You know, Squid. You’re right. This whole time I’ve been venting because I feel like we’ve been completely outplayed by astroturfing foreign propagandists and bots, and it feels like I’m the only one who realizes it. This stuff has real, serious consequences for real people–but why would I expect a bunch of NEETs and children to get that?

Everybody who swallowed it still genuinely thinks they won something, so I guess it’s not fair to lash out. I don’t really want to get anyone on my side because my side doesn’t exist here anymore.

I have to thank you for finally getting me off the platform. It’s just not worth it.

I’m sure this’ll all work out the way you want.

Didn’t bother to read the multi-paragraph follow-up? Don’t worry about it. I’ve had my fill.

The few words of hyperbole is what you took away? I expected better, but I guess that’s on me.

Squid, I appreciate your contributions to putting content on the platform, honestly, but I couldn’t be any less interested in that take. My history speaks for itself, and anybody can read it who cares to. Everybody must vote. I don’t think I could be any clearer about that. I was a staunch advocate for Biden, and I’ll be a staunch advocate for Harris, Newsom, Whitmer, or anyone else who carries the Democratic party forward.

But every single one of them polls down from Biden. To the extent any of the whining on social media since the debate hasn’t been astroturfed, advocacy for Biden to drop out resulted in this news, and it means that the party has now voluntarily given up the single biggest proven advantage a candidate historically has in a presidential election: being the sitting president.

I’m encouraging people to vote, but you know as well as I do that people who were going to vote anything-blue were going to vote for Biden no matter what anybody said on almost-reddit. Harris has to move the needle further than that, and that means that all the armchair it’ll-be-better-if-he-drops-out analysts now need to step the fuck up if they want this news to mean anything other than “The DNC just handed Trump 2024.”

Everybody knows that the kids screaming “oh if the candidate were just younger, the Dems would have it in a landslide” were full of shit, and now we’re about to see just how big a deficit we’re actually running. I’d love to be wrong! I’d be delighted, ecstatic, beside myself to discover that next weeks polls put all these convention front-runners up 10 points on Trump. But I’ve studied this stuff, and it doesn’t take a veteran pollster to realize it doesn’t work that way. Actual campaigning has to happen.

If you cared enough to want Biden out, but not quite enough to want Harris to win, then you were going to hold your nose in the ballot box either way and it doesn’t fucking matter: Trump would still win. That’s not discouraging. That’s statistics.

Stomach isn’t enough. If you’re not actively campaigning and donating for her–or whomever the candidate is–then you may as well have been a Republican.

EDIT: Nevermind. Clearly the hivemind wants to stay in our armchairs. Who can blame us, right? We’ll continue this conversation in November. I hope it’s not I-told-you-so.

Well congratulations “liberals”, bots, propagandists, defeatists. You win. If Trump had beaten Biden, it would have been Biden’s fault, along with the party. Now the party gets to share the blame with you. You lot gambled this for the rest of us. Let’s hope your bet pays off. Open your wallets and hit the pavement. If you’re a real person and you pitched a fit so this would happen, you got what you wanted. Act like it. Your lobbying won you an obligation to campaign. If you were on social media begging for Biden to quit, now you owe the time you spent here to Harris’s campaign (or whomever the fuck they nominate).

You bought it. You own it.

My brother in Christ, I have worked in landlord-tenant on and off for decades, and I’ve been on both sides of many, many evictions. If you think courts always exercise their discretion fairly and equitably, I have a bridge to sell you.

Bonds are paid into court. They don’t go directly into the landlord’s pocket. Also nobody gets evicted without notice (and understand that notice is a term of art in this context–plenty of people get evicted without knowing about it or being actually made aware, but every state has a requirement that you have to do one of a limited number of things in order to provide notice to a tenant of an eviction).

This is a shitty law, but please don’t make stuff up or draw assumptions to pretend it’s worse than it actually is.

The problem this state (via the landlords’ lobbying for this change) is trying to fix is the scenario in which an evicted tenant gets a sympathetic judge in a jurisdiction with a long docket backlog and basically gets to squat in the property rent-free for however long they can stretch out the litigation. If you’re just now becoming familiar with the value of litigants dragging out litigation, well, welcome to 2024.

I know social media despises landlords (and there’s very good reason to revile institutional real estate hoarders), but there are good public policy reasons to not want people squatting in properties rent-free, one of which is that if the landlord can’t get a non-paying tenant off the property through legal means, they will pursue non-legal means instead. There are much better ways to accomplish this than the way TN has here, but shotgun evictions are something we’d really like to avoid.

Holy shit, actual analysis from a thinktank! And here I was so used to thinly veiled lobbying, propaganda pieces, and bribery that I had begun to think the American research institute was dead.

On the actual substance: if this is true, it should be good politically, but I suspect that recovery from the lingering economic trauma arising from inflation (real or imagined) will lag even further. People feel like prices are still rising too fast, whether they actually are or not, and the aforementioned propaganda engine doesn’t help.

No matter our politics, hopefully we can all agree with JB about not wanting to get shot by reactionary Christofascist radicals. I assume Black and Gass’s politics are pretty well aligned with each other, and Gass didn’t say anything a lot of people aren’t also feeling. But you can’t say that shit on stage in front of thousands of amped up fans. --not because it’s wrong to say or because it’s not politically correct or even because it’s controversial. You can’t say that shit because some of the people in the audience are unhinged and have already been radicalized by the Right.

Take a stand for the First Amendment, and take a stand against censorship, sure–but while you’re standing, be prepared to duck.

I don’t blame any public figure for not wanting to expose themselves to an outsized risk of violence. That risk is largely Trump’s fault, but notice how I’m blaming him from somewhere other than an elevated, well lit platform in front of a room full of strangers on drugs.

Well, thief! I smell you and I feel your air. I hear your breath. Come along! Help yourself again, there is plenty and to spare!

That’s a very large assumption. The simplest explanation is that we feel like we have free will because we do. Quantum mechanics suggests some major challenges to determinism, and the best arguments to restore it require a very unsatisfying amount of magical thinking.

Me too.

I’ll also vote if he’s not.

Blue all the way down the ticket. Fuck the agitprop. Save the Republic.

This headline is a disaster. The court found that the exceptions–things you’re allowed to do with your phone while driving–are affirmative defenses. That is, if the prosecutor already made a prima facie case that the defendant was breaking the device use law, then the burden shifts to the defendant to prove one of the exceptions applies.

It’s a much better rule than one that would, implicitly or worse, give the cops carte blanche access to your phone.

Freight rail is still alive in my area–and that means commuter rail could be. But like a lot of places, the public has been duped into voting against their own interests. I don’t want to hijack the thread, but it’s an issue that–if you care about it, you should be voting for Amtrak Joe. Public transportation needs to be part of the nation’s climate agenda, and the Criminal Cheetoh wants to sacrifice us all on the altar of petrol.

The problem is that the infrastructure doesn’t exist, and introducing it is cost-prohibitive for large parts of the US. I would love to be able to take a train from my small town to the nearest metro area 30 miles away and then take a tube to a block away from my destination–but that’s just not going to happen in my lifetime, because the city can’t afford to install a subway, and the auto lobby won the war against commuter rail before I was born.

Could it be better? Sure. Might it become better? Maybe, but probably not in my lifetime.

In the meantime, people are de facto dependent on cars. Destroying infrastructure necessary to support the reality of how people must, through no fault of their own, travel punishes the traveling public without addressing the actual problem.

If we’re going to transition to better transit infrastructure, we first have to build the better infrastructure–and pay for it by eliminating unseating political opposition. Only then can we dismantle these kinds of monstrosities without disenfranchising the people who depend on them.

Good for them. At least somebody did.

Hi, comrade! I love Joe Biden and I hate genocide, so there.

Everywhere the GOP has a lock on state government, the looting inevitably follows. Vouchers literally siphon state taxes and pass them to the hands of rich conservatives and their churches who serve only rich, white, privileged children. By design, vouchers work to entrench the upper class; further impoverish poor and minority citizens; and increase wealth disparity, illiteracy, and crime.

We all called it. Didn’t matter. Time to move to the next box.