I would like you to direct me to any images or posts on fedi or similar that instruct people to call the numbers provided INSTEAD of calling government authorities

Because while your post explicitly calls out the instructions in these image as being wrong, giving the specific impression that people should call the numbers you provided and NOT political orgs (because you speak very critically of the political orgs, insinuating they should not be called), every post I’ve seen with political org numbers has simply provided the information without additional comment

Your initial post reeks of manipulation in an effort to drive people away from the political orgs.

Those orgs serve a very specific purpose that is NOT covered by the state and federal offices you’ve told people to call. Those government offices are not a replacement for the services provided by the political orgs and you should not be presenting them as if they are

Recounts do not include submitting new votes.

And either way, good luck getting a partisan controlled office to institute a recount or re-vote in the current political climate.

You are gambling on the hope that the problem gets fixed later. This is a terrible idea.

And local election offices - often under partisan control - have no obligation to assist individuals in getting their ballot cast.

You are either being extremely naive to the realities on the ground, or intentionally disingenuous.

None of the resources detailed in this post provide any form of immediate assistance to resolve an ongoing threat to your ability to cast your vote.

They will not help you find a lawyer. They will not help pay for that lawyer. They will not contact law enforcement and apply pressure to have them respond in a timely manner.

These should NOT be your first call. They should be who you report to after the fact to pursue long term remediation.

If you are a Democrat, call a left-leaning political org with sufficient funding and an army of lawyers.

If you are a Republican, call a right-leaning political org with sufficient funding and an army of lawyers.

THEN call the folks in the OP

If your ballot is never cast, it can’t be fixed later. The best the folks in the OP can do is punish the people who committed the crime. They can’t get your vote counted. The political orgs are specifically set up to help in real-time to make sure you and everyone else at your polling place gets to vote NOW!

I appreciate your capacity to recognize a valid argument even when it conflicts with your initial position ❤️ It’s more than I expect from the average internet commenter

It’s a charicature. I’m not laughing because I think it’s real (which would be kind of mean, anyway, since I’d just be laughing at someone screwing up). I’m laughing because it’s relatable to real experiences many people have had, and because of the added commentary about software development.

Your hyperfocus on reality in media, and failure to see the comedy for what it truly is, is far more cringe than the video 😉

EDIT: it’s like asking why people laugh at the obviously fake stories stand-up comedians tell because they’re made up. Like, yeah, no shit, that’s not the point.

No thanks. I’m done trying to explain it. I’m curious if others are having as much trouble understanding or if you’re being intentionally obtuse, but there is no other way to say what I’m trying to say. It’s complex and nuanced. There is no simple or concise way to say it. So I’m done here. Have a good one 👋

And your ability to be concerned about such things is your privilege

It is obvious that you are generally comfortable with little risk to your daily life riding on this election

Talk to me again when you’re sacrificing your own immediate safety instead of the immediate safety of others to uphold your high-minded values

Sure.

The important starting point is:

Your perspective is not the only perspective. Every other person has a complex life, just as complex as yours with its own perspectives

And no one perspective is objectively right or wrong. There is only the opinions we bring to the table, what we each choose to do, how that impacts the world, and who we successfully bring to our cause

And most importantly, the policies I believe are morally and ethically the best path forward are often not widely popular without intense, direct conversation on the nuance of a subject, or until after the policy yields long term success that won’t become apparent until after the next one or more rounds of elections

With that said, acquiring votes often involves identifying what resonates with others and pursuing their support rather than enacting the ideal policies you want to pursue

Actual governing means negotiating to enforce a collective will, agreed upon through genuine discourse and collaboration motivated by improving society and humanity

But you can still enact meaningful policy that has nothing to do with those goals and ideals, but rather seeks to generate support through various means.

Through a history of electioneering, the political machine in the US has produced an environment where administrations have a limited amount of time in which they can feasibly prioritize idealistic goals (if they even want or bother to) while still having enough time and political capital to recover any lost support. And the more disregard your opponent has for selflessness and mutual aid, the more risky it becomes to pursue unpopular positions.

You and I may know that it’s good policy. That doesn’t make it popular. And “it’ll be popular when it works” is not a viable strategy when the opposition has become so good at obstruction, deconstruction, consolidation of power, and manipulation of public perception

I hope that clarifies

The fact that you interpret fear of persecution and resistance to authoritarianism as a selfish act tells me everything I need to know about how you view the world. And I choose not to engage in this conversation with you. 👋

Are you implying policy only has meaning if it supports your specific goals? Because there has been plenty of meaningful policy that does absolutely nothing to protect or advance the very narrow goals you’ve defined above in this conversation, or even what one might call moral and ethical. What exactly is “meaningful” when it comes to policy? That is such a vague, garage term in this context

One can enact policy for many reasons, not just legitimate efforts to govern effectively. Enacting policy for the sake of political expediency is still enacting policy, but not what I would consider actual governing

You seem to have misconstrued what “actual governing” means in this context

When did I say anything about being “so singularly focused […] that they are unable to enact policy”? They choose not to pursue the policy positions you want largely because it’s politically expedient.

Part of that includes actually doing their jobs

This right here is where you’re not hearing me

What you define as “doing their jobs” and “doing the thing most effective at getting them re-elected” are not the same thing. That’s literally the problem. Humans aren’t as ethical, self-aware, intelligent, and future-thinking as you seem to want to believe.

Humans are, in fact, incredibly easy to manipulate, as it turns out.

Your idealism is noble but untempered by reality. Solving this particular problem will require something far different from simply abstaining from voting or whatever, and until you and others are ready for that, shitting on Harris and Biden for playing the rhetoric game when the alternative at the moment is a literal extreme fascist is not only a pointless endeavor but actually puts other people in harms way

Tell me you’ve never worked in US politics without telling me you’ve never worked in US politics, speedrun edition

I’ll try to remember to explain the details to you when I’m not actively deplaning from a week-long work trip, because I’m not down with the “do your own research” attitude. But for real, if you have the opportunity to talk to someone who has actually dealt with state or federal election campaigning I encourage you to discuss the nuance of this with them.

In truth, politicians literally never stop campaigning. Every single decision they make until the moment they decide not to run for office again is colored by the need to get elected again. And even then, they are all thinking about how their actions are going to impact their colleagues and successors

Let’s be completely clear about one thing that you both seem to be neglecting in this conversation:

You cannot govern if you lose. And due to how our government is structured and how elections work, an administration gets maybe two years (more like 12-18 months) of actual governing before they have to start focusing on getting (re)elected.

So it’s all well and good to ask for radical change and drastic measures to avert climate disaster. But if the consequence of those actions is that democrats up and down every ticket lose the next election, it’s all for naught, because it’s FAR easier to dismantle hastily enacted radical changes than it is to cement them long term, especially when the people coming into power after you have no scruples about lying, cheating, and profiteering.

Historical evidence suggests that radical honesty regarding complex issues is not a winning political strategy.

One of the main reasons democrats lose so much is because they often prefer to take the moral high ground instead of, you know, winning.

Psychology has been weaponized and your faith in the general public to reward honesty is, sadly, misguided. We know this. It’s been proven out over and over again, in many ways…

So we can stick our heads in the sand, or we can play the game and then govern to the best of our ability after winning.

And that is exactly what the reply means by privilege. It is a luxury to be able to think that far ahead.

It turns out, when you’re at risk of being dead in a week, a month, or a year, you tend not to care about whether humanity will be around in 20 years.

So having the ability to focus on the long term is a privilege that the vulnerable do not have.

Of course, these things are not mutually exclusive. But when you have two parties that both suck at climate care, but only one of them is trying to incarcerate or kill LGBTQA+ folks, for example, and your focus is on things like “don’t vote for anyone or you’re supporting fascism and climate destruction” it reeks of privilege and a disregard for the immediate welfare of your neighbors.

EDIT: To put it another way - if the cost of humanity’s survival is sacrificing our LGBTQA+ neighbors, perhaps humanity is not worth saving.

For anyone questioning this logic, try running your “idle” CPU without a heatsink of any kind.

Fair enough on the first point!

The interesting scenario re: Polaris A’s age would be if a larger, younger original star merged with a smaller, much older star. You’d have a small amount of late-stage byproducts in an otherwise relatively early-stage star. That would definitely make any age models ‘confused’ heh

I could imagine a scenario where the math works out such that the star appears a lot younger than it is despite being the product of a merger of two older stars, based on the masses and ages of the contributing objects and the amount of different material contributed by each

This is only sort of true, unfortunately. Polaris is a two-star system: Polaris Aa and Polaris B.

Polaris B is much older than sharks, by several billion years.

Polaris Aa appears to be younger than sharks, at a measley 50 million years old, compared to sharks’ 420 million years

HOWEVER it is unclear whether Polaris Aa is actually that young. Scientists believe that, based on some contradictory findings, that measurement may be inaccurate if Polaris Aa is formed from two different stars that merged. In that scenario, the model we use to calculate star age would no longer work and could give wildly inaccurate estimates of the star’s true age

TMYK