Honestly, I’d say don’t put any stock in it. If he did cheat, it was at the extreme margins where it doesn’t make a difference. The fact of the matter is that Americans are just stupid and/or hateful. As much as I’d love it to be true if only to restore my faith in Americans, I very much doubt there was any significant cheating.

Before Trump won the popular vote, I’d say that would trigger a mass uprising or ignition of a civil war. Now, maybe a few protests and a riot here and there? Honestly, probably not much.

I’ve never been less sanguine about the United States as a nation than I am right now.

As much power as they have, they can’t do that fortunately. So, they’ll need to get creative. Something along the lines of “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice” really means twice consecutively, so a third term is good to go. As flippant as I sound about it, it is actually a possibility if Trump survives that long and wants to run again.

Sure, that law isn’t airtight. Really, though, what’s a law but a piece of paper when there’s a SCOTUS decision effectively making POTUS king and Congress unwilling to stop him. At this point, are even so-called airtight laws safe from transgression? I think it’s doubtful.

This is a great analogy

If Kamala would have spent half the time she spent talking about Trump, talking about corporate price gouging instead and how she would go after corporations like a bulldog, voters would have had a place to look for blame other than the Democrats.

I agree. It was really frustrating that she wasn’t hammering this home. BUT I still don’t think that it would have really moved the needle that much. Same with Palestine. Same with Biden dropping out earlier. Same with being a bit fuzzy on details. So on and so forth.

In the end, the American people wanted Trump the person. He has no economic messaging besides a nebulous idea of “fixing” the economy through tariffs, which is laughable. People who use the economic anxiety argument are either trying to deflect blame from themselves for voting for him (“I don’t like him as a person, but he has good policies.”) or because they want to believe in the fundamental goodness of their fellow Americans so that their choices can be rationally explained. The former is deluding themselves since Trump has no cogent economic policy. As for the latter, I get why they want to believe that, but the truth is a lot uglier. The majority of Americans either affirmatively approve of or tacitly tolerate Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and/or are simply too uneducated (or just plainly stupid) or (if I’m being extremely charitable) woefully misinformed or uninformed to understand the gravity of his election.

I’m tempted to blame the Democratic party and nitpick, but at the end of the day, Harris ran a good campaign. It wasn’t perfect, but even if it were, we’d still more or less be here. The core problem, I think, lies in our culture and our educational system. Trump was a uniquely awful candidate, and Harris was a competent, “standard” politician. By all measures, she should have won. Even still, the American public repudiated her, which is simply irrational. In the end, it comes down Trump being the symptom not the problem. The problem lies in our culture and society.

tl;dr: Even if Harris did message better, she still would have lost. American culture and society is flawed and ultimately at fault.

Young men may be drawn to Trump because he pushes against societal pressure that men need to be apologetic for being themselves.

“Not being apologetic for being [myself]” is why I’m voting for Harris. I swear that conservatives want everyone to fit into confining, pre-defined boxes for everything. I found that among conservatives, I’ve always had to “apologize” for not being hyper-masculine and interested in “softer” and “feminine” things.

If someone is very masculine, that’s cool, too. No one is saying that you can’t be hyper-masculine if that’s what you’re into. BUT if you constantly are apologizing for “being yourself,” maybe you’re just an asshole trying to hide behind masculinity.

See, this is part of his long con. Clarence knows his wife is crazy, so instead of divorcing her, he’s just going to make their marriage illegal. /s

Or class

I tend to agree and give a ton of leeway to stupid, offensive stuff from years past that people have evolved from. We all said and did stupid stuff that we regret. However, this isn’t offensive, and that’s to highlight that Vance either A. regressed in his values from being normal to being weirdly pro-hyper-traditional gender roles or B. has no true beliefs and is just saying what he says because he thinks it wins him votes.

Depends on your skills. Documentation is always useful. If you have language skills, translation of documentation or helping create language packs/translations.

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure if I thought about it, I could come up with more.

I noticed that, too, but I just chalk that up to people freezing (fight, flight, freeze).

I think what they’re getting at is that we’re uncertain the extent age will affect his duties. Will his cabinet and other advisors be really “in control,” or will Biden insist on his way forcing others to kowtow. It is certain that the dude is old as hell and if it were he alone, he would be incapable of the job. Since there’s a staff and a ton of advisors, the degree of control they have is, well, uncertain.

The water is already 208 degrees man.

Not wrong.

Honestly, that 180 day window thing is nominal. The execution of all of that will take way longer with all of the litigation that would happen, and it’ll take a couple of years to get it all enacted (slow at first then accelerating as more gets enacted).

Personally, I’d prefer if it were fast. The sudden change would wake people up, and cause way more civil unrest. If it’s slow, we end up as frogs slowly boiling. Fewer people will protest or cause issues if things unfold slowly. It’s the idea of the frog in the boiling water. If the changes are swift, there’s a higher chance of ordinary people taking notice and fighting to reverse them.

I got a laptop back in 2018, and it shipped really fast. It’s not my daily driver, but it works well when I’m on the road, and the battery life is pretty good. Granted, I replaced the OS with a distro I prefer and customized the hell out of it, so that might contribute to my experience. Tbh, I was pretty impressed with it (still am), and I was going to buy a Librem 5 when they came out. I wanted to wait and not just throw money at them because I didn’t want to get burned. After all the horror stories and crap reviews, I passed on that and won’t touch the company with a 10 foot pole, and I thank past me for not throwing money at them.

I think that the company started with noble intentions and made a decent product at first, but they got in way over their heads and now they’re floundering.

Except this is a state case. Unless he also has the Supreme Court Court of Appeals of the State of New York under his control…he’s going to have a rough road ahead I think.

The truly unfortunate part is that this may be the only conviction we get. The documents case is being destroyed by the judge, and SCOTUS is likely going to tank the January 6th case.

EDIT: Caught me! I’m not from New York and didn’t check 😅

However, the name “Arthur Grand Technologies” will always be synonymous to racism.

For now. This will be memory-holed in a couple weeks. A couple grand is nothing, maybe just a slightly down quarter. They should have been completely annihilated. Crimes like this shouldn’t be fixed dollar amounts; it should be percentages of average annual gross earnings, and in this case, something like 300% annual gross earnings. Let them sell everything off.

I’m in Illinois, and my entire family thought I was nuts for supporting bail reform. My cop brother said that we’d have hordes of criminals on the street causing more crime, and my parents again voiced how they “want to move out of state” (because Indiana is sooooooo much better /s). They never could answer why paying to be set free until court was so central to security because it never made sense to tie pre-trial lock up with ability to pay.

They never bring it up anymore, and for that, I’m grateful.

Hey, don’t be rude. Cave women were far more civilized and intelligent. They don’t deserve being compared to MTG!