Here Comes the Sun. Simple melody, timeless lyrics, and it’s the most-streamed Beatles song out of an already strong and memorable catalog.

It wasn’t just the delivery, though – it was the meandering logic, the failure to make key points against Trump, and the pathetic response to the party-wide freakout.

https://old.lemmy.world/comment/11034581

Then watch them lean on it after the fact for days on end, such as the post you are replying to. It’s almost… almost… like they’re reposting this shit with malicious intent, isn’t it?

OP here. I voted for Obama (primary and two generals), Sanders->Clinton, Warren->Biden, even busted my ass to elect my man Dougie Jones to the Senate (who should have been the pick for AG over Merrick Garland). And the debate made it immediately obvious that Biden has become a shadow of himself, and does not have what it takes to beat Trump – no media/Russia/Qanon incepting necessary. Despite consistently leading in 2020, he ended up barely winning by a few tens of thousands of votes across a handful of states – this time he’s consistently trailed (both nationally and in the swing states), the biggest news stories have not moved the needle, and the awful debate, follow-on reporting, and feeble response dug him an even deeper hole exactly when he most needed to turn perceptions around on the biggest remaining stage.

Biden was near the bottom of my list in 2020 (again, I preferred Warren), but I’ve grown to like him a lot – he really exceeded my expectations and accomplished sweeping victories with tiny congressional margins. But he’s not the guy to beat Trump this time, and it’s essential he step down in favor of a new Harris/??? ticket (hopefully Beshear) that has at least a fighting chance to prevail in November.

The minimum wage was last raised by a Dem House, Senate, and President, all of which were arguably less progressive than the current incarnations. Why wouldn’t they do it again if they had the votes?

I could see trying to spin it as “As an elder statesman, I don’t have it in me to simultaneously run a national campaign and govern the country, so I’ll be putting 100% of my focus on finishing out my term and passing the torch to the next generation of blah blah blah.”

I really wish they’d rerelease this in 4K, the visuals are spectacular.

But between Biden’s ego and the DNC’s determination to stick with a wholly-owned establishment neoliberal hack at all costs - even if it means losing - I expected that they wouldn’t take this golden opportunity.

Biden has objectively been the most progressive president since LBJ, and the most effective progressive president since FDR. And he did it with about the slimmest possible congressional margins, a situation which would have made it very easy for an actual “establishment neoliberal hack” to say “my hands are tied” and accomplish nothing of substance. Instead we got the biggest climate reform package ever, the biggest infrastructure package since the Interstate Highway system, a child tax credit that massively reduced child poverty, the most significant industrial policy in decades (CHIPS and Science), a veritable bulldog FTC chair with an aggressive anti-monopoly stance, and that’s just for starters.

Not great when that show ended with industry collapsing the biosphere and destroying civilization.

The delivery was bad but it makes sense: A woman was murdered by an immigrant, he (Trump) went to the funeral and tries to demagogue it. Meanwhile Republicans are passing laws to criminalize abortion and prosecute women who try to travel to other states after they’re raped by people they know. So Trump and his party don’t give a shit about prosecuting rapes or protecting women, they just want to demonize immigrants and control women’s bodies.

Edit: You also left out the preceding lines where he talks about Georgia and other states legislating a six-week abortion ban, which sets up the point more clearly.

Need to call a special fact-finding hearing featuring the editors of Merriam-Webster’s, Collins, and the Oxford English Dictionary. Let’s pencil it in for three weeks from next Monday.

M O I S T U R I Z E M E

IMHO 2012 was the one that really broke their brains. The tea party types tried to get various firebrands on the ticket, but end up having to support Romney. Hey, at least he’s a squeaky-clean telegenic millionaire pushing the most severe conservative fiscal policies! Proceeds to get stomped by the Obama campaign so bad that Karl Rove couldn’t believe it as it was happening. THEN the establishment GOP flirts with moving to the center on immigration. The backlash against that on the right, supercharged by the mainstreaming of mobile social media (plus social justice protests and the looming Clinton campaign) was what fueled the rise of Trump.

Science location, you rube.

It’s just not practical – no Minecraft server or map can realistically hold all the books in the Archive, or even just the 500k that were removed. Even if it could, you’d only be able to read them by literally taking your avatar to the book object and reading it in the tiny in-game interface.

The Minecraft thing is just a gimmick to promote awareness of press freedom and censorship, not a plausible way to deliver books to people. If the IA wanted to “set books free” they’d be better off using torrents or something like Libgen (and even then they’d still be criminally liable for making the files available, even if the publishers couldn’t stop the files from being shared further).

It only contains a relatively small collection of banned reporting from various countries, not the whole Internet Archive, and only in the form of in-game books, not anything really usable IRL. It’s neat but basically a promotional project for RWB.

If Biden wins, what do you expect to happen with all the MAGAs?

They will continue to exist, though weakened, and four more years of Democratic executive actions and appointments will steadily move the federal government further away from their position.

How would you prevent another Jan 6th? What if it succeeded this time?

Electing Democrats to critical state roles in 2022 helped a lot here. It’s also useful having the election denier as the challenger, not the incumbent, plus we’re all wise to their playbook. The multiple prosecutions of last cycles conspirators should also put a damper on things.

How will you keep Biden accountable?

Protests, op-eds, pressuring legislators, primary elections, etc.

Will you keep avoiding a fascist dictatorship every 4 years until the end of time?

Yes. Democracy requires active maintenance, from all of us, indefinitely. Giving up is how its enemies win.

It’s not a “Boogeyman” or a “scare tactic” if it actually happened. Trump did appoint three justices, those justices were significantly more right-wing than the ones they replaced, and as a result they actually did overturn Roe v. Wade and a side swath of other rights and regulations. Maybe keep that very recent history in mind when you hear the same people who warned about it then warning about him trying to end democracy in America now.

Climate change is the single overriding issue for me. We are beyond out of time to avert damaging levels of warming, and even Biden’s climate policies – by far the most sweeping in the history of the country – are barely adequate to begin steering us away from the absolute worst. If Trump gets in, and eviscerates federal climate policy, and stacks the EPA with oil lobbyists (again), and fills federal courts with science-denying assholes, and sabotages state and local efforts to decarbonize, and destroys all chance of global cooperation on this issue, and (most importantly) dismantles democracy so that it is effectively impossible to vote for a progressive ever again absent a second civil war, then we will be consigning the entire planet to “nightmare hellscape” levels of climate change with no viable pathway out. A second Trump term would add four billion tons of carbon emissions over the next six years. It would “negate – twice over – all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years”. And that analysis doesn’t account for increased emissions from Trump policies, just a reversal of what Biden has accomplished. Allowing Trump to win again would not just be national, but global suicide.

Yeah, it’s basically a smart photo filter for color-correction, object cut-outs, masking, etc:

https://www.pixometry.com/en/pixometry-the-new-name-for-elpical-software/elpical-claro-pixometry/

This feels more like consolidating positions in an art department post-Photoshop because you don’t need photo editors to dodge and burn physical negatives in a darkroom any more.