporations, or any financial ground we gain will be lost shortly thereafter under a million excuses to bleed the extra money out of us.

I realized that later, yeah. That’s not something that a kid would usually realize is bad on their own, though; if it’s something you and everyone you know has always done, most people wouldn’t think to question it.

For me it was when I was around 8 or 9 and met someone from Kenya. They could speak perfect English, wore normal clothes, and talked about having electricity. I’d literally never been told that those things existed in Africa - every reference to that continent only talked about tribes and jungles, save for Egypt which only talked about ruins and deserts. I asked around and found that most of the rest of the world has the same stuff we have, and most countries have a functioning government. I was so confused - why were we the country of freedom when everyone else has the same thing?

At the time I just assumed that there was something I was missing, or maybe the rest of the world just caught up to our idea, but eventually I came to the conclusion that they tell us we’re the country of freedom - and keep our studies of other countries to a minimum when we’re young - so that we can internalize the rhetoric that our country is the best before we find out that most other countries about the same, and often better in certain ways.

…yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Maybe he’s got no money, or keeps it in a bank with no interest for some weird reason, but the more likely scenario is that he has a lot of money he doesn’t want to make public. If he’s got so much money that it benefits him more to keep it hidden than to let it publicly gain interest, then he’s going to be willing to hand some of it off to a corrupt public official to prevent an investigation.

If a real investigation were done, then there would be no reason for him to bribe anyone, which is the more important thing for the vast majority of the government, so they have no reason to do an investigation. I’d like them to, but my preferences aren’t going to matter to the guy who only took the job of an investigator for the bribery money. If anything, they’ll just do a sham investigation so that they can say “nope, nothing” while walking away with their pockets full of cash.

It’s been a long time since this country meaningfully punished a rich man for doing something wrong.

Why would they investigate it? Either he has no money, and is telling the truth, or he “has no money” and will be happy to share his “nothing” to keep an investigation from happening.

My sister used to be the head of the environmental department of one of the suburbs of Minneapolis. She’s met Tim Walz a few times, and has had nothing but good things to say about both his personality and his attitude toward the environment. The US has pretty slim pickings for good politicians these days, but I really feel that Tim is on that list. I’m feeling hopeful about American politics for the first time since I learned about how American politics works!

My mom made me start saving for college when I was in elementary school, taking anything I got from gifts and chores to put into my college fund. I mowed lawns before I was legally able to work, then got a job as soon as I was able, all to continue padding my fund. I got my bachelor’s then my master’s in biology. My mom died a few months ago because she didn’t believe me or the doctors that her holistic medicine herbal teas wouldn’t cure her cancer.

Small price to pay, imo. When my job was forcing everyone back into the office in 2021 I just picked out one of the headhunters who contacted me on linkedin, got an offer for a remote position with better pay, and brought it to my employer to get a raise and the go-ahead to keep working remotely. I’ll suffer the occasional spam email for the knowledge that I have options for another job lined up pretty much whenever.

People playing tag 💪