drthunder

One of our congresspeople (iirc) bragged about it suppressing enough votes to give the state to Trump in 2016 too.

It’s been a rough fifteen years for us. At least we’re two elections away from being like Florida instead of one, like we were for a while.

100% agreed

Here’s my general summary of why this is an issue: the US has been denying people the right to vote since day 1. You had to own land to vote in 1788. Half the country seceded and started a civil war that killed more of our citizens than any war since, over the right to own people. The 15th amendment was passed in 1870 to make it so you can’t deny Black people the right to vote, but places made it happen anyway. They made it so you had to pass a “literacy test” with intentionally ambiguous instructions, or pay a poll tax, or one of your grandparents had to have the ability to vote (afaik, the origin of the phrase “grandfathered in”).

These were all legal until the 1960s. Lots of people here have parents who were alive before legislation was passed to end Jim Crow. Without that, the racists that be turned to the War on Drugs, because lots of places take away your right to vote if you’ve been convicted of a felony. They started passing voter ID laws and closing down DMVs in areas with lots of black people and reducing their hours. A politician in Wisconsin bragged after the 2016 election that these laws here threw the state to Trump. They’ve also started banning giving food and water to people in line to vote and throwing out mail-in votes that show up after election day.

This isn’t about election security and it never has been; voter fraud has never changed an election in the country’s history. The real election fraud is in suppressing people’s votes and fucking with voting machines (2004) and having allies in positions of power to throw the election your way (2000). There’s more than that too, but it’s a tangent.

I don’t claim this election was in isolation but I agree with everything else you’ve said. We need people to vote for the harm reduction, and we need people to organize because our system of government is trash. Biden being in office gave us four years to organize with the usual amount of opposition instead of the federal government being ordered to go after anyone the fascists don’t like; his response to the Gaza camps last year was fucked up but if/when something like that happens again, Trump’s gonna have the military kill people.

I think this was inevitable too, it would have taken the people at the top choosing to fight fascism like the threat it is and I didn’t/don’t see that happening. I voted for Harris because it gives us breathing room, and if Trump doesn’t survive the next four years it would be harder for the fascist movement to retain its power if they didn’t have complete control of the government. At the same time I’ve been involved in activism for the last few years, because we need people to do both.

I think if you voted for Democrats you get to complain, but if you were eligible to vote and didn’t have to jump through a ton of hoops to do so you don’t get to complain. This could have been avoided.

edit: to be clear, I don’t think Democratic leadership really cares that we’ve got a dictator. But voting for them was harm reduction and too many people couldn’t be bothered, whatever the reason.

I also use it on an LG TV and sometimes it can’t run at its normal framerate with subtitles on. I haven’t figured out why yet, but it might be embedded files like someone else says in this thread. Other than that it works like a charm.

problem?

(sorry, I had to)

Exactly. Voting has never been enough, but it’s also the absolute bare minimum. How am I supposed to trust people to have my back who couldn’t take an hour out of their day to check some boxes?

Harm reduction would have saved trans people like me from being erased by the government.

I’m biased because I wish what she advocated for was closer to what I want, but I think she needed to be bold. She had some good policies, but we need more than some good policies right now. We need to rethink how we live because our institutions are failing us. I don’t know for sure if she would have won, but I think Medicare for all, free school lunch, even more antitrust action (Lina Khan was one of Biden’s best picks), etc, probably would have helped.

Why are the eggs being broken always regular people’s paychecks and food stamps? Why not rich people’s third vacation homes or yachts?

Yep, and austerity kills people. If you want to force the Pentagon to pass an audit before giving them another penny, be my guest, but “the government” isn’t wasteful.

Also even if everything ends up being funded again, this put a whole ton of needless stress on people wondering if they’re gonna get paid.

If you like the aggressive energy of that song, other ones like that are WWIII; Bullets, Bombs, and Bigotry; Paradise; and KMF. They have a shitload of music but that’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

Let’s dispense with the fiction that Marco Rubio doesn’t know what he’s doing, he knows exactly what he’s doing.

(rubio said this about obama in 2016 please don’t hurt me)

It really does. And I do think it was on the Brutal Legend soundtrack. I know it because I’m just old enough to remember that sort of stuff back in the 90s when it was big.

I’ve known about KMFDM for a long time but discovered Free Your Hate about this time in 2017, it’s too bad it’s that relevant again but at least we’ve got some good Nazi-punching music.