I think it’s just the overall tightening of the right wing echo chamber. Yes, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, all create spaces for right-wing chauvinists to capture young men when they are most impressionable and feel least seen.

But also these are dividends from Fox News slowly poisoning discourse and rural communities treating being liberal or left as an immoral betrayal of your kin and kind. For those people, being conservative is seen as being sane and the natural state of things, and no amount of facts or cognitive dissonance can influence those communities to change.

The only way to reverse it is to find a way to prevent those top-down right-wing spaces from engaging in propaganda. But not only is that difficult with the First Amendment, we haven’t even politically acknowledged what is happening.

Conservatives still gaslight and play the victims while exerting excessive influence on our discourse. The left continues to treat them with kid gloves, which only emboldens them. So I expect this trend to fully continue.

I’ve known and agreed about Trump’s obvious clinical narcissism, but I needed to hear this last piece: the ineptitude and culpability of the media in not just facilitating it, but actively contributing to what in any other circumstance would be systematic abuse. It’s so messed up that they are exposing us to, and amplifying, his mental illness without any self-reflection or caution.

For reference, I also had a relationship with someone with BPD. I had to go no-contact after she took a bottle of pills, and then tried to time a call to me so she could die on the phone while I was powerless to stop it. (The ambulance got there in time.) It wasn’t until months later that I realized just how exhausted I had been, and how much it was harming me. Feels familiar.

Yup, good eye - we’re at least two election cycles away from that being plausible.

The only deal Putin is willing to accept is total control over the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

Trump: “Sounds good.”

Black ice on the other hand…

I thought I was a skeptic and maybe even a cynic before 2016, but since then I’ve realized just how much faith I had that people would do the right things - because I’ve lost it.

Every time I look at the polls, which should be Trump at 10% at best, I am disillusioned all over again.

Fortunately, she was just making a fourth-wall-breaking point about gender assumptions in certain professions.

Please please please tell me this was recorded.

A New York Times/Siena poll released Monday shows Trump performing well in three key states, including a 5-point lead in the swing state of Arizona.

The poll also showed Trump up by 2 points in North Carolina and up by 4 points in Georgia. Former President Joe Biden beat Trump in both Arizona and Georgia in 2020 by a narrow margin.

The consistent rightward bump in these different states’ polls seems better explained by the commonality amongst them - the pollster, meaning a polling bias in the sample choices or methodology - rather than a change in Harris and Trump’s chances. But what do I know.

I mean, it’s clear that they’re trying to dissuade people from getting the vaccine. This surgeon general was known at the time he was appointed to be anti-vax: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039613351/desantis-florida-surgeon-general-vaccine-mandates

He’s super busy painting dog pictures.

“How dare the left accuse us of fascism, they’re the fascists! Now c’mon everyone, let’s conspire to fake vote totals so we can assert authority we didn’t earn.”

October 15 is later than it seems - Don’t forget, early voting is already underway in some places and will be in full swing by then.

Is that text from an AI image interpreter? It’s pretty good, seems helpful for search and disabilities.

Republicans: Democrats need to start listening to middle America, the real America!

[enter Tim Walz]

Republicans: -uhhh, no wait hold up

Unless you use a Vichyssoise fork. It’s all in the wrist.

Exactly, this is not an ideological dispute, this is statistics. And that is the key to understanding why the third party astroturf posts and replies are not credible.

Every time someone helpfully responds with a statistics explanation, these users respond with ideological escalation. It always reframes the debate to be about an entrenched system or Gaza or miming offense or generic DARVO. (All of which coincidentally mirror right-wing talking points or known election disinformation goals - i.e., push deep state conspiracy theories, escalation political divisions to fray unity - if you find that coincidence interesting.)

What they never try to do is explain how a vote for a third party in our FPTP system results in a desirable outcome for their stated “third party” policy priorities.

Which is why none of it is convincing: they cannot be both ideologically so pure that it’s a moral imperative to vote third party, and simultaneously so ideologically aloof that they do not care that that vote can only undermine that outcome. So it’s either bad faith, or reckless ignorance.

That said…A wifi access point that requests that info is almost certainly not private for every other trackable thing you do with that wifi, however.

Trump just wants a level playing field, so it’s important that all questions - whether for Trump or for Harris - be approved by Putin personally.

That’s certainly the point she’s making to avoid giving a direct answer.