birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
Pennsylvania mail-in ballots with flawed dates on envelopes can be thrown out, court rules
The state’s high court ruled on procedural grounds, saying a lower court that found the mandate unenforceable should not have taken up the case because it did not draw in the election boards in all 67 counties. Counties administer the nuts and bolts of elections in Pennsylvania, but the left-leaning groups that filed the case only sued two of them, Philadelphia and Allegheny counties.
This came up when the lower court issued their opinion a few weeks ago. I remember several commentators asking if the fact that it was only filed in two counties was going to have a material impact in the outcome. It looks like it did.
For those of you who leaned one way or the other, how does this impact your future predictions?
On a more specific note - @Rov_Scam, you had some fairly extensive commentary on this case that was interesting and insightful due to your profession. If you have time, would you mind chiming in with an update?
birb_cromble
2mo ago
Gavin Newsom was criticized for this exact thing in 2020.
Newsom was involved in Molly-fueled orgies? I missed that one in all the other noise.
birb_cromble
2mo ago
In a headline that say a lot more about modern society than I would like: Public-Health Officials Should Have Been Talking About Their Sex Parties the Whole Time
In conversations caught on hidden camera, New York City’s former COVID czar said that he’d organized a pair of sex parties in the second half of 2020, as New Yorkers coped with peak pandemic social isolation. “The only way I could do this job for the city was if I had some way to blow off steam every now and then,” Jay Varma told an undercover reporter with whom he thought he was on a date.
The article itself is quite fascinating, as is the original recording. Once again, we have a right wing partisan recording footage of a public health official saying things that should ostensibly be remarkably damning to both the speaker and the political bloc that installed him. Instead, the reaction seems to be quite muted.
Is this COVID fatigue? Narrative control in a friendly media? Is it really a nothing burger? What do you personally think is going on here?
birb_cromble
2mo ago
a reflection on the current publishing industry and the audience that still goes into book stores like that
In my neck of the woods, that's best described as "people who want overpriced coffee and will suffer being near books to get it".
birb_cromble
2mo ago
Not OP, but please go vote. There are usually quite a few local referenda and elections that will matter to you and your neighbors.
You don't have to vote the whole ticket.
birb_cromble
2mo ago
- It's definitely been increasing. I noticed the trend start somewhere during the COVID lockdowns, and it seems to have spread at an accelerated rate since then.
- I blame the Tik tok. It seems concentrated in younger women. These same women all got tattoos at the same time as each other, and started carrying metal cups at the same time as each other, started shoving bull rings up their noses at the same time as each other, and claiming they were neurodivergent at the same time as each other.
- In my experience women consume a lot more algorithmically driven short form video based social media than men.
birb_cromble
2mo ago
Jonathan Richardson, now Autumn Cordellioné
This is a bit of a derail, but why is that kind of "flamboyant" self-appelation so common in the MtF trans demographic?
I know three people from college who have transitioned in their 30s. Their self-chosen names are:
- Maeve
- Celeste
- Pandora
At first I thought it was some kind of drag queen schtick, but no, they're all legal names.
birb_cromble
3mo ago
I need to figure out where I want to go with the hobby.
Steel challenge is reasonably cheap, and a lot of fun
birb_cromble
3mo ago
To me, the more interesting question is how 44% gets an endorsement, but 58% gets no endorsement.
I have never been a union member. My only experiences interacting with unions have been profoundly negative. As such, I am unqualified to make any suppositions about why the leadership would act in such a way.
Is there anyone here who could speak to the culture and explain it?
birb_cromble
3mo ago
And the attempted shooter at the golf course had also voted for Trump
This appears to be untrue.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/did-ryan-routh-actually-vote-144911519.html?guccounter=1
North Carolina voter records show he voted in 2012, but show a gap between 2012 and 2024, when the unaffiliated voter cast a vote in the Democratic primary in North Carolina.
birb_cromble
3mo ago
Too bad for Trump virtually nobody does that
In some ways, that's the beauty of it. It only has to work once per person. A person who has seen the media gestalt lie its ass off once willl probably develop amnesia and remain a goodthinker. Eventually though, the statement "the media lies its ass off" will lodge in their memeplex like a grain of sand.
And, like a grain of sand it will grow into a pearl that takes up increasingly large amounts of space whenever the topic rears its head
You have the official spin teams like NYT and Snopes somehow leaving you believing a lie while still only telling the technical truth themselves.
Even this works to Trump's advantage. I'm sure you've seen all the pearl-clutching opinion pieces about how conspiratorial thinking is destroying democracy. It's all the same pipeline. After a certain point, realizing that the media can and will bullshit you means that there's no going back to those outlets. The only way is forward, even if forward sends you to (or through) crazy town.
birb_cromble
3mo ago
I'm in a similar boat. Trump is sleazy, and kind of an asshole, but the Biden administration threatened my livelihood with their mandates. I'll be voting for whoever I think has the best chance of repudiating those policies and humiliating the people who enacted them.
birb_cromble
3mo ago
Who remembers the 2008 or 2012 debates?
I remember Obama's "slam dunk" on Romney, in which he said the following.
Gov. Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that al-Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaida. You said Russia ... the 1980s, they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War's been over for 20 years
It's somewhat ironic, in retrospect.
birb_cromble
3mo ago
That being said, most of his interactions around here are from the '90s, when he was "your local elected official
All the reports I have are from PSU and CMU faculty and staff. That probably has enough impact that, in hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have included him in the list.
birb_cromble
3mo ago
Are we sure about that?
I can't say for sure. The people I know who have met him first-hand are all of a specific (upper middle class blue tribe) type, so there may be some cognitive bias in play.
birb_cromble
3mo ago
SNW wasn't bad. In the he broader context of this thread, though, I think it's interesting that what I saw as the most culture-warry episode (refugee courtroom drama) was also probably the weakest, least engaging one as well.
Star Trek works best when it has a positive vision of the world that it wants to portray. That vision may be fully automated gay luxury space communism, but at least that vision exists, and a solid narrative flows from it when the writers respect it.
birb_cromble
3mo ago
gluten is a fall guy for glyphosate in the wheat supply chain
At least in bread, I've always assumed the "gluten" problem was related to moving from relatively long ferments with high levels of wild yeast and bacteria (ie: sourdough) to the now-ubiquitous Chorleywood process.
Those strains do a lot of interesting stuff to the resultant product. I can leave sourdough sitting on my counter for days at a time without it molding, unlike store bread. The fermentation process also lowers phytic acid levels.
Humans have fairly simple guts compared to even other omnivores. Maybe we're better suited to eating something that's been partially broken down already, and acidic enough to keep out more harmful microbiota?
birb_cromble
3mo ago
The longer Kamala speaks uninterrupted, the more incoherent she appears.
There's an interesting point in there.
Most politicians are quite good at establishing a rapport with their constituents during in-person interaction. I won't link them here for the sake of brevity, but "I met ${congressman} and he wasn't the scum-sucking pile of human shit that I expected him to be" stories are incredibly common. This rapport building usually translates to public speaking as well. It's almost a universal trait in politicians.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of four cases where that's not true, and where direct person to person communication seems to result in lower favorability for the politician in question. They are in no particular order:
- Kamala Harris
- Hillary Clinton
- Michael Bloomberg
- Rick Santorum
Looking at that list, I can't really see any obvious commonality. We have two and a half Democrats and one and a half Republicans (I'm splitting Bloomberg). We have prosecutors and businessmen. We have men and women. We have representatives from the North, South, East, and West.
Are there other politicians like this, where their mere presence seems to be anathema to their political goals? What's behind it?
birb_cromble
3mo ago
Respectfully, I think you're conflating two entirely separate mechanisms here. Actions taken at the state level do not require coordination at the local level, even if the actions taken at the state level can enable actions taken at the local level.
We know that Pennsylvania, and in particular Philadelphia, is unusually corrupt. So corrupt, in fact, that a former congressman was recently convicted on election fraud charges.
It is entirely possible that the department of state is not rigging the election. It's also entirely possible that the department of state is pointedly not taking steps to assure that other parties do not engage in illegal activities.
At the local level, we already know that actors have wildly rigged elections in multiple Pennsylvania precincts already. Are we supposed to ignore that evidence and not factor it into our priors? Given that the constant media drumbeat of "Trump as Existential Threat" has been banging for close to a decade now, are we supposed to believe that nobody might bend the rules (again, still)? Especially when it's for the Greater Good? Especially when we know that the supposed watchers are looking the other way?
That's an interesting comparison. Did any US politician or public servant face meaningful repercussions for flouting their own policies? Newsom is listed below as another example, and is being feted as a future president.
More options
Context Copy link