Disagree, people spend money with the intention of influencing the outcome of elections all the time, that’s all campaign ads and canvasses and phone banks and etc. are

And they’re not paying people to vote - they’re paying people to make a plan to vote (and make an apology and send a tweet, but I think those are irrelevant), which is something that campaign volunteers talk about with potential voters all the time

Yeah, it would’ve been nice if the headline could have mentioned which states, thanks for quoting this

Also, it always bares repeating how mean-spirited, selfish, and shamelessly hypocritical the Republican party is -

Unlike the 2020 election, when Republicans opposed pandemic-related changes such as expanded mail-in voting, both parties are encouraging new rules to help people vote.

One possible reason for the GOP’s change of heart: In North Carolina — a swing state that’s particularly key to former President Trump’s pathway to victory — 8% of eligible voters are in counties impacted by Hurricane Helene.

Those include many voters in rural, Republican-leaning areas.

The Harris campaign forgot (again) how every single Republican is a scumbag and actually went out of their way to highlight Tillis’ statement calling out misinformation, which predictably blew up in their faces

I feel like the ultimate goal really should be getting people to a place where they’re not going to commit further crimes and harm their communities again, and I don’t think just trying to punish people into that is effective. More often than not punished people just sink further into their own misery and keep pushing out and hurting others.

That all being said, I do think the experience of helping a community like this could be a positive one that could actually improve people’s behavior in a lasting way. Minus the coercion and the life threatening conditions, I support volunteering opportunities for prison inmates.

Gives you an idea of how much they try to not spend any money at all on inmate care, those clothes are probably over fifty years old

Lots of people didn’t survive four years of Trump

He has fewer Republicans endorsing him than Kamala does

Does anyone seriously think Biden is ever going to propose any of those ideas to offset this?

“They asked me how well I understood class consciousness. I said I was a member of the conscious class. They said welcome aboard.”

Ah, you’re totally right,thank you, I’d been using those interchangeably without thinking about it much

Synthesis: everyone should have a well constructed residence with ample sound dampening where late night fireworks and early morning traffic noise wouldn’t be a problem. Capitalist real estate developers minimizing their costs and maximizing their profits have us fighting each other when they’re the real problem.

e; I was actually thinking microphones would pick up and retransmit sounds after running it through some reverb and flanging to get a cozy underwater effect, but damping external sounds makes a lot more sense

That actually might be exactly what we should do, just try to reinterpret this before it gets off the ground and make all their attempts to dogwhistle to their fellow shitheads come off like they’re just calling themselves paranoid schizophrenics

And, like, for what it’s worth, “Is bigotry a mental illness?” is a question that’s gotten some academic debate. The professional consensus is still “no,” but it honestly makes a lot of sense to me to think of bigotry as a form of delusional and compulsive thinking (although I don’t want to minimize the evil of racism or demonize mentally ill people, so like I’m still thinking over that one).

The problem with that problem is you can say any kind of accusation of racist behavior is non-falsifiable in the same way (“You can’t prove I was shitty to them because they were black, maybe I was shitty to them because they’re just a jerk”), but everyone knows racist behavior and dog whistles still exist

if people buy the claim

This is a good demonstration of why the concept of dog whistles isn’t really a problem, because when it’s a totally absurd accusation people aren’t going to buy it.

The President Called all the Artists by Micah Sommersmith

*Independent organization that the US occasionally allows to meet with and assist some recent migrants doesn’t change broader US policy to exclude people attempting to migrate from countries in the Global South, in spite of the fact that many of those countries are violently oppressive towards their LGBTQ+ populations

Like, good for them doing what they’re doing, but it really doesn’t address the underlying problems here

I have learned from experience not to trust in my ability to communicate clearly online, so sometimes I overdo it to make sure

Cool, this independent nonprofit that utilizes unpaid volunteers and just happens to run with the US government’s blessing is totally sufficient, we definitely don’t have a blatantly obvious need for an actual government agency with paid staff and legal standing to advocate for migrants when local/county/state officials are being assholes that this token gesture is just an attempt to paper over or anything /s

Ah you are totally right and thank you for the correction, I got taught at a young age by a very nice but very overworked public school music teacher that there were just eight notes and not to worry about anything more complicated than that and my brain always really wants to default back to that

I don’t know for sure, but the Jaws theme is definitely a half-step interval, so the spacing of the keys in the meme is right at least

Random trivia I learned from a music theory YouTuber, the bass line to Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name kind of does the same thing, except instead of going back and forth a single half step it does nine thirteen (aka, an eight note octave plus one note half-step)

e; You’d think I’d remember that there are twelve tones in an octave given the name of that music theory channel

FWIW, the article author also wrote a book called “Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food”