He’s gotten worse, but people also used to be more charitable. I thought he sounded like a pretentious know-nothing CEO when I heard him talking about the Hyperloop in 2012, and it’s been an impressive downhill run from there.

My gut says “that’s probably true, but that doesn’t mean much.” Let me pick it apart.

• LBJ attempted his War on Poverty and Great Society, and while it didn’t go as far as he wanted, he still got some good stuff out the door. Food stamps, medicare, medicaid, minimum wage, just to name a few. No contest compared to everybody that came later.

• Nixon was a Republican, and I’ll skip all of them because by this point in history they would never be as economically progressive as Biden.

• Ford was a Republican.

• Carter ran on being socially liberal and economically conservative. Outside of minor policy like the Community Reinvestment Act, there’s no help there, obviously.

• Reagan was a Republican.

• Clinton ran on the Third Way, which was sort of what Carter did but even more disastrous. Notable policy included gutting welfare and widespread deregulation.

• W was a Republican.

• Obama got ACA passed and used an obviously Keynesian approach to economic recovery with the recession he was given, pulling away from Clinton’s conservative Third Way.

• Trump was a Republican.

• Biden did a similar Keynesian approach to economics.

I would assume your statement hinges largely on the “biggest infrastructure bill” type rhetoric, because he didn’t do anything new, he just continued to fund things that the government needs to fund in order for the country to operate. He sure spent a lot, but whether that’s the metric we should be using for most progressive is up for debate.

Personally, I’d say Obama was more progressive because he actually did something substantial and new with the ACA, but it doesn’t put him in another tier above Biden. Of course, neither comes remotely close to LBJ.

What that statement really shows is how far the government has fallen from even attempting to provide value for people.

I assume the people freaking out about how dumb python is didn’t bother to read the code and have never coded in python in their life, because the behavior here is totally reasonable. Python doesn’t parse comments normally, which is what you’d expect, but if you tell it to read the raw source code and then parse the raw source code for the comments specifically, of course it does.

You would never, ever accidentally do this.

…you’d also never, ever do it on purpose.

What an absurd headline, so ridiculous they even debunk it themselves immediately. He doesn’t need Venezuela’s cooperation, he’s considering making a deal with them. We know from recent history that the US has no issue deporting people to any country they find convenient, regardless of where they originated. As long as the US has any agreement with any country anywhere, they’ll go ahead and do it.

Yeah, how often do the Republicans actually manage to come together to stop Trump?

One major problem here is the lack of community. It was easier to get in-person events organized when the default was to do things in person. #resistance isn’t just more common because people aren’t willing to be in person, but because it’s not as easy to get involved.

As far as actual political groups are concerned, a lot of them have very little online presence, or their information is only available through something like Facebook where you need an account to view it. Those that are more available frequently only hold their meetings online, and many make it difficult to find how to get involved because you have to navigate through all their requests for donations to find there’s very little else available.

But that’s just my experience over the last few years. I imagine it’ll get a lot worse when these groups aren’t legally allowed to exist.

Not who brought it up, but it’s essentially just checking a box if you approve of the candidate, and check as many boxes as you want. Highest number of box checks wins. I’d take it over first past the post, but I prefer RCV still. Proponents of approval voting say it helps weed out extreme candidates, but I find the most extreme candidates in the US have historically been a huge net win, so I’d prefer to give them a better shot at winning.

Conservative messaging wins propaganda battles because it’s simple. Democrats can’t use the same tactics, because they’ll be less effective no matter what. Preventing consolidation of media and monopolization of media would be more effective, since it’s a centrally coordinated effort. Or just preventing anybody from having enough money that they’d even have the ability to do that.

If we get elections in the future, it’s possible we’ll get Democrats in two of the branches, and if they get their shit together they can pack the courts. It’s not entirely hopeless, but it does ride on the Democrats being remotely competent as an organization for even a brief period of time.

Like for a reasonable, ethical individual, that should 100% be enough.

Conservatives have never been reasonable, ethical individuals. Slavery, Jim Crow, against women’s suffrage, against the equal rights amendment, against social security, against gay and trans rights, the list goes on forever. The country’s fight isn’t to change a conservative’s mind, it’s to get enough of the non-conservatives to engage, protest, and vote such that they overwhelm the small but galvanized conservative base.

When you win on those issues, those conservatives don’t change their mind. They continue to support slavery, or voter suppression, or the issues of their time, but eventually they die off. Then you have new fights with the new conservatives.

True, but that’s not new. George Floyd, Occupy Wall Street, Seattle WTO, and the entirety of the civil rights movement all were met with state violence. The more they crack down, the more necessary it is to protest it.

They won’t hear about the bad things, or they’ll be told it was the Democrats that did it, and they’ll be believe it. Convincing MAGA of reality is pointless while they’re still feeding from the trough of conservative shit. We’re better off protesting and being disruptive in combination with getting our shit together for next round, where hopefully we’ll have real primaries and get our first competent general election candidate since Obama.

Yeah, home advantage is less and less relevant every year. Once upon a time this would be news, but it’s a new era and he wasn’t even the presidential candidate.

Sort of, with the major distinction that you can just tell somebody water green tea is and they’ll know what green tea is. It’s a trivial fix. You can tell a Trump supporter that Harris is not a communist, and they won’t believe you for a million years, with all the facts in the world behind you.

Plain ignorance is part of it, but I really don’t think it’s the driving factor. You don’t vote for Trump because you lack some key knowledge, no matter how trivial that knowledge is. You vote for him because you’ve been inundated with conservative media for decades, and you have no grasp on reality anymore. You really believe Harris is going to hold you at gunpoint and replace your gas heaters with electric. You really believe she’s going to sell the United States to China for a hundred bucks. You might even believe there’s a war on men, a war on your religion, a war on everything that brings you meaning to your life. If I truly believed the things that conservative media was saying, I’d vote for him too.

It’s not just ignorance. It’s brainwashing.

They should have given people on the left some reason to be motivated to vote though, not just fear.

This is the massive key that I really don’t think the Democratic party understands. When people are scared, they vote conservative. There are literal studies that show fear is the driving force behind conservative voters. Democrats need to make them feel safe. That’s one of the reasons Obama was so successful - he ran on change and hope. Fear works for Republicans. It doesn’t work for Democrats. But they see fear working for Republicans, so they copy it.

I’m not convinced that’s the reason, but if the country is so misogynistic it’s impossible to elect a woman, we need to stop putting women up for election. That’s shitty, but it’s better than Republicans winning.

The Democrats have managed to field two candidates so unelectable they lost to Donald fucking Trump. That’s how. And we, the Democratic constituents, are failing to either take over or dismantle the Democratic party so we can get a halfway decent candidate in. We fucking suck.

Could just get this tattooed for how often it’s true.

Trump’s likely to win, so we might find out just how bad it gets. I’m betting it’s a literal completed genocide within his term - no Palestinian survivors in the now-official-Israeli-territories. I doubt that would change your mind though, since it’s easy to just say Harris would have done it too.