- 383 Posts
- 454 Comments
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPto
Politics@beehaw.org•Ted Cruz Kept Sightseeing as Desperate Rescue Crews Searched for Missing Kids in Texas Floods
5·8 months agoThere are too many plaques developed in his brain at this point for him to be able to remember the words “flood” or “policy,” is what it sounds like to me.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPto
Politics@beehaw.org•Ted Cruz Kept Sightseeing as Desperate Rescue Crews Searched for Missing Kids in Texas Floods
101·8 months agoHis wife shot me a dirty look

PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cattoLemmy Support@lemmy.ml•Vanished posts (possibly removed communities)
1·8 months agoOh… yeah, you’re right. No idea then.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cattoLemmy Support@lemmy.ml•Vanished posts (possibly removed communities)
1·8 months agoEven your own posts will be hidden from your own profile, if you have “show read posts” unchecked, I think. Like I say it has some pretty weird behavior sometimes.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cattoLemmy Support@lemmy.ml•Vanished posts (possibly removed communities)
2·8 months ago- Do you maybe have “show read posts” unchecked? That’s a deceptive setting.
- Are you on a different instance than where the posts were originally created (meaning they might have been blocked or otherwise not federated to where you’re checking from)?
A lot of people weren’t fine with that. Pretty much the same people who are alarmed and horrified by the current developments were alarmed and horrified about Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, the war, and all the rest of it. The issue is just that we haven’t really done anything about it.
This kind of weird hyperbole helps no one.
Yes, the US’s prison system is an abomination, including atrocious conditions, corruption, maltreatment and death, not to mention any of the injustices baked into the system of car registration / credit checks / felony convictions / education and all the rest of it that effectively create an invisible apartheid system where about 35% of the country are barred, permanently, from ever being able to live a first-world-existence life.
That’s different than setting up mass detention camps and promising to put innocent people and political opponents into them, setting up a secretive law enforcement agency tasked with doing that, and then getting to work at a massive scale. It just is. The fact that the system has been rigged in general since the 80s doesn’t mean what’s happening right now is not a 10-alarm, 20-alarm, fire.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPto
Politics@beehaw.org•Top Democratic Senator Goes On Wildly Racist Tirade Against Zohran Mamdani
23·9 months ago“I will NEVER co-sign a genocide,” they said, and got really condescending about how pure they were being, by refusing to vote to keep Trump out of power.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPto
Politics@beehaw.org•Top Democratic Senator Goes On Wildly Racist Tirade Against Zohran Mamdani
4·9 months agoYeah, 100% agree. See also David Hogg, who tried to reform the DNC from within, and how well that turned out.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPto
Politics@beehaw.org•Top Democratic Senator Goes On Wildly Racist Tirade Against Zohran Mamdani
2·9 months agoI saw people at an anti-Trump protest who were getting up and yelling about how it was largely the Democrats’ fault and it was important not to reward them with our votes. That’s the only person I’ve ever seen in person who thinks this way, yes, but I have seen it a nonzero number of times.
It’s almost all an internet thing, just in general. Every single political person I know in person is more or less either pro-Democrat or pro-Trump, or else wholly anti-US in all respects, the sophisticated leftist viewpoint is almost entirely an internet thing for me.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPto
Politics@beehaw.org•Top Democratic Senator Goes On Wildly Racist Tirade Against Zohran Mamdani
2·9 months agoI was talking, obliquely, about the people on Lemmy pre-election who used “Democrats betrayed Bernie” as a reason to make the argument “politics is pointless, let’s not vote.”
If you’re saying those people don’t represent actual progressive activism (which has, I agree, been making more and more inroads every year as things get progressively worse and worse and their momentum builds), I will agree with you completely.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPto
Politics@beehaw.org•Top Democratic Senator Goes On Wildly Racist Tirade Against Zohran Mamdani
19·9 months agoVery few revolutions succeed overnight (without then making things worse than before). The way that people gave up after Bernie got cheated, and figured “welp let’s leave things on autopilot then, I am discouraged now that we know the people on top are willing to cheat to hold onto power, that’s unfair and I don’t want to play anymore”, is some lazy soft first world part time activism crap.
(And yes, I am equally part of the problem, not trying to point fingers just agreeing with you more or less. Things build over time. The more you push the more they build.)
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPto
Politics@beehaw.org•This Year’s Election Bills Focus On Citizenship, Ranked Choice Voting
2·9 months agoYeah. Nitpicking about how the better replacement isn’t better enough, and so let’s all get derailed into arguments about it, wasn’t what I was trying to do. Just bringing up another also good alternative. RCV seems to be what has the name recognition right now, and generally people like it, so hooray let’s improve.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPto
Politics@beehaw.org•This Year’s Election Bills Focus On Citizenship, Ranked Choice Voting
1·9 months agoI used to be a big fan of RCV (and pretty much anything is better than FPTP), but I’ve become convinced that STAR voting is better than RCV.
There’s no “algorithm,” it’s not confusing, it’s mathematically better, it doesn’t suffer from any of the traps that ranking-candidates systems suffer from. Basically you just give a star rating 1-5 to each candidate and whoever gets the most stars wins. Easy peasy.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catto
U.S. News@beehaw.org•US supreme court limits judges’ power on nationwide injunctions in apparent win for Trump
6·9 months agoSupreme Court, later: No one ever told us we would be in the crosshairs
How could this have happened, we were the good ones
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catto
California@lemmy.world•Most California cities ban apartment buildings that don't add parking. Minneapolis no longer has parking requirements. This is the result.
2·9 months agoAs you point out, it costs money to build parking, but externalizing that cost is completely free. Since there is no block-by-block governmental structure that can enact regulations to stop people externalizing the costs individually, and the outcome of no one ever having any parking unless they pay to rent a space really isn’t ideal, I think having the city make parking zones and be aware of the problems and try to do something about them is a pretty acceptable substitute.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catto
California@lemmy.world•Most California cities ban apartment buildings that don't add parking. Minneapolis no longer has parking requirements. This is the result.
61·9 months agoYeah. There are a few other differences between California and Minnesota other than “are you allowed to say ‘lol good luck and fuck you’ before unleashing hundreds of drivers to gobble up all the street parking with no analysis of whether that will lead to a shortage of parking for anyone, externalizing all the costs onto some other hapless bastard and making life worse for everyone?’”
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catto
Politics@beehaw.org•Josh Hawley is directly targetting leftists now
4·9 months agoI have seen them at protests, and they do seem organized and they definitely can yell. What the fuck, I’ll take it. I feel like it’s probably mostly the central leadership that’s somehow been corrupted into trying to throw elections to the Republicans and getting upset about us sending aid to Ukraine.
I don’t know if the person on the microphone I saw spend most of their speech yelling about Democrats (literally more than 50%) was from the PSL, but I don’t know that they were. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say maybe not, fuck it, come along with us, you can do your thing and I can do mine, sounds good.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catto
Politics@beehaw.org•Josh Hawley is directly targetting leftists now
41·9 months agoYou and Five aren’t 100% wrong, I do take the point that the infighting is a waste of energy. I was all set to apologize and acknowledge, and then I looked at the PSL’s web site and it’s all still talking about the election, they don’t give a shit about progress now that it doesn’t involve an election with a Democrat in it, they literally can’t even be bothered to take down the video yelling about the election that happened a lifetime ago in a different type of country. Literally the day the election happened, they stopped caring, I guess.
I mean like I say, I do get it. I just felt embittered. Now that I’ve got it out of my system for a second, yes, we can all rally together and fight this bullshit whether or not the PSL is aware of its role in this catastrophe or interested in self-preservation in future elections going forward.















I think a lot of the people in a position to decide about this kind of thing are backing Adams (Cuomo is cooked at this point) because he is profoundly corrupt, and has no plans to deal with issues that huge portions of the electorate are facing.
The people who are reading for example the newspapers and podcasts constructed by that first grouping, and then deciding to vote for Adams for example instead of Mandami, are either confused or horrible, in a way that overall is sadly hilarious, yes.