It’s not just that.

One thing that the Republicans got real good at was piping the idea of election fraud into their base. Part of what they’ve been doing is getting devoted citizens to target individuals they suspect to be democrat friendly and pouring over their registration paperwork. If they find anything amiss they report it which has made it nessisary to show up and defend one’s right to vote to the administrative bodies on a schedule.

https://youtu.be/CkK3W0lOKcc?si=OT4mOCnlZosTGbld

It’s meant that relatively small wildcat groups of citizens have managed to target literal tens of thousands of voters in swing states to cause confusion and delegitimize voters based on minute errors.

They find new ways to rig the game because they believe that they are owed this.

Yes I do. Because The situation in Gaza was not an election issue for Biden. There was a fantastic amount of campaigning, a lot of it bought and paid for, that turned that genocide into a single issue vote with tis holier than thou reaction of withdrawal from the entire system toted as the answer. It is political suicide to run a mainstream Pro-Palistine presidential campaign in the US. A candidate of one of the two main parties need unilateral support from their donation streams and encumbant systems and the Republicans knew that. They know that’s the devil’s bargain every DNC candidate has to sign to even get a shot.

Republican money supported Jill Stein to serve as a spoiler candidate to engage those with a naive veiw of the system but still wanted to vote and then they helped pipe that message through all manner of socials that if enough people withold their vote then Kamala would have shift her position… Because they knew how enticing that is. The idea that you don’t have to compromise your integrity and that that will be rewarded. They turned this into a single issue campaign for so many people knowing that they didn’t need to shift their position even a little. They could let their Red capped demogogues talk about literally beheading people and those high on this intoxication of absolute righteousness would ONLY care about an issue that Republicans can flaunt their support in favor of.

It was misplaced moral superiority in part that got us here because if you were lulled into not voting or voting third party because one candidate wasn’t “leftist enough” when the alternative is someone popular with an entrenched imobile base of support who wants to make sure leftistism dies dead then you failed to get the assignment.

It wasn’t ‘voter apathy’ it was a misplaced sense of voter moral superiority. It’s the thing leftist rhetoric has been weak to for a very long time. That love of withholding support except for perfection. The idea that compromise or chosing a lesser evil from two bad options dirties you. It doesn’t matter what you lost if you personally took “the high ground”.

This cutting of our noses to spite our face was exploited all to shit this election. They lulled people by appealing to the same zeal of righteousness that they know divides us fundamentally knowing that when push comes to shove people will turn up their noses on principle of not being personally catered to and forget that their ability to help at all is contingent on the freedoms that one party was explicitly putting on the chopping block.

It will be a while before people can admit that they were duped and there’s a lot of fault to go around, particularly in those funded astroturf campaigns designed to bait the hook… The right have been watching us for the past decade they knew how to divide us and it is on US that so many of us fell for it.

Hey, cis normative passing trans person here (in my case my long time partner has a phenotype preference and I chose him rather than physical transition) you are not betraying anybody. It is a hard road any of us walk and your decision, whatever it’s reason, is valid. We are going to need solidarity like never before and that doesn’t mean pointing fingers at ourselves or others and lamenting that our sacrifices don’t look the same. It means being kind to ourselves too. We are all going to need each other.

Oh, it’s worse than that for Canada. Trump during his last term tanked entire sectors of our economy with executive orders he spat out like tweets. Those “deals” were all taken apart in International court filings but the damage was already done.

Remember we are a very big landmass staffed by only a sliver more people than exist in the state of California. If the US goes under we will be ripped apart as no more than collateral damage.

Conservatism is a worldwide problem and they all borrow each other’s notes. It’s not going to be a fun time for us coming up. I can only hope that when the shit hits the fan down there those up here start rethinking their bullshit.

Not saying our shit doesn’t stink but there’s a certain matter of scale to consider. Leastaways we don’t have nukes we can hand over to the psychopath we are looking at voting in.

The national identity of being Canadian over the last while has been every four years wondering if the downstairs neighbors are going to decide to restart up the meth lab they keep tinkering with and bracing for the sounds of domestic violence to resume.

We assume omnipotence from Gods but it’s not wholly true. Most gods out in the world of myth are limited in their reach and ability. If they are in a pantheon then often that implies that they have no direct power over each other and thus they are not all powerful.

Interestingly omnicence or omnipresence is not something claimed even by the monotheistic religions. No God is actually all seeing. Plenty of times in script things have been hidden from God or something has to be told to God to bring it to his attention.

This has nothing to do with his dick persay… Just the assumption of omnipotence. If the Christian God exists he coulda just be lying about what he’s capable of and what human is gunna be able to check the math? Guy seems like the kind of dick who would pull that shit.

Well I dunno if he is an anti-christ. There never is a specification that there is a singular anti christ and they are often pluralized. There’s a pretty low bar to be an anti christ and they aren’t particularly a big deal. Basically according to script anybody who denies Jesus as being the son of God is an anti-christ and that’s pretty common. Any given day you’ll encounter a half dozen anti-christs. “The Antichrist” as in the one big one though isn’t super specified in character and there’s a bunch of options of not goodos who could fill the role

There is a separate nasty called the “the man of sin” and “son of perdition.” supposedly he will come at a time of a general apostasy, deceive people with signs and wonders, sit in the temple of God, and claim to be God himself. And a “Little Horn” (which I am not unconvinced just is a reference to a tiny dick) setting himself in the wing of a temple acting as though he is a divine authority and causing devistation of the Holy land… Which could fit?

So he’s fine if we remove all toilet paper from bathrooms. How he wipes his ass is his parent’s responsibility right?

I’ve seen a fair number of people on here who deny the spoiler effect is a thing… I for one am glad that idiot RFK didn’t catch on until AFTER he signed the paperwork.

Shelters often share resources and many are more flexible than you would expect. They might not take you personally but dollars to donuts they can point you in the direction of other specialized resources.

You need to call your relatives. If one of my second cousins whom I never met gives me a call saying that they are in your position and don’t know where to turn I am driving out 4 hours to pick them up at the drop of a hat.

It is going to be be hard but there are means to get free. Explore your options once you are safe but right now job one is get safe.

Not really. The Democrats are aware of the effect but if they lose they basically just go back to the drawing board. They actively benefit from a lack of knowledge of the FPTP drawbacks so they don’t bring it up unless things get dire enough to tip their hand. They have been squirrelly about letting that understanding flourish so they have been putting forward a sacrificial lamb in the form of the Electoral College to keep people’s eye off the prize.

But unless you get a once in a lifetime knife edge minority government third parties tend to be unstable voting blocks who don’t have the ability to influence schedules which is where the real power lies. They might vote their hearts but it doesn’t matter if they can’t even propose time on the floor for their issues.

From the standpoint of the beneficiaries of the spoiler effect you are a sacrifice that is useful because if we are having this conversation then we aren’t talking about more threatening things lile election reform.

Fucked up?

I am in Vancouver Canada and the whole week has been a knife edge dance of a provincial election between a party that is basically Republican-lite and two Progressive parties where either could make a majority government… And given the projection is of a Conservative win in the Federal elections having two levels of trans hostile groups in charge of one of the most trans friendly places in the world feels a bit like the one place I feel safe is under fire.

I know I am more durable than most. Because I basically chose my partner’s sexual phenotype preferences over transition I live under general permanent assumption that I am cis and straight passing. It sucks literally all the time for the dysphoria and feeling of living inside this illusion created by my body that people think treating me as cis is okay… but I don’t have to worry about a lot of medical continuity of service vulnerabilities. I have so many friends not in my situation who are down to the bricks clinging by their fingernails already that I worry.

My partner has stepped up the cuddles to keep my spirits up. Things have been getting better as things are being forcast but it’s been a rough ride.

I mean… We here in Vancouver BC just had a Provincial election that is so fiercely fought they are still tallying votes a week after the fact and the winner still has not been officially declared and we have no idea if we have a minority or majority government because some districts (ridings) are like 20 votes apart.

Our election is on fire… Just not literally.

It’s not about the player, it’s about the game. Two party first past the post systems are subject to the weakness of the “Spoiler effect” which is a legitimate problem with the design of the system.

As a Canadian this is a well known and well worn principle of our election landscape as “strategic voting” has been byword in elections for about 20 years. The Electoral College creates additional complexity that is more or less something that can be pointed to as the source of the problem but the issues are much deeper.

I know it’s really hard to actually come up against these principles and lose one’s innocent belief that the system rewards your type of participation… But you need to look beyond the gloss and realize how cracked the system is otherwise you will be played.

What the hell are you talking about? Basically the American establishment has been Pro Israel since it’s inception. You have a two party system that treats this as the air America breathes effectively speaking you aren’t and never were going to be voting about the stance of Israel in this election. If you want that you need to organize and fight like hell and you should but there is nothing anyone can say or do to change the election promises on the table right now. If they could, they already would have.

But that means that you are still voting for something. You are voting for everything else on the table. In your country’s case, your chance to actually have elections in another four years.

You have noble concerns but you are letting them blind you to the reality here. This election is important. Republicans have spend decades rigging the game so they need less voters to win and their candidates have started spewing outright Nazi rhetoric. While your veiw is in the distance the wolf is in the grass in front of you. You need to deal with this first if you want your country not to not remove your personal power to influence it further… And I’m not inferring elections, I mean other forms of resistance.

You got it backwards friend. In the grand scheme here Trump isn’t comparitively rich, he has an empire that constantly hemorrhages money but value wise he is sitting around 3. 6 billion.

Musk’s currently valued at around 269. 8 billion. He spends a ridiculous amount of money on super PACs and uses his purchase of different platforms to kill news stories that show Democrats in a positive light and bankrolls a lot of Republican stuff. Musk isn’t being bought, Trump is.