My comment was more about the hypocrisy of the term “American values”. The people who most loudly espouse “American Values” rarely do more than pay lip service to ideals they think are good in a vacuum, but never actually support in practice when those values are tested even a little bit (democracy, equality, free speech, the right to protest, etc etc).

That may not be a uniquely American trait, either, but it is still annoyingly present enough it warrants complaining about.

This technically isn’t a filibuster, apparently.

But yes, they could suspend the filibuster rule, potentially. I’m not sure of the specifics. It might require 60 votes?

Should be. But isn’t.

American Values TM©®

I’m not super informed here. Why do you think the new DNC chair will change how the Dem primaries will be operated?

I tried googling around myself, but couldn’t really find anything meaningful. But that’s probably more a reflection of how tired my brain is than anything (work’s been hell).

If you have anything readily available you could share, I’d love to feel some positivity about the Democrat party.

Well, I suppose one way to look at it is that we needed the unified front against Trump, but didn’t get it. So for now, and especially for the midterms, maybe now’s the time to get an alternative party started?

And then they can choose to run a presidential candidate in 2028 or not, depending on the momentum they get?

I dunno. Mostly thinking out loud here.

What would it take to get a primary system up and running for Independents (or more accurately I guess it would have to be a proper party for a primary to make sense)?

I assume it’s some combo of setting up the event hosting ($$$) and somehow coming up with the rules for deciding on how to operate the primary (schedule, thresholds for qualification, voting system, etc). And unfortunately I have no idea how to accomplish either.

I’ll have to check those out! Thanks for the rec.

I haven’t used Ground News past the free trial, but a decent feature that I liked was simply that you could look into “a story” and get virtually all of the possible news reports about that one story. Just handy, tbh. If there are other free aggregators doing that sort of linking and grouping, I’d be interested.

The thing about “sources” I can understand, but I think they still have their place. For example, I really like Ars Technica as a tech and science source. One of the things that sold me on them was seeing them make predictions based on their “sources” and those predictions coming true (or close enough). When it comes to politics, the same thing applies. Have they established enough credibility to warrant me believing their “sources”, at least provisionally?

But if you don’t need or want to be on the cutting edge of political conspiring, then waiting for the court filing, full bill, etc. makes complete sense. I just often might need news, anyway, to understand the broader context of a primary source.

To be fair, that does limit your ability to decide what is newsworthy to begin with. Ain’t nobody got the time to read every primary source ever, and sometimes the news is literally just “sources say” until an actual court case or whatever drops.

Granted, if you already know what you want to stay updated on, then cutting out the middleman could be workable. You’re just kinda limited in terms of what you’ll ultimately be exposed to.

I just don’t think the average American can (let alone would) read enough primary sources to keep “up to date” in the political sphere. Add science and tech, and that’s just way too much to wade through. Even seasoned beat reporters miss stuff on their beat.

I mean if you want to blame liberals and leftists go on ahead I suppose, thanks for being unhelpful.

I wouldn’t bet on MAGA suddenly waking up to class conflict to the point of guillotines unless Trump points his grubby little finger at them.

What a world that would be.

Rise up against whom though? Their violence is not driven on principle. It’s out of trust and loyalty to a con man who told them to “fight like hell”. What makes you think they’ll turn on him? Other than a tiny handful of folks, when have the leapords eating their faces stopped them from offering their faces up on silver platters at the leopard’s feast?

Will they ever wise up though?

Scoreboard shows these people, the most violent among them, are disconnected from reality and blindly trust Trump and his cronies.

I can’t even get my MAGA mom to believe Musk did a Nazi salute. “Apparently he was throwing his heart to the crowd.” Granted, she’s not politically engaged, she just listens to my dad who stopped watching Fox News because it wasn’t conservative enough. So yeah.

I’d somehow never heard this argument before, so I found some random article about it: https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/2023/06/slavery-militias-and-methodologies-thoughts-on-carl-boguss-madisons-militia

I can’t speak to the quality of the source above, but they argue that your basic thesis is true, but is not the full story. All the former colonies (including non-slave states) wanted militias instead of a peacetime national military, which was as much or more of a driver for adoption of the 2nd amendment than the idea of using militias for appearing slave rebellions.

But that’s just literally the first article I read about it, so I dunno.

I’m no economist, but I hear the economists are not thrilled with what Trump is doing to the economy. We’re headed for a recession at minimum, if those folks are anything to go by.

Jesus fuck me

It does, but not everyone sets up their 2fa, or uses the least secure forms. Then passwords get hacked, and those lists get shared so when the next hack comes along, they have that many more tools to try and break the encryption (assuming there is any) on a bigger site, compromising even more people.

It’s a whole systemic shit bag. Passkeys were meant to solve a lot of these problems, and they would, but Big Tech is botching the execution in favor of yet another thing locking you into their ecosystem.

Jesus Christ, dude, that is exactly it.

We’re trying to implement passkeys at work and the testing has been an absolute nightmare. Literally have no control over the onboarding experience because each tech giant is clamoring over each other, interjecting into the process to be the “home” for your passkeys. It’s bananas.

When it’s all set up, it’s kinda great! But getting set up in the first place is an exercise in frustration.

Oh yeah I first saw that on a miniminuteman YouTube short. At first I thought, no way, then he played the clip in context. And uh. Yeah. Woof. That’s a Nazi salute alright.

I’m unfamiliar with the context for most of these. Plenty don’t look like Nazi salutes. To me, anyway.

But literally every word that has slithered out of that moldy potato’s mouth for the last two decades is all you need to know he’s a white supremacist.