Yeah I'm also struggling to see the logic in this.
The dude is already sort of a folk hero. If you kill him you will absolutely be creating a martyr. It's going to be one of those things that might not make a big impact right away, but the worse shit gets for rank and file Americans the more they will remember Luigi. And that's when you get copycats...

What you call unreliable voters, the rest of us call the American people. If you think you can rely on a voter, you've already lost. You are taking your supporters for granted, just as Hillary did, just as Kamala did. Didn't work out well for either of them.

'I'm not Trump' is not a winning strategy. Not for Hillary, not for Kamala, not for the DNC.

If you want to win elections, you have to look at what VOTERS actually WANT. And voters want radical reform. The unfortunately aren't informed enough to realize they'll get more reform for their vote in congressional, state, and local elections than in a presidential vote. But they still want radical reform from their presidential candidate, for better or for worse.

There are an awful lot of valid reasons not to like Donald Trump, but lack of reform in his messages not one of them. His very slogan, 'Make America Great Again', implies change.

People are angry. People see a system that works very well for the 1% and tolerable at best for the rest of the country, and they want that to change. They want a country that works for them. It's a reasonable ask. And since they aren't getting it, they want reform.

If DNC wants to win elections, they need to put forward some new ideas, which won't necessarily be popular with big business but will be popular with voters. Bernie would have mopped the floor with Trump had he not been squeezed out. There's a few younger more charismatic Democrats who could bring about some real positive change. They always get sidelined in favor of the milquetoast boring status quo candidate.

Look at Obama as an example. Young, charismatic, and a campaign based on reform. He didn't deliver nearly enough reform but he generally left things better. It was enough to get Biden elected...

This is all well and good but I don't see any changes happening and I don't see any lessons being learned.

We voted for Biden, not Garland. Advisors can push him whatever way they want but at the end of the day it's his call. And voters have been sharing every frustration for the last decade or two at getting presidents that don't actually push the real reforms people want.

IMHO, in Biden's place, The smart thing to do would have been go full Bulworth mode the second he dropped out. If he cut the bullshit and started calling everybody out he could endorse a damp paper bag as his successor and they'd get votes.

People voted for Trump because he is a reform candidate. He may not be a reform President (he wasn't the first time) but he talks a lot of reform on the stump.

Hillary was not a reform candidate. Kamala was not a reform candidate. Both lost.

If there is a lesson to be learned here, it's that DNC needs to jettison a lot of the old guard that have been the face of the party for the last 50 years. Get some young people with energy and new ideas and put them in charge.

After the United CEO shooting, it would have been a great time for Democrats to put the public option back on the table. That should never have been dropped from Obamacare. But there is enough sentiment in favor of it that they could probably get it through, or at the very least make Republicans pay in the court of public opinion for stopping it. Yet another wasted opportunity.

Add in ruined music to that. Shitty speakers, super lossy codecs to preserve cellular bandwidth, even shittier Bluetooth compression, listening to music on a phone is convenient but it sounds like shit. And we've got generations of people who think that's what music is supposed to sound like.

Or to change that stupid ATF form 4473 which basically requires anyone who smokes weed to either commit a felony by lying (checking the box for they don't use illegal drugs) or tell the truth (checking the box that they do) and being unable to purchase a firearm. Unfortunately the war on law abiding gun owners had to continue so on a few occasions their position continued to be that marijuana users should not be allowed to buy or own firearms.

Hypocrisy+++++

I agree with this a lot. Boyfriend or girlfriend is the person you are romantically attached to. Partner is a MUCH stronger word, it implies teamwork and shared purpose; the understanding that you have each other's backs.

There are also plenty of people who are married for whom the word partner does not apply. It's sad.

I think a lot of people reject the title 'partner' because for a very long time before gay marriage was a thing, there was only 'civil partnerships' or 'civil unions' and thus 'partner' was the only accurate term, 'wife' or 'husband' couldn't apply as they weren't legally married. So they see 'partner' as a sort of 'almost as good' runner up.

The chlorine does its job, and whatever shit it kills becomes chloramine. Chlorine does have a smaller smell of its own so maybe they just put a shit ton of it in also.

There's an old quote, 'never blame on malice that which can be explained by incompetence'.

I would adapt that to be, 'never blame on homosexuality that which can be explained by stupidity'...

It will be interesting to see that tested in court. I don't think anyone would complain about for example a pencil sketch of a naked celebrity, that would be considered free speech and fair use even if it is a sketch of a scene from a movie.

So where does the line go? If the pencil sketch is legal, what if you do a digital sketch with Adobe illustrator and a graphics tablet? What if you use the Adobe AI function to help clean up the image? What if you take screen grabs of a publicity shot of the actor's face and a nude image of someone else, and use them together to trace the image you end up painting? What if you then use AI to help you select colors and help shading? What if you do each of those processes individually but you have AI do each of them? That is not very functionally different from giving an AI a publicity shot and telling it to generate a nude image.

As I see it, The only difference between the AI deepfake and the fake produced by a skilled artist is the amount of time and effort required. And while that definitely makes it easy to turn out an awful lot of fakes, it's bad policy to ban one and not the other simply based on the process by which the image was created.

I generally give Republicans more benefit of the doubt than most. I consider myself a liberal libertarian with an open mind to all things. I think there were plenty of valid reasons to vote for Trump the first time around, reasons that much of the country chose to ignore because it was easier than addressing them.

If the GOP nominates Trump again, they deserve to lose as hardcore as possible. I didn't scream and cry when he was elected because I was willing to give him a chance and an open mind. But I think his first term said everything that needed to be said about his suitability as a leader. He talked a big talk of draining the swamp, but then filled his cabinet with alligators and no swamps were drained. If anything, swamps were created as he filled key positions with corrupt people who were loyal to him but had little experience or skill for the job at hand.

Love his policies or hate them, that's just corrupt bad government. And while I don't always agree with Biden's policies, much like Obama, he at least executes the duties of his office in a relatively competent manner.

Same thing if DeSantis gets the nomination. You can't run a platform of jobs creation when you pick a hissy fit with your state's largest employer because they dare voice some mild opposition to a policy of yours (especially when said opposition is essential for said company to maintain credibility on the national level). That speaks volumes about the kind of person, and the kind of leader, that you are. I would rather have someone who's policies I sometimes disagree with, then a childishly vindictive psychophant sitting in the big chair.

Sadly, this all is the very predictable result of the Karl Rove strategy- whip up social conservatives and evangelicals to drum up votes. The result is those groups now have significant power within the GOP, even though their platform of intolerant policies is unappealing to the broader nation to the point of making them unelectable in the eyes of many.

Unlucky. I think Biden is a better candidate than either of them, but I think the American people deserve to have two decent choices to pick from.
I have no particular love for the DNC either or many of the Democratic candidates we've seen, but at least they manage to more often than not put forward someone who would at least make a semi-functional administrator who tries to execute some sort of plan.

RSS is great for content consumption. It's a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.

That said though, RSS doesn't help for participation, it's a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that's still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.