an expectation of privacy even in public spaces

Anyone with this expectation in a post-Patriot Act world has not been paying attention.

In 2016 I thought that social democracy could reform the neoliberalism of the past 40 years and put us back on a new deal pathway, but the more I watch “left-wing” parties capitulate to ring-wing parties, the less hope I have that capitalism can be saved. America needs a real opposition party immediately.

He prefers pictures.

Just the latest social group that’s still broadly acceptable to shit on.

There’s not a ton of global census data out there, but in Canada trans and non-binary people make up 0.33% of the population. Which means there’s a lot of people who don’t know anyone who is trans or non-binary. Unfortunately there’s also a lot of people who are unwilling to emphasize, or even sympathize, for those they feel are different or strange to them. It take time and effort to listen to others’ stories and to gain appreciation for their perspective, and it’s an effort many people are uncomfortable making if it feels they are deviating too far from society’s norm. What you’re observing is those in power taking advantage of the same human weakness that’s been used forever to discriminate on whoever the current permissible outgroup to hate is.

How many times have you heard, “I don’t care about anyone being/doing Y, but…”, and then proceed to say some sort of transphobic, homophobic, racist, or sexist shit? When I grew up it was the G in LGBT. When my parents grew up it was African Americans. Women only got the right to vote a century ago, you better believe some of our great granduncles had some shit to say that would make today’s uncles look like saints.

That fucking watermark…

Doctors hate it! Cure your depression with this one simple trick! (may cause suicide in some cases)

Not until after they purge the “woke” and “DEI” generals first and install their loyalists. Then the executive and military can operate as one.

Look, Trump won an overwhelming 49.9% of the popular vote to Harris’s meager 48.4%, of the 63.9% of eligible voters who turned out. We need to acknowledge the massive landslide victory this was, the clear mandate it provides Trump, and forfeit all gains made for equality and inclusion made over the last 50 years.

/s

Look, Trump won an overwhelming 49.9% of the popular vote to Harris’s meager 48.4%, of the 63.9% of eligible voters who turned out. We need to acknowledge the massive landslide victory this was, the clear mandate it provides Trump, and forfeit all gains made for equality and inclusion made over the last 50 years.

/s

The etymology section of your link suggests different:

The demographer, anthropologist, and historian Alfred Sauvy, in an article published in the French magazine L’Observateur, August 14, 1952, coined the term third world (tiers monde), referring to countries that were playing a small role in international trade and business. His usage was a reference to the Third Estate, the commoners of France who, before and during the French Revolution, opposed the clergy and nobles, who composed the First Estate and Second Estate, respectively (hence the use of the older form tiers rather than the modern troisième for “third”). Sauvy wrote, “This third world ignored, exploited, despised like the third estate also wants to be something.”

But you’re right in that the term began to be used far more widely during the Cold War for political alignment.

The legacy of the Roberts court will its spiral into institutionalized corruption. For a man who claims to hold the legitimacy of the court to be paramount, his resistance to any sort of oversight of the court’s ethical standards will be how he is remembered. You can’t restore faith in institutions by grandstanding against your accusers in a fruitless effort to deflect the valid criticisms of your colleagues.

I mean he might have

No. “We finally beat Medicaid” Biden would have lost, bigly.

If anything though Biden should have dropped out sooner or not ran at all

Yes, 100% this. He should have been the transitional president he signaled he’d be, before being elected in 2020.

More and more I feel we are seeing the pendulum swing. Normally we see 5-10 year cycles of push and pull along the political spectrum, but I’m becoming increasingly convinced we’re in a century long cycle too.

We no longer have those with living memory of the gilded age, losing those who remember the saving grace that was the New Deal, and fewer and fewer left who were sent to war to fight fascism. Meanwhile the wealth gap is worsening in developed nations across the world, democratic republics are electing more far right parties and authoritarian leaders with populist messages, and the incoming administration is floating the idea of scrapping the FDIC and deregulating anything else on his favorite billionaire’s wishlist.

Seems like we’re right on track for a repeat of the 1930s.

Not that surprising given how big our aging boomer demographic is. This was my father two years ago who had fought a year long battle with cancer before deciding to go with MAID. He was already hospitalized in palliative care and it may have only saved him a day or two more of suffering. In fact after how rough his final night was, I wish he had been able to let go a day earlier.

According to AP VoteCast (who surveyed 110k voters), the top issue for voters was the economy, with 6 of 10 considering the economy to be not so good or poor, two-thirds were very concerned about the cost of food and groceries, 7 of 10 thinking the country is on the wrong track, and 8 of 10 looking for substantial change to how the country is run.

This is why the Democrat messaging about the inflation rate coming under control (true) or stronger post-pandemic recovery than most other comparable nations (also true) fell flat for most voters. If someone’s real wages didn’t match the price increases to food, rent, and everything else over the last four years, then how good the GDP is doesn’t really matter to them.

Campaigning on “things will largely be the same”, or saying you wouldn’t have done anything differently over the last four years, is always going to be a real uphill battle against an overwhelming desire for significant change.

After hearing Democrats talk about how they were “too woke” on transgender issues, I don’t blame anyone for feeling unwelcome.

My problem with that is, the only time I heard Harris say trans was when she was talking about prosecuting transnational gangs. Democrats didn’t lose for being too woke, they lost cause they don’t know how to talk about the economy to blue collar workers.

But with this Congress, this President, and this Supreme Court, including any additional conservatives judges Trump adds, no one in the crosshairs of Project 2025 should feel comfortable right now.

the government in Ottawa has warned it won’t allow medicines to be exported if Canadians could experience shortages as a result.

The Canadian government looking out for Canadians. Maybe the American government should look closer at why drug prices are lower in Canada and rather than just try to buy Canadian? We’ve all got aging populations, this problem is only going to get worse, and any change won’t be implemented overnight. Would have been a great campaign issue to run on, rather than small business tax cuts and building a border wall.

Was it this one, from 2017?

There were certainly votes lost in Michigan over Gaza, but even if every single Jill Stein vote was a protest vote (they weren’t), it wouldn’t have been enough for Harris to carry the state.

The tougher thing to parse is the reason why so many voters seemingly stayed home this cycle. I think there is a very reasonable argument that not enough people were excited about her message, even the base.

It’s a lot easier for door knockers, phone bankers, and everyday democrats to talk proudly about their candidate if they can rattle off a list of great things their candidate will do. It’s even easier if those great things hit people where they’re hurting the hardest or is the moral thing to do (healthcare for the uninsured, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.). It’s a lot tougher to get low propensity voters to show up on the harm reduction argument alone, especially if you brush past where they’re hurting or concede too much ground on your moral positions.

The biggest issue for most voters appears to have been inflation and the economy, and while democrats were technically correct to say the rate of inflation has come down and American economic indicators outperformed most other countries in this post-pandemic period, that’s all pretty meaningless to someone whose real wage growth didn’t keep up with inflation these past few years. The “opportunity economy” and targeted small business tax cuts is a much tougher sell to someone working two+ jobs to get by.

The other issue that dominated the media was immigration. Democrats forfeited their moral position when they offered the republican wishlist border bill earlier this year. The argument that republicans weren’t serious on the border because they didn’t support the bill fell flat, and instead democrats were (rightly) criticized for abandoning their framing of the issue as a choice between deportation and amnesty, and their previous claims the border wall was racist.

All of that to say, democrats failed to connect with their own base on the issues that make them the party’s best messengers. Add Gaza to the list of issues where Harris could have pivoted away from Biden, instead of running into the arms of the Cheneys to chase the mythical moderate republican voter.