I heard that the dude making jet fuel ended up immigrating to some place called the United States and started a real estate empire.

Thoughts and prayers for the members of the Abandon Harris campaign and Muslims for Trump.

They’re coming for you. You have to move, now!

It’s not that I don’t believe their actions are supposed to be justified - I don’t believe that they are justifiable. They can try to justify them all they want, but that doesn’t make them just, right, or reasonable when they support a man who has spent 8 years telling everybody exactly who he is and what he intends to do. It means that they either support him in his bigotry and intention to destroy American democracy, or at the very least, they find it acceptable enough to ignore it. The calls for state sanctioned violence against minorities aren’t a bridge too far for these people. Nor are his calls for terrorism against minorities from his supporters.

I have a saying: There are conservatives, and there are Republicans, and these are not the same thing. I have watched Republicans since 9/11. I saw how the attacks on Jews tripled in the 24 hours after the towers fell, how the attacks on black people doubled, and how Muslim parents asked their kids if they wanted to change their names to something more American so they wouldn’t get attacked at school. I have tried to reason with Republicans since I was 14 and had to hide my sexuality and pretend to fit in with cis straight white people. I saw how my former coworker voted for Trump the first time and became a staunch Democrat after seeing what he did. I watched as the racist jokes kids made on 4chan became their actual beliefs. I heard over and over again on live TV Republicans complain about how they were being censored when people reacted poorly to their publicly broadcasted hatred and bigotry.

Refusing to talk to people isn’t censorship or a “death row decision,” as you put it. It’s the conclusion to decades of attempting to reason with these people. It’s accepting the fact that they have shown that when the chips are down, they won’t have your back and may even turn you over to SS themselves. This is about survival now. Cutting the people who voted the fascists in out of your life is harm reduction. When the new administration is openly calling for the genocide of people like you, wagging your finger at the people who voted him in as you’re carted off to the camps isn’t going to cut it.

There are people who can be saved, the young people especially, but Trump is a cult, and one thing about dealing with cultists is that after a certain point, 99% of them will double down rather than accept that they’re wrong. Because to admit that they’re wrong is to admit that everything they’ve done up to this point - everything that they’ve believed - wasn’t justified.

So you can go ahead and wax poetic about the injustice of not talking to the men with rifles all you want. It sure as hell looks like self-defense from the other end of the gun here.

Now you’re just justifying the actions of abusers. Your speculated scenarios are as likely to be accurate as they are to be completely off the mark. Just like your assumption that the people cutting extremists out of their lives never put any effort into changing their beliefs.

You want people to make difficult decisions because they’re the right thing to do, but you don’t care to understand how or why these type of decisions are difficult to them. Because it harms you, it harms others. Well guess what, harm comes in different shapes and forms, often unnoticed and unchallenged.

The same exact words apply to your own argument. You might as well be saying, “Abusive parents deserve to be in their grandchildrens’ lives because it’s harmful to them to not be allowed to see their grandkids.”

Do you not understand the concept of compounding events or something?

This isn’t coming from nowhere and it’s not the first action people are taking.

This is coming from 10-20 years of dealing with these people. The drunk uncle going on about “the darkies” every Thanksgiving since Reagan was in office. The in-laws making comments about how they respect you as a person, they just can’t support your “gay lifestyle.” The mother or father asking why you can’t just be a feminine gay man instead of trans. People who have had years of their cognitive dissonance pointed out to them as they repeatedly vote for politicians who want to hurt their friends and family.

And now, as the thugs are donning their jackboots and people are saying, “Enough is enough, you’re a danger to my life and right to freedom,” you’re wondering why the abuser doesn’t deserve to be in their victims’ lives?

Socially ostracizing them is dealing with it. People aren’t sticking their heads in the sand here. They’re telling these people that their actions have consequences, and one of those consequences is exile. Cutting people out of your life is just one part of dealing with these people.

Yep. These are people who looked at the fascism and bigotry on open display and said, “This isn’t a bridge too far for me. I am perfectly okay with this.”

What confrontation? The confrontation was deciding to cut them out of their lives. The only other confrontation to deal with there may or may not involve a baseball bat.

The thing that really gets me about that quote is that of course your politics are a reflection of your morals. If you’re willing to vote for the bigots, it’s because, at best, you’re ignorant of what they’ve been saying that they’re going to do for a decade now, none of their bigotry is a bridge too far for you, or you actually agree with the bigotry. There are no other possibilities.

I think people’s values and actions are perfectly fine things to judge them on.

We’re not talking about favorite colors here. We’re talking about people actively enabling terrorists to attack minorities without fear of consequence and voting fascists who have openly expressed their intentions to destroy our democracy into power.

If you voted for Trump, then your “idea” is that there shouldn’t be any work or medical safety standards, no food safety laws, no environmental protection to keep companies from dumping waste wherever they want, no national parks, and no schools. And that’s just the government departments that are planned to be axed. We can talk about Operation Wetback 3 next, if you want.

A friend of mine had an alarm clock with big rubberized wheels on it that would drive around the room as it went off, so you had to get out of bed to turn it off.

That lasted a few weeks before he grabbed it and chucked it as hard as he could against a wall while still half asleep, then went back to sleep.

As somebody said in another comment, there were 19 candidates to choose from for mayor alone, and then 16-30 candidates for each district. That’s up to 50 candidates to research to fill out a ballot, in combination with the poor formatting of these ballots. You’ve got 30 names with 6 bubbles next to every single one of them that you have to follow across to fill out your 6 choices. I’ve seen better formatted scantron test sheets.

If this had been the size of a normal primary election or something - around 3-6 candidates or something - I think people would’ve found it pretty easy to understand.

A miserable pile of secrets and lies. But enough talk, have at you!

Interestingly, underground lines aren’t feasible in my hometown because of how close the water table is to the surface. Any trench deep enough to bury cables in would have to worry about flooding with groundwater or saltwater in some places.

The water table is so high that not only are there many places where basements would flood 100% of the year, but the majority of homes still have septic tanks instead of town sewage lines, and you can find houses where the lawn has been raised up with 3 or 4 feet of concrete to raise the septic tank to comply with modern regulations to avoid contaminating the groundwater supply.

IIRC, people have previously reported that Windows 11(?) switched their default browser back to Edge after installing an update.

I agree, the media has an absurd right-wing bias. You need simply look at the view ratios between the posts of right-wing and left-wing politicians to see how leftist messages are filtered out. And that’s not even getting into stuff like the company that bought up something like 500 local news channels after 9/11 with the sole intent of running more anti-Muslim broadcasts.

But even beyond that, when you look at the Democrats during the campaign, it’s all maintaining the status quo rhetoric or shifting away from what their base wants to court the nonexistent moderate Republican, not showing how they’ve moved towards what their voting base wants.

One thing to note about Bernie and AOC is that they’re not popular, but their policies are. During 2016, polls showed that even the majority of Republican voters supported Bernie’s policies - but only if you told them what the policy was before you told them that it was Bernie’s.

The Red Scare is still ongoing today, and having been labeled socialists and communists has made them untouchables and pariahs. And there has never been any Red Scare equivalent for the KKK or white supremacists, or for corporatism or anything, but there has been for socialism, unions, and anything else that puts power into the hands of the people.

You may find it an absurd opinion, but I’d say it’s exactly why the Democrats can’t help but grab defeat from the jaws of victory.

They’re simply bad at showing off the good that they do and they spend their campaign time courting some mythical moderate Republican voting base that wouldn’t vote for them anyway by moving further and further right, disenfranchising their voting base. Who they then blame for their loss. Leftists don’t like voting for the lesser of two evils and vote with their heart, while Republicans vote for the nominee, regardless of their positions or values. And the stats show that the Democrats failed to motivate people to get out and vote. Trump actually lost 2 million votes compared to 2020. If there’s still elections in 2028, we’ll see a resurgence in votes for the Democrat candidate after 4 more years of this monstrosity, but people have forgotten just how bad it really was.

The economy does better under Democratic presidents. That’s a verifiable fact. Biden added 500,000 jobs to the economy and brought inflation down, started student loan forgiveness programs, and all kinds of other things. But the Dems didn’t talk about that, and the media sure as hell wasn’t when going to when they could blast Trump’s absurd claims instead. And when we did hear about it, it was through the lens of the economy as a whole, not what you average American experiences day to day. Inflation is down, but prices aren’t, and wages haven’t kept up in decades. According to the IRS, 51% of Americans made $15k or less in 2021.

So when Trump says he’s gonna change things, and Harris looks like it’s gonna be more of the same (no matter how much hogwash Trump’s claims are and things are only going to get worse), it’s gonna do nothing to alleviate the grievances leftists have had with the Biden administration on all sorts of things like the genocide in Palestine. They’ve heard the “vote for me or it’s the end of democracy!” song and dance too many times while seemingly getting nothing out of it.