The colors should match the colors on the flag. Blue with 50 stars for the boys, horizontal red and white stripes for the girls

Glocking stick?

It is a weaponization of ambiguity on where to draw the line; sailing the Ship of Theseus all the way from one end of morality to another

This isn’t a problem we can type our way out of

You see, the thing is that this particular house actually required a lot of skill and planning to make

The problem is that it’s a blanket ban (plus retroactive firing) of all trans people serving in the military, not just an asterisk on serving combat roles.

You always think you remember how to center a div until you try to do it again after a few years

The only way you can tell it’s fake is that Elon doesn’t wear suits

Deliberately sabotaging your job as a government worker (assuming you’re not working in a military industrial complex or enforcement job) plays directly into the right’s framing of government as inefficient. It’s important that public-facing positions be competent to foster public trust; after all, those positions are what conservatives dismantle first as pretext to abolish an agency. After public discontent sets in through first-hand experience dealing with understaffing, those public services become ripe for privatization.

I really hope it doesn’t, but it’s just the kind of insanity that he’d pull to try and make good on his promise if his loyalists start actually complaining about it.

Trump’s going to order that they stop culling chicken farms due to H5N1 infections, call the disease a mild cold like he did with covid-19 and claim it’s not that big of a deal. Nearly instantly, of course, a bird flu pandemic breaks out as the virus mutates to infect humans, but the CDC and NIH will be stopped from making any statements about the disease.

Get your Trump “I did that” stickers ready

Then they’ll get to 1) be paid nothing instead of a few dollars an hour, 2) be a drain on the taxpayer from funding+running the new immigrant labor camps, 3) get abused by camp staffers, and 4) still pick your crops

We should be punishing companies for paying illegal wages under the table no matter who’s the recipient (documented or not), but instead the undocumented status of the workers is used as pretext to deny them any negotiating power for a raise or better conditions. Until we hold the companies accountable in these situations, they’ll continue to do whatever they can to keep their labor costs down. Unfortunately, farm owners have the money in this situation, so their wishes for cheap labor trump any need for unemployed citizens to have a job :)

These farm jobs aren’t going to be opened up to Americans for minimum wage. They’re going to be done by the same undocumented people, but as part of immigrant detention labor camps as an extension of the prison industrial complex.

The reality is that we should be paying a lot more for groceries than we currently are, given that the current system depends on horrendously underpaid and exploitative labor. Good luck making that case to people struggling to pay for groceries.

edit: slight wording because I suck at proofreading before hitting submit

So, not to say I necessarily believe in this, but the case laid out has a lot to do with Elon’s PAC, which was collecting only names and addresses with the promise that voters would be paid x amount after taking some sort of pledge. The argument then follows, that if electronic tabulation systems were hacked and continuously connected to the Internet, the people who signed up to his list could have their vote automatically cast as a bullet ballot for Donald Trump. Supposedly, there’s a way they could do this digital ballot stuffing specifically for voters whose ballot had not shown up as cast within the voter registry past a certain point in time, so all the fraudulent ballots look like legitimate ones tied to actual people.

It’s pretty far-fetched, but just plausible enough that it’s appealing to a lot of people who were blindsided by election day’s results

“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

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

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)?