evilweasel posted:

yeah, that's the key part: the entire republican strategy right now is about nationalizing everything as ARE YOU WITH THE LEADER OR ARE YOU A TRAITOR and if that doesn't get you 50.1% in kentucky that's, uh, not super for republicans

but it does mean that dems everywhere still need to run good races instead of just hoping trump backlash wins

Dapper_Swindler posted:

Not surprised, if they think trump isn’t bringing people out to vote and is possibly making poo poo worse than they will stab him the back.

Sydin posted:

Is Beshear a lock? He's only up by about 20,000 votes and the only counties still left to report are rural ones.

oxsnard posted:

black felons

Herstory Begins Now posted:

non-violent criminals, not 'black felons' wtf

fool_of_sound posted:

A GIANT PARSNIP posted:

Also the KY Governor has a veto over the 2020 redistricting maps, in case you need another reason to celebrate.

A GIANT PARSNIP posted:

Also the KY Governor has a veto over the 2020 redistricting maps, in case you need another reason to celebrate.

evilweasel posted:

https://twitter.com/Taniel/status/1191889867468398599

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

oh are you under the impression that KY has a fair and equitable criminal justice system?

evilweasel posted:

Do republicans have a veto-proof majority in the legislature?

CommieGIR posted:

Chances that the GOP Kentucky senate will gut that power?

oxsnard posted:

I read earlier that the affected demographic was 75% black

Stickman posted:

The cynic in me just assumes that racist DAs will just push to shoehorn in "violent" felonies whenever they can. If you're going to end disenfranchisement, just end disenfranchisement!

evilweasel posted:

https://twitter.com/albamonica/status/1191887943524388864

evilweasel posted:

Presumably he can do what he proposes by executive action (a pardon or the like), what you are suggesting needs legislation.

evilweasel posted:

Do republicans have a veto-proof majority in the legislature?

mediaphage posted:

Courier Journal says (including violent offences) there are ~312k ineligible voters of whom ~69k are black. This approximates to 1:10 residents, and specifically one in four black residents.

Also: KY voting blue in statewide offices is not that unusual. Beshear’s dad was a democratic governor just four years ago.

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

Yeah I'm not sure what the beef with this is, but I'm unironically all ears for someone to explain.

fool_of_sound posted:

Referring to people disenfranchised for prior crimes as 'felons' is dehumanizing in and of itself, and while pointing out that it predominantly affects black people is fine, paired with 'felons' it sounds like something that plays into bigoted stereotypes. I assumed oxnard didn't actually mean to imply those things, but part of the reason D&D exists is to learn how to better talk about issues.

fool_of_sound posted:

Referring to people disenfranchised for prior crimes as 'felons' is dehumanizing in and of itself, and while pointing out that it predominantly affects black people is fine, paired with 'felons' it sounds like something that plays into bigoted stereotypes. I assumed oxnard didn't actually mean to imply those things, but part of the reason D&D exists is to learn how to better talk about issues.

theflyingorc posted:

The dumb thing about "Oregon Trail generation" is that a lot of schools kept those crappy Apple IIs or Tandys around until like 2000, so it's just a bunch of Gen Xers not realizing that Millennials also played Oregon trail.

KillHour posted:

CNET doing good work.

https://www.cnet.com/news/no-one-should-buy-the-facebook-portal-tv/


When a tech review article on CNET of all places tells people not to buy your stuff because you're too evil, you done hosed up.

Rigel posted:

It would definitely mean something, but the Dems nominated perhaps the best candidate they possibly could for the race (from the KY Beshear dynasty, proven already he can win statewide, good candidate, etc), so he's going to greatly outperform what a generic Dem would do. If he narrowly wins tonight, that means any other Dem would have lost.

It would be more interesting if Beshear wins by like 10 points.

BonoMan posted:

Voted today in Mississippi but the stupid machines don't have a way of confirming how it saw your ballot (it's just a paper ballot that's scanned by a machine). It only checks to see if you are sure about the races you left blank. Who decided that's a good system?

Mantis42 posted:

Protecting pedophiles to own the cons.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:

Instead of just running guns and money to central American death squads, the United States can cut out the middleman and put leftists in mass graves themselves. What do you think happens to that military mission of mercy once another weak corporatist gets voted out for Trump II?

bobjr posted:

Weirdly enough none of the networks seem to be calling the KY Gov race despite 98% of the votes being in.

Ice Phisherman posted:

My BP? Not sure what that means.

This kind of behavior is extremely common in corporate media though. It's not what they say, what they're for or against. It's what they don't say. What they're not allowed to say without lighting their careers on fire. If you're on a hot mic, you can say pretty much anything. You are allowed to do that because eventually you'll be on live television. The problem is that if you offend power, the people who sign your checks or the people who have their ears, you will find yourself out of a job.

The talking heads are the millionaire class who serve the billionaire class. This is true of all corporations who create media. The purpose of corporate media is to launder the abuses of power whether that's political power or corporate power or religious power. Really, whatever power block that corporation is a part of, but there also exists class consciousness and if you offend the class consciousness of the elites you're pretty well hosed.

The thing about people "not caring" about Epstein is that people weren't informed about Epstein. It's not difficult to form a narrative about a billionaire pedophile who is connected to most other Western movers and shakers from across the bullshit ideological spectrum. We view the people in power as on this or that side. Bill Gates as some philanthropist billionaire. Donald Trump as a fascist upon his gold plated toilet. The Clintons as elite middle-right centrists. Jeff Bezos as the richest man in the world never to pay taxes.

All of these people and more are connected to Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell, his ex-fixer and they're terrified that their involvement with him will cause a mob to jail them, if not rip them apart in the streets for raping little girls. It's an indictment not of some left or right win politics. These people are the people who pull the levers of power. Who throw the political footballs and introduce new ones. Those are distractions.

Donald Trump and the Clinton family and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are all autocrats and they have more in common with one another than they do with you or me. It's a small community and they're all directly linked to Epstein, all of them after his first conviction for acting as a broker to the powerful to rape teenage and preteen girls. It was still running for over a decade and the people who run the media are complicit because they did their best to sing us back to sleep after Epstein's murder.

I believe that if the full details of Epstein's involvement were made then people would lose faith not in some nebulous left or right or centrist wing of politics. It would be everyone because there are so many people involved. It would be like breaking kayfabe, where professional wrestlers who pretended to hate each other for so long hugged on stage and suddenly the lie was over. Wrestling was fake.

Well I'm telling you that politics as most of us know it is fake. The left/right/centrist spectrum is bullshit. Corporate media's purpose is to soothe us to sleep so elites can maintain their power. For those who won't stay asleep, they plug them into narratives that make us fight one another to waste our strength and attention. For those who understand that the elites are the enemy, not normal people, those people are either ignored or demonized.

Capitalism subsumes all critiques, even those that critique capitalism. That our elites are all or at least mostly involved in a no poo poo elite pedophile cabal is an all hands on deck moment because it threatens to bring the might low and might even create a reckoning. It could bring the American experiment crashing down around our ears and honestly, I'm not too put out about that if this is who runs everything. These people point from their thrones, pretending to be on this side of that, doing their best to divide us so they can rule us. They want to divide us, to turn us into atomized, self-loathing nihilists who vote for the corrupt because they're convinced the other guy is just as bad. But that's a recipe for exactly what happened in the USSR, where people stopped believing in it and so it effectively ceased to exist. No riot, no protests, just a collapse of the narrative that was nation.

There are some things that you need to believe in a thing to make it true. Some things that work on faith. Nations are one of these things. Borders are imaginary and in the United States, there is no dominant ethnic group. Whiteness is imaginary, for we come from no common ethnic group. Race in general is imaginary and only serves to divide us so elites might steal our labor, slave and slavemaster alike, though one enjoys evil privileges over the other, they are still both held captive by who owns them if not through bondage and violence, then through contenting one with the dark delights that are cruelty to sate the fact that they are also oppressed, though unequally.

We are not born to be whipped nor born to whip others. We are taught to do so. Taught to hate and degrade. Taught to suffer because raising our voice comes with the possibility of pain and death.

Elites cease to be without race to divide us, without class, without the arbitrary politics that we are indoctrinated to believe in largely by them. It is an ongoing divide and conquer strategy as old as time that builds nations and empires also causes them to collapse not only under their contradictions, but under the weight of decadent elites who want more for the simple sake of having more at your expense and mine.

The structure of existing political thought under neoliberalism falls apart if examined critically and neoliberalism dominates what passes for left and right the world over. It is riddled with contradictions and can only be accepted through complicated sleight of hand. If our system is examined without that sleight of hand we see the scam and scam artist. We begin to form a critique and capitalism subsumes this critique of itself into itself and weaponizes it against those who would seek to tear it down. They seek violence, the last refuge of the capitalist. They seek to divide and conquer, turning one group of people against the other. To create slave master and slave as a class once again so they can rule them both. To cause people to glut themselves on violence so they can discharge all of the anger and frustration and fear and rage caused by capitalism. One ape slaps another, who in stead of striking backs, slaps a smaller ape. All down the line, slapping the small until the last ape curls into a ball and hopes that it is not beaten again.

We are not so evolved. We are not so enlightened. We are still savage. The only way out that I know is through forming class consciousness, tearing down elites and not installing more of them, for we'd just repeat the cycle again. We'd have our triumph, but it would be fleeting. It's not individuals that we need to defeat. It is a system. An intellectual virus that causes us to accept a monopoly state violence, because the state would not exist without it.

This system is ripe to collapse under its contradictions, but I believe that we need to go further. And like the binding of Isaac, we need a substitute. To say no, we will not do violence to our fellow man another more. That shall not be the bedrock that we manufacture our political consent. And to me, the answer is simple. Bread. Simple bread. To build consent based on care for one another, not on violence. Because if our political systems are forever built on violence, we will never break this cycle. We will always come back here. We will always struggle with fundamental questions because our system is fundamentally flawed. There will never be justice or peace because how we manufacture consent is through violence.

skylined! posted:

Video schadenfreude

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1191894907801214977?s=20

https://twitter.com/krystalball/status/1191895564780294144?s=20