a lil bee 🐝

Reduce your fractions folks

Different model, same website. Silver got to keep his model and took it elsewhere after departing from 538.

So genuinely, how do you expect this to work? Am I supposed to just go upvote every dumb as shit opinion I read on the internet so everyone feels better?

Why would his opinion not be subject to critique from the hundreds of people who use this site? Don’t post if you don’t want your opinions to be scrutinized by the forum you’re posting in.

No, your children have an equal stake to yours. It gives you nothing.

All good, friend. I just think this is possible for us to defeat, even at the ballot box. The American people are powerful when they decide to wield their votes for the actual, true betterment of the country and our democracy. I really think we can do this, together.

They withheld the vote on obama’s nominee in order to get a Republican to install them.

Yup, because they had control of the Senate. They were voted in. I’m not denying that Republicans are immoral, unethical scumbags with the intent to power game the system, but we have no tools to fix that in our current system other than overwhelming it. It only gets worse the longer we wait.

There really aren’t a lot of other options for the citizenry. You can LARP at revolution or whatever, but I’m not volunteering first and I don’t see a lot of others doing so either. I, and a lot of other vulnerable people, are not going to come out on top, so I’ll pass on that solution.

Fact of the matter is, we could have elected Hillary in 2016. Sure, there was Republican meddling and Comey and yada yada, but it was fully within our abilities and we failed. The Supreme Court would look entirely different right now and we would still have medical rights. We did flip the senate, so it was fully in play before and then Mitch would not have been able to block the Garland appointment. Those are concrete outcomes from something that was fully possible for us to prevent. So I’m just not comfortable writing off voting as worthless at this stage, even with the acknowledged difficulties, gerrymandering, etc.

No worries! I’m full of rage on all this nonsense lately too and I’ve been in that same mode. I’m happy to join with you in November and in the meantime to start to fix this nonsense!

Of course there’s a reason? Legislation was passed (the real problem here) and the entire point of the court is to evaluate legislation against our constitution. I agree with every single statement in your last paragraph, but you have to point the blame at the correct place. SCOTUS taking this up is completely legitimate and falls entirely within their role in our government.

The state legislators are infringing on private citizens and their medical care. That’s the crime here. Even then, it’s important to understand that nothing is off limits to legislators. Even our core rights can be changed by a supermajority in the national congress. Power decides what rights get protected in a society. That’s been the recurrent tale of history for all time. We are beyond fortunate to have a sliver of that power and we are failing to use it to stomp these legislators into the dust. That’s the crime here, not SCOTUS taking up a case that falls entirely under its jurisdiction and mandate.

Genuine question, does anyone have any better suggestions that can be implemented in a reasonable timeframe? Immigration is a bad economic target for so many reasons, but Americans overwhelmingly view it as a critical issue. When 1 in 5 of your citizens, regardless of party, considers it the most pressing issue right now in an election year and it is the thumping drum of your opponent, you’re going to be under a lot of pressure to act. I don’t want this EO to happen but I kind of have to be willing to say I’m in the vast minority in my country, evidently. This is a social/educational problem to solve first, I think.

We’re all trying to be SpongeBob, but we’re all subject to being a Squidward some days.

Are you willing to admit you were wrong if Israel already proposed this deal to Hamas through Qatar? This is a garbage situation all around and none of it is helped by sanctimonious assholes on social media pre-judging every action taken before it even has a moment to breathe.

I really hate it when this sort of thing happens. If you read into this particular death, it looks like a tragic series of unfortunate events and not anything nefarious. The earlier whistleblower death looked truly suspicious and I don’t fault people for that one, but this one just isn’t. Now this family is going to be dealing with a conspiracy and hounded by insane people while trying to grieve their loved one. I wish people could really look into these things instead of just reacting because Boeing has been sketchy lately.

Sure, okay. I agree that people are being manipulated by media and that politicians have lied. Now what? Are we going to just sit and hope it corrects itself? Fixing any of the problems our country or the world are facing is going to take a multi-faceted approach across all sorts of diverse groups and ideologies banding together to shut out the unacceptable ones. Part of that approach will be voting out the conservatives where it is possible and encouraging and aiding those that are “softly” disenfranchised via misinformation or inconvenience to vote. Anything else is just giving up, and we cannot do that.

It’s horrifying, but these are not dictatorships. DeSantis and his legislature were voted in by the people of Florida. DeSantis is not just stomping all over the opinions of Floridians, he represents those who showed up to vote. If we let only the cruel vote and choose our leaders, those leaders will be cruel.

I would argue the opposite is true. The entire idea of “abolishing gender” is to remove the forced expectations and norms, not to force everyone to be androgynous or uniform. Freeing this woman to have her gender expression respected by the state is a small, concrete step towards that end.

That’s not an objective thing to decide. I’m sure this particular teacher would love for us to consider her day to day life a real problem. Work on abolishing gender, sure, but I don’t expect it within my lifetime and we all have stuff to do to make life better in the interim.

This is like commenting on a story about an innocent man being released from jail and saying “why can’t we just abolish all prisons?”. Like, everyone here likely agrees but you’re also commenting on a story about why we can’t. This woman barely, barely got the right to have others be able to use her basic pronouns. Why do you think they would be willing to jump right to eliminating gender altogether for her sake or those like her? People in power love gender and they love the rules it lets them impose, that’s why.

Recreational weed and abortion being on the ballot is a massive opportunity. I’m still not sure that it’s truly in play, but this is about as good a chance as Dems will get for any positions or issues in that state.

Disappointed in the comments here so far. There’s a cardinal rule of improv that also works well for many other things in life, politics included: “yes, and”.

This is a great change that will save folks money and make the country just a little bit fairer. Celebrate that, and then use the momentum to push for more. This builds alliances and a shared vision, instead of devolving into petty squabbles around direction.