Bernie and AOC. It’ll never happen, but I want it to!

You underestimate the racism and sexism of the American voter.

The last time I bought a phone, I used versus.com’s filters to suggest different models that fit the criteria I needed, including a small form factor. I’ve been pretty happy with the resulting phone!

hours after the Trump administration unveiled a plan to overhaul the aging technology that keeps U.S. airspace space safe.

Oh, like the bill that the Republicans voted down when Biden was in office?

OhNoAnyway.jpg.

Because they see other people gaming the system or somehow otherwise being protected from the consequences of their actions. Ethan Couch, who drove drunk underage and killed four people and fled the scene, and who got probation. Brock Turner who raped an unconscious woman, and who got stuff months in county jail and was released after three months. Matthew Broderick, who drove into the wrong lane, hit a car head-on, killed two people, and was fined a hundred pounds. Hundreds of cases, some high-profile, some only known to the local community, where people get off - sometimes on technicalities, sometimes on connections, sometimes on good lawyering, sometimes on bribes.

Then people wonder why they can’t get away with things. Millionaires and billionaires get their debts written off, so they should be able to do so as well. They should be able to claim that they’re not subject to laws just like those other people. So they start looking for things that might exempt them, patterns of how to get away with things. Every time something goes wrong, it’s not because they’re poor or unconnected, it must be because that other guy’s lawyer wrapped his case in a red ribbon, or capitalized the defendant’s name, or something else esoteric that they didn’t notice or didn’t think of.

And they talk to each other, sharing their theories of his to get away with things. And there’s also a rich ecosystem of fraudsters and conmen who are absolutely willing to take advantage of them, selling them false license plates and fake “passports”, selling handbooks and online courses on how to get away with stuff. If they’re caught (and haven’t just changed over to some other URL), it’s because the law changed or there was some nuance in their situation, and you just need this other thing that’ll fix it, it’s only $129.99, payable in four easy installments …

Years ago, I had a friend who was warning me that the National Guard was going to move to put everyone into FEMA camps at 10pm next Tuesday. I called her up, explained how it was a QAnon conspiracy theory that wasn’t going to happen, talked her down, yet she was still like “well, it can’t hurt to be careful next week”.

I brought it up to her a few weeks later, in an attempt to get her away from her crazy QAnon-addicted Facebook friends, and she barely even remembered it.

Lmao. There was a similar law requiring Congress to review the tariffs. You know what those spineless Republican asslickers in Congress did? They literally passed a law saying that, regarding tariffs, the entire rest of this year’s legislative session is just one day long.

Of the 52 cases, 34 came from abroad — primarily from Vietnam — while the remaining 18 were transmitted domestically at home or medical facilities through international travelers.

If you’d like to pressure your Congresscritter in a less-specific but more obstructive way, tell them you’d like to see them doing more of this kind of thing.

the pilot doesn’t deserve being gendered? the child, okay I can see having their info private. but “3 women, and child, and the pilot” just seems a lil weird

I read it as “readers know the plane must have had a pilot, so we’re going to specifically mention that the pilot was also okay”. And I would rather pilot remain a genderless word over references to “pilot” and “pilotess”, or “the male pilot / the female pilot” or some other such nonsense.

I usually start with The Big List of Protests, where a lot of stuff gets cross-posted. Political revolution gets the 50501 protests and some other stuff (note that the site has had connectivity issues when but protests are upcoming and we in the outside aren’t sure if that’s bandwidth issues, hardware/software limitations, or sabotage. If you see an upcoming protest that looks possible, screenshot it just in case you can’t look it up later.] Indivisible runs their own calendar (they have connections with the Democrats, so I wouldn’t use my real contact info with them unless you want you start getting mailers and begging letters), and there’s also No Voice Unheard.

50501 on reddit recently had some kind of moderator drama (idk i heard about it in passing). The original moderators have a new sub at /r/50501movement, but /r/50501 is still active and I’m not sure how many people know or care about the difference. Depending on how active it is, you may be better off using your state or regional 50501 subreddit anyway.

If you can’t make a protest, or don’t want to, you can start with Five Calls, which lists current events or upcoming votes to talk to your Congresscritters about. They suggest choosing one topic each day and making one set of calls every day, but any calls you can make are important. Apparently they’re semi-ignoring emails and letters, as so many of them can be brigaded, but they’re still paying attention to phone calls - possibly because the constant ringing is annoying. [If you end up in voicemail, try calling one of the local state offices for your Congresscritter.] If they hold one that you can get to, to go a town hall so they can see lots of angry faces.

I will note that one reason the Republicans have had so much influence over their Congresscritters is that, apparently in the past, they got 4 phone calls from Republicans for every one phone call from a Democrat. I’m not sure where the math currently stands. If you have any connection with the Congresscritter, mention that: “I worked on/volunteered for/donated to their campaign” (even if it was decades ago), etc. If not, try for some other connection: “I’ve voted for your party my entire life”, “I live in [member’s] home town/office town”, “They were wonderful and helped me with this problem years ago”, whatever you can think of.

If you are calling, this one’s important: if they do something you approve of, call or write and let them know that as well! No one’s going to like getting yelled at all the time, and we can give them both positive and negative reinforcement. So if Cory Booker or Hakeem Jeffries or anytime else does something noticable you approve of (the sit-in, the filibuster, whatever) call and thank them, even if they’re not your Congresscritter, then call your Congresscritter, tell them how impressed you were with the other guy’s actions, and ask them to support your cause-of-the-day.

There are a lot more resources out there, and many more things you can do to help, but those are the ones I’d start with.

You forgot sexism. There’s a non-zero amount of people who simply will never vote for a woman.

Once you’re a billionaire, you have a helluva a lot more leeway and leverage to fight back, they’re just fucking cowards.

Billionaires are fucking cowards.

It was going to mostly crash anyway, when the ships stop coming next week, due to the tariffs.

There was a video on ?imgur? in the past couple days, I didn’t know if it was real. Guy says he was a truck driver and had stopped at a weigh station. He said they asked if he could read and write English; he said yes. They gave him a piece of paper to read, which he did; they then told him to write those words down on another piece of paper, which was filled with identical words in various handwritings. He said he saw a bunch of people off to the side in handcuffs, and said that if you couldn’t speak or write English, you had to pay a $5000 “fine” on the spot, and that if you couldn’t pay, you were arrested on the spot and your driving license immediately suspended. There was some condition (I don’t remember what it was) where the trucking company might also have to pay a $10000 “fine”.

The comments discussion pointed out that, if they had had $5000 to pay the “fine”, it likely would’ve been taken in civil forfeiture. There was also a robust discussion on whether this was real or not, trying to find other sources, which were slim and primarily referenced questionable sources.

Edit: found the video, which apparently originated on Xitter, and was originally posted last month (I only saw it a day or so ago).

Oh very nice - your cousin should be very happy!

Yeah, there’s already a video of them doing this.

The next nationwide anti-Trump administration protests are scheduled for May Day.