Coming from someone who always votes left down the ticket because I live in a republican state hell hole:

There’s a reason we want democrats in charge. They aren’t perfect, but my state had a democrat governor (somehow) for 8 years until this year. The very first thing the supermajority red government did was axe the ethics board. The next thing they did was pass laws banning books that acknowledged gay culture at all and a unilateral bathroom bill with felony penalties.

The “both sides are the different flavors of fascism” take only works when you’re completely blind to what republicans are actually out there doing.

1. “Handset” is obfuscating legalese to refer to a cell phone in a way intending to distance the meaning of the word from the thing that the old and technologically illiterate people who rule on this use every day.

2. I’m no fan of their strategy, but cell phone providers have claimed for a long time that filling your phone with unremovable bloatware causes the overall price to decrease. Their argument is most likely that they will have to charge more once the propagators of that bloatware realize that they can no longer force it on people and wedge that as a reason to pay less to carriers.

3. The reality is that cell phones are priced based on what people will buy anyway and carriers pocket as much of the money as they can that third parties pay them for their bloatware. Ultimately because of that this ruling hurts their bottom line, but the above reasoning gives plausible deniability in the face of the law as it is interpreted by old technologically illiterate lawmakers

I think it’s not necessarily a contradiction to hold your pro-choice and anti-death penalty stance, but it’s still a contradiction to hold the pro-life and pro-death penalty stance if your reasoning behind the pro-life stance is that all life is sacred.

I agree that a person’s body autonomy and the state’s power to execute citizens should not overlap, but I still think that giving the “all life is sacred” line to justify pro-life and then being pro-death penalty “because some people deserve to die” amounts to hypocrisy.

Here’s the thing, a weak Democrat candidate meant the GOP could ride the curtail of a natural red wave born from voter dissatisfaction into another Trump presidency. They didn’t have to try faced with Biden so they didn’t have as many opportunities to show their incompetence.

Now democrats have rallied and the writing is on the wall that Trump isn’t good enough just by the virtue of being the republican choice. He actually has to try, which he hasn’t done since 2016, and he’s pretty bad at trying.

The word you’re looking for is “euphemism”. The media always does this garbage to make the party of traitors seen like they have a point

It’s the natural conclusion of the strategy republicans set into motion to manipulate their base.

It started just after Watergate. Nixon was facing massive calls for justice from both sides. Republican think tanks realized that their base of conservatives consumed news from all sources that informed their mostly unbiased decision to hold their guy accountable. So those republican think tanks devised a plan to create a conservative news outlet that explicitly demonized other news so that the conservative base would never turn on one of their own again. That strategy was realized in the 90’s with the creation of Fox News.

Since then, conservative media has been slowly transforming politics from the perspective of the average conservative into a team sport, where the main motivation isn’t “who runs the country better” but rather “my team is better than yours”.

It wasn’t so pervasive 20 years ago, but conservative media has found themselves with a base that now only responds to the outrage they’ve been conditioning them with, and that has created the raging confrontational assholes you see today.

Being a conservative doesn’t mean what it used to. And that’s because the Republican leadership robbed conservatives of that in order to maintain control of their base.

These kinds of people, the ones who warp and twist society for their own gain, will always be around in some form or another. So will the people they fool into ushering in their brand of fascism.

I’ll grant you that the “anti-woke” crowd is particularly brain dead though

You’d think it would be a win, but honestly Trump is a clown. More “centrists” who detest Trump might rally around someone like DeSantis, that’s what I’m afraid of.

I know posting ben garrison is cheating, but this was years ago. They’d definitely latch on to the name as a tool to degrade him.

Hell, they’ve been trying to make the word “kamala” derogatory. Sorry Pete, even though you’d be as good a candidate as any, you’ve got butt in your name

I like the “formally” vs “formerly” suggesting Elon is never going to get away from Twitter in favor of X

Hey man, nice tittles

All fair points.

Sinema and Manchin could sit it out

Big problem. They are Republicans in Democrat clothes. They will, as they always do, find a reason to vote against

The other side of that coin is that if there is no demand for change, no one will be pressured to work out the logistics required. All change starts with people demanding a solution.

We need a solution right now more than we need a perfect plan of execution. The solution is being called for, to expand the Supreme Court to balance the blatant corruption pouring from the conservative justices. That’s the first step

Republicans’ stated goal is to change the entire structure and political system in America and the 6-3 ideologically Christian scotus has already begun ignoring the constitution.

This is the very definition of a constitutional and democratic crisis. If democrats don’t do something as the only other party with any power, republicans will make sure they no longer have the opportunity the first chance they get.

Now is really not the time for “both sides” logic to prevent democrats from acting.

Wow, I don’t think I’ve seen an edgier comment on the whole of lemmy.

You sound like you’ve got a lot to lose.

Telling me I’d like to watch it all burn, and then calling me a political pacifist in the next breath?

Yeah. You’re actively expressing both of those views at the same time by thinking yourself higher than the society you live in.

Anyway, the debt isn’t a tangible thing like you seem to think. And you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about, and I won’t take on the responsibility of teaching you how to use a search engine, so I guess this is where the edgy comment chain ends.

Have fun in your cabin in the woods, brother. The rest of us understand what it means to live in a functional society. It’s not worth engaging any further with someone as far gone as you are ✌️

Aiding the less fortunate in society benefits everyone, same as maintaining roads or building libraries.

For decades republicans have artificially raised the bar for that aid and lowered the aid actually received, for no reason than to appeal to the crowd that thinks taxation is theft but uses modern public amenities anyway.

The rampant cutting of those benefits and handing the rights over to corporations is one of the major reasons we have a nationwide health care crisis, just for one example of how those cuts end up hurting everyone.

Being self righteous about doing nothing is worse.

Despite your own brand of defeatism in insisting the outcome is the same no matter what, one side actually is better. Even if the metric of “better” pales on the grand scheme of what we deserve or should be doing.

I’m not trying to project self-righteousness by recognizing that there are only two real choices. I’m asserting that advocating non-action or pointless action is such a tired trope that what you’re doing is circlejerking for dopamine instead of applying what little influence you have as an individual to work toward the avoiding the actual worst outcome.

When the American populace as a whole is brainwashed into believing the only choices are red and blue, you have to accept that whining about it and voting green (or not voting) is going to accomplish nothing.

So make your colorful allegory and feel good about yourself on the internet. In the end, you are accomplishing less than the people you look down on who recognize the shitty reality of our situation.

I’m a little shakey on the details but I think it has more to do with the extra bone mass in relation to the way the jaw functions. It acts more like a shock absorbing bumper than a lever.

Other animals that get punched there tend to take that blow more to the throat, which is a bit more problatic