Value’s been being stolen as long as authority has existed. Really cool to see the history of this!

If you sort of mean like how my dad insists that while he loves Buttigieg, he doesn’t think a gay man will ever become president, so he votes for the “electable” candidates, thus helping to manifest his own assumptions, I think that would be very interesting to see laid out with data.

How many self-defeating near-progressives constantly land us with Centrists because they assume that they’d be wasting their vote by voting progressive, and is it enough that it would actually change the outcome if they just voted progressive?

Americans just don’t care about a president’s policies, i.e., what they do with their power, but are more interested in who they are.

To me this is silly. We’ve been hearing about GOP and DNC policy arguments nonstop this entire campaign. What do they think the back and forth about Project 2025 is, if not policy discussion?

Harris is not resetting the entire DNC agenda or something, you can largely apply Biden’s policies to her. The big difference is that she just became the front-runner very late in the game, and now people are scrambling to figure out her and Walz as people.

Nichols says that it’s a myth that Americans care about policy. But perhaps the opposite is true. I think the very reason that so many Americans are disillusioned with politics is that they don’t see how it affects them.

I think they’re both wrong; Americans do care about policy, but we’ve learned that anyone can say anything and there’s nothing holding them to their words except the next election.

Biden wasn’t unpopular because of his age, he was unpopular because of his bad policies on Gaza, his lack of force confronting Project 2025, his lack of force confronting a corrupt SCOTUS, his lack of force confronting anti-LGBT laws, his lack of force confronting anti-reproductive healthcare laws, etc.

He didn’t lose on his policy points- on paper he claims to want a ceasefire and all the rest- he lost his candidacy on his lack of trust from voters that he could or would carry out those policies. Kamala is trying to convince voters that she’s a person who will, which is a question of personality.

The NYTimes article they cite says

There is no area in which she is seeking a significant break from [Biden’s] agenda — perhaps not surprising given that she had a role in crafting much of it.

The CA author uses the example of Nixon’s appealing to black voters as an example of policy campaigning, but then immediately notes that he lost the black vote because voters saw through the bullshit (policy claims) and rejected him as a person because they knew that he could not be trusted.

“Policy” is not peripheral. In fact, it’s everything… The only reason elections matter is that they have consequences for people in the real world, consequences like whether poor children are going to eat or starve.

Nixon wasn’t going to help black people. Neither is Trump, no matter how much “saving black jobs” is one of his policy positions.

Policy is not everything, because policy is implemented entirely by people. It is only half of the equation.

And presidents don’t write laws, they set agendas. What they as people decide to spend their energy actually pushing for is much more important than individual line-item stances. If they are vetoing legislation from their own party because they disagree with line items, that’s a problem, because legislators are the ones who directly (ostensibly) represent a set of constituents.

We don’t need to be enshrining a mindset of even more power being invested in the Executive, by now asking them to declare what will and won’t pass their desk: we need to be punishing presidents who override their own party’s positions too much with their own personal policy preferences.

Gaza was my breaking point with Biden, and him choosing to go above and beyond our current legal aid requirements to Israel, and him quashing the State Department reporting that Israel was in violation of the Leahy Act, and him preemptively sending warships to the region to intimidated other countries, are all actions that were not listed in his policy documents on his campaign website. Those policy claims are curated, and don’t reveal the whole story of who a candidate really is. Biden could have written a million pages of policy briefs, and he would never have put his intentions around Gaza into writing in those pages.

It’s clearly important to know who politicians are as people, too.

end rant/

I don’t have any issue with someone wanting to reassert the liberal basis for Leftist philosophies, but I think that this is one of those things that only makes sense to do in Leftist spaces.

There are too many misperceptions and bastardized meanings that have layered onto Liberalism as a concept in the minds of most people living under capitalism, such that before you can begin reasserting the Leftist agreement with actual liberalism, you are going to have to completely undo the years of capitalist propaganda that has reworked liberalism into being the same as (modern) Libertarianism or Neo liberalism, both of which the average person just calls Liberalism.

And that’s not even getting into the de-Capitalism-ization of Libertarianism, which was originally a leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-government movement, but was completely corrupted/co-opted by the Right in US politics in the 50s, into the current AnCap shitshow.

tl;Dr the amount of work and influence that would be required to correct the definitions around liberalism in the minds of the genpop, as a prerequisite for reclaiming the term for Leftists, is beyond our capabilities, outside of Leftist spaces.

As Republicans find it harder and harder to win on the “merits” of their platform, they’ll look to co-opt Left messaging or even labels to win. Sort of the political office equivalent of conservative guys who claim they’re not, on Tinder.

these polls, which ask only about labels and perceptions, tell you much more about the fuzziness—perhaps even meaninglessness—of those labels than about how well either party’s policy positions align with voters’ interests, and what positions candidates ought to take in order to best represent those voters’ interests. Responsible pollsters would ask about actual, concrete policies in the context of information about their impact; otherwise, as former Gallup editor David Moore has pointed out (FAIR.org, 2/11/22), they merely offer the illusion of public opinion.

Very important point to make- the rhetoric from the Right has been a non-stop chorus of “far-left”, “fringe-left”, “radical left”, about centrist Dems, ever since Trump came to power. It’s no wonder that the disinterested voter recalls those labels when not actually asked about policies.

When you ask about building unions, funding education, fixing the environment, lowering healthcare costs, and holding corporations to account, suddenly everyone lines up with Progressive positions.

• Agencies employ ALJs, or “Administrative Law Judges”, who specialize in regulations, and hear and oversee certain cases related to enforcement actions.
• Some agencies have “removal protection” rules for employees like ALJs, that prevent e.g. the President from axing those employees (e.g. to prevent agencies having to get a new raft of judges every 4-8 years).
• SCOTUS recently ruled those protections are unconstitutional, in SEC vs Jarkesy
• SpaceX is arguing that because the NLRB has similar removal protection rules for its ALJs and some other members, it cannot bring enforcement actions against SpaceX
• the district court agreed, and put an injunction on the NLRB from bringing a pending Unfair Labor Practice charge against SpaceX

That’s not an uncommon thing, actually. One of the most famous mechanical keyboards, the Das Keyboard, was by default glyph-less.

Generally I agree with you, but a week ago (and even before that) 65% of Democrats were against Biden continuing in the race, not arguing for him.

I do think that the DNC isn’t going to budge without a voter revolt (which this essentially was, though not nearly far enough), but I think throwing that support to Libertarians or Green Party is a mistake; they’re no more beholden to actually act on voter demands than anyone else, and making one of them President means either a) abandoning any hope of party-line support from congressional democrats, or b) forcing a coalition-building exercise in congress, which is more likely to make them shift Rightwards.

We need to do to the DNC what Trump did to the RNC, from the Left. Kamala isn’t that- obviously- but Biden and the DNC (once again) fucked us out of being able to do anything about that (and not just because of Biden’s belated withdrawl, but because they didn’t hold a real primary in the first place). Kamala’s saving grace is that she at least is more likely to beat Trump, which Biden had no chance of.

And frankly, there aren’t any good candidates I can think of to banner a reform movement now that Bernie is too old. I’d love for AOC, Omar, or Tlaib to run, but I don’t get the impression they want to. And apart from them, I’m not sure who I actually believe would reform the system. We need that person, or we’re just going to risk handing power over to another Sinema.

It’s a great idea, but I’m very skeptical about how ready it is for ‘production’, looking through their repo.

Fern Gully vibes intensify

Every time I try a vim alternative, I get frustrated and just end up back with vim.

Sounds like a means to encourage people to fight gentrification.

The only way that anyone in government is trying to solve this is via more money to corporations. Pay them to switch to X. Buy Y from them to replace Z.

Carbon credits are a con. Solar and wind are great, but they don’t actually solve emissions on their own; you have to mandate the closure of the non-green energy sources too. And lots of emission sources are not even being targeted at all.

On the upside, my Mini is gonna look awesome with armor plating, out on the dunes that used to be oceans. Shiny, and chrome!

built from the ground up in Rust with a GPU-accelerated renderer

I don’t want GPU-accelerated rendering, I want a renderer that has a solid 5 second lag, to make it look to anyone around like I type faster than 20 wpm.

You can partially blame the pro-marijuana (as opposed to the pro-legalization) crowd, because that’s largely how they’ve been pitching it after decades of “it’s natural” not working.

I’ve seen WAY more “imagine all the tax revenue” arguments from weed heads who were trying to get others on board, than any arguments about justice. Arguments about justice tended to be an afterthought, or only deployed ‘strategically’ when they thought they were talking to someone progressive.

The very vocal pro-marijuana people I personally knew, pre-legalization, here in California were definitely more concerned with getting access to it for themselves, rather than helping people who marijuana criminalization was deployed against as a weapon by the state.

I am in favor of all 9 justices being elected every 4 years, by popular vote.

Their reasoning for forking from the original Bosca Ceoil

It’s also using an outdated technology stack which makes it hard to impossible to run it on modern systems, namely macOS and web.

Ah yes, I forgot that Windows and Linux are “legacy” systems. And “web” isn’t an operating system, it’s just someone else’s Linux box.

We achieve this by reimplementing the entire application with a more modern set of tools, as a Godot engine project.

Okay, that’s pretty great. Always glad to see Godot getting used, especially in a cool new way.

Which is unrelated to their point, which is that visible popularity of a piece of software (e.g. having many downloads in an app store) has a large impact on likelihood of people to trust it.

You feigning ignorance at this just discredits your own position. Their question was essentially rhetorical, and you chose to answer it incorrectly rather than concede their correct point:

If you encountered 2 identical pieces of software, you would trust the one that is more popular, thus proving that popularity is a meaningful benefit to a piece of software.