I’m really surprised as well. But if you think about where American culture was in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, there was a huge emphasis placed on being “normal.” You can be sure that most boomers were told by their parents or peers at some point to “just be normal” or criticized someone by saying they’re not normal, and there’s still plenty of conservative families raising their kids like that today.

I can only imagine that’s the nerve being touched by the “weird” criticism.

People always forget about the lurkers. Most people with less-informed, more impressionable views on a given topic aren’t posting and debating, they’re reading and learning (despite the unfortunate exceptions). Seeing some wacko extremist nonsense or voter suppression tactic go unchallenged by a more reasonable argument may be enough to sway a not-yet-fanatic in the wrong direction.

Here’s a rather informal interview with her from just last year.

Well said.

I get Jon Stewart’s position and agree with nearly all of his criticisms, but I think the biggest thing he’s not acknowledging in his “why can France and the UK do this but we can’t?” argument is that this would absolutely not be confined to just the Democratic Party. Literally every step of the process would be decried as election fraud, cheating, “the steal of the century” etc. by republicans. If they got pissed enough to attempt an insurrection in 2020 when there was absolutely no credible evidence of fraud, just think where things will go if there’s this whole slew of unprecedented last-minute decisions that are nearly impossible to reconcile with every individual states’ laws. I’m not saying we have to bow to repubs demands, but the more excuses they have to claim anything isn’t above board, the greater the risk that the “stolen election” narrative gains traction beyond the far right.

We’ve spent the last 4 years witnessing how slowly our legal system works on huge matters like this. By the time the dust settles on all of the legal challenges, the resulting chaos will have already rendered the decisions nearly irrelevant.

Turns out it’s just a canoe rental place that’s named “Laundromat Bingo Tanning Notary.”

It’s like he watched Beto O’Rourke commit political suicide over guns and thought “I bet I can do that on a national scale.”

Pretty low, actually. Viking_Hippie is actually a pretty legit Lemmy contributor, despite having some utter garbage takes on American politics and making occasionally disingenuous arguments for them, as above. Pretty sure he’s Danish though, not Russian.

And Obama broke the legal Occupy Wall Street protests and killed civilians in Yemen with drone strikes. So he takes the title instead? “Most progressive” is a comparative qualification, and he does not need to BE a progressive to take the title.

While I agree that the strike shouldn’t have been broken and that the rail workers should have the right to stop as much work as they control in order to make their demands heard, Biden also became the first president to walk a picket line during that strike and ultimately got the rail workers a deal that their unions all were reportedly happy with. He may not be everything you want, but he IS the most pro-union president of my lifetime. Again, not a high bar to clear. Recognize progress when it happens, even if it’s not your dream come true.

Furthermore, with all the terrifying examples of actual rising fascism that surround us right now, don’t muddy the waters with BS like that. It just makes you look like a troll.

Reagan, HW Bush, Clinton, W Bush, Obama, Trump. Take your pick.

“Most progressive” is not a high bar to clear. It’s a reasonably fair claim that Biden has been more progressive than Obama, and definitely isn’t outrageous enough to justify ranting about crack smoking and traumatic brain damage.

Only if you ignore that there’s also a segment of Democratic voters who would reconsider support for Biden if he took a stance that they perceived as anti-Israel. Democrats are a coalition party of compromises between factions who have to work together to find as much common ground as possible in order to have any political relevance in a first-past-the-post system. Biden has to walk whatever tightrope loses the fewest votes, and he seems to think that not doing a 180 on decades of US foreign policy is the best way to do that.

Unfortunate that this graph starts in 1972, when the oldest baby boomers were already 27. If you compare that first section of the boomers’ line to the corresponding section of the millennials’ line, boomers were to the left of millennials around the same age.

Now, I find it hard to imagine that millennials will have the “Reagan moment” that boomers had in 1980, but this data shouldn’t convince anyone that millennials are some shining ray of hope for the future. Today’s non-voting, politically apathetic millennials could easily be swayed to the right by the time they’re the age of today’s boomers. I see this sentiment repeated a lot lately, but it’s pure foolishness to think that conservatives will die with boomers.

And it was expensive as hell! They’re not just going to shoot all those underwater scenes and not use them.

Sorry, but you’re not going to get ranked choice voting just by pretending you already have it. FPTP and the electoral college are realities of US politics and the “lesser of two evils” approach is the only realistic way to play the game.

The executive branch is the wrong place to try to achieve ranked choice voting anyway. Vote for legislative candidates who support ranked choice. If nobody is talking about it, call your representatives. Start petitions. Join grassroots organizations. Anything, but don’t fool yourself into thinking the path to fixing our issues involves voting for Jill Stein over Biden next year.

Unwavering support for whatever Israel wants has been status quo for the US for decades. There’s plenty of people who don’t like it, but the unfortunate truth is that we are too broken and divided to fix it right now.

Trump is a literal existential threat to democracy. Assuming he becomes the republican nominee next year, our only chance of ever having a voice in US foreign policy in the future is through a second Biden term.

No candidate will ever be perfect and no vote will ever be without moral baggage, but when you consider all of the issues together and look at what Trump has already said he would do if reelected, there’s really no other choice on the table anymore.

Dragging his feet on student loans? I feel like that’s the only campaign promise he’s been making a consistent effort on. He literally got shot down by the Supreme Court and has kept trying different strategies. The only times he’s reduced the scope of the proposed relief is once he’s been blocked at every turn.

Even as someone with student loans, I’ve almost been frustrated that he’s been putting as much effort as he has into student loan relief while bigger issues see no action.

I would also emphasize that nuclear reactor =/= nuclear bomb. Power reactors cannot under any circumstances cause a nuclear explosion.

That’s pretty cool. Of course Christopher Nolan would insist on editing on film. I bet Tarantino and a few others would as well. In the case of laser printing vs optical printing, he’s probably right, especially at IMAX scale. And you’re absolutely right that he’s choosing it because it’s the highest possible fidelity, whereas someone like Tarantino chooses film for sentimental, kitsch, and artistic reasons. Apparently digital IMAX is still only about 4k at best. In the audio world though, analog DACs really are perfect reproduction many times beyond what is perceptible in sound. Compared to cutting to vinyl from tape, or even transferring from tape to tape, digital is orders of magnitude higher fidelity to the source signal. There’s lots of reasons to love analog audio, but higher measurable fidelity is not among them.

They stopped distributing 35mm film to regular movie theaters in 2014. Only a few modern releases are printed in 70mm IMAX, and only a few IMAX theaters can still project it.

Despite being what a lot of analog fetishists focus on, a purely analog editing chain is not necessarily what causes the effects that they actually like about analog media. Most of it comes from the playback media itself. In the case of vinyl records, there’s mastering techniques that have to be used to make sure the needle stays in the groove that some people feel sound better. There’s minute harmonic distortions that people prefer over the perfectly clear and clean sound of digital. In the case of film payback, you have actual image frames being flashed on the screen. You have shutter dwell where no image is shown at all while the next frame is being advanced. You’d never consciously notice the flicker, but it affects the way you perceive the image and the motion on the screen. Film can have very high contrast and there may also be minor differences in color profile due to being displayed by pigments rather than being created digitally. Most digital media these days is technically far superior to it’s analog counterpart. It just happens that it’s the limitations and artifacts of the analog media that some people find pleasing.