One of the few things I miss from Reddit were the extra small communities like the one for QC. I liked being able to chat with the 30 other people who read this comic daily.

🧅^- anion

Voting is about choosing good candidates well before it gets pared down to 2 options. It’s about choosing a good local government, choosing good representatives, choosing good senators. If the only thing you care about is the President, then you’ll never have a good pool of options from which the parties will pick a presidential candidate. They’re not on our side - it’s our job to force their hand with a deck stacked with good candidates. But only the people who pay attention to politics well before election year get to have a say in stuff like that.

Okay, and how do you plan to get them into the hearts and minds of around 50% of the population in the next 2 months, when the vast majority haven’t even heard of her? It’s not enough to have someone who could be a good president, you also need to get people to vote for them. If you want most of the population to vote for someone, they need to be aware of them as a viable option years beforehand.

I agree that the 2 choices are pawns of the rich, but even if every person who knew about Claudia voted for her, she wouldn’t even get enough votes for her to make the news, much less win. We’re talking about tens of millions of people voting in unison for an election win to happen in this country. At this stage in the game, there are only 2 candidates with that kind of draw power. If you want to focus on the 2028 election (assuming there is one, since there clearly won’t be if Trump wins) to get a 3rd viable candidate on that ballot, that’s a noble plan, but by now this election’s potential winners are already down to 2.

Voting isn’t about closing your eyes and saying “I want someone good to win!” It’s about assessing which people might actually win, and voting for the one that best aligns with your views, however loosely. It’s about strategy. If you want to change that, you need to build national presence in the name of your preferred candidate, and you need to start years ahead of the elections. Big changes don’t happen at the ballot, they happen during the campaigning stage and beforehand. If your candidate isn’t on the news every day leading up to the election, most voters won’t even know they’re an option.

I realized that later, yeah. That’s not something that a kid would usually realize is bad on their own, though; if it’s something you and everyone you know has always done, most people wouldn’t think to question it.

For me it was when I was around 8 or 9 and met someone from Kenya. They could speak perfect English, wore normal clothes, and talked about having electricity. I’d literally never been told that those things existed in Africa - every reference to that continent only talked about tribes and jungles, save for Egypt which only talked about ruins and deserts. I asked around and found that most of the rest of the world has the same stuff we have, and most countries have a functioning government. I was so confused - why were we the country of freedom when everyone else has the same thing?

At the time I just assumed that there was something I was missing, or maybe the rest of the world just caught up to our idea, but eventually I came to the conclusion that they tell us we’re the country of freedom - and keep our studies of other countries to a minimum when we’re young - so that we can internalize the rhetoric that our country is the best before we find out that most other countries about the same, and often better in certain ways.

Small price to pay, imo. When my job was forcing everyone back into the office in 2021 I just picked out one of the headhunters who contacted me on linkedin, got an offer for a remote position with better pay, and brought it to my employer to get a raise and the go-ahead to keep working remotely. I’ll suffer the occasional spam email for the knowledge that I have options for another job lined up pretty much whenever.

People playing tag 💪

I was never full-on incel, but I was definitely headed down that path. I was a late-20’s fat guy with severe acne all over my upper body, and I’d obviously never had a girlfriend. I looked ahead in life and just saw it going further and further downhill. I tried dieting, working out, etc, but none of my attempts at making a change ever lasted.

One day I saw a facebook post that one of my old highschool classmates had gotten married. The guy looked a lot like me, and at first I was mad - I had that classic incel thought of “why is he successful and not me?” But after sitting in that dark place for awhile, I realized that the answer to that question is that I can be successful! I realized that I’d never tried to put myself out there because I always viewed myself as not being worthy - I needed to be fitter, more attractive, better at talking to people, etc - but did I really? I wanted to find out, so I made an online dating account, cleaned myself up, got a friend to take some nice pictures of me doing things I enjoyed, and put myself out there.

I made a goal for myself to never start a conversation with “Hey” or something similar - I went through every profile I found and picked something specific to talk about. It took a while, and I missed a lot of opportunities by being awkward, but eventually I got good enough at holding a conversation to secure a few dates, and in only a few months of that, I found the woman who is now my wife!

I’m still fat, but having someone to look good for was at least enough for me to shower more regularly, which cleared up a lot of my acne. I’m still pretty awkward, but so is my wife, and we both find it endearing. Life’s not perfect - there are still issues - but I’m no longer looking ahead at my life and seeing only downhill trajectory; I have a sense of optimism I didn’t have before, and it mostly came from me accepting myself. I’m not sure if other incels are the same as I was - not realizing that the one they actually hate is themselves - but I hope that if they are, they eventually come to the same realization that I did: that they are worthy.

I lived in Minneapolis during the protests, and someone did light up a gas station just a block from my house, but I wasn’t concerned - I’d already prepared to lose everything when I joined the protests. Fighting back against the government is going to take sacrifices, both from willing and unwilling participants; if we’re too afraid of stepping on people’s toes, then those in power will just use that angle to quash any up-and-coming resistances.

If protests are something people can just ignore until they’re over, then that’s what they’ll do - they need to be polarizing in order to actually get people to make a change. The enemy of positive change isn’t always negative change - it’s often an apathetic population who would rather not put forth the effort to make any change at all. If people are pressured to take a side by a sufficiently disruptive protest, they’ll usually join their fellow downtrodden, but you need to force them to make that decision.

People are scared that if you acknowledge the fact that Biden is concerning as a presidential candidate in any way, people will be less likely to vote for him; the sad state of the matter is that Biden is the only candidate who has a chance to beat Trump at this late of a stage in the game. The reasoning that we need to avoid criticizing him as a result of that is bullshit though, since if you’re closing your eyes and voting for your default color, then such discussion won’t affect to your vote, and if you’re actually paying attention to the state of our upcoming election, then you’ll already be well aware that being against Trump forces you to vote Biden, so your vote is locked in, regardless of how depressing it is. Nobody’s still hemming and hawing at this point, and even if some are, some random meme on Lemmy isn’t going to be the thing that finally gets them to make up their mind.

There’s no reason we can’t acknowledge the fact that, while being better than Donald Trump should win Biden the presidential election, it’s not an accomplishment, and in a vacuum he’s a terrible candidate. In fact, we specifically need to point out that we knew this scenario was coming for the past 4 years, and have organized no major uprisings, or even major educational movements to try to get people to force out a different Democratic candidate in the primaries; we’ve sat on our asses ever since the last election, and there’s no reason to think we won’t do the same going into the next election unless we start forcing a change in the DNC right now.

These “both sides” discussions aren’t about whether or not to choose to vote for Biden, they’re about getting people to notice the fact that we vote for the “lesser evil” every 4 years, saying that the time to make a change is after we’re solidified our candidate’s victory, but then once we’ve done that we do nothing until we’re in the same “lesser evil” situation again 4 years later. If we want to ever have a situation where we’re voting for a president we’d actually like, we need to start planning out how to force that to happen now, because even 4 whole years isn’t a very long time frame to for us to push such a large change.

I can understand some people are scared that Trump is going to win because too many people chose to vote 3rd party, or choose not to vote, but everyone who’s paying attention enough to be swayed by political discussion is already aware that we specifically need to vote for Biden in order for Trump to lose, so at this point the fanatical drive to quash any criticism of him as a presidential candidate seems nearly tailor-made to sow even more apathy among the voting population, making them feel not only forced into voting for Biden, but forced into liking it as well. In the end I think the efforts to prevent discussion about how neither candidate is an objectively good candidate is going to ultimately cause fewer people to vote at all, since they’ll feel as though they can’t even air out their grievances with the candidate they’d already begrudgingly chosen to vote for.

My wife and I usually plan big vacations about a year in advance so that we can follow flight prices and whatnot to get a good deal. We also book a few days at a cabin for our anniversary every year, so we just book the next year’s reservation while we’re there, since reservations can fill up even several months in advance.

Only planning a week in advance seems stressful to me - we planned a last-minute (for us) road trip vacation earlier this month for the long 4th of July weekend, and it was tough to find cheap places to stay that weren’t super grungy.

And he’s got 38 degrees in fucking.

I didn’t really see people mentioning that “would” can still be used past-tense outside of “would have,” though it’s not in the same way - you use it when talking about something that happened multiple times in the past. For example, “When I was a kid my friends and I would go to the pool every Saturday,” which means that, as children, my friends and I did visit the pool every Saturday.

Why the long face?

Huh, that’s interesting. Though, how do you pick MLK specifically out of a recording of an orgy, let alone definitively enough for it to be damning to his reputation?

But they were writing the letter under the guise of just being some guy. I’d believe the government could make the public think I’m some sexual deviant, but not a random person writing a letter to me.

Is there something I’m missing, or is this letter nothing more than an old-timey version of modern internet comments and conservative “LGBTQ+ people are somehow pedophiles!” claims that are as outlandish as they are unfounded? Like, how is claiming a reverend has secret massive orgies he’s clearly not having going to get him to kill himself? He probably just read this, said “Well that’s a load of nonsense.” and threw it away without another thought.

I mean, the bleak thing is that the world works through people making deals with murderers to not be murdered, instead allowing other people to be murdered. I don’t give a shit about her gender, I just want a story about a good person winning in spite of corruption, not a bad person winning because of it.

As bleak as it is, given the high amount of other political opponents that died, the fact that she didn’t is likely an indication of how nice she plays with the people doing the murdering. I’m hopeful that she’s just good at dodging assassins, though!