The primaries are over.

I voted for someone other than Turek but Turek won anyway.

So what happens now?

Turek is horrible in this regard, but I have to vote for him anyway because he wants to TRY to ban transgender care, emphasis on TRY while the other party wants to do worse.

Everyone needs to get this through their heads.

Go talk to american muslims who couldn’t vote for Kamala because she supported Israel.

Not voting perpetuates more harm than voting for the bad guy who is less bad.

Voting third party at this point in the election cycle perpetuates more harm than voting for the bad guy who is less bad.

THE FACTS ARE SIMPLE:

One of two people will win this race. There is no other outcome at this point.

This primary was decided by votes, not anti-bernie-level dnc trickery.

You have to vote for the one who will hurt you less or it will get worse than even this.

I hate everything about it, but this is very simple: at this point anything other than a vote for turek is a vote for escalating harm to trans people to levels even higher than what turek wants.

That is all there is to it.

Go vote.

Do not let this rhetoric stop you from turning out to vote.

That is what the people behind the machine want.

This should be a learned lesson at this point but people like Erin are somehow still getting spun up by propaganda and failing to see the simple, shitty, crushing truth here, which is that an anti-trans democrat who only wants to ban things because his donors tell him to is still more pro-trans than any other option we have at this point in this one race.

The democrats are not “doing nothing”, they are once again performing active self-harm by upholding their previous party status quo, which generally RESEMBLES doing nothing (except on rare occasions when it resembles putting the worst possible and least progressive candidate forward, like endorsing a massive transphobe up against a slam dunk nothingburger opponent like ramaswamy in ohio. They could win with anything and anyone, so they picked the candidate that’s the OPPOSITE of what’s causing startling blue victories in other places).

good policy gets you voted out of office, and makes everyone hate you. You don’t get rich from pursuing a broad-based policy that improves the lives of your constituents. a lot of people i met… were smart and open about this. there was no reason to be a ‘good’ politician because nobody pays you for it, and the voters tend to vote you out for it.

I feel like this effect could be ameliorated by restricting political advertising to direct, verified facts only.

New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!

Failed Fact Checks

None in the Last 5 years

I want to marry this rag.

This is definitely a play they’re considering.

The only defense against it that I’m aware of is to get the popular vote SO FAR in favor of Harris/Walz that Congress won’t be willing to risk their vote being so blatantly opposite and misrepresentative of the will of the people, lest it lead to reform they don’t want.

Yeah, I saw “Gay student says coach” and went “oh no, not AGAIN?!?!” Then saw “Tim Walz” and was briefly all “fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck” until I read the rest.

How bad is it that headlines about terrible abuse are so much more common than positive stories that my brain just went to bad first thing.

One day I want to see news as something other than filler to grab ad revenue.

I’d like institutional reform in the athletic sector too, but I can’t decide which is less likely to actually happen.

Seriously.

Like, the Democrats finally learned ONE EFFECTIVE THING with “weird”.

It would be super cool if we didn’t ONCE AGAIN torpedo the ever-living fuck out ourselves by saying PROVEN STUPID SHIT THAT ALWAYS GUARANTEES THE SAME RESPONSE.

We have at least ten more years before talking about gun control will have the opposite effect it does now.

Currently even mentioning it does nothing demonstrable FOR the person who says it (because it’s typically hand waving instead of problem solving) but it sure as hell drives up ammo sales and gun afficianado panic levels.

It’s a footgun, not a soapbox.

Right now they’re just waving fistfuls of money in Trump’s direction and he gets to pick up whatever falls out of their hands as they’re waving. It’s definitely big money that he’s getting, but it’s ultimately castoffs to the people who attempted to BUY GOLF ON A PLANETARY SCALE just because they felt like it.

Right now any mumbling about climate change is status quo for them.

Drawing direct ire would be an INCREDIBLY STUPID CHOICE right now. Get into office FIRST, then go after the oil barons.

Publicly call out poorly designed cities, under funded public transportation, and corporate resistance to working from home.

Do not publicly call out the oil barons by name.

Not right now.

Do not summon what you cannot banish.

I mean, the lead up to the tea party’s core ideals was already there with stuff like that Imus wanker openly calling the WNBA “Nappy-headed hoes” on his national news show in like 2004-2005. The current hard right, isolationist, bigoted downfall has been going on since rush limbaugh hit the airwaves in the late 80’s. Before the rush era, there was some serious bullshit, but that was the start of not stowing the hoods UNDER the pickup seats anymore. Saying the bigoted parts out loud, in public, and nationwide with blanket tacit approval from roughly half the country really grew legs with that fucker. I think that was 87. Pat Robertson running for president and everything.

The concepts of “us” and “them” started getting real widespread traction with otherwise middle-of-the-road people when rush hit.

That’s the official state rifle of the school shooter TODAY! Anyone who’s seen a gun enthusiast magazine knows they have MUCH more ridiculous stuff in the pipeline.

No, nor should they try, nor should they stick with their current seemingly nonsensical policy ideas about guns.

The “gun problem” as it stands is really more of a symptom of our mental health crisis, our ridiculously confrontational “news” cycle, and a number of other HUMAN factors that aren’t going to be solved by banning a particular model of gun, though and no one seems to want to hear that.

Screeching “Ban the right’s favorite model of toy” right before an election is beyond tone deaf, and an incredibly dumb move politically that won’t do squat except mobilize the NRA voters to vote the other way, which we DO NOT NEED with democracy in this country at stake.

I can personally count multiple handfuls of coworkers and acquaintances who might have voted for him that will now vote trump or stay away from the polls over this.

Holy deep fried frankenfuck will the Democrats NEVER LEARN?!?!?!?!

AFTER!

You talk about guns AFTER the election!

What in the actual pogostickingpopejohnpaul is he THINKING?!?!?

The optics are 1000% awful here.

Uvalde wasn’t enough, but a potshot at the planet’s most notorious living felon is?

I accidentally wore a wolverines starter jacket around Columbus for a week one winter while I was on a business trip. Couldn’t figure out why the waiters were all so curt with me until one of the locals made a comment on the job site.

In retrospect it’s a miracle I didn’t get accosted by a season ticket holder.

Fox News isn’t talking about that. The few moderate Republicans left are still likely watching Fox News. Some on-the-fence voters are likely watching Fox News. They’re not hearing any of this.

They ARE hearing a ton of lies about some mythical “Biden crime family” though. And about how joe is both the mastermind AND a doddering fool.

And if one part of that looks even marginally true, it’s a tiny bit easier to swallow the rest of what Fox is spitting.

Because he’s doing good things for the populace at large and pundits sound bytes are purchasable by those negatively impacted by those good things.

• “Why are we talking about Biden when we SHOULD be talking about Trump!?”

What I mean when I utter something like this is: “why are we laser-focused on a few of Biden’s relatively minor (IN COMPARISON) gaffes/mistakes/issues/flaws when the laundry list of shit that’s bad about Trump is TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE LARGER?”

If you count up every bad thing Trump has done that would be on looping repeat on fox news for weeks if Biden or Obama said/did it, you’d hit five digits before you got back to Trump talking about grabbing women by the pussy. It’s fucking LUDICROUSLY one-sided. And non-fox stations are not much better. Think about it.

• "Why is the media giving Trump so much attention!?!

So much POSITIVE attention.

So according to the head of the catholic church, slagging off the pope is worse than fucking children?

One is just cause for excommunication according to the rules. Excommunication is a very specific punishment for very specific religious things.

Stealing communion wine could technically earn you an excommunication depending on how it was done and what was done with the wine.

The rules behind excommunication are practically ancient at this point but they weren’t there to prevent all sins, just be punishment for specific things that were threatening to the absolute shitshow that the organization itself was a long ass time ago.

The fact that it’s still a shitshow as an organization, albeit a slightly different KIND of shitshow has no bearing on this situation in particular.

Let’s be fair, though. All kiddy diddlers are in the depths of iniquity and should have long since been addressed under what’s said in scripture and held to account on that regardless of any talk of excommunication.

Clergy should have been removed for choosing to actively live in sin and then punished according to the law.

I dunno, my non-drinking finnish acquaintance and former gaming buddy (Stupid RL getting in the way all the time) regularly rants about the idiocy of his countrymen during hockey season. :P

At what point do these kind of lies, SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO CURTAIL HIS FURTHER EMPLOYMENT begin to count as illegal?

When does it meet the New York Times v. Sullivan requirement for “actual malice”?