People always forget about the lurkers. Most people with less-informed, more impressionable views on a given topic aren’t posting and debating, they’re reading and learning (despite the unfortunate exceptions). Seeing some wacko extremist nonsense or voter suppression tactic go unchallenged by a more reasonable argument may be enough to sway a not-yet-fanatic in the wrong direction.

Here’s a rather informal interview with her from just last year.

Not surprising. Musk has referred to the entirety of Bellingcat as “a psyop” before.

Well said.

I get Jon Stewart’s position and agree with nearly all of his criticisms, but I think the biggest thing he’s not acknowledging in his “why can France and the UK do this but we can’t?” argument is that this would absolutely not be confined to just the Democratic Party. Literally every step of the process would be decried as election fraud, cheating, “the steal of the century” etc. by republicans. If they got pissed enough to attempt an insurrection in 2020 when there was absolutely no credible evidence of fraud, just think where things will go if there’s this whole slew of unprecedented last-minute decisions that are nearly impossible to reconcile with every individual states’ laws. I’m not saying we have to bow to repubs demands, but the more excuses they have to claim anything isn’t above board, the greater the risk that the “stolen election” narrative gains traction beyond the far right.

We’ve spent the last 4 years witnessing how slowly our legal system works on huge matters like this. By the time the dust settles on all of the legal challenges, the resulting chaos will have already rendered the decisions nearly irrelevant.

Shame to see Colin Allred voted yea. He’s the only hope we have to unseat Ted Cruz this year.

Turns out it’s just a canoe rental place that’s named “Laundromat Bingo Tanning Notary.”

In my limited understanding of California property taxes, I believe property values are only reassessed on the sale of the property, so if he was living in a house deeded to him by his parents, he might have been paying taxes on a decades-old appraisal. So even if they bought his exact house back for him, he’d still be stuck with significantly higher taxes, which he’d have to fight to be compensated for as well.

It’s like he watched Beto O’Rourke commit political suicide over guns and thought “I bet I can do that on a national scale.”

How do you think smoking went from something nearly everybody did to being taboo? Maybe the labels don’t do anything for the last 10% of the population who still smoke today, despite the taboo, but those labels played a big role in reinforcing public awareness of the health effects of smoking.

Pretty low, actually. Viking_Hippie is actually a pretty legit Lemmy contributor, despite having some utter garbage takes on American politics and making occasionally disingenuous arguments for them, as above. Pretty sure he’s Danish though, not Russian.

And Obama broke the legal Occupy Wall Street protests and killed civilians in Yemen with drone strikes. So he takes the title instead? “Most progressive” is a comparative qualification, and he does not need to BE a progressive to take the title.

While I agree that the strike shouldn’t have been broken and that the rail workers should have the right to stop as much work as they control in order to make their demands heard, Biden also became the first president to walk a picket line during that strike and ultimately got the rail workers a deal that their unions all were reportedly happy with. He may not be everything you want, but he IS the most pro-union president of my lifetime. Again, not a high bar to clear. Recognize progress when it happens, even if it’s not your dream come true.

Furthermore, with all the terrifying examples of actual rising fascism that surround us right now, don’t muddy the waters with BS like that. It just makes you look like a troll.

Reagan, HW Bush, Clinton, W Bush, Obama, Trump. Take your pick.

“Most progressive” is not a high bar to clear. It’s a reasonably fair claim that Biden has been more progressive than Obama, and definitely isn’t outrageous enough to justify ranting about crack smoking and traumatic brain damage.

As the holder of roughly $45 worth of Tesla stock, I voted against his pay package and every other shady, bullshit proposal on the ballot. My vote counted for almost nothing and I’d probably be considered an “activist shareholder” anyway, but it was worth the money I’ve lost to get to click that button anyway.

Not that it changes your point about representation in this case, but I’m pretty sure that photo is at least 20 years old. This is the current, equally diverse Oklahoma Supreme Court:

The more solid red states there are, the easier it is for them to enact their bullshit at a federal level. Then it’s your problem, too.

Texas has been trending bluer in the last decade and the fact that these laws also get blue voters to leave is not by accident.

Only if you ignore that there’s also a segment of Democratic voters who would reconsider support for Biden if he took a stance that they perceived as anti-Israel. Democrats are a coalition party of compromises between factions who have to work together to find as much common ground as possible in order to have any political relevance in a first-past-the-post system. Biden has to walk whatever tightrope loses the fewest votes, and he seems to think that not doing a 180 on decades of US foreign policy is the best way to do that.

Are you in the US? I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from being an organ donor, it’s obviously a great necessity and saves thousands of lives, but I’m always amazed that the bottomless skepticism of our for-profit healthcare system dries up on certain topics.

We all love to moan about greedy health insurance companies and hospital administrations putting profit above the actual health of patients and outcomes of procedures, so why is it taken for granted that, when faced with a decision to go to extraordinary lengths to save a badly injured, uninsured person, or get expensive organs for 3 or 4 insured people at the top of the recipient list, that the responsible parties will make the right decision? Hell, even without a profit motive, that can be a difficult decision that can be influenced by personal beliefs and biases.

I certainly don’t know enough about exactly how these decisions are made to have a strong opinion, but I don’t think it’s fair to characterize potentially warranted skepticism as moronic.