OBJECTION!

The vast majority of Americans both already know how they feel about Trump and Biden and live in a solidly red or blue state. If you do want to focus on Biden, volunteer with phone banking or canvassing so that your efforts are directed to where they’ll actually matter and be organized in line with their messaging. Personally, I’d say you’re better off focusing on local races where you have more of an opportunity to come at it from a different angle and cut through people’s fortified positions. And as another user said, focus on mobilization, it’s easier to get someone who already agrees with you to register and make a plan than to convince someone to change their whole worldview.

There are also strategies outside of electoralism, such as protests and counter-protests. You can join an organization and form tactics and strategies to subvert the right’s actions, and engage with direct action to build trust and community that could be important in the future. Form strategies while being realistic about your goals and capabilities and coordinate with others.

MY rotting corpse just has some stiff joints, that’s all.

That doesn’t give people license to lie about him.

“Stuttered”

he’s only giving you things you say with your friends inside of your living room, the only difference is he’s got the balls to say it in front of you all and don’t have to sugar coat it at all.

Things like what, exactly? We must be hanging out in different living rooms.

There were lots of little niche forums where you could find a lot of different perspectives. I remember as a kid going to nuklearpower.com, the home of the 8-Bit theater webcomic, and I found a thread in the forums about religion and it was kind of my first real exposure to ideas about it outside of what I’d been raised to believe.

Most early memes were lolcats or epic fails, and I remember going through pages and pages on cheezburger.com with my friends. There were also “demotivational posters,” like this was the height of comedy.

4chan existed and was pretty bad even then but it was more common for somewhat normal people to go there, they loved their slurs and gross out humor but it wasn’t full nazi, it was edgy teens. In general slurs and homophobia were a lot more common, but a lot of the edgy, “you can’t tell me what to do” energy was directed at the religious right, the “moral guardians” who wanted to take away your violent video games. The left was very weak and didn’t have the sort of cultural presence it has today, instead you had a lot of energy directed towards libertarianism, with Ron Paul being the anti-war, pro-weed candidate, and you had liberals with ACLU type values. Things weren’t cut as neatly along party lines back then.

Fewer people were on the internet back then. Lots of young people used it but not as many boomers. There weren’t as many big pillars like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit, there were more subcultures and you never quite knew what you’d find (for better or worse). Algorithms were a lot less polished and you didn’t have as much SEO, Youtube looked and felt radically different.

The indie game Secret Little Haven captures some of the feel of that time period of the internet, from the perspective of a transfem, it gets heavy but it’s good.

It did start back up though. And we don’t know if further research could bring the costs down. I’m not proposing it as a magic bullet, just as one potential way to get nighttime coverage.

There’s some promising research in using heliostats (mirrors to direct sunlight) towards a central tower to create molten salt, allowing solar energy to be stored and released at night.

I try not to be but sometimes I can’t help myself.

I’m not talking about changes over time, talking about things I’ve seen recently on here regarding Russia’s current status, in response to news stories and comments discussing the danger of escalation going nuclear.

Shroedinger’s Russian nuclear arsenal. When there’s a story about risking escalation, libs tell me it’s fine because Russia doesn’t have the money to maintain its nukes, so it’d only be a “limited” nuclear exchange. When this story comes out, the libs tell me that Russia has a much larger and better maintained nuclear stockpile, so it’s only necessary for the US to spend more on it to catch up. It’s sort of the same way that Russia simultaneously is on the verge of defeat, yet also has the intention and capability to conquer all of Europe, like Hitler, if we don’t stop him here.

The enemy is both strong and weak, and you never know which one it’s gonna be.

The New York Crimes is a garbage propaganda rag. They don’t deserve a red cent from anyone after pushing their transphobic agenda, (and responding to widespread criticism by publishing an article defending JK Rowling) or after they blatantly lied and published a fake news story about Hamas conducting mass rape in an attempt to sway public opinion to be in favor of Israel’s genocide. If you have a NYT subscription, you are paying people to lie to you.

You can go to archive.is and put in the url of a news story you want to read in the second box and it will usually let you bypass the paywall.

YES

My understanding is that a tankie is defined as someone who seeks to promote global peace, understanding, and equality, with nuanced views that incorporate marginalized and international perspectives, grounded in historical evidence.

That’s how I see it used anyway.

I agree with the article except for this part:

Joe Biden’s success in 2020 was due in no small part to his deliberate rejection of Clinton’s failed strategy. “Scranton Joe” courted both Sanders voters and blue-collar whites. He promised expanded infrastructure spending and tougher trade deals. Progressive young people might not have given Biden their votes in the primaries, but he campaigned as a candidate who saw them as part of his coalition and duly won their votes on Election Day.

I think the main reason Biden won in 2020 is because of COVID. That and correctly recognizing that people despise both him and Trump and realizing that if he simply stays out of the limelight people won’t pay as much attention to how bad he is. Neither of these factors are working for him now, it’s much harder to stay out of the limelight when you’re the one in charge.

I suppose there may have been less open hostility towards the left compared to Clinton, but only because that’s such a low bar.

China has official death estimates so I don’t believe that they deny that anything at all happened.

Now, it’s considered patriotic to protest poor government decisions.

Is it now? Would you say the student protests over Gaza are considered “patriotic” in mainstream American culture?

Comparing an incident where 11 million people were killed to one where hundreds of people were killed is a form of Holocaust denialism.

What’s the historical significance of Tiananmen Square? People sure seem to like talking about it, but personally I don’t really see why it warrants so much attention, in the grand scheme of things.

Remember that time managers at a Tyson meat processing plant ran a betting pool on how many of their workers would get covid?

“We should legislate what people do with their own bodies because I don’t like their decisions”

I mean, yes. That’s the vast majority of people, regardless of political affiliation, or where you live. I don’t think meth should be completely deregulated, for example. If someone goes to a hospital and asks a doctor to inject them with bleach to cure COVID, I don’t think the doctor should do it.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t support bodily autonomy, however. Just not as an absolute right, because I don’t consider any right as absolute. Rights have to be balanced against each other and considered in the context of their material consequences.

I don’t see how this is comparable to something like abortion, where only a fetus is being terminated, not a human being. Nor is it comparable to, for example, trans rights, where a person is aiming to live a happy and fulfilling life. Just because crazies want to restrict bodily autonomy in cases where there’s no valid reason to doesn’t mean that cases with valid reasons don’t exist, and discouraging suicide is one of them.