Coming from someone who always votes left down the ticket because I live in a republican state hell hole:

There’s a reason we want democrats in charge. They aren’t perfect, but my state had a democrat governor (somehow) for 8 years until this year. The very first thing the supermajority red government did was axe the ethics board. The next thing they did was pass laws banning books that acknowledged gay culture at all and a unilateral bathroom bill with felony penalties.

The “both sides are the different flavors of fascism” take only works when you’re completely blind to what republicans are actually out there doing.

1. “Handset” is obfuscating legalese to refer to a cell phone in a way intending to distance the meaning of the word from the thing that the old and technologically illiterate people who rule on this use every day.

2. I’m no fan of their strategy, but cell phone providers have claimed for a long time that filling your phone with unremovable bloatware causes the overall price to decrease. Their argument is most likely that they will have to charge more once the propagators of that bloatware realize that they can no longer force it on people and wedge that as a reason to pay less to carriers.

3. The reality is that cell phones are priced based on what people will buy anyway and carriers pocket as much of the money as they can that third parties pay them for their bloatware. Ultimately because of that this ruling hurts their bottom line, but the above reasoning gives plausible deniability in the face of the law as it is interpreted by old technologically illiterate lawmakers

I think it’s not necessarily a contradiction to hold your pro-choice and anti-death penalty stance, but it’s still a contradiction to hold the pro-life and pro-death penalty stance if your reasoning behind the pro-life stance is that all life is sacred.

I agree that a person’s body autonomy and the state’s power to execute citizens should not overlap, but I still think that giving the “all life is sacred” line to justify pro-life and then being pro-death penalty “because some people deserve to die” amounts to hypocrisy.

A “boys club” scandal a couple years ago where the male higher-ups only hired women who would tolerate being sexually abused. Some ex-employees described it as “company culture” that propagated for a decade or more. There was an investigation after some women spoke out that led to a lawsuit, several top level managers being fired, and a couple CEOs being scrutinized really hard.

All of this is off the top of my head and maybe somewhat inaccurate, but that’s the gist of it.

Edit: Here’s an article for you

Well if you’re so smart, how are they going to track your location otherwise?

I don’t have first-hand experience, but from what I understand the way they make money off of those tablet screens they put in cars is by licensing proprietary software that other companies want you to have no choice but to use. That’s why models with no screens are disappearing from the major car makers

Welcome to sugarfoots, sugarfoot

It’s the natural conclusion of the strategy republicans set into motion to manipulate their base.

It started just after Watergate. Nixon was facing massive calls for justice from both sides. Republican think tanks realized that their base of conservatives consumed news from all sources that informed their mostly unbiased decision to hold their guy accountable. So those republican think tanks devised a plan to create a conservative news outlet that explicitly demonized other news so that the conservative base would never turn on one of their own again. That strategy was realized in the 90’s with the creation of Fox News.

Since then, conservative media has been slowly transforming politics from the perspective of the average conservative into a team sport, where the main motivation isn’t “who runs the country better” but rather “my team is better than yours”.

It wasn’t so pervasive 20 years ago, but conservative media has found themselves with a base that now only responds to the outrage they’ve been conditioning them with, and that has created the raging confrontational assholes you see today.

Being a conservative doesn’t mean what it used to. And that’s because the Republican leadership robbed conservatives of that in order to maintain control of their base.

In theory that’s how it works already. In practice, there is currently no disadvantage to appointing partisan judges and no system in which to objectively measure partisanship of a candidate. What that means is that there will always be partisan parties appointing partisan judges and there will always be candidates who claimed to be neutral who will be either accused of or proven to be partisan anyway.

In the current system true neutrality on the bench does not exist

My wife gets an honorable mention for being able to recite the “what did you say to me you little bitch” copypasta in its entirety on a dime and as fast as she can say it

You’d think it would be a win, but honestly Trump is a clown. More “centrists” who detest Trump might rally around someone like DeSantis, that’s what I’m afraid of.

I like the “formally” vs “formerly” suggesting Elon is never going to get away from Twitter in favor of X

Hey man, nice tittles

My mind is blown. This is very well written. Thank you

Our conservatives aren’t like conservatives elsewhere in the world. Our liberals are like your conservatives, policy wise.

Our conservatives are brainwashed by four decades of targeted conservative media that’s explicitly designed to keep them in an anger loop in order to create a political climate where republicans (who are the actual politicians) don’t have to appeal to the conservative base with actual policy.

Republicans, through channels like Fox News and OANN (seriously, go watch some of it and see what we’re dealing with here) have demonized everyone to the left of them so hard that entire generations of conservatives genuinely believe that there’s a bloody revolution coming.

It would be nice if it were actually bullshit, but these lunatics who make up half of our voting population put a con-man entertainer with zero political experience in the whitehouse for four years and installed conservative justices to our highest court who are systematically dismantling our democracy.

It’s very real. It’s so real that some of the less insane conservatives are waking up to how dangerous the details of this plan actually are, and that’s why Republicans are panicking about this.

Wow, I don’t think I’ve seen an edgier comment on the whole of lemmy.

You sound like you’ve got a lot to lose.

Telling me I’d like to watch it all burn, and then calling me a political pacifist in the next breath?

Yeah. You’re actively expressing both of those views at the same time by thinking yourself higher than the society you live in.

Anyway, the debt isn’t a tangible thing like you seem to think. And you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about, and I won’t take on the responsibility of teaching you how to use a search engine, so I guess this is where the edgy comment chain ends.

Have fun in your cabin in the woods, brother. The rest of us understand what it means to live in a functional society. It’s not worth engaging any further with someone as far gone as you are ✌️

Aiding the less fortunate in society benefits everyone, same as maintaining roads or building libraries.

For decades republicans have artificially raised the bar for that aid and lowered the aid actually received, for no reason than to appeal to the crowd that thinks taxation is theft but uses modern public amenities anyway.

The rampant cutting of those benefits and handing the rights over to corporations is one of the major reasons we have a nationwide health care crisis, just for one example of how those cuts end up hurting everyone.

The call where Biden urged a ceasefire and Netanyahu completely ignored it? I think you think the US has more power in this situation than they actually do.

Could Israel continue this war without US aid?

The US provides about 1% of Israel’s GDP in military aid and Israel already exports weapons and ammo it doesn’t need. Who would provide American-centric weaponry is irrelevant to the question of whether the war would stop.

To add to that, it literally doesn’t matter who steps in to aid Israel, as the aid itself is less important than the potential ally and the strategic act of robbing the US of influence in the middle east. You think Russia or China wouldn’t stoop to changing their position on a massacre to get a step up politically? Two countries currently hosting genocides of their own?

A magic stop button doesn’t exist for the US. We’re clearly not going to agree on that so this is where our conversation ends. Goodnight.

There’s no magic button that ends this conflict, except the one that lies on Netanyahu’s desk. Israel isn’t dependent on the US in the way that you’re trying to make it sound. If the US pulls away from Israel, it creates a vacuum that US’s adversaries are chomping at the bit to fill.

They won’t suddenly go broke. They won’t suddenly be disarmed. They won’t suddenly decide the war isn’t worth it. They will take money and weapons from other nations who want their influence in the middle east and the only thing that will change is the US losing that influence.

Look, I’m not saying that Biden’s hands are clean either. The US as a governmental body is complicit in this heinous war.

What I am saying is that you are woefully naive if you think a phone call could end this. That phone call already happened. It was international news. Netanyahu laughed in Biden’s face.

All of these things, but still Biden does not directly have the power to end this conflict. Blaming him for it happening as if he’s the one crushing Palestinians under the rubble of their houses is dishonest.