@hp i bet you’ve been badgered!
You’ve earned a new badge.
@louis Yes. I never respond to solicitations at all, for example. When I donate, I go to ActBlue or Oath and search the candidate. I don’t want to reward their manipulative communications.
I’d rather we lived in a democracy where financial donations were not an important element of participation, would advocate fervently for complete and compulsory public finance. But in the meantime, I do feel some obligation to contribute.
@louis fair enough, from a certain perspective.
but in general i’d say giving/spending money and being a mark need not be equivalent. it would be possible for political campaigns and organizations to form a longer-term, ultimately more lucrative relationships with me if they actually invested, not just or primarily financially, in a relationship.
from #EdithOlmsted https://newrepublic.com/post/187537/kamala-harris-donald-trump-stunning-endorsement
Text: The letter urges that after the election, they can hold Harris accountable with “every nonviolent tool of democracy.” Such tools would likely not be available under Trump, who has vowed to deport pro-Palestinian protesters and threatened to turn the military against his own citizens.
the false familiarity of political solicitations makes me want to vomit.
“Steve, it's Aly, and I need to have a quick ❤️ to ❤️ with you”
i don’t know Aly. you are not Aly, just some fundraising flack using her name. it’s a campaign i support, have already given money to. why do you treat me like a mark?
I am grateful that Israel seems to have chosen a cautious, calibrated response to Iran’s prior salvo. Frankly, it is not what I expected, and I am very glad to have been proven wrong.
i’m getting pretty tired of Jeff Bezos’ cancel culture.
@IzzyChambers maybe “poop” and “turd” for short. “i just pooped about last night’s debate.” or “i dropped/stepped in a turd about that.”
since there’s no longer any website called “twitter”, i think “tweet” should become a site-neutral term for a microblog post on any site, or for posting one. i am tweeting this on Mastodon.
“Musk has all the money in the world. He has the ability to be one of the best informed people in the world. And he’s built for himself a snowglobe of confirmation bias, making sure that a randomly floating combination of grifters and morons continue to feed him the dumbest shit imaginable, rather than take the slightest effort to actually inform himself of reality.” @mmasnick https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elon-musk/
Chicken: She started it!
Egg: No he did!
“I wouldn’t completely write off a Harris win in the Electoral College even if Mr. Trump narrowly won the popular vote.” #NateCohn https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/upshot/poll-trump-harris-election.html ht #JoshBarro
// on the bright side, this would be the event that could rid of us of the electoral college.
maybe the LA Times and the Washington Post are part of a conspiracy to make The New York Times look good.
“yes,” said the boy who cried wolf. “but there were guard rails — i mean fences — around the village those times.”
“I’ve noticed a little linguistic tic in some recent public statements – the use of the word ‘ruthless’ as if it was a synonym for ‘diligent’ or ‘competent’.” @dsquareddigest https://backofmind.substack.com/p/ruthless-pragmatism
// kind of dark. reminds me of Kamala Harris’ choice to emphasize the word “lethal” when discussing the armed forces.
you’ve become a casualty of the war — in a sense, just a bit — if you find your initial reaction to news of soldiers’ deaths on the side that you dislike is unleavened by sadness or grief.
@carolannie I see that quote a lot too, and I think a lot of mainstream, center-left liberals nod along with it, accept it at the level of aphoristic generality. 1/
@carolannie But taking the quote seriously, i’ve not seen support for meaningful policy that would secure the preconditions of having democracy in this country. Right now, it’s obvious the mainstream center left is too scared to say anything, hopes not painting a target will be enough to win the election. 2/
@carolannie If Kamala does win, I am genuinely curious what the mainstream center-left will have learned from a near-death experience at the hands of billionaires acting strategically in their own interest event at risk of shredding the country. Perhaps I will enjoy a positive surprise! I did with Joe Biden, on domestic policy. I am really hoping, really praying, that the well-meaning affluent mainstream of the party understands the stakes and actually, affirmatively, acts. /fin
@carolannie they support taxing the rich more heavily. but they tend to justify that (like Bernie too!) in terms of “paying their fair share” to “finance government” (which is actually a bit incoherent, not totally wrong but has a lot of complicated nuances).
i don’t know of any center-left liberal who has averred publicly that certain extremes of wealth are simply incompatible with meaningful democracy, and we should tax to clip and then prevent those extremes. i hope i’ve just missed it!