The only way I’m excusing this is if the city planted those semen trees

The trees were a variety of species and were meant to replace a large swath of ash trees that were professionally removed earlier this year, Zumach said. The saplings stood about five to seven feet tall and weighed up to 30 pounds.

:(

“EV company owners” aside, most voters in this country just want something to change, and they’ll vote for whoever promises the most of it. Harris’ campaign didn’t do anything nor promise anything that resonated, and practically everything she said ended up morphing into her highly-rehearsed stump speech. No talks about Medicare for All, no talks about the minimum wage, no talks about legalizing weed, and kowtowing to the right on border policy by accepting the ‘crisis’ framing. Harris also failed to address the situation in Gaza in a way that mattered, even though it was a major issue for undecided voters in key states like Michigan. Over 100,000 Democratic primary voters there cast an uncommitted vote over Biden’s handling of Israel and Gaza, which is more than the margin by which she lost the state.

The right took advantage of this. An EV company owner paid a PAC to distribute ostensibly pro-Harris pamphlets in predominantly Arab neighborhoods in Michigan saying she was the most pro-Israel candidate on the ballot. The right helped put abortion rights directly on the state ballots as propositions, letting people believe the choice could be separated from who they voted for (see Florida, where the proposition lost at 57% support when the state voted roughly the same percentage for ol Don).

Harris had a potential base on the progressive left, but the DNC insisted on tweaking her campaign to try to win over right-moderates. That doesn’t work anymore, precisely for the “sticking fingers in ears” attitude you mentioned from right-wing voters. It’s asinine for the DNC to continue to try and appeal to them, when the median Republican voter thinks Democrats are agents of a satanic agenda. Regardless, the message the DNC seems to have gotten from Nov 5 was that they lost this election because they failed to move to the right hard enough. The ratchet effect continues.

As a side note, I know several trumpets who would’ve voted for Sanders in 2016 were he the Democratic nominee, and would’ve voted for Walz even this election were he the main guy on the 2024 presidential ticket. Such people are not very coherent ideologically, they just want someone in who has big ideas.

Unfortunately, it’s just not enough to be “not the other guy”, even if the other guy is a convicted felon, rapist, and just all-around a downright awful human being.

edit: grammar and wording in a couple spots

Ok but that doesn’t change that they’re being actively invaded by Russia right now. That does tend to put a pretty big damper on a country’s ability to conduct secure elections.

Do you believe the elections in Russia are held fairly? I was under the impression that there are a lot of issues with political repression and electrical fraud, but admit that some of those notions could be more propaganda than reality. I’ll be reading more into Russian electoral politics and history in the meanwhile.

From what I read so far, it looks like Russia actually did hold elections for their own government within occupied Ukrainian territory. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Who do you think the people putting their fingers in their ears are, in this case?

Logistically, how should Ukraine have held an election earlier this year, on account of dealing with an active invasion and contested territory?

It doesn’t matter what your platform is if it’s not communicated effectively to the median voter

So it’s actually a secret third option! That’s pretty rad.

Is that because it’s that simple, or just that the boilerplate is pre-written in the standard library (or whatever it’s called in rust)?

The problem in my experience is that those apps are often quite bloated, require you to make an account, then run in the background slurping up telemetry data. (I’m looking at you, HP Smart)

And then if you run into a situation where the app stops working properly, if a reinstall doesn’t fix it you’re basically out of luck because the error logging and online documentation is functionally non-existent.

That’s because I didn’t explain ranked choice voting, I explained approval voting… They’re two different things

You’re given a list of candidates, and you can select however many of them you approve of being in office. Votes are then tallied, and whoever has the highest approval total is who gets voted in.

We can still push for positive climate policies on the local and state level. If Trump and his cronies try and say states can’t acknowledge the climate in their policy, then we double down and push for it anyways for the reasons of grid resilience and pollution/health instead

Just because a kid grows up in a conservative house, that doesn’t necessarily mean they grow up to be conservative. Most people do take the political beliefs of their parents into adulthood, but they’re not all just mindless clones of their parents and do, in fact, live distinct lives with minds that can be changed

That’s how it’s been for basically decades

In terms of grassroots support, he’s been very effective. This map is from 2020 when there was an actual primary but it does paint the picture pretty well:

Source of graph (it’s paywalled but I found the image directly in the search results and copied it lol)

In some states, you can’t vote by mail except under specific circumstances, such as being a senior citizen or swearing that you’ll be out of state entirely on election day.

I’ve been able to nix so many intrusive web elements with the ublock picker tool, often without leaving a trace due to modern web design practices. The YouTube shorts shelf is one such case, and it’s shocking how well it worked!

In the US, there are still a lot from McCarthy-era sentiment and “Communist” is a pejorative within the general population. For instance, The Communist Control Act of 1954 is still on the books. Though it has issues as a law for being really vague, and hasn’t been used seriously against leftist organizing on account of that, it nonetheless remains and has never been outright challenged to the Supreme Court of the United States. Either way, it had a chilling effect, and was pretty successful as part of the US’s broader campaign to demonize communism and communist organizing.

Because of the way “Communism” and “Marxism” are used within US press and mainstream politics (especially by the Republican party), the average voter is conditioned to view them as bad words accordingly. The Democratic party, trying to court “moderate” voters within the political landscape here, all but refuses to touch those words with a 10-foot pole. It’s not part of their brand (and not part of their policy either, not by any stretch of the imagination).

Progressivism in my view is an umbrella term, but still pretty linked with liberalism as a movement in the sense that it’s mostly reformist, and acts a subgroup within the Democratic party. Most “Progressive” candidates for US political office are SocDems at most.

You can call it newspeak, but political movements arise under new/different names as the situation dictates, and often refer to different things. I’d argue that the point of newspeak within 1984 was actually to limit the evolution of language and restrict the development of new words/ideas, but I do get where you’re coming from on account of “progressive” being considered more politically correct.

Y’know, now that you mention it, the sealioning behaviour I’d been conditioned to expect is a big reason for why I spend so much time writing my comments and adding qualifying statements.

Removing the homepage entirely, replacing the entire UI with the shorts-style format of “view video right now, tap button to see next/previous video”. If you want a specific video, you must search for it.