You do know the American political compass is special among political compasses, right? Compared to Europe (or even Canada), our definition of “moderate” is their equivalent of “conservative”. Likewise, our “left” is “center”.

Wishing the already-not-left Democratic Party starts shifting even more right is wishing for a two-party system where the options are conservatism and fascism.

You’re totally right. We don’t have a two party system, we have a system where only two parties are large enough to win any kind of influence.

Only if you don’t say “no homo” first.

They sure are doing what they can to “make america healthy again”… by trying to permanently reduce the number of people with health conditions.

It’s still worth signing anyways, but realistically, 250k over two months is not something they’re going to listen to.

That is a lot of people if you’re looking at it in absolute numbers, but it becomes an easily-ignored drop in the bucket when you compare it to total population and growth of the movement over time. It’s less than 0.1% of voting-age citizens (or 1 in every 1000 people). Ignoring the fact that petitions are always front-loaded in signatures and quickly lose steam, if it kept going at the rate it’s going, it would take over a year to even be 1% of people. Even by 2028, that would still be an insignificant amount of votes thanks to the winner-takes-all electoral system.

There’s simply no incentive for them to care.

I wonder what other aspects of civilization we can obstruct with debris from irreversible deployment of immature tech.

You’re thinking too far ahead. We already destroyed critical thinking and civility with debris from irreversible deployment of social media.

I know the image is a meme, but LLMs are actually subtly racist.

Another way of looking at it is that it is a worthless statue made from evidence of counterfeiting and forgery.

concerned with procedural correctness at the expense of people’s needs.

Irregardless, that describes the exact opposite of Elon. He’s concerned with personal compensation at the expense of people’s needs.

Billionaire unelected bureaucrat oligarch. FTFY FTFY

Unfortunately.

People expect the Democratic Party to oppose authoritarian and socially regressive policies, but the Democratic Party isn’t an opposition party. They do the bare minimum to look Not as Bad as the Alternative™ so they can avoid having to promise to change things that they benefit from themselves, and anything beyond that is dismissed as not worth even attempting because of hypothetical Republican stalling.

They had well-liked progressive candidates like Bernie and they went out of their way to screw him at every opportunity. And they’re still going out of their way to screw over progressive members among their ranks. It’s disgraceful.

Grep? Nah, he probably fed it into a LLM and asked it to find any word with “trans” in it.

— Trump, probably

Exactly! You get it.

About 20 trips to the grocery store and the associated gas prices.

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference, Elon Musk criticized U.S. passenger rail as “embarrassing” compared to other countries.

Elon Musk? The same Elon Musk who helped cancel a high-speed rail transit project by touting his quickly-abandoned, far-fetched sci-fi transit system?

If the definition is broad enough, imagery can refer to text depicting something visual. For example, describing Trump talking into a microphone can be imagery. The previous sentence could also be imagery, and if you just imagined him talking into a microphone, you proved it.

That would make it incredibly easy to silence media and criticism. An article describes Trump signing an executive order to make Nazis a protected demographic? The author published intimate imagery of Trump signing his signature without first checking with Trump that it was ok to do so. BANNED.

You’re describing the Republican politicians. The Republican voters are a different bag entirely.

Out of the ones I have discussed politics with, their underlying motivations for supporting Trump are emotionally driven but explained through rhetoric aligning with their emotional motivations. It tends to be grouped into one of a few different feelings:

• cost of living/financial security — immigrants’ fault, taxes, foreign nations taking advantage of US generosity
• fear of change/bigotry — immigrants, “DEI”, “wokeness”, border security
• American exceptionalism/egotism — immigrants, 1st ammendment
• distrust of federal government — “DEI”, government corruption, regulatory overreach, socialism = communism
• distrust of industry — vaccines harmful, science bad

Aside from the bigotry and exceptionalism, those emotions aren’t necessarily wrong. Cost of living increases, politicians owned by lobbyists, and profit-driven privatization of essential services are actual problems. The issue with conservatives is that they have scapegoats to blame those problems on instead of acknowledging the underlying causes. All it takes is some loudmouth, ignorant jackass offering an overly-simplified, emotionally-compelling solution to a complex problem, and others will latch on to it, oversimplify and exaggerate it even more, and disseminate it until the rest of them start believing it.

People can be hateful, narcissistic pieces of shit, and it goes without saying that this repugnant rhetoric is spread intentionally. But, it’s also a direct consequence of a public education system failing among a landscape of patriotic propaganda and media controlled by a powerful few who put profit and self-gain above the health of society.

When someone grows up being told America is a flawless nation, that self-reliance is the foundational trait of success, is never educated to think critically of the government and media, and is bombarded by a neverending stream of false information that validates their fears and lulls them into feeling smarter than everyone else, they end up being indoctrinated into the right-wing cult we have today.

They won’t blame foundational American principles (like the economic ideology) for American problems—they were made to believe America is perfect. It must be something external (like immigrants) making their life worse.

They won’t question those they believe have authority over them—the teacher is always right. If Trump says it’s the Democrats fault, it’s the Democrats fault.

They won’t make an effort to understand other views—self-reliance is antithetical to empathy, and they had it ingrained which one was more important. The only person they can trust is themselves and by extension those who agree.

They also won’t need to understand other views. With the breadth of echo chambers available at the tip of their fingers, it’s easy to seek and reinforce conservative views, social connection, and validation. Chuck McFuck has a sole trans daughter who begrudgingly interacts with him, in contrast to his 10,000 friendly and cooperative buddies on r/conservative.

Is it too much to hope that they fuck up, redacting the names by drawing a box over text in a PDF?

Well, that’s disappointing. When trying to convince some less-culty conservatives that some kinds of regulations can be a good thing, I used this very thing as an example, thinking nobody in the right fucking mind would support dumping biological and industrial waste into water supplies.

In hindsight, I really set the bar too low.