Turns out it wasn’t close at all :(
As recently as yesterday morning I had people in my social feeds posting pictures of themselves voting and “excited to witness our first female president!” assuming a Harris victory. What a shocker.
One thing I’ve had to absorb from all this is that the Trump I see is not the Trump they see. Yes their media outlets are lying to them, but my media outlets are also working overtime to turn every comment he makes into a sure sign of goose-stepping fascism right around the corner. His every off color remark, and he has a lot of them, are so amplified by the press I consume that he seems an obvious villain.
I usually don’t “both sides” anything, but I do believe that while right wing media distort Trump, so does left wing media, and both contribute to this sense of “what can people possibly be thinking, to vote for him?” It’s because they haven’t been drinking from the same Trump hate firehose as me.
A lot of good sense here. Democrats have been so focused on race and sex that they lost the whole working class. I don’t think they realize that people don’t think of themselves as demographics. Representation is a thing, but they assume far too much about it: “Let’s run a black woman - we’ll get all the black AND woman votes! And she’s Asian, too!” Meanwhile they are doing little for the working class issues that affect these voters most. Kamala’s program of tax break handouts was a dead giveaway: Democrats think the system is fine - but they’d like to buy your vote this year. People want structural change to the system, not a new line item on their tax return. Trump’s tariffs, ill-advised as they are, show a willingness to make deep structural change to the macroeconomics that have brought us here. While democrats clutch their pearls over a 5% drop to GDP, working class voters are like “we’re already losing big time - let’s roll the dice.”
Thinking back to the one debate he had with Harris, Trump blathered nonstop about immigration. He talks about it like a wave of moorish invaders sweeping across the land, pillaging. This is obviously a powerful Image if you can get people to believe it. And in some areas people have been feeling like American culture is giving way to Mexican culture as the population in their home towns shifts, so Trump’s rhetoric taps into something that was already there. And if we’re honest, border policy is a weird zone where many of the laws don’t make intuitive sense. America talks out of both sides of its mouth on the issue, historically. A lot of people are here illegally whom we depend on utterly to staff our economy. So their presence is in some way sanctioned, tolerated, but not fully legitimized in law. When someone comes along and articulates one clear direction on immigration, it sounds like someone is speaking clearly for the first time. Even if that direction is stupid, hateful, xenophobic, and economically unviable.
True. I do believe they’re focused on renewables though, because they produce little or no oil and don’t want to be dependent on others or vulnerable via the Strait of Hormuz. They have plenty of coal but they know they can’t rely on it because the air pollution will kill them all.
One difference though is social media. Reddit was able to gestate and grow without that massive clusterfuck sucking up all the internet’s oxygen. Nowadays with all the social media sites proper plus Facebook groups AND let’s not forget Reddit itself, there’s just massively more competition for attention online. The old 1.0 web forums are still around, many of them, but they’re small and relatively static. That could also be Lemmy’s fate.
Digg had a large viewer base and there was a lot of skullduggery going on amongst people who figured out how to game its algorithm, get on the front page, and direct traffic to some URL. But without actual data I would venture to guess that Digg and Reddit had roughly equivalent bases of actually genuinely active community posters and commenters and a lot of people were on both. Once Digg got taken over by the spam posters, it died off and Reddit remained. Reddit definitely inherited its mantle and probably many community members, but not the massive viewer audience.
I was on Reddit when it was small. So you never know.
I dug mine out, covered the ground with shredded cedar (an attractive mulch) and planted a diverse set of trees and smaller plants. My city offered a free one hour consultation with a landscaper to select drought tolerant plants I would like and plan an arrangement of them. I replaced all the sprinkler heads with drip irrigation nodes controlled by a Rachio that does smart adjustments like not watering in the rain.
Now we have a beautiful yard with redbud trees and lavender and blue flowering sage plants everywhere. The bees happen to love it. I have a little hibiscus plant which I baby with extra water and it produces stunning flowers one after another.
I’m talking about my front yard there, which has pure ornamental value. The back yard lawn I also dug out but I replaced it with UC Verde Buffalo Grass. This is a rich, soft drought-tolerant grass that looks great short or long and doesn’t require constant watering. You can even stop watering for long periods and it will just go dormant.
I didn’t want to lose the back lawn because I have kids and they play on it.
I did all of the above myself while working full time, except for the tree installations, which did involve a work crew coming out to dig holes.
I have a lot of yard to maintain and it has been a project over the years. Drip irrigation is less “set and forget” than I hoped - every once in a while there’s a line that’s clogged or burst.
But we are in an area that has been embattled with droughts over the years and showering a lawn with sprinklers every morning is just idiotic here. I’d say 70% of my neighborhood have ditched their lawns. Some just let them die and haven’t done shit about it. Others have gone whole hog into stone and succulent makeovers. And the other 30% still overwater their shit until water is flowing out over the sidewalks and down the gutter. These are mostly old people with old ideas - the earth is patiently waiting for them to die off.
It also “takes care of” rehabilitation and redemption.
Well if we’re going to do tit for tat then let’s put this kid to death.
So a basic concept of right and wrong is enough to try someone as an adult?
Perhaps the lies of a serious politician are more significant than the ramblings of an insane clown.
I mean it’s literally right there in the Constitution without room for interpretation. If the Supes pretend to just throw that out then we’ll have an actual civil war on our hands.
Here’s a pet peeve: people who “both sides” the entire American political spectrum because they are SO uninformed that everything looks the same to them.
Here’s another: people who “both sides” the entire American political spectrum because taking a position is more difficult than saying “bah I’m above the whole shit show.”
I remember a guy much further down that “catalyst” line of thinking telling me that things have to get worse before they can get better: a phrase that’s easy to bust out as a grand conclusion to huge sweeping societal problems, but is based on absolutely nothing.
With turnout being the decider in our elections, I think it’s of critical importance if a candidate scares the shit out of the other side. Hilary Clinton for whatever reason definitely pushed conservative buttons and got them to the polls. The Trump phenomenon was happening at the same time, but we can’t discount the anti-Hilary energy.
While the right certainly doesn’t like Kamala, their hatred is nothing close to what the left feels for Trump. Between that and Roe, if we can’t activate voters and take this election, then we really have lost the country, and Trump’s second term will only dig that hole deeper.
No pressure, America!
On top of his excellent coverage of fossil fuels, I just love the way this guy does videos.
It’s surprisingly few people who pay no taxes. The standard exemption is only $13,850.
But your point still stands. Poor people aren’t going to hold on til the end of the year for a lousy $300 credit.