"Certainly the institutions and norms that we've been undermining for decades will prevent anything bad happening."

"America" is just another way Trump refers to himself in the third person.

In both New York and California, redistricting is handled by an independent redistricting commission. Although lawmakers in New York attempted to circumnavigate the commission to push through a map that benefited Democrats, courts ultimately struck down the gerrymander and the state adopted maps very similar to those drawn by Cervas himself, who was appointed to draw neutral maps for the state.

This is how the parties ended up with the current situation: few competitive districts with many of them concentrated in just two states, New York and California. While most good government advocates would say that eliminating gerrymandering is a positive development in these states, it could disadvantage Democrats because Republican-led states did not eliminate gerrymandering.

So basically: Cheating gives Republicans an advantage.

At this point, the rest of the GOP is hoping for this. They're sycophants who probably to a person don't believe in Trump or MAGA at all, but each secretly thinks they're the smart one who will win the game of thrones and be positioned to either manipulate Trump for their ends, take the crown, or both.

Vance, Noem, Haley, Murdoch... the list goes on, but they have all tested and repeatedly compromised every limit they have, thinking "ok, sure, he's a dementia-addled toddler, but this is how I win and I am the smartest person." They want to put the crown on their own head before Trump's body is cold.

Being un-self-reflective narcissists themselves, they don't realize that Trump is the one entirely using them, this is narcissistic sociopathic limit-pushing 101, they are not original or special freethinkers but exactly the opposite, and their compliance weakens them.

Anyone who is pro-Palestinian and is thinking about voting for Trump needs to be aware of the long-term consequences.

*Anyone who is pro-Palestine and is thinking about not voting or voting for anyone other than Harris, just to be clear.

The foundational lesson of the trolley problem is not about the effects of the two options, it's that not pulling the lever is a choice too.

Third-party voters, I know the psychological reaction to being told you "have to" vote for Harris causes you to dig in further, to be more contrarian. I know the feeling. So to be clear, you don't have to do anything. But we can't escape the ethical and moral effects of a choice not to mitigate harm. The dominos are lined up, pushing the one that says "Stein" or "No choice" will cause the one that says "Trump" to fall, it's as simple as that. Our moral culpability doesn't end at the ballot box, it ends at the end of rational foreseeability.

The right takes an oversimplified view of reality to avoid confronting complicated truths. Don't be the same by thinking if we ignore a difficult moral choice, it goes away. Trump is telling you what he plans to do. Stopping him is a moral imperative if you want to save as much life as possible.

I think he means that he didn't have the right clip.

I mean, I get it. Sure, it looks like he's a partisan hack who was trying to gaslight America for propaganda, but in his defense, he's never actually learned to be a real journalist. Also, he was receiving a Zypodean sophonic quantum update from the council of elders when this was happening, and was wearing the wrong size human shell. Also, he wasn't even supposed to be at work that day.

Unless you killed somebody, the statutes of limitations have run.

I still remember the "dumb" tech was AOL warez chatrooms where you interacted with a chat bot to get an email with lists of scene games, movies and other stuff in the traditional multi-RAR parts, and you'd individually request them a few at a time to be emailed. Then you'd move to IRC when you found out could be done faster, or BBSes.

I've probably forgotten most of how things worked.

I'm doing my part.

But goddamn, what is wrong with people.

That's absolutely it.

Vance grabbed the spotlight after his nomination, and that would have been a sin enough, but he was also extremely unlikeable and weird. He probably can't show his face in public without Trump personally approving it, and Trump no longer has the attention and energy to follow his own schedule, much less micromanage Vance - hence, no Vance.

I dunno...all the pirates sounded like they were having a stroke, and the cold hamberders weren't as good as I was expecting.

Hmm, it appears if we squeeze tighter, more blood will come out. Surely there is no natural limit to this principle.

I fully believe once this is all over (for better or worse), this will be analyzed as the largest documented case of a narcissistic abusive relationship in history.

There must be tens of millions of MAGA who are basically abused spouses, so psychologically dependant on Trump that nothing short of a brush with literal death, a personal sustained break and intervention, or focused multi-year deprogramming, will snap them out of it. But the scale of it makes it hard to understand.

To paraphrase Eddie Izzard, if you narcissistically abuse one person, maybe you go to prison. Ten people, you go to Texas, they hit you with a brick. Twenty people, they put you in a hospital and look at you through a small window. More, we can't deal with it. Thirty million people, we're almost like... Well done! How would you like to be president?

Idiocracy timeline:

2006: Wow, so hilarious that this could be life in 1,000 years.

2016: Wow, it's like we're living in Idiocracy.

2024: Please, can we go back to living in Idiocracy?

Joined 12 minutes ago and already posted three articles about third parties, two about Jill Stein.

I'm stumped...there was a "new" Meet app. Why didn't they just use the same "new" app as an update to the old app? Why make users download another new competing, confusing thing?

My understanding is that after the Supreme Court overturned a formalized forgiveness application process, Biden has been using a different method and forgiving specific debt in waves, and that method has neither been challenged nor overturned.

Yup, I think everyone outside of Fox News knew it was just a thinly-veiled Trump rally, but Fox's editing out comments from the audience members that they already were Trump supporters is the really damning part. Fox News knew it was supposed to look neutral and that is an admission that they were trying to hide it.

What are the solutions though? I don’t think this descent stops until the MAGA crowd gets most of what they want...

That's where we're headed, sure. What we need is someone to explain (a) the forces at play at some deeper level, and (b) tell us how we fix it.

That's why this is a disappointing article: The headline proposes an interesting idea - treat the Trump/MAGA mental illness as a disease - and then immediately forgets about it. We deal with diseases all the time, and even if mental disease is a challenge to diagnose and treat, it's a great framework! Studies may be able to show most MAGA disease vectors are people with X, Y and Z verifiable, objective psychological disorders or features. They may theorize that if we treat those disorders, we can save those people from this type of self-harm (which is what MAGA is at this point). That's a fantastic concept! Similar to the far too unexplored concept of treating this as a cult deprogramming. If we work the problem maybe we can come up with a solution that doesn't involve fascism winning, or us all killing each other in a civil war.

Instead, it's just "this is bad...really bad." Ok, thank you Mr. WHO epidemiologist.

(I know, I'm not helping either - but I'm not smart enough in epidemiology, or cult deprogramming. Comment posting is my therapy, nothing more.)

The earth's orbital speed around the sun is 67,000 miles per hour. So this is really gravity's fault.

I literally don’t understand how a grown adult writes all of that without immediately realizing how stupid it is and deleting it before posting on the Internet.

The depressing explanation is that the world is filled with children and teenagers in adult skinsuits, who have learned how to dress up their ideas in similar clothing.