The Republicans being so fucking pissed at the idea their wives might vote for Harris really reveals the patriarchal focus.Like not one even them would even remotely consider the possibility that they betrayed their wives with their votes. No, it's the other way around.#uspol

If the nazis were like, "Fuck yeah, Kamala Harris!" as well, I'd accept your argument that "both parties are exactly the same."But they're not, now are they?

Getting a lot of "Don't fuck this up, America" energy today.

@weyoun6 Well, it's kind of how I felt about Clinton in 2016.We were told "Vote for Clinton, because she's the ONLY HOPE we have against Trump" and she couldn't beat the worst, least-qualified political candidate in history. So clearly that wasn't true. She wasn't the only hope, she was a bad candidate being forced through by the Democratic party. And I was afraid that would happen with Biden.But he stepped down, and with Trump the bar has only sunk lower since then, he's only become more repugnant, and Harris ran a better campaign than Clinton. So there's every reason to be hopeful about the outcome today.

@Frances_Larina Yes indeed it does.

I don't know why you'd not vote for Harris just so that he can become irrelevant and stop dominating all conversations for a few more years.That motherfucker has a pathological need to be the center of every conversation and every day of his Presidency he demanded to be the most important topic in the world.I'm going to need a second therapist if that happens again.

"Technically, Attila the Hun was a more divisive figure."Well, okay, that makes Trump seem normal somehow, thanks for the perspective.

Removed a 'coming soon' entry, which isn't really a fair comparison.

There are certain mechanistic things that AI is good at, in the same way that sometimes I need a good pattern matcher.If I've got a blob of unstructured text, I could try to write a regex to parse it, or I could ask the AI, "convert all of this nonsense into a JSON object with the following keys" and generally-speaking about something like that, it does a pretty good job.Or doing AI/OCR (HTR) to extract text from handwriting, auto-translating, stuff like that.Or as a more elegant find/replace tool, maybe.But note that's largely mechanistic rather than creative stuff.

Elon: "I'm not racist! How could I be? I'm an African-American!"

Why the Hate For Third PartiesNader.In 2000, Ralph Nader ran as a third party, and the margin of victory in the state of Florida encompassed Nader's votes, meaning that if Nader had not been in the race, and if those voters who voted for Nader voted for Gore instead, we'd have had President Al Gore.Now, it's a very big if that Nader voters would have voted at all, much less voted for Al Gore but it's a likely scenario that at least some of them would, and maybe enough to make a difference.It's why there's real hate towards Jill Stein right now among the Dems, and it's why the Republican party is literally bankrolling Jill Stein's campaign.That margin could mean everything on election day.It come come down to a single state, and if that single state hands Trump the election because 6% of the vote that may have gone to Democrats goes to the Green party instead?People will not be happy.It's About WinningSo it's not about purity or anything like that. Elections in the United States, contrary to popular opinion, aren't about "endorsing" much of anything.I'd like to support the Green party candidate for President, in principle.But, and I need you to understand this:Jill Stein cannot win.Jill Stein won't win a single state.There is zero chance of that happening, because a majority of voters in that state will not vote for Jill Stein.Hell, Jill Stein herself will tell you she has no chance of winning. That this is not the point, that this is about "sending a message."Sending a MessageThere is a certain contingent of people out there who believe that voting is about sending a message. That if you go, "Ha, fuck you, Dems" and you vote against them, or vote third party, you're going to make them scramble to support you next time.In reality, they won't do that at all. They'll be dealing with the fallout of a Trump presidency for the next four years and will be a bit too busy to give a fuck what your anonymous vote "really meant."They will not suss out what your vote really meant. They will not do deep introspection into their party values as a result of your vote.They'll simply mechanistically go, "Well, the people who vote third party aren't going to vote for us, anyway, so let's stop focusing on their needs for now."And you'll get the exact opposite of what you want.And real people will actually suffer for the outcome.So you could "send a message."That they aren't gonna respect or hear, anyway.

Here's a thing I can freely share here that Facebook would probably ban me for.

re: uspol election ritual; alcohol

Looking forward to Tony Hinchcliffe being hated by everyone across the political spectrum after he loses the election for Trump.Or at least, you know he'll be a scapegoat.#uspol

The way Mastodon does a handoff to another server when you click a link, rather than pulling in the activity pub link, means that users are clicking and opening to a new page where they can't continue the conversation because they aren't logged in on that remote server.And if the UI allowed you to click a fedi link and open it inline, rather than redirecting to a new instance, people would be a lot less confused. And if you embedded the entire post in the first place, people wouldn't have to click on the OP in the first place to understand the commentary about it.And that's the flow I wish we'd focused on, rather than quote posts.Incidentally, this is how it works in Phanpy. Phanpy doesn't take you outside of the UI when you click a link to another fedi post.

The WSJ was really like, "Come on, a coup is a lot of work. There's all that planning, all that fighting with cops, all those speeches and all the window breaking and how is ONE MAN with an attention span problem gonna do all that, huh? It's ridiculous!"

I agree with other arguments on this topic, like first you've got to be a person people want to follow in the first place, and there has to be enough of those folks for the general public to take an interest, and if those people are annoying assholes, people aren't going to want to come "here."But "here" is so many things to so many people, and audiences don't all intersect due to follows and federation so what seems to be 'everywhere' to you might be 'nowhere' to someone else.It's why I prefer thinking of things in terms of islands, archipelagos, or just "networks" in general, and island networks let you codify what "here" actually means.I think we need to shift platforms a bit to something a bit more agile and less costly, like GoToSocial, to make instances more scalable and affordable and easy to run for others as well as having several built-in privacy and security features. People would tend to think more of these things as islands rather than platforms or a single contiguous place.I think backend-agnostic client tools like Phanpy and Elk and Semaphore, along with the variety of Mastodon API-supporting mobile apps (most of which support GTS, too) will help it to feel like a more contiguous place, but this isn't the place for "everyone", because it's a network of intersecting venn diagrams of audiences.So lecturing people "here" to "do a thing" I'm never sure where "here" is or who I'm actually talking to, beyond my own followers.

@Lady That said, in terms of "providing some kind of an indicator of who will win" they seem to be especially bad at that this particular election

Same-day voter registration is so effective in Minnesota that Republicans (via ALEC) attempted to kill it by implementing VoterID as a ballot initiative.We voted it down.And that's why even if you got purged from the voter rolls in Minnesota, they can't stop you from voting.

Every time a billionaire supports something, and you support that same thing, you should seriously rethink your support of that thing.Bunch of red-hatted "rebels" following the oligarchs like lemmings.