The most effective method to improving our democracy is using our democracy. US history has demonstrated this repeatedly.

Meaningful progress has only ever been made in the US after mass movements engaged in direct action and protests (often met with violent state repression), and even then the legislation that’s made is usually much less than the people wanted. This is not a sign of a democracy that functions for the people.

You can only continue to call this system a democracy by setting the bar very very low. Pointless to argue semantics though, better to argue substance. We won’t get to a better - more representative - democracy by working within the current system; we need to apply external pressure. People don’t feel that voting in this election will save democracy because they don’t feel there’s enough of it left to be saved. Voting in this election can at best stave off a total collapse to fascism, but that’s it.

No they hate this truck. It needs to be 3x the size, get 10 miles to the gallon, and be filled with useless smart features before it meets their standards.

We’re lucky we don’t have ancient Roman style privatized firefighters that would stand around and wait for payment before putting out your fire.

Words mean what people who use them think they mean, and Americans using the word Libertarian mean right-wing anti-government and pro-business folks. This may not have been the word’s original meaning, but language changes.

This is an idea explored in The Egg by Andy Weir.

That’s what irks me the most, when people act like abstaining from an election is a grand act of protest that will change things for the better. I understand the reluctance to vote, but that should never be accompanied by a reluctance to act.

What’s your opinion of the Bolsheviks?

What matters more for public health risk is virility, and mortality tends to have a negative correlation with virility. In simpler terms, the more deadly it is the worse it is at spreading. It’s not a hard rule but is true more often than not, though I don’t know any details about avian flu. I assume if the CDC has determined the public health risk is low that it’s probably because it’s not particularly virile.

I would be wondering what I did to make his job more difficult.

These are the exact kind of targeted ads I see when I disable my adblock. I’m a white male in rural Kentucky so I guess advertisers assume I watch Tucker Carlson and buy trucks (as if I could even afford one).

It’s at least an assurance that I’ve been successful at protecting my privacy enough that advertisers don’t know specifics beyond my surface-level demographics.

I believe this is from Carl Sagan’s book The Demon Haunted World. A fantastic read, and one I recommend to anyone who will listen.

Fascism isn’t binary. It’s not yes/no, it’s analog, the dial slowly turned up.

My biggest concern is that we’re crossing a point of no return from which there is no way back except for violent overthrow of the regime. My biggest fear is that we’ve already crossed it.

I haven’t run into anyone who considers emulsifier a scary chemical word. Most people I know with any baking skill know what the word means and use egg yolks for that purpose all the time.

Let me give you a little dose of realism.

We are long past the point where voting in a presidential election can disrupt the status quo.

Under the current circumstances, voting in the presidential can never be anything more than harm reduction. There are only 3 options when it comes to voting:

1. Vote for Trump and accelerate the US decline to neofascism.

2. Throw away your vote on a 3rd party candidate who will never - and could never - win, likely contributing to the decline since conservatives are considerably less likely to vote 3rd party.

3. Vote for Biden to stave off the decline as much as possible while pursuing other means of affecting change.

Even if a large enough number voted 3rd party to make Democrats take notice, the Democrats are not going to change in any meaningful way. The best they will give us is more of the same, paying lip service to leftist ideas while compromising with corporations and the right at every possible opportunity.

If you want things to change in this country you need to protest, engage in direct action and mutual aid, unionize, and do everything you can think of to create and grow alternative institutions of power.

Edit to include voting in primaries and voting local if you live in an area where that could possibly help.

At the moment Solarpunk is a somewhat small and not very well defined movement, but it’s slowly growing and coming into its own. It started as a call to writers to write more hopeful fiction about the future as a response to the disproportionate prevalence of dystopian fiction, chiefly cyberpunk.

Here is a more comprehensive write-up about it. Solarpunk imagines a future where humanity finds a way to live in balance with nature, technology, and each other, with a heavy focus on being realistic, grounded, and attainable. Politically it’s very socially progressive, environmentalist, anticapitalist, and anti-authoritarian.

I’ve recently started using this, running it in a docker container on my media server. It’s fairly simplistic but that’s exactly what I was looking for.

You can, but definitely not by accident.

You’re an alien frog archaeologist that launches themself into space in a rocket jerry-rigged out of wood and ancient alien goat-person tech. After dying repeatedly in several excruciating and brutal ways you learn to embrace death.